Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  She showed Lewis the parental consent form, signed, an illegible scrawl in the signature block. “Did you want to wait for her to straighten up?”

  “I’m good with it. Let’s talk to neighbors. We can tell her later her daughter’s dead.”

  “I won’t want to leave her alone with that. Let’s get someone from the DA’s Victim Assistance for when she gets the news.”

  Aragon went down the hall and returned with the pink plastic hamper.

  “Mom said we could take her daughter’s dirty clothes,” she said. “You were in the other room.”

  A frail Hispanic woman in a housecoat and slippers answered the door at the house to the right of the Baca residence. Cat hairs clung to the black fabric around her neck. She’d been watching them as they walked to the door.

  They opened badge cases and asked if she’d seen Cassandra recently. Had there been any trouble next door? Loud noises? Did she ever speak with Cassandra, her mother? What could she tell them about her neighbors?

  Her name was Perla Gallegos. She lived alone, her husband gone. She’d lived here all her life, raised three sons, two daughters, right here. Yes, she did speak with Cassandra when she went out to water her flowers and move the sprinkler, it was so hard keeping grass alive in this drought. Cassandra was nice. She couldn’t say that for her mother. No, she’d heard nothing unusual next door. It was always quiet over there, the mother hardly ever came out the door.

  Did anyone come for her in a car, to pick her up? Did she ever see Cassandra getting dropped off?

  No, she walked all the time, coming back with groceries from the Safeway even when it was a hundred degrees.

  Boyfriends?

  That girl was so pretty. But no, Perla Gallegos said, she never seemed to have boyfriends. Maybe she wasn’t missing anything, look at these boys today. I wouldn’t want them taking my daughter out, she lives in Albuquerque, a dental assistant. She got out of here. Cassandra was going places, too, learning a skill.

  Aragon said, “This skill,” wondering if the woman had any idea how Cassandra Baca was making money.

  “Working on cars,” Perla Gallegos said. “She was always under those heaps of her mother’s trying to get them running.”

  Nobody answered at the other houses on the cul-de-sac.

  Lewis got a response to his request for a records check on Dolores Baca as they headed back to their desks and some time with air conditioning. She had prior convictions for possession, shoplifting, fraud, and prostitution ten, eleven years ago. She’d spent part of that decade in the county jail, on a sentence one day short of the full year that would have bumped her up to a state correctional facility.

  She used three a.k.a.’s with different last names. But the first name was always the same.

  Andrea.

  Nine

  “Mr. Benny Silva to see you.”

  He must want his money bad. It hadn’t been long since Marcy Thornton had told her secretary to deliver the message he could pick up his money at her office.

  For a guy dealing in dumpsters and Job Johnnies, she thought Silva would be bigger, at least have large forearms and a gut, scuffed Wolverines, with a smell to let you know his line of work. Instead he was a little guy in a nice blue short-sleeve cotton shirt tucked into Sansabelt slacks, a guinea tee showing underneath. On his feet, those ugly shapeless shoes old men wear with air holes in the arches.

  What’s that in the air, Aqua Velva?

  “Mr. Silva.” Thornton had an envelope in her hand, drawing his eyes down to her waistline. She crossed her arms, the envelope now up near her face. It brought his eyes to hers. Odd that he had white eyebrows but a full head of thick black hair, just a few strands of gray. Short sideburns. A neatly trimmed mustache, white like his eyebrows. She’d seen him pull up in a bronze Oldsmobile, probably 200,000 miles on the odometer, beaded seat covers, grandkids’ stickers on the dash. He’d been wearing those big goggle sunglasses while he drove.

  When their eyes met she saw something else. A deeper chamber in there, darkness behind soft brown. She was glad she’d come out of her office to talk to him in the waiting area—her secretary, a telephone nearby, the day’s only client in the waiting room to the side. Behind a closed door, Benny Silva could be someone else.

  Something different in his face now, there for a second, like he’d seen her before and was glad to see her again. She gave him the envelope to get his eyes off hers.

