Troubled Waters (10 page)

Then I found out why Father Jerry was in the courtroom. Harve called him to the defense table and asked the judge to release Jan into Father Jerry's custody. It seemed there were small cottages behind Our Lady of Guadalupe church, cottages used to house battered women and their children. Jan could stay in one of them pending the hearing. She would be under house arrest, Harve explained, permitted to leave the cottage only to attend Mass and AA meetings held in the church basement. For no other reason would she be allowed to leave her private prison.

The judge bought it. He set bail at one hundred thousand dollars, under the conditions Harve set forth. My co-counsel gave a satisfied nod; Jan could make bail. I wondered who was footing the bill. Surely Jan hadn't saved a hundred thou working at Wal-Mart.

I winced as the bailiff read the next case into the record. “United States of America against Ronald Douglas Jameson” sounded as if the whole country stood arrayed against one man in a wheelchair.

“… permission to amend the indictment to include a violation of Title 18 United States Code section 3 in that the aforesaid Ronald Douglas Jameson did act as an accessory after the fact in that, knowing that Janice Gebhardt had committed a federal offense, he did offer comfort and assistance to her in order to hinder prosecution.”

What was Stoddard talking about? What did he mean, Ron offered comfort and assistance? How in hell could a man confined to a wheelchair aid and abet a fugitive?

I found out soon enough.

It was the Internet. I raised my eyes to the ceiling. It was for this that Ron had studied computers at Kent State's program for the disabled? He and Jan had communicated by email, with her using a phony identity.

And then there was the letter Ron had shown me, in which Jan told him she was going to turn herself in.

Ron had known where Jan was and he had known she was going to return from the dead. He had known, and he hadn't told me.

What other secrets had my brother chosen to keep from me?

I got Ron released. There had never really been any doubt in my mind that I'd do that. But I'd hoped the old charges would be so remote in time, so minor compared to Jan's, that the court would either dismiss outright or send strong signals that a dismissal was inevitable. Instead my brother was facing charges for crimes he'd committed within the past week.

We were mobbed as soon as the judge left the bench. Every reporter rushed toward Harve or me, begging for a statement. Harve promised to answer questions on the courthouse steps. I made no such promises, but I'd learned a thing or two about high-profile criminal trials, and I knew it would be in Ron's interest for me to say something as well.

When bail was posted and we were free to go, Harve strode toward the gaggle of reporters and news cameras at the courthouse entrance. He positioned himself directly in front of the columns, where the minicam operators shooting stock footage for the B reel couldn't miss him. He spoke into the fuzzy mikes that dangled from long booms like huge dusters. His white hair was a flowing mane; his voice already lifted in indignation even before he reached the waiting newspeople. “… an outrage,” I heard him say, and then caught the words “physically challenged veteran.”

The combination of blatant pathos and political correctness was pure Harve. He couldn't say “helpless cripple,” yet if the disabled were fully equal with everyone else, why shouldn't the government prosecute Ron? And what was he doing talking about my client when he was Jan's lawyer?

I turned to Dana, ready to tell her that her father had better confine his remarks to his own case from now on. But instead of Dana, her ex-husband Rap stood at my shoulder.

I'd have known him anywhere. That lean body, the faded Antioch sweatshirt, a Toledo Mud Hens cap over his eyes. Rap always wore hats, always shaded his eyes from the sun, or from human scrutiny. As though to glimpse his eyes full-front would be too much for frail humanity.

“Can't you do anything to shut her up?” he asked. His gray eyes bored into mine. “I mean, I enjoy a good pig roast as much as the next guy, but doesn't anybody notice that Jan's a flake and a half? All that bullshit about an informer. Who knows what the hell she's going to tell the court?”

“She always was a nut case,” Dana remarked. “Remember what a nervous wreck she was? Always chewing on her hair, her fingernails? Taking every drug that came her way? She's out to wreck our lives because she screwed up her own. We'd be a lot better off if she'd never come back. Why the hell didn't she choke on her own vomit and do us all a favor?”

