T. Parker - Laguna Heat

A trial date for Azul Mercante was set. The opening day would be Monday, October 14, and the presiding Superior Court Judge would be Francis Rubio. The article noted that Rubio, at the age of fifty, was the youngest judge on the Superior bench.

Then came the September 26 article Shephard had seen in Hope Creeley’s collection, the brief account of Burton’s tragic drowning in the Newport Channel. The whole Surfsiders newsletter was devoted to the memory of the co-owner. The title-page masthead, usually done in a light-hearted sea green, was a somber black. Creeley’s portrait took up nearly a quarter of the first page, and beside it was a touching obituary written by none other than Helene Lang. She called him a “visionary” and a man “to whom the future was always a place of happiness and hope, a man whose loss dims the hopes and happiness of the futures of us all.” Joe Datilla wrote a guest column on his personal friendship with Burton, the long days and worried months that constituted the birth of the club. “Somewhere inside myself,” he wrote, “even during those times when it seemed our project might fail miserably, I always retained a solid foundation of optimism. Looking back on those times it is easy for me now to see that it was the endless faith of Burton that shored me up. He was a man who proceeded utterly without doubt and utterly without malice to anyone. He was the best of what a man, and a businessman, can be.”

Shephard was struck by a third-page photograph, taken only a month earlier, of Burton and Hope Creeley side by side on the Surfside tennis courts. Her smile was reluctant and elusive as always, but her husband seemed to be brimming with vigor. They couldn’t have been much over thirty years old.

A bad summer for the Surfside, he thought. As Creeley had written in her diary, bad luck seemed to hang over the club as over the pyramids at El Giza. He glanced up at the Mayan deity on the wall, which from his angle seemed to be doing a death dance on the silent chest of Helene.

He lit a cigarette and used a potted plant for an ashtray. He could hear the wind outside mounting for another attack, and when it hit, the glass behind him rattled with a vengeance. He shifted in his chair, the smell of his sweat rising around him, mixing with the dry aroma of smoke.

Helene had also clipped the Register article on the alleged sighting of Creeley in Laguna Beach the night he died. Shephard thought back to her account of the bungled murder, the hoods from Los Angeles unable to tell the Newport Channel from Diver’s Cove. And friends to bring the errant body back north to Newport Beach. But the cops had scoffed at the idea of the body drifting north, and when Shephard considered the logistics of such a drift, he couldn’t help but scoff too. What if Helene had told the truth about the drowning? Even if she were as sick as Datilla and Wade had said, might she have still sprinkled her fantasies with bits of truth? Which bits, he wondered, and whose truth? But the newspaper’s heated call to reopen the investigation dwindled into disinterest, and the next page of the scrapbook contained only a small article stating that Azul Mercante’s trial for murder had been postponed three weeks and a large photograph of a Surfside Halloween gala in which the celebrants dressed up as ghosts.

On the next page of the Surfside scrapbook, the trial began. Weingarten immediately made headlines by requesting not a jury trial but a trial whose outcome would rest solely in the hands of the Honorable Francis Rubio. From his own experience in court, Shephard knew that the request was extremely rare and inevitably was made by defendants who believed that their chances with a jury were nil. Nevertheless, the Academy cliché that an innocent man will demand a trial by judge was sometimes true. Judges were less susceptible to pressure from the press, less impressed with the gyrations of prosecutors, and — perhaps from human reluctance to single-handedly pass judgment — often more attentive to the details of justice than a tired and underpaid jury might be. They were harder to fool. He also knew that judges tended to consider the evidence rather than the man, and could better differentiate between the act and the actor.

But the move to a trial by judge seemed futile as he read Jim Peters’s opening remarks. His first statements portrayed Mercante as a dangerously aggressive “playboy,” a man whose “very concept of women leads to serious questions about his state of mind at the time of the crime.” He promised to produce adequate testimony to demonstrate Mercante’s “everyday” behavior as potentially ripe for this kind of sexual crime. And the cornerstone of his prosecution, as he put it, was to produce a murder weapon clearly covered with the fingerprints of Mercante and reveal the results of paraffin tests, which would show that the defendant had in fact fired the fatal shot.

Weingarten’s opening remarks were brief and to the point: Azul Mercante was a good friend of the Shephards, especially of Colleen, and had visited the house in goodwill, with honorable intentions. According to Weingarten — and the assertion made Shephard sneer with contempt for the man’s stupidity — Wade Shephard had come home unexpectedly, and in a jealous rage fired at Mercante and instead hit his wife. He failed to address the fingerprints and the berium and antimony — the two telltale residues left by the explosion of gunpowder — that were found on Mercante’s right wrist.

Shephard read the testimony with a slow anger shifting inside him. But it was apparent to him, as he began the article on the next page, that Mercante couldn’t even hold up his end of Weingarten’s thin charade.

Murder defendant Azul Mercante, accused slayer of a young Laguna Beach mother this summer, was ordered gagged yesterday by Judge Francis Rubio.

Rubio’s action took place after Mercante continually interrupted the proceedings with violent outbursts directed at prosecutor Jim Peters. The judge told Mercante that any further outbursts would land him outside the courtroom of his own trial.

Mercante’s shouting came during the testimony of police researcher Dwayne Maxwell, who said that a paraffin test of Mercante’s skin shortly after his arrest was positive.

Mercante screamed that the berium and antimony found in his skin were there because he is an artist and the paints he works with contain these substances.

The trial is now in its second week.

With a giddy feeling of pursuit, Shephard flipped quickly to the next page of the scrapbook. It was now Weingarten’s turn to build a case, and he began by summoning several witnesses who testified that Mercante was in fact a frequent tennis partner of Wade Shephard and “apparently” a friend of both Wade and Colleen. Weingarten brought Wade to the stand on a Thursday morning. For nearly the entire day he questioned Wade’s relationship with his wife, with the members of his department, and finally with Mercante, whom Wade described as “a volatile man but apparently a good man.” He went on to state his shock in finding Mercante trying to accost his wife. Wade called their relationship one that was “building toward friendship,” but that he only saw Mercante as a casual acquaintance at the Surfside Club.

Shephard was not surprised to read that Mercante was a member.

Weingarten finished the day’s proceedings by bringing Dwayne Maxwell back to the stand to state that berium and antimony were common components in the paints used by fine artists and that such residues might stay lodged in human skin for “several days.” Mercante was carried screaming from the courtroom after breaking his gag, and was banished by Rubio for the next two days.

The two names that jumped off the next page brought Shephard a swirling sense of exhilaration.