Liars Anonymous

by Louise Ure

  I folded my arms again, tighter this time. Holy shit. Had the witness identified me? And had he seen Guillermo, too? Reuben Sanchez must be the Bracero whose throat Miguel had cut as we left.

  “What’s in it for you, Jessie?” Sabin cocked his head like a curious predatory bird. “You moving drugs for the Braceros? Maybe using the HandsOn network to pass on messages and drops?”

  Let him talk. I turned sideways and gave him my profile.

  “We know you didn’t kill Markson, but you could have been involved with him. We’ve got that call from you to his cell phone that night.”

  “That was after he was attacked, you idiot! I was trying to find out if he was okay!”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced. “Or maybe you already knew what was going on. You sure hooked up with Felicia Villalobos quick, and look what happened to her. Did she tell you about a deal between Markson and the Braceros? Did your Bracero friends think she was going to rat them out? And then you’re spotted where her boyfriend gets killed, and you’d marked that house on your map.”

  He leaned back in the chair and hooked his hands behind his head. The picture of comfort and ease. “That DNA sample comes back as a match? I’ve got you, girl.”

  “That’s it!” I slammed my hands on the desk. “No more questions without my lawyer. You either arrest me or I’m walking out.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.” He reached to the back of his waistband where his handcuffs rested. “Jessica Dancing Gammage, you’re under arrest for the murder of Carlos Ochoa and Reuben Sanchez.” He wasn’t even waiting for DNA results.

  Sabin called a female officer in to take me to booking. I already knew the way. It hadn’t changed much in three years.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  I made my one phone call.

  “Mom, can I talk to Dad, please?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jessica.”

  I recoiled with the thought of being locked up—for the weekend, at least—without anyone knowing where I was. My vision swam and dark circles narrowed my line of sight. I put my head down to keep from passing out.

  “Please, please. It’s the last time—Mom, I’m calling from jail.”

  “My God, what have you done?” At last, confirmation that her worst fears were real. There was a heavy clunk and I thought she’d hung up.

  I breathed into the silence. Then, “Jessie, is that you?” My father’s voice, gentle, with an undertone of panic. “Your mother says you’re calling from jail.”

  “Detective Sabin just arrested me for murder. I think Raisa might be gone for the weekend. I need…” I couldn’t bring myself to say help. Save me. Make everything okay again.

  “Hush, hush. It’s okay.” I could almost feel him rocking me. “I’ll try Raisa and if I can’t get her I’ll find someone else.”

  “I don’t think Deke knows about this, Daddy. Maybe he can help.”

  “Time’s up,” the female cop said behind me. I raised one hand for a moment’s patience.

  “…nothing till Monday,” my father said. “But I’ll see what we can do about bail.” My heart broke, remembering what the last murder trial had cost him.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I know, I know.” I heard the change in his voice: steel where only soft silk had been. He’d convinced himself once before that I hadn’t killed anyone. He could do it again.

  “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll take care of—” he started to say.

  The female officer reached past me and depressed the button on the phone, severing the connection in mid-sentence.

  Two hours later, I was the newest resident of the Pima County Female Detention Center. The booking photos were still unflattering, the jumpsuits were still orange, and the strip search was still an act of purposeful degradation.

  But there had been a few positive changes since my last visit. The big general population ward that had held over a hundred detainees was now broken up into eight-woman dormitory cells with bunk beds and TVs. And based on the What Not to Wear program that my roommates were watching, it looked like there were more channels now.

  No way I’d be arraigned before Monday. Sabin had made sure of that, the asshole. And then what? Did they even offer bail for multiple murder? This might be the beginning of another yearlong wait for a trial. And then? And then? My vision dimmed again.

  A bell rang and a voice called “Lights out!” Like a city in a brownout, the shadows raced grid by grid toward our dorm. When the TV went off and the only light left was on the other side of the bars, I kicked off the plastic jailhouse sandals and stretched out on the thin mattress. One woman near the door was praying in Spanish and another in the bunk just opposite me cried in gulping sobs.

