Gideon's Rescue

by Alan Russell

  “You ever have any dealings with Tito?”

  “None,” said Brockington. “But people who know him say don’t be fooled by his pretend Caribbean smile and easygoing ways. They say he’s a shark.”

  “Got a business name and address for me?”

  When Sirius and I left Central, Perez once again turned on “The Bullfighter’s Song.” I couldn’t help but think of the irony. The world of animal fighting seemed to be following me.

  Being a recovering Catholic, I’m not exactly sure where I fall on the religious scale. I love dogs, but I’m not sure about dogma. Two of the men I most respect, Seth and Father Pat Garrity, live their faith as a vocation. Although I might be a C&E Catholic (Christmas and Easter), I am always alert to synchronicity in my life. A dog left for dead had miraculously survived and prompted discussions of bearbaiting and animal fighting. In my dreams I had felt as if I were in that loathsome pit.

  My destination was in an unincorporated industrial area to the east of Boyle Heights. Within its six and a half square miles, the Boyle Heights neighborhood houses 100,000 residents. It’s a gritty area, made more so by the three freeways and the railroad tracks that run through it. The LA County coroner’s department is located in Boyle Heights, as is the USC Medical Center. Attached to the hospital is the Navy Trauma Training Center. The military wanted to ready their doctors for battlefield medicine, and for many years the vying gangs in and around Boyle Heights have provided those doctors with plenty of war-zone-type injuries.

  The small houses and apartment units gradually gave way to an industrial triangle filled with warehouses, heavy industry, auto wrecking, impound lots, and salvage and recycling. Concertina wire abounded, as did spiked metal gates and security cameras. Two signs confirmed that I was in the right place. One said, Best $crap. The other sign had a graphic of a slathering Rottweiler and the words Junkyard Dog Services. Smaller signs warned against trespassers, promising an armed response and attack dogs.

  I drove through the open gate up to a trailer that looked as if it was serving as the office. When I got out of my car, dogs in distant kennels began barking. I wasn’t being scrutinized only by those with four legs. From inside the trailer two men stared at me. One was small and squat and wore an eye patch over his right eye. He had the face and physique common to many with Mayan ancestry. The other man wore a panama hat and cowboy garb—blue jeans, boots, denim shirt, and bandanna. He had the darker look of what some people refer to as Caribbean Hispanics or Afro-Hispanics. A toothpick moved from one side of his mouth to the other.

  As I entered the office, the man I suspected was Humberto “Tito” Rivera smiled at me, showing a gold cap on one of his front teeth. “What you want, Mr. Lawman?” he asked in an island accent.

  The toothpick made a contemplative loop of his mouth while he studied Sirius. From inside the car my partner eyeballed him right back.

  “You come here to sell me your dog, is that it?” Tito shook his head. “He be a bit long in the tooth. And shepherds don’t make great guard dogs. They’re too passive, and they get bored too easily. I’d rather have a Maligator.”

  Because of their aggressiveness, the Belgian Malinois is often called Maligator.

  Tito removed the toothpick from his mouth. “Twenty bucks,” he said. “That’s the top price I can pay for your dog.”

  “Is that the going rate for bait dogs?” I asked. “Is that what you paid for the pit bull you dumped not too far from here last week? The vet who treated her said she had been used as a sacrifice to a fighting dog.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” he said. “My dogs are well taken care of. Junkyard Dogs supplies businesses and households all over LA with guard dogs trained by me and Fausto here.”

  The man with the eye patch nodded.

  “Since that’s the case, I assume you won’t mind if I walk around your junkyard and look around?”

  “Salvage yard,” said Tito. “Haven’t you heard I’m an environmentalist? I buy metal and recycle it.”

  “Then you have nothing to hide, right, Tito?”

  “I wish I could help you out, Mr. Lawman, but my insurance company is touchy about unauthorized individuals walking on these grounds. There are a lot of sharp objects that could hurt you. I’d hate for that to happen and then have you turn around and sue me.”

  “On your rap sheet I’m told you have the street name El Gallo Negro. How did that come about?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Probably because I love to eat chicken, and I think the dark meat is best.”

  “As I understand it, you were big into cockfights.”

  “That was a long time ago,” he said. “That was before I became a respectable businessman.”

  “I was told that the lowlifes that train dogs to fight have a lot of specialized equipment. Is that what you don’t want me to see?”

  “I already told you how strict my insurance company is.”

  “Or are you afraid you didn’t tidy up well enough after one of your kills? I got to admit this is a perfect setup to rid yourself of bodies, with all your loaders and crushers and heavy machinery. And do you have one of those smelting furnaces on the property? That would make cremations a breeze, wouldn’t it?”

  “Are you selling scrap metal, Detective? If you’re not, then we don’t have nothing else to talk about unless you’re unloading that dog of yours. But now that I can see him better, I’m thinking twenty bucks is too generous an offer. He’s old, and he doesn’t look like he’s got much game. What do you say we settle on ten bucks, man?”

  I did my best to swallow my anger. Tito was watching me with that big smile of his.

  “Is it true what they say about the men who fight dogs to the death?” I asked.

