Rag and Bone (18 page)

“I already told the police.”

“You told them you shot him?”

“I had to tell the truth,” she replied. “That’s what Jesus would do.”

“What else did you tell the police?”

“That he was smoking crack again and he was hitting me. I told them I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted him to stop.”

“When did you talk to the police?”

“When they brought me here this morning.”

They would have taped her statement. “I don’t want you to talk to them again unless I’m with you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Uncle Henry.”

I got up. “You rest. I’ll make sure they give you proper treatment and I’ll be back tomorrow morning with Angel.”

A tear rolled down her swollen cheek. “Don’t let anything happen to him.”

Worse than this?
I wondered. I said, “I promise you I won’t.”

I
LEFT THE STATION
and sat in my car reading the arrest report. The only surprise was that the cops had not recovered the murder weapon. I thought Angel had told me he had seen the gun, but it had been a long, traumatic day and I may have misheard him. There was, as yet, no autopsy report and nothing on ballistics except that the slugs the cops had dug out of the wall came from a .380 semiautomatic. Pete Trujillo must really have pissed off someone to require that kind of serious firepower for protection. Otherwise, the report was perfunctory. As far as the cops were concerned, the case was open and shut. I liked cases the cops thought were dead-bang because they didn’t work them as hard, and my clients tended to profit from the neglect.

I heard the first bars of “La Cucaracha” played on a car horn and looked up. A roach coach had pulled up in front of the police station, where a crowd of cops and DWP workers was already waiting for the truck. It was just now noon. I had been up most of the last twelve hours and the world had taken on the shimmer of unreality produced by extreme fatigue. A transvestite in a yellow wig and red hot-pants tottered by on spike heels, deep in conversation with a balding, middle-age man in lawyerly pinstripes. Three
cholos
passed by dressed in baggy pants and flannel shirts, each with the same tattoo emblazoned on his neck, one of them pausing to maddog me. A young policeman stood in front of the station smoking a cigarette and lazily watching the girls emptying out of the nearby office buildings without making any attempt to hide the hard-on that tented his trousers.
This is my life,
I thought,
these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops.
Usually I could separate myself from the milieu in which I plied my trade, but this time, to quote the slogan of innumerable action films, it was personal. My niece had belonged to this world of the terminally damaged and now it seemed that world had engulfed her. I wanted desperately to rescue her, and not simply because I had promised Elena. Maybe I was beginning to master the paradox of family—loving without liking. Irritably, I tossed the arrest report on the passenger seat and headed off to see the D.A. to plead for Vicky’s life.

“Anthony Earl,” I said.

Tony Earl looked up at me from behind his battered desk in the sweltering cubicle reserved for the head of filing in the small suite of rooms comprised by the D.A.’s satellite office in Hollywood. The furniture told the story: This was a dead-end assignment for any D.A. For Tony Earl, who had, until the last election, been the big D.A.’s number-two man and anointed successor, the fall was particularly steep. Earl had been a man in a hurry, and after a series of botched high-profile prosecutions weakened the incumbent, Tony had smelled blood in the water and announced his candidacy. The D.A. was a Sicilian with a rich wife, and he fought back with one of the dirtiest and most expensive campaigns in L.A.’s history. Tony Earl had movie-star looks, a nimble mind and a preacher’s eloquence. He had also had the politician’s requisite rags-to-respectability story—raised in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, he now wore two-thousand-dollar suits as though to the manor born. He was also black, and he fell victim to the silent racial civil war going on in post-Rodney King, post-O.J. Simpson L.A. One of the battlegrounds was the polling booth, where whites voted in greater and more consistent numbers than any of the city’s other major ethnic groups.

The D.A. ran for reelection on the slogan, “A District Attorney for All Los Angeles.” In white neighborhoods, he distributed campaign brochures featuring a picture of Tony Earl at a black bar association meeting, ostensibly to criticize Earl for being too chummy with the criminal defense bar, but the real point was that sea of black faces. City law required Earl to take a leave of absence from the D.A.’s office to run his campaign. The D.A. parceled out his duties to two deputies, a Latino and an Asian, and won in return endorsements from the Latino and Asian bar associations. Earl was squeezed in the vise of race: If he ignored the D.A.’s barely submerged race-baiting, it would doom him, but if he complained about it, he would be the one blamed by white voters for making race an issue. He complained, bitterly, and went down in the kind of decisive defeat that ends a political career.

“Mr. Rios,” he replied. “Still buying your suits off the rack, I see.”

He had removed his coat, revealing sweat-stained armpits and a pair of maroon suspenders. His handsome face was a bit fuller than it had been ten years ago when we had squared off in a capital case. That trial had gone on for two months before the jury finally sent my client to Pelican Bay for the rest of his life. In the courtroom, Earl was the model of prosecutorial rectitude; outside, he was profoundly cynical—his nickname for the LAPD was “the Aryan Brotherhood.” He fought hard and dirty, but I had the distinct sense he was motivated less by a concern for justice than for his career. On the other hand, he was so good that when he finished his closing argument, even I was ready to send my client to the gas chamber. That I persuaded the jury to give him life instead was one of those examples of why justice is like sausage-making, a process best not examined too closely. Years later, as I stood in my polling booth, I remembered that summation and, realizing what a tough and effective D.A. Tony would make, cast my vote for his incompetent opponent.

