by David Ellis
“You were close.”
“Yeah. Not anymore. Not since this. But before.” He took a deep breath. The emotion had drained away. “He was borracho. Drunk. He talks then. Kiko talks when he’s drunk.”
Okay. So far, so good. A drunken conversation with Kiko.
“He said, this better be it. This better be the only one, the Polish guy. I said, why? Why you gotta kill some Polish guy? Kiko said, the Polish guy’s making noise. He said, they gonna start lookin’ at Delroy. They start lookin’ at Delroy, they gonna find out about the connection. Kiko said, I gotta cover up his connection to Delroy. He said, I’ll do this one for him. This one time, cuz of his connection to Delroy and shit.”
He was talking about Delroy Bailey. A connection to Delroy. He was talking, I assumed, about Joey Espinoza, Delroy’s brother-in-law. But I wanted him to say it, not me.
“Someone had a connection to Delroy,” I said. “And that someone was afraid that people would find out about the connection. So that someone asked Kiko to kill the Polish guy.”
“Ain’t that what I just said?” That was his way, I guess, of agreeing with my summary.
“Did Kiko say who that someone was? Did he say who had the connection to Delroy?”
He exhaled loudly. “No, man. Not even borracho, Kiko wouldn’t say that.”
He didn’t move. I didn’t either. We stood in the freezing temperatures, silent, for a long time. I needed this guy to say it, not me.
“But you know who it was,” I said. “Even if Kiko didn’t say it. You know who had the connection to Delroy.”
Scarface slowly turned his eyes toward me. “You know Delroy?”
“I know who he is,” I admitted. I’d been playing dumb, but I wasn’t going to lie.
“So you know who he used to be married to,” he said.
Used to be. So Delroy Bailey was now divorced from Yolanda Espinoza?
“He used to be married to Joey’s sister,” I said.
“Fuckin’ Joey.” Scarface spit on the ground.
“Joey Espinoza got Delroy a big contract with the state,” I said. “Wozniak thought he got cheated out of it, and he was making noise. He was saying Joey used his influence to get his ex-brother-in-law Delroy the contract. And Joey wanted to keep his connection to Delroy a secret. So he had Wozniak killed. Is that pretty much how you see it?”
He looked down. “Gotta be.”
“You and Ernesto both thought that.”
He nodded.
Right. That’s what Ernesto was going to tell me. Adalbert Wozniak wasn’t killed because he refused to pay the Cannibals’ extortion. It was about Joey Espinoza trying to cover up his connection to Starlight Catering and its owner, Delroy Bailey.
I tried again, because I needed him to say it. “Did Kiko actually say that Joey ordered the hit on Wozniak?”
“Man, I told you, no.”
It was obvious enough. But I wanted the words to come from him, not me. Right now, I had supposition stacked on hearsay. Kiko said something, and we assumed he was referring to Joey Espinoza. Speculation and hearsay.
Not admissible proof in court.
I wasn’t going to get that proof from this guy. We both knew it was Joey Espinoza who had the connection to Delroy. And we both knew he was a part of the decision to kill Wozniak, but this guy couldn’t swear to that. He had led me all the way to the door, but he couldn’t ring the bell.
And there had to be someone else. Joey Espinoza, at the time of Wozniak’s murder, was already working undercover for the feds. There was no way that Joey would be plotting a murder with a notorious gangbanger while he was answering to the feds.
Joey had a partner. Someone else must have delivered the order to Kiko.
But who? Charlie Cimino? Maybe Greg Connolly? Someone involved with the PCB. Someone working in cahoots with Joey Espinoza. But I didn’t know who, and this guy couldn’t move that ball forward even one inch for me.
So I would have to go to the source. I would have to get the information from Federico Hurtado, the Latin Lords’ top enforcer, their most feared, cold-blooded assassin.
Also known as Kiko.
50
SCARFACE WAS WORN DOWN, I THOUGHT, SPENT FROM the emotion and from unloading everything. I’d seen that as a prosecutor, the effect of purging information, especially revelations that triggered guilt. The release of the burden was palpable across their faces. I once had a suspect fall asleep in the interrogation room after confessing to stabbing his pregnant girlfriend.
