by David Ellis
I remember my cell phone ringing, and I remember taking it out of my pocket and throwing it into the ravine.
Various snippets follow: Arguing with the mortician about the amount of makeup on Talia’s face as she lay in rest. The wake for my wife and daughter, surrounded by hordes of conservatively attired people, members of my law firm whom I didn’t even know, still being a relative newcomer, and deciding that I had no interest in ever knowing them. Paul Riley, in that laid-back style of his, mentioning offhand the acquittal of Senator Hector Almundo on all counts, all thanks to me, and telling me to take all the time I needed before returning to work. Paul cautioning me not to rush to judgment, after I told him that I’d never be returning to Shaker, Riley and Flemming at all. Talia’s father, indirectly reminding me, more than once, that I was supposed to be driving Talia and Emily Jane the night they died. Thinking that I should be crying when I wasn’t, and shouldn’t when I was. Being tired, exceptionally tired.
In hindsight, I was probably a ripe target for them, for everything that happened. After that phone call from the state trooper, after burying my wife and daughter, I had nothing left that I cared about in this world. I had nothing left to lose.
That, more than anything, is why I did what I did. And that, more than anything, is why they wanted me.
ADVICE OF COUNSEL
Six Months Later: December 2007
10
I STOMPED MY SHOES OUTSIDE THE DOOR OF MY OFFICE to shake off some accumulated snow. The frosted glass on the door read, in the appropriate order, SHAUNA L. TASKER, ESQ. and JASON KOLARICH, ESQ. “Hey,” I said as I passed the administrative assistant whom we share, Marie, who has put her archaeology degree to fine use.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked. I didn’t feel the need to respond to her commentary on my attendance record. If this law office were a school, I’d have been expelled long ago for truancy. It’s not that I don’t like practicing law; I just don’t like clients very much. They are needy and ungrateful.
“Why don’t you go dig under your desk for some Incan deposition transcript or something,” I suggested.
After I had spent a few months in a funk, Shauna basically dragged me to this firm and demanded that I rekindle my romance with the legal profession. I have no idea how to be a solo practitioner. Since law school, I’d been a prosecutor—where the cases come to you, thanks to a reliable slew of criminal activity in our fair city—and then a junior partner at Shaker, Riley, where partners like Paul Riley reeled in the clientele and I just did the work. The pattern here is I got to focus on the work without having to stroke some idiot for business and tell him how honored I was to represent him.
Shauna, bless her heart, has thrown a few cases my way, and I have benefited from a few cases courtesy of our upset victory in United States v. Hector Almundo. Most of them are criminal cases, which is fine as long as you get the retainer up front, but few of them are particularly interesting. The heaters—murders or white-collar cases—typically go to larger firms where the lawyer has gray hair.
“Hey,” I said, popping my head into Shauna’s office. She had her feet up on her desk, reviewing some transactional document. She does courtroom work like me, but she has wisely broadened her practice to handle basically anything else—real estate transactions, start-ups, trusts and wills, any number of commercial transactions. I refuse to do any of that. Put me in a courtroom, in the battle, or leave me alone. She is also active in three different bar associations, which allows her to “network,” meaning she has to socialize with other attorneys, which is something else I detest with an intensity I normally reserve for brutal world dictators, or the Dixie Chicks.
So, to summarize: I don’t like clients. I don’t like transactional work. I don’t like small-caliber criminal cases. And I don’t like talking to other lawyers. I’m hoping to create a niche in the market for people under indictment for serious felonies who don’t require that I converse with them.
“Twice in one week,” Shauna observed upon my arrival. “Wow.”
“I’m looking to set a personal best,” I explained.
“That’s the spirit. Just don’t overextend yourself.”
The attitudes on these women. I started back to my office but then popped back in, wondering what was different about Shauna today. It was the glasses, black horn-rims instead of her usual contacts, and her blond hair was pulled back. “The naughty-librarian look,” I noted.
Shauna paused, to show her disapproval, then glared at me over her glasses. “Charming. Very mature.” Shauna was easy on the eyes, as they say, more for the sum of her parts than any particular detail—smartly dressed, fit, intelligent—but like most professional women, she didn’t like to be thought of as a slab of meat by the knuckle-dragging males in the profession. The reason she’d left her former law firm, in fact, was because the senior partner had certain ideas about the employer-employee relationship that were, let’s say, inconsistent with Title VII.
Shauna and I had a few go-rounds in college ourselves, but we quickly recognized that animal sex and compatibility were two different things, and we managed to stay buds afterward. We really didn’t have much of a choice back then, because there was a whole gaggle of us packed into a house off-campus, forcing people to double up on rooms, and somehow Shauna had drawn the short straw and gotten me as a roommate. That was after I got kicked off the football team for punching out the team captain, and I was lucky not to have been expelled from the university altogether. Had the team captain pressed charges, I would have been toast, but I think he found the whole thing embarrassing, considering he was an all-conference offensive lineman who was flattened by someone a hundred pounds and four inches his lesser.
