Double Tap

CHAPTER TWO

I had an uncle named Evo. he was a big man, nearly six-foot-four, and though he carried a paunch above his belt and a spare tire over each hip, I never thought of him as fat. From my recollection he filled the frame of every doorway he passed through, from top to bottom and both sides, shoulders like a stevedore and an angular head like a bronze bust, bald and shiny as polished stone. The only hair you would have noticed were the unkempt bushes over his brows and several days’ layer of stubble on his face. For most of my life, as a child and later, my uncle in physical appearance was the spitting image of Luca Brasi, the notorious assassin of Godfather fame.

Evo’s enduring expression was a kind of passive, simpering smile, what you might take for the face of a wiseass until he opened his mouth to talk, which he seldom did. Then you would have noticed the missing teeth up front like broken pickets in a fence and the childish thoughts and worries that spilled from his mind.

Caught up in events, just a few years out of high school, I was told that Evo had always been a happy kid, full of life, smiles, and laughter. But as Christmas 1950 approached he found himself perched behind the sights of an M1 Garand on a snow-covered slope, peering out at what must have looked like the edge of the earth. His Army unit had pushed out into the mountains north of the Marine battalion encamped along the western side of a reservoir, an ominous place of ice-covered rivers and barren mountains.

The North Korean forces had evaporated under the massive air assault and pounding from UN artillery. U.S. forces, Army units, and Marines, along with their allies, had driven the North Koreans up the peninsula to within a few miles of the Chinese border. MacArthur had broken their backs at Inchon. Victory was at hand. By Christmas the troops would be home. It was late November and temperatures at night dipped to sixty below, driven by icy winds off the steppes of Manchuria, temperatures so cold that at times it froze the actions on machine guns so that they would often fire only a single shot and had to be cycled by hand. Having outflanked the North Koreans by landing far behind enemy lines, the UN forces had moved north so fast that most units had been issued little or no winter weather gear.

Though he didn’t know it at the time, from all accounts Evo’s unit and those on the line with him had gone as far north as any UN forces would ever get. As Thanksgiving approached, these troops were just a few ridgelines south of the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.

Much of what I know of these events I have garnered over the years from books and articles and from conversations with my father, who was Evo’s older brother. My uncle seldom talked of his experiences in the war. In fact, in the decades after his return to civilian life, I can recall him having only a few conversations, and most of those with my father.

Even with all of this, what drew my attention to him as a child were the gravitational black holes where my uncle’s eyes should have been. I often wondered what was going on beyond the vacant depths of those twin dark pits. According to the shrinks at the VA hospital, it was most likely visions of hell.

It is possible that these childhood memories of my uncle have softened my brain and impaired my judgment sufficiently that last week I returned a phone call from a complete stranger, one Colonel James Safford, U.S. Army retired. Colonel Safford, who in civilian life is a lawyer in Idaho specializing in estate planning, wills, trusts, and the like, in his spare time volunteers his services as part of a small veterans’ advocacy group known as the GI Defense Fund. The organization was formed in the 1970s in the waning days of the Vietnam War when a growing number of returning veterans found themselves in trouble with the law, oftentimes the result of seemingly senseless and unprovoked acts of horrific violence; this from men who had no prior criminal history or problems with the law before their military service.

Safford had been given my name, along with the names of several other local lawyers, from the office of the base commander at North Island Naval Air Station on Coronado Island in San Diego. It seems the Navy keeps in touch with a handful of local lawyer-veterans who from time to time have drawn attention to themselves by defending members of the armed services who have gotten sideways with civilian legal authorities. These attorneys have on more than one occasion given up on collecting their fees. Some might call this pro bono work. But as a practical matter it is difficult to collect from soldiers and sailors whose spouses and children sometimes have to line up at the county welfare office for food stamps just so that they can eat through the end of the month.

What Safford was looking for was some help with a case. It seemed that a retired Army sergeant had gone a little beyond the usual military brush with the law, your typical bar brawl or flashing incident involving a general mooning of society brought on by unbridled hostility, a domestic dispute, or a few too many beers.

It’s the reason we are here today, my partner Harry Hinds and I, heading for the elevator at the county jail to interview a prospective client. His name is Emiliano Ruiz. We have never met.

He is thirty-eight years old and until two and a half years ago was an Army staff sergeant, what some would call a lifer. He spent twenty years in uniform. And according to what little I know of him, he saw action in Panama and the first Gulf War. He retired and took a job with a security firm in San Diego about two years ago, one of those companies that offer high-end protective services for corporate executives here and abroad. For the last four months Sergeant Ruiz has been behind bars on a charge of first-degree murder with special circumstances. If he is convicted, considering the profile of the case-involving a victim of prominence in this community-and the cold and calculating nature of the crime, Ruiz is a likely candidate for San Quentin’s death row.