  “What is it they say?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “You ever hear the word overcompensate? I’m sure you have.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, as if conceding something. “I’ll pay you fifteen bucks for that dog of yours. There’s an English mastiff I’d like to introduce him to.”

  He wanted me to take a swing at him. I was all but certain his trailer was set up with CCTV.

  “You own a gun, Tito?”

  “The State of California isn’t very forgiving about youthful indiscretions,” he said.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “As you are aware, I have a record. And because of that, California says I can’t own a handgun.”

  I turned to the man with the eye patch. “What about you?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, the man turned to his boss.

  “Fausto’s English isn’t very good,” said Tito.

  “California citizen?” I asked.

  “He has a green card,” said Tito.

  “I’d like to see it.”

  The man produced his permanent resident card. Fausto Alvarez had been born in Mexico in 1972 and was admitted as a permanent resident to the US in 1995.

  “How long have you worked here, Fausto?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Ten years?” he said, making it sound more like a question than an answer.

  “We’re kind of busy, Mr. Lawman,” said Tito. “We need to get back to work unless there’s something else you want to discuss.”

  “Four dogs were dumped less than a mile from here,” I said. “The dogs were beaten and shot.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him that no ballistic tests could be run anyway because all of the forensic evidence had gone up in smoke.

  “Is that so?”

  “I am going to do my best to link you with those dogs,” I said. “There will be commercials aired on TV offering a five-thousand-dollar reward for information pertaining to that animal abuse. Someone is bound to come forward. And what do you think your insurance company is going to do when they learn about your side business?”

  Tito’s smile was no longer quite so pronounced. “You going to eat a steak tonight, Detective?”

&nbs
p; “I’m not sure what I’ll be eating.”

  “But I’ll bet you like a good steak.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I find it amusing that a meat eater like you acts so righteous about a blood sport, but you’re okay with legalized killing.”

  “I don’t think any meat eaters get joy from the killing of their protein. Only sick assholes derive enjoyment from seeing animals rip each other apart.”

  “What you call sick, I call natural. You can’t change the way of the world, Detective. Roosters naturally fight other roosters. Male dogs want to fight other males.”

  “And you engineer it so that the fight is to the death.”

  “Nature’s gene pool is designed to reward the winners and punish the losers. It’s survival of the fittest, man.”

  “In nature the loser can run away and come back to fight another day. You don’t allow that. You set up your pens so that there is no escape.”

  Tito smiled and shook his head. “All over the world animals get pitted against one another, and everywhere you go there is an audience cheering them on. It don’t matter if they’re fish or fowl, animal or insect. If it crawls, swims, or flies, people want to watch a fight to the death. Will the praying mantis beat the black widow? Who will come out alive, the wolf or the pit bull? Shrews happily fight to the death, and you can’t keep Siamese fighting fish apart. Lots of people see nothing wrong with showcasing what comes naturally to animals. So who made you the judge?”

  “I enforce the laws that society has determined,” I said. “Society drew that line in the sand. You might say that line is hypocritical or arbitrary, but I say that line is necessary. Without lines like it, without boundaries, society implodes.”

  Tito shook his head. “Do you really think the world is less violent than it was? If it’s bloody, they will come. Mixed martial arts bouts stop just short of death matches, and no sport has ever grown so fast.”

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I said.

  “Are you sure about that, man?” he said, his Caribbean accent and his smile mocking me.

  Just because the slope is slippery, it doesn’t mean right and wrong have become interchangeable.

  “I’m sure, man,” I said.

  Chapter Eight

  Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

  After leaving the Junkyard Dogs lot, I felt in sore need of a friendly voice and offered up Lisbet’s name to my car’s hands-free Bluetooth system.

  My entreaty got me the mechanical response of “Calling Lisbet on her cell phone.”

  She picked up after two rings, and I said, “I called out your name and you appeared.”

  “That’ll teach me to not screen my calls,” she said.

  “When I shouted ‘Lisbet’ to my car’s electronic genie, I sort of sounded like Stanley Kowalski shouting, ‘Stella!’”

  “Doesn’t sound like you’ve had a good day.”

  “It’s suddenly better now,” I said.

  “Who is this sweet stranger?”

  “I’ll introduce you. When will you be receiving callers?”

  “Come over anytime,” she said. “I was just about to start dinner. Have you given any thought as to what you want to eat?”

  I thought about my food conversation with Tito. “I was thinking bean-and-cheese burritos.”

  “That sounds like a dinner I would have suggested,” she said, “and that you would have vetoed.”

  “That was the old me,” I said. “If you want, I can pick up the burritos.”

  “No,” said Lisbet. “If you’d given me advance warning, I could have soaked the beans overnight, but there’s a nearby mercado that has wonderful frijoles. They also have homemade tortillas and make the best guacamole.”

  “I’m drooling.”

  “Pretty soon, I’m not going to be able to tell you and Sirius apart.”

  “I’m the one who doesn’t drink from your toilet.”

  “Sirius doesn’t do that either.”

  “Yeah, but he’s the one who leaves the toilet seat up.”

  “I was wondering who the guilty party was.”

  “Let me talk with him about it. It’s a male thing.”

