by Ed Gaffney
I had been introduced to Liana about six months earlier by a friend of mine from the Payson Center Health Club named Joe Hextall. Joe had met Liana in the early days of his recovery from a stroke, and had only great things to say about her.
It was hard to believe that I’d actually shot some baskets with Joe only two days before. The wiry African American’s recovery was coming along great, but his left side was still much weaker than his right. He was only thirty-five, though, and his prognosis was excellent.
“Why don’t you overplay me?” he had asked, limping to the right as he always did. “You know I can’t go left. Your sorry game needs all the help it can get.”
“How about I take care of the defense, LeBron?” I replied. Joe looked a little like LeBron James. And the only thing bigger than his mouth was his heart. “The minute I overplay you right is the minute you suddenly discover you’re all better, go past me on the left, and I’m standing there with my pants around my ankles.”
“And how is that different from any other day?” he said, clanging an ugly heave off the front rim.
I remember standing there, watching Liana leave. I was thinking about an overloaded answering machine. I was thinking about defending a mass murderer. And I was wondering when I would next be able to enjoy the simple pleasures of playing basketball and pretending to be insulted by my friend Joe.
I spent the afternoon listening to phone messages from increasingly desperate journalists, looking at damning videotape of my client meeting with the Denver suicide bomber, and reading police reports and witness statements, vainly hoping to prepare myself for the next day. When I got thoroughly disheartened, I went outside and split some logs for Henley’s woodstove.
After I showered and caught a quick nap, I drove over to Cliff and Iris’s house and hung out with their dog, Wilbur, until they got home from work. We lived only twenty minutes away from each other, and I didn’t want to use the phone. Until I figured out who I could trust, I had decided not to trust anyone. Cliff and Iris were surprised to see me parked in their driveway, but quickly understood what I needed, and agreed to come over later for dinner.
I had met the couple through Henley. He had prosecuted a case seven years ago against a pair of racist brothers who had taken exception to the fact that Cliff and Iris, who had been married only a few weeks earlier, had moved into their neighborhood. The essence of the problem was not only that Cliff was a full-blooded Navajo, but also that Iris’s mother was Mexican, and her father was Jewish.
Henley took particular pleasure in going after people who were cruel, and what these idiots had done to Cliff and Iris certainly fit the bill. For weeks, the two newlyweds had endured battered mailboxes, pig’s blood splattered on their front door, and even a burning cross on their lawn.
They knew the jerks who lived across the street were doing the damage—a pair of brothers whose oversized pickup truck was liberally festooned with Confederate flag stickers and obnoxious slogans. The only two things more cluttered and filthy than the inside of that truck were the brothers’ souls.
But Cliff and Iris couldn’t prove anything. Until finally, the bastards went too far.
For their three-month anniversary, Cliff bought Iris a playful and friendly puppy named Wilbur that looked like a mix between a black Lab and a German shepherd. Less than a week after they’d gotten the dog, Iris returned home to find a small window in the kitchen door broken, the door unlocked, and the puppy missing. For hours that night, she and Cliff drove around the neighborhood, searching for the lost pet.
They gave up hope a little after dark and returned home, only to find little Wilbur cowering on their front stoop, tied by some rope to the handle of the front door.
The poor animal had obviously been abused—his ear was damaged, and he was limping.
But most shocking was the swastika that had been crudely shaved into the fur on his back.
Cliff was incensed, and wanted to storm across the street and call the cowards out, but Iris, who had been using their Polaroid camera to take pictures of the damage to the door and the injuries to Wilbur, stopped him. Because every time she aimed the camera at Wilbur, the dog flinched and tried to run away.
He was terrified of the camera. The creeps that had taken him and hurt him had obviously taken pictures of him, as well.
The couple waited until nearly dawn, when their evil neighbors were undoubtedly asleep or passed out from alcohol, and then they walked across the street to where the truck was parked. They shone a flashlight through the passenger-side window, and sure enough, right there on the car floor were pictures of one of the brothers holding Wilbur while the other shaved his back.
Cliff and Iris called the cops. Thanks to a restraining order and some quick work on Henley’s part, the brothers found themselves in jail. Henley had really taken a liking to the young couple, and had introduced them to me, and we’d been friends ever since. We often got together for dinner and a game of hearts afterwards. My father “held” his cards in a stand that I had scavenged from an old board game, and played them with his good hand. Cliff was a terrific poker player—ruthlessly bluffing his way to win after win. But at hearts, Henley was just as good.
On this second night of the Gomez trial, however, Henley went to bed right after dinner. When I returned from saying good night, I found that Iris and Cliff had already gone into my bedroom to begin the counter-surveillance portion of the evening.
Iris was a small woman with light skin and dark features. Her energy and intensity belied the underlying sweetness to which Cliff was drawn immediately when they met in college. Although Iris really wanted to be a nationally famous political reporter, the one time her blog was mentioned on the Channel 7 local news was as close as she got. To earn a living, she worked in Mesa as a computer technician, saving the lives of countless college students whose hard drives crashed, or whose PCs were overloaded with software spies and viruses picked up from surfing the Web.
