Against the Wind (54 page)

Slowly it comes, inch by inch, detail upon detail. By the time Ray finishes telling his story, I’m convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that he’s the killer I’ve been looking for.

What’s worrisome is Hardiman’s complete control over him. It could be a real problem if and when I ever get Scott Ray into a courtroom. He is no more acting out of his own free will than Rita Gomez was when she gave her original testimony. If Robertson picks up on it, and he’s no dummy, he’ll see this for what it is, it could blow us all out of the water. I’m going to be doing some fancy dancing to keep Hardiman buried in the background.

But that’s not the issue. Scott Ray is guilty. His story is utterly convincing; he knows too many things only the actual killer could know.

Sheriff Jenkins puts me in touch with a local lawyer. He seems like a good man, small-town, but knows his stuff well enough. I explain the situation to him, and after his initial shock he agrees to represent Scott Ray so far as taking his testimony goes.

They meet alone for an hour. Hardiman wants to sit in, invoking clergy-parishioner privilege (I’m surprised at his knowledge of the law), but the attorney and I refuse. I’m not sure of their relationship, Hardiman and Ray, but I don’t want to take a chance on anything’s being thrown out on a technicality.

Hardiman and I cool our heels in Jenkins’s office, down the street. After fidgeting for several minutes, Hardiman turns to me.

“I don’t want to lose this boy,” he says to me, his voice anguished. “He’s a soul worth saving now.”

I nod but don’t answer. I don’t know how much of him there’ll be left to save when this is all over.

The lawyer formally tape-records Scott Ray’s testimony. It takes most of the day, by the time the transcribing is done. He locks the tape in his safe, gives me two cleanly-typed, notarized copies.

Hardiman and Ray escort me to the Charleston airport.

“Good luck,” Hardiman offers, shaking my hand.

“Thank you. For all your help.” I mean it sincerely.

“It was the only thing to do,” he says.

Scott Ray shakes my hand, too. He seems fine, unworried, not a crease in his brow.

“Thank you for coming,” he says. “I’m going to be able to get straight with Jesus now, because of Reverend Hardiman and you.”

I nod. He’s probably crazy, certainly his brain has gone through some major hoops, but I know he’s speaking with complete sincerity.

“I’m glad,” I say. “And my clients will be, too. Very glad.”

As I walk across the tarmac to my airplane, Hardiman calls out to me.

“He won’t run,” he shouts. “He’ll be here when you need him. I’ll see to that personally.”

I nod, wave as I’m climbing the steps into the plane.

I take my seat and look out the window. They’re still watching.

I LEFT IN WINTER;
I come home to spring. It’s not like in most parts of the country, where trees are suddenly green, flowers in bloom. It’s more a feeling, partly a smell, warm spring high-desert smell, warmth in the air.

There’s a surprise waiting for me right out of the box as I walk off the airplane in Albuquerque. Mary Lou’s there—that’s expected, I’d called ahead and told her my flight. It’s nice to see her; she looks good, even across the blacktop, I’d forgotten what a fine-looking woman she is. A week out of town and I forget something that important.

Claudia’s the unexpected one. She’s standing next to Mary Lou, her head rising above Mary Lou’s shoulder, she wasn’t that tall the last time I saw her. It hits me that she’s almost a teen-ager; it’s a jolt. A middle-aged father and his teen-age daughter. And what’s she doing here, it isn’t school break yet.

“Mom quit her job,” Claudia announces before the kiss.

I look at Mary Lou. She shrugs. Claudia hands me a sealed envelope.

“She took off,” Claudia continues, dancing around me as we walk to the car. “So I’m going to live with you for the rest of the school year. Isn’t that great?”

Yes and no. For me, yes. For Patricia, I don’t think so.

Mary Lou drives, Claudia in front with her, the two of them listening to Elvis Costello on the tape deck as we drive north in Mary Lou’s Acura. I sprawl across the back seat, digesting Patricia’s letter.

