Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  Benny returned to his desk and signed an affidavit to answer another motion in the new trial drama. The runner acted as a notary and Benny gave him a Silva Enterprises ball cap. He waited to see his car pass through the gates onto the street. Then Benny opened the door that led to the windowless room in the center of his cinder-block building.

  Up close the young woman looked a little sick. Her color was off. Benny checked her arms. He’d seen this before, his own daughter killing herself. Sure enough, those were needle tracks, very old ones, on the inside of her elbow. His daughter switched at the end to sticking herself between toes. She got tired of Benny always grabbing her arm and turning the inside to the light. With this girl’s color, he didn’t need to tell her to take off her shoes to know she was still using the heroin.

  Junior, already his father’s height but minus fifty pounds, said, “Uncle Benny, this is my friend, Star.”

  “I like your name,” Benny said. “There’s that.”

  Star dragged fingers through her hair, each nail painted a different color. The black nails made him think she’d hit herself with a hammer.

  “Joon said you might have a job I can do, pay me in cash. Hook me into something big.”

  “Losing Cassandra spooked her,” Junior said.

  “You already got work that pays in cash. Sit.” Benny nodded at a straight-backed chair, the one the Indian who lost a foot had been in. He pushed it closer to the girl as Rigo entered the room.

  Star looked at Rigo, then Benny, then back at Rigo.

  “We’re twins,” Benny said. “Except for Rigo’s distinguishing features.”

  “I never saw old-man twins.” Now she was looking only at Benny. “I don’t have any job that pays cash.”

  “Junior, what were you telling me?”

  The boy stepped up. Benny could see he was proud to be part of this. Like his father, eager to learn, get his hands on things.

  “Star runs girls. She’d stop beatings, chase away bullies, then turn the girls out. Called them the Jags, each getting a crappy tattoo of a Jaguar car on their hip. Cassandra Baca was one. She was doing a judge and a rich lawyer. Lady judge, lady lawyer. That’s how Star could buy her own Jag.”

  “What did Cassandra tell you about the judge?”

  Star stared at Junior. “You brought me here saying there was a job.”

  “There is a job,” Benny said. “Look at me. We’ve got a machine out back that needs attention.”

  “I don’t know shit about machines. That wasn’t the kind of thing I thought this was about. I heard about you, you know. I want in.”

  “You can jump right in. Rigo and Abel will show you. Junior, you can learn, too. This machine, it’s the key to this business. Star, I’m ready to feed you right into the heart of the operation if you’re up to it. Sit down a while. Consider this your job interview.”

  Star scratched the back of a hand, letters there Benny couldn’t read. She looked behind her and settled her narrow butt on the chair. She pinned her hands in her armpits and bent one leg along the side of the chair, toe pressed into the floor. Benny didn’t like her heavy black boots with the two-inch waffle soles.

  “She said they were weird, but they paid a lot of money. This last time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back.”

  Benny stepped close to the chair, directly in front of her. The tip of his SAS comfort shoe touched her black boot.

  “What last time?”

  “A couple nights ago, right before she, you know. It was on TV.”

  “She went with the judge and lawyer again?”

  “And the lady who picked her up at Pizza Hut. The one who called me.”

  Benny waved for a chair for himself. Abel brought one and Benny sat next to Star.

  “That’s something I never quite figured out, how Cassandra got with this judge. You knew the lady who took her?”

  “She worked for the lawyer that did my brother’s case.”

  “He shot a kid at a party,” Junior said.

  “She was the investigator. My brother, he was in jail, said to give her all the guns to give to his lawyer. She wanted to know if I knew any girls liked being with women, or wouldn’t mind, what they were paying. That’s how I hooked her up with Cassandra. I told her about the kind of money she could make and she said she didn’t care.”

  Benny patted the knob of her knee. The girl could stand to eat a few combo plates. “Did you send this investigator any other girls?”

  “No, only Cassandra. She was my best. She was okay, too. Nice. She kept herself pretty.”

