In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  The sunglasses shop where Mayra set up her business was gone and the atrium had been enclosed to make more shelf space for the denim shop that now occupied the location; the rents in the area are high, and so is the turnover rate. Even though the facade of the shop was entirely different than it had been in 1999, we stopped near where Mayra's cart had once sat and used the site as background.

  Guido positioned himself to capture both my face and the front of the denim store in the frame. He had some conversation with Early about light and incidental noise, adjusted my position a couple of times, and when all was as he and Early wanted, with his eye on his monitor, Guido said, "Speed, and action," as my signal to begin telling Mayra's story.

  Mayra rented space for her taco cart from Kasim al Bashara Kasim, I said. Mr. Kasim told Detective Flint that Mayra was at work, as usual, on the day Jesus disappeared. According to Mr. Kasim, that day was like any other day. Mayra was waiting when he opened his shop at ten o'clock, holding the handle of the red Radio Flyer wagon she used to transport her daily supplies. She came with him into the shop to retrieve her taco cart, a five-foot-long sheet metal box on wheels with a propane-fueled grill on one end, a butcher-block top on the other, and an ice chest underneath.

  Every day, Mayra wheeled her cart out of the shop and into the atrium, opened a patio umbrella over it, filled the ice chest and stocked it with meat, sauces, and tortillas for her tacos al carbon; grilled beef on soft tortillas, Baja style. Mr. Kasim said she did a good business. The location was only a block or so from the Civic Center and she was popular with the government workers.

  Mr. Kasim knew the nephew, Jesus, and had decided from the beginning that the boy was a little troublemaker, though he had never seen Jesus actually misbehave. He did not remember seeing Jesus on that day, but it had been a busy day for him as well, and it wasn't his practice to watch Mayra.

  That January evening, as usual, Mayra began cleaning up a little before five so that she could pull the cart inside when Mr. Kasim came to the front to lock the shop's street door for the day. As he usually did, he helped her pull the cart inside. She finished her cleanup chores inside while he closed out his register, and then they would leave together, usually by five-thirty.

  On that January day, as Mr. Kasim locked the door behind them, Mayra said good night and, pulling her red wagon, she turned north, up Broadway toward First Street where he knew she usually parked her van. He didn't see where she went after she turned north because his bus stop was in the opposite direction. The first he knew that something was wrong was when he did not find her waiting for him the following morning.

  We started walking north, following Mr. Kasim's recollection of his last sighting of Mayra.

  Mayra was found comatose from an overdose of uncut heroin in a vacant building on First Street, east of Alameda Avenue, maybe a six-block walk from the shop on Broadway.

  As we walked, Guido, Early, and I chatted. Guido made a thorough video record that would be edited to a few bits in the final project, as would the sound. Guido always wanted full coverage because you just can't know what will look good, sound good, and be useful later.

  At Second Street there was a stark change in the landscape. The colorful shops and the rhythms of Latin music pouring from loudspeakers were replaced by the great gray edifices of the Civic Center and the Los Angeles Times building. Suddenly, dark suits predominated.

  As arranged, Eldon Washington met us at the corner of Broadway and First. He was leaning against a lamp post, arms crossed over his broad chest, a broad-brimmed fedora on his head, a big automatic strapped on his hip, foot traffic giving him wide berth.

  "Get that," I said to Guido. He turned his camera on Eldon.

  "I like the hat," I said, reaching for his outstretched hand.

  "Can't take the sun anymore; skin cancers. The wife got me some damn Chinese straw thing, but I decided that if I'm going to wear a hat, I'm going Hat Squad," referring to a postwar anti-mobster, anti-subversive unit that used to meet incoming planes at the airport, sort out the undesirables, meaning Commies and East-Coast mafiosos, beat them to a pulp on the tarmac, and put them on a turnaround flight. The Squad took credit, erroneously, for keeping LA mob-free. Never mind that Ben "Bugsy" Siegel and Myron Cohen were doing land office business under the protection of a couple of those same men; several of them became judges.

  I turned to an intern in our train, Guido's current pet, whose name was Madison, and held out my hand. She put a bottle of water into my palm, which I passed to Eldon.