Patricia hadn’t, in the end, been able to hearken to my call. She’d resigned. The firm gave her a great parachute, considering the short amount of time she’d been with them: three months at full pay (a blatant payoff, some of which, I’m sure, is coming directly out of Joby Breckenridge’s pocket), and had gotten her another job, relatively similar, at least as far as pay is concerned, at another Seattle firm, starting when her sabbatical ends. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a mercy fuck—smart female lawyers don’t grow on trees. She won’t have to move again, and she unexpectedly has the sudden wherewithal and security to take her first grown-up vacation in years. She’s in Paris, them on to Rome, Milan, parts north and south. Open-ended, but she’s gone for awhile, so Claudia’s with me, from now until the end of the school year. Everybody’s happy, at least temporarily.

(All this is contained in the letter. It’s more formal than I would have expected, as if she feels guilty about it—all of it, the quitting, the sudden taking off: it all happened in a week’s time, dumping, her words, Claudia on me, the works.)

It’s amazing how lives can change so much in a few days. Hers and mine both. I guess she’s happy—she’s not confrontational, she’s always run from a fight, the daily game-playing would have devoured her, her nerve ends are too raw. Still, I wish she had stayed and faced it down. For her, for her daughter.

The three of us have dinner together, then Mary Lou drops us off at my place. She misses me, I can feel it even though she didn’t say anything, and she’s dying to know about the trip, every single detail. I give her the highlights, enough to satisfy her curiosity. She’d love to hear it all, right now, but she won’t intrude on Claudia and me tonight. I kind of wait to see if Claudia will include her in, but she doesn’t. She wants me to herself, she’s been with Mary Lou two days. Patricia had detoured to Santa Fe on her way to foreign locales, and finding that I was gone, had brazenly asked Mary Lou ‘since her father’s gone and I didn’t know, would you mind?’ To her credit Mary Lou had said ‘I’ll be glad to,’ even though she was under no obligation, she did it out of love, so they spent two nice days together, my daughter and current woman; but now, for Claudia, this is at the heart of the treat of being back here: her and daddy, a twosome.

Mary Lou and I kiss goodnight. There’s real hunger on both sides. We’ll have breakfast tomorrow, after I drop Claudia at school, where she’ll be reunited with her old friends, which thrills her no end. I missed Mary Lou; maybe it took some juvenile lusting after another woman to make that come clear.

My daughter is more like me than she is her mother. This is not revelatory, it happens in the best of families, I’ve known it since she was an infant, practically. It’s more logical in our case than most, because Patricia and I separated when Claudia was very young, and she’s played the other role in the relationship. There have been times when she’s had to be too much of an adult for Patricia, too grownup. With me, a man, she was always a little girl. There’s less stress. She doesn’t know this, but it’s part of why it’s always been easy and comforting for her to be with me.

On the other hand, even though she lived close by until a year ago, I didn’t have to do the daily day-to-day. I got more cream and less skim than Patricia; but also less gut stuff, the making of the person. It’s a price you pay for divorce that’s immeasurable. She will always, at heart, be Patricia’s child.

After we polish off our pizza she wants to talk. About her mother, what happened from her child/woman point of view, about herself and what’s going on there. Gently but firmly, I stop her. She’s been too much burdened with adulthood, she thinks she likes it, the responsibility, but I don’t. We’ll talk; we’ll talk long hours about it; but tonight I want her to be eleven.

I read aloud to her before putting her to bed. We get lost in books, we’re both essentially loners and books are easier than the world sometimes; certainly more alive.

She wants to read something new, something I particularly like that she would like, also, something more ‘grown-up,’ so I find my Lattimore translation of
The Odyssey
, which I’ve had since college, dogeared and underlined, start with Book I: “
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel. Many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of, many the pains he suffered in his spirit on the wide sea, struggling for his own life and the homecoming of his companions …
”

We get through half a Book before she fades. I mark the place, put the book on her bed-table. We’ll resume tomorrow. Maybe she’ll dream tonight of sailing, of water, this land-locked child of mine. Perhaps she’ll dream of her mother, who looks every day upon water.

I kiss her goodnight and close the door, and sit in the darkness with two fingers of Johnnie Walker Black and my thoughts.

