Against the Wind

by J. F. Freedman

  “I don’t know,” she answers truthfully. “Maybe. Probably.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Who was to know?” She fixes me with a rueful smile. “I blew my shot at the big-time in Santa Fe for a lousy piece of ass.”

  I smile back. I’m scared inside, now that I’ve said it.

  “If you ever want to talk …” She leaves it dangling.

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Promise?”

  I nod. I give her a chaste forehead kiss, walk out the screen door and down the porch stairs. She’s still watching as I’m driving away.

  My apartment hasn’t been cleaned in two weeks, the air conditioner’s on its last legs, I feel unclean. If I wasn’t hoarding my pennies I’d take a hotel room for the night, get a cleaning lady in in the morning to fumigate the place.

  Instead, I pour myself a healthy Johnnie Walker over the rocks. You weak motherfucker, you couldn’t leave well enough alone, it’s bad enough you fucked her, you had to bleed all over her rug, tell her about the firm. Christ, it could be all over town by lunch tomorrow. The second Scotch helps; stop panicking, she’s not like that, she’ll take your secret to the grave. But what if it slips out inadvertently? It’s bound to, she works for Robertson and he’s obsessed with it.

  She answers on the third ring. “That was quick.”

  “Yeh.” Shit, why the hell did I call?

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, no.” I kill my drink, lean across the counter for the bottle, pouring myself another, just a couple fingers.

  “Will?” She’s alarmed.

  “Listen, what we talked about earlier …”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t we just forget it, okay? We never had that conversation.”

  “Well … how could I do that? Why would you want me to?”

  “Just don’t tell anyone, okay?” Keeping the terror out of my voice, not entirely successful.

  There’s a pause at the other end.

  “Pat?”

  “Why would I tell anyone?”

  “You wouldn’t. It could just slip out, you know.” Fuck, if I step on my dick anymore I’ll tear it out at the root.

  “Not from me it won’t,” she tells me with certainty. “I think you’re projecting what you would do.”

  “I meant by accident. That’s all.”

  “I’m not you, Will. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “Hey, I knew that.”

  It hangs between us over the hum in the line.

  “It’s late,” she reminds me.

  “Yeh. Got to kick ass in the morning.”

  “I’m glad you called. That you felt you could.”

  “So am I.” I mean it.

  “Next time try to be more positive, all right?”

  I bang the receiver against my forehead.

  “All right. I promise.”

  “Good. Good night Will.”

  “Good night, Pat.”

  She hangs up on me. You dumb shit, every time you think you have the world by the balls it turns out to be your own balls you’re squeezing. And right now the pain is killing me.

  “YOUR HONOR, we’d like to be heard on this issue.”

  Judge Martinez nods.

  This is a hearing on a change-of-venue motion we’ve filed. The jury’s yet to be selected. This could be crucial. Moseby ambles over from his side. He must’ve had garlic bread for lunch; his breath reeks, wafting across the front of the bench. Mary Lou wrinkles her nose, brushes her hand across her face. Frank grins at her; pieces of his lunch stick in his teeth. She shakes her head in disgust. The others feign indifference. I’ve long since quit thinking about him, except as my opponent. The issues are too big to get caught up in personalities.

  “Counselor?” Judge Martinez peers down. He’s the senior judge on the court, a former D.A., who made sure the case fell on his docket, not so much for the case itself—he’s handled dozens of murders, he doesn’t need publicity or the aggravation that goes with these—but because if the bikers are found guilty he doesn’t want the case reversed on appeal and figures he has a better chance of keeping it clean than any other judge. He’s a tough, generally pro-prosecution jurist, but he runs a straight courtroom.

  “On what grounds?” Martinez asks.

  “On the grounds that our clients can’t get a fair and impartial trial in Santa Fe, your honor,” Tommy says. “This case has had more pretrial publicity than any case in New Mexico history.”

  “They have to be tried somewhere,” Martinez reminds us.