“One more thing,” I said. I had regained my balance. The adrenaline surge had passed. I was relatively sure now that this guy was not going to put a bullet in my head. “Essie Ramirez said that Ernesto was going to do something about this. She said I’d convinced him to talk. Do you know if he did? If he talked to anyone about this?”
I thought I saw him smile. But it wasn’t one of those whimsical grins. It was a smile of pain. Bitterness. He was reliving the memory. And, I thought, he was deciding to share it with me, something he hadn’t planned to give up. I saw that all the time in interrogations, too. The breakthrough. You get past that initial wall of denial and deception, and inside is a messy, gooey mix of truth and emotion. They end up telling you more than you even knew to ask.
“Man, Nesto didn’t say nothin’.”
I wasn’t clear on his emphasis. It took me a minute. Finally, I got there.
“But you did,” I said.
He nodded his head. “Nesto said it was the right thing to do.”
“He convinced you to do something about this. So—what did you do?”
“We went to the cops, Nesto and me. That’s what we did.” He flapped his arms. The gun remained in his right hand. “I fuckin’ told’em. I told ’em, Kiko did the Polish guy, and Joey fuckin’ Espinoza was the guy who called it.”
“The cops—”
He burst out laughing, waving his arms and the gun, pacing around in a circle. “Oh, man, they fuckin’ loved me. They was all in my face. They said, how do you know? What proof you got? How you know it was Joey? Just like you did, man. Kept askin’, did Kiko say it was Joey? Did he say Joey? Just like you.”
Cops not believing a gang member when he offered information? Not hard to believe.
“They said I was a liar, ese. They told me, liars go to prison. We gonna lock you up. One-thousand-one, they kept sayin’. The fuckin’ brownies, they pull out my sheet, they tell me, who’d believe you, convict? They tell me, ten years, man. Ten years for lying to us, the priors you got.” He looked at me. “You like that? They gonna lock me up for that. For doing somethin’ good. Nesto, he grabbed me, he said, forget it. Forget it. Not worth it.”
Not worth prison, Ernesto had told his wife. Ernesto hadn’t been talking about himself. He’d been talking about his friend here, Scarface.
Scarface kicked an empty cardboard box into the air, almost falling down in the process. He was drunk with rage and despair, which wouldn’t have bothered me so much if he wasn’t holding a gun.
“Go home, lawyer-man,” he said.
“Wait.”
But he wasn’t listening. He’d worked himself into a lather now, the pain and anger meshing together, making him about the last person who should be walking the city streets with a loaded weapon. But I wasn’t going to be able to stop him. So I let him go.
I felt the cold wind, really felt it, for the first time that evening. But I stood alone in that alley for a long time. I’d learned three things tonight. The first was that Federico Hurtado—Kiko—had been the one who killed Adalbert Wozniak. Second, Kiko had all but named Joey Espinoza as the person behind the murder—to cover up a connection to Delroy, his former brother-in-law who was handed a beverage contract over Wozniak’s company. And third, Ernesto Ramirez and his friend here, Scarface, had tried to do the right thing and report the information they had to the authorities, and for their troubles had been threatened with perjury and sent packing.
I was getting closer. But
there was someone else. Joey Espinoza couldn’t have had a direct conversation with Kiko. He’d have to have balls the size of Jupiter to meet with someone like Kiko while he was also meeting on a daily basis with Christopher Moody and his federal agents, helping them nail Hector. Was it Charlie Cimino? Greg Connolly, the chair of the state board who gave Joey Espinoza’s brother-in-law the contract over Wozniak’s company?
I didn’t know. There was someone else, and I had suspects but no facts.
I reached into my pocket and turned off the tape recorder. I hit rewind and played it to make sure I’d captured everything okay. Then I stuffed it back in my pocket and walked out of the alley.
