A Gambler's Jury Read online

  “I appreciate that, Chip. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Cool, man. Hey, if he needs a bondsman, you know where to send him.”

  “You don’t even need to say it. You’ve been good to me, brother.”

  I hung up and told Michelle I had to go.

  “Come back after,” she said. “I think this batch is gonna be good.”

  I left and started the drive down to the Hoover County Jail about half an hour away, certain I would get my client out immediately and be hailed a hero by all.

  8

  Richardson was . . . unique. The city, it was rumored, was founded when the original pioneers who settled Utah decided that the criminal element—and probably the mentally ill—shouldn’t proceed to the Salt Lake Valley with them but instead found their own city. They were forced to splinter off, and Richardson was born. That’s not knowledge you can get from history books: you only learn that stuff once you live in Utah. I wondered if every city had knowledge like that—things no one wanted to see made public.

  I parked outside the county jail and hurried in. The clerk at the counter looked about as grumpy as an old man could get, and before I said a word, he groaned as if I were asking him to change my tires.

  “Hey, there,” I said, smiling. Old people loved smiling. Or hated it. I don’t know; I didn’t get old people.

  “Visiting hours are over.”

  “I’m counsel,” I said, pulling out my Utah State Bar card. I showed it to him, and he wrote down my Bar number on a sheet of paper.

  “Who’s your client?”

  “Theodore Thorne. I think there’s been some sort of mix-up. He’s only seventeen. He shouldn’t be in here.”

  He typed in a few things and said, “Birthday on the sixteenth?”

  “That’s him.”

  “No mistake. He’s being charged as an adult.”

  My heart jumped into my throat. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Hey! Watch your language. I will not tolerate language like that.”

  “Sorry. Just caught me by surprise. He’s not charged as an adult—it’s just a drug distribution case.”

  He swiveled the computer screen around so I could see it. “Look for yourself.”

  And there it was. Theodore M. Thorne, charged with first-degree felony narcotics distribution, out of the Hoover County District Court.

  “It’s a mistake. They must’ve filed it incorrectly. I’ve already talked to the DA’s office about this case.”

  “I go off what the computer says. You wanna see him?”

  “Listen, I’m telling you, that’s a mistake. Can we get someone on the line? The kid’s mentally disabled and shouldn’t be in here.”

  “I go,” he said very slowly, “off what the computer says. Now you wanna see him or not?”

  I stared into his beady little eyes, eyes that had hardened to the plight of anyone who walked through those doors. He seemed to be enjoying my shock, as if the more he hurt or offended the person standing in front of him, the more strength it gave him—a trait I’d seen too many times in lifelong bureaucrats.

  “Yes, I’d like to see him.”

  I went through the metal detector and was searched by a guard before being led back to a little room with steel benches. The slam of the door filled the concrete space. I had a recurring nightmare that I was trapped in a room like this when the jail staff forgot about me, and I had to fend for myself until they found me. I didn’t remember how the dream ended.

  The door opened a minute later and Teddy was led in. The guard said, “Call me when you’re done.”

  Teddy wore a white-and-gray jumpsuit, and his right eye was swollen. His cheek was red, and he had a cut lip.

  “I didn’t want the cake, see,” he said, his fingers crossing and uncrossing compulsively as he looked toward me but not directly at me. “I told them I didn’t want the cake.”

  “Teddy, what happened to your face?”

  “I told them that I didn’t want the cake, but they gave me the cake anyway.”

  He paced in front of me, his fingers rubbing each other. Agitation poured out of him and filled the room as his voice got louder.

  “I told them I didn’t want cake I wanted pudding but they put cake on my tray and I said I didn’t want it and the lady said—”

  “Teddy,” I interrupted, “did someone hurt you?”

  “They were not nice,” he said, stopping and staring at the wall. “They were not nice and I said they were rude and they said I had to have the cake because—”

  “Teddy,” I said, this time standing up to get in front of his eyes.

  He jumped back, his hands covering his face as he pushed himself against the wall. He was trembling as he stared at the floor, his eyes wide.

  “I’m sorry, buddy,” I said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  I sat back down and watched him. He couldn’t stop trembling.

  “You shouldn’t be in here. I’ll get you out as soon as I can. Hopefully tomorrow or the next day. I just need to straighten it out with the courts. There’s been some sort of mistake on your case, and they’re charging you as an adult.”

  He glanced at me and then back to the wall. His middle finger started furiously rubbing against the top of his index finger.

  “Just hang tight, okay, buddy? I’ll get you out of here as soon as I can.”

  I rose and knocked on the door. The guard came.

  “Hey,” I said, “he’s getting worked on in there. Can you guys transfer him to another cell block or administrative segregation? He needs to be by himself or closely monitored.”

  “Don’t got the room,” he said, brushing by me to grab Teddy.

  “Hey,” I said, gently putting my hand on the guard’s shoulder.

  “Get your damn hand off me.”

  I lifted my hand, surrendering. Those with egos the size of their penises had to be handled gently. “Easy, big fella. I’m just trying to help him. He’s mentally disabled and he’s clearly getting hurt. He needs to be in a more mellow cell block.”

