Illegal

by Paul Levine

  An easy smile. The guy had a politician's set of teeth.

  "Not a blood uncle," Cardenas said. "More like my godfather. It's a long story."

  Tino nudged Payne in the ribs. "And you gabachos say Mexico is all dirty politics."

  "Why do I feel like I'm playing a road game?" Payne said to the chief.

  "More like you're the Washington Generals and you're playing the Harlem Globetrotters," Cardenas said.

  "So how the hell can you investigate Rutledge's business?"

  "Didn't know it needed investigating. Did I mention Tio Sim bought me my first gun and my first car?"

  "What about your badge? He buy that, too?"

  Cardenas let out a soft train whistle of a sigh. "You work hard to get under people's skin, don't you, Mr. Payne?"

  "Nah. It just comes naturally."

  The chief was silent a moment. He seemed to be figuring out what to do with his unwelcome visitors. Then he gestured with his sandwich. "You want a B.L.T., Mr. Payne? And what about you, young man? Donna over in Planning and Zoning made a bunch today."

  "No thanks," Payne said.

  "Me, neither," Tino said.

  It was the first time Payne ever saw the boy turn down food.

  "Suit yourselves. But it's mighty good. Rutledge lettuce. Rutledge tomatoes. Bacon from Rutledge hogs. All courtesy of Tio Sim."

  "All Rutledge, all the time," Payne said. "You're sending a message, right?"

  The chief's smile gleamed like the blade of a knife. "If that's what I wanted, I'd lock you up right now on all those outstanding warrants."

  That stopped Payne, who took a moment to think it through. Once Rutledge learned about the cluster fuck in Hellhole Canyon, he would have wanted a dossier on J. Atticus Payne, Esquire. Enter Cardenas, who had to do something to earn his bacon, lettuce, and tomatoes.

  "You're a one-man crime wave, Mr. Payne. Grand larceny in L.A. County. Resisting arrest and assaulting an officer in Imperial County. Importing drugs from Mexico into San Diego County."

  "The drug rap's bogus," Payne said.

  "And that cop," Tino said. " I'm the one who resisted and assaulted."

  "So why aren't you gonna arrest me?" Payne demanded.

  "And deal with all that paperwork?" Cardenas said. "Three different jurisdictions fighting over your sorry butt." The chief let his eyes twinkle. "I'd miss the County Fair over in Hanford."

  "But if Rutledge told you to do it, you'd throw my sorry butt in jail."

  The chief laughed, showing those good teeth. "Mr. Payne, you and Sim are more alike than you realize. You both overlook the fine print of the law. Hell, you overlook the large print. And you both go out of your way to help people."

  "No, I don't. And I doubt he does."

  "Don't be modest. Sim respects what you're doing for the boy. So do I."

  "But you refuse to help."

  "What makes you say that? I arranged lunch for you tomorrow with Sim."

  "No way."

  "He might try to poison you, Himmy," Tino said.

  "Happens on telenovelas all the time."

  "Sim said he'll have his people do everything they can to find the boy's mother. He'll have a report for you by lunchtime tomorrow."

  "Great," Payne said, not sure he believed the chief. "Sorry about what I said before."

  "Not a problem. There's one more thing Sim said. What was it, now?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Oh, I remember." The chief's smile turned sly. "He said, 'Javie, ask that persistent little pissant if he likes sheep balls in coyote gravy.' "

  SIXTY-THREE

  It was dark outside the window when Marisol tried her door again.

  Locked from the outside.

  Dizzy, she returned to the bed.

  They must have put something in her food. An older black woman, a uniformed housekeeper, had delivered a tray. Grilled vegetables, a green salad, and rice pudding.

  "They don't want you putting on any weight, honey."

  Now, lying on her back, looking at the mirrored ceiling, Marisol heard voices in the corridor. Laughing men, voices fueled by liquor. Giggling women, teasing talk. Grunts and yells through the wall next to her bed. A man brayed like a goat. A woman fired off words like bullets from a machine gun."?Si!?Si!?Si! No! No! No! Don't stop!"

  Marisol wondered if that room was like her own. Dim lights. Mirrors. No telephone. A television that played only filthy movies. A tiny bathroom with a shower and toilet and a dozen hand towels.

