Dick Clark does the New Year’s bit with the ball now. We watch on television as thousands of nuts scamper about Times Square, drinking and yelling, some of them stripped to the waist even though it’s below freezing out, like you see at football games in Pittsburgh or Cleveland. I realize with the time delay those ant-like figures up on the screen are all asleep or crashed out somewhere by now, but the manicness comes through, different from when I was Claudia’s age watching with my grandparents. Halloween for real, with real stabbings and real blood. I was always happy my kid was growing up in a small city instead of a big one; now she’s going to be part of that thundering herd.
A disquieting thought. I put it out of my mind. She’s here now, having fallen asleep minutes after the magic hour, still in her party dress. For too brief a moment, as I watch her lying there, her mouth slightly open in child sleep, she metamorphoses in my fanciful imaginings back into the child of old, daddy’s little girl, barely out of diapers and still sucking her thumb.
But that’s not her, not really. She’s a couple of years from teenagehood. Changing and growing, finding her true self, the one she’ll live with the rest of her life. Like I’m doing. The way I feel right now, she’ll get there before me.
THE NEW MEXICO state penitentiary is less than a half-hour’s drive south of Santa Fe, down the same back road the bikers took when they were leaving town (they thought for good) seven months ago. It’s cold out, bitter. February’s the coldest month of the year, this year even more than usual, cold as hell and dry. We’ve had northern winds for a month, they’ve blown everything away, even the color, nothing bright outside, the sky itself pale, pale washed-out blue, almost clear, like the blue of mountain creek water during a false-spring runoff. Overhead an occasional streak of cirrus clouds, the sun faint yellow, half-transparent, skirting the mountains. Not a picture-pretty winter’s day; going outside is labor.
I drive down to see the bikers, my once-a-month visit. Visit number four. Before all this is over there’ll be hundreds once we start going into court on formal appeals.
I’m their only human contact with the outside world. I think about that a lot. It’s a funny thing, or maybe not so funny, but I’ve become extremely ambivalent about them in hindsight, about the case. Not the way it turned out, but my involvement. The feeling blindsided me, I thought I’d be completely engrossed in the appeal, because of the obvious injustice of what happened to them. That part still holds true: they were screwed and I hate that, I hate the way the system lets that shit happen, to them and to others like them, all the time. And I’m going to fight like hell to overturn that decision. I am, it’s not just an idle promise I make to myself to assuage my conscience. I am going to see this through to the end.
But there is a part of me that wishes I’d never gotten involved. For openers, I lost. I don’t lose that many, and to lose a big case doesn’t feel good, it’s not part of my agenda, particularly when I’m taking such an ass-whipping in my personal life. It certainly helped push the dissolution of my partnership over the edge. Granted, I wouldn’t have wanted to stay there, it would’ve been an impossible marriage, but I would have liked to have left on my terms, not theirs. No one likes getting canned, whatever the language says it was. And to be going out on your own with a defeat as your most recent decision is not as good, simply put, as going out with a win. I have business, but I’d probably have more if the decision had gone the other way. Winners attract, losers repel.
But that’s not the main issue. We all lose, I’ll rebound. What eats at me, constantly, like a rat gnawing in my gut, is the time with Claudia that I lost, time I will never recapture. I thought I knew at the time I was losing it but in a certain sense I didn’t, because until she and Patricia actually, physically left, and I was without her, it wasn’t real for me. I didn’t gut-believe it. I’d still be missing her as much as I do now, but I would’ve put in the time. There would have been no recriminations, like there are now. Bottom line, these guys cost me part of my life. Sometimes, I’m realizing, that’s more important than the black-and-white pursuit of justice.
Too late now for excuses, second guesses, might-have-beens. It’s like what getting drunk’s gotten to be: feels good while you’re doing it, but the payoff changes your mind about is it worth it. It’s for losers, all that stuff. I can’t help that I lost a case, a partnership, a child, most of my life’s savings. I am not a loser. I’ve got to get my act together and live by the Mickey Rivers school of life (one of my favorite baseball sages, up there with Casey Stengel and Satchel Paige): ‘I’m not going to worry about the things I can’t control, because if I can’t control them there’s no point in worrying about them; and I’m not going to worry about the things I can control, because if I can control them there’s no point in worrying about them.’
