Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  John Q. turned to the jury for his next question. “What happened? Why wasn’t this tight, complex security of yours working that night?”

  “Because Luis Lopez disabled it.”

  I was up on my feet for that one. “Objection!” I called out. This was hurting me, I couldn’t be a fly on the wall any longer. “Hearsay.”

  “Sustained,” McBee backed me up. “There’s no foundation for that,” he told John Q.

  John Q. turned back to Portillo. “You saw Mr. Lopez disarm the security system?”

  “No,” Portillo answered before I could object again. “But he was the only one who wasn’t there at the end, so it had—”

  “Objection!” I yelled as loud as I could.

  “Sustained!” McBee turned to the jury. “This part of the witness’s testimony is not admissible. Strike it,” he instructed the court reporter. “Do not pursue this line of questioning any further, Mr. Jones, or I won’t let you continue.”

  “That’s fine, Your Honor.” John Q. smiled as he turned away. “Because I don’t have any more questions.”

  I had to change direction, get the jurors’ minds off thinking about who had tipped off Juarez’s group.

  “After the attack was over, Mr. Portillo,” I began, “was Mr. Juarez alive? He wasn’t killed during the attack on the compound, was he?”

  “No. He was alive.”

  “He was found in a walk-in freezer and taken prisoner, is that correct?”

  “Yeah,” Portillo answered in a surly tone.

  “You saw him with your own eyes. You know that he was alive and was not killed during the raid on your compound. His compound.”

  “I saw him. He was alive.”

  “Did you see where he was taken?”

  He nodded. “In this command trailer they had.”

  “Okay.” I wanted to be clear on where I was going; John Q. had thrown me a curve. “Did you see who went into that trailer, after Mr. Juarez was put there?”

  “Some DEA agents.”

  “How many do you think that was? Three or four, ten or twelve, twenty or thirty?”

  “Three or four. Jerome and a couple others.”

  “So only a few agents had physical access to Mr. Juarez.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see anyone else go in that trailer, Mr. Portillo?”

  “Like who?”

  “Another prisoner, someone else who was out there.”

  Portillo scoffed at that. “All of us were handcuffed, we weren’t going anywhere. There was only agents out there. Agents and us.”

  I nodded. “Agent Jerome was in there the most, is that right?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “And at some point, after he’d been in there for some time, presumably questioning Mr. Juarez, he came out. Is that right?”

  “Yeah. He came out and talked to some other agents.”

  “And at some point while he was talking to these other agents, Mr. Juarez escaped from that trailer, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  I moved over to the jury box, “To the best of your recollection, was Agent Jerome the last person who had been in that trailer before Mr. Juarez escaped?”

  Portillo thought for a moment. “I guess,” he said, looking at me, and by doing so looking at the jury as well.

  I repeated my question, so it would stick in the jurors’ minds. “The last person who was in that trailer—before Mr. Juarez escaped—was Agent Sterling Jerome.”

  “He was the last one I saw.”

  It was too hot to continue—people were squirming in the hard wooden seats, plucking their garments from their backs and rear ends, fanning themselves with newspapers, magazines, anything stiff. The jurors, their chairs perched on risers in the jury box, looked especially uncomfortable. During the recess that followed my cross-examination of Portillo, Judge McBee conferred with the air-conditioning technicians, who promised him the replacements for the defective parts would arrive via FedEx and could be installed in time for the courtroom to be properly cooled off by tomorrow morning. With that, he adjourned us for the day.

  I went home. Riva, dressed for the weather in shorts and a halter top, had the air-conditioning turned up, so our rental box was nice and cool. Joan was out shopping. I played with Bucky for a few minutes, filled Riva in on the general tenor of the action in the courtroom, then retired to the third bedroom, which I use as a home office. It’s Spartan—a sixty-five-dollar, put-it-together-yourself desk from Staples, two chairs snitched from my regular office, filing cabinets, my laptop, and copies of our investigations, the grand jury proceedings, current trial information.

  I found the section I was looking for in the grand jury testimony, started reading. A few minutes later, Riva popped her head in the door.

  “Kate’s here.”

  “Come on in,” I called.

  She came as far as the doorway. “Got a sec?”

  “For you, always.”

  She plopped into the other chair, slipped her feet out of her sandals. “It is blistering out there. I hear the courtroom was an oven.”

  “About as hot as the participants.” I filled her in on the day’s escapades, notably the second telephone call warning Juarez of the raid. In the middle of my recitation Riva joined us, sitting yoga-style on the floor.

  “Who would have made the call?” Kate asked, her interest piqued.

  “There’s only one person who wasn’t inside the compound who would have had the information and the number,” I said.

  Kate nodded slowly. “Lopez.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “But why?”

  “Two reasons I can think of. One, he got cold feet and chickened out. He would have been scared to death about what would happen to him if Juarez survived the assault, particularly since the orders were to take him alive. He was playing both ends against the middle, hedging his bets.”

  “And two?” Kate asked.

  “It follows one. If Juarez is alive after the raid, Lopez is screwed. He has to provoke the men inside into defending themselves. Which, of course, they’d do, being who they are. So he baits them into action. He could have lied about the size of the DEA force—underplayed it—their tactics, anything to convince Juarez that the men inside could win a shoot-out with the DEA agents who were coming in.”

