Where to Choose

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Not necessarily. Gutierrez is as common a name as Smith or Jones. So are Pablo and Pedro. It could be coincidence—”

  “Bullshit! We both know better than that.” He jumped up from the sofa, almost upending the low table in front of it, and reached the front door in two giant lunges.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Bert’s, to change clothes. I’m meeting Robbie at the gym. He set me up a face-to-face with a dude who’s done some dealing with Ricky Nunez.”

  “I don’t like it, Tommy. Anyway, we know all we need to know about Ricky Nunez and his dealings.”

  “No, we don’t. Ricky is too stupid to run an international opera­tion by himself, and that’s what we’re talking about here: Smuggling undocumented Mexicans into California, supplying them with dri­ver’s licenses and visas and birth certificates, not to mention a place to live while the paperwork is being processed. That’s the definition of an international operation. I’ve seen Ricky. He couldn’t organize a two hot dog picnic.”

  She stifled the giggle starting in her throat and gave him an evil look. He was sounding, and behaving, more like Jake every day. “Ray and Dave and Jose said their informants told them that ‘an old dude’ ran the operation, and that Ricky was his ‘right hand.’ Their words, not mine,” she added quickly when he snorted. “So maybe the ‘old dude’ is the management company guy, or—” The words froze in her mouth as the thought that sent the chill took shape and form. “Oh, my God.”

  Tommy hurried himself back to where she sat and knelt next to the chair. “What, C.A.? What!”

  “Hector. It’s Hector. That’s what keeps Luisa involved and con­tained. Hector in Mexico and Pablo Gutierrez here.”

  “And Pablo’s—what? son?—in the LAPD keeping a lid on every­thing? I’ll bet everything I have—except my wife—that Pablo and Pedro are related and in on this scheme. And a hell of a scheme it is, too,” Tommy whispered, almost admiringly. Then he got up and headed toward the door again. “I’ll be back late. Wait up for me.”

  “I’ll be up. I’ve got a phone meeting with Addie at the stroke of midnight.” The dryness of her tone scraped like sandpaper.

  He laughed. “And people criticize the hours cops keep.” He closed the door behind him and she heard him whistling and as the sound faded, so did her excitement. Whatever joy she’d felt in having un­earthed the truth about what she believed to be the long-forgotten Hector Nunez’s involve­ment in a human smuggling ring paled compared with the knowledge that Luisa Nunez certainly would go to prison. For certainly she was his accomplice. Still.

  Shuddering at the thought of what she was doing to her mother’s telephone bill, she called Jake and told him everything.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” he said in an almost reverent tone.

  “You sound surprised, Jake.”

  “Surprised?” he snorted. “I’m damn near speechless!”

  “But it’s exactly what you speculated was happening—that Jacar­anda was a cover for some large-scale illegal activity.”

  Jake whistled something tuneless for a few seconds before speak­ing. “This is one time, C.A., when I could have done with not being right. You know anything about the smuggling of human beings?”

  “Only that it’s illegal.”

  She heard him sigh. “I guess L.A. cops must know a lot about this kind of thing but it’s not something I’ve ever seen and it’s turning my stomach.” He was silent for a moment. “But I’m about to find out all there is about the subject and I’ll call you later with what I know.”

  “OK—” she began but he cut her off.

  “You will be home later, won’t you, C.A.?”

  “Yes, I will be home later,” she answered through clenched teeth. Damn, but he annoyed her sometimes. “I’ve got a midnight phone meeting with Addie.”

  “You lawyers keep worse hours than cops.”

  “That’s what Tommy said.”

  He asked where Tommy was and she told him. Then he asked whether they’d had any success figuring out the playground guys.

  “We tried following them a couple of times but there’s no place to surveil. Nothing but wide-open spaces. But we’ve watched and they do the same thing: Hang out, talking and smok­ing, and every couple of hours, they peel off in groups of three and go do we don’t know what.”

  “I thought it was in pairs,” Jake said, the frown evident in his voice.

  “They changed to threes last week.”

