Broken Saint, The (12 page)

Chapter 18

My eyes scanned the room. “No computer?”

Mark Gerson shook his head. “There’s a few
computers in the Rec Room. That’s what they call it.” He rolled his eyes. He
looked a lot better than he did when we talked with him the first time. Having
showered and washed his hair was a big part of that.

“Internet access?” Ryan said.

Mark Gerson shook his head.

Ryan smiled sadly. “Guess they want you to be able
to write letters and seal them in envelopes.” We were in Mark’s room at New
Beginnings.

Mark said, “This is total bullshit. I have no idea
what they want me to be able to do.”

“How’re you feeling?” Ryan sat on the wooden chair
that went with the small desk.

“How’m I feeling? Tired, lethargic, depressed,
demoralized, fuzzy. Did I mention bored out of my fuckin’ skull?”

“So they’ve got you back on your meds.”

“That’s mostly what this place is about. It’s
great, if you like people sticking their fingers in your mouth to make sure you
swallow the damn pills. But you wouldn’t know about that.”

“I don’t have schizophrenia.” Ryan was wearing a
grim expression. “One of my sisters has it.”

“She locked up?” Mark gestured with his hand,
taking in the room, which had a single bed, a writing desk, a soft chair, and
an adjoining bathroom. Some of the business at New Beginnings was short-term
stays for people like Mark, but they made most of their money doing drug and
alcohol rehab for non-violent offenders. There were cameras all over the place.
Semi-lockdown.

“No,” Ryan said. “She’s married. She has a family.
It goes up and down. But she controls it.” I was standing off to the side, leaning
on the windowsill, letting Ryan run the interview.

Since Ryan has about a dozen siblings, it’s
technically possible he has a schizo sister. But I wasn’t buying it. Anytime
we’re interviewing someone who’s screwed up, Ryan has a sister with the same
thing. Just off the top of my head, I remember sisters with
obsessive-compulsive disorder, Asperger’s, bipolar disorder, anorexia, seasonal
affective disorder, Tourette Syndrome, ADHD, and bulimia. Plus, one sister’s a
meth head and another has four personalities.

Once, I mentioned to an autistic suspect that my
sister was autistic, which happens to be true. She disappeared when I was in
high school. We haven’t seen her since. The autistic guy said to me, “You’re
full of shit. Fuck you,” then turned away like I didn’t exist.

Ryan said, “We want to talk with you about
Maricel.”

Mark Gerson was sitting on his bed, hunched over,
his elbows on his thighs. “Go ahead,” he said, without looking up to make eye
contact.

“When we spoke with you before,” Ryan said, “at
the gaming store, you told us she was brought up in an LDS orphanage, right?”

“Yeah.”

“That was good information. We checked it out. You
were right. We want to thank you for that.”

Mark Gerson raised his head to look at Ryan, then shrugged
his shoulders. I think he was a pretty smart kid. He looked a little annoyed at
getting complimented for telling the truth, but he nodded to acknowledge it. He
must’ve been so tired of getting reamed out for all the lies he’s told, he’d
take any praise that someone would toss him.

Ryan said, “Were you two close?”

“Last few months, I’ve been crashing with friends
a lot, so I wasn’t home all that much. Before that, yeah, I guess we were
close.” He was silent a moment. I could see the wheels turning. “‘Close’ being
a kind of relative word.”

“Tell us about her.”

“She was quiet. Didn’t have a lot of friends, you
know, growing up the way she did. She’d hold back, let you show yourself first.
Sometimes it came across as obnoxious or bitchy, but that was just on the
outside. She was more afraid. Underneath everything, I mean.”

“How did Maricel get along with your father?”

“Dad didn’t try to interfere much with her. He’s real
big on
listening
.” Mark made a set of air quotes around that last word. “You
know, ‘I’m always here for you,’” Mark said, in a pompous, dorky voice, the
kind the black comedians use when they rip white guys. “But he treated her like
an adult. Guess that’s the role he plays at the university. Treat the students
like they’re adults. He says really lame shit like, ‘The kids are on a
wonderful journey of discovery.’ But he really believes it, even though he
knows some of them are just fuck-ups. I mean, he has to know that, right? He
can see their transcripts on the fuckin’ screen.”

Mark looked like he was getting agitated. I could
see how, even when he was on his meds, he had to struggle to stay on top of it.