  “Retard probably ran into somethin’.”

  I stared at the guard as he dragged Teddy away. As they were leaving, Teddy looked back at me once and then turned a corner with the guard and was gone.

  Outside, evening had turned to night. The sky was clear and the stars sparkled above me like gems. I stared up at them a long time. Jack and I used to lie in our backyard and stare at the stars. He would ask me the names of the constellations. I had no idea so I made them up. Later, when he found out I had been making them up, he said he liked my names better. I wondered if anyone had ever lain with Teddy and looked at the stars.

  I exhaled and took out my phone.

  “This is Chip.”

  “Hey, I need you to bail Theodore Thorne out. Tonight. Like right now.”

  “Okay. Family ponied up the ten percent, huh?”

  “No, I’m paying it.”

  “What? You’re paying five G for a client? They paying you later, though, right?”

  “Chip, don’t worry about the money. Just get him out.”

  I slipped the phone back into my pocket and looked at the jail. A monolith of steel and brick, a testament to humans’ ability to hurt each other and our ability to throw mercy out the window. I couldn’t look at this jail or any jail very long, and I never liked visiting clients in them. A cold rush always filled my guts, and I had an overwhelming urge to run away. I don’t know if it was claustrophobia or what, but jails were hell on earth for me.

  Once, in foster care, the father of the family had locked me in the basement without any lights or food. I think I was in there for two days, but really couldn’t tell. I sat against the wall and cried at first, but then I stopped crying. I decided I wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction. I wondered if sitting in a cell was similar.

  A mother and child walked up the steps. The mother looked at me. “Do you know where we go to visit inmates?”

  “Through those
doors right there. Visiting hours ended at five, though.”

  “Oh.” She looked down at her daughter. “We’ll come back tomorrow, sweetheart.”

  The daughter’s face lapsed into a sadness that pierced me as she turned around and headed back to their car. She held a little sheet of paper with the words “Love you, Daddy” written on it.

  I got into my car and drove back to Salt Lake, relieved, at least, that Chip would have Teddy out within the hour.

  9

  I had a restless night. I drank a few glasses of whiskey and tried to watch Netflix but couldn’t concentrate. I ended up just lying in bed with my eyes glued to the screen, the sound off while blue images flickered in front of me for a couple of hours.

  When I woke, I took a quick shower and threw on the first suit I saw and a pair of actual pain-in-the-ass heels. Then I took them off and put on Chuck Taylors, because screw men if they needed me to torture myself to look their version of good. The sun burned my eyeballs, and I put on sunglasses before I even left the house.

  I had one quick hearing in the morning, then I went straight to the office, said hi to Kelly, sat down at my desk, and began making calls. My first was to the Hoover County District Attorney’s Office. I asked to be transferred to the assigned prosecutor on the Theodore Thorne case, and she said the two words I least wanted to hear: Jasper Diamond. They called him “Double D” for Double Diamond because his middle name was Diamond, too. Jasper Diamond Diamond. Maybe his parents figured he would forget that he was a Diamond, or something.

  I’d had two previous cases with him and both were disasters. One was a simple theft case where he wouldn’t give me a deal, and we had to go to trial. He’d withheld a nice little fact: the police officer who had cited my client was currently under investigation for rape. He arrested women for minor traffic offenses and misdemeanors, and then told them they could go to jail or have sex with him. My client, an attractive female, had no doubt been one of his targets, but there were too many people around for him to make his move, so he just wrote her the citation and left.

  My client really had been stealing something, but that was beside the point. Prosecutors had a duty to disclose all the relevant information to the defense. I didn’t find out about it until the day of the trial, when an anonymous tipster called my office. Someone on the Hoover County police force still had a conscience. I was sure that would be weeded out in time.

  During the trial, I filed motions for sanctions. Instead of fighting it out with me, Diamond dismissed the case.

  The second case was a DUI where he kept trying to introduce evidence the judge had already ruled was inadmissible: the fact that my client belonged to the Black Panthers in the 1970s, which would clearly prejudice the jury against him. I objected so many times my throat was sore. Finally, he just told the jury in his closing. I moved for a mistrial and it was granted. The case was then given to another prosecutor.

  “This is Diamond,” he said. Not Jasper. Diamond.

  “Double D, this is Dani Rollins.” A second of silence. No doubt he was happy to hear from me. “Good to hear from you, too. Anyway, you’re the assigned prosecutor on one of my cases and I thought I’d give you a ring. There’s been a misfiling.”

  “Thorne, right?”

  “That’s right. Kid’s seventeen and he’s in district court.”

  “That’s not a mistake. We’re certifying it.”

  Now I was the one who was silent for a moment. “You can’t certify it. It doesn’t fall under the statute as one of the qualifying offenses.”

  “Take it up with the judge. I filed certification on it with the information. See you at the hearing, Counselor.”

  He hung up on me.

