Above the Law

by J. F. Freedman

  The first man he killed, when he was in his midteens and already an established dealer and supplier, rich enough at sixteen to buy his parents a nice house in Tustin and himself a Jaguar convertible, suites in Vegas, and expensive hookers, was a coyote who had savagely raped two young girls during a crossing, while their parents and others who were with them had to stand by helplessly and watch. The girls were not even old enough yet to have started their monthly bleeding. One of Juarez’s closest friends, a cousin of the girls, went crazy with anger and vengefulness when he was informed of the atrocity. The cousin and Juarez had crossed the border to Tijuana, tracked the coyote down, abducted him from his house, and brutally tortured him for hours, before slitting his throat with a dull knife and leaving the body to rot within sight of the border, a clear signal to other smugglers who were disrespectful of their less fortunate brothers and sisters that they must behave around Reynaldo Juarez’s family and friends, a large and extended group, or face a similarly grisly demise.

  That was an honorable killing, as murders go; others he committed or authorized—of opposing gang leaders, members of rival drug cartels, cops who got in his path—were not. He was a ruthless businessman who did whatever he had to do to sell his product, an outlaw known and feared in his subculture, his community, and by law officers of every stripe. In the end, nobody wept when he died, except for his family and the others in his organization. His family cried because he was blood; the others, because he was money.

  From the time the investigation started, Kate had been trying to trace Juarez’s life, from his distant past to his recent death. She had learned that the boy who had entered his adopted country tied to his father’s chest, stinking of human shit and Big Macs, had made it big, a modern version, in the barrios and ghettos, of a success story: he was a multimillionaire, paid taxes on almost none of his earnings, lived like a rajah, and had never been convicted of a major crime. That he had never spent a night in jail as an adult was part of his legend, because his nefarious exploits were no secret to anyone—his slipperiness in avoiding the arm of the law was a huge thorn in law-enforcement agencies’ sides nationwide. Accordingly, what had happened in Muir County was a source of great, if clandestinely acknowledged, satisfaction to the police; Sterling Jerome was a hero to them, fuck the bureaucrats and the horses—make them asses—they rode in on.

  All these elements, the fear and adulation in the barrio, along with the hate toward Juarez in the police forces, were making Kate’s task more difficult than it already was, which was plenty difficult by itself. Juarez was like a Latino Howard Hughes. He had houses scattered all over—besides the lodge in Blue River, he owned lavish estates in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, even a villa on the coast of Spain—but hardly anyone ever knew where he was at any particular time, whether he was sleeping in one of his own beds or was on the move, living in hotels under assumed names. His official residence was his L.A. home on St. Cloud Drive in Bel Air, close to the Bel Air Hotel and Bel Air Golf Club. The proximity to those elite establishments seemed to mean nothing to him; to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he had never played golf and had not taken a meal in the hotel restaurant or used any of their facilities.

  Which is not to say he didn’t; it’s that there wasn’t anything on record to substantiate that. He kept a low profile, he didn’t hobnob with movie stars or famous jocks, like gangsters of an earlier era. It was rumored that welterweight boxing champ Oscar De La Hoya was a friend, that the two had hung out at Juarez’s home to shoot pool, sweat in the Jacuzzi, and screw beautiful women by the carload, but that was one more rumor that couldn’t be confirmed, and De La Hoya’s people flatly denied it.

  There was one gaping hole in his personal history. From the ages of eighteen to twenty-one, it was a complete blank. It was rumored—another rumor, there were hundreds of rumors about Juarez, many more rumors than known facts—that he had lived in Europe or the Middle East. That he had studied Tibetan Buddhism in a remote mountaintop monastery in northern India. That he had tried to go straight and bought a Honda dealership in Houston. That he was married to a WASP socialite from New England and had children with her.

