‘I will,’ said Nikki, adding, tongue in cheek, ‘Derek Williams gave me the same advice earlier.’
Goodman scowled. ‘Williams wants your money, Nikki. I don’t. Remember that, when you’re thinking about who to trust.’
As he drove off, his parting words rang in Nikki’s ears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The town of Chowchilla, in Madera County California, had only two features deemed interesting enough to warrant a mention on Wikipedia. The first was that the town’s name itself meant ‘Murderers’, a reference to the notoriously warlike Chaushila tribe of Native Americans who first settled there. And the second was the presence of Valley State Prison, formerly a women-only institution, but now home to almost a thousand male inmates.
Classified as ‘medium security’, from the outside the low, squat quadrangle of concrete buildings ringed with barbed wire and electric fences appeared forbidding enough to make any visitor wonder what a ‘high-security’ prison might look like.
Jerry Kovak hadn’t seen the outside of Valley State in six years, not since the day he first arrived here, transferred from an overcrowded hellhole of a prison in LA County. Jerry had his pal Mick Johnson to thank for his move, and for many other things too. Jerry’s waste-of-space attorneys had told him not to squander his time on another ‘hopeless’ appeal – as if he had anything better to do, stuck in here! But Mick Johnson hadn’t given up and had helped Jerry lodge the paperwork. Without it, or some other kind of miracle, Jerry would never see the outside of Valley State’s walls or anything beyond them until he was carried out in a coffin.
Shuffling into the visitors’ room, an attempt at a cheerful space with brightly colored walls and a play area for children in one corner, Jerry took a seat and waited. He’d hoped his daughter might have made it today. It was almost six months since he’d last seen Julie. But she had three kids of her own now, and a husband who disapproved of Jerry, plus Chowchilla was a four-hour drive from LA. You can’t expect too much, he told himself, doing his best to mask his disappointment when Mick Johnson waddled in alone. She has her own life to live now.
Taking the seat opposite Jerry’s, Mick handed over the few meager gifts he’d been allowed to bring: a fishing magazine, a book of Sudoku and some herbal tablets supposed to help with joint pain. ‘How are you, man? You look good.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jerry. ‘I’m doin’ OK, considering.’
This was an obvious lie. When Mick Johnson and Jerry Kovak first met as junior detectives, Jerry had been a seriously handsome guy. A football player, super-athletic, with the kind of chiseled jock’s features that made him every woman’s type. But despite his great looks and endless opportunity, Jerry had been a one-woman guy, utterly devoted to his wife Marianne and their kid, Julie.
That was fifteen years ago now. They’d all aged since then. But whereas Mick and the rest of the guys had simply grown fatter and balder, Jerry had withered like a tree in the desert. Stooped and frail, his skin as cracked and dry as parchment, his eyes rheumy and red, he had become an old man. Arthritic. Broken. Pathetic, in the true sense of the word.
It was the year he turned forty-five that it all came crashing down, the blows raining on poor Jerry Kovak like hailstones from a vengeful heaven. First Marianne got sick. Then, really quickly, faster than anyone expected, she died. Mick would never forget Jerry during those days, howling like a wounded dog, wracked with a tormenting grief beyond anything that Mick had ever witnessed.
He should have taken time off then. Some sort of compassionate leave, time to process things, to grieve in private with his daughter. But things were different in those days. Jerry had not long transferred into the drug squad, the first Pole in an almost entirely Irish division, and that was a big deal. Those guys didn’t go home and cry. They were fighting a war, and the war didn’t stop because somebody’s wife had dropped dead of cancer at forty-two. Besides, Jerry didn’t want to stop work. He needed the distraction, he told Mick at the time, not to mention the money. ‘It’s only me and Julie now. I have to provide for her.’
So Detective Kovak had gone back on the streets, and at first he seemed OK. But as his grief shifted through despair, to denial and into anger, things began to change. Jerry would start losing his temper at colleagues, flying off the handle over the smallest thing. In an argument over a parking spot, he threw a punch at a junior officer, breaking the poor kid’s nose. That was all handled on the down low, and Jerry apologized. But out on the streets, in his daily interactions with the junkies and dealers and hookers and informants that were the bread and butter of drug squad life, he became a different person. Hardened. Battle weary, yet at the same time, looking for a fight.
Eventually, he found one. Kelsey James, a lowlife, piece of shit pimp and part-time crack dealer from Watts, gave Jerry some false information that led to the collapse of his first big case. Jerry drove straight from the courthouse to find James, pulled him out of his car in broad daylight and beat him to a bloody pulp on the street. For three weeks the boy was in intensive care, and for a while there it looked like he might not make it. In the end, he lived – more was the pity as far as Mick Johnson was concerned – but the doctors said he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair and need constant nursing care to be able to perform even the most basic functions.
Jerry was charged with aggravated assault and attempted murder. The boys all rallied round in court – it was in the line of duty. Kelsey looked like he was reaching for a weapon. Jerry could have used his firearm but he didn’t. He showed restraint. But then Kelsey James’s
mama showed up, sobbing and wailing, and his sisters yelling blue murder about police brutality and what a ‘good boy’ their dealing, scumbag brother was, how Jerry had robbed him of his bright future.
Mick Johnson attended the trial every day. He could see the judge – a liberal, bleeding heart woman – buying every word of the James family’s baloney. It made Johnson’s stomach turn, listening to them lie through their teeth and blacken a good man’s name. But there was nothing he could do about it. Clearly, Jerry needed some other line of defense, some sob story of his own to soften the judge’s heart.
Luckily, he had one. Diminished responsibility, due to his mental state after Marianne’s death. His attorney was doing a pretty good job with it too, bringing little Julie up on to the stand to tell everyone how much she loved her dad and how hard losing her mom had been on the family. Character witnesses from Julie’s school and soccer team spoke up for Jerry. Even the local pastor came and sang his praises.
But then that bitch Nikki Roberts took the stand. And just like that, Jerry Kovak’s case unraveled, and with it his future. Dr Roberts was called as an expert witness, to talk about the psychological effects of grief. Could grief explain what Jerry had done? Could it excuse or mitigate a sudden, compulsive display of violence? Was it at least possible that Jerry Kovak was not in his right mind when he attacked Kelsey James?
No.
No.
No.
‘Doctor’ Roberts never wavered in her damning judgment of poor Jerry. In her expert opinion, he showed zero signs of mental incapacity. His attack was premeditated, not compulsive or spontaneous. His motives, according to Nikki, were racist and selfish, his actions rooted in rage rather than grief. Mick Johnson could do nothing but sit and watch helplessly as this young slip of a girl who knew nothing about Jerry, and even less about the dangers cops like him faced on the streets every day at the hands of the Kelsey Jameses of this world, annihilated any hope his friend had of clemency.
Jerry Kovak was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-five years in jail.
Twice he’d appealed his sentence. Twice, Nikki Roberts had come forward voluntarily to re-state her case: that there should be no mercy for Jerry, no compassion, no ‘special circumstances’. ‘Justice for Kelsey’ was all that mattered, apparently. Nikki Roberts had gone out of her way to ensure that Jerry Kovak would spend the rest of his days behind bars.
Mick Johnson would never forgive her for that.
Smiling at his old friend, doing his best to project an optimism that he didn’t feel, Mick told Jerry he’d filed his appeal.
‘You think we have a shot?’ Jerry asked querulously.