Daughter's Keeper (33 page)

“The mattress on which you slept for two more nights, knowing full well it was there?”

“No.”

“You didn't know it was there?”

“I knew it was there, but I didn't sleep there for two nights. I slept there that night and then the next night I was arrested in the middle of the night.”

“While you were sleeping on top of the drug money.”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Goodman, you have taken illegal drugs, haven't you?”

“Objection!” Izaya bellowed.

“Goes to predisposition, your honor,” the prosecutor said. “He's given notice of his intention to argue entrapment. The defendant's history of drug use is relevant to the issue of predisposition.”

“Your honor, if she had a history of drug
dealing
that might be relevant. Drug
use
most certainly is not,” Izaya was just barely containing his anger.

The judge rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. Suddenly, Izaya blurted, “You know what? I withdraw my objection. My client isn't a drug user. I don't want the jury to be under the misapprehension that she is.”

“Are you certain, Mr. Feingold-Upchurch?” the judge asked, obviously doubtful about Izaya's decision.

“Absolutely. Go ahead, Olivia. Answer the prosecutor's question.” He nodded at her.

For the barest fraction of a second, Olivia considered the question. She thought of the times she'd smoked pot in high school and college. The line of cocaine she'd once snorted at a party. The two or three times she and her friends had taken ecstasy and spent a night contemplating their love for the universe and each other. Then she opened her mouth and spoke.

“I tried marijuana once in high school. I didn't like it. I've never done any other drugs.” Her voice was firm and clear, and she was the only one who knew how her hands shook in her lap.

She felt the lie glowing white hot in front of her, a ribbon of reproach in the righteousness of her claim of innocence. She wished she could stuff the words back into her mouth and swallow them.

Amanda Steele shook her head, “Are you honestly trying to tell this jury that the only time you've ever taken drugs was once in high school?”

“Asked and answered, your honor.” Izaya was crowing.

The judge, who had been preoccupied with shaking his watch and holding it to his ear, looked up. “That's enough, Ms. Steele. You've got your answer. Let's move on.”

The prosecutor leafed through her notes for a moment. “I'm done, your honor.”

“Mr. Feingold-Upchurch, redirect,” the judge said.

“I'm done, too, your honor.”

“The witness is dismissed,” the judge said. Izaya leapt to his feet and made a great show of leading Olivia back to her seat. She needed his arm. The trembling that had begun with her hands had spread now to her entire body, and her back was sticky with sweat. She sat down heavily and turned to look at her mother. Elaine smiled, and Arthur, who sat next to Elaine wearing one of his accountant suits, gave her the thumbs-up.

Judge Horowitz dismissed the jury, informing them that the next day they would hear closing arguments and begin their deliberations. Elaine, Arthur, and Olivia walked with Izaya to the elevator bank. Amanda Steele was waiting for the elevator, pushing her metal cart full of exhibits, rule books, and notebooks. They all stood together in the narrow hallway, silently. At one point, Arthur opened his mouth as if to say something, but Elaine silenced him with a hand on his arm. When the elevator finally arrived, the AUSA motioned for them to take it.

“I'll wait,” she said.

“No,” Olivia replied. “You go ahead.” Those were the first words she'd ever spoken to the attorney for the government, outside of her cross-examination. Olivia was sure the woman knew she had lied on the stand. How could she not? What person Olivia's age could really claim such inexperience with drugs? Olivia was confident, in fact, that the prosecutor herself must have tried them. What did she make of this dishonesty? Olivia wondered. Perhaps she considered it justification for her prosecution of Olivia. Olivia wished she could tell her, now, away from the jury and the judge, that yes, she had lied on the stand, but that didn't make her guilty of the crime. She was innocent. For some reason it was important to her that the blond woman with the thin lips and expensive clothes know that.

“Go ahead,” Olivia said, again.

Amanda nodded her head and wheeled her cart into the elevator.

“Bitch,” Arthur said as the elevator doors closed behind her.

