The illegal alien part was difficult, because they were, in fact, illegal aliens. But in America, no issue was so clear-cut that it could not be obfuscated beyond recognition by a talented lawyer. The Ramirezes now had one: a nationally famous hell-raising San Francisco lawyer who liked to do pro bono work if lots of TV cameras were present; he insisted that he was going to get these people green cards real soon.
The part about being bad parents was different. The Ramirezes were actually known in their community as very good parents. Carlos was a teetotaler who spent every minute of his free time with his children, and Anna was a domestic saint. Ray had arranged for character witnesses to show up at the safe house and say as much.
Eleanor Richmond’s part in the endgame was a different matter. She snuck into, and ransacked, the office of her young colleague Shad Harper. This was easily enough to get her fired and possibly enough to get her thrown into jail. She understood this clearly and had already typed up a letter of resignation to Senator Marshall. She had been working at this job for exactly one month and had received exactly one paycheck.
It was completely insane for her to be doing this. If she had been looking for snippets of information that she could have kept to herself and used discreetly, that would have been one thing. But her entire goal was to dig up some dirt that she could turn around and release to the media. Eleanor Richmond had gone native. She was out of control.
She had lost it sometime over the weekend. The realization that Sam Wyatt, her boss’s main man, had triggered this whole chain of events was bad enough by itself. For a day or two she had wavered, mostly because she was turned off by Ray’s tactic of planting toys in the grass for the photographers. When the INS had come around looking for Carlos and Anna, she had been annoyed. But when the state had tried to take Bianca away from her parents, Eleanor Richmond had gone nuts. That was no fair. She’d rather be a bag lady than a coconspirator in an affair that involved breaking apart a family.
So on Thursday, whenever Shad Harper left his office for more than about ten minutes, Eleanor went in and made herself at home. It would be worth destroying her own career if she could find anything to bring Shad down along with her. It would have been nice to find something on Sam Wyatt, or on the aide in D.C. who had made the fateful phone call to the Forest Service, or even on Senator Marshall himself. But she was willing to settle for Shad Harper’s head on a platter.
Somewhat to her own astonishment, she didn’t get caught. Once or twice, someone poked their head into Shad’s office while she was there, and she explained that she was looking for a stapler that Shad had borrowed. This explanation worked because Shad was always borrowing stuff, including money, and not returning it. Shad himself spent most of the day out of the office, deeply enmeshed in some kind of plot involving the Ramirez family.
By the time the sun rose on Friday morning, illuminating the new headline:
“BIANCA: I WANT MY MAMA!”
nothing had really changed. Arapahoe Highlands Medical Center was going to release Bianca at 6:05 P.M. By an astonishing coincidence, this put her release just a few minutes into the local evening news programs, making it an ideal candidate for live TV coverage. Their new PR director, who had been on the job for five days and had already received a raise and a bonus, insisted that this was just a coincidence and that the time of the release had been set for purely medical reasons.
He deserved his raise. From a media/PR standpoint, Highlands had started out the week gut-shot and had made a miracle recovery of their own until they now looked like archangels in white coats, their arms brimming over with fuzzy stuffed animals. At 6:05, they would roll Bianca Ramirez out into the horseshoe drive where their uniformed valet parking attendants stood guard twenty-four hours a day, and release her into the world. This would be good for two reasons: it would cement their reputation as medical geniuses and it would clear out the hyperbaric chamber so that heavily insured middle-aged diabetics could get into it again.
The question was: who was going to take charge of Bianca when her wheelchair reached the curb? The fact that no one knew the answer to this question turned the entire scenario into a certified Real-Life Drama and insured vast, saturating media coverage.
Colorado was still trying to get a court order making Bianca a ward of the state, but the Ramirezes’ high-profile lawyer and his team of young legal ninjas had thrown this action into a procedural snafu that would take weeks to untangle. Barring any last-minute action by the judicial branch, Carlos and Anna would still be Bianca’s legal guardians as of 6:05.
But Carlos and Anna were illegal aliens and the INS was looking for them. As a matter of fact, the INS was right there at the hospital, and had been for three days, waiting for them to show up. So if Bianca’s parents actually showed up at 6:05 to take custody of their daughter, they would immediately be taken off to the slammer and someone else would have to step in anyway to take care of Bianca. This would probably end up being Anna’s sister Pilar, but there had been rumors that the state might use the arrest of Carlos and Anna as a pretext to seize Bianca, in which case the media could look forward to a tearful three-way Solomonic showdown right there in the horseshoe drive.
All the networks showed up, and as early as six o’clock on Friday morning, twelve hours before the Big Event, Highlands’ new PR man was already out in the horseshoe drive with a thick piece of blue chalk, marking out camera positions: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Chan 4, Chan 5, Chan 7, and more.
As one journalist could be overheard remarking to another journalist while they waited in the car-rental line at Stapleton Airport: “It’s got a coma baby. It’s got a miracle recovery. Weepy parents. A crooked senator. And it’s even got a fucking cowboy!”
