In My Dark Dreams (27 page)

No one has ever said that to my face. No one had to. Wayne Dixant was a bullying asshole for calling me out the way he did, but he was right. It didn’t matter that I had done what I was supposed to do, what every lawyer is supposed to do—give the client the best defense possible. It was the perception that mattered. I had put a killer back on the street, which had allowed him to kill again.

After a few days of hand-wringing and dithering, the powers that be decided our office should try the case. Part of the decision, to be cynically frank, was economic. The lawyers in the Public Defender’s office are already on salary. It won’t cost Joe Taxpayer any extra money for us to defend Salazar. Even though private lawyers who are assigned cases like this are paid less than their regular fee, the cost can still be astronomical, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why waste that kind of money on a nobody everyone knows is guilty anyway?

The other reason we’re doing it is purer and better. It’s our job. This is why we exist: to defend those who can’t afford to defend themselves. If we passed the buck every time a controversial case crossed our doorstep, we would lose our reason to be. There are thousands of counties and dozens of states around the country that either have lousy public defender offices or don’t have them at all. The maxim
equal justice under the law
is laughable. In those places, if you are indigent, you are going to get a bad defense, if you get one at all. I’m not saying there are a lot of innocent people in prison in Texas, for example, but if you are poor, that’s not the state you want to get arrested in—especially if you’re poor and a member of a minority. We are far from perfect here in the Golden State, but every defendant gets a competent lawyer, at least every defendant who uses a public defender. (I won’t comment on the quality of private lawyers except to say that they’re like apples—every barrel has a few rotten ones.)

What was surprising is that I was selected to be one of Salazar’s lawyers. I’m not the lead, I don’t have the experience. I have never tried a capital case; this will be my first one. My superior, Joe Blevins, one of our best and most experienced trial lawyers, is the front man. I’m sitting second chair. But I’ll be there, every day, for all the world to see.

My assignment was not only unexpected, it was controversial, as you can imagine. Some people in the office were afraid it would look as if we were rubbing salt into a wound. Others worried about the public’s reaction. There has been blowback on talk radio, Steve Lopez’s column in the
L.A. Times,
even some national forums. Mostly it’s been the usual windbags—Nancy Grace has thrown in her two cents, Larry King, some of the geniuses from Fox News.

None of this is affecting me, because I’ve put blinders on. I don’t read anything about the case, I don’t listen or watch any news shows that touch on it. I could be living on the world’s most remote desert island as far as any news about this case reaching me. I have a job to do, and I’m going to do it the best I can.

I’m on this case for two reasons. The first is that my boss wanted me on it. “This will be a defining moment in your career,” he told me when the idea was initially broached. “You’re a good lawyer, and this department needs all the good lawyers it can get. I’m hoping you’ll stay for a long time, and if you do, you’ll be handling many cases like this one. You need the right training for them, and you’ll get it with me.”

The second reason is personally gut-wrenching. Salazar wanted me to represent him; he requested me specifically. When I was told he had made that request, I panicked. The prospect of defending him again, this time on a charge of such magnitude, scared the shit out of me, particularly since my gut reaction, like everyone else’s, was that he actually is the Full Moon Killer. Rationally, I wanted him to be properly represented, but emotionally, I didn’t want to be the one to do it.

I had to put those feelings aside, too. My job is to defend people, not judge them. I can do that in the private recesses of my heart, but not in the open world. All my life I’ve fought against that, because for me, it’s personal. So many times, in so many situations, I could have been (and was) judged unfairly, wrongly. Starting with my mother, who was always reminding me I was a loser, then to the schools where I didn’t fit in; until I was out of my teens, I was an outcast. I was judged not for who I was, but what people thought I was. That was a long time ago, but I still feel those stings.

So after I got over my initial shock and panic about being Salazar’s lawyer again, I realized I had been doing to him what I hated for others to do to me. A heavy recognition that jolted me back into balance.

He probably is guilty. If he is, and the state proves it and a jury convicts him, so be it. But I will defend him the best I can. It’s not about him—it’s about me. My self-esteem, my dignity. I want to keep them as intact as I can. Doing this will help me.

