The Fourth Conspirator

Prologue

When our daughter Natalie was ten, she asked me whether I thought trees had souls. I’d never even considered it. What do you think? I asked her. She was adamant. God wouldn’t make any living things without souls. There would be no point in that. Without souls, you can’t get to heaven, she said with the conviction of youth. She wanted trees in her heaven—one especially—the Dyerville Giant, her daddy’s tree.

We were standing in a redwood grove in Humboldt County, California, beneath that very behemoth, when she said it. We made a pilgrimage there every year, in November. It was the tallest tree in all the forest. In fact, some said it was the tallest in the entire world. It was a very old tree. Not the oldest living thing in the world, mind you, but when you get to be sixteen hundred years old, who’s counting?

What about your actual daddy? I asked her.

I’m not sure there’s any difference when it comes to souls, she said.

My jaw dropped. She’s only ten! Where did she come up with that? Up to that point I’d raised her Catholic, with a smattering of Jewish thrown in, but then it struck me. He’d believed he was one with that tree too. Was he speaking to me through her? Somehow, without her ever actually knowing Nate, she’d inherited a big piece of him. Had she become a little shaman? As I brooded on the possibilities, I couldn’t but reject every one except that it was Nate who was responsible for that pronouncement. I don’t know how he did it but I’m sure that he’d somehow transcended his death.

I’d never mentioned that to her. But from that moment on, I waited for the day she’d take my hand and drag me along life’s path, just as Nate had done. And then, when she was twelve, she did just that and led me away from the tree.

Before I met Nate, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I could do. What I had was fear, a nagging expectation that my life would pass in failure and anonymity. I feared that I’d travel through this world alone and that if I had children my legacy would be that same bundle of fears. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to make my children’s lives any better than my own and that their world would be circumscribed by that place in the Atlantic Ocean where the sun came up, and the low rolling hills of Middlesex County in the west, where it went down. But my life changed forever one night, during an improbable dinner at an expensive restaurant—an eating place that I’d only seen by looking in through its glowing windows. I felt like Cinderella dining there.

Nate, for all his faults, and he sure had plenty of them, gave me the whole world as a gift. He pushed me to get the education that had been just a dream before. He encouraged me to assert myself, to confront danger and to overcome my fears. I don’t believe he was ever really conscious of what he gave me. He was just Nate.

When she was old enough, I took Natalie on long trips so she could meet all of her uncles and aunts. I took her to Portugal, to its islands in the Atlantic, to Tangiers and even to Israel. I wanted her to discover her full heritage and when I did, I learned more about myself. If it weren’t for her, our Natalie, I’d be...bereft.

You’ll have to forgive me. There was a time when I had a way with words. The right ones just fell out of the sky. You might say the words I needed always rained on me. I opened my mouth. They dropped onto my tongue as I spoke. What I said made sense. People always complemented me on how...eloquent—yes, that’s the word they used—I could be.

That’s no longer the case. It all changed when I got hurt. The words stopped raining on me. Now I have to hunt for them. Sometimes it takes me a while to find the one I want. Sometimes I can’t find it no matter what. I take so long now, I’m not influential anymore. People wonder about me.

The accident—I prefer to call it that now—didn’t help my looks either. Thank God I had enough money to fix up my face. I don’t think it looks bad at all. I’d ask me out. But I’d also say No because I don’t want to get into a relationship. I’ve said No plenty of times. Even so, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to look terrific. I want to be asked and I want to say No. It gives me a perverse pleasure. I realize that makes me sound like I’m a nut case, but I know what I’m doing. I’m too hard to live with now. I have these mood swings where I have to grit my teeth and tell myself Control, Christina, goddamn it, control, control. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t. Sometimes my language gets foul. And I can be fierce too. It wouldn’t matter how good I could make myself look. I’d scare the pants off any sensible suitor and frankly I wouldn’t want the ones who’d have me in spite of my baggage.

No. I had one great love in my life. I’ll be forever grateful for having Nate. And I have a souvenir of that love in Natalie. Every day, even at her worst, she’s a blessing. So I say the same prayers, the Catholic ones and the Jewish ones, whenever I see Nate in her eyes or in her petulant expressions or when she says those things that have me convinced she learned them from him.

