Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  She’d stopped crying. She looked up at me. “They won’t be you.”

  “They’ll be better, believe me.”

  “You’re a celebrity, Luke.”

  “That’s really what I want to hear.”

  “Well, you are, whether you like it or not. You have a Teflon shield, Luke. You’re unassailable, you’re a hero because of what happened out in the desert. Your motives can’t be attacked, unlike those of a career criminal defense lawyer, a Gerry Spence or Johnnie Cochran. You aren’t political, and you’ve worked both sides of the aisle. I don’t know another lawyer in the country with your qualifications, honestly.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to be a celebrity. I hate it. All those interviews, they were awful. If I live the rest of my life in peaceful anonymity, I’ll die a happy man. I’m really serious about that. And there are plenty of great lawyers who are as qualified as I am for this. Better lawyers than me, and you know that.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to take no for an answer,” she said. “For now, anyway.”

  “Forever,” I told her firmly.

  She didn’t reply to my objections. Instead, she walked over to the dining room table, picked up the cartons of Chinese food, and tossed them in the trash.

  “There’s a bar about twenty miles from here. It isn’t too rowdy and they cook up decent Buffalo chicken wings. It’s about as haute as our local cuisine gets. Let’s not end our time together on a downer, okay?”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. “Lady, that’s the best idea you’ve had all day.”

  Long-necked Buds, spicy chicken wings, ranch dressing. When you’re in the right mood, that’s a combination that fell right out of heaven.

  Hap’s Happy Hour was another throwback joint, like the lunchroom. When Nora and I first walked in, I felt an unsettling déjà vu; it reminded me of the Brigadoon, the killing field out in the desert. I let the emotions roil around inside of me for a moment, then I sloughed them off. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, not like that. And if it did, I’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter.

  Nora seemed to know most of the people here; she nodded and said hellos as we navigated the length of the room. There was no waitress service—we placed our orders at the take-out counter and settled into a back booth with a couple of cold beers.

  “Quaint,” I observed.

  “Isn’t it?” She drank her beer straight from the bottle. “It fits me…now. Who’d’ve thunk it?” She smiled at me and held up her bottle.

  I clinked mine to hers. “To the good old days,” I toasted. “And those to come.”

  “I’ll drink to that. I hope that’s a prophecy.”

  I inventoried the place. It was crowded—mostly men, although some wives and girlfriends were there, too. People that I assumed were typical for the area—cowboys, loggers, working-class men. The women had the same look in a feminine way. No one was dressed up, not a sports coat or tie in the crowd. Or skirt, for that matter, except for Nora, who was still in her district attorney clothes. Wood tables and booths, sawdust on the floor. Part of it had been sectioned off for dancing. Your basic shitkicker bar—a good place to get a load on, if one was so inclined.

  “Come here often?” I asked her.

  Nora shook her head. “I don’t go anywhere often. I’m too tired after work to do anything except go home, eat, work, watch television, go to bed. I’m not a party girl, to put it mildly. Besides, I don’t go to bars alone.” She flashed a smile. “Bad for my image.”

  I wondered if she was dating, or had. My gut told me she wasn’t and hadn’t. She might have become acclimated to this region, but I didn’t think there would be many men here she’d spark to. Even though Dennis had fallen, he’d been a star once. She’d savored caviar, hamburger wasn’t ever going to taste the same.

  “You’re going to miss it around here, I’ll bet,” she teased me in a semimocking fashion. I had the feeling that was how she dealt with her world; with irony. Whatever it takes to keep you going. I’ve been there.

  “I’ll miss you.” I said that to be nice, but I meant it, once the words were out of my mouth. She was a nice woman, attractive, and we’d had good times together back then, when we had all been young and the world had been full of promise, unlimited.

  “Thank you, Luke. That’s nice to hear from a man like you.”

  “What kind of man is that?” I enjoy being flattered as much as the next guy, but this was a mite uncomfortable.

