The Royal Family (47 page)

In our republic, collateral cannot be paid except in good hard money. (The felony bail schedule reads:
CASH, SURETY BONDS, VISA OR MASTERCARD. NO PERSONAL CHECKS.
) Why this is I cannot fathom. A deed of trust means even less to a court clerk than a defendant’s fate. Well, couldn’t there be an appraisal office for the former as there is for the latter? The state of California seems perfectly able to staff such establishments in order to tax my house. Never mind. Who, then, will accept the surety of a cashless soul? Not the judge, I assure you; nor the happy lawyers with their suitcoats off, neckties fluttering in the breeze, who sometimes may be seen carrying bag lunches, nor yet the cops whose doubleparked police cars rest as immune to meter maids as most cops themselves are to bribery. And so the accused, or, more likely, since he’s at this
moment sitting upstairs in a cell, the friends of the accused, descend the Hall of Justice’s steps on which other lion’s-prey smoke cigarettes while keeping to themselves or else glaring nervously everywhere like that whirling man in court, and then the friends (what nice friends!) turn to the slow orange blinking of the
BAIL OPEN
sign for Barrish Bail Bonds, or to any of the other signals of rescue in that casino-like strip which more or less begins by the Inn Justice Bar & Hofbrau with Dad’s Bail Bonds, and Cable Car Bail Bonds, whose office resembles a fast food restaurant and whose motto reads:
“WE NEVER SLEEP”—LOW RATES.
Next comes De Soto Bail Bonds, followed by Al Graf Bail Bonds, an establishment which figures in this sketch, then the aforementioned Barrish, Ballestrasse (
OPEN 24 HOURS
), Puccinelli; and at right angles to all these, in the alley behind Cable Car Bail Bonds, my vision descries Curtis Howard, O’Reilly’s, McKenzie Green, Hutch and Hutch, King, De Cortez and then Sheila Lockett, who very pleasantly said when I rang her bell: No, I can’t help you; I’m sorry . . .

Thus that miniature Las Vegas where many an accused hits the jackpot of sunlight and kisses. But is this treasure imperishable American bullion, or fool’s gold? Bail can be revoked, you know.
*
On the other hand, some lucky souls’ cases get dismissed within days, and
then
sunlight endures unto death or the next arrest. Regardless, Judgment Day comes for all. Angels inscribe a name on one of the daily computer printouts affixed to the marble walls of the Hall of Justice—time to report to the lion, time for district attorney and public defender to gamble over the gambler’s fate. But up to that moment he’s
free
within due limits to spend the life he’s won—provided only (as I said) that his well-wishers can offer deeds of trust, stock certificates, or good safe municipal bonds.

That bail bondsman I met in Spokane didn’t mind accepting videocasette recorders or cameras as collateral. (What did he think, when somebody brought in two dozen television sets? Where had those televisions come from?)—In San Francisco it seems more difficult to meet with such catholic receivers. One can easily try, of course, for it was explained to me by ancient Al Graf, retired owner of the aforesaid Al Graf Bail Bonds, that each bondsman specializes in a very particular subspecies of client, just as each creed has its god, and each parasite its host. Somebody somewhere will take television sets. Why not try? Freedom Casino lies so conveniently situated right across from the lion’s mouth! —When you win in Vegas your slot machine says
BAR BAR BAR.
But for the lion-bound winners, all bars shall be sprung. A blood-vermillion sign blinks in a bondsman’s window.

Am I free to go? asks the defendant.

Yeah, you’ve got bail set, the judge replies.

I got bailed!
he crows, rolling away in his wheelchair.

The judge sighs and sets a new trial date.

How much do you love me? —Easy to find out. I’ll beseech of you my resurrection. Then I’ll wait.

Ah, but how much will the ransom be? Well, how much
should
it be?

Gaunt, bald and overworked Ron Albers, one of the felony supervisors at the public
defender’s office, tried to be civil, but the more questions I put, the more convinced he grew that I was a fool. To him, life came case by case, like the row of bail establishments each with its own policies; generalization equalled vacuity. I wanted to know whether he thought that the bail system was fair, and such inquiries exasperated him.