51
WHEN I REACHED MY CAR , MY LIMBS WERE FULL OF electricity, my mind racing. I’d never really thought that Scarface was going to shoot me. He could have found twenty different ways to kill me anonymously, as opposed to a prearranged meeting orchestrated by Essie Ramirez. Still, having a gun against my forehead wasn’t an everyday occurrence for me, and on top of that, I’d learned some new information that was getting me closer.
Sensory overload. I needed to burn off steam. When my cell phone rang, I thought of ignoring it but finally answered.
“I need to borrow you for an hour,” said Madison Koehler.
She gave me an address. It was on the near west side, near the new lofts that had sprung up and the trendy restaurants and bars. Hot part of the city these days. I thought I was looking for a condo or house, but when I got close to the address she gave me, I realized it was zoned commercial. Then I found it. A small one-story with a large glass window in front, bearing the title FRIENDS OF SNOW. It was the governor’s campaign office. I don’t know why I was surprised.
I parked a block away and made the walk. It was close to nine o’clock. The block was quiet. The air was cold and wet. FRIENDS OF SNOW looked closed. It was dark up front, but there was some light emanating from the back part of the establishment. I rang a buzzer and saw a figure approach.
“I’m here about a job,” I quipped, but Madison hadn’t called me to follow up on the offer. She locked the door behind me, and we walked in relative darkness. It was hard to see anything very clearly, but the walls were papered with charts and documents. There were several banks of telephones and dozens of computers, some of them still beeping on power-save mode.
Not sure where I was going, I stayed close behind my hostess. Out of an abundance of caution, lest I find myself lost, I kept my hands on the lower parts of her body as she walked. Midway down the hallway, she stopped. My momentum carried me against her, which I thought was the point. We remained there, pressed so hard against each other that you’d think I was trying to poke a hole through her. My hands did not remain still, however, clawing at the buttons on her blouse and slipping inside her skirt. For her part, she showed herself quite skillful at working blind with those hands, to the point that she had managed to unzip my pants and liberate a certain part of my anatomy before I realized it.
I’m not sure where she’d planned to take me—her office, presumably—but we didn’t make it there. Her feet didn’t touch ground for about thirty minutes. My adrenaline explosion from this evening’s events had translated into a testosterone avalanche. We pawed and grabbed and squeezed and pulled and thrust at each other like wild animals.
We stopped for a few minutes, had a cup of water at the dispenser, cracked a joke or two, then calmly walked to her large office in the back for round two. I needed a few minutes to recharge but there were plenty of other ways to spend my time, and I tried to be economical. We still had half our clothes on, for starters, so that needed to change. There was a large conference table filled with documents that I thought would make a nice landing for us, so I cleared it off with all the precision I could muster. I let her be my guide, of course, because she always seemed to lead me to places I’d never visited and enjoyed quite a bit, though I drew the line at the megaphone.
“I’m serious about that job offer,” she said to me as I left. Say this much for her: I was out of there in sixty minutes as promised.
FEDERICO “KIKO” HURTADO had been a member of the Latin Lords street gang, by our accounts, since the age of twelve. No known father. Mother deceased. One brother, whereabouts unknown to me at the moment, at least. No wife and no children that we knew of.
Kiko committed his first murder at the age of thirteen. He committed his second, we believe, at the age of sixteen. We liked him for about twenty kills, all told, over the years. He’d maimed and raped a lot of others along the way. He’d largely remained free during this time. Witnesses tended to have serious memory losses when Kiko was a suspect. Some of them had unfortunate accidents.
Kiko was productive. He was ruthless. And he was savvy. He’d made his way up the ladder by being all three of those things. It was believed, in fact, that he assumed the role he currently held, at the right hand of the leader, by murdering the guy who previously held the position. The lore was he decapitated his predecessor with an ordinary kitchen knife.
At the ripe age of twenty-seven, by my estimation—it had been a few years since my stint on the gang crimes task force as a prosecutor—Kiko was now firmly entrenched in the upper echelon of the Latin Lords. He was the muscle, the enforcer, whatever word necessary to convey that when someone got out of line, Kiko got them back in line, or he put them out of commission.