  “Successful. Purposeful. Has his life in order. And is cute.” She took a quick swallow.

  “If you only knew the truth,” I bantered. This was our last night together, I’d turned down her proposal, I needed to keep the evening light.

  “You say.”

  Our order was called. I walked over to the counter and got the baskets. It smelled good and there was plenty of it. I could tell, both from the clientele in here and people I’d seen on the street in town, that the locals took their eating seriously. What they lacked in quality they made up in quantity, and then some. Besides the wings, ranch dressing, biscuits, and fries, there were onion rings in bricks, an added bonus. Between lunch and this I was going to chow down more cholesterol than I put into my system in a month at home, but no one from home was watching. I bought a couple more Buds and carried everything back to our booth.

  We dug in, cleaning the grease off our fingers on paper napkins and Handi Wipes. “You’re getting the knack,” Nora said, watching me lick the last speck of skin off a wing.

  “I’m a fast learner.”

  “Sure you don’t want to—”

  I put up a hand to stop her. “Look, Nora. You’ve got a righteous case, and it’s good that you’re pursuing it. With the state’s money in your bank account you can do it the way it needs to be done. But I’m not your man. I’m just not.”

  “Okay.” She bit into a piece of onion ring. “I had to give it one more shot.”

  “That’s fine. But no more, all right?”

  “Yes.”

  The jukebox was strictly country-western. A slow Randy Travis came on. A few couples got up and started to dance. For a fleeting moment I thought of asking Nora, but decided not to. The memory of our toes touching the night before, and my guilty-husband reaction to it, cautioned me against physically touching her.

  She started on her second beer, put it down. “You haven’t asked me about Dennis.”

  I don’t know if I flushed—I definitely felt hot. “I didn’t feel I should bring him up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Embarrassed, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “No one ever wants to talk about him. The people here, my parents, his former colleagues back in Denver and Washington. It’s like he’s the family retard you want to keep hidden in the attic.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that way.”

  “Are you embarrassed for me, or yourself?”

  “Both,” I admitted.

  “Well…” She took another pull from her beer. “I’d like to talk to you about him. Is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “He killed himself.”

  So I’d been right about that.

  “He blew his brains out, four years ago.”

  “Jesus, Nora, I’m sorry, I’m…”

  “Uh-uh. Don’t be. Nobody made him pull the trigger. And don’t be sorry for me, I’ve had enough sorry to last me ten lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach at people feeling sorry for me.”

  I was mute. I didn’t know how to react, what to say.

  She didn’t need my complimentary voice. She needed to spew this out.

  “It all turned bad so fast neither of us could understand it. And once it started going downhill, bam, it was an avalanche.” She picked up a piece of chicken, started to eat it, dropped it back in the basket. “Which didn’t help our sex life, either.”

  Oh, fuck. Where was this going to end?

  “Sex between us was never good anyway, Dennis wasn’t much of a performer. It wasn’
t important to him. He lived for work.” She gave me a sideways, embarrassed look.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t think she was coming on to me, but it sure was awkward, sitting there and listening to this.

  “Part of his lack of sexual interest was that he was sterile. We didn’t know that until we tried having a family. I think that contributed to our sex life going bad—worse than it had been, I mean. I think it contributed to everything going bad, to tell you the truth. He wanted kids, more than me. He was devastated when we found out.”

  “You never thought about adopting?” The standard line; it sounded stupid.

  She shook her head. “It would have been an admission to the world that he wasn’t perfect. He couldn’t deal with that.”

  I couldn’t help it—I was too hungry not to eat, and I needed something to do besides sit like a bump on a log and listen to this, I shoved a dressing-laden wing in my mouth, washed it down.

  “We talked about breaking up,” she continued.

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “More Protestant guilt. For better or worse, whatever. Because to leave him would have been to admit failure, my failure. It would have made our failures public, and that would have killed Dennis, before he killed himself. I couldn’t do that to him.” She gave me one of her intense looks. “I loved him, flaws and all. I really did love him, Luke. I’d followed him here out of old-fashioned wifely devotion and then I just stayed. To the bitter fucking end.”

