“You sent my Ray to jail?”
“Yes, I did.” I hoped I found the right tone between apologetic and defensive. If I’d been certain I’d made a mistake, it would have been much easier.
“So, are you a sick person? Why are you calling here? Haven’t you done enough?”
“I know my calling must seem very strange to you, Mrs. Garcia, but I’m not trying to upset you in any way, I promise. This is very difficult for me, too—”
“Yes, it must be,” she said bitterly. Well, what did I expect? The welcome wagon?”
“The truth is, since the trial, I’ve been sort of investigating some of the things that happened, and there are some issues I’d like to clear up.”
“What do you mean ‘clear up’? Do you believe Ray is innocent, now that it’s too late?”
I didn’t want to lie to her. “I don’t know, Mrs. Garcia. I don’t want to misrepresent myself. But there are some troubling things about the case, and maybe it could help Ramon if I could clear them up.”
“So what do you want from me, Ellen Santiago?” She said it like a curse.
I swallowed. “I’d like you to convince Ramon—Ray—to talk to me. Tell me what really happened that night.”
“Dios mío. Leave Ray alone. You want to destroy his appeal.”
“No!” I sensed that she was about to hang up. “Let me give you my phone number, so you can think it over.” I read it off really fast, before she could refuse.
The voice on the other end was stone-cold. “You did a terrible thing to my Ray. Don’t ever call here again.” And then she did hang up.
Other than that, Prince Hamlet, how was the family reunion?
I hadn’t exactly bowled her over with my charm, nor had I convinced her of any reason she should cooperate with me. I contemplated going up to Chino or Tehachapi or wherever they’d sent Ramon, but even prisoners have rights, and he didn’t have to see me. I doubted that the curiosity factor would be sufficient motivation.
Back to square one.
The phone rang about ten minutes later. I was so absorbed in wondering what I was going to do for the next act of my private-eye number that I forgot to be worried about Putative Dates. When I heard a man’s voice, I almost dropped the phone.
Another false alarm, but I wasn’t relieved. “This is Juan Garcia,” said a tough-guy voice on the other end of the line. “Did you just talk to my mother?”
Ramon’s brother, I presume. “Yes. Yes, I did.”
“I have a message for you.”
I hoped it wasn’t “die, racist bitch” again, although I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. He didn’t sound as if he wanted to commend my scruples about the case. “What is it?” I asked, trying not to show how intimidated I was feeling.
“We want you to come here. You come here and tell us what you know about Ramon.”
“Come where?”
“Here. To my mother’s house. You come tell her to her face what you found out.”
I gulped. Maybe I’d seen too many Westerns as a kid, but I knew better than to ride Old Paint into Box Canyon when the bad guys were out in force. “Look, Juan, I’m sure it’s painful for your mother to see me. You don’t really want me there. Wouldn’t it be better to do this over the phone?”
He covered the receiver and said something to someone else. When he came back on, he made chicken noises into the phone. “I knew you wouldn’t have the guts to face her. Fucking white-bread bitch.”
I sighed. At least it was a variation on the theme. Giving him “Santiago” as my last name had not appeared to establish my ethnic credentials. He said something behind his hand again, more loudly. I waited.
“I apologize for my son,” Mrs. Garcia said suddenly in my ear. “He was very close to his brother.”
What could I say? No problem? I don’t think so.
“I’m sorry for what I said before,” she said.
She sounded so sad and not as angry. I liked angry better. It made me feel less guilty.
“Juanito thinks you should come here and tell us what you’ve found out. If there is a chance it might help my Ray…”
She’d tolerate even me. I sighed again. I was cornered. “What’s your address?” I asked her.
17
The Mad Squirrel was back. He looked battered, and a large patch of fur was missing from his shoulder, but he leapt onto the screen of the sliding glass door, legs splayed and whiskers twitching. I went out on the balcony to give him his peanuts. He didn’t run up the rainspout, as he usually did when I came outside, so I backed into the corner to watch him. He stared at me with large almond eyes. I’d read that when squirrels are nervous, their palms sweat, like a person’s.
