I was staccatoing my questions. “Until when?”
She thought for a moment. “Around six-thirty. Tom called and told me what had happened.”
“The raid. Juarez being caught. Escaping. Being killed.”
She nodded. “Everything.”
“So from midnight until six-thirty in the morning you were here, waiting by the telephone to hear what had happened.”
Another nod.
“You didn’t go out at all, make any calls, anything?”
“No. I stuck right here, by the telephone. I wanted to make sure I was here when Tom called back.”
I looked at the last page in my hand. “According to your telephone records, you made some phone calls between midnight and four in the morning. From your phone, here.”
I angled the page to Kate, out of Nora’s vision. She looked at it carefully, her eyes following my finger down the page.
There were no phone numbers in my notes. Records aren’t kept of local phone calls in California. I was counting on Nora not knowing that, or that I’d rattled her enough that she’d forget. Kate did a convincing job of playing her part, mouthing the phantom numbers to herself.
“Who were they to?” I asked.
Nora started shaking.
“I…I think …I don’t remember, but maybe I did. I think I was trying to call someone from the DEA to get more information, or…I don’t remember exactly, it was such a nervous time.”
Next to me, Kate’s body was vibrating. I could feel it, an electric impulse. I put my notes aside and threw my haymaker.
“You killed him.”
Nora fainted dead away. Kate propped her up, applied a damp dishtowel to her forehead until she revived. She sat on the couch, slumped over, her body limp. We sat close by, flanking her.
“When did you know?” she asked dully. Her eyes were glazed over, spittle was dribbling out the side of her mouth.
“Not until this morning, for sure. But last night, when I pulled Dennis’s autopsy report out and read it again, it hit me. The missing piece of the puzzle. A left-handed man would shoot himself in the left temple, not the right.”
She shook her head mournfully. “Nobody ever caught that. You’re the only one.”
“It was a lucky break. Although by itself, that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until we arrested Wayne Bearpaw that I put it all together. I knew there had to be someone else involved, someone Juarez knew and would trust to help him get away.”
I looked at her. “That had to be you.”
Her head barely moved in acknowledgment.
She made a pact with the devil. Money for access and protection. It had taken a long time, his people feeling her out, plying her with small favors, making certain she was corruptible.
When the big offer came, it was too good to resist. Fifty thousand dollars a month in cash, for as long as they operated out of there and she was the D.A. She would see to it that they could run their business without police interference. Dennis was a bust, her parents had no money to leave her, she couldn’t go anywhere else and start over, she was too old, too many bridges had been burned. It was her only chance to ever make real money.
Tom Miller had been suspicious of what was going on out there. She had restrained him from investigating, citing financial considerations.
Louisa Bearpaw was in on it from her end, and Wayne. A Luciferian threesome.
When Jerome came on the scene, she was worried, but not as much as Juarez. Jerome had dedicated his career to finding Juarez and nailing him. Juarez had been staying away from Muir County since Jerome had centered his operation there, until the night the drug deal was supposed to go down. He had to come, the buyer had insisted on it. Too much money was at stake for him not to. It was going to be a one-night stayover, gone before dawn.
The timing of the raid caught her completely by surprise. She had assumed the DEA would notify her and Miller well in advance. The feds always work with the locals.
When Miller called her the first time and told her he was going on a raid with Jerome and his men that night, right away, she had called the compound to warn Juarez, but it was too late for him to run. The compound was surrounded, his avenues of escape were blocked. He was going to have to stay and fight it out. He had a huge cache of arms, and Jerome wasn’t expecting resistance. They had outfought the DEA before, they could do it again.
But they didn’t. He was caught and arrested.
All this she knew because Tom Miller, the consummate pro, was constantly in touch with her.
Wayne Bearpaw was on the phone with her as soon as he left the war zone. She gave him his instructions: Find a way to sneak into that trailer and break Juarez loose—take the handcuffs off, unlock the trailer door. Kill whoever’s guarding him if you have to, Juarez has to be sprung loose. If Juarez could get out, he might be able to make his way to a prearranged spot and get away. It would be risky, but it was his only chance. That’s what she told Bearpaw. She didn’t say who might be at this prearranged location, or where it was.
Bearpaw was scared out of his wits to do it—the place was an armed camp, those agents would shoot at anything that moved. But she forced him to. If he didn’t, all three of them—him, his mother, her—were finished.
Somehow, he did his part.
She was at the designated spot, waiting. Juarez had planned this out before, long ago—I may have to come to you for help, he’d said. She’d agreed to it—she hadn’t thought it would actually ever happen. But it had, and now she had to fulfill her end of the bargain.
She was standing at the edge of the grown-over fire trail, in the clump of trees. She knew the area well—she had selected it because of its proximity to the fire road.
Juarez came running to her. He was shaking with exhaustion and fear. He bent over, hands on knees, gasping for breath. She leaned him up against the tree for support.
They could hear the DEA agents chasing around, running in all different directions. The feds didn’t know this terrain as well as she did, they weren’t close enough to find Juarez and her before the two of them could get to her car and get away.
Juarez never saw her raise her automatic, point the barrel an inch from his head, and pull the trigger.