“And how did Maricel respond to him?” Ryan said.

“She was okay with him. Because he didn’t get in
her face. I think she appreciated that. Like I said, she was scared. Anyone
who’d try to get close to her, she’d pull back.”

“Did you see any special bond between her and your
father?”

Mark Gerson shook his head. “Nothing like that.
Least that I could see.”

“How did your dad react when she started going out
with Hector Cruz?”

“I heard him and my mom talking about it. A little
bit tense. You know, through the walls.”

“They didn’t agree on what to do about it?”

“My mom was more worried about it. Her voice kind
of goes up when she’s stressed, which is, like, most of the time. I could tell
it was a big thing when Maricel started staying out nights. Dad was all, ‘I
understand how it’s a major step, but the boy seems polite and well brought up,
and we’re living in a different world today.’ I wouldn’t say he was for it, but
he understood that you can’t tell a college girl not to get laid. He’s always, ‘Our
role is to model the kind of behavior we think is best for her.’ Which I guess would
mean Maricel’s supposed to be crying most of the time and running out of the
room, while he stares at the floor, not knowing what the fuck just hit him.” Mark’s
eyes drifted off over Ryan’s shoulder.

Then he looked at Ryan and started talking again.
“It’s not like Maricel was his daughter. He was a lot stricter with my sister
before she went off to college.”

“He wasn’t concerned that Hector wasn’t a college
guy?” Ryan said.

“‘Work is a blessing from God,’” Mark said in his
dorky white-guy voice.

“How do you think her relationship with Hector was
going?”

“Not really sure. I wasn’t, like, her confidante.
Especially the last month or so.”

“Did the two of them spend much time at your
house?”

“No. If he got trapped when he came to the door,
he’d have to do the handshake thing. Hector’s face looked like he was grabbing
a snake. Maricel would always have an excuse for getting the fuck out of there as
soon as possible.”

Ryan nodded. “Mark, did you ever see yourself as
maybe becoming Maricel’s boyfriend?”

Mark Gerson looked down at the floor, silent for a
few moments. I leaned my head down a little bit to get a better look. He was
blushing. “Hector is, like, ten years older than me. And he’s got his own
place. And you’ve seen him, right? He looks like a man.”

“Do you think your schizophrenia put her off?”

“I don’t think so. Everyone has something, she
said to me once. I think she saw me like a little brother. Harmless. My disease
was … I don’t know. She saw me as broken, like her, so I didn’t scare her, but
I didn’t appeal to her in that way, that was real clear. I never said anything
to her about, you know, anything like that.”

Ryan nodded his head and stood up. “You know how
long you’re going to be here?”

“They don’t tell me shit, but I think it’s
day-to-day. Maybe till the end of the week.”

“Have you been here before?”

He nodded. “They know me.”

“Your parents stop by?”

“My mom’s here a lot during the day. Dad stops by
for a little while at night.”

“They have you do counseling here?”

“Some, but not much. It’s mostly about making sure
I don’t cheek the meds.”

“All right, Mark,” Ryan said. “Thanks for the
information.”

Mark Gerson nodded and we left.

The place was busy, with nurses and attendants
walking quietly through the halls. As we walked down the hall toward the main
entrance, I could see patients in their rooms. They weren’t scary looking. No
zombies. They weren’t in straitjackets or those horrible gowns with their asses
hanging out. They were wearing normal clothes. But a lot of them looked like
they were deep in thought, just staring straight at the wall, or maybe they
weren’t thinking at all. Most of them were young, under thirty, which was kind
of depressing: young people fucking themselves up, even when they don’t have a
real disease, which Mark Gerson did.

As we drove back to headquarters, I said to Ryan,
“You didn’t tell me you had a sister with schizophrenia.”

Ryan smiled. “I don’t.”

“I see,” I said, nodding. “So, it’s just like I
said, right? You’re alive, you lie.”

“I like to see it more as a technique I use during
interviews.” He turned to me. “You know: empathizing to put the person at ease.”

The sun was up high, and the sky was taking a
break from its usual steel gray. I looked at the thermometer on the dash:
thirty-three. When I used to live in LA, I’d bundle myself in a coat when it
dipped below fifty. Now, if I can feel my toes, I’m good.

“So what did you get from the calm, medicated Mark
Gerson?”

“Well,” Ryan said, “not sure how calm he was, but I’d
start with he didn’t sin with our Heavenly Mother.”

