Compromised

by James R. Scarantino

  Doing the right thing, why is it so hard? Montclaire had asked Aragon this and got back, that’s what we do every day. We and most of the world manages, Lily. Most of the time.

  Aragon called Serena and heard how she already had Lily cleaning the bunkhouse she was staying in. Aragon asked her to bag a glass and silverware Lily used without her catching on. Serena said, what aren’t you telling me?

  She left the truck in the SFPD lot and together they took their department car to Whole Foods. Lewis knew this store on St. Francis. His wife, Sandy, sent him here for things they could get for less at Smith’s. Aragon said the Dollar Store was even cheaper, where she bought the little she didn’t get from living on Lotaburgers.

  “What’s celeriac?’ she asked as they passed a produce display. She’d never been in a Whole Foods. Seeing the prices on organic grapefruit, she said it might be the last time.

  Lewis led them to where he said they sold reusable shopping bags. The store offered four kinds, including the one on Andrea’s head.

  “We need to get a last name for her,” Aragon said. “I don’t like calling victims by first names.”

  “You do it all the time.”

  “So do you.”

  “We need to stop.”

  “We won’t.”

  “The most expensive model,” Lewis said, holding up a bag of lined nylon, printed brightly with pictures of fruit and vegetables. “Not what the Lewis family uses.”

  At checkout he asked the cashier, “Is this bag sold only here?”

  The young man had dyed black hair done like the early Beatles. He’d worked the Whole Foods off Logan Circle in DC, he said. They had the same bags there, probably in all their stores.

  “Leaving with an empty bag feels strange,” Lewis said after he’d paid. “Do you mind?”

  While Lewis shopped, Aragon wandered the front of the store looking at people eating grain salads, tapping on keyboards, reading paperbacks. She got coffee, went back through the line, and paid. Shoving change in her pocket, she saw a display of flowers for sale. No roses. It had just been a thought, that maybe the roses in the dumpster were purchased here along with the bag. She saw only flowers she didn’t recognize.

  Lewis was waiting at the car behind the wheel. An open box of protein bars sat on his lap. He tossed one to Aragon.

  “I’ve got the address for the waste disposal company,” he said. “Down Agua Fria. They haven’t been notified yet of what ended up in their dumpster.”

  “The warning that unauthorized use will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law? I don’t think they had this in mind.”

  Five

  “What’s wrong with people?” Benny Silva asked Aragon, standing across the counter in the office of E. Benny Silva Enterprises. “I’m not even getting paid for that drop. I give him a dumpster, the guy goes to jail. I got his lawyer giving me the song and dance. Now I get to talk to police.”

  His nephew, Abel, watching the security cameras in the back, had buzzed him cops were coming through the gate. Silva had his metals book out when they entered the front door. The identity of everyone selling him copper, their driver’s license, home address, source of the copper, weight, what he paid per pound. But that wasn’t what had brought them.

  The short Latina with the arms and shoulders, biceps that don’t belong on a girl and none of the hair that should be there to go with the pretty face, the big Spanish eyes, lips you could say were sexy. But those muscles and that thick neck. What was going on with this one?

  Detective Denise Aragon. He knew Aragons who used to live by Miller Park. They had a daughter had a bad time once with the Locos using her as bait to pull her brothers into a fight. Raped, he remembered. And the boyfriend running to save her gunned down. Right there on the basketball court outside their house. That park, it had been called Killer Park ever since.

  She had the Aragons’ square build, all of them looking like cinder blocks on legs, taking after their father who’d been a hell of a football player at Santa Fe High. Yeah, this was her. And here she was with a gun on her hip, showing a badge, asking about a dead girl in one of his dumpsters.

  She wanted to know when the dumpster was delivered and when it had last been emptied. She wasn’t interested in sharing family history. A big white guy next to her taking notes, Silva didn’t catch his name. Anglo names sounded the same to him. He had to write them down to keep them in his head.

