Above the Law
Page 16
I didn’t want to watch anymore. “Let’s get lunch,” I told Phil.
We walked down the street to the Paradise, where I ordered a glass of chardonnay as soon as I sat down, and another with my grilled salmon. I don’t drink at lunch, but this was a special occasion. A wake, in absentia.
“This has been a lousy year for the police,” Riva said.
“How about the victims of the police?”
“That’s what I meant. I meant public-relations-wise.”
“If they stopped killing people and violating their civil rights, they wouldn’t have that problem.”
“You’re sounding like Gloria Allred.”
“Spare me.”
I’m not one of those talk-show lawyers who think the police are corrupt as an institution. Nor am I a bleeding-heart liberal who cries for the killer behind bars and doesn’t for his victims. I’m not a liberal at all when it comes to law enforcement, it was my life. But I do believe that the police have a special obligation, because it’s their job and because they hold so much power, to uphold the law beyond that of an ordinary citizen. When police officers cross the line, they dishonor the ninety-nine percent who do it the right way. And they give the public the impression that the police are out of control.
Which they were in the Brigadoon bar. Even though Bill and Joe weren’t cops anymore, in the public’s eye, they were—once a cop, always a cop. The point is, people died as a result of law officers (and ex-officers) going beyond their mandate. When that starts to happen, and they aren’t called to account for it, you’re living in a police state.
It was night. I was back home. Over dinner I’d filled Riva in on the day’s events up in San Luis Obispo. She doesn’t watch TV during the day, except kids’ stuff on PBS.
We watched some of the coverage, which out local affiliate was broadcasting live. The initial reporting had been wrong; the convicts didn’t have guns, and they weren’t holding any guards hostage. And you can’t seal yourself in like in the old prisons, everything’s controlled centrally. In a day or two, the reporter told us, everything would be back to normal.
“Normal?” I yelled at the screen. “You call seven men dead over a fight in the yard normal? One of them a Ph.D. candidate who shouldn’t have been there in the first place? You call that normal?”
“I don’t think the man in the little box can hear you, honey,” Riva said softly. “You’re going to wake Buck up.”
“Ah, fuck it.” I remoted the tube off. “Why don’t they put happy shit on TV for a change?” I groused. “Boy Scouts helping old ladies across the street. Firemen rescuing cats from trees.”
“Do you need a rocker or a walker?”
“Corrupt police, police brutality, malfeasance…murder, which is what happened to William Lowenstein, as far as I’m concerned, murder sanctioned by the state. I hope his family sues the shit out of those bastards, I’ll do that one for free.” I forced myself to calm down. “It sure seems like I’m attracting this stuff, doesn’t it?”
“You’re still thinking about what happened up in Blue River, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t…I thought I wasn’t…but this got me started again.”
She’d gone into the kitchen, was putting the dinner dishes into the dishwasher. She turned the machine on, came back into the living room, settled down next to me on the couch.
“Let me ask you a question, husband of mine. Darling husband of mine.”
“The Beatles, 1969. Abbey Road.”
“How’d you know that’s what I was going to ask?”
“Call me Carnac. What’s the question?”
“If we weren’t married, would you have taken that special prosecutor job?”
“We are married, so it’s irrelevant.”
She put her feet in my lap. I started massaging them through her socks.
“Oh, that’s good. Right there.” She stretched out like a cat. “But if we weren’t. Theoretically.”
“I don’t know. I probably would have thought about it.”
“You would’ve taken it, wouldn’t you?”
I switched to her other foot. “Maybe. After what happened today, the odds would have gone up.”
She pulled her feet away, sat up.
“Take that job, Luke.”
“No way. It’s going to be a mess. I’d be neglecting all my other clients, it’s boring as hell up there, and I’m not going to be away from you, I’ve told you that.”
“If you had a big lawsuit against Boeing and you had to go up to Seattle for three or six or nine months, you would, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“It just is. I don’t want to be a prosecutor anymore, for one thing.”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be about that. You’ve been railing about police acting wrongly, you don’t like outside agencies coming into local territories, you’ve bitched about that for years, how that pissed you off when you were the D.A.”
“That was then. Can we change the subject?”
“You’ve been having nightmares since you killed those two men.”
That stopped me cold.
“So?” I finally said.
“They were rogue cops. The killer of the drug dealer in Blue River could be a rogue cop.”
“Not the same.”
This was an argument I wasn’t going to win—these were my own words, coming back at me.
“Okay.” I gave in to her. “After what happened today, added to what happened out in the desert, I would have taken the job. Thought seriously about it, at least. If we weren’t married. And if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass on the ground so much. We’re married, I’m staying right here.”
“And keep having those nightmares? I’m not getting any sleep.”
“I’ll sleep oh the couch for a few days.”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “You’re sleeping right next to me. That’s the best part of being married, as far as I’m concerned—that big man-blanket I can snuggle up against. You ain’t going nowhere, buster.”
“Good. That’s resolved.” I got up, went toward the kitchen to make myself an Irish coffee.
