“Something like that. If it’s payday. The usual.”
“Have you ever gone there alone?”
“Yeh,” she admits, “sometimes. But not that night,” she adds forcefully. “Me and Richard went together that night.”
“Yes, you’ve made that point. Hitch-hiked there together.”
She nods. She won’t be so quick to volunteer information from now on.
“You started drinking at seven. That’s when you’ve told us you arrived.”
“Around then.”
“And you drank until you left.”
“On and off. I mean I wasn’t chugging ’em or nothing.”
“From seven in the evening until two in the morning.”
“Yeh but not all the time. I didn’t have all that much money. I had to nurse ’em.”
“Did Richard buy you a drink? Assuming he was there?”
“He was there and yeh, a few.”
“Anyone else? Any other fellows?”
“A couple might’ve … yeh, a couple guys did.”
“A few drinks each.”
“Yeh.”
“What were you drinking? Tequila?” An easy guess.
“Some. Some wine coolers.”
“Tequila with wine-cooler chasers. Maybe a few beers.”
“I don’t drink beer much in bars,” she shakes her head. “My kidneys can’t handle it. Just when I’m home alone is all.”
“So you stuck pretty much to the tequila.”
She nods. “I don’t get hangovers from tequila.”
“You must be a hell of a drinker,” I say. “Tequila from seven at night until two in the morning. I’d be out cold.”
“I can hold it pretty good,” she says, patting herself on the back. Like it’s an admirable trait. Actually, I’ve always thought so myself. Maybe I’d better take another look at that.
“Sounds like it,” I tell her. “Although with that much tequila in you I can understand why it might’ve been hard to remember whether you drove there that night or hitch-hiked. That much tequila in me I doubt I could remember my name, let alone anything that happened that night at all.”
“I can remember,” she says defiantly. “I can remember good enough.”
“So you’ve said,” I reply. “Before the night in question,” I ask, shifting gears again, “when was the last time you were in the Dew Drop?”
She purses her eyebrows in concentration.
“I think … I’m not sure.”
“The night before?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember everything I ever did every single day.”
“It’s possible.”
“Yeh, I guess.”
“If I were to produce witnesses that positively placed you there the night before would that help refresh your memory?”
She licks her lips again. Her lipstick’s cracking. The prosecution should request a recess, fix her up. She isn’t making a favorable impression on the jury.
“Now that I think about it,” she admits, “I’m pretty sure I was there then.”
“It’s your regular hangout, isn’t it.”
“More or less,” she answers. “I ain’t no barfly though if that’s what you’re getting at.”
I shake my head ‘no.’ “I’m just trying to establish some of your patterns, Miss Gomez. Your social behavior as it were.” I lean towards her, then almost recoil. That perfume’s hard to take, the daily effect has to be giving Martinez one hell of a headache.
“So you were there the night before,” I continue.
She nods. Martinez instructs the jury that’s a ‘yes.’
“With Richard, another friend, by yourself? What?”
“Just me. I couldn’t find nobody to go with me.”
“But you found somebody to leave with you, didn’t you?”
“Objection! This is completely irrelevant, your honor,” Moseby whines.
Martinez looks at her, pondering it. I can tell that the more he sees and hears her, the less he believes.
“Over-ruled,” he says. “I think the witness’s pattern of behavior is important here,” he tells Moseby. I like this; he’s using my language, he’s hearing me. “I’m going to allow the defense a broad field to play on,” Martinez continues. “If it turns out to be a blind alley I’ll reel you in, counselor,” he informs me.
“Thank you, your honor.” I turn back to her.
“You picked up a guy in the Dew Drop Inn the night before this alleged killing and went home with him, right?”
She looks at Moseby: do I have to answer?, she’s asking silently. He stares at her. His anger at losing the momentum is apparent.
“Answer the question, Miss Gomez,” Martinez instructs her.
Almost a whisper: “Yes.”
“Speak up so the jury can hear you,” Martinez tells her.