I laughed. “Agree. But he wanted to sin with
Maricel, right?”

“Oh, yeah. But he never did.”

“So how’d he get from Maricel blew him off to he
killed God’s wife?”

“The way I see it,” Ryan said, “he was real upset
when Maricel started going out with Hector—”

“Especially when she didn’t come home at night,” I
said.

Ryan smiled. “Yeah, I think Mark would consider
that an important aspect.”

“Okay, that makes Maricel a fallen woman. That’s
how your religion would see that?”

“That’s right. We’re big on pre-marital chastity.
Although, to be perfectly honest with you—”

“Guy like you, lies about his sisters, I’m
supposed to believe anything you say?”

“To be perfectly honest with you, we’re better at
not drinking liquor and caffeine than we are at chastity.”

“Well, goodness gracious, Brother Miner. I’m
shocked—”

“Which means that an emotionally immature kid like
Mark can’t process Maricel as a sinner, so he takes it on himself. He’s the
sinner.”

“It’s not like he wants to kill anyone,” I said. “He
just wants to screw her. Why not just see himself as a fornicator?”

“A romantic kid like Mark can’t look at himself
rationally. He has to up the emotional ante. He can’t be just a fornicator. He
has to be the ultimate sinner. He’s a murderer.”

“And his victim is the most important woman: the
wife of God.”

“That’s how I see it,” Ryan said. “The kid’s not only
a schizophrenic, he’s also a horny, delusional eighteen-year old.”

“A horny delusional eighteen-year old carrying
around a couple tons of religious repression and guilt.”

“Absolutely,” Ryan said, giving me one of his big
grins. “I never had that problem, of course, because I am the master of all my
desires. But I’ve heard that some weaker mortals have those problems.”

“So, you can’t get laid, right?”

“Can’t get laid.”

“And you can’t jerk off?”

“Can’t jerk off.”

“So what the hell are you supposed to do?”

Ryan laughed. “I told you, Karen. You’re supposed
to repress your desires. Like I did.”

“You’re completely full of shit, you know?”

“I’ve got a sister completely full of shit.”

From what I could figure out about Ryan, he was
serious about his religion, but he didn’t have a stick up his ass, if you get
the distinction. Which is good, because I don’t think I could work with him if
he did. I don’t care what kind of voodoo he’s into, as long as he understands
how a normal person might be into some other kind of voodoo.

I pulled into the entrance at headquarters,
followed the driveway along the side of the building, and parked near the rear
entrance.

Getting out of the cruiser, I said, “You notice
Mark said Maricel was not Dad’s daughter?”

“Which means either Maricel was not Dad’s
daughter—”

“Or Maricel didn’t know she was Dad’s daughter—” I
said.

“Or she knew it and didn’t tell Mark—”

“Or she told him and he couldn’t process it.”

Ryan gave me a big smile. “This is fun, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s a fucking blast.”

Chapter 19

“Want to go outside and watch the show?” Ryan said.

“I’d rather not. If he sees us there, he could try
to bait us.” Since we hadn’t even bent any regs so far with Hector Cruz, I
wasn’t afraid his lawyer would box us in, but it was pretty clear he was all
about publicity, and I wanted to do what I could to block him.

“Let me see if it’s going to be on TV live.” Ryan
was on his computer, looking at the four network sites.

“I doubt it,” I said. “He set it up for four so
that it’d be ready for the five o’clock news, but I don’t see any station
breaking into their regular schedule to air it.”

“I got an idea: we can watch it from here on the
CCTV security camera. We might be able to get an audio feed off a radio
station.”

“All right, good,” I said. “I’ll tell the chief.”

Ryan, the chief, and I gathered in his office and
sat in the upholstered chairs facing the desk. He swiveled his big screen
around so we could see the CCTV feed. Ryan gave him a station for a radio feed.

Because of the camera angle, we weren’t going to
be able to see Samosa’s face. He was already there, carrying a clipboard and
talking real close with another guy, a beefier Hispanic guy, also in a suit.
Even without the hundred pounds’ weight difference, it would be easy to tell
the two apart. Samosa was Armani; the big guy, J.C. Penney.

The four network satellite uplink trucks were
parked out front of headquarters, adjusting their big dish antennas. I
recognized the four sets of network Barbies and Kens, with their camera crews.
But there were only about a half-dozen spectators. Four were geezers with
leashed dogs who seemed to be attracted to the satellite trucks rather than the
miscarriage of justice that Raul Samosa was going to expose.

