Prologue

Once upon a time … there was a magical city, Las Vegas, in a desert valley in the United States of Nevada. Buffets were delicious and inexpensive. If someone didn’t have a job, they didn’t want a job. Hotels, schools, and homes were built and filled, immediately. Cellular telephones were as large as an adult’s forearm and weighed ten pounds. No one had ever heard of a text message. Photographs were developed from film. An hour was the soonest you could see them.

A wonderful new invention, caller ID, stopped crank callers in their tracks. The World Wide Web was just coming onto the scene. Al Gore was still claiming its invention – or was that an urban legend? It was so long ago that the word, windows, referred only to glass encasements in physical structures. Rich kids had Apples and Atari. That is when this story begins, in the last days of the pre-digital world.

You see, before one could sneak a look at a cell phone or emails, Google a name, access cheaters online, or hack a Facebook account, people dared to fall in love, and even then, it often ended badly, and at times, in tragedy. For in that magical land, just as in all the best fairytales, love rarely ended in, “Happily Ever After.”

 

Bang Bang

Living in Vegas, those words mean many things. I grew up here. I became a court reporter. I am not a tape recorder in a wool suit. I am not a timid, bland, unattractive, older woman with a bun, who blends into the background. I am young. I am sexy. I wear Ellen Tracy and the requisite double pair of shoulder pads. These are the days of big hair, and I have a big mop of naturally curly, dark, wild pony hair. I wear doily socks with heels. I make over $75,000 a year, and I am in my late twenties. It’s designer everything.

My equipment is even computerized. I am the first court reporter to write, “real-time,” in a courtroom on a daily basis in this jurisdiction: Real-time means that, as I write, it comes right up on my computer screen next to me. It’s brand new technology. My judge and the attorneys can get a rough draft of the proceedings at the end of the day on disk. Well, the attorneys have to pay for them. I charge them $100, and I ask them if they want one of my, “Dirty ASCII’s.” And yes, I will explain how that magic little machine of mine works. Be patient.

I have been the scribe for thousands of criminal histories, satires, even a few legends. I keep the Record. The judge I work for is one of the best. Hence, he is referred to as one of the Supreme Court’s favorites. He presides over many a civil suit, as well.

Usually, the civil suits are excruciating vacuums of vexation so dry they suck the life out of your cells. Let me pierce your imagination with a speck of these doldrums, as follows: The malpractice of any and all professionals, except prostitutes; construction defect cases, when 75 lawyers argue over soil composition, whether it is dirt or sand, Jurassic, Triassic, alluvial or sub-alluvial – big money for me, and well deserved -- and probate cases, during which the beloved, grieving siblings at funerals walk into the courthouse transformed into vipers, shrews, starving Komodo dragons, whose behavior is so egregious as to make their dead parents wish they had left it all to the dog. Sprinkle in breaches of contract and condemnation, and you will have glanced at the smorgasbord of wrongs that my little fingers have banged out and into my little machine.

Court reporters must develop coping mechanisms to compensate for sitting in a state of Zen-like attentiveness, I personally believe that by the time every court reporter has worked for a year, we have developed little ticks to our personalities. You have to in order to compensate for sitting in a state of Zen for hours on end. Our job is not to be good at what we do; our job is to be perfect.

That little machine is not the magic. It has nothing to do with typing skills. The machine is phonetic. The beginning sounds of words are on the left. The end sounds are on the right. The vowels are in the middle. We are squeezing sound INTO that machine. It is exactly the same and yet the opposite of playing the piano.

I am adventurous. Give me motorcycles, toddlers on sugar, or nights that no one can guess how they might end … and now you know how I cope. I like my stability, but once stability is established, status quo, well then, I am a Viking. I am also naïve and yet flirtatious, which has proven to be a dangerous concoction of personality … or so some have remarked.

After dinner, a bath, a swim, after my little one is sleeping, and after sex – be it lovemaking or banging -- I sit down at my home X-Scribe computer to punctuate, perfect, and print the Record, which is then delivered to the Clerk’s Office, the attorneys, and sent upstate to the Supreme Court for their review and decision. By that time each proceeding has been diminished and publicly doomed to purgatory, detached and devoid of passion, magic, fury, suffering, and, of course, any tenderness. Then -- bang, I get paid.