Chapter 1

Nate

I can see them working above me. Just the tops of their faces. Their noses and mouths are covered by masks. They have tight-fitting white caps that cover their hair. The only way I can tell their gender is if they’ve plucked their eyebrows. Not that it matters much. At this point, I’m beyond flirting.

There’s a powerful light shining down on where they are doing stuff. They’ve put something over my face and I can feel it forcing cool air into me. I think I hear Christina shrieking. I’m all right, sweetheart. I’m not in pain. I’m not even sure how conscious I am.

It’s as if my mind is detached.

I pulled the trigger and I’m sure that was the end of it. My only interest now is in sorting things out, while I still have a moment. I have to get my story right, just in case I’m asked. I’m still a lawyer after all. I can’t take the chance that I haven’t gotten my story right. That would be an eternal fuck-up. Right?

I can tell by the tension in their voices that time’s short. They aren’t holding out a lot of hope. It’s funny in a way. I always wondered how dogs and cats could figure out what humans were trying to communicate even though they didn’t understand language. Now I know. I can’t understand a word they are saying as they work above me, but the urgency, the clipped tones, the interruptions, they all tell me what they’re thinking better than words could ever do. I’d like to expound on this epiphany but it’s come way too late to make any use of it.

* * * *

The first shot was fired a couple of months ago, in the small hours of Friday morning, September 23rd. I know because I was retained to defend Vince Rossi for firing it. And that made it my job to know everything I’m going to tell you.

But I’ll begin earlier that evening when Billy Coe tossed three pruning shears, three five-battery flashlights, a box of thirty-gallon black trash bags and a pair of industrial bolt cutters into the trunk of his 1970 Olds Delta 88 coupe. He left his dinged-up mobile home on a dismal acre of land strewn with random auto parts just off East Hill Road in Willits, California, and drove the back roads to the center of town. He parked behind the Skunk Train railroad station and made his way over to John’s Redwood Room where a local shit-kicker band was butchering all the latest heavy metal tunes that could be played with three chords in the keys of C, G or E major.

According to Coe, Rossi’s plants weren’t quite ripe enough for picking. The buds still had a couple of weeks to go. But we couldn’t wait, he testified. We had to rip them off before Rossi started harvesting.

Rex Cooper and Buddy Mueller, Coe’s partners in crime, were already propping up the bar when he pushed open the door to receive a blast of decibels. Both were just a few months past twenty-one and dead set upon staking claims to alcoholism before their next birthdays. Coe acknowledged them, ordered a Bud and suggested they occupy an open table close by the band, where only youth can hear a conversation. It was here that they planned the caper. As the evening wore on and zero-hour approached, they took to the bathroom where they fortified their courage with caps of crystal.

Sometime around midnight, the loaded threesome launched themselves in Coe’s Olds and headed south on 101 to commit their felonies. The Olds was blowing smoke and crying out for a new muffler as they chugged up the Ridgewood Grade past the California Department of Forestry helicopter station. Halfway down the Ukiah side, Coe hung a hard right and started to double back on a two-laner running parallel to the highway.

After a ways the road turned to dirt. Trees began to close in on both sides and over the top, blotting out the starlight. In places it seemed like they were passing through an unlit tunnel. A little further along, the road split.

Coe knew which fork he wanted. He’d spent half a summer checking out the progress of the plants and waiting for this night. About a mile on, they came to a metal stock gate, chained and padlocked. Coe gave Cooper the combination. Cooper undid the lock and held open the gate for the Olds to pass, then closed and relocked it.

From that point, Coe thought it best to drive without headlights. They used a flashlight to keep on the road. Above, there was only a brushstroke of our galaxy in the onyx sky. The moon, well into its last quarter, had already dropped below the ridges to the west. Now and again the egg-yolk lantern light of a homestead filtered through the trees or they passed through clearings where flickers of Ukiah could be seen glistening in the distance, but all the rest was darkness.