  She heard a key turn the lock, and the door opened. A heavy-bosomed American woman with teased platinum hair came in, carrying a satchel. The woman's translucent skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones, but her neck crinkled with turkey wattles. She was either forty or sixty, no way to tell. The woman opened the satchel.

  "For you, dearie."

  Out came lingerie, black as midnight, glittering with sequins. A leather bustier with tie strings. Leopard-spotted bras and panties. A satin slip with garters and stockings. Items she'd never seen except in the movies, the American woman calling them teddies and baby dolls, camisoles and peek-a-boos. Giving her shoes with velvety skin and heels longer than a sixteen-penny nail.

  "I do not belong here," Marisol said.

  A shrug. "Who does?"

  The woman showed her how to apply layers of makeup and hauled out small bottles of lotions and tubes of lubricants. Plus lipstick a whorish red.

  When tears filled Marisol's eyes, the woman said, "Honey, I can share a few tricks that'll make it a bit easier for you. Let me show you how to make a John think he's getting a blow job when you're really just jerking him off."

  A man appeared in the open doorway. "Helen, get out of here and take that shit with you."

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Zaga." The woman gathered up her satchel and left the room.

  The man was as old as El Patron. But smaller. Hispanic features. Grayish hair falling nearly to his shoulders, a Western shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Arms corded with thick veins.

  Marisol tensed as he approached. If he grabbed her, she would fight.

  "Relax, chica. I'm here to talk, not fuck. Back home, did you read newspapers?"

  It was such an odd question Marisol had no answer.

  "You understand English?"

  "Yes. I read newspapers. Books, too."

  "What's your favorite book?"

  "Why do you ask such a thing?"

  "Just answer me."

  "El Amor en los Tiempos del Colera."

  "You read it in English or Spanish?"

  "English. My father insisted. Why do you care?"

  Appearing unhappy, the man mumbled to himself, "What the hell are we gonna do with you?"

  "I do not understand."

  "Rutledge has a soft spot for your type. Those damn gypsy eyes."

  Marisol felt dazed, the dizziness returning. "And he cares if I read books?"

  "He don't care if you can count to ten. But it's my job to protect him from himself. You're not some illiterate campesina. We let you go, you could cause the boss some real problems."

  "No. I would never-"

  "Five, ten years ago, it might have been different. But it's too hot out there. Too many people want the boss's scalp."

  "I swear I will not make trouble."

  "Damn right you won't."

  He turned and left the room, locking the door from the outside.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  "You like horses?" Simeon Rutledge asked.

  "Not the ones that rob me blind at Santa Anita," Payne answered. It was ten o'clock in the morning of his third day in Kings County. Payne had no idea why Rutledge had asked him to come to the ranch, but his own mission was clear.

  Why the runaround at your office? What are you hiding? Where the hell is Marisol Perez?

  Tino had pleaded to come along. Jimmy told him he wasn't invited, then dropped him off at a video arcade. Tino asked for fifty dollars, Jimmy offered twenty, and they settled on thirty-five.

  Now Payne lean
ed on a fence post of a corral, the dirt as finely groomed as a sand trap at Riviera Country Club. A stable hand tightened the cinch of a saddle on an Appaloosa speckled like a Dalmatian. Rutledge saddled his own horse, a midnight black stallion with angry eyes. He wore weathered chaps and a black felt Stetson with a flat brim.

  "We'll ride a bit, then have lunch," Rutledge said.

  It didn't sound like a question or even an invitation, so Payne didn't answer.

  The midday sun poured down, a ball of orange fire. They mounted up, and Rutledge gestured toward a long building of yellow pine with a steeply pitched roof. "Knocked off my first piece of ass in those stables."

  Payne decided not to say "congratulations." Instead, he tried to keep his horse from sidestepping and crushing him against the corral rail.

  "Maria something-or-other," Rutledge reminisced. "Grape picker. Hands stained like she worked an old printing press. Went on for a month before my daddy caught us. I was afraid he'd beat me, maybe send the girl back to Mexico. But he hauled out a bottle of Old Grand-dad and told us to do it again. He wanted to watch. Then he had his way with her."

