Unlucky in Law Read online

  As soon as she had pulled the chair up to the window and placed her briefcase on the floor, the door on the other side of the glass opened and a hesitant young man entered. Stefan Wyatt had a soul patch on his chin and enormous biceps developed during, or maybe due to, his months of imprisonment. He wore the usual jail-issue orange jumpsuit, and tripped over the chair that faced Nina through the window before sitting down. The deputy, just closing the door from his side, reflexively reached for his weapon at the sudden movement.

  At this first meeting with her client, Nina examined him as severely as she would a new pair of shoes, checking for hidden defects. Sometimes clients brought a smog of evil into the room along with their stories, and she knew right away: here’s one who could have done it. This one didn’t strike her that way.

  “It’s all right, man,” Wyatt said to the deputy, who relaxed, seeing there was no harm intended. Fumbling with the phone, twisting the wire straight, he said, “Hello, there.” Twenty-eight, tall, a college dropout with a spotty employment history-odd jobs, bartending, almost a year at a moving company, and six months on a fishing boat-he had blue eyes, an average IQ, and a great smile that indicated a nature so sunny even this dungeon hadn’t stolen his spirit.

  Nina showed him her State Bar card and smiled back, saying, “How are you?”

  “Fine?” He shook his head as if uncertain of the truth of his own words. The blue eyes on her were wide open, bewildered.

  Had Klaus forgotten to mention her during his visit the day before? “Er, I’m Nina Reilly.”

  “Right. You’re working with Klaus. I’m Stefan. I guess I didn’t expect…” He paused, smiling. “I guess I thought you’d look like Klaus.”

  Nina raised an eyebrow. “I probably will, at his age.”

  “Nooo. Not ever.”

  “Ready to settle down this morning and do some work?”

  “Sure. Absolutely.”

  “Like Klaus, I’m your attorney, and you have the same privilege of confidentiality in talking with me as you do with him. Do you understand that, Stefan?”

  “You can’t tell anyone what we talk about. I know.”

  “I’m here to ask a few questions. You probably understand that I’m coming in late to your case and need to hear it all.”

  “Klaus didn’t explain everything to you?”

  “Short notice.”

  “Okay,” he said amiably. “What do you need to know?” She was already forming more judgments about the young man in front of her. Sane, at least oriented to reality at the moment. Engaging. Nice mouth, set of beautiful teeth, a healthy fellow but passive and awkward, the big body not quite coordinated. His eyes held a hangdog eagerness. He looked anxious to please. A certain kind of woman would want to take care of him.

  Klaus had said this divided room wasn’t bugged. They could talk safely, he believed, so she would put her doubts aside and ask for the whole story.

  Uncapping her lucky Mont Blanc pen, Nina wrote the date on her yellow legal pad.

  “It’s not like I know who killed that woman,” Stefan said. “I was in the wrong place, just trying to help someone and make a few bucks I really needed.”

  “All right,” Nina said. “I’m listening. Tell me what happened right up to your arrest.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything. What you were thinking, not just what you did.”

  Stefan began to talk, his story coming out in spurts as if he were still coming to terms with some of the things he had done. As he spoke, Nina looked up from her notes now and then and watched him, gauged him, weighed the words.

  “It was April, cool at night.”

  “What day in April?”

  “The twelfth. Right into the next morning, April thirteenth. Lucky thirteen, ha, ha.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Stefan had waited for the sun to sink low, so he could get it over with. He didn’t want the job; just thinking about it made him feel like some grisly comic-book character.

  But he had already delayed one night on account of rain and a minor drinking binge that sent him to bed early instead. Alex might be angry about that, and he didn’t like disappointing people. Still, if anything could wait, in a weird way, it was this. After all, the old man had been dead for decades. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  Yet.

  But now, if he was going to do this thing, tonight was the night. He would go light on the brewskis and be primed for action later.

