No Way Out. David Kessler
prosecutions damaged the reputation of the department, and gave her a poor track record, personally. So Bridget knew that she had to word every sentence carefully to give Sarah the impression that this was a winnable case.
When she looked at the fax, her eyes lit up. She scooped it up and rushed out of the room.
Sitting on a lounging chair on the deck of his Mediterranean-style villa, looking out onto the ocean, Elias Claymore realized that crime and repentance had served him well. His present surroundings were a far cry from the ramshackle hut where he had been born and the rat-infested ‘hood where he had grown up.
The villa stood in landscaped grounds on the sands of Montecito’s most prestigious beach and had breathtaking views of the ocean from nearly every room. There was a huge living room with fireplace, bar and ocean view, a beachside kitchen, two beachside bedrooms each with a fireplace, and a third at the back. Even the office had an ocean view. There was also a separate guest apartment, a large beachfront deck, a sunset view seaside spa, majestic trees and flowering gardens and seventy-five feet of private beachfront.
But how far had he really come?
‘You can take the man out of the ghetto,’ the racists had taunted, ‘but you can’t take the ghetto out of the man.’ And much as it pained his troubled conscience, the racists were right on this one, albeit in the most literal sense. A ghetto is a place of retreat where one is surrounded by one’s own kind yet is constantly under threat from those outside. And right now Elias felt besieged.
His mind drifted back to what his life had once been like. He used to think that the pain was all over. He had never forgotten what he had done. But after all these years he thought it would no longer come back to haunt him. Yet the events of the past week had proved him wrong – and it was like a slow, drawn-out torture.
He tried to soften the pain by reminding himself what had driven him to do the things he had done and become the man he became, thinking back to the time he was nine when two white policemen raped his mother before his eyes. He had tried to stop them, but one of them had grabbed him and twisted his arm behind his back, forcing him to watch while the other had pinned his mother to the ground, ripped her clothes and forced himself into her as she screamed and begged for mercy.
She had brought up Elias alone, without the help of a man, and she had always been a strong figure in his early years, dishing out the punishment while protecting him from the bigger kids in the ‘hood. But she couldn’t protect herself from this. And Elias Claymore learned in those few minutes that his mother, who had been like a pillar of support for the entire world as he knew it, was powerless in the face of this invading force in their own home.
And through his childish eyes, little Elias knew why. She was a woman – and women were weaker than men. He couldn’t expect a woman to protect him. It was for men to be strong and to protect women…or violate them. That was how it was in other households. He had seen the local pimps slapping their girls around and he quickly learned that this was the natural order in the world. It was normal for men to dominate women.
But these men who had invaded his house and raped his mother were not their men. They were an alien presence. These were the pigs who beat up blacks just because they were black. These were the people who called him ‘Nigger’ and made him afraid whenever they walked by, knowing that he daren’t respond to their racist taunts. And now they were here in his home, doing…this thing…to his mother.
He couldn’t blame her for being weak. But it was her fault that they didn’t have a man to protect them. She had driven him away. That’s what one of his brothers had told him. She had called Elias’s father a no-good, drunken deadbeat and thrown him out of the house. But now he realized how much they needed a man in this household…and they didn’t have one because of her.
He realized in that moment that one day he would be a man. He would be big and strong and then there’d be hell to pay! Because then he’d be able to fight back…and he’d hit them where it hurt. He’d hit their weakness – their women.
He was shaken out of his unhappy daydream by a loud, aggressive knocking on the front door.
‘Who is it?’ he called out.
‘This is the police! We have a warrant for your arrest.’
‘This time we’ve got a witness,’ said Lieutenant Kropf.
‘Who?’ asked Alex.
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
Alex had flown down to Los Angeles from San Francisco as soon as he heard of Claymore’s second arrest, having told his client not to say a word until he got there. He knew that the cops would try their usual tricks – telling the suspect that they were more likely to believe him if he spoke freely on the record, without getting all ‘lawyered up.’ But Alex had been firm.
‘Don’t fall for it,’ he had warned. ‘The issue is not whether they believe you, but whether they’ve got a case. They’re capable of talking themselves into anything. You just stay cool and hang on till I get there. If they’ve got no case, they can’t act. If they think they’ve already got one, then nothing you can say will make any difference.’
‘What exactly did this witness see?’ Alex assumed that someone hadn’t just stood there watching a rape and doing nothing about it.
‘He saw your client running away from the crime scene,’ said Kropf, regretting it a moment later.
He.
Alex picked up on it. So the witness was a man…or a boy. And he had only seen Claymore allegedly running away from the crime scene, not the rape. That was a very different thing.
And Kropf had also let slip that an ID had already been made.
‘Wait a minute, you put my client in a line-up when I wasn’t there?’
‘We didn’t need to,’ said the lieutenant. ‘He recognized him from the news reports.’
They hadn’t said anything about a witness at the time of Claymore’s first arrest. And even if he was right about the identity of the man running away, how did he know that it was from the scene of a rape? If he had known at the time, would he not have stayed to help the victim? Or given his name to the police? And would they not have said something about a witness at the time of the first arrest? And put Claymore in a line-up? But now they were saying that this man had recognized Claymore from the news reports. That meant that he didn’t stick around at the time.
Why not? Had he been afraid? Why would he be afraid if the rapist had run away? Was he afraid to get involved? Was he afraid of the police? Was he a criminal himself? Had he really seen something? Had he even been there? Or was he one of the legion of freeloaders who come out of the woodwork in high profile cases, looking to make a quick buck?
‘Can I see his statement?’ asked Alex.
At a certain point, if they decided to proceed against Claymore, they’d have no alternative but to show him the statement. However at this stage, they owed him nothing, not even the name of the witness.
‘You’ll get it from the D.A. with the rest of the discovery material.’
That sounded ominous, like they had already made up their minds to charge Claymore.
‘I don’t suppose you’d like to give my client an opportunity to explain what he was doing there?’
‘What, you mean why he was at a crime scene at the time of the crime when he had previously claimed to be