Daughter's Keeper (13 page)

“Yes, of course,” Elaine said. She had bailed Olivia out before, hitting an ATM at three in the morning on her way down to the county courthouse in Santa Cruz. “How much money should I bring?”

“I'm afraid it's a little more serious than that. I will be recommending to the judge that Olivia be held on a one hundred ­thousand dollar surety bond secured by at least fifty thousand dollars in real property.”

Elaine gasped. “One hundred thousand dollars? I don't have that kind of money. What in God's name did she do?”

“One hundred thousand dollars is a standard bond amount in our court, Mrs. Goodman, I can assure you. It is, actually, low in a case like this, where there is a presumption against release.”

“A presumption against release? Excuse me, I'm sorry. I don't understand.”

“In drug cases, there is a presumption that the defendant should not be released.”

“Drug case.” Elaine couldn't seem to stop repeating everything the woman said.

“Methamphetamine. As I said before. And because it's a drug case, your daughter is considered a danger to society.”

The absurdity of those words woke Elaine from her shocked stupor. “A danger? That's ridiculous. Olivia's not a danger to anyone.”

“Your daughter has been charged with dealing in
methamphetamine, Mrs. Goodman. A very large amount of methamphetamine.”

“Oh, God,” Elaine whispered. “But I don't have that kind of money.”

“We don't require or expect that the amount be paid to the court in cash. Most people sign a surety bond, with their homes as collateral. I am recommending that you be required to secure only fifty thousand dollars of that amount. Olivia says that you own your home, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And are you willing to use that home as surety for your daughter?”

“I…I don't know. What does that mean?”

“What it means, Mrs. Goodman, is that if your daughter fails to appear in court, or if she does not comply with any of the many other conditions of her release, you will be expected to pay that sum to the government. If you cannot, we will take possession of your home.”

Elaine closed her eyes and saw the bright pinks and purples of her lovely tended bougainvillea that had taken so many years to grow into the riot of color that now gave her such pleasure.

“I'm actually in the process of refinancing my house,” she said.

Miss Watts-Thompson sniffed. “It's unlikely that you would be able to do that with a government lien on the home. Do I understand that you are unwilling to act as a surety for your daughter?”

“No!” Elaine objected. “It's just that I can't do this without talking to my fiancé. We're supposed to be buying a condo together. I just need to talk to him before I agree to do anything with the house. Isn't there some other way? Couldn't I sign for her or something? I did that that time she was arrested up in Eureka.”

“I will inform the court that you are willing to act as surety for your daughter, but that you will not put up your home as security. Good day, Mrs. Goodman.”

Elaine stared at the silent receiver for a moment. She had a creeping sensation that she had just done something terribly wrong, even unforgivable. Would another mother have simply said “yes”? She called Arthur at home and at work, leaving urgent messages that he call her. Only after did she realize that she hadn't asked the woman where Olivia was being held and if she could see her.

For the rest of the morning, every time the phone rang, Elaine rushed back to the storage area to pick it up. She was tremendously relieved when a man introduced himself as Olivia's lawyer. She interrupted him after a moment.

“Where is my daughter?”

“She's being held in the lockup in the federal courthouse in Oakland. Downtown. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes, I think so. The twin buildings by the freeway?”

“Exactly.”

“Is she okay?”

“She's fine. Scared, but fine. She's going to have a bail hearing later today.”

“Yes, I know. Someone from the courthouse called me.”

“Ah, Watts-Thompson. She took all your information? Did she tell you what forms to bring to court this afternoon for the secured surety bond? You'll need your mortgage information—did she tell you that?”

Elaine paused, biting her lip. “Actually, I told her I wasn't sure about the house. You see, my fiancé and I are in the process of buying a second home in Lake Tahoe. I need to refinance my house in order to pay for my share of the condo.”

Olivia's lawyer didn't say anything.

Elaine swallowed. “The woman said that she would tell the judge that I can't put up the house but that I'll sign for Olivia.”

The lawyer remained silent for another moment. Then he spoke. “Mrs. Goodman, I'm not sure you really understand how serious this is. I can ask the court to allow Olivia out on an unsecured bond, but I doubt the judge will do it. In large-scale drug cases, there is a presumption against bond. That means the judge doesn't have to let her out at all.”

“What did Olivia do?” Elaine asked, wincing at the shrillness of her voice.

“Maybe nothing. This seems to be something her boyfriend got involved with. It looks pretty likely that she was just along for the ride.”

Elaine felt a rush of rage complicated by something embarrassingly akin to satisfaction. She had made her opinion of Jorge abundantly clear to her daughter. Yet, despite that, Olivia had insisted on staying with him. Elaine had certainly been proved right once again. “Why is her bail a hundred thousand dollars if she didn't do anything?” she said.

“Is that what Watts-Thompson told you? A hundred grand? Secured?”

“I think so. I don't know. I don't really understand any of this.”

“Never mind. Listen, Ms. Goodman, this is federal court. That's actually not a particularly high bond. Even if Olivia really didn't do anything, it's going to take some time to convince the government of that. It's even possible we'll never convince them, and we'll end up making that argument to a jury. If you don't act as a surety for Olivia, she could spend a few weeks, or months, or even longer in jail.”

“Oh, God.”

“Do you think you'd be willing to put up your house?”

Elaine steeled herself against the panic that began to overwhelm her. “I don't know. I have to talk to my fiancé. Can't we just ask the judge if I can sign for her or something? Miss Watts-Thompson said I could do that.”

“Will you at least come to court? If you're there in person, the judge might be more willing to consider letting her out,” Izaya said.

Finally, she was presented with something specific she could do, a way to show her support without risking Arthur's disapproval. Relief flooded her, and she nearly smiled. “Yes! Yes, of course,” she said.