  “Cops,” Jake said. “They’re undercover for sure, although why they’re running an op so half-assed puzzles the shit out of me.”

  “Suppose they wanted everybody to think that they were respon­sible for all the violence. That they wanted people to stay inside and away from the playground.”

  “Then they failed miserably, wouldn’t you say?”

  Something stirred in Carole Ann’s memory. “You remember me telling you that I thought there were three of them the night my mother was attacked?”

  “Yeah,” Jake said slowly, drawing the word out until it became a question.

  “Suppose one of them was one of the undercovers.”

  “No cop attacked your mother!” Jake yelled into the phone.

  She held up a hand he couldn’t see. “Will you let me finish?” And when he didn’t respond, she continued. “Suppose he was on his round, doing his patrol duty, and stumbled upon the attack on Ma. What I thought I saw as I drove up was someone running toward my mother and one of the others—”

  “And your arrival scared him off.”

  “Makes as much sense as anything else.”

  “None of it makes sense,” he snapped. “This is the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever smelled! And the more we dig, the deeper it gets! This is giving me an ass ache!” And he hung up.

  She took a moment to laugh at the miracle of creation that was Jake Graham, then rewound in her brain and replayed the conver­sation with Arthur Jennings. His surprise at learning of his part­ner’s immigration status had been complete. He’d believed that both Hector and Enrique had been born in California, and that it was their mother who had been born in Mexico and who had immi­grated north as a young woman.

  He remembered little about Pablo Gutierrez except that Jamilla had liked him. He retained him to manage the land of Jacaranda Es­tates, Jennings said, because he had no reason not to. He wasn’t sur­prised that there was not a listing in the telephone directory or anywhere else for Gutierrez; most likely, Jacaranda Estates was his only business. He lived on the property, rent free, and spent his time car­ing for it. It paid well enough that if he didn’t require luxury, he didn’t need other work.

  Two points reverberated in her consciousness: That Pablo Gutier­rez lived at Jacaranda Estates and that he lived an almost anony­mous existence. For she’d never heard of him and had no idea where he lived.

  “It’s the only single house on the property,” Grayce said, chewing gen­tly but with gusto. Her visit to the dentist had served to allay all her fears and restore most if not all of her brash spirit. It had taken Ca­role Ann weeks to understand that for her mother, having reached the age of sixty-seven with her original teeth healthy and intact was a source of enormous pride and self-gratification. The thought that she’d lose her teeth as a result of the attack was more of an assault on her spirit and pride than on her body.

  “But where is it, Ma? Why haven’t I seen it? Why don’t I know where it is? And why don’t I know who he is? This Gutierrez char­acter?”

  “I don’t know why you don’t know where the maintenance sheds are, C.A. They’re where they’ve always been, on the business side of the complex. And that’s where Mr. Gutierrez lives as well. His house and all the maintenance sheds are the boundary markers for the end of the property. And you don’t know him probably because he keeps to himself. He always has. His English isn’t very good, and he sees himself as an employee, so he doesn’t socialize.” Grayce’s eyes narrowed and she ceased her chewing. “And
I haven’t seen him around in quite a while, now that I think about it.”

  “Maintenance sheds? Maintenance sheds! Yes! How damned con­venient! And pretty damn smart, too.”

  Grayce put down her fork with a determined clatter and fixed her daughter in the glare that had, from the very beginning, solidified the mother’s position of prominence and authority. Carole Ann put down her fork, gently and silently, wiped her mouth on her napkin, and began to squirm.

  Annoyed with herself for her regression, she jumped up from the table, pointedly ignoring her mother’s reaction to her profanity— Grayce abhorred cursing—slouched into the living room, and col­lapsed onto the sofa. “Come have a seat, Ma, while I tell you a little story.”

  Grayce sat in silence for a long time after Carole Ann finished talking. Then she sighed deeply and shook her head. “Those poor people. They bring them here and lock them up in those little sheds? How cruel!”

  Carole Ann raised her hand. “This is all speculation, Ma. It’s what we think is happening. We have no real proof.”

