The Lies that Bind

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Some states are forcing banks to cram down their mortgages and reduce the payments to fit today’s poor market, you know.”

  “New Mexico? Are you kidding me? In the first place, we don’t have a lousy market. In the second place, you’ve been here long enough to know cram-downs aren’t gonna happen in the Land of Enchantment.”

  “Is there anybody I can call in Phoenix?”

  “Try Eric Winston.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  He was probably right, but I called Eric Winston anyway. He wasn’t in. I left a message, and that took care of real estate and divorce for one day. So I pulled a legal pad out of my drawer, flipped to an empty page and began drawing circles around the red line down the side. I started at the center of the circles and spiraled out. When I’d looped my way to the bottom I flipped to a new page and drew a straight line down the middle of the yellow sheet. On one side I listed the reasons why I didn’t want to represent Martha Conover. On the other side I listed the reasons why I should.

  On the plus side I wrote: “You shouldn’t judge a woman unless you’ve driven a mile in her car on her substances. The most interesting thing about crime is that ordinary people will commit it under extraordinary circumstances. To meet your nemesis alone on a dark and rainy night in control of a loaded weapon when you’re under the influence and have less than a second in which to act is one of the most revealing things that can happen to a person.” Those are some of the platitudes that keep those of us who don’t do it for prestige or money in the legal business.

  On the down side of the page I wrote: “I wouldn’t like Martha Conover even if she hadn’t committed a crime.”

  On the plus side: “You need the money.”

  On the no side: “You don’t like to represent women on medication, and you can’t effectively represent clients who lie or don’t tell the whole truth. One reason you went into business for yourself is so you don’t have to take on clients you don’t trust or like.”

  Yes, “But another reason you got into this business is your interest in those rainy nights when human beings reveal what they are capable of.”

  True, only, “There are holes in Martha Conover’s story big enough to drive her Buick through.”

  Maybe, “But if she were lying, wouldn’t she have made up a better story? Besides, you’d be up against a deputy DA you like, and how can you say no to Cindy Reid’s mother?”

  Back to the minus column: “You haven’t seen Cindy Reid in years. What makes you think you owe her anything?”

  My final entry was: “It’s not real estate or divorce.”

  I flipped the page, started drawing loops again, down one side, up the other. Martha’s list was reminding me of another time, another mother, another pad, another list, a kid who was keeping score. That kid drew a line down the middle of a page and printed I HATE MOMMY on one side of it and I LOVE MOMMY on the other with a third grader’s block letters. When she was mad at her mother she drew a vertical line in the appropriate column. When she wasn’t, she made a mark under love. When she had four scores in either column she drew a line through them and moved down the page. One day she got tired of the game, ripped up the paper and threw it away. She knew which side was winning anyway. Her mother found one piece of the paper in the trash, the piece that said I HATE MOMMY. “Did you write this?” she asked, large and disapproving as only a mother can be. The kid stared her down, belligerent and bratty as only a kid can be. “Yes,” she said. It was one of those moments that nobody asks for but that are a bend in the road when they happen. The kid was eight years old. She never knew what the mother’s excuse was—the mother didn’t stick around long enough for the kid to find out—but that was the beginning of the exit ramp for those two. Things were bad anyway, and they got worse. Maybe you have to become a parent yourself before you can really understand and forgive a mother. I don’t know yet what it takes to forgive an eight-year-old kid.

  I needed some comic relief after that, so I went out to the reception area to see Anna. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said, “but women are using skunk smell these days to protect themselves.” I showed her the skunk gun brochure.

  “What happened to dogs?”

  “The smell of a skunk is worse than the bite of a dog. Besides, you can carry one around on your key ring. Look at how small they are.”

  She read the brochure. “They’re only twenty-nine ninety-five. Let’s get one. I don’t have a gun, and you always leave yours unloaded in your drawer.”

  I had a Smith & Wesson LadySmith .38 myself. It had protected me, but not as well as I would have liked. The Kid complained about guns around the house, so it had been sitting unloaded and half forgotten in my desk drawer. “All right,” I said. “Call and order a couple and charge them to the office account. Heard any good jokes lately?”

  Anna was our office comedian. Comedians are society’s psychic sponges; they absorb everybody else’s pain and let us squeeze the laughter out of it. It’s a tough role to play. Fortunately for Anna, her jokes were always about lawyers; they didn’t go that deep or get that funny.

  She had begun tapping at her keyboard. “What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of fifty?” she replied without missing a beat.

  That was easy. “Congressman,” I said.

  5

  I WAS AWAKENED Saturday morning by a ringing phone and the angry voice of Martha Conover in the receiver, not the best way to start a weekend. “Did you see the Journal this morning?” she snapped.

  “Not yet.”

  “I am on the front page.” Some people might like to find their name on page one, but not Martha.

  I reached for a cigarette, looked around to see if the Kid was awake yet. He was. In fact he’d already gotten out of bed and left for work. Saturday was just another day at the car repair shop for him. “Your case was bound to get some attention sooner or later, considering the circumstances,” I told Martha. I found a Marlboro on the bedside table and lit it.