  He couldn’t tell Erin, which put a strain on what should have been a great Saturday night. He had made a solemn promise to her never to break the law again, and here he was preparing to break it just this one last time. Feeling guilty in advance, he took her out for fish and chips at her favorite place at Fisherman’s Wharf, the Captain’s Gig, where, stoked on caffeine, she talked fast-happily, it seemed to him, though as usual she looked longingly at the shops across the street that carried wind chimes and sea otter statues and that gnarled burlwood furniture they couldn’t afford. And jewelry, beautiful rings…

  While Stefan listened with one ear to a guy ranting through a microphone across the plaza, who actually said a few things Stefan agreed with about working people and how important strong unions were, Erin got on the topic of her family and how much they would like him once they got to know him.

  Stefan knew what this meant: What they had heard of him made them not like him. They had heard he had a record. Erin wouldn’t lie about that to anyone. He didn’t feel ready to meet them until he had his life in better order. But he loved Erin, so he listened to her as they walked home, hoping she wouldn’t raise the issue of meeting her folks again.

  When they got home, Erin drank the shot of tequila he poured for her in the kitchen. Flushed and beautiful, she sidled up behind his chair to give him a kiss and back rub. Shit, Stefan thought, heaving a sigh, pouring himself a beer. How he would prefer to be pulling that yellow sweater over her head and taking advantage of her mood. But that had sabotaged him the night before. Tonight he couldn’t let it happen. Erin showed no signs of slowing down, and he needed her asleep, so he pretended to keep pace with her while discreetly tossing his own Coors down the kitchen sink. He drank most of one first, to be honest.

  They sat down at the kitchen table. “My favorite place, if you’re gonna talk about places worth noticing, is that spot between sleeping and waking. Like after good sex?” Erin nudged him with her knee. “You float around like you’re in a boat.”

  “Uh-huh.” He stuck his nose into her neck, getting a whiff of her warm smell.

  “You tickle.” Smiling, she pushed him away a little and put her hand on his leg, then she slid it up and started messing with his fly.

  He really did not want to leave.

  His brother Gabe called Erin “dim” behind her back, but Stefan didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. She was hard to read sometimes. But if Gabe meant brights, well, Erin was brighter than Stefan. Gabe wouldn’t think that was saying much, but it meant something to Stefan. He respected her. He liked the surprises that came out of her. “Deep” fit her best. Her politics were naive to nonexistent, but she had something he didn’t have. She had connection, to people, to the earth.

  He touched her and listened to her, staring beyond the window curtain to the darkening trees.

  Thinking: Where is that shovel?

  And: I wish to God I didn’t have to do this.

  Erin ’s chin sank to her chest as she nodded off. He led her into the bedroom, took her clothes off, and tucked her into bed regretfully. Her eyes closed instantly. “Stef,” she mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Stef,” she said again, and then just breathed.

  Dark had gathered outside. Yellow lights brightened in the mist. He leaned down to Erin and stroked a strand of hair back from her forehead.

  “Forgive me for this,” he whispered. “Never leave me.”

  He put on a warm jacket, located the new gardening gloves he had bought, and stuffed them in his
pocket. Outside, he pulled tools from the shed where Erin stored things for her landscaping jobs: a shovel, a pick, a few other things that he thought might come in handy. He tossed them into the trunk of his Honda Civic.

  A few cars passed, and every one made him jump. One slowed down as it passed, and he regretted not making sure the light had been out above the shed, but in the dark, he couldn’t make the car out, and in the end, he decided it didn’t matter. What he had to do was macabre, yeah, but not wrong, exactly.

  Who was there to care about an old man dead for decades? The only people who might care didn’t, as far as he could tell.

  Stefan patted the wallet in his pocket. He needed this money. Erin wouldn’t have to pay the rent again this month, and with what was left over, plus what was to come, he could buy something for her that he had wanted to buy for a long, long time.

  He took Del Monte Avenue as it curved around the bottom of the bay, passing the wharf and the Doubletree Inn right in the middle of Monterey, then drove north along Lake El Estero and turned toward the two main town cemeteries. The narrow gates at both entrances to the Cementerio El Encinal were closed, and beyond the wrought iron the green grass looked gray.

