Howtown (5 page)

“Because Mark thought what?”

“That Paul wasn’t quite a man.”

“I see.”

“I don’t mean that he thought Paul was a homosexual,” she said, her vinous breath drifting across the table. “Just that he never thought Paul was tough enough. Apparently toughness matters a lot to Mark, but you probably know that better than I do.”

I said nothing. It was news to me.

A
S I ENTERED LOS
Robles Valley, bare brown hills gave way to long unbroken stretches of farmland that ranged toward far-off bluish mountains in the east, the Sierra Nevada. The sky was flat and close. Straggly lines of cotton woods marked distant watercourses and irrigation ditches flashed silver in the still light. I passed a group of farmworkers drinking water from a metal container at the back of a battered truck, a vast tomato field behind them. A billboard flashed the time and temperature: 8:30, 80 degrees. Nothing moved, not birds in the sky, nor a breeze through the great oaks that gave the valley its name, and the stillness had a heft as if everything, to the last blade of grass, had been fixed in place forever at the moment the earth was made.

Approaching the city, however, I noticed that, perhaps, one or two things had changed since Creation and even since I’d last been on this road: housing tracts erupted on the landscape like geologic carbuncles, rows and rows of pastel boxes lining wide streets that emptied onto the surrounding fields or curled among themselves in a labyrinth of what nearby billboards advertised as “the good life.” Clarendon Estates, the Oaks Condominiums, La Vista—the sonorous names promised a posh, worry-free, cable-ready existence on easy credit terms. But behind unnaturally green lawns, most of these places appeared uninhabited. Apparently the market for the good life had dried up or maybe it took too much imagination for the average consumer to picture it here, in these houses, amid the emptiness, beneath the suffocating sky.

Many of the same billboards shouting out their promises also listed Windsor Development as the developer. And then I was crossing a causeway above rice fields and there, in front of me, shimmering in the heat, was the prim skyline of Los Robles.

Every Californian knows that the real California can be found in the Central Valley, a great dish of land in the middle of the state, dotted by dour farm towns that bake in the summer and freeze in the winter. The city of Los Robles is the largest of those towns. Two broad, slow rivers, the Los Robles and the Oeste, flow into the city and merge there. Their wandering courses mark the city’s northern and western borders; to the south and east is country. Within that quadrant is a town of 150,000.

The city’s history is negligible. The only excitement in its hundred-and-forty-year existence had been the gold rush, which took place in the foothills east of the city. That mania swelled its population, making it the largest settlement between San Francisco and the Oregon border. When the gold rush played itself out, many prospectors remained. Pining for the Midwestern towns they’d left behind, they’d constructed a larger version of them here, wide, treelined avenues featuring gingerbread Victorians, Queen Anne cottages, shuttered Colonial Revival mansions, gloomy Romanesque and neo-Gothic churches, Federal-style public buildings. In short a very pretty town that bore no relation at all to the city’s preceding hundred years of colonial rule under Spain and then Mexico.

True, that rule had touched lightly here, but even those traces had been almost entirely eradicated, leaving only the Spanish place names to inform the curious that time had not begun with the arrival of the first former resident of the Midwest. Along with the Spanish place names, there also remained many of the town’s original Mexican families. In time, they and their descendants and others who had joined them in making the long trek north from Mexico were relegated to the neighborhood south of the main Southern Pacific line called Paradise Slough.

A ship was passing on the Los Robles River when I got to the bridge that led into town. Traffic stopped while the bridge was raised to let the vessel pass. Directly ahead of me was River Parkway, the main street into the city. Bright new buildings rose on either side of it, in a style I’d come to think of as neo-Corporate, the only distinction lying in the type of glass, black, green or mirrored, used in their construction. The river front, formerly skid row, was in the process of being transformed into an “Old Towne.” Brick warehouses and former flophouses now housed boutiques and restaurants. The ubiquitous oaks lined the wooden walkway at the river’s edge.

