Free The Hidden Law by Michael Nava

at the pricey Chicano Bar Association dinner I attended on Saturday night there was muttering about whether the police were pursuing their investigation with the same dispatch as they would have had Peña been an Anglo politician. To me, this was bad news. The more pressure that was put on the police, the likelier it was that they would scapegoat someone. By the time Monday morning rolled around, the day of Peña’s funeral, the city was braced for violence.
    I made my way across a police barricade to City Hall where I was picking up Inez Montoya for the short walk to the church where the funeral was being held. A metal detector had been set up at the entrance. Inside, police officers were posted beneath the eight civic virtues, shiftily eyeing the few bureaucrats who had bothered showing up for work that day. Inez was on the phone in her inner office, so I waited outside.
    It had been at Inez’s table at a fund-raising dinner two years earlier where I’d first met Gus Peña. He’d come over to congratulate his one-time administrative assistant on her election to the city council out of the same district which he represented in the state senate. There had been a certain amount of condescension in the gesture, which, Inez had later told me, pretty much summed up his attitude toward women in general.
    I’d known Inez for years, from her days, and mine, as public defenders. I’d worked up north at the time, and she was in Los Angeles. We’d met at a statewide meeting of the CPDA, California Public Defenders’ Association, a group loftily dedicated to promoting the best legal services possible for indigent criminal defendants, back in the days when young lawyers thought this was a worthy goal. A long time ago, obviously.
    We’d gotten drunk together—I was still drinking then—and she had tried to seduce me. She’d always had terrible luck with men. But we’d stayed friends and I’d watched her career, helping in whatever small ways I could, as she made her way through the political maelstrom on brains and guts and a passionate commitment to the disenfranchised. She was an altogether admirable, if sometimes scary, human being.
    As I sat leafing through an issue of Hispanic magazine, I heard her shouting in her office.
    “Don’t give me any bureaucratic excuses,” she was saying. “This guy’s the worst slumlord in the city.”
    One of her staffers looked at me and smiled. From within her office, she growled, “Yeah, well you are the Building and Safety Department, aren’t you?” After a moment’s pause, she resumed her tirade. “Well if I don’t have an answer by the end of the day I’m going to haul your ass down here to explain why.” There was a jangle as she slammed down the receiver.
    “I guess you can go in now,” her aide told me.
    “Thanks.” I went to the door and knocked.
    “What?” she demanded.
    I pushed the door open and said, “Building and Safety inspector, ma’am.”
    She smiled, “Was I being a little loud? A little unladylike?”
    “You ready to go pay your respects to Gus?”
    She pulled a cigarette out of the pack on her desk and lit it, sucking greedily. “Is it time, already? Do I look OK?”
    In her dark suit, her hair pulled back and tied with one of her trademark ribbons, she could have passed for a schoolgirl.
    “You look fine.”
    She got up and hoisted her purse over her shoulder. “Let’s go, then.”
    “This place looks like a scene out of that Costa-Gavras movie, State of Siege,” I said as we crossed the rotunda, past the unsmiling countenances of the police guards.
    “Oh, them,” she said, dismissively. “It’s safer than working the streets.”
    Outside, it was hot and clear, the early signs of another scorching summer. The trees on the grounds of City Hall sagged listlessly. The grass had been allowed to die, a concession to the drought, but it was still heavily populated in equal measure by street people and city workers eating lunch. A grizzled old