The Ancient Rain (25 page)

The rain does not purify anything but keeps on falling.

The rain falls in my mouth as I die. The rain of vengeance. The rain of purification. The rain that sets nothing right.

Now it is raining television sets, bits of glass. Severed hands.

Ash.

The old rain, the endless rain …

Kaufman went on. And then on some more. It was time to give it up, but he kept on going. He laughed. He dropped his beer. Then there was a smattering of applause, and the video flickered out. Johnny Pesci, the old black shirt, had not stirred, he was still sleeping, and Julia Besozi, whose husband had been interned with the Japanese, took another sip of port. Stella had left halfway through the man's rant, retreating to the kitchen, but returned now at the sound of the static to eject the tape.

Nonsense, Sorrentino thought. The tape had told him nothing. Or almost nothing.

Only that he had been suckered. By the rumors, by that hoax and nonsense Ricci and her like had put out, tapes, stories smeared all over the press, making connections where they didn't exist, sending the feds scurrying this way and that. They'd done it back then, and they were doing the same thing now.

No, Sanford was long dead, Sorrentino was all but sure. Or if not dead, insignificant to the matter at hand.

Blackwell, he guessed, had already figured this out. Blackwell wanted Owens—for his own lousy reasons, maybe, nothing to do with Elise—but Sorrentino could not see how he meant to get him. He could not see Blackwell's angle.

If Sanford had not been with Owens the day of the robbery, then who? What four people? But it didn't matter. It wasn't Sorrentino's business anymore.

Sorrentino looked along the counter and felt his eyes welling. Stella slid him the tape but he did not look up because he did not want her to see. He leaned over and picked up the tape. Then he just stood there, head down, staring at the counter.

He looked at the photo.

Himself and the kid, smiling. Father and son. Arm around Dad. A string of fish hanging on a line at the dock. Mountains behind.

He felt a cry rise from his diaphragm, involuntary. An ugly noise, strangled in an old man's throat.

He pushed the front door out into Chinatown. He was weeping now, and could not stop himself, not even in front of these yellow men and their families, these Chink bastards, these faggots and Jews.

My son. You killed my fucking son.

Down at the Embarcadero, he put his hands on the railing and let himself go. The tape had told him nothing. A dead lead. His weeping had nothing to do with the man on the tape, he told himself, nothing to do with his meandering poem. It was of no value to the case, no value at all.

He looked over the pier into the water. He looked at the water for a long time. Then he dropped the tape into the bay.

PART SIX

The Trial

THIRTY-THREE

The trial would bring certain things to light. Or that was the idea. What had happened that day in the bank, it would be revealed in the courtroom, with the jurors watching from their box, the press reporting, the cameras peering. In reality, though, there was a door at the back of the courtroom, leading to a corridor, and that corridor in turn led to another room. Inside that room, the judge sat in her chambers. And the truth was, not everything emerged from chambers. Not everything made its way down the long corridor back into the light.

In chambers, at the moment, the defense sat to one side of the judge, and the prosecution to the other.

“I am going to address this question to the prosecution,” said the judge, and she glanced toward Blackwell, the federal prosecutor.

*   *   *

Blackwell was not well liked. He knew this. Mocked in the press, distrusted by his underlings. Despised by the defense, of course—but also by Elise Younger, who shrugged away from him as if he were some kind of reptile. Disdained, too, by the honchos at Justice, who worried he would botch the government's case.

He'd read the recent spate of articles, seen the media portrayals contemplating his motivations, picking at his biography—or the bones of it anyway, the barest facts. He'd read the descriptions of his ranch house in San Mateo, of his fundamentalist daughter and wild son. Of his long career as a nose-to-the-grindstone investigative attorney, a cool shell with a hot exterior, perennial second in charge. The government's hit man, angry in the shadows.

Well …

Maybe he was a son of a bitch, but the world was full of sons of bitches. Like a lot of people, he had a wife and family. And like a lot of people, if anything happened to them—if someone with a cockamamie idea blew apart his life—then he would want someone like himself to do just what he was doing now.