Eventually they came to a cat trail, gouged sideways into the hillside long ago by loggers. Coe instructed Cooper to get bolt-cutters out of the trunk and cut the rusty choker cable that the owners were using to bar vehicle access to their property. They turned onto the trail and pulled the car into a spot that had been cleared for a home site.

Coe distributed pruning shears, flashlights and plastic bags, then led Cooper and Mueller up a long, ambiguous deer track and across a ridge that was nearly sixteen hundred feet above the valley floor. Then he stopped and sniffed the air as if he were a hunting dog on the prowl. Skunk, he announced. And they sniffed as he was doing.

Yes. It was there all right—the faint odor of resin produced by extremely horny un-pollinated buds. Following his nose, Coe led them closer—the scent of the plants growing ever stronger until its sweetness was powerful enough that you could catch a buzz just from breathing.

The garden was protected by a fence of six-foot high chicken wire. It was no barrier for thieves, but intended to keep the crop beyond the reach of the local stoner animals—hares, rats and especially deer. Coe felt his way around the fence, carefully checking for traps, trip wires and alarms. When he found the spot where the chicken wire broke and was turned back on itself to make a crude gate, he unhooked the metal strands binding the fence together and let it fall aside. He ran his flashlight over the plants. There were some Sativa, delicate of leaf, probably South American and Vietnamese by origin and others, heavier, dark and musky, the Indica variety, likely from seeds native to Afghanistan and Morocco, where they use it to make hashish. Every one was at least ten feet tall and bushy. They immediately set to clipping.

They had topped every plant, taking the largest buds first, and were working their way down among the smaller flowers, dreaming about their profits, when it came crashing down. With all the snipping and clipping, the fact that they were already stoned and with their excitement over the haul they were making, they’d not heard Rossi approaching. They should have. Given the time of year, the floor of the forest was thick with dried tan oak leaves. Every step produced a loud crinkle as if one was walking on soda crackers.

Cooper was working somewhere behind Coe. Mueller was off to his left when Rossi announced himself.

You boys just freeze, right where you are. Put down the bags. Put down the clippers, real slow and shine those flashlights you got on your own faces, Rossi supposedly said. Coe was sure it was Vince Rossi’s voice. They both worked at the same winery.

Coe knew Rossi as an ex-Marine with a hair-trigger temper. He said he could tell from the anger in his voice that the second he turned his light on his own face, he’d be shot. So he decided to toss his flashlight one way and dive the other. He landed behind a plant. Mueller dropped his flashlight along with everything else. It probably saved his life. Cooper obeyed Rossi’s command and received a load of buckshot for his troubles. A quarter of his lower face was blown away, guaranteeing that his funeral would be a closed casket affair.

Coe testified that in the confusion, he rolled out of the garden. He claimed that Rossi shot at him as he ran away and that buckshot kicked up a swatch of dirt just behind his heel. He caught a glimpse of Mueller crawling under the fence and then stumbling down the mountainside. He found his car and laid tracks back to his dingy mobile home where he knocked back most of a bottle of Jamison.

Billy Coe was adamant that Vince Rossi had fired the first shot. We was just clipping buds when he starts shooting, he asserted. We wasn’t doing nothing to threaten him. He could of just told us to freeze and we would of. We were just ripping him off. Nobody needed to die over it.

Rossi had admitted to me that his was the first shot that hit its mark, but he insisted that Coe shot first and that he’d fired back in self-defense. I never got to the truth of it. Regardless, I was well on my way to destroying Coe with my cross-examination, when the court adjourned for the day. I was confident I was going to win. That was all I cared about—that and Christina. I couldn’t imagine then how many more deaths would result from that single blast from Vince Rossi’s shotgun, but when we recessed that afternoon, I was certain that there was a big hole in Coe’s story. There had to be someone else in on the rip-off, someone who loomed like a puppet-master over the whole caper. I left court that afternoon determined that when we reconvened I’d get Coe to rat out the fourth conspirator.

Chapter 2

Christina

It was nearly four years since Nate and I were married and Mama was going nuts. I didn’t know it at the time but the only thing that was preventing her from flying out to California to personally oversee my impregnation was Papa. They were keeping Enrique’s condition a secret from me.