I cannot keep watching and listening, courtside, with no weapon nor shield for my soul, while reruns of unimaginable insults to human dignity are proven up beyond a reasonable doubt. I break my silence. Ergo, from my fingers to your eyes, I vow to tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Before I expound, I need to take you somewhere.

There are moments in time when one choice changes everything. Imagine throwing a pebble into a stream, watching it ripple, and someday being on a boat and capsized by the wave that pebble created. That’s where I am taking you, to the ripple that capsized a family’s reality, mine, and on this day, it laps up onto the shore of your life. I wonder where you are, and how it will affect you.

Paul Connors, a family man, is returning to his modest home with his wife and oldest daughter Mary, after enjoying the seafood buffet special at the local Henderson casino. Their younger daughter didn’t want to go to dinner. When invited, she made a funny face and said, “Ger-Ross. You eat it. I’ll stay home and eat Lucky Charms.”

“Find your way home, Brown Sugar,” Paul Connors says to his Jeep, being, a man of simple pleasures.

As they pull into the short driveway, Mary looks to the right and sees a familiar car parked on the side of the house. “Will you take these in, Daddy,” she says, dropping the bags of dessert into the front seat between her parents. The clear, cold, desert night hits her face and pervades her open jacket. Her parents lag behind, locking up the Wagoneer. Mr. Connors gathers the doggie bags, shaking his head. Mrs. Connors walks to the street to collect the mail. Their firstborn, Mary Michelle Connors, slipstream in her long shadow, as silent as moonlight, races up the walk to the front door.

Mary twists the handle of the door, soundlessly, pushing it open. Practice pays off. Scaring your brazen little sister, in the same manner, year after year, is no easy task. Saving your sister and her boyfriend from being caught in the act by devout Catholic parents, simultaneously, is loyalty, hilarity, and brilliance, all at once. She steps in, like a Shaolin monk on rice paper, and across the threshold into the dark, empty living room. Summoning all of her chi, Mary shouts, “Boo!”

“BANG!”

“Cheyenne?” Silence. Mary walks toward the bang still resonating from the kitchen.

Blood. Blood? Dark red blood. Mary stumbles backward out of the kitchen feet never feeling the floor no sound coming from her screaming mouth in slow motion long legs running red hair flying in her face.

Crossing the threshold, sound at last escapes her mouth when the cold air hits her face -- “DADDY!” she screams, crashing into him on the front walk, knocking the bags of dessert onto the lawn, “They’re playing a joke Daddy make them stop it they’re playing a joke Daddy make them stop it.”

As Mary shrieks into her father’s chest, Mrs. Connors turns the corner with the mail under her arm. In the darkness, she cannot tell which of their daughters is hysterical. Colleen surmises it is Cheyenne -- because isn’t it always -- until her husband pries the young woman loose, pushes her behind him and into Colleen’s arms. As the mail slaps the pavement, Paul walks into his home, toward the light in the kitchen, calling out the name, “Cheyenne! Cheyenne!”

Six feet behind him follows a procession of dread. First, his wife, in cadence with each reluctant step, prays silently, Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with you. Clutching her mother’s bicep, Mary chants in a whisper, “They’re playing a joke Daddy make them stop it they’re playing a joke Daddy make them stop it,” but it is not a joke, and Paul Connors cannot make them stop dying together on the kitchen floor.

“This is no joke, Mary. Get your mother out of here. Call 911, then take your car and go get Justin’s dad. GO, Mary, NOW!” Paul shouts, without taking his eyes off his dying daughter.

Soon after, five police officers enter the modest Connors residence at 7183 River Run Drive. The sergeant walks to the doorway of the small kitchen, noting five paramedics grappling with the Grim Reaper for two teenage lives. Sergeant D shakes his head and remarks to himself aloud, “Shit. They’re just kids.” The cacophony and fluorescent light ooze from the kitchen into the dim dining room. Sergeant D backs away, flips on the dining room light, and points at his partner, Officer T, signaling him to come and replace him at the doorway.

