In My Dark Dreams

by JF Freedman

  “Unlock him,” Joe instructs the jailers. “He’s going to need to use his hands.”

  Wordlessly, one of the deputies uncouples the handcuffs and waist-shackles. Salazar slumps into the chair across the table from us and flexes his arms to get the circulation going.

  “I’ll buzz you when we’re done,” Joe tells the guards. “It’s going to be a while.”

  The deputies close the door behind them as they leave. It’s a metal door, built like a tank. You can hear the locks engage, sealing us in. It’s a chilling feeling. To add to the claustrophobia, there is the nagging worry that our conversations are bugged, at least some of the time. That’s illegal, of course, but bending the rules in the so-called pursuit of justice has never been a deterrent for the police. We have to hope they’re playing fair and square, and we try not to discuss critical information or strategy within these walls.

  “My wife is falling apart,” Salazar says by way of greeting. “The whole community is shunning her. She can’t even go to the grocery store without being ripped apart. And my kids are tormented at school.” He buries his face in his hands. “They don’t deserve that, they didn’t do anything.” He raises his head and stares at us. “I didn’t, either.”

  He has been maintaining his innocence from Day One. There has not been a chink in his armor, not one tiny crack. Usually, when a lawyer thinks (or knows) that his client is guilty, he doesn’t ask him if he is, not directly. He doesn’t want to know that truth, because it will be a psychological straitjacket. But in this case, Salazar has been outspoken and consistent: he did not kill that woman. He did not kill any of those women. He acknowledges (bitterly) that the police found damning evidence in his truck, “but I did not put it there.” He swears that on the heads of his children.

  The evidence. God, it’s horrific! That needle in the haystack Cordova found under the floor mat of Salazar’s truck, which blew his normally imperturbable mind, was a pair of underpants that belonged to the most recent murdered woman. She had apparently been wearing them when she was killed, and because stripping the victims of their panties was the killer’s ugly signature, it linked all the murders to one another. In every killing, the victim was naked from the waist down, and her underpants were missing. The murderer, it seemed obvious (and odious), wanted a fetishistic souvenir of his work.

  That a pair of underpants was taken from each of the victims had been a closely guarded secret. Only those cops and prosecutors directly involved in the murder cases (and the killer himself) knew about it, and not one of them leaked. The media never got wind until after the fact, a point of pride for the LAPD, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department, and the D.A.’s office. Once the DNA evidence confirmed that those panties belonged to the latest victim, the state’s case against Salazar went from good to virtually airtight.

  The panties had been sent to two labs that test for DNA—one in Northern California, where the L.A. Coroner’s Office normally sends their DNA work, and a second in Maryland, which has a national reputation. The District Attorney’s office wanted to be super careful with the DNA, because even the best labs make mistakes. So they doubled up on the testing, which is almost unheard of.

  The results from both labs, which positively identified the panties as having belonged to the victim, came back in thirty days, a minor miracle, because DNA tests usually take months. It’s a complicated process, and the labs are jammed with samples sent in from jurisdictions all over the country. That the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office got this one back so fast was testament to the importance of this case. The rumor, which I believe to be true, is that Governor Schwarzenegger personally interceded to expedite the testing.

  I was sick to my stomach when I found out about the results. Although I was never absolutely sure whether Salazar really was a dupe about those stolen televisions or was in on the fix, I still liked him as a person and was impressed with his considerable achievements. But if he is the killer, and this evidence overwhelmingly points to that, it means that he’s not only a murderer, but he’s also really fucked up, a real sicko.

  The only glimmer in this sky of black clouds, if there is one, is that Salazar’s DNA is not on the underwear. For the purposes of defending him, though, that is pretty much irrelevant. The autopsies of the murder victims didn’t indicate that they had been sexually assaulted, so rape isn’t part of the charges against Salazar. Murder is more than enough.

  The police didn’t know that rape wasn’t an element in the killings when they busted Salazar, though, so immediately after his arrest they scoured his house, inside, out, and backward. Anything that might be incriminating was taken. What they were looking for—hoping for—were other sets of women’s underwear that could tie him to the previous victims. Anything that had been washed would be useless, but they did take all the soiled female laundry from the family’s hamper. Each article was analyzed for DNA content, but they all turned out to belong to Mrs. Salazar. So that was a dead end, thank God, because if there had been a match, there would be no point in having a trial. They could take Salazar to the nearest public forum and hang him, after he was first drawn and quartered.

  The police also tried to reexamine his cube truck to see if there was evidence in it they had overlooked, since when they arrested him the first time they were interested in television sets, not women’s underwear. But between that arrest and this one Salazar sold the truck, and it can’t be located. It’s probably in Mexico or was crushed for scrap, because it wouldn’t have been worth any money on resale here. His reason for selling it was that since the police had that truck in their records, they would stop him again for other phantom infractions, and would try to pin another bogus charge on him. (That the sets were stolen didn’t count in his reasoning, since he didn’t know they were contraband; a dubious distinction, even to me, but I understand his thinking.)