Dana's words were extremely close to the thought I'd had when Jan first surfaced. Why didn't she die of an overdose and leave us all alone? Cold, brutal words that sounded a lot colder when someone else said them.

“Your old man's her lawyer,” Rap pointed out. “If anyone can convince her to shut up, he can. You could talk to him.”

“Harve doesn't listen to me,” Dana said, her tone bitter. “He's on his high horse, he's riding the sixties again. Happy as a pig in you-know-what. He doesn't give a damn about what all this could do to me, to Dylan. His own grandson, but Harve doesn't care. All he can see is the Big Case, the headlines, him saving the fucking world. That's all it's ever been about for him.”

Rap looked at me, calculation lighting his cold gray eyes. “You're part of the defense team,” he said. “You can shut her up. Cut a deal. Tell Harve to cut a deal.”

“I am not part of a team, Rap,” I said, making my voice as cold as his eyes. “You watched too much O.J. There is no team. There is Harve, representing Jan the way he sees fit, and there is me, trying to get Ron out of the whole mess. There is no team.”

“There better be some teamwork, Mama Cass. If all the dirt gets dug up, it's going to stick on all of us—including your precious brother. Got that?”

“Is that a threat?”

“If it has to be.”

He strode through the crowd before I could reply. Always an exit line. I wondered how serious his threat was—and what exactly he was afraid of. Even a million-dollar drug deal from twelve years ago couldn't hurt him now. In fact there was only one crime he could still be worried about: murder.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

July 15, 1982

Rap held up his hand for silence. Behind him, Dana watched the lazy lake waves lap the shore. Trees grew along the edge of the beach, giving shade and cover. That was the blessing of fresh water; near ocean, they'd have been exposed on all sides.

“Do you hear something?”

Dana listened. At first, nothing. Just a wan, overheated breeze ruffling the leaves of the trees that sheltered the little inlet from the road. The persistent lapping of the waves, the pitch and toss of the boat. Then, underneath but growing louder, a whine like a mosquito circling your head on a hot summer night, zeroing in for the kill.

A siren. Close. Too close.

“I'd better get the
Layla
out of here,” Rap said, moving toward the boat, lying lazily in the hazy sun. “Jan could be in trouble.”

“Jan!” Dana's wrath, heated by the relentless sun, exploded. “We should have known better than to let her make a run by herself. I should be with her, not out here with my thumb up my ass. Who knows what she's gotten us into?”

“Which is why I should move the boat. We don't want her impounded if the cops roll up.” He turned toward the rickety pier where the cabin cruiser was tied.

Something about Rap's haste rang a bell in Dana's mind. Something about his eagerness to cast off, to take the
Layla
out of reach of the police—

“Rap,” she said sharply. “What the hell have you got on that boat? And don't give me that innocent look. I remember the first run, when it turned out you had Roberto pay you in—”

She broke off, panic and anger struggling within her. “You didn't. You couldn't be that stupid. That greedy. Oh, Jesus, tell me you don't have dope on that boat.”

Even as she said the words, even as Rap opened his mouth to protest his innocence, she knew the truth. Of course he had dope on the boat. He was ferrying people who were fleeing the drug wars of South America; what better currency for them to pay their passage with than white powder?

“Fucking shit!” She wheeled around in frustration. “This is supposed to be a rescue mission, you asshole. We're taking these people to Canada because their lives are in danger. And you're using the trip to make a buck. I can't believe—” Words failed her; she regarded her former husband with a loathing she did nothing to conceal.

A sinewy hand reached up and grabbed her T-shirt, pulling it into a hard knot. The other fist rested lightly against her damp cheek. Rap's gray eyes were granite chips and he spaced his words with a deliberate slow contempt she'd heard before.

“What the
fuck
do you think I am, babe? The fuckin' Red Cross? You think I take this boat out, risk going to jail, just to help suffering humanity? You and Father Jerry wouldn't have an underground railroad without me.”

His hot breath licked her face; she glared into his eyes, praying the deep fear in her stomach didn't show on her face. She went rigid, just listened, let him blow it off. Like always.

