Point of Law (15 page)

“Would have appreciated you telling me that a couple of days ago,” he responds. “Might have saved us a lot of trouble.”

I agree. “It might have saved Cal’s life.”

“Only if your brother’s not the one who beat him to death.”

I don’t want to argue. The sheriff already knows all the reasons I believe Roberto didn’t have anything to do with Cal’s death. Feeling even guiltier, I also violate Kim’s confidence in order to tell the sheriff about the ruin and the cave Cal had supposedly found and was in the process of revealing in some secretive way to the Forest Service. I explain that according to Kim Walsh, Cal believed the caves were such a valuable resource to the valley that their acknowledged existence would halt the exchange.

“Sounds like a fairy tale, or a joke,” Munik says when I finish. “Cal’s Bad Caverns,” he chuckles, shaking his head.

I think about the fact that someone kicked in the door to Sunny’s apartment and searched the place. And I recall Kim telling me that Sunny said Cal had taken her to see the caves two days before. Even if she hadn’t seen Cal killed, she is the only person alive now who knows just where Cal’s caves are. And someone isn’t taking it as a joke.

“They’re looking for her, Sheriff. She witnessed the murder and she knows where the Indian ruin is. Either one will screw up the whole deal for Fast and Burgermeister.”

“Then why didn’t she come here?” Munik says skeptically, meaning to his office.

“Because she’d helped Cal burn down the lodge. If she came to you, then she’d have to tell you the whole story and get arrested for arson.”

“You got to be kidding me, Burns.”

I ignore his tone. “What are you doing to find her?”

He sighs. “There’s not a lot we can do other than check around town for her and put out a Colorado BOLO on her car.” He means Be On the Lookout. It would only do any good if she were stopped in Colorado for some sort of traffic infraction or other crime. “We found an old address in her apartment. We’re going to follow that up with a call to the locals there.”

“Where?”

“Sorry, son. You don’t need to know that. I’m pretty sure you’re clean, except for being a little naive and imaginative. But I’m not taking any chances.”

I start to get angry again but decide to just let it go. I’ll get nowhere by pushing it. “What about Fast? Will you look into him?”

“I’m going to tell you this only so you aren’t pestering the man. I tried to call him this morning, just as a courtesy, see, to let him know someone’d been whacked up on what’s about to become his land. His secretary said Dave’s out of town and has been since yesterday afternoon. She said he was up on the family property in White River, and that he couldn’t be reached there even by cell phone. She’ll have him call or stop by when he gets back. Now, don’t you worry, Agent, I’ll make sure he had nothing to do with this. And I’ll check on the con, too, that fellow Burgermeister, and I’ll check out any alibi he gives me. Now, stay out of it and let me do my job. All right?”

It would be a waste of time to argue about his assumption that Fast couldn’t be involved. I swallow the words. The sheriff’s not going to help. If anyone’s going to look for evidence against Fast, if anyone’s going to clear Roberto, it’s got to be me.

NINETEEN

C
OMING OUT OF
the courthouse, I jog down the steps and start to cut across the courthouse lawn when I hear my name half shouted from across the broad field of well-tended grass. Kim is stiffly running toward me, her usual fluid runner’s grace absent. She no longer looks like the proud, tough woman I’d first been attracted to. Now she looks more like a frightened young girl. As she comes closer I can see that her single good eye is bloodshot and that her cheeks are swollen from crying. Her hard exterior has cracked; her spirit appears in danger of shattering.

When she’s just a few feet away I start to ask, “What’s wrong?” but the words never leave my mouth. So much is wrong for both of us. What else could go wrong?

“I can’t find Sunny!” she blurts out.

After a second’s hesitation, remembering the way she’d stiff-armed me with her eyes when I tried to comfort her once before, I put my hands on her shoulders, then slide them around her neck in a quick platonic hug. “I know,” I tell her. “The police can’t find her either.”

She doesn’t immediately pull away from my embrace. Her torso is small and hot against mine, her fists clenching handfuls of material at the back of my shirt. Despite the circumstances, my attraction to her returns. Magnifies.

“What’s happened to her, Anton? I went to her apartment and there was a cop in the living room. He said someone had broken down her door.”

“I heard.”

Everyone wants to find Sunny. Kim wants to make sure her friend is all right. I need to find her because she’s the only one who can decisively exonerate my brother. The police want her so that she can further implicate him. And David Fast and Alf Burgermeister, if they are Cal’s killers, must find her to shut her up before she can point the finger at them.

