How Town

by Michael Nava

  I gathered up my notes and went down to Peter’s office. As I walked down the hall, Mark Windsor emerged from Bob Clayton’s office. We hadn’t seen each other since the night we’d talked at the hotel.

  “You look pretty official there,” Mark said, with a crinkly smile.

  “What’s going on, Mark?” I asked, stopping.

  “Just counting my money,” he replied.

  “Well, everyone needs a hobby.” I started past him.

  “I thought you were going to call me,” he said.

  I stopped again and looked at him. Maybe the crinkles around his eyes weren’t good humor but worry. After what Peter had told me, I could imagine Mark had good cause for concern.

  “Your brother’s kept me busy,” I said.

  “You’ve gotta eat, right? Relax? Come over some night.”

  It sounded casual enough but I could hear him struggling to connect.

  “I promise.”

  “Good. See you later, Hank.”

  Peter was at his desk, with a half-eaten sandwich before him, dictating something. He clicked off his tape recorder when I came in. I dropped into a chair and said, “I just ran into Mark.”

  Peter nodded. “He’s been here all morning. I think the feds have caught his scent. So how’s the motion going?”

  “Great, thanks for your Ps and As. You’re a pretty good lawyer, Peter.”

  With a sidewise smile, he said, “Go tell that to Bob.”

  “Can you give me some more help on this?” I asked, laying the motion on the desk.

  “Just let me cancel my appearance before the Supreme Court,” he replied. “What do you need?”

  “I can handle the legal research part but what I need is someone to do some fact gathering to support my argument.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I’d like to know the Sentinel’s circulation in the county, both by subscription and at vending machines. Also, I want to know how jurors get drawn around here …”

  “Voter registration rolls,” he said.

  “What about DMV registration? I want a clear idea of how big the pool is in relation to how many people the Sentinel reaches. Also, I’d like some kind of analysis of the amount of coverage that Paul’s case had received in the paper compared to other murders it’s reported in, let’s say, the last eighteen months.”

  Peter had been taking notes. He stopped and said, “You’re really serious about this.”

  I nodded. “And what about TV and radio coverage? Can we get transcripts or something, and the dates of broadcast? I want to be able to say that there isn’t anyone in Los Robles County who hasn’t heard of Paul Windsor.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything if you can’t show possible prejudice,” he pointed out.

  “I know that. But look, one thing the court considers is the notoriety of the crime. Here we’ve got a brutal murder plus a connection with pedophilia and a defendant with a famous name. This is not a routine homicide for Los Robles.”

  “Let me play the DA,” Peter said. “You can’t say that just because the case involves a couple of child molesters people around here can’t be fair. They’ve heard of McMartin. They’re just as bombarded as everyone else is about abused kids.”

  “True,” I allowed, “so here’s my trump card. It’s not just the way the Sentinel’s covered the case, it’s how they’ve used it to try to get at Mark Windsor. It’s turned this case into part of its political vendetta against the Windsors on the no-growth issue. Paul’s trial isn’t just about his guilt or innocence, it’s a referendum on big developers in general, and his family in particular.”

  “Well, it’s a novel argument,” Peter said. “I don’t know how convincing it is.”

  “It’s what I’ve got.”

  “So when do you want all this stuff?”

  “I’d like to file the motion next Monday. That gives you four days.”

  He grinned. “You’re counting the weekend.”

  “You mind?”

  He looked around his file-littered room and said, “What else do I have to do?”

  Back in my own office, I called Ruth Soto. From the way she answered my greeting I knew that she wasn’t happy to hear from me. I didn’t blame her a bit. It was one of those times when it seemed to me that my job consisted of getting people to do what they didn’t want to.

  “Have you had a chance to think about what we talked about yesterday?” I asked her.

  “I been busy,” she said with schoolgirl surliness. “I don’t remember everything you said.”

  “I’m talking about whether you’re willing to testify at Paul’s trial.”

  There was silence at her end. “I want to talk to Elena.”

  “Have you called her?”

  “She don’t answer her phone,” Ruth said. “I’m really busy with school starting, and Carlos …”

  “Ruth, the trial won’t be for weeks, at least,” I replied, cutting off her evasions.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice getting faint. “I want to think about it.”

  “Okay,” I said, letting it go for now. My appeal to her sense of fairness had evidently failed, and I could understand why. How fairly had Paul treated her? I would have to devise another approach. “I’ll call you tomorrow. If you talk to Elena, tell her …” but I couldn’t think of what I wanted Ruth to tell her. “Tell her I tried calling her, too.”

  I put down the phone and contemplated the irony of Paul’s defense lying in the hands of the one person in the world who had the least reason to want to help him. This case seemed to be generating its own peculiar brand of karma.

  On the street, a jogger braved the early afternoon heat, heading toward the river on the Parkway. I thought of Ben Vega, and that brought me around to another thread in this mystery, the possibility that the cops had fabricated evidence to convict Paul.

  I turned away from the window and considered the pile of documents on my desk generated by the Windsor prosecution. Idly, I flipped through them, coming to the police reports of Paul’s previous arrest for child molestation. I studied the signature of the investigating officer, Dwight Morrow.