I suspected Teresa thought I was on the pill, but was afraid to ask. On the phone, she’d hint around. "Are you well? How’s Nate’s health? Are you sure everything’s okay? What she meant was, Are you having any fertility problems? or Is there something wrong in your marriage?"

What was I supposed to say to her? No, we’re committing a mortal sin. Or, it’s not that, Mama, we decided that now that we’re married we’d become a pair of celibates.

For nearly five years, before we got married she fussed and fumed about us living in sin. Back then, it was sin, sin, sin. Now, of course, being married, when you’re supposed to do it, but only to have children, she was frustrated again because nothing was happening.

Our phone calls became ritualized. We’d begin with her eternal marveling at the time difference between the coasts. What time is it out there? she’d ask, as if she’d made an innocent miscalculation whenever she woke us early on Saturday morning. Then we’d move right to the evasive dance around my fertility. Usually, I’d give her a quota of three intrusive questions before parrying with a question about my nieces and nephews. At that point Mama had eight grandchildren tugging on her apron. My older sister, Ana Maria, had three kids. The same with my big brother Paulo. My little brother, Fernando—I call him little brother, even though he was two years older than me, because I ended up taller and boy did that rankle him—had two. So it wasn’t as if she was famished for grandchildren. But sometimes the reminder of her existing brood didn’t take. Then she’d say something like, You won’t truly know the meaning of life until you have your own. That’s what God put us on earth to do.

And then I’d respond by saying, Mama! We’re going to have kids, really. I just have to get settled in my career first.

I was the only one of her kids who went to college. I got a degree. None of my sibs even got a high school diploma. Sometimes it stopped her, sometimes it didn’t.

Before we were married, there was a lot Mama didn’t like about Nate, but the one big thing she did like was that he encouraged my education. He pointed me in the direction of college. Then after I graduated from State, he got me started on public relations. He encouraged me to take an unpaid internship at that radio station where the disk jockeys treated women like shit whenever they called in to request a song. (Christ, half the time I was there all I did was make and deliver coffee. The other half the time, I was fending off their ass-pinching. At least back when I was an up-front waitress, I got paid.) Okay, okay, my resume did make it sound a little more impressive and it did get me a paying job working for the PR department at the Bank of America. Once, they even let me read a public service announcement on the radio.

Then Nate got on my case about how I used ain’t a lot and how sometimes I dropped my g at the end of words. And then after I’d spruced that up, he started picking at my double negatives. Like when I’d say I ain’t goin’ nowhere. He also had a thing about me putting an er on the end of words that should end with an a, like Americer and bananer and when words did end in er how I said ah like Gloucestah, which is where I come from. He said that with my looks I’d be more cut out for TV or personal appearances, but I needed to bury that Yankee accent and he was going to see to it that I did. He was on me all the time about it, until I had to kick him to make him quit it.

So, as I was childless in the spring of ’78, it seemed like Mama was re-thinking the benefits of a college education for me. I remember one time in particular, I used that line about getting my career going and it got me into big trouble. She’d obviously been working on a comeback because, as I said, a lot of our calls had become ritualized. Anyway, she ambushed me with the accusation that I was using my education as an excuse to avoid my Catholic duties—by which she meant to create more Catholics.

So I took the bait. I told her there was plenty of time to have kids. I was only twenty-seven and Nate was only thirty-two. I promised her we’d have at least two before Nate turned forty. That’s when she unrolled her script about Papa’s uncle Jose who was arrested and killed after the 1926 military coup, when the Portuguese fascists came to power. His wife, Alma, Mama explained, loved children but Jose died before they could have any and she became a sad, pathetic case. That won’t happen to me, Mama, I shot back somewhat defensively as I was reminded of the bullets Nate and I had already dodged successfully in our young lives—things we would never tell her for fear she’d go crazy. But she was undeterred. I could almost see her finger wagging as she warned me, You never know.