He didn’t head straight for the nuts. Squirrels are masters of indirection. He took the long way around, moving in a circle until he ran past and swept around from the side, whisking a nut off the perch. Then, satisfied, he ripped off the husk and settled down to eat, still watching me.
It seemed as good a way as any of getting what you wanted.
Ramon’s mother lived in a tiny wooden house in East Los Angeles, with a minuscule front plot consisting of 90 percent dirt and 10 percent clumps of determined Bermuda grass. A tired green Chevrolet, lowered, sat in the driveway, and the street in front of it was filled with geriatric cars in varying states of visible decline. I had to park about half a block away, which seemed somewhat less than optimal. I wasn’t seriously worried about my safety in the daylight, but in this part of town, testosterone ruled, and I didn’t think being a middle-aged smart-ass woman of dubious ethnic credentials was going to protect me from unpleasant encounters. I had taken the precaution of leaving a note with my exact whereabouts for Mark, just in case.
A Mexican radio station was playing from one of the houses at a decibel level that would have commanded attention from the moon. A Rottweiler growled at me from behind a rusting chain-link fence. His dyspepsia was justified; nobody had cleaned his quarters in a long time. There were reasons why people posted big mean dogs outside their derelict houses. Most of them were ones I preferred not to think about. I scuttled forward, trying not to breathe.
The Garcias’ house had a security screen door and bars on the windows. The bell appeared to be broken, so I knocked loudly on the screen door. Nothing happened. Finally, I heard soft scraping noises on the other side of the inner door, and it opened on a chain. An eye peered out at me. “Yes?” inquired a soft voice.
“I’m here to see Mrs. Garcia,” I told the door. “She’s expecting me.”
The chain slid off, and the door opened wider. A woman of about seventy-five, wearing a black dress and house slippers, gestured that I should come in. She had beautiful white hair, pulled back in a bun. “You’re here about Ramon,” she said.
I nodded. “Yes.”
“I am his grandmother.”
I wasn’t sure what was called for under the circumstances, so I just said, “I’m Ellen Santiago.”
“Santiago? You are Latina?”
“My father was from Mexico.”
She waved me to a seat on a dark green couch covered with a blanket. I sat, and she sat down opposite me in a rocking chair piled high with pillows. The house was very spare but very clean. “Ray was innocent,” she announced.
What could I say to that: I hope so? I hope not? It was a definite conversation stopper. “I’m sorry,” I said. Women always say that when they find themselves in awkward situations, whether it’s true or not. In this case, I was sorry, but I wasn’t sure what about.
She sat there and watched me, saying nothing. A chorus of one, waiting to deliver her truth.
The frame of the door into the hallway, opposite to where I sat, was hacked about crudely, as if someone had tried to widen it with an ax. I tried not to think about it. I wondered where Mrs. Garcia was. I tried not to get paranoid, but visions of something explosive being planted under the Camry kept edging into my consciousness. It was all I could do not to run to the window.<
br />
I looked at my watch surreptitiously. I was definitely not going to be caught in this neighborhood after dark, when the gang-bangers were out shooting each other up. No way.
I looked up and suddenly realized what had happened to the door frame. A man of about twenty-five was pushing himself through in a wheelchair, which barely scraped through the opening. He had on a white sleeveless undershirt, and his arms and chest were covered with tattoos. He wore a baseball cap and a goatee. He was glaring at me, so I guessed that he must be Ramon’s brother.
“Juanito,” said his grandmother, “this is the lady who came about Ramon.”
“My mother’s getting dressed,” he growled at me. The Rottweiler had sounded friendlier. He joined his grandmother in staring, while I occupied myself with trying not to look at his swollen feet stuffed into heavy black shoes, and the thick metal braces on his legs.
