She drove out to the girl’s trailer and found her home alone, frying a hamburger patty on a griddle meant for waffles. The girl seemed to be oblivious to the juxtaposition of beef patty and waffle griddle. She poked and flipped the patty as she vaguely answered Angelina’s first inquiries. In fact, if Angelina hadn’t asked and been satisfied the answer was truthful, she would have thought the girl high on dope. But she wasn’t; she was just immature and overly sheltered, not by doting parents but by the circumstance of living ten miles out on a remote highway, far from any neighbors, classmates, or other members of her tribe who might have provided support if they’d known of her de facto abandonment by her father. Angelina could see the girl just didn’t know better than to be cooking a hamburger on a waffle griddle. It was a short assumption for her to make that the girl was equally naive about protection against STDs. Which traditionally, on the reservation, were the offspring of family rape.
“How did you acquire the STD?” was question twelve on the DCFS interview sheet > sexually transmitted diseases > sub-part C.
The girl crossed her arms defensively, a blackened spatula dangling from one hand. “Do I have to answer?”
“Please. It’s my job to find out so I can help you.”
“My uncle Randy. He’s the only one who’ll have me.”
“What does that mean?”
The girl shrugged and one-handed a square of paper towel. She wiped spattered grease from the Formica counter. “He tells me he’s the only one who’ll ever want me. He tells me I’ve been ruined for anyone else.”
“Heaven help us,” muttered Angelina. “Where is this Uncle Randy right now?”
“Kayenta. He’s selling a cow.”
“Is he coming back here?”
“He’s always here. When he’s not at a party.”
“Does he live here?”
“Pretty much.”
“This is two bedrooms. Does he sleep on the couch?”
“He sleeps with me until sunrise, then sneaks out on the couch.”
“So Uncle Randy has been sleeping with you. Having sex with you?”
“He fucks me.”
“I want you to come with me tonight.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes.”
“What if I don’t want to go? What if I won’t go?”
“Then I’ll phone the police and have you removed. You don’t want that, believe me.”
“Can I eat first?”
“Certainly. Take your time. What time will Randy get back?”
“Probably late. Maybe in the morning. He goes to the party after he gets money.”
“Sure he does.”
Angelina removed the child that night. She drove her back to Flagstaff and made an overnight placement.
The next day she filed a petition for dependency. A hearing was held and a temporary placement in a foster home was made. Unhappy and missing her father, Turquoise hitchhiked out of Flagstaff, back to the reservation.
She arrived home on a Wednesday afternoon.
Randy Begay stormed inside the trailer that night, knocking over a lamp and burning a hole in the thin carpet with his cigarette.
He found Turquoise in the back bedroom and forced himself on her.
The next day she called Angelina and reported the assault. Then she called Katy Murfee and made an appointment at the clinic. She had pain in her pelvis and was afraid the STD had returned. Katy called Angelina and discussed the situation with her. Something had to be done.
Angelina was furious and swore to the girl she would protect her. But she also knew the uncle was going to be a huge problem because he would always find the girl and abuse her once again.
Something more was called for.
9
Then the summer was over and Katy found it difficult to return to Chicago. First semester was put on hold. It was more important to work through several family issues, beginning with Thaddeus.
Then there was Sarai. The little girl had come a long way and was talking now and even held out her hands to Thaddeus when he kissed her goodbye in the mornings. He would swoop her up and whisper in her ear and get her to smile. Then he would turn her over to her mom and head up to the office.
* * *
He needed another man to talk to. Someone who wouldn’t ever turn around and repeat his words.
So, Thaddeus made the two-hour drive and spent a Saturday with his old friend Henry Landers. Henry was a Navajo shepherd who had survived over a century and was happy to tell how. He was still actively caring for a herd of 220 Navajo-Churro sheep, while his mind and physical health were as good as they had been at forty. Henry was also Katy’s great-grandfather and he saved Thaddeus’ life, literally, at one time. Henry listened over coffee and donuts and thought long and hard about what Thaddeus shared: He had described his troubles with Katy and his drinking and the problems with Hermano Sanchez when he paid the man’s bail. H. Ivan Trautman was described in detail and his hatred for Thaddeus recounted several times.
