Against the Wind (17 page)

“I’m fine with her.” Why have I let myself get on the defensive like this?

“You’re great. But she sees it. It influences her.”

“If it’ll make you feel any better I won’t drink around her,” I say. “At least not hard stuff.”

“Thanks. It does.” She leans over, touches my hand. “You’re a wonderful father and don’t you ever forget it.”

I stand in her doorway. There’s a strong smell of jasmine and honeysuckle coming from the side of the porch. She’s leaning against the jamb, wearing a short robe.

“You’re still a great lover,” she tells me. “Sorry if I wasn’t completely straight with you.”

“It’s okay,” I nod. “You’re terrific yourself.”

“It’ll be a nice memory to take into my old age,” she says.

“You’ll forget it as soon as a better man comes along.” I’ve gotten over my anger at being used.

“I hope not.” She means it.

It’s comfortable here, standing on my old porch, looking at my former wife, the residue of sex still hovering around us.

“Will,” she says in parting, “good luck with the case.”

“Thanks. I’m going to need it.”

She pauses a moment; she wants to say something to me but doesn’t know if I want to hear it. I wait her out.

“You’ve got a good team,” she says. “Even with Mary Lou.”

“I think so.”

“And I’m only jealous of her professionally—not the other way.”

“You don’t have to be anymore. They’re calling you up to the bigs, kid, remember?”

She smiles a moment. Serious again: “Can I ask you a question? Professional?”

“Shoot.”

“How come the firm isn’t involved more?”

I feel the hair rising on the back of my neck. “What do you mean?” I ask cautiously.

“From what I can see, which admittedly isn’t at first hand, they don’t seem to be giving you much support. I realize you’re on a leave and this is a one-shot deal, but still and all it’s a sensational case, you’ll probably get national coverage. It’s like they’re invisible.”

A long, slow exhale. Fuck it, if you can’t tell your ex-wife, who can you tell?

“There’s an easy answer for that.”

A smile of relief crosses her face. Goddam, she really does care.

“My leave of absence isn’t voluntary.”

“Oh my God!” Her hands are at her mouth, then she’s smothering me, pulling me to her, against her breasts. They aren’t soft and comforting, I realize nothing is perfect.

“Those bastards,” she exclaims. “Those lousy shits. After all you’ve done for them. They’d be nowhere without you.”

“They figure they’re nowhere with me. And by their lights they’re right,” I say.

“Fuck their lights.”

My sentiments exactly.

“Let me help you.” She’s holding my arms in a gesture of solidarity.

“No.” I shake my head.

“Why?”

“Because it’s wrong, that’s why.”

“Who cares,” she answers, she’s so much more practical than I am. “You need all the help and support you can get, the rest is immaterial.”

I have to be as honest as I can. “From anyone else, Patricia, except from you.”

“That’s lousy.”

“I know,” I say, “but I can’t see you anymore. Nada. Nix. It’s got to be absolutely hands-off between us.”

“Because of tonight?”

“Yes.”

“Shit.” She’s angry. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“There was no reason to. Why,” I ask, “would it have made a difference?”

“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully. “Maybe. Probably.”

“Sorry.”

“Who was to know?” She fixes me with a rueful smile. “I blew my shot at the big-time in Santa Fe for a lousy piece of ass.”

I smile back. I’m scared inside, now that I’ve said it.

“If you ever want to talk …” She leaves it dangling.

“I’ll call you.”

“Promise?”

I nod. I give her a chaste forehead kiss, walk out the screen door and down the porch stairs. She’s still watching as I’m driving away.

My apartment hasn’t been cleaned in two weeks, the air conditioner’s on its last legs, I feel unclean. If I wasn’t hoarding my pennies I’d take a hotel room for the night, get a cleaning lady in in the morning to fumigate the place.

Instead, I pour myself a healthy Johnnie Walker over the rocks. You weak motherfucker, you couldn’t leave well enough alone, it’s bad enough you fucked her, you had to bleed all over her rug, tell her about the firm. Christ, it could be all over town by lunch tomorrow. The second Scotch helps; stop panicking, she’s not like that, she’ll take your secret to the grave. But what if it slips out inadvertently? It’s bound to, she works for Robertson and he’s obsessed with it.

She answers on the third ring. “That was quick.”

“Yeh.” Shit, why the hell did I call?

“Is something wrong?”

