Sins of the Fathers (36 page)

Charlene wouldn’t take the card. “I don’t want any help.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Don’t tell me what I want, okay?”

Lindy wanted to shove the girl in a car and get her to a safe house. Abused and wanting it. An all-too-familiar story. She settled for putting her card in Charlene’s shirt pocket.

“Charlene, what did Drake do to Darren? This is really important.”

“Stop trying to make me say.”

“Did he beat him?”

The look in Charlene’s eyes made it plain that Drake did all that and more.

“Why?” Lindy said. “Why would a man do that to his own child?”

“That’s just it,” Charlene said with a sudden defiance.

“That’s what?”

“The kid. Darren. Whatever his name is. The kid isn’t his.”

SEVENTEEN

1.

The district attorney for the county of Los Angeles, Jonathan “Iron John” Sherman, always reminded Leon Colby of the little quarterback who played for Cal when Leon was at UCLA. Wiry, fast, tough. Hard to bring down. Could kill you with a trick play.

Sherman had the same qualities—same intensity in his eyes, the same slight yet deceiving build, a build that had lulled many a defense lawyer into false security during Sherman’s early years with the DA’s office. But after a few poundings, word got around. Never underestimate Iron John—he got the nickname by refusing plea bargains. The man loved to go to trial and win.

As Colby entered Sherman’s office, he wondered how much Iron John knew about Colby’s desire to win something himself—this room. Colby thought he could fill the office nicely. He was even decorating it in his mind when Jonathan Sherman sat in his big, black leather executive chair and said, “Nice work so far on the DiCinni case.”

It sounded exactly like what it was, a mere warm up, a prelude to the real reason he’d been called to Mahogany Row. “Thanks.”

“No, I mean it. Really. You have that wild child, Field, in there. If this wasn’t such a bad case for her, I’d be worried about a little sympathy factor from the jury.”

“She may get it yet.”

Sherman waved his hand. “I’ve seen a little on TV. You got nothing to worry about.
We
have nothing to worry about.”

Sherman put his feet up on the desk. This bit of forced informality surprised Colby. Sherman never had a hair out of place or a suit with a superfluous crease. He looked like he was trying too hard to put Colby at ease.

“So what’s the occasion?” Colby said.

“Just wanted to have a little strategy session with you, is all,” Sherman said.

“It’s a little late for strategy, isn’t it? We’ve already had opening statements, the first wits—”

“I’m not talking about the DiCinni case, Leon.”

Colby looked at him, tried to read the iron eyes. Couldn’t. They glinted like polished stones, and then Sherman laughed and pulled his feet down. “Let’s not get all fancy here, Leon. Cards on the table, what do you say?”

“What cards you got?”

“Here’s what I know. I know that you have your eyes on this chair.”

Colby opened his mouth but Sherman put his hand up. “Hey, listen, I’m not bent out of shape about it. Ambitious deputies, it goes with the territory. Shows a little moxie too. I’m not upset about that. If we were to go into the election, of course, I’d be sitting pretty strong. I’m a popular guy, did you know that?”

Colby knew it.

“Yeah, the
Times
even said I was the best DA in the last thirty years, and it’s hard to please those people. They have this county-oversight complex that just drives me nuts. Hey, can I pour you a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll just take a snort.” Sherman had a wet bar in a rosewood cabinet. He poured some amber liquid—Scotch, probably—into a stippled glass. Then he turned to Colby and said, “What I have to say to you now is going to rearrange your brain.”

2.

“Talk to me, Darren.”

He stared blankly at Lindy, shook his head.

“Tell me about your father.”

Now the eyes started to ignite. “No.”

“Tell me what he did to you.”

He shook his head.

“What did he do to you all those years, Darren? The beatings. Tell me what he did.”

“Shut up.”

“No, I’m not going to shut up. You need help. And you can get help, but you need to be up-front with me. Tell me now, tell me what your father did to you. How did he do it? Did he do it—”

“You don’t know anything—”

“—with a rod, a wire, his hands? What?”

“—you don’t know what you’re doing—”

“Why, Darren? Do you think you deserved that?”

“Yes!”

The answer brought her up short, like a seat belt locking on a hard stop. “Nobody deserves that, Darren. Especially not a child.”

“Yes, I did!”

“No.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Why did you think you deserved that, Darren?”

He looked at his hands as veins began appearing under the skin of his neck.

“Why?” Lindy demanded.

“To get the devil out,” Darren said. He looked up at her. Tears were forming in his eyes. “He’s still in there and I have to get him out.”

“Darren, you’re just a boy.”

“Shut up!”

The on-duty sheriff’s deputy hurried over. “That’s it.”

“Wait a minute,” Lindy said.

“Make her shut up!” Darren cried.

“On your feet.” The deputy began to unshackle Darren’s table cuffs.

“I’m not finished here,” Lindy said.

The deputy pulled Darren to a standing position. “You are finished,” he said, pushing Darren ahead of him.

“Stop!”

They did not stop. She was losing him. She had tried to force things, and now she was losing him.

