by Ed Gaffney
The defendant studied me in confusion. Or was it suspicion? “I know,” he said. “She denied that motion this morning.”
“No. I mean I went to another court to have them throw her off the case.”
“Whoa. You went over Judge Klay’s head? Damn.” Gomez shook his head. “You got some balls, my friend. Great big balls. I just hope she don’t screw you bad.”
And on that jolly note, the door at the front of the courtroom opened up. First Manny Estrada, the clerk, emerged, carrying a file folder. Manny was followed by Sarge. Instantly, the room fell silent, and everyone got to their feet. I turned and saw the red light above the Judicial Broadcasting System camera blink on. This was it.
But no one called the case back into session. Manny stood behind his desk, set his folder down, and simply said, “Please be seated.”
I was puzzled. Had Chief Justice Bridges changed his mind, and decided to rewrite his decision? How long would we have to wait?
Clerk Estrada began to speak.
“As you know, this trial is in recess. During that recess, an order has been issued out of the Supreme Court of Arizona. I would like to read a portion of that order now.” He opened the folder on his desk, and withdrew a single sheet of paper.
“‘In the matter of The State of Arizona versus Juan Abdullah Gomez, Superior Court Number 4201, it is hereby ordered that Superior Court Judge Rhonda M. Klay be and she hereby is recused, and the Administrative Judge of the Superior Court is hereby ordered to appoint a successor judge to preside over the trial forthwith. Pending such appointment, the aforementioned matter is to remain in recess.’
“And the order is signed by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Arizona, Hugo H. Bridges.”
And without another word, Manny replaced the document, scooped up his folder, and walked back through the doorway, out of the courtroom.
The door hadn’t even swung completely shut when the spell holding the courtroom silent was shattered. “Wait a minute!” I heard one reporter cry out. “So who’s the new judge?”
But instead of answers, the question was met with a chorus of more questions. I couldn’t understand a word of any of it.
And then Sarge was barking, “Quiet! Quiet in the court!”
It was like someone had hit the mute button. One minute, the place was buzzing like an angry beehive; the next, instant silence. Sarge stood in front of the clerk’s table, facing the gallery. His big hands were slowly and rhythmically squeezing into and out of fists. He almost looked like he hoped someone would say something, so he could finally discover if grabbing a person by the throat really would pop their head right off.
“This case is in recess until at least tomorrow,” he snarled. “The new judge will be reassigned sometime later today, and the announcement will be up on the court’s Web site as soon as it happens, along with information about when the trial will be back in session.
“Until then, this courtroom is closed!” he shouted. “I’ll expect it to be empty in five minutes.” Then he followed Manny Estrada out through the door behind the witness stand.
The murmurs started up again the instant Sarge left the room, but before they got too loud, Sarge’s partner, Mike, eased into the good-cop role as if the pair had been dealing with rowdy courtrooms like this for their whole lives. “All right, everybody. Clear the courtroom. That’s it. Clear the court. Thank you.” From the look of the way most people were moving, the place was going to be vacated long before Sarge’s five-minute deadline.
I was stunned, and sat there, speechless.
My client, however, had much to say. He was pounding me on the back, shouting, “Holy shit, man, you’re a good lawyer!” and, “You really got that nasty judge thrown off my case? Damn. So what’s your next move?”
It was a perfectly legitimate question, yet I almost laughed. I had no answers for Juan Gomez. Up to that point in my professional life, I had prided myself on my preparation. I planned for every contingency I could imagine, feeling like that was part of my responsibility in representing my clients zealously.
But in this trial, I had absolutely no idea what my next move was. In the two days I’d worked on the Gomez case, I’d spent more time flying by the seat of my pants than I had in all my years since law school.
And I had a feeling that my aerial stunts were just beginning.
One of the court officers arrived to take Gomez back to his holding cell. I followed them, both because it allowed me to leave the courtroom without having to fight my way through the mob that was noisily milling around in the hallway, and because it gave me a chance to explain to my client that I was pretty much making this all up as I went along.
