Against the Wind (12 page)

“I must’ve missed it,” I tell her, leafing through my notes. She refills my cup, adds a precise amount of half-and-half, stirs it in for me. I look up. “It was Saturday morning when they were here. You’re sure?”

“Damn straight I’m sure,” she replies with indignation. “I said so didn’t I? Well didn’t I?”

“Of course,” I reply quickly. Maggie’s not someone I want to pick a fight with. For one thing, it could keep me here a couple hours extra, and I’ve got places to go and people to see.

“Do I look like I have Alzheimer’s disease to you?” she continues. “Do I? My mind is so sharp,” she goes on, not waiting for an answer, “that a professor from MIT, that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to you, doctor, told me he wanted me to come back to Boston, Massachusetts, to study me. My brain. He said I had the most accurate brain of any mature person he had ever encountered. Yes, it was Saturday morning. Bright and early.”

“Do you recall how early? When they showed up?”

“They was setting on the front stoop when I opened up.” Maggie lives in a little apartment in the back. She showed it to me once. It’s decorated in mostly Hawaiian tourist style.

“Which was when?”

“Seven-thirty. Regular as clockwork. Not seven-twenty-five,” she says forcefully. “Not seven-thirty-five. Seven-thirty. A.M. amen.”

I jot down the information in my notebook. The bikers had told me the same story: after leaving Santa Fe before sunup, they’d ridden south, stopped for gasoline and a couple six-packs at an all-night mini-mart north of Cerrillos, and got to Madrid about seven, where they’d camped out on Maggie’s porch until she opened. The station attendant, a teenage boy with a severe case of neck boils, had remembered them vividly. Maggie might think them pussycats but they’d definitely scared him, four apparitions riding out of the night on low-slung hogs: the stuff of American nightmares. They drank one of the six-packs while they stood there filling their bikes, no more than fifteen or twenty seconds to the can. It was right before six when they got there; the boy remembered it precisely because while they were doing their business he’d turned on the TV to catch the first news and it ran a color-bar for about a minute before the six o’clock program came on. I’d showed him a time-coded credit card receipt Goose had signed. That’s the one, the boy had said affirmatively. I’d also shown him pictures, Polaroids I’d taken the day before. It was them, no doubt about it. You don’t forget four strangers like that, not hardly.

“What’d they eat?” I ask Maggie. I don’t really care, I just want to test that so-called brain of hers. I drain my coffee; it’s cold, acidy-tasting under the sweet cream. My back is getting cold from the air-conditioner blowing on my wet shirt.

“Bacon and eggs over medium, grits, wheat toast. Ham and easy over, hashed browns, biscuits. Bacon and scrambled hard, hashed browns, white toast. French toast, bacon. Four milks, three coffees. The kid didn’t drink coffee. And four large O.J.’s,” she concludes, trumping me.

I put a dollar on the counter, wave her off from making change, close my notebook.

“You bailing out on me, doctor?”

“Places to go and people to see,” I reply.

“Don’t take your time coming back. And bring your little girl with you next time. She like them castanets I gave her?”

“She loves them,” I tell her. “Practically sleeps with them.” I’d stopped in about a year ago with Claudia, and Maggie had insisted on giving us the grand tour. Claudia’s eye had caught an old pair of Spanish castanets sitting on Maggie’s bureau, a gift from an old admirer, and Maggie had made her a gift of them there and then. I didn’t think Maggie needed to know Claudia had lost interest by the afternoon and shortly after had misplaced them, never to be seen again.

“Well tell her hello for me,” Maggie says, beaming. “Tell her there’s another present waiting for her with her name on it.”

“I will,” I say. “And thanks.”

I walk to the door. I can feel a blast of heat on the other side.

“Them boys,” she calls out. “What kind of trouble they in, doctor?”

“Big trouble,” I tell her.

“They kill that man up in the mountains I saw on TV?” she asks querulously.

“The law says they did.”

“They did not kill that man,” she tells me with certainty. She hesitates. “You lawyering for them?”

I nod. She nods too, somehow reassured.

“You think they killed that man?” Her voice cracks, slides; the old lady underneath she can’t repress at this moment.

“No,” I answer. “They didn’t kill him.”

She’s the first noncombatant who’s heard the words come out of my mouth. She’s the first to ask me.