A minute after four o’clock, Samosa began talking into
a small cluster of mikes set up on a portable podium provided by one of the
news teams. “Ladies and gentleman, my name is Raul Samosa. I am the president
of the Montana Hispanic Alliance, and I want to thank you all for coming out on
this beautiful sunny winter afternoon. My message to you today, however, is not
beautiful and sunny. It is anything but beautiful and sunny.”

The spectators were shuffling around, not paying
Samosa all that much attention. Part of that might have been that they didn’t
know who the hell he was, or what the hell the Montana Hispanic Alliance was.
If he’d wanted to get their attention, he should’ve introduced himself as the
lawyer for the Latin Vice Lords.

“As you know, late Sunday night, a twenty-two-year-old
student named Maricel Salizar was brutally murdered here in Rawlings. And I’d
like to begin by asking you to join me in a moment of silence in Ms. Salizar’s
memory.”

“He’s a pious son of a bitch, isn’t he?” I didn’t
feel the need to join him in the moment of silence. Ryan and the chief didn’t
say anything. They don’t know how to watch TV.

“As we might have expected, the Rawlings Police
Department has spent the last three days harassing a single suspect—”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “We’ve been harassing three
or four suspects.”

“Quiet,” the chief said. It was like watching TV
with my ex-husband.

“Is that because they have solid evidence leading
them to that suspect? No. Is it because they have any evidence at all? No. Why
have they been harassing this suspect? When I tell you his name, you will know
the answer. His name,” he said, pausing for effect, “is Hector Cruz. The
Rawlings Police Department has been hounding Cruz because he fits the racial
profile for this crime. Hector Cruz is Hispanic. And Hector Cruz is uneducated.
And Hector Cruz is poor.

“Hector Cruz works as a janitor at Central Montana
State University. And that is why the police can dare to persecute him. Hector
Cruz does not have a PhD and a cushy nine-month teaching job. No, Hector Cruz
is in charge of the toilets. That’s right. He is in charge of making sure the
toilets are clean.

“And because of the police harassment, he won’t be
able to bring home his full pay of eight dollars and fifty-two cents an hour.
Because the police department has interrupted his work repeatedly this week.
Why? Because he knew Maricel Salizar, the student who was murdered Sunday
night.”

“Come on,” I said. “‘Because he knew Maricel
Salizar’?” I turned to Ryan. “Write this shit down,” I said to him, but he
already was doing it.

“Have they charged Hector Cruz with any crime? Of
course not. Because they know—they
know
—that he had nothing to do with
the death of that student. But he is Hispanic. And because he cleans toilets
for a living, he must have done it.

“So they insist on searching his trailer—the
trailer that he rents for one-hundred-and-twenty-five dollars a month, the
trailer with holes in the floor, where the door doesn’t even shut tight—they
want to search that trailer, so they can find some evidence, so they can
make
sure
they find some evidence, to link Hector Cruz to a crime he did not
commit. And they want to search his car—his 1994 Dodge Neon, which he bought
for twelve-hundred dollars—for evidence linking him to a crime he did not
commit.”

I was standing up at this point. I’m not as cool
as Ryan and the chief, who can sit there, all calm, thinking about what this
shithead was saying. A guy accuses me of planting evidence, I get pissed.

“But they are not going to do it. No, they are not
going to succeed. Because this is not Arizona, where you can be pulled over and
interrogated by the police for the crime of Driving While Hispanic. No, this is
not Alabama, or Indiana, or Georgia, or Utah, all states that have passed
racial profiling laws that made it legal—
legal
—to search and seize
property of Hispanics, in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United
States Constitution.”

Then Samosa started going national, doing a minute
or two on the bad shit that was happening in Alabama, where cops can pull over
Hispanics if they suspect they don’t have papers or are a terror threat. About
how you couldn’t find a cop in Alabama who
doesn’t
suspect every
Hispanic of being illegal,
et cetera
.

“Hey, asshole, you’re in Montana, remember?” I
said.

The chief turned to me and shushed me. He actually
shushed me.

Then Samosa went on about how he’s going to
prevent us from racially profiling his guy by putting a posse on him 24/7—he
didn’t say it was going to be the Latin Vice Lords—so if a cop tries to do
something wrong it’ll all be on video.

