by Alex Abella
"Why? You no like aquas? They're the mirror of the sky. I have good emeralds, too. Wholesale."
"Please, Mr. Lobera. Counsel."
"Mr. Lobera, were you supplying Barry Schnitzer with jewels?"
"Who?"
"One of the victims in this case, the owner of Schnitzer Jewelers."
"Oh, you mean Levi. Poor schmuck. Yeah, sure. I was there when he got it. Almost got wiped myself."
More chuckles in the room. Vlad looks around, surprised anyone would find mirth in his sayings.
Phyllis stands up, walks behind Ramón.
"Do you see somebody in this courtroom who was there at that day and time?"
"Yeah, sure. The black fellow there in front of you, he was there with another Neg-What do you call them now, Afro-American? Him I see, I don't see the other guy. Big guy, you know. Kind always makes me nervous on account the jewels I carry."
"For the record, he has identified the defendant, Mr. Valdez."
"Yes. Proceed."
"Where did you see them?" asks Phyllis.
"They are standing by the jewelry case, looking at it. I noticed because they were dressed all in white and smelled kind of funny."
"What do you mean, funny?"
"Like cheap cologne and ether, you know? Very strange smell."
Phyllis is about to ask another question but instead wheels around and sits in her chair. She riffles through her papers. Seconds pass in expectant silence.
"Counsel?" asks Reynolds.
Phyllis plays the distracted fool. "Yes?"
"Anything else, Counsel?"
"Oh, no. No further questions."
I turn urgently to Ramón, a strange reversal, Faust advising Mephistopheles.
"Don't ask any questions! It's a trap. He hasn't said anything that could incriminate you. She's waiting for you to trip. Just say, No questions."
Ramón brushes me away. "I know what I'm doing."
"Mr. Valdez?"
"Thank you, Your Honor. Mr. Lobera, you said you saw me and someone else at the store. Tell me, did it look as though we were carrying weapons?"
"Who knows? I didn't see any."
"How close did you get to us?"
"Close enough to smell you."
Laughter again. Even Ramón cracks a smile.
"So that would be, what? Five, six feet?"
"Yeah, more or less."
"Did we say something? What were we doing?"
"You didn't say nothing while I was there. You were just staring at the jewelry case, like you was looking for something, that's all."
Phyllis smiles to herself. Ramón has fallen into the trap. Or has he?
"You say you were in the store during the incident. Where were you exactly?"
Vlad shifts in his seat, the weight of revelation now uncomfortable.
"Well, to tell you the truth, I was in the crapper."
This time everyone laughs. Vlad shrugs.
"What can I tell you? Had a heavy breakfast. I shouldn't, I have a nervous stomach." He pats his overhanging belly. Ramón waits for the laughter to die down.
"So if you were busy like you say, how do you know something happened?"
"I heard it. I mean, it was just right outside. I heard all this shouting, then Levi, I was showing him my aquas, he says, 'You wait here a minute, Vlad.' So then he goes outside. I'm wrapping up the stones when I hear the sound of glass breaking and then, pow, pow! Two bullets and then all kinds of shouting. Then all hell broke loose."
"So in other words, you never saw what happened, you just heard it."
"That's right. Those damn walls are paper thin, I could hear everything. I was shitting in my pants, pardon my French, thinking you guys were going to hear me and come in."
"Now just a minute. You don't know that we were there after you went into Schnitzer's office, no? You never saw anything."
"Yeah, that's right."
"Thank you. No more questions."
The judge enters his notes on a laptop computer, then gestures at Phyllis.
"Redirect?"
"Yes, Your Honor. Mr. Lobera, you just heard the defendant, Mr. Valdez, speaking. Wasn't his one of the voices that you heard that day inside the store?"
"Oh, without a doubt. It's him. I recognize it for sure."
"Thank you. No further questions."
Reynolds gestures at Ramón but he's already asked Lobera, "But, Lobera, were you able to understand what was being said?"
"Oh no, not that. I mean, I don't speak Spanish or whatever you fellows were speaking. Couldn't understand a word."
"So for all you know, I may have been telling someone to put down his gun and surrender, isn't that correct?"
"Objection, calls for speculation."
"Sustained."
"Thank you, Mr. Lobera. No more questions," says Ramón.
As Lobera leaves, Ramón adds, "Fast out. That's how you win the game, Charlie."
"Wrong. You just stole a base. That's a far cry from stealing home."
"Just gimme time, Carlitos. Gimme some time."
17
d oes time flatten when you look back upon it? Is our perception of our own history like that of the stars Sirius or Alpha Centauri, whose light is dappled red when they're close and blue when they are far, so that the nearer our memories the more they are colored by our emotions, and the farther they are the more they assume the sad azure of neglect?
I ask this because there are certain things about the trial that I have forgotten and I don't know why. The days rolled on in a repetitious accumulation of horror that after a while became senseless, detached, incomprehensible. If the jurors felt as I did, there was no longer any emotional impact to the detailing of the murders as narrated by the investigating officer, Detective Samuels. With the slow methodical tone of the man for whom murder is a living, he droned on about the technical findings in his investigation-the bullet holes, the layout of the location, the amount of debris found scattered on the floor, the thinking behind the decision to surround the store and not to rush in, the exact deployment of the attending officers.
