Against the Wind (38 page)

“So now what? How soon do we get out of here?”

“You don’t. Not for a while.”

“But she turned her story. She’s their whole case,” he says, un-comprehendingly. “Fair’s fair … isn’t it?”

“Fair doesn’t count. You ought to know that by now.”

“But still …”

He’s scared again, already. A minute of euphoria; less. Then what it is.

I explain how it’s going to work. (Later today, I’ll go through this same exercise with the other three. I’d asked to be allowed to see them all at once, that this was a special one-time situation, but my request was summarily vetoed, especially since I didn’t give the warden particulars, which I have to save for the court.) I’ll take Rita Gomez’s video to the Supreme Court and petition for a motion for a new trial, based on this recanted testimony, which was suppressed during the original trial. Once they’ve granted it, assuming they do, I’ll move that the charges against the bikers be dropped because her stuff won’t be usable anymore, without it the state doesn’t have a case, and anyway the whole original trial was riddled with perjury and coercion. I feel pretty confident that’s the way it’ll go; Robertson wanted to burn these puppies, but he’s not an idiot.

“So how long?” he asks.

“Count on six months,” I answer. “It could be less but the wheels of justice grind slowly, especially when the state’s got egg all over its face.”

“Yeh.”

He can do six months standing on his head. They all can. He doesn’t like it, none of them will, but at least they can see the end coming.

I look at him.

“How are you?”

He looks back at me; the look I remember from before, when we first met.

“Innocent, man. Like I always was.”

IN THE SUPREME COURT
for the State of New Mexico. Order: Upon motion by the defendants in the State vs. Jensen et al., the Court hereby remands this matter for a hearing on defendants’ motion for a new trial.

SIMPLE ENOUGH STATEMENT
. Of course, it took two months to get to it. I couldn’t get hold of Paul, that first night back, but Tommy and Mary Lou and I celebrated, the three of us far into the night, then she and I the remainder. She has a nice place, the new girl of my dreams, just north of town, an adobe house with a stellar city view, new but authentic, exposed piñon vegas running the length inside. I stayed that night; the first time I slept at a woman’s place since Holly left me (which technically was my place, too, although she claimed otherwise). The first of many, hopefully. So it’s the next morning, I’m in Robertson’s office, he kept me waiting forty-five minutes, what else is new, old friendships may die hard but they do die. I’m sitting across from him, trying not to look like the cat that ate the canary, he’s impatient, ‘I’ve got a full schedule today, this better be important.’ Wordlessly, I hand him the affidavit.

He starts to skim it, stops short, looks at me with alarm, reads it slowly. I’m watching him, sipping my coffee. He reads with concentration, a couple times flipping back to check something he’s already read. It’s a longish document, twenty-odd pages, he takes his sweet time. I’m in no hurry; he can take all morning if he desires, I want this to sink in.

He finishes it. It falls from his fingers to the desk. I reach over, deftly pick it up, put it back in my briefcase. He steeples his fingers, looking at the far wall, the ceiling. Getting his thoughts together as best he can. I’m patient; I can sit him out this time.

“Can I have a copy of that?” he asks.

“At the appropriate time.”

“When are you going to file it?”

“This afternoon if I can. Otherwise tomorrow.”

He nods.

“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he says finally.

“It’s a good thing for my clients you’re not me,” I answer. “Why not?”

“Because it’s a pack of lies. A complete and utter fabrication. It stinks to high hell, Will, and it could ruin your career.” He picks up a pencil, nervously twirls it between his fingers like a drum majorette.

“I disagree.”

We stare at each other, a Mexican face-off. The psychic wall between us at this moment is thicker and more impenetrable than the real glass one that separates me from the bikers in prison.

“I’m a liar,” he says flatly. “A perjurer. A fabricator of false evidence. A criminal.”

“No one’s saying that,” I reply. Cautious, boy, don’t get into a spitting match with him.

“It says so.” He points to my briefcase. “That rag in there.”

“The two cops. Moseby. Not you.”

He shakes his head. “The buck stops here,” he intones, finger stabbing hard on his desk, “my department, my men.” Long exhale of breath. “My life.”

“You were duped.”

“Screw you, Will.”

