by Michael Nava
“What’s our next step?”
“The headmaster wants Angel to come in for aptitude testing to see where he is academically. They’re starting a kind of academic summer camp in two weeks, which he highly recommends for Angel. Five thousand for six weeks.”
“Holy moley.”
She laughed. “Didn’t you know? Kids are a money pit.”
“Grandma, Uncle Henry,” Angel called. “Hurry up and see John’s house.”
“Remember how hard Dad worked to support us?” she asked. “Think of this as paying him back.”
La Iglesia de Cristo Triunfante was located in a storefront on a stretch of Beverly Boulevard known as Little Tegucigalpa because of all the Central American restaurants and travel agencies that had set up shop in the crumbling, ornate one-and two-story buildings that dated back to the 1930s, when it had been the heart of a prosperous Jewish neighborhood. The buildings were now painted blue and lime and pink, but they retained their original Art Deco zigzags and chevrons. The building the church occupied was not one of the older ones, but a featureless brick square, the windows of which had been painted white with the church’s name written in blue across them. On the sidewalk, a squat, dark man with a broad, impassive Indian face pushed a cart with an ear of corn painted on it and cried out, “Elote, elote.” An old woman in a black rebozo picked out kids’ T-shirts imprinted with Bart Simpson’s face from a bin in front of a store that sold everything from communion dresses to velvet tapestries of John and Robert Kennedy. Mariachi music blared out from a music store. A homeless man peed into the doorway of a shuttered bank. Outside the church, women in pastel dresses wearing veils over their heads greeted each other with kisses.
“This the place?” I asked Angel.
“Uh-huh.” He looked at me. “What’s wrong, Uncle Henry?”
I couldn’t tell him that I was afraid I would turn into a pillar of salt as soon as we crossed the threshold of the church.
“Nothing, m’ijo. It’s just that I haven’t been to church for a long time.”
“Is that because you’re gay?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Most churches don’t like gay people very much.”
My nephew’s expression was sympathetic. “Don’t worry, Uncle Henry. Reverend Ortega is really nice.” He glanced at the church. The women were going inside. “We should go before they start.”
I followed him into the church. The sky did not fall.
The service was in Spanish. I struggled to follow along, then gave up and looked around the small room. The air was hot and close and reeked of perfume, hair oil, flowers and bodies from the hundred or so people crammed into folding chairs. Only the ceiling fans kept it from being really unbearable. There were more women than men, though not by much, and everyone was dressed in their Sunday best: Easter-egg colors for the women, for the men dark trousers, white shirts. There was a sprinkling of children and a surprising number of adolescents, but most of the crowd seemed to consist of people in their thirties and forties. Here and there, hefty women in late middle-age fanned themselves with fans improvised from the church bulletin and watched the proceedings with a proprietary interest; the ladies sodality, I imagined. At the front of the room was a simple altar covered with flowers, and on the wall above it a cross. On one side of the altar was the choir—ten women and four men wearing sky-blue robes—and three musicians, a keyboardist, a guitarist and a flutist. Opposite them was a podium with a microphone. The choir had just finished singing a high-pitched, piping hymn, more like a chant than a song, and now Reverend Ortega took the podium and began to read a passage from the Bible. He was wearing the same black suit that he had worn when I first encountered him at court, the same narrow, unfashionable tie.
I had formed my stereotype of evangelists from channel-surfing through the Sunday morning religious shows: white Southern men in expensive suits, with brittle, poufy hair and faces slimed theatrically with tears as they condemned people like me to the crude hells they constructed out of ignorance and fear. Sometimes the face was black, and instead of tears was frowning sternness, but the condemnation was always the same and it was animated by that purposeful energy of hatred. I expected Ortega to be the same kind of shrieker and weeper, and assumed the best I could hope for was that Leviticus was not this week’s text.
I turned my attention to him. He read from Matthew about the afflicted woman who believed if she touched even the hem of Jesus’ garment she would be healed. She humbly made her way through the throng that surrounded him, touched his robe and was instantly cured. Among all the people who pressed against him, it was her touch that Jesus felt and her faith he praised. I had no trouble understanding the simple Spanish of the verse or the sermon that followed. Ortega was not a weeper and shrieker. He spoke in a conversational tone, in a resonant voice and seemed scarcely able to conceal his happiness; like someone bringing you the best news you would ever receive. I thought he had to be faking it, that this bubbling mirth was an orator’s trick, and perhaps there was something of that in it, but the joy was real, too. His message was not complicated: He used the story to assure his listeners that among the rich and powerful, it was the faith of the poor and the humble that pleased God best.
I thought of my niece. She’d responded to me with a passive blankness that made me wonder if she had an interior life at all. Now it occurred to me that perhaps she was like the woman in Mark’s story, her blankness concealing humility and her passivity, faith. When I was with her, it often felt to me as if she had hoped for someone else. Perhaps it wasn’t that she was hoping for someone else, but that she had placed her hope in someone else. I looked around the room; sweat poured down the mesmerized faces of the congregation as Ortega expounded his text. I was touched, but the mystery of faith remained mysterious to me.
