Above the Law (59 page)

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“Did you open this bank account?” John Q. asked. His face was flushing. He was losing composure. Not a good sign when your lawyer gets flustered.

“No,” Jerome answered adamantly. “I did not. I never even knew about it until I was informed in the grand jury.”

“What was your reaction?”

“I didn’t believe it,” Jerome said as convincingly as he could, which certainly fell short of anyone having full confidence in him, if I could read the looks the jurors were giving each other. “I still don’t know anything about it.”

“Or the five hundred thousand dollars?”

“I don’t know anything about this five hundred thousand dollars, or this bank account, or any of this. I didn’t open it, I didn’t deposit any money in it, I didn’t do anything about it.” Jerome was almost whining now, he seemed so frustrated and beaten down on this point.

“Once you found out there was a bank account in your name, with five hundred thousand dollars in it, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. It isn’t my account, so it isn’t my money.”

“That is your sworn testimony,” John Q. declared. “You did not open this bank account, nor did you deposit any money in it.”

“Like I said,” Jerome answered, his voice rising in anger, “I didn’t know it existed, so how could I have?”

“How, indeed,” John Q. rumbled. He shuffled some papers around, then asked quickly, “Why do you suppose anyone would set up a bank account for someone else, like this one?”

Before I could get to my feet, Jerome answered in a loud, powerful voice, “To frame me.”

“Objection!” I literally jumped out of my seat, knocking my chair over. “This is outrageous, Your Honor!” Pointing to Jerome, I cried, “What is he, a soothsayer? This line of questions and answers is nonsense and highly prejudicial to the fairness of these proceedings.”

“Sustained.” McBee looked down at John Q. with a weariness that belied his building impatience. “Any ideas like these are for final argument only. Stay with your examination, please. Or I’m going to have to terminate it.”

That caught the old man off-guard. “I’m not pushing for that,” he apologized. “I’ll be careful.”

“Do so,” the judge remonstrated him.

John Q. turned back to Jerome again. “You’ve known…you had been aware of Reynaldo Juarez for many years.”

Jerome nodded grimly. “Yes.”

“Before you joined the DEA.”

A murmur: “Yes.”

McBee looked down from the bench. “Speak up, please. The jurors can’t hear you, or the court reporter.”

“Yes,” Jerome said more loudly, not bothering to conceal his anger.

“You had a dispute with him over your sister, while they were in college together?”

“Yes.”

Dispute?
I thought. He almost killed Juarez. I made a note—that was not going to get by unchallenged.

“Tell us about that, if you would, from your perspective.”

Jerome rearranged himself in the witness chair. He’d been looking forward to doing this for years. This was going to be a good one.

“We heard Diane was dating someone in her class. We figured it was fine. A student at Stanford, one of the finest universities in the world. How bad could that be?”

His face darkened; he took a sip of water.

“Then we started finding out bits and pieces, things about this kid, this Juarez. Him being Chicano, we didn’t give a damn about that. That’s like being Irish, two generations ago. If anything, you give a person like that credit, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, you know? How many Chicanos from east Los Angeles wind up at Stanford? Hardly any, I’ll bet. So you figure he’s got plenty on the ball.”

He paused again. This was sickening, I thought as I listened to these lies. He was a bigoted Irish prick from a low-rent family, all of whom hated Juarez precisely because he was Chicano, no other reason.

“But then we started hearing stuff about him. What he’d been doing in L.A. before he went to Palo Alto. The more we heard, the uglier it got. The guy was a common criminal, a thug. How he ever got into Stanford I’ll never figure out. Affirmative action or some such crap, I guess. Tells you everything you need to know about affirmative action, doesn’t it?”

I looked at the Latinos and Native Americans on the jury. They didn’t seem put off by Jerome’s ethnic smears. Maybe they believed that propaganda, like other rural, suspicious people. Or maybe they just didn’t get it; not a good omen.

“What did you do then?” John Q. interjected.

“We talked to Diane about him, over the telephone. My mother, my father. Begging her to listen to the facts. We told her about this person she was so blind over that she couldn’t see who he really was.” He shook his head sadly. “She didn’t hear us. She couldn’t. She was blinded by love. It was so pitiful, to listen to her.”