  All, some, or none of these stories might have been true. No one had been able to track any of them down—it was as if Juarez had dropped off the face of the earth for that period. What was known was that after living under the radar for several years he had surfaced in his hometown, Los Angeles, and almost immediately thereafter became the leader of a major drug organization, moving millions of dollars of product a month into the streets. And that he’d done this, overcoming all opposition, for the rest of his life, almost two decades.

  Kate was looking for connections. People who had known Juarez and could be linked to his most recent drug operations; competitors who wanted him gone; confederates who felt they had been fucked over and wanted to bring him down; people in law enforcement, like Jerome and countless others, who were sick of Juarez getting away with murder, literally, and who might have gotten to someone close to him, either through bribery, threats, or appeals to masculine pride, which runs deep in Latino culture. She was also trying to reach out to family members and close friends who wanted to know who had killed their shining light. So they could take revenge.

  It had been difficult getting people to talk. No one in law enforcement would, for the record. They were all glad the bastard had been taken out, but they didn’t know anyone who had tried to do it or tried to recruit someone with access to Juarez. All the cops knew about the DEA investigation and its conclusions and were loath to publicly criticize a sister agency, even if it was one they often feuded with. The best anyone would say, strictly not for attribution, was that Jerome, more than almost anyone else in the entire world, had a raging hard-on for Juarez, that he had consecrated his life to capturing him. Everyone Kate talked to, from LAPD beat cops and sheriff’s deputies up to captains and chiefs, as well as several FBI agents, believed that Jerome would gladly have killed Juarez and thrown his remains to the buzzards if he hadn’t been under orders not to; it was also sworn to, emphatically, that Jerome was honorable, that he would not place himself above the law and above his orders.

  Not one gang member—Latino, black, Aryan, Asian—would talk to her. The only person who had spoken for attribution was Curtis Jackson, to Keith Green. That had been brother to brother, and it had been for a purpose, to confuse and fuck with the investigators’ heads; so Luke thought, and she was inclined to go along with that, having known and dealt with a lot of Curtis Jacksons.

  Louis, being Latino, talked to members of the family and a few close friends, those who dared talk to him. Wary conversations, almost no meat on the bones. Although Louis was an hermano, he was also a cop. They wanted to know who did it, but they had no idea who, so they said. They all swore that his “associates,” as they characterized the other members of his inner circle, would never have betrayed him. He was good to them, like a father, even though he was not an old man, younger than some of them. These associates were all rich because of Reynaldo’s industriousness (no one admitted that his organization was a criminal gang that brutalized people, murdered opponents and innocents alike, and caused massive hardship) and would not speak against their leader.

  “They’re scared to talk,” Kate said.

  It was the end of what had been a long and basically fruitless day for Kate and Louis. They sat in a rear booth in EI Coyote on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood, drinking tall margaritas and eating chips with salsa and guacamole. Kate loaded up a blue-corn tortilla chip with guacamole and ingested the whole affair in one big bite.

  “Yummy.” She looked around. “This is a great place, Louis.”

  “They’ve been here forever,” Louis told her. “My dad used to take me as a kid. Across the river, the great divide.”

  When Louis was a boy, growing up in the fifties, east L.A. had been home. Crossing the L.A. River was a big deal then. Now Los Angeles is Hispanic all over, from the desert to the sea.

  �
��You want to eat dinner here?” he asked, reaching for a menu. “Or do you have to drive home tonight?”

  He wasn’t hitting on Kate; they’re friends, colleagues, even though, in her early forties, she’s a very attractive woman. He knows that she’s long been divorced from a former cop up in Oakland who was tossed off the force for abusing her, a real prick. She won’t try marriage again, not in the foreseeable future, anyway.

  He’s divorced, too. It goes with being a cop, he guesses, so many of his friends who were on the force with him are, but he has a nice girlfriend his age, a paralegal with one of the big downtown firms. He’s too old to stray, not when he has a good thing going. Male cops have been partnered up with female cops for so long now, because of affirmative action and similar minority-supporting programs, that the male/female arrangement is taken for granted. You can do the job or you can’t, sex doesn’t come into play that much. A good thing, Louis thought. In the old days, office romances killed a lot of marriages that weren’t that bad.

