Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  I’ve done some good work using snitches, but in principle I agreed with him. Using an informant who has his own motives is a bad way to build a foundation. You should have other planks to bolster your case.

  “Okay, I’ll buy that. What’s number two?”

  “You know the answer to that,” he threw back at me.

  He was cagey, this old man. Maybe he figured me for a spy. “Somebody tipped them off? They knew you were coming?”

  He nodded.

  “And no one except the members of the task force knew about the raid?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  Which meant somebody on that task force was dirty. I didn’t have to say that out loud.

  A thought had been gestating in my head, from when I was reading the summary. Now it crystallized. “Did you know that operation existed?” I asked Miller. “Before Lopez copped?”

  Finally, a smile. More a grimace, but the lips did curl upward. “We knew there was something there. We had our eye on the place.”

  “For how long?”

  A casual shrug. “Six months, a year.”

  How come this was just coming out? I thought. “How’d you know?”

  “We knew there was an airstrip being built on the hush-hush by some out-of-state corporation, which we figured out quickly was a sham, we couldn’t find them listed anywhere. This is a remote area, but our computers work as good as anybody else’s. You mix one airstrip in a remote location together with a dummy corporation, you get bad news.”

  “So you suspected there was something going on out there. Something illegal.”

  “That’s my job, being suspicious.”

  “Why didn’t you do something about it?”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell the appropriate agencies.”

  “Oh, the DEA perhaps? You saw how well they handled it,” He sat up, poker-up-his-ass straight. “I’ll be direct with you. Garrison. I’m the law here, not some jerks who take their orders from three thousand miles away. I don’t like these high-and-mighty dipshits coming into my backyard, throwing their weight around. They take all the glory if an operation’s successful, and lay blame if they fuck it up.” He spun back in his chair. “Which is exactly what happened.”

  I’d touched a nerve. Good. I didn’t know how this would be helpful to Nora, since they were partners, but it needed to be known.

  Then another thought arose. Did Nora know about this? She had to…didn’t she? And if she did, why hadn’t she told me?

  I felt queasy. I’d come up here to do a favor for an old classmate in distress, and now I was finding that I wasn’t playing with a full deck.

  “Did Nora know about it?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  He realized he’d committed a faux pas. He tried to make it right.

  “There was nothing to tell, because we didn’t do anything. You can’t move in on someone because they build a place to land airplanes. We have to wait for complaints, we can’t horn in on our own anytime we think something criminal might be going on.”

  He was right. Still, I would have liked to have known from Nora.

  I was finished with him. “Is there anything else I need from you?”

  “I’ve told you all I know. I wish I knew more, I’m damn frustrated by this. They shut me out in my own county, one of the biggest busts that’s ever come down here, then it blows up in their faces, half a dozen people are dead, and a murder’s committed fifty yards away from three dozen men, but no one knows who did it, and there aren’t any suspects, just some blue-sky theory that exonerates everyone.”

  Our meeting was over. “Thanks for your help,” I said. In truth, he hadn’t given me much. The two details I’d gleaned from meeting with him were that he believed the same things Nora did, and he’d thought something dirty might be going on out there prior to the bust, but hadn’t done anything about it.

  More important to me, in the overall scheme of things, was Miller’s conviction, even stronger than Nora’s, that Juarez’s shooting had the fingerprints of the task force all over it. The man had been in law enforcement his entire life, he knew the lay of the land. And being a former FBI agent, he had no illusions about the federal law-enforcement bureaucracy.

  “Thank you for coming all the way up here,” he said. “I know Nora appreciates it.”

  He escorted me the three steps to his door. “Nora’s an exceptional woman. She’s been through hell. I don’t know what it is she wants you to help her with exactly, but I hope you can.”

  He cared about her. This was a man who didn’t care about many people, I was sure of that.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I told him. It was easy to promise that; that’s what I was here for. Except I don’t know what it is she wants from me, beyond someone from a better past to talk to for a few days, I thought, as I walked down the hallway to Nora’s office.

  “How come you didn’t tell me you knew there was dirty business going on up there before the DEA got involved?” I asked Nora.

  We were having lunch in Maize’s Lunchroom, a coffee shop across the square from her office, an old-fashioned place that featured milk shakes and root beer floats and burgers on the grill. I was devouring a grilled-cheese sandwich—Kraft American slices on Wonder bread—one of the great bad-for-you sandwiches of my youth, and a cherry Coke served in a real old-fashioned Coke glass, the logo etched on the side. Fries to go with it. Nora, sensible female public servant that she was, had selected a Cobb salad and unsugared iced tea.

  “Because I didn’t want to tell you anything that might prejudge your perception of what happened that night,” she said coolly, reaching over and spearing one of my fries. “And we didn’t know what was going on up there, exactly, we just suspected there was something. Rightly, as it turned out.”

  “Why didn’t you go in and check it out?”

  “On what grounds?” she asked. “You were a prosecutor. Enlighten me. What would you tell a judge to get him to issue a search warrant?”

  “I’d figure something out.” The grilled-cheese sandwich was damn good, just the right amount of buttery grease on the bread.

