Lizardskin (40 page)

She smiled at them all, a bright smile full of sweetness.

She turned and stalked off toward the bar, Duffy following along behind her, looking back over his shoulder as he left.

“Well,” said Joel Sherman. “What an extraordinary performance, Dwight. Where do we go from here?”

Maya BlueStones was standing apart from them, a short spiky bomb hissing at every rivet.

“We are going straight to the governor’s office! And to the Bar Association! We are going to
nail
that little cunt!”

The word floated up into the air between them and hovered there. Dwight and Joel Sherman stared at the woman in stunned silence.

Finally, Dwight sighed and shook his head.

“
We?
” said Dwight. “As in, you and me?
We
don’t go anywhere. I understand your anger, but Ms. Ballard is a respected prosecutor in this county, and you aren’t giving her a chance to use her office to help us at—”

BlueStones cut him off. “
You
are on a retainer and under professional obligations, Mr. Hogeland.”

Dwight looked pained, struggling with conflicting emotions. BlueStones was right, but when all this had blown over, she’d be off on another crusade and Dwight would still have to work with the legal community in this town. He gathered himself.

“Ma’am, I’m afraid I’ll have to return your retainer. Joel, I hope you’ll understand. The level of acrimony here—it’s entirely unreasonable. Ms. BlueStones is far too confrontational for my tastes.”

“Dwight!” bleated Joel Sherman. “This is an ACLU issue. There are more important matters at stake than a personality conflict.”

“Yeah,” said Dwight, looking past them and out toward the bar, absently stroking his bruises. “I’m getting that idea myself.”

“Vanessa?”

Duffy had seen him coming and turned around on the barstool to confront him. Vanessa, who had seen him in the long, smoked mirror behind the oak bar, turned her empty glass upside down on the copper bartop and gestured to the silvery old man in the red jacket.

“You even fucked up the Holmes quote, Dwight.”

“I did not. May I sit down?”

“Depends on what you sit on. Duffy, you have a jackknife or an ice pick or something?”

“Look, both of you. I think we need to talk.”

“Frank needs a drink. I need a drink. You need a high colonic.”

The old bartender brought them their drinks. Dwight asked for a Laphroaig and branch water.

The barman drifted off. Dwight lowered himself onto a barstool and sighed loudly. “I’m a wreck, Vanessa. Ease up on me.”

“Ease up on
you
? From where we sit, you have it far too easy.”

“I wish I understood where all this enmity is coming from. Is this all over Beau and Maureen?”

Vanessa set her glass down hard. “Dwight. If you are trying to find a way to tell Frank here about what you tried to do yesterday morning, you should know that Frank would probably
share my sentiments on the subject and you’ve only got one nose.”

“I wasn’t, Vanessa. I have some ethics. Besides, that’s a dead issue. I have spoken to the principal, and she takes the point.”

“What about Joe Bell?”

“I haven’t been able to reach him yet. I think I’ll have to drive out there.”

“Bell’s in for a very bad time, Dwight.”

There was a silence.

“Where’s Beau, Vanessa?”

“How should I know? I assume he’s at home.”

“No, he’s not. Maureen tried to reach him there. Tom Blasingame answered the phone. He said Beau was out and didn’t know when he’d be back.”

“Then he’s out. He’s on a medical leave right now, anyway. Maybe he went for a drive on his bike.”

“There are—there are things happening, aren’t there? Things I don’t know about.”

“You ought to be used to that, Dwight.”

“Will you tell me what they are?”

“You’ll hear about it.”

“Can I hear now?”

“No. Anything else?”

Dwight picked up his glass, drained it, and nodded to the bartender for a refill. “How did I screw up the Holmes quote?”

“It was in Olmstead
versus
the United States. Justice Holmes’s actual words were, ‘I think it is a lesser evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.’ ”

“Oh, yes. I recall it now. But his point, the principle is a good one. You need to talk to Beau about this. There are higher goals in the law than simple enforcement concerns.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the good of the state. The protection of liberty and freedom, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of the legal system.”