“Amen to that,” Izaya said.

“She's just doing her job,” Olivia answered.

Elaine, Arthur, and Izaya looked at her, stunned.

“Let's just hope you keep doing yours so much better than she does hers,” Olivia told Izaya. The elevator arrived, and she stepped inside. After a moment, they followed.

***

Izaya stalked through his living room, wearing nothing except for a pair of purple silk boxer shorts he'd gotten for a long ago Valentine's Day from a girl whose name he could no longer remember. This room was the perfect place to practice a closing argument. He'd never bothered to buy furniture, and the long empty space was ideal for pacing and orating. His words bounced off the pale, dusty walls and echoed from one end of the narrow railroad apartment to the other.

He had just convinced an imaginary jury to acquit Olivia of all charges when his telephone rang.

“You ready, boy?” his father asked

“How did you know I was closing tomorrow?”

Ervin T. Upchurch's deep guffaw made the telephone receiver buzz in Izaya's ear. “You
ready
?” he asked again.

“I think so.”

“You
think
so!
What you mean you
think
so
, son? You better do more than
think
so
.”

“I'm ready!” Izaya said, in the tone of confident excitement he knew his father expected of him.

“You want to try your closing out on me?”

Izaya laughed. “Why don't you come on up and watch me. Maybe you'll learn something.”

For all the gifts and acknowledgments that arrived at the end of every trial, his father had never once come to see Izaya in action. With every new trial, Izaya had invited him, at first with a tentative shyness—hoping he would have the opportunity to strut his stuff for the man he had spent most of his life trying to impress. By now, though, he made a joke of the invitation he knew was certain to be rejected.

“I just might, one of these days,” Ervin said. “You going to win this one, son?”

Izaya considered the question. The possibility of losing, of ­failing Olivia, made the almost manic buzz of anticipation he experienced with every trial turn into an anxious dread. Olivia was, he realized, the first of his clients, in his nearly five years of practice, whom he genuinely believed to be innocent. Virtually everyone he met, at some point or another, in a tone either of hostile confrontation or prurient interest, asked him what he would do if he found himself representing someone who was guilty. What they never realized was that that was the constant state of affairs.

A criminal defense attorney's job is, by and large, to represent the guilty. If Izaya took a case to trial, it was not because his client was innocent; it was rather because he thought he could win or because the cause was so completely lost it made little difference. In the latter case, he figured that the government might as well work a little for the privilege of prosecution. In the former, while he knew that his client had committed the act of which he'd been accused, the government's case was, for some reason having nothing whatsoever to do with the truth of the accusation, weak.

All this was not to say that Izaya believed his clients deserved the punishment meted out to them. One of his clients had been a father who lied on a mortgage application in order to borrow enough money to renovate his home so that it could accommodate his severely disabled daughter's wheelchair. That man had received two years; the daughter had been institutionalized. Izaya had had mentally ill clients who had tried to rob banks as part of addled plans to assuage the voices in their heads. And, more times than he could count, he had represented minor participants in drug offenses who received ten- or twenty-year prison terms. He was inspired, first and always, by a righteous indignation at the extent of the government's mean-spirited prosecution of these people, when it was so clear to him that it should have been providing them with the care and services that would allow them to live more productive lives.

He had, thus, often felt that he was on the side of justice, but never before had he held an innocent person's future in his hands. And never before—it had to be confessed—had he been so personally involved with a client. The irony of this did not escape him. It was pretty, white Olivia, so clearly not the kind of person he had ever expected or intended to represent, so clearly not one of those he thought of as “his people,” who aroused in him an unprecedented intensity of devotion. He knew that any mistake he made could spell disaster for her, and he felt a grim apprehension at the thought of losing the trial. He told himself that this was because of Olivia's vulnerability and dependence on him. The truth, he knew, was much more complicated. Olivia was, of course, much more like him than he wanted to acknowledge. They were from the same place and of the same time. Reflected in her was his own devotion, however naive, to social justice. More importantly, he recognized her as another child whose identity had been forged in the absence of a father. They had this in common, and for both of them it had defined their lives. It was, perhaps, why he found himself in love with her.