North of downtown was a wealthy old suburb called River Park. The Windsors had lived there, in an antebellum mansion. Built by Mark and Paul’s father, it hinted at graceful Southern antecedents, but Herb Windsor was a Dust Bowl Okie. His wife, on the other hand—“the former Lydia Smith,” as she was referred to in the society page of the
Sentinel
—was a local banker’s daughter. I bore an ancient grudge against her, arising from her having banned me from the family swimming pool one summer after learning that I lived in Paradise Slough. Mexicans and Anglos didn’t mix; each was “they” to the other. I remembered all this vividly as the bridge was lowered and I drove into town.

My first stop was at the law firm of Clayton and Cummings. I’d alerted Robert Clayton that I would be arriving to talk to him about Paul’s case that morning and he’d agreed to a nine-thirty meeting. The address he’d provided turned out to be one of the glassy boxes on the Parkway. To the strains of “Scarborough Fair” a dimly lit elevator carried me to the fourth floor, depositing me at the end of the long airless corridor. Beige walls, deep green carpet, low lights and brass lettering on mahogany doors—a factory for the white-collar proletariat.

“My name is Henry Rios,” I told the receptionist in Clayton’s office. “I have an appointment with Mr. Clayton.”

“One moment.”

I sat down in a leather wing chair and tried to interest myself in a three-week-old issue of
Business Week
. An article worried that the Japanese were buying up the Western world. Let them have it, I thought, they couldn’t do a worse job with it than its current masters. I was reminded of Gandhi’s reply when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

“Mr. Rios?” The short, fat, bearded man beamed at me, obviously mistaking my private smile over Gandhi’s remark for amiability.

I extended my hand. “Mr. Clayton?” I was surprised, having expected a typical waistline-conscious Yuppie.

He shook his head and my hand with equal enthusiasm. “No, I’m Peter Stein.”

I remembered the name from the door outside, near the bottom of the list, an associate.

“Bob had to cover a deposition at the last minute. He should be back soon. In the meantime, he thought you might want to review the Windsor file.”

“How long is ‘back soon’?”

“Well, by noon at the latest. Come on back.”

I followed Stein past the receptionist into the hall behind her and then into his cramped office. He wedged himself into the chair behind his desk and picked up an accordion file, handing it to me. I glanced at the label:
WINDSOR
,
PAUL
,
STATE OF CALIFORNIA V
., and a series of numbers beneath it I assumed to be the firm’s internal file number.

“This is it,” he said, adding, “Have a seat. Can I get you coffee?”

I sat. “Why not? Black.”

He placed an order for two coffees over the phone and continued to beam at me. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” he said. “I read your profile last month in the
Daily Journal
.”

I nodded. The LA legal newspaper had run a profile of me on the front page after an unexpected victory in the state supreme court reversing a death penalty case. Unexpected only because the current reactionary governor had managed to stack the court with right-wing judges.

“You have an interest in criminal law?” I asked.

“Bob hired me out of the DA’s office,” he replied. Our coffees arrived via a Chicano boy who grinned at me, one
vato loco
to another. I grinned back.

“Really,” I said to Stein. “Finding it hard to make the transition from criminal to civil?”

“Bob’s been a real help there. He had a two-bit practice before he lucked into the Windsors.” He smiled, his head bobbing like a manic balloon.

I felt sorry for him. He seemed to be one of those fat people who’d been tagged jolly at an impressionable age. “Is there someplace quiet I can go over this?” I plucked at the edge of the folder.

“At the end of the hall there’s an empty office,” he replied. “My predecessor. Couldn’t cut it,” he confided, and I detected a tremor of anxiety in his tone. Maybe the transition wasn’t going so smoothly after all.

“Thank you, Peter,” I said, rising. “Will you let Mr. Clayton know that I’m here?”

“Sure thing.”

Stein’s unfortunate predecessor had left only a dying rubber plant to mark his tenancy in the otherwise stark office. I dropped the folder onto the desk and looked out the window. The tinted glass cut the glare, but from the lack of movement on the street below I could tell that the heat had set in. It was not unusual for the temperature to rise to three digits by noon and stay there until evening when it dropped to the tolerable eighties. While it lasted, the heat produced a glacial calm, white and still, during which even breathing was exhausting. As a boy I had taken shelter from the heat at one of two places—the river and the library. The river was not much of an escape, as it was impossible to remain underwater all day and, at any rate, the water itself was bathtub tepid and sludgy. The library, on the other hand, was air-conditioned and offered the added diversion of books from which I first became aware of a world beyond the valley.

