“The Lord.”
CHAPTER 2
“Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…”
My jailhouse conference lasted less than five minutes. After admitting the stabbing at the behest of the Lord, Robbie, his eyes rolling, climbed back into his bowing and scraping mode and started to sing. There was no point in sticking around. ‘Forgive me’ wasn’t part of any criminal lawyer’s lexicon, and I had to get out before it started to rub off.
Regardless of how Robbie felt, it was obvious his mental capacity was diminished, and he wasn’t the one who should be making decisions about how he was going to spend the rest of his life. From the report, I learned that Robbie was an only child whose father had been killed in a car wreck years ago. His mother lived out in the San Fernando Valley, somewhere way out in the Valley, almost to Ventura. After stopping at the D.A.’s office, I’d go see her, make the drive on the hot and crowded Golden State Freeway all the way to a dusty region barely in L.A. County, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Chatsworth.
Why did Robbie have to stab the guy at a time when the temperature outside was a hundred degrees? And why did his mother have to live out in the Valley where the smog was thick and the air was as sticky as blackstrap molasses? Why couldn’t the guy’s mother live at the beach?
The D.A.’s office was located in the new Criminal Courts Building downtown, a typical government structure. And, like the people housed inside, it was gray, utilitarian, long on function but short on imagination. Steve Webster, the Deputy D.A. assigned to the case, was no exception in the imagination department. But after an hour of saying no to every creative proposal I came up with, I felt I was finally wearing him down.
“C’mon, Steve, let’s get this thing over with. The guy’s loony-tunes, for chrissakes. We’ll plead not guilty by reason of insanity. You can warehouse him in some state hospital…”
“No way, O’Brien. He could miraculously be cured; he’d be back on the street.”
Steve sat behind his metal desk, which was painted gray-but of course, everything in the building was painted gray, as gray as the law I was trying to invoke. If Robbie had been insane at the time of the crime, then he wouldn’t go to jail. Then again, if he happened to be in his right mind, he wouldn’t have stabbed the guy. Yeah, the law had its Catch-22, and at times I felt like Yossarian, a little paranoid and thinking everyone is crazy.
Steve sat there shaking his head. Maybe this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. Then suddenly, he dropped the bomb. “Your client has priors.”
“What? There is nothing in the report about any prior convictions.”
“Sealed. Juvie stuff, drug-related…”
“I don’t believe it. My guy’s a holy-roller.”
“You’d better believe it. I saw the sheet,” he said.
“Hey, Steve, that proves my point. He got whacked on acid as a kid, and now he’s totally out of it. Not responsible.”
“Won’t fly, O’Brien. Robbie Farris wasn’t diminished when he signed up for his GED at Golden Valley College. Where the good professor taught, I might add, before your client turned him into sushi.”
We came to that moment in every negotiation when both sides, refusing to give up points, sat and stared at each other. How long the staring would continue depended on several factors, not the least of which was the stubbornness of the combatants. Women were much better at this phase of negotiating than men. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Barbara, my ex-wife, still sat there staring at the spot where I had been sitting when she unceremoniously asked me to leave the house and never return.
But, of course, one way to break the logjam was to change the subject. I glanced around the room, taking in the functional furniture, the filing cabinets, and Steve sitting there with a dismal look on his face.
“Hey, Steve, your tie isn’t gray.”
He dropped his chin, glanced down and fingered his coffee-stained knit tie. “It’s blue. So what?”
Now, back to the negotiation. “Got a deal for you. We’ll get this case behind us.”
“What about my tie? You don’t like it? Shit, look at you…”
“I’ll plead my guy not guilty, insanity. You hold off requesting a trial date until a shrink checks him out. If he’s nuts, you accept the plea. Sound good?”
Webster stopped fiddling with his tie and looked up. “And, if he’s sane, sane in the legal sense of the word?”
“Then we work out a new deal.”
“You’re the one who’s nuts, O’Brien. If the shrink says Robbie Farris is sane, then he pleads guilty.” Webster paused for a moment, making a steeple with his fingers, flexing them in and out.
“Okay, it’s a deal,” I said. “At the arraignment, we’ll ask the judge to postpone…”
“Not so fast, O’Brien.”
Uh-oh.
“We use the county shrink,” he said.
This was going better than I figured. It was obvious Robbie wasn’t in his right mind when he killed Professor Carmichael. Any competent doctor would see that. But I had to nail this down before Webster changed his mind.
“No deal, Steve. We use an impartial guy. No county doctors.” I didn’t give a damn about the doctor. I just didn’t want to appear that I was too eager, or a pushover.
“Costs money,” he said.
“Cheaper than a trial.”
“Okay, O’Brien. I’ll go for it. I’ll make the motion at the arraignment, but no tricks. No last minute complications. Capish?”
“Aw, Steve, trust me. Have I ever…but there is one small thing…”
“There you go. Goddammit, O’Brien, same old bull pucky.”
“Calm down,” I said. “I just have to flag the deal by his mother. Need her approval. Don’t worry, I’ll nail it down.”
The Deputy D.A. peered at me in silence. His eyebrows formed a distrusting V, and there was skepticism in his eyes.
“It’s a formality,” I said.
“See that she goes along.”
The drive out to Chatsworth, bordering Ventura County on the far side of the San Fernando Valley, killed what remained of the morning. Steve Webster supplied the unlisted phone number, and I had called Hazel Farris from a payphone in the lobby of the court building before I left. After about forty rings, a boozy voice answered and confirmed that she was Robbie’s mother. She agreed, reluctantly, to a meeting. I told her I’d be there in a couple of hours.
The directions she gave over the phone made no sense, but after digging out my moldy, five-year-old Thomas Brothers and wasting ten minutes jumping from one page to another with no apparent logic to the map book, I finally found her street. At least I found it in the book. She lived off a side street called Larkin outside the city limits of Chatsworth in an isolated area of Los Angeles County. After cruising up and down Topanga Canyon Boulevard looking for Larkin and spending another fifteen minutes trying to find her place, I finally pulled into a trailer camp straight out of the thirties.
These were no holiday getaway jobs. Cobwebs stringing the wheel wells, the flat tires, and the expired license plates told me they hadn’t been moved in years.
I knocked on a few doors, but only one guy answered. He told me how to get to Hazel Farris’ unit. She lived in a beat-up Airstream parked at the end of a dirt road that weaved through the camp, the last one by the exit. Her trailer was hunkered down in the center of a weed-infested patch of dirt. It rested on a haphazard scattering of cement blocks acting as a feeble foundation. The trailer’s oxidized aluminum siding was torn in spots and peeled back like a castoff rusty tin can. In fact, the whole trailer looked like a big old tin can, a can of Spam, the large economy size.
I slid out of my Corvette. To the distant sound of a barking dog, I trudged through the weeds to what I perceived to be the front door cut in the side of the Airstream. I rapped on the flimsy tin, not too hard, not wanting to knock the trailer off its blocks. I waited and was just about to knock again when the door opened a crack. A bloodshot eyeball peered at me through the opening.