Good Morning, Killer

buddies, you see. He goes up to the driver and he’s got his gun out. Big, big mistake. He’s going to pull this guy out of the car. He’s not in uniform, he’s drunk, the civilian doesn’t know what’s going on, his friend cell phones the cops. They have a vehicle in the area, and they swing over in seconds, and they seize my dad. Take him into custody.” “Where was this?”

“Pacific Palisades. LAPD.”

I nodded.

“In trying to get the story from a bunch of inebriated witnesses, all they focused on was that my dad had a gun and tried to pull this guy out of the car. So they book him for attempted car jacking and put him in jail.

“I’m a rookie, I’m living with two roommates in a dive off Pico, and I get the call from my lieutenant on a Sunday morning. ‘Your father’s in jail.’ Not only in jail but on a felony charge. You have to remember, nothing like this ever happened to my dad. This is like Sandy Koufax robbing a bank. It just doesn’t happen. Turns out, they called the office, verified his status as a captain in the Santa Monica Police Department, and now I go over there to bail him out.

“He’s okay, he’s sobered up, a little chagrined but not majorly, or so I think,” Andrew said, wagging a reproachful finger. “So we go and have breakfast at Rae’s, and I drop him off at his house and go play basketball. That’s what I do. I play basketball.” He took a jagged breath.

“When I go back to the house later on, I find he’s penned a note, indicating that he wants me to have all his possessions”—Andrew’s voice cracked—“because I’ve been such a good son … And he says he’s going down to the beach.” He waited. I held on to his shins.

“So I call the department and I say, ‘You’ve got to find him, he’s going to blow his brains out,’ and they did find him at the end of a strand, he’s sitting on a rock, two uniforms approach and talk to him, and he’s not responding, and he pulls out his service weapon, and he did kill himself.” Again he lifted cupped hands like a chalice and water ran down his face.

“I’m so sorry.”

“All his life my dad wanted to be a police officer. He thought that at the end of his career he would go out under a veil of shame, and he couldn’t live with that. It got to the point very quickly where he decided to take his own life.” “It wasn’t only that.”

“What?”

“How did he feel about retirement?”

“He wanted to retire. Planned for it for years.”

“You can still be afraid of what you want.”

Andrew just sighed, exhausted.

“You have to forgive yourself, Andy.”

“Doesn’t matter to me.”

“You’re a loving son. Remember that.”

“Oh, he wasn’t even my real dad, why should I care?” Andrew smiled ironically and quickly tweaked my toes, to show it was a joke, a painful joke. “Who are you?” he mused. “How did you come into my life?” and whispered my name just to hear how it sounded now that everything was different, and slipped farther, chest-deep, into the warm suds, sloshing water on the floor. We stayed so long in that common pool that when we slept entwined in each other’s arms that night, it was as if we had become transparent to each other.

Twenty-one

Devon County simply lied to Juliana, assuring her she would not have to talk about the rape on the stand, and so, after several more conversations involving her parents, she agreed to appear for my defense at the preliminary hearing. Juliana said she would do anything to “help me out” (that’s the way Devon put it to her), but the deal was sealed when he promised to send a limo to pick them up. The girl wanted to know if the limo had a TV. Luckily, I was not aware of any of this, as I had been banned from talking with Juliana until it was over.

The Honorable Wolfson H. McIntyre presided over the courtroom that was to become our theater, our coliseum, on the fifth floor of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles.

Judge McIntyre, who was about seventy years old, with a ruddy beak enlarged by rosacea, wore a bow tie that was pressed tightly against his Adam’s apple by the yoke of his black robes. He had sparse white hair parted on the side and combed in ridges. He would not be the trial judge, if we went to trial. All he did, all day long, for the past quarter of a century, was preside over preliminary hearings. He was the traffic cop, sending folks this way and that. Final destination? No interest.

But that did not mean you were going to get away with anything. Judge McIntyre was tenaciously anal, which made him a great traffic cop. He reminded me of an art history professor I had at UC — Santa Barbara. A pompous egomaniac who wore a three-piece suit at the podium, I had once surprised him in his office, slumped at his desk in a worn cardigan sweater, lining Ritz crackers up in a row and ritualistically squirting each one with a rosette of American cheese product from an aerosol can. He had looked up with rheumy, accusatory eyes … and you did not want to think about it any further than that.

Judge McIntyre’s windowless courtroom was paneled in dark oak beneath square modular ceiling lights, which illuminated everything with democratic pallor. We had an American flag and a California flag. We had the Great Seal of the state. An exit sign and a thermostat switch on the wall. I spent a lot of time staring at that naked, proletarian switch. It spoke to me, in eloquent detail, of exactly what it would be like to be in prison.

I was not in my right mind during the hearing. Could a doctor remain sane, forced to operate on himself? Facing charges in a courtroom before a judge was the cruelest reversal so far in this unlikely pageant, which would turn into a full-blown Roman circus, should I be held to answer those charges at a jury trial. Meanwhile, we were doomed to be part of the sideshow.

The judge had a twin brother who sat in the back of the courtroom. It was explained to me the brother came every day to bring the judge his lunch, and sure enough, there were two identically folded brown paper bags on the floor near the gentleman’s polished Oxford shoes. He wore a tweed jacket with leather buttons and sat straight and calm, head up like an eagle, while his brother fussed over pages on the bench, getting dandruff all over his black robes, the brother’s hooked nose pointing north, the judge’s pointing south, like two faces of destiny.

The judge had a clerk who was so obscenely overweight his belt floated around his belly like a hula hoop. His shirt was too short, so when he turned around you could see his butt crease. We had an audience of twitchy high school students on a field trip, prodding and smirking, while the middle-aged male teacher read Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul. Then there were the watchers, a boozed-out clan of bowlegged cowboys and cowgirls wearing dress boots with taps who also brought their lunches, and the other defendants and their families awaiting hearings, including a young male with four sticking-out braids who hunkered down in the seat and kept his hands in his pockets while his lawyer discussed with the mother the possibility of drug rehab instead of jail.

“This place is a zoo today,” said the mother, wiping her forehead.

“Gotta do something about this justice system,” muttered the son. “Something wrong with it.”

“That’s what Judge Judy says.”

The son snorted and shook his braids.

“Just think,” said the mother, cuffing him, “what kind of justice you’d get with Saddam Hussein!”

Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch made his entrance through a side door, pushing a trolley laden with stacks of books and files like a man with an awesome and holy burden. Those tablets could have been made of stone the way he huffed and puffed, in a detached Scandinavian way. A bully in an austere town out of a Swedish art film is how I saw him, the angry kid without a mother who keeps punching the other kid until there is blood in the snow. He was over six feet tall, forty, flattop hair, wearing a blue suit with an iridescent blue tie. There were dark manic rings beneath the eyes, and he moved with the lanky urgent stoop of a preacher crackling to put things right.