This was sounding worse and worse. “Was it…?” Shit, what? An accident, murder, self-inflicted? I felt like a ghoul. “Forget I asked that.” I had to change the subject, this one was too overwhelming, especially without any warning. “What’re you up to? Are you working, do you have kids?”
“We never had children.” Another pause; another painful subject? “And yes, of course I’m working, I’ll always work, I’m the repository of ten generations of Protestant guilt. If I hadn’t been working, I don’t know what would have happened. To me, how I would’ve coped.”
Abruptly, her tone of voice changed. “Hey, you know what, you don’t need to hear this now. Not over the telephone, after almost twenty years. Anyway, that’s not why I called, Luke, to talk about Dennis or any of that. If we get together—which I hope we will—we can talk about it. Wine helps, and vodka’s even better.”
“Uh-huh.” Where is this going? I thought, having recovered, at least partially, from this two-ton safe that had just been dropped on my head.
“So, to amplify your question about ‘am I working?’ I’ve been with the district attorney’s office for eight years. In fact, for the past four years, I’m the man.”
“You’re the D.A. of…?” This was an interesting twist, the big-city sophisticate running the show in some obscure, backwater county. The last job anyone would’ve expected to happen to a woman like Nora. Where the hell was Blue River, anyway? Up north in the tules, but I couldn’t remember what county, exactly.
“Muir County. Blue River’s the county seat.”
“Oh, yeah.” Something jogged my brain. “Wasn’t that were that DEA bust that went south happened?”
“That’s us. Not our operation, but we were tarred by it nevertheless, once the press got hold of it. They tried to keep it hush-hush, since it was such a fiasco, but you can’t avoid the press these days, not even in an out-of-the-way place like Blue River. And the press can be brutal.”
I knew the feeling—between the publicity from the killings six months ago, and my kidnapping trial a couple years before, if I never saw my name in the newspapers or on the boob tube again I’d be a happy man. “Yes, I know.”
“It was awful.” She hesitated. “You were the D.A. for some time down there, weren’t you?”
I finally figured out where this call was going. “Ten years, about.”
She corroborated my hunch. “I need to talk to somebody about this, who has your kind of experience.”
“It’s been a while,” I told her, not wanting her to get the wrong notion of my present understanding of or involvement in the prosecutorial area. “I don’t know if I’m the right person to give you whatever help or advice it is you might be needing.”
Another pause from her end. Then she came right at me. “Do you not want to see me, Luke?”
Why the hell do people have feelings, anyway? Life would be so much simpler without them. “I’m sorry, Nora. If I gave you that impression, I didn’t mean to.”
“I’ve developed a thick hide over the years. There’s almost nothing anyone can say or do to me anymore that I can’t handle.”
I told her the truth. “I would love to see you.”
“Thank you.” Her tension dissipated—I could feel the hum of relief over the wire. “Have you ever been up here?”
“Not in Muir County itself, no.”
“Most people haven’t. No reason to.” She got to it. “Could you come up here for a day or so? We’d pay your expenses, of course. The county.”
I wasn’t lying when I told her I’d love to see her. But going up to Muir County and seeing her as the D.A., rather than meeting somewhere as two old friends, those were two separate and different issues.
“When would you like me to come up?”
“As soon as you can.”
“Run this by me again,” Riva said.
I told her. As far as the back story, Dennis and Nora and all that, she got the abridged version. It wasn’t that I was hiding anything—Nora and I’d never had anything going, she was Dennis’s woman from the moment they met—but it wasn’t about Riva and me, in the present. Those were different times, I was a different person. Part of my reticence, I guess, was not wanting to examine old skeletons. And what, if anything, Dennis Ray’s life and death meant to me. Or about me.
“I still don’t get it.” Riva was chewing on this. “What does this woman want from you, Luke? Contacting you after umpteen years of no word at all?”