  “I’m staying over. I booked a room in Santa Monica.”

  “You like the beach?” He signaled for a waitress.

  “Yep. It’s cooler down there, and I can get up in the morning and run before starting up work.”

  The waitress took their orders. Kate ordered a combo plate—after a tough day in the field, she was ravenous. Louis, a big man with a waistline problem, opted for a fish dinner, hold the beans.

  “Are we getting anywhere?” Louis asked. He liked this job; the pay was good, ditto the players, but it was frustrating not knowing exactly what you were looking for. This wasn’t like regular detective work, interviewing witnesses, taking depositions, tracking down husbands or wives who had flown the coop, etc. Reynaldo Juarez was a spook, a phantom. Trying to find out who he was connected to in relation to this case, if in fact there was any connection, a dubious prospect, was turning out to be a study in exasperation.

  His not to wonder why, not at 125 dollars an hour plus full expenses. Still, he liked to produce results. He knew Kate felt the same.

  The waitress put their plates down in front of them. “Everything okay?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Smells great,” Kate told her with a smile.

  She turned back to Louis. “We’re eliminating all the blind alleys and dead ends,” she said, attacking her food with gusto. Catching the waitress before the woman was out of earshot: “Can I have a beer, please? Bohemia, if you’ve got it.”

  “Make it two,” Louis said. He tried a bite of his fish—delicious, sautéed in garlic and oil, just the way he liked it. “We’re going to eliminate until there’s nothing left to eliminate and we’ll be left with a cloud of smoke and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver.’ ”

  “If so, then we’ll have done our best. If the needle isn’t in the haystack, you can’t find it, can you?”

  “I never have.”

  They finished their meal. Kate paid the check, tucking the receipt into her purse, next to her Glock 17.

  Outside in the parking lot, they discussed plans for tomorrow. Louis was heading back to east L.A., to try to mine for nuggets among the few friends of Juarez’s they hadn’t contacted yet. He didn’t expect he’d have much luck—the Chicano community had closed their doors to the investigation.

  “What about you?” he asked Kate, getting into his Seville. He was an American-car man, always had been. The Caddy suited him—big, smooth, comfy on the freeways.

  “Keep looking for connections. See if there’s something out there we’ve missed.”

  “Good luck.”

  “See you.”

  “See you.”

  Louis headed east on Beverly. Kate drove the opposite direction, toward the ocean.

  I was going to have dinner with Nora to tell her about my trip to West Virginia, Jerome’s anguish over the disaster and its effect on his career and life, fill her in on what my detectives were pursuing, which wasn’t encouraging, so far.

  She met me at the door to her house in a terry-cloth robe. “You’re early,” she said.

  “I knocked off early. I’m in a holding pattern.”

  “I was going to take a swim,” she said. “Care to join me?”

  It had been a sweltering spring day, muggy for the area. I was in my normal working clothes, feeling hot and clammy. There was still plenty of light in the sky at seven in the evening. “A swim would be nice, but I don’t have a suit with me.” She squinted against the low late-afternoon sun over my shoulder, appraising my physique. “One of Dennis’s old ones ought to fit you,” she declared. “I’ll forage for it. It’s stuck away somewhere. Come on in.”

  I followed her into the house. It was nice and cool—the air-conditioning was on, humming low. “All this and a pool, too?”

  She smiled. “The pool, the Jacuzzi, the whole shooting match.” She led me out onto her rear patio. I’d never seen her property before, I’d always been here after dark.

  Before the tree line, there was an impressive yard. A hundred yards square, at least. Most of it was grass, freshly mowed, almost as manicured as a putting green. Flower beds were strategically placed, giving the area a smart, sophisticated feeling, as nice as many of the fancy properties I’d been on in Montecito. Closer to the house there was a long, narrow lap pool with a beautiful tile deck, a large barbecue area, and off to the side, a Jacuzzi, built into a fieldstone deck.

