4th of July (5 page)

“You violated police procedures, didn’t you?”

“We had an obligation to render aid.”

“Yes, I know. You were trying to be kind to the ‘kids.’ But you’re admitting that you didn’t follow police procedures, correct?”

“Look, I made a mistake,” I blurted. “But those kids were bleeding and vomiting. The car could’ve caught fire —”

“Your Honor?”

“Please limit your answers to the question, Lieutenant Boxer.”

I sat back hard in the chair. I’d seen Broyles operate many times before in the courtroom and recognized his genius for finding his opponent’s pressure point.

He’d just fingered mine.

I was still blaming myself for not cuffing those kids, and Jacobi, with more than twenty years on the force, had been suckered, too. But Christ, you can only do what you can do.

“I’ll rephrase that,” Broyles said offhandedly. “Do you always try to follow police procedures?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the police policy about being intoxicated on the job?”

“Objection,” Mickey shouted, leaping to his feet. “There’s evidence that the witness had been drinking, but there’s no evidence that she was intoxicated.”

Broyles smirked and turned his back to me. “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”

I felt huge wet circles under my arms. I stepped down from the witness stand, forgetting about my leg injury until the pain called it sharply to my attention. I limped back to my seat, feeling worse than I had before.

I turned to Mickey, who smiled his encouragement, but I knew the smile was fake.

His brow was corrugated with worry.

I WAS SHAKEN BY the way Mason Broyles had flipped the events of May 10 and placed the blame on me. He was good at his job, that slime, and it took all my strength to park my face in neutral and sit calmly as Broyles made his closing argument.

“Your Honor,” he said, “Sara Cabot is dead because Lindsay Boxer killed her. And Sam Cabot, age thirteen, is in a wheelchair for life. The defendant admits that she didn’t follow proper police procedures. Granted, there may have been some misdoing on the part of my clients, but we don’t expect juveniles to exercise good judgment. Police officers, however, are trained to deal with all manner of crises, and the defendant couldn’t handle a crisis, because she was drunk.

“Simply put, if Lieutenant Boxer had properly performed the duties of her job, this tragedy wouldn’t have occurred and we wouldn’t be here today.”

Broyles’s speech outraged me, but I had to admit he was persuasive and had I been sitting in the gallery instead of the dock, I might have seen it his way. By the time Mickey stood to mount his closing argument, my blood was pounding so hard in my ears it was as though a rock band were jamming inside my head.

“Your Honor, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer didn’t put loaded guns into the hands of Sara and Samuel Cabot,” Mickey said, his voice ringing with indignation. “They did that themselves. They shot unarmed police officers without provocation, and my client returned fire in pure self-defense. The only thing she’s guilty of is being too kind to citizens who showed her no kindness in return.

“In all fairness, Your Honor, this suit should be dismissed and this fine officer allowed to return to her duties without blame or blemish to her distinguished service record.”

Mickey finished his summation sooner than I had expected. A gap opened behind his last ringing words, and my fear poured in. As he sat down beside me, the courtroom filled with slight mouselike stirrings: papers rustling, the clicking of laptop keys, bodies shifting in their chairs.

I gripped Mickey’s hand under the table and I even prayed. Dear God, let her dismiss the charges, please.

The judge pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, but I couldn’t read her face. When she spoke, she did so concisely and in a weary tone.

“I believe the defendant did everything she could to salvage a situation gone horribly wrong,” said Judge Algierri. “But the alcohol bothers me. A life has been lost. Sara Cabot is dead. There’s enough evidence here to merit sending this case to a jury.”

I WENT RIGID WITH shock as the trial date was set for a few weeks in the future. Everyone stood as the judge left the courtroom, then the mob closed in around me. I saw blue uniforms at the edge of the throng, eyes not quite meeting mine, and then clumps of microphones were pushed up to my face. I still held Mickey’s hand.

We should have gotten a dismissal.

We should have won.

Mickey helped me to my feet, and I followed him as he cut through the crowd. Joe’s hand was on the small of my back as the three of us and Yuki Castellano exited the courtroom and made for the stairs. We stopped in the ground-floor stairwell.

