Nanston leaned back in her oversized leather chair and gazed out of her window toward the glass and concrete County Administration Building across the street.
After a long moment, she pointed at her law clerk.
“Get me Louis Craft v. Superior Court of Orange County and People v. Simpson. It’s a Fourth Appellate District case from the 1970s.”
She then pushed herself to her feet.
“Let’s go back.”
D onnally followed Blaine into the courtroom. The DA was shaking his head and biting his lower lip as he walked Donnally to his seat, then faced him across the low barrier.
“We’re in big trouble,” Blaine said in a tense whisper.
“How do you figure?”
The bailiff again. “The court will come to order.”
Blaine turned around and took two steps, stopping behind his chair, his shoulders slumping, his head lowered as if facing his executioner.
Nanston scanned the reporters in the gallery and the news video cameras in the jury box as if to say, You folks will want to get this down. Her eyes then bored down on Blaine.
“As the loss of evidence over the years may have impaired the ability of the defendant to put on a defense, the court is willing to entertain a defense motion to dismiss People v. Brown on speedy trial grounds.”
Donnally felt his body rock backward.
Blaine raised his hands in front of his chest as if to block a blow.
“Just a second, Your Honor-”
Donnally leaned forward, trying to hear the rest of the prosecutor’s complaint, but he couldn’t make it out over the gasps and confused chatter among reporters, each asking the other if the judge had said what they thought she had.
Nanston struck her gavel once and the room fell silent.
“This is not the time, Mr. Blaine.” She looked back and forth between him and Perkins. “And this isn’t brain surgery. I want all the briefing done in a week. Work out the schedule between you. Court is adjourned.”
Chapter 18
B laine threw his file down on his desk and kicked his trash can across the room, smashing it into a bookcase. It bounced, then rolled in a semicircle on the linoleum floor.
“I knew it the second she asked for Craft and Simpson. That bitch. She’s never stopped being a public defender.”
Donnally cast Blaine a sour look.
“Skip the performance,” Donnally said. “It was your job to get this guy to trial and now you’re dead in the water.”
Blaine spun toward Donnally, his finger jabbing.
“You-”
Donnally raised his palm.
“Now you’re going to blame me?”
“I don’t know why you opened up this can of worms in the first place.”
“That’s not the point. The question is what you’re going to do about it.”
Blaine dropped into his chair, thought for a moment, and then said, “Since it looks like Nanston has already made her decision, I’ll try to smoke her out and make a record for the appeal.”
He glanced out of the window, then looked back at Donnally with a half smile.
“Wait a second… wait a second. Maybe we can block the speedy trial hearing altogether. Maybe we can argue that no decision can be made on anything in the case until he agrees to talk to the shrink and is found competent. That way Nanston can’t dismiss the case and he stays in custody.”
Donnally locked his hands on his hips.
“Let me get this straight,” Donnally said. “You’re going to trade places with the defense? You arguing he’s not competent and them arguing he is?”
Blaine’s smile turned into a grin. “Exactly. You saw how Brown has been acting in court. If his own lawyer calls him a lunatic, I sure as hell can.”
“Who are you trying to kid, me or yourself?”
The prosecutor’s grin faded. “Apparently not you.”
Blaine tapped his pen against the edge of his desk. His eyes blurred, then he started to nod.
Donnally sensed the prosecutor’s mind gaining traction on the slope of his impromptu strategy.
Blaine’s head snapped up and he aimed a forefinger at Donnally’s chest.
“You’re still going to be my first witness,” Blaine said. “But this time to show that he’s crazy. You’re gonna testify about Brown’s delusion that he was in the nut ward for thirty-theven yearths. ” Blaine laughed as he imitated Brown’s lisp.
Donnally glared down at the prosecutor. “Not… a… chance.”
D onnally walked down the courthouse steps and turned toward the eight-story county parking garage a half block away. It loomed over the surrounding buildings like a nuclear cooling tower. He stopped at the corner crosswalk.
I did my part, Donnally said to himself as he stared at the red “Wait” sign. Maybe I delivered a different message to a different recipient, but it got delivered.
Moments later, Donnally found himself crossing the intersection, away from his car and toward the lake. He felt suffocated by the rumbling of traffic that reverberated off the government offices behind him and the faces of the apartment buildings along the encircling boulevard.
Donnally traversed the grass between the sidewalk and shoreline trail, sickened by the trash littering the bank: the squashed malt liquor cans and scattered pork rinds, the yellow-brown butt ends of joints, the Taco Bell wrappers.
He stopped along the shore and watched the foamy water lap up against the moss-covered rocks. He took in a breath infused with the decay bubbling to the oily surface.
The air was thick with an odor of rot and deceit that seemed to seep through his clothes and into his skin.
He exhaled.
It was time to head home.
I’m done playing postman.
Chapter 19
“H ey, Harlan, you in there?”
Donnally’s body jerked forward, as if the voice had jabbed him in the back of the neck. The sound broke his mind free from the accounting scrawl lying before him on top of Mauricio’s desk.
In the previous two hours he had discovered that the little guy had done well by living cheap. He had about thirty thousand dollars in cash in the bank and at least ten times that amount in equity in his property.
The question that had been troubling Donnally as he stared at the figures was what to do with the money now that Anna wasn’t alive to collect it.
He looked over and saw Will with his hands cupped around his eyes and pressed against the dirty office window, his cook’s apron splattered with beaten eggs and pancake batter.
“Harlan?”
“Yeah, what do you need?”
Donnally walked over and worked the bottom of the weathered double-hung window back and forth until he could raise it a few inches.
“Nothing,” Will said, tilting his narrow head to speak through the gap. “Deputy Sheriff Asshole came by the cafe a few minutes ago. Said he had to speak with you, personal. I told him I didn’t know where you was, and I didn’t, till now.”
“He say why?”
“Nope.”
“You ask?”
All the skin not concealed by Will’s black eyebrows and the wide soul patch springing from beneath his lower lip flushed red.
“I didn’t think to do it until he drove away.”
“That’s okay. Thanks for the heads-up.”
Donnally glanced over at the few cars left in the cafe’s gravel parking lot. Two had snowboards clamped onto rooftop racks.
“How many came in for breakfast?”
“I think forty. I wish it had been thirty-nine. Deputy Asshole was saying that if his father was still sheriff there’d already have been some kinda investigation of Mauricio to find out what he was hiding. Asshole kept calling him Pancho just like his father used to. Can’t we just ban him from the cafe?”
“You mean put up a sign? No brains. No sense. No service.”
Will laughed. “But you’d have to add, This Means You, Deputy Pipkins, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to figure out that it was aimed at him.”
D onnally stood by the window after Will returned to the cafe. He wondered whether Wade Pipkins Jr. was just doing what his father would’ve done, but for which he no longer had the authority beyond what he commanded as the patriarch of his Sunday dinner table.