How Town

by Michael Nava

  “The little boy is cute.”

  “Ruth’s son, I think.”

  From the back of the house the shadowy figure of a young woman emerged, walking slowly toward me. Dark hair framed a round, pretty face. She wore jeans and a pale pink sweatshirt and was large-breasted and thick-hipped, not at all the little girl I’d been imagining. But perhaps, like the roses, the change had been sudden because she carried herself a little awkwardly, as if unaccustomed to her body.

  “I can’t see you right now,” she said, coming to the door. Her large, brown eyes were frightened. “Can you come back later?”

  “Your mother told you who I am?”

  She nodded. “There’s something I have to do.” She was nearly pleading.

  “When can I come back?”

  “In an hour,” she said, closing the door softly. “Please.”

  We went and had lunch at the only restaurant in Paradise Slough, a drive-in called Emma’s Taqueria. Exactly one hour later we presented ourselves at her doorstep and I knocked, half expecting that no one would answer, but she came to the door and let us in, silently.

  “Thank you for talking to me,” I said. “This is my friend, Josh Mandel.”

  She shook his hand, limply. “Please, sit down.”

  Dust drifted up from the couch when we sat down. She settled nervously into an armchair and said, “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  At that moment, the little boy whom we’d seen earlier came running into the room with his grandmother a few steps behind him. He threw himself into his mother’s lap, squealing.

  Ruth looked at her mother. “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll watch him.”

  The old woman shrugged, then said, to Josh and me, “Quieren algo a beber? Una coca o café?”

  “Coffee,” I said. “Josh?”

  He nodded. “Thank you.”

  She wandered off into the back of the house. The little boy had righted himself and sat in his mother’s lap, looking at us.

  “This is my son, Carlos,” Ruth said.

  I said “Hello, Carlos.”

  But the boy ignored me and smiled at Josh, whom he apparently took for a large child of approximately his own age. He climbed off his mother’s lap and sat down on the floor where there was a collection of plastic trucks. He began playing with them, glancing now and then at Josh. Josh smiled and joined him. Carlos handed him a red truck and they began to race their cars across the floor.

  Ruth and I watched them crawl into the dining room. She looked at me and said, “He’s not usually like that with strangers.”

  “He must think Josh is just another kid.”

  “Your friend is nice. My mother said you work for Mr. and Mrs. Windsor.” There was a tiny note of deference in how she said their names.

  “Did you know he’s in trouble?”

  Her smile was unexpectedly sophisticated. “Again,” she said.

  “Yes, again. He’s accused of murder. I represent him.”

  She nodded, pressing her lips together.

  “When the police arrested him,” I continued, “they found a roll of film in his car. He said it was pictures of you and Carlos that he’d taken without you seeing him, but the pictures the police showed the judge were … of someone else.”

  “Who?”

  There seemed no way to be delicate about it. “A girl and a man, having sex. Paul says it wasn’t him.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked with sudden bitterness.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  We were interrupted by Mrs. Soto, who brought me a cup of coffee. From the dining room we heard giggling. Mrs. Soto smiled at me as she left the room.

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Ruth said nervously.

  “Paul says the police switched the film,” I replied, “but it’s his word against the police. Paul says he took the pictures from his car while you and Carlos were in the park over on Dos Rios. It would have been around six weeks ago.” I paused. “He thought you recognized his car.”

  She looked past me. “Does he still have that black car? That Mercedes?”

  Hope building, I nodded.

  “I try to take Carlos to the park every day,” she said, wistfully, “but it’s so bad there with drugs. I have to watch him real careful. One time I found him playing with a rubber.” She scowled. “We didn’t go back for a long time after that.”

  “Did you see the car?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to remember,” she replied. “Like I said, I got my hands full with Carlos.” She rubbed the palms of her hands against her thighs. “What would happen if I said I seen him?”

  “I would ask you to testify at his trial,” I replied. “To show that the pictures that Paul took weren’t the same pictures that the police have.”

  Now she fussed with the ends of her hair. “What if I don’t testify?”

  “Well,” I began, “I could try to force you to but I guess you already know there’s only so much that can be done if you don’t want to.”

  She glanced at me sharply. “Like the last time I was in court.”

  “It would be different,” I said. “The last time when you decided not to testify, the case was dismissed and Paul went free. This time, if you did see him that day, and you didn’t testify, there’s a good chance he would be convicted.”

  “Would he go to jail?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  She exclaimed, “Good. That’s where he belongs.” Then, as if astonished by her own vehemence, she drew back and bit her lip.

  “If you feel that way,” I asked, “why didn’t you testify against him?”

  “I didn’t want to have to tell my son that I made his father go to jail,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “That would have been on me. But this time—”

  “You did see the car, didn’t you?”

  “There ain’t many cars like that in Paradise Slough,” she replied, her tone curving toward bitterness again.

  From the other room, I heard Josh laughing and looked over. Carlos was crawling all over him, pounding his small fists against Josh’s back and head.

  “So,” I asked, in the tone I reserved for cross-examination, “it’s all right with you if he goes to prison for something he didn’t do because that lets you off the hook with Carlos?”