  “I’ll happily leave you to it.”

  “See you in a few.”

  “Ciao and then chow,” she said.

  Both Lisbet and I have a drawer at the other’s place. Of course, Lisbet also happens to have most of my walk-in closet, but I don’t mention that. Sirius isn’t forgotten in the equation; Lisbet keeps provisions for him. In fact, after Seth gave her his recipe for the Sirius Burger (ground turkey, cooked and grated yam, cooked oatmeal, and egg as a binder), Lisbet took to cooking them ahead of time and freezing them. There have even been occasions, Lisbet says, when a Mother Hubbard cupboard necessitated her eating one of Sirius’s burgers. According to her, they are delicious and should be marketed to the public as the first human/canine cuisine.

  Lisbet has a lot of good ideas; I have my doubts about that being one of them.

  I drove toward West LA. Lisbet’s apartment is about a mile from the Loyola Marymount campus; a number of graduate students live in her complex. Because her apartment doesn’t allow pets, whenever we’re in common areas my partner goes by the formal name of “K-9 Sirius.” So far, management hasn’t busted us.

  Lisbet’s apartment is only eight hundred square feet; it’s not only her residence, but her business address. One of the two bedrooms is devoted to her graphic arts business; the smaller bedroom is for sleeping. The apartment is cozy and well thought out, sort of the opposite of my house. When it comes to furnishings, I act out of necessity, not aesthetics.

  As Lisbet opened the door, all the aromas from her cooking came rushing at me. I took a deep and appreciative breath but wasn’t alone in the heavy-breathing department. Sirius was doing some major nostril twitching.

  “Go ahead, Sirius,” said Lisbet, “your dinner is ready.”

  My partner went running inside. In my whiniest voice I said, “What about me?”

  “You can start with sugar,” she said, tilting her head back. The two of us kissed.

  “And now you can proceed to your appetizer plate,” she said, “which consists of tortilla chips, salsa, guacamole, and some black bean dip. Dinner will be served in about twenty minutes. Right now I’m putting together the finishing touches for some Mexican rice.”

  “I want a second helping of sugar,” I said, and got a second kiss.

  “There’s also cold beer in the fridge,” she said.

  That was encouragement enough for me to follow Lisbet into the kitchen. On her moveable butcher’s block, I could see she’d already sliced and diced onions, tomatoes, cabbage, radishes, and limes for our burrito garnishments. She had also filled bowls with crumbled queso fresco, alfalfa sprouts, and sour cream. The vegetables and herbs she was chopping—cilantro, epazote, jalapeños, onions, and garlic—looked destined for her Mexican rice. We did a tango around one another as I made my way to the refrigerator. Finding a six-pack of Modelo Negra in bottles made me a very happy man. I flipped a cap, got my plate of chips and fixings, and by inhaling and moving sideways was able to ease my way out of the galley kitchen.

  Once I was safely out of Lisbet’s way, I took a seat on the sofa. “Dorothy Parker once shared a very tiny office with Robert Benchley,” I said, “and Parker said that if the office were an inch smaller, it would have constituted adultery.”

  Lisbet laughed, but then realized I was impugning the size of her kitchen. “My kitchen is small but mighty,” she said.

  “I am in awe of what you and your small but mighty kitchen are able to accomplish.”

  I took a long pull of my beer. “Imagine,” I said, “two of the world’s greatest wits sharing that small office. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall. Whenever the chief forces me to give a talk, I almost always steal Benchley’s line about why dogs are so important in a boy’s life: ‘A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times b
efore lying down.’”

  Lisbet thought that was funny enough to laugh, but my comment also made her curious. “Why do you think dogs do that?” she asked.

  Sirius must have decided his bowl was not going to magically fill up with another burger; he joined me at the sofa.

  “Good timing,” I said to him. “Why do you make circles before lying down?”

  When Sirius didn’t answer, I said, “I’ll Google it.” And then I spoke my question into the phone.

  Lady Google didn’t want to directly answer either. “Here is an article that deals with that,” she said.

  I expanded the phone screen but still had trouble reading, so I put on my reading glasses. “This anthropologist theorized that wild dogs had to tamp down grass and underbrush for bedding. She then went on to say that the circling might have been done for safety reasons, to make sure the space was clear of critters.”

  “A scientist used the word critters?”

  “I might have paraphrased,” I admitted.

  “Your vittles are ready, Bubba,” she said.

  “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit.”

  I went through the burrito buffet line, filling my tortilla until it looked like an overinflated balloon. After I’d finished what was on my plate, it was my stomach that felt like an overinflated balloon.

  “My compliments to the chef,” I said.

  “No room for seconds?”

  “‘I’m absolutely stuffed,’” I said, doing my best Mr. Creosote imitation.

  “But, monsieur,” said Lisbet, paraphrasing the John Cleese waiter line, “a wafer-thin mint.”

  We both started laughing. How many times had the two of us acted out the same silly scene? Lisbet enjoyed playing the unctuous waiter as much as I enjoyed playing the slovenly glutton. As she pantomimed the incredibly thin mint, I began to lose it, which prompted her to redouble her entreaties that I eat the mint.