My office would appear, to the untrained eye, to be abandoned. I had a couch that my brother had spotted me in one corner, shelving with law books, and a desk with nothing on it but a computer. I didn’t like coming here, because it reminded me that someday soon, I was going to run out of money from my days at the silk-stocking law firm, and I’d have to get off my ass and restart my career. It was hard to imagine doing it here, but I didn’t have a better idea. For several months after the bottom fell out, I’d received weekly calls from Paul Riley or someone else from the firm, asking me back when I was ready. But I couldn’t go back there. And I couldn’t stomach the idea, at this point, of answering to anyone else. As surprising as it may seem, given my overall sunny outlook on life, I don’t like being told what to do, and I don’t like having to be nice to people.
To summarize: I don’t want to work for anyone else, or for myself.
My intercom buzzed at about ten o’clock. “Someone to see you,” said Marie.
I hadn’t expected anyone. “Do you want to give me a hint?” I asked. “We could play twenty questions.”
“No, I’m happy to tell you, if you’d like.”
Always the attitude.
Marie said, “Her name is Esmeralda Ramirez.”
11
I HADN’T THOUGHT OF ERNESTO RAMIREZ FOR SIX months. After Talia’s and Emily’s deaths, I had dropped out of society. The trial finished without me. I hadn’t followed up with Ernesto and, presumably, neither had anyone else.
That was kind of funny, as I thought about it, because I had spent the last six months blaming myself for not being the driver of that SUV that night, allowing my sleep-deprived wife to navigate a winding road in the rain, but I had never included the reason for my absence—Ernesto—in the equation.
It came flooding back now, images from that time, mostly the haunting ones by the roadside, the identification of the bodies, the phone call to Talia’s parents, but also Ernesto—his ambiguous expression when we first interviewed him about the Wozniak murder; the fear in his voice later on, as I homed in on him.
And most of all, the panic in his eyes when I’d slapped him with a subpoena, forcing him to testify to whatever knowledge he possessed. I wondered, for no particular reason, if Ernesto had shown up in court that f
ollowing week. I was bluffing more than anything. The subpoena was real, no question, but I had threatened to put him on the stand and question him all day long, when in fact I wouldn’t have done so. I wouldn’t have flown blind in front of the jury. I hadn’t even given notice of the subpoena to the federal prosecutors yet. I was just trying to force Ernesto into a corner.
Esmeralda Ramirez walked in behind Marie. She was a tiny woman with long black hair pulled back, a youthful face save for prominent worry lines dancing along her forehead, and what appeared to me to be a very modest demeanor, gripping her purse with both hands in front and only briefly making eye contact as she walked in. I took her hand and she squeezed mine softly.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said. “Do you know who I am?” She was from Mexico, I recalled, and the accent confirmed it, but she spoke English comfortably.
“I know your husband.”
She watched me a second. Her expression changed a bit. “You know him?”
“A bit, yes.” I didn’t understand her inquiry.
“My husband is dead,” she said.
“Oh, well, I’m very sor—”
I didn’t, I couldn’t finish that sentence. Dread filled my chest. Ernesto Ramirez was dead, and here was his widow in my office. And she wasn’t here, I gathered, to have me administer his estate.
“You didn’t know,” she said.
I shook my head, no.
“But you were the lawyer, weren’t you?”
The lawyer. I put my hands flat on my desk. “Six months ago, I was trying to get some information about a case from him, yes. Is that what you’re referring to?”
“I don’t know what I’m referring to.” A trace of frustration had crept into her voice. “My husband, his way—he wouldn’t talk about something like that with me. It would be his job to worry about things like that, not mine. I knew only a little bit.”
“Tell me how he died, Mrs. Ramirez.”
“He was shot to death.” Her dark eyes trailed off.
I steeled myself, not wanting to ask the next question. I felt like I knew what the answer was going to be before I asked. “When was he shot?”
“June twenty-second. A Friday.”
I closed my eyes. June twenty-second was the day I served him with the subpoena. June twenty-second was the day I waited in my office for him to call, rather than traveling with Talia and Emily to my in-laws. June twenty-second was when life, as I knew it, ended.
“Does that mean anything to you?” she asked me.
“Maybe,” I said, but it seemed like a whole lot more than maybe. “Did they catch the shooter?”
“No. He was killed in Liberty Park. That’s in La Zona. Do you know what that is?”
I nodded. And I could see where the police would have a hard time making a case. “They figure it was a gang shooting,” I said. “But in the ‘zone,’ that gang could be the Cannibals, could be the Lords. Could be random gang violence, could be intentional because your husband was trying to steal away their recruits from gang life. No way of knowing, and next to impossible to get anyone to admit they saw anything. Is that about how they explained it?”
Her eyebrows rose, almost imperceptibly. “Pretty much exactly.”
“But you think they’re wrong.”
She was quiet for a while. No, of course she hadn’t accepted the cops’ conclusion. That’s in part because no one ever really accepts an unsolved murder of a loved one. The crime becomes all they have left of their spouse or child, whatever, and knowing that your loved one was murdered, but that nobody will pay for it, is like walking around with a missing limb.
But the other reason Esmeralda Ramirez wasn’t buying the cops’ theory was, in a word, me.