  "Your star perks, sir. As promised."

  He laughed and tucked the bottle into a back pocket of his khaki slacks. Early mic'd him and performed a sound test with Guido. Then he took the bottle out of Eldon's pocket because it made a funny bulge, and handed it back to Madison.

  "Is my nose shiny?" Eldon asked, teasing.

  "You're okay," Guido told him, looking at Eldon's image through the camera monitor. "But you need to push back the hat brim so we can see your face."

  With our parade larger by one, we walked east down First Street, headed toward the old toy factory building where Mayra was found after Jesus went missing. At Main we passed City Hall and kept walking. At Los Angeles Street we came to Parker Center, police headquarters.

  I touched Guido's arm. "I want to have a conversation with Eldon standing right here. What do you think of using Parker Center as a backdrop?"

  Guido moved around, moved us around, framed his scene, turned his camera to scan Parker Center and recorded an establishing shot. As if on cue, two black-and-white police units turned onto San Pedro Street out of the police garage and came our way as if we had planned for them to be there to give context to our shot.

  "It's good," he said. "I have speed."

  I told Eldon I was going to ask him to recreate the chronology of events on January 16, 1999. He said he could do it blindfolded. One of the interns guffawed at his non sequitur, pleasing him.

  "When you're ready," I said.

  He straightened the collar of his polo shirt. "All set."

  Guido gave the signal, I asked the question. Eldon began with what he saw on Alvarado Avenue, Boni leaving with Nelda, Mike leaving with Jesus. Then, after a pause, he continued:

  "A few minutes after noon, Mike dropped off Jesus, four blocks away from here. At about the same time, Boni Erquiaga arrived at Parker Center and signed Nelda Ruiz into the custody of Robbery-Homicide Division on the third floor of Parker Center. At twelve-thirty, Boni Erquiaga signed out again as he exited the basement parking garage. Fifteen minutes later, Mike Flint began to record an interview with Nelda Ruiz, on the third floor of Parker Center. At that time, Mayra Escobedo was at her taco cart around the corner, doing a brisk business."

  "So, between about noon and twelve-thirty, Boni, Nelda, Mike, Jesus and Mayra were all within a very few blocks of this location," I said.

  "That's right," he said.

  "Around twelve-thirty, Jesus essentially vanishes."

  "Essentially."

  "His Aunt Mayra did her own disappearing act that afternoon," I said. "She was seen walking up Broadway, pulling her wagon, at five-thirty. And then, she was gone."

  "For a while." Eldon turned, gazed further east down First. "But she turned up again."

  "When she was found she was comatose, almost dead," I said. "Someone slipped her uncut heroin and didn't tell her."

  "That's the story," Eldon said.

  "Remind us of the charges against Boni Erquiaga and Nelda Ruiz that sent them both to state prison."

  "Among other crimes, Boni stole drugs out of police evidence lockers and sold them, or had them sold, on the street. Nelda was one of his dealers."

  "Was uncut heroin among the drugs he stole?" I asked.

  Eldon frowned, looked up, searching for an answer. Then he shook his head. "Good question, Maggie. I just don't remember. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the criminal career of Boni Erquiaga, but that one I'll have to look into, do
some homework."

  He went on: "Heroin usually comes into the country uncut and goes to the big-time distributors."

  "Like Rogelio Higgins?" I asked.

  "Like Higgins," he affirmed. "Before the stuff gets distributed to the street dealers like Nelda Ruiz, it's been cut, sometimes a couple of times. Usually, when we run across uncut H or coke, the feds get attached because it's a smuggling issue. Boni didn't get hit with any federal charges. Which all means not one damn thing."

  Eldon turned to Guido. "Can I say damn?"

  "Say anything you want."

  "Uncut heroin isn't unheard of on the street," I said.

  "But it's rare. Especially in the hands of a penny-ante street pusher like Nelda Ruiz. Anything she got her hands on to sell would already be cut, bagged, and ready to go. I'll have to do some homework, but it's an answer I can get you."

