Wind and Lies, page 9
“I’ve been a lawyer for twelve years, Hal. It’s no different anywhere, not here, not in Brooklyn. Lawyers don’t get clients by doing the right thing; they get clients by doing anything it takes to win. I’m not exempt from that. We call it ‘zealously representing our client,’ but what it really means is being willing to kick the living shit out of anyone who gets in our client’s way, even when we know the client is wrong. And the harder we can kick, the higher fees we can demand.” Joshua wrinkled his forehead and pursed his lips. “But after twelve years of it, it just feels good sometimes to do something because you believe in it, because it’s right. You do it just because justice requires it, and to hell with everything else.” He frowned at his father-in-law.
Hal shook his head disgustedly. “The last a the swashbucklers. They’re gonna cut your nuts off and feed ‘em to their blond cocker spaniels.”
Joshua laughed. But it really wasn’t very funny. Right, truth, and justice were little more than slogans. They had only occasional application to real life. Most of the time, right was the guy who won, truth was whoever lied better. And justice? That wasn’t a legal concept at all. It was a term that philosophers wrote entire books about and still couldn’t define. To use it in relationship to anything that happened in the law was to confuse philosophical theory with legal reality.
“I guess I don’t feel very proud of myself most of the time, practicing law. I’m just doing a job, like a butcher cutting meat or a garbageman emptying your trash barrel. But sometimes, working at the BIA, I have the opportunity to do something I really believe in. That’s a hell of a good feeling.”
Hal squinted at him and wrinkled his cheeks. “There’s no use even talking to you, is there, Josh? You’re gonna do whatever the fuck you think is right, and to hell with all of us.”
“Nonsense,” Joshua said. “I took the Merchants Association case because it pays twenty dollars an hour, not because I think it’s right. And when John Dukovoy and Charlie Dunne came and hired me, they didn’t ask me to make sure that the right side won and to see to it that justice was done. They only asked me to win.”
“Winning is what life is about.”
“I know.”
“But being right don’t hurt,” Hal said.
“Laymen think in terms of right and wrong,” Joshua said. “Lawyers are trained not to. We’re taught to think in terms of arguments we can make in favor of our side, whichever it is. And we’re taught not to confuse our own personal notion of justice with what we call our obligation to represent our clients, right or wrong. I mean, if Hitler were tried in the U.S. for war crimes, he’d be entitled to have a lawyer represent him and argue that what good or Adolf did was in the best interests of humanity. And we wouldn’t lynch the lawyer for defending his client, no matter how deeply convinced we were that the lawyer was full of shit.”
“Maybe we ought to lynch him,” Hal said.
“Lots of people think that way. Even me sometimes. But then we’re no better than Nazi Germany.”
Hal shrugged.
“It’s like the joke they tell in law school,” Joshua said. “Jake the lawyer is representing a guy accused of defrauding someone. They have a trial in front of a judge. At the end the judge takes the matter under advisement, promising to make his decision soon. A couple of weeks later, Jake the lawyer receives the judgment in the mail. He is jubilant, his client has won. He calls him on the phone and says, ‘Harry, justice prevailed.’ And Harry says, ‘Oh, my God. Appeal! Appeal!’”
Hal burst out laughing and slapped his knee.
It was eight-thirty, and Barbara had finished helping her mother wash the dishes. She came into the dining room and sat down next to Joshua.
“Is this my cue to leave?” Hal asked and snickered. Without waiting for an answer, he got up and went into the den, where Hanna and Adam were listening to the radio.
“It’s been a whole week,” Barbara whispered.
“You’re telling me?” Joshua whispered. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“Thought you’d never ask.”
They walked quickly out of the house to Joshua’s car. He drove a few blocks and parked where Campbell Avenue dead-ended in the foothills overlooking Tucson.
“I’ve wanted you all week,” he said and kissed her.
“I hope so,” she said.
He nuzzled her neck and the tops of her breasts at the V-neck of her green silk blouse. She put her hand on the zipper of his trousers and pulled it down slowly. “Liberating the wild beast,” she whispered in his ear.
“Are you scared?”
