Kind of Kin (3 page)

Monday | February 18, 2008 | 8:45
A.M.

State Capitol Building | Oklahoma City

S
tate Representative Monica Moorehouse was feeling very good about things this cloudy blue Monday, the third week of the new legislative session. True, she wasn't properly prepped for her committee meeting in fifteen minutes, a huge stack of unread House bills clogged her To Read tray, and Kevin had lightened her hair way too platinum on Saturday—she'd have to stay out of sight of the cameras until he could fix it—but the national press had picked up on the raid story, and that was worth everything. She sifted again through the clippings, sorting them according to prominence. Only two-inch AP articles on the inside pages in the
New York Times
and the Dallas papers, but they'd made the front page above the fold in the
Tulsa World,
page three in the
Houston Chronicle,
and they were the lead screaming headline in the
Sunday Oklahoman.
She buzzed the front office, told Beverly to hold her calls—“except for my husband, you can put him right through, and also please call Kevin back, tell him he has
got
to see me this afternoon, I don't care what's wrong with his Chihuahua!”—closed the inside door, and unlocked her desk.

From the top drawer she pulled out her Personal Press File. She trusted no one with this, not even Beverly, who'd proven herself to be as loyal a legislative assistant as any lawmaker could hope for, but the press file was Monica's private domain. One by one she slipped the laminated articles from the folder, laid them out in chronological order across the mahogany desktop. Her favorite was the one of her giving the speech at the Family Values Voters Conference in Denver last summer. The photographer had caught her smiling her most bemused smile, her hands raised in a graceful gesture of bafflement. Her hair was perfect. The caption read: “Oklahoma State Representative Monica Moorehouse wants to know, ‘What's wrong with those people?' ” The article below failed to make clear that she had
not
been referring to illegal aliens per se but to the federal government and its failure to act, forcing lowly state legislators, such as herself, to take matters in their own hands. Well, it was the
Denver Post,
what could you expect? There'd been several resultant nasty e-mails from out-of-state idiots accusing her of being a racist, et cetera, but the story had played well inside the state, and it was a fabulous picture.

The intercom buzzed. Beverly's voice was pitched low. “I know you wanted me to hold your calls, but Senator Langley is here. Personally. In the office. He says it's urgent.”

Monica groaned. Dennis Langley was the opposition state senator whose district overlapped her own, a lanky good ole boy with hound dog eyes, a Will Rogers drawl, and the cunning of a backwoods lawyer. She did not like him, did not trust him, dared not turn him away. “All right, give me a minute.” Quickly she cleared the desk, locked it, grabbed a stack of House bills and scattered them across the leather blotter before buzzing Beverly to send him in. She stood up, stretched forth a languid hand with perfectly lacquered French nails, invited the senator to have a seat. He nodded his thanks but remained standing, so Monica did, too, realizing a half beat too late how it put her at a disadvantage. Far better to lean back in her chair delicately arching her neck to peer up at him until he had the good manners to sit down than to stand behind her desk, merely short. She smiled.

“What can I do for you, Senator?”

“My, my, look at this here.” Langley lifted a framed photograph from her desk. “I don't believe I ever saw this.” He glanced from the photograph to her and back again. Comparing, she felt sure, the soft mocha of her hair in the picture with the shrieking platinum it was right now. Oh, Kevin was going to fix this,
today,
if she had to camp out in his veterinarian's office. Langley cocked his shaggy head at the picture. “You're sittin' in some mighty high cotton here.”

“Yes,” she said through her gritted smile. She was not sitting in that photograph, she was standing, flanked by both Oklahoma U.S. senators in the middle of the congressional rotunda. She'd been invited on that Washington trip hardly two weeks into her first term, a sign of just how much the powers that be believed in her future. The frame was sterling silver, an elegant cowboy-hat-and-horseshoe motif; it was one of her most prized possessions, and she had to grip herself to keep from reaching across the desk and snatching it out of Langley's hands. “So what's this urgent business of yours, Senator?”

