by Michael Nava
“No, I’ve got to do some work. You’ve been a great help, John. Really.”
“All right, viejo. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks, baby. Sleep tight.”
“Te amo.”
“Yo también.”
He laughed. “Someone’s been practicing.”
I was up half the night mulling things over, going back and forth, but I could come up with no better conclusion than John’s: Put up or shut up. I couldn’t put up. I still had to decide what to do about Friday. I decided on a risky tactic that involved a half-lie. I would tell Judge Ryan that Vicky’s memory of the events was so unreliable that I had decided simply to submit on the police and probation reports without a hearing. She and the D.A. would naturally be suspicious after the big deal I’d made about wanting a sentencing hearing. Well, it couldn’t be helped. I’d tap-danced my way through worse fixes than this, and with a lot less at stake.
I went into Angel’s room. He was asleep on his back with the blankets kicked to the floor. He had never removed the heart pendant I had given him. I reached down and touched the warm stone. I covered him, kissed his forehead and then stood above his bed for a long time, silently wishing him better dreams.
19.
MY DECISION WAS STILL bothering me the next morning, but I had little time to ponder it further because there was a crisis with Angel. He was scheduled to spend the day at the Winslow School in Pasadena for what their fax called “placement orientation,” a euphemism for aptitude tests. At breakfast, he announced he didn’t want to go. He was in a high state of agitation. I had to coax him for an hour before he admitted he was anxious about being around kids his age. I realized as he spoke about his fears that he had been raised almost entirely among adults in a series of welfare hotels in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin in San Francisco. He knew about AIDS and drugs and he may have shot the man he thought was his father, but the prospect of being around other ten-year-olds terrified him.
“Other kids don’t like me, Uncle Henry,” he said.
I resisted the impulse to sweep him into my arms and murmur, There, there.
“Angelito, remember when we talked about Ulysses?”
“No,” he pouted.
“Yes, you do,” I said. “Some of the gods tried to keep him from reaching Ithaca, but there were always other gods that helped him and eventually he got home. There will always be people in this world who won’t like you, but there will also be people who will become your friends. People who will help you through life. You won’t find them if you don’t get out there and look.”
“I don’t want to,” he said.
We went back and forth for another half-hour, until finally I told him we were going and he sullenly acquiesced. As we drove to the school in silence, I reached over and grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed back.
John was right: If Angel had killed Pete, it was something to be worked out in the family. The alternative was the juvenile court system, where kids didn’t even have the minimal rights of adult criminal defendants, and he might end up being committed to the youth authority until he was twenty-one. Still, I could foresee for myself many troubled nights.
At first glance, the campus of Winslow School seemed as stereo-typically preppy as its name. The main building was a three-story rambling brown-brick Gothic edifice, complete with ivy-covered archways set back from a quiet street that was lined with sycamore trees. It looked like a parsonage out of an Agatha Christie novel, and as we crossed the great expanse of lawn, I looked for the croquet wickets. The resemblance to an English country house ended abruptly inside, where the unmistakable smells of a school—chalk dust and wood resin—floated in the warm, bright air. The corridors were plastered with posters in English, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese. A portrait gallery of great men and women included Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, Dolores Huerta and Harvey Milk. We found the room where I was to deliver Angel. A sturdy young woman in dreadlocks and a tie-dyed T-shirt that she must have found in a raid on her grandmother’s closet took custody of him. I stayed for a few minutes until the scared look went out of his eyes, gave him a kiss and told him I would pick up him at four.
On my way out, my cell phone rang.
“Hello,” I said.
A woman replied, “Mr. Rios? I’m Morgan Yee. You wanted to talk to me about Pete Trujillo. Sorry I didn’t call back sooner, but I’ve been down here in L.A. and I just picked up my messages. How is Pete?”
“I’m afraid he’s dead.”
“Wow,” she said. “So his homeys finally got him.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His homeboys. The Garden something gang. How did it happen?”
