by Alex Abella
"Aee, aee, aee, aee, aee," cried the old lady again.
"But don't worry," said Bongos, "it's only coffee, señor. So here's some music to dance away that ... cafeína."
He flicked on the turntable, playing a fast paced cumbia from Medellín, then he wheeled around and faced me.
"What can I do for you?"
I told him what I was there for. He frowned, fingering his fat mustache.
"Ah, yes, Officer McCloskey told me you'd be dropping by."
He wheeled around once more, opened a drawer, took out two cassettes. He tossed them at me, then rose from his chair as a smaller, darker man with bottle bottom glasses slid into the seat, placed a record on the turntable and put his lips to the mike, ready to swallow it whole.
"Good day, lovers of love," he said in a low, throaty, rumbling voice, "the moment of angelical, divine, amorous transport that will take you to the stars of emotion is here once again in this, your 'Program of Love.' "
Limping slightly, Bongos led me to his office, a service closet in which he'd stuck two filing cabinets, a board across them and a chair.
"How'd you get hurt?" I asked.
"A memento from D'Aubuisson's people in El Salvador. They didn't like some of my coverage of the Arena party so they broke my legs into four pieces."
"You were lucky to get out alive."
"I'll say. Especially after they put a bullet through my head. That healed but the left leg never mended right."
He plopped down in the chair and opened up a file drawer, and planted two other cassettes on the desk.
"Here, let me have the ones I gave you. These have better-quality sound. You understand Cubans? Some people say they're incomprehensible."
"I'm Cuban too."
"Are you? I thought you were a gabacho, an Argentinian. Well, there you have it."
"Thank you."
"You can keep those. But let me tell you something about those guys. They're not all there, you know that. Something happened in that store that had nothing to do with a robbery or anything like that. It's like they saw something, they peeked into an abyss, then retreated out of fear for their souls. But by the time they got back, it was too late, they had already been dragged down into the pit. I don't know if that makes sense. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"I think so."
When I returned to my apartment, I found the front door unlocked, the windows flung open and the bed still warm. On the dresser, in a childlike hand, with the kind of spelling and grammatical errors a third grader makes, Lucinda had laboriously scrawled me a note. It read, in Spanish,
"I'm going. Looking for work. A man says he finds me some today. By your indulgence. Lucinda."
She had started to write 'I love you' but had left it incomplete, putting down only the te q of "te quiero," then quickly scratching it out, not daring to presume any lasting links from just one night of passion.
I took a shower and barely bothered to towel, the Santa Ana winds wiping the moisture off like an invisible sponge. I made myself some coffee, opened the balcony doors and sat staring at the observatory.
I'm fourteen, living in Opalocka. A mulatto family, rare among Cubans of the day, has moved next door down from New York. The girl, slender and cheerful, is my age; she waits for me every day when I come from school. We sit under the orange tree in her yard, blossoms drawing bees buzzing for nectar. I shoo away a bee, feel her small breast. We kiss, my first kiss.
"Carlos, come here," bellows my father, unexpectedly home from the garage. I scurry away, caught in the act of love.
I open the door to our house, he slaps me so hard I hit the wall.
"I don't want you fucking around with little colored girls!"
Stunned, all I can say is, "Why, Dad?"
"Because all they want to do is get pregnant so they can sink their hooks into you, because you're too young to throw your life away, because I forbid you!"
I slither down the wall to the floor, where I sit, still reeling. I lick the blood from the broken lip. I realize he's right, that behind that love is the specter of unwanted commitment, of marriage and duties and obligations far beyond what I can envisage or desire. I go to the kitchen and put an ice cube on my lip. After the explosion, papá slips quietly away. I never see her again. I never explain, I never talk to her. A month later we move to Kendall, a hurried relocation that I now realize was directly linked to that one moment of discovery. Is that why I am drawn to Lucinda? Is she just another round in our unending conflict? Will I ever escape?
A book fell to the ground in my office. I sat up, startled. I visualized the espalier in Enzo's garden, an inviting stepladder for anyone wanting to break in. I put down my coffee mug, stood up quietly and moved to the kitchen. I took out my .38 from the pasta jar.
Another book fell with a thundering thud. Then I heard a filing cabinet drawer sliding out, its rusty hinges squeaking. I raised my gun and advanced quickly to the far wall, waiting to see if the intruder would come out. The noises continued in the office. My heart was a runaway train plunging down a steep hill. Yet another noise. I scooped across to the bedroom and glanced inside. No one there. I scurried to the partition dividing it from the office and pressed my damp hand against the wall. A bird trilled a sunny melody from the eucalyptus tree outside. A gasp, then a moan, as though the intruder had somehow injured himself.
I whipped around in a dance of fear and twirled into the doorway, holding my gun with both hands, pointing it inside the room. A thick-set man with a broad back and gray wavy hair was hunched over my files, lifting papers, his breathing tortured, raspy.
"Freeze or I'll fucking blow your brains out!" The man put his hands up. There was something familiar about his profile. What was it, who was it?
"Turn around, slowly." The man turned, papers cascading in delayed time to the floor. I gasped, my breath rushing out of me, as though I'd fallen into an icy lake.
