Blood Orange (4 page)

Dana sat on the bottom stair and put on her shoes and socks.
Moby Doby walked up to her, his nails clicking on the hardwood,
licked her hand, and sat, eyeing her expectantly.

“Are you learning to read time, too?”

Keeping Bailey’s schedule today meant Dana had rushed home
from her job at Arts and Letters, leaving Rochelle with three customers-one an art historian with an interest in Early Renaissance
Italian art, which happened to be Dana’s field. Or would be, once
she finished her thesis. Were it not for Bailey, she would be sitting in
Bella Luna drinking a double capp, discussing the influence of
Giotto.

She believed she was not cut out for a life of self-sacrifice.
Almost any woman would be a better mother than she for a child
like Bailey.

She did not socialize with mothers from Phillips Academy. She
told herself she did not want to hear them complain. Secretly she
feared conversations with those women would reveal that they never
complained at all, that only she resented her child’s demands.

Dana blamed Bailey’s disability on her side of the chromosome
equation. In the North Park neighborhood where she grew up, kids
had called her grandmother “loony” because she’d dressed like a
bag lady and yelled at them and shook her fist if they walked or rode
their bikes across her pitiful square of front lawn. As for her mother,
on any test for mental health she would definitely score on the peculiar side of the bell curve. She had abandoned Dana, her only
child, before Dana was five years old.

When Bailey’s medical and psychological reports came in, David
Cabot had sprung into defense mode before anyone could accuse
him of contributing to her problems. Not only did he personally
possess all the requisite DNA for scholarship, ordered thinking, and
rationality, but every single person in his family was smart and ac complished. David’s brother and sister held advanced degrees, and
he had been an honor student and a star athlete, accepted by Law
Review, and Order of the Coif. His father had been a judge, albeit a
certifiable sexist, racist, and workaholic. His mother wrote poetry
and chaired committees and sang in the community choir. She
spoke four languages, and Dana had never seen her when she
wasn’t stoned on Valium.

The phone rang.

“Hi, Mrs. Cabot. We’re at the stoplight, Washington and
Goldfinch. See you in two.”

San Diego’s chilly spring fog had burned off, leaving behind a
misty blue sky; a cool breeze disturbed the pipe chimes in the olive
tree in the front yard. Dana wished she had worn a sweater.

She slapped Moby’s bony hindquarters. “Let’s run, kiddo.” He
took off at a lope, Dana following.

Before Bailey was born Dana had run several half-marathons,
but since then she rarely had the time for more than a mile or two.
Often she ran at night or at dawn through the Mission Hills neighborhood. As if she were visiting an aquarium, she looked in the windows of the houses she passed. She wasn’t sure what she was
looking for. Validation perhaps. Some indication that her childhood
had not been wacko as David claimed. In the kitchens and living
rooms of strangers’ homes she wanted to see another little girl eating a macaroni-and-ketchup sandwich, another grandmother asleep
in front of the television with a yellow cat around her shoulders like
a fur collar.

On the far side of the park the cherry red Phillips Academy
minibus idled at curbside. Dana waved to the driver, and the pneumatic doors wheezed open. Bailey bounded out and hurled herself at her mother, grabbing her around the hips and almost
toppling her.

“I played football, Mommy.”

At the end of the day, Bailey was always a beautiful mess. One
butterfly barrette gone, hair wild and tangled, the buckle on one of
her beloved shocking pink, strappy plastic sandals hanging by a
stitch.

Resentment and ambivalence and dreams of Giotto vanished, incinerated by a love so fiercely protective it rocked Dana. “What happened to your shoe?”

“I was like Daddy.” Moby trotted beside Bailey closely enough
so her hand skimmed the back of his neck.

“I didn’t know they let you play football at Phillips.”

“I ran, and then I fell down.” Bailey stopped and pulled up the
leg of her size-six cargo pants, revealing a knee covered with pink
and yellow bandages and layers of gauze. Looking up at her mother,
dark eyes alight with gold flecks in the park’s dappled sunlight, she
said, “I’m brave, Mommy. Like Daddy.”

Dana whisked her up into her arms and spun around, then made
a controlled tumble onto the grass with herself on top, buzz-blowing
into Bailey’s neck while the little girl squealed joyfully and Moby
barked and pranced on his toes. Before the squeals turned to tearsthe change could occur in a millisecond-Dana let Bailey go.

At the same moment a white van turned onto Miranda Street
and paused in front of their house.

Bailey began shouting, “S’cream man, s’cream man.”

Several things happened at the same time.

Dana saw that the rear bumper of the van had a sticker on it.

There was a crash of glass and a squeal of brakes.

Moby barked furiously and dashed in front of the van.

Dana heard Moby’s sharp kye-eye cry; the van swerved and sped
off; and Bailey began to scream.

t about the same time, in an interview room in San Diego’s
Ldowntown jail, David Cabot studied his client across a Formicatopped table and through the bars separating them.

It was a crappy place to be on a beautiful May afternoon.

The prosecutor had argued that a man with Frank Filmore’s financial resources and international connections constituted a bail
risk, so this Ph.D. chemist was spending the months before his trial
downtown in the county lockup, wearing a two-piece cotton uniform that made him look more like an emergency-room nurse in
scrubs than a man accused of a capital crime. David’s associate,
Gracie Perez, sat beside him in the small room, asking the questions-essentially the same questions they’d been asking since taking on the case. No fact or gap or contradiction in Filmore’s story
could be overlooked. It was the same way in football. All it took was
a hole in the line and the other guy was in for the TD.