“If you’re down here, I wonder if we could talk face to face.”
“Sure,” she said. “I have an argument in the Court of Appeal at one-thirty. If you want, I could meet you for lunch around noon.”
“That would work. Where?”
“The Court of Appeal’s in the state building. I think there’s a cafeteria in there.”
“All right. I’ll meet you in the lobby in front of Ronald Reagan.”
“Huh?”
“Just ask the security guards.”
At noon, I stepped into the Ronald Reagan State Office Building on Third and Spring, a place familiarly called Ronald Reagan S.O.B. A bronze bust of the former president graced the atrium, flanked by two ficus trees that appeared to be dying. A tall, sinewy Asian woman in a gray suit was standing beside the bust, talking on a cell phone. I paused and looked up at the skylights that flooded the plant-filled atrium with light. From the courtyard came the murmur of the fountain that emptied into a reflecting pool, where a massive bronze bear hunted bronze fish against the background of a brilliantly painted mural depicting scenes from the state’s history. The last time I had seen that mural was from a gurney as I was being carried out of the Court of Appeal into an ambulance. I had forgotten that, but now, looking at the depiction of the Golden Gate Bridge, the terror of those moments swept through me. I breathed deeply, letting it go. The heart attack seemed like an event from another life, as if I had emerged from those seconds of death at the hospital a man reborn. Certainly, my life was very different now, for I had been, perhaps, at my most solitary point; but now I had this family, this child to care for. This was the last thing I would ever have expected, but I was grateful for it. I was glad to be alive, as perhaps I had not been before the heart attack, because, in retrospect, I saw that I had run out of reasons for living.
Morgan Yee cocked her head, gave me a narrow look and mouthed the words, Mr. Rios? I nodded. “Gotta go,” she said into the phone. “No, I’ll get a cab from the airport. Kiss, kiss.”
She snapped the phone shut and extended a big hand with what I recognized as a weightlifter’s calluses. Beneath her suit I discerned the lines of a powerfully developed body.
“I’m Morgan,” she said.
“Henry.” Her handshake was bone-crunching.
“You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“I’m fine. You found Reagan.”
She laughed and pinched the Gipper’s bronze cheek. “Oh, yeah. He actually looks more lifelike here than in life. Is he still alive or what?”
“I think the answer is ‘or what,’” I replied. “You’re too young to remember the Reagan years.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t go all golden oldie on me, Henry. I’m thirty-five, old enough to remember the Gipper. Can we eat? I’m starved.”
In the second-floor cafeteria, Morgan hit the salad bar hard, erecting a precarious pile of vegetables, greens, tuna and cottage cheese that dripped off her plate. I put my burrito on her tray and paid for our food. We went out to the tiny sunbaked patio from which we had a view of L.A.’s skid row, a collection of liquor stores, cockroach cafes, a couple of homeless shelters and the spire of the abandoned Catholic cathedral, Saint Vibiana. The sun blazed through the fetid air.
Through a mouthful of salad, she sai
d, “Why did they build this place in the slums?”
“The state workers were supposed to be the advance guard of gentrification,” I said. “The attack faltered on the winos and crack-heads.”
“Tell me about Pete.”
“I was going to ask you the same question.”
She tackled the mound of salad. “No, I mean how was he killed?”
“Shot dead in a motel room. The cops charged his wife. She’s my client.”
She swallowed. “Vicky. She couldn’t kill Pete,” she said. “They were like Romeo and Juliet, except Romeo was a junkie. Studmuffin, though—not that I think that’s what she saw in him. She was a serious chick. I guess she thought she could change him. The love of a good woman, all that crap. I could have told her she was wasting her time.”
“Because he was a junkie?”
She nodded. “People think heroin’s like some Billie Holiday song. Kind of sad and romantic. That’s such crap. Billie died chained to a hospital bed. You’re better off blowing your brains out than sticking a needle in your arm. See where it got Pete.”
