Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  That was a lame justification, and we both knew it.

  “One of his own?” I shook my head. “Never.” I could feel it in my stomach—the tightness. “We have to look at the harsh truth—that the shooter was someone else.”

  We were at the buildings. As I looked back, all was in darkness in the direction we’d come from.

  “It’s a possibility.” It was gut-wrenching to give the thought voice, but I had to. “Isn’t it? A strong one?”

  She sighed heavily. “Yes.”

  IN HIS OWN DEFENSE

  JEROME, SITTING STRAIGHT AND tall on the stand, looked like the poster boy for the DEA. Strong, straight, handsomely rugged. He was dressed in a conservative dark blue suit, his shirt was freshly pressed and starched, his black shoes were mirror-bright with spit-shine. He’d had another haircut, not a prison-barber job, clean, sleek, short, not a hair out of place.

  John Q., Oscar Madison to Jerome’s Felix Unger, shambled to the lectern. He looked Jerome in the eye.

  “Mr. Jerome…did you kill Reynaldo Juarez?”

  Jerome locked eyes with his lawyer. “I absolutely did not.”

  “Good,” John Q. rumbled. “Now let’s show how you would not have killed Juarez, and could not have.”

  He ran through the usual laundry list of awards, citations, encomiums, other tributes to Jerome as a first-rate, honorable, law-abiding agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a man entrusted with the most sensitive cases. It was a good recitation—it had nothing to do with the charges against Jerome, but it presented him in a good light. You could do the same with Stalin if you cherry-picked through his résumé.

  I wasn’t looking too good—literally. I hadn’t had to confront the mirror when I’d gotten out of bed in the morning, I could feel the bags under my eyes. I’d struggled all night long about my concerns. No matter how much I went back and forth, they didn’t go away.

  But I wasn’t going to do anything about them—not now, with the trial only a few days from concluding. Proving Jerome guilty was my job. Getting him off was John Q.’s. John Q. could have found out what I did. The reason he hadn’t dug as deeply as I had was that in his heart—forget the chest-thumping regarding Jerome’s sterling (no pun intended) qualities^—he believed his client was guilty.

  “Describe for the members of the jury, please, the special circumstances on the night in question,” John Q. said, “that led to your decision to mount a physical raid on the location where Mr. Juarez and the other members of his drug ring were hiding out.”

  Jerome told his story. How his undercover operative, posing as an Iranian arms dealer, had gained Juarez’s trust. The small, then medium-size, then large buys of cocaine from Juarez’s organization. Then the big enchilada, the hundred-million-dollar transaction.

  “This was all set up over a long period of time, over a year,” John Q. stated. “A legitimate operation, everything above-board in your agency. Everyone knew what was going on, there were no secrets.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So it all came down to this special night.”

  “Yes.”

  “The airplanes, the money, the arrests.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  John Q. took a moment to blow his nose into a large handkerchief he had tucked into his back pants pocket. He’s from the old school, he doesn’t use tissues. Crumpling the snot rag up casually, he shoved it back into his pants.

  “What happened then?” John Q. continued.

  “The operation…the deal was aborted.”

  “Because the airplanes couldn’t fly in.”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you learn that?”

  “About three-thirty in the morning.”

  “This news was sudden and unexpected.”

  “Totally unexpected.”

  “How did you feel when you heard this?”

  Jerome looked down, shaking his head regretfully. “It was terrible. Shocking, unbelievable.”

  “Depressing?”

  “Very depressing.”

  “You’d been after this desperado for almost a decade. You finally had him in your sights, and then your plan went kabloooey.”

  I stood. “Objection, Your Honor. He’s leading the witness.”

  “Sustained,” Judge McBee agreed. “Save your conclusions for final arguments, Mr. Jones.”

  John Q. continued without missing a beat. “What did you decide to do then, Agent Jerome?”

  “I decided to proceed with the assault.”

  “Was this a snap decision?”

  “A quick decision,” Jerome clarified, “not a snap one.”

  “What made you decide to go ahead?”

  “If I hadn’t,” Jerome explained carefully, “I might never have had the opportunity again. A chance like that comes along once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. To allow, through inaction or indecisiveness, a man like Reynaldo Juarez to escape, when you have him right there—you can’t let that go. If I hadn’t moved on him, it would have been a dereliction of my professional obligations and responsibilities. And, I might add, highly immoral.”

  “Still, it was a pretty fast decision.”

  Jerome nodded. “It had to be. It was already almost four in the morning. Another couple hours, it would’ve been light. We couldn’t have surprised them. We had to go in immediately.”

  “Your plan was to take Juarez and the others inside alive.”

  “Yes. I was very clear about that.”

  “And you had it, on good information, that the coast was clear.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Your informant was a member of Juarez’s inner circle, who you had turned.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “To bring up an earlier expression that was used in this courtroom, a snitch.”

  “Yes, Lopez was a paid informant.”

  “Does that make his credibility suspect, Agent Jerome? The fact that he was an informant?”

  Jerome shook his head vigorously. “Not in the least. Informants are one of the most important tools we have. We couldn’t make half our cases without them. That’s a fact of life when you’re working undercover, particularly in the drug business.”