Although they shared the most tender of hearts, the images Cliff and Iris presented to the outside world were in sharp contrast. While Iris favored cargo pants and boots, Cliff dressed like he was the spokesman for Navajo Gentlemen’s Quarterly. He was a healthy, handsome real estate lawyer, and he wore the uniform of the young professional with aplomb. Yet his business persona was not a false one—he fully incorporated his laid-back, peaceful aura into his stylish image. It was a very successful combination.
That night, Iris had brought a bag of electronic gizmos along, and was now fishing through it. Assuming the worst, Cliff and I stood there with a pad and pen, trying to have a “normal,” non-suspicious-sounding conversation, while communicating our real thoughts in writing.
As Iris laid out some power cords on the bed, Cliff said to me, “Nice work getting the Lizard Queen off the Gomez case. You rock.”
“Yeah,” I stammered. “I guess I was wondering if you could, uh, you know, help me with more motions. You know. For the trial.”
Cliff rolled his eyes and wrote, Dude. Not good banter much.
It was ironic. I was normally comfortable speaking in front of a courtroom full of strangers, yet the presence of a tiny microphone in my own home made me feel intensely self-conscious. Cliff, on the other hand, was fine, despite the fact that he was so bad with crowds that he almost passed out when he and Iris said thank you to the fifty guests they had invited to their fifth-wedding-anniversary party.
By now, Iris had taken a palm-sized device out of her bag. It looked like a television remote control with a display, and she pointed it at the panic button that Landry had given to me earlier. Cliff said, “Work isn’t too bad these days. I might be able to do some research.” A series of red lights all came on at once on Iris’s device. She took the pad, and gesturing toward the panic button, she wrote, This is definitely a bug.
“Great,” I said out loud, as the three of us moved back into the living room. On his way to bed, my father had put a Delphonics CD on the stereo. “La-la Means I Love
You” was playing. If you didn’t like seventies and eighties soul, you were going to have a hard time hanging with Henley.
“Want some more dessert?” I offered. But I sure wasn’t feeling hungry. The bathroom attacker hadn’t lied. The trooper had given me a bug. What the hell was going on?
“No thanks,” Cliff said. “I’m pretty full. How about you, Iris?”
But before Iris had a chance to answer, I found myself pointing at the device that she still held in her hand as she walked through the doorway into the living room.
“Whoa,” I said, involuntarily.
Cliff looked over at me, and said, “What?”
I pointed to the flashing red lights, which apparently indicated either that the machine was faulty, or that I had a bug in my living room. “I thought I saw something. Outside,” I added hastily, in hopes that I didn’t sound as ridiculously stilted as I felt.
By now, Iris was directing the device around the room, trying to isolate where the signal was coming from. She pointed it at the television, and then, as she got closer, at the cable box. She looked down at the device, and then up at me. “I’d like a little more coffee,” she said, nodding vigorously. It looked like our cable company’s trial upgrade had also come with a free listening device.
Suddenly the bathroom assailant was looking a little less like a crackpot. For several reasons, that did not comfort me.
Cliff, Iris, and I sat down and shared some small talk while scribbling notes back and forth on the pad. According to Iris, there was no way I’d be able to disable either listening device without alerting the people who’d placed them to the fact that I knew about them.
I also needed to assume that my phone lines were tapped. Iris swept the device over the phones in the kitchen, living room, and my bedroom and found nothing, but there was no telling whether they were being monitored from a remote location through the phone lines themselves.
As of that moment, I was certain that some potentially dangerous entity was eavesdropping on everything that was being said in my house.
The first thing I had to do was decide what I was going to do about the panic button. I didn’t have any reason to believe that Landry would suspect I knew it was a bug, so theoretically, I could leave it home, and if he ever checked up on me, I could tell him I forgot it.
But I wasn’t real confident in my ability to deceive the cop. I still didn’t believe everything Beta the mugger had told me, but I now knew that Landry was the kind of law enforcement officer who didn’t really care whether he broke the law himself. I feared that type of person might be better able to sniff out a lie than I would be able to tell one. Especially since the stakes were considerably more serious than my elementary school permanent record.
Before I went to bed I dug around in my closet for my old cell phone and plugged it into its charger. I had gotten a new one some time ago, because the old one couldn’t maintain power for more than ten or twenty minutes of use. But I had held on to it, intending to give it to Henley for emergencies. Back then I was under the impression that Henley’s recovery would be more robust than it turned out to be.
The next morning, I put the panic button in my briefcase. I thought it was a particularly astute compromise. If Landry approached me, I could show him I had it. But on the off chance that I needed to say something that I didn’t want overheard, I could walk away from the bag before saying it. Iris had told me the range of the bug was no more than ten feet.
Next, I needed to get word to Amy before she and Erica came over to the house again. So on my way to work, I stopped at the convenience store along the way for some coffee, and before I got back into the car and within range of Landry’s listening device, I called my sister-in-law on my old cell phone. If the state troopers and the cable guy were bugging me, I had no doubt that my current cell phone and my e-mail accounts were being watched, as well.