“Hey, there, hoss, how’s it hanging?”
“Long and low,” I say.
“Beats the shit out of short and low,” Lone Wolf replies, his lip curling off his canines in a half-assed smile, the teeth stained almost-black from the plug of Red Man tucked in his cheek. A man can acquire some nasty habits in prison, when he’s sitting around with nothing to do while waiting for the hammer to drop.
We’re in the attorney-client meeting room on Death Row, not a pleasant place to be. Sterile, overlit, unremittingly cheerless. Meetings in here feel like oral surgery without novocaine. In the old days, before the prison was rebuilt, it had a kind of funkiness about it. It was, albeit under the grimmest of circumstances, a place where human beings could relate to each other, which is important here, because everything about doing time on Death Row is terrible, utterly demeaning and depressing, a mixture of boredom, futility, and certainty.
We sit facing each other on hard plastic chairs at a long Formica table that runs the length of the room. A floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas barrier separates us. It’s two inches thick, bullet-proof. We talk on telephone receivers that connect across the barrier. We’re the only ones in the room. Everything we say and do is privileged: once a month the room is swept for bugs, for the state’s protection as well as the prisoners’. One illegal eavesdrop on a lawyer-client discussion and it could be a major lawsuit, even an overturn of a death sentence. The state doesn’t want shit like that—they play it by the book in here, willingly. They can afford to; it’s all so stacked in their favor they’d be stupid to cheat.
“What’s the good news?” Lone Wolf asks.
I shake my head: there is none. He asks the same question each time I see him, not because he thinks there might be some good news—he knows I’d be telling him if there was some the minute I heard myself—but as part of a ritual, our own Kabuki. Another habit to be cultivated to keep the days going, like doing a certain number of pushups or flossing your teeth at certain self-regulated times.
“Same old same old,” he says.
I nod. I wish I wasn’t here. Lone Wolf doesn’t say so, but I suspect he wishes the same. There’s nothing I can say or do. The appeals process in a death-penalty case is a long proceeding, tedious and nitpicking in the extreme (unless it’s you sitting there, about fresh out of options) with lots of checkpoints along the way. It pretty much takes care of itself as far as the technicalities of the law are concerned. It’s a hoary cliché but nonetheless still a true one that no judge or legal system, no matter how harsh, including those in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, the places where they actually kill people in quantity in the name of justice and the American way, wants to see a man put to death by the state until he’s exhausted all his appeals. Since we’re the only democracy left in the world that still executes its citizens, we have to be careful about it, or at least make a show that we are.
The problem with this case, the appeals side of it, is we conducted it too good, my colleagues and I. The way you get to retry a murder case, or any capital case, is to find a mistake. A big one, that would’ve (or at least could’ve) changed the outcome if it hadn’t been made. More convictions are overturned because the defen
se fucked up than any other reason. In hindsight, these boys would have been better off with a shitty defense, because that might have been grounds for retrial.
No such luck here. Every lawyer in New Mexico, from the penthousers to the ham-and-eggers, knows we did the best job that could’ve been done, given the lynch-mob attitude in the community. (Aside from the opening we blundered into on the coroner’s report, which in hindsight was inevitable. They would’ve snuck it in one way or the other.) So what we’re looking for is something the judge said or did, or something the prosecution did (or didn’t do) that would warrant a new trial, or at least a reopening of this case.
So far, I’ve drawn a blank. Judge Martinez did a first-rate job. We couldn’t have asked for a fairer judge. Some of the time you catch them on the instructions to the jury, about how to weigh the evidence or what can’t be used. None of that here. Everything was proper, as kosher as a Jerusalem rabbi. In the years ahead I’m going to be filing reams of motions revolving around Martinez’s decisions, but I won’t win a one. All I’ll do is buy some time.