“So don't ask stupid questions about what's on the boat, and we won't have any trouble. Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispered. Then gathered courage and said, “Get the boat out of here before the cops come. I don't want to get busted on your drug rap.”

The siren had stopped now, but that was no guarantee of safety. Cops could be on their way along the dune road even as they spoke. Rap let her go, let the T-shirt knot go limp, and sauntered toward the
Layla
.

As she watched her former lover, former husband, the father of her son amble, then trot toward his beloved boat, Dana knew that as long as white powder made its way north, Rap would make money from it. And as long as she was part of the sanctuary movement, needing Rap and his boat to ferry refugees to safe Canadian water, she would live in dread of the day he was caught and his boat thoroughly searched.

For today, she could live with it. But she swore to herself that next time she would take the hull apart with her bare hands before she loaded the refugees on board.

The siren zeroed in on them, homing like a missile seeking its target. Jan speeded up at first, then slowed as she bowed to the inevitable. Next to her, Miguel turned eyes huge with fright on her.
“Qué pasa?”

Jan shook her head. What was happening? The worst, probably.

In the back seat, Pilar began to moan.
“La Migra,”
she repeated, over and over, her voice a lament.
“La Migra
will find us.
Madre de Dios.”
She rocked back and forth, keening like an Irish widow. Panic turned Pilar from self-assured professor's wife to peasant. She had never played her role better.

Manuelito whimpered. Jan's high dissolved in a cold-sweat bath. The danger rush had congealed into the certainty that this trip wasn't going to end well, that capture was at hand. She had a sudden, sharp memory of wheeling Manuelito in a shopping cart while they bought him clothes for the journey. He'd pointed and giggled and kicked his little feet into her stomach.

For one wild moment, she considered speeding up, racing the cops to the water's edge in a mad hope that the family could get on the boat and make their escape before she was caught.

Jan pulled to the side of the road. There wasn't much shoulder; the road edged off into a ravine designed to catch rainwater.

The car was a blue and white Ohio Highway Patrol vehicle, but Jan wasn't surprised when the man who strode toward the van, sun glinting off his glasses, was Walt Koeppler of the Border Patrol.

As if he'd known they'd be on this road. And driving this van.

The van was the first line of defense this time. It wasn't the church van, with Our Lady of Guadalupe written on the side in Gothic script; this was Ron Jameson's specially designed vehicle, with a hydraulic lift for the wheelchair. He sat in the back, strapped in, wearing a bathing suit, an orange towel draped over his whale-white bony shoulders. Playing his part of cripple being taken on an outing by a friend.

The theory was that the police would be watching for the white, green-lettered church van, not a red van with no lettering on the side. The theory was that not many cars travelled the old dune road to get to the lakefront. The theory was that the stop three days earlier had been a fluke, a coincidence, not to be repeated.

The theory was full of shit.

Second line of defense: the forged papers, the indignation bit. Jan watched Walt Koeppler's determined glare as he approached the van, accompanied by a uniformed Highway Patrol cop. She decided abruptly to jettison the tantrum. He'd already seen Dana do that number. It wasn't going to work a second time. Just be cool, pass the papers to him, and act as if the whole thing were a giant hassle. Boring, annoying, but hardly threatening.

Koeppler's first words were less than reassuring. “You again. I thought I warned you about transporting illegals.”

“Who said they were illegal?” She tried for the flip, bad-girl tone that came so easily when she'd had a few belts. It was a lot harder to pull off sober.

“You gonna run phony paper on me again?”

Stay cool. Not easy, with relentless farm-loving sun beating down on the roof of the van. Not easy, when a family's life hung in the balance, dependent on the nerve of a woman sober seventy-nine days.

Not easy, when your eyes were level with the single cyclops eye of a blue-barreled gun.

“I'm going to give you the identification this man gives me.” Her voice shook slightly, as did her hand when she passed the documents from Miguel to Koeppler. Once again, they were phony birth certificates from Texas, a driver's license with Miguel's picture superimposed upon that of Eduardo Peña, a genuine Mexican-American migrant. A letter from the van Wormer farm certifying them as employed for the sugar beet season.