4th of July (16 page)

“Never watch it.”

“Well, just so you know, there was a skit. You’ve been dubbed Dirty Harriet.”

“That must’ve been a riot,” I said, pulling a face. “I guess someone made my day.”

“It’s going to get worse,” said Yuki, tugging at a lock of her shoulder-length hair. “Judge Achacoso okayed live TV coverage in the courtroom. And I just got the plaintiff’s witness list. Sam Cabot’s going to testify.”

“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it? Sam confessed to doing those electrocution murders. We can use that!”

“’Fraid not, Lindsay. His lawyers filed a motion to suppress because his parents weren’t there when he blurted out his confession to that ER nurse.

“Look,” Yuki said, grabbing my hands, no doubt responding to the way my face had frozen in shock. “We don’t know what Sam’s going to say—I’ll take him apart; you can count on that. But we can’t impeach him with his confession. It’s your word against his—and he’s thirteen and you’re a drunken cop.”

“And so you’re telling me ‘Don’t worry’ because . . . ?”

“Because the truth will out. Juries are composed of human beings, most of whom have had a drink in their lives. I think they’re going to find that you’re entitled and probably even expected to have a few drinks now and then.

“You tried to help those kids, Lindsay. And that ain’t no crime.”

“DON’T FORGET THAT YOU’RE on trial from the minute you arrive at the courthouse,” Yuki said as we walked together through the cool and darkening night. We entered the Opera Plaza Garage on Van Ness and took the elevator down to where Yuki had parked her taupe two-door Acura.

Soon we were driving east on Golden Gate Avenue toward my favorite watering hole, although I was sticking to Cokes tonight. Just to be safe.

“Come in a really plain car, not a cop car or a new SUV or anything like that.”

“I have a four-year-old Explorer. With a ding in the door. How’s that?”

“There you go.” Yuki laughed. “Perfect. And what you wore to the prelim was good. Dark suit, SFPD lapel pin, no other jewelry. When the press climbs all over you, you can smile politely, but don’t answer any of their questions.”

“Leave all that stuff to you.”

“Bingo,” she said as we pulled up to Susie’s Bar.

A surge of happiness warmed me as we stepped inside Susie’s. The calypso band had put the dinner crowd into a fine mood, and Susie herself, wearing a hot pink sarong, was doing the limbo in the center of the dance floor. My two best friends waved us over to “our” booth at the back.

I said, “Claire Washburn, Yuki Castellano; Yuki, Cindy Thomas,” and the girls stretched out their hands and shook hers in turn. I could see from the strained look on their faces that my buds were as worried about my upcoming ordeal as I was.

When Claire took Yuki’s hand, she said, “I’m Lindsay’s friend—and I don’t have to tell you, I’m also a witness for the prosecution.”

Cindy, looking quite grave, said, “I work for the Chronicle and I’ll be yelling rude questions outside the courthouse.”

“And chopping her into bite-size chunks if that’s the way the story goes,” said Yuki.

“Absolutely.”

“I’m going to take good care of her, you guys,” Yuki said. “We’re going to have a real nasty fight on our hands, to be sure, but we’re going to win.”

As if we’d known in advance we were going to do it, we clasped our combined eight hands across the center of the table.

“Fight, team, fight,” I said.

It felt good to laugh, and I was glad when Yuki took off her suit jacket and Claire poured margaritas for everyone but me.

“My first one of these,” Yuki said dubiously.

“It’s about time, Counselor. But drink it nice and slow, okay? Now,” said Claire. “Tell us all about yourself. Start at the beginning.”

“Okay, I know, what gives with the funny name?” Yuki said, licking salt from her upper lip. “First, you should know, the Japanese and the Italians are like polar opposites. Their food, for instance: raw squid and rice meets scungilli marinara over linguine.” Yuki laughed, a lovely sound, like the ringing of bells.

“When my petite, demure Japanese mom met my burly, passionate Italian American dad at an exchange student mixer, it was pure magnetism,” Yuki told us in her funny, rapid-fire delivery. “My daddy-to-be said, ‘Let’s get married while we’re still in love,’ which they did, about three weeks after they met. And I arrived nine months after that.”