Jesus, I thought, this bastard has more blarney in him than all of Dublin. And he was doing it so convincingly. He could, because he believed it: not the facts, but the emotions. No greaser was going to be his kin, he’d kill the fucker first.

Not that he said that. Under John Q.’s easy prodding, he went on with his story.

“Finally, we had to go out there. My brothers and me. We didn’t want anything bad to happen. He could stay at Stanford, we didn’t care. All we wanted was for him to leave go of Diane. She didn’t know any better, we were her family, we had to protect her. That’s what families are for, isn’t it?” he asked, looking up plaintively.

“Yes, they are,” old John Q. assured him. “That’s exactly what they’re for. To take care of each other. Go on, son,” John Q. said kindly.

I really felt like laughing. I could have objected to this nonsensical display, this third-rate dinner-theater emoting, but to what point? It was such obvious crap. All the facts were in direct contradiction to this self-serving bullshit. It’s the same old story—when you don’t have the truth on your side, lie.

“We met up with him—Juarez. We went someplace private, to talk to him.”

“He went with you willingly?”

“He wasn’t happy about it.”

That was good strategy, I thought. John Q. had rehearsed that with Jerome. Admit to a few small damaging details, they’ll believe you on the big ones.

“That’s understandable,” John Q. said. “Go on.”

“We convinced him it would be the right thing to do, to come talk with us.”

“Did you use force to convince him to come with you?” John Q. asked cagily, anticipating my cross.

Jerome shook his head. “No, we did not. We didn’t want to
pound
sense into him, we wanted to
talk
it into him.”

“Then what happened?” John Q. asked as if he were truly interested in finding out. “How did Juarez get hurt so badly?”

Jerome shut his eyes for a moment, rubbed his temples as if he had a terrible headache.

“He pulled a gun on us.”

“He what?” John Q. asked, glancing at the jurors as he did.

“He pulled a gun on us,” Jerome said again, louder.

“That must have been frightening. None of you were in law enforcement yet, were you? You and your brothers.”

“No, we were just kids. Of course it scared us. Some guy from east L.A., you already know he’s a criminal, he pulls a gun? You figure he’s going to kill you.”

“So then what did you do?”

Jerome shrugged, the easy shrug of a man who does a hard job and doesn’t like to brag about it. “We disarmed him.”

“You managed to get his weapon away from him.”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“We beat him up. He pulled a gun on us, for crying out loud,” he said defensively. “What were we supposed to do, let him go his merry way?”

John Q. paused before asking his next series of questions. Walking up to the witness box, standing right next to Jerome, he said, “Your sister has testified that you forced her to get an abortion.”

Jerome shook his head firmly. “That isn’t true. We didn’t force her.”

“She didn’t get an abortion?”

“Abortion is a sin. My family is antiabortion. That goes against our strongest core beliefs. Only God can decide that.”

“Are you telling this court that your sister did not have an abortion?” John Q. asked again.

Jerome buried his head in his hands. When he looked up, he whispered, “She had one.”

“But you didn’t make her?”

Jerome’s voice was choking. “No. She decided to do it on her own. We tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted. She didn’t want to have any part of his life, especially his child.”

I watched Jerome, writhing in fake agony. At that particular moment I wanted to kill him myself. There are lies, and then there are unforgivable lies. This was an unforgivable lie. Thank God Diane Richards wasn’t here in the courtroom to hear this.

“And that’s it?” John Q. placed a comforting hand on his client’s shoulder.

“That’s it. After that, we figured we’d done what we could, Diane could do whatever she wanted. She chose to come home, thank God. But it was her free choice, I swear it.”

Judge McBee gave us a ten-minute piss break. John Q. was loitering by himself in an out-of-the-way hallway outside the courtroom. No one else was around. I ambled over to him. He looked up, gave me an old pro’s smile.

“You’re going to hell, you know that, don’t you?” I said, smiling back at him.

“We’re all going to hell, Luke. Whatever hell is.”

“Lying is a sin, John Q. You’ve got this good Irish-Catholic boy up there lying his brains out.”

