In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  Nelda Ruiz, one of the original witnesses to the events of that day Jesus Ramon disappeared, had been paroled from the state prison for women at Frontera a month ago. Nelda never reported to her parole officer and had no known address. But a patrol sergeant named Harry Young who worked out of Central Division had a line on her whereabouts. I should follow that line, Mike wrote, maybe find Nelda. Away from the prison mafia and prison snitches, maybe she was ready to talk.

  Most of the letter was his summary of the investigation to date, the mistakes that had been made, the good leads, the holes, the stone walls, and a long list of people to talk to and where to find them, if he knew where they were.

  "Go back to the beginning and walk it down," he wrote. "And be careful who you trust. Watch six, Maggie. There are people who won't want anyone opening this up again."

  Mike also asked me to take his ashes to the cottage in Humboldt County. If there was a heaven, he said, he wasn't sure he'd pass the entrance exam. The next best thing to heaven, he said, was the wild redwood coast where we'd built the cottage, and that's where he wanted to remain.

  At the end of his letter Mike asked for forgiveness and made a declaration of love. He did it gracefully, intended to offer whatever comfort he could. I wasn't at all ready to be comforted, but I understood the decision he had made.

  Kenny, Nick, and Harvey had all discreetly stepped from the room to give me some privacy while I read Mike's letter. I could see Kenny standing just outside the office door, signing some forms on a clipboard held by a woman whose jacket identified her as a technician from the coroner.

  I appreciated the time alone, in Mike's place, surrounded by his things. For just a few more moments, before he was taken away, I wanted to imagine that he might walk in, talk to me. Pushing back against the reality of the moment and what was happening outside our house, I took advantage of what I expected were the last quiet minutes I would have for a while and opened the top file folder to read the narrative from the initial investigation report.

  Jesus Ramon disappeared the year before I met Mike, but I knew the story, I had read this report before, and I had lived with the fallout. I knew what the case did to Mike and to his reputation. A simple tale, it would seem, an obvious one: a gangbanger wandered into enemy territory and was made to disappear. But nothing is simple in the community politics of media-rich Los Angeles.

  I read the investigation summary again, making notes on the back of my envelope, listing names, times, places. There was quite a cast of characters: a spoiled cop now serving a life sentence, witnesses who decamped for Mexico rather than talk, gangbangers who "never saw nothing." The case summary was a straight-forward account, but there was never anything straightforward about the case itself.

  I read: January 16, 1999, 1200 hours. The temperature was seventy-four degrees and dry. Service area of Central Division.

  Sixteen-year-old Jesus Ramon, five feet four, one hundred and ten pounds, walked with his girlfriend, fifteen-year-old Teresa Galba, to his mother's bodega on Lake Street, west of downtown Los Angeles, to drop off a cousin's two-year-old daughter. At the bodega, Jesus bought a pack of Marlboro filters and promised his mother that he would stay out of trouble. The mother was well aware that her son's gang set, the Sleepy Lagoon Crips, was in a declared war with longtime rivals, the Thirteenth Street Bloods. Jesus promised he would take care of himself.

  Walking arm in arm, Jesus Ramon and Teresa Galba left the bodega and turned west, walking toward Alvarado Avenue. They arrived at the intersection of Alvarado Avenue and Lake Street just as Officer Eldon Washington, working an observation post near that intersection, observed nineteen-year-old Nelda Ruiz selling drugs out of a public telephone booth. Officer Washington placed Nelda Ruiz in custody.

  As instructed during his morning briefing, Officer Washington called Detective Mike Flint, who wanted to question Nelda about a drug-related homicide committed the previous month. A drug dealer named Rogelio Higgins had been gunned down in the driveway of his Bel-Air home.

  Officer Bonifache Erquiaga, working the gang detail, intercepted Officer Washington's call. He arrived at Alvarado Avenue at 1210 hours, transferred custody of Nelda from Officer Washington to himself, and put her, handcuffed, into the backseat of his patrol car. He told Officer Washington that he would transport Nelda to Parker Center, police headquarters, for a meeting with Mike.

  Before Officer Erquiaga left the scene, however, Mike arrived. Mike sent Erquiaga ahead to Parker Center with Nelda, with instructions to hold her in an interview room until Mike got there.

