Obstruction of Justice

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  Sarah was a single mother now, just like Nina. Though her children were older, they were just as needy, as if some crucial developmental phase still hadn’t taken place. There was no heavier responsibility than being the sole parent. Nina could attest to that.

  She parked behind the house. The grounds were quiet, the drapes drawn. No one answered the bell. She even tried the front door, but it was locked. She wouldn’t have a chance to talk to Sarah. Across the sweep of lawn Lake Tahoe gleamed in the early afternoon. The martini shaker sat on its tray by the empty chairs. Nina sat down in one of them and watched the sailboats.

  Sarah had said, "It’s too late." But if any of us comes across a drowning family, Nina thought, we have to do something about it even if we feel inadequate, even if the family has set out to drown itself. She and Bob had come close to drowning a few times. And always, someone had helped them, as she wanted to help Sarah and the twins.

  The lake was opaque, unknown, endlessly receptive, a live entity like the forest or the sky. Collier had said he hoped there existed some inhuman Justice that took care of the big problems human justice couldn’t handle. If there was, Justice would be like the other natural forces, indifferent, unbiased, uncaring.

  Nina thought, I don’t want to be the instrument of that kind of Justice. Human justice is flawed, but there’s room for mercy in it.

  A paper boat floated by, already soggy, made by some kid farther down the beach. She set her troubled thoughts adrift on it, and watched them sink slowly into the secret depths.

  12

  PAUL TOOK THE INTERSTATE BACK FROM L.A., UP the long, dusty valley that was the spine of California. He had left Bright’s house after dark on Thursday, but the new speed limit for most of the way was seventy miles per hour, so he flew through the night. Bryan had been right—the Cat attracted the attention of even the jaded truckers, who flashed their lights, giving him the thumbs-up sign as he roared by. He parked the Cat in the lot behind the lab of Ginger Hirabayashi, his lab expert in Sacramento, by two in the morning, not a bad time for four hundred miles of dodging eighteen-wheelers.

  That this car had probably caused Anna Meade’s death did not bother him. A car by itself was nothing more than a tool. The car and driver formed another entity altogether.

  A short taxi ride took him to the Sacramento airport, where he found a car rental desk still open, but all the sleepy-eyed rep had to offer was a Geo Metro. Paul putt-putted up into the mountains, reduced to pulling over after several sports utility vehicles thundered up behind to chomp bites out of his tiny tail. He made the last forty miles of winding uphill driving bearable by swigging coffee and listening to a couple of football commentators talk about the upcoming season on AM radio.

  At about five in the morning, dead beat, he reached the Caesars parking lot. Giddy with fatigue, he rode up the elevator to his room and, kicking off his shoes, collapsed on the neat blue quilt of his bed, conscious only long enough to make the sweet-smelling pillows into a feathery nest for his aching head.

  The first thing Paul did on Friday morning was call his office in Carmel. The town had gone downhill since his departure. Several clients in ongoing cases wanted his personal juggling act back right away. He made a few calls and stalled them, maneuvering substitutes into place temporarily, but knew he’d have to get back by Sunday morning if he wanted to keep all the balls in the air.

  He called Hallowell at the DA’s office and left a message that he was back and would call again later. Then he called Ginger in Sacramento to goose her about the car.

  All business, Ginger dispensed with a basic hello, reporting that the car had been repainted from white to black. That was easy, but she hadn’t gotten much farther. Paul pinned her down to a time for a callback on Saturday.

  He took the elevator down to the first floor of the building, into the carefully controlled pandemonium of the casino, where he couldn’t resist pausing to make a twenty-dollar cash bet at one of the blackjack tables. Although it was nine A.M. on a beautiful day, busload after busload of tourists was checking out the action.

  A morose dealer who had substituted motor oil for shampoo flicked out the cards, Paul’s first card facedown, the dealer’s card up and showing a five. Paul’s second card, dealt faceup, was a six. He lifted the corner of his hole card and found a seven. Thirteen. According to the rules he had learned from a canny card-counter named Al Otis, he should stand against the dealer’s five and pray the dealer would bust.

