Mean Justice (19 page)

She promptly divorced Wayne, though they later remarried. In the meantime, she went to college and studied sociology, planning on a career in law, only to fall in love with being a private eye during an internship that was supposed to end in a few months but which she could not let go. Sandberg Investigations opened for Laura a window into a world of mystery and jeopardy that she had never before glimpsed from her pampered childhood or her cocooned life with Wayne. That she could be someone’s last best hope for justice—and the justice system’s tool for finding the human truth behind the facts of a crime—intoxicated her. After barely a week at the investigations firm, she knew that this was what she wanted to do in life. In a field filled with cynical ex-cops, burned out by their careers on the streets and the terrible things that they had seen there, Laura brought a vivacious idealism to her work, a big-hearted approach that let her see the best in all her clients, even the clearly guilty ones. She was not naive—she knew
many, if not most, of her clients had done terrible things. But she still found herself liking all but a few—lost souls she would, against her better judgment, end up giving her home phone number, so they could reach her whenever they felt desperate or sad. On vacations, even in far-off Hong Kong, she talked incessantly about her cases and penned lively postcards to her jailed clients. She particularly agonized over those special few she believed innocent. “Can you imagine the terror of being innocent and in prison?” she asked Wayne once—but only once. Her husband, a law-and-order conservative mostly sympathetic to Bakersfield’s desire for order, rolled his eyes at his wife and quipped, “Aren’t all those poor guys in prison innocent?”

Wayne warned Laura that her usual approach to cases might not fly in Bakersfield, and she took seriously one word of caution he offered. He said he knew country people, the suspicions they harbored toward anyone who smacked of “city slicker,” the resentment they felt when good, hardworking folks were treated like hicks, particularly when they were proud of their city and knew its explosive growth of late had given them size but little stature. So, going in, Laura understood she might be perceived as the carpetbagging city girl come to show the bumpkins how it was done, with the resentment and the resistance palpable. Wayne had steeled her for this, for slammed doors and silent stares in response to her questions.

Instead, as she began to knock on the doors of witnesses and friends of the victim, she found herself greeted not with hostility, but with small-town hospitality—even after confessing that she worked for the accused in one of Bakersfield’s juiciest murder cases. She had never
seen anything quite like it. “It really is Mayberry,” she told Wayne in one of her first nightly phone calls home. And yet, even as she was invited in for coffee and offered plates of cookies on doilies, something nagged at her. For in the fictional Mayberry—and in every other place Laura had ever worked—she felt certain that, given the meager evidence, Pat Dunn would be home grieving his wife and getting on with life right now. But in Bakersfield, Pat Dunn faced a possible trip to death row.

•   •   •

“I didn’t kill Momma.”

Pat Dunn spoke to Laura in a measured voice. No phony displays of emotion here, Laura thought, evaluating the potential witness even as she seemed to be chatting casually. No genuine displays of emotion either, for that matter. Right away, in this first jailhouse meeting, she sensed why the detectives took an immediate dislike to Pat—they didn’t see what they expected to see. No extravagant displays of grief, no outraged protests of innocence. The detectives found this suspicious. But to Laura, this showed Pat wasn’t posturing, he wasn’t playing a role. He was just being Pat.

“I didn’t kill her,” he continued. “Not for money, not for anything. I loved her.”

Laura nodded sympathetically at the big man with the short graying hair and owlish glasses. He looked morose and out of place in the jail visiting room, clad in ill-fitting regulation blue denims. Such comments had no real effect on Laura’s opinions—every client delivered a similar recitation. Laura would let them get this ritual out of the way, then try to shift focus to more useful points: his wife’s habits, his habits, his activities and conversations on the day Sandy died, who he had talked to about the
case—the stuff of alibis and legal argument. At the same time, she would try to get a sense of who the client was and how he could best be presented to a jury.

“They’re going to try to suggest you were not sufficiently concerned about Sandy’s disappearance,” she said, as gently as possible. “That you didn’t act like a worried husband, that you delayed reporting her missing for too long.”

Laura paused. She, like Pat’s lawyer, was concerned about the call Pat made to report Sandy missing. The tape of that conversation showed a jokey, folksy manner during what should have been a very serious moment for Pat. People reacted strongly to that tape, particularly women, who tended to come away with very negative impressions of Pat after listening to it. He had flattered and bantered with the sheriff’s dispatcher on the phone, and while this proved nothing in itself, Pat’s defense team had to acknowledge and respond to the effect it likely would have on a jury. “Tell me about the phone call to missing persons,” she asked. Laura groped for a neutral word. “It sounded . . . strange.”

“I wasn’t flirting, Laura, if that’s what you mean,” Dunn replied. Laura thought she heard irritation in his voice. His first lawyer had raised the same point, Pat explained, after playing the tape for his wife and observing her very disapproving reaction to Pat’s conversation with the female sheriff’s dispatcher. “Hell, I’m just a fat, old man, Laura. I just had heard that you can’t report someone missing for three days. And all I knew was that I wanted them to take the report. So I was doing everything I could to keep her on the phone, to get on her good side, so to speak. That’s all.”

“Okay,” Laura said. She’d accept that for the time
being, as much because of the easy, convincing way he said it as for the logic of his reasoning. But what about his vagueness on the tape when reporting Sandy’s memory lapses? “Why did you back off that? Why didn’t you push harder for them to begin searching right away?”