“On the phone you said he was afraid of his homeboys. Why?”
She plopped a cherry tomato into her mouth. “He ratted them out to save himself from a three-strikes sentence.”
So I’d been right in my reading of his rap sheet. “What happened exactly?”
“He got picked up for possession of just enough heroin for the cops to bother charging him and then they discovered he had two strikes.”
“Juvie stuff.”
She nodded. “Yeah. He and this cousin of his robbed a grocery store and on the way out shot a customer. The cuz did, not Pete. Pete was not a macho guy. A follower from the word go. The cuz gets this brilliant idea that in juvie court each one will claim the other did the shooting, and that way he figures the judge will let them both off.” She smirked. “So the D.A. moves for separate trials and they both get nailed, and Pete ends up with two strikes. When he picks up this possession charge, suddenly he’s looking at twenty-five to life. That’s when I got the case.”
“Was it your idea for him to snitch?”
“I tried to get the strikes struck. When that didn’t work, I sat him down and explained the facts of life. They had him on the possession charge, they had him on the strikes. It was bye-bye, baby, and I was all out of ideas. Then he says Butch is part of these narco-trafficantes who bring heroin in from Mexico and distribute it up and down the state through Latino gangs. I told him if he was willing to roll on them, I might be able to save his ass. He didn’t go for it at first.”
“What convinced him?”
She pushed her plate aside. “Vicky. She told him it was better for him to snitch and take his chances on the outside than die of old age in prison. She’s a smart chick. What she was doing with a loser like him is beyond me. Anyway, with Pete’s information, there were drug busts from San Diego to Sacramento that actually put some dealers out of business. For a while, anyway.”
“Was Cousin Butch among them?”
“He got away. Pete says he has hideouts in Mexico. There are a couple of arrest warrants out on him.”
I thought about his antics at the cemetery. He was back, and not exactly lying low. Which made him either arrogant or stupid or both.
“Do you know what Butch’s real name is?”
She thought about it for a moment. “It was a kind of unusual name. Oh, yeah, Narciso. Narciso Trujillo.”
“Narcissus. The guy who fell in love with his reflection. They named the flower after him.”
“Butch is no flower,” she said. “With all his strikes, next time he gets picked up, he’ll be serving time into his next four incarnations. Pete was more scared of him than anyone because Butch wasn’t just a homey, he was family. Pete figured snitching on Butch made him a double traitor.” She reached into her briefcase, extracted a pair of sunglasses and a bottle of Evian water. She put the shades on. “When you told me Pete was dead, I was sure it was Butch who killed him. He tried once before.”
“When?”
She chugged some Evian. “Pete was shanked in the yard at San Quentin. Another couple of inches, they would have hit his heart. He told me the guy that did it was Mexican mafia carrying out a contract for Butch’s gang. The Garden something.”
“Garden Grove boyz,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s it. I got Pete out of Quentin and he served the last few months of his sentence in the high-power unit of San Francisco jail. Total isolation, that’s what it took to keep him alive. When he was released, witness protection was supposed to set him up with a new identity and reunite him with Vicky and their kid. What’s his name?”
“Angel. Did they?”
“In a half-assed way. They put him on a bus to some town in the central valley, where they gave him an apartment and a job and a couple of phone numbers to call if he got into a jam.”
“Turlock?”
“Turlock. Yeah, that was it. He called me once to ask me to help him get a gig with the DEA after they turned him down. That was the last I heard.” She glanced at her watch and stood up. “Look, Henry, I gotta get ready for argument. I’ll be back in the city tonight if you have any more questions. I can tell you one thing, though—if Pete is dead, Cousin Butch is behind it.”
“Would you be willing to testify in Vicky’s trial if I needed you to?”
“Hey, if you can get my testimony past a hearsay objection, I’d be happy to. You got a business card?”
We exchanged cards.
“Thanks, Morgan,” I said. “Good luck with the C.A.”