The clear plastic breathing apparatus of a hospital patient dangled from his nose, his face contorted into a frozen spasm, skin with the pallor of the dead, eyes hooded, barely open. My father looked gravely at me from beyond the grave, silently, neither loving nor hating, affirming nor denying, just being at that moment, existing in a frozen instant. Then the features began to dissolve, melting, as though wiped by an invisible eraser, until at the end only two mournful eyes gazed back at me and then they too were gone and all that was left in the room was a cold mist and the smell of burnt matches in the air.
9
d ecember seven, the day that will live in infamy, was the day our trial finally began. It had been over two years since the carnage at the jewelry store, yet Ramón's case had never been far from my mind, no matter what other investigation I might have been conducting. Twenty-four months of delays, appointments, substitutions-a speedy trial by the standards of Los Angeles justice, abetted by the certainty on the part of the prosecution that all they had to do to win was show up in court for, after all, what defense could there be? Even at this point I couldn't see any and Ramón had not volunteered any. Is this really the purpose, I asked myself, for Ramón to become some perverse sacrificial lamb, some guilty creature slain for-But that's silly, I told myself. Totally senseless.
Hurricane-force Santa Ana winds had scoured the basin the night before, reaching speeds of a hundred miles an hour, suggesting, with alarming clarity, the terror of Nature set loose. Trucks jackknifed in the San Bernardino freeway, electric lines plunged from Palos Verdes to Glendale, brush fires that at any other time would have quickly been spent instead blackened thousands of acres in the Santa Susana and San Gabriel mountains, threatening homes in Malibu, Monrovia and Pacific Palisades. The shutters in my bedroom window hummed all night, sighing from the repressed force that wanted to set them free, while in the distance the wailing of ambulances and fire trucks lifted into the air in a chorus of emergency. The hours stepped fitfully forward as I lay in bed, my heart pounding, thinking the building would topple, waiting for the end. Inste
ad, otherworldly in its stillness, a lilac dawn arose like a maniac who murdered his family and in the morning goes down to fix his coffee, unheeding of the bodies strewn by the stove.
In the Criminal Courts Building, jurors waiting to be impaneled jammed the hallways, hundreds of people standing around, like so many schoolchildren waiting for the bell to ring to go into class.
The day has come, I thought as I swung open the doors to Judge Reynolds' courtroom, the skirmishes are over, once more into the breach.
Perhaps I should have walked out of the courtroom at that point, renouncing this charade of a lawyer sans brief, a counsel without a cause, but the centripetal force of the event drew me further and further in. Besides, I felt I had a role to play, an obscure but all important part that would reveal itself in the doing, a duty that went beyond giving aid to the needy, regardless of personal opprobrium, one that had been preordained, somehow somewhere by a greater being outside the confines of the legal system. My last chance to flee evaporated as the bailiff brought out Ramón and José to the tinkling of jail chains.
Both men were dressed in civilian clothes. José wore a baggy light beige suit with a wrinkled shirt and a six-inch-wide flowered tie, looking as though he'd merely traded one uniform for another. Ramón had on an old gray double-breasted suit of mine which fit him perfectly; with a chill I saw for the first time that we were indeed the same size.
The bailiff unlocked the cuffs. José ambled over to Clay Smith's side and sat in the defendant's wooden chair, a blond female interpreter speaking into his ear.
Ramón slid into his seat and nodded at me.
"Nice day for a hanging," he said in Spanish, barely smiling.
"They gas them in California."
"Details, details. You have to learn to rise above your circumstances. Go for the big picture. That's the secret."
"That's why you're here, right?"
"Not for long."
Ramón scanned the courtroom, nodding to himself with satisfaction as he spied the expectant crowd, the lines of reporters at the far end of the courtroom, the extra bailiffs conspicuously posted every six feet around the perimeter of the hall. Jim Ollin, the latest glamour boy of the local TV news wars, was standing by his cameraman behind the bar, pointing his notebook at us like a lance, ordering a zoom-in. Ramón gave him a wide smile, then turned to me.
"Tell Ollin I'll talk to him in jail this afternoon, if he's interested."
"All rise!" intoned the head bailiff, announcing the judge's entrance.
"You're crazy," I whispered to Ramón, "he could blow your whole case."
"We'll see," he said, putting his hand to his heart when the bailiff mentioned the flag of our country.
In her corner, like a prizefighter surrounded by her coach and second, Phyllis was ringed by the head investigator, Detective Ron Samuels, and her co-counsel, Deputy D.A. Phil Hammond. She looked calmly at Reynolds in spite of the resentment she must have harbored for having to put up with him, instead of another judge. Pellegrini had turned down her proposal to change judges, unwilling to trade in a known quantity, no matter how deficient, for an unknown magistrate who might spoil their solid chances of winning with some arcane legal requirement.
Reynolds sat in his upholstered blue leather chair, cleared his throat, looked quickly at the file in front of him as though he'd momentarily forgotten what case he was hearing. He glanced up.
"The People versus Valdez and Pimienta. Are the parties ready?"
"Ready for the People, Your Honor," answered Phyllis, standing.
