Above the Law (32 page)

“Make it two,” Louis said. He tried a bite of his fish—delicious, sautéed in garlic and oil, just the way he liked it. “We’re going to eliminate until there’s nothing left to eliminate and we’ll be left with a cloud of smoke and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver.’ ”

“If so, then we’ll have done our best. If the needle isn’t in the haystack, you can’t find it, can you?”

“I never have.”

They finished their meal. Kate paid the check, tucking the receipt into her purse, next to her Glock 17.

Outside in the parking lot, they discussed plans for tomorrow. Louis was heading back to east L.A., to try to mine for nuggets among the few friends of Juarez’s they hadn’t contacted yet. He didn’t expect he’d have much luck—the Chicano community had closed their doors to the investigation.

“What about you?” he asked Kate, getting into his Seville. He was an American-car man, always had been. The Caddy suited him—big, smooth, comfy on the freeways.

“Keep looking for connections. See if there’s something out there we’ve missed.”

“Good luck.”

“See you.”

“See you.”

Louis headed east on Beverly. Kate drove the opposite direction, toward the ocean.

I was going to have dinner with Nora to tell her about my trip to West Virginia, Jerome’s anguish over the disaster and its effect on his career and life, fill her in on what my detectives were pursuing, which wasn’t encouraging, so far.

She met me at the door to her house in a terry-cloth robe. “You’re early,” she said.

“I knocked off early. I’m in a holding pattern.”

“I was going to take a swim,” she said. “Care to join me?”

It had been a sweltering spring day, muggy for the area. I was in my normal working clothes, feeling hot and clammy. There was still plenty of light in the sky at seven in the evening. “A swim would be nice, but I don’t have a suit with me.” She squinted against the low late-afternoon sun over my shoulder, appraising my physique. “One of Dennis’s old ones ought to fit you,” she declared. “I’ll forage for it. It’s stuck away somewhere. Come on in.”

I followed her into the house. It was nice and cool—the air-conditioning was on, humming low. “All this and a pool, too?”

She smiled. “The pool, the Jacuzzi, the whole shooting match.” She led me out onto her rear patio. I’d never seen her property before, I’d always been here after dark.

Before the tree line, there was an impressive yard. A hundred yards square, at least. Most of it was grass, freshly mowed, almost as manicured as a putting green. Flower beds were strategically placed, giving the area a smart, sophisticated feeling, as nice as many of the fancy properties I’d been on in Montecito. Closer to the house there was a long, narrow lap pool with a beautiful tile deck, a large barbecue area, and off to the side, a Jacuzzi, built into a fieldstone deck.

She turned to me. “Let me get that suit of Dennis’s for you. Be right back.”

Kate lounged on her queen-size bed at the Shangri-La in Santa Monica, browsing through the latest edition of
People
magazine. She liked the old art deco hotel. The rates were half those of the Miramar up the street, and it was right on Ocean Avenue, a good location. She could walk along the bluff overlooking the ocean at night, run it in the morning.

The missing years of Reynaldo Juarez. Where were they?

She’d already checked on the military and the prisons. As far as she could find out, he hadn’t been in the service, and he hadn’t served time in any jail—county, state, or federal. He had a passport—she’d checked that out, too. Foreign travel before he turned eighteen, to central and South America. Then lots of forays outside the country after he was twenty-two, dozens of trips to Colombia, Ecuador, and Honduras alone, plus other South American countries, as well as Europe, the Far East, Australia, Egypt, Israel. He seemed to love to travel; often he went by private plane. Planes used to transport drugs, she surmised, but there wasn’t any product on those planes when he was. That was one of his survival secrets: he was never directly involved in a transaction, never in immediate contact with anything illegal. There were always buffers between him and his deals, multiple screens. The deal up in Blue River would have been one of the few exceptions.

What do people do between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one? She had been working then, a young mother trying to make ends meet. She had been the exception in that regard; most of her friends, like her daughters, went to college. Of course, where Juarez came from, college wouldn’t be commonplace. A kid would have to be motivated to go to college from one of the east L.A. high schools.

Restless, she put her magazine aside and perused the
TV Guide.
Nothing worth watching.