  She turned to me. “Let me get that suit of Dennis’s for you. Be right back.”

  Kate lounged on her queen-size bed at the Shangri-La in Santa Monica, browsing through the latest edition of People magazine. She liked the old art deco hotel. The rates were half those of the Miramar up the street, and it was right on Ocean Avenue, a good location. She could walk along the bluff overlooking the ocean at night, run it in the morning.

  The missing years of Reynaldo Juarez. Where were they?

  She’d already checked on the military and the prisons. As far as she could find out, he hadn’t been in the service, and he hadn’t served time in any jail—county, state, or federal. He had a passport—she’d checked that out, too. Foreign travel before he turned eighteen, to central and South America. Then lots of forays outside the country after he was twenty-two, dozens of trips to Colombia, Ecuador, and Honduras alone, plus other South American countries, as well as Europe, the Far East, Australia, Egypt, Israel. He seemed to love to travel; often he went by private plane. Planes used to transport drugs, she surmised, but there wasn’t any product on those planes when he was. That was one of his survival secrets: he was never directly involved in a transaction, never in immediate contact with anything illegal. There were always buffers between him and his deals, multiple screens. The deal up in Blue River would have been one of the few exceptions.

  What do people do between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one? She had been working then, a young mother trying to make ends meet. She had been the exception in that regard; most of her friends, like her daughters, went to college. Of course, where Juarez came from, college wouldn’t be commonplace. A kid would have to be motivated to go to college from one of the east L.A. high schools.

  Restless, she put her magazine aside and perused the TV Guide. Nothing worth watching.

  College. That would be a long shot. How many colleges are there in the state of California alone, a hundred? Juarez was already a moneymaking machine by the time he was in his midteens. By then he knew what his path was, and it didn’t include learning about Plato or calculus or going to Friday-night fraternity parties. Still, the ages when he was off the charts are when people go to college.

  He had actually graduated from high school—Garfield, one of the biggest high schools in the country, almost one hundred percent Latino. She wondered what the percentage was of kids going to college from Garfield High, twenty years ago. That would be a place to start. It would be tedious, time-consuming work, but she might as well give it a try, she had no other leads to chase.

  She checked the movie listings for the Third Street P
romenade theaters. There were a couple playing she thought she could tolerate. If not, she’d have a drink in one of the restaurant bars. Or two. She could use a bracer, in anticipation of what faced her as soon as she got up in the morning—driving all the way over to east L.A. at the height of rush-hour traffic, then starting to slog through old college records (if that hunch had any legs), then driving home, again facing rush hour.

  Tomorrow was going to be a long, long day. Screw the movies—she was going to treat herself to a tall, cold drink.

  I emerged from Nora’s house wearing one of Dennis’s baggy old swimsuits. He had put on weight in the years after he left law school; I remembered him as a thin man, but the waist on this baggy old suit was at least a forty. Although I had the drawstrings pulled as tight as I could, it still hung loose around my waist.

  Nora, wearing a dark blue tank suit, was already in the pool, swimming laps. She had good form. I remembered she’d been a swimmer in college, as I’d been—one of the first things we’d found out about each other those initial weeks in law school, something in common to grow a friendship on.

  I joined her, essaying an easy crawl. I missed the ocean; I made a mental note to take Buck down to Butterfly Beach when I went home over the weekend.

  We swam for fifteen or twenty minutes, then we climbed out and toweled off. The sun was almost down now. Nora went inside and came back with an open bottle of wine in an ice bucket, two glasses, and a plate of cheese and crackers. We sat in lounge chairs by the pool, sipping the wine. It was still hot out—our suits were dry in less than ten minutes. I told her what was happening with my investigation, which wasn’t much.

  “We’re not getting anywhere.” She sounded depressed.

  “It’s early in the game. We have to be patient.”