  At that point, Mike took Jesus into custody, handcuffed him, and put him into his own backseat, just for show. Jesus was one of Mike's gang snitches and Mike wanted to protect him in case any of his gang set had seen them talking. Jesus asked to be dropped off downtown where his aunt, who owed him money, ran a taco cart.

  When Mike drove away with Jesus in his backseat, leaving the little girlfriend, Teresa Galba, standing on the sidewalk sobbing, Jesus was very much alive.

  After Jesus got into Mike's car, myth and fact became so muddied by speculation, obfuscation, personal agenda and moral attitude that Jesus, the actual boy, a missing child, was forgotten. Out of the inevitable distortions that came from the endless telling and retelling of events imperfectly known, in his absence Jesus Ramon emerged as a sort of mythic giant, a symbol for something far larger than anyone who was present on Alvarado Avenue that January day could ever have imagined. His disappearance became a ten-ton gorilla on the back of the Los Angeles Police Department, and on Mike Flint's heart.

  The others? Quite a cast. Boni Erquiaga was now serving a life sentence for stealing drugs out of the LAPD evidence locker and selling them on the street; his girlfriend Nelda Ruiz drew twenty to life. Teresa Galba decamped to Mexico rather than testify before a grand jury that convened later to determine whether there was evidence that a crime had been committed. Eldon Washington retired.

  "In remembrance of me," Mike had closed his letter, "find Jesus. No matter what you dig up, make it public. Do this one last thing for me."

  His gift to me, and mine to him: I was going to go look for Jesus, and while I was doing it I was going to make one hell of a film. For both of us.

  I folded Mike's letter and looked up at Kenny, who had been watching me.

  "Need anything, Maggie?" Kenny asked.

  "Just some time to think," I said. I didn't get that for a while.

  • • •

  The rest of the week was a blur. From Monday afternoon until the funeral was over on Saturday, the house was always full of people. My daughter, Casey, a freshman at UCLA, was the first to arrive, with her roommate, an hour after I called her. My mother and my aunt and a number of my childhood friends all flew down together from the San Francisco Bay Area that evening. My best friend and her husband flew in from New York on a red-eye flight. Mike's son, Michael, was on his way out of Afghanistan on the first flight that could be arranged. He arrived at the house very late Wednesday night, exhausted after forty-eight hours in transit. Every newcomer needed comforting, no matter the hour they arrived, as well as housing and meals until the funeral.

  Friends, neighbors and the police chaplain organized pick-up trips to the airport, beds for out-of-towners, meals for the multitudes. Because there was no mortuary or viewing room to send people off to, the house was the hub. Parking on our narrow street became an issue, so overflow parking was arranged down at the old Ronald Reagan Ranch on Mulholland Highway, now part of the Malibu Creek State Park, and police cadets ran a shuttle service up the mountain to the house; the horses were taken down the road to a friend's stable until it was all over.

  The press came and went Monday evening.

  Flowers began to arrive as soon as word got out. By Tuesday noon, great profusions of flowers in baskets, in wreaths, in bright bouquets, covered the patio table and the ground underneath, lined the back steps and spilled across the barbecue island; Mike knew an amazing number of people. Again t
he chaplain came to the rescue. He arranged for the cadets shuttling people to also shuttle flowers to local hospitals and nursing homes and to the homes of injured or ailing police and firemen across the county. Cards, a basket full of cards.

  I walked through every day like a somnambulist, fell into bed every night, started over the next morning. People talked to me; I don't know what they said. Now and then I managed to slip into Mike's office to read through his Jesus files, but I couldn't concentrate. Everything in his room distracted me, became the seed from which a new problem would sprout. What would I do with his cap collection? His softball trophies? His mug full of pens?

  The funeral went according to Mike's instructions; Mike would have been pleased. Immediately after the funeral lunch at the Academy, houseguests began to make their way home. Suitcases went out the door. Bedding from stripped beds went into the wash. Flowers stopped arriving. Even the telephone took a rest.