Then there was the criminologist, a totally bald, gaunt man in a polyester leisure suit who had not experienced a new thought or emotion since 1975. He too dragged on about bullet calibers, angles of penetration, stippling and barrel marks and shots fired in the laboratory to identify the weapon, so much detail that the denseness of the testimony seemed too hard to bear. Phyllis was following the prosecutor's manual-pile on the evidence until it becomes such an overwhelming mound that it passes understanding and all that is left in the minds of the jurors is that this mountain of facts can only mean the defendant is guilty as charged.
The normal defense posture in the face of this attack is to fight fire with fire, to undermine the experts, to find the famous fly in the ointment by pointing out the hidden inconsistencies and logical deficiencies. The defense will run its own tests on the murder weapon and call in its own experts on what it all means, so that it becomes a question of whom do you believe and why should you care at all. The principle of reasonable doubt sits in the courtroom like a specter everyone alludes to but no one actually calls by name.
But Ramón wasn't doing any of that; he was letting Phyllis spend herself in the barrage of minutiae, trying so hard to prove every point, to cover every angle, that by the end even Judge Reynolds was barely restraining himself from yawning. Ramón merely sat back and watched her spin her wheels, following a strategy that was becoming clearer by the day. Let the evidence accumulate pointing to a killer, but shift the blame onto someone else. I tried to convince him to poke holes in the technical testimony but he only asked a handful of questions of Detective Samuels:
"Detective, did you take fingerprints of the weapons that were fired that day?"
The lieutenant consulted his report, then glanced up, mildly annoyed. "No, we did not."
"Is that not standard procedure?"
"Not really. It depends on the situation. When we feel we hav
e enough evidence to support the charges, we do not necessarily lift prints off the weapons."
"Could that be done now, taking the prints?"
"No. We tried a few months ago but we found the weapons had been contaminated, that is, too many people had handled them so it was not possible to lift any prints."
"So, in other words, you really don't know who fired those weapons."
Samuels smiled for the first and last time during his testimony. "Well, that was quite simple. It was either you or Mr. Pimienta or both of you."
"But still, you don't know that for a fact, do you?"
"You were the only ones left alive."
"But you don't know who did it, is that not true?"
"Well, I don't know if the sun will rise tomorrow but I believe it will. That's the degree of certainty I have."
"Please answer the question, sir. Do you know specifically if I fired those weapons?"
"No, I don't."
"Thank you. That is all."
The sun was an orange ball dipping into the ocean when I pulled up in front of the house. A postmodernist villa of limestone, white stucco and glass-block walls, it had two conical-topped towers sheathed in copper so new it was still a shiny red. A few square windows opened the walls like the eyes of a robot, seeing everything and understanding nothing. A motor court trimmed in stone in front of the building was already jammed with the limos and the preferred power vehicles of the elite of Los Angeles-Jaguars, Porsches, Ferraris and Range Rovers. I knew it was going to be an all-out Halloween party when I spotted the parking valet handing tickets to the vehicle owners at the door. I made a U-turn and drove a block down the hill, parking underneath a still blooming bottlebrush tree.
Mae West answered the door when I rang the bell. That is, Suzan Nash, deputy D.A. in Van Nuys Superior Court, dressed like she'd done someone wrong.
"Is that a gun in your pocket, big boy?" she asked, batting eyelashes that seemed ready to stick together and never open again from the globs of mascara.
"No, sugar, it's a subpoena duces tecum. Show me the goods."
"Anytime, fellow." She kissed me on the cheek and hailed me inside. "Help yourself, the party's just starting."
"Where's our wonderful host?"
"Clay is probably in the kitchen, checking out the tamales," she said, taking me by the arm and leading me into a living room with a view of the coastline from Palos Verdes to Point Hueneme.
"So you two are still an item?" I asked Suzan as we walked down the steps to the second level of the living room by the curving balcony.
Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft" drifted at that point out of the high-power stereo speakers painted the color of the fuchsia walls.
"When he wants to," said Suzan.
"Excuse me?"
"You know Clay can't commit to anything but his practice. Tell you the truth, I'm not so sure I'd like to be married to someone like that."
"And miss out on all this?"
I gestured at the large buffet table, catered by two former movie industry executives who called their outfit Catering Girl even though the only female was the Salvadoran woman who did the dishes. Starlets, movie directors and studio executives dressed like cats, lions, ghouls and Richard Nixon-that is, like their true inner selves-mingled with corporate lawyers, judges and real estate developers, in the interlocking community of concerns that runs the state.
"It's only money," said Suzan. "There are greater things in life."
We stopped next to a Hockney print of the San Fernando Valley under a sculpture of neon-colored fiberglass that looked like the four-level interchange of the 101 Freeway downtown.
"Anyways, I heard you have a girlfriend. Where is she?"
