Murder Plays House by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online Page B

paying ones three or four to one.
    She had called a week before, asking for help on a case. One of her clients, a young woman, had been fingered by aDEA informant who claimed to have passed her three kilos of cocaine for processing into crack. The defendant, a twenty-one-year-old college student, had insisted that she was in Los Angeles visiting family at the time the deal was supposed to have gone down. Sandra had called and asked us to track down the family members with whom she was staying and get witness statements from them. She was hoping that the statements would help in her motion to dismiss the charges. Meanwhile, because it was Texas, the poor kid was rotting in jail, bail not being something the judge felt obligated to provide to an African-American in a drug case, no matter how patently false the charges.
    “Why don’t I do it?” I said. “There’s no reason for you to schlep all the way up here, and, anyway, who knows when or if we’ll get paid for this case.” Sandra would bill the government for our time, but if she were to receive reimbursement at all, it wouldn’t be for a good long while.
    “Okay,” Al said. “You’re better at chatting up regular folk, anyway.” That certainly is true. There’s no one like Al for getting the lowlifes to spill their guts, but somehow his skills often fail him when confronted with decent, law-abiding citizens. I think the truth is that after twenty-five years on the force, Al just has a hard time believing that there’s any such thing as an honest person. My years as a public defender certainly infected me with this cynicism, and it has been more than validated by my experiences sticking my nose into private investigations. I’ve seen some pretty straight-seeming people do some pretty awful things. Still, unlike my partner, my belief in the fundamental integrity of at least some members of the human race has not gasped its final breath. Who knows how long that will last?
    Inglewood is one those strange Los Angeles neighborhoods whose benign, even charming, appearance belies itsfrightening crime statistics. Little cottages flanked by palm trees and jacaranda bushes nestle on small squares of lawn. There are bicycles leaning against porch steps, and kids playing hopscotch and basketball on the sidewalks. It’s only at second glance that you notice the metal bars on the windows and doors, and realize that there are few if any older people sitting out on their porches, even in the warmth of a Los Angeles winter morning. They are bolted and barred in their houses, too afraid of flying bullets and warring children to risk the sun-dappled streets. The young people are out, congregating on the corners, leaning against the broken streetlights and staring at the passing cars with eyes vacant of any expression other than vague menace.
    In my years at the public defender’s office I’d represented many boys like these. And they
were
boys, still in their teens, although they had lived through enough violence and fear for men twice their ages. It had taken me many hours to get through to these young men, to convince them that I, a white woman from a background so dissimilar to their own that it might have been another country, another era, another world, would represent them not just honestly, but passionately. I’m ashamed to say that many of them never believed me. The ones to whom I got through weren’t necessarily those who ended up being acquitted. Like most public defenders, I had relatively few of those—my clients were pretty much always guilty of the bank robberies and drug deals with which they’d been charged. Every so often, however, I made one of them understand that I cared about him, that I knew that underneath the tough hoodlum he presented to the world was a young boy with the same fears and dreams as any other boy, from any other neighborhood, including my own. Those guys stayed in touch with me, writing me long letters from prison, occasionally