  The bottom line is that no other pairs of underwear belonging to any of the other victims has been found.

  Joe and Salazar did not get off on a good footing when we first started working on this case. Right off the bat, as soon as Salazar insisted he hadn’t left the incriminating evidence in his truck, Joe interrupted him. “Who did?” he demanded brusquely, almost dismissively. “The tooth fairy?”

  Salazar jumped when Joe attacked him that directly. So did I. But I knew where Joe was coming from. He doesn’t want clients to play head games with him, what we’re doing is too serious.

  But Salazar didn’t back down. “No,” he declared. “The tooth fairy exists only for children. I am not a child.”

  “Who, then?” Joe demanded.

  “The police,” Salazar shot back, “or—”

  “Stop right there,” Joe ordered him. “We’re not getting into any police conspiracy theories. At least not until someone shows me absolute proof, which I’m not going to hold my breath for. That is an insane defense, and all it would do is tighten the hangman’s noose around your neck. For one thing,” he pointed out, “where did they get them? The victim wasn’t wearing them, and a few hours later, they were found in your truck. That won’t wash, so drop it.”

  The police do plant evidence—that’s a fact. But in this situation, with the players involved and the timing between finding the body and arresting Salazar, if we so much as hinted that that was the case, we would be pilloried. Even staunch civil liberty groups, such as the ACLU or the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wouldn’t back us on that.

  “You were about to say something else,” Joe asked Salazar. “What was it?”

  “That the real killer could have planted it in my truck.”

  Joe rolled his eyes at that idea too. “When? Again, let’s remember the time line. Meaning there was no time.”

  “There was, a little,” Salazar disagreed. He explained that he’d left his house early that morning while it was still dark out to beat the crosstown traffic. Because he was early, he stopped at a McDonald’s on Bundy to get an Egg McMuffin and coffee. He bought his newspaper out
of a rack outside the fast-food joint. He was inside the McDonald’s for a few minutes. The real killer could have slipped the panties in then. He never locked his truck.

  “Of all the trucks in all of Los Angeles, the real killer (Joe leaned heavy on the sarcasm) picks yours. Man, what a piece of bad luck that was for you.” In other words, forget about it.

  Salazar didn’t have a comeback for that.

  So we’re stuck. Salazar insists he didn’t kill any of the women, and didn’t leave the panties in his truck. He also made the point, as proof that he isn’t the killer, that the police hadn’t found any articles of underwear from the other murdered women. “If I kept one pair of underpants, like they say I did,” he demanded, “why didn’t I keep all of them?”

  That was another easy pigeon to shoot down, which Joe did, and not gently. “Because she had just been killed, and you didn’t have time to get rid of them. That’s the logical answer, which the D.A. would throw in our face,” he bluntly told our client. “Leave this alone, for now. We have other matters to deal with.”

  We are going to do our best for Salazar. We always do. But this is going to be a brutal case to defend, and we are not going to let ourselves look like fools or jerks. Whatever defense we decide to put on, it will be as logical and reasonable to the twelve men and women who will be on our jury as we can make it.

  So here we are, in the present. “We got your appointment book back,” Joe tells Salazar, reaching into his hand-tooled leather briefcase, which his wife gave him for his tenth anniversary in the office (twenty years ago). He takes out a dog-eared notebook, the kind with the dappled black-and-white cover used by kids in elementary school. This beat-up appointment book, which Salazar carried with him, had been taken from him at the scene, along with everything else. Joe smoothes a hand over the frayed cover as if to buff up the contents, like a genie rubbing a magic lamp, hoping for three wishes. “The police made a copy, and if there is incriminating material in it, they’ll use it against you. There’s nothing we can do about that. But hopefully, we’ll be the ones who can use it to your benefit, and not them.”

  Several of the pages in the book have been marked with Post-its. The date on the first flagged page conforms to the night the first victim was murdered. The coroner had pegged the time of death between two and five in the morning, so Salazar’s whereabouts between midnight and dawn that day are critical. The same holds true for all the other days when one of the murders was committed. Salazar is only being tried for the latest crime, because that’s the one that has direct evidence linking him to the victim, but in reality, he will be on trial for all of them, because it’s a given that the murders were the work of a single man. If we can prove that he could not have been where one or more of those crimes were committed, that will be a huge boost for us.

  We already have one strike against us in that regard, a big one, because of Salazar being in the vicinity of one of the earlier murders the night he was arrested with the stolen television sets. So far, the police haven’t proved he was near any of the other killings on the days and dates they occurred, but we know they’re working their butts off to find another connection. If they do, it will be more gasoline they can throw on the pyre.

  “Let’s get started,” Joe says. “We have a lot of ground to cover.” He dives into his briefcase again and pulls out a large manila envelope. He sets it on the table next to Salazar’s appointment book, opens the flap, and pulls out a stack of eight-by-ten color photos of the murdered women. Details about each one, including where she lived and where her body was found, are stapled to the backs of the pictures. They have been stacked in sequence, from the first victim to the last.

