Robert’s mustache shifted and rose. “That’s right. None of us do, do we, Mitch?”
“No home, no family, no records. We’re ghosts.”
The Stork emitted a wheezy little laugh. “No taxes either.”
“Ghosts.” Mitchell grinned. “We are ghosts, aren’t we? We just come out of our graves now and then to take care of business.”
Tim nodded at the binder. “What’s the case?”
Rayner folded his hands atop the binder and gave a magician’s pause. “Rhythm Jones.”
“Ah,” Mitchell said. “Rhythm.”
It would be difficult to live in L.A. County and not have at least a passing awareness of the Rhythm Jones-Dollie Andrews case. An exrapper of modest acclaim, Jones was a small-time dealer with a propensity for turning out girls. His first name derived from the fact that he was always bouncing, as if to a private beat. According to street lore, his mother had named him in the crib. As an adult he threw off a sloppily endearing vibe, all fat smile and bopping head. Usually he wore a Dodgers jersey, hanging open to reveal the RHYTHM tattoo stenciled in Gothic across his chest.
For a few chance weekends in his twenties, he’d spun vinyl with the East Side DJ set, but he’d quickly found himself back in his hometown, South Central. Three years and two hundred pounds later, he was the go-to man for shitty rock and petite white girls who’d hook for a twenty or a spoonful of liquid nirvana. He was a notoriously vicious sex addict; his charges had been known to hobble into emergency rooms, towels crammed down both sides of their pants to stanch the bleeding.
He’d been indicted on two counts of possession for sale and one count of pimping and pandering, but due to a combination of dumb luck and cowed witnesses, he’d never been convicted.
Until Dollie Andrews.
Andrews was an off-the-bus Ohioan who’d taken the archetypal Hollywood header, from waitressing actress to back-alley blow-jobber. But she’d finally gotten her dream: After her body had been found smeared into Jones’s ratty couch, punctured with seventy-seven knife wounds, her modeling eight-by-tens had been released to a ravenous press, and her short-cropped towhead curls and the just-right width of her hips had etched her persona posthumously into the zeitgeist.
Jones had been found sleeping off a PCP high one room over; he claimed complete amnesia regarding the past two days. None of Andrews’s blood had been found on his body, his clothes, or under his nails, though a crime-scene technician had discovered traces in the pipes beneath the shower drain. The weapon, bearing a clean set of ten-point prints, had been recovered from a trash can outside. Motive? The prosecutor had argued sexual rejection. One of Andrews’s colleagues had captured her on camcorder wholesomely proclaiming she’d never give it up for black meat. In certain boxcars composing the train wreck of public opinion, this was known to pass for virtue.
To Jones’s immense disadvantage was the egregious ineptitude of his lawyer, an acne-faced kid just out of school whom the overburdened public defender had thrown to the wolves on the nothing-to-gain case. Given the circumstances under which the body had been found, several witnesses who claimed Jones had been stalking Andrews for weeks, and the unanimous testimony of two medical examiners that the stabber had been a forceful, right-handed male around five feet ten, Jones had been convicted by a jury after less than twenty minutes of deliberation.
The verdict had brought out the Leonard Jeffrieses and the Jesse Jacksons, who had proclaimed that, as a non-professional-athlete black male accused of killing a white woman, Jones wasn’t being given a fair shake. The resultant political pressures had accelerated Jones’s Writ for Ineffective Assistance of Counsel, which was granted.
Verdict overturned.
Meanwhile, some jackass in long-term record storage had misfiled the evidence and exhibits, which left the prosecutor with no forensic reports, no photos of the body to flash at the jury during the second trial, nothing more than the testimony of four white cops.
Verdict, not guilty.
The case files were discovered the following Monday, mistakenly filed under “Rhythm.”
Jones slipped out of sight, lost somewhere in the faceless obscurity of L.A. slums, protected from the heat of further inquiry by the generous parasol of double jeopardy.
As Rayner finished reviewing the specifics of the case, Tim’s eyes were drawn to the picture of Ginny, propped on the table before him. He glanced again at the other photos in sight-Ananberg’s mother, Dumone’s wife, and the Stork’s mother, an imperious-looking, heavy-set woman with an expression of disgruntled impatience common to pugs and Eastern European immigrants. This was their purgatory, Tim realized, to oversee deliberations about L.A.’s most vile crimes and criminals, to play silent chorus to a seedy drama. This was how Tim had chosen to honor his daughter.
“…reasonable doubt,” Mitchell was saying. “It’s not no doubt. There’s never no doubt.”
But Ananberg held strong. “If someone were planning to frame him, it would be the perfect way. He’s a known drug abuser with countless enemies. Get him when he’s high as a kite, hack up a body in his living room, and voila.”
“Sure,” Robert said. “Forensic stab patterns are a breeze to fake. Especially seventy-seven punctures.”
Rayner’s head snapped up from the court transcript. “Oh, come on. We all know facts can be tailored. The public defender failed to produce a single expert witness for the defense.”
Robert’s hands were both spread on the table, white from the pressure. “Maybe there wasn’t one who could represent the defense’s version of the facts in…in-”
“-good faith,” Mitchell said.
“Please,” Ananberg said. “Expert witnesses are like whores, but more expensive.”
Rayner’s head jerked a bit at the simile.
Tim watched Robert closely. Robert’s fuse, for obvious reasons, was considerably shortened by murderers of women. Tim reflected on the firmness of his own conviction about Bowrick’s guilt and realized he held the same defensive rage for killers of children. Anger guarding trauma, ever vigilant. And-for purposes of the Commission-ever polluting.
“The verdict was overturned only because the evidence was misfiled and could not be presented.” The Stork flipped through the forensic report with one hand, and with his other he rubbed his thumb across the pads of his fingers, swift and ticlike. “It’s fairly conclusive.”
“This case was thrown out the first time around due to incompetent counsel,” Ananberg said. “By definition that means no respectable defense was mounted. There could have been considerations available that were never explored. Plus, the evidence is hardly damning-they found no blood whatsoever on his person. Seventy-seven stab wounds and no trace of blood on him? He was wacked-out on angel dust-I doubt he had the clarity of mind to burn his clothing and exfoliate with a loofa.”
Mitchell spoke very slowly, as if monitoring himself. “We have a body in his living room, a weapon bearing his fingerprints, and traces of the victim’s blood in his shower drain.”
“It is remarkably compelling physical evidence,” Tim said.
Ananberg regarded him, surprised, as if he were breaking some heretofore unspoken alliance.
“What the fuck do you want?” Robert said. “Live footage of the murder? If that evidence hadn’t been lost, this guy would’ve already been fried.” His voice was rising, his face starting to color. “He was caught dick deep at the crime scene, which happened to be his house. You’re overthinking this one, Ananberg.”
“He’s a pretty street-smart guy. And it’s such a stupid crime scene…” Ananberg shook her head. “The evidence doesn’t seemdamning to me. It seems convenient.”
They moved through the formal procedure swiftly, as it was obvious there would not be a unanimous decision. The vote went four to two; Rayner sided with Ananberg against the others.
“For fuck’s sake,” Robert said. “You’re letting the prick off the hook because of a bunch of stupid liberal bullshit.”