  Unlike my neighbor, I cried silently.

  Welcome home, Jessie.

  “You have a visitor,” the guard said. I had taken advantage of the less-than-ninety-degree October temperatures to do sit-ups and push-ups out in the quad. Many of the women had family show up for Saturday visiting hours; I didn’t want to be reminded that I would probably have none.

  “Who is it?”

  The woman shrugged, her badge and pinned-on nametag (“Delta Bragg”) rising with the gesture. I followed her inside. She gave me a cursory pat-down then unlocked the metal door that led to the visiting room. My father was seated on a plastic chair on the other side of the glass in the second booth from the end.

  “I got in touch with the public defender’s office,” he said when I sat down in the facing chair, his palm pressed flat against the Plexiglas. “They said there’s nothing they can do before Monday when you’re arraigned, and Raisa Fortas will be back by then.”

  I’d thought as much. “That’s okay, Dad. Thanks.”

  “We can get a real lawyer if you want.”

  I knew he couldn’t afford that.

  “Raisa’s good. She’ll be fine.”

  He hesitated, fingering the scratched initials in the laminated desk in front of him. P.K., it said in sawtooth letters. “Can I bring you anything?”

  I shook my head, then reconsidered. “Maybe some pin money.” Any money you had on you got credited to your account when you were booked, and you could use it for things like snacks, socks, and underwear. Visitors could add to it. I didn’t know how long I’d be in here, but the twenty-seven dollars I’d had on me wouldn’t go far.

  “Your mother,” he started. “She’s pretty shaken up by this.”

  I nodded. If there had ever been any hope of reconciliation, it was gone now.

  I needed to get a message out to Guillermo. Or even better, to someone who had no ties to me. Tell somebody to place an anonymous call to the Tucson PD, and get them to search Chaco’s car. But I couldn’t involve my father in that. I’d have to find another way.

  “I’ll put some money in,” he said, drawing a well-creased twenty from his wallet.

  I returned to the yard, and was halfway through the next hundred sit-ups when a shadow fell over me.

  “Didn’t think I’d see you back here.”

  “Lisa!” I jumped up and hugged her. Lisa Goodrich was the old cellmate who had given me that jittery jacks tattoo. She hadn’t changed much—still stocky with a Jay Leno jaw and heavy upper body. Back then she’d been up on charges of domestic abuse. “I’d say the same about you. What’s up?”

  “Corey again. I love him, but when I get mad, I just can’t stop myself from whaling on him.”

  “Jesus, girl. What did you do?”

  “Nothing, Officer.” She held her hands up in mock surrender. “But he’s still in the hospital. Damn. I really didn’t mean to hurt him.”

  Lisa must have had forty pounds on her bantam-weight husband, Corey. And he never fought back.

  “How did you make out last time?”

  “I did nine months of a three year. I’m headed back up to Perryville on Monday.” She wouldn’t even have to wait for a trial this time. She’d busted her parole.

&nbs
p; “My ex-sister-in-law’s up there. Paula Chatham. You’ll have to look her up.” I couldn’t really picture my Bible-spouting ex-sister-in-law cozying up to fight-ready Lisa, but you never know. Maybe Lisa would be good protection for her.

  “Have you got any visitors coming in?” Lisa might be the conduit I needed to get the cops sicced on Chaco.

  “My mom’s coming by tomorrow. Want her to bring you something?” Lisa swung her arms forward and back, almost simian in her gesture.

  “No. But here’s what I want you to tell her.”

  Raisa showed up on Monday morning. The same guard who’d taken me to see my father led me to the interview room where detainees met with their lawyers. It was a small space with three metal-legged chairs and a plastic laminated table. Mesh-covered fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.

  I wrapped my arms around Raisa in greeting, her head mashed squarely into my chest. She smelled like freedom.

  “How was your weekend?” I asked to be polite.