  Joe lays the top picture in front of Salazar. “Do you recognize her?” he asks. “Take your time.”

  Salazar scrutinizes the photo carefully. Then he looks up. “No.”

  “You’re positive?” I ask him. I’m suspicious now of everything he tells me, no matter how innocuous. I wish that weren’t the case, but I can’t help it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I’m not going to be hoodwinked again.

  “You’ve never laid eyes on this woman?” I pick the picture up, turn it over, and scan the information. “She lived on Medio Drive. Do you have any clients on Medio?”

  I pick up his logbook to look for myself, but he stops me. “Yes,” he says. “The Shapiros. Sixteen-twenty.”

  “You know the address by heart?”

  “I know the addresses of all my clients,” he says with a proud voice. “Over fifty of them.” He taps his temple with a finger. “I don’t need the book to tell me where they live.”

  “So you might have seen her,” I press. “If only in passing.”

  His forehead wrinkles in concentration. “I suppose so,” he grudgingly allows. “But I don’t remember her.”

  Joe and I exchange a concerned glance. If the prosecution hasn’t already made this connection, they will.

  I put the picture aside, pick up the next one, and put in front of him. “What about her?” I ask.

  Salazar looks at this picture with the same intensity with which he viewed the previous one. “No,” he says firmly. “I don’t recognize her, either.”

  I check the information on the back of the picture. “South Marino Avenue, in Brentwood. Do you have any clients who live there?” I ask.

  “No,” he answers. But before I can relax my guard, he says, “but I have two clients on Alta Avenue, around the corner. The Steins and the Lomaxes.”

  “So it’s possible you had seen her, too,” I state. “And she, you.”

  He shakes his head in exasperation. “Yes, it is possible,” he admits. “But I do not remember her. When I am working, I am not looking at people walking up and down the street. I don’t have time to sightsee. Besides, I am a married man. I don’t look at other women that way.”

  “What way is that?” Joe asks.

  “Checking them out,” Salazar says in exasperation. “Which is what I would have to do to remember them.” He picks up the picture, stares at it. “She is a pretty woman …”

  “Was,” Joe corrects him. “She’s dead. She was murdered.”

  “Sorry,” Salazar says. He sounds as if he’s really contrite. “Was. But what I was going to say is, she is not special looking. You would not remember a woman who looks like this unless you actually knew her. Which I did not,” he states emphatically.

  “If you say so,” Joe gives in. Like me, he’s skeptical. He’s also worried that if Salazar is lying about knowing these women, it could backfire on us. “Let’s move on,” he says, dismissing this line of inquiry, for now.

  Salazar does not admit to knowing any of the murdered women. This is important, because the cops’ main witness stated that it appeared to him that the victim knew the man she was talking to, shortly before she was murdered. The man who may well have been her killer.

  That’s the good news. The bad news is that all the victims lived, and were killed, in proximity to one or more of Salazar’s gardening clients. He was in their space on a steady basis, whether he ever actually saw them or not.

  As far as we know, the police only have that one witness. An old man who thinks he saw a man and a woman talking, late at night, on a dark street, from a full block away. That’s not going to hold up well in court. I don’t know if the prosecutors will even use him. He certainly can’t identify Salazar—they’ve already tried that. They brought the old gent in and showed him Salazar’s picture, along with other men who fit Salazar’s general description. To his credit, the man would not give them even a maybe.

  One for our side. But in the overall scheme of things, not very important.

  Joe’s and my fear, which we have discussed at length, is that another witness will emerge who will more clearly link Salazar to one of the murdered women. If that happens, we’ll really be screwed.

  “Let’s go back to the night before you were arrested,” Joe says, as he puts the pictures of the slain wome
n back in the envelope. “From the time you left your house.”

  “We’ve been over this a million times,” Salazar complains. “I’ve told you everything I can remember.”

  “So we’ll go over it again,” Joe scolds him. “What, you have something better to do?”

  Salazar scowls. “Funny.”

  “That’s me, the class clown,” Joe says. He puts his tape recorder on the table, turns it on, takes out a notebook, and opens it to a clean page. I do the same, and lead off with our first question, the same one I asked him the last time: “What time did you get up?”

  Salazar’s commitment to his businesses, rather than being a positive, is turning out to be a huge thorn in our side. He often stayed up late and woke early, doing his bookkeeping or other obligations, which means that most of the time his wife was asleep when he got into bed, and was still asleep when he got up. Often he was gone from the house before she and their kids were awake. So she won’t be able to verify his schedule.

  At least she’s still in her husband’s corner. I’ve seen marriages shipwrecked on rocks far less treacherous than these. I think of my own situation—a single woman, newly pregnant, whose longtime relationship has collapsed. If Salazar’s wife had bailed on him, I would not have blamed her. But despite everything, she’s still behind him. He has declared his innocence and that is good enough for her. No matter what happens to him, they have a lasting marriage. I’m jealous.