I remembered the first time I met him. It was about ten years ago, some months after Lucy was born. Ellen and I had found a sitter for the afternoon and gone to a party at Drew’s house. He was living up in Glendale with his then wife. This was soon after I made detective, and Drew was, I guess, something of a role model. Even though we’d never crossed tracks, I’d certainly heard enough about him. He was the arrogant homicide star back then, always with a cigarette in one hand, often with a glass in the other. To Ellen and me, convinced that nothing could ever break us, it was obvious that day that Drew was about to explode as a husband. He and his wife were at each other’s throat; mildly drunk, he was rude to everyone else. He spent most of the afternoon teaching his little girl how to hit the curve ball, a phenomenon she’d encountered to her recent distress in junior league softball. With her he was gentle and patient. It’s funny; you can think someone a total asshole until you see him with his kids, and then you realize, hey, this guy might be all right.
We didn’t work together at that time, though we saw each other pretty regularly for a drink or two, trading stories. When his marriage ended, he seemed blank and numb, but with a suppressed anger waiting to be turned on. Then he was out of my life for years, working East LA, working too hard, messing up his instincts, and by the time he came back to the Westside, to Ocean precinct, he seemed exhausted, as if suffering reaction and remorse, though nonetheless still expecting the promotion I got. He was, after all, the more experienced man.
I’d asked him after the promotion, “What keeps you at it, Drew? Why do you still bother? You’ve put in your twenty. You don’t seem interested anymore. You could quit, take your pension.”
“I’m keeping my eyes open,” he’d said, glancing at the sleeve of his blazer. “Maybe I’ll have an astonishing second act in my life.”
Charlie Corcoran was in his late fifties and had survived as a star in Hollywood for more than three decades, staying power he was reputed to take with him into the bedroom, where his prowess was legend and where he’d seemingly met with them all, from Fonda to Pfeiffer, from Seberg to Silverstone. Watching him, I thought I’d measured the true nature of his charm. He didn’t calculatedly seduce, but desired seductively, making each individual he looked at — whether man or woman — feel that he or she was, for that instant, the most important person in the world. He let you know how well he understood the rough-and-tumble of ambition, the tender comedy of imperfect human wanting. This is all far from a joke, his eyes said, but if by any chance it were one, I know the joke would be on me. He had the gift of seeming modesty. He had a still boyish charm.
The court room was packed. There were the larger than life personalities, the TV anchors, waving and smiling at each other. There were the high-profile print reporters, sharp in Armani, who added to their corrosive reputations during the course of the trial. There were the hardcore crazies, who waited outside each day on the off chance that they’d win the lottery for the leftover seats. There were the court reporters beneath the judge’s bench and the lawyers on either side of Corcoran himself, who gave off a carefully humbled air of confidence, with graying hair that was cut short and stood up in porcupine quills. His suit was dark blue, his shirt plain and white as the innocence that his blue eyes and even his spiky hair contrived to make hover around him like a halo.
It was over in minutes. The judge came in, a balding distinguished black guy who gathered his robes about him as he sat, swished and banged his gavel with self-conscious theatricality, and asked the foreman of the jury if a verdict had been reached in the matter of the State of California versus Charles Emerson Corcoran. The foreman — a woman actually, in her late forties, with red-framed glasses and no less susceptible to Corcoran’s strange magnetism than anyone else in that courtroom — said yes, nervously fingering a piece of pink legal-size paper she’d folded in two.
At university I’d read philosophy, not for its logical niceties, its fancy footwork and arguments, not for its frequent visions of very smart angels dancing on the heads of extremely intellectual pins, but for the sense it sometimes gave of another mind grappling with what it means to be human, with the problems of living well and fairly. I turned to the study of law and jurisprudence with the same idea. For the rule of law, for the enforcement of common order and justice, for a restatement of the principles of the Republic and why the United States had divorced itself from Britain in the first place — for all these, America seemed to cry aloud. And though I’d no intention then of becoming a cop, when in time I did I still believed I could make a difference. I was passionate, naive, and young, a man all bright and quivering, primed for fifteen years of the streets and disenchantment.
Justice is a commodity, I now knew, and this was the Los Angeles County Superior Court, which gave to monied might the means abundantly to confuse, confound, and humiliate the right. It was a disaster I was used to living with. In this court the poor got screwed, while the rich broke all the rules, duly expecting, and being granted, the sorts of privileges and exemptions that in England are given to the kings, queens, dukes — the aristocracy.
In the eyes of my colleagues and most people in Los Angeles I was an admired, even a celebrated, man. I solved big cases and got my picture on TV. I’d twice won the Department’s highest decoration for bravery, the first time for stepping out onto a bridge high above San Pedro to pull back a jumper, and then for saving a couple of kids from a burning apartment building. I had a certain fame myself, which, to be honest, I liked, though I tried never to let it interfere with the work. There was a mystique about homicide, something beyond the hours and the dead bodies. We crossed the border to touch finality. The most bizarre, terrifying murders could and did happen every day. True, mostly they happened to certain people, those whose unlucky birthright is crime, the chance of victimhood, though every now and then homicide would reach out to remind us of how it too cherished democracy, and those of us whose job was to deal with it would be reminded in turn how democracy reserved special favors for wealth. This was the way of the world, the system of which I was a part; justice was just only part of the time, a tough reality against which you’d break your foot kicking.
All this I knew to be true, watching Corcoran as he glanced at the neat, square nails of his right hand. And yet, in that hushed moment of waiting, I suddenly found myself willing a guilty verdict, needing a guilty verdict, and I realized that it wasn’t Drew Diamond who’d been rousing my anger that morning. It was Corcoran, and not just because he’d done this shit and most likely I was going to have to eat it.
“Not guilty,” said the woman in the red glasses, her voice with a smile in it while thirty camera shutters clicked as one, while Corcoran’s eyes didn’t budge from his own lucky hands, while people all around me gasped, then cheered, and the judge called loudly for “order, order,” even as lawyers swooned around, clapping Corcoran on the back.
I rubbed my eyes, stunned, so obviously deflated that the woman next to me, one of the lottery winners, said, “Hey, detective, are you gonna faint?”
Outside, in the corridor, I pushed through the crowd of reporters into the corridor, fleeing down the stairs, hearing my heels clatter a couple of flights down the stairwell before I struck back into the main body of the building and splashed water in my face from a drinking fountain. I didn’t quite know where or who I was. My heart was going fast and my skin prickled. A woman went by, rolling her cleaning cart with its wafting stench of ammonia and filthy water.
Corcoran had been a movie star, an American aristocrat, for so long that he thought he needn’t concern himself with matters of honor, trust, and fidelity. Given the chance to be completely corrupt, he grabbed it. He’d had affairs, and his life hadn’t been messed up. He’d killed his own wife, and gone free. Apparently for him it was a cleaner way of dealing with things than divorce. Throughout the trial, even in his performance of grief, he made clear to the jury, the audience, that he was the one who had suffered, who’d been oppressed; it was always Denise who was doing things to him. Taking drugs. Trashing the house. Sleeping