Obviously, I’d thought about this. “Someone to talk to. Someone who’s walked a mile in her shoes, to coin an expression. Dennis and her and I were good friends back then. Also, I’m probably the only one from our circle who became a D.A. Stanford Law Review honchos don’t usually go into the public sector. Not on the prosecutor’s side.” I had been the exception—the odd man out.
We’d put Buck to bed. He’s a good sleeper, he usually goes down without too much fuss and doesn’t wake up until five or six—his motor runs so hard when he’s awake that when the switch is turned off, boom, dreamland. Now we were sitting in Adirondack chairs, side by side on the deck of our house, which overlooks the Mission to the immediate west, the city below, the ocean beyond that. Killer views, which we paid through the nose for. After that big kidnapping trial of mine, a few years before, we decided to live the best we could afford, even stretch it some. When you’ve almost been killed, the future is now. The horror show out in the desert earlier in the year had confirmed that feeling.
It was chilly out. February nights are generally cold and moist in Santa Barbara. The thick, wet fog covered most of the deep view, but we could see down as far as the lights in the harbor. Both of us, bundled up in sweaters, blankets around our legs, were drinking Irish coffee from thick mugs I’d bought years before at the Buena Vista in San Francisco, when I was young and naive/dumb enough to think it was a cool place.
Riva was still skeptical. “It’s about that messed-up FBI operation up there.”
“DEA, but yeah.”
“Wouldn’t the DEA be handling it? It was federal, wasn’t it?”
Riva used to write bail bonds. She knows the law better than most lawyers, especially in criminal matters.
“From what I know”—I nodded—“but I know what I read in the papers, which I didn’t pay that much attention to. Another government screwup; like, what’s new? Let’s face it, they fuck up all the time, especially the alphabet agencies. Maybe she’s got something going on her own—which she doesn’t feel like sharing with them.”
“But wants to with you? Who she hasn’t seen or spoken to in almost twenty years? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
It did seem odd, put that way. Nora Sherman Ray and I didn’t know each other anymore. Law school, twenty years ago? Such ancient history. But who knows how someone else thinks? Our shared three years at Stanford had been one of the high points of her late husband’s life, and by extension, hers. It probably meant a lot more to her than it did to me.
“I think she wants to talk to someone about Dennis. My guess is she hasn’t done that with satisfaction. Not to someone who knew him when he was a champion. And this comes up, which is a convenient and permissible venue. Meeting on a professional level, I mean.”
“I know what you mean.” Riva’s hand was on mine, under the blanket. “You’re not a shrink, Luke, a priest, her brother, cousin, father. You’re not even her friend, I’ve never once heard her name out of your mouth.”
“I was, though. A friend.”
“Maybe you’re a lifeline.”
Maybe. I’d thought that could be it. I didn’t want to be.
“She said she wanted to pick my brain about this case.” I held firm. “So that’s what I’m going to talk to her about.”
Riva grinned, nudged me with her foot. “Yeah, Sure. She’ll be meeting you at the station, in widow’s weeds. Grace Kelly hanging fire on Gary Cooper.”
My wife cut me no slack, none: She also watches too many old movies on cable�
�home alone with a kid, you can fall into that.
“This is doing an old friend a favor, honey.” I nudged her back. “Anyway, Amtrak doesn’t run anywhere near Blue River. This is going to be a puddle jump and a rental car and a day with…” I shrugged.
“With?” She prompted me with another foot nudge. Not delicately.
“A fellow professional.”
With old memories, is what had flashed through my mind. Riva’s, too, I’m sure.
Since the incident in the desert, I’d been lying low. You kill a couple of rogue cops, you save a dozen lives, you become famous for a little while. Everybody wants a piece of you, whether it’s People, Larry King, Oprah, whoever. Senators and governors. It lasts a couple of weeks and then dies down, but still, your face has been out there.
So I hadn’t been working much, taking stock of my life, which was good, by and large, but I need to work, it defines me, I’m too old and set to change professions and I’m way too young to retire. Maybe I could spend a few days helping out on someone else’s problem and let that ease me back into the lawyering racket.
