Sins of the Fathers (13 page)

“Something’s wrong, Darren. You don’t kill people without something being wrong. You realize that, don’t you?”

He frowned as if he did not understand.

“Darren, suppose you try something. Suppose you tell me why you killed those kids. You have to talk about it eventually. I’m your lawyer. It’s best to start with me.”

He looked at her with that blank stare again. “My life is really over, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t have to be. You’re only thirteen.”

“I’ll never get out of here, will I?”

Trying to stop his slide down a pole of despair, Lindy said, “That’s an open question. Getting people out of here is what I do, Darren. And if you give me a little, I can help you more.”

She waited for him to respond to the pleading in her voice.
Just
come to me halfway.

The young prisoner, lost in the orange jumpsuit that looked like an ill-fitting Halloween costume, slumped on his stool. “I’ve done what I need to do.”

“Need to do?” Lindy said. “What do you mean, Darren?”

He shook his head.

“Darren, what did you mean by that? I want to know.”

He waved the back of his shackled hand at her, looked at the dull green wall.

“Tell me,” she said. “Please, trust me. What is it you needed to do?”

“Shut up,” he said quietly.

No, she was not going to shut up. She had just seen a fissure in the mountain. A thin shaft of light shone out, but the mountain was threatening to close up again. If she didn’t drive a wedge in now she might never get the chance.

A wedge. Something to shove into the tiny crack.

“You want to know about me?” she asked. “Want to know why I’m here?”

Darren was silent for a moment, then slowly nodded.

“I’ll tell you, but you’ve got to make a deal with me. You’ve got to give me something back, okay? Deal?”

Nothing from him. Oh, well, she had to dive in anyway.

“I was pretty messed up as a kid,” Lindy said. “A real troublemaker. My dad and I didn’t get along too well. He didn’t really like me. And then, I don’t know, something snapped in me when I got to be a teenager. About your age I guess. I started doing things behind my father’s back.”

Darren’s eyes moved a little, but he was looking right at her.

“Then he ran off. That was really hard on my mom. I tried to deal with it. I started drinking and stuff like that. Let school slide. There was a teacher at my school, though, wouldn’t give up on me. Managed to get me into junior college. Long story short, I got through college and into a law-school program at night. I went on to do mostly juvenile work with the public defender’s office. And then . . .”

She was about to tell him about Marcel Lee. She stopped herself. She was backtracking to some other part of her past when Darren spoke.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

That was unexpected. And the crack stayed open.

“Do you?” he pressed.

“What made you ask me that?”

“I just want to know.”

In the split second between question and answer Lindy relived the bar exam—she felt all the anxiety, all the information jumbling around in her head, all the hope that when it came to crunch time something would make sense. Only that was just the bar exam. This was a kid’s life.

“Sure,” Lindy said.

“Why?” He was challenging her, a prosecutor cross-examining a defendant who tried to get by with shallow answers.

Lindy shrugged. “It’s just one of those things you know. There has to be a God.”

“Yeah, but what’s he like? What do you think he’s like?” He moved his hands around in the desk shackles and leaned forward. His default reticence was replaced suddenly by some odd curiosity.

“I think God knows everything. But what he does with that knowledge is beyond us.”

“Oh yeah?”

“What are you trying to tell me, Darren?”

“I know God.”

“Tell me about him.”

He smiled then, like a kid who knew where the answers to the test were and had copied them down. But he did not say anything further.

“Darren, I really want to know.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t really want to know.”

“Why don’t you believe me?”

“You’re getting paid to do this, aren’t you?”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in this case, in you.”

“You better believe in God,” he said. “You better.”

And then the fissure sealed shut, crushing Lindy with frustration.

This kid better be crazy, and she’d better find a good doctor to verify that.

4.

“I think it would be a good idea to be apart for a while.”

Mona heard her own voice. It sounded clipped and precise and emotionless. It surprised her that she wasn’t crying.

Not even Brad’s look, his shocked and hurt face, brought tears to her eyes. She wondered if he’d cry. Every now and then Brad would tear up at an old movie. He would try to hide it, but Mona always knew. He’d pretend to scratch his head when he was really wiping his eye. Like when John Wayne looked at his gold watch in
She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon.
Got him every time.

And she couldn’t resist holding him when he did. She would tear up and grab him and hug him, even though he told her not to. He was embarrassed and tried to cover up. Usually she had the waterworks.

Now she was the desert as Brad’s eyes misted ever so slightly.

“Do you mean . . .” he said, then started again. “What do you mean?”

“I mean apart for a while. I don’t want to have a repeat of last night.”

Brad waited a long time before responding, and Mona knew he’d picked up that there was more to her words than she’d let on.

“You don’t actually think,” he said, “our marriage is in trouble?”

Can
’
t you see it? Where have you been?

“I’m not saying anything,” Mona answered, “except I think we need some time apart.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Not a good idea at all.”

“I think it is a good idea.”

“So that settles it?”

“Yes.”