Nevertheless, he caught me looking. “I got shot,” he said matter-of-factly. “In the head.” He looked at me to see what my reaction was.
“An accident?” I inquired politely.
He laughed. “A payback. We took out one of their guys first.”
How reassuring. His grandmother crossed herself.
“It’s temporary,” he said.
“Ah…?”
“The paralysis,” he said firmly. “One of these days, I know I’ll be able to get up.”
“I’m sure you will,” I said brightly.
“Don’t patronize me, bitch,” he said. But he said it quietly, and his grandmother didn’t hear.
Mrs. Garcia’s entrance at that moment was such a relief I could have kissed her, though I doubt she would have welcomed the gesture. I recognized her from the trial, but she looked older and sadder now. Like her mother, she was dressed in black. I stood up.
She threw me a look full of suffering and resignation. Well, who could blame her? She had one son in prison and the other in a wheelchair from a gang bullet, and she looked like a decent person who’d tried to do her best. The clean, tidy house in the middle of the derelict neighborhood spoke volumes. She’d waged a battle, but the war was being lost. You could read it in the papers a million times, but seeing it for real was infinitely more poignant.
She didn’t look as if she’d welcome a handshake, either, so I didn’t offer one. “I’m Ellen Santiago,” I said.
“Lupe Garcia,” she said, taking a seat next to her mother’s, so that the three of them were facing me. “Please, sit down.” She lifted her eyes to my face. “Why have you come here?” she asked me. “What is it you want?”
“The truth,” I said simply.
Juan snorted. “What did you want before, then? To get things over with so you could go back to your life, I bet. Get the cholo off the streets, so all you rich people can feel safe at night.”
“Be quiet, Juanito,” said his mother. “She is trying to help your brother.”
“No, Mamacita, she is trying to relieve her conscience. What she would really like is to prove that Ray is guilty, so she can start to sleep at night.”
She looked at me with alarm. “Is this true?”
Clearly Juan was no dummy, and even though I wasn’t hot to answer the question, his mother at least deserved an honest answer. Even if it got me kicked out of the house. “Not exactly,” I told Mrs. Garcia. “There was a lot of evidence against your son, and I don’t feel guilty about the decision I made. I didn’t come here because I’m sure I made a mistake. But if I did help convict an innocent man, because I didn’t know all the facts, I’d want to do something about it.”
“Like what?” asked Juan cynically.
“Like take the facts to an attorney, or the police.”
“The police wouldn’t listen if you brought in some other guy’s written confession. And who’s going to pay another lawyer, you? My mother can’t get another job because of Ray. We can’t even pay for the appeal.”
“At the very least, you can take whatever I find out and use it to help with that. But I’ve already discussed this with an attorney, and if there isn’t any new evidence there isn’t much chance that…that things will change.”
“You what?” he roared. His face turned red, and his big hands clenched the arms of the wheelchair. “You—”
His mother leaned over and put a restraining hand on his wrist. “Enough, hijo,” she said quietly. “I will listen to what this woman has to say.”
He shook off her touch, but he stopped whatever he was going to say. I tried to look only at Mrs. Garcia while I told her about my concern about the “eyewitness report” after the burglary, and the bits of information I’d learned about Natasha Ivanova. It sounded thin, even to me.
“You don’t have much,” Juan jeered.
“That’s why I need your help,” I said, still looking at Mrs. Garcia, “and why I need to talk to Ramon.”
“Ha!” scoffed her son. “You think you’re going to just show up there at Tehachapi and ask to speak to Ray Garcia! You don’t know much, do you, lady?”
I resisted the urge to point out that experience in such matters was hardly a desirable attribute under normal circumstances and said merely, “I guess not.”
“If you’re not family, you have to apply to get on the approved visiting list. In writing. It takes at least a month.” He seemed to take a kind of twisted delight in the obstacles to my getting to his brother. I wondered how close he really had been to Ray, despite what his mother had told me.
