: Margolin: The Last Innocent Man

“This is Mr. Nash, Jessie,” Monica said. David stood. Detective Stahlheimer continued to work on the tape recorder at the far end of the wooden table. It was hot and humid outside, but it was cool in the room. The wire mesh in the room’s only window threw crisscross shadow patterns across the detective’s broad back.

“Mr. Nash represents Tony Seals,” Monica continued. The girl looked puzzled.

“T.S.,” Monica said, and Jessie nodded. David watched her carefully. She was nervous, but not afraid. He imagined that she would never be afraid again, after what she had been through.

The girl interested him. Nothing about her suggested that she was a survivor. Her body was loose and sloppy. She wasn’t ugly. “Plain” was a better word. Unkempt strands of brown hair straggled down past her shoulders. The shoulders were rounded and the arms heavy. David would have picked her to fail, to fold under pressure. She hadn’t. There was steel there, someplace. A fact worth noting when he began to prepare his cross-examination.

“Mr. Nash wants you to tell him what happened on the mountain. He’ll probably ask you some questions, too.”

“Do I have to?” the girl asked. She looked tired. “I’ve said it so many times.”

“But not to me, Jessie,” David said in a firm, quiet tone.

“And why should I tell you…help you, after what they done to me?” she challenged. There was no whine in her voice. No adolescent stubbornness. Monica had told him she was sixteen. It was an old sixteen. A runaway for the past year and a half. Then, this. Life had leapfrogged her over adolescence.

“So I can find out what happened.”

“So you can get him off.”

“If there’s a way to do it. That’s my job, Jessie, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But lawyers usually don’t get guilty people off, and I want to find out what happened so I can decide whether to tell T.S. to go to trial or plead guilty or what. Only I won’t be able to tell him one way or the other if I don’t hear your version of what happened.”

Jessie looked down at her sneakers, thinking. It was working, David thought. His power over people. The ability to persuade. The trick he had used so many times was now as natural a part of him as his arm.

At thirty-five, David still looked open and honest, like a little boy at an American Legion oratorical contest. Jurors trusted him. When he looked them in the eye and told them that his client was innocent, they believed him. When he told a witness, like Jessie Garza, that he was interested only in finding out the truth, they spoke to him. More than once David had seen the shock on the face of a witness as something innocently revealed during an interview was used to destroy the prosecutor’s case.

Jessie shrugged and walked over to a chair near Detective Stahlheimer, turning her back to David.

“I don’t care,” she said. She didn’t say anything else, David noted. She knew the routine.

“I think it’s ready,” Stahlheimer said. Monica sat down across from David and beside the girl. She was immaculately dressed, in a double-breasted charcoal-pinstripe cutaway jacket, a matching skirt, and a cream-colored, ruffle-front blouse. Monica looked more beautiful now than she had when they were married. Their eyes met for a moment; then David looked away. He always felt a bit uncomfortable when he had a case with Monica. Their divorce had been relatively amicable, but being in her presence stirred up feelings of guilt best left buried.

“This is Detective Leon Stahlheimer,” the detective said into the mike. “It’s Thursday, June sixteenth. The time is ten-oh-sevenA.M. I am present in a conference room at the Juvenile Detention Center for the purpose of an interview with the victim in an attempt murder. Present are Jessie May Garza, Deputy District Attorney Monica Powers, and David Nash, the attorney for Anthony Seals.”

Stahlheimer stopped the tape and played it back. David took a pad out of his attache case and wrote the date, the time, and “Jessie May Garza” at the top. Monica leaned over and said something to the girl which he did not catch. Jessie crossed her fat forearms on the table and rested her head on them. She looked bored.

“Okay,” Stahlheimer said.

“Jessie,” David started, “I represent Tony Seals, one of three boys who you claim tried to kill you several weeks ago. The purpose of this interview is for me to find out what happened and, more specifically, what part Tony…You know him as T.S., don’t you?”

She nodded.

“You’ll have to talk, Jessie, so it goes on the tape,” Monica said.

“Yes. T.S. It meant ‘Tough Shit,’ he said. I never even knowed it meant Tony.”

“Okay. I’ll say ‘T.S.,’ then.”

“It don’t make no difference to me.”

“Now, Jessie, I don’t know what impression you have of lawyers from TV or the movies, but I’m no Perry Mason and I’m not trying to trick you here. The purpose of this talk is to find out what happened, and if I ask a question you don’t understand or if you say something you want to change, ask me to explain the question or just say you want to change what you said. Okay?”

The girl said nothing.

“Why don’t you just start at the beginning.”

Jessie sat up, then slouched back in the chair.

“Like, when?” she asked.

“Well, when did you first meet T.S., Sticks, and Zachariah?”

“I don’t know. It was at Granny’s. Whenever I started living there. Because Zack was there already, you know, and then T.S. and Sticks moved in about a week after I got there.”

“Who is Granny?”

“I don’t know her last name. I heard someone call her Terry once.”

“What does Granny have going on over at her place?”

“Well, it’s where a bunch of people used to crash. There was always guys who worked the carnivals when they came through. Then she used to let people fix up speed, and she used to do acid and everything, and then everything changed because Zack and Sticks OD’d. All of them came damn close to OD’ing on pure heroin and, let’s see, and so like, so like her old man’s in the Navy or used to be, and she changed old mans. This guy Norman is now her new old man.”

“Is he young?”

“Oh, he’s about twenty-three.”

“But she’s quite a bit older, isn’t she?”

Jessie laughed sarcastically.

“Like a hundred.”

“She liked having young boys like T.S. and Sticks around?”

“Yeah. She dug it.”

“Did she go with Zack for a while?”

“No. She brought Zack into the house to bring him off the needle from speed ’cause he was gettin’ to the point where he needed speed all the time.”

“Were you guys speeding quite a bit the night it happened?”

“I hadn’t took speed for almost two weeks ’cause the last time I did, I overacted on it.”

“What about Sticks and Zack?”

“No. Like I said, they quit speed and chemicals altogether ’cause they almost OD’d.”

“And T.S.?”

“Man, like he was constantly fucked up. Yeah, he was doin’ speed and acid. But I don’t know what he was into that night specifically, except for pot, ’cause we was all smoking that.”

“Well, did he seem awake and aware that night or what? How did he look?”

“I guess he was stoned. We all were, a little.”

“When you say ‘stoned,’ what do you mean? Can you describe how T.S. looked?”

“Well, he was talking slow and his pupils were big and he was dreamy. I don’t really remember that much. I remember in the car, going up to the park, I was in the backseat with T.S. and he was tripping out, you know, like gazing off in his own little world. My problem remembering is I took some downers before we left and I slept through most of the ride.”