By itself, the story was plenty, but things got even better, if that was possible, in the middle of the day, when rumors began to circulate that one of Senator Marshall’s staff members had documents incriminating another staff member in the Lazy Z Ranch grazing scandal that had triggered this whole mess, and that she was going to be there this evening to lay the whole thing out before the massed forces of the national press. And when this rumor was embellished a little, to the effect that the woman in question was the famous bag lady who had recently cut Earl Strong’s nuts off in public, journalists all over Denver had to put their drinks down and breathe into paper sacks for a while.
Eleanor Richmond strode like a gunslinger into the horseshoe drive at 5:55 P.M. cradling a three-inch-thick stack of xeroxed handouts. Before she said a word, she held one of the handouts up next to her face and stood motionless for a few seconds. She had learned this from watching the pros in action. It gave the video people a chance to adjust the white balance on their cameras so that she, and everyone who followed her into the center of the maelstrom, would not look pink or green on television. At the same time, it was a great pose for the still photographers. Dozens of motor drives whined, clearly audible in the astonishing silence that had suddenly fallen over this makeshift technological amphitheater.
If the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had chosen this moment to gallop through the horseshoe drive on their fiery mounts, the journalists would have chased them out of the shot with verbal abuse, and possibly interviewed them later, after the main event. The only figure who dared to break into the frame was a helpful reporter from the Washington Post who scurried up to Eleanor, relieved her of the stack of handouts, and frisbeed them wildly into the crowd.
“My name is Eleanor Richmond. I am the Denver health and human services liaison for Senator Caleb Roosevelt Marshall. I have held that position for one month.
“When I began working for the Senator I was convinced, based on his past record and statements, that he was a racist. I am now convinced that he does not have a racist bone in his body. I have never met a man more willing to judge people on their individual merits, or lack thereof.
“However even the most perceptive judge of human nature can occasionally be fooled by ambitious persons who practice to dece
ive. It is my unpleasant duty to report to you that several such people have risen to positions of influence on the Senator’s staff and, unbeknownst to Senator Marshall, have abused the power of his office for private gain.
“Going direct to the media is not the best way to handle this situation. I should have met with the Senator first. I have made repeated efforts to reach him but he has been unavailable. Unfortunately I cannot wait any longer to release this information, because it has a bearing on the matter of Bianca Ramirez, and if, by my inaction, I were to cause damage to her family, I could never forgive myself. So I am releasing the information now and I am also offering my resignation to Senator Marshall at the same time.”
“Eleanor!” shouted all of the journalists at once, raising their hands.
“Excuse me, excuse me, but I think that I should be given an opportunity to speak,” someone said, coming up behind Eleanor.
She turned around and looked directly into the face of Shad Harper.
And then she hesitated. She had her back to the lights and cameras now; he was facing them, every pore in his face exposed to their pitiless illumination. She felt like an interrogator as she stood there staring into his face, weighing the situation, trying to make up her mind.
He didn’t look good. Shad was just a boy, after all, not very well seasoned, and although he had a few on-camera skills, he was hardly a master of the game. And right now, he was really, really upset.
She knew that if she let Shad talk, he’d cut his own throat. He’d do it because he was a man and he had been conditioned, all his life, to deny his fear, to act before thinking, to get in over his head. A woman, or an older man, would have backed off, thought it over, chosen the right time. Not Shad; Shad had to confront her right now; he couldn’t let her win even a single skirmish.
“Be my guest,” she said, and stepped away from the microphone.
“I’m Shad Harper,” he said, his voice cracking. “BLM liaison for Senator Marshall. And since I’m still on his staff, unlike Eleanor here, who has apparently resigned—and if she hasn’t resigned—which I can’t say for sure either way, since I have not seen and do not have any independent knowledge of any letter by which she might have resigned—if she hasn’t resigned then she will probably be fired, and in any case no longer speaks for Senator Marshall, if indeed she ever did—I do speak for Senator Marshall and so, since it appears that very damnable allegations are being made about him that I should step up and say something.”
“She’s not making allegations about the Senator,” one of the journalists shouted, glancing through the handout. “She’s making allegations about you personally, Mr. Harper.”
Harper’s mouth fell open. “Well, I haven’t seen these alleged allegations yet, but—”
“Is this your handwriting?” said another journalist, a woman from the L.A. Times, holding up one page of the handout.
It was a photocopy of a sheet of stationery printed, at the top, with the words FROM THE DESK OF SHAD HARPER. It was covered with hand-written notes.
“I’d have to take a better look—”
“Let me just read you some of this and maybe you can explain why you were writing some of these things down,” the woman said. “‘State of Washington versus Garcia 1990.’ That sounds like a court case.”
“I don’t remember,” Shad said.
“I looked it up,” Eleanor said. “It was a case in which some children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the back of a pickup truck and the state of Washington successfully took custody of the surviving children on grounds that their parents had neglected them.”
“Why were you looking up that case, Shad?” the woman from the L.A. Times said. “How does that relate to your job as BLM liaison for the Senator?”
“First and foremost, I am a servant of the people,” Shad said. The protesters gathered off to one side hooted derisively. The sound threw Shad off balance and he stumbled for a moment. “Uh, I’m entitled to look up court cases in the privacy of my own office.”