“Yes, Your Honor,” he said.

“In regard to Cynthia Nakamura—this issue of the discovery material?”

“Ms. Nakamura has been available to the defense for some time.”

“That's not true,” interjected Jensen. “The prosecutor has been playing a shell game.”

“Your Honor, Ms. Nakamura was listed initially under her husband's name. As soon as we realized the potential for confusion, we corrected the problem. The defense has been provided with her deposition.”

“Her illness precludes our speaking with her,” said Jensen. “And the deposition has obviously been heavily coached. Your Honor, we must insist this witness be disallowed.”

This back and forth had been going on for some time, since early in the trial, and Judge Jackson looked weary of them both, but seemed particularly impatient with Jensen, Blackwell thought. The defense attorney had lost his touch. He was loud, inelegant. His skin had grown splotchy, and he touched his beard too often. There was something decidedly syphilitic in his manner.

“Your Honor,” Jensen continued, “if it weren't for the current political environment, we wouldn't be here. This case is the same one that was too weak to go to trial three decades ago. So far, the government hasn't brought anything new. And now they want to bring forth a woman who has obviously been coerced on her deathbed.”

“You've made your point,” said the judge.

Regardless, Blackwell knew that his case so far hadn't done much to tie Owens to the crime. He'd introduced the new forensics, true, connecting bullet casings at the bank to weapons found in an SLA hideaway. But Jensen would counter that by challenging how the evidence had been stored these many years. Other than that, Blackwell had spent much of his time with witnesses who could establish what had happened in the bank. An aging woman who'd been working as a teller that day. The security guard who'd seen the shooting. The insurance salesman who'd dropped to the floor at the robbers' commands, and who had lain beside Eleanor Younger as she died.

The only thing that had taken the defense by surprise, perhaps, was when he'd called Annette Ricci and Jan Sprague. Both of them well spoken. Ricci with her theatrical smile. Sprague with her cashmere looks, her pearl necklace, her well-cut jacket. His questioning of the two women had been brief and without incident. He'd asked them where they had been the day of the robbery. In Aptos, they told him. And Owens, they said, had been there, too.

The press commentators had derided the seeming purposelessness of his approach, how he'd been outclassed by the women, but this didn't bother him. He had his own strategy, his own plan.

As for Judge Jackson, Blackwell had been in front of her before. Antonia Jackson was African American—a severe, dark-eyed woman of liberal reputation, but she was no knee-jerk liberal. She had a brother who'd been killed in a robbery and a son who worked as a prosecuting attorney. And she, too, like everyone, had her own considerations.

“How ill is this woman?” she asked.

“She's terminal. But she has recently taken a turn for the better. If I can point out, our handling of this is well within the boundaries of the new legislation, which grants the state considerable discretion in matters of protecting witnesses.”

Jensen went off on a howl then. Complaining about the abuse of the system. About the trumped-up nature of the case. About the state expanding its powers to coerce witnesses and bring in pretty much whomever they pleased, violating the rules of discovery. Most of it was noise. The rules had changed recently, but underneath it all, there were other reasons for the fuss. He could see the worry in Jensen's eyes.

Antonia Jackson shifted in her seat, uncomfortable in her robes, her eyes running from one of them to the other. She was in a hard place herself. The administration was going after certain judgeships. And the public was in a lousy mood. Once you got past the noisy ones and the fools, the protestors in the street, people weren't game for letting killers go.

“I don't see the reason to exclude this witness,” she said at last.

“Your Honor,” Jensen objected, “the state has taken multiple depositions from Ms. Nakamura—all riddled with contradiction. Either she is not altogether competent, or the state is coaching—”

“The defense will have a chance to point out these contradictions during cross-examination,” said Judge Jackson. “In the meantime, let's proceed with Ms. Elise Younger. I believe she is next on the prosecution's docket.”

