“It was in school today. They had a special session. It was to tell us not to be frightened or upset.”
“About what?”
“About them finding the terrorist cells, right here, with their bomb-making equipment and explosives.”
“They didn’t exactly find terrorist cells.”
“Yes, they did. They showed us. In school. The tapes on the news. I saw it. There was a big raid. The Islamo-Fascist terrorists,” she said, obviously reciting back what she’d been told in school, “fought back, and the police had to shoot their way in. One of them even shot a cop! And they arrested a whole bunch of them. But we don’t know that we got them all. Even the ones we did get, who knows if they’ll get punished or even locked up. If the ACLU has their way, they’ll all get get-out-of-jail-free cards and be back on the streets doing it again.”
“I think you should slow down,” I said.
“That’s exactly right,” Gwen said. “I saw it on the TV too.”
“They raided a mosque. That’s a Muslim church,” I said.
“I know that, Dad. Obviously, I know that.”
“Yes, we all know that,” my wife said.
“What I’m trying to say is that we don’t know if this is the way the police say it is or another Waco.”
I could see that I had drawn a blank. Angie was too young to remember Waco.
Before I could explain, Gwen asked, “Why would the police lie? This isn’t Nicaragua.” In her early twenties, she’d spent a year with a Cathedral of the Third Millennium mission in Puerto Cabazas, helping the poor and seeking converts. There had been a lot of violence and corruption around them. She’d sailed through, never flinching, certain that Jesus, like a force field, and her blue passport, like a shield, would protect her. “This is America. They have no reason to lie.”
The snap answer—of course they lie, and for all sorts of reasons—sat behind my teeth, ready to be spit out like a bitter stone.
I looked from Angie to Gwen and back again, Gwen so certain and Angie so accepting, and wondered if I should say it. Welcome to the real world.
Back when I was on the job, we’d get frustrated over some perp who we were certain was dirty. Morally certain. Unable to put our hands on the dirt, we’d find some dirt to put on the man.
If someone had asked, what if it’s the wrong guy, though no one ever did ask, we would have said, one out of thousand, maybe, but isn’t it worth it if it means nine hundred ninety-nine bad guys were put away. Besides, the types of people we went after, if we got them for something they didn’t do, they’d done something else, so it didn’t matter. Justice was served. Case closed. They were wrong; we were right.
That’s part of why I’m Manny Goldfarb’s favorite investigator. I can tell when the cops are stretching, massaging the evidence, spinning their testimony, inventing informants, even planting evidence. I can figure out how they’re doing it because there’s no new way. We all do it the same old way.
Also, I still have friends.
Also, I know where many of the bodies are buried. After all, I was in narcotics.
I can only thank Jesus. I know Jesus was watching out for me because He came for me just in time. In order to get right with the Lord and live right, I knew I had to get out of narcotics.
It happened during the first year of the bounties.
As part of the War on Drugs, the federal government was giving a lot of grants to local police forces. The city had to come up with matching funds, twenty-five percent to the federal seventy-five percent. The city didn’t want to raise taxes or take the money from somewhere else. They decided to go into the confiscation business, seizing the assets of drug dealers. It was sort of a free perpetual money machine. Every dollar it created was turned into four by the feds. The mayor, the council, the taxpayers—everybody loved it.
To get more money, they needed more busts.
To get more busts, they decided to imitate another federal program, one that paid informants ten percent of whatever was confiscated.
Confiscation falls outside the normal rules of criminal law. It loosened things up a lot and also created new types of informants. They didn’t have to have the kind of knowledge that would justify a warrant and that could later be questioned by an ACLU-type defense attorney and lead to a search being thrown out by an activist judge. In other words, they didn’t have to be criminals, creeps, and coconspirators.
The informant could be a neighbor who noticed too many people coming and going. A car dealer who sold a BMW for cash. A bank clerk who noticed suspicious transactions. If they fingered someone and it led to a drug arrest, the city could seize both money and property, and the informant got ten percent of the value. Even if the criminal charges didn’t stand up, the seizures usually remained.
In order to get a warrant, there has to be due cause. One of the simplest ways to establish due cause is to find someone to say, “I saw,” “I heard,” or “I have knowledge of” something criminal. It’s very easy to make up a fake informant.
The first time a fake informant and our bounty program came together was, I think, fortuitous.
Xavier Garcia, who owned a body shop on Division Street between Sixty-fourth and Santiago Boulevard, was dealing on the side. There wasn’t enough information for a warrant, so we made up an informant. The bust went down, and we found an ounce of cocaine. The city attorney was aggressive and went after everything that Garcia had: the shop, the plot it was on, the equipment, his personal cars, and his home. The value of the seizures was $328,000. That meant that $32,800 was due to the person whose information had led to the bust.
Except no such person existed. The check was ready, but we couldn’t say that we’d made it up, sworn falsely, and committed perjury. We could have claimed that the informant had died or gone to Mexico or disappeared. But everyone agreed it was a shame to let that money go to waste.
So, we recruited one of our regular informants to come in and sign for it and tossed him a few hundred dollars.