  “We have three volumes of newspaper and magazine clippings, your honor,” Paul says. “Six hours of videotapes. It’s impossible that anyone who lives in Santa Fe hasn’t read or heard about this case.”

  “I don’t know,” Martinez says. “That’s what jury selection’s going to tell us.”

  “The evidence seems overwhelming, your honor,” Tommy argues.

  Martinez glares at him. “I’m supposed to be the judge of that, counselor,” he rasps.

  “No offense, your honor,” Tommy replies quickly. Rule number one—don’t piss off the judge. “All I meant was there’s more of it than any other case our research has found.”

  Martinez turns to Moseby. “What’s the prosecution’s view on this?” he asks.

  “We want to try it here, your honor,” Frank replies, taking care not to breathe on Martinez. “We feel we can impanel as fair and impartial a jury here in Santa Fe as anyplace else in the state. It’s a notorious case, Judge Martinez. The prosecution’s going to deal with that the best it can. The defense ought to, too.”

  He’s a slob, but he’s cunning. Admit the problem and by doing so disarm it. It puts him in the catbird seat: we’re bitching and he’s making do the best he can.

  Martinez ponders while we wait. He knows that Moseby’s demurral, while essentially bullshit, has enough truth in it to hang a decision on; and he also knows this could be one of the most important decisions he makes during the entire long, drawn-out affair. If, after going through an entire trial and finding the defendants guilty, an appellate court decides the jury wasn’t impartial, the whole shooting match could start again. States don’t like spending millions of dollars on retrying cases that could’ve been done right the first time.

  “I’m going to withhold judgment on this,” Martinez says finally. I groan inside; I was afraid of this, which is why we delayed asking for the change right away, agonizing for weeks over it, going through a lot of discussion and soul-searching. We could spend a month trying to get a jury and then have Martinez decide we were right and the case has to be moved. Then we’d have to start all over again. It’s becoming the fashion to do this here, and it’s a royal pain in the ass, not to mention being time-consuming and damned expensive.

  We trudge back to the table. Behind us, our clients, cleaned up for their court appearances but still menacing as hell, look to us for signs, good or bad. We try to give them nothing; we’ll discuss our feelings in private, we don’t want to send any signals publicly that the prosecution might capitalize on. But they know by now that no news is bad news, they’ve been inside for months, they’re taking on the defeatist attitude of the incarcerated. I feel for them, then catch myself in the irony; under normal circumstances I’d be happy to see people like them safely removed from society. Right now all I’m looking at are four more victims of a hopelessly fucked-up system.

  “THIS IS the ‘NBC Nightly News’ with Tom Brokaw.”

  It’s five-thirty. We’re sitting in my office, watching the tube: Paul, Tommy, Mary Lou, me. We’ve made the national news. It’s been a slow day, I guess; even so, this is the big time. We savor it with a kind of morbid fascination, like ancient Christians standing on the floor of the Colosseum, looking up and gawking at a hundred thousand bloodthirsty Romans.

  We’re the lead story after the first commercial break. The NBC correspondent, a blow-dried woman wearing a Gucci scarf artfully tied around her neck, stands
at the bottom of the courthouse steps. Behind her, jockeying rudely for position, is the obligatory crowd of attention-seekers, fighting for their two seconds on camera.

  “In Santa Fe, Judge Louis Martinez has finally impaneled a jury in New Mexico’s most sensational murder trial in several years, in which four members of the outlaw motorcycle gang known as the Scorpions allegedly killed and violently mutilated drifter Richard Bartless. With me is District Attorney John Robertson, whose office is prosecuting this case.”

  The camera widens out to include Robertson, who looks every inch the proper man of the courtroom (to my less-than-impartial eye he appears unctuous and faintly sweaty) in his three-piece Hickey-Freeman suit.

  “Are you glad to be finally going to trial?” the blow-dry queen asks, her face screwed up all-pretty-like, TV’s idea of what passes for serious.

