Mean Justice (18 page)

F
EBRUARY
1993

T
HE LONG CLIMB OUT OF THE
L
OS
A
NGELES
B
ASIN
into the Kern Valley is a twenty-mile uphill trek of singular scenic monotony, a steady rise through the stony Grapevine Pass, where gusting summer winds can topple a mobile home as if snuffing a candle, and where a December rain mild at sea level can glaze the Grapevine summit with sheets of black ice even tire chains cannot bite. On the best of days, lines of tractor-trailers inch up the steep incline like a march of garden slugs, great black clouds of diesel grit trailing from their stacks, staining the procession of yellow signs urging summer drivers to turn off their air conditioners lest they overheat their engines. Despite these sensible warnings, a few northbound motorists, unable to relinquish the Los Angeles custom of exceeding all speed limits by at least twenty miles an hour with air conditioner on full blast, daily push their cars beyond the tolerance point as they climb the grade. Now and then these unfortunates can be seen trudging the highway shoulder or speaking into cellular phones from inside their expired cars, provoking slight, smug smiles from passing locals who would just as soon see the road to LA closed down entirely.

The Grapevine was meant to be a lifeline to Bakersfield and Kern County, carved out in one form or
another a century ago to allow riders and stagecoaches to make easier passage from San Francisco. But in truth the residents of the Kern Valley have come to view the Grapevine as their Great Wall, limiting both entrance and flight. The locals have always taken comfort in the knowledge that no amount of urban development, no matter how feverish or sprawling, will ever climb the Grapevine and envelop the oil wells and carrot fields to link the evils of Los Angeles with their town. The gangs and the crime and the misery of LA could stay on its side of the mountain. Downtown Bakersfield’s wide, empty Main Street with its big, empty stores—standing where pioneer land baron Thomas Baker’s alfalfa once grew around a sign inviting travelers to graze free in Baker’s Field—would stay safe from the worst excesses of Southern California. Kern County would remain a family town, a sanctuary amid the madness. Or so it seemed for a very long time.

•   •   •

Wild West. Frontier law. Hanging judges.
The half-serious words of warning about Kern County dished out as a kind of
bon voyage
to Laura Lawhon from various lawyers she knew kept coming to mind as she began the steep descent from the top of the Grapevine to the floor of the valley. Her view was as if from an airplane, squares of brown tilled earth tiled in with the faded yellow of aging hay and the drab green of orchard and vineyard, stretched out in a neat geometric grid, orderly, precise, the random contours and ragged edges of the once wild land wiped clean by man. It was a familiar sight to her now; she had made this tedious drive far too often in recent weeks. Not for the first time she thought, if only the loose ends of her case could be fit together in such an
orderly pattern as the one arcing across her windshield, her life would be far easier.

Murder had brought Laura Lawhon to Kern County—a client charged with murder. Patrick O’Dale Dunn faced the death penalty, accused of killing his millionaire wife, Alexandra, after she threatened to throw him out and leave him penniless—or so the prosecution claimed and the local news had dutifully reported. Laura had other theories in mind. She just needed the time to develop them. The state’s case seemed weak to her, hinging, as she saw it, on one key witness, a heroin addict who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Jerry Lee Coble’s account of his fortuitous predawn visit to Crestmont Drive not only brought a sudden solution to a case that had stymied the authorities for months, but it also guaranteed the convicted career criminal
¹
the one commodity he craved more than anything—freedom. His payment as star witness in
People vs. Patrick Dunn
had come in the form of a generous plea bargain from the Kern County District Attorney, a deal that allowed Coble to elude what had been an impending six-year prison sentence for grand theft. It was all far too convenient for Laura’s liking. She believed Coble to be an opportunistic liar. Now it was her job to prove it.

But Pat Dunn’s trial would begin in less than two months, giving Laura very little time to pick apart a case that the police and the prosecution had had nearly a year to construct. She had to dismantle their investigation like so many jigsaw pieces, then try to force it back together into a new pattern—one that would exonerate Pat or, at the least, let a defense attorney raise reasonable doubt about his guilt.