None of that bothered me. Though it should have. But whoring around and my second wife whoring around and her doing speed and me drinking and no one being responsible enough about our daughter and getting very casual about violence, all of that bothered me. Frightened me, and I was spilling my guts to Alan Stephens one lunch hour in a bar, my mind sloshing around in beer and bourbon, at noon, and he said come with me and made me get in a car and he drove and drove, out past the city limits, to where a great modern cathedral sat on a ridge dominating the whole horizon and there was a big rainstorm coming down from the mountains, you could see it moving like a dense black wall, bolts of lightning coming off its face hither and yon, and he drove up to the Cathedral and dragged me out of the car, every breath that came out of me spewing fumes that would burn if you held up a match in front of my mouth, and he dragged me down that long, long aisle to where Pastor Paul Plowright was preaching in front of a choir that was singing and where the lights were shining and at that very moment he was calling people to come down, to give it up for Jesus, to be saved, and my legs carried me forward as if my body knew already what my mind was yet to learn and I went right up to him, the smell of me preceding my arrival, so he knew full well that he was dealing with a reprobate and drunk, reeling through the afternoon, and he smiled at me, kindness in his eyes, no condemnation, no criticism, not even revulsion, a greeting on his lips, and he put his hands upon me and Jesus came through him and I fell backward. And I was saved.
A few days later, I put in a transfer to get out of narcotics. I was not there when the money was distributed. It was clear that Jesus was looking out for me, that He had sent Alan to come and get me, and He got me just in time.
That was not the end.
For the crew I’d left behind, it was just the beginning. When you drop your bucket down the well and it comes up filled with gold, you keep going back to the well. After all, Christmas is coming. Your wife wants to remodel the kitchen. Your son is dreaming about a $2,800 Mon
goose jump bike. Did you know that, with 403 horsepower and 417 pounds of torque, an Escalade is “a personal empowerment zone?” Your girlfriend wants to go to Costa Rica. You want to go to Aspen. All that’s needed is an arrest—a righteous arrest, no doubt, of a bad guy—a confiscation, a minor polite fiction, and a check is written, and your dreams can come true.
The arrest rate went up. The city made money. The department made money and was able to maintain its federal grants. The A Team was living large. Everyone was happy.
I know all this because my ex-partner, Rafe Halderson, tried to talk me into coming back. So I could share in the bonanza. Rafe was driving a new Vette by then. He was buying turquoise jewelry as an investment. “I can even afford a divorce,” he said.
Instead of being a side effect—call it collateral profit—of legitimate police work, arrests became the means, and money became the end.
They did it too many times, to too many people. One of the fake informants got caught with serious weight by the feds. He asked for a deal, and he offered them a city cop.
Rafe Halderson.
Rafe called me. He was like a kid. He wanted to take it all back. He wanted another chance. He wanted to say how he’d always meant well. They wanted him to rat out all his friends. That didn’t worry me very much because I was out before money touched my hands. “I don’t know of any other answer,” I told him, “than Jesus Christ. Maybe it’s time to give yourself to the Lord, put yourself in His hands. He’ll see you through, and nobody else will.”
He asked, “Won’t you see me through?”
“How?” I asked him. “How can I see you through? I can’t be there in the dock with you. If you go to prison, I can’t be there in the cell with you, through the nights, the regret, the fear. But He can. He can be with you everywhere and all the time.”
“I don’t know, Carl. I don’t know.”
“Give yourself to Him,” I said. “He’ll take your hand. He’ll walk beside you. Somehow, together, you’ll get through all this. Then, there will be a day when this is over, you’ve paid the price, and you’ll be able to say, ‘Thank you, Lord, for getting me through the dark times, through the valley of the shadow.’”
That’s what I said to him. What else could I say?
When he hung up the phone, Rafe ate his gun.
It was selfish and awful of me, but I thanked Jesus for coming and rescuing me. Could’ve been me, could’ve been me. I quit the police force soon after that.
All that was in me. All I had to do was open my teeth, and it would pour forth from between my lips, like serpents and worms out of a corpse, a display to my wife and darling daughter of the corruptions within and without.
We want her to grow up right. And safe. To do so, she needs to respect authority. To believe that her parents and her pastor and her teachers and her leaders are all good people doing the right thing with our interests at heart, so she should obey and be a good girl.
If I tell her these things, will it all fly apart? Then what will she hold onto?
In the silence of my hesitation, Gwen’s verdict and the official version were accepted as gospel, and we’d moved on.
“I have a question,” my daughter said. “The lawyer you’re working for is a Jew, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How come Jews are always working with the ACLU to get people like that out of jail. You’d think they’d know better, what with Israel fighting the Arabs and everything.”
That night I longed for a drink. But, of course, I didn’t have one.
Ahmad Nazami was a job for me, not a cause.
A college professor was dead. An adulterer. A man who likely slept with his students. Of adult age, perhaps, but still. A nonbeliever. I still didn’t understand how that could be. Even when I was lost, I still knew there was a God, somewhere. I just didn’t know how to let Him into my life to help me.
