by Alfredo Vea
All of them looked on helplessly, transfixed by horror as the young man slowly raised the ugly weapon to eye level, aimed at the pretty woman’s face, then fired a single shot into her head. One sobbing witness said that the killer had pulled a nylon stocking over his face, but she was sure that she saw him smile as the victim dropped to one knee, then onto her back.
For a few moments the gunshot stopped every meal within ear-shot. Mothers in the Potrero projects ran to their babies’ rooms to make sure they were still breathing. Winos on the sidewalk felt the perimeters of their own benumbed bodies for a wound. Though dozens saw what happened after the first gunshot, only seven would eventually come forward.
All of them were doubly shocked when they saw the small Asian woman come running at full speed, screaming as she appeared from the southwest corner of the block. She was barefoot and her long black hair was trailing behind her like a flag. None of the petrified witnesses could decipher her screams, but all heard two distinct words shouted over and over again at the top of her lungs.
“I think it was something like ‘tan lens,’ ” said one shivering witness. “Tan lens. Foreign words, probably gook words.”
“No, it was more like ‘ten lands,’ ” said another who dabbed her eyes with a small towel.
They told the officers that she had headed in a straight line, directly toward the woman who was bleeding to death beneath the telephone. Those who gave statements said that she seemed to ignore the man with the gun, that she must have seen him aiming it right at her head as she ran. He was standing no more than ten feet from the body.
“She run past him like he wasn’t there. I ain’t never seen the like,” said a man who lived above the nature-food store. “She run up to where the other lady was and she threw herself right on top of her. She didn’t care spit about that man and his bullets.”
Four stunned witnesses reported that the dying woman had slowly lifted her arms from the sidewalk and thrown them around the Asian woman. Two of the four stated that the dying woman had been moving her mouth as though she was saying something to her friend. All of the seven who came forward to give statements said that the gunman had walked up even closer to the women, taken careful aim, and fired into the back of the smaller woman. The flash from the muzzle had lit up the dark street. Some said that it had lit up the low clouds overhead, turning the world a ghastly yellow. Both victims had jerked for a few moments, then gone still.
“Never seen nothin’ so cold as that,” said a sad widow who lived in a third-floor studio. “Nothin’ cold as that.”
The young gunman had then run into the middle of the street and brazenly pointed his gun at all the faces that were framed by window shades and curtains and were backlit by lights that had once presided over a peaceful dinner. The eyewitnesses had ducked or receded into their homes. Some had turned off their lights and returned to their windows, while some had gone back to their darkened, cooling meals. Others who had seen the horrible acts of savagery in their street would not eat for days.
All the witnesses would agree on one thing: that someone had screamed a single name into the night air: “Calvin!” Those who had returned to their vantage points saw another young man step from the blackness of shadows, thirty or forty feet away from the phone booth. Loud words had been passed between the gunman and his accomplice, then the second boy had taken the gun, held it in front of himself for a moment, and run off toward the hill that rose up behind the Amazon Luncheonette. The shooter had followed at a slower pace, his frigid eyes turned toward the two women lying on the sidewalk. One witness swore that the one called Calvin had pulled the trigger. This same witness swore that someone had called out the word “forever.”
Two of the witnesses recognized the shorter boy. One witness knew his mother. He had certainly been an accomplice, nothing less. A single witness stated that she had seen a third man kneeling near the bodies in the time between the killers’ escape and the arrival of the police. He had been an older man, not a boy. When pressed for a description of this man, she could give none, and she soon began to doubt in public that she had seen him at all. In truth, she knew exactly who he was.
Few people on Potrero Hill would finish their dinner while the street outside was glutted with idling ambulances and police cars. For long hours on end, the night air on the hill would be stunned senseless by the rude noise of radios and the intrusive glare of spinning and flashing lights. The unnatural, ghastly white of flashbulbs would push the night away for instant after time-freezing instant. Chalk marks would circle bodies and expended casings. A perimeter would be created, using yards of yellow plastic tape. A little boy would point excitedly toward Persephone’s panties beneath a car.
The street would fill with spectators who would crowd together for comfort, to gasp and gossip at the ghastly amount of blood at the scene, and at the police department’s clumsy attempts to separate the embracing women. Some of the wiser spectators would smile discreetly and nod knowingly between themselves that the inseparable women were lesbians. Didn’t their last mortal acts on earth prove it?
“Stone lesbians.”
“Loin-lickin’ lezbins.”
Children would climb to the nearby roofs to watch as the chief medical examiner and his assistant finally arrived to survey the scene and to remove the bodies. They too would struggle with the bodies for a while, then give up and place them both on a single gurney. A trail of lemon grass and blood would lead to the ambulance.
Gloved fingers would sift and comb rudely through the Amazon Luncheonette for shards and scraps of physical evidence. Wooden boxes of yellow onions and African peppers would be shoved aside. Bottles of spices would be knocked over and spilled. A barrel full of nuóc mám would be upended. The sweet, pungent scent would fill the neighborhood for weeks. A young police officer would drop the photographs of two soldiers into an evidence bag. The glass that had once protected the photos would be swept into a corner. The night’s proceeds from the sale of sauce would follow the photos into the bag. A Catholic Bible written in Vietnamese would be placed in a manila envelope.