He went on about some case in Rochester, New York,
where the cops arrested a woman who’d used her camera phone to record them
doing a beatdown on a black man on the street in front of her house. They told
her to stop recording. She said she had every right to record what goes on in
the street. They told her to go inside. She refused. They arrested her.

I guess the link to Hector Cruz was the bit about
the video. We’re going to use video to record the truth, and the truth shall
set us free. Then Samosa paused before his big finish, a few lines about how
we’re going to stick real close to Hector, “until the Rawlings Police Department
decides that it might be a better idea to try to find whoever killed Maricel
Salizar—and leave Hector Cruz alone.”

Seeing as Ryan and I are spending eight hours a
day trying to do just that, this last line pissed me off as much as the crack
about us planting evidence. I turned to the chief. “Can we get that search
order now?”

He looked at me, then shook his head.

“Seriously,” I said, “everything that scumbag just
said is a crock. You know it. Ryan and I know it. Are we supposed to not look
at Cruz—who has no alibi, who was sleeping with Maricel, whose gang colors were
found on her body—because he’s Hispanic?”

“Are you done?” the Chief said.

“For the moment,” I said, my voice louder than it
should have been. The headache I’d brought to work this morning was thumping
hard.

“We’re not putting in for the search warrant—not
because of Samosa but because we don’t have probable cause. When you get me
probable cause, I’ll sign off on it.”

“Are you going to issue a statement in response to
Samosa?”

“Yes, I’ll have it ready to go with the news
tonight at five,” he said, standing up, “if that will do it for now.”

“No, chief, that will not do it for now.”

He looked at me hard. I hadn’t meant it to come
out like that, but sometimes my brain doesn’t keep up with my mouth. Now was
about the time for the chief to start lecturing me about insubordination.

But all he said was, “Well, what do you want to
say?”

“He’s playing us, Chief.”

“No, Karen, he’s
trying
to play us.”

I shook my head. “Not sure I see the difference.”

“The difference,” the chief said, shifting his
weight, “is that he’s trying to get us to react to his taunts. But we’re not
going to.”

“Not how I see it,” I said. “I don’t give a shit
that he insults us, saying we wanna plant evidence, crap like that. He’s
playing us by saying he’s gonna put his own guys on Hector 24/7 and record
everything. Because now
we’re
not gonna be on him. Samosa knows Hector
is guilty, and he’s intimidating us into not looking hard at him. And Hector’s
gonna walk because we don’t want Samosa to be posting videos on YouTube showing
us harassing his client.”

The chief scratched at his chin. “I hear what
you’re saying, Karen. But this is what you need to understand about me. I don’t
give a damn about how many press conferences Samosa holds. And I don’t give a
damn about how many videos of the Rawlings Police Department he puts online.
What I
do
give a damn about is what those videos show. If they show
Rawlings police personnel carrying out their legitimate duties—by the book—I’m
happy. If they show us messing up, I’m unhappy. Because I don’t want us to mess
up.”

“But don’t you see? He’s making it so we’re not
gonna go after Hector.”

“No, I don’t see that at all,” the chief said. “I
understand what he’s doing. It’s part of the narrative. We profile Hector
because he’s Hispanic. We’re cops, so we’re anti-immigrant, we’re
anti-Hispanic, we’re anti-poor, whatever. So the next time we want to take down
one of the Vice Lords, we’ll think twice about it because he’ll spin it as
another instance of racial profiling. I worked most of my career in California.
I understand how the gang lawyers spin. I understand Samosa’s profiling us. I
also
understand that a guy like Samosa can say whatever he wants, but he doesn’t get
any traction unless it’s true. Here in Montana, in particular, most people start
out on our side. We don’t have to persuade them we’re not persecuting Hector.
We just have to deprive Samosa of
the evidence
that we
are
persecuting Hector. And if we don’t persecute Hector, there
won’t be any evidence that we do.”

I shook my head. “All due respect, Chief, that’s a
nice sentiment, but the reality is he’s gonna win this one—and all the
others—if he senses that it works.”

“I agree. So your job—you and Ryan and everyone
else in the department—is to make sure it doesn’t work.”

“So, you going to okay a search warrant so we can
find the evidence so we can arrest Hector—before Samosa and his boys get rid of
it?”

“I already answered that question. Get me probable
cause.”