Still, the prospect of getting back into the lion’s den has been tough. And that was before Jeremy dropped his bomb on me. But I have to stay strong. Self-pity is an easy emotion to fall into, but it’s deadly, like falling asleep in a snowstorm—your body wants to, your mind wants to, but you know that if you do, you will never wake up.

J
OE AND I WALK
from our office to the county jail. It’s only a few blocks, and it’s faster and easier to walk than drive and hassle the parking. We present ourselves at the appointed time, and they whisk us right in. They are not going to diddle us on a case of this importance; they don’t want to give us any reason, no matter how trivial, to cry foul. Moments later, Roberto Salazar, escorted by two jail deputies, is brought into the interview room. He’s handcuffed and shackled, so his gait is like a ninety-year-old man’s brittle shuffle. He looks us over with eyes that have gone dull and guarded from confinement. No longer is he the sweet, naive, optimistic lover of humanity I defended earlier. Now he’s a sullen, angry prisoner who has no faith in the system or trust in anyone who works for it, including Joe and me. I understand why he feels this way, but it hurts to see it. The bastards grind you down. That’s their objective, and they do the job well.

“Unlock him,” Joe instructs the jailers. “He’s going to need to use his hands.”

Wordlessly, one of the deputies uncouples the handcuffs and waist-shackles. Salazar slumps into the chair across the table from us and flexes his arms to get the circulation going.

“I’ll buzz you when we’re done,” Joe tells the guards. “It’s going to be a while.”

The deputies close the door behind them as they leave. It’s a metal door, built like a tank. You can hear the locks engage, sealing us in. It’s a chilling feeling. To add to the claustrophobia, there is the nagging worry that our conversations are bugged, at least some of the time. That’s illegal, of course, but bending the rules in the so-called pursuit of justice has never been a deterrent for the police. We have to hope they’re playing fair and square, and we try not to discuss critical information or strategy within these walls.

“My wife is falling apart,” Salazar says by way of greeting. “The whole community is shunning her. She can’t even go to the grocery store without being ripped apart. And my kids are tormented at school.” He buries his face in his hands. “They don’t deserve that, they didn’t do anything.” He raises his head and stares at us. “I didn’t, either.”

He has been maintaining his innocence from Day One. There has not been a chink in his armor, not one tiny crack. Usually, when a lawyer thinks (or knows) that his client is guilty, he doesn’t ask him if he is, not directly. He doesn’t want to know that truth, because it will be a psychological straitjacket. But in this case, Salazar has been outspoken and consistent: he did not kill that woman. He did not kill any of those women. He acknowledges (bitterly) that the police found damning evidence in his truck,
“but I did not put it there.”
He swears that on the heads of his children.

The evidence. God, it’s horrific! That needle in the haystack Cordova found under the floor mat of Salazar’s truck, which blew his normally imperturbable mind, was a pair of underpants that belonged to the most recent murdered woman. She had apparently been wearing them when she was killed, and because stripping the victims of their panties was the killer’s ugly signature, it linked all the murders to one another. In every killing, the victim was naked from the waist down, and her underpants were missing. The murderer, it seemed obvious (and odious), wanted a fetishistic souvenir of his work.

That a pair of underpants was taken from each of the victims had been a closely guarded secret. Only those cops and prosecutors directly involved in the murder cases (and the killer himself) knew about it, and not one of them leaked. The media never got wind until after the fact, a point of pride for the LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and the D.A.’s office. Once the DNA evidence confirmed that those panties belonged to the latest victim, the state’s case against Salazar went from good to virtually airtight.

The panties had been sent to two labs that test for DNA—one in Northern California, where the L.A. Coroner’s Office normally sends their DNA work, and a second in Maryland, which has a national reputation. The District Attorney’s office wanted to be super careful with the DNA, because even the best labs make mistakes. So they doubled up on the testing, which is almost unheard of.