As Harry and I turn the corner for our two o’clock conference somebody over by one of the satellite trucks hollers, “There they are,” and within a few seconds they are on us like locusts.

We are engulfed in a sea of bodies hoisting microphones and pushing camera lenses in our faces. Bright lights and a million questions, most of them unintelligible, are drowned out by more shouted questions from behind.

There is no telling how many are here. I can’t see far enough into the crowd, but the camera crews are jostling each other for position. There are satellite trucks from as far north as L.A., all of the network affiliates, their dishes already arrayed and aimed skyward, generators running. They are parked at the curb in front of the entrance to the county jail, blocking the sidewalk so that we have to move around them to get there.

“Mr. Madriani”-some guy sticks his microphone in Harry’s face-“can you tell us, have you spoken to your client yet?”

With that, everybody jumps on Harry. He is awash in questions, everybody figuring the reporter must know him.

“When are you going to see Ruiz?”

“Why did the defendant fire Dale Kendal? Was he unhappy with Kendal’s representation?”

It is my chance to slip the crowd, but I don’t do it. “What about the preliminary hearing? If he’s innocent, how come the judge bound him over?”

“What does Ruiz know about the Information for Security program?”

“Was he working for the government?”

“Do you think Chapman was killed because of IFS? Has anybody in the administration talked to you?”

Harry keeps trudging forward, wading into them, briefcase up in front of his face; he finally looks over at me, half smiles, then says, “He’s Madriani, not me.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Like quills on a mad porcupine, a hundred microphones-some hoisted on six-foot booms-are suddenly pointed in my direction.

Even in the afternoon San Diego sun the camera lights are blinding, portable banks of them arrayed on bars held high on stanchions moving with the crowd as we approach the entrance to the jail in lockstep, half an inch at a time.

“We’ll have nothing to say right now. Maybe later, after I’ve spoken to Mr. Ruiz.”

This tentative offering doesn’t appease them. Some character sticks me in the ass from behind, trying to lift his microphone boom over my head. I make a mental note to find another way out of the jail.

Using his briefcase like a shield fending off swords, Harry pushes on into the crowd, Don Quixote tilting at mic booms and cameras. We run this gauntlet for half a block, the press mob now a wide circle of bodies around us, shutting down traffic as we cross the street. A photographer with a wide-angle lens tries to get a shot from down low. Somebody jostles him from behind, and by the time he snaps the shutter he is close enough to my face that I can read the f-stops off the barrel of his lens. “Extra! Extra! See hair up the lawyer’s nose!” And some people see this as glamorous.

The murder of a prominent socialite, one of the state’s leading software magnates-a major local employer and a woman who made it to 220 of the Fortune 500-is a good story, but nonetheless it is one that likely would have had only local legs. This morning a front-page piece in a Washington newspaper changed all that. The story, which has now been regurgitated coast-to-coast on all of the morning network news shows, has linked the victim, Madelyn Chapman, and her company to the controversial Information for Security program, known to the press and the public as IFS.

IFS has been leading news in the national press for weeks now, ever since it became the largest bone in a tug-of-war between the White House and Congress, the President saying he needs the program to safeguard national security and civil libertarians claiming it’s an invasion of privacy.

Until this morning Harry and I had agreed to become involved in a nice, quiet little murder trial, with perhaps a few local reporters invited. Now that Chapman has been linked to the IFS program, her murder has been ginned into national headlines, and Harry and I are up to our asses in a sea of questions.

Fifty yards away I can see a small band of uniformed guards. They have crowded up against the inside of the glass doors at the main entrance to the jail. Looking out and laughing, one of them has a cupped hand to his mouth and is talking. They seem to be enjoying the entertainment, two lawyers being engulfed and digested by the news amoeba out front. Want some publicity? Help yourself.

We grind to a halt, unable to move forward or back. I’m beginning to feel like Custer surrounded by the Indians. This kind of stuff can get out of hand. Somebody pokes Harry with his mic and gets a face full of leather with a handle attached. The guy starts to push back and I stop him before we have a news riot. If this continues, I know that my partner will be packing an anvil in the bottom of his briefcase the next time he comes for a jail visit.

“They’re taking their time,” says Harry.

We are cooling our heels in one of the concrete cubicles they call conference rooms at the jail. Harry is standing with a foot up on the steel bench to one side of the table, his left elbow resting on his knee, his hand propped up under his chin as he drums the metal tabletop with the fingers of his other hand.

Harry has had enough for one day. Courtrooms are one thing, crowds are another. Harry is a gentleman of the old school. He has a short temper when it comes to anarchy.

“Why didn’t Kendal want the case?” asks Harry.

“Said he was too busy.”