“You ain’t sleeping nowhere without me. Here or in a motel room in Blue River, end of nowheresville, California.”
There was still coffee in the pot from this morning. I filled a cup, put it in the microwave to heat up, got down the bottle of Jameson from the liquor cabinet and the whipped cream from the refrigerator.
“It would be a bad decision, honey. You don’t know what it would entail. A lot of important people will be mad at me, and at the end of the day I don’t know if anything would ever come of it. That’s a really serious accusation, accusing a government agent of killing his prisoner. That borders on assassination.”
“All the more reason for you to get involved.”
“You’d hate it up there, I promise you. You wouldn’t last two weeks.”
“If it came to that, we’d cross that bridge. We can handle this, Luke.” She pulled my face around. “Look at me. This could be the most important case you’re ever involved in. This could be big, huge,” she went on. “You could uncover a pattern of killings like this, in other raids. Which is all the reason more for somebody to do it, and that somebody is you.”
I made my Irish coffee with an extra shot of whiskey and went back into the living room. I wanted to go outside and take a walk; it was a beautiful night, clear, starry, full-mooned. Warm enough to be comfortable.
“We should get an au pair,” I said. “We have that spare room. We could have some time to ourselves, like take a walk now.”
She wasn’t going to allow me to change the subject. “You haven’t resolved those killings, Luke. This could help. You need to do something. It almost seems heaven-sent.”
“In a perverse way, maybe.”
“So be it. Who cares how salvation comes?”
“That’s very poetic, Riva. Is that a quot
e?”
“It is now. Seriously, honey, there’s bad stuff inside you that needs to be gotten out, looked at, disposed of. I think this could be the key.”
I didn’t want to argue anymore. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good.” She took a sip of my Irish coffee. “That’s too strong!”
“I’ll sleep well tonight, after this,” was my excuse.
I dream in color, which I’m told not many people do. It makes my dreams seem more real, not always an enjoyable experience.
This nightmare was particularly brutal and horrifying, and so literal there was no way I wouldn’t think I was dreaming, even subconsciously. A task force was raiding Lompoc prison. I was running the operation along with Jerome, the DEA agent. We suffered heavy casualties but made it in, and then we started killing indiscriminately, anyone we saw. We fought our way to the wing where the prisoners had taken control. The prison wing turned into the Brigadoon bar. My client William Lowenstein was one of the men running the show for the prisoners, along with Joe and Bill, the men I’d already killed in the desert. I couldn’t figure out how they were still alive, but it didn’t matter, they were, and they were armed and aiming their guns at me. “Give it up,” I told them, sounding like Humphrey Bogart. They laughed at me. I had no choice—I had to kill them. As I raised my gun, they started shooting at me. Then Jerome was shooting at me. I was hit by a fusillade of bullets.
I fell to the ground, dying…
Riva was shaking me. I woke up. I was sweating like a bandit. All the covers had been thrown off the bed.
PART THREE
FALLING CHIPS
NORA WAS OVERJOYED TO hear from me. She didn’t ask why I’d changed my mind, and I didn’t tell her. We set up a meeting with Bill Fishell at his office in Sacramento, to go over the conditions they’d have to agree to in order for me to take the job.
Luke Garrison, J.D.
Attorney-at-Law
106 E. De La Guerra St.
Suite 7
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
805-555-9876
805-555-6789 (fax)
March 10, 1999
Hon. William Fishell
Office of the Attorney General
Sacramento, CA
Nora Sherman Ray
District Attorney
Muir County, CA
Dear Bill and Nora,
Here is my list of what I’ll need from the two of you in order to consider taking the job of special prosecutor for Muir County in the matter of the killing of Reynaldo Juarez:
(a) The investigation will be under Nora’s jurisdiction, as she is the Muir County District Attorney, but I will have autonomy. I will report to her and consult with her, but it will be my show to run, the same way a federal special prosecutor works.
(b) I will hire the staff, and within reasonable limitations I will have free rein to do so.
(c) Although all investigations like this are inherently open-ended, I want to put a preliminary timetable on it; not to save the state money, that’s your problem, not mine, but to give myself an exit, in case this looks like it could drag on for years. Basically, if after intensive investigation this situation doesn’t start bearing fruit in six months, I reserve the right to walk away from it and let someone else take over, if you want to keep it going, I don’t want to be stuck in Blue River the rest of my life.
(d) My billing rate will be $400 an hour, including travel, plus expenses. My normal workweek will be four days, Monday through Thursday. If my presence isn’t needed, I won’t be there, be it a day, a week, a month—I want to maintain my own practice, particularly with the cases already in the works.
(e) I will be provided with first-class accommodations, and given a comfortable living allowance. At my option, I will be flown home every weekend I am free, Blue River-Santa Barbara direct. Given the difficulty of getting in and out of Blue River, particularly during times of bad weather, this or similar transportation will be available to my staff when appropriate, and will also be used to bring in witnesses and/or suspects as is necessary. Time will be of the essence; it is also money.