“Your problems are bigger than the problems,” Henry finally pronounced.
Thaddeus held a donut inches from his mouth. “What in hell does that mean?”
The old man smiled and blew on his coffee. “The problems are real. But your problems you are making up and telling yourself about the real problems—not good. There’s what’s holding you back.”
“My problems are bigger than the actual problems. That’s amazing.”
“Yes. You’re a good man, Thaddeus. You got in trouble because you are a good man.”
“Thank you.”
“The white man’s law is never true, not to my heart. In our culture we do whatever we can to help one another. In the white man’s culture—in your law—it is possible to do too much. That amazes the Indian. There are no limits on good in our world. There are in yours. But your laws are artificial and they exist for reasons that are always about money and greed. You can’t pay a client’s bail because that might make other clients come to you too. That’s crazy. If you want to help, you should be totally free to help. You are to be held up as an example of what’s good in a man, not made an example of by losing your license. How sad.”
“I’m going to have to mull this over,” Thaddeus said.
Henry smiled. “You be sure and do that.”
On the drive back home, his thoughts took flight. I’m a trial lawyer, dammit! I want to try cases, prove why many of these folks aren’t really guilty of anything, do what I do best! But for Hermano Sanchez and his beat-down family and the hell he was living in, I gave it all up. For one case I turned myself over to the hands of the prosecutors and a hateful judge. I’ve had enough deep periods of depression and paralyzing anxiety. Can I ever shine again?
He vowed to himself that somehow, someway, he would scramble his way back on top. He would make the phones ring again with people who came to him for his reputation. It had happened before, it would happen again.
10
She attempted suicide two times, two weeks apart. On the second try, she was successful.
Her name was Hamilton ”Hammy” Steinmar and she was seventeen and a freshman at the University of Arizona, where she had pledged Alpha Nu, made the freshman swim team in the 200 freestyle, and was turned down in tryouts for the cheerleading squad. It wasn’t the cheerleading rejection that prompted the suicide, however.
It was her father.
Her father was John Steinmar, the duly elected district attorney of Coconino County, Arizona. He was married to Angelina Steinmar, the five-foot-eleven mother of Hamilton, member of the Northern Arizona Botanical Society, wine connoisseur, and caseworker for the Department of Children and Family Services. DCFS was a full-time job and kept her away from home for long hours. As a result, daughter Hammy, preteen, had often found herself alone at night with her father while mother was away at work, intervening in the life and family situation of some poor abused or neglected child in a jurisdiction that stretched from Williams to Winslow
, including a third of the Navajo Reservation. It was on those long nights that father forced himself on daughter.
It continued for four years. While at home from college on Thanksgiving break, Hammy made her first suicide attempt. She had never seriously considered killing herself before that Thanksgiving night, but this time was different. There had been a struggle in the bathroom as she was finishing with her bath, father against daughter. She had cried and begged him to leave the room. She told him she had been away to school and learned that other girls had never had sex with their fathers and, rather, their fathers kept them on pedestals and did everything possible to help them through life.
Her words had enraged him and he had choked her with a bath towel so as not to leave marks around her throat. She had passed out, only to regain consciousness with him inside her, panting heavily against her ear, their upper bodies semi-attached with sweat and bathwater. Wordlessly he had climbed to his feet and faced her while drying his penis with a washcloth. When he was done, he zipped up his pants and raised his right hand, index finger extended. “Not one word,” he demanded. Then he had left her to her toilette.
She wiped herself clean and shrugged into her blue and white bathrobe. For several minutes she stood before the mirror, disoriented and staring wildly into her own eyes. ‘If only, if only,if only,’ her brain repeated on full loop. Then, as she struggled with forming a coherent thought, she pawed through the medicine cabinet. Spinning the bottles label-out, reading, reading, she had finally settled on one bearing her mother’s name. Prescribed by Dr. Francis L. Prine, it was labeled Xanax. She dropped the bottle into the pocket of her bathrobe and disappeared into her bedroom.