  Riva, listening to this, shuddered. “That’s diabolical. Sick. Even for a shitheel like Lopez.”

  “Come on,” I said, “you’ve been there. These are men who have running gun battles in the streets. They don’t give a shit about anything except their profits and their survival.”

  “Your theory makes sense,” Kate agreed. “Unfortunately for Lopez, Juarez wasn’t killed.”

  “No. Lopez must’ve been shitting bricks out there when Juarez was captured. He had to be the happiest Mexican in the world when Juarez broke out.”

  “Could he be involved with Jerome?” Riva asked. “In the murder?”

  I shook my head. “I wondered about that, believe me, especially after Portillo’s testimony.” I held up one of the volumes of the grand jury material. “Lopez wasn’t allowed anywhere near the trailer where Juarez was being held. Several agents stated that, independently of each other, to the grand jury. Plus he wasn’t armed, also confirmed by several of the men there.” I dropped the thick volume on the desk. “He just got lucky.”

  Kate had dug in her purse for her notebook. Now she hesitated. “Maybe this isn’t the time for what I’ve got.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Sure you want to hear new stuff? You’re in the home stretch, Luke. Nothing can stop you now.”

  “Except you, I’ve got a feeling.”

  “This can wait until tomorrow.”

  “No, it can’t.”

  “Sorry. I’m trying to give you a day off. You sure?” Kate asked once again.

  I motioned with my hand for her to quit procrastinating. She nodded and flipped open her book. “Some of this you a
lready know, so I’m recapitulating. Putting things in order. So don’t get antsy.”

  “I won’t, but let’s go.”

  “Hold your horses.” She looked at her new material. “Item number one. Nora was elected D.A. before her husband killed himself.” She looked at me; I nodded—that I knew.

  “She contracted for her new house six weeks after Dennis died. Before that they were living in a rental house, here in town. Nothing special, what you see around here.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. So?”

  “Not a long period of mourning. Especially when death comes so unexpectedly, so violently. I don’t know how you function when that happens to you, let alone take a bold step like building a new house, with all the crap that goes with that.”

  “You’re upset with what you think was a lack of feeling?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you? He was your friend.”

  “Not for a long time,” I told Kate calmly. “And he’d been gone long before he died. The suicide made it official.”

  “Oh.” She seemed surprised; and disquieted.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, I guess. It’s just that everyone around here I’ve talked to said they were a happy couple. That his suicide was a shock.”

  I thought on that for a moment—what she’d said resonated with me personally.

  Before I could reply, Riva stood up. “I’m going to get dinner ready. You’ll stay?” she asked Kate. “Cold cuts, nothing fancy.”

  “Sure,” Kate answered. “Thanks.”

  Riva left, closing the door behind her, giving Kate and me privacy.

  “What’s this about?” Something was in the air, and Kate had felt it.

  “No one ever knows what’s going on behind someone else’s closed doors, Kate,” I said. “People said the same thing when Polly and I split. They were shocked. We were a Norman Rockwell couple. Except we weren’t.”

  Polly was my first wife. She walked out on me. The usual complaint—too much work, not enough her. Which was true, but it blindsided me, nonetheless. Losing her was a bitter pill, unexpected, and my recovery took a long time. I wasn’t truly healed until I met Riva. Even then, the circle wasn’t complete until we got married and she became pregnant with Buck. So I know the feeling. It helps to find something else to do with your life—you have to. I found a wife and a son. Nora’s way of keeping her life and her sanity going was to build a house.

  “I didn’t know that.” Kate blushed with embarrassment. She looked at the closed door, as if she could see my wife through it. Now she knew why Riva had excused herself. “I’m sorry, Luke.”

  “It’s fine, now. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. I’m saying, though, that no one ever knows, except the people who are living it.”

  “I hear you. I’ve been there, too. I guess we all have.” She looked at her notes again, hiding further emotion behind professionalism. “Tom Miller started on his house about the same time.”

  “I remember you telling me that.”

  “They started on their houses less than six months after Juarez finished up his estate.”

  All of a sudden I had a bad feeling in my stomach. You can get ulcers in this job; I didn’t want one, not from this.

  “Guess who the architect/contractor was for the Juarez compound.”

  I didn’t have to guess. I knew. Knowing didn’t help my stomach.

  “The guy from San Francisco.”

  “Bingo.”

  I sat back in my chair. “That’s…a hell of a coincidence,” I managed to say.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Go on. What else do you have? Anything?”

  She nodded. “You also remember I told you they both paid cash. No mortgages.”

  “I remember.”

  “Which was supposed to have come from trust funds, stock investments, whatever.” She flipped to the next page. “Nora’s parents are both still alive. Living in Denver, like they always have. They lived a nice lifestyle, but they’re not rich. In fact, they’ve gone beyond living off their interest. They’ve been eating away at their principal for years. They aren’t broke, but if they live to a ripe old age, they will be.” She looked up. “They don’t have money to give Nora. Certainly nothing like half a million dollars, which was what the lot and the house cost.”