College. That would be a long shot. How many colleges are there in the state of California alone, a hundred? Juarez was already a moneymaking machine by the time he was in his midteens. By then he knew what his path was, and it didn’t include learning about Plato or calculus or going to Friday-night fraternity parties. Still, the ages when he was off the charts are when people go to college.

He had actually graduated from high school—Garfield, one of the biggest high schools in the country, almost one hundred percent Latino. She wondered what the percentage was of kids going to college from Garfield High, twenty years ago. That would be a place to start. It would be tedious, time-consuming work, but she might as well give it a try, she had no other leads to chase.

She checked the movie listings for the Third Street Promenade theaters. There were a couple playing she thought she could tolerate. If not, she’d have a drink in one of the restaurant bars. Or two. She could use a bracer, in anticipation of what faced her as soon as she got up in the morning—driving all the way over to east L.A. at the height of rush-hour traffic, then starting to slog through old college records (if that hunch had any legs), then driving home, again facing rush hour.

Tomorrow was going to be a long, long day. Screw the movies—she was going to treat herself to a tall, cold drink.

I emerged from Nora’s house wearing one of Dennis’s baggy old swimsuits. He had put on weight in the years after he left law school; I remembered him as a thin man, but the waist on this baggy old suit was at least a forty. Although I had the drawstrings pulled as tight as I could, it still hung loose around my waist.

Nora, wearing a dark blue tank suit, was already in the pool, swimming laps. She had good form. I remembered she’d been a swimmer in college, as I’d been—one of the first things we’d found out about each other those initial weeks in law school, something in common to grow a friendship on.

I joined her, essaying an easy crawl. I missed the ocean; I made a mental note to take Buck down to Butterfly Beach when I went home over the weekend.

We swam for fifteen or twenty minutes, then we climbed out and toweled off. The sun was almost down now. Nora went inside and came back with an open bottle of wine in an ice bucket, two glasses, and a plate of cheese and crackers. We sat in lounge chairs by the pool, sipping the wine. It was still hot out—our suits were dry in less than ten minutes. I told her what was happening with my investigation, which wasn’t much.

“We’re not getting anywhere.” She sounded depressed.

“It’s early in the game. We have to be patient.”

“Maybe the DEA was right after all.” She didn’t sound happy voicing that.

“Isn’t our objective finding out who the killer is? We’re not looking to pin it on the agency, are we? Wouldn’t you be happier if it
wasn’t
a DEA agent?”

“Why should I be?” She almost snapped at me.

“Because they’re the good guys.”

“They weren’t the good guys that night.”

“Look, Nora. Don’t let bad experiences you’ve had with them or other big agencies cloud your judgment. People make mistakes. In that job, it’s a given.”

“They make too many damn mistakes.”

“How long are you and Sheriff Miller going to carry this grudge against them?”

“Tom isn’t carrying a grudge anymore. He lets bygones be bygones.”

“But you don’t.”

She nodded. “I can’t help it. I don’t like being treated like the village idiot in my own backyard. I know that’s childish and vindictive, but…”

“I can understand that. No one does. But you’re going to have to get over it, starting now. This can’t be a grudge match, some Hatfield-McCoy wingding.”

She sighed. “You’re right. As usual.”

We went inside and had dinner—steak, potatoes, salad. She’d scrounged up an old bathrobe of Dennis’s for me—we were still in our now-dry bathing suits. It felt kind of funny, wearing her dead husband’s clothes, but I didn’t dwell on it. We finished off the white wine with the salad and had a bottle of red with the steak.

After we were done eating, she stacked the dishwasher and turned it on. “I’m going to have a hot tub. Care to join me?”

I turned to her with an uneasy look. She laughed, as if reading my mind.

“I’m not stripping down in front of you, Luke Garrison. Not with this middle-aged body. I’m keeping my bathing suit on. And so are you, guy,” she said, almost giggling schoolgirlishly.

“Sounds…okay.” My earlier concerns about her intentions toward me seemed silly, unfounded. “I have to use the john, then I’ll join you.”

