Dying Declaration (6 page)

9

“WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO
with all this food?” Theresa Hammond asked as she busied herself in the kitchen. “Everyone at church has just been incredible.”

Thomas sat in his favorite recliner in the living room. The kids were in bed. It was Tuesday night, the night after Joshie’s funeral. And it was like they had entered into an unspoken pact not to talk about Joshie’s death. Every time Thomas tried to bring it up, Theresa would cry. And so he learned. The emotions were still too raw. Pretend it hadn’t happened. Shelter yourself in the shock of it all. Deal with it later.

“Beats me,” the big man said, staring at the spot on the floor where he would wrestle with Tiger and wait for Joshie to pile on.

“You think the kids will make it through the night?” Theresa asked between the clinking of dishes.

“Prob’ly not. Stinky’ll come climbin’ into our bed about midnight; then Tiger’ll holler ’bout nightmares a few hours later.”

“You hungry?” She seemed desperate to talk about something—anything but Joshie.

“’Course not. Been doin’ nothin’ but eatin’ and talkin’ to visitors all day. Why does everybody in church think they’ve gotta bring food over, like we can’t cook our own meals anymore?”

“I guess they just don’t know what else to do.” As she talked, her voice quivered. Thomas could tell she was on the verge of tears again. He got up out of his seat and stepped into the kitchen. He leaned against the doorway and watched her for a moment. He saw the vacant stare in her puffy eyes and shared her bone-deep grief. Though she had never said as much, he sensed that Theresa blamed him. And why not? His lack of faith had surely caused this. It would be a burden that would haunt him the rest of his life.

Maybe he should walk over and rub her shoulders. Maybe he should just hold her and lie to her—tell her it would be all right. Truth was, he didn’t really know what to do. Emotions were not his thing.

“You all right?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded, then turned to walk down the narrow hallway toward the bedroom. A firm but polite knock on the front door stopped him.

“Can you get that?” Theresa called from the kitchen.

“I reckon,” he murmured to himself. “It’s prob’ly another casserole.”

When Thomas opened the door, the two men standing on the small wooden porch of the trailer were not smiling. They were dressed in the brown garb of the Virginia Beach Sheriff ’s Department. Their badges glistened in the light from the one bulb that had not yet burned out.

“Can I help you?” Thomas asked, standing in the doorway.

“Are you Mr. Hammond?”

He hesitated. “That’s me.”

“Well, Mr. Hammond, we don’t enjoy doing this under any circumstances—but we’ve got a job to do and hope you’ll understand.” The officer thrust some official-looking papers at Thomas.

“What in sam hill?”

“We’re serving you with a summons for your arrest on charges of involuntary manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide,”
the officer said. “You are to appear tomorrow morning at 9:00 a.m. in Virginia Beach General District Court for your arraignment and bond hearing.”

“Thomas . . . who is it?” Theresa called from the kitchen.

“Nobody you know, Theresa,” Thomas replied. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him.

“Was that Mrs. Hammond?” the officer asked politely.

Thomas scowled. “Yes.”

“We have a summons for her as well. Same charges. You can deliver it to her yourself if you want to.”

Thomas reached out and took the papers without saying a word. The men did not leave.

“Is that it?” Thomas growled. They might just be doing their job, but he didn’t have to make it easy. “Are you fixin’ to take me to jail?”

“Not tonight,” the officer replied evenly. “The commonwealth’s attorney could have requested a warrant for your arrest tonight. Instead, this summons is basically saying that you’re being trusted to show up on your own.”

“Will I go to jail tomorrow?” Thomas pressed them. “Will I lose the kids?”

“You might go to jail. Depends on what the judge says about bond. As for the kids, well . . . the commonwealth is basically claiming that child neglect caused the death of your son. If you have other kids, there’s a chance you could lose custody of them pending trial.” As the officer spoke, he shuffled slowly back to the edge of the porch. Both officers eyed Thomas warily.

Thomas felt the warmth rise in his neck. His head started spinning and burning with anger. Who did these guys think they were? They come to his house the night after he buries his own son, they matter-of-factly accuse him of murder, and then they just stand there and calmly say they might take his other children from him as well. He looked down at his clenched fists and thought about how good it would feel to pop these guys.

“Leave,” he sneered.

“Mr. Hammond, I know this is incredibly tough, but don’t do anything drastic. Get yourself an attorney—”

“Leave,”
he said louder.
“Now!”

“We’re just doing our job, sir.”

“Nobody takes my kids from me.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked the officer who had not yet said a word, still hovering near the edge of the porch.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Thomas replied, taking a step toward him. “Now, if you’ve finished your job, get out of here.”

Both men backed down the steps without taking their eyes off Thomas. He stood on the small porch, arms folded across his chest,
until the unmarked brown sedan backed out of the parking space next to his trailer and headed out of the trailer park.

Only then did he begin to read the official-looking papers that he held in his trembling hand. When he had finished, he punched the side of the trailer and heard the pop of the siding as it yielded to the force of his blow.