“I figure if they don’t fall asleep on me, that’s a win,” she said and headed briskly into the building.
I sat on the patio as flies buzzed around the ruins of Morgan’s salad. Less than twenty-four hours ago, I’d become convinced that Angel had shot Pete Trujillo. When John had floated the idea that the shooter was one of Pete’s gang buddies, I’d dismissed it because it didn’t fit the evidence. Now I had to rethink it all. Could Cousin Butch have come to the motel, beaten up Vicky and killed Pete? How would he have found them? If Pete had been released through witness protection, there would have been no record that some prison trustee could’ve looked up and passed along to a gangbanger on the outside. But Butch had another access to information about Pete. Their family. Jesusita Trujillo. She had been beaten the same night that Pete was killed by someone whom she had willingly admitted into her house. Mrs. Cerda thought her mother’s attacker was a gang member, someone her mother knew from the neighborhood. Could it have been Butch? But if it had been Butch, why would Vicky take the rap for him? I didn’t think I’d get the answers I needed from her. There was one other possibility. I dug through my wallet for his number. I got his pager and punched in my number. A few minutes later, he called back, and after I explained to him what I wanted to talk to him about, he reluctantly agreed to meet me.
He was wearing the gray uniform of a janitor with his name stitched across his breast pocket. In the sleek Westside shopping mall where he pushed a broom, he was just one more black-haired, brown-skinned menial worker, all but invisible to the trendy lunchtime crowd that packed the boutiques and restaurants. He clasped my hand warmly, but his eyes were worried.
In Spanish, he said, “Señor Rios. I can only talk a few minutes before I have to go back to work.”
“I only need a few minutes, Reverend Ortega. I thought you were a full-time preacher.”
He smiled. “My people are poor. I work here to support my family.” He gestured toward the food court. “May I buy you lunch?”
“Thanks, but I’ve eaten. You go ahead.”
He lifted a grease-stained brown bag. “This is my lunch. Shall we sit down?”
I bought a cup of coffee and joined him at a table that looked down on six levels of stores that sold such essentials as German nose-hair clippers and two-thousand-dollar Italian suits made of wool so fine you could a read a paper through it. There were no children or old people
among the hundreds of well-dressed shoppers; just sleek, well-groomed youngish white people whose eyes seemed to register nothing but the next purchase. The only conversations going on were into cell phones. I looked at Ortega’s face, the dark skin pitted with acne scars, the thick eyebrows wild as an Old Testament prophet, and thought that in his homeliness, humility and forbearance he must represent everything the mall mannequins were desperate to escape. He was not simply of a different ethnicity than most of them, he was of a different species. There were vast divides of education and experience between Ortega and me, but we were at least of the same genus.
“Vicky didn’t kill Pete,” I told him as he munched a homemade taco of chorizo fried with eggs and potatoes. “Pete’s cousin Butch is the murderer. Why is she protecting him?”
He chewed and swallowed deliberatively. “How do you know this?”
“Please, Reverend, there’s no time. Unless I get the whole story by Friday, she’ll go to prison and her husband’s murderer will go free.”
“Her sacrifice is not for him, it is for her son.”
“I don’t understand. What does Angel have to do with this?”
“This man, Butch. After he killed her husband, he told her if she went to the police he would come back and kill Angel, too. His own son.”
I don’t know which bit of information stunned me more. “Angel is Butch’s son?”
“Vicky told me that when Pete went to jail for some little crime, he asked Butch to take care of her for him. Butch tried to turn her into a prostitute and he made her sleep with him. She became pregnant with Angel.”
“So Pete must have known.”
He shook his head. “He only knew Angel was not his son. She told him that she had been raped, but would not tell him who did it.”
“Was she afraid he would go after Butch?”
“She was more afraid of Butch. He is an evil person, Señor Rios. A man who would threaten to kill his own son.”
“So she pled guilty to protect Angel from Butch.”
“To save his life.”
“Does Angel know who his father is?”