“Look at all the face time he could get on the tube,” says Harry. “He wants it back, my advice is give it to him. Life’s too short for this crap.”

Dale Kendal is one of the brand-name criminal defense lawyers in Southern California. He forages for cases in L.A., Orange, and San Diego counties. Kendal handled the preliminary hearing with the result that Emiliano Ruiz was bound over for trial in the Superior Court. Given the low threshold of evidence required, no one really expected Ruiz to beat the indictment. Still, after the prelim, Kendal made arrangements to withdraw from the case, and the court allowed him to do it.

Harry looks at his watch. “Suppose you can’t expect the jail to operate on the same commercial concept as fast food.”

He looks at me but I don’t bite.

“What, you don’t think it could happen-that a corporation could take this place over and run it right?”

“Did I say anything?”

“Think of the advantages. A private correctional facility. The county could save a zillion bucks a year in safety retirement with the sheriffs’ union alone.”

Harry glances over out of the corner of one eye. By now I’m a cipher, giving him nothing with which to argue.

“They could put a couple of kiosks around back,” he says. “You drive up and talk into the little speaker, you order a felony and two misdemeanors. Sort of supersize the order. Give ‘em the clients’ names. Oh, yeah, and order me up a deputy DA-you know, one of those new ones, fresh right outta law school. The one you gave me last week was kind of tough, an old bastard who knew what he was doing. You have them repeat it to make sure they got the order straight. After all,” says Harry, “you gotta remember, this is a private business now. And in a private business the customer is always right.”

He glances at me to make sure that he is getting my easy assent on all of this.

“If it’s a private business, what makes you the customer? Why not the inmates?” I ask.

“No. No,” says Harry. “They’re the commodity being bought and sold.”

“I thought justice was the commodity.”

“No, that’s just an occasional by-product,” says Harry.

“You’re the one with the golden arches.” I’m smiling. “So where do you go from there?”

“You pull around to the side of the building, reserved parking spaces facing this way. You roll down your window and you pick up the phone. A shade goes up on a window at the side of the building and your client’s sitting there with a phone in his hand on the other end just waiting to talk. None of this crap where you have to sit around and wait.” Harry checks his watch again. “Then a shade goes up on another window and you got the DA sitting there waiting on the other line.”

“You better keep those two lines straight.”

“That goes without saying.”

“What about the judge?” I ask.

“What judge?”

“You’re going to need a judge, otherwise you’re going to have to walk all the way to the courthouse at some point.”

“Okay, fine,” he says. “We’ll put the judge in a window upstairs so he can look down on us. Make him feel good.”

“What do you mean, ‘him’?”

“Him, her, whatever. The thing wearing black robes, we put it in a window upstairs, give it a hammer so it can pound on a piece of wood to work out its aggression and a bullhorn so it can be heard. In the meantime we’re outside in the car with the air running, checking our calendar, making sure we’re not getting behind for our ten o’clock back at the office. I mean, look at the advantages: Don’t have to hoof it into the building. Do your business, slip into drive, and you’re outta here. Save us a lotta time and money,” says Harry.

“I guess I’m out of touch, but I don’t remember the county standing with any particular zeal on that scale, the one that measures savings in our time and money.”

“It’s still a good idea,” he says.

“Oh, I think it’s a hell of an idea. Just think of the retired set. They can come over every morning, set up their folding lawn chairs out in the parking lot, and take up lessons lip-reading with binoculars while you get the story fresh from your client in the little window-or is it the other way around?” I start to laugh.

Harry gives me a dim look.

“Either way,” I say, “the audience gets it right from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. They can see the whole system at work, right out there in the parking lot. Civics on asphalt.”

“So it has a few problems. Nothing that can’t be fixed,” he counters.

“You could just blind everybody over sixty-five,” I say.

“There’s a thought.” Harry thinks a moment. “Maybe I’ll write it up. The idea, I mean.”

“Good. Just do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t do it on the firm’s stationery.”

“There you go,” he gripes, “running a good idea into the ground again.” Within a few seconds Harry’s back to tapping a cadence with his fingers on the table.

Harry and I have been together for nearly fifteen years, through a marriage-mine-that ended with cancer for my wife, Nikki. He is uncle and godfather to my daughter, Sarah, who is now seventeen going on thirty. A straight-A student, she won’t give me a glimmer as to which college or university she wants to attend until she waxes her snowboard and checks out the slopes in each area. This could take a while, as she seems in no hurry. Nor am I anxious to push her out the door. There are times when Sarah seems to be the last contact I have with life as I knew it in happier days.

Harry takes his foot off the bench and glances out through the louvered blinds in the window. “Here they come.”

Outside, I can hear the jangle of chains and the shuffle of feet coming this way. Two guards, one of them I recognize, a brute who once tried out at summer camp with the 49ers. Between them is a smaller guy, seemingly dwarfed by the two giants on either side.