“You were trying to assemble material with which to blackmail Anna and Carlos Ramirez,” Eleanor said. “By threatening them with the loss of their only remaining child, you could coerce them into silence, and reduce the intensity of the spotlight on the cozy arrangement between you and Sam Wyatt—which never drew any public attention until a freak accident exposed it to public view.”
“That is just, just—a terrible thing that you are saying.”
“What is terrible is to live in a time when saying things is considered to be worse than doing them,” Eleanor said.
“You seem to be forgetting here that people in this state, and in this country are damn tired of these unemployed welfare mother illegal aliens coming into this country and stirring things up!”
“Why don’t you call them spics and wetbacks, the way you do when you’re speaking on the telephone to Sam Wyatt?”
“That is a totally unprovable allegation!” Shad yelped. He looked shocked, horrified, to hear these words spoken in public, as if he and Sam Wyatt had invented the words for their personal use. “Listen. I am not a person with any kind of ethnic bias or bigotry. I limit my concern to those people, of whatever ethnic group, who take advantage of the system. Who are like parasites on the prosperous economic system that has been built up over the years by the hard work of productive citizens the likes of Sam Wyatt.”
“Sam Wyatt,” Eleanor said. “Sam Wyatt, who grazes his cattle on government-owned land. Land that was occupied by Native Americans until the government paid soldiers to come out here and kill them. Sam Wyatt, who irrigates his ranch with water from a government-built dam. And you think that Anna Ramirez is a welfare queen? I’ve got news for you, cowboy. Everyone in the state of Colorado is a welfare queen. We all live and feed off the largesse of taxpayers in other parts of the country. It’s just that some of us, like Sam Wyatt, have been here longer than others, and have had time to pile up more government welfare checks in their bank accounts and funnel more of that money back into big campaign contributions. So don’t stand here in Denver, a metropolis built on a creek, the capital of Colorado, a state that would dry up and turn back into a prairie without the continuing help of the government, and bray about the bad moral qualities of welfare queens. Because these people who come north across the border may not have gel in their hair and they may not have ostrich-hide cowboy boots, but unlike you, they have something a lot more important. They have values.”
The hospital doors slid open and Bianca Ramirez rolled out in a wheelchair, pushed along by a smiling nurse, escorted by her entire medical team.
A disturbance moved through protesters and suddenly Carlos and Anna Ramirez emerged from the crowd, smiles on their faces, tears streaming down their cheeks. They moved across the horseshoe drive, unhindered by journalists or INS agents or Shad Harper or anyone else, and engulfed their daughter in their arms. And were engulfed, in turn, by hundreds of their supporters.
The whole thing was a lot warmer and calmer than anyone had expected. The only real disturbance was off to the side, where an INS van, a paddywagon with steel grilles over all the windows, had begun rocking from side to side. The driver jumped out, leaving the van empty, and a broad open space suddenly appeared in the crowd. Then a dozen men, their arms and backs burly from stooping in Arkansas Valley truck farms, rolled it all the way over onto its roof and left it there like a turtle upended on a highway.
thirty-one
ELEANOR WAS in the middle of cleaning out her office. This wasn’t much of a job since she had barely moved into it and the empty boxes were still stacked conveniently in the corner. Bent over with both hands in a file drawer, she didn’t notice Caleb Roosevelt Marshall coming into her office until he got her attention by tossing a keychain onto her vacant desktop.
“I’m taking you on a ride, lady,” he said.
She straightened up, startled to see him standing right in front of her, dressed in a blue work shirt and chinos, leaning on a cane. �
��I have my best conversations when I’m driving flat out into the mountains,” he said, nodding at the keychain. Eleanor picked it up; it was a set of keys to a rented Cadillac. “But now I’m getting too old to drive. Can’t even see the goddamn hood ornament.”
“Allow me, then,” Eleanor said.
It was a nice Cadillac, a convertible, parked in the Senator’s private space in back of the Alamo. The Senator had apparently dismissed his security detail, so Eleanor offered her arm and helped him out of the building and into the passenger seat. Then she got in and cranked it up. The car had a nice sound system with a tape player, and although the Senator complained that he wanted to get going, Eleanor decided to rummage around in the hollow center armrest for one of his tapes.
“What are you going to play? Rap music?” he said as she popped a tape out of its case and shoved it into the dashboard.
“Resurrection Symphony,” Eleanor said, as the opening bars came from speakers hidden all over the car.
“Good,” Marshall said. “I been listening to it a lot. Figure I’d better become expert in the subject. Now let’s get going, damn it.”
The Senator had a particular, highly detailed route he wanted to follow through Denver and up into the mountains. He eschewed the newfangled foolishness of freeways in favor of a devious route that took them down alleys, through parks, along curvy residential streets. For a while, as she followed his barked and seemingly improvised instructions, she was afraid that he had gone completely off his rocker and was getting them hopelessly lost. But they never got stuck at a slow stoplight, never had to make an impossible left turn, and in time the city began to spread out and undulate as the landscape awoke from the thousand-mile slumber of the prairie.
“Thanks for saving my ass,” Senator Marshall said, when he wasn’t giving directions.
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