Daughter's Keeper (26 page)

“Fight,” she said. “I want to fight.”

“Good,” Izaya said, smiling. “I want to fight, too.”

“So what do we do now?”

“We do what we've been doing. We prepare for trial.”

Olivia nodded, and, pushing thoughts of Jorge from her mind, pulled a pad and pen from her bag. “Did you find out anything more about Contreras?”

Izaya grinned in a way that was at once playful and mean. “You bet I did,” he said.

In the spring and summer of 1980, Cuba heaved open the doors of its prisons and insane asylums and vomited the scum of its society onto American shores. Or at least that's what Izaya told Olivia he was planning on telling the jury. The truth, he explained, was a little more complicated. The truth was that, by and large, those Cubans floating toward the shores of Miami in the Mariel boatlift were decent people who had somehow run afoul of Castro or were merely looking for an easier, safer life. However, amid the tide of political and economic refugees bobbed a foul flotsam of criminals, lunatics, and malcontents of every stripe and proclivity.

Gabriel Contreras was one of the scum. He'd made his living in Cuba as a drug dealer who committed no actual crimes—he sold talcum powder, baby laxative, and cornstarch to addicts too addled to tell the difference. While the crime of fraud on the junkies of Havana was not one even Castro's judicial system was able to find within its abilities to punish, it had garnered him a stay in a crumbling lunatic asylum on the outskirts of the city. That bit of good fortune had bought him a ticket on an ancient fishing boat whose motor died within sight of the Florida Keys.

The team of U.S. doctors and immigration officials reviewing Gabriel Contreras's asylum application concluded that, while he was certainly a sociopath and quite possibly insane, there was no legal reason to continue his detention, and so he was released into the indifferent arms of American freedom. Contreras did with his opportunity what one might expect. Finding actual narcotics much easier to acquire on the streets of Miami than they had been in Havana, he became an honest-to-goodness dope dealer, one who offered at least a small percentage of legitimate product to his customers. Within a couple of years, he found himself back in custody. This time, with the aid of a criminal defense lawyer who'd left Cuba only a few years before Contreras himself, he translated his arrest into a career as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency. By the time he had set his sights on Jorge and Olivia, Contreras had a total of thirteen convictions to his credit. He had earned more than three million dollars over the course of fewer than four years of federal employment and had been permitted to keep a hunter-green Lincoln Navigator seized by the feds during the investigation of one of his cases.

“Man, Olivia, this guy is evil,” Izaya said. “I want to bring him down so bad. I'm aching for the chance to stand in front of a jury and count out every one of the millions of taxpayer dollars that despicable sponge has soaked up.”

“Wow,” Olivia said. “Despicable sponge. That's good. Write that down and use it in your closing.”

Izaya laughed. “I already have. Gabriel is evil, and the jury will know it. He's not the problem.”

“What
is
the problem?”

Izaya had been pacing the room as he recounted Contreras's history. Now he sat down in his chair and threw his feet up on the desk.

“You. You're the problem.”

“Me?”

“Yup. On the one hand, you're the perfect defendant. You're a pretty white girl with a mother who cares about you and a big old pregnant belly. The jury is going to think of you as one of their own—a suburban girl who came under the sway of an unscrupulous boyfriend and went along for a ride she never should have.”

“But on the other hand?”

Izaya took his feet down and sat up at his desk. “On the other hand, maybe we shouldn't even go to trial. Maybe we shouldn't be playing Russian Roulette with your life.”

“We've had this discussion before. I don't want to plead guilty.”

Izaya leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Then he bobbed forward again.

“Man, this would be so much easier if you were someone else.”

“What do you mean? If I were who?”

He rubbed a hand across the top of his hair. “I don't know. Any one of my other clients. It would be easier if you were a smack-addicted bank robber or some punk gang-banger.”

“Why? What are you talking about?”

