Toni picked up our daughter just before ten. Skye left while I was sleeping, so I woke on the day of my arraignment sober and alone.
I didn’t mind being sober, but I didn’t like being alone.
I showered, grabbed some dry toast, jumped into the Range Rover, and drove south to the Compton Courthouse. The modern white building was broken up by black stripes and looked like a giant air filter, inhaling wrong and exhaling justice. It was a monument to countless lost hopes and broken dreams.
I entered the building determined not to do time for driving into the sheriff’s car. I would not have my hopes stolen or my dreams broken.
I met Mitch Hoffman outside the courtroom, and as we stood in the huge space surrounded by stagnant air and the serious whispers of lawyers, defendants, witnesses, and press, I reappraised the guy. A drowning man might be glad of a rotten hunk of timber tossed his way by the raging sea, but I wasn’t drowning anymore, and I could see the flaws in this piece of flotsam. He was nervous and shifty, with eyes that never met mine. My initial assessment was wrong; this man was not like George Costanza. He was like someone who’d been bitten by a radioactive Costanza and acquired a manyfold magnification of his defects.
“So, they’ve offered two years minimum security if you plead guilty to assault and criminal damage,” Mitch said. His voice was as feeble as an old man’s punch and inspired no confidence.
“I’m not going to prison,” I replied.
“If you fight this and are found guilty at trial, you could get fifteen years,” Mitch protested. I’m doing him a service because his voice wasn’t capable of protest. I’m inferring intent. And he still didn’t look me in the eye.
The American justice system is not for the faint of heart. It’s for wealthy gamblers. You have to be rich to afford a decent lawyer, and you have to be willing to gamble because only a nerves-of-steel adrenaline junkie would turn down the certainty of an easy two against the prospect of a hard fifteen.
“I’m not going back to prison,” I repeated, and Mitch nodded wearily.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. I think you’re making a mistake, by the way, but it’s your life. We’d better go in.”
He shuffled toward the courtroom, and I followed a few paces behind so no one would think we were together. I was in a better suit than my lawyer, who wore a brown two-piece that was frayed at the hems and looked as though it might have belonged to his Depression-era grandpa. His shoes were scuffed and his heels badly worn at a diagonal.
The courtroom was a drab place with cream walls and wood paneling. We sat near the front and waited twenty minutes for my case to be called. The judge was speeding through the arraignments, keeping the wheels of justice turning as one defendant after another was crushed by an expedient guilty plea. When my docket was called, Mitch and I took the hot seats, directly opposite the gnarly old judge who’d long since surrendered the battle against old man hair. It sprouted from his nose and ears, and his eyebrows were as wild as any jungle. His jowls sagged like an ancient and faithful mutt’s, but who was going to tell a judge with power over liberty he looked like horseshit?
The clerk read out my name and the charges, which immediately deepened the furrows on Old Hairy’s craggy face.
“How does the defendant plead?” he snarled once the clerk had finished.
Mitch got to his feet. I noticed his hands were trembling as he fumbled with a blank piece of paper.
“Erm… your honor, we’ve erm… that is to say, the defendant pleads guilty.”
It took me a moment to realize what had just happened.
“What the actual fuck,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.
“Excuse me?” Old Hairy exclaimed.
“I’m sorry, your honor, I didn’t mean to cuss, but my lawyer got it wrong.” I turned to Super Costanza, Mitch. “You got it wrong, didn’t you?”
The hopeless attorney in his New Deal grandpa’s suit gulped and nodded. “I haven’t been to trial in years. I’m out of practice.” He leaned close to whisper. “And no one fights a case like this.”
“Your honor,” I cried out. “Surely this is a mistrial or something.”
“It’s not a mistrial, Mr. Collard, but it is certainly grounds for an investigation of your counsel’s competence,” Old Hairy said. “I assume you’d like to make a complaint.”
“Please don’t,” Mitch whispered.
“I would,” I replied, and quickly added, “your honor.”
“Perfectly understandable, and in the circumstances, I imagine you’d like to avail yourself of new counsel.”
“I most certainly would like to avail,” I replied.
Mitch crumpled beside me. This was an abject and very public humiliation. The prosecutor, a shark in a shiny suit, was laughing and nudging his junior, a serious woman in her early thirties. She didn’t share her boss’s amusement.
“If you cannot afford a lawyer—” the judge began.
“I can, your honor,” I interrupted. “I can afford a lawyer.”
“Well, in that case we’ll push the arraignment…” He trailed off and looked at the clerk.
“A week,” she suggested.
“We’ll give you a week, Mr. Collard.” Old Hairy nodded indulgently, like he was Santa Claus and had just handed me a neatly wrapped gift.
“Thank you, your honor,” I replied.
I was glad Mitch had fumbled such a simple job. I should have thought about firing him sooner. I could afford one of those expensive OJ lawyers, the kind who can get a person off a smoking-gun, blood-spattered-shoes murder rap. Might also be useful if Rosa Abalos started to get too close.
I had the money to make these charges vanish, and if I took out the pedophile priest, I’d have plenty more to beat a murder rap too. And it was hardly murder in any case. Killing the priest wasn’t even in the same league as Walter Glaze or Farah Younis. I’d have done it for half the price and wouldn’t have lost a second’s sleep over it either.
Look at what you’re becoming, Walter’s ghost said.
Righteous, I replied inwardly. That’s why you’re in the ground.
I swaggered out of court full of myself. I wasn’t tied to losers like Mitch Hoffman anymore, and soon I’d be a fully paid-up billboarder. But you know what the book says about pride. Well, my fall was waiting for me right outside the courtroom. Three of them, dirty and brutish. Cutter, Curse, and Frankie Balls, oozing menace like a trio of festering wounds.
“You think you can give us the slip?” Frankie asked. “You’ve got five days to get me another fifty thousand. Or we’re gonna put you in the hospital. Think on that.”
He narrowed his eyes and stared me down before he and his heavies stalked away.