Free Lion Plays Rough by Lachlan Smith Page A

shouldn’t have spent so much time on it, but I needed to keep from thinking about Jamil hanging there in his cell, needed to keep from wondering what his last moments had been like. Whether the videos came into evidence or not, the girl herself still had to testify, and it was her live testimony that I was afraid of. I couldn’t very well keep her from taking the stand.
    I could, however, keep my client from testifying, and I was faced with the task of finding a viable defense without him telling the jury he didn’t do it. Though we hadn’t definitely decided that Marty would testify, we’d proceeded under that assumption. Jeanie hated putting clients on the stand; she believed that it was at best a roll of the dice, and that most of them would, in the end, lack the composure to do anything but hurt themselves. Trust yourself, trust your evidence, trust the Constitution: that was her mantra.
    And yet there’s no substitute for the horse’s mouth. No matter how relentlessly we attacked the police interviews, no matter how many motives we could give Erica for making up the story of Scarsdale molesting her, it was a child sex-abuse case. The law says it’s the prosecutor’s burden to prove the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; still, none but the greenest attorney believes the jury in a child sex-abuse case will follow that instruction. Given the revulsion such cases arouse, a defendant is effectively charged with proving himself innocent.
    On the bright side, I wouldn’t have to babysit Scarsdale all week, wouldn’t have to spend those hours I’d dreaded rehearsing his testimony, wouldn’t have to hold his hand, coach him, warn him, reassure him. Now we wouldn’t have to go through the whole sticky pageant of rehearsal and cooperation. I was free to forget him, there in his hotel room, until the day of trial, free to set aside the human element and distill the case to a series of rhetorical formulations.
    The trouble was the human element never stays down for long. Yet it wasn’t Scarsdale; it was me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jamil—and about Lavinia.
    â€œI know who she is,” I said to Teddy when I got home after filing my motion Wednesday night. “Or who she must be, at least.”
    Teddy was parked in front of the TV watching SportsCenter with a beer, eating a bowl of cereal.
    â€œShe had inside information, which makes her connected either to Damon or to Campbell. She knew about their relationship and about their meetings. She didn’t seem like a gangster girlfriend, so I figure she’s got to be a cop.”
    Of course the people who’d hired me, who’d set me up, were cops. I figured that the two of them must have wanted to expose Campbell but didn’t want to take on the career-ending alienation and contempt that comes with the code of silence, the thin blue line. Whatever was going on here, it was identical to the code of the streets.
    That gun in Lavinia’s purse hadn’t been a cop gun, though. I just couldn’t imagine an off-duty officer carrying it. Nor was a Pontiac convertible a cop car. So maybe she’d been a cop but now was paid better. In any case, she had the inside scoop and wanted to do the right thing, wanted to see a crooked detective exposed.
    In the morning I called two friends from law school who worked for the Alameda County public defender’s office. Neither of them could recall an officer who matched the description I gave. The hesitant quality of their voices told me it wasn’t much of a description . The only part of her I could picture clearly was her legs.
    There was no official, public directory of Oakland police officers, certainly none with photos, but I knew that group portraits of every graduating academy class for the last fifty years hung in the public hallway of the headquarters building on Frank Ogawa Plaza.
    It’s strange for someone like me, an