The attitudes on these women. I started back to my office but then popped back in, wondering what was different about Shauna today. It was the glasses, black horn-rims instead of her usual contacts, and her blond hair was pulled back. “The naughty-librarian look,” I noted.
Shauna paused, to show her disapproval, then glared at me over her glasses. “Charming. Very mature.” Shauna was easy on the eyes, as they say, more for the sum of her parts than any particular detail-smartly dressed, fit, intelligent-but like most professional women, she didn’t like to be thought of as a slab of meat by the knuckle-dragging males in the profession. The reason she’d left her former law firm, in fact, was because the senior partner had certain ideas about the employer-employee relationship that were, let’s say, inconsistent with Title VII.
Shauna and I had a few go-rounds in college ourselves, but we quickly recognized that animal sex and compatibility were two different things, and we managed to stay buds afterward. We really didn’t have much of a choice back then, because there was a whole gaggle of us packed into a house off-campus, forcing people to double up on rooms, and somehow Shauna had drawn the short straw and gotten me as a roommate. That was after I got kicked off the football team for punching out the team captain, and I was lucky not to have been expelled from the university altogether. Had the team captain pressed charges, I would have been toast, but I think he found the whole thing embarrassing, considering he was an all-conference offensive lineman who was flattened by someone a hundred pounds and four inches his lesser.
My office would appear, to the untrained eye, to be abandoned. I had a couch that my brother had spotted me in one corner, shelving with law books, and a desk with nothing on it but a computer. I didn’t like coming here, because it reminded me that someday soon, I was going to run out of money from my days at the silk-stocking law firm, and I’d have to get off my ass and restart my career. It was hard to imagine doing it here, but I didn’t have a better idea. For several months after the bottom fell out, I’d received weekly calls from Paul Riley or someone else from the firm, asking me back when I was ready. But I couldn’t go back there. And I couldn’t stomach the idea, at this point, of answering to anyone else. As surprising as it may seem, given my overall sunny outlook on life, I don’t like being told what to do, and I don’t like having to be nice to people.
To summarize: I don’t want to work for anyone else, or for myself.
My intercom buzzed at about ten o’clock. “Someone to see you,” said Marie.
I hadn’t expected anyone. “Do you want to give me a hint?” I asked. “We could play twenty questions.”
“No, I’m happy to tell you, if you’d like.”
Always the attitude.
Marie said, “Her name is Esmeralda Ramirez.”
11
I hadn’t thought of Ernesto Ramirez for six months. After Talia’s and Emily’s deaths, I had dropped out of society. The trial finished without me. I hadn’t followed up with Ernesto and, presumably, neither had anyone else.
That was kind of funny, as I thought about it, because I had spent the last six months blaming myself for not being the driver of that SUV that night, allowing my sleep-deprived wife to navigate a winding road in the rain, but I had never included the reason for my absence-Ernesto-in the equation.
It came flooding back now, images from that time, mostly the haunting ones by the roadside, the identification of the bodies, the phone call to Talia’s parents, but also Ernesto-his ambiguous expression when we first interviewed him about the Wozniak murder; the fear in his voice later on, as I homed in on him.
And most of all, the panic in his eyes when I’d slapped him with a subpoena, forcing him to testify to whatever knowledge he possessed. I wondered, for no particular reason, if Ernesto had shown up in court that following week. I was bluffing more than anything. The subpoena was real, no question, but I had threatened to put him on the stand and question him all day long, when in fact I wouldn’t have done so. I wouldn’t have flown blind in front of the jury. I hadn’t even given notice of the subpoena to the federal prosecutors yet. I was just trying to force Ernesto into a corner.
Esmeralda Ramirez walked in behind Marie. She was a tiny woman with long black hair pulled back, a youthful face save for prominent worry lines dancing along her forehead, and what appeared to me to be a very modest demeanor, gripping her purse with both hands in front and only briefly making eye contact as she walked in. I took her hand and she squeezed mine softly.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said. “Do you know who I am?” She was from Mexico, I recalled, and the accent confirmed it, but she spoke English comfortably.
“I know your husband.”
She watched me a second. Her expression changed a bit. “You know him?”
“A bit, yes.” I didn’t understand her inquiry.
“My husband is dead,” she said.
“Oh, well, I’m very sor-”
I didn’t, I couldn’t finish that sentence. Dread filled my chest. Ernesto Ramirez was dead, and here was his widow in my office. And she wasn’t here, I gathered, to have me administer his estate.
“You didn’t know,” she said.
I shook my head, no.
“But you were the lawyer, weren’t you?”
The lawyer. I put my hands flat on my desk. “Six months ago, I was trying to get some information about a case from him, yes. Is that what you’re referring to?”
“I don’t know what I’m referring to.” A trace of frustration had crept into her voice. “My husband, his way-he wouldn’t talk about something like that with me. It would be his job to worry about things like that, not mine. I knew only a little bit.”
“Tell me how he died, Mrs. Ramirez.”
“He was shot to death.” Her dark eyes trailed off.
I steeled myself, not wanting to ask the next question. I felt like I knew what the answer was going to be before I asked. “When was he shot?”
“June twenty-second. A Friday.”
I closed my eyes. June twenty-second was the day I served him with the subpoena. June twenty-second was the day I waited in my office for him to call, rather than traveling with Talia and Emily to my in-laws. June twenty-second was when life, as I knew it, ended.
“Does that mean anything to you?” she asked me.
“Maybe,” I said, but it seemed like a whole lot more than maybe. “Did they catch the shooter?”
“No. He was killed in Liberty Park. That’s in La Zona. Do you know what that is?”
I nodded. And I could see where the police would have a hard time making a case. “They figure it was a gang shooting,” I said. “But in the ‘zone,’ that gang could be the Cannibals, could be the Lords. Could be random gang violence, could be intentional because your husband was trying to steal away their recruits from gang life. No way of knowing, and next to impossible to get anyone to admit they saw anything. Is that about how they explained it?”
Her eyebrows rose, almost imperceptibly. “Pretty much exactly.”
“But you think they’re wrong.”
She was quiet for a while. No, of course she hadn’t accepted the cops’ conclusion. That’s in part because no one ever really accepts an unsolved murder of a loved one. The crime becomes all they have left of their spouse or child, whatever, and knowing that your loved one was murdered, but that nobody will pay for it, is like walking around with a missing limb.
But the other reason Esmeralda Ramirez wasn’t buying the cops’ theory was, in a word, me.
“I knew there was something wrong,” she told me. “I didn’t know what. He mentioned a lawyer. I didn’t understand. I asked him if he was in trouble with the law or something. He told me, ‘Not in the way you think.’ He talked about a lawyer but said it wasn’t a lawyer for him. It was just a lawyer who wanted to know something. A lawyer who was persistent.”