Izaya Feingold-Upchurch set his telephone receiver back in its cradle, a puzzled frown creasing his broad forehead. He had been worried about pulling the bail package together quickly enough, but it had never occurred to him that the girl's mother wouldn't immediately step up. They almost always did, even the ones who should have known better—the ones whose child or grandchild had already proved to possess an all-consuming
self-absorption impervious to even the most dramatic of consequences. In those cases he hated even mentioning the
possibility of putting the house up as collateral. Knowing how it would end, Izaya sometimes flirted with the idea of protecting the woman—and it was almost always a woman—from her son's perfidy and her own delusions that her love had any hope at all of saving him. But the duty he owed was to his client, not to those exhausted women from whom, despite all reason, life had not yet drained the seductive elixir of hope. So he convinced Mama to put her house up and referred her to one of his friends in private practice when Junior skipped and the government came calling for its dire compensation.

Izaya smacked his hand down on his desk. His no-brainer of a bail hearing was fast becoming something else entirely. He considered the question of whether he should call the mother back. Perhaps the failure was his own. Perhaps he had not adequately communicated to her the seriousness of her daughter's predicament. He reached for the phone again, but instead of calling Olivia's mother, he called his own.

“What up, Ruthie!” he said, in the homeboy accent he'd been using with his mother ever since he'd realized, in sixth grade, how crazy it made her and how impossible it was for her ever to ask him to stop.

“Good morning, sweetie,” his mother answered. “Are you having a good day?”

“I'm on duty,” he said.

“Well that's always fun, right? Did you pick up anything good?”

“I think I might actually have gotten a tryable case,” he said. Lately, it had begun to seem like he was never going to get in front of a jury again. Izaya had a caseload almost twice as big as that of most of his colleagues in the defender's office. This was no accident, but rather a testament to his ambition and to his relentless industry. Izaya loved the courtroom—the drama, the swiftness, the terrifyingly high stakes. Because only one in ten or even twenty of his cases ended up in front of a jury, he packed his schedule in order to maximize the possibility. Izaya spent ten to fifteen hours of every day, weekends included, in the office. This, too, was a choice. He was learning the family business on the government's dime, and when the day came that his father extended the inevitable invitation to join his firm, Izaya intended to be prepared. He felt absolutely sure that with enough experience he would one day rival his father's brilliance. He already had the man's natural talent for bullshit, combined with a capacity for hard work that was all his own. This fusion enabled him to win at least some of his cases, not necessarily common in a system where the decks were so completely stacked against the defense.

Still, despite Izaya's best efforts, it had been months since he'd had a client who hadn't provided the FBI with a thorough catalog of not merely the details of the offense for which he'd been arrested, but a wide variety of other crimes, most of which the cops never would have known about if it hadn't been for these confessional outpourings. “What part of ‘everything you say can and will be held against you' didn't you understand?” Izaya would ask these men, none of whose cases he could hope to bring to trial when the piles of physical evidence were supplemented by a signed and witnessed confession to every last element of the crime. Now, at last, Izaya had a case that didn't feature a statement by the defendant. He had a case with a sympathetic client and what looked, at this point at least, like a decent chance of success. The nagging suspicion that he had already failed the bail hearing weighed heavily on his mind.

His mother said, brightly, “Well, that's wonderful, honey. I know you've been going a little stir-crazy lately.”

“Yeah, no kidding. So, how's your day been?

“The usual. I don't have any more patients until this afternoon.”

Izaya's mother was a therapist; she saw patients in the small, sun-filled cottage in the backyard of the house where he'd grown up in North Berkeley. As a little boy, he'd thought it perfectly normal to have a steady stream of women traipsing through the garden past his sandbox and swingset, their faces red, damp tissues clutched in their hands. The truth was, there
wasn't
anything particularly unusual about it. Half his friends had at least one parent who was a shrink. Berkeley was lousy with them.

But there were other things that had always made Izaya different from those children. His name, Izaya Feingold, labeled him neatly as what he was, the son of a Jewish woman and a black father who had come together in the brief period in the early 1970s when it had seemed like the civil rights movement had succeeded, justice had prevailed, and racism was fast becoming a thing of the past. His parents' affair had lasted about as long as those illusions of racial harmony, although their separation had more to do with his father's refusal to leave his wife than with anybody's disappointment with the state of contemporary politics. Izaya started using his father's name in his last year of high school, the same time he had first sought contact with the man who had all but disappeared from his life when he was a small boy. He had considered dropping the Feingold altogether, but his generally unflappable mother's tears at the prospect had convinced him just to tack his father's name onto his own. So he had become Izaya Feingold-Upchurch, a mouthful, but one that served him well with feminist-minded young women, and, too, with clients—both the ones who wanted a Jewish lawyer and the ones who recognized his father's name.

“So, Mom, this case? The one that I think will go to trial? My client's mother is giving me a hard time about posting bond.”

“Really? Is that unusual?”

“Pretty. I mean, I didn't expect it. She's a white girl.”

“And white people love their children more than other people?”

He laughed. “No. You know what I mean.”

“I really don't.” Ruth Feingold was, without question, the most politically correct woman Izaya had ever met. The walls of her house were hung with quotes from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. done in batik; in the winter she kept her neck warm with a
kaffiyeh
in Palestinian liberation red; and a rainbow-striped ­windsock fluttered from her front porch, even though she wasn't a lesbian.

“She's a middle-class kid. From Berkeley. I just would have expected her mother to do more,” Izaya said.

“I don't need to tell you how many middle-class people abuse their children, do I?”

Izaya shook his head in irritation. “We're talking about not posting a hundred thousand dollar bond here to get your kid out of jail. That hardly qualifies as child abuse.”