Hammy had never tried cocaine but she had heard of doing lines. So she knelt down bedside and pushed and turned the medicine bottle. She arranged the Xanax into six lines of four tablets each, and began doing lines. A bottle of water washed everything down. She removed the bathrobe and stood nude before her open bedroom window. In one way she was wishing to startle and disgust; in another way, it was a cry for help; but in another, she only wanted to entice the next inappropriate suitor into her bedroom and her intimacy. She knew she was crazy. She no longer cared.
Two minutes later she was fully prepared to die, so she lay down on her bed, between her Elmo doll and her most-favored iPad, earbuds inserted, feet tapping toes in time to the music of Rosebud. She watched the empty medicine bottle as it rose and fell on her diaphragm, consistent with her breathing. Soon it shallowed and all but ceased.
She was found and rushed to the hospital. She survived this first attempt.
Two weeks later, alone in her dorm room, she hung herself from her closet door with a coat hanger.
This time there was no one to save her.
11
Then it happened: The murder of the district attorney. The crime of the decade. And Thaddeus immediately knew he would have no role in the drama—he was a pariah, an outcast since his disbarment. Another huge parade would roll off down the street without him.
In August the monsoons settled over Flagstaff and it rained every afternoon for three weeks. Late summer weeds and wildflowers burst forth in the Inner Basin, blue jays swooped into catch basins and took long, fluttery baths, deer and elk crept down off the mountain and drank deep, while black bears swiped fish from the ever-deepening Lake Mary. Thaddeus took to fly fishing in the early evenings before the sun settled behind the mountains and oftentimes would catch his limit, gut and clean them on the shoreline, and cook his supper before driving home and catching summer league NBA.
The house with five acres backed up to the Coconino National Forest, so it was quiet and serene, the highway traffic more than a mile away down a north-south gravel road. He opened his eyes when the rain began hammering the skylight overhead. Katy was nude, rolled up against him, and charmingly accessible. Instead of awaking her, he crept across the plank floor and slid open the glass door on the north wall. He stepped out onto the porch, unclothed and unseen, and let the rain drum down, matting his hair and running down in rivulets, draining away from his feet in a torrent.
At 5:45 he saw headlights approaching and ducked back inside. The rural newspaper carrier let fly with a wrapped Coconino Examiner that hit the lower deck with a thump! Thaddeus threw on Levi’s and traipsed downstairs and retrieved the paper. He unsheathed it and was blasted with two-inch headlines, “DA Slain in Home!”
His name was John Steinmar, the paper said, and he was a local boy, born and bred, whose signature characteristic was the albino gene that had tagged him at birth, leaving him pink-skinned and white-haired.
His politics were impeccable. Just before he died he had been on the phone with several precinct committee members. They had just elected him chairman of the Coconino County Republican party. They recounted that he had been his usual, chatty self, that there was no stress in his voice and nothing to indicate any kind of torment in his life.
Thaddeus absorbed the stories about the death by gunshot wound, and examined the photographs. He absently shook his head. “Good grief, I wonder who gets the needle over this?” he said to Max, his pound mutt who shadowed him. Max responded to the query with a cocked head, which might have also meant he was hungry. Thaddeus wiped Max’s bowl and shook in a cup of dry food. He went to the refrigerator and sprinkled Parmesan cheese over the pellets—the only way that Max would agree to eat the stuff.
He looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the north end of the house. Rain was still a downpour; his two horses were pressed together beneath their shelter, heads lowered into a rack of hay, stamping and blowing. Their names were Coconino and Charlie.
He sighed and looked north at the San Francisco Peaks. It was time to go to the office. There would be more news about the murder of the district attorney. So the morning had some merit.