  “Like what? There were never any complaints filed, no obvious criminal activities.”

  “I’d figure out something,” I said through a mouthful of sandwich. “My investigators would.”

  “My investigator, singular, is Sheriff Miller, and he isn’t about to walk into a lion’s den without authorization and backup, plus he doesn’t have the time to chase wild hares, he’s stretched doing the basic stuff.” She picked at her salad. “Anyway, that isn’t the main reason. We could’ve come up with one, I don’t deny it.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  She rubbed the thumb that wasn’t holding her fork against the tips of her fingers. “Money,” she whispered throatily, like an old Sarah Vaughan record. “We don’t have enough. We’re the poor relations.”

  The plight of the county prosecutor. I’d faced it myself, in a rich county. You can only do so much. Your budget determines what you can and can’t pursue, particularly when the situation is more a judgment call than bold facts in black and white.

  “Miller wanted to try to slip someone in, deep cover, the kind of operation where your man goes in for a year or more,” Nora said. “He fought for it like hell, but the cost didn’t justify it. And we couldn’t have gone all the way with it anyway, we’re way too underfunded. We certainly couldn’t have run the kind of operation the DEA did, even if they did screw it up. In the end, we’d have had to call them in anyway, so…we let nature take its course.”

  I nodded. We ate in silence for a minute. My straw made a loud sucking sound as I slurped the dregs of the Coke from the bottom of the glass.

  “Are you finished?” Nora asked.

  I looked down at my plate. It was so clean they wouldn’t have to run it through the dishwasher.

  “Guess so.”

  She signed the
check, put down a dollar for the tip. The entire meal was under seven dollars, a cappuccino and a scone in Santa Barbara.

  We walked back to her office. “Hold my calls, if I get any,” she instructed her secretary, a June Allyson look-alike, complete with hairdo.

  Nora closed the door behind us. “A murder was committed in my jurisdiction,” she said. “I can’t let that go unanswered, even if the federal government wants me to.”

  “Are you sure they don’t want you to?”

  She smiled. “They don’t want us coming in and mucking up their investigation, such as it was.” She looked at me steadfastly. “I’ve waited for them to come up with something. But they haven’t. So now, I’m going to proceed.”

  “You’re doing the right thing.”

  “I know. But I’m glad you agree with me.”

  I didn’t know that what I’d done for her was very important. Listened, and agreed with her. She’d needed the reassurance, now she had it. Mission accomplished.

  On a personal level, which was what this was about, she’d also needed me to be the one who did the listening. Not members of her staff, not others in the community. Me. I sat there a minute, thinking, why? Because I was a reminder of a better time in her life? Because I’d been in her shoes, figuratively speaking? Because I was now, in her eyes, an important figure, with the murder defense and the business in the desert under my belt?

  She’d needed me to hold her hand. There was no one around to do that anymore. So she’d reached back into the past and pulled a name out of the headlines.

  “You’re going to have to turn over a lot of stones, most of which won’t have anything under them. You know,” I cautioned her, “at the end of the day you might not have enough credible evidence to bring charges against anyone.”

  “I know.” She paused. “Money isn’t going to be a problem, fortunately.”

  “The county’s going to bite the bullet?”

  She shook her head. “We don’t have it. It could come to more than our entire budget for two years, easy. I’ve discussed this with Bill Fishell. The state’s going to foot the bill.”

  Bill Fishell’s the California attorney general. We’ve known each other for a couple of decades. He stayed in the system and moved to the top of the food chain. I didn’t.

  “Then you don’t have a problem.”

  She frowned. “I have seven deputy D.A.s, Luke. Seven for everything. And none of them have the kind of experience a case this size needs. I’m going to have to go outside. Bill and I have been discussing this over the past month, in case I decided to go for it.”

  I knew what she was talking about. In situations like this, where a county D.A. lacks the resources to conduct an investigation and trial thoroughly, the state will appoint someone to do it, usually a member of the attorney general’s staff. Once in a blue moon one of the big counties, L.A., San Francisco, San Jose, will rent out one of their aces, someone who knows his or her way around a capital murder case, because as sure as the sun is going to rise in the east tomorrow morning, if they did manage to obtain an indictment and go to trial, it would be a murder-one case with extenuating circumstances. A death-penalty case. You need a lawyer with experience to do that. Someone who can eat nails for breakfast.

  “So you’re going to bring in a gun.”

  “Yes, that’s our plan.”

  “Have you been discussing candidates?”

  “Dozens. We’ve narrowed it down to one person, a short time ago.”

  “When’s he going to start?” I assumed it was a man; if it was a woman, she would have mentioned it.

  “Soon, I hope. Bill and I haven’t asked him yet.” She stretched her long legs out. She had strong calves, I noticed. Living in this wild country, you could do a lot of outdoors stuff, hiking, things like that.

  “In fact,” she continued, “I was on the phone with Bill while you and Sheriff Miller were meeting. He gave me final authorization to make an offer.”

  “You’d better get on the stick, then,” I counseled her. “The longer you wait, the colder the trail’s going to get. And the quality of lawyer you want is booked way out in advance.”