To David most of life could be compared to football. Gracie, the
whole office, and half the San Diego bar laughed at his metaphors,
but for him football comparisons were a useful way of sorting life out; and if some people thought he was a half-smart jock, he didn’t
care. In the courtroom they discovered how wrong they were.

To the right of Gracie and David, near the door of the cramped
and windowless room, Allison, a paralegal, was taking down questions and answers on a steno pad. An audio recorder would be easier, but David had yet to meet a defendant willing to be taped.

David listened to Filmore talk and assumed that three quarters
of what he heard was either a bald lie or a cheap wig. Guilty or innocent, rich or destitute, you put a guy in jail and he forgot how to
tell the truth. And the longer you gave him to think about his answers, the more he’d make it up and bullshit. The unjustly accused
lied because they were afraid; the guilty lied because they thought
they were smarter than the system. They were also afraid, but they’d
never admit it. David didn’t want to get too jaundiced in his view of
the men and women he defended, but he doubted Filmore was the
one in a million actually telling the truth. Although he had sworn he
wouldn’t let the law make him a cynic, there were days-like today
and yesterday and probably tomorrow-when he could feel the
negativity creeping up on him like mold.

It had been a long day, and his neck and shoulders were tight.
He glanced at his watch. God willing, in an hour he’d be at the club
playing racquetball with his law partner, Marcus Klinger. Then a
sauna and a massage. He had a regular weekly appointment with a
therapist whose thumbs knew how to find the knot at the nape of
his neck. She didn’t talk. She wouldn’t ask him how he could stand
to be in the same room with a man like Frank Filmore.

He imagined his father laughing and shaking his fat index finger
in his face. Scum of the earth, boy. Watch it don’t rub off. Claybourne
Cabot had been a hanging West Virginia judge whose best friends
were the coal-mine owners in the southern part of the state. When
he got drunk, which was once a week on Sunday starting right after church and going on until he passed out, he would tell anyone in
earshot that the government could save a heap of cash if it would
dispense with courts and lawyers for ninety percent of the people
arrested. “Put ‘em down the mines and forget the sons of bitches,”
he’d say. One of his coal-mine cronies would drawl in response,
“Whatdya wanna do, C.C.? Ruin us?” Claybourne Cabot laughed
so gustily, people thought he had a sense of humor. “Serve you
right, you brass-balled pirates.”

It galled David to recognize that when it came down to the
bones of it, he practiced law much as his father had adjudicated.
Judge Cabot had assumed if you were in court you’d done something bad now or in a previous life, so he might as well punish you
hard. Guilt and innocence had been irrelevancies to the judge. They
weren’t important to David, either, although in the early days of a
defense the question of guilt or innocence popped up in his mind
like an irritating ad on a computer screen. Especially in a capital
case like this one, with Frank Filmore’s life on the block. At the preliminary hearing the prosecutor, Les Peluso, was going to argue for
murder with special circumstances, leaving open the possibility of
the death penalty. Peluso wanted to be mayor of San Diego, and as
far as he, the press, and public were concerned, Filmore’s trial was
only a formality on his way to that position.

Right now David was less interested in Filmore’s answers to
Gracie’s questions than he was in his client’s mannerisms and body
language, the way his right eyebrow twitched and he rubbed at it
with the knuckle of his index finger. David learned a lot about people when he tuned out the words and just watched the body.

On television child killers were invariably homely, with pocky
skin and small, mean eyes. Filmore was fit and handsome in a slick,
saturnine way. A “hottie,” according to Allison, who believed him
innocent, framed by cops trying to cover up sloppy police work. She was twenty-two, and this was her first case. Her reaction to
Filmore’s appearance would be important information for David
when it came time to choose a jury. Who would find him most appealing? Young women without children, or thirty-something guys
resentful of authority and short on empathy?

David’s stomach growled. After tennis and a massage, what he
wanted was a three-inch filet so rare it moaned when he cut into it.
But he couldn’t charge another expensive dinner. Dana wrote the
checks, and she knew how much interest they were paying on their
MasterCard and Visa accounts, all seven of them. One of these days,
David thought, he was going to be able to throw down cash for a
hundred-dollar steak dinner. Frank Filmore was going to do it for
him.

Gracie asked Filmore to account for his activities on the day
three-year-old Lolly Calhoun was snatched from her backyard. He
answered calmly, with a slightly clipped accent.

David interrupted, leaning forward. “You English, Frank? South
African, maybe?”

“People ask me that.” Filmore had a good smile and even white
teeth with a chip out of a front incisor. Allison said it was the kind of
imperfection that gave his face appeal. “Born and raised in California.”

The movie-star smile was all wrong on a man facing a possible
death penalty. And jurors did not like defendants with phony accents.

David, Gracie, and Les Peluso had been study partners in law
school, and there had been a time when they were either young or
foolish enough to confide their ambitions to one another. Peluso
wanted to be mayor. David wanted the big-ticket cases where drama
and stakes were high. Gracie the same. He wondered as he watched Filmore answer Gracie’s questions if it was really ethical to see a
client as a means to a career goal, as a way out of debt and on to
Court TV.