(f) All travel and housing expenses for investigators and other staff working with me will be paid for by the state and/or county. We should assume that almost everyone on my staff will be from outside Muir County, some from outside the state, all top-of-the-line people. This is going to be a high-stakes game, only the best will do.
Sincerely,
Luke Garrison
Luke Garrison
I set my demands deliberately high. Going after a federal agent—or more than one, if there was a conspiracy—would be a rough piece of business, particularly since the man who was killed was a shitbag criminal who most people would think deserved killing. My team would be pilloried, possibly threatened. I had to protect them and see to it that everything but the actual work was smoother than silicon. The perks had to be premium, from housing to cars to family considerations to everything I could think of—whatever it would take to keep me and the professionals on my staff, who would be making sacrifices to live in Blue River for an extended period, happy and motivated.
A more personal reason for these stipulations was that a substantial part of me wanted no part of this. Playing God scares me, and special prosecutors have godlike power. It’s hard to be humble under those circumstances. And Juarez was a piece of shit any way you cut it. I wasn’t sorry he was dead; one less conduit for the drugs that would be out there for my son to buy someday.
Those were truths I had to acknowledge, and I felt okay about them. If Fishell tried to lowball me, I would walk away with a clear conscience and figure out another way to cure my nightmares.
I faxed copies of my stipulations to Nora and Fishell. Nora got back to me within an hour, agreeing to all my conditions. No surprise there, it wasn’t her money I was going to spend. Fishell’s more guarded reply came a day later; he’d do the best he could to satisfy me, but he couldn’t promise everything at this moment. We’d discuss specifics at our meeting.
The following day I caught the milk-run United shuttle out of Santa Barbara to San Francisco, where I hung around a slow forty-five minutes, drinking airport coffee and reading the New York Times, before jumping on another small prop-job to the state capital. These planes are so sardine-cannish you can’t stand erect in them, you Groucho Marx down the aisle to your seat. It’s a pain-in-the-ass, time-consuming trip—commercial flights out of Santa Barbara are lousy, almost everything goes through L.A. or San Francisco. Having an airplane on call, to fly in and out of Blue River, would be a necessity for me, not a luxury.
An off-duty state trooper, an older guy with a flattop and an easy manner, met me at the airport and drove the Crown Victoria into the city, to Fishell’s office in the state government complex. I went inside, passed through security, and rode the elevator up to the attorney general’s complex.
Bill Fishell is a good guy, competent, hardworking. He was a good D.A. in Alameda County, he’ll be a good A.G. The cops like him because of his strong opposition on the hot-button issue of private ownership of assault weapons, as grimly illustrated by this current disaster: If the druggies hadn’t had their heavy artillery, especially the AK-47s (verboten to the police, God forbid they should have weapons on a par with the scumbags they’re going after), good men would still be alive.
We sat around Bill’s conference table. It was all informal, relaxed. Three friends with a common mission. Bill’s legislative aide, a career assistant A.G. named Julius Schwartzman, also joined us for the record.
“You’re asking for the moon,” Bill said after we’d exchanged greetings, thumbing through my request memo.
“I’m being reasonable as hell,” I countered. “But if that’s how you feel, hire someone else. I hear Marcia Clark’s getting bored with her television gig.”
“If Luke doesn’t come aboard,” Nora said, jumping in, “it could take months getting someone else. Time is of the essence here.”
“I know, I know,” be said, glancing at Schwartzman, who sported the bemused smile of one who’d seen a variation of this dance a million times, “but I’ve got duly-elected officials to answer to, most of them so green they can’t find the bathrooms off the capital floor, let alone a piece of legislation. An on-call airplane?” He looked at the document in front of him. “That’s what the bad guys do, Luke, they’re the ones with the money. We’re government flunkies here.”
I was in the catbird seat, because although I did give a shit, it wasn’t life-or-death with me. I didn’t want him to call my hand, though, because you can’t bluff in this game.
Nora reasoned with him. “Look at this.” She pulled a newspaper clipping from her purse. “In Washington, D.C., it costs two hundred thousand dollars to clean the pigeon shit off one statue. One! And there’s thousands of them. They’re going to clean two this week, not even the Lincolns and Jeffersons, two nobodies. Three or four of those and that’s the airplane, with lobster and Jack Daniel’s thrown in on a daily basis, if that’s what Luke wants.”
“I prefer Johnnie Walker, but the gist of it sounds right to me. Given the work, and the caliber of person you have to have running this show, not blowing my own horn, just being realistic, this is cheap time you’re buying, and quality work. Any other lawyer with the background and capability for this is going to charge you more, bring in unnecessary staff, go crazy with your money.”
Fishell held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. You’re hired, you knew that before you came up here. At three hundred, not a dime more.”
I smiled at him. I knew the state wouldn’t go to four. “And the ancillaries, too, right?”
“Yes,” he gave in. “You’ll live as well as a major-league ballplayer.”