  “This investigator. Was she tall, long arms and legs, a neck like Audrey Hepburn?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Like a model.”

  “Oh, yeah, ’cept she’s old.”

  “Abel and Rigo, show Star how that machine works. I’m done here.”

  “What’s the job pay?” Star dragged her heavy black boots to the front of the chair and pushed to her feet. Her hands dug into pockets coming through tears in her jeans, not after anything. Just another place to put them. “Can I start today?”

  “You can start right now. Give Junior your keys. He’ll move your car around back while you learn the ropes.”

  “You didn’t say what it pays.”

  “We’ll see if you’re up to the job first. You finished our interview. Now’s the on-the-job training part, where you show the valuable contribution you can make to Silva Enterprises.”

  Rigo and Abel led her to the door, each taking an arm, bone under skin with that bad color that made him think of ashtrays.

  Junior said to his uncle, “How come you never gave me that job? I need to get my own car.”

  “This kind of job … ” Benny moved the chairs from the middle of the room to a wall. He was thinking about how to put this when the phone started ringing. “Look, you want work that can take you places in life. This one, it goes nowhere. Move that car and catch up with your dad and grandpa. You’ll see. Go ahead. I’ve got a call.”

  He picked up the phone. The call had come to his direct number, bypassing the number in the Dex for E. Benny Silva Enterprises, Waste Disposal, Recycling, and Sanitation Services. He was thinking who might have this number when he recognized the lawyer’s voice saying she wanted to meet him.

  “Come by my office,” he said, remembering how she moved in the movies.

  “Not a chance.” A laugh in her voice the same time she was being serious, showing she was sure about things and enjoying herself, all of it, even the danger. Telling him, too, she knew some things about him and his office. Abel had said he thought he saw her circling the block with Frank Pacheco, someone they’d done business with off and on.

  “I’ll come to your office again,” he said.

  “I want people around. And I don’t want anybody who knows me seeing us together.”

  “Something you want to keep between us. Tell me where.”

  “Moriarty.”

  “That’s a drive.”

  “La Cantina de los Romeros.”

  “The state senator’s restaurant? He’s there, I’ll introduce you.”

  “Maybe not. Down the street. Jenny’s Truck Stop, I think it’s called. It’s got a big rig painted on the wall. Meet me at the café inside. I’m leaving now.”

  “You don’t want people recognizing you, meet me at Juanita’s on Airport Road. It’s full of mojados don’t know me neither. I don’t like to drive so much at night. That’s a long way, down and back.”

  “Divide the distance by nine million dollars. That’s what you’ll be making per mile.”

  “We’ve got an Abominable Snowman,” Elaine Salas said to Lewis. She sized up Aragon. “What do we call you? A bunny with shoulders?”

  Salas was in her own hooded white clean suit. She led them to the sheet of plywood from
the dumpster site, now on saw horses inside the evidence room. Spotlights showed it in a pool of harsh white light. With the tip of a surgical knife, Elaine Salas touched a spot circled and marked “#1.”

  “I found the first tissue here,” she said. Six other circles, with matching numbers, spanned the wood. “Tiny scrapings of skin snagged against the grain. I think we can confidently say how Cassandra Baca got those abrasions and splinters on her backside.”

  She pushed the knife into an unmarked spot on the board and flaked off a piece of wood.

  “Plywood’s made from particle and fiberboard. I doubt it will have any distinctive signature. But there’s glue, waxes, and resins mixed with the fibers. That we can definitely identify with an electron microscope. We find it on the splinters in Cassandra Baca, and a DNA match with the skin on the board, we slide into home plate.”

  “On to the next question,” Lewis said. “Why put her on a board?”

  “The Abominable Snowman speaks,” Aragon said.

  “Why not just heave her into the dumpster?” Lewis tugged at the clean suit where it climbed his chest to pinch his Adam’s apple. “It’s a lot harder to raise a body on the board, keep it balanced, until you can tip it over the side.”