  “It shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose. So much about this smug­gling business has changed in recent years.”

  She looked at her mother in open-mouthed wonderment. “Ma, what could you possibly know about smuggling? About smuggling human beings, for the love of Christ!”

  “Watch your mouth, C.A. I don’t want to remind you again. And quite a lot. Smuggling human beings is big business in this part of the world, and the news is full of it. Especially when there’s some kind of tragedy involved. Like the time a bunch of them were found dead in this cargo van—”

  “How many is a bunch, and are you talking about Mexicans smuggled over the border, and how did they get dead?”

  Grayce showed her annoyance. “A bunch is twenty-something if I recall correctly,” she snapped at her daughter, “and yes, I’m talking about Mexicans brought illegally into the States. I thought that’s what we were discussing. And they got dead from carbon monoxide poisoning and heat stroke and starvation and only God knows what else. And to make matters worse, most of them were women and children.”

  Carole Ann wanted to ask many more questions but held back because she felt overwhelmed by what she’d just heard. And be­cause she knew Grayce was annoyed with her. So they sat in si­lence, thinking and feeling and wondering at the perversity of human nature.

  “There was a time when just working, family men found their way across the border. They’d get established and then send for their families—wives, children, parents, other relatives. Then women began coming alone in great numbers and following the same pat­tern: Work, get established, send for the family. Well, now they’re bringing in the hoodlums. Anybody who can pay the price, the mules will bring in. These days that includes some pretty rough cus­tomers—”

  She was interrupted by the ringing of the phone, which Carole Ann answered in the middle of the second ring.

  Jake began talking before the “hello” was out of her mouth. “Peo­ple smuggling is damn big business, C.A. And damn dangerous. More for the people being smuggled than for the damn smugglers! And the really bad news is that some really nasty fuckers are being brought in along with the honest citizens, who’re just looking for a chance for a better life.”

  “That was quick,” she said, not having the heart to tell him that she’d already just heard the same thing from Grayce.

  “So how ’bout this for a scenario: All the bad stuff that’s been hap­pening in Jacaranda, including the murders, is the work of some of these smuggled-in hard asses. That’s why the one who Roberta shot hasn’t been ID’ed, or why the one you...that one hasn’t been ID’ed. They’re illegals.”

  He finally wound down and they listened to each other breathe for a moment.

  “Can we prove any of this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know about proof,” he said, and she could see his shrug, “but this points us in the direction of which trees to shake. And if we start shaking trees, something’s bound to fall out.”

  “But will that be good enough for...good enough to—”

  “To get your ass out of the sling it’s in? We’ll make sure it’ll be good enough,” he said, and hung up on her again.

  When it got dark, she took a long, slow jog around Jacaranda Es­tates. Twice. Each time taking a long, slow look at Pablo Gutierrez’s house and at the eight maintenance sheds, painted the same color as the house, as was the trim around the windows and doors. Noth­ing unusual about the house itself unless one looked at it long enough and carefully enough for it to register that, unlike its neigh­bors, it was neither a duplex nor a triplex. It was a single, one-sto­ried house, architecturally identical to every other house in the de­velopment. And the maintenance sheds closely resembled garages. Nothing unusual about them, either, unless one stopped to ponder why one house would have an eight-car garage. And why they would have windows. And why those windows would be open.

  She called Arthur Jennings again, to inquire what one might ex­pect to find inside the sheds, and was annoyed with herself that she hadn’t reached what should have been a logical conclusion: Lawn mowers and rakes and water hoses and sprinklers and grass seed and fertilizer and paint and paintbrushes and tools, whatever might be required to maintain the grounds and buildings of an estate. As an afterthought, she asked whether Pablo Gutierrez had known Hector Nunez. And through his surprise at the question, he recalled that Pablo had been a closer friend to Hector than to Enrique.

  She envisioned the sheds and imagined them empty, or empty of maintenance materials and equipment. Each shed contained more than enough space to secret human beings long enough for forged documents to be delivered to them. She envisioned cots or, more likely, sleeping bags lined up on the concrete floor, and quickly abandoned the exercise when attempts to imagine how the people would eat, and then relieve themselves, made her, by turns, angry and ill.