“Yes.” Louder, with defiance. “I went home with a guy I met in the bar.”
“Someone you knew?” I ask. “A friend?”
“I’d seen him around.”
“In the bar.”
“Yeh.”
“But you didn’t know him.”
“I’d seen him.”
“You picked up someone you’d never met before and went home with him and slept with him, isn’t that right?”
She hates my guts now, but she hates Moseby’s more. He didn’t prepare her for this. Of course, if he had, she might’ve had second thoughts about coming forward.
Too late now.
“Okay. I did. So what? They …” pointing at the defendants, “still did what I said they did. What I did or didn’t do some other time don’t make any difference about that.”
“How much did he pay you for sleeping with him?” I ask, brushing aside her qualifiers.
“OBJECTION!” Moseby is beside himself.
“Over-ruled.” Martinez is leaning forward in his chair, he’s definitely involved.
“How much?” I ask again. “You went to bed with this fellow you picked up in the Dew Drop Inn,” I say. “You had sex and he paid you. How much?”
She looks down at her shoes. “Fifteen,” she mumbles.
“Fifteen dollars?” I repeat. Jesus, talk about your low-rent trash.
“He bought me some drinks first,” she says lamely, by way of face-saving explanation. “He was a nice dude, I ain’t in it for the money,” she adds desperately.
The laughter rolls across the room. Jesus, somebody throw the poor bitch a life-rope. If it wasn’t my clients’ lives on the line I might muster some compassion for her.
Martinez gavels for order.
“Expenses,” I say helpfully.
“Yeh,” she says. “I lost a couple hours at work.”
“Girl’s gotta make a living,” I throw in flippantly. “Sorry, your honor,” I add quickly. Watch yourself, Will, I remind myself silently, you’ve got Martinez leaning your way, you don’t need to irritate him unnecessarily.
“Okay,” I sum up. “It’s now on the record that you frequent bars alone, you sleep with men you’ve never met before, and you charge them for it. In this state, Miss Gomez, that’s called prostitution.” A beat, almost as an afterthought: “have you ever been convicted for prostitution, Miss Gomez? Convicted for it?”
I glance over at the jury; nobody’s asleep yet.
She’s mute.
“Answer the question, please,” Martinez tells her for the umpteenth time.
“Do I have to?” she whines.
“Yes, you have to,” he says, not bothering to hide his irritation. “You have to answer all the questions you’re asked, not just the ones you want to.”
She crosses and recrosses her legs, shifting in the chair, trying to avoid the inevitable; her foot’s jiggling out of control, her shoe is in danger of falling off.
“The answer, please,” I say.
“Yes.” She finally says in a low whisper.
“How many times?”
“I … I’m not sure.”
&
nbsp; I’m already back from the defense table with her record in my hand.
“Isn’t it true,” I continue, reading from her sheet, “that twice you’ve been convicted for prostitution? And two other times for soliciting?”
“You’re the one reading it,” she says.
“I take that for a yes?”
“If that’s what it says, then yes,” she throws at me in anger. “I said so, okay? You happy now?” Whining like a kid who’s willing herself not to cry.
I look down at her sheet again. My look’s for show, I know what’s on it.
“It says here you’ve also been convicted for public drunkenness.”
“I never was …”
The record’s in her face, my finger on the appropriate line. Her head jerks back as if I’m holding a blowtorch to her.
“You were never what?”
“It wasn’t all that big a deal. Jesus, people get drunk, so what? Big deal. I just mouthed off to the wrong people that’s all.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “I’ve done that a few times myself.”
That comes out before I realize it. Martinez looks at me quizzically; I shake my head, press on.
“Something else comes to mind, Miss Gomez,” I say, almost as an afterthought. “We’ve established that Richard’s car was in the shop on the night in question. It was out of commission. Would you agree?”
“It wasn’t running, yeh, okay. I messed up on that, I forgot is all.”
“That’s okay. But something strikes me then …”
I face the jury as I ask the next question.