  On Sunday morning Michael, Mike's son, borrowed his father's car and drove, with my mother for company, up to Sonoma to visit his grandfather, Oscar; Michael would remember the visit even if Oscar did not. After breakfast, my daughter, Casey, and her roommate, Zia, and our next-door neighbor, Early Drummond, walked down the road, fetched the horses, and brought them home. Then the girls got into their car and went back to school. As I stood on the driveway waving after them, I felt a wave of panic. Suddenly, I was alone.

  I went up the stairs and sat on the front deck for a while, looking out across the canyon, and tried to decide what to do first. Exhausted, I dozed off. I slept until Duke set up a fuss. I went to the rail to see who or what was coming up the road.

  Kenny Noble, Nick Pietro and Harvey Bing got out of a civilian car wearing casual Sunday clothes, jeans and Hawaiian print shirts.

  "Morning," I said, relieved to have company though a couple of days earlier I had longed for solitude. "Come on up. There's coffee. Is it too early for a beer?"

  Harvey opened the back car door and lifted out a white box and handed it to Kenny, the boss. The box could have held a small hat, but from the careful way Harvey handled it and Kenny carried it, its contents had to be fragile. I was curious. They were oddly subdued as they followed me inside.

  Kenny looked around for a place to put the box.

  "What do you have there?" I asked.

  "Kenny, Nick and I drove down to San Pedro last night," Harvey said, looking to the others for help.

  "Maggie," Nick said, "we went down and picked up Mike's remains from the crematorium. His urn is in the box." Nick handed me a manila envelope he had tucked under his arm. "The death certificates, honey. We got you eighteen copies. You'll need them."

  We decided the mantel was the appropriate place for the box until I could get up to the Humboldt cottage with it, as Mike had requested. Kenny placed the box ceremoniously and we had a quiet, awkward moment, after which we retreated to the kitchen for coffee.

  I set a carton of milk on the kitchen table in front of Kenny. "Where is Boni Erquiaga now?"

  "Corcoran," he said. "In a high-power segregation unit the California State Department of Corrections set aside for convicted ex-cops."

  "Can you get me in to Corcoran to talk to Boni?"

  Kenny frowned, puzzled. "Why in the world?"

  "Did you know Nelda Ruiz was paroled?"

  Kenny turned to Harvey. "Didn't you testify against her at the Parole Board a couple months ago?"

  "Guess they weren't listening," Harvey said. He narrowed his eyes, watching me, as he thought that over. "You want to talk to Boni about Nelda?"

  I nodded. "Mike asked me to."

  "You can arrange a press visit, Maggie," Kenny said. "You don't need me. Anyway, my signature might complicate things between you and Boni."

  Clutching my mug, I said, "I don't have time to wait for approval for a press visit. That can take weeks. Months."

  Kenny glanced at Harvey. "What did Boni draw?"

  "Twenty-five-to-life for stealing cocaine out of the police evidence locker and selling it, followed by life with possibility of parole for ordering a hit on a witness. That adds up to pretty much the rest of his miserable life."

  "Okay, so he's not going anywhere soon," Kenny said. "What's the hurry, Maggie?"

  "Indulge me," I said a little too forcefully. I felt edgy, restless.

  "All right." Kenny stole a quick glance into the backyard, focused on the avocado tree. "When things have settled down a little, after you get some rest, give me a call, remind me."

  "I don't need some rest," I said. "I need to get back to work. How soon can you arrange access?"

  He turned to Nick for support. Nick frowned at first but then, after some thought, he shrugged.

  "You know how Mike is when he has a bone to chew," Nick said, by habit using the present tense. He looked at me. "Maggie's the same."

  Kenny smiled ruefully. "Yeah. Okay, honey, I'll see what I can arrange. When do you want to go?"

  "I have some housekeeping things to do around here this afternoon, and I want to spend more time with Mike's files," I said. "But I can drive up to Corcoran tonight. How about arranging for me to visit first thing tomorrow morning?"

  "Tomorrow?" he barked. "But this is Sunday."

  "Jeez, Maggie," Nick said, beginning a protest rant, arms flung wide as the other men joined in; a thousand reasons they had for me to just stay put.

  I felt something suddenly burst. Must have been a dam because flood waters began to spill down my face. I groped for the box of tissues on the kitchen counter.