  “What will it cost to remove the dumpster,” she asked, “so we may terminate your service? My client’s out of business and I don’t want to be paying to handle other people’s garbage.”

  “Nothing. The police did it yesterday.” There it was again, that look. What was he saying with it? And what was this about police?

  “Why would they take the dumpster?”

  “Something about a body in there,” he said. “Took it away on a flatbed, wouldn’t let me do it for them. I notice you’re using curb cans, busy place like this. Here’s my card. We got all sizes. We can give you a lock, keep people from throwing bodies in. Your client, Narciso, he went cheap. And lookit, now I have his unit behind a police gate. His bill keeps growing till I get it back. You don’t have to mail the checks. I come see you, like this.”

  This old man was blackmailing the chief judge. He had liver spots on the hand that held out his card.

  He opened the envelope, read the check, and nodded. She expected that would be it, he’d head to the door and leave. But he stood there, smiling, teeth yellow under that snowy mustache except the front top two and one on the bottom. New white caps. It made her think of white and yellow corn mixed together. She turned to go to her office and call Diaz. You won’t believe the guy shaking you down. Five steps toward her office, she looked back over her shoulder. He was still there.

  Smiling: I know you.

  He wanted to say it out loud, “I know you.” He was looking at an ass under a black skirt he’d seen in Cassandra’s movies. He’d seen everything this lawyer had to show.

  He wanted to tell her, “You got a birthmark like a sunburst, the New Mexico state symbol, down there below your waist, sliding into home.”

  “Land of Enchantment.” Rigo had said it first when they’d all seen the birthmark at the edge of her dark patch. The state symbol, the state’s nickname, the Land of Enchantment where this lawyer’s legs met and told you that the hair on her head was dyed. Walking away, the good muscles in her thighs disappearing under her dress, silk, expensive. He didn’t have to imagine anything.

  Thinking what he could do with things he knew kept him smiling as he stood in line at the bank to cash her check. They had names for two of the three women in the movies with Cassandra Baca, who’d done a good job aiming the camera in her purse. The judge, of course, and now this lawyer. Four movies she’d turned over. He wondered what it had been like the first time, before he’d heard about her customers and gotten her working for him.

  No more movies now. Cassandra’s film career was over.

  He reached the teller’s window, turned over the check, signed, and handed it to a heavy-set Hispanic woman with too much makeup. The plastic tent said her name was Julia Rickard.

  “You’re Manny Archuleta’s daughter, aren’t you? I guess you got married.”

  She lit up, a pretty girl in there under the fat and eye liner. But he was back to thinking about Cassandra’s movies.

  Who was the older one, all legs and arms, tall like the models you see on television walking the plank at fashion shows and looking hungry?

  “I’ve slept worse places, eaten worse. At least the food here doesn’t move around on your plate.” Walter Fager at the stainless steel table in area five, pod three of the Santa Fe Detention Center, a crowd of men come to see the lawyer in a red jump suit like them. “But I understand why guys like you paid me to keep you out of here.”

  He
was the only white man, the rest Hispanic, Navajo, one Black, the man he’d met coming on the bus from court. The Hispanics were ganged up with the Mexican Mafia. The oldest was in his seventies, his name Yago, written on his neck. Right away he told Fager he’d lived through the riot at the Santa Fe Penitentiary in 1980, thirty-three prisoners killed, something like two hundred cut, beaten. He’d delivered snitches’ heads on shovels, held a guard while they shoved his night stick up his ass, got him ready for the carnales in line in the shop, c-vises holding the guard’s arms across the work bench close to the tin press. Thirty-five years later, the guard was just getting compensation. He’d read it in the Santa Fe New Mexican, the legislature taking that long to pass a law. Mother still walks with a rod up his ass.

  In that time, Yago said he’d killed two men, fucked a lot of women, had a million beers, beat heroin, found the Lord, lost the Lord. What stayed real were the memories of those days, still worth something in here, people knowing who you are.

