Against the Wind (21 page)

11:30
P.M. WE CROSS-EXAMINE
Rita Gomez tomorrow. We’re going to tear her a new asshole, destroy her credibility: destroy
her
, if we have to. The idea that this little cunt, this whore, cretin, low-life sack of shit might be believable enough to a jury that they will condemn four men to death is an insult, it burns my ass way beyond my normal underdog-lawyer’s righteous indignation.

I feel good: I like being angry and outraged. If I find myself walking through a case, not really giving a shit deep down, I know I’m in trouble and so is my client. When I’m roiling, kicking ass inside my head, translating that to action, then it’s working.

Earlier this evening I spoke to Claudia on the phone. An unsatisfying conversation: she misses her daddy, her anxiety compounded by the impending move, the separation that will last forever. I’ve barely seen her in the past few weeks and I’ll see even less of her until the trial’s over, which could be months. She tells me about school, her friends, her mother, her mother’s upcoming new job, none of it with any enthusiasm. She feels cheated, that we’re at fault. She’s right, of course, certainly by her fights, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it; I’m still guilt-tripped all the same, it sits sour in my stomach like an ulcerating stone.

We can’t talk as long as we want. She extracts a promise from me that we’ll have some time together this weekend, even if only a few hours, maybe over Saturday night. I can feel the hurt in her voice as she hangs up; she is my only blood left in the world and we are fading apart. At times like this I wish I’d never gotten the call from the bikers, that I’d actually taken the leave, forced though it may have been. We could have spent so much time together, my daughter and I, time I’ve never given her. Now I’ll never be able to; no matter what happens later these moments will be gone.

Quarter to one. We finally break it up. We’ve got our shit together, tomorrow’s our turn. Mary Lou manages, without arousing suspicion, to be the last one to go, lingering near the exit, a tacit invitation. Not for tonight, the last thing either of us could or would do now is to make love, especially for the first time. More a connective pass, mutual support. It’s nice. She’s a nice woman; the fear I initially harbored about her, this good-looking aggressive hotshot young female lawyer who wouldn’t have the requisite soft emotions (a ballbuster of the imagination, in other words) isn’t there anymore. It’s amazing how you can come to like someone when they tell you up front they feel that way as well. I always like women better when I’m not afraid they’re going to reject me.

I close her car door for her, watch her drive away, her taste lingering on my mouth. It’s a warm, dry night, starry, a night full of promise I won’t partake of. I stand here, leaning against my own car, wanting to take more out of the world, wanting, in some basic way, new for me, to join with it more. I want some new birthings in my life. I want to be happier than I am.

“
YOU ALLEGE THEY
raped you?”

“Yes.” Fidgeting, squirming. It’s hot, muggy in here.

“All of them?”

Peevishly: “Yes. I already said so a thousand times.”

“Objection.” Moseby is on his feet once again, even as the words are coming out of her mouth.

“On what grounds?” Martinez asks. Maybe for the two hundredth time.

“This topic’s been covered, your honor. Every which way but loose.”

We’re in the third day of cross-examination of Rita Gomez. My partners have all had a whack at her. Now it’s my turn.

“How many times are we going to be interrupted by these irrelevant objections, your honor?” I ask. Moseby keeps trying to stop the flow of our arguments, chicken-shit objections. Martinez is tiring of these tactics, too; his look to Moseby is not friendly.

“Fine, it’s been examined,” I continue, answering Martinez’s anticipatory look, “but certainly not from every angle. The prosecution introduced the allegation of rape, not us. We were happy to try the case in front of us, but it’s been expanded; okay, fine, we can deal with that. But we have to be able to scrutinize all of it as carefully and fully as we think is necessary because the prosecutor—not us, your honor, the prosecution—is basing his case on a chain of cause and effect. We have to be allowed to follow it, wherever it takes us.”

“Agreed. Objection over-ruled. And Mr. Moseby …”

“Yes, sir?”

“Let’s keep it flowing okay?”

“Yes, your honor. Absolutely.”