I flew into Reno, the closest city to Muir County that had a commercial airport, and headed up Highway 395 in my rental Dodge. In a short while I’d left the populated world in my rearview mirror—except for Susanville, a fast hour’s drive from the airport (population 7,300), there were no towns of consequence before or behind me for hundreds of miles.
As I’ve mentioned, I’d lived in the northwestern part of the state a few years back, up in the old-growth redwood area around Ukiah, not far from the ocean, which is where I met Riva. By any rational reckoning that is a weird, one-of-a-kind area—you have that much dope being grown, manufactured, and distributed, it has to be. Law and order is a hit-and-miss proposition, more to be honored in the breach than for real. It’s a sixties kind of thing, I guess, the whole place is a throwback of a kind, but not so much peace, love, and understanding as paranoia against the man and all things organizational. Bunker mentality, the kind that bedrocked old communes once they turned squirrelly and insular. Some of them still exist pretty much as they did back then, when the urban kids came from the Eastern cities with Bob Dylan playing in their heads. Thirty-five years later the answer is still blowin’ in the wind, and you never need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
I was too young for that, and I wouldn’t have gone for it anyway, I’m too square to feel comfortable in that life. But I see their point.
The thing is, I know what it’s like to inhabit an environment that’s abnormal, physically and emotionally. Riva and I thought we were fairly isolated there, which by my urbanized standards we were—but compared to this region of the state, we were absolutely cosmopolitan. Everywhere here was rawer, way more forsaken. Starting out, my drive took me through landscape similar to that of other places in northern California—massive stands of timber, towering skyscrapers jammed shoulder to shoulder that reached to the clouds and beyond, far past my seeing their tops out the windshield as I drove along the narrow boulevard that the highway created through them, occasionally broken up by stretches of raw grassy-mossy range. Unspoiled, majestic.
Then the landscape changed. Dramatically. From an abundance of foliage to terrain that was stark, dry, lifeless. The farther north I drove, the more featureless the territory became. Barren, dry, a lunar-looking landscape that went on and on, like that Dali painting with the melting watch. But no melted watch, no bright colors. Which is not to say it wasn’t beautiful; eerily, it was—on its own stripped-down terms. But so far from the world of people. It was almost impossible to conceive of two young, gung ho professionals leaving a place like Denver for this. Their circumstances had to have been dire in the extreme to have made this spot their home; more than I could ever have realized from hearing stories about it.
I stopped at a mom-and-pop gasoline station and filled the tank. They hardly exist anymore, even as far out in the boonies as this. It was comforting, being there; it reminded me that America hasn’t gone completely corporate yet.
Lemon Snapple, mint Milanos, and Altoids in hand to fortify me the rest of the way, I handed a twenty-dollar-bill to the cashier, a weathered older lady with a bad homemade henna job. “How much longer to Blue River?” I asked.
“Hour and a half, about, if you pedal to the metal,” she answered, making my change. She gave me a serious look-see. “Do I know you? You look kinda familiar.”
“I’ve never been here in my life.” Not a lie. I didn’t want to be identified, too much hassle, and it could mess up whatever help I might be able to give Nora.
“You’re not with the DEA?” she persisted.
“No. Do I look like I am?”
“They’re about the only outsiders been around here, last bunch of months. Swarming the place. Looking for who did that murder. That drug kingpin. You seen it on TV? It was big news.”
“I’m just passing through,” I lied. I wasn’t ready for anyone other than Nora to know I was coming. “Did the DEA catch who committed the murder?”
“Get serious.” Her look at me said, How feeble are you, anyway? “When was the last time the DEA caught anything except a cold?”
She wasn’t a fan of the bureaucracy, obviously. “I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t keep up on those things.”
“Check out the Enquirer,” she advised me, pointing to the newsrack next to the register. The featured papers were the Enquirer, the Globe, the Star, and for serious newsies, USA Today. “It’s a rag, they all are,” she allowed, “but they get the scoop more often than not, and they don’t wallow in their own pretentious bullshit, like those pathetic talking heads on CNBC.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She placed my snacks in a plastic carry-bag. “So who does the Enquirer say did it?”