“Over my dead body,” he said. Then he braced himself to tell Theresa.

10

WEDNESDAY MORNING
dawned hot and muggy. Virginia Beach in the early summer, the kind of weather that Nikki Moreno lived for. The tanning index registered a nine. Later she would catch some rays and work on her tan line. She would endure the late afternoon sun and the sand. It was tough work, but perfection had its price.

But first, unfortunately, there were matters of lesser importance requiring her attention. She would have to put in a few hours at her day job as a paralegal for Carson & Associates, a personal-injury firm that recently gained national attention on a high-profile civil rights case against the nation of Saudi Arabia. Nikki played a crucial role in that case, and for a few fleeting moments she had basked in the spotlight from the national media. She tried angling for an acting career, but the offers never came.

What did come was a whole boatload of new clients. Now Carson & Associates was busier than ever, incredibly shorthanded, and stretched to the breaking point.

A second matter required Nikki’s attention this morning as well. The courts called it their CASA program—Court Appointed Special Advocates. The program allowed nonattorneys like Nikki to serve the court system on a volunteer basis by looking out for the legal interests of innocent children caught up in custody disputes. Nikki would typically spend time reviewing reports from the Child Protective Services caseworkers and then recommend to the judge whether a child should receive foster care or not.

Nikki did not consider herself a do-gooder—the furthest thing from it really—and she had no desire to run around the courts protecting the best interests of children. But she had been required to serve one hundred hours of community service through CASA as part of a plea bargain she had entered into following the Saudi Arabia case. She considered herself a hero and believed her actions at the end of the case had been required by the circumstances. But the commonwealth’s attorney had seen it differently. No matter. She would do it the same way again. And in a few more weeks, she would be done with this stupid program and the charges against her would be dropped.

After more than six months working the court system, Nikki was getting comfortable with the drill. Virginia Beach General District Court on Wednesday mornings. Review a few reports. Talk to a few kids. Interview some prospective foster parents. Then recommend to Judge Silverman whether the kids should be placed in a foster home. She was good at it, and though she had started off a little shaky with the judge, he now seemed to like her. She was one of the few special advocates who could maintain a sense of objectivity and remain detached from the kids. It made her judgment all the more valuable.

It was not exactly rocket science. But it was an extra obligation that she didn’t need at the busiest time in her firm’s history. And it kept her, one of the hottest single female professionals on the beach scene, from getting as much time in the sun as her dark tan required. But still, she wouldn’t complain too much. It was better than picking up trash along the roadways with the guys in the orange jumpsuits.

With any luck she would be out of court this morning in forty-five minutes and at Carson & Associates by ten.

Charles Arnold arrived early at the sprawling municipal complex in an area of Virginia Beach that was farmland a few decades ago. The courthouse building was a large four-story monolith that would have taken up an entire city block if it had been situated downtown. In its present location, it had replaced a good half acre of cornfields.

Charles survived the madness of the parking lot derby, the metal detector lines, and the escalators that did not work. He eventually made his way to General District Courtroom No. 6, on the second floor, the Honorable Franklin Silverman Jr. presiding.

At 8:50 a.m., ten minutes before court, Charles Arnold sauntered down the middle aisle of the already packed courtroom, his confident glide and “don’t mess with me” style masking the butterflies in his stomach. His charmed legal career had never landed him anywhere near General District Court, where traffic cases were heard, small-time criminals were prosecuted, small claims were resolved, and unimportant hearings on felony cases were conducted. General District Court was the Kmart of the legal world, rough-and-cheap justice for the masses, complete with blue-light specials when a liberal judge in a good mood on the right day might dismiss half the traffic tickets before him.

Charles had spent his career in loftier settings. High grades at Virginia Law School had earned him a coveted two-year clerkship at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, a federal appellate court just one step below the Supremes. Before heading to Richmond for this clerkship, he had married a fellow radical from his graduating class named Denita.

After his clerkship, he joined one of Richmond’s largest and finest law firms, a four-hundred-lawyer sweatshop where billable hours were the currency of success. Denita had started working at a similar sweatshop across town while Charles clerked, and by the time he started as a private lawyer, she had made a name for herself defending corporate America against charges of sexual harassment. Meanwhile, Charles put in three long years as a litigation associate, pushing tons of paper, taking hours of depositions, and seldom seeing the inside of a courtroom. They were both too busy building careers to think about how thoroughly they had sold out—African American revolutionaries tamed by the white man’s legal system.

And then, just four short years ago, Charles’s radical conversion to Christianity changed everything. Charles came kicking and screaming to Christ, but when he came, he did so with every fiber of his being. He began preaching on the streets almost immediately. He pushed the gospel with equal fervor on his coworkers and his wife. He reminded Denita often that
his
faith was the faith embraced by Martin Luther King Jr. And he drove her further away.

She filed for divorce not long afterward. Charles needed to get out of town.

