The Edge of Justice

by Clinton McKinzie

  I shrug. “I heard her boyfriend, one of the witnesses, is your County Attorney's son?”

  “Yep. Brad Karge. I've known that boy all his life. His daddy too, who's going to be your next governor—you might want to keep that in mind. The boy's a pistol. Been in a little trouble, but nothing serious. He just messes around with those rock climbers and gets high a little. Still growing up.” The sheriff pauses and studies me. “I heard somewheres you used to be a climber.”

  “I still am.” I say it with unexpected pride, still feeling the euphoria of the afternoon's rededication to my passion.

  Willis shakes his head, squinting through his pig eyes. “Sounds like a foolish hobby to me, son. Good way to get yourself killed. Anyhow, I'd appreciate it if you'd sign off on that girl's death right quick and move on. As you saw today, this town's got more important things going on. Put this accident to bed.”

  With a grunt the sheriff pulls himself out of his chair and picks up a thick manila file from his desk. “What little we've got is in there. Like I said, should be a piece of cake.” With a quick toss that I barely catch as it hits my lap, he gives the file over to me and wishes me a good night.

  THREE

  THE RESTAURANT IS crowded and dark when I walk in a little after eight o'clock. Its air is perfumed with the fecund odor of portobello mushrooms steaming on a grill. I stand in the entrance with all the other locals and out-of-towners who are waiting for tables while my eyes adjust to the candlelit gloom. The reporters and tourists are easy to spot. They wear expensive new hiking boots and shiny Gore-Tex jackets, as if they expect to go backpacking after dinner. The angry looks on their faces lead me to suspect the locals are being seated first.

  According to the garrulous clerk at the hotel's desk, The First Story restaurant is something the town is proud of. A former university professor bought the old building, which stands in the center of town. Like most of the other buildings in downtown Laramie, it had once been a brothel. The upstairs was divided into twenty or so small “cribs” where the working girls had plied their trade. The professor tore them out and installed a highbrow bookstore called The Second Story. She converted the lower level into this, The First Story, and hired a chef from one of San Francisco's finest restaurants to run it for her. Judging from the odor and the atmosphere alone, the place seems to be as much a part of the new Laramie as Sheriff Willis is a part of the old.

  After a few minutes of peering into the darkness, I spot Ross McGee crouching like a troll over a small table in the far corner. There's a bottle of wine and a full glass before him. He has a hand clenched around each. Above the white beard his cheeks are flushed and his eyes shiny, indicating that maybe this is not his first bottle.

  I pull out the other chair. “Sorry I'm late, Ross.”

  “Goddamn, you are sorry, lad,” he growls.

  “It's good to see you too. How's the old battle-ax?” I use one of McGee's own terms of endearment for his fragile and surprisingly beautiful wife.

  “She's deliriously happy,” he says, then pauses in his peculiar manner, sucking air into his emphysemic and overworked lungs, “. . . to see me out of town.” His home is in Cheyenne, not far from the main office of DCI and the Attorney General.

  Even though he has an exterior more prickly than a porcupine's, I like McGee as much as I like anyone. He takes shit from no one and routinely sends agents off on politically sensitive investigations with his mantra of “Do the right thing; don't fuck around.” And when his agents get in trouble with the office for doing exactly that, McGee backs them up with the ferocity of an old hump-backed grizzly protecting her cubs. As a result he is feared, despised, and avoided by the state administration, from the Attorney General himself on down. My lower-level colleagues and I dread the inevitable day McGee will keel over from a heart attack.

  He has an unexpected softer side too. He dotes on his wife's two miniature poodles with an obvious adoration that is completely out of character. When I once told him a story of my father's about a poodle, meant to be morbidly funny, McGee had been outraged.

  In the early seventies, my father had been climbing near where two Frenchmen were putting up a new route on the great overhanging wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. The route had been a nightmare—they'd run out of food and water on the fifth day and had done without for the remaining three. Near the edge of the broad summit, where an easy trail reaches from El Capitan's gentle backside, the Frenchmen were congratulated by climbers, hikers, and tourists, all wanting to know what eight days of hanging by threads without a horizontal surface had been like. An elderly couple approached with a tiny toy poodle that wouldn't stop snapping at the Frenchmen's ankles. The couple indignantly refused to leash the pint-sized dog, insinuating that its aggressiveness must have something to do with the unwashed smell emanating from the climbers' bodies. To everyone's horror, one of the Frenchmen shrugged and nonchalantly punted the tiny dog over the edge.