And there’s also the fact that she may be the only one who knows where the entrance to Cal’s Bad Cavern is, if it exists at all. I remember what Kim had told me the night of the Tribe’s meeting around the campfire, about how Cal believed that the cave was important enough that it could keep the Forest Service from approving the land swap. Maybe that’s why Cal was beaten to death rather than just shot or stabbed—because he wouldn’t tell them where the entrance is. The developers might have tortured him to get him to talk.

Kim takes a step away, then looks up at me with slightly quavering lips. She speaks in a rush. “I’ve been looking everywhere, trying to find you and Leonard. I was about to drive up to the valley again when I saw your car over there. I was writing a note to leave on your windshield but your dog acted like it was going to come through it after me.”

“He wouldn’t hurt you,” I say, not entirely sure. Oso isn’t tolerant of people coming around the truck when I’m not in sight to grant them permission. “I was about to go looking for you. My dad had to go back to his job in Washington, and I need your help to find Sunny. She’s the only one who can get my brother out of jail.”

“What about the police? The officer in Sunny’s apartment said they were doing all they can to find her.” In a way I’m relieved that she doesn’t question further where and why my father has gone. It would be embarrassing to my sense of family pride, having to to admit out loud that he’s abandoned his sons.

“I just talked to the sheriff. There’s not all that much they can do.” I explain that they’re looking for her around town and about the BOLO. “You two were friends, right? If something scared her real bad last night, where would she run to?”

Kim’s face regains some composure. The question, the requirement that she do some thinking, seems to calm her. “To my house, I guess. But I’ve already checked there.” She looks down at the grass. “Lately we haven’t been as close as we used to be. At one time we were really close. I guess I was a sort of a mentor to her or something.”

“Do you know where she lived before she came to Tomichi?”

“With her family in Arizona. She’s only nineteen, you know.”

“Where in Arizona?”

“A place called Page. It’s on the shore of Lake Powell.”

A bit of her old toughness creeps back into her voice when she says the lake’s name. I recall that many environmentalists continue to be horrified by the lake’s existence. Its creation, due to the building of an immense dam back in the fifties, had destroyed thousands of pristine desert canyons. Edward Abbey had vilified the huge new body of water in
The Monkey Wrench Gang.

“Do you think she might have gone back there?”

Kim shakes her head. “I don’t know. She didn’t talk about it all that much, except for about how she liked to get away from everyone out on the lake. She had some secret place there she liked to escape to. Her parents weren’t abusive, but it sounded like they were pretty neglectful. And she had some boyfriend who liked to knock her around. I don’t know if she’s stayed in touch with any friends there, but maybe she’s out on the water.”

“How far is Page?”

“It’s a seven- or eight-hour drive. If you’re going to look for her there—”

“I’m going.”

“—then I’m coming with you.” She finally looks up at me again, determination now on her face. With one hand she pushes back her tangled hair and reveals the eye patch. “When do we leave?”

I’m tempted to say
Right now
, but restrain myself. “Give me half an hour. There’s something I’ve got to do first.” For more reasons than one I’m glad she’s willing to come along. And I’m feeling unusually lonesome, with my father gone, my brother in jail, and everything a mess.

Then there’s the thing I have to do first, something I definitely don’t want to do. But I feel obligated to let my brother know that I’m not going to bail him out with the money in my trust. Dad had been right—he’s safer in there. For the time being, anyway. Maybe a few days in jail will dry him out to the point where he’s ready to get some treatment. But if it’s too long he’s going to burn himself up with his own energy.

TWENTY

A
N ELDERLY DEPUTY
, too old and crabby for street work, makes me wait while he finishes his cigarette. With a palsied hand he leafs through a faded copy of the
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Edition as he smokes. Normally I would be amused to see that libido still exists even at his age and condition, but all the stress and sleeplessness have left me irritable. And I’m in a hurry to get on the road—I need to find Sunny before Fast and Burgermeister do.

“Can you suck that thing down any faster?” I hear myself say. I immediately regret the words. Antagonizing the jailer will only result in him prolonging my wait. And I don’t need any more trouble with the Sheriff’s Office.

The older man’s hand freezes from where it had been turning a page. He looks up at me slowly, his eyes tight in what’s supposed to be a menacing squint. Instead of intimidating, the effect is pathetic. The deputy is long past being able to intimidate anyone.