  She looked at me angrily, but said nothing.

  “In a way, Ruth, you’d still be sending him to prison.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “What he did to you was wrong. I’m not defending him. But this is different. Not even Paul should be punished for something he didn’t do.”

  She pressed her lips together again. “He’s a bad man.”

  “I’m not saying he isn’t,” I replied. “I’m just saying this is different. This is something he didn’t do.”

  Her anger was giving way to confusion.

  “I just want him to leave us alone,” she said.

  “When this is over,” I replied, “I can help you with that. We can get the court to order him to stay away from you.”

  She shook her head slowly. “The court don’t care. They put my brother away for trying to defend me.”

  “I can help you,” I said. “When this is over.”

  “I have to talk to Elena,” she whispered.

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Your sister, Mr. Rios,” she said. “I have to talk to your sister.”

  “How do you know my sister?” I demanded.

  She bit her lip. “I thought you knew,” she said. “When I got pregnant, the social worker said I should get an abortion but we’re Catholic and I wanted my baby. But my father, he said the social worker was right. Then Elena called me. She told me I should keep my baby if I wanted him. She talked to my father. She gave us money for the hospital and let me come and stay with her and finish school where nobody knew what happened.”

  My mind was racing. “When?”

  “I came back home last June,” she said,
“after I graduated. Now I’m in junior college. I want to be a nurse.” Frightened, now, she began to cry. “I thought you knew.”

  Awkwardly, I reached out and touched her hand. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. I guess Elena just forgot to tell me that she knew you. But how does she know you?”

  “Mrs. Windsor told her what happened, and she called me.”

  I nodded. Out of my confusion, one or two things were beginning to fall into place. “Let me talk to Elena,” I said. “Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Give me your phone number,” I added, “and I’ll call you after I’ve talked to her.”

  She nodded again and gave me the number. I jotted it down, then called Josh. He came in carrying Carlos.

  “We have to go now,” I said.

  In the car, he asked, “Henry, what’s wrong?”

  “I’ll explain it to you later. Right now I need to go see someone, alone.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  I dropped Josh off at the hotel and drove to Sara Windsor’s house. She was in the garden, clipping dead roses from the bushes, her face shadowed by a big straw hat, a glass of iced tea beside her.

  “We have to talk,” I said.

  She put the shears down and picked up her tea. “Let’s go inside.” As we entered the house, she took off the hat, tossed it on a table and asked, “Is something the matter, Henry?”

  “Yes,” I said, angrily, “something is the matter. I’m being played for a fool by you and my sister.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked impatiently.

  “I just saw Ruth Soto. She told me that my sister came to her rescue after Paul was finished with her. What the hell is going on here, Sara?”

  She sat down. “Why did you see Ruth?”

  “She saw Paul’s car the day he was taking pictures of her. Those pictures the cops had in court, they’re not the ones he took. Now, tell me about my sister.”

  “Sit down, Henry, you make me nervous, standing there.” I remained on my feet. She shrugged. “Then have it your way. I didn’t ask her to come to Ruth Soto’s rescue,” she said coolly. “That was her own idea.”

  “Why? Why should she care about what happens to Ruth Soto?”

  Sara combed a stray, limp hair from her forehead with her fingers. “Why should you care about the men you help make out their wills? You think you’ve cornered the market on compassion?”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “You cut her off a long time ago.”

  “It was mutual.”

  Sara shook her head. “You and she seem to have compassion for everyone but each other. Maybe it’s time you talked.”

  15

  AFTER I LEFT SARA’S HOUSE, I drove to Clayton’s firm, shut myself up in my office and called my sister. I got her answering machine and left an awkward message. I thought about what Sara had said, how Elena and I had compassion for everyone but each other, and I also remembered Elena’s terrifying comparison of our childhood to a concentration camp.

  At the time it had seemed extreme, but now, as I thought about it, it reminded me of something I had always known about myself: what kept me alone as a child was a tiny spark of hope I managed to preserve in that crazy, violent household. But alongside that hope was a belief, irrational and profound, that what I had suffered—the beatings, the neglect—I had in some way deserved. Even now, I saw how those feelings persisted, hope alternating with guilt. It made for a conscientious lawyer, but not a particularly happy man. What had Elena said? Those who have been tortured go on being tortured. I wanted my sister at that moment in a way I had never wanted anyone.

  Someone was knocking at the door. “Come in.”

  Peter Stein pushed the door open, carrying a stack of papers in his hand. “Hey, Henry, I thought I saw you coming in.”

  “Hello, Peter,” I replied, swiveling in my chair to face him.

  “Are you feeling okay?” he asked. “You look a little pale.”

  “I’m fine. What do you have there?”

  “That research I told you about on changing venue.” He sat down and plopped the papers down in front of me. I pretended to read them.

  “These will help,” I said, stacking them.

  “I got some other news that might interest you,” he said, dropping his voice. “About Mark.”

  “Yes, go on. I’m listening,” I replied, completing the difficult transition from my private thoughts to this conversation.

  “Do you know about S&Ls?”