  Morrow. Was it really a coincidence that he was also the investigator on the McKay case? Ben had told me how angry Morrow’d been when Paul got away the first time. Despite Peter’s defense of him, to me Morrow had the look of a cop who always got his man.

  Always? I wondered, as I picked up the phone.

  16

  THE PHONE RANG JUST AS I’d finished lacing my brand-new Nikes. “Hi. Ben?”

  “Yeah, I’m downstairs in the lobby. It’s real nice running weather.”

  I glanced out the window. It was just getting to be dusk.

  “Still hot?” I asked.

  “Not too bad. It’ll be nice and fresh by the river.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  He was downstairs, looking nervously out of place in his black running shorts and Los Robles Police Department singlet. He smiled when I appeared, and I was again struck by the contrast between his heavily muscled body and round, little boy’s face—he looked like he’d stuck his head through one of those muscleman cardboard cutouts.

  “You ready, Mr. Rios?”

  “If we’re going to parade down River Parkway half-naked,” I said, “you’re going have to stop calling me Mr. Rios. Try Henry.”

  “Sure, Henry. Ready?”

  It had been months since I’d run. “As ready as I’m going to get.”

  We walked the few blocks from the Hyatt to the river’s edge.

  “Where’s your friend?” Ben asked abruptly as we approached Old Towne.

  I glanced at him, but he looked intently ahead. “Josh? He went back to LA.” I hesitated, then added, “Listen, about that crack he made, Ben. I’m sorry if it embarrassed you.”

  “Different strokes for different folks,” he said, with forced nonchalance.

  I couldn’t think of an appropriate platitude with which to answer him and w
e walked on in a faintly uncomfortable silence, stopping when we got to the river.

  A bike path went upriver from the newly renovated waterfront to a park about seven miles away. I figured I was good for three.

  “Let me stretch,” I said. While he stood watching, I went through my stretching routine waking slumbering joints and muscles. They weren’t gracious about being called back into service, but slowly, and sullenly, they responded. “Okay.”

  We started at a slow warmup trot, passing the T-shirt shops and fast-food restaurants that now occupied the brick structures that had been the original city. It was warmish, still, and the air was thick with light the color of honey. Briefly, a motorboat shattered the green surface of the river. Soon we were out of Old Towne and into a wooded area between the river and a levee.

  Away from the cars and businesses and people, the air was fresher, and the odor different, mixing the smell of the muddy earth and anise, and some underlying scent of vegetable decay that I’d never smelled anywhere other than by the banks of this river. Stands of bamboo obscured the river at points, but then we would pass an open space and it reappeared, leaves and spores of cottonwood glancing its surface. The sky was beginning to change, darken, and the sun was slipping out of view in a slow smoke of red and orange and violet.

  Our pace had steadily increased and now, as we passed a wooden mile marker, I felt my breath deepen, my legs relax and my arms develop a rhythm instead of simply jerking at my side. We’d been running abreast but I knew that if Ben increased the pace I’d have to drop behind. I found myself remembering my boyhood runs along the river with Mark Windsor.

  Except for the methodical rasp of our breathing, Mark and I had run in silence. Occasionally one of us would see something at the side of the trail, a covey of quail or a skunk or some hippie’s marijuana patch, and would nudge the other to alert him to the sight. Mostly, though, we just ran, side by side as if yoked together, and I had the absolute certainty that everything I was seeing, Mark was seeing at the same moment with the same eyes. I’d never felt so much a part of another person as I did then; it was what sex was supposed to be like but, as I discovered soon enough, seldom was.

  When we stopped one of us would say, “Good run,” or “Hard run,” and we’d strip off as much of our clothing as we thought we could get away with and dash into the river. There for the rest of the afternoon we’d swim and float, sit on the bank, again not saying much. In fact, I never knew what Mark was actually thinking or how he felt. I just assumed that he was as happy to be with me as I was with him. At twilight we’d get dressed and go to our respective houses for dinner and I wouldn’t see him until the next day. Sometimes it was only the thought of the next day’s run that got me through those tense and silent meals.

  Ben and I were coming up on two miles. I was still holding my own, but I could hear the rattle at the end of my exhalations. It seemed as good a time as any to get on with my purpose in having suggested this outing.

  “What did you think about the prelim?” I asked.

  Ben glanced over at me, sweat beading at his hairline. “It was real interesting. I never testified before except one time for drunk driving.”

  “I was real surprised by those pictures. Had you seen them before?”

  He worried his brow. “Hey, should we be talking about this?”

  “What’s the harm?” I panted. “Everything was laid out at the prelim.” I jogged a couple of steps before adding. “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He speeded up a little, forcing me into overdrive.

  “The pictures surprised me, that’s all. Makes me kind of wonder if the DA has anything else up his sleeve.”

  “Don’t know,” he replied, uncomfortably. Eyes forward he added, “I don’t know much about the case. They just brought me in on the search.”

