Above the Law (28 page)

My uneasiness was about need—her emotional need. The musk of it was in the air, nothing you could define or give an identity to, something ethereal out there, like air, unseeable, untouchable, but you know it’s there, you breathe it in and out. I don’t like the word
vibe,
it seems sixties antiquated, but that’s what came to mind—there was a vibe between us.

The problem was that it was one way, from her to me. Under any circumstances that wouldn’t have been good; in these, it wasn’t only bad, it was dangerous. She was physically horny, I’m sure, but that wasn’t the main ingredient. She was looking for warmth, closeness, and validation. And there was no one around to give it to her. Her husband was dead, a failure as a lawyer, non-father of children, almost everything. All her eggs had been in their little basket, and none of them had hatched. They were long gone now, withered and cracked and blown away in pieces. But her essence, her feminine drive, that was still alive.

She hadn’t overtly said or done anything to confirm that my instincts were true, of course. She wasn’t that foolish, or bold. But I knew they were. Which was why I was keeping her at arm’s length, professionally as well as personally.

And yet here I was. I didn’t know why I was doing this, except that she needed me. She needed my friendship, and I couldn’t refuse it. Not back when she had phoned me out of the blue and asked me to come see her, not when she had inveigled me into her scheme to investigate this mess, not when she had done just about everything in her power to be a part of my life, if only tangentially, and not when she had come at me sexually; subconsciously, maybe, I didn’t know, but it was there.

She was needy, and I was guilt-ridden. I had been up and down, but I had a great life now, and she had a crummy one. We had started out evenly, more or less. In fact, she’d had the advantage then, she was from a privileged background, she was a brighter star, she was associated with the brightest star, and together she and Dennis had the potential and clout to go further than any of her classmates. Instead, I, and most of the others in our class, had surged ahead of her; so that now, when she had this chance to regain some ground, I felt obligated to help her. To say no to her, to dash any slim hope she had of recapturing the dream, would have been an act of cruelty.

So I told her what we were doing. The interviews with Agent Kim and Lopez the informant and Curtis Jackson the rival drug kingpin, the concern among members of the team that this could be more complex and unsettling than any of us had initially thought.

By the time I was finished reciting my litany, we had finished dinner and were having what had become our ritual postprandial cognac in the living room. This time our bodies weren’t touching, not even close. It was as if she sensed my uneasiness at that kind of proximity and was being careful not to violate my space.

“Do you still think there’s a possibility someone other than a DEA agent could have shot Juarez?” she finally asked.

“I don’t see how, but there must be. I’m worried,” I told her, finally admitting it to myself.

“About what?”

“A conspiracy, what else?”

She nodded. “Yes,” she agreed softly. “It’s what I’ve always thought, Luke. Or at least felt was a possibility.”

I sighed; I was tired. “I’m feeling the prosecutor blues. I haven’t felt them in a long time—I haven’t been a prosecutor in a long time, it’s a hard switch to throw, it’s like you have to flip your brain one hundred eighty degrees. You do defense lawyering, you develop a mentality against the system. Now I’m the system again, and I’m investigating the system.”

“But if someone in the system commits a crime, haven’t they forfeited their position in the system?”

The angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin argument was spinning inside my head: If the good guys do something bad while fighting the bad guys, is that at the same level of badness as the bad guys doing something bad? Is crime all black-and-white, or are there gray areas? Absolutist or situational?

“Of course. But if I wind up indicting a DEA agent for killing a man who everyone in the world knows was an evil bastard who deserved to die, I’m not going to be dancing in the streets.”

“But what if it
was
premeditated? If there’s something conspiratorial going down, then isn’t that as bad as anything Juarez or any other criminal could do?”

She leaned over and touched me, her hand on mine. There was no sexual energy in the touch; it was one of a friend reassuring another friend. “You got into this because of those rogue cops you killed out in the desert, isn’t that right?”

I nodded, my mind flashing back, the fear, rage, the blood pumping so hard I thought my heart would burst out of my chest.