“Urgent? Well, now, I don't know as I'd call it urgent. Very handsome.” Langley set the frame back on the desk. “Just thought I'd drop by and visit with you a minute this morning.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. My assistant must have misunderstood. Anyway, I've got an Agriculture and Rural Development meeting to get to, but maybe we could arrange something for next week?” She thumbed her desk calendar. “How's Thursday? Say three thirty?” She reached to buzz Beverly to tell her to put it on the schedule, but Dennis Langley's lazy drawl stopped her.

“That'd be fine, ma'am, but what I wanted to visit with you about, well, it's sort of relevant here this morning.”

Ugh. She hated being called
ma'am
. They all talked like that, like they'd just dropped off the potato truck; it was the sort of thing she'd moaned to Charlie about when he moved her down here from Indianapolis eight years ago. Charlie would just wave her off, tell her she had to get used to a few things. Plenty of things she had gotten used to. Being called
ma'am
was not one of them.

“I expect you know all about that little raid they had in Latimer County Friday evening. Where they nabbed all those Mexicans?” She nodded. Of course. “And you also know they scooped up a couple local men along with them.”

She kept smiling as if to say,
I know, isn't it perfect
? Now the whole world was going to see that her law had teeth! Well, not
her
law, of course; she'd merely coauthored the House version—but her name was on it, wasn't it? A first-term state representative pushing through a bill of that magnitude, well, she could be forgiven the teensiest bit of pride. From the minute the law had gone into effect last November her office had been flooded with calls, citizens groups, state legislators, town mayors, from Iowa, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, all over the country, all hoping to get similar legislation moving in their own states.

“I heard from the Latimer D.A.'s office this morning.” Langley plucked his creased slacks at the knee, perched himself on a corner of her desk. “Tom Waters is an old friend, me and him go way back. He's got a few concerns. They're not real keen on all this publicity, for one thing, and then—”

“Senator Langley, if people are going to hire and harbor illegal aliens, they are no less criminal than the aliens themselves. That's the whole point of the legislation. Naturally there's going to be publicity. Taxpayers are tired of their money going to support lawbreakers!”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Oh for God's sake, shut up with the
ma'am
s. Irritably she watched Langley trace a finger along the humped back of the Kokopelli paper-clip holder on her desk.

“Latimer's a small county,” he went on, his voice all lackadaisical. “Naturally they haven't got a real big budget to cover security and all.”

“Security.”

“Well, this stuff provokes a lot of anger. There's already been a few threats. And then, too, there'd be reporters to deal with, camera crews, news vans, all that. They're just not set up for that sort of thing down there.”

“If space is a problem,” she said, “I'm sure we can have the proceedings moved, like they did for the Terry Nichols trial.” Yes, why hadn't she thought of that before? Move the trial to her home base in McAlester—so much the better! Ah, Terry Nichols, the second Oklahoma City bomber, what an exciting time that had been. The streets blocked off for security. CNN, Fox News, the networks, they'd all been there! At least at the beginning, although the trial had dragged on for months, and they'd drifted away, lost interest, until it was time for the verdict—but then they'd all come swarming back. She'd been on the McAlester City Council then, a great platform, actually—as her husband so endlessly liked to point out.

“Yes, ma'am,” Langley drawled, “we talked about a venue change. He's not sure that'd exactly satisfy the situation.”

“What situation?”

“Well, apparently, according to Tom Waters, there might have been a few . . . irregularities.”

“Please speak plainly, Senator Langley.” This was another part of the good ole boy act that just irritated the snot out of her—how they'd pussyfoot around a subject and never come right out and
say
anything. Charlie told her she needed to learn to read metaphor and subtext. But Charlie could kiss her derriere. He wasn't the one who had to deal with these people. The senator crooked his head, studied the portraits of the governor and the president smiling down from her office wall. Oh, would he never get on with it? She felt like her cheeks were ready to crack.

“One of these fellows they arrested,” the senator mused, “Bob Brown his name is, well, he's something of a fixture in the county. I know him a little bit myself, actually. He's a white fellow, you know, and a Christian. A real religious man. Naturally some folks are going to feel sympathy toward him. And then, of course, I know it, some won't. The other man's a Mexican, but he's a citizen—they already checked that out—and he's a Pentecostal preacher, so that's a problem, and his name is Jesús, and that's another problem, because you know in the newspapers that's going to look like Jesus, and some folks won't like that. Well, and then that terrible thing happened in Texas, that's a real sad story. I know it's nobody's fault, but still, it's not good.”

“What happened in Texas?”

“That girl that died?” He turned to look at her. “No, I guess you don't know yet. One of the girls they took out of Bob Brown's barn and bused down to Houston, well, she went into labor somewhere along the line, and I guess she was having trouble and either nobody saw it or nobody understood. Or maybe they thought she was faking. Anyway, both her and the baby died. Now, that didn't happen here, but she was part of that bunch they rounded up in Latimer County, so, well, it's a situation.”

“Why are you telling me this? What do you think I can do about it?”

“Just wanted to give you a little friendly heads-up, is all. Waters is thinking he might have to drop the charges against the two Americans.”

“No!” she nearly shouted, but then she caught herself. “I mean, he can't do that. It's not his call. Those men were caught red-handed harboring fourteen illegal aliens, not one proper document or word of English among them—that's a felony in this state. We made it a felony!”

“Yes, ma'am. But, then, like I said, there might've been some irregularities.”

“What does that mean?

“How the sheriff went about things, well, let me just say, Sheriff Holloway's a fellow who doesn't necessarily hold real tight to regulation.” Langley unfolded his lanky frame and stood up, towering over her. “Welp, just thought I'd let you know. We may be on opposite sides of the aisle, but we both serve the same constituency down there.”

“The D.A.'s got to uphold the law!” she burst out.

“Oh, well,” the senator drawled, “probably not if he thinks he hadn't got a case. Might've helped if the sheriff had got himself a proper search warrant. Anyhow, I didn't say he's definitely going to drop them, just said he's thinking about it. That's all he told me.” Langley started for the door, paused and turned back. “One thing about it, ma'am, Tom Waters, the county judge, county sheriff, they're all in the same boat you and me are.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He cocked his shaggy head, gazed down at her. “Why, we all got to get elected if we intend to serve.”

Monica remained standing for a long time after the senator left. What did he mean by that last remark? House Bill 1830 was a win-win, that's what Leadership kept saying. A win-win. Dear God, she couldn't go into committee like this, her mind a whirling mess thinking about how her fabulously high-profile achievement was on the verge of being ripped away! And yet there was no way for her
not
to think about it. She lifted the receiver to call Charlie, slammed it down again. No! She would figure this out herself. Oh, damn that Langley for coming in here and filling her mind with such crap—that was just exactly what he'd intended, wasn't it? That sly old lawyerly aw-shucks-ma'am act. He wanted to strip her of her confidence, make her fumble, make her second-guess herself. She was
not
going to let that happen. All right then, what to do . . . what to do . . .

A press conference. Of course. She would fix the cowardly D.A., and that old fox Langley, too, and she knew just how to do it: she would put in a call to every friendly contact she had at the local networks, the newspapers. Standing in the rotunda downstairs, she would praise Latimer County law enforcement to the hilt. In particular she'd want to thank District Attorney Tom Waters for having the
courage
to uphold the state's laws, no matter
who
transgressed them, because no one is above the law, and Tom Waters is a man of
principle,
she'd say, a man willing to prosecute transgressors no matter how
personally difficult
the circumstance might be for him. Then just let him try and slither out of pressing charges!

She had to get on it today, though, right now, this minute, in time for the clips to make the evening newscasts. No, God no—her hair. She couldn't do it today. She'd have to arrange things for tomorrow morning. Surely that would be soon enough. Just so long as she held her press conference before the D.A. gave one or, heaven forbid, quietly dropped the charges. Monica jabbed her knuckle on the intercom button so as not to chip a nail. “Beverly, bring your Rolodex and come here a minute. And
please
tell me you've managed to get Kevin on the phone!”