by Michael Nava
“Oh, I see. For a minute there, I thought it might have something to do with my qualifications.”
She lit another cigarette. “Spoken like a true male,” she said, clicking her lighter shut. “Don’t tell me it never crossed your mind when you were arguing to some payaso in a black robe, that you couldn’t do a better job.”
I temporized. “They’re not all clowns. All right, yes, I’ve thought about it.”
“Pues, I can do this for you. Just fill out the form.”
I picked up the diskette. “All right. It can be my occupational therapy.”
“Always a smart-ass remark,” she said. She put out her cigarette and studied me with an expression that seemed to mingle concern for me and fear for her own mortality. “You’re skin and bones. How bad was it?”
“They tell me I actually died for about a minute,” I said. “If you stand close enough, you can still smell the sulfur from the fire and brimstone. Have you figured out what the secretary of state does yet?”
“She runs for senator,” she said, then added in her bossiest voice. “And don’t die again.”
Elena called that evening, and from the weariness in her voice when she greeted me, I knew the reunion had not been one of unmitigated joy.
“Is she your daughter, Elena?”
“Yes,” she said. “She is definitely my daughter.” Her words were emphatic, but her tone was neutral, cautious. “She showed me the paper with my address on it that I gave the social worker. She’s also the spitting image of Mom.”
That startled me. In our generation, my mother’s genetic heritage had been overwhelmed by my father’s, whom both my sister and I resembled. “Then she doesn’t look like us,” I said.
“No,” she said, “but Angel looks exactly like you when you were ten. It’s eerie. I keep calling him Henry.”
That was more startling still. “Does he know about me?”
“I showed him a picture of you when you were a boy. He kept asking to see it, so I finally gave it to him.”
“What are they like?”
In the silence that followed, I discerned that she was choosing her words carefully. “A step or two up from street people,” she said. “Vicky’s had a hard life but it hasn’t made her hard. She is pretty closed-mouth, though. But then I was the mother who abandoned her, so I can’t expect her to trust me right away.”
“Has she told you anything more about why she came to you?”
“She said her husband was in prison for beating her until last month, when they released him. The first thing he did was find her and beat her for having gone to the police the last time. She went to a women’s shelter in San Francisco, but they asked her to leave. Everyone she knows also knows him, so she came here.”
“Why was she asked to leave the shelter?”
Another careful silence. “She said it was because she’s a Christian and the women who ran the shelter weren’t.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“She belongs to one of those storefront Pentecostal churches that have sprung up in the barrios the last twenty years. You know, what we used to call Holy Rollers. Vicky’s very serious about her religion. Most women’s shelters are secular, to say the least. I can imagine her giving her born-again spiel to a lesbian social worker.”
“Has she given it to you and Joanne yet?”
“She’s let drop a couple of disapproving references to lifestyles, but so far we haven’t had that conversation.” She added quickly, as if in mitigation. “Don’t misunderstand, Henry. I respect her faith. I think it’s all that has kept her from the kind of street life I was afraid that she had had.”
“No evidence of drugs?”
“No,” she said. “She really doesn’t seem the type.”
“What’s the boy like?”
Without hesitation, she replied, “He radiates intelligence and he’s so self-possessed you forget he’s a child.”
“Children who don’t seem like children have generally had a pretty rough time of it,” I observed. “Has he been abused, too?”
“If he has, it wasn’t by her,” she said. “They’re so close they’re almost telepathic. Vicky’s intelligent, too, Henry, though she didn’t get much education. I think she sees Angel’s potential and she’s tried to give him stability, but this man she married, he sounds like her worst mistake.”
“Has she told you what she wants?”
“She says she needs a little time to get herself together.”
“Does she work?”
“She told me she was a maid at a hotel in the city. She gave up her job because she was afraid her husband would turn up while she was at work.”
“What’s her husband’s name?”
“Peter. Peter Trujillo.”
