Compelling Evidence

CHAPTER 21

Harry’s in my office at the bookshelf-lined wall using my codes, too cheap to spring for the subscription to keep his own current. Harry’s library is a forest of repealed statutes and outdated law.

“Where’s Dee?” he asks.

“Given her the afternoon off,” I say. “I need to do a little reading.” I point to the report on my desk and signal that quiet is appreciated.

I open the cover. Under the clear acetate is his letterhead:

SCOTT BOWMAN AND ASSOCIATES LICENSED INVESTIGATORS

Bowman was my own idea; without a word to Cheetam or Skarpellos, over Talia’s muted objections, I have paid him $2,500 of my own money, a retainer. Halfway through the hearing Talia had finally come to realize that freedom was not likely to follow Cheetam’s performance in the prelim.

Bowman does only capital cases. His specialty is penalty phase investigations, the background needed to save Talia from the gas chamber should a jury return a guilty verdict.

While dwelling on the penalty phase may seem macabre at this stage, Bowman has recommended an early start. His advice makes sense. Little things known about Talia’s background now might be woven into our defense, a little preconditioning for mercy if the jury convicts.

Talia had a hard time with this, two lengthy interviews alone with Bowman at his office. Her early life, it seems, is something she would rather forget.

As I read this first preliminary report-Bowman will do a follow-up investigation contacting family and friends for more information-I am struck by just how little I know of Talia’s background. In the first five pages I learn more concerning her life and what motivates her than I gleaned during the months of our relationship.

Talia is part Latina, something she has covered over with Anglicized ways-mastered, it would appear, at some cost to her own identity.

Conscious life for Talia Griggs began during a Monterey Park summer, her first memories coming from age five. She lived with her mother, Carmen, two brothers and a sister in the trackless waste of nondescript duplexes and squalid five-room frame houses that the contractors charitably dubbed “ranch homes.” These structures now litter the east end of Los Angeles County like some sorry architectural bivouac.

As a teenager growing up in the more affluent section of the county, I had seen it-a place where the houses were dominated by dead lawns and broken window screens. Long-abandoned vehicles littered every residential street, resting on bricks or blocks of wood, the fantasy of would-be mechanics caught in the perpetual illusion of one day returning the wrecks to the highway. The houses bake under an oppressive sun that is for months not visible through the perennial brown haze that hovers like some clouded cornea over the inland areas of the county. And always there are the children, in disproportionate numbers scampering about the streets and sidewalks playing with toys that match the houses in their state of disrepair.

It is in such a setting that, from Bowman’s report, I can now visualize Talia, streams of oily brown hair curling at the shoulders, dirty-faced, running to keep up with the boys. For an instant, visions of Sarah flood my mind between the lines of his narrative, for their features and coloring, Talia’s and my daughter’s, are not dissimilar.

Carmen Garcia, Talia’s mother, was never entirely certain of her daughter’s paternal bloodline. Apparently after some calculation and by process of elimination she settled on the putative father. James Griggs, an itinerant truck driver, had followed Carmen home from one of her habitual nightly haunts to share her bed during a cold winter night and had remained a tenant in her home for a week while his truck had undergone repairs. Carmen had Griggs’s name added to Talia’s birth certificate when the little girl reached age two. According to Talia this was more an act of bureaucratic expedience than concern for pedigree. It gave the county authorities someone to pursue for contribution toward the AFDC benefits that Carmen received monthly from the welfare department for support of her daughter.

It appears that this was an idle act, for Mr. Griggs was never seen again, and but for his brief, and questionable, genetic contribution he never entered little Talia’s life.

Through childhood and early adolescence, Talia learned to live with the constant stream of male friends who wandered through her mother’s life like tattooed vagabonds in search of some sexual holy grail.

I sit back in my chair, and in my mind’s eye I can visualize a small child kneeling on the living room floor of that littered house, wide-eyed and precocious, as a procession of strangers wandered through the place in pursuit of her mother.

The household of Talia’s early childhood, it seems, was governed by two unfaltering doctrines. Rule number one, her mother did not suffer from an alcohol problem, and rule number two, the children did not talk to others about their mother’s problem. The seeming lack of logical consistency between these two precepts apparently eluded their young minds, or else the fear of retribution was so great as to render reason impotent. More than anything else was the sense of misplaced loyalty shared by all of the children toward a mother who had shown little sensitivity or love.

By the time Talia reached age twelve, Carmen’s problems with alcohol had reached intolerable proportions. Most of her days were spent in an intoxicated stupor. Talia noticed that the attention of male friends toward her mother had begun to wane. There were fewer such visits and the men were older, and the situation appeared more desperate. Increasingly, if they stayed for more than a single night, their attention turned from Carmen to her daughter.

Given her nearly constant state of inebriation, Carmen did not notice these advances toward Talia until a few months later, when Talia, her body taking on the rounded curves of womanhood, was cornered alone in the house by one of her mother’s male friends. Carmen walked in, unexpected and surprisingly sober, to find Talia half naked, her clothes torn, huddled under the sheets, struggling with one of Carmen’s former bed mates.

According to Talia and as related by Bowman, the mother’s reaction was instantaneous and unbridled, a display of rage that marked the girl’s memory for life-and directed exclusively at young Talia. Lamps were thrown, sheets ripped, nightstands upended. The girl lay frozen in terror on the bed, protecting herself as best she could behind two pillows as her mother flung any object within reach at the child. Talia’s male assailant, completely ignored in this melee, quietly slipped from the room, pulling up and buckling his pants as he hopped down the front drive toward his car.

For weeks after this incident Carmen would speak to her daughter only to remind her of her disloyalty, her sinfulness. She told her of the price paid by wayward children. Carmen carted Talia off to the local Catholic church, a place never darkened by Carmen’s own shadow before that day, and compelled the teenager to confess her sin to an aging priest huddled behind the plastic shield of the confessional. In Talia’s own words, the episode left an indelible scar on her, a sense that all of society’s institutions were flawed by the same hypocrisy demonstrated by her mother.

In the weeks and months that followed, Carmen’s behavior grew only worse. She would carouse until the early hours of the morning, sleeping in to ward off the effects of the previous night’s drunk, and then awaken to the headed hoof beats of a hangover alone in an empty bed. To read Talia’s narrative as related to Bowman, her mother’s mornings always started the same way, in a halo of cigarette smoke, to a chorus of tobacco-induced coughing spasms. Until one morning she clutched her chest during one of these coughing jags and keeled over, dead.

I close the cover on the report, leaving the next section, “Adolescence and Adulthood,” for a later time.

“Interesting reading?” says Harry. He’s standing on one of my chairs reading a book he pulled from the top shelf.

In ten pages Bowman has shredded the image of Talia as the ultimate spoiled rich bitch.

The surprise here is not so much the manner of her early life, as the fact that she has concealed it so completely from those with whom she has been so intimate.