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"I thought if you were charged with murder, they wouldn't reduce that."
"True, hypothetically, but that's not the way it works. It was just discretionary with the district attorney how he filed. What Lehto did was, he goes to De Witt and says, 'Look, George, I've got evidence my guy was under the influence at the time. Evidence from your own people.' He pulls out the police report. 'If you'll note in the record, when the officers arrested him, it states he appeared to be drowsy…" Blah, blah, blah. Clifford does this whole number and he can see George start to sweat. He's got his ego on the line and he doesn't want to go into court with a big hole in his case. As DA, you re expected to win ninety percent of the time, if not higher."
"So Bailey pleaded guilty to the manslaughter and the judge maxed him out," I said.
"Exactly. You got it, but we're only talkin' six years. Big deal. With time served and time off for good behavior, he might have been out in half that. The whole time, Fowler's thinking he got screwed, but he doesn't understand how lucky he was. Clifford Lehto did a hell of a job for him. I'd have done the same thing myself."
"What happens next?"
Clemson shrugged again, stubbing out his cigarette. "Depends on how Bailey wants to plead on the felony escape. What's he go
"What do you want from me in the meantime?"
Clemson got up and started pawing through the piles of paper on his desk. "I had my secretary pull all the clippings from the time of the murder. You might want to look at those. Lehto said he'd send down everything he's got. Police reports, list of witnesses. Talk to Bailey and see if he's got anything to add. You know the drill. Go back
Through the players and find me another suspect. Maybe we can develop evidence against somebody else and get Bailey off the hook. Otherwise, he's lookin' at a lot more years in the slammer unless I can persuade the judge no purpose would be served, which is what I'll try to do. He's been clean all this time, and personally, I can't see the point of puttin' him back in, but who knows? Here."
He unearthed an accordion file and handed it to me. I got to my feet and we shook hands again, chatting about other things as we left his office, walking toward the front. The office temp was sitting at her desk by then, trying to sustain an air of competence. She looked young and bewildered, out of her element in the world of habeas corpus, or corpuses of any kind.
"Oh yeah, one thing I almost forgot," Clemson said when we reached the porch. "What Jean was upset about that night? She was pregnant. Six weeks. Bailey swears it wasn't his."
5
I had about an hour to kill before I was due at the jail. I got out a city map and found the little dark square with a flag on it that marked the location of Central Coast High School. San Luis Obispo is not a large town, and the school was only six or eight blocks away. Lines painted on the main streets delineated a Path of History that I thought I might walk later in the week. I have an affection for early California history and I was curious to see the Mission and some of the old adobes as long as I was there.
When I reached the high school, I drove through the grounds, trying to imagine how it must have looked when Jean Timberlake was enrolled. Many of the buildings were clearly new: dark, smoke gray cinder block, trimmed in cream-colored concrete, with long, clean roof lines. The gymnasium and the cafeteria were of an earlier vintage, Spanish-style architecture done in darkening stucco with red tile roofs. On the upper level, where the road curved up and around to the right, there were modular units that had once served as classrooms and were now used for various businesses, Weight Watchers being one. The campus seemed more like a junior college than the high schools I'd seen. Rolling green hills formed a lush backdrop, giving the facility a feeling of serenity. The murder of a seventeen-year-old girl must have been deeply distressing to kids accustomed to pastoral surroundings such as these.
From what I remember of high school, our behavior was underscored by a hunger for sensation. Feelings were intense and events were played out in emotional extremes. While the fantasy of death satisfied a craving for self-drama, the reality was usually (fortunately) at some safe remove. We were absurdly young and healthy, and though we behaved recklessly, we never expected to suffer any consequence. The notion of a real death, whether by accident or intent, would have pushed us into a state of perplexity. Love affairs provided all the theater we could handle. Our sense of tragedy and our self-centeredness were so exaggerated that we weren't prepared to cope with any actual loss. Murder would have been beyond comprehension. Jean Timber-lake's death probably still generated discussion among the people she knew, giving rise to a disquiet that marred the memories of youth. Bailey Fowler's sudden reappearance in the community was going to stir it all up again: uneasiness, rage, the nearly incomprehensible feelings of waste and dismay.
On impulse, I parked the car and searched out the library, which turned out to be much like the one at Santa Teresa High. The' space was airy and open, the noise level subdued. The vinyl floor tile was a mottled beige, polished to a dull gleam. The air smelled like furniture polish, construction paper, and paste. I must have eaten six jars of LePage's during my grade-school years. I had a friend who ate pencil shavings. There's a name for that now, for kids who eat inorganic oddities like gravel and clay. In my day, it just seemed like a fun thing to do and no one ever gave it a passing thought as far as I knew.
The library tables were sparsely occupied and the reference desk was being handled by a young girl with frizzy hair and a ruby drilled into the side of her nose. She had apparently been seized by a fit of self-puncturing because both ears had been pierced repeatedly from the lobe to the helix. In lieu of earrings, she was sporting the sort of items you'd find in my junk drawer at home: paper clips, screws, safety pins, shoelaces, wing nuts. She was perched on a stool with a copy of Rolling Stone open on her lap. Mick Jagger was on the cover, looking sixty if a day.
"Hi."
She looked at me blankly.
"I wonder if you can give me some help. I used to be a student here and I can't find my yearbook. Do you have any copies? I'd like to take a look."
"Under the window. First and second shelves." I pulled the a
I traced Jean Timberlake's picture back, volume by volume, like the aging process in reverse. During her high school years, while the rest of California 's youth were protesting the war, smoking dope, and heading for the Haight, the girls at Central Coast were teasing their hair into glossy towers, putting black lines around their eyes and white gloss on their lips. The junior girls wore white blouses and bouffant hair, which curved out in a heavily sprayed flip at the sides. The guys had damp-looking crewcuts and braces on their teeth. They couldn't have guessed how soon they'd be sporting sideburns, beards, bell-bottoms, and psychedelic shirts.