He slipped into court clothes. Ten minutes later he was strapped in the F-250 he had driven from North Dakota.
Just then he received a text from Shep Aberdeen. It was cryptic, saying only, Call me. It’s big.
He studied the cell again and dropped it back inside his shirt pocket.
He wondered what Shep Aberdeen could want with him on a Monday morning. Maybe he was ill and needed cover at court. Or maybe his calendar was conflicted and he needed a warm body. Why he would be texting Thaddeus with the enigmatic “It’s big,” Thaddeus had no idea. But once he got to the office he wasted no time calling Shep’s office.
“He’s in court in front of Judge Gerhardt,” said his receptionist. “He said if you call to, quote, get your skinny ass right over there, unquote.”
“What’s going on in Judge Gerhardt’s court?”
“Initial appearance. Angelina Steinmar.”
Thaddeus sucked in a deep breath. So, the DA’s wife, the finger had been pointed at her. He blew out a long breath. Do you imagine—he stopped and didn’t allow his mind to race away. “Okay, Maya. I’m on my way.”
Thaddeus hurried up the courthouse stairs to the second floor. He raced for the courtroom at the far end. Honorable William A. Gerhardt, Criminal Calendar, said the notice posted outside the double doors. He let his eyes scan over the roster and saw that there was nothing listed referencing Angelina Steinmar. That’s why they were holding court so early in the morning: they were having a fast session before the press could get wind. He stepped inside and was greeted by twenty pairs of eyes turning to see who had come in. Five pairs belonged to armed deputies arranged directly behind the defense table. They effectively shielded that table’s occupants from Thaddeus’ view, but he already knew whom he would find there—Shep Aberdeen and Angelina Steinmar—defense counsel and defendant in the murder of John Steinmar, Coconino County district attorney.
“Morning, Mr. Murfee,” said Judge Gerhardt from the bench. “Lock that door behind you, please.”
Thaddeus did as he was told.
He turned back around. The courtroom was part of the original building of the Coconino County Superior Court. Its c
eiling arched up two stories to a condemned gallery that ran around three walls on the second floor and remained locked. The lower walls were populated with portraits of judges reaching as far back as territorial days—bearded men, with their mutton chops and rimless spectacles, posed without any indication of character other than grim and serious—their posterity. Closest to Judge Gerhardt’s bench was the current crop of six jurists comprising the Superior Court, robed and smiling, as if life had become more accommodating as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first.
Judge Gerhardt had drawn the Angelina Steinmar assignment over the five other judges for one reason only: among the six judges he was the only one who hadn’t served as an Assistant DA under John Steinmar at some career point. Bill Gerhardt hadn’t felt that call, the call to prosecute and put people behind bars. His pre-judicial law practice had been mostly commercial with just a smattering of minor criminal work—DUIs, disturbing the peace, retail shoplifting, the two-bit stuff where not much was on the line. So his slate was clean to accept the assignment of the Angelina Steinmar murder case.
The case would be high pressure and high profile. Already it was clear the local district attorney’s corps wouldn’t be prosecuting. Thaddeus saw at the state’s table a fortyish man, thin and bespectacled with a bald spot plating his crown, who evidently hailed from the office of the Attorney General in Phoenix. Big-time prosecutors. So, the cannons were in place, the press would be charging the door at any moment, and here he stood—but why?
Judge Gerhardt was hastily setting bail before the press could storm the courtroom. Bail hearings were the trickiest part of high-profile prosecutions because the availability of bail in a capital crime always came down to judicial discretion. Which meant the judge couldn’t (nor would he) blame his ruling on something required by the law. Instead, the amount of bail would be his call. If he even allowed bail at all. He probably wouldn’t, Thaddeus knew, where the “presumption was great and the evidence strong” of guilt. The morning was shaping up to be an all-out war, and Thaddeus had arrived just in time, though for what reason, he still was unsure. That part was up to Shep.
Defending Turquoise (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thriller Series Book 5) Page 3