THE FIRST BEER
of the day is always the best. I sit in the dark bar in a booth near the back, drinking a long-neck Budweiser that came from an old ice-cooler. They always taste better when they’re long-necked, and they’re always the coldest when they’ve been hibernating under chunks of ice floating in dark-green water.

The biker from Albuquerque sits across the table from me. His name is Gene. He’s president of the Albuquerque chapter of the Scorpions, the same national organization my clients are from. He’s six feet six, an Arnold Schwarzenegger in outlaw biker colors. He’s been Lone Wolf’s best friend since they met as teenagers in a Pittsburgh reform school.

“Lone Wolf,” I muse. “How’d he get a handle like that? Sounds kind of romantic for a one-percenter.”

“Kind of pussy, you mean?”

I half-shrug—he can say that, I don’t dare.

“Some chick laid it on him. Must’ve been reading one of them romance novels.”

“Nobody’s ever ragged him about it?” I ask.

“Fuck, yes,” Gene says. “’Till he busted this one motherfucker’s forearm up into toothpicks one time. After that nobody seemed to find it particularly strange.”

He takes a pull off his brew, regards me.

“Figure this out,” he drawls. “What kind of dumb fuck who has two prior convictions and just got off parole kills somebody and leaves the body and a witness to tell the tale?”

“The kind of dumb fuck who thinks he’s above the law,” I answer. “The kind of dumb fuck who picks up a drunk girl in front of two hundred witnesses and gang-rapes her. That kind of dumb fuck.”

“They got ’em up on a rape charge?” he asks.

“You know they don’t,” I reply testily, knowing he knows where things currently stand.

“Then they’re the dumb fucks, ’cause they messed up on the charges. Anyway, she’s a known whore and a common one at that,” he informs me, “she’d fuck a syphilitic dog in a Juárez whorehouse. I personally know seventy or eighty men who’ve fucked her and survived.”

“Are they all Scorpions?” I ask.

“Mostly,” he grins. “A few Hell’s Angels and Bandidos.”

“All prepared to testify on their behalf?”

“If it comes to that.” He leans forward, caressing his beer bottle, which is barely visible in his enormous hands. “What do you think?” he asks, suddenly serious.

“About … ?”

“What’s going to happen.”

“The verdict.”

“Yeh.” He drains his beer, walks over to the cooler, comes back with four more in one hand. He church-keys the tops off two, sets one down in front of me.

I drink in long swallows, feeling the cold going down the back of my neck. There are times when I think about cutting back, for my own good. This isn’t one of them.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle,” I tell him honestly. “I don’t know who all the state’s witnesses are yet, but they’re going to be buttoned up tighter than a nun’s asshole. If I work hard and get lucky I’ll find a crack in one of them and get inside and break it up.”

“What about your own evidence?” he asks.

“I’m developing it,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”

“It’s going to come down to somebody’s word against somebody’s word.”

“That’s usually the way it works,” I say. “I’m sure you’re no stranger to that.”

“Not hardly. And what I also know is people like us usually come out on the short end of the stick.”

People like us. In one form or another I’ve been hearing that phrase my entire professional life. Is there some kind of secret underclass that’s never been defined sociologically? I’m not talking about the usual groups that commit the majority of violent crimes: the fatherless families, the beaten-down ethnic minorities, usually black or Hispanic, the battered inner-city rubble, the hardscrabble rural, the alcoholics, the junkies, the mentally ill. They generally have one thing in common: poverty. I’m not talking about that. It’s something else, the feeling that there’s society and then there’s you, outside of society. I was relatively poor growing up, but I never had that feeling. I felt I belonged, in or out of trouble. But there’s millions of people out there who feel they’re not part of the basic community; even if they manage to become middle-class in the economic sense they still feel estranged, apart from the rest. And if you’re not part of the group, why abide by the group’s laws? I think that most of these people believe they never had an option; it’s like fourth-generation families on relief, it’s all they’ve ever known. But others, like these bikers, choose to be apart, outside. And in the past few days, since the charges were brought against them, I’ve been wondering why.

“Why is that?” I ask Gene.