  Robertson nods. He’s serious for real, this is major personal to him. “The people of New Mexico deserve this trial,” he says. “This was a vicious, heinous crime and the perpetrators need to be severely dealt with. We don’t want it to get caught up in a bunch of legal malarkey,” he continues, an unseen dig at the defense, nicely played to the public, you plant as many subconscious hooks as you can, “we have the evidence to prove they’re guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt and we want them to pay for their crime.”

  “You’ll be asking for the death penalty?” she asks.

  “Anything less would be a gross miscarriage of justice.”

  “Screw you too, Jack,” Mary Lou tells the image on the tube, watching alongside of me. Her hand drops lightly onto my thigh, an unconscious gesture of reassurement. I get a twinge.

  The rest of the team catcalls the screen, expressing like sentiments. We’re developing our own bunker mentality, us against the world and fuck ’em all but six, the kind of self-support you need to carry you through.

  On the screen the camera shifts angles, and suddenly there I am for the whole world to see. I’m looking good, my clothes fit and aren’t wrinkled, my hair’s in place, my look is bright. An altogether formidable opponent, alert and at ease with myself and my task, not uptight like the impression Robertson made.

  The people in the room applaud. I’m thinking about Claudia, that she’s watching her daddy with pride. It feels good—I’m on the case.

  “With me now is Will Alexander, one of New Mexico’s foremost criminal trial lawyers and the lead attorney for the defendants. Tell me,” she asks, “are you and your partners satisfied with the progress of the trial so far?”

  “No,” I answer. I look serious, I don’t have to fake it. “The trial hasn’t actually started,” I properly correct her, “this has all been preliminary, but no, we aren’t as satisfied as we’d like to be.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Unlike the prosecutor, we’re going to conduct our defense inside the courtroom,” I tell her and the world, getting my digs in. “But I will say this: I don’t believe the defendants are being judged by a fair and impartial jury. Not as I understand the meaning of the words ‘fair’ and ‘impartial.’ More than half the jurors are women, none of them have ever been on a motorcycle, none of them have ever been inside a jail, let alone served time in one. These are some of the reasons we had asked for a change of venue, which was regrettably denied.”

  “So you contend there is a built-in bias towards the accused,” she says.

  “What do you think?” I answer. Always take the offense, if they’re defending they can’t attack. “You read the local papers you’ll see our clients have already been convicted, at least by anyone who’s heard anything about it, which is practically everyone in this state, certainly in this county.”

  “And that’s why you asked for the change of venue,” she presses.

  “It was one of the reasons.”

  “How do you feel about Judge Martinez turning you down?”

  “Check with me when it’s over,” I answer.

  I watch as the camera comes off me, moving in close on her for a brief wrap-up before cutting back to Brokaw. What she says is this: no member of any biker gang has ever been executed for committing a crime, particularly the crime of murder. The enormity of that is what’s fueling so much interest in us, beyond the case itself. Society wants to burn an outlaw.

  Paul turns it off. “Not bad,” he says.

  “I came across okay,” I admit. I don’t hide my light under a bushel. “Serious and caring.”

  Everyone chuckles. Anything to break this damn tension.

  “You were good,” Tommy adds. “Robertson looked worried.”

  “Because he has the most to lose,” Paul continues, an important point. In the strictest sense that’s not true; the bikers have the most to lose. But he’s right in the trial sense, lawyer versus lawyer. Everyone figures the prosecution has cards and spades in this one; if they lose and we win they’re dogshit. So the conventional wisdom goes. On the other hand, I’ve won more than my share of cases that didn’t look hopeful, at least when they began. So it’s not like the betting’s going all one way.

  The four of us spend a couple more hours together, last-minute practicing for tomorrow’s opening statements. I’ll go last: I’m the star, the jefe. Moseby’ll most certainly do his shuck and jive ol’ boy shtick, but he won’t orate, because if he does I’ll level him when it’s my turn. You have to be true to yourself in the courtroom, if you can shoot the moon you go for it, otherwise you play your cards conservatively and don’t go for the bluff, certainly not at the beginning.