Yuki explained that there was a lot of prejudice against “half-breeds” in still-conservative Japan and that her family moved to California when she was only six. But she remembered well what it felt like to be tormented in school because she was of mixed race.

“I wanted to become a lawyer from the time I was old enough to know what Perry Mason did on TV,” she said, her eyes glinting. “Believe me, I’m not bragging, but just so you know, I got straight As at Boalt Law, and I’ve been on the fast track with Duffy and Rogers since I graduated. I think that people’s motives are critical to their performance, so you guys should understand mine.

“I’ve always had to prove something to myself: that smart and that super good aren’t good enough. I have to be the best. And as for Lindsay, your old friend and my new one, I know with all my heart that she’s innocent.

“I’m going to prove that, too.”

DESPITE EVERYTHING YUKI HAD told me about the media frenzy, I was stunned to see the square block of mosh pit at the Civic Center Plaza the next morning. TV satellite vans lined Polk on both sides of McAllister, and a somewhat malevolent, shifting mob fanned out in all directions, blocking traffic to City Hall and the Civic Center Courthouse.

I parked in the garage on Van Ness, only a three-block walk to the courthouse, and tried to blend into the crowd on foot. But I didn’t get away with it. Once I was spotted, reporters stampeded, shoved microphones and cameras into my face, and screamed questions that I couldn’t understand, let alone answer.

The “police brutality” accusations, the baiting, the almost painful noise of the crowd, made me dizzy with a kind of grief. I was a good cop, damn it. How had it happened that the people I’d sworn to serve had turned against me like this?

Carlos Vega from KRON-TV was on the “Dirty Harriet Trial” big-time. He was a tiny man with a rabid style, known for interviewing people so courteously they hardly felt the evisceration. But I knew Carl—he’d interviewed me before—and when he asked, “Do you blame the Cabots for taking this action against you?” I almost snapped.

I was about to give Mr. Vega an ill-advised sound bite for the six o’clock news when someone plucked me out of the mob by my elbow. I jerked away—until I saw that my rescuer was a friend in uniform.

“Conklin,” I said. “Thank God.”

“Stick with me, Lou,” he said, steering me through the crowd to a barricaded police line that offered a narrow path to the courthouse. My heart swelled as my fellow officers, grasping hands to give me safe passage, nodded or spoke to me as I passed.

“Go get ’em, Lieutenant.”

“Hang tough, LT.”

I picked Yuki out of the crowd on the courthouse steps and made straight for her. She took over from Officer Conklin, and together we put all our weight into opening the heavy steel-and-glass doors of the civil courthouse. We climbed a flight of marble stairs and moments later stepped inside the impressive cherry-paneled courtroom on the second floor.

Heads turned toward us as we entered. I straightened my freshly pressed collar, ran a hand over my hair, and walked with Yuki across the carpeted floor of the courtroom to the attorneys’ tables at the front. I had gained a measure of outward composure in the last few minutes, but I was absolutely seething inside.

How could this be happening to me?

YUKI STOOD ASIDE AS I edged behind the table and took my seat next to silver-haired-and-tongued Mickey Sherman. He half rose and shook my hand.

“How ya doin,’ Lindsay? You look terrific. You okay?”

“Never better,” I cracked.

But we both knew that no sane person would be feeling “okay” in my shoes. My whole career was at stake, and if the jury went against me, my life would go up in flames. Dr. and Mrs. Andrew Cabot were asking $50 million in damages, and although they’d have to get $49.99 million from the City of San Francisco, I would be financially devastated anyway and possibly known as Dirty Harriet for the rest of my life.

As Yuki sat down beside me, Chief Tracchio reached across the railing to squeeze my shoulder in support. I hadn’t expected that, and I was touched. Then voices rolled across the room as the plaintiffs’ “dream team” filed in and took their seats across from us.

A moment later, Dr. and Mrs. Cabot came into the courtroom and sat behind their attorneys. The reedlike Dr. Cabot and his blond and visibly grieving wife immediately fixed their eyes on me.

Andrew Cabot was a trembling rock of contained rage and anguish. And Eva Cabot’s face was a picture of desolation that would never end. She was a mother who’d inexplicably lost her daughter because of me, and I’d crippled her son as well. When she turned her red-rimmed gray eyes on me, all I could see was her bottomless fury.