  When I told McGee that story, I expected to receive a rough chuckle. But instead tears came into his eyes. He reviled the French with language so hateful and vile that I noticed the office secretaries fleeing the room.

  “Why are you late?” he demands.

  “I stopped by to see the sheriff and get the file on the Danning girl. The sheriff and I had some patching up to do.” I explain the mistake I'd made a year ago and McGee's satyr face is split by a smile. That's the sort of prank he enjoys.

  “Good lad. I'd forgotten about that.”

  Then McGee's eyes brighten further as he focuses on someone behind my back. Turning my head, I see the reporter whose profile had so enticed me in the courtroom.

  “Ross McGee,” she says fondly.

  “Aah, the lovely Miss Hersh.” McGee gives her his most lecherous look, nearly smacking his lips.

  She looks as if she's dressed for dining in Paris, New York, or Rome instead of Wyoming. She wears a long black dress that stretches across her thin hips, and a tight leather jacket. Clinging high up on her exposed neck is a string of pearls. She has mahogany eyes and her dark hair hangs limply almost to the tips of her breasts. The skin of her face and throat is a porcelain white, far different than the high-altitude tans of the girls I normally find myself attracted to. It's not easy to keep from staring.

  “How are you, you old goat?”

  “Fine, my dear. If I were two years younger . . . I'd be goring you tonight.”

  She laughs, and I like the confident sound. I think she can't be more than twenty-six or twenty-seven, nearly forty years his junior. Then McGee asks, “What brings you to this inhospitable state?”

  “The newspaper sent me up to cover the trial, of course. Would you let me pick your brain with some legal questions?”

  “You can pick me wherever you like. . . . But first tell me how is your father . . . that ugly son of a bitch?”

  She laughs again. “That's exactly how he refers to you—‘that ugly son of a bitch.' At least when he's feeling generous. He told me to be sure and see you while I'm here.”

  McGee then speaks to me. “Don't get any ideas, lad. . . . This is Rebecca Hersh of the Denver Post. . . . She's the daughter of an old enemy of mine . . . a limp-wristed professorial type. . . . And this young ruffian is Special Agent Antonio Burns. . . . You may have heard of him.”

  I rise to shake her hand, more than a little dazzled by her looks, as she assesses me in return. Her look is quizzical. “Aren't you the one who was in the news last year? That gang shooting?”

  I feel the blood coming into my face and try not to wince. “I'm afraid so.”

  McGee is not the least bit sympathetic to my discomfort. He chuckles and coughs, saying, “They call him QuickDraw nowadays. . . . Will you eat with us?”

  “I'm sorry, I can't. There are some others waiting for me. But I'd love to interview you sometime, Agent Burns.”

  “I'll think about it,” I say. My face is hot.

  She takes a card from her purse and puts it on the table in
front of me. Then without pause she turns again to McGee.

  “Let me ask you quickly, Ross, what did you think of the closing today?”

  “In general . . . it was well done, lass.”

  “I saw you talking with the prosecutor. What was your role there?”

  “Just to make sure the prosecution doesn't step in any shit . . . that'll make our shoes stink in the AG's Office . . . when the case comes up on appeal.”

  “Were any issues created?”

  “Of course, my dear. . . . There's always issues. . . . And when there aren't . . . the Public Pretenders will make them up.” He pauses to drag several ragged breaths into his lungs. “Nathan probably stepped in it a few times . . . in an appealable sense. But from what I saw . . . none are likely to stink enough . . . to get the case thrown out.”

  “When did he go too far?”

  McGee counts off on his thick fingers. “When he talked about the community's right for justice and protection . . . when he called this the most horrible of all crimes . . . when he called the defendants cold-blooded animals . . . All of those are technically improper. . . . There's some case law that says . . . the prosecutor can't inflame the passions of the jurors . . . or call the defendants names.”

  “But the defense lawyers called all the witnesses and police liars, and said that Karge was conducting a witch-hunt for political gain.”

  McGee explains, “The prosecution does it, it's potentially reversible error. . . . The defense does it, it doesn't fucking matter. . . . You can't appeal an acquittal, lass. Only a conviction. . . . Those are the rules of the game.”