When the service ended, we followed the other congregants as they filed through a door into an adjacent room equipped with an industrial stove and a double sink. Food, paper plates, cups and plastic utensils were laid out on the long counter that partitioned the room. A screen door was propped open, and through it I glimpsed a patio set up with tables and chairs and realized this must have been a restaurant. Reverend Ortega saw us and came over. He shook my hand warmly and ran an affectionate hand through Angel’s hair.
“Señor Rios, I’m glad you could come. Hello, Angelito.”
“Hi, Reverend,” Angel said.
“Will you excuse us for a minute, Angel? Reverend Ortega and I have to talk.”
Angel went off to eat. Reverend Ortega said, “Come, I have an office.”
His office was a tiny room that must have been the pantry. There was just enough space for a desk and two chairs. There was a cross on the wall and a bulletin board that sagged with announcements, calendars and photographs from church socials. Reverend Ortega squeezed behind his desk and invited me to sit down.
“Did you enjoy the service, Señor Rios?”
“Actually, yes. I expected something different.”
He cocked his head. “What?”
“Fire-and-brimstone. People rolling in the aisle. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be offensive.”
“God hears us even when we—” He paused, and I could see him searching for the English equivalent of the word he had in mind. “Even when we whisper. No one needs to yell.” He smiled apologetically. “Señor Rios, Spanish is more easy for me. If I speak Spanish, you can understand?”
“I think so, but I’ll have to speak English back.”
“Okay,” he said. “We trade Spanish for English.” In Spanish, he said, “Would you like me to be a witness for Vicky at her trial?”
“It wouldn’t be her trial, Reverend. She pled guilty—admitted the crime. Now the judge will decide how many years Vicky will have to spend in prison. I know you’ve been talking to Vicky and I would like you to testify to help me convince the judge to show mercy.”
“I understand,” he said. “I have done this for other members of the church. I can tell
the judge that Vicky is a good woman, a Christian, and she has a good heart.”
“It would help if you could tell the judge that she is very sorry for her crime.”
He gave me a puzzled look, as if working something out, and after a long moment he said, “I can testify that she did what she did to protect Angel.”
“Are you saying she’s not sorry that she killed Pete?”
Another long pause. Something was going on, and then I understood. “Reverend Ortega, I’m not asking you to testify to anything she told you in confidence. The law protects what she told you about the details of the killing. I only need for you to say something that will help me show the judge the killing was not an evil act.”
He frowned. “Killing is an evil act, Señor Rios. I can only testify that Vicky has no evil in her heart. Everything she has done, she has done out of love for Angelito. She has sacrificed everything for her child.”
We appeared to be going around in a circle, but I didn’t know what it was we were circling.
“I understand that, but what I’m asking you is whether she’s told you she’s sorry. If she did, that’s helpful. If she didn’t, I won’t ask you the question.”
“She never told me that she is sorry,” he said. He seemed uncomfortable with his answer, as if he knew it was a half-lie. “You must understand, Señor Rios, that she wanted to protect Angel.”
“By killing his father?”
He was so long in responding that I thought he hadn’t understood, but then he said, “Peter was not Angel’s father. I tell you this in confidence.”
It took a moment to absorb the information, but then I remembered the young man in the casket—fair-skinned, fair-haired, nothing like my black-haired, brown-skinned nephew. Now I understood why Ortega kept repeating that Vicky had sacrificed everything for Angel.
“Was Pete abusing Angel?”
“I cannot say more, Señor Rios. She spoke to me in confidence.”
I inferred from his anguished expression that he regretted having told me as much as he had and nothing would be gained by pressuring him. Vicky had obviously told him something about the circumstances of the killing involving Angel that she had kept from me. I could assume it was that Pete had abused Angel, either physically or sexually. I made a snap decision: Whatever it was Pete had done to Angel was irrelevant at the moment. In fact, I didn’t want to know. I had sold Kim Pearsall on the plea bargain by representing that Vicky had been Pete’s victim and it was clear that she had been, for whatever reason. To switch my theory of the killing at this point would, at the very least, confuse the issues and might even endanger the deal. As for my personal interest in Angel, I would have to hope that as he grew to know and trust me, he would volunteer whatever had happened between Pete and him. Someday I would discover the truth of what had happened in that room, but at the moment I didn’t need the truth, only a plausible and sympathetic scenario.
“I understand. I’m not going to ask you to testify, Reverend Ortega,” I said.
Relief washed over his face. “That is for the best.”
“Someday, though, I may return and ask you to tell me what you know, to help me raise Angel while his mother is in prison.”
“I can never tell you what I know,” he said. “But when Angel is safe, Vicky will tell you.”
I got up. “Thank you for your time. I’ll respect Vicky’s wishes to bring Angel to services here.”
“You are also welcome.”
“I’m not a Christian, Reverend.”
He started to speak, thought better of it, and let me go.
18.