No wonder, if Kiko was involved, that the guy in the alley, Scarface, was reticent about having his name associated with the matter. And no wonder he didn’t come forward after Ernesto’s death. It would be the same thing as putting a gun to his head.
But these days, if things held to form, it would be unusual for Kiko to do the wet work personally. It was routine for the gangs to use juveniles for the heavy crimes because they were harder to imprison. The state kept lowering the age for an automatic transfer from juvenile to criminal—trying minors as adults—and the gangs kept lowering the age of their assassins accordingly. If Kiko was ordered to kill someone, he’d more likely dispatch someone else to do it than do it himself.
So this had been exceptional. I suppose Joey Espinoza would merit such an honor. I didn’t know that Espinoza knew Kiko, but it didn’t surprise me. He was a lot closer to the ground than his boss, Hector. He knew the streets. He admitted knowing members of the Cannibals, including the supreme leader, Yo-Yo. Not a stretch at all that he’d also know a guy like Kiko.
“Lightner,” I said into my office phone. It was bright and early the following morning. My lower back was tight and my calf muscles were sore as hell. But somehow I didn’t mind.
“Kolarich.” Joel Lightner was in his typically effusive mood.
“Favor.”
“Shoot.”
“Address.”
“Who?”
“Federico Hurtado,” I said. I spelled it for him. It had been a long time since Lightner had been a cop. He wasn’t a stranger to gangs, but he wouldn’t be as familiar as I with the current rosters. He wouldn’t recognize the name “Kiko.”
Technically, I was violating my own promise not to involve Lightner. But this was a discrete assignment, far removed from anything associated with the feds and their sting operation. At least I thought it was far removed. I wasn’t sure of a whole lot right now.
“What do you know about him?”
“Latin Lord,” I said. “Age twenty-seven.”
“Oh, nobility. A higher-up. And why do you want to find this guy?” he asked.
“I want to invite him to a baby shower I’m hosting.”
He paused to show his displeasure.
“C’mon, Joel, say yes. I’ll buy you some breath mints.”
It took him a while to come around. He was worried about me, which I found aggravating. Maybe it was the breath mints that put him over the edge. Or maybe he decided I was a big boy and I could take care of myself, thank you very little.
“So you want to know where Mr. Hurtado lives,” he said, relenting. I figured Kiko had a l
ot of money, being at the top of the organizational chart. And he wouldn’t want wads of cash lying around. My bet was he owned more than one house.
“I want to know where he sleeps,” I said.
“HEY.” SHAUNA POPPED HER HEAD into my office, having been in court all morning. She was dressed accordingly, a snappy sand-colored suit and cream blouse. “Aren’t you the busy beaver.”
We hadn’t seen much of each other lately. With my legal plate swelling over the last few months and time spent with Charlie Cimino, I was stretched pretty thin. But it was more than that. I found myself putting distance between us. I felt radioactive these days, and I didn’t want any residue rubbing off on her. She couldn’t know what I was doing, and if we spent too much time together, she would. She’d sense it. She’d ask. I’d lie. She’d know. I’d used up a pretty good chit with the U.S. attorney’s office to free her from their clutches, and I didn’t have any more.
“Turns out, this practicing law thing ain’t so bad,” I said. “Depositions. Interrogatories. Motions to compel discovery. I can’t get enough of it.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” She peered at me through squinted eyes. “You’re a chipper one today.”
That wasn’t quite right. I wasn’t in good cheer so much as I was hyped up. I’d had a few volts of electricity injected into my veins over the last week. Mind-altering sex and a gun pointed at your head tend to clear your sinuses.
“So, what do you say, sport—dinner tonight?” I asked.
She made a face, like she had an answer but didn’t want to give it. “I’m seeing Roger tonight,” she finally admitted.
Ah, yes. Roger. Roger. I remembered the initial date and my reaction to it. But Shauna and I had lost touch. Apparently this Roger was a keeper?
“You should meet him some time,” she suggested.
“I’ll count the hours.” My intercom buzzed. Marie, at the reception desk.
“Hang on,” I said. “This might be Uma Thurman. I stood her up last night.”
“You got laid,” Shauna guessed.