“When you walk outside, hold your head up,” Mickey advised me. “When they scream, ‘Why did you kill that girl?’ just walk slowly to the car. Don’t smile, don’t smirk, and don’t let the media beat you. You did nothing wrong. Go home and don’t answer your phone. I’ll stop by your house later.”

The rain had ended by the time we stepped out of the courthouse into the dull late afternoon. I shouldn’t have been shocked to see that hundreds of people had gathered outside the courthouse to see the cop who’d shot and killed a teenage girl.

Mickey and Yuki split away from us to address the press, and I knew that Mickey’s thoughts were turning now to how he was going to defend the SFPD and the City of San Francisco.

Joe and I walked through the jostling, yelling crowd toward the alley where the car was waiting. I heard a chant, “Child killer, child killer,” and questions were lobbed at me like stones.

“What were you thinking, Lieutenant?”

“How did you feel when you shot those kids?”

I knew the faces of the television reporters: Carlos Vega, Sandra Dunne, Kate Morley, all of whom had interviewed me when I’d been a witness for the prosecution. I did my best to ignore them now and to look past the rolling cameras and the jouncing placards reading Guilty of Police Brutality.

I kept my eyes focused just ahead and my steps matching Joe’s until we reached the black sedan.

As soon as the doors thunked closed, the driver put the car into reverse and backed out fast onto Polk Street. Then he wheeled the car around and pointed it toward Potrero Hill.

“He murdered me in there,” I said to Joe once we were under way.

“The judge saw you, saw the kind of person you are. It’s too bad she felt she had to do what she did.”

“Cops are watching me, Joe, cops who work for me and who expect me to do the right thing. I’m supposed to keep their respect after this?”

“Lindsay, the right-minded people in this city are rooting for you. You’re a good person, damn it, and a fine cop.”

Joe’s words got to me in a way that Mason Broyles’s vicious barbs had not. I put my head on his nice blue shirt and let the pent-up tears come as he held and comforted me.

“I’m okay,” I said at last. I mopped up with the hankie he offered me. “It’s my hay fever. A high pollen count always makes me weep.”

Molinari laughed and gave me a good hug as the car climbed homeward. We crossed Twentieth Street, and the staggered rows of pastel Victorian houses came into view.

“I’d quit my job right now,” I said, “but that would only make it look like I’m guilty.”

“Those murdering kids, Lindsay. No jury’s going to find in their favor. There’s just no way.”

“Promise?”

Joe squeezed me again, but he didn’t answer. I knew that he believed in me completely, but he wouldn’t make a promise that he couldn’t keep.

“You going back right now?” I asked at last.

“I wish I didn’t have to. But yeah, I have to go.”

Joe’s work for the government rarely allowed him to break away to be with me.

“Someday I’ll have a life,” he said tenderly.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

True? Or a dumb fantasy? I put my head back on Joe’s shoulder. We held hands and savored what could have been our last moments together for weeks, not speaking again until we kissed and murmured good-byes at my doorstep.

Upstairs in the quiet of my apartment, I realized how emotionally depleted I was. My muscles ached from holding myself together, and there was no relief in sight. Instead of freeing me from this assault on my reputation and my belief in myself, the hearing had only been a dress rehearsal for another trial.

I felt like a tiring swimmer way out past the breakers. I got into my big soft bed with Martha, pulled the blankets up to my chin, and let sleep roll over me like a thick fog.

A SHAFT OF EARLY-MORNING sunlight split the clouds as I tossed a last suitcase into the back of the car, strapped in, and backed the Explorer out of my driveway. I was hot to get out of town and so was Martha, who had her head out the passenger-side window and was already creating quite a breeze with her wagging tail.

The stop-and-go rush hour traffic was typical for a weekday, so I pointed the Explorer in a southerly direction and used the time to replay my last brief talk with Chief Tracchio.

“If it were me, I’d get the hell out of here, Boxer,” he’d told me. “You’re on restricted duty, so call it vacation time and get some rest.”