The results from both labs, which positively identified the panties as having belonged to the victim, came back in thirty days, a minor miracle, because DNA tests usually take months. It’s a complicated process, and the labs are jammed with samples sent in from jurisdictions all over the country. That the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office got this one back so fast was testament to the importance of this case. The rumor, which I believe to be true, is that Governor Schwarzenegger personally interceded to expedite the testing.

I was sick to my stomach when I found out about the results. Although I was never absolutely sure whether Salazar really was a dupe about those stolen televisions or was in on the fix, I still liked him as a person and was impressed with his considerable achievements. But if he is the killer, and this evidence overwhelmingly points to that, it means that he’s not only a murderer, but he’s also really fucked up, a real sicko.

The only glimmer in this sky of black clouds, if there is one, is that Salazar’s DNA is not on the underwear. For the purposes of defending him, though, that is pretty much irrelevant. The autopsies of the murder victims didn’t indicate that they had been sexually assaulted, so rape isn’t part of the charges against Salazar. Murder is more than enough.

The police didn’t know that rape wasn’t an element in the killings when they busted Salazar, though, so immediately after his arrest they scoured his house, inside, out, and backward. Anything that might be incriminating was taken. What they were looking for—hoping for—were other sets of women’s underwear that could tie him to the previous victims. Anything that had been washed would be useless, but they did take all the soiled female laundry from the family’s hamper. Each article was analyzed for DNA content, but they all turned out to belong to Mrs. Salazar. So that was a dead end, thank God, because if there had been a match, there would be no point in having a trial. They could take Salazar to the nearest public forum and hang him, after he was first drawn and quartered.

The police also tried to reexamine his cube truck to see if there was evidence in it they had overlooked, since when they arrested him the first time they were interested in television sets, not women’s underwear. But between that arrest and this one Salazar sold the truck, and it can’t be located. It’s probably in Mexico or was crushed for scrap, because it wouldn’t have been worth any money on resale here. His reason for selling it was that since the police had that truck in their records, they would stop him again for other phantom infractions, and would try to pin another bogus charge on him. (That the sets were stolen didn’t count in his reasoning, since he didn’t know they were contraband; a dubious distinction, even to me, but I understand his thinking.)

The bottom line is that no other pairs of underwear belonging to any of the other victims has been found.

Joe and Salazar did not get off on a good footing when we first started working on this case. Right off the bat, as soon as Salazar insisted he hadn’t left the incriminating evidence in his truck, Joe interrupted him. “Who did?” he demanded brusquely, almost dismissively. “The tooth fairy?”

Salazar jumped when Joe attacked him that directly. So did I. But I knew where Joe was coming from. He doesn’t want clients to play head games with him, what we’re doing is too serious.

But Salazar didn’t back down. “No,” he declared. “The tooth fairy exists only for children. I am not a child.”

“Who, then?” Joe demanded.

“The police,” Salazar shot back, “or—”

“Stop right there,” Joe ordered him. “We’re not getting into any police conspiracy theories. At least not until someone shows me absolute proof, which I’m not going to hold my breath for. That is an insane defense, and all it would do is tighten the hangman’s noose around your neck. For one thing,” he pointed out, “where did they get them? The victim wasn’t wearing them, and a few hours later, they were found in your truck. That won’t wash, so drop it.”

The police do plant evidence—that’s a fact. But in this situation, with the players involved and the timing between finding the body and arresting Salazar, if we so much as hinted that that was the case, we would be pilloried. Even staunch civil liberty groups, such as the ACLU or the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wouldn’t back us on that.

“You were about to say something else,” Joe asked Salazar. “What was it?”

“That the real killer could have planted it in my truck.”

Joe rolled his eyes at that idea too. “When? Again, let’s remember the time line. Meaning there was no time.”

“There was, a little,” Salazar disagreed. He explained that he’d left his house early that morning while it was still dark out to beat the crosstown traffic. Because he was early, he stopped at a McDonald’s on Bundy to get an Egg McMuffin and coffee. He bought his newspaper out of a rack outside the fast-food joint. He was inside the McDonald’s for a few minutes. The real killer could have slipped the panties in then. He never locked his truck.