“Do you know what prison he was in?”
“San Quentin. Why?”
“I can probably pull his rap sheet.”
“His what?”
“His criminal record. It would tell us what he was convicted of, when he was paroled and under what conditions. If he was convicted of some kind of spousal abuse crime and he’s stalking her, he could be tossed back into the prison on a parole violation.”
I could tell she was tempted, but she said, “I need to establish trust with her. What you’re suggesting sounds too much like going behind her back or trying to run her life.”
“These domestic violence situations can be terribly volatile, Elena, and they tend to escalate. I don’t like the idea of this guy showing up at your house with a gun and a grudge.”
“According to Vicky, he doesn’t know anything about me. That’s why she came here.”
“That’s hard to believe if they were married any length of time,” I said. “Finding out who your natural mother is, that’s big news. Don’t you think she would have told him?”
“I think she always meant for me to be her last resort,” Elena said.
“I’d still be worried.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “As hard as this is, Henry, I can’t tell you how happy I am that she and Angel are here. All I want now is to spend as much time as I can with them. I’ll tell her what you told me about her husband being in violation of his parole, and maybe we can find a lawyer who specializes in domestic violence cases.”
“I’ll get you a referral,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s talk tomorrow, and, Henry, don’t worry. You should be happy, too. Overnight, our family’s been doubled.”
Yeah, I thought, not counting the psycho husband. “I can’t wait to meet them,” I said.
The next morning, I called around and got the names of a couple of lawyers in the San Francisco area who handled domestic violence cases. Then I called a contact in the sheriff’s office and persuaded him to get me Peter Trujillo’s rap sheet. A few minutes later, I called him back and asked him to pull the criminal history, if any, of my niece as well.
4.
THE FAX MACHINE IN MY OFFICE WENT OFF WHILE I WAS watching Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity having one of the longest death scenes in cinematic history. I went to retrieve the fax, and when I returned, he was still dying. I switched the TV off and examined the fax. The cover sheet bore the letterhead of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office. In the space for remarks, my sheriff pal had written: “Who are these losers?” I flipped to the next page, my niece’s rap sheet.
Victoria Mary Trujillo, a.k.a. Victoria Maria Rios, born twenty-nine years earlier; five foot five; one hundred and twenty pounds; brown hair; black eyes; a small butterfly tattoo on her right ankle; a San Francisco address that I recognized as the Tenderloin. Probably a welfare hotel. Three arrests and three convictions, the first when she was twenty-two, the last when she was twenty-six: the first conviction was for Health and Safety Code section 11350, the second for Penal Code 647(b) and then another for 11350. In English, she’d been busted once for prostitution and twice for possession of a controlled substance, all misdemeanors. The prostitution charge
had been knocked down to a 415, disturbing the peace, the standard plea bargain for a first-time offender. On the first possession charge, she was allowed to enter a drug diversion program; the second time, she did 90 days in the county jail. That was three years ago and she’d gone without convictions since. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but if her son was now ten, she’d incurred all of her arrests after he was born. Each time she had been convicted, she had risked losing him to the same system of foster care in which she had grown up. Hardly mom-of-the-year material. Still, something had happened within the past three years. The type and sequence of her offenses pointed to the beginning of an all-too-familiar story: female drug addict who turns tricks to support her habit. I could even guess her drug of choice. Crack. A quick, cheap high that didn’t screw around like heroin or yuppie cocaine, but took its users down fast and hard. My niece, however, seemed either to have learned her lesson or learned discretion. Elena said she’d found Jesus. That might well be, but when I’d seen it happen over the years to the occasional client, he was eager to testify to his prior wanton ways, the more dramatically to contrast his present state of salvation. I gathered that my niece had not mentioned to my sister her stint as Mary Magdalene, pre-Jesus.