“I’m serious, John. Your own people sandbagged you. Can’t you see that? For Godsakes, can’t you see that now? Finally?”

His face is turning red, the veins bulging in his forehead. If he wasn’t such a physical specimen I’d be scared for him. I’m already scared for me.

“I’m supposed to take the word of some goddam whore, some chippy greaser who can’t add two and two, I’m supposed to now believe that everything she said was a lie, that now she’s telling the truth, that my number one deputy and two of the best men in this county’s sheriff’s office, who between them have forty or more years of experience, with a couple hundred commendations, not a blemish on either one’s record, I’m supposed to believe they concocted the whole thing?”

“I do,” I answer as calmly as I can. I’m very calm; I know I’m right, I know he knows it, or at least is harboring strong doubts about everything in this case. About his own judgment.

“Funny,” I muse, pressing my luck a tad. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. “When she was your witness she was a paradigm of truth. Now she’s a chippy liar.”

“Shit.” He waves that off. “Don’t confuse the issue.” He looks at me like I just stepped in a pile of dogshit and tracked it into his office.

“Where is she?” he asks.

“In a safe place.”

“Where?” he demands.

“Someplace where your people can’t get to her,” I fire back. “Like they did last time.”

“You’d better hope so.”

I bristle. “Is that a threat, John? Are you threatening my witness?” Son of a bitch, we are really playing hardball now.

“Take it any way you want,” he answers darkly. “I don’t break the law, I uphold it, remember?”

“It’s hard to sometimes, when I hear that kind of shit.”

“Fuck it all.” He leans forward on his desk, getting in my face. I don’t back off.

“If my boys’re lying,” he says, “then so is Doc Grade. Merely one of this country’s most eminent and respected forensic pathologists. He’s lying, too, isn’t he, Will?”

I’d thought about that. “Not necessarily,” I say.

“Oh, yes, necessarily,” John says. “They support each other. Without his testimony, hers is suspect. They go hand-in-glove.”

“Not if your boys knew about his theory before they found her,” I throw back at him. “Not if they took it and incorporated it into the stuff they fed her.”

Robertson snaps his pencil in half. “You’re smoking some powerful weed, Will. What else? Maybe she didn’t even know them? How about that? Maybe that was a lie, too.”

“We know she did,” I say. “A hundred people testified to that.”

“What if they’re all lying, too?” he asks.

I stand. This is going nowhere but bad.

“See you in court, John.”

“I’ll be there.” He looks at me with the conviction of the true believer. “I almost buried you before, Will. This time I’ll finish the job.”

Or you’ll dig your own grave, asshole, I think but don’t say as I walk out on him, feeling his eyes on my back even after I close the door behind me.

“
RITA. IT’S ME.
Will Alexander. Open the door.”

I knock again. No answer. It’s almost ten at night, she should be here.

“Rita?”

Fuck. Why isn’t she here? I talked to her just yesterday, told her I was coming up, to make sure she was there, waiting. Our motion for a new trial is next week, I want to go over everything with her again.

It’s been four months since I took her statement, four months since I first broke the news to the boys in the slam, four months since I braced John Robertson in his office. Four nut-cutting months. I’ve had over two dozen meetings with Robertson. Moseby was in on some of them, although Robertson was careful not to do anything that could prejudice him later: his
número uno
lieutenant could be on the other side someday, a defendant in a perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial, if it ever came to that.

Appeals are automatic at the death-penalty level, the higher courts get involved in all of them, no big deal. Once Robertson calmed down and saw this was legitimate, that I wasn’t grandstanding, self-promoting myself into a media-circus dog-and-pony show, he and I agreed to keep it quiet, let it be judged in the courts, not the press.

It’ll be a bombshell when it hits, though. The closer we come to the hearing date the less sleep I’ve gotten; I’m not alone there, I’m sure Robertson, my fellow lawyers, his people, the bikers, everyone connected who knows it’s coming down has done his or her share of eyeballing the ceiling at 3:00 A.M.

“Come on, Rita, open up.” I knock again, harder.

From behind doors up and down the corridor I hear muffled televisions, stereos, the usual evening noises. Behind her door, though, it’s silent.

“Rita!”

I pound. Nothing.