  Sick fuck, Payne thought. "Nothing like fathers and sons sharing quality time."

  "My point is, we're all a product of our upbringing."

  "Why not just cut the bullshit and tell me what's happened to Marisol Perez?"

  Rutledge gave him a look as hard as polished oak. "There's a time I would have horsewhipped a man who spoke to me that way."

  "All I'm saying, how tough can it be to check who started work the last few days?"

  "We're looking into it. Now, let's ride." Rutledge cluck ed in the stallion's ear and tugged on the reins to turn the big animal. Payne followed, bouncing in the saddle.

  The path took them past two workmen polishing a pickup truck, an ancient short-bed Ford with a gleaming finish the color of freshly washed spinach. Rutledge noticed Payne admiring the truck.

  "A 1951 F-100. My daddy's. Do you know why I keep it?"

  "Tradition, I guess. Another link to your past."

  "You got it, Payne." Nodding with approval. "Your father hand anything down to you?"

  "Only a bowling ball he forgot to take with him."

  Rutledge grunted, nudged his stallion, and they headed toward the fields at a steady trot. The horses clop ped along a path of brick-colored dirt. After a few moments, Rutledge said, "Attorney Payne, I admire what you did in that trailer-truck case."

  "Forty-eight hours in an air-conditioned cell. Nothing compared to what the migrants went through."

  "Point is, you risked your career for a cause you believed in."

  "Wasn't that hot a career."

  "Still deserves respect. Damn few men of principle left. Much less men of action."

  A realization came to Payne.

  He's complimenting himself. Simeon Rutledge considers himself a man of principles and action. But what principles? And what actions?

  They came to a barren stretch of black earth. Two dozen workers chopped at dirt clumps with hoes, smoothing out the soil.

  "Notice anything about those hoes?" Rutledge asked him.

  "Not really."

  "The handles are five feet long. Lets the worker stand straight. Used to be, all the growers insisted on el cortito, the short-handled hoe. The closer to the dirt, the better the weeding. But the poor sumbitches had to work all hunched over, ten hours at a time. It was inhumane, and everybody knew it. But I couldn't find any long-handled hoes on the market, so we started milling the wood ourselves. I had my workers weed the strawberry fields standing up. Proved to everyone it could be done."

  "That's a good deed. A very good deed." Payne meant it. Rutledge was damn complicated. But then, who wasn't?

  "I try to make my workers' lives more bearable. Ice water in the coolers, hot water in the showers. I give loans without collateral. I take care of my people."

  A feudal lord, looking after his adoring peasants. Nagging thoughts tugged at Payne.

  Why's he greasing me?

  Why does Simeon Rutledge care what I think of him?

  And where the hell is Marisol?

  In the distance, a small plane flew low over a field, dropping a billowing cloud of white flaky pesticide. Payne wondered if the migrants, enjoying cold drinking water and hot showers, were downwind.

  The horses picked up speed, cantering past fields popping with red and yellow peppers. They approached an apple orchard, the fruit nearing ripeness. To their right was a spillway. Water poured into an irrigation culvert. They neared a concrete-and-steel structure that looked like a dam, rising above the culvert, which disappeared behind an earthen levee twenty-five-feet high. A chugachuga sound came from unseen machinery. A sign read, Pump Station Three.

  Near the top of the levee, a bizarre sight. The grille, bumper, and headlights of an old car peeked out of the dirt.

  "What the hell is that?" Payne asked.

  "A '56 Chevy."

  "What's it doing there?"

  "A memorial to Hector."

  "Hector?"

  "Javie's father."

  "Cardenas? The chief who calls you his uncle?"

  "His old man saved my ass when we got hit by three Pacific storms, back-to-back in '79. Worst flooding in a hundred years. We ran out of sandbags, and the levee was gonna breach. I was damn close to owning a hundred-thousand-acre lake instead of a farm. Then Hector Cardenas came up with the craziest idea. Reinforce the levee with scrapped cars. We called every junkyard from here to San Francisco, got three thousand chassis for scrap metal prices. All the braceros pitched in, tough little fuckers, working in mud up to their chests. Townspeople, too, women making coffee and sandwiches. Worked seventy-two hours straight through storms and gale-force winds, but we saved the levee. Saved the farm."