It was dark when I came back outside. Nora had turned on a few outdoor lights. She was already lounging in the hot tub up to her neck, her hair pulled up over her head in a casual bun. “Come on in, slowpoke,” she called to me merrily as I tentatively approached the edge. “The water’s steaming. I hope you like it hot.”

“Hot’s good.”

I stuck a toe in. Hot it was. We’d be lobsters in a few minutes. I eased into the tub, bit by bit. Then, submerged to the bottom of my chin, the bubbles foaming around my chest, I looked up at the dark sky, the countless stars in the firmament that you only see in outlying areas like up here. Man’s light can’t compete with these, I thought contentedly.

I closed my eyes, laid my head against the wall of the tub, and let the evening take me away: the steamy, bubbling water, the infinity of stars overhead—I was becoming spacey, my mind drifting off, not sleeping, but as in a half-wakening dream state.

Her hand was on my cock, under the baggy trunks.

This was not a dream. My eyes popped open.

She was naked. Her abundant breasts, the nipples fat and pink like a baby’s fingers, grazed my arm, which rapidly began forming goose bumps despite the heat of the water. She was kneeling next to me, perched on the seat, her leg touching my thigh, her hand caressing my penis, which was, to my consternation, becoming erect.

“Nora…” I tried to move; she held onto me.

“Luke…please …”

It was as if I were under water—not how I actually was, in a hot tub with my feet able to touch the bottom, but in a vast, viscous ocean, deep below the surface, trying to swim to the surface, but unable to. I felt like I was trapped in molasses, my muscles exhausted from the heat, the alcohol, and the shock of her unbelievable action.

“Nora, you can’t…”

Still holding onto my penis, which was now fully erect despite my fervent desire that it not be, she placed her free hand across my mouth, hushing me.

“Let me. Please. Just for a moment.”

I didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Yet my reaction, unbelievably to me, was not to push her away, or in any way be harsh with her, although I felt I should be, as she had broken a basic trust; it was, for reasons not completely known to me, that I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. A stupid impulse, of course, but that’s what was there: I didn’t want to hurt her.

I didn’t want her hand on my cock, either. That could only lead to all kinds of tragedies.

“Look, Nora…” I reached down to try to pry her hand off me.

“Dennis was impotent at the end. It wasn’t that our sex life was bad, it was nonexistent.”

“Nora, don’t. That’s…” Jesus, that was the last thing I wanted to hear, about her sex life with her dead husband. I didn’t want to hear anything, really, I wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.

She wouldn’t let go. Her grip tightened; not painfully, but snugly.

I wasn’t just erect now; I was becoming aroused.

“Not always, not completely. But most of the time, even before we moved here. Then once we did, he could never …”

Her eyes bored into me. She was crying.

“I haven’t held a man’s erect penis in ten years. Or had one inside me for fifteen. I never knew a man besides Dennis, I’m practically a virgin. So please,” she implored, “let me. Just for a little while longer. Please, Luke.”

“Oh, Nora.” I was begging her. “I’m not the right one for this. Find someone else to…do this with. I’m not the one.”

“There is no one else.”

She was stroking me. “I’m the goddamn district attorney. Being normal isn’t good enough, I’m held to standards above the law.” She was almost laughing, bitterly, through her tears. “I have to be as chaste as a fucking nun.”

I finally managed to pry her hand off my erection. Leaping out of the hot tub, I ran into the house.

Nora stood in the hallway, wrapped in her robe, her hair still wet. I was closer to the door. I was dressed, sort of—I had my shirt and pants on. My shoes and socks were in my hand; my jacket was slung over my arm.

I was shaking from the incident—anger, regret, remorse. The anger was at her, on the surface, but it was really at myself. What was I thinking when I got into that hot tub with her? That we’d relax with a glass of wine and sing the Stanford fight song? This wasn’t like some repressed sexual desire that I let out, in the guise of rationalizing to myself that she’d seduced me when I was looking the other way. This was flat-out dumbness, lack of awareness of how needy and desperate she was.

I wasn’t born yesterday. All the signs were there, clearly visible.

The best I could do, in my defense, was to plead pity. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings, so I wound up screwing everything up royally.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, her voice a tow, husky whisper.

“Go home. What else?”