“The ultimate goal of the legal system, Dwight, is to expand. To get more laws passed so that more lawyers can get jobs arguing about what the laws mean.”

“If you have no faith in the criminal justice—”

“I have as much faith in the criminal justice system as I do in any other device built by men, which is to say that whenever I fire it up, I stand back a bit to make sure it doesn’t explode and get grease all over my alligator pumps.”

“The protection of innocence is the first calling of any society, Vanessa.”

“I’d say the first calling of any society is to survive, and it’s not going to survive long if it allows abstract legal niceties to overpower a clear and crying need for arrest and swift punishment.”

“That’s a classic fascist argument. Even a murderer deserves every protection under the law.”

“And in the meantime, the relatives of his victims suffer terrible dreams and their lives corrode with unresolved hatreds. Where’s the justice for
them
?”

“As Holmes said, it’s a lesser evil.”

“Okay, I get you. So in the end, the preservation of legal process justifies the
means
, which include the damage to victims and the ruinous delay of criminal trial?”

“Plainly, crudely put—yes.”

“Do you think justice
is
equal in the real world?”

“Well … there are variables, Vanessa. Sometimes things go wrong. It’s a fallible system.”

“So, in effect, people are being hurt and victims are going begging for justice to protect our right to the
possibility
of a fair trial?”

“Yes. You’d have to say that.”

“And you’d have to say that there is also the possibility of an
unfair
trial?”

“Sure, that’s a possibility.”

“So what you’re saying is that we are supposed to allow the courts to function as haphazardly as they do, to bog down in plea bargaining, to lose track of cases, to fuck up prosecutions, to favor the rich over the poor, to mismanage the
prisons and parole dangerous sociopaths and generally screw up royally—for the right to make a personal gamble that we, as a single case in the court, that we have a
chance
at a fair trial?”

“Maybe. It’s better than
no
chance at a fair trial, isn’t it?”

“Why?”

“Why? That’s a stupid question, Vanessa. We all want a fair trial, don’t we?”

“Do we? I’ve prosecuted hundreds of people, and the only ones who wanted a fair trial were the ones I kind of thought might be innocent. Innocent people want a fair trial. It’s the
guilty
bastards who want to plea bargain, who want to avail themselves of every evasion and delay they can get their lawyers to use. Because they know that in a
fair
trial, their ass is grass and their next full-time position is bum boy in the prison shower.”

“These evasions, as you call them, are all perfectly legal. They
are
the law. Everyone has the right to use them.”

“And in return, society promises to give us justice?”

“Yes, but—”

“And we’ve agreed that this justice is particularly important when we are dealing with
guilty
people?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“The very same people who refuse to live by this social contract?”

“Perhaps. But that’s the—”

“So to sum it up, the rest of us have to put up with all this bullshit in the justice system for the benefit, in practical terms, of the very people who are
making
our lives so miserable. Is that a fair way to put it?”

“What’s your point?”

“The point is, people hate lawyers because we are the professional
liars
of modern life. We strangle truth for bucks! The last thing in the world we want is a court system where simple logic rules the day.”

“What
do
you respect, Vanessa?”

“I respect personal integrity and the sanctity of innocence. I intend to protect the second by using the first, and I intend
to speak the simple truth as often as I can. I believe that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to protect the innocent and punish—
punish
, mind you, not rehabilitate—to
punish
the guilty, and not the other way around.”

“That’s vengeance, Vanessa.”

“Vengeance is an underrated concept.”

Dwight rubbed his nose absently, then winced. “Do I have the right to vengeance, then? For the pounding I took?”

“It’s questions like that that started the law in the first place. And in answer to your question, no, you don’t.”

“Am I going to be told what’s going on around here?”

“When I know, you’ll know.”

Sometimes integrity is as simple as mowing the lawn. Sometimes strength is shown in the grace notes. Beau could see it as he drove up to the little wood-frame bungalow. Whoever lived at 1623 Vallejo Canyon Drive showed that kind of integrity and that kind of strength.