Peter Trujillo, a.k.a. Solo, born thirty-four years earlier; five foot ten; one hundred and sixty-five pounds; brown hair; brown eyes; numerous gang tattoos; a healed bullet wound in his right thigh and, for further identifying marks, a sixth toe on his left foot. The same San Francisco address as my niece. I glanced down the lengthy list of his arrests and convictions, and thought, Whoa. This looks familiar. Generically familiar, that is—Solo’s three-page rap sheet told the story of an entire generation of poor Latino boys: gangs, guns, drugs, jail and early graves. He had gotten off to a seriously bad start: juvenile convictions for robbery and attempted murder that garnered him a seven-year sentence at the California Youth Authority—“prison with training wheels” an old supervisor of mine at the public defender’s office used to call the CYA. Still, Solo had been lucky. Sixteen-year-olds who committed the same offenses today were automatically tried as adults and skipped CYA for prison. There followed the classic rap sheet of a drug addict. Theft offenses alternated with drug arrests, and while he never again committed as heavy a crime as he had when he was sixteen, he racked up the usual low-grade felonies of someone supporting a ravenous habit: second-degree burglary, receiving stolen property, grand theft, petty theft with a prior. He was fortunate only in that Three Strikes hadn’t been in effect while he had piled up most of these convictions, but it was in effect the last time he’d been convicted of felony possession of heroin with intent to sell. His juvenile convictions counted as strikes and he should have been sentenced to life upon his plea to the possession count. Instead, and incredibly, he got off with a 36-month sentence. He must have had a hell of a lawyer to persuade a judge to dismiss the prior strikes and sentence him to the lowest term for possession. His record ended with the notation that he had been paroled from San Quentin four weeks earlier, with the usual drug conditions.
Wait, I thought. Didn’t Elena tell me that Vicky said her husband had gone to prison for beating her up? I rechecked the last entry. Straight drug possession. Of course there could have been misdemeanor spousal abuse charges that were dismissed as part of a deal. Dismissed charges weren’t always picked up by the Department of Justice when they prepared criminal histories. Drug-addict/wife-beater was a pretty common combination, but it was odd that none of his prior arrests or convictions were for any of the usual domestic violence offenses. Which in my experience could mean only one thing—she never called the cops on him when he hit her. And what that meant to me was that she would eventually return to him.
Edith Rosen showed up that evening with a bag of groceries and cooked me a meal of baked chicken, baked potatoes, and string-beans, with strawberries for dessert. Afterward, we sat on the deck and watched the sunset while drinking a special green tea that she insisted had helpful medicinal qualities. It tasted very much like it smelled, and it smelled like the moldering woods in a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
“Edith, what do you know about wife-beating?” I asked, tossing the contents of my cup over the railing. “Professionally, I mean.”
She poured me another cup, saying mildly, “Honey helps, now drink it. What about domestic violence?”
“The women so often go back to the men who beat them. Why is that?”
“Often because they have no economic choice, especially if there are children. They need the man’s income even if they pay for it with bruises and broken bones. Drink your tea, I mean it. My rabbi swears that it’s a blood cleanser.”
I put in another two tablespoons of honey and essayed a sip. It still tasted of the tomb. “I feel my blood getting cleaner by the moment. I meant what’s the psychological reason they go back to their abusers?”
She leaned back and pulled her sweater around her as a cool breeze trickled up from the canyon. “This is a little out of my field, but battered women’s syndrome is a fairly widely accepted explanation of that particular dance of death. You begin with a woman with low self-esteem and a man who alternates between being attentive and being violent. The attention bolsters her self-esteem, the violence tears it down. She’s a little like Sisyphus, you know. She rolls the rock up the hill and then it rolls down and flattens her. Why are you asking me this?”
“I’m trying to understand my niece,” I said.
She set her cup down. “Yes, Elena said something to me about an abusive husband the other morning.”
“I looked at his criminal history. No convictions or even arrests for domestic violence. She’s never called the cops on him.”