“Miss Gomez …” I turn back to her. She’s dressed more demurely now, has been since the first day. I found out that Robertson was livid when he saw her, he sand-blasted Moseby’s hide, and then sent his own wife out shopping for her that night. Now she’s attired like a Sunday-school teacher: modest little dark-blue dress with a white collar, low white heels, fake pearls. Much less makeup. Younger-looking, more vulnerable.

“It must have been very painful. All of them raping you as you say. All those times.”

“It hurt like hell. I was bleeding real bad.”

A pencil cracks behind me. Moseby. He exchanges a quick look with Gomez and Sanchez, his investigators who broke the case.

“So you went to the hospital … which hospital was that?”

She starts to say something, bites her lip.

“I …” she stops cold.

“You say you were bleeding terribly.”

“Yeh. It was bad.”

“Did you go to a hospital?”

She bites her lip again, searching the courtroom. I intercept the look: Gomez and Sanchez. Staring straight ahead, cigar-store Indian stoic.

“No,” under her breath.

“Speak up, please,” Martinez tells her.

“No,” she says.

I turn to look at the jury. They’re paying attention.

“Weren’t you afraid? If you were bleeding terribly, didn’t you think you should be examined by a doctor?”

“Of course I was scared. You would be too if it happened to you. But I was more scared of going to a doctor than the bleeding.”

“Why?”

“’Cause a doctor would have told the cops and then they’d have found about the bikers and I was scared they’d come back and kill me if I said anything. That’s what they told me they’d do. I believed them, I knew they would, I seen what they already done to Richard.”

“So you never went to any hospital or had any doctor examine you following this incident?”

“No.”

In this particular instance, I believe her. Regardless of whether or not my clients had killed the victim, they had fucked her and fucked her hard. But there’s no way the cops would’ve taken her someplace where they would have kept a public record. One reason, among others, I’m sure, that the prosecution didn’t add rape to the murder charge. It’s conceivable, of course, that she could have been seen by a private doctor; every lawyer in town knows of doctors who have cozy relationships with the police; but as far as a record goes, there isn’t one. These cops may be crazy or venal, but they aren’t stupid.

“Not even after the police found you?”

She turns away, to the detectives seated behind the prosecution table, her look imploring ‘what should I say?’

“Answer the question, Miss Gomez,” Martinez says, more than a touch of annoyance and anger in his voice.

“No.” She swallows. “Not then. By then I was … getting better.”

“These are good policemen, first-rate men. You must have been all better for them not to have taken you to a hospital as a precaution.”

“Actually I was, yeh. All better.”

“But you did tell them you’d been raped.”

“Yeh. At first I didn’t want to but finally I did.”

“Even though it would bring the wrath of the bikers down on you. You’ve said that yourself, several times.”

“They promised me protection.”

And what else, you pathetic little creature?

“And because I’d been thinking about what they’d done,” she intones. “To Richard. I just didn’t want ’em to go scot-free from that.”

I look at the jury. Is the stench reaching them? I can’t tell.

“Between the time you were allegedly raped and the time the policemen found you,” I continue, “did you have sex with any other man or men?”

“Are you crazy? I could hardly walk.”

“I thought you just said you were all better.”

“I meant from the bleeding. I was still sore.”

Lying little cunt. If my clients hadn’t already admitted to having sex with her I’d be doubting whether anything happened at all.

“So they just accepted your statement that you had been raped by these four men.”

“It’s the truth. Why shouldn’t they?”

One way or the other, the prosecution’s in trouble. If she wasn’t examined, and there’s no evidence that she was, then Gomez and Sanchez fucked up royally. And if she was, they’re suppressing evidence. They stink to high hell, I’m itching to flush it out.

“Let’s go back to the bar where you first met the accused,” I say. “You got there what, six, seven o’clock?”

“Around then, yeh. It was still plenty of light out.”

“You went with the victim? Richard Bartless?”

Rolling her eyes. “Yeh, I went with Richard.”

“In his car?”

“Yeh.”

We’ve established that already. I’m just reconfirming.

“Which one of you drove?”

“Him. My license got suspended.”

“Oh? Drunk driving?”

“No.” Sassy, practically sticking her tongue out at me. “I didn’t pay some parking tickets so it got suspended.”

“But you got it back since then …”

“Yeh …”

“With the help of the police? The same officers you gave your statement to?”