“Sorry,” I force myself to say. “I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just in a hurry.” I’d left Kim on the street outside by my truck. Thinking it might be a good idea for her and Oso to get to know one another before an eight-hour drive, I’d let the beast out to urinate on the courthouse trees. Kim nervously held the old piece of climbing rope I used as a leash. For a few moments, at least, her mind was occupied by thoughts of her own safety instead of concern for her friend.

The deputy inhales deeply on his cigarette and blows the smoke out of his nose, looking like an elderly bull. Then he slaps the magazine shut, takes the soggy butt out of his mouth, and flicks the cigarette past me and out the open door behind my back. The whole time he keeps up the sad glare.

“All right,” he finally says, deciding he has me thoroughly cowed. “Let’s go.”

He leads me through two steel doors and into a closet-sized room. Above a waist-high counter dividing the room is a sheet of bulletproof glass. On each side of the counter are heavy black telephones. The walls are freshly painted but the glass on my side is smeared with finger and lips prints—a silent testimony to the longing that occurs for the men and women in the jail. Bare concrete makes the floor. There are two plastic chairs on my side of the window and a single metal stool on the other. The stool looks as if it’s bolted to the concrete.

The deputy leaves me alone and disappears back out into the corridor. I wait alone for five minutes until the steel door on the other side of the glass swings open. Two burly young guards plus the elderly deputy escort my brother into the visitors’ room. He’s shuffling in leg irons. All three jailers watch him warily, the same way Kim had watched Oso when I’d left them outside. They take the handcuffs off his wrists. One of them says something warningly to him but the window is thick enough to obscure all sound on the other side. Roberto glances back with a smile and a shrug.

Once seated on the stool on the other side of the two-inch-thick glass, Roberto appears calm and bemused except for his eyes. They are red and bleary, hot and angry. On his head is what looks like a broad-brimmed hat made of tissue paper. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a sanitary toilet bowl cover.

“
Che
, what’s up?” he asks when we each pick up the phones on our respective sides of the window.

“Roberto. What the hell is that on your head?”

He grins again. “Urban cowboy hat. My new look.”

I shake my head and say, “It looks like you’re having fun.”

“There’s some cool guys in here. Bunch of Indians. We’ve been having a little party while waiting for you to get me the fuck out of here. It’s the only way to pass the time, bro. I learned that in the pen. You wouldn’t believe the sweet shit they’ve got in this place.” He lifts his index finger and thumb, which are touching, to his lips and rolls back his eyes. “It’s like a fucking wild powwow in—”

I tap the phone sharply on the glass to interrupt him, then point at the phone. I know of plenty of jails in Wyoming that tap the phones. It would just make things worse if he’s caught with contraband.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, catching my drift but either not taking it seriously or not caring. “This whole thing’s bullshit, you know. There’s no reason to stress about it.”

“They’re charging you with arson and murder, Roberto. And whatever else they can think up. You’d better stress about it.”

He laughs. “What evidence? Why would I fucking do it? I just showed up in this county two days ago. All the sheriff, that Wyatt Earp–looking wanna-be with the pole up his ass, all he’s got on me is that I’m a felon. Their whole case will get kicked at the prelim,
che,
if not before. Shit, you should know that—you do this stuff for a living. And then I bet I can sue the bastards for false arrest and imprisonment.”

I’m more disturbed by Roberto’s legal acumen than impressed. From all his prior trials and the time spent in the federal pen, he’d acquired the usual perp’s knowledge of the legal process. Often it is just enough to make them dangerous to themselves. They take seriously the “innocent until proven guilty” line and always seem to be puzzled when they are held in jail until a jury convicts them. Since becoming a cop and learning that juries cannot be counted on to convict the guilty, I’d usually been pleased when a suspect was made to rot behind bars until the jury kicked him or her loose. Now I’m not so sure.

“The judge liked the case enough to set bail at five hundred thousand dollars, Roberto.”

“That’s because the DA fed her a bunch of shit about me being a danger to the community, not because the case is any good. I’m innocent, bro. So you gonna get me the fuck out of here or what?”

“It’s five hundred thousand dollars, Roberto.”

“Why are you harping on that? You’ve got it in the trust Grandpa left us—just have the bank wire it north. All you need is ten percent, fifty thousand, for the bail bondsman. Right?”

“No bondsman will touch you.
You
should know that. Besides, I called around after the arraignment this morning.”