  But thirteen was such a crummy hand. He rapped the edge of his cards in front of him to indicate he wanted another card, and damned if the dealer didn’t toss him a three. Now he had sixteen, the rottenest hand in the game of Twenty-one. The other players took their cards and busted, and now the dealer was back to Paul, the top card of the pack live in his hand.

  He should definitely stand. There was still the chance the dealer would draw over twenty-one and bust. Paul bit his lip, his eyes trying to X-ray the top card in the deck, hovering in front him in the dealer’s hand.

  "Hit me," Paul said. "It’s only a game."

  And the card floated out on wings of fire, flipped in the air, and settled on the table in front of Paul.

  "A six. Bust," said the dealer. "Sorry." He gathered up the cards. Paul skulked off to his car, his wallet lighter, his mood darker. He drove west along the bottom of Lake Tahoe toward the Y where Sierra Motors was located.

  "Mr. El-Barouki is no longer with us," said the gum-snapping African American salesman who came to greet him. "But don’t worry. I can do everything for you that he did, backward and in high heels." With a smile, he pulled a white handkerchief from his suit jacket and buffed an invisible mark on a nearby car.

  "Where did he go? I talked to him yesterday."

  "You’re not going to believe this. He won the lottery!"

  "You’re right. I don’t believe it."

  "Not the big prize, he said, but enough."

  "Enough for what?"

  "To go back home."

  "And where would home be?"

  "Egypt."

  Paul whistled. "Let’s see. He won the lottery, so he packed up the wife and the kids and the whole house and caught an overseas flight all in the same day? No doubt his brother went too?"

  The gum snapped furiously as the salesman nodded. "They left for San Francisco last night. I think they were going to catch the plane to Cairo this morning. So fill me in. What kind of car were you talking about with Munir?"

  "Not one you could help me with." "I’ve got some great deals today. Here’s a ’95 Olds with cruise, overdrive, antilocks—you name it. Coupla minor dents to make it a good deal. I’ve got the keys right here in my pocket, let’s take the boy out for a ride— Hey, don’t walk out on me, man! Gimme a break!"

  Royally pissed, Paul drove to the address of the El-Barouki auto junkyard.

  A vacant lot.

  The phone book listed two addresses for El-Barouki, both shacks in the Bijou area of town. At both, a scatter of household goods lay hastily abandoned along the street. FREE said a sign propped against a ripped red couch. Paul thought about dredging around in the overflowing cans of refuse, but what was he going to find? An address in Cairo? He sat down on the sagging porch swing at the second shack and thought.

  Only two things could have happened. El-Barouki had run down Anna Meade himself, and was so extraordinarily greedy he had put Paul on to the car for two hundred fifty bucks. Then he had come to his senses and fled....

  Scratch that. Nobody was that greedy. Okay, then, El-Barouki went straight from Paul to the guy who brought him the Catalina and blackmailed the living shit out of him. Or her.

  He liked this better. The seller had access to enough money to enable two families to leave the country without scrambling for cheaper fourteen-day-advance-purchase reserved tickets. What else?

  El-Barouki couldn’t have made this deal on the phone and gotten the money so quickly, and he hadn’t had time to leave the mountains to make the deal between
talking to Paul and taking a long hike. That meant the seller might still be in Tahoe, but where?

  The weight of his body strained the springs of the porch swing as he rocked. He creaked back and forth, like an old man taking a rest after a long day working his fields. Two little kids on bikes whizzed by the yard hollering, their faces a blur of gaping teeth. A pinecone dropped onto the roof with a noise like a shot, then rolled gently the long way down, landing with a thud in the dirt nearby. The wind whistled through the trash.

  He looked up the street. A dead end, like the one he’d come to.

