CHAPTER 21
By this time the police know everything, of course, everything but where Rickie is. Alex tells them all they need to know, but not about the house.
“You’re going down for murdering a cop, you punkass motherfucker!” a cop yells at him at the station, but Alex barely understands the words or registers the pain in his arms and hands restrained behind his back or anything else. He barely knows where he is.
He tells the story at the station in painful stops and starts. Of going to the electronics store with the idea of doing some damage because the owner had treated them like shit; of beating on the door with a pry bar, setting off the alarm and running through the neighborhood; of seeing the cop car and splitting up; of his trying to hide behind some low bushes next to an apartment building but being found and giving up; of sitting in the cop car and hearing the weapon discharge; and of coming on to the scene and watching in horror as the young cop slumped to the ground. Alex was stunned by the ordinariness of that, the surprise and hurt on the face draining to no expression at all. Lifelessness, the look of death and nothingness, impressed itself on his memory and terrified him. He didn’t see a serene first glimpse of the afterlife on the young officer’s face. No, just life become not life, a human being become a body.
The image haunts him as he sits in cuffs in the back seat of the cop car on the way to the station, and during the booking process when he sits on a hard blue plastic chair.
The sirens and lights and pounding on the door waken Berta. When she opens it, four heavily armed police in riot gear brush by her with rifles pointed and yelling something in anger and fear that she doesn’t understand. Another one rushes her out of the house and stands in front of her and demands Rickie, something about Rickie, something about a policeman. She repeats over and over, “No entiendo. Dime…no entiendo. Ay, Dios mío,” she says, making the sign of the Cross, “Tengo que llamarle por teléfono a mi’ jo.” She stands in the yard in her old nightgown, ashamed to be outside like this, patting her hair distractedly, waiting for a Spanish-speaking officer. She reaches for her Rosary in her apron pocket, but, of course, she is not wearing her apron this time of night; the Rosary is on her dresser. Two officers lead her back inside when they are sure that Rickie is not there. They allow her to get her robe and her Rosary from her bedroom; she finds the paper Ricardo has written his number on.
“I don’t know,” she says after Ricardo finally answers. “They say too many things so fast. They yell at me, Ricardo, like I have done something wrong. I do not understand. It is something about Junior shooting a policeman.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Let me talk to them, ‘Amá,” he says to her.
“Please. Explain my son,” she asks in English and hands the officer the phone.
She watches as the officer speaks to Ricardo in English, but she cannot understand, particularly when the officer catches her watching him and turns away from her. When he is finished speaking, the officer motions for her to sit on the couch. Then he gives her the phone. He stands above her as she hears what has taken place, but she makes no outburst. She just stares blankly, shaking her head slightly, as though looking into the heart of a vastly larger unknown.
“Do you understand, ‘Amá?” Ricardo asks. She nods her head that she does, but does not speak. “Are you all right? I’ll call Bill and Daisy to come be with you. I’m coming down right now. I’ll be there soon.”
Bill and Daisy are there within half an hour. Daisy sits with her grandmother and pats her hand. Bill talks quietly with the police. He watches as they pick through and examine Rickie’s belongings.
Later, her son and grandchildren sit with Berta in vigil. They don’t speak. Daisy sits next to her grandmother on the sofa. Ricardo gets a chair from the kitchen and sits across from her. Bill perches on the arm of the sofa, not looking at or speaking to his father. They all stare at their thoughts and wait for the inevitable call or knock on the door or, worse, the burst of gunfire.
Out in the neighborhood the search continues. The low-flying helicopters rattle and boom in circles with bright searchlights probing empty lots and backyards. Patrol cars rush up and down streets with sirens crying. Someone thinks the kid has been spotted near the middle school. Anyone unlucky enough to be out on the streets is detained and questioned roughly.
Grim determination spreads deep into the neighborhood like the rivers of rainwater that flow on the streets and gather in small lakes at intersections during wet winters. This killer isn’t going to get away.
Dogs strain at leashes, up alleys and through yards, glad to be out of their kennels. They pick up the scent and the excitement. Cops cluster at various checkpoints. Occasionally a siren whoops and a patrol car speeds off down Landerman or some side street.
Rickie wakes suddenly from a tortured sleep in which strange and shadowy beings run into and out of houses, some in terror, others in relentless and hulking pursuit, seeking bloody vengeance. He lifts his head and listens. Feet tread on the leaves that blanket the yard from the previous fall. The police. They know he is here. They whisper, call softly to dogs that pull their handlers forward. With fear gripping and choking him, he hears footsteps on the driveway, a boot crunching the glass from the broken window, a whispered curse, and then Rickie hears the screen door open.
He flattens himself as best he can, knowing it will not be enough. And then he remembers that he has not dragged the stepladder up with him. Only moments are left. What should he say? What can he do? His chest begins to heave in fear. He can hear them below now. The ladder scrapes on the floor, dog nails click and scrabble on the hard wood, and men whisper commands to one another. Rickie’s eyes are fixed on the hatch. He knows it will rise up, a hand with a weapon in it will precede a head with fearful, angry eyes.
“Don’t shoot!” he cries out. “I’m up here. Don’t shoot, please,” he adds. “I’m sorry.”