Rednecks. Gun nuts. Cowboy cops.
The words of warning
kept coming to mind, though, to be sure, Laura knew stereotypes when she heard them. They were unfair, the easy shorthand city dwellers employed to describe places where farms and livestock and scuffed cowboy boots dominate. She knew they weren’t right, not entirely, anyway. After all, people looked at the expensive jewelry and clothing she wore, the Rolex on her wrist, the Louis Vuitton handbag she lugged when visiting clients at the county jail, and sometimes they drew sweeping and unfair conclusions about her, too: rich girl, spoiled, shallow—the usual crap. Laura’s colleagues—and courtroom opponents—all came to understand that you underestimated her at your own peril. Well, all right, maybe she was rich and spoiled, Laura would concede, an unlikely private eye who had come to the business late, after graduating college at twenty-nine and falling in love with detective work during a semester’s internship. But there were reasons she was prized by the defense attorneys who paid for her services: her insights, her intelligent analyses of complex criminal cases, her ability to get people to talk in a way most lawyers and police officers, who too often attempted to dominate their subjects, never could.

Getting people to talk was Laura’s forte: Somehow, the crooks, cops and ordinary citizens who inevitably get caught together in the complex web that surrounds any big criminal case would look at Laura, the smile lines on her freckled face, the hazel eyes that met theirs without flinching, and they would trust her. They would talk, and they would say the most amazing things. Some would want to mother her, others to flirt with her, still others figured her for a pushover they could lie to. Didn’t matter to Laura—the important thing was they were talking. Truth, lies or a mixture of both, all were welcome, all were
fodder for the case, for all could be used to enhance or undermine credibility as needed during a trial. Some people would spend twenty minutes talking to Laura on the doorstep, explaining why it was they didn’t want to talk—and in the process give up a complete interview without even knowing it. That’s why Laura never called ahead of time—people could hang up on her that way and that would be the end of it. Instead, she just knocked on doors cold, her invulnerable smile and gleaming white teeth at the ready. Very few doors slammed in her face. These were the qualities that got Laura the Dunn job in Kern County, far from her usual turf.

So Laura knew better than to accept at face value the warnings she received about Kern County. Contrary to the clichés she had heard, she found Bakersfield very much like other cities around the country—diverse, growing and complex. She saw from the start that it was a much bigger town than she had anticipated, that it was full of hardworking, honest people like any other city, that most of the cops and prosecutors she met seemed honest, even helpful. This was not the nightmare town she had been warned about. And yet . . . Those warnings kept coming to mind as she drove down the Grapevine. Because there was something to them, too.

You want to know what Kern County’s like?
one lawyer had told her.
Imagine Mayberry, except Andy Griffith’s got a big ol’ shotgun he likes to mow people down with, and Barney Fife likes to frame people, and Aunt Bea is a John Bircher, and old Floyd down at the barbershop, well, he got a bug up his ass one day and blew up the family-planning clinic, which all the other good citizens of Mayberry thought was just swell. They’d just as soon pin a medal on him.

Bakersfield
did
make her think of a big, sprawling
Mayberry, old-fashioned and quaint, with its dimly lit steakhouses with the green leather booths unchanged since the fifties, and street signs that proudly pronounced the community an “All-America City.” High school athletes were local heroes here. People measured the passage of time by harvests and plantings. The most celebrated favorite sons were Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, the country-music legends who gave Bakersfield a reputation as a kind of West Coast Nashville. Big, goofy billboards inexplicably promoting water sports stood tall out on the highway, welcoming visitors to this city in the desert. There was a wholesomeness to the place, to the fields of grazing cattle and the farmers on their tractors, a celebration of small-town virtues and the value of hard work and common sense, even as the city of Bakersfield grew quite large.

