A Checklist for Murder (31 page)

Every consideration had to be given to him, no matter how absurd it might sound. Thus a position that seemed perfectly reasonable on its face was going to be even harder for Victoria to repel, such as his insistence upon being allowed to use the family’s estate for his defense because he had to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Today, as soon as the hearing got started, her senses warned her that it was not going to go well.

She argued forcefully to the judge that Peernock’s access to funds could justifiably be limited because of the civil cases against the estate and because the end result of those cases
partially depended on the outcome of the criminal trial. But her point was not as direct as Peernock’s very simple reliance upon the basic constitutional guarantee of the presumption of innocence.

Beneath the legal reasoning was her gut feeling that the court should deny
all
access to his funds because this man, who had already tried to kill his own daughter twice and also attempted to have Victoria killed, just might be inclined to use the money to try again.

Her worst fears began to take shape shortly after the session began. Judge Rimmerman agreed with Peernock’s position that if there were any funds held by the estate which legally belonged to him, they had to be released to him so that he could hire whatever attorney he wanted, especially since Peernock’s constant disputes with the state-appointed lawyers were dragging the trial far beyond the original time estimates. Once again it seemed that Peernock’s manipulation of the system’s flexibility was working.

Marshal Oldman reminded the judge that Peernock was down in his cell insisting he now realized that Gerald Fogelman, Peernock’s third criminal defense lawyer, was also working for the district attorney’s office to help rig a conviction against him. Therefore Peernock had immediate and pressing need for funds to pay for a new attorney. Furthermore, he had located one through his own trusted sources.

Victoria sighed and informed the judge that her office had been collecting and saving rents from the three income properties ever since the arrest. Half of that money belonged to Robert’s share of the estate. It would most likely come to around $40,000.

She affirmed that although she had seen Peernock’s rage at her and had read his constant attacks on Natasha in his handwritten court pleadings, she could offer no concrete proof that if he got his hands on any cash he would use it to create more lethal mischief.

But it was at this point that Victoria realized, to her great chagrin, that her emotions had begun to overwhelm her. She could feel tears welling in her eyes.
Don’t do this
, she ordered herself.
This is just the sort of thing that sexist male lawyers make jokes about female lawyers doing under stress. Do not do this
. She had never lost emotional control inside a courthouse, but it was like being a grade school kid all over again. She was without the slightest power to stop her eyes from filling up, hating her emotions for betraying her so bluntly. She stood in utter embarrassment as tears began rolling down her cheeks. “I tried to remain composed,” she said later, “but I couldn’t. I’d been fighting this case for too long without adequate resources. I just lost it.”

Judge Rimmerman had known her for years and realized that this was extraordinary behavior for a woman with a reputation for being just as tough as any situation called for her to be. He paused a moment, then asked Marshal Oldman to wait outside.

“All right, Vicki,” Rimmerman said once they were alone, “this isn’t something we usually see in here. What’s going on with you today?”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” she replied, chagrined. “I really am. It’s just that I can’t do this any longer. There’s nothing left. You can’t practice law on air. I’ve had to deal with Robert’s first attorney, Bradley Brunon, and respond to all of his requests while he was generating something like sixty thousand dollars in billed hours on Robert’s defense. And of course Dern, Mason and Floum dragged me into court constantly. They generated enough opposition to justify billing seventy thousand dollars for about three months of work, most of which was used as ammunition to try to get at Natasha. All of it required legal responses from my office. Then Peernock went in pro per and started filing one motion after another from inside his cell because his meals are paid for and he has nothing better to do. And I could still handle
that much, but now he wants to give this new attorney forty thousand dollars to do God knows what.

“Everybody seems to have unlimited funds to fight this thing. And I’m all that stands between him and Natasha. I’m not afraid to battle it out, but this case, this damn case, is killing me. It’s killing me physically. It’s killing me emotionally. And financially, forget it.