  You got people on the outside who can get to your money? The old gangster had leaned in close, Our Lady of Guadalupe in blue on his forehead, her eyes staring straight ahead, spaced wide, knives drawn inside her eyes. People who can keep it from getting hard on you in here?

  That’s when Fager had asked Yago to call a meeting. He had something to announce. Yago said, I gotta hear this. Then you start making calls.

  “Since I’ve got time on my hands,” Fager said to the men around the table, “I thought I’d see how I can help you out. I’m open for business. Motions to reduce bail, dismiss for speedy trial violations, appeals, habeas petitions, discovery motions. I’ll polish all your pro se pleadings, impress the judge you’re not a crackpot scrawling ‘I’m innocent, the motherfuckers framed me’ a hundred times on toilet paper.”

  Fager looked across the table at the old gangster standing behind everybody, a wolf prowling at the edges.

  “You’ve got me on retainer, all of you. All I ask is you get my back. If I can’t work, I can’t help you. It’s in all your interest, collectively, to keep me healthy.”

  “Tell me again,” said a square-headed man, drooping mustache like horns turned upside down. “You called a judge a cunt? To her face?”

  The story’s gotten better, Fager thought. Why not run with it?

  “She said, ‘Tell me, Mr. Fager, exactly what you’re thinking. Word for word.’ So I told her.”

  Leave it at that. They’ll fill in the blanks.

  And they did. High fives, fist bumps. The old gangster, Yago, seeing how this was going.

  “Another thing,” Fager said. “Ineffective assistance of counsel. That’s when your lawyer fucks you. You have a right to competent, zealous representation. The system depends on that, justice in the balance, a level playing field. If one side lays down, it’s not only an unfair fight, it fails to produce the truth. The adversary system depends on both sides giving it all they can.”

  “My lawyer—my mom gave her a mortgage on her home.” The square-headed man again, taking the lead, the others waiting to see how this goes, but already showing they were warming to this white man with skills they needed. “Now she’s out on the street. The lawyer had the bank take it when she missed a payment. Is that what you’re talking about, my lawyer fucking me?”

  “Certainly it casts the lawyer in a bad light. We need to examine how she executed her obligation to represent your interests. You said ‘she.’” Fager paused, hoping he’d hit it. “What’s her name?”

  “Marcy Thornton.”

  “Me too.” A man with a long face, giving him room on his cheek for a cascade of blue ink teardrops starting at his right eye. The ones closest the eye, the earliest, looked professional: neat lines, clear shapes, done outside the walls at an ink shop. The ones at the bottom had been added in prison with a needle inserted through an empty pen casing. They were smudged, different hues. “I told her go around the hood, ask people about me. Character witnesses, right? She said that would open the door or some shit. Fuck, I want to open her door. Tear it off the hinges.”

  “We can look into that. I need to know the facts of your case and obtain statements from the witnesses she failed to call.”

  “Two would say I wasn’t even there.”

  “Now we’re talking.”

  The old gangster stepped to the table, a different look in his eyes. “I stay down for my third felony, I die here. I want to see my grandkids one more time, but my son won’t bring them.”

  “I’ll need to know where the case stands in terms of what relief to seek. Do you have your files? Your lawyer should be copying you on everything.”

  “Not if I don’t pay for the copies, twelve cents a page. Plus the box,” the old gangster said. “And a delivery boy, fifty bucks to drive ten miles, bring it to the desk out front. I got nothing but the sheet of paper saying guilty. I had to go to court to learn what the cops had on me. She wouldn’t accept my collect calls. I’m trying to see what the hell’s going on, what the hell she’s doing for me.”

  “Inexcusable. You can’t possibly be assisting your defense if you’re uninformed. What’s your lawyer’s name?”

  “The one’s got your eyes lit up.”

  Lily Montclaire watched from the window in the trailer, a bunkhouse for men willing to pay four figures to kill large animals. Five figures if it was a bighorn sheep. Hunting and rifle magazines in the bathroom, the furniture done in cowhide, dead deer and bobcats on the wall watching her change clothes. Across the forest clearing, Aragon’s brother threw a saddle over a chocolate-brown mule. She wondered how they could be from the same family—the brother, Javier, tall and big as that animal, Aragon, squat like a fire plug. You could see it in their faces, though, the same brows on ridges over the eyes, the same high cheek bones, the strong jaw.