“That’s for the jury to judge. Isn’t that what you’ve been preaching? Let lawyers try cases, let juries decide them?”

I wagged a finger at him. For some reason, I was feeling good about this, my knowing Jerome was lying through his teeth, John Q. knowing I knew. It made me feel better, as I regarded my own doubts. I still had them, but Jerome was such an arrogant prick I was going to be happy to see him get shafted. And he was going to be.

“You asked him if he killed Juarez, and he said no. You know the obligation of a lawyer to disclose the truth, if he knows his client’s lying. Especially about murder.”

John Q. looked away for a moment, then turned back to me. “The man swears to me that he didn’t do it, Luke. I have to believe him, he’s my client.” He paused. “And you know what? I think I do.”

“You’re the only one who does, then.”

“We’ll see what the jury has to say about that,” he gravel-voiced his soft reply. “You never know what’s going to happen in that cramped little room, once we pros leave it to the amateurs.” One more smile. “That’s the beauty of the system, isn’t it. The sheer and terrifying unpredictability.”

John Q. was almost finished. “There’s one last section we have to cover. An important one.”

Jerome, looking refreshed, nodded, almost eagerly.

“You went to college and got your degree in criminology.”

“That’s correct.”

“And then you joined the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

“I was on the Chicago police force first for a few years. Then I joined up.”

“You moved up the ranks quickly.”

A self-deprecating shrug. “I worked hard. You work hard, you get rewarded.”

“At some point you began tracking a large drug ring. Juarez’s drug ring.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“When you got involved investigating this terrible drug ring, did you know that Juarez was the leader? That your sister’s former boyfriend was, in fact, the same man?”

Jerome shook his head. “No, I did not.”

“You were just going after a vicious drug lord.”

“That’s my job. That’s our job, all of us in the agency.”

“At what point did you realize Juarez was that same person?”

Jerome looked up at the ceiling, as if in deep thought. “I don’t recall.”

“A few weeks later? A few months?”

“Oh, no. It was years later. Several years later.”

“At that point, when you discovered the connection, did you think you should take yourself off the case? Hand it over to another agent?”

Jerome nodded slowly. “I thought about it. I gave it a lot of thought.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“By then, it didn’t matter,” Jerome answered. “My focus was on who he was, then, not who he had been. And I had compiled a huge dossier, I had contacts working for me I’d spent years cultivating. You can’t hand something that big and important over to a fresh team. You’d lose years of momentum. We couldn’t afford that.”

“So your going after Reynaldo Juarez for as long and as hard as you did wasn’t about revenge?”

“No, sir,” Jerome answered forcefully. “It was about justice.” He paused. “But it confirmed the truth of my family’s feelings from twenty years earlier. Juarez was an evil, corrupt, dangerous criminal. My sister should get down on her knees every night and say a prayer thanking her family that we cared enough about her to take care of her, when she was too blind to take care of herself.”

It was late in the day, so Judge McBee recessed court until the following morning. I went back to the office to begin preparing my cross-examination. Jerome’s attempts to right his ship, which had already been three-fourths underwater, hadn’t done much for him, despite John Q.’s attempts to put a positive spin on his actions. Either everyone in the world was engaged in a great conspiracy against him, or he was lying through his teeth. If he’d killed Juarez during a misguided raid, and that was all there was to it, the jury might have let him off—a mercy verdict, because Juarez was evil. But when revenge, premeditation, and killing for money were factored in, he didn’t stand a chance.

Aside from the events in the courtroom, I was on an emotional roller coaster. If I hadn’t found out all this new stuff, I would have lit up a victory cigar. I still could, because no one else knew, only me, Kate, and Riva. But because of this fresh information, my impending win—I was going to win, I had no doubts about that now—was leaving a sour taste in my mouth. All the evidence pointed to Jerome as the killer. It’s what hadn’t been placed into evidence that was disturbing me, more and more. The smoke was blacker and thicker, but I still hadn’t found a fire.

I reread bits and pieces of all the material I’d accumulated since the first time I’d come up to Blue River to meet with Nora. It was a mess, because it was complicated, and because the two elements that would have tidied everything up—witness and weapon—didn’t exist.