If I ever pull this off, if I ever get this nest of vipers reversed, it’ll be through a hole the state’s provided for me. Robertson and Moseby. Some fuckup of theirs, something royal. I don’t know what that is yet; I don’t even know if it exists; but I do know that for these four men doing their time on Death Row it’s the only avenue out.
Anyway. Lone Wolf knows all this. He knows the odds of pulling a Perry Mason, of finding new evidence the court will accept, or turning a witness, that kind of theatrical stuff, is a one in a thousand chance. He and the others fight to accept that, because they have to live in dual worlds: the real one, life in prison, and the one they want, the free world.
Knowing all this, he still asks anyway.
“Nothing?” he asks again. “Shit, man, there’s got to be something.”
“I’m looking,” I tell him. “I can’t invent what isn’t there.”
“Why not?” he says. He’s still got a sense of humor, a macabre one. It’s keeping him alive.
“Because if they caught me I’d be in here with you,” I say. “Then where would we be?”
We make small talk for awhile. I bring him news of his friends. Other than me, he isn’t allowed visitors except for immediate family, and since he isn’t married and his only family is his brother, who helped put him in here, he doesn’t see anyone else. Especially the other three. They’re here on this floor with him but the segregation is complete, none of them have laid eyes on any of the others for one second since they’ve been inside.
“What about the cunt?” he asks. “You find head or tail of that lying bitch?”
“No.”
Rita Gomez. The state’s star songbird. Star liar. We shaked her but we didn’t break her. What I realized in hindsight, going over things, was that she was smart enough to spin a convincing yarn but too dumb to break. It didn’t matter what was asked, she had her answer and she stuck to it. Catching her in lies didn’t do any good, she merely incorporated them, swallowed them up, made them another appendage to the story. Even at the end, when she had more barnacles on her than Moby Dick, she didn’t succumb. Too goddam stupid.
Or … too scared. She was coached well, very well. That’s fine, everyone coaches their witnesses, but with her it felt almost beyond that, that she was telling their story for them. It’s something you want to believe but you can’t, because if you do, there’s no safety net. If the state sends men to their death on perjured testimony we’re back to fighting with sticks and rocks.
I looked for her after the trial, but she was gone. Vanished, without leaving a trace. It wouldn’t have mattered, once a trial is over you can’t open it up again and put a witness back on the stand, unless, of course, they’ve flat-out lied, and we know that wasn’t the case here, she was with them, and they did rape her, and she did know the victim, and all that jazz. But there were things missing, I knew it, we all did. I wanted to put them to rest. And maybe find some technical grounds in the way the cops coached her that would’ve given me a fingerhold.
I checked, hard, but the trail was cold. Rita Gomez no longer resides in the state of New Mexico. The odds we’ll see her again are about as long as my guys finding a way out. The best we can hope for right now is that they keep their noses so clean that the governor, whoever it is when their number finally comes up, commutes them to life.
I don’t tell them that, of course. It’s too cruel, hope has to spring eternal in the human breast. So we talk, we bullshit for the allotted hour.
Time to go. We stand, placing our hands on the Plexiglas, palms to palms, fingers to fingers, the closest to another human touch this poor bastard will feel for a long, long time.
MY NEW OFFICE ISN’T physically very far from my old office, only a couple blocks, but it’s light years away in prestige. It’s an old run-down adobe, once a mansion, now converted to little rabbit warrens, where fringe type lawyers like me, who can’t afford the normal goodies—law libraries, secretaries, and copying machines—hang their shingles. It’s got a half-time receptionist, a woefully inadequate library, a copier that’s usually out of order, and a coffee machine. Period. Two-room front office-back office suites, the secretary in front, the principal in back. Probably no less personal than a big New York firm, where the senior partners don’t even know half the lawyers in their office, but a far cry from where I used to put up my boots.