  Marvin Gates, director of the Tahoe division of the El Dorado County Probation Department, proved to be a soft-spoken, portly bureaucrat with green eyes, freckles, and soft reddish hair that traveled down his jaw into muttonchops. He led Paul through a series of offices crowded with clients and caseworkers to an austere office in the back. Educational posters about AIDS and birth control and a map of Lake Tahoe, the All-Year Playland, had been tacked some time ago over fading green paint. The cost-cutting drabness overall had its compensation: a big window opening up to one of Tahoe’s million-dollar views.

  "I miss her," he said. "Anna was special. Her clients felt protective of her, and she went to bat for them. I was sick when I heard the news."

  "I’m trying to find out if the hit-and-run might have been deliberate," Paul said. "Probation officers can’t always be helpful. They’re law enforcement, when you get down to it."

  "Yes. Sometimes probation or parole has to be revoked. "

  "The defendant figures somebody has to pay, and it might as well be the son-of-a-gun probation officer who turned him in."

  "You got that absolutely right. We get threatened a lot. Sometimes we get killed."

  "How long have you been doing this?" Paul asked.

  "Twenty-four years at this one gig. I’m out of here next year."

  "What are you going to do then?"

  "Move off the Hill. Sleep like a baby all night long, without the bad dreams. Slow down, like my doctor says. Make it up to my wife."

  "Sounds like a plan."

  "Three hundred forty-three days left and counting, baby."

  "Did Anna ever mention any particular trouble with a client, especially around the time she died?"

  "Ah, that’s a hard one. All her clients were particular to her, and they all had trouble."

  "Any threats at the time?"

  "She made friends out of these people. If anything, that’s what got her killed."

  "How do you mean?"

  "I don’t know what I mean. I just know it’s safer to keep your distance. Most of the people who come through here are repeat offenders. It’s a shame, but that’s the way it is. Anna was never a fool. She didn’t trust them, and she was good at spotting the liars and con men. But she let them get too close."

  "You found her naive?"

  "Not really. Just... too willing to listen." He laughed. "People you’d be scared to give the time of day to, she gave all her time to, you know? She’d have them in there for hours sometimes, while the work piled up and the rest of us tore out our hair. She refused to give anyone short shrift. If they wanted her attention, they got it."

  "That last day, she had eight appointments," Paul said. "Anything significant happen that day that you can recall?"

  "Only one unusual thing, like I told the police. One of her parolees came in without an appointment during the lunch hour and she shut the door and sat with him for at least an hour. He appeared intoxicated when he came in, and the receptionist tried to send him home, but Anna came out on her way to lunch and he caught her. That meeting seemed significant after we learned about the parolee killing himself later on, about three o’clock in the afternoon. Anna was hit about three hours after that, I understand."

  "Right. Ruben Lauria, that was the name of the parolee, wasn’t it? I saw it in your statement."

  "Mmm-hmm. So they were talking for an hour or so. The receptionist checked on them—I was at a training session in Palm Springs, so I didn’t hear all this until later—and Lauria looked harmless, so she left them alone. Anna left a little early, about four. Next day Toni, the receptionist, called to tell me Anna was in a coma, not expected to live. I came right back."

  "When did you find out Lauria had committed suicide a few hours before Anna was hit?"

  "The next day. His wife—Lucy, her name is—called to tell Anna. I took the call."

  "Two people talk to each other at noon, and they’re both dead by sunset," Paul said.

  "It’s pretty clear to me that Lauria was considering suicide and Anna tried to talk him out of it. I sometimes think—could she have walked into the path of the car because she was distracted, thinking about his problems? In a sense, she would have died because of him. I never told Collier this, because I didn’t want to raise the question that she might have been a little... well, not watching where she was going."

  Paul said, "I just can’t understand why there was no record at all of the meeting with Lauria, no notes, no doodles."

  "Pure stupidity on our part. Somebody probably threw her notes into the trash. We could have recovered them if we’d been thinking. But you see, we were all so shocked, and we thought it was an accident. The trash went out."

  "Okay. You have the list of people she was seeing for me?"

  "The ones she was scheduled to see that day, and the rest, in two sections. Right here." He handed Paul a typed list.