I understood what he wasn’t saying. While my case was pending, I was an embarrassment to the department.

Get lost?

Yes, sir, Chief. No problem, sir.

Agitated thoughts bounced around inside my skull about the preliminary hearing and my fears concerning the upcoming trial.

Then I thought about my sister, Cat, putting out the welcome mat and how lucky that was for me.

Within twenty minutes I was heading southbound on Highway 1, the open road cutting through thirty-foot-tall boulders. The waves of the Pacific pounded the rocky incline to my right, and great green mountains rose high on my left.

“Hey, Boo,” I said, calling my dog by her pet name. “This is what’s called a vacation. Can you say va-ca-tion?”

Martha turned her sweet face and gave me a loving brown-eyed look, then put her nose back into the wind and resumed her joyous surveillance of the coastal route. She’d gotten with the program, and now I had to do the same.

I’d brought along a few things to help me do just that: about a half dozen books I’d been wanting to read; my screwball-comedy videos; and my guitar, an old Seagull acoustic that I’d strummed sporadically for twenty years.

As sunshine brightened the road, I found my mood lightening. It was a stunning day and it was all mine. I turned on the radio and fiddled with the dial until I found a station in the thick of a rock and roll revival.

The disk jockey was practically reading my mind, spinning hits of the seventies and eighties, sending me back to my childhood and to my college days and memories of a hundred nights with my all-girl band jamming in bars and coffeehouses.

It was June once again, and school was out—maybe for good.

I turned up the volume.

The music took me over, and my lungs filled as I sang LA dude rock and other hits of the times. I crooned “Hotel California” and “You Make Loving Fun,” and when Springsteen bellowed “Born to Run,” I was pounding the steering wheel, feeling the body and soul of the song out to the ends of my hair.

I even egged Martha on, getting her to howl along with Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.”

And that’s when it dawned on me.

I really was running on empty. The little blinking gas light was frantically signaling that my tank was dry.

I COASTED INTO A filling station right inside the limits of Half Moon Bay. It was an indie that had somehow avoided takeover by the oil conglomerates, a rustic place with a galvanized-steel canopy over the tanks and a hand-lettered sign over the office door: Man in the Moon Garage.

A sandy-haired guy looking to be in his late twenties wiped his hands on a rag and approached as I got out of the car to work a cramp out of my bum leg.

We had a brief exchange about octane, then I headed toward the soda machine in front of the office. I looked around the side yard, a lot full of sticker weeds, teetering towers of worn-out tires, and a few beached old junkers.

I’d just lifted a cold can of Diet Coke to my lips when I noticed a car in the shadows of the garage that made my heart do a little dance.

It was a bronze-colored ’81 Pontiac Bonneville, the twin of the car my uncle Dougie had owned when I was in high school. I wandered over and peered into the passenger compartment, then I looked under the open hood. The battery was encrusted, and mice had eaten the spark plug wires, but to my eyes the innards looked clean.

I had an idea.

As I handed my credit card to the gas station attendant, I pointed a thumb back over my shoulder and asked, “Is that old Bonneville for sale?”

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” He grinned at me from under the bill of his cap. He balanced a clipboard against a denim thigh, ran the slider over my card, then turned the sales slip around for me to sign.

“My uncle bought a car like that the year it came out.”

“No kidding? It’s a classic, all right.”

“Does it run?”

“It will. I’m working on it now. The tranny’s in good shape. Needs a new starter motor, alternator, a little this and a little that.”

“Actually, I’d like to fool around with the engine myself. Kind of a project, you know?”

The gas station guy grinned again and seemed pleased by the idea. He told me to make him an offer, and I put up four fingers. He said, “You wish. That car’s worth a thousand if it’s worth a nickel.”

I held up the flat of my hand, five fingers waggling in the breeze.

“Five hundred bucks is my limit for a pig in a poke.”

The kid thought about it for a long moment, making me realize how much I wanted that car. I was about to up the ante when he said, “Okay, but it’s ‘as is,’ you understand. No guarantees.”

“You’ve got the manual?”