  “Did they have to interview Mina Alarid?”

  “Who?”

  “Justine’s aunt, the one she lived with when she came here from Argentina. She told the reporter that she saw me driving up and down her street the weekend before Halloween. She said Justine was staying at her house and that I had been stalking her.”

  It was a good story; you couldn’t blame the paper for printing it.

  “Isn’t there anything you can do to stop them from repeating Mina Alarid’s lies?”

  “Not really,” I said. Lawyers aren’t gods, sometimes they’re not even humans, especially early on Saturday morning. “Look, I’ll read the article, and we will talk about it when I get to your house tonight. All right?”

  “All right,” Martha said and hung up.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but it was impossible after that, so I got out of bed, dressed, went to La Vista’s vending machine and bought a copy of the Journal As usual the machine didn’t like my quarters, and it took three before the door flopped open and the paper fell out. The story was on page one, just as Martha had said. I brought the paper inside, made myself a Red Zinger tea, sat down and read the article. Either some enterprising reporter had tracked down Mina Alarid or she’d called the paper herself. The article didn’t say. There wasn’t much I hadn’t already heard from Martha or Saia, except that Mina Alarid was specific about what she’d seen, a late-model gray American car, driving up and down her street the weekend before the accident. She’d be a good witness for the prosecution.

  ******

  When I got to Martha’s town house at five-twenty, Dan Rather was on the TV, trying not to look too pleased that some third-world disaster had upped his ratings. Martha had stuck pink Post-it notes all over the back of the door—her shopping lists. One of them fell to the floor when she opened the door to let me in. I picked it up and handed it to her. Vodka and peas, it said.

  She already had the vodka. It was in the glass in h
er hand, with two olives and, maybe, a splash of vermouth. It hadn’t made her any happier with her attorney. She still looked at me as though I was a delinquent teenager, although one who’d gotten old enough, at least, to drink. She asked me if I’d like one.

  The answer was yes, but would I accept one? “No,” I said; we had business to discuss.

  Gunga Dan finished the news and signed off with a smarmy smile. Martha hit the remote and got rid of him. I sat down on the chintz sofa, took out my yellow legal pad and prepared to start my interrogatories, but Martha spoke first.

  “Did you see the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  She was still fuming. “It’s outrageous that Mina Alarid is permitted to make statements like that.”

  “Your car is a late-model Buick?”

  “Yes.”

  “What color is it?”

  “Gray. That doesn’t mean anything. There must be thousands of late-model gray cars out there.”

  “You didn’t drive by Mina’s house that weekend? Not even once?”

  “Absolutely not.” Martha put her drink down on a coaster, aligned her vertebrae and looked me right in the eye. Her eyes didn’t wander to the left or the right, the way the eyes of a person with a guilty conscience might. Either she was telling the truth and didn’t have a guilty conscience or she lied better than most. “You did talk to the DA’s office, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “What did they say?”

  “The police are investigating. Deputy DA Anthony Saia, who is handling the case, is considering whether to file charges.”

  “What charges is he talking about?”

  “Second-degree murder or vehicular homicide.”

  “What are the penalties for those?”

  “A maximum of nine years and ten thousand dollars for second-degree, three years and five thousand dollars for vehicular homicide.”

  Martha picked up her drink and took a large sip. “And if I was driving while under the influence?”

  “Most likely vehicular homicide. There’s something I need to get straight with you right off,” I said, “and that is I don’t enjoy getting surprises from the DA’s office or from the newspaper either. What I learn about you I want to learn from you, not from somebody else.”

  “Oh?” Martha said.

  “For starters, Saia told me that your grandson was killed on Halloween three years ago and that Justine Virga was driving the car. You’re the one who should have told me that.”

  “I was very close to my grandson. He was living with me when he died. I … I find it difficult to talk about him.”

  “Saia also told me that Justine was driving Michael’s Porsche.”

  “That’s right; she was.”

  “Where did Michael get a Porsche?”

  “His father gave it to him.” That didn’t sound like the Emilio Velásquez I’d known, but I let it pass for the moment.

  “About your Buick—does anyone have access to the keys?”

  “No. I never give the keys to anyone, not even Cynthia.”

  “Where do you keep them?”

  “In my purse.”

  Her purse stuck to her arm as if it was made of industrial-strength Velcro. “Have you had any work done on the car recently?”

  “I had the oil changed at Mighty last week.”

  “Which one?”

  “On San Mateo.”

  I made a note of that, moved on to drugs, something else she hadn’t told me about. “Saia also told me you had taken Halcion that night. Do you take it often?”

  “Only when I am under stress.”

  “And then how much do you take?”

  “A half.”

  “You know there’s a forty-five-minute gap between the time you got home and the time Justine’s body was found, and an hour before the police got here.”

  “It seemed longer to me.”

  “What did you do in that time?”

  “Slept.”

  Martha’s monosyllabic answers weren’t taking up much space, but I flipped to the next page on my legal pad anyway, just to break the rhythm. “Is there anything else you’d rather not talk about? Anything else you haven’t told me?” She might find denial comforting, but it wouldn’t help me defend her.