*   *   *

There was often a certain theater, an electricity, to the moment when the aggrieved took the stand and peered down from the witness chair toward the table of the accused. Elise Younger had waited for it, Blackwell knew, with considerable hunger. After weeks of proximity, watching Owens from across the aisle, brushing against the family in the corridors, hours on the hard benches, Elise shifted in her skirt now, rising at the sound of her name. Owens, meanwhile, sat with his hands together, maintaining his posture, neither particularly attentive nor dismissive. Most of all, refraining from the impulsive gesture. The shaking of the head. The twisted smile. Anything that could be interpreted as arrogance in the face of grief.

He had been carefully coached, no doubt, as had Elise.

Blackwell knew that verdicts were often handed down on the basis of moments such as these—by personal associations the lawyers ultimately could not anticipate. By the fact that Elise Younger, perhaps, reminded the juror in the second row of his high-school English teacher. That Bill Owens's son resembled a brother who had died years ago. That a flicker in the lighting overhead gave Blackwell himself the appearance of a perpetual scowl. Like other attorneys who worked in this building, he sometimes patted his face with a faint powder.

Some people might mock him, but it wasn't his fault. He hadn't invented the fluorescent light.

Blackwell wore his bluest suit. He had thick hair, and he was fit, but not too fit. The imperfection helped, he knew, because people did not trust anyone who looked too good. Jensen, on the other hand, tipped too far toward the slovenly these days. His Nordic looks had grown too jowly, too thick.

Blackwell started by projecting a map onto a screen, showing the path Elise and her mother had driven to the bank that day. He had an evidentiary purpose, but another purpose as well—to capture for the jury the texture of the day, the girl riding on the hot vinyl in the Ford Falcon down Judah Street, the mother with her hands on the wheel, the big purse on the seat bench between them. He wanted the jury to see the mother in the checkered blouse, adjusting on her face the horn-rimmed shades that would later tumble from her fingers in the bank.

“You entered the parking lot from the north side of Judah, as shown on the map.”

“Yes.”

“And you waited in the car.”

“I was listening to the radio.”

“So, as to the events of that day, is it true you delivered an account to the police at that time, and identified, with the aid of a sketch artist and file photos, two of the suspects in the robbery?”

Jensen objected, as Blackwell expected he would, challenging a childhood memory from almost thirty years before: an eyewitness account blurred and faded by time.

Judge Jackson overruled. She motioned for Blackwell to continue.

“What happened next?”

“We pulled into the parking lot, and there was a woman sitting there, on a bench. I noticed her because of her hat—a floppy hat, like people were wearing then, with the big brim.”

They dwelled on the woman for a while, seated as she was on that bench, situated as it was, affording a view of the street corner, of the parking lot, and of the bank itself, front entrance and side. The bench sat some forty-odd feet from the parked car, but not so far that Elise couldn't see her mother exchange pleasantries with the woman on her way to the entrance. After her mother had entered the bank, the woman on the bench suddenly rose to her feet and started to wave. She wore dark glasses and her features were hidden in the long shadows of her hat.

“I thought she was waving at me,” said Elise. “She was making some kind of sign, the peace sign, I didn't know, I just waved back. But then I looked behind and saw these people, four of them, coming out of an alley.” Elise paused then, as if she were peering into that alley. “The woman on the bench…”

“Yes?”

“She was Japanese, I think.”

“Objection,” said Jensen. “This is speculation on the part of the witness.”

Jensen was right, of course. Blackwell himself, years ago, odd as it seemed now, had missed the significance of the woman on the bench. But Elise's description had not much changed.

“How many people, did you say, were in the alley?”

“Four. Dressed in camping clothes, or that's how it looked to me. And one of them gave the sign back. And the woman with the floppy hat, she went off in the other direction then.”

“This Japanese woman…”

Judge Jackson hit the gavel, cautioning Blackwell now for deliberately leading the jury, since the ethnic identity of the woman had not been established. It was true, the slip had been deliberate … planting a seed … preparing for things to come …