She had a throaty, lascivious chuckle that he loved. “Terrified,” she said, and he felt her tongue and lips on him.
It was just eight o’clock the next morning when Hal Dubin called. Joshua was sitting on the sofa in his living room, staring disconcertedly at the story about the Moraga case on the front page of the newspaper.
“Guess what, Mr. Fairbanks?”
“Who?” Joshua asked, distracted.
“The swashbuckler, you know, Doug Fairbanks.”
“Yeah, so?” Joshua was feeling a little too touchy to handle much of Hal’s ribbing.
“I just got seven telephone calls. Never had so many this early on a Saturday. They all loved reading about you in the paper. They’ve decided you’ll be too busy to handle their little pissant tax case. They’re hiring Harry Chandler.”
Joshua winced. There was silence on the line, then a dial tone.
Chapter 7
At noon on Monday, Edgar walked into Joshua’s office. “Ya ready to go?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Joshua said. He had worn Levi’s and a cowboy shirt and a pair of tan loafers to work, and he had his small overnight bag with him as always when he went to Sells.
“Come on, I’ll buy ya a hamburger,” Edgar said.
“Wow, the last of the big spenders.” Joshua walked with Edgar through the BIA reception room and out the back door to Edgar’s house.
“Hendly’s Diner,” Edgar said. “Frances is makin’ lunch fer both of us.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Peggy is ten months old today,” Edgar chuckled.
Peggy was sleeping soundly in her playpen in the middle of the living room. Frances held her finger to her lips as the men came in.
“It took a half hour to get her to go to sleep,” she said softly. “She’s got a real stubborn streak.”
Frances was forty-one years old, fifteen years younger than her husband. She had straight brown hair tied back in a bun, a thin face, square yellowish teeth, and a scrawny, shapeless body. But Joshua loved her like a sister. In the two years he had been in Tucson, Frances and Edgar and Magdalena and Chuy had become his closest friends, sometimes the only people who would even talk to him. Magdalena was twenty-two now, Chuy twenty-six, and they were both blessed with extraordinary good looks. Frances and Edgar had not been so fortunate. In the early days, when Joshua had first arrived and Frances had been cold, even hostile, he had thought that she resembled a skinny little mule. That never occurred to him any longer. He saw her only as a friend, a sweet, shy woman in a simple life wanting nothing more from it than a pleasant home, an attentive husband, and a couple of children. Peggy had not been an accident of old age. They had desperately needed her to fill the void in their lives after their eleven-year-old son had been killed a year before. Since Peggy’s birth there was no longer a vacant look of melancholy in Frances’ light brown eyes.
Peggy was lucky. She was a pretty girl. She had platinum blond hair and a little turned-up nose and green eyes. “She takes after the Irish part a the family,” Edgar would say. “My grandpa, Seamus Hendly, a drunk and a horse thief, got hisself throwed outta County Cork, ended up farmin’ some caliche land just a few miles from here and gettin’ knifed by a coupla drunk Apaches in a bar at the age a seventy-six. Feisty som bitch he was, ol’ Grandpa Seamus. Yella hair ‘n green eyes, just like my little Peggy.”
Edgar and Joshua sat at the round Formica table in the kitchen. “I made ya chicken-fried steak instead a hamburger,” Frances said, putting plates of food in front of the two men. “I didn’t like the feel a the hamburger meat up at the market. Real greasy, like they’re puttin’ sawdust in it again.”
“This is great,” Joshua said, eating heartily.
“Yeah, honey, really good,” Edgar said. He wiped a few specks of breading from his oft-anointed tie.
“Ya think ya’ll be back tonight?” Frances asked.
“I doubt it,” Edgar said. “Romero ain’t gonna be at the headquarters till after three, he told me. It’ll take till four to stop dancin’ and get down to bidness, and the council is meetin’ at seven. We’ll be back tomorra mornin’.”
“I’m sure gettin’ tired a you bein’ gone so much.”
“Fer the cause, honey. Fer the cause.” Edgar shrugged apologetically.
They finished lunch quickly and got into Edgar’s Ford. They cracked the windows a couple of inches to get a cross breeze.