“I don't know.” He yanked the elastic out of his hair, smoothed the locks back with his palm, and snapped the band back in place. “I don't know. It's just that you're…”

“I'm
what
?”

“You're…”

“
What?
” she said, impatient and confused.

“Nothing.” He jerked his chair around. “Forget it. Let's go over the transcripts of the tapes again.”

She looked at him for moment, wondering what it was he'd almost said to her. Then she shrugged, and, as she pulled her chair in, she caught sight of a photograph on the desk. It was a man in a black leather jacket and a red helmet sitting astride a motorcycle.

“Is this you?” she asked.

He looked up from the documents. “Yeah. My mom emailed it to me, and I printed it out on the office photo printer. I don't normally have pictures of myself just lying around.”

“Cool bike,” Olivia said.

Izaya looked at the picture and smiled. “It's a Buell Cyclone M2. I just traded in my Harley for it.”

“It reminds me of the Batmobile. Or the, what, the Batcycle, I guess.”

Izaya laughed. “Maybe that's why I love it so much. I was a huge Batman fan when I was a kid.”

“I liked Wonder Woman,” she said. “The invisible plane. The magic lasso to make people do what you say.” Olivia reached out a finger and traced the rearview mirror that stuck up from the motorcycle's handlebars like a cockroach's antennae. “So where does a public defender get the money for a bike like this? Should I be slipping you a bribe under the table or something?”

“I do okay, even without kickbacks. And it's just me, you know. I'm not married. No girlfriend. No life. All I do is work. I live in a dumpy little apartment in the Mission that costs me next to nothing. Food, clothes, and my bike. That's where my money goes.”

“How come a guy like you doesn't have a girlfriend?” Olivia ­didn't look at him when she asked the question. She kept her eyes firmly affixed to the photograph.

“A guy like me?” Izaya leaned against in his chair, his feet outstretched. “What kind of guy am I?”

She smiled faintly and reached for the picture. Her knuckles grazed his. His hand was cool, but she felt as though her entire body flushed when they touched. He jerked back as if she'd hurt him.

She shrugged and raised her eyes to his face. They smiled at one another. Suddenly he looked down at the documents on his desk.

“So, was this the extent of your phone conversation with the informant? Or was there more that didn't get taped?”

She felt suddenly let down, dragged back to earth, to the grim reality of her predicament.

“I wish I had an invisible plane,” she said.

***

“Are you going to come for a run with me, or are you going to spend the rest of the fucking day staring at that computer screen?”

Elaine looked up. “Were we supposed to go running?”

“No, we weren't
supposed
to go running. But, in case you've forgotten, we generally do go running on Saturday mornings. Or for a bike ride. Or something. We don't usually sit glued to the computer like retarded thirteen-year-old boys.”

“Arthur! I'm not glued to the computer. I'm answering my email. I have a ton of it, and I don't get much time during the week. You're the one who signed me up for this ‘fucking' listserv in the first place.”

A few weeks before, Arthur had called Elaine into the makeshift office he'd set up in a corner of the dining room after Olivia had evicted him from the room he had assumed as his office. He had spent some time surfing the Web and found Elaine a site maintained by an organization called Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Elaine had ordered FAMM's book of photographs and personal essays and, with Arthur's encouragement, had joined a listserv for parents and spouses of defendants in federal drug cases. For the first week or so Elaine had not posted anything to the group, but she had logged on daily to read the fifty or sixty ­messages in her box. She had come to know the other posters, all of whom signed themselves by name and by the sentence imposed on their loved ones. There were six or seven women whose husbands were serving life terms for marijuana cultivation. As one of the women reminded the list again and again, in the federal system, life meant life—there was no parole. Some of the posters were parents of young men and women doing five-, ten-, and twenty-year sentences for cocaine and heroin offenses; one was the father of a twenty-year-old boy who had mailed a page of blotter acid to his eighteen-year-old sister. Both were now serving ten years.

