Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [80]
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Mike had suggested during the long rush-hour slog back from jail.
I lay on the half-lowered passenger seat, staring up at the beige interior, body tissue swaying subtly on the bones. That might have been the low point: humbled and inert, in Mike Donnato’s station wagon.
The trees had filled in since I’d been there last, the ocher two-story postmodern had already increased in value by a third. We pulled in at sunset, the twin round windows reflecting like rosy moons, the development bathed in uncertain light. I had been condemned, of all things, to suburbia.
He guided me like a regular guest, between the faux Greek revival columns that framed the doorway, to the floral-scented living room, and soon a glass of red wine, trusting me with a long-stemmed goblet. He dumped a pile of catalogues from the mailbox on the coffee table and went upstairs. Someone was home from school. Soon I heard a halting clarinet.
Devon County was a former LAPD detective who had become a federal prosecutor and then gone into private practice. Over the years there had been a small growth industry in our town of cops going to law school and then representing their own, mainly because the policeman’s union often paid for representation. Devon was smart and capable, and, most of all, he was not a press whore. What everyone at the Bureau respected was how he kept a low profile in a potentially tabloid case where a state senator had been shot and wounded by his male lover, a senior federal agent out of our Sacramento field office who nobody had known was gay. Although he could have made the national news every night, Devon County considered it in the client’s best interest to keep that story out of the papers.
I first glimpsed Devon County through the heavy mesh of the booking cell. He was a hefty guy, overweight, with a shaved head and goatee, looking more like a con than a cop. It was barely dawn; he wore a sweatshirt and baggy warm-up pants; you might have thought he was out for a run, except for the crutch. He had become a lawyer because he had been forced to retire from the department on disability after a horrific crash during a high-speed chase. He made legendary use of the crutch in the courtroom.
There was to be no more “special handling.” Devon would remain outside the cell, I would be inside, and we would speak through yellowed mesh. When I protested there would be no privacy, Devon said that’s the way the lawyers liked it.
“You know why they have this double screen?” he asked. “So you can’t spit on your attorney.”
“I’d laugh if I knew how.”
“We’ll try to improve the jokes.”
“Devon,” I said right off, “you have women on your staff. Shouldn’t I have a woman represent me?”
He shook his head confidently. “You would suffer the backlash of the prosecution’s theory.”
“You already know the prosecution’s theory?”
“They will claim the obvious, which is you went after him in a fit of jealous rage. ‘Fatal attraction.’”
“Not true—”
He held up a hand. “Not now. You need a strong, macho guy as a counterpoint to all the cops they’re going to parade out, and I’m as close to macho as we’re going to come up with in the middle of the night on a Thursday.”
Nor was he unhappy they had made me wait “while suffering unduly” for medical care. Another bullet in the macho ammo belt. I was feeling better after a couple of painkillers and a shot of penicillin from a spiffy young Asian doctor with beautiful shoes. They even gave me a cup of raspberry Jell-O. The bare outdated first-aid room in the jail had seemed like a Club Med vacation.
“You understand that you are being charged with attempted murder. You are looking at potential penalties of twenty-five years to life.”
Incomprehensible.
“Apparently the condition of the victim, Detective Andrew Berringer, has been upgraded to stable.”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.”
“Stop!”
I cringed.
“You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.” He was speaking intently, close to the mesh. “We need to have a truthful, but