  “I know,” I said. It was getting harder for me to keep up my end of the conversation as we passed the two-mile mark. “Getting a conviction’s not too hard in most criminal cases, it’s making it stick.”

  He looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  I slackened our pace. “The DA has to win fair,” I said, “or it’s no good. I figure I’ve already got three or four grounds to appeal if Paul gets convicted.”

  We slowed even more. “Like what?” he asked, intently.

  “There’s that bogus search warrant,” I replied, “and then the way the judge ran all over me at the hearing. But the biggest thing is those pictures. Paul says he didn’t take them. He says that roll of film had pictures of something else.” We were trotting now. “I have a witness who’ll back him up.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ben said, and quickened the pace. “Who?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say. It gets into his alibi.” For a few minutes we ran in silence. My knees were complaining. To shut them up, I said, “I believe my witness. So I also have to believe that someone switched the film you took from Paul’s car with the film those pictures at the prelim came from.”

  “Uh-huh,” he repeated, increasing his speed again. Sweat ran down his face, and soaked his singlet.

  “Can we slow down?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, but didn’t.

  “Are we at three miles yet?”

  “Just about.”

  “Let’s turn around.”

  “One more mile.”

  “There’s still three miles back, Ben.”

  “One more,” he said, and spurted off.

  Watching his fierce legs pumping, I muttered, “Jesus,” took as deep a breath as I could and pushed on, managing to stay a few draggy paces behind him. Now, though, it was painful to breathe and my legs were cramping. Meanwhile it was also getting dark and there were small eruptions of sound from the riverbank, crickets, frogs, muskrats slithering across the mud and into the water. We passed a lacy railroad bridge, unused for decades.

  “This is it, Ben,” I shouted, when we got to four miles. “I’m heading back.”

  He looked at me over his shoulder. “Two miles to the park,” was all he said.

  “Asshole,” I thought and prepared to turn around and start back. I figured this was his macho revenge for my having impugned the integrity of the cops. The sight of his broad back as he stripped off his singlet enraged me. I’d been running this trail when he was still in grade school and I was damned if I was going to give up. Fueled by anger, I pushed on, waiting for that moment when my body’d go into overdrive and break through the pain. It had been a long time since I’d called upon it to break that barrier and I wasn’t sure I could do it anymore. But I carried less bulk than he did and I’d been at this for a lot longer. Long enough to know that he had speed but no strategy for a long run. Strategy was all I had left.

  At about four and a half miles, just when I seemed to be losing sight of him in the darkness and the distance, my breath evened itself out and the pain in my legs subsided. Up ahead, his pace slackened, all that muscle weighing him down. Resisting the impulse to spend everything in a sprint to overtake him, I increased my speed just to the edge of pain and kept it there, testing that limit, accustoming my body to it.

  At five miles I was close enough to see that his running was getting sloppy and wayward. A moment later I was alongside of him, listening to his shaky breath. Glancing over I saw sweat pouring down his chest, the strain in his face. Although I knew that it must be almost chilly now, my skin was so hot that I dried up my own sweat.

  And then the pain lifted and I saw with incredible clarity the pavement beneath my feet, the curl in Ben’s fingers, the dark leaves in the bushes along the trail, the moon rising above the levee. I felt myself smile and with a choppy breath surged forward a step, then two, then three, until I was running ahead of him, high on the euphoria of the effort. It no longer mattered whether he caught up or not, or how long I ran or that my body was knotted in pain just beneath the euphoria—I was ready to run until I dropped.

  At mile six I turned around and could no longer see him. Ahead was the entra
nce to the park. I came in at a jog and then slowed to a walk. Tomorrow would be torture but at that moment I was sixteen again. A few minutes later, Ben shuffled in, veered off toward some bushes and threw up.

  He came up to me, wiping his mouth on his singlet.

  “Good run,” I said. “Are you ready to head back?”

  Panting, he said, “Let’s flag down a patrol car.”

  When he’d recovered, we walked up the levee road and stood there shivering in the darkness. On the other side of the levee a field stretched away into the night beneath the moon. Although my knees ached and my chest was wracked with pain each time I drew a breath, I still felt wonderful.

  “You okay?” I asked Ben. His face was tense.

  “You run pretty good for an old man,” was all he said. A moment later, a black-and-white came down the road and he flagged it down. It took us back to the Hyatt.

  Outside the hotel I asked, “Where did you park, Ben?”

  “In the lot,” he said, “downstairs.”

  “I’ll go down with you.”

  We went into the lobby and took the elevator to the parking lot, saying nothing. I walked him to his car, an old Chevy lovingly cared for. He leaned against the driver’s door and grinned at me.

  “Man, you’re a ringer.”

  “Were you trying to kill me out there?”

  “I guess I got kind of pissed off at you when you was talking about those pictures.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Anyway, it don’t make sense, about switching the film. Morrow booked it right away.”

  “Two hours after the search,” I corrected him.

  “It takes that long to do the paperwork.”

  I didn’t want to admit that I’d also thought of this. A car skidded around the corner. “I just wanted to give you something to think about.”

  “Why me?” he asked. “Morrow’s the one you should talk to.”