“I knew there was something wrong,” she told me. “I didn’t know what. He mentioned a lawyer. I didn’t understand. I asked him if he was in trouble with the law or something. He told me, ‘Not in the way you think.’ He talked about a lawyer but said it wasn’t a lawyer for him. It was just a lawyer who wanted to know something. A lawyer who was persistent.”
I didn’t want to interrupt her, but when it was clear she was done, I said, “And he was reluctant to talk to that lawyer. To me.”
She nodded. Her eyes trailed up and she started to speak, then stopped.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Ramirez. Ask away.”
“Call me Essie.” She thought for a moment. “You talked to him and then left him alone for a while. And then, after a time, you came back. Is that right?”
It took me a moment, but I realized that she was correct. I’d worked on Ernesto pretty hard about a month out from trial. Then I gave him some space, a few weeks, and called him, at which time he told me to go jump in a lake. I let it lie for months before returning near the end of the trial to make a final, full-court press.
She said, “Whatever it was you did worked, I think. At first, I mean.”
“When I first approached him.”
“Yes. He wouldn’t say much to me. He was so protective, Ernesto. So protective.” Her eyes welled up but she kept her chin high and her voice strong. She cleared her throat. “I think you convinced him to talk about what he knew.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Apparently not. I remember he came home one day—he was very upset.”
“Scared?”
She angled her head. “Upset more than scared. Kind of—decepcionó. I don’t—”
“Disappointed,” I translated.
She nodded. “Thank you. He said to me, ‘La verdad no importa.’ The truth doesn’t matter. He said it wasn’t worth prison. And then he said he didn’t want to discuss it with me or with the lawyer or with anyone. That was it. He never brought it up until a few days before—before the—”
Before I returned, accosting him and hounding him.
“And what did he say then?”
She shook her head. “Little. Just that the lawyer was back, and he didn’t want to tell him anything. He couldn’t,” she corrected herself. “He said he couldn’t tell you.”
I put a hand over my face. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “I tried to talk about this to the police after he was killed, but there was nothing to tell them. They kept asking for details and what did I have? I didn’t even have your name.”
It raised a question that hadn’t yet occurred to me. “How did you get my name?”
She nodded and reached into her purse. “It’s funny, how long it took me even to clean out his drawers. You don’t want to do those things because it’s so—final, I guess.”
I understood her completely. Talia’s clothes still hung in our closet. Emily’s room was exactly as it was the day she left with her mother for the trip to see Grandma and Grandpa.
“I found this, of all places, as a bookmark in a book he was reading.” She produced a business card, and even across the desk I recognized its style. It was a business card bearing the name of Shaker, Riley and Flemming. She handed it to me. “Your card. Turn it over.”
I did. On the back of my card, in black ink, a small diagram had been written:ABW → PCB → IG → CC?
“Do you know what that means?” she asked.
I put the card down and blew out a sigh. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want a mystery. I didn’t want to go back. A door that I’d been trying to close was now opening, a crack at a time, only it wasn’t sunlight pouring through but an ugly, lethal darkness. I didn’t want to think about Ernesto Ramirez because it made me think of my wife and daughter.
“ABW is the name of Adalbert Wozniak’s company,” I managed. “I have no idea what the rest of this means.”
“Adal—? Who’s that? Was he a friend of my husband’s?”
“Not particularly, according to your husband.” I gave her the Reader’s Digest on Bert Wozniak, including that I had been investigating his murder and thought that her husband, Ernesto, had information on that subject. “But I never knew what he knew,” I said.
“So we know nothing,” sh
e said, bitter and disappointed. Another dead end.
Her composure was on the verge of crumbling. She was a proud woman, I could see. Proud like Ernesto as I remembered him. They made a good couple. Ernesto had beaten some odds and made a decent life for himself and Essie and their two kids. He’d come upon some incriminating information, undoubtedly, something dangerous, and he wouldn’t have been the first person who would choose, in that instance, to keep his mouth shut about it. He would have been thinking about his family.
But Essie Ramirez was wrong. I knew two things.
I knew that I got her husband murdered.
And I knew that I would find the person who killed him.
12
I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE, PER SE, BECAUSE THAT WOULD be giving more credit for a higher being than I have been willing to concede of late. I grew up a God-fearing Catholic but with a healthy dose of skepticism that was allayed only briefly, when I met Talia and we had little Emily Jane. But if I don’t believe in a predetermined order of events, I do believe there is some higher order in play, that we are one gigantic chemistry experiment, with various actions causing reactions that we often chalk up to coincidence.
Was it divine intervention that former state senator Hector Almundo called me later that same day, after I spoke with Essie Ramirez? Probably more like happenstance. It’s not like he hadn’t reached out to me before. He’d stopped by the funeral back in June. He’d called after the acquittal, though my cell phone was swimming with the fishes, so to speak, at the bottom of a ravine off of County Road 11. He’d even sent me a note after I rejoined the legal community at my own shop.
He’d been facing the possibility of a life sentence, after all, had he been convicted on all counts. Instead, he walked out a free man, however bruised his political career had become. He’d been forced to abandon his run for attorney general and he didn’t bother running for reelection to the senate, having faced a formidable challenge in the Democratic primary while he awaited trial.