There were other strange items on the floor that had probably been pulled down from the wall or swept from the top of the vanity: a melted Chinese watch, some melted glasses, and a purple heart, among many other things. Rather than ask which items might be of importance, the young cop dumped it all into the evidence bag. From the new glass front door of the Amazon Luncheonette, the fingerprint technician would lift two perfect sets of prints, palms and all. On the sidewalk in front of the luncheonette was an empty pot and a lid with even more usable latents. The light of morning would see a wide band of yellow tape drawn across the front door like a banner across a wreath.
No one on the hill would ever admit it, but in their heart of hearts they deeply resented the terrible death of the Amazon women. Random killings and drive-by shootings over in the housing projects were one thing. They usually involved stupefied drug addicts and rough squads of remorseless, fatherless children—tiny mercenaries who had accepted the risk. They were acceptable losses. But these two women were valiant warriors who had armed themselves against gossips, braced themselves against liars, and girded their loins to do battle with a male world. They had carefully surrounded themselves with ambitious plans and used their shared female strength to fight off every mean stare and unkind remark. The pathway to their door had been mined with aspirations.
In their most secret hearts, some people on the hill began to resent the women themselves. They whispered among themselves that Persephone Flyer and Mai Adrong had reached too high. They had overreached. The women had erected an amazing fortification to fend off attacks of loneliness, pessimism, and failure.
“You can’t tempt God like that,” they said. “You can’t raise a temple that high.”
“Fire from heaven will strike you down,” said an old retired minister. “His fire will strike you down.”
Theirs had been a castle. All the local serfs could build their home
s next to it, find comfort in its presence. Yet this grand, imposing fortress had been so easily breached. the people on the hill would shiver for months at the very thought of the two lovely women, torn and sundered by a mysterious God. They would avert their eyes whenever they passed by the Amazon Luncheonette. They would shoo away the memory the way they shooed away a house cat that has brought home a suffering bird.
“Rock breaks scissors,” the dumbfounded would say. “Stupid kills beautiful.”
“You see”—a mother would wave a finger at her two young daughters—“you can’t go getting above your raising. You can’t go being what you ain’t.”
No one on the hill would admit it, but what they resented was the death of hope.
“There is evidence of trauma about the vaginal opening of Jane Doe 36. I note some tearing and a small laceration just above the perineum. There is marked swelling and redness of both the labia majora and minora. I see no evidence of semen or any other fluid; however, I am swabbing the vault now for testing. ”
After a few minutes of labeling plastic bags, the chief examiner returned to his microphone to sum up.
“Evidence of sexual assault is present. Cause of death: penetrating gunshot wound to the head. Conclusion: homicide by criminal agency. ”
The chief examiner turned off the overhead light and the microphone and mechanically removed his gloves and mask. He used his lab coat to wipe his brow. This had not been a good day. He had shared a secret with someone whom he had never even bothered to know, and the fact embarrassed him. On days like this, his days in the military seemed idyllic. As captain of the graves detail in Da Nang, he had gone for whole months at a time without speaking with a subordinate.
He reached into a cabinet and pulled out a large tube of Super Glue that his assistant would use to close all the openings and replace all the reflected body parts on both cadavers. The mortician would do the rest, unless, of course, there was to be a cremation.
“There is no evidence of sexual assault in or about the vaginal vault of Jane Doe 37. ”
The assistant turned off the microphone at his station. After he had weighed the brain and entered its weight on his protocol, a thought had suddenly occurred to him. “You know,” he said in a strange tone, “consciousness is a weird thing. People who are blind, deaf, and dumb are most certainly conscious. There is self-awareness even when physical sensation ceases. Even dreamers with no external stimuli are aware of themselves as an embodied being.”
It was a continuation of an ongoing conversation he’d been having with the chief examiner. It was always a very one-sided conversation. The chief medical examiner wasn’t much for small talk.
“I’ve read somewhere that the basic level of self-awareness might be sustained by as few as five neurons firing in harmony within the cortex or the corticothalamic net.” He looked closely at the folds of the brain as he spoke.
“Out of billions, just five neurons are enough to keep the pilot light on! Is that what conscious life is, just five harmonizing sparks? Is it possible they could be listening? Could they be watching us cut them up?”
The assistant looked around for a response, but the chief medical examiner had already discarded his gloves and left the room. He was on his way to the parking lot and dreading the drive home. His wife would he sitting in the front room, waiting up for him. He had heard the assistant’s question, but he had long ago given up considering such foolish things.
“Hell, ten synchronous neurons could be an entire dream, a whole universe! She could be dreaming right now,” the assistant said to no one. “Their spirits could be searching for each other, maybe even linking up.” He heard his own voice coming back to him again and again as he looked down at Jane Doe number 37 and her lover. Before leaving the room he made his final entry:
“The heart weighs two hundred eighty-three grams.”