"Working. She's a hostess at Baldocchi's. Halloween's a big night for Italian restaurants, didn't you know?"
"You mean like the Mexicans? I didn't know that. He should be in there," she said, pointing at two swinging etched glass doors.
In the kitchen Clay, dressed as Zorro, down to the whip gathered by his side, was sampling the cone-shaped tamales a tall brown-skinned woman in a red dress was presenting on a platter.
"No, no!" he was telling her, "too salty, no mas salt, oh shit."
"Dice el señor que están muy salados los tamales," I said. The woman, very indignant, replied all her customers liked them that way.
"Boy, am I glad to see you. What's she saying?"
"That you're going to have to pay her for all those tamales because that's what you ordered, otherwise she'll sue you."
"OK, OK, está bien. Ándale, ándale." The woman picked up her tamales and very calmly strode into the living room.
"What the fuck, everybody will get so smashed they'll probably love the extra salt. Hey, where's your costume?"
"I'm not staying long."
Clay turned, admiring himself in an imaginary mirror.
"Always wanted to be Zorro when I was a kid. So, what's up? Wanna drink? María, cerveza para Charlie!"
"I wanted to talk to you about Pimienta and his testimony."
"Guy, what are you, all work, no play? It's Halloween, kick back, have a drink, do some toot, get laid. It's fantasy time!"
"Clay, it's always fantasy time in L.A. I want to know what Pimienta is going to say."
One of the maids brought me a Corona with half a lime.
Clay tried some of the tamale, digging his finger in the masa and extracting a chunk of fried pork.
"Cholesterol city. Shit, I was dead drunk when I told her to cater this. You know she works at El Coyote? Serves me right."
"Pimienta."
"All right! Look, what can I say? The guy's going to finger Ramón, it's that simple. He'll give Phyllis book, chapter and verse on their whereabouts, actions and intentions."
"Such as?"
"Such as Ramón had planned to kill the manager and the owner to begin with and maybe the guard too. The rest just got caught up in the flow of things. It's like that old Dr. John song, 'I was in the wrong place but it must have been the right time.'" He looked for a towel to wipe his finger but finding none on the marble-topped island, he turned on the gold-plated bar faucet and rinsed it off.
"You think he's telling the truth?"
"The truth?" He laughed. "These guys wouldn't know what the truth is if it bit them in the ass. They're full of this macho shithead posturing, they think Cubans are the best and everyone else is jealous of them and that's why everything happened. They say Mexicans are resentful of them."
"I don't get it."
"The manager of the store was Mexican. They feel he was responsible for the store repossessing the jewels even though Barry had given them the jewels. Pimienta claims they tried to cut a deal but the manager told them, Fucking Cubans, you think you're so smart all the time, let's see you get these back, or something like that."
Clay lifted his finger at one of the maids, who brought another beer without delay. He gulped down half the bottle, belched.
"Now I feel like a real Mexican. I'm not sure but I think Pimienta is going to say he was under the influence of Ramón and couldn't help himself, you know, the Jim Jones devil made me do it bullshit. He's going to claim that now he's been in jail all this time he's been able to cut the umbilical cord, so to speak. Like a newborn babe in the land of the free, which is what he's going to be in approximately three months, if not earlier, with time served. Let's go in, I'm tired of hanging out with the help. Hey, no offense intended."
"None taken," I said, as we swung open the double doors and stepped back into the party. "Assholes will be assholes and always full of shit."
His reaction was totally unexpected. Either the beer had paralyzed his flapping tongue or the costume was making him act different. Clay pushed me against the wall, toppling a cadmium blue vase from a corbel. He leaned on my throat with his forearm, pressing it tight.
"Where do you get off calling me an asshole, Carlos?" His breath reeked of garlic and beer. "You fucking Cubans are all the same."
&nbs
p; I closed my fist and hit him in the groin with a hammer blow then lifted the elbow to connect with his chin as he tilted down. He flew backward and I gave him an uppercut in his solar plexus, throwing him to the ground, face up.
"Who the fuck do you think you are, Clay?"
Heads turned in our direction, silence fell in the room, broken only by Tony Bennett's "I Wanna Be Around" in the background. Clay turned his head and puked on the bleached white oak floor.
"You make me sick," I added.
I knew Clay was back to normal when he turned and wiped the vomit from his chin with a grin. "Feeling's mutual."
"I'm outta here."
All turned as I walked out. No one-no banker or developer, no D.A., no PD, counsel, cop or judge, not even the mayor or his ever present bodyguard-said a word or stopped me from going. It was very simple, as simple as a Jew in a room full of Nazis, the yellow star on my clothes shouting out, Scum, subhuman dreg, stinking spoor of defiling animal, Hispanic shit, leave the room.
Out in the motor court I was stopped by an arriving Bentley. As the valet swung open the door, long legs in sequined hose connected to an Irma La Douce costume stepped out-Mrs. Schnitzer.
"Leaving already, Mr. Morell?"
"I knew you were corning so I came out to say goodbye. Clay's inside. A little the worse for wear but I'm sure he'll be glad to see your checkbook again."