  "You're assuming it was Nelda who gave Mayra whatever it was she took," I said.

  "Couldn't swear to it in court, but yes."

  I was thinking how easy he was to talk to when we had a camera trained on him and a young female intern carrying his water bottle for him. People are endlessly surprising.

  I said, "It was Mike who told Julia Ramon that her sister Mayra had been found and was in the hospital. But who found Mayra, and when? And who told Mike?"

  "She was found inside a derelict building just up the street a couple of blocks by a homeless woman looking for a safe place to sleep."

  "Can you show us?" I asked.

  "Not sure the building's still there; it's been quite a while," Eldon said. "But if you want we can walk over there."

  With Eldon and me in the lead, our little parade headed off east down First Street.

  After we passed the Japanese Village shopping area in Little Tokyo, Eldon pointed out a new condominium project that now covered the site where there had been a parking lot in 1999. Before the condos were built, the parking lot that was here was a bit cheaper than lots closer to the Civic Center, but it still cost twelve dollars a day, too expensive for a taco vendor. Mayra negotiated an arrangement with the evening lot attendants: she brought them tacos for their dinner and they let her drive her fifteen-year-old Toyota van out of the lot without paying the day-use fee.

  Mayra's van, with the Radio Flyer wagon tied down in the cargo area, was still in the lot the day after Mayra's overdose, when Julia Ramon came looking for it. Julia remembered that the daytime attendant charged her twenty-four dollars, two full days' parking, when she retrieved the van so that she could drive Mayra to a clinic in Rosarito Beach, in Baja, Mexico.

  We continued down First Street, passing a couple of blocks of small, tired factories. Some were in use, some were abandoned, some were undergoing yet more expensive loft conversions, some of them labeled "artist lofts." There were colorful murals with Aztec themes, and plenty of graffiti. Everywhere there were high fences topped by concertina wire, and barred windows.

  At Alameda Avenue, the landmark First Street Bridge rises to cross over a set of railroad tracks, then the two-lane-wide cement canyon that is the Los Angeles River--a trickle of brown water running along a narrow trough cut in the center--and finally a second set of railroad tracks. Old brick warehouses with their loading bays, some dating to the early 1900s, stretch in a continuous line along the tracks.

  The bridge itself is a work of WPA art. Its white plaster pillars and arches and light poles are fine examples of Art Deco design, fine enough to show up in photographs on the pages of a good number of coffee table books.

  Under every bridge arch there is a bench. On every bench a homeless person had taken up residence. Under the bridge, among the old factories, along the warehouse walls and docks, there was abundant evidence--shopping carts, sheets of plastic and collections of cardboard--that a very different, and far older and more elemental trend of residential conversion was underway; people lived in every sheltered nook we could see, and probably in many we could not. Phil Rascon at the coroner's office told me that it was from the underside of this bridge that a city maintenance crew had recently washed down a human skull.

  Mayra was found, comatose, in an abandoned toy factory two doors west of the bridge. The factory still stood, more or less.

  Guido shot the street, the neighborhood, put the lens of the camera through the bars in front of a broken window and shot the shadowy interior of the vacant factory. We walked halfway across the bridge and videoed back towards the Civic Center. Guido recorded several of the encampments on the bridge under the arches, and leaned forward to capture the tracks, the muddy ribbon of water in the river, the old warehouses, bedrolls secreted anywhere shelter could be found.

  "Good stuff," Guido said. "Gritty. Don't know if we need it this time, but someday it might be useful."

  Guido turned his camera from the bridge to Eldon, who was leaning on a bridge support, looking down below the bridge.

  I followed Eldon's line of sight, saw that he was watching an old woman down beside the river as she rearranged her possessions in a shopping cart someone had rolled away from a Ralph's market. She took off her sweatshirt, shook it, and then carefully folded it before she placed it in her cart and covered the whole with a white plastic tablecloth.

  "I never get used to this," I said.

  Eldon looked at me, shook his head. "We shouldn't get used to it. Ever."