“In a year and eight months since I took Natasha’s case, I’ve received a total of ten thousand dollars. It takes up too much time for me to handle much other casework, but my office overhead is five thousand dollars a month in staff salary and costs. If I throw in the towel and sub out the case, what about Natasha? What if the next attorney just uses her to run up fees and leaves her with nothing? We both know it’s quite possible to do that and be perfectly within the law. I mean, her uncle told me that Claire Peernock would have wanted me to do this and I’ve come to feel so much loyalty to the girl. But now …”

She had to stop.

After a long pause, Rimmerman stood and admitted Marshal Oldman back inside. He quietly told him he could have $40,000 from the rent receipts, but only on the condition that Robert Peernock should agree that Victoria Doom could receive another $30,000 against her accumulated unpaid fees to pay her staff and catch up with her office expenses. If both sides were going all the way to the wall on this case, Rimmerman determined that they should do it on a level playing field, where the best legal position could win on its merit, not where one side simply spent the other into defeat.

Victoria sighed with relief as she left the courthouse. The new funds wouldn’t really level off the playing field after so many months of volunteer legal work. But at least she would be rolling the boulder up a gentler slope for a while.

•   •   •

That night Victoria stayed late at her office, trying to figure out what her next step ought to be. She slowly sifted through piles of assorted papers that she had retrieved from the Peernock house on Natasha’s behalf. As she did so, she realized that she hadn’t come as close to being driven out of the case as she had feared; all these little remnants of the family’s shattered lives were here in her hands, just as Natasha’s future was.

She never could have let the opposition whip her into just walking away.

One of the papers she came across was a copy of a reference request that Tasha’s fashion-design school had sent to her high school counselor. The counselor, who had known Tasha for nearly four years, had written his reply weeks before the night of the crimes, when he had no idea that anyone outside the design school would ever see it. And as Victoria began reading remarks that Natasha herself had never seen, she felt as if she were listening in on some secret conversation.

Appearance
: Excellent.
Maturity
: Excellent.
Integrity
: Excellent.
Creativity
: Excellent. “Natasha is a motivated, intelligent, and mature individual who constantly strives to accomplish her personal and educational goals. Loyal, determined, and fun loving, her pleasant personality, sincerity, and compassion for others has been a shining delight to her peers and teachers. This outstanding and determined young lady will strive diligently to pursue her career goal of working in the fashion industry.”

Victoria might have found the recommendation touching under other circumstances, but now it just made her angry. She got madder by the second as she thought about the characterizations leveled at Natasha in the court documents filed by Dern, Mason and Floum. They had essentially accused her of having made everything up to frame her poor innocent father, of inventing a horrible lie in the form of this story
about her father being a killer. They not only implied that she was doing it in order to get her hands on her dead mother’s insurance money, they had included Victoria in these valentines. They called her professional behavior deceptive, dishonest, done in service of some awful hoax.

The firm had asserted this position to the courts even though they were talking about a young woman who had lain trapped in the car’s wreckage next to her mother’s dead body while the pool of gasoline that the murderer had poured over them slowly ate away at her flesh.

Victoria clutched Natasha’s character reference in her hands, gazing through it with a grim stare. How satisfying it would have been, she thought, if the excellent law firm of Dern, Mason and Floum had not yet left the case. She would have loved to take this character reference over to their offices high up inside the shining white towers of Century City.

And jam it down their throats.

Tasha’s facial scars had healed enough that she was finally able to make herself get a job as a waitress at the base NCO club. Her flesh was still too raw to tolerate sunlight, but she wanted to try working indoors. The job helped to bring in a little money. It gave her a chance to go somewhere on her own, to have something to do even if it was just a service job. Most importantly, it helped to take her mind off the fact that her marriage was beginning to feel as if it had hit the same wall her father’s Cadillac had been headed toward on the night of the crimes.

Piles of coins began accumulating on her dresser at home. They helped give her the feeling that she was finally able to accomplish something on her own. Still, every time she tried to imagine leaving, she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Leave and go where?