The cover bursts away to the side. A hand and a weapon and a helmeted head emerge from below.
“Put your hands where I can see them, you fuck. Now!”
“Don’t shoot, please. My arms are asleep. I can’t feel them.”
More of the torso emerges. The weapon and the light are extended closer to Rickie’s forehead. “Move! Let me see your hands.”
His head has been on his crossed arms. He opens and closes his hands, desperately trying to get the blood flowing again.
“You can see my hands. I don’t have nothing. You can see them,” he cries.
“Don’t tell me what I can see! Get them away from your body!”
Rickie rises up on his chest, lifting his head, hoping to be able to free an arm. He rises up on one elbow.
“Get down, kid. Get down and put your hands out where I can see them. Do it! Slowly!”
Rickie flattens himself again. It is then that his left arm betrays him. It jerks out quickly in front of him.
“No!” he cries out as he sees fear charge the officer’s eyes and the brilliant flash of light, and he hears the deafening explosion for a brief instant before light and sound and memory and life itself are scattered into the night.
And in that instant, before the bullet slams through fragile bone and explodes the soft mass behind, Rickie knows what has been bearing down on him, what threatened to run him over. It has been there his whole life; he has known it all along. Finally, it has arrived. There will be peace now. What has threatened has finally come to pass. He can relax. He has nothing to prove, nothing to be strong against. He is free and untouchable. He can be a boy again. He can laugh and cry, hold his grandfather’s rough hand and look into his eyes. They can walk together again as they had done when his grandfather discovered him asleep in the shed, and Rickie will know he is safe. He can walk with his grandmother, a little boy holding her hand and jumping in the puddles as they walk home together from school. No more worries. No more hurt, no more pain. Nothing.
CHAPTER 22
You all right? What’s going on?” a voice calls from
below.
“Got him! Got his ass! He was going for a weapon,” the officer yells.
“Come down, Becker,” a voice calls. “I want to take a look before the others get here.”
Becker recognizes the voice. The owner of it had been right behind his partner and him on the way into the house.
The only officers in the house now are members of L.A.’s elite anti-gang unit. The K-9 officers have taken the dogs outside.
Ever since its inception, the unit has been given free reign. Supervisors turn a blind eye to its questionable practices; formal inquiries, the few times they are made, are always pro forma and without any disciplinary consequences. Everything justifies bringing L.A.’s burgeoning gang violence under control. Few people ask questions.
Becker climbs down the ladder and his fellow officer brushes by him on the way up.
They all jump when another shot rings out.
“What the hell?”
“What’s going on?”
“He went for his weapon again,” the man on the ladder calls out.
“My turn,” a third officer says. “I think I know this punk.” He climbs up the ladder after the second officer comes down.
“I knew this little creep,” he calls from above. His large form blocks most of the entrance to the attic and muffles his voice. “He tags “Great White” or some such shit, like he’s a vicious shark. Well, R.I.P. Great White, you little fucker. Tag this!”
The shot rings out just before a number of other patrol cars pull up.
“C’mon down. We’re done.”
Becker finally steps outside the abandoned house when the body is wheeled into the coroner’s van. He wonders momentarily about the house, who had lived there, where they had gone. A sea of nameless brown faces populates these neighborhoods now; the people are all the same to him, unknown and interchangeable. He knows that they don’t stay long if they can afford to move elsewhere.
He looks at the facade of the house with its pagoda roof and shutters suggestive of Chinese characters, and he shakes his head at the irony of its history. The poor bastard who built it back in, what, 1910? The 1920s?—pleased to have a new house in the current style, a comfortable bungalow not far from Hollywood—what had happened to him and his family? They could never have envisioned this. What happened to the ones who have lived here since?
Becker shrugs his shoulders and looks up at the night sky expecting to see the approach of dawn, an increase of light in back of the mountains, but there is none. It is still the dead of night. Birds have begun to chatter in the trees, however, because the peaceful night has erupted in noise and bright light. The breeze continues to cool the air and rustle the leaves.
There will be a party at the apartment in Van Nuys that the members of the anti-gang unit keep secretly for themselves. After they take down a gangster or make a big bust, the officers gather at the apartment to celebrate. Tonight it will be subdued because of the dead officer, but Becker will be the center of attention. He’ll have to recount how he and his partner were right in back of the K-9 unit and found the ladder in the hallway; how he knew the situation right then and jumped on the ladder, pushed open the hatch, saw the kid’s arm move, and placed a shot dead center, right above the bridge of the nose. He’ll be high-fived and slapped on the back.
Becker finds his partner waiting for him at the car.
“Are we headed for Van Nuys?” his partner asks as they get in.
“Yeah, why not?”
“You think it’s okay? I mean, considering…?”
“We’ll be at the officer’s funeral. Did you know him?”
“No. He was a rookie. I didn’t know him.”
“Me neither. Let it go. Get in. We’ll just have a couple of beers.”