He snatches the tissue paper hat off his head and wads it into a ball. The amused look is gone. “Why the fuck not?”

“Because you’re an addict, bro.”

“You told them that?”

“No. The cops did. Or the DA.”

He slams the phone on the counter surface before him. He does it hard enough that the sound makes me wince and jerk the receiver away from my head. I expect the phone to shatter in his hand but it doesn’t. I also expect a guard to check on us but no one appears. Probably another cigarette break. Through the window he glares at me. His eyes seem hot enough to melt the glass.

After a long minute he picks up the phone again. It still works. “Then you put it up, Anton. The whole thing. You know I’d do it for you.” My name is funny coming from his mouth. I’ve only rarely heard him call me anything but
bro
or
che,
which is roughly the Argentinean equivalent of
dude
.

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

He stands quickly and leans toward the glass until his forehead is pressed against it. His bright blue eyes are blazing. They look like the hottest part of a candle’s flame. He’s not threatening me—I know he’d never hurt me, and it’s just his natural reaction to get in someone’s face when they’re giving him news he doesn’t want to hear. But still I find myself leaning back in the plastic chair. I’m not exactly scared of him; it’s more a fear of what he’ll do to himself.

“
Why the fuck
—” His breath steams the window, obscuring his mouth.

“Roberto, listen. If I were to bail you out, then you’d have to stay sober, take urine tests and all that until the charges are dropped. And even when the charges are dropped, they can take the money and charge you with violating bond conditions. Put you right back in here even though the original case was bullshit. Violation of bond conditions is a mandatory minimum one-year sentence.”

With a bit of shame I remember how I’d once used that against a suspect when I couldn’t prove a heroin distribution charge beyond a reasonable doubt. After I’d arrested him on the weak charge, I’d arranged with the DA up in Wyoming to set a low bond so the guy would be able to get out, knowing he was addicted and that he’d violate the “no drugs or alcohol” conditions of the bond within hours. Then I’d followed him to a shooting gallery, picked him up when he came out, had him pee in a cup, and locked him away on new, solid charges. The original distribution charges were dropped. He was convicted of violating his bond conditions and sentenced to the mandatory one year.

“You’re safest where you are right now until I can get the case dismissed. I’m working on that right—”

“Where’s Dad?” he demands, his voice as hot as his eyes.

I hesitate for a moment and look away. Then quietly I tell him the truth. “He split. He got called back to Washington, ’Berto. Some emergency in the Balkans or something.”

I expect him to explode, to rip the counter off the window and try to put the stool through the glass. But he doesn’t. Roberto looks at me for a moment, then takes the phone from his ear and places it gently in its cradle. He lifts his forehead off the glass. Then he turns and stands by the steel door, facing it after knocking, with his back to me.

“Roberto!” I shout into my phone. I crack it three times against the glass. My brother doesn’t turn around.

“Roberto!” I shout again as the steel door on the other side of the glass swings open. The same three deputies pull him roughly into the corridor on the other side. He never looks back at me.

Out in the sunlight, I’m nearly reeling with the shame of my perceived betrayal. As far as he knows, I’ve abandoned him, too, just like our father had. And despite all his reckless energy, all his uncontrollable urges, Roberto is intensely sensitive. I remember the time he’d shown up in the Tetons one summer when I was guiding there. He tore into my camp on the Grand’s Lower Saddle like a tortured demon trying to claw his way back into heaven. His girlfriend since our childhood on Grandfather’s ranch in Argentina—the only serious girlfriend he’d ever had—had just sent him a letter. She loved him, it said, but he had no future. He would die young. He would break her heart. So she was cutting all ties and moving to Spain. Roberto borrowed some climbing gear, showed me a mind-blowing stash of acid, and then disappeared into granite spires. It was a month before he came out, a month that I spent snapping at clients and fighting waking nightmares of him falling through the sky. When he reappeared he was just a stinking shell—burned down to nothing but muscle and bone.

I’ve abandoned him in a way he would never abandon me. If it were me in jail on some bullshit charge and he couldn’t post the bond, then he’d just bust the place wide open and drag me out. But I can’t do it. Unlike Roberto, my actions are restricted by the fear of consequences. Walking back across the courthouse lawn toward where Kim and Oso wait on the grass near my truck, I think about how betrayed, how hurt, how unloved he must feel, sitting all alone in a concrete cell.

I make a promise to myself: I’m going to make it up to him.