"Ready for defendant Pimienta," said Clay, also rising.
"We are ready," said Ramón, folding his hands on the table.
"Get up!" I whispered. He shook his head. Reynolds frowned, his eyes shining through his horn-rimmed glasses.
"Mr. Valdez, you will rise when you address the court."
Ramón smiled apologetically, almost making one think that he truly regretted what he was about to do.
"Your Honor, there is no legal requirement that counsel be standing up when talking to the judge. Since I am acting as my own counsel-"
"Yes, there is!"
"If I may inquire, Judge, where is there that I can find this legal requirement? It is not in any book that I am aware of."
"It doesn't matter if it's not, it's the tradition of our system."
"Who says one must follow tradition blindly, with all respect?"
Judge Reynolds banged his gavel in frustration. "I say it! This is my court and in my court, sir, you will follow my standards!"
Ramón shook his head, obdurate. "Judge, to rise before you is to stand before a man and to pay homage to a man, not a principle. I can only honor the law and the flag, sacred symbols of our country. If you rise when you address me, 1 will rise when I address you. You are just a man, you are not the law."
"Sir, I am the l-" Reynolds hesitated for a brief moment, for the first time aware that camera lenses were pointing his way and that reporters were scribbling every word of their confrontation. But pride won out.
"Bailiff, remove this man from the court until further notice. Counsel, approach the bench!"
Now Ramón finally stood up.
"Judge, I am counsel and cannot be removed from the court without good reason!"
"I have good reason. You're in contempt, sir. Bailiff, put him in the holding cell until we decide what to do with him!"
Ramón struggled briefly, enough to make the "Six o'Clock News" viewers get their money's worth.
"This is an abuse of power, Your Honor," he shouted, as three bailiffs hauled him away. "You are not the law, no man is the law. You cannot act like the King George in this country, like the Communist commissar, we are a country of laws!"
The door to the cell slammed closed behind them. I could hear Ramón being slammed against the wall and the dull thumping of blackjacks on his body.
"Don't hit me!" he shouted.
"You too should approach, Mr. Morell," said the judge. I snapped to.
"Yes, sir!"
"You ever seen a cockier son of a bitch!" said the judge as Phyllis, Clay and I drew near the high bench.
"Totally uncalled for, Your Honor," said Clay, looking to score sympathy points.
"That little coon, calling me King George! Why, when my people were chasing the redcoats out of Carolina his folks were running for zebras in the jungle!"
Phyllis sounded a note of quiet caution. "Judge, perhaps we ought to confer in chambers. Someone is likely to overhear us."
"Good idea." The judge banged his gavel. "This court is in recess!" Then, to us, "I guess we better see if the jungle bunny's right. Let's hit the books."
That afternoon, lips swollen, cheeks puffy and slashed, eyes narrowed into slits, Ramón greeted me like the winner of the prize match.
"I gave it to them, didn't I?"
"I'd say you got as good as you gave."
Our interview had been moved to a booth in the high-security wing of the jail, away from the general prisoner population. The isolation suited Ramón, who proudly stretched stiff arms as much as the double length of chains and padlocks would let him.
"What do you hope to gain?"
He grinned. One of his front teeth had been knocked out, leaving him with a seven-year-old's touching gap-toothed smile.
"This trial is not going to be won in the courtroom, Carlitos. I have to bring the outside world in as the jury. They're the ones who will decide my destiny."
"You really think the judge is going to let you control the trial?"
"What choice does he have? I already set the ground rules. He came off as a tyrant and everybody in the whole world knows it by now."
"That's your opinion. Some people may say what they saw is a killer who has no respect for our legal system. You could actually be antagonizing people."
Ramón waved his hands. "I already lost those people a long time ago. They're the ones who automatically think you stole the mango the moment they see you walk in
front of the bodega. I'm talking about laws here. I want to make sure that everyone follows the strict meaning of the law and justice, because if they don't, I'm sunk."
This last statement was accompanied by the same emphatic up-and-down hand motion I'd seen used by Castro on TV, my father in a political argument, all Cubans on occasions when noise and bluster count for more than logic and reasoned argument-tip of thumb to tip of index finger, the other three fingers held straight out, as though the speaker were calibrating a ring or measuring the neck of a milk bottle or just jerking you off.
Law and justice. Ramón didn't see any irony in his words, for now he looked at me expecting confirmation, assurance that his plea had reached a responsive listener. I felt sick, ashamed of myself and what I was doing, like a boy unable to stop lighting matches to the furry tail of the neighbor's cat.
"We'll see what happens. I told Ollin he could talk to you. He practically came in his pants."
He grinned, his remaining teeth shining bright.
"I know. I called him at the station."
I was surprised. As a high-security prisoner, Ramón was to be watched all the time, and above all, was not to have access to communications, either with other prisoners or the outside world.
He was housed alone, in a twelve by twelve cell. His only link to life beyond the pale green walls of his cell and the crowded courtroom were his visits to the library, when he'd be flanked by two bailiffs.
"How did you manage that?"
He shook his head evasively, not willing to be drawn out. "Friends. Brothers in the faith."