At least things were looking up in one sense; either people didn’t stare at her so much anymore, or she had begun to
develop a resistance to it. It made working easier. She mulled over the marriage while she hefted the heavy trays, glad finally to have something to do that got her out of the house on a regular basis.

She realized that when they had started out, her husband had barely been more than a kid himself. He had suddenly found himself saddled with a badly injured young wife and a witness protection program and stories of brutality that went far beyond the impersonal naval battles he was trained to fight.

She could see his side of the problem, all right. It just didn’t give her any way of reconnecting their broken communication lines.

Back in Los Angeles as the second year of the case dragged toward a close, Pam Springer discovered she was being transferred to another division. The Peernock case, which the D.A.’s office had originally estimated would take only a year to complete, now found itself in need of a new prosecutor.

Springer admits that she left with definitely mixed emotions. She was hardly sorry to be free of the entanglements, but was still frustrated that she wouldn’t be able to see it to completion.

Because by that point Robert Peernock was on his fifth defense attorney and his fourth pretrial judge, chewing them up like gum balls. He found every loophole in the system to drag out the proceedings month after month, despite blaming the delays on the system itself. He turned nearly every court appearance into yet another opportunity to plead his detailed conspiracy accusations.

Even today when she gives her thoughts about the personal experience of handling the case, her eyes harden. She lapses into prosecutorial mode, ticking off names and facts with the skill of an experienced senior prosecutor. Clearly, that part of her hated to walk away.

Only when the topic switches to her marriage and motherhood does Springer’s smile fully open up. Her eyes suddenly glow, her face softens; the woman that her husband fell in love with is revealed. Her smile remains for as long as the topics focus on pleasant things.

It is still there as she begins to discuss Craig Richman, the-up-and-coming young prosecutor who replaced her. Springer knew that whatever the outcome of the trial, Craig Richman would be aggressive as hell in pursuing the conviction.

And by this point Pam Springer knew very well that whatever the outcome of the case, this new guy Richman was in for a treat.

“I came back from lunch one day and walked into my office to find several big boxes of case files on my desk,” Richman said later. “There was a note from Billy Webb, my boss, telling me that the Peernock case was now my baby. I didn’t have to ask who Robert Peernock was; by this point everybody knew. But I also knew that the guy had been having a lot of success at jerking the system around in circles. A couple other prosecutors who were senior to me had been offered the case and refused. One had been involved with Peernock before on his old battery case and didn’t want to set grounds for conflict of interest. But nobody asked if I wanted it or not.”

Craig Richman trained at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and still describes himself as a soldier. Now he serves with the thousand-prosecutor army of the largest law office in the world. The battlefront is a courtroom, and here the bad guys have Craig’s team heavily outgunned and severely outnumbered.

Asked whether it made him nervous to inherit an infamous and complex murder case, Richman replies that it did not.
But then he smiles and shakes his head. “I didn’t know any better.”

Richman was a radio announcer at the Air Force Academy’s campus station. The background shows in his voice. He liked radio so well that after military service he spent several years working at stations in California and Arizona before settling into law school in Sacramento. He left his radio career behind when he joined the DA’s office in 1985, but he describes trial work as being like radio drama. “The two are similar in a lot of ways. The jury is an audience; you have to draw them in and keep their interest. Just because they can’t change the channel doesn’t mean they can’t tune you out.”

On the day he inherited the Peernock case, Richman had just begun married life with a wife whose beauty matches his chiseled features so well that co-workers still refer to them dryly as “Ken and Barbie.” He resolved to keep the case away from his off-duty time; he didn’t want to blow the new homelife. But it didn’t take long before the case began to bite deeper. Like Steve Fisk, Richman was born in Los Angeles and grew up watching his hometown become increasingly dangerous as the streets turned into shooting galleries and the neighborhoods into breeding grounds for bizarre psychotic outbursts.