The irony was that Gomez didn’t believe me. For the first time in over a year, an attorney in the criminal justice system had done something that worked to his benefit, and he was firmly committed to believing that attorney was going to keep it up. He was elated.
As I left him there in the holding cell, I was much less confident than he.
I had other things to think about, though. I hadn’t had breakfast, and I was starving. I decided to get something fast from the cafeteria before heading home. I figured that even if some reporters were lurking up there, I’d just grab something to go. I returned to the main corridor from a side door between the courtroom and the end of the building, which kept me from running into the small crowd of people who were still hovering at the courtroom entrance.
I’d gotten some grease on my hand when I leaned on Gomez’s cell door as I was talking to him, so I headed for the bathroom to wash up.
The room was empty, which was fine with me. The fewer people I ran into, the sooner I’d be able to eat something and get home. I stepped over to the sinks on my right, turned on the faucet, and soaped up my hands.
My reflection did not look like one of a man who had, albeit unwittingly, taken the first steps along a path which would risk his life and, with it, the lives of everyone he loved.
Rather, it looked like one of a bleary-eyed thirty-year-old with a vague resemblance to Gregory Peck’s less attractive brother on a bad hair day, wearing a dark gray suit and a blue tie with a coffee stain on it.
I looked away from my reflection, down again into the sink, and rinsed the soap off my hands. Then I cupped them together, collected some water, and splashed it onto my face.
It was refreshing, but for only about one, maybe two seconds. Because just as I reached out to turn off the water, I felt a presence behind me.
In retrospect, I bet I would have noticed the man coming into the bathroom before that moment if I hadn’t been washing my hands. Splashing water masks most sounds even for people with perfectly normal hearing.
As it was, I paid no particular attention. Until I felt fingers close around my throat and heard a voice say, “Make one sound, and you will die right here.”
EIGHT
FOR ABOUT A quarter of a second I caught sight in the mirror of a man wearing a blue ski mask. And then, before I could respond or even regain my balance, I was pulled into one of the toilet stalls.
I am not a small man. And although I have been described as gangly, I am by no means a weakling. One of the ways I pass time up at my father’s house is to chop mesquite logs for the woodstove that he loves to sit near. My hands, and especially my shoulders and arms, are pretty darn strong.
And my survival instincts run very much against getting murdered in a bathroom, so I started to fight.
The struggle didn’t last long, though, because my attacker now had my throat in the crook of his elbow like a vise. As soon as I grabbed at him, he choked off my air quite completely. I knew from my days as a high-school wrestler that I didn’t have much time before I passed out, so I braced for one final effort to break his hold.
But in the split second before I made my last stand, my assailant released his grip on my throat slightly, and murmured, “Stop. I’m now holding a gun to your head.” He spoke in a harsh whisper that sounded like it was inten
ded to disguise his voice. I twisted slightly in his grip, and my temple bumped into something that sure felt like the muzzle of a weapon.
I’ve read books and seen movies where the hero is as cool and calm as a mountain lake while he’s all tied up and the bad guy is sticking a gun in his face. “Weren’t you scared?” coos the beautiful starlet, as she gently wipes the blood from our hero’s bruised jaw.
“If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have done it right away,” Captain Manly explains, squinting gallantly.
Here’s a tip to those of you who haven’t yet had the experience of being held at gunpoint: Bruce Willis dialogue is not what’s racing through your brain as you stand there in a deserted bathroom, while the smell of disinfectant mixes unpleasantly with the sharp metallic odor of a deadly weapon less than an inch from your skull.
What is going through your mind? Well, you probably start wondering if you have any chance at grabbing the handgun before it blows a hole in your head, and then you nearly jump out of your shoes when you hear a voice come through a walkie-talkie of some kind, saying, “Beta, this is Gamma. Cafeteria is clear. Over.”