  “Savings and loan associations? Just that a lot of them are failing.”

  Peter nodded. “Including one here called Pioneer S&L. The feds are on the verge of taking it over.”

  I tried to appear interested. “What does that have to do with Mark?”

  “He owns it,” Peter replied. “Not in his own name. He’s got other people fronting for him. The reason it’s going down the tubes is that it made a lot of risky loans, mostly on shopping malls and condos.”

  I nodded, waiting for the punch line.

  “As it happens, most of those deals involved Windsor Development.”

  “I thought Mark was doing well,” I said.

  “He was in too much of a hurry to expand,” Peter said. “He put up things that no one wanted to get into and he did it with Pioneer’s money. The worse it got for him, the more ready cash he needed, and the more money he took out of Pioneer.” He tapped the desk. “That’s against the law. The feds call it looting.”

  I was beginning to get the picture. “And when Pioneer started failing, the feds came in and took a look at the books.”

  “They’re about to run an audit,” he said. “They don’t know what I’ve told you, yet. I got it from reading some very confidential memorandums in a special client file.”

  “How did you find it?”

  He smiled. “You know how lawyers are, there’s copies of everything if you look hard enough. There was a copy of the file in billing. The way I look at it, Henry, Mark’s not concerned about what happens to Paul. He’s about to have enough on his hands just trying to keep himself out of jail.”

  “Poor Mark.”

  “Well,” he said, rising heavily, “if someone has framed Paul, this at least eliminates Mark. Hey, did you talk to your corroboration?”

  I nodded. “Yes. She saw Paul’s car the day he said he was out taking pictures of her. It backs up his story that the film was switched.”

  “Maybe,” he cautioned. “Maybe he had two rolls.”

  “Yes, that’s possible, but it’s the kind of coincidence that makes the DA’s case look a little less compelling.”

  “True,” he allowed. “So who does that leave?”

  “The cops,” I said. “If someone switched the film, it would have had to be Morrow.”

  “That’s mighty hard to believe, Henry.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he really wanted to nail Paul on the child molest thing and saw his chance.”

  “I don’t know,” he said doubtfully. “Cops get cases dismissed on them all the time and they get over it. Unless he had special reason to be interested in the girl. Family friend, maybe.”

  “That’s a possibility I hadn’t thought about,” I said, jotting myself a note.

  “Listen,” he said, at the doorway, “just out of curiosity, did she tell you why she wouldn’t testify?”

  “She said she didn’t want to have to explain to her son that she put his father in jail,” I replied. “I can’t blame her. She’s going to have enough to explain to him as it is.”

  He nodded.

  “Peter,” I said, “I appreciate your help but I don’t want you to get into trouble around here.”

  “I’ll tell you a little secret, Henry. When I was snooping around I found another file, a personnel file. There’s a memo from Clayton to Cummings saying that I don’t seem to be working out. They’re getting ready to fire me, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry, Peter.”

  “They�
��ll be doing me a favor.”

  After Peter left, I tried calling Elena again, but this time didn’t even get her machine. There was no answer at Ruth Soto’s house, either. Finally, I packed up my papers, called Josh and told him I was on my way.

  Josh insisted on taking me to dinner for my birthday so we went off to Old Towne and a French restaurant which he had read about somewhere. Having worked in them from the time he was thirteen, Josh knew something about restaurants and food. At one point he’d considered going to cooking school, but he’d put the idea aside because he didn’t think anyone would hire a chef who was HIV-positive. No one would take the chance that he might accidentally cut himself and bleed into the food. There was a certain logic in this, but it pained me when he imposed limits on himself like that.

  He ordered for both of us. Living with him, I’d begun to overcome my indifference to food, but presented with more than two choices I invariably ordered whatever my dining companion was having. Josh diagnosed this as a form of ahedonia, a word he’d picked up from God knows where that purportedly meant an indifference to pleasure.

  Over the grilled lamb chops he’d ordered for me, I told him what I had learned about my sister that afternoon. He listened intently, and when I finished said, “Why didn’t she ever tell you?”

  “We’re not close,” I replied. The answer sounded inadequate even to me.

  “I bet you have secrets you’ve never told her.”

  I shrugged. “Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident. Elena and I went our own ways, no questions asked.”

  He sipped some wine. “I’d like to get to know her.”

  “So,” I said, “would I.”

  Josh left for LA the next morning and, after taking him to the airport, I went to my office. I worked until noon drafting a motion to change the venue of Paul’s trial from Los Robles to San Francisco, the nearest big city. Peter had left me the points and authorities he’d used when he was a DA opposing a similar motion. I was pleasantly surprised at how thorough and well written they were. Criminal law is a courtroom practice, and few of us, on either side of the table, have much talent for the written word.

  Motions to change venue are rarely granted since their premise is that pretrial publicity has prejudiced a defendant’s ability to get a fair trial by tainting the pool of prospective jurors. A court must be convinced of the “reasonable likelihood” that this has occurred. It’s a vague standard that gives the court a lot of room in which to move and with my hometown disadvantage I knew I’d have to work doubly hard to box the court in.