“Anything goin’ on with the Melinda Lopez thing?” Edgar asked.
Joshua shook his head. “Dead ends. Except Roberto Felix or maybe Josiah Porter. The old guy’s just crazy enough to do something like that. Real weird eyes. Him standing there in the courtroom laughing like a hyena was scary. Eyes like Rasputin, big wild beard.”
Edgar laughed. “Yeah, I seen the movie. Maybe we can do a remake with Josiah Porter as the mad monk.”
“Anyway, other than them, Chuy says they’re not getting anywhere.”
A few moments passed. “Chuy and Roy were in to see me last week,” Edgar said casually.
“Yeah, I know.”
More silent moments. “They really think I had somethin’ to do with it?” Edgar asked.
Joshua looked over at him. “Not with her murder. But they think you had a much bigger relationship with her than you’re letting on.”
“Wish I did,” Edgar snorted. “She was a helluva looker. Almost as pretty as Magdalena.” He glanced at Joshua. “Y’ever have a go at Magdalena?”
Joshua shook his head. “No, but I’ve thought about it a couple more times than I should have.”
Edgar looked at Joshua. “Lots a folks think you two been gettin’ it on.”
More silent moments. “Yeah, I know. But we don’t.”
Edgar nodded. “Well, whatever folks are sayin’ and dreamin’ up in their heads, I didn’t have nothin’ goin’ with Melinda neither.”
Joshua looked over at Edgar. “I hear you,” he said, his voice reassuring. “And that’s what I told them.”
Sells always looked the same to Joshua. In the past two years there had not been a house built or painted or torn down, not a vato repaired or propped up, not a tree chopped down or a lawn planted. It has probably looked the same as this for twenty years, fifty, Joshua thought. The poverty and the squalor of the many shacks were only slightly alleviated by the picturesque surroundings, the rolling hills of wildflowers and cacti and creosote bushes and palo verde and mesquite trees. On the face of this genuinely beautiful high desert, the shacks were like keloid scars. Sells was sixty miles from Tucson and a zillion light-years away from the care and concern of the people who really mattered, the politicians, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, and builders who turned patches of ground into real cities with growth and hope and futures. Coming to Sells was literally like stemming the future, stopping forward movement. Joshua always felt sad here, stifled, a little frightened of the hopelessness that infused the air like pollen. Men sat on orange crates beside their front doors, drinking openly from bottles of muscatel. Several sat against the side of the desiccated clapboard gas station, torpid, enslaved by the hegemony of hopelessness, the necks of the bottles sticking out of worn brown paper bags.
People like Chief Romero tried, they did their best, as Macario Antone had done before him, as centuries of tribal leaders had done. But the Papagos’ lives had been changed irreparably by their contact with the white man. Just a few short years ago they had all been farmers and hunters. But now they did not have to forage or hunt or grow their own food in the desert anymore. There were cans of this and packages of that on the shelves of every market, so it was much easier to eat the white man’s food. But their bodies had been conditioned over hundreds of years to a vastly different diet, so the white man’s food gave over half of the Papagos diabetes by the time they were thirty. And most of them were overweight, not because they were gluttons, but because their bodies had not adapted to metabolizing the processed food. And they suffered from the illnesses brought by the white man, diseases against which the Indians had developed no antibodies. A white man’s mild flu could decimate an entire Indian village. Unemployment was also a persistent, rampaging epidemic here. What work was there on the reservation once farming had become pointless? And who would hire them in the white man’s cities and towns?
Edgar parked in front of the BIA office. They went inside, and Joshua turned on the swamp cooler. By the time they returned this evening, the office should be cool enough for them to sleep comfortably. They had a little time to kill before their meeting with Chief Romero, so they drove down to the Artesia Mountains to see if anything new had been added to the Mormon cult’s settlement.
Nothing had changed, but there were at least a dozen more young men than there had been the last time, working in the fields. In one field several boys were digging up cabbages and celery. In an adjacent field were piles of just harvested carrots and onions and eggplant. Next to it was a field covered with hundreds of watermelons.