“It’s a good thing you did kill them. Because if you hadn’t,
you’d
be dead,” she declared bluntly. “Which supersedes any anxiety about going after rogues. So if this turns out like that, then isn’t prosecuting and convicting the bastards the right thing to do? The only thing to do?”

What could I say? She was right. And she understood how I felt, trying to balance the tightrope-walking nexus of objective justice and subjective righteous retribution.

I hadn’t been looking at her for real. I’d only seen the superficial trappings, some false front in my mind, not the person behind it. I had been thinking that the emotional protection was one-sided, me toward her. But it wasn’t.

“You’ve got a great head on you for seeing through the bullshit, Nora.” I almost felt like apologizing, but I didn’t want to get into emotion, there was already too much of that. “I shouldn’t try to fight that, because of some legalistic protocol. You definitely can help me.”

“Thank you.” Another quick touch, fingers to back of hand. “We can help each other, Luke. Whatever justice there is in this, we can find it, together.”

She held out her hand. I shook it.

“Partners,” she said. “To the end.”

“Yes,” I agreed with relief. “Partners.”

W
AYNE BEARPAW’S MOTHER, LOUISA,
was one of the elders of their tribe, the White Horse Nation. The term
nation
is a generous characterization of the tribe—there are less than five hundred members, for over a century there haven’t been more than that, and they have never occupied more territory than they do at present, a thousand square miles situated in the most rugged, desolate part of the county.

Unlike her son and most of his generation, Louisa had never moved off the reservation. She’d traveled to various parts of the country, mostly on tribal business; she also enjoyed her vacations, primarily to Vegas and Reno, where she was an aficionado of the one-armed bandits and crap tables. But she had always made her home on the barren piece of land where she was born.

This was not to say Louisa was content with her life. About to turn sixty (she could easily pass for fifty; her long hair was still black, her figure strong and tight), she had fought long and hard for a better life for the members of her tribe. Better housing, better schooling, better medical care, programs to combat alcoholism and drug abuse, more jobs. She had been successful in all these endeavors, but to a degree that fell short of what she wanted, conditions that would make life on the reservation comfortable and enjoyable, rather than the past and still-current situation, which was having to work your ass off just to maintain the basics of life.

More than anything, they needed jobs, industry on the reservation, so the young people wouldn’t have to leave it to have a decent life. Some money was available, from mineral-rights royalties, but that wasn’t work. Having money’s only half the struggle—jobs provide value, self-worth. She wanted jobs for her people, full employment within their own boundaries. Only then would they feel complete.

The infrastructure, as on most poor reservations, was derelict. The roads were terrible, even by Muir County standards; the public buildings, such as schools, fire stations, and so forth, were old firetraps. Reservation housing was crummy, but at least the structures had plumbing, electricity, natural gas, the basic amenities that have long been taken for granted in the rest of the country but hadn’t been available on many reservations, including this one, until recently.

Many of these improvements had come about as a result of Louisa’s tireless lobbying for them at the county, state, and most importantly, federal level. There’s money out there and she works hard to get as much as she can for the tribe. Sylvan Furness, the regional BIA director in Sacramento, has her phone number on his speed-dial, that’s how much they talk.

Which was where she was on a midweek spring morning, sitting in Furness’s office with three other tribal leaders, two men and another woman, Mary Redfeather. They had driven down the night before in Louisa’s Dodge Caravan, bunking with a member of the tribe who works here in the state capital as a field rep for State Fish & Game. Sometimes they stay in a cheap motel, but if they can save money, they do. The tribe’s paying for this trip, which means it’s their own money they’re spending. Dinner had been takeout from Taco Bell and a six-pack of Tecate.

“Hey, you guys,” Furness said, greeting the delegation in his outer office. He hadn’t kept them waiting for more than a few minutes; Louisa gets on his case if she has to cool her heels. He’s known her a long time now. Staying in her good graces makes life a lot easier and less complicated. Louisa has no qualms about firing off a fax or an E-mail to Washington, to the congressional committees on Native American affairs, to anyone she thinks can help.

