Sins of the Fathers (3 page)

“So how long’s it been since you’ve tried a case down here?” Greene asked.

“A year.A little more.”

“Get some skiing in during the off time?”

“I don’t ski when I’m on meds. I tend to run into trees.”

“Was it rough?”

Lindy inhaled deeply. She knew he was referring to her crash-and-burn after the Marcel Lee verdict, when she went from rising deputy public defender to thirty-two-year-old washout. “Yeah, it’s been rough. But I beat it back with ice cream and Kate Hepburn movies. You’d be surprised what a little
African Queen
can do for the spirit.”

“Who’s handling the Lee appeal now?”

“Appellate Division. Menaster.”

“He’s good. If there’s a way to get the thing reversed, he’ll find it.” Greene did not say it with much conviction. That was understandable. The days of frequent reversals were over. The fair citizens of California, demanding easy answers to a complex crime problem, were initiative happy. They passed laws that promised instant, get-tough results. They elected politicians and judges who strove to come down harder on crime than Torquemada. They passed bond measures to build more prisons to warehouse an ever-swelling population of hard timers and three-strike losers.

And if a kid like Marcel Lee got tossed into that fetid swamp, so what? One more they wouldn’t have to worry about being out on the streets.

Lindy felt that sensation that took over her skin whenever she thought of Marcel.
Fever skin
, her mother used to call it, when every pore felt sensitive and exposed. She couldn’t will it away, so she settled into a chair like a swami lowering himself onto a bed of nails.

Greene sat behind his desk. “You have an office?”

“I pay a guy for a mailing address in the Valley, and the use of his library and conference room.”

“Hard to get started again?”

“Only thing I know for sure, making it on your own as a lawyer is not about competence.”

“What’s it about?”

“Overhead.”

Greene nodded. “And getting clients.”

“Oh yeah. I’ve heard of those.”

“Why don’t you do one of those lawyer commercials? Like that guy who used to have his clients say, ‘He got me twenty million dollars.’”

“Right. I can see it now. One of my guys pops onto the screen. ‘Lindy Field got me twenty years.’” It felt good to be talking plainly again.

Greene swiveled in his chair, smiled. “So you want to know why I wanted to see you?”

“Comic relief?”

“An assignment.”

“Cool.
Court-appointed
means county pays.”

“It’s a juvenile matter.”

An involuntary groan escaped Lindy’s throat. “Judge—”

“Just hear me out.”

“I don’t want to do juvenile again.”

“I understand. But there’s something about this one. Does the name Darren DiCinni mean anything to you?”

Lindy’s jaw dropped like a law book falling from a shelf.

“That’s right,” Greene said. “The one who killed those kids at the baseball game.”

Lindy tried to wipe the shock off her face.Was he actually asking her to rep the thirteen-year-old whose face was all over the news?

“Won’t the public defender handle it?”

“There’s a conflict.”

“How?”

“The boy’s father, Drake DiCinni, was repped by the PD’s office for something that got dismissed a year ago. So they can’t do it. Even if they could, I’d want you.”

Lindy closed her eyes for a moment, trying to keep the office from closing in around her head. “But there are so many others you could tap.”

“I know this is not your average juvi case. But you have a way with them.”

“Had.”

“You still do. You don’t lose that touch, Lindy, no matter what. And this kid’s going to need special handling.”

“He said God told him to kill the people?” That’s what she’d read in the
Times.

“Right.”

“He connected to some cult or anything?”

Greene shrugged. “I only know what’s been reported.”

Lindy paused, then shook her head slowly. “I just don’t think I’m ready for something this heavy.”

“There’s one more thing. The deputy handling this is Leon Colby.”

The name hit her like a spear. It took a long moment for Lindy to remove it. And then she felt the old wound, the one shaped like Marcel Lee. Colby prosecuted the Lee case, sent the boy away for life.

“This is some kind of weird
Twilight Zone
, right?” Lindy put the heel of her palm on her forehead. “I’m going to be getting out of this universe soon, right?”

“I know what you must be thinking.”

“Really? You know? From on high?”

Greene said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Lindy said. “That was a rotten thing to say.”

“It’s okay. I completely understand. Why don’t we just forget it?”

Yes, forget it. Leave now before you change your mind.
Leon Colby? Why had Greene even considered asking her?

Maybe because he knew the thought of Colby coldly scavenging the bones of another kid almost made her gag.

“Hey,” Greene said, “there’s a great play at the Taper. Have you seen—”

“I’ll see him,” Lindy said.“Once. And I’m not promising anything.”

“Lindy, you don’t have to—”

“Don’t press your luck, Judge. Where is he now?”

2.

The last time Lindy was in Men’s Central Jail was during the Lee case, right after Marcel attempted suicide.

Why wouldn’t he? This was no place for juveniles. That was the whole reason for having Juvenile Hall. But when the kids were tried as adults, Los Angeles threw them in Men’s Central, downtown, where they spent twenty-three-and-a-half hours a day locked in windowless four-by-eight-foot cells.

Death-row inmates at Quentin had it better. Career criminals at Pelican Bay were on easy street by comparison. All those guys got ample time each day for showers, phone calls, and a walk in the corridor in front of their cells. Not the juvis in Men’s Central.

Lindy remembered when the
Times
did a story on the horrible conditions behind the steel door of Module 4600 at Central, which guarded the two tiers of twenty-four cells where the juvis were housed. Four, five, or six to a cell. Some of the local politicians jumped on it and beat their chests for change. It gave them a couple days’ publicity.

And change did happen. For a time. Most kid-adults were taken to Sylmar, a juvi lockup, and that seemed to make everybody feel good. But pretty soon the bottom line snapped its jaws tight around the situation: it cost more to put kids out there.