  John Q. consulted a note. “We have heard testimony earlier, Agent Jerome, that the men inside that compound may have been warned of the impending raid. Someone called in to warn them. Could that person have been Lopez, your informant?”

  “No way,” Jerome answered with strong feeling. “He was by my side the entire time. It would have been impossible for him to make a phone call and for me not to know it.”

  I made a note for my cross.

  “What about one of the other people on your team? Could one of them have called?”

  Jerome regarded his lawyer balefully. “That’s a ridiculous theory. We’re going to call a killer drug dealer and warn him we’re coming in? Forget about it.”

  “I agree with you, Mr. Jerome,” John Q. said in his gravelly voice. “I want the jury to hear it from you. You were there, you would know.”

  Jerome turned to the jury. “No one in my organization called Juarez,” he stated hotly. “Whoever warned him, it wasn’t us. Or Luis Lopez.”

  John Q. walked over to the defense table, picked up some pages of earlier court testimony, walked back to the lectern. “I have to ask you some tough questions now, Agent Jerome. Questions about your motives, your credibility, your honesty. I want you to answer them in the most honest and straightforward manner that you can, even if it embarrasses you to do so. Are you ready?”

  Jerome took a sip of water, nodded grimly. “Fire away.” He carefully put his glass down.

  I looked over at the jury. Two of the women jurors had caught the irony of that statement. Rack up one for me.

  This was a dangerous strategy John Q. was pursuing. He was going to bring up the damning facts and accusations that had already been made against Jerome by strong and credible witnesses, and then, through his client’s force of per
sonality and assertions of innocence, try to demolish or discredit them. It’s analogous to setting a controlled burn in a forest to prevent larger fires. The problem with that strategy is, you can’t always contain the fire you set. The wind shifts direction, the undergrowth is drier, all sorts of unexpected elements can go wrong. The fire blazes out of control, and everything goes up in flames.

  John Q. was going to set the controlled burn. I, coming in behind him on cross-examination, would try to be the force of nature that would turn his fire into a conflagration that would consume Jerome in John Q.’s own flames.

  I wouldn’t have done this if I’d been in John Q’s position. There’s too much risk. But he had decided that he was holding a losing hand, and he was betting the farm on one bold move. Ironically, if he’d known of the fresh details I’d discovered recently, he wouldn’t have played it this way. But early on, his case had turned negative so hard and so fast that he hadn’t dug deeply enough. It happens to the best of us—no one can cover all the bases. So now he stood at the lectern, a box of matches in hand.

  John Q. looked at his pages, then at Jerome. “A few days before the raid, you bought a box of full-metal-jacket bullets for your handgun from a gun-shop owner named Harrison, whose store is on the far side of the county from where you were located. Why did you buy the ammunition, considering you get your ammunition free of charge? And what were you doing all the way over there, anyway?”

  Jerome took his cue.

  “I’ll answer the second part of your question first,” he said smoothly as if he were an expert witness in someone else’s trial. “I needed to get away by myself, so I could clear my head. You can’t do that when you’re surrounded by four dozen samurai, which I consider my men to be, in the finest sense. I meditate every day,” he added, which I’m sure surprised everyone in the courtroom as much as it did me. “I like to be in a private space before I’m about to go into battle. I often go into the hills alone, wherever I am, to be at one with myself.”

  At one with myself? I believe in meditation and contemplation as much as the next man, but this was a crock of shit. Now he’s a flower child? What’s next, dropping acid on the top of Mt. Everest?

  “So you were in that part of the county to get away,” John Q. said. “Nothing sinister.”

  “The opposite is true,” Jerome replied unctuously.

  “And the first part of the question,” John Q. continued. “Why did you buy the ammunition? You get free ammo.”

  “That’s a simple explanation,” Jerome answered easily. “I wanted to get some target practice in while I was out there, and I hadn’t brought any ammunition with me.”

  John Q. nodded. “That seems reasonable to me. But why full-metal jackets instead of hollow points, since that’s what you normally use?”

  Jerome smiled. “Full-metal jackets are cheaper.”

  “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up,” John Q. pronounced solemnly, as if Jerome’s buying the bullets was no longer an issue. “Now to the other two damaging areas that have been raised, which are more complex. What can you tell us about this phantom bank account you purportedly opened with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit shortly after Juarez was killed?”

  Boy, I was up fast for that one. “Objection. This bank account and deposit—”

  Judge McBee put up a hand to restrain me from going any further—he’d figured this was coming, he had it covered. “Objection is sustained,” he said sharply.

  He looked to the jurors. “A stipulated witness has testified that a bank account was opened, that the account was Mr. Jerome’s, that five hundred thousand dollars was deposited into it.”

  McBee looked down at John Q., using the height of his perch for obvious intimidation. “We already went through this, with the bank official. Don’t bark up this tree again.”

  John Q. looked properly chastised. “Yes, Your Honor,” he muttered. Turning back to Jerome, he asked, “Do you have any idea who opened this bank account?”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained.”

  “Did you open this bank account?” John Q. asked. His face was flushing. He was losing composure. Not a good sign when your lawyer gets flustered.