When I got into bed, I reached for Gwen and began to kiss her.
“I didn’t want to say this in front of Angie,” she said.
“What?”
“Somebody called today.”
“Who? What do you mean somebody?”
“I don’t know, some man. He said to tell you not to work for terrorists, or you’d get it too.”
“Get what?”
“You know. I mean . . . ”
“What?”
“It was a threat. A death threat.”
“He didn’t threaten you, did he?”
“No. No, you.”
“Look, anytime something gets on TV, people get weird. They come out of the woodwork. Gwen, back when I was a cop and actually busting people, I was always getting threats. It was all noise and bluster.”
“They called here.”
“I’m listed. I was on TV. We can change the phone number. Would that make you feel better?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Look, we can’t go changing our lives because some idiot calls us up and tells us not to do something. If someone called and said, if you keep going to church, the Muslims will get you, would you stop?”
“That’s different. That’s my faith.”
“Alright. If someone called up and said, Don’t wear blue dresses anymore. We’re attacking people in blue dresses.”
“We’re not talking about dresses.”
“Come here. Let me kiss you. Come on. It’s going to be all right. Nobody is going to attack me.”
I kissed her. She kissed me back. She wasn’t thrilled. I tried various forms of touching to arouse her. When Gwen gets excited, she can be very, very enthused. But this time, she merely acceded to my touch. She went through the motions as a dutiful wife. I went through the motions thinking that the motions would work, that they would open the doors for sexual healing to work its wonders. They did not.
Having sex with a woman who doesn’t truly want to, or only half wants to, or wants to for reasons that are not sexual is strange. But men do it. Or at least, I will do it. The penis has its own needs and sets its own tone, and once it’s up and running, it’s hard to take it away from where it’s gone and say, let’s go out to the garage and fix electrical appliances instead. Rather, the penis takes some sort of charge and leads the rest of the body and mind along with it, saying play with her breasts and her buttocks, no matter what she thinks about it—you know I like that. And if she’s not responding in your favorite way, it says how ’bout that Teresa. I bet she would. Why don’t you imagine how hot and frantic she would be, and what are all those things she’d learned in the intervening years that made her pretty fabulous, that woman with a saint’s name who’s so eager to play. She’d be whispering hot somethings in your ear. You know she would, urging you on, telling you how big and good you are.
Get the hell out of my mind, Teresa. Get out. I know the games you’re playing. Planting seeds that promise to blossom in that garden where the orchids are made of flesh.
I am not going to ruin my marriage, my life, my daughter for you, Teresa.
How about, if you have to drop Teresa, my erectile consciousness said, why not think of some of the women you used to know, when you were a wild young stud, and then it started coming up with their names.
So I ejaculated to get it over with.
15
I scrolled down through the caller list on the telephone until I saw a number that I didn’t recognize. I noted the time. Then I went to the bedroom and asked Gwen what time the threatening call had come. She told me. Yes, that was the one.
I put the phone number in a search engine. It popped up a name, Tod Timley, and an address. I put the address in Map Quest and got directions directly to his house. I took a look at the neighborhood on Google Earth. The geography of our lives at the touch of a button. So convenient. So few places left to hide. I went back into the bedroom and began to get dressed.
Gwen asked, “What are you doing?”
“Making sure he never calls again.”
Tod drove a ten-year-old Chevy Mal
ibu. It was maroon. He lived in a small ranch-style house in the Castle Creek development.
The house was big enough for a single man or a couple without kids, but not much more. From the streetlights and a little help from the moon, it looked well kept and recently painted. It was off-white with a blue door. The lawn had been mowed and the edges trimmed. There were no unusual shrubs or desert plants. Tod was a neat person but not very imaginative. According to the most recent information available on the net, he was divorced and lived alone. There were many things I didn’t know: if he had an alarm system, if he had a gun, if he was trained in the martial arts, if he sat up all night in a rocker with a shotgun on his lap waiting for them to come.
So I parked out front. I wore a beige jacket, a white shirt, a tie with an emblem on it, and a western hat so I had a law-enforcement look. I carried a big flashlight that added to the effect and would serve as a weapon too. I walked calmly up to his door and knocked with the knocker, a cast iron fist that hung from a hinge at the wrist. Then I saw the buzzer, and I rang that too. Like I had a right, a duty, to bang at the doors of strangers after midnight.
I waited. I saw a light go on, the glow leaking around the edges of his front windows. I buzzed again.
“Hold your horses,” he said.
He came to the door in a bathrobe and peered out the peephole. I figured he’d seen me on TV, so I had the hat pulled down low to obscure my face, held up my wallet flipped open to an official looking ID in my left hand and the flashlight in my right, turned on and pointed at him.
“Who’re you? What do you want?”
“Sh’r’ff department,” I said. “Had a r’port of prowlers.”
“Not from me.”
“Could I come in an’ talk to you a moment, sir? Security of the neighborhood.”
“It’s late.”
“Could be important. Home invasions lately ’round here.”
“Well, I guess.”
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