HE SLOWLY STARTED to think that it didn’t matter if the cop were indicted because he’d just be acquitted at trial. No one would be hurt. He wondered how he might present the facts of the case to leave open enough doubt for the grand jury to indict. It wasn’t reasonable doubt. A case was indicted on majority of votes by the jurors. It would be easy. Easier than working on Road Patrol. Midnights. With Wednesday and Thursday off. He took more than one break to vomit in the small men’s room on the third floor.
THE DAY OF his grand jury testimony, he wore his lone blue suit with the matching blue tie that the guy from Penney’s had thrown in because he was a cop. He had a file with a few notes and some lab reports in case anyone asked him about them. He knew it would hinge on how long the fight was, if the officer had had any other option, and if he acted within state guidelines for use of force.
Stoltz nodded to the PBA attorney outside the grand jury room. Although Stoltz had spoken to Carla Lazaro numerous times since the shooting, always giving her reports and keeping her informed, he had been careful not to give her any clue as to what he planned to do. He dealt in facts, not feelings. Her superior tone showed that she believed she had won. He knew she felt as if she owned him. Why not? She could call his captain and complain, and he’d be moved. The S.O. needed the state attorney more than it needed him. He shuffled into the room and took a seat, and a bailiff swore him in.
He swore to tell the truth. His stomach flipped. He felt bile build in the back of his throat.
All Stoltz really remembered was the look on Carla Lazaro’s face when he noted that all the witnesses had said the cop was exhausted. He threw in a fact from what he had researched: it was the longest hand-to-hand fight between a cop and a suspect in Florida history. Also that the suspect had five convictions for assault on a police officer, one of whom he had tried to choke to death. Stoltz followed up, without being asked, with how the cop applied first aid immediately.
The grand jury came back with a “no true bill” in record time.
As he stepped down from the witness stand, the look from Carla Lazaro said everything. He figured he had nothing to lose and winked at the fuming assistant state attorney, leaving the room with his integrity intact.
On the following Monday, his new phone played the theme to Hawaii Five-O as he picked it up and said, “Stoltz, Economic Crime, may I help you?” He jotted some notes on a check-cashing fraud and opened his first economic-crime case. He now had one case to go with the file his sergeant had allowed him to bring over from Homicide. Jane Doe number sixty-eight had her own drawer in his new desk. As he copied down some information on his first identity-theft investigation, he wondered when he’d get to her. One thing was for sure: there were no droughts in financial crime in South Florida.
Divine Droplets by Paula L. Woods
The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.
– William Faulkner
During those anxious nights, coiled into his narrow bunk, his mind would soar along the 101, down the 405, or out on remote stretches of Pacific Coast Highway until he arrived at one of those longed-for places – with their low counters, perfectly spaced chairs, glass cases holding the glistening jewels he’d come to crave. Ruby-hued maguro, carnelian-colored beads of ikura, or kurage glistening like citrine ribbons – he could feel the cool flesh yielding in his mouth, washed down with a subtly flavored sake. The sensation was liberating, one of the most intense he’d ever experienced. And he had come that close to losing it all.
But this afternoon, as he hastily assembled his Japanese pens and sketchbooks, he knew with a certainty that made his nerves dance that all the pleasures he craved would once again be his. He was being released from the county jail, his case dismissed by a fair-minded judge after his defense team showed just how stupid and overzealous the police had been. Their stupidity, not his. Because, in almost every aspect of his behavior, he had been remarkably clever. Clever enough to allow himself visits to only exclusive sushi bars such as Urasawa or Matsuhisa when preparing for his outings, although he’d stopped when he became aware of the pattern after the third. Later, there were the receipts from the decidedly downscale Yamashiro and the eyewitness testimony of bartenders who rang up rounds of sake he conspicuously bought for himself and anyone sitting within shouting distance in the lounge overlooking Hollywood. Even his accessories had been purchased years before, from specialized stores all over the country, always for cash and never more than one or two pieces at a time. Every contingency had been considered. There was no reason he should have been arrested.
As he was escorted to the reception area by two burly sheriff’s deputies, he savored the moment, knowing in the end he was much smarter than the cops would ever be. He hadn’t fallen for their subterfuge that first time they came calling. Had they asked him outright, they would have learned that he could thoroughly account for his movements on the nights in question, that they would never be able to put him anywhere near the locations where those eight girls had been found.
Yet because of his carelessness and one foolish lie, they had persisted until they trapped him. Then it was those detectives – Truesdale from the LAPD and Firestone from Simi Valley – who had interrogated him for four hours in a little room in Parker Center, their hot breath tickling his ears like the gnats one August at his mother’s home in the Hamptons. He’d laughed in their faces when they tried to trick him into confessing in exchange for a reduced sentence. But he never cracked, never said one word they could use against him.
But they indicted him anyway, on two counts, although he had refused to believe the misbegotten evidence would be admitted into court. And he was right, although his certitude had to be backed up by three days of grilling the cops on the stand and a fortune in legal fees to get the evidence excluded. It pleased him to think that the trust fund his mother had so diabolically constructed to control him from the grave had been relieved of 1.3 million dollars to secure his freedom. It pleased him even more to know he was being released three days before Mother’s Day.
But his vindication was anticlimactic. As opposed to the pack of reporters who had clamored outside the jail at his arrest and throughout the proceedings, their number had dwindled to only a half-dozen stalwarts willing to brave the weather for a sound bite. He stepped outside the confines of the jail – refusing the umbrella being held by Michelle Dunn, the lead attorney on his team – and tilted his head back, allowing the drizzle to caress his face. He could imagine how the shot would look on CNN – his untanned, chiseled face raised skyward, longish brown hair lifting slightly in the wind. He allowed himself to be gently led away by Dunn, selected as much for her resemblance to Tiffany Rutherford as for her skills in the courtroom. Superimposed over the shot, he could envision the words “Heir to Solange Fashion Empire Freed After Murder Charges Are Dismissed,” as the camera caught him in a private moment, mouthing a prayer, his palms raised as if the raindrops whispered a heavenly communication.