Oh God, don
’
t let me lose him.

God. Darren. The devil in there.

She jumped off the hard jail bench.

3.

“What I want to tell you, Leon, is the following.” Jonathan Sherman sounded like he was about to deliver one of his famous closing arguments. Rock-hard logic that few defense lawyers ever had the legal jackhammer to crack. “I don’t like being the DA.”

“You could have fooled me,” Colby said.

“I fool a lot of people. That’s why I’m here. But this is too much flesh pounding, too much time with city council members with sweaty foreheads and receptions with money men and their plastic wives. It’s not very satisfying, not as satisfying as putting some drug dealer in the can for the rest of his natural life.”

Leon nodded.

“But I clearly cannot go back to being a deputy. Which leaves me with private practice, some cushy rainmaking job at a big firm. But the problem is, Leon, I don’t like those people either. I’m sort of a loner, if you want to know the truth.”

He paused, looked out at his panoramic view of downtown L.A. “What I really want to be is attorney general.” He turned back to catch Colby’s reaction.

“That’s not a bad thing,” Colby said. “Sacramento is a nice place to—”

“No,” Sherman said. “A.G. of these United States of America.”

“Isn’t that an appointed position?”

“Sure is. And if the national election goes like the polls say, I’ve been assured from the inside that I’m their guy. See, Leon, I can play politics when I have to.”

“I would say so.”

“But what I don’t need is a big black eye before that day comes. One lousy case, as you’ll find out, can make your life miserable up here.”

“What do you mean, as I’ll find out?”

With a big, political smile, Sherman said, “Why, Leon, you’re going to be the next DA. I’m going to hand the office to you.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“You’re going to come off big after the DiCinni conviction. It’ll be a good way for me to go. I am not going to run for reelection.”

A shocker.

“It’s all part of the big picture,” Sherman said. “Here’s what I get: I go out a success, I take time off to be with my family—and I make sure everybody knows about that—and then I sponsor the first African-American DA in the history of Los Angeles. The party will love that.”

It was a good political plan, cynical and effective.

“So how does that sound to you, Leon?”

In truth it sounded very, very good. It sounded like a dream on a silver platter. “You’ve put in some thought on this.”

“That’s the secret of any trial, isn’t it? Preparation. There’s just one thing . . .”

Colby’s prosecutorial antennae went up.

“Judge Greene came to see me,” Sherman said.

“Greene? What for?”

“About DiCinni.”

“He doesn’t have anything to do with DiCinni.”

“Yeah, but as presiding judge he naturally takes an interest in the judges he supervises and what goes on in their courtrooms. And he has expressed a concern.”

“About what?”

“About the integrity of the police witnesses you’ve got. He came to me because he wants to keep it quiet, for the sake of this office and the whole administration of justice. So I’d kind of like to know what you know.”

Colby cleared his throat. “Are you asking me if every one of my witnesses is squeaky clean?”

“If I asked you that, I know what the answer would be. So that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if anything is going to leak out of this trial that could be potentially embarrassing to me. To us.”

Colby thought long and hard. A political question like this deserved a clever answer. But nothing clever came. Which bothered him more than he thought it would.

“There’s been some expansion, shall we say, of certain facts,”

Colby said. “I don’t see it as any big thing.”

“Lindy Field, is she a big thing? Is she going to make trouble like she did on the Marcel Lee case?”

“She might.”

“And what do we do?”

“We do our job. We fight back.”

“That’s not good enough. I want a win. A slam dunk. What I don’t want are a lot of embarrassing questions dogging me after I leave this place. And Leon, I want to know if I can count on you, or if my confidence is misplaced. Because if it is, I’ll look around for someone else to take my place.”

Colby rubbed the burnished-wood arms of the leather chair. They were clean and smooth and a whole lot nicer than the arms of the chairs in his own office. He said, “You have not misplaced your confidence.”

Iron John smiled.

4.

“Drake is God,” Lindy said.

She sat in Roxy’s car in the jail’s parking structure. The cement edifice cast dark shadows across the lot, even though the L.A. sun was bright and the sky blue. Only thin shafts of light made it between the columns and cars.

“Drake is God to Darren. I’m sure that’s it. Drake beat him, telling him all the time he was getting rid of the devil. And that left him to be God.”

“You got all that from Darren?”

“Not in so many words. I’m reading between the lines here. Maybe Darren was listening to Drake when he says God told him to shoot up the field.”

“You think?”

“Let’s chase that for a minute. The question is why? Why would Drake tell Darren to shoot up a baseball game? And if Darren was aiming at Joel Dorai, what was it Drake had against him?”

Roxy chewed her thumbnail. “Darren won’t tell you?”

Lindy shook her head. “Not yet. He’s scared.”

“But if you get this in front of the jury, we might be able to create reasonable doubt on mental state, right?”

“That’s the question. How am I going to prove it?”

“Maybe I can help.”

Lindy said, “Go for it.”

“While you were inside I finally got a call from the homicide detective in Vegas who handled the death of Darren’s mother,Trudy.”