I was numb. “You have no soul.”
She didn’t respond.
“You have no comprehension of your own depravity, do you?”
She shrugged, as if to say, So what?
“I have a question.” Kate spoke. She was trembling.
Nora turned to her blankly.
“Why did you kill him?” Kate asked. “Why didn’t you spirit him away, like you’d planned?”
Nora laughed harshly.
“What was I going to do with him, stick him in the guest bedroom? I couldn’t take the chance he wouldn’t get caught again. That was the strongest thing he had going for him—that he could never be captured. But now he had. His shield of invulnerability had been shattered. He was just another drug dealer on the run now. Sooner or later, Jerome would have caught up with him. Or one of many others who had been after him.”
She continued. “After that night, he was useless to me. Worse than useless, he was dangerous. He wasn’t going to be paying me anymore, his people wouldn’t be able to operate out of Muir County. And he would have turned on me if he’d been caught. A district attorney on a drug dealer’s payroll? They would have sent me to jail forever.”
She took a sip of her water. It was incredible how calm and detailed she was in telling us this. It made the situation, and her, even harder to take.
“I thought for sure he’d be killed, trying to escape. I had to think Jerome could get that much of it straight. I never thought he’d actually get away.” She sighed. “But he did. With sixty men at his disposal, Jerome couldn’t even do that one thing right. Talk about a loser.”
She smiled at Kate and me, as if we were all sharing a wonderful secret.
“Killing him was my only option. Surely you unde
rstand that.”
I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to be in her sick, loathsome presence. But I had to know the rest.
“But why did you kill Dennis? He wasn’t involved in any of this…was he?” I asked fearfully. How deep did this go? I thought. How widespread was this corruption?
Her face was a dark mask of pure contempt.
“Dennis involved in this? That fucking pussy. By the time this chance came he was so beaten down he didn’t have the guts to cross the street by himself, let alone take any kind of risk.”
She shook her head as if trying to clear away a bad memory. “I wanted him to be with me in it, I begged him. It was a chance for us to have the kind of life we’d always wanted, the only chance we’d ever have.”
She cleared her throat, took a sip of water. “He didn’t want any part of it. After all I’d done for him.”
Her voice was thick with vitriol. “In all the years we were together I only asked him one goddamn thing. One lousy favor. And he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t lift one lousy finger to help me.” The scorn was in her eyes. “He was going to blow the whistle on me, all of us. It wasn’t enough that he wouldn’t be there for me when I needed him the most. He was going to stop me. His own wife, who had sacrificed everything for him. My career, my chance at having children, everything.”
I looked over at Kate. She was trembling, shaking her head, back and forth.
“You killed your husband because he was against this deal? Against breaking the law?”
Her answer was flat, unfeeling of anything. “He was already dead by then. His brain hadn’t passed the message to his body, that’s all. I did him a favor.”
I put a hand on Kate’s, human reassurance.
“That bank account of Jerome’s. That was your doing, wasn’t it? Everything with Jerome was your doing.”
She nodded.
“Once Juarez was dead, I had to figure a way out, some donkey to pin the tail on. Jerome was the perfect ass. I discovered the background of him and his sister and Juarez, it set him up beautifully, particularly since he’d hidden it from his agency and they’d never known about it. The money was the clincher. Sure, it was a lot, but it had to be, so it couldn’t be explained away. Fifty thousand wouldn’t have caught your attention, Luke. Five hundred thousand had to. I could afford it. Juarez had made me rich. I still have plenty left. Which no one’s ever going to find.”
She paused. “I put in half. Louisa Bearpaw put up the other half. It hurt—a quarter million apiece is a lot of money, but the way we looked at it, it had been free. It was an expensive insurance policy. And it worked.”
She smiled. “We even got lucky with things we didn’t plan, like those bullets Jerome bought. The way he said it happened is true, I’m sure. One more lucky coincidence in a perfectly planned piece of work.” She frowned. “Almost perfectly.”
There was one question left unresolved—the most important one, for me.
“Why did you bring me into this?” I beseeched her. “Why didn’t you leave it alone? Why take the chance of exposing yourself? Nobody suspected you.”
She stared at me like I was the village idiot.
“The DEA wasn’t going to give up. Sooner or later, they would have found a weak link. The tribe, probably. Do you think Louisa and Wayne Bearpaw would have protected me? They would have thrown me to the wolves.”
Her eyes were gleaming now, like she was rabid.
“I had to deflect it. I knew I could pin it on Jerome, if I had someone smart enough ramrodding the case.”
She smiled tenderly at me. “That was you, Luke. I knew you’d find all the clues I’d sprinkled around. And I knew you’d feel so sorry for poor Nora, your old friend, that you wouldn’t quit until you did.”
I stood there, swaying. She’d been conning me from the beginning, and like the trusting sap I am, I’d flown right into the center of her web.
“Let’s go, Nora.”
She ignored me, turned to Kate.
“Luke loves me. We’re lovers. Do you know that?”
Kate’s jaw dropped. She looked at me in shock. I shook my head sadly—she’s crazy, can’t you see that?
