“Please don’t stand, sir.” I crossed the room quickly and took his hand. I could feel bones barely covered with skin. His expression was concealed in the half shadow. The room smelled of Mentholatum. I felt like a nightstick had repeatedly been jabbed into my abdomen.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Judge…”
“Why don’t you call me Carlos?”
“Carlos,” I said. But it was no good. “I can’t, Judge. It just goes against my grain. The way I was raised, I suppose.”
“Understood,” he said. “When I was your age it was inconceivable that I would address an older person by his first name. Now every stranger talks to me like I am four years old.”
“We’ve had a development in the case,” I said. He was silent, so I went on, speaking through the acid I could sense creeping up my throat. “A former deputy was found murdered, a man who used to work with me and Mike in the East County.” I watched his weathered face, but no expression registered. “We’re not sure if he was killed by the same person who shot Mike last Monday. But this man, whose name was Dean Nixon, left some evidence…”
I just let it hang there for a minute as my eyes were drawn into the conjuring flame of the gas fireplace. I looked away, scanned some of his books. There was Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude, several volumes of Plato and Locke. The judge said nothing.
“The evidence is a logbook that may show payoffs to sheriff’s deputies from years ago, from the 1970s.”
“Is my son among them?”
The words were spoken with no emotion. I could imagine the cool litigator of a half-century ago. I said, “Yes, he appears to be. But we are very early in the invest-”
“I didn’t want him to be a policeman, do you know that?”
I shook my head.
The judge inhaled loudly and said, “From the earliest, I wanted him to be a man of the law, a lawyer. I suppose that guaranteed he would rebel against me.”
“I know he always revered you,” I blurted.
“We didn’t speak for years,” the judge said. I didn’t know that either, although I had always sensed a distance between father and son, like magnets repelling. He went on. “I was severe. I had worked very hard to make it in the Anglo world, and here was my son making common cause with men who, in my memory, would stop and beat a Mexican-American for sport. I told him, ‘You will be nothing but the token beaner, the one they call spic behind your back.’ He never listened.”
The judge raised himself up. It looked painful. But after all the effort, his body seemed even deeper in the chair. “Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “I detest today’s Balkanization and victim-mongering. My brother always says he is a Chicano. I am an American, of Mexican descent…” He looked toward a small side table, where his hand found a teacup.
“Your evidence doesn’t surprise me,” he said, sipping from the cup. “Law enforcement always grows corruption.”
I shivered a little in the sudden coolness of the room, amazed at the clinical tone of the man opposite me.
“Judge, I’m not saying he was involved.”
“When I was elected to the bench in 1965, Maricopa County Superior Court, it was common to see cops plant evidence that damned a suspect, suppress evidence that might exonerate him.”
“Common?” I challenged, losing some of my fear of the man.
He ignored me. “In the 1970s, drugs changed everything. The money just added to the opportunities for corruption. I presided over a dozen trials involving law enforcement that had stolen drugs or fallen in with dealers. And that was nothing compared with what the federal judges heard.” He smacked his lips loudly. “I always wondered, if these were the stupid ones getting caught, what must be going on that we never even knew?”
My mouth had turned to a dry riverbed. “Are you telling me you suspect your son was involved in corruption?”
“Who do you think shot my son, Sheriff?” he demanded. He didn’t wait for an answer. In a higher, softer voice he said, “Policemen make a lot of enemies. Good ones and bad ones. Just like lawyers. I know I did. And when all this comes out, they won’t hesitate to crucify my son, just like they tried to do me. Whatever the truth.”
&n
bsp; “What do you think the truth is, Judge?”
His breathing fell back into a wheeze. He said evenly, “Lawyers and history professors, both wordsmiths. Both truth-seekers. When we’re young we think truth is something that can be bottled and preserved, like some specimen in biology. Now, they tell us everything is relative, that there is no truth, and that’s crazy. What do I think? I think a revolution happened in the 1970s, and if that’s where your evidence comes from, then all the rules were off.”
“This is your son, Judge! Give me something that can help him.”
He didn’t speak for a long time, just seemed to shrink more into the big leather chair. I finally rose and prepared to go.
“I knew your grandfather Philip, you know.”