  For the next hour they went over the list, name by name. A few days after Anna’s death, Gates had made extensive notes on them all. He wouldn’t show Paul any paperwork, including his notes, but considered much of the information public record. By the end, Gates had an eye glued to his watch.

  "I really have to go. I promised to drive my wife over to Grass Valley this afternoon to see her mother."

  "I’m almost done. Let me just go over one or two things that stuck in my mind here."

  Gates really had to go, his drumming fingers informed Paul.

  "Who else could have wanted her dead?"

  "I went through all her files, her notes, the phone messages, for the cops. Nothing out of the ordinary. Her replacement is an ex-marine who transferred in as a trainee from guard duty at Soledad. Off duty, he uses words like coddle and scum. He’s the one who’ll lead the department into the twenty-first century, because he likes it here. He’ll outlast all of us."

  "How about Anna and the other staff here? Any problems?"

  "Nothing. Certainly nothing to make somebody run her down. She got along with everybody."

  "Okay. Boyfriends, then. An attractive girl like her, her husband always at work. Two-hour lunches, long phone calls..."

  Gates was shaking his head vigorously. "She kept the wedding picture right on her desk. She talked about how much they wanted a family. She talked to her husband every day. I believe they were very close."

  "I do believe you’re right," Paul said, putting away his notebook.

  "She was a rare and radiant maiden," Gates said unexpectedly, with a sorrowful note in his voice.

  "Darkness there forevermore," said Paul. "It’s a damn shame."

  "Wish I knew something more to tell you." Gates got up, consulted his watch again, and shook Paul’s hand.

  "So it goes. Sorry to keep you for so long. Blame me, if it does you any good. Mind if I make a call before I go?"

  Gates let Paul make the call from his desk phone, then locked up the office behind him, scurrying off to his car and his wife.

  Paul drove away too, wondering why Ruben Lauria killed himself. He felt frustrated. He felt as if he were being pushed around, but by some impersonal force, led by a nose-ring like a balky donkey from murky connection to obscure lead. He kept trying to do the straightforward police work that cracked cases like this, but nothing came of those efforts; the breaks happened when he stared at a painting or a gun-crazy Egyptian salesman appeared at his door. He might as well consult the oracle at Delphi and get the thing over with.


  Would Mrs. Lauria prove to be the oracle?

  13

  WITH AN HOUR TO KILL, PAUL DROVE UP TO HEAVENLY. The Gunbarrel, a fearsome mogul-run in winter, looked like a peaceful fire trail up the mountain. He parked the van in full sun on the street that ran partway up, facing the lakeview far away, then pushed his seat back and dozed off.

  The car phone rang.

  "Paul? Are you there?" Nina.

  "Lemme think about that."

  "I was just sitting here in the hall at court, and it struck me that you probably are at loose ends tonight. Bob’s not due home until Sunday, and..."

  She was asking him, in her oblique female way, to have dinner with her. This immersed Paul in a brief internal struggle. Any male on the make could see Hallowell was blowing his advantage by not paying attention to her. If she spent the evening with Paul, she might spend the night with him, as she had on a memorable evening a few months before, and he wanted that in a way.

  But he thought Nina was pulling an old maneuver, even if it was unconscious. She was trying to pull him back because she’d noticed he had moved away. And if he surrendered, he would just be old Paul who came running when she didn’t have anything else going. He didn’t feel like seeing her on her terms anymore.

  Besides, he had made a date, right after talking to El-Barouki, with the woman who didn’t date. So he told Nina he was busy, sorry, and there was a great scraping sound as the tables turned. Nina put on an I-was-just-being-nice voice and said she had to go, the bailiff was calling her, and Paul said good luck, from one colleague and friend to another. He felt mean complacence, even if he was cutting off his nose to spite his face.

  He picked up Highway 89 where the lake road turned north at the Y. The stores and restaurants thinned into the forest. Bicyclists paced him, but there were few cars on the road. Summer was about over, and Tahoe was emptying out. When the snow began to fall they would all be back, but for now Paul had the first flaming yellows of the quaking aspen along the road to himself.