I think back on those conversations a lot now. Mama’s dead. Papa’s dead. Nate’s dead. All I have is our Natalie. I see bits of Nate in her and it makes me wonder. Maybe Mama was on to something. Maybe, if you have enough kids, each one of them captures a little bit of the parents—different bits, of course—but if you’ve got enough bits, then maybe you come close to recovering the whole. Maybe if I listened to Mama, I’d have more Nate with me now.

Well, to be honest, her story about Jose and Alma turned into a nightmare for me. I remember one time I dreamed I was in church. I looked up at the statue of the Virgin and I saw Mama’s face in it and she was crying. You could see the tears glistening like sequins down her cheek. Then I looked at the crucifix behind the altar and the Christ I saw had Nate’s face!

I’m not being blasphemous, I hope. I think it was a vision. Startled, I rolled over in bed and reached my hand out for him, but his side of the bed was empty and cold, like it has been all the days of my life since he was killed. But that dream was before. And I must have screamed because the next second he was there beside me and I grabbed him and hugged him so hard I had him choking.

In the morning I told him about my dream. He smiled at me like he was some Zen master. She’s playing the guilt card, he said, and doing a damn good job of it. Maybe you should go to confession and admit that you’re on the pill. You look like a girl in need of absolution. Then he laughed in anything but a Christ-like way.

At times he could be such a prick—a smug, atheist, pagan fucker. He knew the sin game as well as Mama, only he was on the side of sin. More than once he pointed out that the apple in the Garden of Eden symbolized knowledge; that snake! Once you’ve got it, you can’t give it back? he’d say mockingly, as if by urging me to get my degree he’d personally fed me the apple. And now you’ve got it.

Well he was the one who didn’t get it though. It wasn’t knowledge or education that was causing my anxiety; it was my vision of losing him. I started sobbing. He apologized and made us breakfast.

So anyway, my dear stubborn Mama, she kept on pushing it and I kept on saying that I needed to get my foot in the career door so that when I finally did have kids and they made it out of diapers, I could get back to working. And then Mama would say something about kids being a full-time job. I’d reply, Mama, but you work. And she’d say, That’s ’cause I gotta. I ain’t married to a lawyer, like you. Like she just assumed all lawyers were rich. And I knew then that was what my whole family was thinking—I’d turned into a spoiled rich kid, living on the Coast and only thinking of my selfish pleasures. How the hell can I ever get out of that hole, I wondered.

But if you go on saying the same thing over and over, sooner or later it comes back to haunt you. And that’s what happened with me in the spring of 1978, during one of our regular phone calls.

Christina, honey, Mama said.

I could tell by her voice that she’d been cooking something up. Yes?

You remember I told you that you had some cousins out in California?

Uh oh, Yes?

And that they had some kind of farmin’ business?

Uh huh.

Do you know a place called Hopland?

"No. Where is it?’

Well, they say it’s only a coupla hours drive north of San Francisco, dear.

Oh, we’re supposed to go up and visit. I was feeling relieved. Okay.

"Well, what they got isn’t quite a farm, exactly, dear. Turns out they own a winery."

Hmmn. Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Hey Nate, baby, I yelled. He was in the kitchen fixing a sandwich—staying off the phone and out of trouble.

What?

Remember I told you I got cousins out here somewhere?

Yeah, so?

Mama says they own a winery a couple hours from here.

Nate put down his sandwich and ambled over to stick his ear by the phone. Christina honey, now listen carefully. My grandmother, Judite Elena, who you didn’t know; she died in the twenties. She had a lot of children but two daughters in particular, your granny, Raquel Edite and your great aunt Barbara Paula. And they came over here way back before the First World War. Barbara married and moved to California. She had a daughter, Estela who married a man named Ramiro de Gomes.

My head was spinning. Who’s who? Am I supposed to remember all this? Will there be a test? "Mama, I can’t remember a thing you’ve said. Make a family tree or something, please, and send it to me. This is going in one ear and out the other."

When it came to stubborn, my Mama could have competed for a gold medal. She ignored my whiny appeal and went right on with her story as if I was a tape recorder. "This de Gomes got a hold of some land during the depression but while there was still prohibition and it was just his luck that prohibition ended because he was from the mountains back in Portugal, where they make wine. Christina, the name of the de Gomes’ winery is