Eva Cabot hated me.

She wished me dead.

Yuki’s cool hand on my wrist broke my eye contact with Mrs. Cabot—but not before the image of our locked stares was captured on tape.

“All rise,” boomed the bailiff.

There was a deafening rustle as everyone in the courtroom stood and the small bespectacled form of Judge Achacoso ascended to the bench. I sat down in a daze.

This was it.

My trial was about to begin.

JURY SELECTION TOOK ALMOST three days. After day one, because I couldn’t take the ringing phone and the media swarm outside my wee little house any longer, Martha and I packed up and moved into Yuki’s two-bedroom apartment in the Crest Royal, a mini high-rise with great security.

The media swarm got bigger and more vociferous daily. The press fed the public’s frenzy by detailing the ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of every person picked for the jury, charging us with racial profiling, of course. In fact, it made me queasy to watch both sides choose or dismiss potential jurors based on discernible or imagined prejudice against me. When we excused four black and Latino men and women in a row, I put it to Yuki during our next break.

“Weren’t you just telling me the other day about how it felt to be discriminated against because of your race?”

“This isn’t about race, Lindsay. The people we excused all had negative feelings about the police. Sometimes people aren’t aware of their own bias until we ask them. Sometimes, in a hugely public case like this, people lie so that they can have their fifteen minutes of fame.

“We’re working the voir dire process as it’s our right to do. Please trust us. If we don’t play hardball, we’re done before we start.”

Later that same day, the opposition used three peremptory challenges to excuse two middle-aged white civil servants—women who might have viewed me kindly, as if I were a daughter—as well as a fireman named McGoey who presumably wouldn’t have held even a gallon of margaritas against me.

In the end, neither side was happy but both sides accepted the twelve men and women and three alternates. At two in the afternoon of the third day, Mason Broyles got up to make his opening statement.

In my worst dreams, I couldn’t have imagined how that poor excuse for a human being would present the Cabots’ case against me.

MASON BROYLES LOOKED AS if he’d slept his full eight hours the night before. His skin was dewy, his suit was classic navy blue Armani. His pale blue shirt was crisp and matched his eyes. He stood and, without using notes, addressed the court and the jury.

“Your Honor. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. In order to understand what happened on the night of May tenth, you have to go inside the minds of two kids who had a notion. Their parents weren’t home. They found the keys to their father’s new Mercedes and they decided to take a joyride.

“It wasn’t right, but they were kids. Sara was fifteen. Sam Cabot, an eighth grader, is only thirteen.”

Broyles turned away from the jury and faced his clients, as if to say, Look at these people. Look at the faces of bereavement caused by police brutality.

Broyles turned back to the jury and continued his opening statement.

“Sara Cabot was at the wheel that night. The Cabot kids were driving around in a bad neighborhood, the high-crime area we know as the Tenderloin District, and they were driving an expensive car. Out of nowhere, another car started to chase them.

“You will hear Sam Cabot tell you that he and his sister were terrified by the police car that was in pursuit. The siren was very loud. The grille lights and headlights were flashing, lighting up the street like a disco from hell.

“If Sara Cabot were here, she would testify that she was so afraid of the car that was chasing them, she fled and then she lost control of the car she was driving and crashed it. She would say that when she finally realized her pursuers were the police, she was scared out of her mind because she’d run from them, because she’d wrecked her father’s car, because she was driving without a license. And because her little brother had been hurt in the accident.

“And she was afraid because the police had guns.

“But Sara Cabot, who was two full grades ahead of other children her age, a girl with an IQ of one hundred sixty and almost endless promise, can’t tell us anything—because she’s dead. She died because the defendant, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, made an egregious error of judgment and shot Sara twice through the heart.

“Lieutenant Boxer also shot Sam Cabot, barely a teenager, a bright, popular young boy who was captain of his soccer team, a champion swimmer, an athlete extraordinaire.

“Sam Cabot will never play soccer or swim again. Nor will he stand or walk or dress himself or bathe himself. Sam will never even hold a fork or a book in his hands.”