  Paul and Tommy take off. Mary Lou stays, banging away at the word processor, last-minute polishing on her remarks. She’s never been in this deep before; I know how scary your first murder case can be. I stand at my window, looking out at the dark city. The only lights still on are from bars, where I won’t be tonight. I sit down in my chair, my back to Mary Lou and the room, on automatic pilot, playing my opening in my head.

  She finishes her changes, prints them out on the laser printer. It’s quiet for a moment—she’s gone down the hall to Xerox.

  I sense her behind me before the actual touch, her hands on my shoulders, massaging them strongly. I tense, then relax. It feels good, comforting, her hands rhythmically stroking.

  “You don’t know how much I admire you,” she tells me, digging deep. “Sometimes I get so enthralled watching you in the courtroom I forget I’m on the job.”

  “Thanks.” The massage feels wonderful. I have an overwhelming impulse to kiss the palm of her hand, tongue it. I manage to resist. I can smell her, her perfume mingled with her faint body odors, we’ve been on the go for fifteen hours. She’s slipped out of her heels, sways on her stockinged feet.

  I’m hard. If there was ever a time in my life I didn’t want that, this is it. I try to think of multiplication tables, batting averages. She continues kneading, her strong thumbs stretching my neck muscles. I want to melt.

  She massages my temples. I close my eyes, breathing with the tempo of her moving hands. As I finally start to relax, feeling an ebb in my desire, a hand slips to the side of my neck, an unmistakable caress. The moan almost passes my lips; I manage to stifle it.

  Jesus Christ. She’s on the make for me. Patricia was right; she knew something women know instinctively.

  I take the hand from my neck, holding it, standing and turning to her. It’s finally out in the open. This will be the greatest sexual coupling in modern times, if I’ve ever known anything in my life I know this.

  “I’m dying to sleep with you, Mary Lou,” I tell her. Dying’s the operative word here, but not in the way she’d understand.

  She breaks into a girlish smile, happy and relieved. “Oh, Jesus. I was afraid I was making a complete fool of myself, but I couldn’t help it, so …”

  Now I know where they got the expression about knees turning to jelly. I feel like I’m actually going to collapse. All this time fantasizing about her, and she’s been doing the same thing.

  “But I can’t do it. Not now.
”

  She stares quizzically at me.

  “We can’t.” I’m starting to get dry, cottonmouth. “We’re working together eighteen hours a day,” I say, pushing the words out before I weaken, “if we’re lovers it clouds the issue. One time with you and I’ll be ruined forever, I’ll be mooning like a schoolboy. It just isn’t professional, Mary Lou.”

  What a fucking joke. It’s never stopped me before. Of all times to grow up.

  She looks at me like I just got off the five-ten from Mars.

  “What’re you talking about?” she says, “it happens all the time.”

  “It does?” Suddenly I feel like a seventh-grader.

  “Of course.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I stammer.

  “You never have?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re a celebrated … cocksman,” she says.

  “Maybe. But not where I eat.”

  “But it’s unavoidable, Will, you work with people around the clock, sooner or later you’ll find one that turns you on.” She looks right at me, making sure I’m not putting her on, playing a little game. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Shit. I’ve been saving myself for the right one for years, staving off half the senior partners in my firm, and I fall for a virtuous man. Probably the only one left in town; definitely the most unlikely.”

  “Sorry,” I tell her. Man, how I am.

  “Unprofessional,” she says, as if it’s a foreign word, a language she’s not accustomed to hearing. “Guess I’m not exposed to that kind of thinking these days.”

  Jesus, Mary Lou, don’t give up so easily.

  “Can I have a raincheck?” This is no act, she’s serious.

  “When this trial is over,” I promise her, “if you’re still interested,” I caution.

  “I’ll still be interested,” she assures me.

  Maybe this is a sign. A good woman finds the inner me attractive.

  I walk her to her car, which is parked in the lot across the street. She unlocks the door, turns to me.

  “A preview,” she says, planting a quick one flush on my mouth, “so you won’t chicken out about honoring that raincheck.”