  “I know.” She gave me a tired smile. “I wanted to get your input before I made the conclusive decision to go ahead. The state of California is going to spend a fortune trying to find out who murdered an international drug dealer who was an unredeemable scumbag who would have spent the rest of his life in a federal maximum-security prison if he hadn’t been killed. It won’t be a popular move—especially if the shooter turns out to be a renegade federal agent.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Nora, I’m flattered that you wanted my opinion, although you could have come to this decision without me. You know what you’re doing, I can see that from the short amount of time I’ve been here.”

  “I don’t know if I could have or not, but thanks for the compliment. I feel more secure about it now, believe me.”

  “Then this trip was well worth it. Not only for the help, but to see you after all these years, still looking great and fighting the good fight.” I smiled at her. “So when are you going to ask the lucky guy?”

  The smile she sent back to me was tentative. She hesitated a moment, then stood up and walked over to me.

  “Now.”

  Dinner was at her house again. Bad take-out Chinese. It didn’t matter—I had no appetite anyway. The Scotch didn’t help either, but I knocked it down and poured myself another.

  “You had this planned before I came up here,” I berated her. I’d been blindsided, and I was pissed off about it. I hate being manipulated.

  “I didn’t. I swear it.”

  “Bullshit.” I was steaming. “You set me up.”

  “It’s the truth, Luke, please believe me. I wouldn’t run a con on you.” She wasn’t happy with my attitude. Which was too bad, because I was frosted from what felt like transparent duplicity.

  “Well, what’s this?”

  “I didn’t ask you to come up here so I could set you up. I didn’t…” She tailed off.

  “You didn’t what?” I sounded like a jealous husband who’s caught his wife in a sleazy affair.

  I looked at my glass. It was almost empty. I put it down. I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, and I didn’t want whiskey fucking my head up. “You didn’t what, Nora?” I said again.

  “Want to use you.” She was sitting across the room from me, looking miserable.

  “Then what?”

  “I…needed someone to talk to, and I’d been thinking about you, from the publicity last fall. Actually, I’d thought about calling you a couple years ago, after you won that big case. Seeing your name in the paper after all these years, I got a rush of pride. I know that sounds silly, but I did.”

  “A rush of pride? For what?”

  “That someone I knew, who I’d shared an important part of my life with, was so successful. Reflected glory, you know what I mean?”

  That’s just what I needed. A woman whose own life hadn’t turned out the way she’d envisioned it living vicariously through a man she didn’t know, but had, superficially, in the distant past. As if the relationship in the past legitimized one in the present, even though the present for us had never existed.

  “So this was a good excuse,” she continued. “Then once we talked, I got to thinking about how right you’d be for this. Bill Fishell agreed with me, but I needed to know how you’d feel about it. The case, I mean,” she said hurriedly, “not about taking it on.”

  “You should’ve been straight with me up front,” I said. “It would’ve saved me time, you money, and you wouldn’t have built your expectations up. I couldn’t get into this for all the teabags in China.”

  She started crying. Softly, her head in her hands.

  “Oh, shit, Nora, don’t, come on.” I walked over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. She was trembling. “Come on, don’t.”

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were red. “I’m sorry.”

&n
bsp; “I’m happy to be here for you as a friend. But friendship and work are separate, and should stay separate.”

  “I know,” she said, even more miserably than before.

  I felt like a schmuck. Not because of what I’d said: it had to be said. But because she was so unhappy and wasn’t keeping a stiff upper lip.

  “Do you want something to drink?” I asked. When in doubt, apply booze.

  “Yes, please.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  I poured out a decent shot for her, refreshed my own glass. Then I sat down next to her.

  “I’m not in the prosecutor business anymore. I left that a long time ago, and I’ve never looked back.” I caught myself. “Actually, I did look back, for a number of years. But I got over it, and now I am over it. I don’t want to go back to that.”

  She started to say something, but held her tongue and drank some Scotch instead.

  “I’m married,” I went on. “Fairly recently, after a traumatic divorce. We have a small son. I have a nice, easy practice. In the past three years I’ve almost been killed twice, and there’ve been other traumas, too. I’ve moved out of the fast lane, Nora. I’m not even on the superhighway anymore. I’m just a plain old country-road, lawyer, doing the best he can.”

  “Which is very good. I know what you’ve been doing.”

  I let that pass. I’d already blown off all the steam I wanted to blow off.

  “This is going to be an intense, time-consuming job. Too time-consuming. And I don’t want to be away from my wife and child, not for the months this could take.”

  She nodded, agreeing with all my very good points.

  “Also—if federal agents are involved, and I think they are, like you do and your sheriff and even Bill Fishell, I presume…”

  She nodded her head again.

  “…this will get messy. You don’t know where it’s going to lead. These are rough and tough people, you get in their path at your peril.”

  “Physical danger?”

  “It could happen. Anything could happen. None of it enjoyable. Which is why, my long-ago friend, the answer to your question is no. Listen, Nora, there are plenty of great lawyers who can do this job and will be happy to take it on. You won’t have any problem getting one.”