“You don’t know that,” Edith said. “The police are often called and leave without making an arrest or bothering to take a report.”
“They’ve been together ten years, give or take his jail and prison time. If he hit her habitually and she reported him, someone would have noticed.”
Edith smiled grimly. “Really, Henry, you know the criminal system as well as I do. The cracks are big enough for whole populations to fall through, and poor women are the first to go.”
I swallowed some tea and made a face. “She finally went to a shelter. If she knew enough to do that, she must have had some sense that the system could protect her. She didn’t report him, Edith. She’ll go back to him.”
“Have you talked to Elena about this?”
“No,” I said. “When I offered to run his rap sheet, she told me not to. I ran Vicky’s too. Arrests for drugs and prostitution.”
Edith counseled kids who were facing murder charges. Vicky’s record did not impress her. All she said was, “Current user?”
“I don’t know. Elena doesn’t think so, but she does live in that ivory tower. Vicky’s last drug arrest is three years old.”
“And the prostitution arrest?”
“Seven years.” I conceded. “That may not mean anything except that she got smarter.”
“You seem determined to think the worst of her,” she observed.
“I don’t want my sister to be hurt.”
She poured herself more tea, raised the teapot in my direction. I crossed myself as if to ward it off. “Very funny,” she said. “Elena’s a very able woman, Henry. She can handle this situation without you having to run background checks.”
“She feels so guilty about having put her daughter up for adoption that she’s an easy mark.”
“Realistically, Henry, what do you imagine your niece can do to her?” she asked, in the modulated tones that therapists use when they want to let you know you’re being an idiot.
“She can get herself emotionally invested with a masochist,” I said. “A woman involved in what you called the ‘dance of death’ with an abusive husband. I don’t want my sister dragged into that kind of ugliness.”
“I don’t know whether to be touched by your sibling loyalty or annoyed by your male chauvinism,” she
said. “So I repeat—Elena can handle the situation. You might think about your hostility to your niece.”
“This isn’t my issue.”
“Pulling the girl’s rap sheet is not exactly avuncular behavior, sweetie,” she observed over the rim of her cup.
I knew better than to argue with her when she was in full therapist efflorescence, so I drank the wretched tea.
The following morning, I decided to return Double Indemnity myself instead of calling the video store and asking them to pick it up, a service they performed for shut-ins like me. This meant taking my most ambitious walk yet, all the way down the hill from my house to Franklin where the store was located, a distance of about five blocks. In the warm May morning, the big white Mediterranean-style houses drifted like galleons on lush lawns. Hummingbirds burst through the smoky air, bullets of green and yellow. Cars and trucks streamed continuously up and down the broad boulevard, creating a constant low rumble broken by the occasional shriek of brakes at an intersection where the stop sign was almost hidden by a stray branch of flame-colored bougainvillea. I felt almost maniacally alive on the way down, but halfway up the hill on the way home, my legs turned into sandbags and I was nearly gasping for breath.
I felt like I had drifted into the deep end and the water was closing over my head. I told myself not to panic. Hayward had cautioned me that I would experience these moments of exhaustion— “You’ve been dragged down a bad stretch of road by a Mack truck,” he said. “The body has great recuperative powers, but you’re not in control of them. Sometimes you’re going to wear out.” Still, it was terrifying to feel my fragile heart pounding in my chest as if looking for the nearest exit. Knees creaking, I lowered myself to the curb to catch my breath. Fatigue seeped through my entire body, a kind of weariness I had never felt in my life before the heart attack. At that moment, I would happily have died rather than get up. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed information for the number to a cab company. Then I heard heavy footsteps coming down the driveway behind me, turned my head and saw a pair of battered construction boots, the laces broken and retied, the leather cracked. I snapped the phone shut as I raised my eyes to bejeaned legs, a plaid shirt and the dark, inquisitive face of a man wearing a red baseball cap with the words DELEON & SON stitched across a stenciled lion’s head.