But the dark side was there, too, the “anti-Mayberry,” Laura called it. The sheriff’s department in Kern County
did
seem to shoot more people than most police agencies in the state.
²
Kern County once
was
a West Coast haven for the Ku Klux Klan—just as in the 1990s it became a stronghold for armed militias. The only clinic in town that performed abortions
was
torched that year, an arson widely celebrated and never solved. (Kern County earned the distinction that same year of having the second highest rate of teen pregnancy in California—and the highest birthrate of all among girls fourteen or younger, children having babies on an almost daily basis here.) And some of the judges
were
right out of the Wild West, it seemed. One infamous judge, now dead, kept a noose hanging in his chambers and liked to be referred to as the “Judge Roy Bean of the San Joaquin” (though he belied this hanging-judge image by once dismissing charges against a courtroom
filled with accused criminals, simply to teach a lesson to a police chief whom he disliked).
³
Another Kern County judge was censured for playing practical jokes on defendants—sending a rattlesnake head to one man who was phobic about snakes, and a phony signed message and photo from Connie Chung to another defendant obsessed with the celebrity newswoman, nearly provoking a nervous breakdown.
⁴
There was the “Bubble Judge,” who sealed off the air vents to his courtroom, more concerned about dust and “spores” than the stifling atmosphere he created. And then there was the judge who invited a stripper on trial in his court to perform a private dance in his chambers. Not that he would allow that to influence his decisions in the case, of course.
⁵

But as far as police officers framing people, accidentally or otherwise, well, Laura wasn’t ready to go that far. At the courthouse, she had begun to hear from local sources stories about cover-ups and conspiracies, of innocent men and women imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, of a law-enforcement zealousness that sometimes crossed the line. But she wasn’t certain what, if any, credence could be given these sometimes apocryphal stories. She knew the vast majority of men and women in law enforcement were honorable professionals who sincerely desired to help others, to do their duty. But even good intentions could sometimes lead to injustice, she knew. For an outsider like Laura, telling the difference would take time—more time, probably, than she had to solve the case of the
People vs. Patrick Dunn.
In the end, she sensed Kern County would always be foreign terrain to her. Laura normally worked in urban Orange County, two hundred miles to the south, as did the lawyer who had hired her. The Dunn family had not wanted local
legal talent to try the case. Pat had originally retained Stan Simrin, reputed to be the best defense attorney in town, a former local bar association president with an excellent record of winning tough cases—and for taking on the powerful district attorney. But Simrin had been replaced abruptly just before Christmas, after a falling-out with Pat’s brother Mike. Mike Dunn, a well-off Orange County businessman, was footing the bills for Pat’s defense, as Sandy’s accounts and will were all frozen in the wake of the murder charges, and Pat’s own money had been spent in a vain attempt to keep their real estate ventures afloat. So it had been Mike who chose the new lawyer, someone he knew from Orange County.

Though it got her this job, privately, Laura wondered at the wisdom of hiring an out-of-town legal team. Here she was, a tourist, with a jumble of fold-out road maps and a collection of fast-food wrappers on the floor of her Mercedes. She had no sources in Kern County, no insider knowledge of the courthouse scene, no clear idea of what she was up against. Pat’s defense seemed to be going well, the case against him teetering under Laura’s scrutiny, but her unfamiliarity with Bakersfield and its justice system left her unwilling to relax. The defense case could easily turn into a disaster, no matter how good things might look for Pat at the moment.

Laura felt ill prepared for this place, having grown up and lived in worlds much different from this one. Her hometown of Westport, Connecticut, was a place of wealth and privilege where she had shared neighborhoods with the likes of Martha Stewart and Paul Newman. She grew up with cotillions and ski vacations and thinking every teenager automatically received her own car at sixteen. At eighteen, she had left this life
behind in an act of rebellion that stunned her parents, leaving home to marry a country boy, Wayne Lawhon, a working man as far from her world as Bakersfield. Wayne was determined to create his own wealth to support Laura, rather than rely on his new wife’s family money. And so he did, moving to prosperous Orange County, California, to open a mobile-home-parts company. Plainspoken and blunt, Wayne was utterly devoted to his wife, denying her nothing, treating her like some rare and exotic creature who might fade from view at any moment. Laura kept the books for the business and raised their three children until, at age twenty-nine, she announced, as Wayne always feared, that she wanted more.