  To certify a juvenile case meant they were seeking the judge’s permission to try the defendant as an adult. But only certain offenses qualified: aggravated arson, burglary, robbery, murder, attempted murder, sexual assault, or discharge of a firearm. Drug distribution wasn’t anywhere near that list. And there was a set procedure: the case had to be filed in juvenile court, and the juvenile court judge had to find that there was probable cause and that trying the defendant in the district court didn’t offend the interests of the child. It was bullshit because of course it always offended the interests of a child, but I could see why they’d want some kid who murdered his neighbor for fun to be tried as an adult.

  Just in case I had missed something, I looked up the statute: section 78A-6-702 . . . nope, drug distribution wasn’t listed there. What the hell were they doing?

  My cell phone buzzed: it was Will.

  “What up?” I said.

  “Hey, lady, I tried interviewing your boys in that Thorne case.”

  “Already? Look at you, all efficient.”

  “Well, I’m retiring a young man of thirty-two, remember? Wanna get this over and done with.”

  “What’d you find out?”

  “Nada. They wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Since when has that stopped you?”

  “Uh-uh, not gonna happen. I am not getting some ethics violation now that’d keep me from my paradise island. They lawyered up and don’t wanna talk. End of story.”

  I leaned back in my seat. “Hoover just did something weird.”

  “What?”

  “They certified the Thorne case. But there was no hearing in juvenile court. They filed the certification and got it right into the district court.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir. I’ll get it kicked at the first hearing. But why would they even try this? It’s clearly against statute.”

  “Hm. Maybe they don’t like the statute.”

  My heart skipped a beat and my guts turned to ice. “Gotta go,” I said. I dialed Double D again, and he answered, this time sounding more put out than before.

  “Hello?”

  “You want to lose,” I said. “Are you trying to take the Serious Youth Offender Act up on appeal?”

  “What I am and am not doing is no concern of yours, Counselor.”

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You guys have always hated that you don’t have the power to charge juveniles as adults whenever you like. This is someone’s life, Jasper. This kid’s mentally disabled, and you guys are trying to use him as a guinea pig? Send your lobbyists to the capital like every other corrupt corporation and bureaucrat.”

  He sighed. “I already told you, take it up with the judge.”

  “Who’s the judge on the case?”

  “Roscombe.”

  Shit.

  Mia Roscombe. And no, not female. I don’t know why his parents decided to name him Mia but they had, and now he made the lives of every defense attorney in Utah miserable. I wondered if his parents and Double D’s had gotten together to come up with names that would screw up their children.

  Most judges would have declined the filing and told the DA to take it to juvenile court. Roscombe hated the Serious Youth Offender Act more than Hoover County did. He wanted to be the one deciding the fates of youth offenders, not some “soft-hearted juvenile court judge”—his actual words.

  “Find another case, Jasper. This kid doesn’t deserve it. Use one of the codefendants.”

  “Your guy confessed, and everyone else said he was the one who set it all up.”

  “There’s no way with his mental—”

  “That’s for the psychiatrists to decide when you have him evaluated. Not for us. Can I get off the phone now? I’ve got things to do. I can’t drink all day and hang out with male strippers like you do.”

  “I resent that. Only half my day is spent drunk with strippers.”

  “Good-bye, Dani.”

  I hung up the phone and shook my head. Then I called Riley.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Dani Rollins.”

  “Oh, Ms. Rollins, I was going to call you. We got a call from your bail bondsman, and they let Teddy out last night.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “
I paid him five grand to do that. We can talk about that later. Anyway, got some news. It looks like the DA has filed this correctly. They want to try Teddy as an adult.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Very bad. If they lose on the issue of jurisdiction, they want to appeal it and overturn the law. If they win, Teddy could be facing a five-to-life sentence. This particular judge has told me before it’s his policy to always send defendants to prison for drug distribution cases, so at a minimum Teddy would do five years.”

  There was silence for a moment. “I don’t think he could survive that.”

  “I don’t either. So I’m going to do everything I can to get him out of this.”

  “Whatever you think is best.”

  A lot of parents would have been screaming about the injustice of the system. Riley seemed less concerned than I thought she should be. But what the hell did I know? I certainly wasn’t June Cleaver. My son would soon be the stepson of my polar opposite and learning how to harpoon whales or whatever Peyton the Animal Cannibal had planned.

  “Anyway, I’ll keep in touch. And make sure he’s at his court date.”

  “We will. Thank you.”

  After hanging up, I lifted Teddy’s file and stared at it a minute. I had a motion to write on another case, but I didn’t feel like doing that right now. I opened the file to Kevin’s address and then thought, screw it, and left the office.

  10

  Will wouldn’t interview Kevin, but who said I couldn’t give it a shot? I hadn’t officially been notified that he had a lawyer and could always play dumb later. But I didn’t want to do anything as obvious as knocking on his door and asking to speak with him. So I did the creepy stalker thing and went to his school.

  Skyline High School was surrounded by green shrubbery and plenty of pine trees. The air was cleaner here, above the muck of downtown Salt Lake. The school was a flat building that had been designed in a lost decade.

  I parked and watched the kids coming out. I had seen Kevin’s driver license photo in my file and knew who I was looking for. Although if a thousand kids came out at the same time, I’d be hard-pressed to spot him. I called Will.