'Did she?'
'Quite likely.'
'You'd be willing to testify to that?'
'Of course.'
I thought about it. If Chrissy had blacked out, she wouldn't have the requisite criminal intent to support a murder charge. Manslaughter, maybe, but not murder. With a plea, maybe ten years, out in six. Better than life without parole. Of course, I'd have to ask Chrissy about the blackout. Better yet, I'd get Jimmy Stewart to ask. 'I'll need her complete file to get ready for the bond hearing,' I said.
'Already copied it for you.' He gestured toward a redwood picnic table just behind me.
I picked up a file six inches thick, then sat down to examine it. One folder contained handwritten notes of the therapy sessions; another seemed to be transcripts. 'You taped the sessions?' I asked.
'Only the hypnosis. You'll find the transcripts to be quite complete.'
'Good. But I'd like to have the tapes, too.'
His arched eyebrows shot me a Why?
'If they're helpful, we play them for the jury,' I said.
'If they're not, wouldn't it be better if you didn't have them?'
It took me a second to figure that out. Schein was a slippery shrink. First, he was handing me my defense. Now, he was playing hide the evidence. What was on those tapes anyway? 'You're worried about me having to turn over the tapes to the prosecution?'
He began raking the mulch again, though as far as I could see, it was evenly spread. 'Once I testify, your client will have waived the physician-patient privilege, will she not?'
'Yeah.'
'And wasn't the psychiatrist's tape recording of the Menendez brothers admissible?' he asked.
'Sure was.'
'So…'
'So, you can't destroy them, no matter what's on them. That'd be obstruction of justice.'
'I see,' he said.
'But I do appreciate the gesture.'
I looked through the folder, checking the dates along the left margin of the therapy notes. 'You were seeing her three days a week.'
'At one point, five days a week.'
I thumbed through several pages in a file labeled simply MEDICATION. 'I had no idea she was taking so many drugs. Xanax and Ativan…'
'For anxiety related to depression.'
'Mellaril…'
'To control flashbacks.' He carried a potted fern to the picnic table and sat down across from me.
'Any idea whether she was taking them the day of the shooting?'
He shrugged. Another question for Chrissy.
'Prozac and Desyrel…'
'For depression.' With a small clipper, he cut away some brown stems of the fern. For some reason, the gesture reminded me of a woman plucking her eyebrows.
'Restoril, Darvocet, and lithium.'
'To help her sleep, for headaches, and mood swings.'
'Better living through chemistry,' I said.
'The proper use of drugs is an essential part of therapy.'
'Uh-huh. What about now?'
'I beg your pardon.'
'Does she need drugs, therapy, anything?'
'Oh, no. Christina has confronted her demons and exorcised them.'
'By remembering… or by killing?'
Dr. Schein put down his clippers, briefly scanned his environmentally friendly, xeriscaped yard, then looked me in the eye for the first time. His smile was just this side of smug. 'In one sense, the killing of Harry Bernhardt was quite unfortunate.'
'Especially for Harry Bernhardt,' I agreed.
'But in another sense, what Christina did was finally take control of her own life, and that was therapeutic. Quite therapeutic indeed.'
6
I approached the intersection of Calle Ocho and Twelfth Avenue in Little Havana, intending to turn left and head north. But the city padres had changed the street signs again and, momentarily confused, I missed the turn to the bridge on my way to the sadly misnamed Justice Building.
Oh, we seek justice in the building, just as we seek holiness in a house of worship. Both goals are difficult to achieve and seldom witnessed by mortals. Which is not to say that the building doesn't dispense 'law' by the bucketful. Law is the product that spews out of the building's courtrooms, hundreds of times each day. Guilt, innocence, suspended sentences, pretrial intervention, nolle prosequi, time served, mistrials, adjudication withheld. The product comes in a dozen brands. But justice is an ideal, a vague concept we strive for but can barely define, much less master.
Justice requires lawyers who are prepared, witnesses who tell the truth, judges who know the law, and jurors who stay awake. Justice is the North Star, the burning bush, the Holy Virgin. It cannot be bought, sold, or mass-produced. It is intangible, ineffable, and invisible, but if you are to spend your life in its pursuit, it is best to believe it exists, and that you can attain it.
So there I was, going farther east on Calle Ocho, or Eighth Street, or Olga Guillot Way, according to the new sign that threw me. I don't know why the bolero singer got the honor, unless it was because a few blocks away, Celia Cruz, the salsa singer, has the same street named for her, and a few blocks from that, so do Carlos Arboleya, Felipe Vails, and Loring Evans. If that's not baffling enough, a stretch of Twelfth Avenue, near here, is called Ronald Reagan Avenue.
Our city and county commissioners, ever desirous of licking the boots of their constituents, once named a street Leomar Parkway after a major campaign contributor who turned out to be a major drug dealer. There are streets named for Almirante Miguel Grau, a Peruvian admiral in the 1800s, and Francisco de Paula Santander, a Colombian general. There's even one named for Jose Canseco, the baseball slugger, who has been fined repeatedly for driving his sports cars at more than one hundred miles an hour. Maybe a lane at the Daytona Speedway would be more appropriate.
Eventually, I doubled back and found General Maximo Gomez Boulevard-no, I don't know who the hell he was-and made my way north to the Justice Building, which houses criminals and other miscreants such as judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers.
It was just before nine A.M. when I slipped into a parking place next to the jail. Overhead, prisoners were being taken across an enclosed walkway directly into holding cells on the fourth floor. Chrissy would already be inside, having arrived by bus from the Women's Detention Center a few blocks away.
I hurried down a narrow alley toward the back entrance of the building, nearly running into Curly Hendry, who was leaning on his rolling trash bin. Curly, who was bald, had spent several stretches in the county jail, plus a couple of years upstate. I represented him once, when cops found an ATM machine all trussed up in a towing chain, the other end of which was attached to a winch on his heavy-duty Dodge pickup. These days, he pushed a broom for the county.
' Que pasa, Curly?'