“No, no.” I kill my drink, lean across the counter for the bottle, pouring myself another, just a couple fingers.

“Will?” She’s alarmed.

“Listen, what we talked about earlier …”

“Yes?”

“Why don’t we just forget it, okay? We never had that conversation.”

“Well … how could I do that? Why would you want me to?”

“Just don’t tell anyone, okay?” Keeping the terror out of my voice, not entirely successful.

There’s a pause at the other end.

“Pat?”

“Why would I tell anyone?”

“You wouldn’t. It could just slip out, you know.” Fuck, if I step on my dick anymore I’ll tear it out at the root.

“Not from me it won’t,” she tells me with certainty. “I think you’re projecting what you would do.”

“I meant by accident. That’s all.”

“I’m not you, Will. Your secret’s safe with me.”

“Hey, I knew that.”

It hangs between us over the hum in the line.

“It’s late,” she reminds me.

“Yeh. Got to kick ass in the morning.”

“I’m glad you called. That you felt you could.”

“So am I.” I mean it.

“Next time try to be more positive, all right?”

I bang the receiver against my forehead.

“All right. I promise.”

“Good. Good night Will.”

“Good night, Pat.”

She hangs up on me. You dumb shit, every time you think you have the world by the balls it turns out to be your own balls you’re squeezing. And right now the pain is killing me.

“
YOUR HONOR,
we’d like to be heard on this issue.”

Judge Martinez nods.

This is a hearing on a change-of-venue motion we’ve filed. The jury’s yet to be selected. This could be crucial. Moseby ambles over from his side. He must’ve had garlic bread for lunch; his breath reeks, wafting across the front of the bench. Mary Lou wrinkles her nose, brushes her hand across her face. Frank grins at her; pieces of his lunch stick in his teeth. She shakes her head in disgust. The others feign indifference. I’ve long since quit thinking about him, except as my opponent. The issues are too big to get caught up in personalities.

“Counselor?” Judge Martinez peers down. He’s the senior judge on the court, a former D.A., who made sure the case fell on his docket, not so much for the case itself—he’s handled dozens of murders, he doesn’t need publicity or the aggravation that goes with these—but because if the bikers are found guilty he doesn’t want the case reversed on appeal and figures he has a better chance of keeping it clean than any other judge. He’s a tough, generally pro-prosecution jurist, but he runs a straight courtroom.

“On what grounds?” Martinez asks.

“On the grounds that our clients can’t get a fair and impartial trial in Santa Fe, your honor,” Tommy says. “This case has had more pretrial publicity than any case in New Mexico history.”

“They have to be tried somewhere,” Martinez reminds us.

“We have three volumes of newspaper and magazine clippings, your honor,” Paul says. “Six hours of videotapes. It’s impossible that anyone who lives in Santa Fe hasn’t read or heard about this case.”

“I don’t know,” Martinez says. “That’s what jury selection’s going to tell us.”

“The evidence seems overwhelming, your honor,” Tommy argues.

Martinez glares at him. “I’m supposed to be the judge of that, counselor,” he rasps.

“No offense, your honor,” Tommy replies quickly. Rule number one—don’t piss off the judge. “All I meant was there’s more of it than any other case our research has found.”

Martinez turns to Moseby. “What’s the prosecution’s view on this?” he asks.

“We want to try it here, your honor,” Frank replies, taking care not to breathe on Martinez. “We feel we can impanel as fair and impartial a jury here in Santa Fe as anyplace else in the state. It’s a notorious case, Judge Martinez. The prosecution’s going to deal with that the best it can. The defense ought to, too.”

He’s a slob, but he’s cunning. Admit the problem and by doing so disarm it. It puts him in the catbird seat: we’re bitching and he’s making do the best he can.

Martinez ponders while we wait. He knows that Moseby’s demurral, while essentially bullshit, has enough truth in it to hang a decision on; and he also knows this could be one of the most important decisions he makes during the entire long, drawn-out affair. If, after going through an entire trial and finding the defendants guilty, an appellate court decides the jury wasn’t impartial, the whole shooting match could start again. States don’t like spending millions of dollars on retrying cases that could’ve been done right the first time.