  Payne could picture it. Simeon Rutledge standing knee-deep in muck atop the levee, shouting orders. If he couldn't command the rain to stop falling, he would push men and machines to reconfigure the earth where the rain fell.

  "But we couldn't celebrate," Rutledge continued, his voice dropping a notch. "One of the cranes toppled over and pinned Hector underwater. Drowned before we could get him out."

  "Jeez, that's awful." Payne figuring this was the "long story" Cardenas referred to, the source of Rutledge becoming Tio Sim. "So you raised Javier?"

  "His mother raised him. I just made their lives a little easier."

  The horses followed a straight path that ran in the shadow of the towering levee. Gesturing toward the levee, Rutledge said, "Where do you suppose that water comes from?"

  "Wells, I suppose," Payne said. "I saw some back by the vege table fields."

  "Not up here. I dammed a river and diverted the water for the orchards. Now I got state and federal agencies crawling up my ass. Some crap about not getting permits and polluting the water with fertilizers."

  "You must have some high-priced legal talent working on it."

  "Whitehurst and Booth in San Francisco."

  "They're good."

  "Good and expensive. Long on bills and short on balls. They want to negotiate fines that'll cost me millions."

  "That's what deep-carpet firms do."

  "What would you do, Counselor?"

  "O.D.D. Obstruct. Delay. Distract." For the next five minutes, Payne gave his theory of pettifoggery. Hang tough, he advised. Outlast the bureaucrats. Only a matter of time until they jump to the private sector or just get so damn tired that they'll dismiss charges or settle for pennies on the dollar. He told Rutledge to file counterclaims. Sue for inverse condemnation, claim the government has destroyed the value of the land. Seize on little mistakes like missed filing periods.

  "Always bring a contingent of your workers to court," Payne said. "Let them track mud into the gallery. Hard workers who'll lose their jobs if the government prevails. Put a human face on the billion-dollar corporation."

  Rutledge scratched at his brushy mustache with a knuckle but didn't say a word. They entered a fragrant-smellin
g orchard of peach trees, the horses slowing to a walk. The earth had become a rich, sandy loam. Workers carried totes, plastic boxes slung around their necks, just like peanut vendors at Dodger Stadium. Rutledge greeted a crew chief by name, then allowed as how it was time for lunch.

  They started back, the horses picking up their pace. Like human folk, they enjoyed going home.

  Rutledge guided his black stallion alongside Payne's horse. "Been thinking about your legal strategy. I could use someone with your brains and balls."

  "You're joking."

  "You want to make some real money?"

  He's not joking, Payne thought. Rutledge's strong suit was not his sense of humor.

  "I want you to cocounsel with Whitehurst and Booth," Rutledge continued.

  "They hire the brightest lawyers around. I doubt they need my help."

  "They do if I say so. Charlie Whitehurst has gone soft."

  "And you think I'm a better lawyer?"

  "I think you're a tougher lawyer. You got a hard bark. You'll go to jail for your clients."

  "Went to jail for some migrants. Doubt I would for you."

  "You're proving my point." Rutledge allowed himself a crooked grin. "I don't scare you. You got bigger balls than Whitehurst."

  Rutledge slowed the stallion and said, "How about a retainer of two hundred thousand. When you need more, you let me know."

  Payne's mouth opened but nothing came out. If the devil had been perched on his shoulder, the offer could not have been more tempting.

  "That's a lot of money," Payne said, finally.

  "There's just one condition."

  Of course there is, Payne thought.

  "You gotta stop poking your nose into places where you got no business."

  Payne didn't need to be a tough, hard-barked, big-balled lawyer to figure that one out. He'd been offered a bribe. Rutledge wanted his disappearing skills, not his lawyering skills.

  "I'm not going to stop looking for Marisol Perez," Payne said.

  "Nothing but trouble down that road. A real patch of quicksand."

  Rutledge glared at him, waiting for a response.

  After a moment, Payne said, "That trouble down the road. That patch of quicksand. Would that be a problem for me? Or for you, Rutledge?"