  Spanish eyes, high on their faces. Proud, beautiful. Both of them.

  Now he was grooming another mule, this one looking like it was old and getting fat. She watched him position the animal by a pipe fence, turn it how he wanted, grabbing the harness when it got restless, giving a treat when it stayed still.

  And she saw herself: her mother grooming her, putting chemicals in her hair, training her how to walk, how to stand, how to smile, even. A kid’s smile not good enough, she had to work on a knowing smile, a playful smile, a naughty smile. How to carry shoulders her mother said were an asset even before other assets took shape in her body.

  Parading her for competitions. Claiming victory for herself when she was the one up there, her face hurting from smiling, trying to forget the touches from a smelly judge behind the curtain before she went out in front of people.

  Fourteen years old, her mother taking her to a studio in New York. Bright light inside an umbrella, everything else dark, the man with the camera moving in and out of the white places, telling her to put her feet higher on the stool. Wink. Higher. Wink. There, oh that’s good. I’m going to teach you so much. And squeezing both eyes shut like a contented cat.

  Marcy grooming her years later, when she had nothing else. Too old to stand in front of cameras, now moving furniture for young girls to lay back on, running out for flowers to spread next to them, bringing the photographer a Martinelli cider, and going home alone, no one at the after-shoot party interested when look what else they could choose from.

  “I’m going to teach you so much.” Marcy had used the same words. Cruising a Santa Fe night in the Porsche convertible Marcy had then, the air cold but the heater full blast keeping her legs warm. Marcy pretending to reach for the bottle of wine between her thighs when her hand slipped.

  “That’s my girl.” Wink. Marcy pleased with how she handled the first job as her private investigator. She’d brought Marcy the gun the police were looking for. Interviewing the jury after the not guilty, they heard how important it was the prosecution couldn’t come up with the murder weapon. Marcy told her to find someone for a
celebration in the office and tossed her the keys to her car. A teenage boy it was then, in his white hoodie, looking at condoms at Walgreen’s. She stepped right up and said she knew how he might use a few, was he interested?

  Marcy winked when she brought him back. “That’s my girl.”

  Javier called to someone and Serena walked from the house carrying a thermos and a big packet of aluminum foil, probably a giant burrito. She’d been making them in the house. They talked while Javier cinched a saddle under the mule’s belly. Serena tucked the burrito and thermos into a saddle bag. He climbed up and she watched him head down the dirt road, his dogs tagging behind like they’d done this a hundred times.

  Last night at dinner—red chile in the posole that brought sweat to Montclaire’s forehead—he said he would get a start on scouting for the August elk hunt. The other guides were hammering the Pecos Wilderness. He was going to try a valley outside, closer to the house, a place everybody might be overlooking.

  Montclaire watched Javier and his dogs and imagined riding behind him on the saddle, feeling the heat of his back against her breasts, wondering if she could even get her arms around him, when she noticed Serena looking straight at her. She pulled a long knife from the sheath on her belt, turned to a coyote hide draped over a fence rail, and scraped, never taking her eyes away from Montclaire in the window.

  The files on Dolores Baca, a.k.a. Andrea Chacon, Andrea Luna, Andrea Tenorio, were no longer in central storage. They hadn’t been filmed for micro fiche or digitized. But Lewis found what had been the records of a forgotten, short-lived vice squad in the basement. He came up with a torn accordion file and reports on onion skin, carbon copies of the official report that had been lost over the years.

  Baca had been arrested at downtown hotels during the legislative session. She worked the bars and receptions, apparently got passed around among lobbyists. The files contained the names of three legislators suspected of using her services. She’d been offered a deal if she testified, but the penalties she faced were too insignificant to make it worth her while. She did a couple months in county, she could still work. She snitched, she’d have to leave town.