Amy was obviously running a little late, and every other thing she said was directed at Erica as they prepared to leave for school. But when I told her all that had happened the day before, and what Iris had found that night, Amy stopped talking to Erica, and in a quiet, tense voice, asked, “Are you telling me this is the end of the world?”
ELEVEN
AMY’S QUESTION was not as paranoid as it might have first appeared. She was merely referring to a code we had set up after we had seen a city disappear before our eyes.
The Hurricane Katrina crisis occurred when Erica was three years old. About a week after the floods wiped out New Orleans and ended or destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, Amy and I set up our own private emergency procedure. We agreed that if either of us ever became aware of a situation that required immediate escape to safety, we would get a message to the other that the world was coming to an end. We would then both take off for a pre-designated rendezvous, where we would make specific plans in order to fend for ourselves.
And if we lost contact in the middle of a crisis, we were to call Cliff or Iris and communicate through them. They were constantly calling or text-messaging each other anyway, and they’d make sure Amy and I stayed in touch.
Even as I write this, I realize that Amy’s reaction to the Gulf Coast disaster sounds a little extreme. But as the mother of a small child, Amy believed it was the only responsible thing to do. After all, from her perspective, the towers that fell on September 11 were only the first of a series of lethal dominoes that, for several years, had been regularly and brutally crashing down on her little family.
We didn’t actually lose loved ones in the attacks on that cursed September day. Our personal tragedies began some months later, when death came to Dale on a distant battlefield.
My brother was a member of the Arizona National Guard when he and Amy were married on February 13, 2001. Two days after the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, on his seven-month wedding anniversary, Dale was called to active service. In October, he was assigned to an army base in California, and in November, he was on his way to Afghanistan.
By then, Amy was six months pregnant. That made Dale’s deployment even more anxiety-filled for all of us. Amy moved in with my parents until Dale’s expected return, to save money for when the baby came, and to feel a little less lonely.
Eight weeks later, when Amy was a month from giving birth, a phone call delivered devastating news: Dale was missing in action after a series of explosions destroyed his unit’s position. I can still see Amy standing there that Saturday in my parents’ living room, belly swollen, shoulders shaking, tears streaming from her reddened eyes. The memory breaks my heart. My father kept telling her that she needed to stay hopeful and strong, because Dale might just be lost, or injured. But somehow Amy knew that her husband was gone.
And she was right.
I happened to be visiting on the miserable Sunday morning when the two men wearing dress military uniforms rang my parents’ doorbell.
Dale had died as a hero in a place with a name more suited for a children’s bedtime story than for the demise of a young father-to-be: Tora Bora.
The only direct experience I have ever had with the military was on September 12, 2001, when I was told by a very rigid recruitment officer that my hearing loss made me ineligible for armed service. So I wasn’t prepared, in the least, for all of the ceremony attached to my fallen brother and his funeral. Amy suddenly became the centerpiece of a series of rituals played out over the following days: the official visit from the two servicemen who notified Amy of Dale’s death, the return of the flag-draped coffin containing those few fragments of Dale’s body that were recovered—for some reason, I cannot stand to use the words “his remains”—the memorial service and then the funeral itself, with full military honors: twenty-one-gun salute, taps, presentation of the flag, the whole tragic business.
I found myself resenting the pomp. It seemed designed to distract me from the real issue—the loss of my big brother. The kid who cheerfully slept on the floor next to my bed when I was five
because I was scared that there was a monster that was crawling around on its belly in my room. The golden boy with the flashy smile who taught me how to skateboard, and how to throw a curveball, and what to say to a pretty girl. The guy who never missed one of my high-school baseball games, no matter how bad we were. The only person I ever told about my crush on an up-and-coming country singer named Shania Twain.
My captain, my personal hero, the brother I blindly followed with the certainty only a younger sibling can understand, had just disappeared from the planet.
I didn’t want to remember Dale with pageantry. I didn’t want to have to remember him at all.
And then a month later, like a final chord to Dale’s personal symphony, I received his last correspondence. It began, “Greetings Captain Rootbeard. If you are reading this, then I must be dead.” The salutation refers to a Halloween persona I chose at the age of five, thanks to some misinformation I had been given regarding a famous pirate whose name I mistakenly understood to be Blue Beer. I carry the letter with me to this day.
But almost as if it were mocking us, life went on as if Dale’s death didn’t matter. Dad kept prosecuting cases, I kept appealing them, and Mom kept going to Lamaze classes with Amy.
Much sooner than seemed possible, Erica was born. Predictably, Amy suffered terrible postpartum depression. There were days when she could barely get out of bed. My parents and I did what we could to help—we all took turns caring for Erica as Amy got back on her feet.
But of course Amy wasn’t the only one suffering. I had never seen a person deteriorate faster than my mother did after she buried Dale. Try as she might, she never got over the death of her oldest. Her smile just never recovered its spark, even at the birth of her granddaughter. It was as if the only thing she could see when she looked at Erica was Dale’s empty chair at the dining room table.
And before Erica had even reached her first birthday, my mother developed pneumonia. From what I could see, she never even fought the illness. No doctors would connect my mother’s demise to Dale’s, but I didn’t need them to. Anyone who knew the woman knew that grief killed her.