The house was painted a creamy white, and the fence around it was so new, the wood hadn’t been painted yet. Inside the fence, the yard was a careful arrangement of rocks and desert plants. No attempt had been made to grow an English lawn in the desert climate of Southern California. There are only two things that are naturally green in Los Angeles, money and envy. The people who lived at 1623 Vallejo Canyon Drive had tried very hard to keep things simple and honest.

The house itself was a low wood structure with a big front porch, sheltered by an overhanging roof. Up on the veranda, a swing chair, freshly painted but old-looking, sat in an arrangement of potted cacti and desert roses. The screen door was closed. The draperies were drawn. There was no car in front.

Vallejo Canyon Drive was a narrow rising lane that led into a low chain of hilly territory, a kind of barrow set in the middle of the tortilla flats of East L.A. By local standards, it was a decent part of town, although the signs of poverty were everywhere, the old cars and the aimless teenage boys on the front steps, the disrepair of the pavement and the walkways, and the general atmosphere of fatigue and crushing boredom.

Beau parked the Lincoln on the street in front of number
1623 and got out, reeling a little from the hot air and the brutal sunlight after the air-conditioned ease of the Town Car. He had brought a hat along, his best black Stetson, and he was wearing his only lightweight gray suit and his black cowboy boots. He needed the suit jacket to hide the big Smith in his shoulder holster. He put the Stetson on and looked at himself in the Lincoln’s tinted-glass window.

Christ, what a battered mug. Ugly as Texas roadkill. Shoulda trimmed the moustache. Shoulda lost some weight. Woulda lost some weight if I’d trimmed that moustache.

He finished off the look with his state trooper sunglasses. Never hurts to look hard in a hard town. And from the stares he was getting around the block, from the old folks on the porches, and from the five Chicano hardcases fixing that diamond-blue Eldorado over there, this looked like a very hard block.

He walked in through the carefully tended fence and up the wooden steps. The screen door was locked. The inside door was glass and wood-framing, held with a Yale lock. The interior of the house was dark. He could see some furniture and, on the far side of the room, another door leading into a bedroom. Through the front door he could see a small brass-railed bed, and beyond that another door leading through to the backyard. A table and four chairs stood in the backyard, with a vase of dead flowers on it.

Beau recognized the style of the house. Down in Tularosa they’d called these railway-car houses shotgun shacks. The idea was, a husband who came home and found his wife in bed with another guy, he could just pull down the shotgun off the wall, stand in the front door, and get a clear shot right through the house at the guy going out the back door. And not hit the walls or the windows.

It looked and felt empty, but he knocked on the frame anyway.

The sound boomed in the leaden silence of the afternoon.

Nothing.

He could have popped the inside door with little effort, but
he decided not to. Maybe he could get something from the neighbors. It was a good move, as it happened, because when he turned around, he saw most of the neighbors standing on the sidewalk, blocking his path. Five young men from across the street had stopped work on the Eldorado. They were lined up in the pathway, wearing head scarves and—God help us—hair nets. They had their arms folded across their bare chests, and their meanest faces on, drooping mustachios and bad skin.

And hair nets.

Beau sighed and walked back down the stairs. He decided not to open up the conversation by asking them where their husbands were and how come Chicanas grew such nice moustaches.

“
Buenas tardes, hombres. Soy polica. Hablan ustedes Ingles?”

“Choo gotta batch?”

He dragged out his state trooper ID and flashed it around. Somehow, it didn’t open up the gates of heaven for him. A slope-shouldered guy with a railroad scar that tore across his upper lip and right cheek, one of the guys with his long black hair in a net, sneered. It didn’t help his looks at all.

“Don mean a focking thing aroun here,
pendejo
. Wha’choo wan with this place?”

Beau, who knew damned well what
pendejo
meant, gave himself some air and tried again. “I’m looking for the owners of this house here.”

“Hey, choo go ass the Firs California Stay Bank. Dey own everything aroun here.”