“I’m going to withhold judgment on this,” Martinez says finally. I groan inside; I was afraid of this, which is why we delayed asking for the change right away, agonizing for weeks over it, going through a lot of discussion and soul-searching. We could spend a month trying to get a jury and then have Martinez decide we were right and the case has to be moved. Then we’d have to start all over again. It’s becoming the fashion to do this here, and it’s a royal pain in the ass, not to mention being time-consuming and damned expensive.

We trudge back to the table. Behind us, our clients, cleaned up for their court appearances but still menacing as hell, look to us for signs, good or bad. We try to give them nothing; we’ll discuss our feelings in private, we don’t want to send any signals publicly that the prosecution might capitalize on. But they know by now that no news is bad news, they’ve been inside for months, they’re taking on the defeatist attitude of the incarcerated. I feel for them, then catch myself in the irony; under normal circumstances I’d be happy to see people like them safely removed from society. Right now all I’m looking at are four more victims of a hopelessly fucked-up system.

“
THIS IS
the ‘NBC Nightly News’ with Tom Brokaw.”

It’s five-thirty. We’re sitting in my office, watching the tube: Paul, Tommy, Mary Lou, me. We’ve made the national news. It’s been a slow day, I guess; even so, this is the big time. We savor it with a kind of morbid fascination, like ancient Christians standing on the floor of the Colosseum, looking up and gawking at a hundred thousand bloodthirsty Romans.

We’re the lead story after the first commercial break. The NBC correspondent, a blow-dried woman wearing a Gucci scarf artfully tied around her neck, stands at the bottom of the courthouse steps. Behind her, jockeying rudely for position, is the obligatory crowd of attention-seekers, fighting for their two seconds on camera.

“In Santa Fe, Judge Louis Martinez has finally impaneled a jury in New Mexico’s most sensational murder trial in several years, in which four members of the outlaw motorcycle gang known as the Scorpions allegedly killed and violently mutilated drifter Richard Bartless. With me is District Attorney John Robertson, whose office is prosecuting this case.”

The camera widens out to include Robertson, who looks every inch the proper man of the courtroom (to my less-than-impartial eye he appears unctuous and faintly sweaty) in his three-piece Hickey-Freeman suit.

“Are you glad to be finally going to trial?” the blow-dry queen asks, her face screwed up all-pretty-like, TV’s idea of what passes for serious.

Robertson nods. He’s serious for real, this is major personal to him. “The people of New Mexico deserve this trial,” he says. “This was a vicious, heinous crime and the perpetrators need to be severely dealt with. We don’t want it to get caught up in a bunch of legal malarkey,” he continues, an unseen dig at the defense, nicely played to the public, you plant as many subconscious hooks as you can, “we have the evidence to prove they’re guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt and we want them to pay for their crime.”

“You’ll be asking for the death penalty?” she asks.

“Anything less would be a gross miscarriage of justice.”

“Screw you too, Jack,” Mary Lou tells the image on the tube, watching alongside of me. Her hand drops lightly onto my thigh, an unconscious gesture of reassurement. I get a twinge.

The rest of the team catcalls the screen, expressing like sentiments. We’re developing our own bunker mentality, us against the world and fuck ’em all but six, the kind of self-support you need to carry you through.

On the screen the camera shifts angles, and suddenly there I am for the whole world to see. I’m looking good, my clothes fit and aren’t wrinkled, my hair’s in place, my look is bright. An altogether formidable opponent, alert and at ease with myself and my task, not uptight like the impression Robertson made.

The people in the room applaud. I’m thinking about Claudia, that she’s watching her daddy with pride. It feels good—I’m on the case.

“With me now is Will Alexander, one of New Mexico’s foremost criminal trial lawyers and the lead attorney for the defendants. Tell me,” she asks, “are you and your partners satisfied with the progress of the trial so far?”

“No,” I answer. I look serious, I don’t have to fake it. “The trial hasn’t actually started,” I properly correct her, “this has all been preliminary, but no, we aren’t as satisfied as we’d like to be.”

“For what reason?”

“Unlike the prosecutor, we’re going to conduct our defense inside the courtroom,” I tell her and the world, getting my digs in. “But I will say this: I don’t believe the defendants are being judged by a fair and impartial jury. Not as I understand the meaning of the words ‘fair’ and ‘impartial.’ More than half the jurors are women, none of them have ever been on a motorcycle, none of them have ever been inside a jail, let alone served time in one. These are some of the reasons we had asked for a change of venue, which was regrettably denied.”