She exposed him to movies, plays, to the symphony. Growing up, she had been to movies, to plays, to the symphony and the Chicago Art Institute with her friends. He had never been to any of those things, but he had a new life now, and a new woman, who could show him the ropes. He loved the symphony, the big romantic pieces, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and he loved the art, too, especially the Impressionists. An entire new life was unfolding for both of them, and they savored it, they devoured it. And the sex was fantastic, they couldn’t get enough of each other.
He bought her clothes, so she’d be properly dressed when they went to these fancy places. Expensive designer clothes, on the flashy side, he was Latino, he had colorful tastes. Her mother would have ripped the dresses off her body. She felt self-conscious when first she wore the new dresses and blouses and skirts, but she quickly got used to them. She loved the way she looked in them, how the silks and cashmeres and fine cottons felt on her. After being in drab Catholic school uniforms her entire life, this was like being a movie star.
He drove her to the airport to catch her flight home for Christmas. Standing in the stale air of the terminal, waiting for her plane to board, he told her, for the first time, that he loved her. She told him that she loved him, too.
Her family knew how to celebrate the holidays. They ate too much, they got drunk, they had a wonderful time. They were all together, the boys, the oldest with their wives, and Diane, the baby, home again, in the bosom of her family.
Her mother confronted her between Christmas and New Year’s.
“You’re pregnant.”
“What’re you, nuts?” Her heart was pounding like there was a sledgehammer slamming way inside her chest.
“Who is he?”
“You’re crazy, Mom. I’m not sleeping with anybody.”
“We’ll see what Dr. Schwartz has to say.”
She didn’t want to see the gynecologist, her mother had to practically tie her up and drag her.
“Don’t tell Dad we’re going, Mom,” she pleaded.
“Don’t worry. I’m not gonna. Because I don’t want to see him kill you. My baby. My littlest angel, who’s gonna ruin my life.”
“Don’t talk like that, Mom. For God’s sakes.”
“Mother Mary of God, pray for us sinners.”
The test came back positive.
“I’ll ask you again, once,” her mother said. They were in a bar a few blocks away from the clinic. Her mother was on her third 7&7. She was drinking a Coke. “Who’s the son of a bitch?”
She broke down. “A boy from school.”
Her mother slammed her fist onto the table. “I knew it! We never should’ve sent you away. Fucking Jesuits! Fucking Jesuit bastards who said it would be good for you! Since when is getting knocked up good for you!” she shouted.
“Mom, please.” She looked around wildly. People were watching them, but nobody here knew them, thank God. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“For me it is. And your father…”
“You don’t have to tell him. Please, Mom. Don’t tell him.”
“He’s your father. He has to know.”
“Mom.” She was fighting to stay calm, because her mother was off the wall. “We can keep this between us.”
Her mother looked at her over the rim of her whiskey glass. “Are we talking about an abortion here? Taking the life of an unborn innocent?” She sighed, finished her drink.
“I…” She loved Reynaldo, but she couldn’t have his child. She couldn’t have a child, period. She was a freshman in college, she was going to go to law school or med school. She was going to have a career. Having a baby at eighteen wasn’t part of the great plan.
“You’re gonna have to,” her mother said, signaling the bar waitress for another round, holding up two fingers to signify she wanted a double. “You can’t have some…who’s the father?”
“Just…just a boy. From school.”
“A boy from school. Does this boy have a name?”
“Oh, God, Mom, does it matter? If I get rid of it, who cares who the father is?”
“Because I want to know who you’re fucking,” her mother said, ice-cold. “What is he, a kike? A nigger?”
“No, Mom.”
Her mother exhaled a massive sigh of relief. “At least it’s a white man’s baby you’re carrying. So who is he already? Is he rich? What’s his father, some bank president or something? All those kids out at Stanford, they’re all blue bloods, aren’t they?”
The waitress brought her mother’s drink. She slammed down half in one gulp. “Maybe you should keep the little bastard” She chuckled. “The little bastard. That’s a good one. So, all right, I’m calming down now. Maybe it isn’t the end of the world. The name, Diane. What is this boy’s name?”
She told her mother Reynaldo’s name. Her mother fainted, right onto the floor.
“What happened then?” Kate asked. It was dark outside now. She was breathless, listening to this. They were alone in the house.
“We have to tell your father.” Her mother was revived now, slumped against the back of the booth, a drink in one hand, filtered Camel in the other, the ashtray in front of her overflowing.
“For God’s sakes, Mom, no! You promised.”
“I didn’t know it was a spic.”
“Don’t use that word, Mom. He’s Mexican, not Puerto Rican.”
“They’re all the same.”
It was as if a sea change had come over her. From girl to woman. She got up from the booth.
“They’re not all the same, Mom.”
She walked out, took a cab home, packed her clothes, took another cab to the airport, and flew back to Stanford calling Reynaldo’s house in Los Angeles from the airport to tell him when her plane was arriving.
He was there to meet her. Of course.