  He explained they don’t empty dumpsters like the city does garbage cans. You park one, it’s empty. You take it away when it’s full or the customer calls, come get it. This one had been dropped off some weeks ago. It was for the mobile home park, Plaza Contenta. Guy said he was bringing the place up to code, needed to clear furniture, toilets, heaters, moldy linoleum out of the tin cans he rented to Section 8 tenants. It was on the news. City shut him down and locked the front gate. Rats. Not mice, but rats. No water fit to drink. Tenants could try boiling, but the gas company cut off service when the lines were red tagged.

  The work stopped. The guy disappeared. Then someone stole all the copper out of the mobile homes. Didn’t mean people weren’t living there. Some of the tenants cut the lock, moved back, this time living rent-free, filling water jugs at the gas station a half mile away. Now that particular dumpster was full of other people’s garbage, people who don’t pay for E. Benny Silva Enterprises to haul their junk away.

  “And a dead girl,” he said. “I’m not in the human body disposal business. I got a contract with Game and Fish and animal control. The highway department. The remains of poached elk. Cows, dogs, deer hit by cars. Horses they put down. Dead people isn’t my line of work.”

  His company basically turned the dumpsters upside down and shook them out, big machines for the job, then separated the metals and cardboard they could sell to recyclers. The leftovers a bulldozer loaded in dump trucks for the city’s landfill. He didn’t think she was interested in any of that.

  He gave her the name and telephone number of the client who had ordered the drop and told Aragon to call anytime, anything else he could do to help her get the guy who killed a girl. The parents. He couldn’t imagine losing a child.

  “Hey, when can I get my dumpster back?” he asked. “I need it for Fiesta week. I got the contract.”

  Aragon pulled out a cell phone and turned it toward him.

  “This is the girl we found. Can you identify her?”

  A very pretty Hispanic girl, the camera so close he couldn’t see anything but her face. Her eyes were closed. She could have been sleeping.

  “Never seen her. Who would do this?”

  The white guy asked for the can. Silva told him there were porta-johns in the yard by the crusher, out the door, keep turning right. E. Benny Silva Enterprises provided portable toilets to construction sites, outdoor concerts, the Zozobra burning, the Fiesta parade. After his family marched they took off their conquistador helmets and went to work. Did he know those are E. Benny Silva Enterprise crappers at the Police Academy where they’re building new barracks?

  “Keep the door open, no one here cares,” Silva yelled after the big detective slipping outside into the white sun. “Hot as hell in those things.”

  There was a nice bathroom behind the wall, inside the air conditioned walls. Silva didn’t mention that. He didn’t want cops any deeper inside his office.

  Aragon waited in the car, making calls with the engine running the air conditioner. It had been Lewis’s turn to ask for the head and get an extended look-around. She conferenced Elaine Salas and the FBI’s Evidence Recovery Team manager about how to sift through the contents of the dumpster. They’d be lucky to find Andrea’s clothes, purse, maybe her phone. It would be nice to find a gun but she wasn’t counting on it. The garbage that could rot would be bagged and placed in cold storage. Already they’d found syringes and ampules and a broken scale.

 
Cool air rushed out when Lewis opened the door and got into his seat.

  “Busy place,” he said. “There’s a mountain of crushed glass, cardboard in bundles the size of cargo containers, bins with copper wire, and a city of plastic shithouses.”

  “Enterprising guy, E. Benny Silva.”

  “Coming back I walked along the building, looked in through a window, the shade was up. Security monitors on the wall, lots of them.”

  “He’s got that copper to protect. Already stripped, ready to melt or whatever they do, a cash-and-carry operation if you can get in. Easier boosting here than pulling it out of light poles and transformers, worrying you’ll be electrocuted.”