  "Hey, guys!" I shouted to get their attention. They fell silent, looked at me, horrified, chagrined as if they were responsible for the sudden tears. The tears made me angry, which only triggered more tears.

  "But--" Kenny tried again.

  "I am not sleeping in this house tonight," I blurted. "I am not ready to get back into Mike Flint's bed, alone. But I am ready to take care of his unfinished business. With your help or without, I intend to see Boni Erquiaga tomorrow morning, and I'm leaving here as soon as I can get out the door."

  Nick came over and put an arm around me. "Maggie, honey, you know, there are five stages of grief. The first is denial."

  "Been there," I said, snuffling. "I liked it there."

  "The second is anger."

  I said, "Or it's a descent into alcohol, or a dive into Mike's stash of medical marijuana."

  "Mike has medical marijuana?" Kenny said, eyes wide: shocked? Intrigued? "Is it in the house?"

  "This is California," I said, wiping my face with a gob of tissues. I opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out a quart-size Baggie stuffed with a gray-green tangle of bud. "Medical marijuana is legal in California for people on chemo. It increases the appetite, suppresses the pain, or makes you not give a damn that you can't keep food down and that you hurt all the time. I can roll you a joint as big as a stogie, if that's your deal, but there are brownies in the freezer. That was Mike's preference. There are always brownies in the freezer."

  "It's just..." Kenny looked as if he had just been hit with a big wet bag of shame. He was pale, desole; big, tough street cops can't bear making a woman cry or face their own mushy emotional core. "Excuse me, I'll go make some calls. We'll get you in to Corcoran. Tomorrow."

  Chapter 3

  That night, I dreamed about Mike. Maybe the dream seemed so real because the circumstances in it were so utterly ordinary, so easily a part of any day. Or maybe, because I wanted so very much to speak with Mike, I made more out of that ephemeral encounter than was merited. Whatever the reason, all during the day afterward I had to remind myself that I had not, in fact, seen or spoken with Mike. Could not have spoken with Mike, no matter how much I wanted to do so.

  After Kenny and the others left, I moved Mike's computer from his office into my workroom and set it up. The files he wanted me to read and two white file storage boxes he had written my name on were already in my room. I spent the rest of Sunday sorting the material, making notes, making a plan.
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  By the time I managed to haul an overnight bag and Mike's files out to the car that night, it was long after the weekenders had made their way home and were off the road. The only traffic headed north with me over the Grapevine, the single mountain pass that connects the southern coast with the state's interior, was container trucks making the overnight run out of the LA-Long Beach Harbor full of stuff from China and headed for points north. The trip to the small town of Corcoran in California's agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where the eponymous state prison is, took me just over two fast hours. Still, it was almost midnight when I exited the freeway.

  I found a room in a generic chain motel about a mile south of the prison. It was April, early spring. It should have been cool. But the air outside at midnight was a muggy ninety-two, the air inside the room about the same.

  Exhausted, hot, I stripped naked, sprawled across the bed closest to the window-mounted air conditioner, and tried to sleep. But I was too tired, my thoughts too fragmented, to shut down enough to drift away. Even the constant whir of distant freeway traffic, a night sound not unlike pounding surf, did not calm me.

  At some point before dawn I got up and showered. Afterward I managed to fall into a light, dream-filled sleep. In that nether zone, not awake but barely asleep, dream and reality can seem separated by the thinnest veil. And that was when Mike came to see me.

  In the dream, I walked into the diner across the street from the TV studio where I work, as is my lunchtime routine. Mike and a woman I did not know were already seated in my usual front booth. My impression of the woman was that she was attractive. I couldn't remember her face or anything she said, only a single gesture: she put her hand possessively on Mike's arm when I sat down opposite them.

  Mike and I said the things old friends might say during a chance meeting after a long separation, not as lovers who had been apart for less than a week. I told him that my film project was in a stall and that my daughter, Casey, had broken her ankle during a dance rehearsal. We talked about his son Michael's deferred wedding plans because of his deployment, and wondered when the VA hospital in Sonoma would again bring up ejecting Oscar, his father, because his drinking exacerbates his Alzheimer's.