  “Actually, I do have an idea about what happened to Justine,” she said. “Drugs.” She folded her hands in her lap as if she had just explained everything, but she hadn’t explained a thing to me. I don’t consider drugs the great catchall explanation for everything that goes wrong in America.

  “The only drugs found in her system were antihistamines,” I said.

  “I didn’t say she had taken drugs. I believe she was selling them.”

  “And why do you think that?”

  “She was very secretive about her past. I asked Michael why she came here from South America, but he never would give me an answer. Virga is obviously an assumed name. At Michael’s funeral I overheard her telling Mina Alarid that they were following her. She was driving very fast; I think she was being chased.”

  It wasn’t all that fast for New Mexico, but I didn’t say so. “By who?” I asked.

  “Drug dealers.”

  There are illegal drugs and legal drugs. Pick your poison. In Martha’s world the good people took the legal ones, the bad people took the others. “You think drug dealers set you up?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “To divert suspicion from them.”

  It had a certain kind of Halcion-and-vodka logic. “Just because someone happens to come here from Latin America, that doesn’t make her or him a drug dealer,” I said. “There are lots of other reasons to come to this country.”

  “Justine was carrying a revolver the night she was killed,” Martha said.

  The pen that was scrolling across my legal pad stopped in midstroke. “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “One of the policemen, the one who was acting like the nice cop, was holding it inside one of their plastic bags, and he showed it to me. The gun had two empty chambers, he said, and he asked if Justine had fired it. Maybe he thought it had been an attempted robbery and was trying to get me to say I’d acted in self-defense. If I had killed her in self-defense, I asked him, would I have put her gun in the glove compartment?”

  “That’s where they found it?”

  “Yes. The keys were in her pocket. They went into the car looking for her identification.”

  “How did they know which car was Justine’s?”

  “It was the worst-looking car in the parking lot.”

  Martha had been pretty observant for someone who was under the influence. But being accused of killing someone and asked to look at a dead body in the middle of the night might be enough to sober somebody up. It sounded to me as if the police officers had been sloppy; they shouldn’t have entered Justine’s car. They should have towed it away and impounded it as evidence. On the other hand, they were probably thinking of Justine’s death as an ordinary hit-and-run at that point. Sometimes police carelessness works in a defendant’s favor, sometimes not.

  Justine had a revolver in her car, not that unusual in New Mexico, where your car is considered your house in the eyes of the law. It could have been a .38, a gun women favor. Sensible people leave the chamber under the hammer empty for safety reasons, which would mean that only one bullet had been fired. I had no way of knowing who or where. As for when, I’d say recently, or Justine would have reloaded. The police had the investigatory resources to find out who and when, but Saia wouldn’t tell me what they discovered, not yet anyway.

  Martha’s hands pressed together in her lap like a closed book. “Justine Virga was a killer. She carried a gun,” she said. “The DA let her get away with killing my grandson, and now he wants to charge me with murder. That’s his idea of justice? What kind of a name is Saia anyway?”

  “American.” I stood up. “I’d like to use your bathroom.”

  “
It’s down the hall.”

  I walked down the hallway to Martha’s bathroom, which had the same pinky-beige carpet that covered the rest of her floors. White hand towels with the initials MCC embroidered in pink hung on the rack. I flushed the toilet for camouflage and opened her medicine chest. A lot of women have their own private Idaho, a place where the grass is greener—a little stash of marijuana, Xanax, José Cuervo or whatever it takes, substances that work when used sparingly, cause worse problems when used to excess. Martha’s little helpers were on the shelf in a brown plastic container with a white prescription label. I picked up the container, made a note of the doctor’s name, Muldauer, and pushed down on the childproof lid, which would be a challenge for anyone not at the peak of reflexes and conditioning to twist open. It was already loose. Martha probably kept it that way so she could get at the Halcion easily in the middle of the night. The pills were smooth white ovals about the same size and shape as Xanax but without the dividing line down the middle. None had been broken in half, and there were plenty of them, more than enough to encourage abuse.

  I knew something about Halcion, a drug that—along with romance novels and TV—puts ladies all over America to sleep. It had been in the news lately, and the news had not been good. A half is not supposed to hurt you, but sometimes a half stops working, and then it’s a whole and then two or three, and before you know it you’ve got a jones on. There’s a narrow margin between a safe dose of Halcion and a dangerous one, because the body metabolizes it so quickly. Alcohol exacerbates the effects of Halcion. Alcohol exacerbates everything.

  I looked into the container in my hand and tried to enter that part of Martha’s mind where an anger burned that drugs and drink apparently hadn’t extinguished. I saw it as a smoky, smoldering dump. There were already a number of cases before the courts in which people (usually—but not always—women) had committed murders (usually—but not always—of family members) and were using the Halcion defense. It wasn’t the kind of defense I’d choose, because I’m not sure that Halcion causes psychotic or violent behavior. It could be that it keeps the bad dreams away and prevents the little aggravations from being expressed daily until finally, after years of repression, they explode. Deal with it now when it’s a problem child, deal with it later when it becomes an adult monster. Sooner or later you have to turn the headlights on in your life.