“They don’t. Ain’t spicy enough.”
Well, I thought, I’ve got a captive audience here in front of me—might as well try my luck, see if I could get a finger on the local pulse. “Who do you think did it? You must hear talk.”
“Do I look like Sherlock Holmes?” she parried. She didn’t know me, my agenda, if I had one, despite my lame disclaimer to be “just passing through.” “The man who got himself murdered was a drug lord, so he’d have made plenty of enemies.” She hesitated, then said, “I’ll bet you this—if they ever do find out, which is not likely, given the quality of law enforcement these days in general—I’ll lay odds it won’t be one of the usual suspects.”
Dusk. The faded wooden guide-sign at the Blue River city-limit line informed me that this was the Muir County seat, that the population as of the latest census was 2,225: There were the standard civic organizations: Lions Club, Masonic Lodge, Knights of Columbus, a handful of lesser ones. A few churches were advertised, some establishment, some fundamentalist. The elevation was six thousand six hundred feet. It had been close to or over six thousand feet from shortly after I’d passed through Susanville. I could feel it in my lungs, the sparseness of the air.
Off to my right, looming over the small buildings of the town, a mountain range, nameless to me, was glimmering orange and violet in the fading sunlight. It looked fairly close, but it could have been a hundred miles away, distances are deceiving in vast landscapes such as this. A thin scattering of gnarly trees clung stubbornly to the side. A light covering of snow mantled it haphazardly in spots, where the sun never reached. Not a skier’s or climber’s mountain. Rocky, inhospitable. This entire region was a mighty force of nature, a raw, enormous gut of country. One of those places that isn’t that different from when the first white settlers moved through it a hundred and fifty years ago. They rode horses, I was driving a car, but in both cases the land ruled. I knew it could overwhelm you in a heartbeat if you turned your back on it.
The courthouse shared space in the same building with the various county agencies. It was a squat concrete structure, located a block from the center of town, built in the boring one-size-fits-all mold from the fifties. Business w
as finished for the day, so plenty of parking spaces were available. In small towns like this they roll the sidewalks up early. I parked in front and went inside.
Quiet. I looked up the number of the prosecutor’s office on the information board. First floor, the far end of the hall. I walked toward it.
Halfway there, a door opened. Nora had heard me, my footsteps echoing faintly in the empty corridor. I knew she had been awaiting my arrival, getting antsy as the day slipped away, and now there she was. It hit me that she had seen me out her window, my headlights as I pulled up. Watching for me.
The light from inside the office was behind her—she was in silhouette. Standing there motionless, erect, looking at me. Even from a distance it felt as if she wanted to come toward me; but she didn’t. She held herself in check, waiting for me to reach her.
It had been almost twenty years. We hugged awkwardly, trying to fit our bodies together without being sloppy. Then we stepped back and looked at each other.
She spoke first—she was more nervous than I was. “You look good, Luke. You look … you haven’t changed much at all.”
“You’re too kind.” I smiled. “Full of it, but that’s okay. I’ll take it. You look good yourself, Nora.”
“Thanks.” Her eyes were on my face. Looking for…? Now she smiled back; a shy smile. “It’s been a long time since a man said something nice about my looks. The men around here, they don’t look at women like me as…”
“As?”
“Women.” She shrugged. “It’s the culture. For me, that’s good. I wouldn’t want…” She tailed off again.
To get involved with a man here: I read her mind. She could feel it—the vibe was oscillating like a tuning fork. “How did we get on this track?” she asked, backing up a step.
“We’re not on any track,” I said to put her at ease.
She nodded. “Good.”
Her office was standard government issue. At least she had a corner, windows on two walls. One view was of the street, the other of a parking lot. She grabbed her purse and an old leather briefcase from her desk.
Above the Law Page 9