“Well, this Porter sure knows how to farm,” Joshua said. “You can’t take that away from him. They’ve only been here a few months, and they’re already getting their first crop in.”
“Yip, he could do a lotta good fer these folks if he’d just quit screwin’ ten-year-olds and paid the boys a decent wage. They could turn this into a damn good farmin’ cooperative, put a bunch a the Indins to work. Pity he’s so damn crazy.”
They drove slowly back to Sells and parked in front of the tribal headquarters. It was a little after three o’clock. Chief Romero was sitting in his office with his feet on his desk, smoking a cigar and listening to staticky Mexican music on the radio.
“Howdy, Francisco,” Edgar said.
Romero had his hands clasped behind his head. He squinted through the pall of smoke and nodded.
“Hello, Chief,” Joshua said.
They sat down in front of the desk. Edgar pulled out a mashed pack of Camels and extracted a bent cigarette. He straightened it and smoothed it out carefully. He took a stick match out of his gray wool suit jacket and lit it with his thumbnail. He puffed deeply on the cigarette and waved out the match.
“We need yer help, Francisco,” Edgar said.
Romero nodded and blew a cloud of smoke from his mouth. “Yah, I hear. Cannot get rid of Porter without tribe.”
Edgar nodded. “Either that or we gotta go to the county attorney and have Porter charged criminally. It seems just a whole lot simpler to have the tribe come in as plaintiff and well throw him off the Res. He can go back to Short Creek and do whatever he wants to up there, long as he stays clear of us.”
The chief flicked the cigar butt out the open window. He took his feet off the desk and straightened in his chair.
“Damn hard to get council to agree on throw him off reservation. He hand out plenty of food, much clothes. So what if he has bunch of young wives?”
Edgar was becoming angry at the chief’s unexpectedly cavalier attitude. “‘Cause it’s against the damn law, Francisco. It’s against morality.”
Romero stared hard at Edgar. “You talk morality? What you talking? You got wife, little daughter, but you have plenty of fun with young Indian girl right here.”
Edgar flinched and sat back slowly in the straight-back wooden chair. “What the hell you talkin’ ‘bout, Chief?”
“You know damn well, Mr. Superintendent. You can bullshit everybody. You can’t bullshit me. I seen you ‘n her. I seen your eyes.”
“Aw, let’s get off a that crap,” Edgar growled. “We gotta talk ‘bout Porter.”
“No, nothing going happen with Porter. I tell you now. No white man give a dry dog shit to a Papago ‘cept Mormons. They care about us. To them we important. You think council gonna make him leave just because you say so? You have say over BIA. You have say over much, but not our lives. Who live here on reservation is our business.” He thrust his thumb at his chest. “Our business, Mr. Superintendent. You watch after yours. We watch after ours.”
“Used to be you people cared ‘bout what the BIA superintendent wanted.” Edgar studied Romero petulantly.
“Used to be we respect you more,” Romero said, staring defiantly at Edgar. “Used to be we trust you more. Now, since Melinda, nobody sure.”
Edgar stood up, gritting his teeth, sputtering. “Well, you bring the Porter thing to the council tonight, gott damn it! You let them decide whether they want their daughters fuckin’ that old man and their sons doin’ slave labor.” He stormed out of the office.
Joshua stood up slowly. He looked searchingly at Romero.
“Is true,” Romero said, nodding for emphasis. ‘Is many rumors here about Edgar and Melinda, too many for it be just talk. Is no good.” He shook his head and frowned sourly. “Is no damn good.”
Joshua and Edgar ate at the only cafe in town. They sat wordlessly at the counter, staring at their plates or studying their own distorted faces in the scarred mirror behind the griddle-top stove. The food had no taste to Joshua. He had lost his appetite in the chief’s office. What had transpired there was profoundly disturbing. Edgar’s single ultimate power over the Papago tribe was his moral suasion, his capacity to prevail on issues of vital importance to the BIA because in the final analysis the Indians trusted him. But Melinda Lopez had been killed. Chief Romero believed that Edgar had been having an affair with her. Maybe he even believed that Edgar had killed her. Melinda Lopez had thus killed the moral suasion of Edgar Hendly.