  “No splinters in her scalp, right?” Aragon rubbed the back of her own head through the clean suit’s hood. “She had the Whole Foods shopping bag on her head when she slid down the board.”

  Salas wrote numbers on masking tape and stuck them on little packets with wood chips inside. “She went in head first or the bag would have come off. Nate Moss said there was a uniform angle of penetration to the splinters. That should answer it.”

  “We should get the drag dummy from the Academy,” Lewis said. “Load it to Cassandra Baca’s weight, get another board like this. See how it might have been done.”

  Aragon said, “Elaine, can you rig that for us? Something close to a dead body with arms and legs flopping around. A dead weight, as difficult to handle as the real thing.”

  “Balancing and lifting a body on a board,” Lewis said. “We’re talking pallbearers. We don’t need an experiment to know one person couldn’t do it.”

  “What if they didn’t lift her from the ground, but were already higher, closer to the edge of the dumpster? They had her in the back of a pickup. That got the most votes last time we kicked this around.”

  Lewis said, “You see that a lot. Guys not wanting to scratch their truck. You cut a plywood sheet to fit. A cheap bedliner.”

  “But she slid off the board, in one direction,” Salas said. “She didn’t get those abrasions and splinters from rolling around. I would think it requires more force, sudden movement, for wood splinters to penetrate the skin.”

  Aragon held an edge of the board with white gloves, trying hard to imagine it with a body, raised level, carried to the edge of the dumpster, the end with the feet lifted so high Cassandra Baca slid off head first.

  And not seeing it.

  Eighteen

  Thornton drove east from Santa Fe and took the US 285 exit south through a sprawling bedroom community. The houses were spread out, on large lots, no tight clusters of lights. Beyond that the night closed in. No houses or gas stations. Road signs coming up fast when her headlights hit them.

  She slowed. Last thing she needed was a ticket placing her here on this night. She was driving the Durango. Taking the Aston Martin to a truck stop off I-40, she’d defeat the whole purpose of a hundred-twenty-mile round trip to meet unnoticed with Benny Silva.

  Lily had asked her to buy the Durango for work. Her cute BMW three-series was losing its battles with washboard roads and two-tracks when she searched for witnesses on reservations and in the mountains north of Santa Fe. The mileage reimbursement wasn’t covering the cost of a new front end every ten thousand miles.

  The seats in this thing were huge compared to the Beemer, even the Aston. She’d needed time to get the driver’s seat right. Lily had left it way back for her long legs. She had to take it all way to the shortest setting to reach the pedals. Then she needed a couple phone books under her to see over the dash.

  Out of the darkness, a sign said “Stanley.” For a village of seventy people—no, you couldn’t call it that, just a few houses and farms spread wide apart—this place had turned out the state’s longest-serving governor and an attorney general, and was the location of a billionaire’s ranch. There were lots of very rich people in Santa Fe, but not billionaire sex offenders who chummed around with Bill Clinton and British royalty. Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch with its 27,000-square-foot main house was somewhere out there in the dark. Thornton had once hoped his criminal problems would blossom in New Mexico and give her a shot at being local counsel.

  Traffic moved in the distance on I-40, nothing blocking the view across open prairie. Soon she was out of the darkness on Moriarty’s main street. She’d gotten to know this town from handling cases for drug runners stopped on the Interstate. That had been the route: up from El Paso on I-25 to I-40, left to LA, east to middle America. She hadn’t handled an interdiction case in a long while. Most went into the Federal CJA program, appointed lawyers earning a measly hourly rate. She wouldn’t take anything now without her full fee paid up front, no refunds for a guilty verdict, no discount for a quick dismissal. When you hit it, that up-front fee could be one huge chunk of money for a couple hours’ work, sometimes just a phone call to straighten out an Assistant DA.