“Hey, Sylvan,” Louisa greeted him back, speaking for the group. She’s a forceful speaker, she usually takes charge. “You got any good coffee around here?”

“How many?” he asked.

They all raised their hands. He took a twenty out of his wallet, handed it to his secretary.

“Get four coffees from Starbucks and some croissants,” he instructed her. “Come on in.” He waved his guests into his office.

A short while later, coffee and pastries in hand, they sat around his conference table. A letter on tribal stationery was in front of Furness.

“So,” Furness said, initiating the conversation, “you want to buy that property adjacent to yours.” He thumbed through the letter. “The one that belonged to that drug syndicate.”

“We’d rather you outright gave it to us,” Louisa said with a smile. Her compatriots smiled along with her. She tried the coffee—tasty. It’s what she drinks at home, brewed up in a Krups coffeemaker. None of this supermarket-house-brand cowboy coffee crap for her, like her mother used to drink.

“What a stellar idea,” Furness responded jovially. “Would you like us to throw in the California Water Project along with it?”

He liked bantering with Louisa. She was sharp and had a good sense of humor. For an older woman she was damn attractive, too. She was wearing a Mexican-style blouse and a skirt that showed off her bottom nicely, had her hair coiled up in a braid. Some turquoise and silver jewelry around her neck and wrists. None of the dumb squaw about this woman, she could make it anywhere.

“That’s state,” she joked back. “You don’t control that. But that property we want is federal. That’s yours.”

“Technically,” he explained, “the Justice Department’s taken receivership of it, since the DEA confiscated it. Interior isn’t involved. Seizing property isn’t allowable for us. Wish it was.”

She made a brushing-aside motion with her hand. “It all gets thrown into the same big pot. But anyways, you’re right, we know no one’s going to give it away, even though it doesn’t have much value, being isolated up there in Muir County, which ain’t nothin’ but rednecks and redskins. We want to buy it, like our letter says.”

“Where’re you going to come up with the money, Louisa? The location might not be as great as some others, but it’s a formidable piece of property. Some rich hunting type might want to buy it for a lodge type of scene.”

“The money’s for us to worry about. As far as some rich Anglo buying it, I don’t see that. All the good hunting surrounding it is our property, reservation land. We’re the logical party to buy it, Sylvan. You’ve got to agree with that.”

He bobbed his head neutrally, but didn’t say anything that could be construed as a commitment or even an endorsement.

Louisa pressed on. “What we want now is to know is this something we can talk about seriously? ’Cause we’re serious, and I can’t see anyone else being serious about it. Like I said, it’s too far and gone.”

Furness thought for a moment.

“It’s a white elephant. Sylvan,” Louisa continued. “Every month it sits out there unused, it costs the taxpayers money in upkeep. If it was me back there in Washington in charge of handling it, I’d want to get it off my hands as soon as possible. To the first serious bidder,” she emphasized. “I’m sure the bean counters would agree with me.” She made a mental note to fax her congressman when she got back to her office.

“Well…I’ll have to find out what kind of price we’re putting on it.
They’re
putting on it,” Furness amended quickly.

“Okay,” she said, stealing a glance to the rest of the delegation. The tribe had gotten its foot in the door. That was the hardest part. Now it would be a question of negotiation.

“So getting back to my question,” he said. “How is your tribe going to come up with the money to buy it? White elephant or not, it’s pricey.”

“Float a BIA loan, is what we’ll try first. Cheap money.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs offered low-interest loans to tribes for capital investments. The more self-sufficient a tribe was, the less money the government had to shell out to keep them afloat. The tenet “the end of welfare as we know it” applied to reservations as well as the inner cities.

“You’d have to have a commercial use for it,” Furness reminded them. “If it’s so isolated up there as you claim—and I agree with you—how can you make money off it?”