  I reached over and touched her hand. She grabbed hold of mine like she was holding on to a life raft.

  “A couple of years before Dennis died, I started working at the D.A.’s office. Then Turner Jenkins, the old D.A., retired and endorsed me. Forced me to run, truth be told. I ran unopposed and here I be.” She let go of my hand. “It ain’t the bright lights, big city, but it’s home now. I can’t explain why. My fate, karma, whatever they call it.”

  I wanted to say, You aren’t stuck here if you don’t want to be. Not now. But I didn’t. It was none of my business. She’d already told me more than I wanted to hear.

  “Hey, Miz Ray.”

  We both looked up. A hefty, good-looking Native American man in his late twenties was standing at the end of our booth, smiling at us.

  Nora smiled back at him. “Hey, Wayne. Say hello to an old friend of mine, Luke Garrison. Luke, this is Wayne Bearpaw, one of Tom Miller’s deputies.”

  Bearpaw. I remembered the name from the reading material: the deputy who had been with Miller on the DEA raid.

  We shook hands, said hellos.

  “I heard you were in town. You’re the city lawyer’s going to help our D.A. beat up the big boys from Washington,” Bearpaw said, grinning at Nora.

  “I put in my two cents, that’s it,” I corrected him.

  “Luke won’t be involved any further with our investigation. I’ll fill you in later,” Nora told him with a forced smile.

  “Sorry to hear that. I’ve heard good things about you.”

  “You were there on that raid,” I said, out of curiosity and to change the subject. I looked him over. He was big and strong. He could handle his end.

  “Yeah, I was a warm body,” he said derisively. “Like it mattered.”

  “Sounds like it was a real mess.”

  “Shit, and then some. Me and the sheriff, we were lucky we didn’t get our asses blown to kingdom come when all that munitions blew inside. Stupid fuckers. They should’ve never stuck their damn selfs into it. Me and Sheriff Miller, we could’ve smoked those fuckers out. With enough time and money.” He looked pointedly at Nora.

  “Luke knows all about that,” she said, placating him. “We’re just having a friendly dinner now. Dinner among old friends.”

  “Yeah.” He calmed down as fast as he’d heated up. “Didn’t mean to come on salty there, but boy, that was a piss-poor operation. And then, after all that, they up and kill their own prisoner.” He shook his head as if he still couldn’t believe it had all happened the way it had.

  “You think they did?” I was interested in his adamance over the killing.

  “Who else was there? Nobody with a brain buys that shit about his own men doing him. I know how those people live. They don’t operate that way.”

  “Wayne’s our number one undercover narc,” Nora said. “He’s broken some big cases for us—big by our standards.”

  “Yeah, nobody suspects a dumb Injun,” Bearpaw said, laughing.

  “You weren’t there, though?” I asked. “When Juarez was killed.” Had I read that? I didn’t remember.

  A negative head-shake. “I went home once the survivors had been captured. We had nothing to do there, Jerome and them sure as hell didn’t want us around. I was in bed sawing logs by the time the killing happened.”

  “But Miller stayed.”

  “He’s an old warhorse. He’s the best.” The deputy gave Nora a good-bye salute. “Nice meeting you,” he said to me. “Sorry you ain’t coming aboard. I think it’s going to be fun.” He melded into the crowd.

  “He sounds gung ho,” I said, looking at his retreating back.

  “We all are.” She gave me a last-chance look.

  “Well, I hope you get your man.” I turned back to my dinner.

  “I already didn’t,” she said directly. “But that’s okay, I understand your reasons. I’ll get the one who killed Juarez. If there’s anyone to be getting.”

  We said our good-byes at my motel door.