And before I had a chance even to begin to try and process that, my gunman responded, “Roger that, Gamma. First-floor bathrooms are clear. Kappa is on five then seven. Go up to six—check everything. Including the women’s rooms. Over.”
And then Gamma—Gamma, for God’s sake—shot back, “Roger sixth floor. Out.”
I probably should have thanked the guy with his arm around my throat for so completely confusing me that I was momentarily distracted from the fact that I was one heartbeat away from death.
Who the hell were these people? And who were they looking for? It couldn’t have been me—otherwise Mr. Gun At My Temple wouldn’t have said that the first-floor bathrooms were clear.
But if I wasn’t their target, why in the world had he grabbed me? Surely he’d seen me before I’d seen him. He could very easily just have walked out the door before I even noticed him, and then happily continued his search for whatever poor sap he, Kappa, and Gamma were so intent on finding.
As if he could hear my thoughts, the man behind me rasped directly into my ear. “Your life is in danger” was how he started.
“No kidding,” I wheezed out in response. I was running on one hundred percent hormones and zero percent brain.
“Not from me, dumbshit,” he said. His tone did not leave room for disagreement, so I said nothing, but I remember feeling that the gun pressing against my head was at least mildly inconsistent with his last statement.
“I’m the least of your problems,” he continued. “Your ass is on fire because your little stunt with Judge Klay this morning has pissed off a lot of very powerful people in the prosecutor’s office. And right down the street in the Arizona Statehouse. Not to mention Washington, D.C. They’re really bullshit back there.”
If this guy thought he was making things easier for me to understand, he was sadly mistaken. “I have no idea—”
“Listen up, Counselor,” he snapped. “I’m almost out of time. This whole trial was put together very carefully. And Judge Klay was a major part of it. The case didn’t just land in her lap accidentally. Big people have put a lot of effort into making sure Gomez fries for what happened in Denver, and Rhonda Klay was on the team. You stepped in some serious shit, my friend, when you managed to kick her out.
“So from now on, they see you as a real threat. You are going to be watched. You are going to be bugged. Everything you say and everything you do is going to be monitored. By the feds, the cops, people you can’t even begin to imagine.
“You aren’t safe. Your father, your sister-in-law, your niece—nobody is safe. You should be especially careful around this state cop Landry. He used to be in the army. He’s going to be all over you, and he’s a fucking freak. Watch out for him. That psychopath will do anything. So—”
My new benefactor was interrupted by one of his fellow Greek letters. “Top floor is clear, heading for rendezvous point on one. Over.”
“Roger that, Kappa.”
The walkie-talkie went silent, and he spoke to me. “I don’t have much time,” he said. “Put your right hand behind your back.”
For a second I thought about resisting, but I did as he said. The threat of a bullet to the brain was quite effective. I felt and heard a handcuff click into place around my wrist. “Keep facing forward, but take a step back. I’m going to lock you to the pipe here”—there was a tug on my wrist, and another click—“and I’m putting the handcuff key in your shirt pocket.” He did as he said. “It will take you about thirty seconds to get out of here after I leave. Do not tell anyone about this. Anyone, understand? If you do, I guarantee that within sixty minutes, you’ll be lying on your face, with a bullet in the back of your head. And so will anyone within a hundred yards of you.”
Then he patted me down, as if looking for weapons. Before I reminded him that normal people don’t know how to smuggle guns into buildings guarded by metal detectors, he reached into my breast pocket and withdrew my cell phone. “I’ll just leave this on the sink—I don’t want you calling anybody for a minute or so.”
It was all so insane, it was hard to decide whether I believed him. But I sure believed that pistol poking me in the face. I was so overwhelmed with everything that had happened to me over the last twenty-four hours that I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
Then I felt a ski mask come over my head, except the eye holes were missing. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Leave the mask on until you hear the door close. Then take it off, and get out of here. They’re going to make contact with you. Just do what they say and nothing will happen to you or your family. Stay smart. Keep being Gomez’s lawyer, but don’t do anything fancy, okay? Nothing unusual, nothing stupid. I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry. I’ll let you know when it’s time to make some noise.”