“How did the defendants get Richard Bartless up on that mountain? They couldn’t have gotten up there on a motorcycle. He would have fallen off.”
The room goes silent.
“Miss Gomez?” I prompt.
“He … uh … they … uh … they stole a car,” she blurts out.
“They did what?”
“I forgot about that,” she says. “They took one of the cars that was in the motel parking lot and they hot-wired it and that’s how they did it. Got Richard and me up there.”
I look at Martinez, at the jury, at the prosecution table. They’re all staring at her in disbelief.
“Miss Gomez.” Judge Martinez leans down from his perch. To say he’s concerned is the understatement of the month. “How is it that in all your testimony up until now you’ve never mentioned this?”
“’Cause I forgot,” she whines. “They’d raped me, they had a knife on me, they had Richard all tied up, I thought they were going to kill me, I didn’t remember.” She’s bordering on hysteria. “What difference does it make how they got us up there? They did, ain’t that what all’s important?”
“And what happened to this quote stolen car unquote?” I ask her. “It flew away or something?”
Moseby’s fidgeting like crazy. He blew this one, and he knows it.
“They brought it back,” she says. “Left it out back, I guess.”
“Just brought it back? Miss Gomez … I hope you won’t find my saying this the least bit insensitive, but doesn’t this sound a little ridiculous to you as you hear yourself say it?”
“I don’t much remember!” she cries out. “I’d just watched them mutilate and kill a man. I wasn’t paying attention to no goddam car!”
Despite that sympathy-grabbing outburst, by the time I’ve finished my cross and Martinez puts us in recess until the morning, I’m feeling pretty good. She’s a shabby piece of work: a public liar, drunk, and whore. Pretty hard to send four men to Death Row on that kind of testimony.
IT’S BEEN A WONDERFUL day, away from all the bullshit. Claudia and I were in the mountains all day, hiking when we felt like it, examining the high desert wildflowers, Claudia exclaiming on each one’s unique beauty in reverential tones, as if no one had ever seen that kind of beauty in these scrubby flowers before, the newest eye on the world. We caught our dinner in the river and cooked and ate it there, packing out our garbage, leaving as little trace of our coming and departing as we could. The sun was down by the time we drove home, the sky purple-orange across the mountains far to the west, our faces wind-burnt, sun-burnt. We played the Grateful Dead as we slowly headed down the winding roads leading back to town, “Truckin’” and “Uncle John’s Band.”
The kind of day you want to bottle and keep forever.
We’re reading The Yearling. Her small head, the long light-brown hair still wet from washing, rests on my shoulder. As I read I look at her face, her delicate features. My flesh, my blood. I’ll die before I let her go. I’ll die if I have to let her go. I’m already into the long, slow slide into my dying. Living in this moment, I’m rapturous. If I could only stay here.
I finish the chapter. She cuddles closer, not wanting to go to bed, to be apart from me.
“Can I stay up a little longer?” she pleads. “Just fifteen minutes.”
“It’s late already, angel. It’s been a busy day. All that sun, it pulls the energy out of you and you don’t even know it, I really want you to get enough rest.” Her mother had cautioned me that she was on the verge of a cold, to make sure she got plenty of sleep.
“Please?”
“Sure.”
I tell her a story, a piece of the same story I’ve been telling her for years, about a little girl who discovers a secret gate into another world and the friendly gatekeeper who is her guide. A magical world, where even when it’s dark and scary you know that hope is just around the corner, that it will all turn out right in the end.
She goes to sleep in the second bedroom, her room. She keeps some clothes here, some toys, pictures, books. Not very many; in my former house she had a princess’s room. This is more transitory, I don’t want to be here much longer. But it’ll probably be the last home we have together where it isn’t visits on holidays and summers. She’s clutching her old Teddy, her lips faintly sucking in a vestigial throwback to when she sucked her thumb. When she was little; an eternity ago.