These first couple months have been tough: I’d been following the same routine for a dozen years. Even when they forced the leave of absence on me, I’d used my old office. I was like an old dog there, I could have navigated the place blind. What with the separations and divorces I’ve gone through, my office was more of a home to me than most of the places I’ve called home.
You can get used to anything, though, and I’m slowly getting comfortable here. I’ve always been a kind of solo bird anyway. The other habitués are a good lot by and large, a mixed bag. There are some young turks recently removed from law school who can’t stomach the bureaucracy of government work, defense or prosecution, and unable as yet to connect with the bigger, prestigious firms. (Like Alexander, Hite, and Portillo, now doing business as Hite and Portillo. The week after they booted me out they took a quarter-page ad in the Santa Fe New Mexican to make sure everyone knew. Big men, my old partners. It was strange seeing it, but surprisingly it didn’t hurt. Maybe by then I was numb.)
The rest of the building is two and three-person firms, several of them women, and older singles, not like me, I’m still a force in this town, men more like Paul, my associate from the trial. Lawyers who need a place to hang their hat, get out of the house, even if there are days, maybe most days, where nobody crosses the threshold. A place to be professional.
Speaking of Paul, I haven’t seen him since the trial ended. We wrapped things up, promised to keep in touch, and promptly fell off each other’s phone fist. It’s inevitable; we all have our own dreams to chase. I doubt that he’d go out of his way to meet up with me; my jumping him on the ‘hot knives’ incident drove a wedge between us that’s too basic to paper over. And I’m sure that deep down that hurts him, that he was the one to do it.
Tommy I see with regularity. He approached me after I was shown the door, asked if I was looking for someone to partner with. It was tempting; he’s going to be a force to contend with down the line. But I turned him down, although I left the door open for possibly later, if we both wanted to. My relationship with him is a variation on the theme I played out with Mary Lou: a part of my past I have to put some distance between for now. And like her, when I want to get together again he won’t be available.
He’s a good soul, Tommy, he goes down to the pen to see Goose every month without fail. He isn’t Goose’s lawyer anymore, we all agreed as there was no conflict in their cases I’d take on the appeal for all of them, it was mine at the start and it’ll be mine until the bitter end. Even so, Tommy’s there for the old biker, like a dutiful son. I
t means everything to Goose, it probably keeps him alive. Unlike the others, who are younger and might see a light at the end of the tunnel years from now, Goose is resigned that if he isn’t executed he’s going to die in prison. It would make some men homicidal; with him it’s probably more likely to be suicide. Either way, the state’ll get its pound of flesh.
In brief, my life is getting back to some sort of normalcy. I get up, I go to the office, I meet with clients, file briefs, go to court, the usual stuff. I joined a gym, go three days a week after work. Nautilus, aerobics, swim. I’m getting into shape. I’m not drinking as much; it isn’t as attractive right now, as necessary. A scotch or a glass of wine seems to satisfy me. Maybe it’s the reflection Patricia held up to me.
Aside from my monthly visits to the pen, the most constant reminders I have of my clients are the crank confessions that still come into the office, periodically floating to the surface like dead carp. Anytime there’s a sensational crime the nuts come out of the woodwork, looking for their moment in the spotlight. Either they did it, and can prove they did it, or they know who did it and can prove that. It’s a sick psychological phenomenon we have to put up with in the legal profession. Even though you know they’re phonies you have to check them out, which is time out of your job and money out of your client’s pocket. After a while, when the case has been’ over as long as this one, you do as little as possible to verify that it’s a fake; but you have to do it. The one time in a million you don’t will be the one time it’s the genuine article.
So far, seventeen of these claims have come to us. All bogus, as they always are. Within the next few months they should finally stop, only to revive when the next sensational case comes along.
The biggest change in my life is that I haven’t been laid since I got back from Seattle. The odd chance drifts by, but it doesn’t connect. I haven’t jacked off this much since high school. I think about Mary Lou, wonder how she’s doing, but except for a Happy New Year’s call we haven’t spoken. Sometimes I fuck her in my less-than-sweet dreams.
Against the Wind Page 27