  Chapter 14

  Juh-heezuss, Maggie," Fergie greeted me as I walked into the office. Her peeling nose had already begun to scab over and her face still glowed from her Baja sunburn. Or was it the obvious angst she was feeling that had reddened her freckled cheeks? "Of all the impossible things you've ever given me to do, finding a place that will take Oscar..."

  "Could be, but the task will keep you indoors for another day instead of trailing off after Guido and crew," I said. "Thanks for coming in on a Saturday."

  "Thanks for the overtime. I need it."

  "How's your tummy?" I asked her as I sifted through the phone messages and mail she had placed in my in-box. "Still sore?"

  "Better," she said, tone coming down a few notches. "Thanks for the referral to Casey's dermatologist. Without your name to drop, it would have taken two weeks to get an appointment. The doc bawled me out worse than you did, but he gave me drugs and some skin goop."

  "Next time you go sunbathing, do it in Antarctica with the penguins."

  Fergie handed me my day's bundle of sympathy notes and cards, an especially bulky and irregularly shaped bunch, tentatively held together by a rubber band.

  I asked her, "Any progress at all with Oscar's arrangements?"

  "Actually, he's already on about half a dozen wait lists. Been on them for months. The closest he is to getting a bed is at a place in Washington state, near Spokane. Best they can predict is four weeks before they have an opening." She looked at me pointedly. "Someone has to die first."

  "Did you ask if they take bribes? A little tip, maybe?"

  "I suggested you might do an expose of care facilities and focus on them unless they hurry up, but they just laughed and said that anything they can do to help you fix the nation's overburdened elder care system, they'll do it. But there's still no bed for Oscar."

  "Keep looking," I said. "I know Sonoma isn't going to put Oscar out in the middle of the vineyards and abandon him. If the VA goes to court to evict him, we'll get a minimum of three months before we have to take action. By then, surely we'll have found something."

  "I need a copy of Mike's death certificate," she said. "The staff at Sonoma accepts you as Oscar's guardian, happily, but the VA still doesn't have you in their system."

  "Let's not be too efficient about sending documentation," I said, seeing a ray of hope offered by bureaucratic red tape. "Every delay buys us time."

  "Gotcha," she said.

  "Anything else?"

  "We got the permit from the county to shoot at the morgue on Sunday. The county kept saying no, until they got a phone call. How did you work that?"

  "Cal
led in a debt owed to Mike."

  "Should have known."

  I thanked her for her efforts and went into my office to call Mike's son, Michael, to discuss with him his grandfather's situation with the VA. Michael had been to visit Oscar early in the week. Michael told me that when he told Oscar that Mike, his only son, had passed away, the information did not register. Oscar had not recognized Michael, and though he also did not recognize my mother, who had gone with Michael for support, he thought she was pretty hot. For a tall, lanky woman of a certain age, whose idea of plastic surgery is to snip the plastic ties on her rose bushes, I suppose she is.

  Michael said that Oscar could still feed himself, but now he needed help dressing, and sometimes forgot to go to the bathroom to relieve himself. He could walk, but he got lost sometimes on the trip from the dining room back to his bedroom. I knew the facility was nice enough. We had visited Oscar regularly until Mike couldn't travel any longer. Michael said the staff was taking good care of his grandfather. So, for the moment, Oscar was all right.

  Oscar had two daughters, but neither had spoken to him for over thirty years. Neither showed up at Mike's funeral, even though I called them. Michael had told me he saw no point in calling his aunts to talk about Oscar.

  I was in my office, packing up to leave for the day, when I heard Guido's signature tattoo rapping on my door. He didn't wait for an invitation to come in.

  "I'm working on the shot list," he said. "The taxi-dance place won't let us video, but we're sending in a ringer with a lapel lens to capture the scene. I like the hidden video aspect, makes it all seem more sinful. The he-shes at Club Caribe are delighted we want to video. They offered to do a conga line in the street. Lana wants sexy, we'll give her sexy."

  "When are you doing all that?" I asked him.

  "Next week. Tuesday, maybe. I think we'll get those two locations done in one long night shoot. But we need to get union approval for overtime pay for the crew."

  "Ask Fergie to start the paperwork," I said.