She isn’t there. After I told her when I was coming, made her repeat my instructions back to me. Goddam it, why the fuck aren’t you here, you scuzzy bitch? Why does nine-tenths of my life revolve around this cretin, this piece of flotsam?

She’s fucking somebody: that’s it. She’s with a man behind this door that I’m at this point practically knocking down; my knuckles’ll start bleeding soon if I keep pounding this hard. She picked up some sailor (sailor? not in Denver; some cowboy), is even now spreading her legs for him, her practiced juicy snatch awaiting his pleasure. Or maybe it’s one of the detectives we’re paying to keep tabs on her. Let’s face it, the profession isn’t what it was when Sam Spade was prowling the mean streets.

Talk about your primal love-hate relationship; I need her desperately and hate her passionately at one and the same time.

Too bad. I hate to break up a love-tryst but business before pleasure. I have a key to the place; I made sure of that. I take it out, unlock the door.

“Honey, I’m home.” I push the door open, like Ricky Ricardo used to do, wondering what Lucy was cooking up this time. Play it cool, ace, she’s everything to you.

Like the song says, the light’s on, but there’s no one home. Shit scattered around: a couple days’ dishes in the sink, food in the fridge, the closets half-empty, ditto the drawers, some of her toilet-articles are still in the bathroom. She threw together what she could grab fast. Not a leisurely exit; she took off running scared.

Flown the coop. Gone.

Mary Lou flies up the next morning. We scour the town: bars, hotels, motels, YWCAs, restaurants, anyplace someone on the run could be hiding out. Greyhound, Amtrak, the airlines. Nothing, which is no more than I expected. I don’t know her friends, if she has any, how much money she had, how big a jump she got on me. If she bailed right after our last conversation she could be anywhere now, including out of the country.

We spend two days looking. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack, worse; because we don’t know where the haystack is, if there is one.

She could be dead.

I try to put that thought out of my mind, but I can’t help it. She could’ve been gotten to. I warned her, over and over, don’t make friends, don’t give anyone your phone number, don’t bring anyone home. Above all, don’t go to the cops for any reason. They are not your friends. They’d like to see you out of the way worse than anyone, because you’re a potential cop-killer, destroyer of their deepest, closest bonds.

And they knew she was up here; they’d sent her. They’ve had four months, four months is plenty of time for the police to find someone when they want to. The Denver cops would’ve helped them, if not actively, at least by getting out of the way.

That’s a chilling thought. Robertson wouldn’t countenance that, ever. I know Moseby doesn’t have the balls to do something that desperate, but Gomez and Sanchez; who knows? A long shot; but long shots happen sometimes.

More likely, the reality, the terrifying prospect of having to go back to Santa Fe, go to court, face the men who’d set her up, was too much for her to handle. It wasn’t her fault that she got raped, that she knew some shitheel who got himself killed by the same bunch of bad guys who’d raped her, threatened her life. She was a victim, that’s all. She doesn’t want to be a victim anymore. I can understand it. For the first time, I feel for her.

“Now what?” Mary Lou asks.

“I don’t know. You got any ideas?”

We’re in a lounge at Stapleton Airport, waiting for our flight to Albuquerque. We’ve been here less than a half-hour and I’m three Johnnie Blacks to the good. Every time I try to cut down on my drinking this kind of shit happens.

“I’ve never been to Hawaii,” she says.

“Did you pack a bathing suit?”

“I brought my American Express Gold Card. Same difference.”

We look at each other in despair. I signal the waitress for another round.

“Will …” A cautioning.

“What the fuck’s the difference?” I feel so bad I want to cry. “I’m entitled. I’m drinking for five.”

“They wouldn’t want you to. I don’t either.”

“They pay me for my advice, not the other way around,” I say, wallowing in my angry self-pity.

“I don’t.”

“Aw babe,” I wail, “come on, lighten up, please? I don’t deserve to be lectured at. Not tonight.”

“All right.” She shrugs, washing her hands of it.

Shit. I hate it when someone gives in that way. Victory through guilt-tripping.

The waitress comes over to take our order. I put my hand over my glass.

“Changed my mind,” I smile wanly. She walks away. I glare at Mary Lou. “Happy?”

“Yes,” she says. “So …”