MONDAY MORNING
CHAPTER 23
In a few hours, the sky in the east begins to lighten. The neighborhood awakens and goes to work. Women wait for buses to take them to the houses south of Ventura Boulevard, or to Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood. Men go off to their jobs at Home Depot or Sears or Costco as assistant managers, cashiers, salesmen, or warehousemen, or as truck drivers, or to street corners in search of a day’s labor. Others check mowers and gardening tools in the beds of their pickups. Commercial airliners and private jets begin to roar out of the airport before the sky is fully lighted.
In another hour, as the school children begin to make their reluctant way out front doors, the story of the young cop who has been killed and of the boy who shot him and been killed himself, makes its way in quiet voices throughout the neighborhood. Everyone is incredulous at first. It doesn’t make sense. No one understands why a kid who was such a good baseball player would kill a good young cop, one of our own, maybe even from this neighborhood. Why does it happen? It’s the parents, they say. What was the kid doing out so late on a Sunday night, a school night? It’s the schools. It’s video games that make death look so easy and unreal, and music groups that record so-called songs about killing and suicide. It’s the neighborhood itself. It’s a combination of everything. It’s the times we live in, they say, and shake their heads at this latest horrible thing to happen.
The Deans at the high school quickly put in a call for grief counselors to come to the school, and they, along with others, sit through the day in circles of teenagers who stumble through a sentence or two and then fall silent. The number of kids who come to the empty classrooms to grieve surprises Wagner. Throughout the day, some adults who knew Rickie gather in the lunchroom and say in lowered voices that he was incorrigible, that this or something like it was bound to happen. Some, like Bill Phelan and a few other teachers and counselors, join the grieving teenagers and wonder if they could have done more for the boy. They speak in hushed tones about the good they saw in Rickie. Phelan recalls the assurance Rickie gave him of getting an ‘A’ in his class; Lopez says that Rickie was troubled and had started out in life as a little boy with the same hopes and dreams as anyone else. Maltrey is quiet, saying nothing about the incident of the previous Friday, just three days before. He sits with the others in mournful silence.
During the week Dennis and Tony, swollen-eyed and mournful, carry shoeboxes with a slot cut in the top and decorated with Rickie’s photo and “R.I.P. Rickie” and “We miss you, Rickie” written on them. Oscar joins them sometimes. They go from classroom to classroom, where teachers and students reach into pockets and pull out dollars and stuff them into the boxes. The secretaries and custodians and cafeteria people contribute, too. Their generosity is real and uncalculated; they know the money is for Rickie’s burial. No one blames the grandmother. People know that even a simple funeral is expensive, and the school is one of the few resources to turn to.
At the morning break and again at lunch, the boys stand on the steps leading to the auditorium. They hold a larger photo of the dead boy and collect money. Claudia stands with them in quiet gloom. Others join them; many wear baseball hats or black T-shirts with Rickie’s photo and “R.I.P. Rickie” printed on them, produced by a storefront business in the neighborhood that has experience doing this sort of thing on short notice. Other students scrawl R.I.P. on their shirts with anything that will show—marker, lipstick, even liquid whiteout. All of the students stand in gloomy groups of two or three or more. During the first few days, there is no laughter, no shouting across the quad before the bell rings. When the bell does ring to end the morning break or lunch, the students move slowly and quietly to class.
Throughout the week, the local TV stations and the Times and the Daily News run segments or print articles about the rookie cop and his family, his hopes and aspirations, and the fact that he had a good heart. They write, too, about the frightening growth of gangs in Los Angeles.
Reporters wait outside Berta’s house to interview members of the family. Ricardo refuses to speak. Bill is angry—“Three shots to the face? At close range? That’s execution. There was no need for that.” Daisy brushes by the press of reporters and news cameras on
the way into the house. She stops at the doorway and turns to face the gathering. “I don’t have anything to say about it except how sad and angry I am. I just lost a brother, his face all shot up on purpose, just another Mexican shot dead. The policeman’s family lost a son and a brother, a husband and a father. He shouldn’t have died. My brother either. What do you want me to say? It’s a needless tragedy. Maybe you should figure out why these things happen and how to stop them rather than wasting your time here. You think we have the answers? His grandmother? We don’t.”
The local TV stations carry the funeral of the fallen officer and re-play it on the evening news. The mayor and the Chief both speak of the young man’s desire to serve the community; the camera pans often to the officer’s tearful wife holding their daughter. Neither newspaper mentions Rickie’s funeral, though a reporter from the Daily News attends for a while and is surprised and disgusted by the number of people in attendance and the out-pouring of grief for a cop-killer. He writes a short piece on the service that’s cut out of respect for Officer Padilla.
The championship game is cancelled. Coach Vega shows up at Rickie’s service, but he leaves hurriedly before anyone can speak with him. He is too conflicted to speak to the media.
The man with the red hair comes forward. “I could almost swear he didn’t have a weapon in his hand. Yeah, I read that the reason they had to shoot him so many times was that he kept threatening them with Officer Padilla’s weapon. I remember the kid’s hands being empty. But everything happened so fast, I could have missed it. Mostly I remember his face, wild-eyed and scared, like a horse in a stable fire. I thought gangsters were chasing him. I didn’t know. He looked so young and scared. I can’t imagine him killing anyone, a cop particularly.”
Rickie Trujillo Page 19