“Because in this society,” he tells me, suddenly earnest, “somebody’s got to lose. I mean this idea about winners, right, the American way, winning, winners? Well, if there’s got to be winners, if you got to have winners to make the system work, then you got to have some losers, too, right? And to Joe Mortgageholder out there, who’s been brainwashed his whole life that if you do this and this and this you’ll be a winner, people like us, who think the whole goddam thing’s a crock of shit and say so in a big loud voice, well we’re fucking losers, right? And the winners got to get the long end of the stick, right?, so people like us, designated losers, we get the short end.”

“So you admit you’re all a bunch of losers,” I say.

“Fuck you Jack.” He finishes his first new beer, drains half the second in one gulp. “
You
admit we’re losers. Far as we’re concerned we’re the biggest winners of all time. This thing about a jury of your peers?” he continues. “Ain’t nobody on that fucking jury’s
my
goddam peer. You give me a jury of my fucking peers, Jack, I’m outa there.”

It’s a novel concept. I’ll have to try it out sometime; maybe in this trial. Wonder how the legal community would react to that gambit?

“I don’t think I can sell that,” I tell him. I start on another beer. It’s comfortable in here. I’m out of the heat, I’m drinking cold long-neck Budweisers on somebody else’s tab, and I’m conversing with a person of reasonable if not high intelligence.

“You ever read Karl Marx?” I ask idly.

“Cover to cover,” he answers with a trace of a smile. “And Veblen and Hoffer and Frantz Fanon, among others. Milton Friedman, too, although I think consensually he’s pretty well discredited by now. Fucking Reagan,” he growls contemptuously, “bastard made Nixon look good.”

Jesus. I’m drinking beer with a radical socialist economic political outlaw biker with two priors and three hung juries who uses words like ‘consensually’ in everyday conversation.

“Tell me about Lone Wolf and the others,” I say.

“What do you want to know?”

“Anything I can use in their defense.”

He makes his way methodically to the cooler, comes back with another half-dozen cold ones. This is definitely going to be my last interview of the day. We toast each other with raised bottles. He leans back, thinking of what he can tell me that’ll save his friends’ lives.

“He’s done some mean shit in his life but he never killed nobody. Lone Wolf that is. None of the others ain’t never killed nobody, either, to my knowledge.”

“That doesn’t help very much.”

“You mean was he a boy scout or something? Pulled an old lady out of a burning building, that kind of shit?”

“Wouldn’t hurt,” I say.

“He was in Nam. Field hospital in Da Nang. Won two purple hearts. Bronze star.”

Now that’s something. I jot it down to check on later. I like this guy sitting across from me but he could be jerking my chain.

“’Course they were giving medals out at the end in Nam like Hershey bars,” he informs me. “Trying to find any way they could to put a heroic face on it you know what I mean?”

“That’s still good. Juries love war heroes. What else?”

“He had a brother that was homosexual.”

“Had?”

“He’s dead. ‘Least that’s what the Wolf says. I don’t know none of the particulars. He don’t talk about it, and nobody’s ever been dumb enough to bring it up.”

The mind reels. How many doors am I going to be opening here? And this is just one of four defendants.

“That ain’t common knowledge,” Gene adds. “You best check with him about whether he wants going public on that. He ain’t going to be happy I even told you.”

“Don’t worry, I will,” I say; “check with him.” I pause. “You’re his friend, you know his mind. Has that made him more tolerant?”

He shakes his head. “The opposite,” he tells me. “He hates faggots with a passion. Not that any of us love ’em,” he adds, “but the Lone Wolf’s got a particular hair up his ass about queers. He almost killed one once he thought was hitting on him. Bought ninety days for it.”

I’m on the worst rollercoaster of my entire career. I was almost euphoric earlier, becoming more convinced of my clients’ innocence, accompanied by a growing outrage at the social forces judging them. Now I’m faced with a piece of evidence that forces me to examine the alternative: there’s no question that the killing, if not an outright homosexually oriented murder, had strong homosexual overtones.

And now his best friend tells me my client has a pathological hatred and aversion of gays. If Robertson and his boys find out about this tidbit it’ll be another brutal hurdle to overcome.

“Look,” I tell him frankly, “this is a major bitch. If this piece of information ever gets out it could help put Lone Wolf and the others on Death Row.”

He nods.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you told me,” I continue, “and I will talk with him about it … but I’ve got to try and keep this quiet.”