A vague memory from childhood surfaced. Of naked cherubic children with red-gold curls and ice cream smeared all over their chubby cheeks while I watched cartoons on Saturday morning. “Oh God, you were those kids?”
“Yep. But then we hit five and we weren’t so cute any longer.” He looked pensive for a brief moment. “It’s tough to be told you’re all washed up at five.”
“That’s … terrible.” I remembered him mentioning his parents’ divorce, and I wondered if the loss of the career had something to do with it, but for once I kept my mouth shut.
He shrugged. “Hey, our parents made a boat load of money, invested it well, and didn’t rob us, so we ended up all right. I went to Harvard, and Maslin went to Columbia, so don’t cry for us, Argentina.”
I had to admit I was getting really tired of people in LA talking in pop-culture quotes. I released my irritation and asked, “Does Maslin work at the LA Times?”
“No, he’s a freelancer. Travels to shitholes in the third world and covers bush wars. Goes undercover in corporations to reveal dangerous working conditions and dangerous products. Exposes corrupt politicians. Then he sells his articles to magazines and major papers. Since he doesn’t give a crap about access and doesn’t think it’s the job of a journalist to be a stenographer, he wins Pulitzers. Don’t expect to ever see him at a cocktail party in D.C. He’s in town right now, taking a break after his last trip to the latest shithole. I’m sure he’d love to help you.”
I sat with the idea for a few minutes and started to like it more and more. “Since David gave his blessing to my making inquiries, I’ll bet we can squeeze some bucks out of the firm to pay him,” I offered.
“I’m sure he won’t say no.”
“So, how do we arrange this?”
“How about we all have dinner tonight?”
“Let’s make it tomorrow. I’m going to try and see Kerrinan today.”
“You got it.”
Merlin turned away to call his brother, and I put in a call to Christine Valada.
11
The rendezvous took place in the lobby of the main police station. At first Christine Valada had been suspicious to the point of hostile, but finally I convinced her that I wasn’t working for the DA and frankly thought something really strange was going on. She agreed to meet me at two thiry and take me in to see Kerrinan.
I hadn’t thought to ask what she looked like, or describe myself, or look her up on Facebook and see if she had posted a photo. As I drove I thought, how hard can it be? Two female lawyers. Turned out to be really hard. The lobby was filled with women in chic suits carrying slim briefcases, with faces set in serious frowns. (I once again felt inferior, with my bulky rolling bag, but how the hell did you carry anything with you in those tiny leather folders?) Statistics stated that women were a majority in the nation’s law firms. Here was the empirical evidence.
I was staring in consternation at the flood of women when someone touched my arm and a voice said, “Linnet Ellery, right?”
I turned and found myself facing a woman a few inches taller than me and probably twenty years older. She had thick, dark brown hair touched lightly with silver. It flowed over her shoulders in a tumble of crisp curls and made her creamy golden skin all the more striking. Deep brown eyes studied me critically.
“Yes. Ms. Valada?”
“Chris, please.”
“Call me Linnet. Sorry, I forgot to tell you what I looked like or ask for a description. How did you—”
“You’ve been in the papers a lot, and while the photo from last night was fuzzy, the one with Jeffery Montolbano wasn’t.”
“Shall we go up?” She shifted a large and bulky purse briefcase higher onto her shoulder, and I pulled up the handle on my rolling bag. For an instant we glanced at each other’s giant bags, shared a quick smile, but said nothing. Chris continued. “We’ll be interviewing him in his cell, and it won’t be easy,”
“And why is that?” I asked. I followed Valada as she headed toward an elevator.
“I take it you’ve never visited an Álfar in jail?”
“No.”
“It takes a special facility to hold one.”
I felt really stupid. “I should have thought of that. How do you hold an Álfar when they can just walk out of our world?”
“They’ve found a way.”
The elevator arrived and we rode up to the jail level. The female guard at the desk searched our briefcases and treated us to a hostile stare, which took me aback. Chris leaned over the high-tech desk. I peered over her shoulder and saw that the entire back of the horseshoe-shaped desk was lined with screens displaying pictures of prisoners in their cells. One of the screens had multiple windows offering different views of the cell. Occasionally one picture would be blocked, though I couldn’t tell why.
“Hey! Back off!” The female guard had come out of her chair, and she and Chris were almost nose to nose.
“And you guys better back off. I’m forced to interview my client in his cell where he is under constant surveillance rather than in an interview room where I’m assured confidentiality. You better not have microphones in that cell, because if you do and if anything turns up in the DA’s evidence I’m going to sue a lot of people naked and put some others in jail. And I want the cameras turned off until I’m finished. Got that?”
“I can’t do that. He might—” the guard began.
“The cameras aren’t what’s keeping him there. The walls keep him there. Now turn the cameras off or I call the DA and a judge.” Valada pulled her cell phone out of her purse and brandished it like a small, blunt sword.
”Let me check with my boss.” She made a call and had a quick, hushed conversation. “He says okay.” She jabbed at a button and the screen went dark. “Go on through.” She buzzed us through the heavy bulletproof glass that separated the outer lobby from the jail proper.
“What’s with her?” I said in a low voice to Chris.
“Never done criminal law, I take it?”
“A few weeks in the summer during my clinical work.”
“Cops do not like defense attorneys. They think we put scumbags back on the streets and play gotcha with good cops. I try to explain to them I only play gotcha with bad cops. And it’s bad cops doing bad work that gets scumbags released. Defense attorneys just take advantage of their failings.”
A guard approached us. “Come with me. He’s in the special cell at the end of the block.”
He led us down a long hallway lined with cells. Men hung on the bars staring, hooting, and catcalling. “Hey chickie, chickie, chickie. See what I got. Big man over here.” I forced myself to meet the gazes of the men haranguing me. They were dressed in orange prison jumpsuits; several had pulled down the top to reveal either bare chests, or wife-beater T-shirts. Where skin was exposed it was almost always heavily decorated with tattoos: barbed wire, swastikas, dragons, swords, and Chinese and Japanese ideograms. The harsh scent of cigarette smoke caught in the back of my throat and tickled the nose, and the wild male odor of sweat mingled with a less than inefficient sewer system. And somewhere in the building dinner was being prepared. It smelled as if cabbage was on the menu.
I hadn’t been in a jail since my senior year in law school when they had taken us for a tour of several prisons and given us an up-close look at the execution chamber. Intellect told me to oppose the death penalty after so many people on death row had been exonerated by DNA evidence. But there were some cases where my gut took over, and the angry, frightened, and far more emotional side screamed for blood and vengeance. My only other brush with criminal law had been a six-week course at the public defender’s office that I had mentioned to Chris. The students got the small fry cases—drunk driving, marijuana busts, bar fights that didn’t leave anybody dead or maimed. I never represented anyone I thought was innocent, but I found myself deeply involved in every case because my clients seemed so helpless and confused at being enmeshed in the American justice system.