Brad normally sat during upsetting discussions. It was Mona’s observation that this was his way of anchoring himself to something. He did not like emotional upheaval. And his chair in the family room, a brown recliner,was his favorite. Mona, who was standing with arms folded, expected he would remain there as the discussion drew to a close.

But he did not. And Mona knew that meant trouble.

SEVEN

1.

Lindy went over to check on Mr. Klinger. He was in his favorite soft chair, circa 1958, watching a sitcom.

“Ah, Lindy! Come and watch how bad this is.”

She looked at a couple of actors pretending to be flummoxed.

“Not funny,” Klinger said, waving his arms. “Now Sid Caesar, he was funny. Funny this is not.”

“Why don’t you turn it off,Mr. Klinger? Might be better for your blood pressure.”

“What about you?”

“Me?”

“You with that crazy kid.”

Lindy sighed and sat on his modern sofa, circa 1965.“You’ve been watching the news.”

Klinger wiggled his bushy white eyebrows. “I don’t want you should get in too deep.”

“Impossible in a murder case.”

“Murder! That was a massacre. Kid like that.” Klinger shook his head sadly as canned laughter filled the room.“Why, Lindy? Why did he do that terrible thing?”

“I can’t really talk about it yet, Mr. Klinger.”

“God told him to do it, is what he says?”

That much was public information. Lindy nodded.

“Ah, God maybe isn’t dead,” Klinger murmured, “but he’s out getting a second opinion.”

“Do you believe in God, Mr. Klinger?” Suddenly, she wanted to know very much what he thought. Maybe because of his age. Maybe eighty-some years on the planet had filled him with burnished insight.

Klinger turned thoughtful. A burst of laughter and applause came from the sitcom. He flicked it off with the remote.

“My father was a rabbi, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“He used to say God created the world in six days. On the seventh day, he rested. On the eighth day, he started getting complaints. And it hasn’t stopped since. I got complaints too, Lindy. There’s so much pain in this world.”

He paused, looked at the floor.

“But then I think, we laugh. A God who can make laughter, he can’t be all bad. So why don’t we laugh all the time? This is the question. You know the story of Job?”

“A little. God took everything away from him.”

“Ah, you got one little detail wrong. It was Satan who took everything. God just let him do it.”

“Doesn’t that amount to the same thing?”

“Only to a smarty-pants lawyer! I had a dream a long time ago. Satan was the producer of a TV show. That’s very close to the truth, by the way. And he wanted me to tell some jokes he wrote. But the jokes weren’t funny. I said to him, ‘You’re not a Jew. Only Jews are funny.’ He said, ‘I am the producer and you will say what I write.’ I told him, ‘No,’ and he fired me. And I never worked again.”

“Not a very happy dream.”

Klinger leaned toward her with a glint in his eye. “But there’s more. I went out to the street and started telling my own jokes. I got a million of ’em. And people started laughing. All over the street. And soon there was thousands of people, all laughing at my jokes. And Satan looks out the window of the fancy office building and tells us all to shut up. But I kept telling my jokes, and people kept laughing. And he screamed until he lost his voice.”

He paused. “So I figure our job here is to make people laugh when we can. Make life easier for the guy next to you. That’s our job. And when we do that, Satan loses his voice.”

Lindy got up and kissed Emil Klinger on the forehead. “I think God made you just right, Mr. Klinger.”

He looked at her wide-eyed. “My blood pressure just went from almost dead to
whoopee.
”

Lindy picked up his pill dispenser, sitting on a small table, and opened it. “Don’t forget the blue one before bed. Good night.”

She kept thinking about God as she spooned out Cardozo’s food and waited for Roxy to show up to discuss the case. Something was eating at her, like a little ferret gnawing at the wires in her brain.

Maybe it had to do with the way Darren looked at her when he talked about God. Like he had some sort of special knowledge about things divine that she didn’t. Like he was some kind of thirteen-year-old prophet with a hidden message from on high.

Of course that was absurd. How much can a thirteen-year-old know about anything?

But then, how much did she know? She told him she believed in God, but what did that really mean? She did have a back-of-the-mind belief, a nonthreatening corner of her mind where she could park God, leave him there to fiddle on his own.

Then there was Roxy, who was so into the God thing now. When she arrived, and the two of them settled down with Diet Dr Peppers, Lindy brought the subject up first.

They sat in the front of the trailer, looking at the lights of the Valley. The hot and dry night air blew down from the Santa Susanna Mountains, reminding Angelinos to be thankful for water.

“Did you go to church on Sunday?” Lindy asked.

“Yeah, of course.” She seemed fascinated that Lindy would even ask. “You want to come with me again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you thinking about it?”

“Here’s what I’m thinking about.” Lindy turned slightly on her lawn chair, facing Roxy directly. “What makes Christianity any better or worse than any other religion?”

“Well, Jesus, for one thing. The main thing.”

“You think he really happened? Like in the Mel Gibson movie?”

“Oh yeah.”

“But the part about rising from the dead. That’s kind of hard to buy.”