At last, at nine forty, La Cosse was brought through the lockup door and into the courtroom. I turned and watched as the deputies led him to the defense table, removed the hip shackles, and sat him down next to me. He was wearing the second suit I had bought for him. I wanted him to have a different look than he’d had last week as we started the defense. Both suits had come off the rack in a two-for-one deal at Men’s Wearhouse. Lorna chose them after we’d checked out La Cosse’s own clothing and found nothing that presented the conservative, business-like appearance I wanted him to have in court. But the new suits did little to disguise his ongoing physical decline. He looked like someone suffering in the latter stages of terminal cancer. His weight loss had gone unchecked during his six-plus months of incarceration. He was gaunt, had developed rashes on his arms and neck in reaction to the industrial detergent used in the jail laundry, and his posture at the defense table made him look like an old man. I constantly had to tell him to sit up straight because the jury was watching.
“Andre, you doing okay?” I asked as soon as he was seated.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “The weekends in there are long.”
“I know. They still giving you medicine for your stomach?”
“They give it and I drink it, but I don’t know if it’s doing anything. I still feel like I’m on fire inside.”
“Well, hopefully you won’t be in there too much longer and we’ll get you into a first-rate hospital as soon as you get out.”
La Cosse nodded in a way that indicated he couldn’t quite believe he would ever leave the shackles and the jail behind. Long-term incarceration does that to an individual—eats away at hope. Even in an innocent man.
“How are you doing, Mickey?” he asked. “How is your arm?”
Despite his own circumstances, Andre never failed to inquire about me. In many ways I was still recovering from the crash of the Lincoln. Earl had died and I was battered and broken—but mostly on the inside.
Physically, I’d suffered a concussion and needed surgery to reset my nose. It took twenty-nine stitches to close various lacerations and twice-a-week physical therapy sessions since then to help restore full motion to my left arm where ligaments were torn in the elbow.
To put it bluntly, I got off easy. People might even say I walked away. But the physical injuries didn’t even approach the intensity of the internal damage that still lingered. I grieved every day for Earl Briggs, and the sorrow was only equaled by the burden of guilt I carried with it. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t recheck the moves and decisions I’d made in April. Most damning was the decision to keep the tracker on my car and to taunt those monitoring my movements by boldly driving to Victorville to see Hector Moya. The consequences of that decision would be with me forever, the image of a smiling Earl Briggs attached to them in my mind’s eye.
By the time the wreckage of the Lincoln was examined, the GPS tracker was gone, but it had been there the afternoon before when Cisco had checked out the car. There is no doubt in my mind that I was followed to Victorville. And there is no doubt in my mind about who made the decision to send the Lincoln into the guardrail, if not did the deed himself. I had only one true purpose with this trial. That was to free Andre La Cosse and clear his name. But I considered destroying James Marco in the process to be an integral part of the trial strategy.
When I looked back on what happened up on the 15 Freeway, only one thing came out of it that could even remotely be considered good. A rescue helicopter transported both me and Earl to Desert Valley Hospital back in Victorville. Earl was dead on arrival and I was admitted to the ER. When I came out of surgery, my daughter was there at my bedside, holding my hand. It went a long way toward healing things inside me.
The trial was pushed back almost a month while I recovered, and that cost had been borne most heavily by Andre. Another month of incarceration, another month of withering hope. He never once complained about it. He only wanted me to get better.
“I’m good,” I said to him now. “Thank you for asking. I can’t wait to get started because now it’s finally your turn, Andre. Today we start telling a different story.”
“Good.”
He said it without much conviction.
“You just gotta concentrate on one thing for me, Andre.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. Don’t look guilty.”
“You got it.”
I gave him a playful punch on the shoulder with my good arm. It had been the mantra I had given him from day one. Don’t look guilty. A man who looks guilty is found guilty. In Andre’s case it was easier said than done. He looked destroyed, and that wasn’t too far off from looking guilty.