Elaine read about parents who knew they would never see their children graduate from college or have families of their own and about wives who were afraid they would never again see their husbands outside of a prison visiting room. Her inbox was filled with calls to action, cries of despair, and rants of frustration. But the worst by far were the emails about children whose mothers were inside. Children who could not visit their incarcerated parents more than once a year because they had been moved to correctional institutions in different states. Children growing up without their mothers' presence and out of their mothers' sight.

After several days of lurking, horrified and enthralled, Elaine had posted her first message. She described Olivia's situation and her own fears. She didn't, however, tell the list that Olivia was pregnant. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps it was because she still trusted that, if the unthinkable happened, and Olivia lost her case, she wouldn't keep her baby. Or perhaps it was more simple than that. Perhaps she simply could not face the possibility that Olivia's child would grow up like the others on the FAMM list, without its mother. She could not bear even to imagine her grandchild, that lost and lonely hypothetical child, aching for a touch that was denied him.

The members of the group had welcomed Elaine as they welcomed every new member, with open arms, notes of sympathy, and compassion. Elaine felt at home, amazingly so, in the virtual ­neighborhood of families of tragedy. She surprised herself with the rawness of her emails, with the extent she was willing to confide in these strangers her fears and apprehensions. She asked technical legal questions about Olivia's case and the mandatory minimums and the federal sentencing guidelines. Each of her posts garnered tens of responses; all supportive, knowledgeable, and filled with information and even, although it seemed so unlikely, with love.

“When I helped you subscribe to this list, it never occurred to me that I would end up an Internet widower,” Arthur said, his tone of jocularity so obviously faked that it made Elaine feel sorry for him.

“I'm sorry, honey. I promise I'm not addicted. It's just that there's so
much
. There's a ton of information out there, and I'm just starting to learn about it. There's going to be a delegation going to D.C. to lobby Congress, and we're trying to draft a series of demands for them to take with them.” She didn't describe to Arthur the threads that had nothing to do with data, news, or advice—that were not about specific action but rather opportunities to rage and vent and cry. She knew that would be utterly beyond his ken.

Arthur did a knee bend and touched his hands to his toes. “Look, I'm all warmed up and I want to go. Are you coming with me or not?”

Elaine opened her mouth, about to tell him to go on without her, but the look on his face made her change her mind. She snapped the laptop closed and got up.

The two of them started off slowly, running up Russell Street toward Claremont Avenue and the hills of Tilden Park. It had been days since Elaine had had any exercise at all. That fact surprised her. Since she'd met Arthur they had worked out almost every day, together or separately. Exercise was Arthur Roth's religion. It was his favorite activity, and, other than foot massages, his only source of relaxation. Before meeting him, she had been on the plump side of normal, happy to go to a yoga class if she had time but equally eager to spend her weekends lying on the couch reading novels. Now, years later, she was fit and strong, able to run six miles up and down hills or bike for hours at a time. She'd grown to appreciate the way her body moved and worked, although she'd never achieved the euphoric endorphin rush about which Arthur so often crowed.

They pounded up the hill to the park and then turned off the road onto a marked trail. Arthur shot forward with a burst of speed, sprinted up a hill, then coasted back down. Returning to her side, he matched his pace to her slower one.

“Olivia's looking well,” he said.

“She is, isn't she?” Elaine wheezed a bit with the effort of talking while she ran. They reached the top of the hill together and began the gentle descent to the other side. Breathing more easily, Elaine looked up at the rolling hills dotted with clumps of black oaks. One of the things Elaine loved about Berkeley was how close she was to vast spaces empty of houses and telephone wires and populated exclusively with cows, deer, and even the odd mountain lion. She had fallen in love with the East Bay the first time she'd driven through a fragrant eucalyptus grove high up here in the hills. Back home in New Jersey, if you wanted to leave people behind and be somewhere that even approximated wild, you had to drive for hours down to the Pine Barrens or up to the Catskill mountains. Here, it was all so close, a few minutes' jog into the hills.