THE PHONE WAS RINGING when I stepped into my office the next morning after a long breakfast with Angel at which we discussed the tests he would be taking later that week at his new school. He was enthusiastic about going back to school but worried that he would have to repeat the fourth grade. Listening to him, one would have thought that the humiliation of being held back a year was the most traumatizing event he had ever faced. Unless I brought her up, he rarely spoke about his mother and never about the shooting. He still woke up some nights screaming, but resisted my attempts to coax him into describing the bad dreams. I clung to the belief that his inability to talk about these things was because they were still so fresh, but I worried that, like a splinter, the memories were working themselves deeper and deeper into his consciousness, where they would fester and become ever more difficult to extract. Furthermore, after talking to Reverend Ortega, I had a new fear—that the powder keg of unexpressed feeling beneath Angel was not only from the shooting but from whatever abuse he had suffered at Pete Trujillo’s hands preceding it. I didn’t want my nephew’s life distorted by unexpressed rage toward his father or drowned in alcohol, as mine had been, or for him to pick up some other equally self-destructive club with which to beat himself. Yet I was reluctant to force him to talk. I was afraid if my timing was off, I would destroy the still-fragile bond of trust growing between us. All this was passing through my head while Angel cheerfully gobbled cereal and rattled on about the previous day’s baseball scores and wondered if the school’s baseball team needed a shortstop.
Still preoccupied with these thoughts in my office, I picked up the phone as it rang. It was Edith Rosen.
“Henry, I read the material in Vicky’s case you faxed me and I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
I didn’t like the apologetic tone I was hearing in her voice.
“What do you think?”
“I’m still not convinced it was BWS,” she said.
Ordinarily I would have lobbied her, but I thought about Reverend Ortega’s intimation about the shooting, so all I said was, “Tell me why.”
“Battered women don’t ordinarily kill their batterers in the midst of an attack because they know they can’t win that kind of confrontation,” she reminded me. “These reports make it seem that Vicky shot him while he was coming at her.”
“Exactly,” I said. “She shot him. She didn’t try to overpower him physically.”
“Unless she ran out during the fight and bought the gun, she must have had it available before,” Edith said. “Why did she choose that moment? Also, Henry, if he was beating her, it was very risky for her to escalate things by introducing a gun. He still had the physical advantage and he could have used it to get the gun away from her.”
“She shot him in the back,” I said.
Edith was silent for a moment. “Had the attack stopped or had he just turned his back for an instant?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not clear. There’s a chance he could have been reaching for his own gun.”
“That’s not in any of these reports,” she said.
“I know. Does it make a difference to your opinion if you throw that into the mix?”
“Actually, that supports my point. If she knew he had access to his own gun, then why didn’t she wait until the attack was over rather than get into a gunfight? Remember, Henry, the core of BWS is that the abused spouse has been terrorized. Someone in that kind of fear is trying to avoid confrontations, not provoke them. If she was going to kill him, she wouldn’t do it while he was enraged and at his most dangerous. She would have waited until she could catch him off guard.”
She was making a persuasive case and I could hear her on the witness stand, methodically discrediting my theory of the shooting.
“Is there anything else that makes you skeptical this was BWS?”
“Yes,” she said. “Two things. First, she had the presence of mind to hide the gun before the police arrived. The other thing—and it’s related to the first—is that she was reluctant to admit that she had killed him.”
“Why are those things significant?”
“Battered women don’t usually try to hide or deny what they’ve done. They’re filled with remorse and anxious to explain it.”
“She did tell the police she shot him because he beat her,” I said.
“Well, no,” Edith said. “I read her s
tatement. She agrees with them that that’s what she did when they put it to her in question form. That’s different than making an affirmative statement.”
“Not for purposes of the law.”
“It is for purposes of my opinion.”
“What exactly is your opinion of what happened that night, Edith? She had been beaten. There’s physical evidence of that. I saw her.”
There was a long, thoughtful silence on the other end of the line. “I’m not saying they didn’t fight or that he didn’t strike her,” she said. “What I’m saying is that it wasn’t something he did routinely. BWS requires a pattern of abuse, not a one-time quarrel, however violent. They were fighting about something specific and very serious.”
About Angel. “You offered to work with Angel. I’d like you to start right away.”
This time the silence was puzzled. Then she understood. “This is still about the shooting. You know something you haven’t told me,” she said in a seriously annoyed tone. “Henry, you know better than to try to withhold information from me to get favorable testimony.”
“I didn’t know this until yesterday”
“Know what?”
“Angel’s not Pete’s son. There’s some suggestion that Pete may have abused him somehow.”
“Sexually?”
“I don’t know, Edith. That’s what I’d like you to find out for me.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I sold the D.A. this deal with Vicky by representing that she was a battered woman. It’s a little late for me to change theories. I mean, if you’re right and she shot him in the heat of an argument, then it really is second-degree murder. The DA. took her plea on voluntary manslaughter.”
She said, “I’m not a lawyer, Henry, but as I understand it, the D.A.’s stuck with that plea.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Unless the plea was obtained by fraud. If I know the facts to be different from what I’ve represented them to be, well, you see where I’m going.”