“What’s this about?” Harry is talking about the security.

“I don’t know.” I begin to wonder if Ruiz has been trouble in the jail. The jangling metal procession stops outside the door.

By now most clients under indictment for murder, after having been handed off from one lawyer to another, would be a jittery bag of nerves, on edge and itching for answers. But as I watch him standing outside the door, one of the guards working on the waist chain, disconnecting it from the manacles that bind the prisoner’s hands behind his back, Ruiz appears to be none of these.

He appears calm, collected, his skin dusky, his face angular and thin, framed by short closely cropped dark hair. In a crowd he would not stand out: the anonymous man. He is of average height-I would say five-ten-well proportioned, with a wiry physique that seems more sinew than muscle. Good-looking, but not enough to be noticeable in a lineup. He appears fit, his arms showing well-veined and — toned biceps and broad shoulders. He is dressed in a jail-issue tank-top T-shirt, baggy cotton sweatpants, and pair of low-top canvas slip-on shoes with rubber soles.

The only visible blemishes are a couple of tiny pockmarks on his forehead and chin, and a small scar over the bridge of his nose at a point where it deviates just slightly to the left, leading me to suspect that his nose might have been broken at one time. There is a tattoo on the bicep of his left arm, what looks like the head of an eagle in profile, its beak sharp and open as if ready to take a bite.

Behind bars for more than four months now, even with the restraint of the chains, Ruiz still bears himself with a certain confidence. It’s not the slick, false bravado, the cock-of-the-walk pimp roll of the jailhouse crowd, but something different. I’m just about to turn and say something to Harry when Ruiz does something so fast that, had I blinked, I would have missed it. With one of the guards still holding his left arm at the elbow, Ruiz lifts both feet off the ground, knees to his chest, his upper body stationary as if it’s suspended in air, and in a single fluid motion he jumps the manacles so that his hands are now in front of him, feet on the floor again.

“Did you see that?” Harry cranes his neck as he stares through the window in the door. “You ever see anybody do that before?”

“No.”

“I’ve never seen anybody do that.”

Neither have the guards, from the look on their faces.

“Guy must be double-jointed,” says Harry. “I tried that, I’d end up with both shoulders out of the sockets and a hernia from the handcuffs wedged in my crotch.”

Ruiz is not your usual inmate.

“Maybe that explains the security,” Harry muses.

“Could be.”

“Let’s hope he’s not one of those guys needs to be rolled into court strapped to a furniture dolly, wearing a hockey mask to keep ‘im from sinking his fangs into you.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” I tell him.

“Fine. You get to roll the dolly in and outta court,” says Harry. “They’re not doing all this shit out there”-he gestures loosely toward the window, turning away just before he finishes his thought in case Ruiz can read lips-“for their health. I take that back. They probably are doing it for their health. So what do we know about this guy?”

“What are you looking for, references? The man’s charged with murder.”

“I’m just looking to make sure he’s not gonna eat us both before the guards come back.”

“He looks normal to me.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” Harry is a good lawyer. A bit of a worrier at times, but that goes with the trade. He is also very practical. He’s been jumped twice by clients in the courtroom and once during a jail conference when Harry refused to put a psychotic client’s cooked-up alibi witness on the stand.

Call it an occupational hazard. Get a bad result in a criminal case and an uncollected fee may be the least of your problems. One of Harry’s old law school profs once told him “When you practice on the criminal side, you want to represent your clients vigorously, but you don’t bring them home to meet Mom.” Harry calls it keeping a proper social distance Like he says, “Most of these people have been arrested for a reason.”

“Actually, he’s clean. No prior criminal record, at least not in civilian life. Military record is a little more clouded.”

“What, as in My Lai massacre?” Harry’s looking at me.

“Nothing like that; just a few blank spots we need to fill in. Some of his unit assignments are a little sketchy. According to Kendal, we just need to get copies of the records.”

When I got the first call in Ruiz’s case, I received a file with some materials. Inside, along with documents was a photograph, an eight-by-ten glossy, black-and-white, a shot of Ruiz in his uniform, garrison cap in hand, standing somewhere on a street, cobblestones and old buildings in the background. He stands there staring directly into the camera lens as if looking right through it. It was as if the figure in that photograph could peer right through me, and could see my soul.

While he stands outside the door, as one of the guards now works to remove the manacles from his hands, what strikes me besides Ruiz’s composure-his apparent self-possessed lack of fear in the face of a capital charge-is the brooding fix of his lifeless eyes. I could be wrong. The hollow gaze I see staring back at me through the glass could be the look of a cold killer. Anything is possible. But that’s not what I see. What I see is the thousand-yard stare, what I have always remembered as Evo’s eyes.