I drink a light scotch, look over some papers. I’m too antsy to work; my circuits are over-loaded, burnt-out, anyway it’ll be at least another week before we present our side. I know who their other witnesses are, I know as much as I can about what they’ll testify to.
Claudia’s dreaming, beyond my reach. I want some action.
There’s a teenage girl across the quad who’s baby-sat for me before. Sad little thing, no figure to speak of, bad complexion, with a hangdog personality. The kind of kid who isn’t out bopping with her friends at the mall on Saturday night.
She’s available as long as I’m home by midnight. No problem, I just need a change of scenery; I promise myself I won’t drink anything stronger than a glass of wine or a beer. Just an hour or two around grown-ups that isn’t business-related, eyeballing grown-up ladies with tits and asses and long legs. Nothing more, pure voyeurism, at this point I couldn’t handle even a casual overnight nameless fuck. I’ll come home alone, masturbate if I can’t sleep; close my eyes and think of Mary Lou. It won’t be the first time. Fuck, am I down on myself. Outside the courtroom and the all-consuming intensity of the trial I’m a bundle of raw, exposed nerve endings. I’m not centered, not remotely; being with myself isn’t the kind of company I want to keep, I have the need to be distracted from my loneliness by casual encounters with acquaintances or (better yet) strangers. Talk about wallowing in self-pity; I’m practically drowning in it. And I’m enjoying it way too much.
THE BAR AT LA FONDA isn’t far from my office. They know me there, first-name basis. What with the publicity from the trial I’m a celebrity, my money’s no good tonight. I should be taking advantage and knocking back double Chivases, but I stick to my guns and sip the house Chardonnay.
Half the lawyers in town seem to be passing through, they all want to talk, exchange ideas and rumors. I’m a local hero. Stand near me and you might catch lightning in a bottle.
“Hey, bubba.” Andy’s materialized behind me, quiet as an Indian. Harriet
, his wife, who he met at Columbia, is with him.
“Will,” she says, offering her cheek. I brush it with my lips. She’s good people, a rock. Andy’s always made the right decisions.
“Hi, Harriet. Looking good.” Tall, aristocratic, good bones. She could be a model out of the Tweeds catalogue.
“Batching it tonight?” Andy asks.
“For an hour. I have Claudia for the weekend.”
Nothing I can do about the wine glass in front of me. Andy sees it, discreetly doesn’t comment. He knocks back the rest of his own Scotch on the rocks, signals the bartender for another, pointing his finger at mine.
“No thanks,” I tell him. “Just one tonight.”
“One’s permissible,” he smiles. “The tension you’re under more than one’s permissible.”
Well, hell. Now the son of a bitch is condescending to me. Poor sad Will, the drunk of the legal profession, he isn’t even strong enough to keep a promise to his partner.
“Andy tells me you’re doing a wonderful job,” Harriet says.
“Too early to tell,” I answer modestly.
“He is,” Andy says. “If anybody can walk those turkeys it’ll be you, pard.” He claps me fraternally on the back. He’s had a few, he’s loose.
“They’re innocent, Andy,” I say.
“So what?” he counters. “You think anyone gives a shit? I know you’re going to dazzle your jury, Will, you’re gonna place those bikers in a convent in Burlington, Vermont, at the time of the murder, is it going to matter? Stick a wet finger up in the air, man, can’t you tell which way the wind’s blowing?”
“I don’t need to hear this.”
“It’s reality talking, son.”
“It’s Saturday night, Andy. Let’s let reality off the hook for a couple hours, okay?”
“Shit yes. Hey listen man, you might do it. I’ve seen you in action. You’re the best.” He holds his fresh drink in toast. We clink. White fucking wine.
“Take care,” he says.
“You too.”
“See you around.”
“Yeh, see you.”
They leave. He’s talking low to her, whispering in her ear. She glances back at me. I smile. It hurts.
One more and I’m out of here. I don’t know what I was looking for but this isn’t it.
Against the Wind Page 18