  “Better than yours, I’m sure.” She separated papers into two stacks in front of her and opened a notebook with a lined yellow pad in it. “We don’t have much time. The bus to the courthouse leaves in a half hour.”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  She tapped her pencil hup-two-three on the table. “Even with a rush on it, they can’t possibly have DNA results back yet. But the judge will most likely say there was probable cause for an arrest. You’ll plead not guilty and they’ll set a trial date.”

  “And if there’s any new evidence that comes in that exonerates me?” I didn’t know how fast the anonymous call from Lisa’s mom would be acted on. Hell, I didn’t know if the police would follow up on it at all. And even if they searched Chaco’s car and found the knife, they still had to test the blood on it and make sure that Chaco had no alibi for the time that Reuben was killed. Shit, I wish I knew where he’d been that night we raided his uncle’s place.

  “What kind of new evidence?” Raisa asked, sucking the pencil like she was ready to light it.

  I told her about our trek across the border and the story Ricky Lamas told about the children.

  “You’ve got to get Deke in here. Carlos had one of the kids with him and now he’s dead.”

  She nodded. “I’ll set up a meeting with Deke, but you’re going to tell an abridged story. Nothing about sneaking across the border or the knife fight with the Braceros. Just what you heard Lamas say. And I’ll make sure Guillermo Ochoa knows what we’re doing.”

  After a minute’s silence, she slammed the notebook shut. “Okay. They probably won’t set bail, but we’ll try. Can your family come up with anything?”

  “Talk to my dad. He’s been working on it all weekend.”

  I stood up when she did, but we parted ways at the interview room door. Raisa was headed for the sunshine. I was on my way to the Corrections Center bus.

  We pulled up to the back entrance of the courthouse. The men were let off first, then the four of us women in the back. Shackled at the ankles, waist, and wrists, we danced in a short conga line with clanking metal instrumentation.

  The holding pen felt subterranean, cavelike in the Arizona heat. The eleven o’clock timing of the arraignment must have been just a suggestion. I was still waiting when they brought a cheese-on-white bread sandwich at one o’clock.

  At one-thirty, a guard at the end of the corridor called my name and I approached the bars. He let me out and I walked ahead of him down the hallway to the courtroom.

  A woman judge today. The Honorable Rose Griffiths, the name plaque said. She had hawk eyes and a beak to go with them. Raisa stood when I came in, leaning to pat my father’s hand in the first row behind her. I tried to give him a smile, but it came out like a grimace. His eyes were wide with concern.

  The bailiff read the charges. First-degree murder.

  Raisa did her best, saying that the state’s case was purely circumstantial, that I had family in the city, and that I’d never been convicted of a crime.

  Judge Griffiths seemed to have heard of me before. She dismissed that “no previous convictions” comment with the wave of a turquoise-jeweled hand.

  “The defendant has no job and no permanent residence here, your honor. We ask for remand.”

  I spun around, gutted by the sound of that voice. It was Ted Dresden, the county attorney who had prosecuted me for Walter Racine’s murder. The man who’d already tried to send me to prison for the rest of my life. The man who’d said I was “a card-carrying member of Liars Anonymous.”

  And now he was going to prove it.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dresden’s curly black hair was trimmed shorter now than it had been during my first trial, but he still had the raisin-sized wart below his eye. A lesser man might have had it removed just for vanity, but I’d heard Dresden tell an associate in the courtroom once that the mark was his own version of the prison-inked teardrop denoting a kill. “I’m tougher than any of these bastards,” he’d said. “My ink is three-D.”

  “I see your point, Mr. Dresden,” the judge said, bringing me back to my current dilemma. “The defendant is remanded to the custody of the Pima County Sheriff’s Office.” The gavel rang down. “The trial is set for”—she flipped through a poster-sized calendar—“December thirteenth.”

  It was over that quick, and the bailiff shooed me back toward the prisoner’s door.

  “Nice to see you again, Miss Gammage,” Dresden whispered as I passed by. He wiped at the spot where the wart met his eye. “Second time’s the charm.”

