“I don’t know. I can’t remember. Maybe a couple,” he says.
“Twice?” says Harry.
“I don’t know. Do you always know how many times you talked to somebody about something?”
Harry wants a list of names, the people Arnsberg may have talked to in the days leading up to the murder, the places where they met, whether it was on the phone or in person, and how many witnesses were present.
“So we talked about him. Doesn’t make me a killer.”
“Ah, yes,” says Harry, “but there’s the rub. You don’t get to decide who the killer is. The jury does that. And I can guarantee you that they will be positively riveted by any information concerning things you might have said about Mr. Scarborough to others, especially in the period right before he was killed. They’re funny about that. Juries, I mean.”
The kid doesn’t seem to like Harry’s sense of humor. I suppose it too much resembles lectures he’s gotten at school and in other places of authority.
He turns to me. “The guy was stirring up crowds everywhere he went. You saw the news,” says Arnsberg. “Way he was going, sooner or later somebody was gonna nail him.”
“There again you have a problem,” says Harry. “He wasn’t, as you say, ‘nailed’ somewhere else. This particular hammering took place in the hotel where you happened to work, and according to the cops all the evidence points to you being the last person in that room with him.”
This from his own lawyer. The look on the kid’s face is a mix of anger and fear. “I thought you were here to help me,” he says.
“We’re tryin’, son. But you have to give us the tools,” says Harry.
“You got a cigarette?” Arnsberg looks at me.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Me neither,” Harry lies.
People v. Arnsberg is the kind of case that is made up of hard circumstance, assorted pieces of physical evidence, and the fact that the defendant fits the expected profile of the killer like a fat man in stretch pants. Whether he did it or not, he can be seen to possess the kind of insane motive that is easy to peddle to an inner-city jury-blind hatred based on race. In fact, the evidence came at them so fast that the cops fell over themselves in a blind rush to arrest the defendant.
To listen to the media, Arnsberg didn’t kill a person of color. He did something worse. He killed their self- appointed messenger, in this case a lawyer, author, and celebrity, all the ingredients to whip up a hot story, except for sex, and they’re relying on innuendo for that one. The media mavens are now calling the case the “San Diego Slavery Slaying,” and they’re camped all over it, 24/7.
“I talked to my dad. He says you can get me off.” This the kid directs at me.
“We’ll do whatever we can. But there are no guarantees. We can’t do anything unless we know everything. That means everything you know. If you withhold information from us, even something you might not think is important…then you’re just wasting our time. You can bet the cops will find out about it-that is, if they don’t already know-and when they start dropping surprises on us in court, there will be nothing I or anyone else can do to help you. Understand?”
He swallows, then nods, not something hip or cool, but vigorous, like someone who suddenly realizes that the threads of security, whatever it is that tethers him to this life, are far thinner than he ever realized. “Yeah. I told you everything I know. Really,” he says. “I didn’t do it. I swear.”
“All right.” We lecture him on jailhouse etiquette, not to talk to anyone-guards, cellmates, even family-about events in the case. Anything told to them can be repeated in testimony on the stand. Even family members can be forced to testify against him. “You talk only to us, Harry or myself, that’s it.”
“Somebody in the jail wants to talk about the weather, fine. Sports, feel free. But anything having to do with your case, with Scarborough, with race relations in general, you’re a mute,” says Harry. “If you have to, swallow your tongue. If we’re in trial and somebody asks how it went in court, you don’t know.”
“I understand,” he says. “I talk to nobody. Only the two of you.”
“And your buddies, the ones you may have talked to before the event, don’t talk to them at all,” says Harry. “As far as you’re concerned, they don’t exist. If they come visiting during hours, you don’t want to see them, and you don’t want to be seen talking to them.”
“What do I tell them?”
“You don’t tell them anything. If they call the jail and want to talk to you, you don’t take the call. If they show up in the visiting room and you see them, you don’t sit down. You turn and you walk. Anything you tell them can be used against you. It can be twisted for whatever reason and end up being your word against theirs as to what was said. Worse than that,” says Harry, “the cops may be listening in. Friends have been known to wear wires. Just figure that if any of these old friends show up to give you moral support, and you talk to them, you may as well have a heart-to-heart with the D.A., because you probably are.”
He nods nervously, in the stark realization that he is alone, a dying man in a desert, with only me and Harry to toss him the occasional drop of water.
Harry and I start collecting our papers and notes, the photos go back into my briefcase.
“I need to know one thing,” says Arnsberg.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“They aren’t serious? They don’t really wanna…well, you know…”
I stop with the briefcase and look at him. “No, I don’t.”
“I mean, they’re not gonna really execute me?” he says. “They’re sayin’ that just to put pressure. Right? They’re thinking squeeze hard enough and I’ll do a deal. That’s it, isn’t it? Sure. That’s gotta be it. Scare me and they figure I’ll confess, tell ’em I did something I didn’t do. I can understand that. I mean, I won’t do it. I mean, confess to something I didn’t do. But I understand it. It makes sense.” In half a second, his eyes flash from me to Harry and back again.
At this moment I wish his father were not my friend, that instead I was dealing with the child of a stranger, where my only psychic connection to the outcome would be just the blood that ordinarily oozes from my pores whenever I stand with a client to hear a verdict.
“Carl. I can call you Carl?”
He nods.
“Carl, I want you to understand this because you’ll save yourself a lot of pain if you get it into your head and come to grips with it now. The police, the D.A., the State of California are not testing the water here. They’re not playing Let’s Make a Deal. Given the case, the media hype, and racial politics, unless something major breaks our way, I can’t see that they would ever accept a deal, though if things get bad, we may have to go there before we’re finished. They’re doing this because they believe they have the evidence to convict you, send you to the death house at San Quentin, and inject enough lethal drugs into your body to kill you. I wish I could tell you it wasn’t true, but if they have their way, that is exactly what they intend to do.”
It’s hard to tell whether he even hears all this. His face looking up at me is that flushed. A second later the breath seems to leave his body as his shoulders slump and he sags in the chair. His head is down. The nightmare is real. He begins to tear up, then sucks it all back in a boyish effort to keep his nose from running. He wipes his eyes with the back of his forearm, the one decorated with the swastika. Carl Arnsberg may be twenty-three and halfway to becoming a hard-baked race case, but at this moment I would gauge his social age to be no more than ten, with the hardness quotient of his heart somewhere in the neighborhood of hot Jell-O.
“I don’t know what happened. I guess it’s my fault. Somehow I lost touch with him. You know how hard it is to raise kids.”
Sam Arnsberg is a friend of long standing. We went to college together, belonged to the same fraternity, dated some of the same girls.
Today, seated in one of the client chairs across from my desk, Sam doesn’t even look like the same person I once knew. But for certain aspects of terminal cancer, there is nothing I can think of in life that will destroy a person faster than the perils of dealing with the American judicial system. Even mired in the middle of it as I am, I cannot imagine what Sam is going through, a child facing a possible death sentence.
“Maybe you should find someone else to do this,” I tell him.
“No! I trust you. I have faith in you.” He says it as if he were reaching out to grasp one of those life rings they
