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When I walked into The Freedom Agenda office, Karen was sitting behind her desk reading a copy ofGeorgewith a tall Black man dressed in a white wig and parts of a revolutionary war uniform.
“I didn’t know you were a fan of politics,” I said.
“I’m not. I’m fan of Charles Barkley.”
“Baseball?”
“Basketball.”
“Clippers?” I guessed. I think that was the L.A. team.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Suns. Phoenix.”
I decided to quit while I was behind, and asked, “Is Lydia in?”
“She’s on a call, but she’ll be done in a—oh, there you go. She’s off.” I don’t know how she did that. I’m sure it had something to do with the lights on her phone and what she could hear through the paper-thin wall, but still. It always seemed like magic.
I walked around the corner and stood in Lydia’s door. She looked up at me, flipping her hair out of her face as she did. It was the kind of move that would have driven Richland Keswick crazy.
“I saw Camille Eggleston. She has a very high opinion of Detective Wellesley. She’s adamant that Wellesley didn’t try to influence the identification. Of course, there’s still a problem with the lineup. The only person who fit the description is the person Camille picked.”
Lydia nodded, taking it in. Then she called out, “Karen?” A moment later Karen was standing next to me.
“Karen, would you make Dom a copy of your file on Detective Wellesley?”
“You wanted to return calls this afternoon.”
“After that,” Lydia said.
“Tomorrow is fine,” I said.
Karen went back to her desk.
Then to me, Lydia said, “Could you write up your notes on Camille Eggleston? We’ll go over it again if we need to depose her.”
“Sure. So, this is unusual, isn’t it? Grouping three cases like this?”
“Yes. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get a judge to go for it. If I can get the DA to relent and join our petition for release, a judge can approve them together or separately, it really makes no difference.”
“So the grouping is really a pretrial thing.”
“Yes. It’s better on our end and it’s better for LAPD in the long run.”
“I can’t imagine it’s good for Brenda Wellesley.”
“Well, no, but then it wouldn’t be no matter how we did this.”
“Do you think there are more bad cases that she worked?”
“Yes. They’ll turn up eventually.”
“How’d you find these three?”
“After we won Jimmy Claxton’s case there was a lot of publicity. We got an avalanche of mail from prisoners. Karen noticed that these three cases were all out of Rampart, all around the same time, all one detective. I was intrigued, but I put them aside while we did the Danny Osbourne case.”
I nodded. “Um, change of subject. Yesterday, I made arrangements to see Larry Wilkes at Corcoran.”
Actually, I’d had to ask Karen enough questions that she eventually just did it for me. “I’m planning to go up on Monday, if that’s okay.”