Fine,
he said staccatto. Take possession of drugs. What’s an appropriate bail?

Well, I began, in relation to a violent crime—

No, he said.
Tell me a number.

All right, a thousand dollars.

He shrugged and said (another verbal lunge):
Fine.
A thousand dollars. How about possession for sale?

Ten thousand.

Fine,
he said challengingly. Ten thousand dollars. How about possession with conspiracy to sell?

Twice as much.

Okay, so that’s your system, said Albers a little contemptuously, and maybe it works for you. But nobody
agrees,
you see. Bail for the same crime varies wildly from county to county.

He was correct, and one need not compare the legal apples of San Francisco with the legal oranges of Sacramento to be unnerved by eccentric discrepancies. What were San Francisco’s judges thinking of, when they set bail for assault with
attempt
to rape at twenty thousand dollars—the same number as for rape itself? Leniency ought to be the watchword for an uncompleted crime, no matter what reason the ellipsis. Just as Dante’s hell contains circles of graduated misery, so should the bail system. That anomaly, the radiantly rational criminal, ought always to be reminded that no matter what he’s done, he’d be better off not doing worse.
Fine,
as Ron Albers would have said. Assault with or without penetration, with or without disease and escalated shame: Twenty grand.
Fine.
Meanwhile, kidnapping for
purposes
of rape became bailable at fifty thousand dollars. I suppose that carrying off one’s prey is more terrifying than laying hands on her where one finds her, but a courteous kidnapping might be preferable to a bloody assault (granted, the blood might comprise a separately bailable offense, but in that case what meaning remains to the word “assault”?). Vanilla
kidnapping
got bailed at five thousand dollars more than kidnapping for rape, I’ll never comprehend why; and the bail for rape-less
assault
varied between five and fifty thousand (but take heart, O you suffocating students of logic! We can, do and
will,
as bureaucrats say, “prioritize”—for it costs precisely three times as much to be suspected of attacking a fireman as to be accused of harming a bus driver. What would they bail me at, if I shattered their legal tablets?). Sexual battery (which essentially means fondling) was only ten thousand—
fine,
reasonable actually, proportionately Dantesque—but then incest had been priced at twenty-five thousand. If a brother and sister happily went to bed together and then a cousin called the cops, must their amusements necessarily be considered more terrible than ravishment by a monster? Where was the
sense
of it? And so to me the words on the San Francisco bail schedule—to say nothing of the fees—began to seem like careless and transitory exhalations.

The bitter truth of Ron Albers’s
Fine
was that in law there
was
no truth. Sometimes I’ve wished that every crime could be addressed by a single statute, perfectly drafted.
*
So
it used to be:
An eye for an eye.
But what if I put out my brother’s eye by mistake? What if I did it in wartime, or slyly paid Domino to do it? And so the dust of confusions and exceptions dulled the glitter of the ancient, perfect laws. In their place, we learned to fire multiple laws out of justice’s shotgun, hoping that if one pellet didn’t bring down the criminal, maybe the next one would. Al Capone deserved to go to prison for his numerous murders and thuggeries, and so he did go—but for tax evasion. That was the pellet that got him. The district attorney takes aim and files charges—
fires
them, I should say—determined to prove his case. He fires multiple shots whenever he can, and each shot spreads constellations of leaden legal pellets. And the more charges stick, the more weighed down becomes the defendant by crushing bail.

This science is as easy as it is repulsive. An example: In Department Twenty-Two I heard a prosecutor insistently arguing: This was a case of GBI (great bodily injury) with use of a knife. The bail was only five thousand, which does
not
reflect the seriousness of the case!