  “I can't imagine the jury doing anything but finding them guilty of first-degree murder and imposing the death penalty. Can you comment at all, officially or not?”

  “Unofficially and off the record . . . you never know what a jury will do . . . You understand, we're talking about your average . . . to below-average citizen-idiots here. . . . These are the same morons . . . who think reintroducing wolves is a federal plot to steal their land . . . and that Waco was an execution. . . . And any time you try to get twelve people . . . to agree on anything, you're asking for trouble. . . . All too often they'll focus on something . . . that's totally irrelevant. . . . But the town's just as hot . . . to put the Knapps in the fryer as Karge is. . . . People've been saying his predecessor was soft on Shepard's killers . . . letting the punks get away with their lives.” McGee then starts into one of his stories, of which there seem to be thousands, while I signal the waitress for a drink stronger than wine. This one is about a domestic violence case he prosecuted where the victim was well known in the community and not very popular. The jury felt she got exactly what she had coming—a broken jaw courtesy of her drunken husband. They acquitted him. It was later revealed that one of the jurors had smuggled a bottle of whiskey into the deliberations. Instead of deliberating, the jury sat around drinking and talking about what they would have done to the bitch.

  I've never seen my boss speak this much.

  I'm crunching the ice from my drink by the time he's finished the story, unsure and uncaring of the point McGee is trying to make. But Rebecca Hersh has more courtesy. She is still standing by the table, looking attentive.

  After a few other questions, she asks, “Nathan Karge looked tired to me. Everyone's talking about that too. Is it just the trial or has he been much affected by the death of that girl his son was dating?”

  “I don't know . . . Nathan is a very private man when it comes to family. . . . He doesn't talk about his boy with me. . . . But it sure as hell was poor timing . . . having to deal with shit like that . . . in the middle of the trial of his career. . . . During a capital case like this . . . you don't want anything else on your mind. . . . Especially not with the fucking election coming up.”

  “Well, I've got to go find my friends. Can I call you tomorrow for some legal background?”

  “Always, lass. I'm at the Holiday Inn.”

  “Great, I'm there too.” Rebecca then gives me a slightly embarrassed look. “It was nice meeting you, Agent Burns. Will you think about doing an interview?”

  As she leaves I can't help but turn in my seat and watch her walk away. When I face McGee again he fixes me with his bright blue eyes. “She's way out of your league, youth.”

  “Fuck you, Boss,” I answer but feel it's probably true.

  Back at the Holiday Inn, I'm both elevated from the climb—my hands still tingle with the feel of the warm rock—and embarrassed at how I handled my introduction to the reporter. The file I took from the sheriff sits unopened on the bed. I'm off duty and intend to stay that way until the morning. Oso's old bones are tired from the afternoon at Vedauwoo. Gorged with Purina, he snores contentedly, sprawled across the room's second double bed.

  I find myself driving back through the breezy night again toward downtown Laramie, not knowing at first what I'm hoping to find. But images of Rebecca Hersh and the girl who gave my dog the wreath of daisies play inside my mind. I park and begin to walk.

  I come across a place called the Fireside Bar. A neon sign flashes, “Dancin' and Drinkin'.” Underneath, on the white wall in black marker, someone has added, “And Dyin'.” I observe the souped-up pickups outside and see through the window throngs of young white men in tightly curled baseball caps. This was the bar from which Matthew Shepard had been lured by two yokels from the same nomadic trailer-park culture as the Knapp brothers. They'd cajoled the small college student outside, driven him onto the plains outside of town, tied him to a buck fence, and beat him to death with the butt of a pistol. They told the police they did it because he flirted with one of them and for the couple of dollars and credit cards he had in his wallet. The Fireside Bar had been a poor choice for the boy. And his murder brought Laramie the continuing fame the town never wanted and didn't deserve. I walk on.

  Two blocks farther I come to the Altitude Brewery. It's a new place, large and open inside. The floor and fixtures are all bright pine. The customers are dressed in a mix of alpaca wool sweaters, fleece jackets, and tie-dyed T-shirts worn under open hemp shirts. Unlike the other places I passed, the banging rhythm vibrating out the door from this bar is secondary to the sound of voices. While that attracts me, what really draws me in is that through the front window I think I see the flower girl.