  “And a big flat screen playing Forensic Files,” Lewis said. “Two guys, could have been father and son, watching. For a second I thought the older one was the guy out front. But this one was heavier with no mustache. Instead he had a zipper. On his face. This scar running from his ear across his lips. You see it, you’d know what I mean. It was strange, how fixed they were on the show.”

  “Hell, everybody watches that program.”

  “Yeah, but these guys were taking notes.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Silva said to the man tied to the chair in the windowless room at the center of his building, not far from where the detectives had been standing minutes ago.

  This one sat straight. But that was the copper wire holding him up. He was a sloucher, Benny was sure. Undo the wire, he’d slide to the floor. He had the pants below the hips, a yard of denim loose below his balls. Not even laces in his shoes. No wonder he was easy to catch.

  “I didn’t know,” this one said. He had a metal safety pin up by his eyebrow. Those teardrop tattoos used to mean you’d killed someone. They meant nothing anymore, just face graffiti.

  “What are you, Indian?”

  “Acoma.”

  “You’d have a good casino, but all the semis parked outside, coming right off the interstate? The buffet’s okay. I like Cities of Gold better.”

  “I’m sorry, mister, whatever I did.”

  “You don’t know?” Silva said. “First you cut power to San Isidro during a funeral, the church going black, scaring old ladies, making the priest trip trying to light more candles. Now you took wire for lights on my street. People in the dark. Meat going bad in freezers. Swamp coolers stop and it’s stinking hot. Hit the museums, the streets in the hills with big houses where the people really live in California, those parking lots at the casinos with hundreds of light poles. That’s not enough for you?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You and who else? You couldn’t pull all that wire alone. I don’t want my ice cream melting again.” Benny looked up at the air vent, thinking he smelled smoke from the forest fires, wondering if the wind was bringing it across Santa Fe. It was bound to happen soon.

  His brother, Rigo, and his son, Abel, leaned against the wall watching him lecture this idiot. Abel was the Indian’s age, but Benny never had to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Three kids at home, their dad making a good living using skills taught by his father, not like families where the only knowledge passed on was how to shoot the heroin. Grandparents giving grandkids their own needle, like sitting around at Christmas figuring out a new toy under the tree. Here, kids, you hold the spoon like this over a candle. Don’t burn your fingers.

  He and Rigo were twins. Both in light blue short-sleeve shirts, tucked in, not sloppy and disrespectful. Pressed chinos with elastic belts sewn in. Ventilated SAS comfort shoes, ugly but they felt good. Benny kept a mustache, white now. Rigo couldn’t grow one because of what happened to his lips when he was a kid. They both still had their hair up top, thick and dark, a straight part on the side, trimmed every week in the barber’s chair at the Chop Shop while watching the traffic, talking about new boxers coming up. New Mexico turned out tough fighters. The rest of the country learned that in the ring.

  Rigo had been a wrestler, too short for football. The other teams’ coaches had to get their boys ready for the face that met them on the mat. That was long before he’d heard about anybody getting their game face on. Rigo had that face all the time. He’d kept up with the weights. He had a bench and dumbbells in a corner of the warehouse. Benny, he’d been good with numbers, liked history, especially the conquistadors, how a couple dozen men kicked the shit out of empires with huge armies. There was a lot to learn from those men. Too much had been forgotten. None of these Lunas, Trujillos, Madrids, C de Bacas, De la O’s—Aragons, like the detective—remembering what it took.

  Five hundred years, they’d say. We’ve been in New Mexico since before the Pilgrims. Anglos in Massachusetts freezing, begging corn from Indians, when the Spanish already had a Palace of Governors in Santa Fe with Indians doing the cooking and cleaning.

  So what do we have to show for it? Mexicans now pushing us out of jobs. Anglos buying up the land, telling people back in New York, Los Angeles how they discovered Santa Fe.