Pat looked down at his hands, shaking his head. Then he shrugged. “It’s the same reason I put off calling the sheriff right away: I was afraid I’d embarrass Mom,” he said miserably. “It seems stupid now, I know, now that we know she’s gone. But back then I figured she would come back to me. I was worried, and I wanted to do something, but I knew she be madder’n hell if I did anything to humiliate her. She was forgetting things, I knew it, she knew it. But we didn’t really talk about it. And she sure as hell didn’t want it advertised. She was so proud. She didn’t want anyone else to know. They say why didn’t I tell the housecleaner and the pesticide man and the guy at the pizza parlor and everyone else. Well, Mom could never have faced those people again if I had told them. She had this idea we were in some higher social station. You know, that’s the New Yorker in her, growing up on Park Avenue and all. Anyway, that’s the reason. I did it for Mom.”

Laura watched as Pat took a deep breath, trying to compose himself. “You know, I still can’t believe she’s gone,” he said with a sigh. “I don’t know how I can live without her. She took care of me, really took care of me, like no one else ever has.” He told his favorite story then, the one about how Sandy always magically anticipated his needs, replacing his shaving cream or razor blade just as he needed them. Laura heard the wonder in his voice and found herself wondering about the Dunns’ relationship—and how Pat managed to survive before he was
married, if fetching toiletries from the corner market seemed so awesome an accomplishment to him.

“She really, really took care of me,” Pat repeated, but now his eyes, pale blue and searching for belief and understanding, were raised up and drilling into Laura’s. “She always put me first. You don’t know what a wonderful feeling that can be. Or at least, I never did—before Mom. I never had that before. That’s why I always called her Mom, because she took such good care of me. And why I never could have killed her.”

Laura listened intently. She knew from reading the police reports that these same words, almost verbatim, had been relayed to police by Kate Rosenlieb—how Pat was concerned about being alone with Sandy gone, worried about not being cared for, about the little things Sandy always attended to. But when filtered through Rosenlieb and the cold language of police reports, these words sounded unfeeling and selfish. Even with his wife missing, all he thought about was himself, they suggested. But here, spoken by Pat, the connotation seemed entirely different to Laura. These were words of loss and sorrow—and love. Why, Laura wondered, had the police—and his friend Kate—been so eager to read the worst possible interpretation into Pat’s distress?

Pat had fallen silent. After a moment, Laura gently prompted him to continue. “Why don’t you tell me how you met, how you ended up together?”

“Well, those are two different stories,” Pat answered, relieved by the change in directions. “We met a long, long time ago, before this town changed so much. You know, back when it used to be a good place to live. Back when I still thought the police could do no wrong and that
everyone they arrested had to be guilty.” He laughed, a short, sad bark.

“You don’t think that now?” Laura said. She meant it as a joke, but Pat took the question seriously.

“I never thought twice about it before I was locked up in this place. Now I think it’s more than just a mistake with me. It’s not just my case you should be investigating. It’s the history of this whole damn county. Now there’s a story.”

2

A
PRIL
1982

T
HERE IS A SPECIAL INTERVIEW ROOM IN THE
K
ERN
County District Attorney’s Office. It has a toy box and dishes of candy and crayoned pictures adorning the walls, though none of these accessories can make this room a happy space. Decidedly unhappy stories are told here, pulled like decayed teeth from the mouths of the small and the vulnerable.

On this day, the room reeks of pain. A six-year-old boy cries mournfully. Between sobs he says, “I miss my mommy.” A prosecutor and a sheriff’s detective try to calm him, shutting the tape recorder on and off as they alternate between the questions and answers of an official interview, and comforting whispers that everything will be okay, everything will be okay. The two men in the room would have preferred to leave this little boy alone, but they had to have the truth.

This was a very different sort of interrogation than the normal exchange between cop and suspect. This was delicate, tough, grueling, a prying of secrets not from a crook but from a victim, and a child victim at that, in a case that was tearing a town apart.

Unfolding in this room like some twisted stage play was Bakersfield’s crime of the century, or so the cops and the prosecutors kept telling one another in excited asides.
What had started out as an investigation of one father accused of molesting one daughter—originally thought to be a misdemeanor—had mushroomed into an enormous case, a hideous case, an unthinkable ring of child molesters. Members of prominent families were implicated, even a county social worker who handled adoptions. It seemed these monsters were selling their own kids for sex out of sleazy motels, shooting kiddie porn, maybe even snuff films, staging orgies, drugging and defiling children, then threatening them with death if they talked. The grandmother of one of the kids had coaxed and teased the story to the surface, then called the cops. Now the scandal of it—the terror of it—had just begun to reverberate throughout Bakersfield, where most people believed themselves immunized by distance and determination from the big-city horrors two freeway hours to the south. This case had crashed into the city like a force of nature, like one of the floods that transforms a dry sandlot in the middle of town—the dusty bed of this once-mighty branch of the Kern River—back into the raging torrent it used to be before the boom of houses and farms sucked it dry.

This new, terrible flood had to be understood, contained, defeated. Bakersfield wanted its children safe and the monsters put away. The problem was, some of the kids, like this boy in the interview room, had said nothing had happened. This boy maintained he had never been molested. But the prosecutor and sheriff’s deputy do not believe this, and so they question the six-year-old insistently, even mercilessly, prodding, leading, urging him to tell it all. When he denies that certain events happened—as he keeps trying to do—they press him until he says otherwise.
Well, your brother told us about the men in motel rooms
doing things to your butts with their penises. You know the word
penis,
don’t you? Your brother wouldn’t tell us a lie, would he?
In fact, the brother had told them no such thing.

When there is hesitation still, the inquisitors say to this little boy who desperately misses his parents, who has been swept from his mother’s arms by men with guns and uniforms, that the only way they can
help
his mommy and daddy is if he tells the truth. And they make it abundantly clear that the truth, so far as they are concerned, is a tale of gruesome molestation. Anything else has to be a lie. So, after a while, the boy starts saying yes to their questions. Anything to get it over with.