from the other side to determine their opening moves. That’s giving too much power to the opponent. I’d start to form up my theory and then go out and look for the facts supporting it.
I opened other documents titled Opening Statement, Voir Dire, Law & Motions, Witnesses, Jury Instructions, Exhibits, Memoranda, and Closing Argument.
I would go over these documents every day, brainstorming, adding things that were relevant to each area, depending on what my investigation turned up.
In my Theory of the Case document I wrote the following:
1. Eric did it.
2. Eric didn’t do it.
Under number 1, I put the following subheadings:
a. With malice aforethought
b. In the heat of passion
c. By accident
d. In self-defense
e. With mental impairment
Under number 2, I wrote:
a. Has alibi
b. No alibi, but misidentified
c. Carl committed suicide.
d. Somebody else killed Carl.
Now, with every fact I discovered, I would determine the most likely place it would go. I had to know the prosecution’s case as well as my own. At this point I had a minimum of prosecutorial discovery—police reports, the autopsy report, some crime-scene photos, and a few witness statements. I had the distinct feeling they were holding something back, to be revealed at the prelim. For now I had to try to anticipate what they would present at both prelim and trial. “Half of all trial work,” Art used to say, “is heading them off at the pass.”
I spent about an hour jotting random thoughts and thinking about the case, getting my mind in the right frame for a trial. I guess that’s how the old gladiators of Rome would do it, before heading into the arena. They were trial lawyers, all of them. There just wasn’t enough legal work to go around, so they went into the Coliseum and beat the caesar salad out of each other.
One thing was odd about the facts as I knew them. How could a big man like Eric get into the apartment building, then Carl’s apartment, shoot him, and get out without being seen? That would be a good thing to argue to the jury. Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story.
When I looked up from my work I saw it was an orange-sky night. People have this idea L.A. is nothing but a smog blanket with citizens underneath, hacking and wheezing.
The air’s actually not as bad as it was fifty years ago, so they tell me. Back then dirt and fog would sit in the bowl they call the Los Angeles basin and it could get so thick you could walk across town on it. Kids, swimming during hot summers, would get out of pools coughing like they were three-pack-a-day smokers.
Sure, there’s stuff in the air, but there’s one benefit. As if the universe couldn’t stand leaving us in the muck without a little compensation. The benefit is how the sun, dropping into the Pacific horizon, gives a bright, burnt-orange hue to the sky. And a deep purple just before night.
On nights like this I think of Jacqueline, and how she loved driving down to Paradise Cove, off Pacific Coast Highway, to catch a sunset.
Once when we did that, sitting on the sand, a blanket around us as the wind blew in cold, I thought it was the happiest moment of my life. A wheelhouse where everything had finally come together for me.
It was all ripped away a few weeks later, when Jacqueline was killed.
I went outside and walked to the parking lot of St. Monica’s. I looked down at the Valley, past the 118 Freeway, at the buildings of Warner Center, tall in the oncoming gloom. It’s a view people pay millions for and I had it for free.
I sat on the curb and watched dusk become night, aching for Jacqueline and a blanket and a breeze.
58
THE NEXT MORNING I drove into Hollywood to the job site Carl had worked on before he died. Boss Hildegarde had Sister Mary delivering some of St. Monica’s signature fruitcakes to victims—I should say customers, but I won’t—at locales around the Valley. So I was on my own, which I didn’t really want to be. I liked Sister Mary’s eyes on the people I questioned.
The dig was, ironically, just a beer can’s throw from the Hollywood station where Carl was booked that December evening, and where I got to cool my jets after sparring with Knuckle Face on the boulevard. But I wasn’t getting sentimental about it.
The site was also right around the corner from the field office