  And this idiot in the chair, trying to sell him copper ripped from his own street. He’d been watching the local PBS with Millie before the lights went out. About Don Juan de Oñate coming into the territory at the end of the royal road from Mexico City, leading a band of conquistadors, going after the Indians Coronado had fought a half-century before, who got it together to push the settlers back across the Rio Grande. Oñate did his job, and the Spanish built Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Taos.

  Don Juan, he’d taught the Indians a lesson, never had problems when things were done his way.

  Now people were trying to make him a bad guy. This thing with the statue the Indians wanted in a Santa Fe park, Oñate holding a foot like a baby in his arms, saying he killed kids and their mothers when all he did was chop the left foot off Indians who killed Spaniards. Not even all Indians, just the men and boys left alive after he took over the pueblo where his men had been attacked. The Indians started it. The soldiers only wanted food and blankets. Instead a shower of arrows and spears and rocks, killing good men come all this way from Spain, up from Mexico, trying to build something here.

  Eight hundred Indians killed, they say. That couldn’t be true. Acoma pueblo was still out there, high on its rock like a castle in the desert. They were buying up ranches with all the gambling money, coming into Santa Fe in new pickups, tribal leaders making bids on downtown real estate that Don Juan’s men had fought and died for.

  That statue they wanted: spit in the eye.

  The Indians could put their own statues outside casinos anytime they wanted, no need to make trouble, insult our customs and culture. Millie, his wife, was going to hearings, taking carloads of friends, organizing on the phone. We’re going to win back New Mexico again, she was saying. Put down this Pueblo revolt for good. These Indians, thinking money makes them better than us. Nobody would be here to feed their slots if it weren’t for the Spanish making this land into something, she said, going out the door to the hearing at City Hall, her flabby arms shaking, worked up.

  “Where’s the copper this one, this Acoma, wants to sell us?” Benny asked Rigo, the Indian staring at Rigo’s scar.

  “Out back in his truck. About a quarter ton.”

  “Abel,” Benny said. “Move it inside and have the guys unload.”

  “Hey,” the Indian with metal in his face said. “You said you don’t buy west-side copper.”

  “Who said I’m buying?”

  Benny bent to open a tool box, came up with a hack saw, trying to remember, was it the left or right foot?

  Wait.

  Don Juan didn’t have hacksaws. He would have used a sword or an axe.

  “Abel, the wall behind my desk, the sword I wear for Fiesta days. Let’s see how real it is. Bring an axe from the tool shed just in case.”

  Benny sat at the desk cleaning the silver safety pin he’d pulled from the Indian’s face after deciding there wasn’t much difference,
right or left leg. Don’t pull copper on Santa Fe’s west side. The message would get out when the Indian was found by the transformer he’d gutted.

  And the sword worked just fine. It was the real deal.

  Rigo and Abel had insisted they put down plastic first. The chair the Indian had been in, they washed it with lye and set it outside to dry. Then they’d spray paint it. Something about skin cells they’d learned from Forensic Files had them worried.

  This silver pin, he might send it to his daughter in California. He’d heard Mirelle had another baby on the way. She hadn’t called to give him the news. He’d had to learn it from Abel. The only daughter he had left outside New Mexico, not interested in carrying on the business, women content to let their men provide. She didn’t even come for Christmas and Thanksgiving, said she was in New York, all the way across the country, when he took Millie to Disneyland, not far from where Mirelle lived.

  His other daughter, he didn’t even say her name in his own mind.

  Abel had a son carrying his name. Abel Junior, in ninth grade at Camino High. And a new baby girl, Benita. It was close enough Benny could say he was the godfather of his tocayo, his namesake, yet another honor given him by his hardworking nephew. He and Rigo would talk how this salvage business, the dumpster company they owned together, the portable toilet service and the little grocery store, La Tiendita, still in the neighborhood where they had come up, all should go to Abel when it was time.

  So should this silver safety pin. Abel could give it to his wife for Benita’s diapers, saying it was from Uncle Benny, a sign of his love for their family. Passing along something good to the next generation. What life was all about.