  I walk in and sit on a varnished stump at the bar. The bartender, sporting a lip ring, a couple of nose rings, and viciously spiked hair, pours me an Easy Street Wheat from the tap. When he says, “You're welcome,” I see that his tongue is also pierced with a silver stud. I stare toward the big-screen TV behind the bar, but I'm really watching the mirror below it—reflected there I see the girl sitting at a booth with three men, one ponytailed and older than the other two, and several more young men gathered around, gripping mugs of beer.

  When she stands and walks toward the bathroom my eyes follow her. She's wearing threadbare jeans and a purple loose-weave vest. Her bare arms are tan and slender. There are thin cords of muscle running from her shoulders to her wrists. Her dirty blonde hair is mostly tucked behind her ears except for the few loose tendrils that sweep around her face. The young men around the table all steal glances after her as she bounces away. The only exception is the big, ponytailed one she'd been closest to. He looks at the others in challenge and annoyance.

  I meet his eyes in the mirror for a moment and glance away. Then I look at my own. They seem to have recessed back in my head over the past year and a half, as if my withdrawal from the things I loved has withdrawn my ability to see the world. The sockets around them are tight and dark. People used to comment on my eyes, tell me what a surprisingly dark color they are, almost like coffee, against my lighter skin and hair. But no one's said that in a long time. Not since things started to go wrong.

  A voice beside me says, “You climb solo and drink solo, huh?” She speaks with a Dead Head's lilt.

  I turn and try to give her a smile. “Thanks for the flowers. My dog felt like a prince.” />
  “I thought he'd either like it or eat me, man, when I put them around his neck. But he just ignored me the whole time.”

  “That's because he was busy, giving me a spot.”

  She laughs at that, her eyes wrinkling slightly at the corners where, like mine, too much exposure to the sun and wind has prematurely carved thin lines. “He's big enough to spot. Falling on him wouldn't hurt either one of you much.”

  The mirror shows me that the ponytailed man from the booth is approaching. I can almost feel the air around us becoming denser. He moves up close behind the girl and me, looming over us.

  “I know you from somewhere, dude. Where's it at?” he asks.

  I'm enormously tired of the infamy that resulted from the shooting. And just hours before, on the rock again at Vedauwoo, I'd thought that maybe I was finally learning to deal with it. With great reluctance I turn to look up at him and try to think of how to answer his question.

  The man is huge in every way. He's at least several inches over six feet tall, nearly half a foot taller than me, and at a minimum of 220 pounds he outweighs me by 40. His powerful jaw muscles are barely contained by taut, tan skin. He wears his glossy black hair pulled back so tight that it looks like a helmet. Ropes of thick brawn bulge down his neck and disappear into his shirt. The hand he lays on the bar between the girl and me is scabbed and callused. It's also the size of a boxing glove. Seeing his paw, I realize that this guy, who I now recognize as an almost-famous climber, probably doesn't know me from that notorious Cheyenne event. The hands don't look like the type that regularly turn the pages of a newspaper.

  “I don't know. But you're Billy Heller, right?” I hope that saying his name, establishing his identity, might make him forget about mine and appease his obvious hostility.

  Heller's fame is limited to hard-core climbing circles. He was first noticed when he developed super-gymnastic routes at Tahquiz and Suicide. Then he spent a couple of decades as a wall rat in Yosemite before coming to Vedauwoo a few years ago in search of new material. I've heard he is the master of off-width cracks—the recesses in granite too wide to jam with a clenched fist and too narrow to crawl in and chimney with feet and hands on one side and one's back braced against the other. He developed intensely powerful techniques known as the arm bar, chicken wing, knee jam, and the kick-through. People say that he knows the physiology of musculature, joints, and bones better than a medical student. I've heard about how he can lead a rope up the blank roofs that jut sometimes more than fifty feet from cliff faces, roofs that contain only a single, wide fissure like a jagged earthquake fracture across a high-beamed ceiling. He will hang with his elbows and palms wedged in the crack and with his feet dangling over dead space, then fold his entire body like a jackknife to shove his feet into the tight space. And he will release his hands, so that he is suspended by just his feet jammed heel and toe into the crack, batlike and sometimes hundreds of feet off the ground, and do it all over again, inching along until he can pull himself over the lip.