His chance came when Regent Law School, in an effort to further diversify its faculty, promised Charles a fresh start in Virginia Beach and the chance to become one of the youngest constitutional law professors in the country. He took a huge cut in pay to make it happen. But he still regarded it as one of the smartest moves he ever made. He loved the students, the academic challenge, and the fact that he had never even seen a time sheet, much less filled one out, since the day he left his firm.

But he still thought about Denita almost every day. And she would die if she knew her ex-husband, the African American legal scholar, the man who had clerked for the vaunted Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, was now slumming in Virginia Beach General District Court, preparing to argue his own case for violation of a noise ordinance.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

He had dressed the part of a big-time lawyer and turned heads as he walked to the front of the courtroom. Buster would have been proud—Johnnie Cochran had nothing on Charles today. The man who taught law in jeans and a T-shirt was now sporting a dark gray custom suit with a suit coat that hung long on his body like a gunslinger’s, a monogrammed shirt, and Gucci loafers that practically glowed.

He had a soft leather Tumi briefcase stuffed full of potential cases on the constitutionality of noise ordinances and the procedural rules for General District Court. He was ready for just about anything.

He strode confidently past the wooden railing that separated the lawyers and police officers from the litigants. There was a lot of chattering and bantering going on among the fraternity of regular General District Court lawyers, mostly older men with sport coats and cloth ties or younger women in pantsuits. There was not another African American lawyer among them. And they all ignored Charles.

“What’s the drill here?” Charles asked a couple of seasoned-looking lawyers who were each holding dozens of manila folders.

“You a lawyer?” one asked, eying Charles suspiciously.

The man was round and had a meaty face. His white shirt didn’t quite button at the neck, and his sport coat seemed two sizes too short in the sleeves. Then there was the guy’s hair! Why couldn’t these white guys just admit when they were going bald? He parted his hair just above the left ear, and with a liberal application of gel managed to paste a few long strands up over the top. He had plenty of hair on the nape of his neck and the inside of his ears, more fertile ground apparently, but to call the stuff on top “thin” would be stretching it.

“Yeah,” Charles responded, “but this is my first time in General District Court.”

“Sure,” the man said, sounding disinterested. “Well, find out what line number your case is on’” he motioned to several pages of docket sheets sitting on the counsel table—“then wait for your case to be called.”

“Hope you brought something to read,” another veteran said.

“Plenty,” Charles said. “What’re the cameras here for?”

“Not sure,” the greasy-haired lawyer said, as if television cameras and news reporters showed up in General District Court every day. “Must be an arraignment or bond hearing on some criminal case that will eventually be transferred to circuit court.”

“Mind if I sit down?” Charles asked. He pointed to an empty seat next to the guy, the only empty seat in front of the bar on the lawyer’s side of the courtroom.

“Actually, I was saving that for someone.” The greasy-haired dude put a pained expression on his face. “She’s a special advocate for the kids in one of my cases, and I’ve really got to talk to her before court starts.”

“No problem,” Charles responded. He made a mental note to keep an eye on the seat. Prejudice wore many faces.

He turned and walked to the other side of the courtroom where the police officers were sitting and chatting. He sat in one of the empty chairs without asking and pretended not to notice the stares. He began reading some cases that he had stuffed in his briefcase.

He had the look of bravado, but he felt very much alone.

Twenty minutes later the judge was still nowhere to be found, and Charles had given up pretending to read. He started watching people and had the good fortune to be glancing at the back door when she burst through.

It was clear she had been running, but she broke stride and changed to a strut when she saw the judge was not yet on the bench. She carried a stack of files but didn’t look much like a lawyer. She was all legs and accentuated them with three-inch platform heels and a short black miniskirt. She wore a sleeveless white blouse and rounded out her immodest outfit with large gold jewelry dangling from her neck and both wrists. If she had been a student and dressed that way for moot court, Charles would have flunked her.

She had a dangerous allure—the exotic looks of a Latin American woman, complete with tanned olive skin, long jet-black hair,
and haunting brown eyes. She wore too much makeup for Charles’s taste, and he immediately began disliking her, put off more by her arrogance than anything else.

He watched as the young woman became the center of gravity in the courtroom and greeted both police officers and lawyers with mutual warmth and a dazzling smile.

“Hey, Nikki, when are you gonna dump that bum Carson and come work for a real lawyer?” An older man flung the comment across the courtroom as Nikki talked to one of the cops.

“You couldn’t handle me, Jack,” she shot back over her shoulder.

The other lawyers moaned and guffawed.

Nikki finished her chat with the police officer and walked over to entertain the lawyers. The boys gathered around and yukked it up with Nikki, though the few female lawyers seemed unimpressed.

“All rise,” announced the court clerk, who did not bother to rise herself. “General District Court for the City of Virginia Beach is now in session, the Honorable Franklin Silverman Jr. presiding.”

Judge Silverman walked briskly to his spot on the bench and peered out through thick glasses. He looked older than Charles expected, a short and spindly man with a gaunt face. He had white hair, but bushy black eyebrows stuck out from his forehead and overhung his eyes. He placed both palms down on the bench in front of him and forced a thin smile.