“Objection!” Moseby’s on the balls of his Thom McAns.

“Withdrawn, your honor,” I say quickly before Martinez can sustain it. Back to her: “He drove?”

“How many times you gonna ask me the same stuff?”

I stare at her, as if something just came to me. I cross to the evidence table, extract a document, walk back to the stand.

“Take a look at this if you would, Miss Gomez,” I ask her, handing it to her. “Carefully. Read everything on it.”

“Out loud?”

I shake my head. “That’s not necessary, unless you want to.”

“I don’t like to. I’m not so good a reader.”

“To yourself is fine. Take your time.”

She reads it slowly, her lips moving word by word. The courtroom is quiet, the air hanging on us, another garment. She finishes, holds it out to me. I take it from her, on the move towards the jury box.

“What is it you just looked at, Miss Gomez? What I just showed you?”

“Some kind of bill?” Perplexed, tentative.

“Exactly. Very good.” I turn to the jury, exchanging a smile with them, a friendly nonthreatening smile. Then I face her, leaning on the far end of the jury box.

“Know what it’s for?” I ask.

“I’m … I’m not sure.”

“Isn’t it for a car?” I ask her, “a car repair?”

“That’s what I thought it was, yeh.”

“Actually, it’s for Richard Bartless’s car. A blue Honda,” I add, looking at it. Back to her: “Is that what he drove? A blue Honda?”

“Yeh, that’s it,” she answers fast, eager to show she knows something. “Had a ton of black smoke coming out the exhaust.”

“He was stopped because of that, wasn’t he? Stopped by officer …” here I read: “Dan Kline of the Highway Patrol.”

She giggles. “Yeh, he got stopped all right. Pissed him off royally.”

“It says here that Officer Kline told Richard he couldn’t drive it anymore until he got it fixed. That he had to get it fixed and bring in the paperwork in three days or the car would be impounded.”

“What do you think got Richard so pissed off?”

“But he took it in?”

“Yeh, he took it in to some shop near the motel.”

“Ricky’s Auto,” I say, reading it from the paper in my hand.

“I guess. Yeh, I guess that was it.”

“And you co-signed for the repair, didn’t you? That is your signature next to Richard Bartless’s, isn’t it?”

“He didn’t live in New Mexico and he didn’t have no credit cards or anything, so I had to sign. It didn’t mean I had to pay or nothing.”

I take the document from her, pass it to Martinez.

“At this time we’d like to introduce this into evidence as defendants’ exhibit 35, your honor.”

Martinez looks at it, nods, hands it to the bailiff, who walks it over to Moseby. Frank glances at it, perfunctorily at first, then studies it carefully, showing it to his deputy, then taking it back and reading it again. He frowns, looking at his witness, then behind him to his investigators. He stares at the piece of paper for a long moment before reluctantly handing it back.

“No objection,” he states in a flat voice.

I suppress a smile; I surprised him, you don’t like to be surprised by your own witnesses. The bailiff enters it as defendants’ evidence number thirty-five. I regain it from him, walk back to the stand.

“You were just helping out,” I say to the witness. After a pause: “How long was it in? Couple of days?”

“At least. They had to get some part from Farmington.”

“So what’d he do in the meantime? Rent a car?”

She titters.

“You serious, man? He couldn’t afford no rental car.”

“How did he get around then?”

“Walked. Hitched rides.”

“You too? When you were with him?”

“Had to. My license was suspended, you already asked me that.”

“Right,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

Moseby’s head is in his hand. He has to hear this, but he doesn’t want to see it, like it won’t hurt so bad. He’s glad Robertson’s not in court today.

“Interesting, these dates,” I continue, looking at the paper. “They seem to overlap when you and Richard Bartless drove to the bar, and met my clients, and so on.”

“Huh?” She doesn’t get it.

“You’ve testified you and Richard drove to the bar together. You’ve testified to that several times already.”

“Yeh?”

“That Richard had a bad encounter with my client and the others, which made him drive off, leaving you stranded. You did say that, didn’t you?”

“Yeh.” She’s squirming, it’s hot despite the air-conditioning, she’s not used to pantyhose, I have a feeling she’s itching in a place you can’t scratch in public.