  Deke and Raisa were both in the small interview room at the Detention Center the next morning as promised, but so was Detective Sabin.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “We’re working this together,” Deke said. “If you know anything pertinent about these killings, we both need to hear it.”

  I rolled my eyes. Sabin had never been open-minded to anything I had to say.

  “I’m not going to let her testify against herself here, gentlemen,” Raisa said, then nodded to me. “Go ahead, Jessie.”

  I swallowed hard and took the last remaining chair. “I saw Ricky Lamas and two other Braceros in the desert south of town. They were trying to take a small child from a family that had just crossed illegally—”

  “What family?” Sabin asked. “Where are they?”

  I ignored him. “He said the Braceros were taking children from illegals when they cross, and that Carlos Ochoa had taken a little girl that they were holding. He said some big shots in Tucson were involved.”

  “And you believe him because Ochoa had a child’s seat in his car?” Sabin said, as if that belief stretched credulity.

  I replied to Deke instead. “Children are being stolen.”

  “Do you know any other specifics?” he asked. “Any names, or where they take them?”

  I shook my head.

  Deke and Raisa both gave me a hug on the way out. Sabin was the last to leave, and he turned back to me at the conference-room door.

  “I’m never going to be on your side, Ms. Gammage. I know you’ve killed before, and this time I’m not going to let some jury let you get away with it. But what you did here—coming forward with this—thank you. If it helps us get that child back even one hour faster…well, it was the right thing to do.”

  I took the offered butterscotch from his hand.

  I settled back into jail life as if I’d never left. Up at six to stand in line for powdered eggs and cereal. Work in the laundry until twelve-thirty, then back in line for bologna on white bread. One hour outside, trying to counteract the carb-and-calorie-heavy diet. Six p.m., pressed turkey with skin-colored gravy and mashed potatoes.

  The nights were long without my old friend Lisa to talk to. I became an expert on Tyra Banks and American Idol. No visitors. No calls. No hope. Maybe Raisa had told Guillermo and my father there was no need to come. It was more likely that Guillermo stayed away for fear of bringing police attention to himself,
and my father didn’t come back out of respect for my mother’s wrath.

  I’d become so used to other names being called during visiting hours that I didn’t hear my own when it was announced.

  “Gammage? You want to see this visitor?” Delta asked for a second time.

  “Who is it?” Like I was going to turn down anybody at this point.

  “A woman named Racine.”

  Catherine’s aunt, Elizabeth Racine, waited in the same visitor’s chair my father had taken. A pastel pantsuit, hair coiffed into that nonstyle favored by plain women in their sixties, knuckles swollen to the size of shooter marbles.

  I remained standing behind the chair on my side of the glass. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  We glared in a mutual standoff.

  “That’s okay. I don’t want to hear anything from you.” She fingered a half-inch-thick stack of papers in front of her. “I came across this last year, in a trunk with Catherine’s things.” She waited a beat and then answered her own unspoken question. “I couldn’t go through it before. It was…it hurt too much.”

  I waited her out.

  “But then I read about your arrest in the papers. You always think you’re right, don’t you? Think that God gave you the right to decide who lives and dies?”

  “You didn’t protect Catherine. And you weren’t going to protect Katie.” What kind of woman would put her own flesh and blood in the way of a monster, and then defend that monster after he’d acted?

  Elizabeth raised her glance to the guard leaning against the wall behind me and held up the stack of papers in her hand. “May I give her these?”

  The guard reached over the glass barrier to take the papers. He thumbed through them and shrugged, placing them on the table in front of me. It was a stack of Xeroxes, in a handwriting I knew as well as my own. I kept my hands at my sides.

  “They’re notes from Catherine. Kind of a diary, I guess, that she was keeping for her therapist. Read it.”

  “If you expect me to say I’m sorry, I’m not.” The killing was lodged in my heart like a stone, but I’d had to do it, no matter what the price to me. “I’m glad your husband is dead.”