“We’ve been in love since we were in law school. It wasn’t meant to be, then. Dennis swept me away. But then, when Luke came up here, it was like we had gone back in time.” She smiled dreamily, her eyes closed. “We became lovers, the very first night. And we’ve been lovers ever since.”
This was painful, for reasons beyond Kate’s knowing.
“Nora.” I was pleading, with her and for myself. “Let’s go.”
She wasn’t here. Wherever “here” is.
“He was going to leave his wife. We were going away together, me and him and his son. Where no one would ever find us.”
“Nora…”This was horrendous now, made more so because of that tiny kernel of reality I’d been a part of.
She looked at me with an otherworldly expression. “I lied to you, Luke. I told you there was no one else but you, except for Dennis, and he didn’t count. But I lied. There was someone else.”
Don’t say it, I thought. You’ve already said too much. Way too much.
“Reynaldo was unbelievable. Such a man. When we started, it was business. I didn’t even meet him for over a year. But once we did, we couldn’t get enough of each other. While his men were screwing around out there, he was here with me. In my bed.”
She laughed, an insane braying. “Jerome was in town once, looking for the legendary, elusive Reynaldo Juarez. Who was in bed with the district attorney.” She laughed again. “We thought it was the most delicious thing in the world.”
Her eyes were open now. She was looking at me, but she wasn’t seeing me, not the me who was standing here in front of her. She was seeing something else—her fantasy.
“I thought he was the best I’d ever have. And he was, Luke. Until you. You’re the best. The best there ever was. The best there ever will be.”
She moved toward me, as if to wrap me in an embrace. I recoiled in horror.
“Nora. For God’s sakes…!”
A guttural sound came from deep in Kate’s throat—she couldn’t handle the sickness anymore. Stepping between us, she hauled off and slapped Nora across the face, as hard as she could.
“Shut up, you sick bitch!” Kate was shaking. “Shut your filthy, lying mouth!”
I pulled Kate away. We were both shaking, uncontrollably.
“Don’t. Can’t you see?” I turned to Nora. “It’s time to go. We have to go.”
She rubbed her mouth where she’d been hit. “I can’t go to jail in something like this.” She fingered her dress, the fine material.
Her voice was matter-of-fact now—she was back in the real world. “Let me change into something more comfortable and get my toilet things. I’ll only take a minute.”
I wasn’t thinking—I was emotionally wasted.
“Go ahead.” I wanted her out of my sight, if only for a few minutes.
She walked down the hallway into her bedroom, closed the door. I sagged onto the sofa. Kate, equally devastated, dropped down next to me.
We heard drawers opening and closing. Then metal slamming against metal.
Kate leaped up before me, both of us running for the bedroom door.
The explosion from Nora’s automatic rocked the house to its foundations.
PART SIX
HOME
I STOOD AT THE prosecution table.
“The state is dropping its case against Sterling Jerome, Your Honor. We move the defendant be released immediately.”
My motion was a formality. After the ambulance came to Nora’s house, and the police, and the coroner, and Kate and I had given our statements, I went into town and met with Judge McBee and John Q., in the judge’s chambers. Bill Fishell came with me. I recounted what had happened, all the back story, up to Nora’s suicide.
They were all thunderstruck, including John Q., who really had thought he had a los
er. Not only the case, the client.
It was ironic in a terrible way. If I hadn’t done John Q.’s job for him, I would have won, hands down. Now I was flushing it all away.
“You’re filing charges against Louisa and Wayne Bearpaw, I presume?” McBee asked me.
They were being held in the jail, no bail.
I looked over at Fishell.
“Racketeering and money laundering,” Bill confirmed. “Assisting in the escape of a prisoner, against Deputy Bearpaw. Resisting arrest against him, too. Whatever else we can come up with.”
“What about murder?” the judge asked.
“That was Nora’s doing. Hers alone,” Fishell said.
They wouldn’t go to prison forever. Although for Louisa, at her age, it was basically a death sentence. Maybe she’d pull something out of the hat. She was a survivor. And a great con artist.
“You’ll be the prosecutor?” McBee asked me. We’d come to like each other.
I shook my head firmly. “I’m done here.”
“This will be filed in federal court,” Fishell said. “It’s their jurisdiction.” He was happy to pass the buck this time.
Outside chambers, John Q. pulled me aside. “You did my job for me. You should get a cut.”
“No, thanks. You showed up, you did your best. He was lucky to have you.”
“I gave up on him,” John Q. insisted. In the dim light he was looking old, even older than he was. I suspected this was his last big case.
“He was a crummy client,” I said.
“Well…”
We shook hands.
I signed the release documents in open court. As I was turning to push through the gate and leave the courtroom. Sterling Jerome blocked my exit.
“I hope you’re satisfied,” he said in an ugly voice. “You fucked my life up, really good.”
I tried to move around him. He moved with me.
“You almost convicted an innocent man,” he ranted. “You ought to be sick of yourself. I ought to sue you, you cheap shyster.”
I stepped back. He was contaminating my air.
“If it wasn’t for me,” I said, maintaining my calm, which wasn’t easy, “you would have been convicted of premeditated murder.”
Above the Law Page 52