“I hadn’t realized that, obviously,” I said. “Maybe you could convince him to call me when it’s permitted. I want to ask him about the night of the burglary. Whatever he can remember about what happened.”
“Burglary!” bellowed Juan. “What fucking burglary? The fucking pigs set him up. They planted the stuff in his car.”
I looked at his mother and grandmother. They both looked away.
“You’re saying the police framed your brother?” I asked Juan.
“You heard me.”
“How did that happen, exactly?”
“How do you think it happened?” he said nastily. “They had a crime they needed to solve, and they pinned it on the first Mexican pendejo who came along. He was just a kid, out late at night, so who was going to believe him?”
“What was he doing? Was he coming back from somewhere?” I tried not to sound skeptical.
Juan shrugged and squared his shoulders. “Ray was a man,” he said, by way of explanation. “A man doesn’t have to answer to no one for where he goes at night.”
I wasn’t impressed by machismo in its more virulent forms. “Ray told the police that Ms. Ivanova gave him the things out of her office,” I reminded him.
“He was scared,” Juan insisted. “He knew no one would believe him about the pigs planting evidence. What else could he say?”
Mrs. Garcia still would not meet my eyes. “You worked for Natasha Ivanova, didn’t you?” I asked her.
She nodded. “I cleaned the offices.”
“For how long?”
She looked at her hands. “For eight years. Until she fired me.”
“She fired you?” I hadn’t heard that. “May I ask why?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. She said my services were no longer needed after the end of the week. She gave me a check.”
“She told you this personally?”
She raised her eyes then. “No. She left me a letter. I went the next day to see her, to tell her that we needed…Well, she wouldn’t see me. Her assistant, Miss Klein, told me it was impossible. They were going to use another cleaning service. She was very nice, but…” She shrugged.
I tried to phrase the next question carefully, but there was no avoiding the implication. “Did Ramon know you had been let go?” I asked gently.
She looked out the window. “Yes.”
“And how long after that was Ms. Ivanova killed?”
“Two days,” she said miserably.
“The police weren’t aware of this, exactly?”
“They did not ask me about it.”
“And can you think of any reason why Ms. Klein would not have mentioned it?” I asked.
She drew herself up straight against the cushions. “Perhaps because she is kind,” she said quietly.
“I see.” I saw that she realized that she had handed me some information that might hurt her son. It didn’t look good that he’d shown up at Ivanova Associates in the middle of the night right after the owner had fired his mother. “You still had your key, then, that night?” I asked her. I didn’t ask what Ramon was doing with it.
She nodded. “I was going to finish out the week.”
“Mrs. Garcia, did you have any personal contact with Ms. Ivanova? I mean, is there anything you can tell me about what she was like?”
She shook her head firmly. “I hardly ever saw her. When I cleaned, it was always at night.” She paused. “Well, once or twice when I came in, she was there. Sometimes her office door would be locked, so I was not supposed to clean. Sometimes I heard voices, behind the door.”
“A man’s voice or a woman’s?”
“I think both. I don’t know more than that.”
“One last question,” I told her. I hoped I could get it past Juan without an explosion. “Do you happen to know if there were any files among the things the police found with Ramon in your car?” I’d already checked my notes and the police report and discovered nothing.
“I told you—”
“Cállate,” she said to Juan. “I don’t think so,” she told me.
“Are files missing from that office?” Juan asked me. He was very quick.
“Possibly,” I admitted.
“Then that’s good for Ray, isn’t it? If something else is missing, maybe something else was going on there that night.”
He’d forgotten that he’d already insisted Ramon hadn’t been there, but maybe he didn’t really believe it himself. “It might be, but it could be just a coincidence. Anyway, that’s why I’d like to ask your brother about it.”
I handed Mrs. Garcia my number. “Please tell Ramon it is important that I speak with him.” I hesitated. “I know this has been disturbing for you, and I appreciate your time.”
Staying Cool Page 20