  “No,” Jerome answered adamantly. “I did not. I never even knew about it until I was informed in the grand jury.”

  “What was your reaction?”

  “I didn’t believe it,” Jerome said as convincingly as he could, which certainly fell short of anyone having full confidence in him, if I could read the looks the jurors were giving each other. “I still don’t know anything about it.”

  “Or the five hundred thousand dollars?”

  “I don’t know anything about this five hundred thousand dollars, or this bank account, or any of this. I didn’t open it, I didn’t deposit any money in it, I didn’t do anything about it.” Jerome was almost whining now, he seemed so frustrated and beaten down on this point.

  “Once you found out there was a bank account in your name, with five hundred thousand dollars in it, what did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. It isn’t my account, so it isn’t my money.”

  “That is your sworn testimony,” John Q. declared. “You did not open this bank account, nor did you deposit any money in it.”

  “Like I said,” Jerome answered, his voice rising in anger, “I didn’t know it existed, so how could I have?”

  “How, indeed,” John Q. rumbled. He shuffled some papers around, then asked quickly, “Why do you suppose anyone would set up a bank account for someone else, like this one?”

  Before I could get to my feet, Jerome answered in a loud, powerful voice, “To frame me.”

  “Objection!” I literally jumped out of my seat, knocking my chair over. “This is outrageous, Your Honor!” Pointing to Jerome, I cried, “What is he, a soothsayer? This line of questions and answers is nonsense and highly prejudicial to the fairness of these proceedings.”

  “Sustained.” McBee looked down at John Q. with a weariness that belied his building impatience. “Any ideas like these are for final argument only. Stay with your examination, please. Or I’m going to have to terminate it.”

  That caught the old man off-guard. “I’m not pushing for that,” he apologized. “I’ll be careful.”

  “Do so,” the judge remonstrated him.

  John Q. turned back to Jerome again. “You’ve known…you had been aware of Reynaldo Juarez for many years.”

  Jerome nodded grimly. “Yes.”

  “Before you joined the DEA.”

  A murmur: “Yes.”

  McBee looked down from the bench. “Speak up, please. The jurors can’t hear you, or the court reporter.”

  “Yes,” Jerome said more loudly, not bothering to conceal his anger.

  “You had a dispute with him over your sister, while they were in college together?”

  “Yes.”

  Dispute? I thought. He almost killed Juarez. I made a note—that was not going to get by unchallenged.

  “Tell us about that, if you would, from your perspective.”

  Jerome rearranged himself in the witness chair. He’d been looking forward to doing this for years. This was going to be a good one.

  “We heard Diane was dating someone in her class. We figured it was fine. A student at Stanford, one of the finest universities in the world. How bad could that be?”

  His face darkened; he took a sip of water.

  “Then we started finding out bits and pieces, things about this kid, this Juarez. Him being Chicano, we didn’t give a damn about that. That’s like being Irish, two generations ago. If anything, you give a person like that credit, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, you know? How many Chicanos from east Los Angeles wind up at Stanford? Hardly any, I’ll bet. So you figure he’s got plenty on the ball.”

  He paused again. This was sickening, I thought as I listened to these lies. He was a bigoted Irish prick from a low-rent family, all of whom hated Juarez precisely because he wa
s Chicano, no other reason.

  “But then we started hearing stuff about him. What he’d been doing in L.A. before he went to Palo Alto. The more we heard, the uglier it got. The guy was a common criminal, a thug. How he ever got into Stanford I’ll never figure out. Affirmative action or some such crap, I guess. Tells you everything you need to know about affirmative action, doesn’t it?”

  I looked at the Latinos and Native Americans on the jury. They didn’t seem put off by Jerome’s ethnic smears. Maybe they believed that propaganda, like other rural, suspicious people. Or maybe they just didn’t get it; not a good omen.

  “What did you do then?” John Q. interjected.

  “We talked to Diane about him, over the telephone. My mother, my father. Begging her to listen to the facts. We told her about this person she was so blind over that she couldn’t see who he really was.” He shook his head sadly. “She didn’t hear us. She couldn’t. She was blinded by love. It was so pitiful, to listen to her.”

  Jesus, I thought, this bastard has more blarney in him than all of Dublin. And he was doing it so convincingly. He could, because he believed it: not the facts, but the emotions. No greaser was going to be his kin, he’d kill the fucker first.

  Not that he said that. Under John Q.’s easy prodding, he went on with his story.

  “Finally, we had to go out there. My brothers and me. We didn’t want anything bad to happen. He could stay at Stanford, we didn’t care. All we wanted was for him to leave go of Diane. She didn’t know any better, we were her family, we had to protect her. That’s what families are for, isn’t it?” he asked, looking up plaintively.

  “Yes, they are,” old John Q. assured him. “That’s exactly what they’re for. To take care of each other. Go on, son,” John Q. said kindly.

  I really felt like laughing. I could have objected to this nonsensical display, this third-rate dinner-theater emoting, but to what point? It was such obvious crap. All the facts were in direct contradiction to this self-serving bullshit. It’s the same old story—when you don’t have the truth on your side, lie.

  “We met up with him—Juarez. We went someplace private, to talk to him.”