  Driving around the perimeter of the cemetery, he looked for a hidden place to park nearby. The cemetery boundaries didn’t include any good private places, so he pulled into the lot at Dennis the Menace Park. No brightly lit ball games at the field next to the park, the kids in bed, the old locomotive engine at the entrance to the park a dark volume against the thin night. All good.

  Stefan checked his watch, discovering it was just past midnight, then pawed through the back seat until he found the flashlight. From the trunk he pulled out the shovel and pick, which he pushed into the army-surplus duffel bag he had brought. Walking along the boundary of the cemetery, the bag slung on a long strap over his arm, he watched for cops, taking in the sounds of the night, amazed at how vivid white clouds looked against the black sky. In spite of his black jeans and black polo shirt, he felt bright as a peacock.

  Avoiding the gate with its pointed metal shafts, and the open side around the corner that had no wall but seemed too exposed, he threw the bag over the six-foot wall, listening for the soft clank as it hit ground on the other side. He cast one last look at the street. Bums and dopers sometimes hung out at the picnic tables across the street, but he couldn’t see anyone. Still, he definitely felt watched.

  The ghosts aren’t happy to see me, he thought.

  He had meant to cheer himself up, but this joke had the opposite effect. Childish fears woke up and started working on him.

  Maybe this wasn’t illegal. Was it? It was trespassing, sure, but was it more? He didn’t want to break any laws, not only because he had promised Erin, but because he always got caught. He was a poor risk. Whether you believed in the system or not, there was power behind it, and you were the little guy getting squeezed like a juice box if it took hold of you.

  He fingered the little Buddha Erin had given him to wear around his neck, saying it might help avoid the bad luck that followed him around everywhere like an evil little brother.

  Stefan had always had bad luck. If he used a meter, it expired before he could finish his business, and the meter maid would show up in a bad mood. If he so much as palmed a ballpoint pen after signing a credit-card receipt at the store, the clerk ran after him to get it back.

  Five hundred dollars in my pocket, he told himself. More to come when the job is done. Now, that’s good luck.

  Grabbing a tree limb, he got his boots onto the rough wall and dropped into the cemetery, landing on wet grass. He was on the end near the corner, roughly in position. Turning the flashlight on, he skulked off the path among the graves, hunting for the headstone he had scoped out two days before. At first he stepped gingerly between the stones, but then he loosened up, thinking, The people aren’t under the stones. They’re stretched out in front of their stones, right where I’m walking.

  Some of these flat stones were a hundred years old. The groomed green grass and silk flowers kept the place-well, not pretty, but kind of sweet during the day, but in the dark, they became brown blobs that could trip him if he wasn’t careful.

  He looked for an odd marker, one with two straight parallel boards at the top and, below, a crooked, slanty one. He flashed on the headstones, on the strange names and lettering. Why did so many Russian people come to Monterey, he wondered, enough of them to rate their own neighborhood of the dead?

  After what seemed like forever, he found a funky headstone marking the right name. Unlike most of the graves here, this one had a concrete rim and contained just muddy dirt and gravel instead of a grass surface. Opening his case, he pulled out the pick, swallowing hard. He swung it back and when it hit dirt it buried itself right up to the shaft in the damp ground.

  Stopping, he looked around. The nearby graves did not open. No bony fingers pushed up the stones. He could smell the kelpy waters of Monterey Bay on the breeze, hear the street traffic, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that some things didn’t sound natural. Standing with the shovel poised over dirt, he listened hard, heart pounding even though he hadn’t even started digging.

  Dead means dead. Don’t start thinking about it.

  Working furiously, Stefan assaulted the soil next to the complicated gravestone. As he dug, his body warmed up. The chunk-chunk of the shovel covered up what the wind did to the trees and bushes around him, and to his heartbeat.

  Once his eyes adjusted, not daring to leave his light on for long, he turned it off and went mostly by feel. He dug as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast.