When I got home I searched the felony bail schedule for San Francisco County and found:

PENAL CODE FELONY 245(a)(I) Assault (great bodily injury)
BAIL
$5,000

Indeed, if I meant to box in this suspected stabber (as a prosecutor must do), I might insist and argue against ordinary GBI in that same rising voice, for the bail bondsman’s ten percent weighs but five hundred dollars here. Very likely, the accused or his friends could support such a burden. So quick! Load the shotgun! On that very same page I found sweet
mayhem.
Somebody, possibly our defendant, has superficially cut the victim about the face, and in the process nicked off an infinitesimal portion of an earlobe. Thus mayhem, which is mutilation and bails at twenty grand. (Aggravated mayhem can go for more.) Were I the D.A., why not fire that one off?

This procedure being not only expedient, but also self-exculpatory, it gets applied at all levels. The defendant gets his day in court, and directly or through agents pleads his righteousness. The prosecutor (whose name is Legion, because he gets to call himself
the people
*
) does the same. And the uniformed vice-hunters in their rolling black-and-whites, don’t they also want to justify themselves? When they take somebody in, it’s only human nature for them to show cause. Why not triply show it? —When you’re arrested, said Ron Albers, the person making the charge is the police officer. If he likes you, it’s possession. If not, it’s possession for sale. I think there’s no limit to the number of charges he can make. Let’s say you happen to be a person passing a bad check. They can charge you with uttering a bad check plus conspiracy to defraud plus possession of counterfeiting tools or whatever. Or you walk into Safeway and you want to steal a loaf of bread. Well, that’s petty theft, but entering the premises for purposes of petty theft can be burglary, and it becomes violent robbery if the security guard tries to stop you and you pull your arm away.

Needless to say, each new charge augments the bail bondsman’s ten percent. When the Salem witchcraft trials were in full flourish, they arrested a man named Giles Corey, who to save his estate would not plead innocent or guilty, so the magistrates in their wisdom directed that he be laid down upon his back in a dark room and slowly crushed to death with weights. Doubtless, many of the Giles Coreys whom we press with the less reprehensible weight of bail actually did the deed, and deserve to remain in the dark room for the duration. But remember the principle of
innocent until proven guilty.

Thus the first flaw of bail, its
absolute arbitrariness.
(As a smart young lawyer once told me: The criminal justice system is an
ad hoc
system. It’s not logical.) The second flaw is its
relative arbitrariness.
How brittle is each Giles Corey’s ribcage? Does any given sum of bail weigh the same to me as to you? —We had one guy who was faced with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars bail, Ron Albers said. The charges were very serious. What the person did, I don’t have to get into that. But bail could have been set at a hundred thousand; it wouldn’t have made any difference. He couldn’t have gotten out of jail. But another guy with a hundred-thousand-dollar bail did get out. He had enough resources to pay for an attorney to boot. Those were serious sexual assault charges. And some of the guys you saw in Department Twenty-Two today had bail set for five thousand dollars or less. They didn’t have the five thousand on their credit cards, and they didn’t have the five hundred plus collateral for the bail bondsman. So they’re sitting in jail.

In the elevator at Five Fifty-Five Seventh Street, I met a lady who often represented street prostitutes. The elevator was slow, so I inquired of her how often those types were able to make bail. —Almost never, she replied. —And a bargirl friend of mine whom I’ve visited in jail more than once (let’s call her Strawberry), assured me: I’ve never had bail in my life. And I don’t get a trial anymore either. It’s all parole violation.
*
They take me and lock me up. You shouldn’t be writing about bail. That’s irrelevant. You should tell people about what goes on in jail. What they like to do is beat you when you’re in the elevator, when they’re taking you up to your cell.

This being a novel, we need not sorrow over wretches such as Strawberry, who don’t even exist—I made her up out of three sad women I know—and the sad woman who alluded to the beatings she got was also quite practiced in weeping over her dead baby and then hitting me up for money; so let’s suppose that she never was beaten (although one time, and here I write not as a novelist but as a witness, I saw two policemen enter the back door of the place which we’ll call the Wonderbar, and march her into their squad car because she’d violated her parole again—which is to say, because she’d been sitting quietly at the Wonderbar—and when I strolled out to watch them and see if I could do anything to help Strawberry I saw one cop at the wheel while the other cop was sitting in the back seat beside Strawberry, whose head he now began to drag down into his lap.