The female is bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound to her face. Her name is Cheyenne Connors, and her brain is dead. The male suffers a gunshot wound, as well, that severed his tongue, sending half of it and his front teeth across the room where they lay, as yet, undiscovered. He is 16, a junior at Basic High School, and his name is Justin Daniel Castle. He is fighting for his young life, after sending a .9-millimeter round into his chin. His tongue will be saved, and he will speak again.

Two more police officers usher Cheyenne’s parents around a corner, down a narrow hallway, and into a bedroom for their statements. Another walks through the house, then will exit to walk its perimeter. Sergeant D sits on the couch with his radio and begins the paperwork. When Rookie K enters the residence, Sergeant D delegates him to the kitchen to, “secure the scene.” He meant for K to relieve T, and stand at the doorway.

Timing, indeed, is everything, for seconds after K relieves him, Officer T intercepts a young redhead charging through the front door towards the kitchen. T stretches out one well-muscled arm, catching Mary by her shoulders. As T takes hold of her, spinning her around, she begins to shriek, “CHEYENNE! CHEYENNE! I want to see my sister. Let me go you son of a bitch! AAAAAUUuugh – He killed my baby sister.”

Officer T is seven years on this force, a transplant from Philadelphia. He doesn’t want to disturb a potential crime scene by waltzing the sister through the house. T deftly keeps one arm tight around Mary’s shoulders, ushers her to the backyard, where he plans to console and question her, nor does Officer T want the redhead to watch the paramedics fighting to preserve just enough of the dying girl’s life for organ donation. T does not want her to have false hope, nor does he want her to see them wheeling a body bag out the front door. Sergeant D nods to T -- silent cop language for good call -- T winks back at him.

It is then that Rookie K, who is two months out of the academy, enters the kitchen. He sees two dying children, five paramedics, blood everywhere on everyone – and a gun, a .9-millimeter semi-automatic, shadowed by a cupboard’s overhang, and now illuminated by the dining room light. The gun rests inches from the hand of the boy, whose mouth is a bubbling fountain of blood. K glimpses the gun when it is bumped ever so slightly by the foot of a paramedic, R, who is on his knees attempting to intubate the gory mouth.

R is praying out loud, “Give me a hand here, God. I can’t find his airway. If you want him to live, God, the kid needs air.”

K sticks his head out of the kitchen and asks Sergeant D’s permission to move the weapon. The sergeant is sitting on the sofa, his back still to K. Without looking up from his report, the sergeant nods approval, “Go ahead then. Don’t get in the way in there.”

Young K is no different from any of us. His consciousness is his universe, and in his own private universe, Rookie K has established the guilt of the defendant-to-be. It is obvious to him that he is on the scene of a classic, yea, Shakespearean even, murder/suicide. The position of the gun near the boy’s hand and his contact wound, the non-contact wound on the girl and her position on the dishwasher door – he has solved his first big crime and a rather sensational one at that. It is at least a very bloody one.

The ego of this eager, well-intentioned rookie swells a little as he steps forward and instead commits his first professional sin, pride, the origination of degeneration. If you think about it, the entire Bible, which is rather long, had to be written because of the first three chapters, the first deadly sin: Pride, so it was, and so it is, the same scenario in all humanity, over and over again.

Rookie K picks up the gun, barehanded, and takes it to the dining room table in the next room. K’s sergeant hasn’t looked up from his report. His back is to K, who stands at the table -- his latex gloves tucked neatly in his pocket -- while he removes a live round from the chamber, disengages the clip from the gun, and in the process, destroys any possible fingerprint evidence.

Apparently, K has made it through life without viewing a single episode of Kojak – or Law and Order, depending on your age. Maybe his mom made him go to bed before reruns of Dragnet came on, before forensic science was dinnertime TV. One wonders if K had a television at all. This aberrant police behavior led to Rookie K’s fingerprints all over the weapon, which led in turn to: Defendant Castle’s Motion to Dismiss.

What WILL follow is not the sanitized Record. This is my Record. This is the story of the death of Cheyenne Connors, the prosecution of Justin Castle, the wizardry of the practice of law, and to me, what is the mystery of love. This is my first attempt to at last: