San Antonio Rose (9 page)

She was pleased for the migrant couple but more concerned with their son’s progress. “Law school is so expensive.”

He grimaced. “Tell me about it.”

“How did you manage to pay your tuition?”

“I did construction work the first two years, then clerked for a judge the third.”

She could just picture him hustling from the classroom to the job site to moot court. “When did you find time to study?”

“I burned a lot of midnight oil.”

“It must have been exhausting.”

“But worth it, in the end.”

“How were your grades?”

“Mostly A’s.” Rafe couldn’t resist boasting a bit. “And I was editor of the law review my senior year.”

Jeannie was duly impressed. “With that kind of record, I’m surprised some big law firm didn’t snap you up straight out of school.”

“I was invited to join several firms, but I was just too much of a maverick to fit their mold.”

“And?” she asked, sensing there was more.

He gave her a mirthless smile. “And I wasn’t interested in being their token minority.”

“Not even for the money?”

“I’ve done all right for myself.”

She toasted the visible signs of his success with her tea. “Here’s to tailor-made suits and silk ties.”

“Beats those hand-me-downs I lived in as a boy.” He finished his beer but kept the bottle. “Let’s go.”

“You collect empties now?” she asked as she picked up her purse.

“I need it for court,” he answered enigmatically, laying enough change atop the generous tip to cover the deposit charge.

Jeannie didn’t get a chance to pursue that because, just as she stepped outside, she stumbled over a small crack in the concrete sidewalk. Rafe caught her, the tapered strength of his fingers encircling her arm and stirring embers that were better left banked.

“My knight in shining armor,” she said with a smile.

“Surely you
joust
,” he returned as he released her.

They shared a laugh and started walking in the direction of his office. But that brief contact left a residue of awareness that she tried to put from her mind as diligently as she tried to match his stride.

The delicate scent of roses wafting from a flower garden in front of a modest but well-maintained
home had stiff competition from the pungent aroma of
yerba buena
—dried mint leaves—coming from someone else’s open kitchen window.

“Do you live around here?” she asked as they turned the corner and approached his office.

He stopped and pointed skyward. “When I bought the building, I gutted it and converted the second floor into a loft.”

“You live over the office?” She looked up and, sure enough, saw wooden blinds at the windows.

As she preceded him into the anteroom, he gave her golden plume of hair, cascading from that plastic clip, a playful tug. “Wanna go up and see my collection of empties?”

She whipped her head around, the laughing reply “Don’t you mean etchings?” burbling to her lips. But the comeback perished in her throat under his penetrating stare.

The secretary had gone to lunch in their absence, so they had the office to themselves. Their eyes connected in the air-conditioned stillness, and they both remembered vividly what good use they would have made of time alone in years gone by.

But that was then and this was now. He had a preliminary hearing this afternoon, and she had to pick their son up from school in a couple of hours.

“It’s getting late,” she noted nervously.

He shot his cuff back and glanced down at his watch, his dark hair gleaming in the sunlight that found its way through the leafy green fronds draping the window. “It’s twelve thirty.”

“When do you have to be in court?”

“The hearing starts in thirty minutes.”

She figured it would take him a good fifteen minutes to get there, given the noon-hour traffic rush and the never-ending street repairs, and another five to find a parking place.

“We can talk on the phone tonight, after Tony goes to bed,” she offered since he was in a hurry.

“We’ll talk after court,” he decreed before disappearing into his office.

It took a second for that to sink in. When the full impact of his statement finally registered, she swore under her breath and bolted after him.

“What do you mean,
after
court?” she demanded, positioning herself in front of his desk and bracing both fists upon her hips.

“I mean you’re going with me.” He placed the empty beer bottle in his burnished leather briefcase.

“But I—”

“The hearing shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“An hour!”

He shrugged. “Two at the most.”

“I have to pick up Tony at three.”

“Can’t Rusty do that?”

“He’s riding herd today.”

“What about Martha?”

Jeannie’s mouth turned downward in an attractive sulk. “Tony’s expecting me.”

“Tony’s had you to himself for ten years.” Rafe’s entreating blue eyes only added to his appeal. “All I’m asking you for is one afternoon.”

“Oh, all right.” She feigned an irritated sigh, but actually her heart was pounding with anticipation at the idea of seeing him in action. Besides, she was dying to know what he was going to do with that bottle. “I’ll have to call the ranch, though.”

“You can use my phone.” He picked up his briefcase and headed for the door.

“Shakespeare was right,” Jeannie grumbled good-naturedly as she dialed the Circle C.

“But if we killed off all the lawyers,” Rafe countered in that same vein, “who would run for political office?”

“Precisely my point!”

He laughed and closed the door behind him just as Webb Bishop answered the phone at the ranch on the second ring.

“W—Webb?”

“Hello, Jeannie.”

She shook her head in confusion. “What are you doing out there in the middle of the day?”

“I had a couple of hours to kill between hospital rounds and office calls, so I thought
I’d swing by and see how you’re getting along.”

“I’m fine,” she said a bit too quickly. “Just fine.”

“Good …” He cleared his throat. “Good.”

A telling silence hummed on the line.

She rushed to fill it. “I’m in San Antonio right now.”

“So Martha said.”

Jeannie pinched her eyes shut at the note of resignation in his voice. Tears burned behind her lids. But it was over between them. Over before it had really begun. And there was no sense in prolonging the agony for either of them.

“Is Martha there now?” she asked with false animation.

“She’s up to her elbows in bread dough.” Which explained why Webb had answered the phone. “But I’d be glad to give her a message before I go.”

She passed along her instructions, then said in parting, “Thank you for all you’ve done for Big Tom and for Tony and … and for me.”

A gentleman to the bitter end, he made a gracious exit. “Good-bye, Jeannie.”

“Good-bye, Webb,” she whispered before she hung up, wishing with all her heart that she didn’t have to break his. The problem was—

The problem was, he wasn’t Rafe.

Seven

The courtroom was as quiet as a church.

People walked softly and spoke in whispers. Sounds were magnified: the hum of the air conditioner, the ticking of the clock on the wall, the shuffling of papers at the lawyers’ tables, the squeak of the heavy doors.

Even though she was sitting on a wooden bench that looked remarkably like a pew, Jeannie was well aware that she wasn’t in church. Nor did she think that Rafe’s client—his hair as wiry as steel wool and his skin the color of sorghum molasses—bore the slightest resemblance to a choirboy.

A bartender by trade, he had admitted to shooting a customer during an argument. He also claimed he’d done it in self-defense. But since there’d been no one else in the bar at the
time of the altercation, it was his word against the victim’s. And who would believe a man with the word
killer
tattooed on his left arm?

The victim, who had lived to tell the tale, looked like a candidate for Confirmation by comparison. His hair was neatly trimmed and combed, his face clean-shaven and hospital-pale. He wore a dark suit, a tasteful tie, and a sling on his right arm.

“All rise,” the bailiff said in a sonorous tone.

Jeannie stood along with everyone else when the judge made his entrance. A man who looked to be in his mid-sixties, he wore a black robe and a pair of Ben Franklin glasses.

“Please be seated,” he instructed everyone after he’d taken his place on the bench. Behind him an American flag and the flag of the state of Texas drooped on their stanchions. He nodded to the prosecuting attorney, then said, “You may proceed.”

Jeannie had a front-row seat, which allowed her an unobstructed view of everyone and everything. She’d never been in court before, not even on a traffic charge, so she was anxious to learn how the system worked. Now she leaned forward a little, the better to hear.

On the drive to the courthouse Rafe had explained that during the hearing the prosecutor had to present enough evidence to convince the judge that the defendant—Rafe’s client, in this case—should be bound over for
trial on felony charges of assault with a deadly weapon. If Rafe could prove otherwise, through a combination of evidence and examination, the charges would be dropped and his client would go free.

The prosecutor called the arresting officer.

A burly man with close-cropped hair and bulldog jowls, the policeman took the stand and began to tell the court how he’d been called to the scene by a passerby and caught Rafe’s client with smoking gun in hand.

As she listened to the prosecutor and the policeman driving nails into the defendant’s coffin, Jeannie kept glancing at Rafe, who was sitting at the counsel table with an impassive expression. From the heavily starched cotton of his shirt collar to the hand-tooled toes of his eelskin boots, he looked like the Madison Avenue prototype of a prosperous Texas attorney. But there the resemblance ended.

No courtroom pallor lightened his skin and no desk jockey’s paunch ballooned his stomach. His burnt-sienna coloring was due in large measure to his heritage, but his superb physical condition was strictly the result of the five miles he’d told her he jogged every morning.

His black hair was a trifle shorter in front than it had been the day of the funeral, though it was still collar-length at the back. The silver earring, which she had mistakenly
assumed he would remove for the hearing, winked at her in the fluorescent lighting whenever he moved his head to make a note to himself during the policeman’s testimony.

“Pass the witness,” the prosecutor said when he was finished presenting this part of his case.

“Thank you.” Rafe stood, tall and somehow invincible, seeming to dominate the courtroom through sheer determination.

As he picked up one of the photographs that the prosecutor had introduced into evidence and carried it toward the witness stand, Jeannie couldn’t help but remember a passionate young man proclaiming that he wanted to become a lawyer because he wanted to make a difference. She had always believed in him. Always supported him. But until today she’d never really understood the terrible injustices that had spurred his lofty ambitions.

Born in the charity ward of a barrio hospital, he’d cut his teeth on grinding poverty and gang warfare. The oldest child of migrant workers, he’d learned to sleep cramped, to wear cast-offs, and to eat whatever was put in front of him and be grateful for it. A streetwise attorney, he knew from his own experiences that Justice occasionally lifted her blindfold to see what color a person was, how he dressed, where he lived, and who his friends were.

Rafe Martinez was a rebel with a cause, she
realized. A modern-day gladiator whose arena was a courtroom rather than a coliseum. And in most cases, he was his clients’ last chance for a fair hearing.

“Officer,” he said now, “I’m handing you this photograph of the scene of the shooting again and asking you to tell the court what that object on the floor to the right of the victim is.”

“It’s a beer bottle.”

From the corner of her eye Jeannie saw the victim squirm in his chair and adjust his arm sling, as if he hadn’t counted on having to sit through this line of questioning.

Then Rafe commanded her full attention again, standing relaxed and poised before the witness stand and asking, “What kind of beer bottle?”

“I don’t know.” The policeman squinted at the photograph, then shook his head. “I can’t read the label.”

A smile broke across Rafe’s handsome face, briefly relieving it of its foreboding austerity. Jeannie’s heart fluttered at the sight of his firm lips softening, his white teeth flashing, and the deep lines on either side of his mouth denting in.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said then, the twinkle fleeing from his blue eyes and his expression turning solemn as he got back to the business at hand. “Does anything appear to be wrong with the beer bottle?”

Now the policeman nodded. “The bottom is broken off.”

Utterly fascinated, Jeannie listened as Rafe went on to build his foundation, brick by brick, until he finally got to the point he really wanted the policeman to make.