  It was easier to recall the shabby condition of the Jacaranda Estates grounds and imagine that the reason was that Pablo Gutier­rez was otherwise occupied. And to imagine the bolder of the sheds’ occupants breaking away from captivity for a stroll around the grounds, encountering unsuspecting old ladies carrying purses and grocery bags.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Carole Ann could hear Addie’s excitement. She’d had no difficulty jumping to the conclusion that Pedro Gutierrez, erstwhile L.A. cop, was a trafficker in human beings, and it looked as if the LAPD had known it. “If the DA wants to take you and Mrs. Lawson and Mr. As­mara to trial and risk having me run that flag up the pole for all the world to see, I’m ready to bet the farm it’ll be a mistake they’ll re­gret longer than they already regret Rodney and O.J.”

  Addie was as alert and excited as if it were noon instead of half past midnight, and while Carole Ann shared the excitement, she also was exhausted and she wanted to sleep. Addie wanted to hear the details again. Especially the tying in of Hector Nunez to the op­eration.

  “I’m speculating, Addie, and extrapolating. No one’s seen Hector in thirty years—”

  “But it all makes sense, C.A. It’s a perfect plan. And it’s probably been working perfectly for a good many of those thirty years. Until something went wrong. That’s what we have to figure out—what screwed up the plan?”

  “Losing control of the merchandise,” Carole Ann said thought­fully. “Pablo or Pedro or whoever is in charge here lost control of their...what do you call smuggled human beings?”

  “So, you’re saying the thugs on the playground didn’t kill Sadie What’s-her-name, or beat Mrs. Asmara senseless?”

  “I’m saying the thugs on the play ground aren’t thugs,” C.A. replied, barely stifling a yawn. “I think, and Tommy and Jake think, they’re cops.”

  “Then how and why in the hell did they allow people to be beaten and killed! I can’t buy that part, C.A. I know the LAPD has done some pretty sorry shit, but this I can’t accept.”

  Carole Ann, fighting fatigue, struggled for enough clarity to s
hare with Addie thoughts she had yet to share with Jake or Tommy. Because she hadn’t completed the processing of them. “What I think, Addie, and this may be totally off the wall, is that the cops on the playground were there to watch the smuggling operation. And the two other undercovers, the ones living in Jacaranda, were put in to curb the assaults and the vandalism. But they had to stay out of the way, keep low profiles.”

  “So the renegade illegals are responsible for all the vandalism? The broken windows and stolen cars and turned-over grills—”

  “I think so. Listen, Addie, if I don’t get some sleep—” Carole Ann was interrupted by the call-waiting beep. “Who the hell,” she mut­tered, before asking Addie to hold and clicking over to the other line. “Who is it?” she snapped into the phone.

  “It’s Robbie, C.A. They’ve got Tommy.”

  It took several seconds to process those few words, to reconcile them with the time of night and with her expectation of who might be calling so late and why. Seconds in which she shifted mental and emotional gears. Seconds before the fear took hold. “Who’s got Tommy, Robbie? Where are you?”

  “At the gym. Tommy met me here. We were gonna meet another dude, only he didn’t show. We waited for a while, then went across the street to a burrito place and ate, then came back to the gym. I went inside to see if anybody was waiting or if anybody had left a message. Tommy was leaning against his car. He’s some kind of crazy about that damn car!” Robbie’s voice caught and stuck in his throat and he coughed. “The gym is on the second floor. It’s got those one-way windows. Look like mirrors outside, you know? Any­way, I was standing there talking to Pete, the owner, when this rocket ship pulls into the parking lot—”

  “When what pulls into the parking lot?” Carole Ann had regained some sense of herself, enough to pose a question.

  “That’s what I call it. It’s an old Caddy convertible painted this ugly orange.”

  “I know it,” she said, and felt a cold wave pass through her.

  “Two dudes jumped out and grabbed Tommy before he could even think to protect himself. C.A., they got him!”