Even as he wrote, he realized with a sudden rush of terror that this career would stalk him; it would take careful aim at his native curiosity, his romanticism, his passion. For the first time in his life, he felt the full weight of his own heart. In time even his wife’s lovely ears would become unremarkable.
“They both could be dreaming right now.”
2
the house of toast
Down deep in the restricted bowels of the Hall of Justice a small windowless cafeteria rang with sharp laughter. It was not the blithe, easygoing talcum and Rolex mirth of manicured civil lawyers that was swirled over heaps of greasy chow mein and between heated steam tables filled with glistening fried rice and orange-tinged meat-loaf. Nor was it the modest giggle, the discreet holy titter and righteous snickering of newly ordained assistant district attorneys that caused the overhead lamps and the menu board to shiver.
It was icy gallows humor, foxhole laughter soaked with dolor and with the great relief that remains when hours and days of mental trauma are now only harmless memories, though still very painful ones. It was the numbed laughter of wary men and women who know that a recurring danger has passed … for the moment. This kind of solemn mirth did not occur very often. It was a periodic ritual with a liturgy that included obsessive declarations of worry, grief, and panic and an occasional word of joy. This rite of laughter was a rhythmic purging, a monthly concurrence evolved over time to match the phases of the moon, much as when the menstrual periods of a group of close female friends have slowly become synchronized.
More often than not, defense lawyers met in this cafeteria to grumble about pro-prosecution judges, to wait nervously for jury verdicts, or to swig down cups of acrid caffeine and to bounce questions off the mind of a peer.
“What will the jury think about these facts? My client is one of five Mexican guys arrested in a 1954 Nash Rambler parked behind the Sheraton Palace Hotel at three in the morning.”
“There’s probable cause to arrest right there,” interjected a voice.
“Suppose each one of the suspects had a flashlight, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver in his pocket. Further suppose that one of the windows at the loading dock had been broken but nothing was taken. No prints were lifted from the glass or the sill. It’s all circumstantial, right?”
But periodically, something more was called for. An organic imperative demanded ceremony: a formal gathering of warriors and a holy, saturnalian festival of sardonic humor. It was a profound act of ritual purification, an act of mending. It was incantatory, a precious rite of common healing. These war stories always began with the defense attorney’s preamble: “I once had this guy.”
“I once had this guy, a fifty-year-old child molester who woke up one morning believing that a ghost was trying to rape him. This guy was so terrified of being sodomized by this ghost that he came to court with his left hand down the back of his pants and his thumb jammed right up into his asshole. I can still see him now,” said the laughing lawyer, “bouncing around the courtroom like a paranoid jumping bean, making sure his back was never turned toward the spirit world.” The speaker shook his head at the memory. “He was all right until some smartass bailiff told him that a pervert ghost could poke him right through the wall. When my boy heard that, his tiny mind just snapped in two. Within twenty-four hours he was on the bus to Atascadero State Hospital. Can you imagine that bus ride? Three hundred miles, two cheeseburgers, a Coke, and hour after hour of invisible sodomy.”
“That’s nothing,” said Newton Lam, with a tone of mock disdain. The Chinese lawyer laughed as he wiped dribbles of coffee from his chin. “I once had this guy who decided to break into a house up on Pacific Heights.” The laughter around him subsided as another story began to unfold. “One of those huge, thirty-room mansions near upper Broadway. Anyway, this guy had five prior residential burglary convictions, all hot prowls—you know, the husband and wife asleep in the next room. So here he was, a five-time loser on the second-floor landing of a mansion, breaking the antique latch on a set of imported French windows. If he gets caught this time, it’s a mandatory life sentence.
/> “Now, when I first saw the initial police report, I thought that the owner of the mansion was a real tightwad, because he had neglected to install burglar alarms on the second floor; all of the sensors and magnetic switches were down on street level. The alarm company he hired hadn’t installed motion detectors. I decided at the time that he had figured no one was going to bother with climbing up to the second floor. I guess he’d never heard of a second-story man.
“So my boy is feeling real good about this job. He’s cased the place thoroughly and he knows the alarm system is only on the ground floor and he knows that there’s no guard dog on the premises. He’s checked out that, too. He looks around for a dog run and he lifts the lids on the garbage cans. There were no sacks of dog food anywhere, just a big pile of bloody butcher paper near the service entrance. This time no one is going to catch him. He could get in and get out in ten minutes, go sell the stuff to a fence, buy some heroin, and still have enough time to see his parole officer in the morning for his monthly urine test.”
Cigarettes were snuffed out and coffee spoons were stilled as bodies leaned forward to listen closer.
“So he cracks open the window and steps inside. Now my boy is smiling from ear to ear, because the place is pitch black and quiet as a church. There are no lasers, no pressure sensors. This job is gonna be a cakewalk. But when he turns his flashlight on, what do you think he sees?”
No one responded—not even a shrug was ventured. There was anticipation in every lawyer’s face, but no attempt to hazard a guess. Over time, each of them had learned better. Irony is delicious and distasteful, soft and savage. Irony is not to be trifled with. Its very essence was that it could never be predicted.