I am searching for the perfect woman, and the perfect woman doesn’t exist, except in my fucked-up childish desires. I blew it with Patricia, granted it was both of us, but I was the lead player, we might still be together if I had worked harder at it. Strike that, it’s bullshit. We wouldn’t have stayed together, but we should have worked harder at it anyway, I didn’t know shit about staying together; ‘it isn’t working?
Adiós
.’ Holly, of course, was the disaster of all time, I don’t blame myself for that, but what was I doing with her in the first place? I fucked around on both of them, I fucked around in-between, finally a terrific woman comes into my life, practically throws herself at me, and the first piece of exotic pussy that crosses my line of vision, a born-again semi-virgin no less, stirs my loins. I’m going to be making love to Mary Lou tomorrow night, she’s going to do me better than Delilah did Samson, and I’d bet healthy money Evelyn Decatur will slip into my stream-of-consciousness. ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ They should engrave it on my tombstone. And of course when I do get it (which is more than I should, I wanted Mary Lou much more, didn’t I?), that
it,
whatever that is, isn’t what I wanted. Or thought I wanted.

By and large, I think therapy’s a crock of shit, all that inward narcissism, but I should go into it. I need to know why I’m such a bridge-burner, why I trash what’s most important to me. I did it to two wives, to the firm; what’s next, Mary Lou, my new practice, Claudia?

I keep thinking about how Patricia’s not such a good role model for Claudia, negatively comparing her to other women. Yet what right do I have to talk, to compare anyone to anything? What the hell kind of model am I as a man for my daughter? I’m a womanizer and a boozer; talk about being a role model, I’m a prize loser in that arena. And she has to know, she’s old enough now, she’s seen me lose jobs and relationships.

I have to change. For her sake if nothing else. I can’t let her see her old man go down the tubes; forget success in the marketplace, that’s shallow, that I can do in my sleep, it’s the waking world I’m inadequate in. I have to show her that there’s beauty and honesty in men.

Two fingers begets two fingers begets two fingers, before you know it you’ve killed the better part of a fine bottle; I resolve to put Johnnie-boy away so as not to pour that second drink. I want to sleep without a buzz. I want to lie awake, if that’s what it comes to, clear-headed. So if the thoughts come, they’ll be real.

But I am a weak-willed motherfucker, that I am. I manage to hold the line at two, small ones, mere sips, really, boon companions against the night.

Shit, I’ve become good at deceiving myself. A fucking master. I don’t even bother with pretense anymore.

And of course, when I do put the bottle away, I’m full of petty self-disgust. Scott Ray is the real thing, I should be flying, instead of dying in little shitty bits, not even heroically, but with the lamest of whimpers.

“I
N THE EVIDENTIARY HEARING
for a new trial in the case of
The State of New Mexico versus Jensen, Paterno, Hicks, and Kowalski,
this court is now in session, Judge Louis Martinez presiding. All rise.”

Finally. After all the twists and turns and blind alleys and disappointments, after having door after door slammed in our face, after being told it would never happen, we’re here, back in the same courtroom with the same players we were with for the trial, a trial that feels like it took place a long, long time ago. Which it did, well over two years since that night Robertson first called, a damn long time, time enough for me to have blown off my firm, gotten a divorce, seen my child move away, and lost the most important case of my life. But what goes around comes around, with luck this time for the better, because this is it, I have no illusions, there will be appeals for years, but if I can’t do it this time, if I don’t spring these men here and now, with the new witnesses and information I have, I’ll never do it, and they will die in the penitentiary by the hand of the state.

“This is not a trial,” Martinez says, instructing us. “We are not here to judge innocence or guilt.”

I look over at Robertson, who’s presiding at the prosecutor’s table. He’s neatly pressed in one of his good courtroom pinstripes, his hair freshly trimmed, a week-end tan giving him a healthy, robust air. Moseby is with him. His attire is not as sartorially elegant.

Robertson had accosted me outside in the corridor a few minutes before the hearing started.

“Enjoy it while you can,” he’d warned me. “I’m not going to be content with just beating you this time, Will. I’m going to humiliate you.”

I’d kept my cool. I won’t rise to his bait; our side will conduct our case and not worry about his. He doesn’t have one, doesn’t need one. He can sit back and take pot-shots at our witnesses. As far as he’s concerned we’re fishing without bait, one last desperate attempt to pull one out of the bag.

“In a proceeding such as this,” Martinez is saying, “the burden of proof is not on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That happens at the trial phase. We’re here today because new evidence has come to light that may make us reexamine our findings at that trial; evidence that, if it is deemed sufficiently important, would compel us to grant a new trial.”