  Coming down the main street, she saw gas pumps and “JENNY’S” in red letters. There, painted on a cinder-block wall, was the mural she remembered, a cartoonish big rig and a Route 66 sign. She got down from the Durango and started to the door, surprised to see Benny Silva at the wheel of an Oldsmobile, a much younger man in the passenger seat next to him. She tapped on the window. It came down.

  “Let’s talk inside,” she said.

  He had the black hair of Benny Silva, with a lower voice and more mass in the upper body. And a face that made her step back, like it had been cut in half then sewed back together, but they couldn’t get the lips to line up right.

  “I’m his brother,” the almost-look-alike said. “Benny’s inside.” The young man next to him, now that she was closer, could be this man’s son.

  She heard “La Tierra Encantada,” and the men in the car laughing as the window went up.

  The lights inside the doors showed what could be any convenience store, but this one had a restaurant in back. She stepped past the register and saw Benny Silva at a table with a Mexican combo plate, red and green chile, steam rising from refried beans. She pulled out a metal chair and sat across from him.

  “Juan de Oñate came through here on his way to Kansas,” Silva said, mixing chile into his beans. “Imagine riding out across the plains, not knowing where the next water was, land like an ocean. He got all the way to what’s now Wichita before he turned around. You want something?”

  She waved for the waitress while Silva tore apart a tamale. Coffee would be good, she told the middle-aged woman wearing a Jenny’s Truck Centers tee.

  “We’re here.” Silva was now onto an enchilada, melted cheese oozing from the folded tortilla. “Something you want to say you couldn’t in Santa Fe?”

  Her coffee arrived. She took her time bringing it to her mouth, putting it down. She’d been working on how to say this as she drove across the dark prairie.

  “You haven’t thought it through. Without me, you’ll lose your nine-million-dollar verdict. Even if Judge Diaz denies the motion for new trial, enters those findings of fact you want, you’ll get reversed in the Court of Appeals. That’s where I can help you, but you’ll have to hire me as your lawyer.”

  Silva wiped his mouth and rested his hands out of sight in his lap. Done eating, ready to talk, but he’d missed some red chile in his mustache. “No dancing around,” he said. “You get right to it.”

  “Dancing. Is that what
you call it, putting that photo under my wipers? The e-mails to Judge Diaz?”

  “I was saying hello, I know you. Now you know me. Tell me why it is I need you?”

  “Your lawyer—does he realize what you’re up to?”

  Silva touched his mustache, felt the wet chile, wiped his mouth again. “He’s a choirboy. He looked pretty in front of the jury. We knew the abuelas would love him. He thinks he won with his smooth talking. Hasn’t once wondered how come the other side had nothing. Maybe we could use new representation.”

  “I know most of the Court of Appeals. Well. Very well. Beyond them is the Supreme Court. It’s in their discretion to take an appeal from the Court of Appeals. You have to petition them for what’s called certiorari. I can make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “You know them, too.”

  “Most have been elected in the past ten years. They remember how much I did to give them their jobs.”

  Thornton rotated her cup in its saucer, back and forth, putting her nerves somewhere. Underneath the table, she was curling and uncurling toes inside her shoes.

  “I already got a deal with the boy lawyer. He gets twenty-five percent.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He was doing slip-and-falls before this. Now he’ll get better cases, riding his rep. The big gun who shot down the Hollywood fat cat. What I’m saying, I’m not anxious to cut any deeper into my take.”

  “The other thing I’ll do is hold Judge Diaz together so she can enter that ruling you need. You’ve pushed her over the edge. She may not make it to the finish line. She’s talking of resigning. She steps down, your case goes to a new judge.”

  “Who doesn’t have a thing for teenagers.”

  “She’s talking about going to the police. She blames herself for Andrea getting killed.”

  “Who’s Andrea? Oh, Cassandra. Terrible news. Somebody does that to a pretty girl, what’s wrong with people?”

  “If Judy Diaz unburdens herself to the police, they’ll learn about your movies. Those e-mails you sent to get kiddie porn on her computer—the police will be very interested. They can find out the computer they were sent from.”