“I have to win,” he said. His father didn't reply, and Izaya wondered if he had noticed his son's vehemence. “I just have to,” he said.

“You got something going on with this girl?” Ervin asked.

“What?”

“You heard me, son. You two got something going on?”

“She's my client!”

“Give me a break, boy. Who you think you're talking to?”

“I'm not sleeping with my client, Ervin,” he said.

His father chuckled.

“I'm
not,
” Izaya said.

“Good thing, son. I been there, and it ain't no place you want to be.”

“You've had affairs with
clients
?” Izaya asked, wondering why he felt so shocked. His father's proclivities were fairly notorious. Izaya knew that his own mother was by no stretch of the imagination Ervin's only conquest, although he was fairly confident that she was the only one of his mistresses to have borne him a child. There was a steady stream of attractive female attorneys second-chairing Ervin's high-profile cases, and on more than one occasion, Izaya, watching his father and his associate on Court TV, had felt a jealous admiration of the older man's ability to seduce such young and accomplished women.

Ervin chuckled. “Oh Lord. And it was one hell of a mistake, too. Don't do it, son. That's all I'm saying. Don't do it.”

“I would never sleep with a client. I'd never even think of it,” Izaya lied.

“Good boy.”

Izaya sighed. “Hey, Ervin. Dad. I'd love if you would come tomorrow. I mean, if you're going to be up north.”

“I might just do that, boy. I might just.”

***

Amanda Steele's closing argument was much like the rest of her case—like her—dry, cool, and convincing. She approached the podium with a neat stack of bright-yellow index cards and set them out tidily on the polished wood surface. She laid her silver pen down next to the cards and took a single step back from the podium. Then she turned and faced the jury.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, on behalf of the government of the United States of America, I thank you for your participation in this case, and for your attention over the course of the past week. The role of the citizens in the criminal justice system is the most crucial of all. It is more important than that of the investigators; it is more important than that of the prosecutors. It is even more important than that of the judiciary. Your role, as a jury, is to evaluate and make a judgment about the evidence presented against the defendant. I am confident that you will find that evidence to be overwhelming in support of a conviction on the charge of distributing methamphetamine, conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, and using a communications facility, to wit, a telephone, to facilitate the distribution of methamphetamine.”

As Amanda Steele went on to describe the events leading up to Olivia's arrest, she looked scrupulously from one member of the jury to another, making eye contact and speaking clearly and dispassionately. She reminded the jury of the tapes they had heard of Olivia speaking on the phone with Gabriel. “The defendant herself has admitted that she knew full well that the topic of that conversation was the distribution of methamphetamine. The defendant herself has admitted passing the information on to her accomplice, Mr. Jorge Rodriguez, so that he could exchange the drugs for the money. The defendant herself has admitted that she knew the money was hidden underneath the mattress on which she slept.”

The prosecutor then held up the photograph of Olivia waiting in the car for Jorge. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I remind you as well of the photographic evidence against the defendant. Here you can see the defendant, the owner and driver of the vehicle that transported both the drugs and money, waiting for her accomplice. Her presence was necessary in order to make an expeditious getaway. The defendant herself has admitted that she knew full well that Mr. Rodriguez was effecting the exchange of drugs for money while she waited behind the wheel of the getaway car.”

During the course of the trial, the prosecutor had never once referred to Olivia by her name. She called her only “the defendant.” As the closing argument progressed, Olivia began to feel that phrase, that word, like a sharpened, poisoned dart, piercing her, reminding her that she was not an ordinary person who could leave the courtroom and go home to a life unexamined by the government, unsupervised by the police. She was a criminal with an arrest record. Someone who would, even if she were acquitted, always be different from the rest of the world.