  “I’ll keep in touch,” I told her. “If I think of anything, or anyone who you should talk to, I’ll call.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was after midnight, chilly out. I could have invited her in—I could tell she was reluctant to go back to her empty home, but I didn’t have anything to drink, and it was time to close this chapter.

  “It was great seeing you again, Nora, after all this time.”

  “You, too, Luke.”

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I feel about what happened to Dennis.”

  She nodded.

  “This might seem like a shitty thing to say, but I’m glad I didn’t know what had happened. My memories of him will always be good ones.”

  “I’m glad of that. I try to do that, too. Sometimes I can.”

  She was deflated, from my rejection and from bringing up the old wounds. I pulled her to me in a hug. She hugged back, her body pressing against mine. For a moment she laid her head on my shoulder. Then we separated.

  “I hope you keep your promise.” she said.

  “About?”

  “Keeping in touch.”

  “I will. Promise.” I crossed my heart over my jacket.

  We stood there in the dark. There was nothing more to say.

  “Thanks for coming. You helped me a lot.”

  “I’m glad.” I smiled at her. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

  “I’ve survived a lot worse than anything some stooges from Washington could ever do to me. I’ll make it fine.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you will.” She was one tough lady; she’d grown into it. A far cry from the young, idealistic, wealthy sheltered girl I’d known in school, who had the prince and the whole world on a string. “You have.”

  There was nothing left to say or do. She reached out and touched my sleeve for a second, then turned and walked to her car, got in, and drove away. I went into my room and called Riva and told her I was coming home.

  A NEED FOR CLOSURE

  I FLEW FROM RENO to L.A., L.A. to Santa Barbara. It was early afternoon when my plane taxied in. Riva and Bucky were waiting for me at the gate. It was a good thirty degrees warmer here than it had been in Blue River—Riva was wearing shorts, sandals, a UCSB sweatshirt. She looked fetching and sexy and welcoming, and I grabbed her up in my arms as soon as I got to her.

  “Missed you,” I said into her hair.

  “Me, too.”

  I swung Buck up onto my shoulders. We made like an airplane on our way to the parking
lot.

  “So how’d it go?” Riva quizzed me. “You didn’t say much on the phone.”

  We were southbound on 101, heading for home. I was driving, she was in the front passenger seat, Bucky was in his car-seat in the back, half-dozing. I’d arrived when he normally takes his nap, but he wasn’t going to miss out on seeing his daddy get off that big airplane.

  “Different from what I’d expected.”

  “Different how?”

  “For one thing, her husband didn’t just die, he committed suicide.”

  Riva’s mouth made a round, wordless O. “Jesus,” she then said, “that’s awful.” She couldn’t resist asking, “How?”

  “Gun.”

  “Ugh.” She turned and looked reflexively at Buck—a mother’s protective instinct.

  “Yeah. So there was that.” I looked at my son in the rearview mirror—he’d fallen asleep. They look like angels at this age when they’re sleeping. Mine does, anyway. He has curly blond hair, blue eyes, the works. Botticelli couldn’t have created someone this perfect.

  “And we talked about her work, this DEA case specifically. I need to talk to you about that, but it’s going to take time, so let’s get home, get me unpacked, have dinner, put Buck to bed, then I’ll fill you in on everything.”

  She gave me one of her funny stares. “Is there something I need to know about?” Meaning, Something wrong?

  “Not at all,” I assured her. “It’s complicated, that’s all. And I want a break, okay?”

  “Fine by me.”

  She had no cause to worry—and I had no intention of giving her any.

  What with playing with Buck, feeding him his dinner, getting him ready for bed and then into bed—no small achievement, he was all keyed up from Daddy being home, tonight was a two-book, three-story bedtime—then the two of us having our dinner, candlelight, wine, the whole romantic trip, it was almost ten by the time we settled in for the story of my trip. My brief but interesting trip.

  “Nora’s going to do her own investigation of the fiasco up there. She isn’t satisfied with the DEA’s version of what happened. She thinks they’re whitewashing it. Covering their tracks.”