And then, like it was nothing out of the ordinary, he just walked out of the stall. A second later, I heard the bathroom door open, then close.
He was right—it took me about a half a minute to pull the ski mask off and unlock the handcuffs from my wrist. I didn’t rush out into the hallway after the guy, though. I knew he’d be gone.
And even if he were standing out there like an idiot in a courthouse hallway with a gun, what was I supposed to do? Talk him into voluntarily laying down his weapon? Less than sixty seconds ago he’d been a finger twitch from shooting my brains out. He didn’t seem like the kind of person I was likely to convince to surrender.
I sat down on the toilet seat, locked the stall door, and took a second to try to bring my pulse rate down to something in the triple digits.
Just to clarify, when I said earlier that I was open to life’s opportunities, I wasn’t including the opportunity to be victimized by a nonsense-spouting thug in a courthouse lavatory.
Why would everyone involved in the Gomez case bother to conspire to fix a guilty verdict? The evidence against him was overwhelming. I hadn’t had time to review it in detail, but I’d seen enough of Steve Temilow’s files to know that they had video- and audiotapes of the defendant doing and saying some seriously incriminating things, many of them establishing a strong connection between Gomez and the suicide bomber who actually committed the Denver atrocity. And then there were the things found in Gomez’s home—maps of Denver with the tunnel highlighted, photos of the tunnel, photos of fuel tankers, dozens of radical Islamic texts, and printouts of instructions from the Internet on how to make detonating devices.
Not to mention a newspaper article detailing the most heavily trafficked stretches of road in Houston, and a map of that city which had been highlighted to show exactly those spots identified in the article. And then there were printouts of train, bus, and airline schedules from Houston to Phoenix.
Sure, some of these things could be explained innocently, but taken all together, especially with the tapes, there was absolutely no way Gomez was getting off. The only thin
g I could think of was that the authorities were so afraid of some freak jury thing—like what happened in the O.J. case—that they had decided to cheat, just to make certain there was no chance Gomez would go free.
It didn’t make a lot of sense, but it made more sense than what I could piece together about my own little personal encounter.
Question one was who was that nut with the gun? And exactly what the hell was he trying to do? Not to sound ungrateful, but did he really think he was doing me a favor by telling me that there was some crackpot conspiracy behind the trial? If everything he said was true, I was soon to be contacted by powerful people who were going to threaten to kill me and my family if I refused to represent Gomez without doing anything fancy, stupid, or unusual. Whatever that meant.
So how did getting threatened at gunpoint in a bathroom make that any less monstrous? Did my assailant think that I wouldn’t take the conspirators’ threat seriously if I didn’t literally have a gun to my head?
But that couldn’t have been it—the guy in the bathroom made it pretty clear that he was not part of the conspiracy.
Or at least he didn’t want me to think he was.
Maybe this was the most sophisticated good cop/bad cop routine in the history of coercion. The bathroom man sticks a gun to my head and threatens my life, and he’s the nice one. The message could be Look out for the other lunatics out there. They’re really out of control.
I wasn’t thinking clearly. I needed to get out of the bathroom and get some food, some air, and some rest. The artificial energy that my body had generated at the prospect of being on the wrong end of several violent felonies was oozing out of me fast. I was woozy from fear, hunger, and lack of sleep.
I got up, leaving behind the ski mask and the handcuffs still attached to the pipe above the toilet for somebody else to worry about. As promised, my cell phone rested on the edge of the sink. I dropped it into my pocket, and headed out into the hallway, still uncertain of what to do.
Sometimes, when I look back on my actions, they seem so naive. I knew I needed help—I just had no idea who I could turn to safely. Were all state cops a threat? Or was it just the one named Landry? And was he really a threat? Or was Beta’s message intended to raise my suspicions about one of the cops that I really could trust?