There was only one solution. They would get married, at the end of the spring term. The baby wouldn’t be born yet, their child would not be a bastard. It was fine that they had to get married, they were in love, they would have gotten married sooner or later anyway.
Her mother told. Not right away, she wrestled with it for some time. She knew that to tell Diane’s father, her brothers, would be tantamount to issuing a license to kill. But she did, over Easter Sunday dinner, when the celebration of the Resurrection and its message about everlasting life was more than she could bear. Plus she and all the clan, gathered from all over into the bosom of the family, had consumed copious amounts of whiskey and Guinness, especially her husband and her boys, Sterling foremost among them. The horrible truth spilled out.
Diane wasn’t home with them. She’d stayed in Palo Alto. She got the news over the phone from her brother Mike.
“We’re coming out.”
She didn’t run from them, she didn’t hide. Nor did Reynaldo, he wasn’t about to back off from anyone, he was a man, he was only nineteen but he’d been a man for years. If he could survive and flourish on the mean streets of East L.A., doing what he did, he could handle these prejudiced assholes. And she was his woman, protecting her was his job. He arranged, through her, to meet her brothers, the three who had come out to deal with this. The meeting would take place in the library. A public place, where they would all have to act civilized.
Diane wasn’t going to come to the meeting. After Reynaldo and her brothers talked, she would join them, if he told her things were okay. She was reluctant to do even that. She didn’t want to see her brothers at all, her pregnancy was beginning to show. That would inflame them, even more than they already were. She didn’t care if she never saw them again. She had cast her lot in a different direction. Reynaldo convinced her they had to do this—they couldn’t run from her family.
He shaved, showered, put on some good clothes, left his room to meet them, to show them that he was worthy of their sister’s love. But her brothers didn’t deal honorably with Reynaldo. They laid in wait outside his dorm, until he emerg
ed, alone, to go to the library. Catching him by surprise, they jumped him, tied him up, took his gun, which he had hidden tucked into the back of his pants under his shirt (he was from the street, he always carried when a situation might be dangerous), threw him in the trunk of the car they’d rented at the airport, a big Buick with a big trunk, plenty big enough to hold a body, and drove to a deserted area near the beach, twenty miles away.
Waiting in her dorm room to hear, Diane knew something had gone wrong. She was petrified.
At the beach, the Jerome brothers, Mike, Joe Jr., and Sterling, hauled Reynaldo out of the car trunk, where they proceeded to beat the living shit out of him, teaching him a lesson, so that he’d never come near their sister again. Beating him unconscious.
After they’d finished administering their punishment, they left him for dead on the beach, drove back to the campus, abducted Diane from her room kicking and screaming, and drove her to San Francisco, where a doctor performed the abortion they had already arranged, in a hospital, under a false name. They paid the bill in cash.
They stayed overnight, making sure she would survive okay (the operation, not the emotional trauma, they didn’t care about that), and to ensure that her spic lover wouldn’t find out where she was and try to join her. Then they went home, having done the job they had come out to do, leaving her with a warning: Never see him again, or we’ll kill him.
She did see him again. Two days later, when she went back to the campus, feeling hollow inside, and found him in the university hospital, recovering from the vicious beating her brothers had inflicted on him. He was too tough for them to kill. He had crawled to the highway and flagged down a car, the driver called an ambulance.
He didn’t tell the police who had done it. He said he didn’t know who it was. The police, after their inquiry revealed his background, concluded it was a gang thing, like a drive-by shooting. They weren’t inclined to put energy into investigating it—he was a former drug dealer. Case closed.
It took him a month to recover. She came to the hospital every day. It was hard for them to be with each other. She wasn’t carrying their child anymore, and he had almost died, both at the hands of her family. Who didn’t know any other way to show their love.
They finished up the school year after he got of the hospital and resumed classes. Neither of them was interested in schoolwork, but they both struggled through, maintaining their grades by sheer force of will.
The semester ended. They were going home for the summer. They would see each other again, in the fall. They would start over fresh.
It was hard to stay in touch, she had to call him from friends’ houses. As the summer wore on, they communicated less and less with each other.
Love can survive almost anything, but not everything. Theirs didn’t survive this battering of their hearts, bodies, and souls. When the fall semester began, neither of them was there to begin sophomore classes. She transferred to Northwestern. He didn’t transfer anywhere, as far as she knew.
And then she stopped hearing from him altogether.
Diane Richards made a vodka martini for Kate and one for herself. She talked briefly to her husband over the phone from the kitchen, then rejoined Kate where they were sitting.
“He’ll be home in about forty-five minutes,” she told Kate.
“Would you like me to be gone by then?”
“I’d prefer it.”
“Sure. We can be finished by then.”
They drank their martinis in silence for a few minutes. Then Diane finished her story.
“I lost contact with him altogether. I called his family, but they didn’t know where he was, or at least they wouldn’t tell me. I could tell they didn’t approve of him seeing me. I was the reason for his dropping out. I could understand that.” She sipped her drink. “So after a while, I stopped trying.”
“And you never heard from him again?”