I spotted the roof of the central library not far away. I sometimes had trouble remembering what my mother looked like, but I could picture, to the last wattle beneath her chin, the woman at the check out desk. Mrs…. Mrs…. Stop this, I told myself, and went back to the desk and
WINDSOR
,
PAUL
,
STATE OF CALIFORNIA V
.

I disliked Robert Clayton on sight and the feeling appeared to be mutual. He was as slim and fashionable as his peers on Montgomery Street or Wilshire Boulevard, a briskly tailored seersucker suit his sole concession to the weather. It wasn’t his tailoring I minded as much as his air of self-containment. He was a locked box and proud of it. I immediately set out to pick a fight.

We were in his tasteful office. He was saying, “Yes, I looked at the search warrant.” He shrugged. “I specialize in real estate transactions, so I’m a little out of my element in crime.”

“Mmm,” I replied. “Not to insult you, Bob, but even a first-year law student would’ve recognized the absence of probable cause in the affidavit.” I withdrew the bulky document from the file. “Half of it is a paean to the superior investigative skills of the affiant, a detective named Morrow. Then there’s a lengthy reference to Paul’s prior arrest for child molestation, and an equally lengthy account of the kiddie porn recovered at the motel room where they found McKay.” Ignoring Clayton’s frown I continued. “He then gets to the heart of it—Paul’s fingerprints were found in the room. Ergo, he concludes, Paul was in the room. Well, that doesn’t take a genius. From there he jumps to the spectacular conclusion that probable cause exists to connect Paul to the murder, justifying a search of his house and car for,
inter alia
, the murder weapon.” I looked up at him. “This might pass muster in, say, Chile—”

“I’m not a jury, Henry. What’s your point?”

“I don’t see a motion in here to quash the warrant.”

“Well, that’s your job, isn’t it? There hasn’t even been a prelim yet. You have all the time in the world to make your motions.”

I looked at him. “Meanwhile, Paul’s in jail. If it had been brought to the attention of the arraigning judge that Paul was being held on the basis of this—” I stabbed at the warrant “—he might not have been so quick to deny him bail.”

“The arraigning judge,” he replied, “was the same judge who signed the warrant.”

“Well, this is a one-horse town.”

“And,” he added, “is the same judge who’ll hear the prelim.”

“That’s unlawful,” I replied. “I’ll move to disqualify him.”

Clayton leaned forward slightly, gripping the edge of his desk with shapely fingers. “We’re not in Los Angeles, Henry. There are only four muni court judges up here, and they don’t like it when an attorney papers one of them.”

“How much don’t they like it?”

“I don’t think you want to find out,” he replied, releasing the desk. He tried out a grin on me. “You’re right about the warrant, of course, but Paul had already told me that he wanted someone else to represent him. I didn’t see the point in antagonizing Judge Lanyon. I thought I’d leave that to you. From what I’ve seen, you’re probably better at pissing off judges than I am.”

“Sara said you’re the one who bailed out on the case.”

He shrugged. “It was mutual.”

“And the fact that you represent Windsor Development had nothing to do with it, I suppose?”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

“Just whose interest is being served by Paul remaining in jail?”

He smiled to mask his anger. “Even for a lawyer you have a suspicious mind, Henry. The reason I don’t want to defend Paul is simple, I think he did it. I think the police are right. He went to McKay with the intention of paying him off, but McKay must have said something that made Paul realize he would be paying for the rest of his life, so he killed him.” Indifferently, he added, “It’s like Paul to panic and act stupidly.”

“What about Paul’s explanation of why he went to see McKay?”

He eyed me with interest. “What explanation?”

Apparently, he had not been taken into Paul’s confidence. I feinted. “He must have one.”

“Not that I know of.” He rolled his head, slowly, from side to side, working out the tension. “Look, Henry, you don’t think he’s innocent, do you?”

“I haven’t formed an opinion,” I replied, “but I do know that any lawyer with even a little criminal experience would’ve acted a lot more aggressively than you did to at least get him out on bail.”