So little by little, the warehousing of juvis in Men’s Central—isolated from the adult population, of course, but crammed inside those cells that had only a toilet and what the county had the temerity to call bedding—little by little, the dumping of kids no one had any sympathy for returned. And without the
Times
making hay, the politicians kept quiet.

There was no rousing plea to be kinder to juvenile criminals.

He didn’t look like Lindy had pictured. When he was marched into the interview room, shackled and in his orange jailhouse jumpsuit, he was a lot smaller than she thought he’d be. Lindy estimated he was about her height. Which wasn’t good for him. If he got sent to prison—and Lindy knew that was the most likely outcome, even if Clarence Darrow came back from the dead to defend him—Darren DiCinni was not going to last long. He’d be fresh meat, tossed into a pit of ravenous lowlifes with nothing left to lose.

“Twenty minutes,” the deputy sheriff said as he put Darren’s hands in the desk cuffs. The jail classified juveniles as K–10s, highest security, and kept them isolated. The deputies claimed it was because juvis did crazy things, to prove themselves to the older inmates. Darren was also a “high power” inmate, one with notoriety and media coverage. He needed to be protected from prisoners who might want to make a name for themselves by taking out a celebrity killer.

She tried to read his face. Who was Darren DiCinni, besides some teenager lost in oversized coveralls? Who was this boy sitting on the steel stool on the other side of the wire-mesh Plexiglas in the green interview booth, accused of an abominable crime? How did he get to this place?

She always asked herself these questions about new juvenile clients. They were only a step or two removed from childhood, yet they did evil things.

Why?

He did not look at her.

Lindy leaned toward the talk holes in the Plexiglas. “Darren, I’m Lindy Field. I’m your attorney.”

His eyes did not move. He was staring at the floor like some sort of comic-book character who could cut through stone with laser beams shot from his eyeballs. Lindy suddenly had no trouble believing he had killed six people in cold blood.

“I’m here to talk to you about your case.”

No change.

Lindy had handled bad ones before, ones with attitude, with chips on shoulders the size of buses. But she’d always managed to penetrate the barriers, at least a little bit, to a level where she could communicate.

Some were tougher to get to than others, that was all.

Darren DiCinni was going to be one of the tougher ones.

“Look, you don’t have to talk to me now, but at some point we’re going to have to get together on this thing. The DA isn’t going to look out for you. The cops aren’t. Your lawyer is, but you’ve got to give me something. Remember, anything you say will stay with me. I won’t talk about it with anybody else.”

That was always the first move. Establish trust. Cast yourself on their side.

DiCinni didn’t move.

There was something strange here.

Despite his inner fires, Darren DiCinni didn’t have a bad-boy aura. His light brown hair was trimmed and neat. He was a skinny kid too, stuck in that awkward stage between child and young man. His hands and wrists looked as if they could slip right out of the shackles, like toothpicks from a wedding band. And his face, cool and impassive, was almost translucent, like baby skin.

Darren DiCinni was not, at first glance, like the tattooed and scarred outlaws she was used to. Nor was he trying to be.

But the peculiar thing was, he wasn’t some tragic innocent, either. A few years ago, another young, skinny kid had shot up a school down near San Diego. He looked so young, so impossibly young to do such a thing.

DiCinni might have seemed that way too, except for those eyes. And that made him impossible for Lindy to peg.

There was a reason he did not fit into any apparent slot, and Lindy had to find out what that was. She had the feeling the answer would be her—and DiCinni’s—only hope of getting a more favorable sentence than life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Darren, I’m going to talk to the DA about your case. I need to get to know you just a little. I want you to know you can trust me.”

Nothing. Those lasers burned into the floor.

Maybe there was a competency issue here. Maybe DiCinni wouldn’t have the capacity to help with the defense, and she could get him into a mental facility, keep him out of prison.

“You gonna talk to me today, Darren?”

She waited. And then, slowly, DiCinni shook his head. He still had not looked at her.

Lindy wanted to reach through the glass and grab him, shake him. She wanted to rouse him out of his stupor, force him to pay attention, make him realize he was dangling over a gorge by a string. And, she realized, to make him help
her.
She didn’t want to lose another one like she lost Marcel Lee.

“Please,Darren. Let me help you. That’s what I’m here for, that’s what I do. I went to law school and everything. I had seven years with the public defender’s office. Will you just give me something to work with here?”

DiCinni looked up. She now could see his eyes were brown speckled with flecks of green. They were still shooting hot beams, but with something added. A probing.

She let him look.

Then Darren DiCinni started rattling his desk cuffs. Violently.

“Darren—”

The metallic clatter got louder.

“Stop, Darren.”

He did not stop.

The deputy charged over and slapped Darren’s back. “Cut it out.”

“I wanna go back,” Darren said. His voice was high, like a choirboy’s.

“Darren, you have to talk to me,” Lindy pleaded.

He glared at her with a mix of defiance and confusion. The deputy began to undo the shackles.

“Darren, wait.”

The deputy looked at Lindy with disdain. “Says he’s through, he’s through.”

Lindy put her hand on the Plexiglas. “Wait a second.”

But the deputy already had the desk cuffs off. Darren got up quickly and didn’t look back as he was led away.

Outside Men’s Central, the harsh glare of the LA afternoon sun hit Lindy’s eyes like a police interrogation light. The kind cops used to coerce confessions in those old B movies.
Why don
’
t you just admit
it, Lindy? Come on, you know it, we all know it. You lost your chops
when they put you in the psych ward. You don
’
t have what it takes. Your
father knew it all along, didn
’
t he? Tried to tell you. What
’
ve you got to
prove, Lindy? Give it up. You can
’
t help anybody, especially this kid who
rattles chains at you.