“Once. Towards the end of my junior year at Northwestern. I had readjusted—slowly. I’d met Ron by then, he was there in graduate school, we were dating. My family approved of him, not that I gave a damn, I cut off all communication with them, paid my own way through school on partial scholarship, student loans, work.”
Diane nibbled on her cocktail olive.
“But it was good with Ron, he was solid. There for me. It wasn’t like it had been with Reynaldo, that fire we had. But you can only have that when you’re young. I wasn’t looking for that anymore.” She paused. “I didn’t want that.”
Kate watched and listened, sipping her own drink. It was as if, for a moment, the woman went somewhere else. Then she returned from wherever she’d gone.
“There was a postcard in my mailbox. It was a picture of Machu Picchu, in Peru, those famous ruins. Just one line—‘You would love seeing this with me.’ No signature, no return address.”
“It was from him.”
“Oh, yes. I’m sure.”
“And that was all.”
Diane nodded. “That was all, I never heard his name again…until last fall, when I heard it on the news.”
“You knew it was him.”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“And you knew your brother had led the raid.”
Another nod.
Kate hesitated before asking the next question. “When you were at Stanford—when you were seeing Reynaldo—did you know he was dealing drugs?”
“Yes. Not there, he wasn’t selling them there while he was a student, he promised me he wasn’t, but I knew he had.”
“What did you think about that?”
“Honestly?” Diane smiled. “That it was glamorous. I knew it was wrong, but you know, a young girl practically out of the convent, the edginess of it, being with someone who lived in an illegal world, it was exciting. Vicariously, not for real,” she added hastily.
Kate pondered on that. “What would have happened if you had stayed together? If you hadn’t gotten pregnant, say, and your family hadn’t found out? How would you have dealt with being married to a drug dealer? A menace to society? Someone whose life would always be in jeopardy?”
“I wouldn’t have.”
Kate looked at her, the skepticism clearly showing on her face.
“He would have gotten out of the life.”
“You know that for sure? That sounds more like a young lover’s dream than a reality.”
Diane nodded emphatically. “We talked about it, extensively. He knew how I felt. Not only about the immorality of it, but the danger. To him, to us as a family in the future.”
A sudden thought flashed through Kate’s mind. “I just had a weird hit. Sad, really.”
“What’s that?”
“Your brother, who wound up being a crusader in the war against drugs, helped push Juarez into going back to being a seller when he was really on the way out.”
Diane nodded somberly. “Yes, I know. I’ve thought of that, many times.”
Another thought came to Kate. Much heavier, chilling. “Do you think your brother Sterling knew that that boy he almost killed, and Reynaldo Juarez, the legendary drug lord, was the same person?”
“Yes. He had to know.”
Jesus, Kate thought. Wait until Luke hears about all this.
“What about the people your brother worked with over the years at the DEA? Do you think any of them had knowledge about what happened between Sterling and Reynaldo? The vendetta your brother was carrying against him all those years?”
Diane shook her head. “I’m sure they didn’t. I don’t think anyone ever knew, outside of our immediate family. We never talked about it after that. It was one of those terrible family secrets everyone takes to their graves.”
“No one except Reynaldo Juarez,” Kate corrected her. “Who took it to his.”
“Yes.” Diane was on the verge of tears, finally.
It was time to go—Kate had what she needed. She put the Stanford yearbook back into her briefcase. “One last question, Diane.”
; “Yes?”
“Do you think your brother Sterling might have killed Reynaldo Juarez? Do you think he was capable of it?”
The former Diane Jerome stared down at the floor, her elbows on her knees. She was spent, this evening had taken a heavy toll on her. She looked up at Kate.
“I don’t know if Sterling killed Reynaldo. I hope he didn’t. But I do know that Reynaldo was a lifelong obsession with Sterling, ever since going back to that time at Stanford.” She sat up straighter. “Did he kill him? Like I said, I don’t know. Did he want to? I’m sure he did. Was he capable of doing it, emotionally?” Her eyes bored in on Kate. “Absolutely.”
DAMNING EVIDENCE
KATE’S NEWS HIT ME like a bombshell, since it was one.
We were sitting in my temp office, after hours. I’d had a grueling day with my grand jury witnesses. She had called as soon as she left the Richards house, but she hadn’t reached me with her news until the following morning. She’d flown back to Blue River from Chicago via San Francisco, arriving shortly after I was finishing up with the grand jury for the day. My head hadn’t been in the testimony I was taking—I was anxiously waiting on her.
On the airplane she had made copious notes about their meeting. I skimmed through them while she helped herself to a Beck’s from the office refrigerator.
I dropped her information on my desk. “This changes…I don’t know what this changes. A lot of things. Holy shit! Good work, Kate!” I congratulated her.
“Thanks, boss.” She chugged some beer. “What do you think you can do with this information?”
“Keep it to the immediate team, for openers,” I said, meaning the two of us and my other investigators. “I don’t want this getting out prematurely.”
“Do you think anyone at his agency knows?”
Above the Law Page 30