  When they were both young, he used to dig holes with Gabe. He remembered trying to dig to China, and ending up with a shallow hole in the grass, and his mom pitching a fit.

  He had a few good memories mixed in with the bad ones. When his brother had gotten sick, that was bad. Gabe would lie in bed, pasty white, listless, while their mom rushed around to doctors looking for hope. Sometimes Mom looked at Stefan, and even though she tried to hide it, he saw her outrage that it was Gabe who had gotten sick, and not him. Gabe was her favorite, born loved and deserving of success, with Stefan the sidekick goofball who slipped on banana peels when there weren’t any.

  But Gabe got cured, and Stefan was proud that he had been able to help him with that. Now look at Gabe, Mom’s gold-star boy, making decent money and taking her out for Mother’s Day next month to some fancy restaurant in San Francisco. And check out her younger boy, out here in the cold, digging up a dead body, getting a rhythm going, panting, liking the exercise and finding the work remarkably easy. This dirt wasn’t hard; in fact, it was strangely uncompacted, considering the guy had been buried for over twenty-five years. That heavy rain last night must have softened the ground a lot.

  Gabe would never have agreed to do this. Mom always said Gabe got the smarts and Stefan got the muscles. Stefan didn’t necessarily agree. He had ideas, lots of them, as many as Gabe. He would like to start a business someday, where he could work outside. He thought he could do better, now that he had Erin. He had someone who respected him, who thought he came first.

  Yes, he would have a business, and then they would have kids, and that was fine by him. He wanted that. He wanted to create a happy family with her. His childhood wasn’t happy, with his mom always treating him like second-best after his brother, her hero. A chronic, infernal worry about money had hung over their lives like a bad moon. His mother and brother both loved him, he believed that, but being poor didn’t help family relations. He would love his kids equally. He would take them camping, be the good father he had never known.

  His thoughts went back to Erin. He would buy her a new bed, with a pillow-top mattress, and an aquarium for her birthday. Erin liked goldfish. And after tonight, he could finally afford that ring, the one in the window she pretended not to notice, the one that made her look hungry.

  Something in the dirt stopped the shovel. He looked into the open grav
e. Dirt, blackness, wet. A shiny patch? He probed at it, around it. Six feet deep, that’s how deep the old man was supposed to be, so how come he’d only dug a couple of feet and the shovel was hitting something?

  He scraped around the obstruction, trying to figure out where the edges were in the big hole. Because he felt fear overtaking him, he put the shovel aside for a moment and, head up, listened to the wind, which was stirring up the plants and getting loud. Dude, didn’t anybody else notice? No, they wouldn’t. They were dead!

  He laughed, his nerves tingling right down to his fingertips. Eucalyptus and the scent of the local pine mixed unpleasantly with the damp old dirt in the air, hanging around him like mildewed walls. Working the soil again, he couldn’t locate any edges to the thing, whatever it was, in the grave, so he gave up with the shovel and put it on the ground beside the hole. He jumped in with the pick, staying close to the edge, but rubbing up against the dirt. He had worn canvas shoes so that they could be washed later.

  Flipping on his flashlight, he reached down with his gloved hands and felt around inside the hole. Smoothing away another layer of dirt, he could see what was there: a couple of big plastic garbage bags all wrapped together and tied with loose rope. Trash? An old Christmas tree? He tried to lift the bundle. No, too heavy, and all one piece. Had a relative tossed in a bag of the old man’s possessions at the funeral in 1978? Did Russians do that? Had they buried the old man in a bag?

  Then his breath caught as he thought, It’s a body that got out of its coffin! The shape was right, the length and size of the thing in there-did they even have plastic trash bags in 1978? The bags didn’t look twenty-five years old, either.

  Scrambling out of the hole, he shivered. The urge to get out of there was so compelling that he had to plant his feet harder on the ground to keep himself from leaving the whole shebang behind and running like hell.

  Think.

  He stomped his feet a few times, got back in, and shined the light carefully all around the bags. Just more damp dirt, harder underneath.