  I cradled my fingers in front of my face, forming a skeletal steeple. “You know this for a fact?”

  She hesitated a moment. “Not for a fact, no. But I’ve learned enough about their finances to know that it doesn’t fit the picture.”

  “Improbable, though, rather than impossible.”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “It’s possible, for instance, that they divested themselves of their stock holdings and gave the money to her, or sold off a vacation house, or something else you haven’t discovered yet.”

  “Yes, that’s possible.”

  She was feeling deflated and chagrined (and probably a bit annoyed, too)—here she’d come up with what she thought was hot information, and I was dousing it with cold water.

  “Go on,” I told her.

  New page. “Miller said he’d made his money in the stock market. But I couldn’t find any evidence of his being in the market in a meaningful way until the last few years. He was living on his FBI pension and his sheriff’s pay. Which isn’t the amount of money needed to finance his house.”

  “You talked to brokers, bankers, people like that?”

  “And I did some creative electronic eavesdropping,” she said, a bit red-faced. “Nothing patently illegal,” she assured me. “A little shady, maybe, but there’s so much information out there now you can access legitimately, if you know where to look for it.”

  “Again,” I said, “it’s interesting, but far from conclusive. Maybe there was money in his wife’s estate, maybe he hit big at the craps table in Vegas, there could be a variety of legit reasons. You didn’t happen to get a look at his tax returns from back then, did you?”

  “Now that would be clearly illegal.”

  “Just checking to see how far you’d go,” I teased her. “Glad to see you have some scruples, after all.”

  “I’ll walk the line, boss, but I won’t cross it.”

  “So they say.” The idea of seeing Miller’s tax returns made me actually want to. “It would be nice to see those tax records.”

  “You’re not suggesting…” She looked at me impishly.

  I shook my head. “I’d get a subpoena if it came to that. Which I don’t want to do, not now. Shit.” I cracked my knuckles, one at a time. “It sure is coincidental, isn’t it.”

  “Yes, it sure is.”

  This was happening too fast, too much of a jumble. My brain was already overburdened with the trial. “This connection with the contractor. That could be explained away, I suppose, but it smells bad.”

  “Juarez reaching out from the grave.”

  “There’s a link between him and them.” It was there, I couldn’t not acknowledge it. “That can’t be denied.”

  Kate and I continued our discourse after dinner. Riva joined us. Both women were anxious about Nora’s and Miller’s fishy financial dealings, and the connection with the contractor. I was, too, but I had to temper enthusiasm with other possibilities. Kate has a strong anti-law-enforcement bias, based on her experience as a cop on the mean streets of Oakland a decade ago and her work now, as a private investigator for defense lawyers like me.

  Riva, too, has seen the dark side of the law. It’s a sobering thought, with no foundation in actual fact (because we’ve never discussed it), but she and I wouldn’t be together if I was still a prosecutor. She’d backed me on this undertaking because I was going after what looked like, and has turned out to be, official wrongdoing. So if there’s a possibility that someone in law enforcement, be it a DEA agent, a county sheriff, or a county prosecutor, even if it’s a personal friend, is dirty, she’s going to believe the worst.

  Kate pounded the connections hard. “The
ir money isn’t accounted for, Nora’s or Miller’s. One instance you could excuse—two looks like a conspiracy. Particularly since they came up with all that money at the exact same time, right after the drug compound was built.”

  “Are you saying there was a financial connection between Nora and Miller and Juarez?” I put to her.

  “There could be,” she answered doggedly. “It should be looked into.”

  “I agree with Kate,” Riva chimed in. “It’s all too cozy.”

  “And what about the White Horse Nation’s money?” Kate added. “Where are they getting that from?”

  “You’re telling me that’s connected to this, too?” I asked. “You’re making this out to be an Oliver Stone movie. Everybody’s dirty, the world is one big conspiracy.”

  “It’s too much to dismiss,” Riva argued. “How is it that all these different entities that shouldn’t have lots of money do? Nora, Miller, now the tribe. Maybe there is a conspiracy. Conspiracies exist, Luke. Even if they involve friends,” she added pointedly.

  “I’m not blinded by my friendship with Nora,” I rejoined, stung beyond anything she could understand. “But you’re taking a bunch of what I agree are disturbing coincidences, each of which, in and of itself, is a molehill, and making Mt. Whitney out of them.”

  Riva gave me a hard look. “You don’t believe that. I know you. You don’t believe there’s nothing to what we’re saying.”

  “Okay,” I copped, “there could be. I know that. But whatever it could be, that’s something else. That’s not this trial. I’m prosecuting this trial. That’s what I’m doing now, and that’s all I’m doing now. I don’t have time for anything else.”

  “You’re afraid of what you’ll find,” Kate said challengingly.

  That got my ire up, which was her intention.

  “I’m not afraid of anything, and you damn well know it,” I responded hotly. “If I start going after everything that’s a could-have, should-have, or maybe, I won’t be able to do my job. I’m in the home stretch, I can’t deal with a million distractions.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” Kate apologized. “You’re not afraid.” Not backing off, though, she added, “But you’ve got tunnel vision.”