“So this is what happened to you,” I said, sitting down in a metal chair. “Why is it so hot in here?”

“Brand-new building,” he said. “’Course the air-conditioning system is fucked up. Go ahead, take off that wrinkled-ass sports coat. Unless it’s covering a mustard stain on your shirt.”

“Who are you, Mr. Blackwell?”

“That’s funny, Rios, on so many levels. I haven’t seen you in a long time. Thought you were dead.”

“Not yet. I don’t do much trial work anymore. I’m more into appeals.” I laid my niece’s arrest report on his desk. “But I do have this case I came to talk to you about.”

He picked up the report and flipped through it. I remembered from our trial together that he was a speed reader with near-perfect retention.

He tossed it back at me. “Why are you bringing me this low-life shit?”

“Because your name is on the door, Tony. You’re the D.A. who decides what gets filed. Plus, the suspect is my niece.”

He leaned back in his chair and played with his tie, a pale lavender silk number that went perfectly with the French blue shirt and the darker suspenders. “Yeah, well, all that proves is that you should choose your relatives more carefully. What do you want?”

“Reject it for filing,” I said. “He was a wife-beater, she snapped. Plus, the cops did a crap job that’s not going to look good if I get to cross-examine them. They didn’t even find the weapon.”

“Dream on, baby,” he said. “All I need for what’s left of my career is to start cutting deals like that. Anyway, she copped to it, Rios. Pretty stupid of her, but I’ll assume she didn’t have the benefit of your wise counsel.”

“I’ll argue self-defense.”

“You do that,” he said, “but last time I looked at the jury instructions on self-defense, if someone comes at you with fists you don’t get to blow their brains out with a semiautomatic.”

“You can if his fists can kill you,” I said. “My expert on battered women’s syndrome will testify that her belief that she was in mortal danger was reasonable.”

He grunted dismissively. “My expert will say she wasn’t. This is going to get filed as second-degree.”

“That’s bullshit, Tony. We both know this is voluntary manslaughter, at best.”

He grinned. “I gotta to give the trial deputy something to deal.”

“Then file it as voluntary and let them deal it down to involuntary.”

“Yeah, right,” he said. He snapped his suspenders thoughtfully. “But because I like you, I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m going to see this case gets assigned to the greenest deputy I can find. Give it to someone as their first homicide. If you can’t deal some greenhorn down to involuntary, you better turn in your bar card.”

“You give to it a green trial deputy and they’ll be so afraid of screwing up and losing their job, they’ll treat it like a capital case.”

“I have great faith in your powers of persuasion,” he said.

Bemused, I said, “You haven’t changed, Tony. You talk like the street, but you think like a cop.”

“It’s payback. I still remember you beat me in that case we tried together.”

I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not. “As I recall, my client was convicted.”

“But you kept him off Death Row.” He was serious.

I got up. “So, how’s exile?”

The handsome face turned to stone. “There ain’t but one rule when you strike at the king, Rios. You got to kill him. Now get out of here, I have work to do.”

When I looked back he was staring into the mid-distance with an expression of bored desperation.

The day had turned muggy. By the time I pulled into my driveway, I was ready for a shower, something to eat and a nap. Then I remembered Angel would be waiting for me. I cut the engine and sat there rubbing my temples. How was I supposed to do my work with a ten-year-old boy to worry about?
Welcome to the world of single parenthood,
I thought, and then,
Who can I call for advice?

Angel was sitting on the deck reading
Tales from Homer.
As I stood at the doorway leading outside, I could hear him softly sounding out words. I tossed my coat aside, loosened my tie and stepped out to the deck.

“Hey, Angel,” I said, sitting at the edge of his chaise.

He set the book in his lap and looked at me anxiously. “Did you see my mom?”

“Yes,” I said. “She’s going to be okay in a day or so. I’ll take you to see her tomorrow.” I tapped the book. “How far along are you?”

Reluctantly, he allowed me to change the subject. He picked up the book and struggled to pronounce Scylla and Charybdis.

“The rock and the whirlpool,” I said. “Isn’t there a picture of them?”

He leafed through the pages, then handed the book to me. “This one?”

I studied the wood print of the tiny ship entering a narrow strait, on one side of which were hulking rocks, and on the other a whirlpool in which the wreckage of another ship was still visible. The proverbial rock and a hard place. The place where he and Vicky had lived most of their lives.

“Why can’t Ulysses go home?” Angel was asking.

I returned the book to him. “Because he angered Poseidon.”

“The god of the ocean.”

“That’s right. Poseidon was offended by Ulysses so he put obstacles in his way to keep him from reaching Ithaca. But some of the gods were friends of Ulysses so they tried to help him overcome Poseidon’s obstacles. This is a very old story,” I said, “but one reason people still read it is because sometimes in life it feels like we’re struggling the way Ulysses had to struggle. We have to overcome dangers and obstacles, too, sometimes alone and sometimes with the help of others. You understand?”

His dark eyes were thoughtful. “I’m not sure.”

“Then think of it this way,” I said. “A month ago, you and I had never met, but since then, all these things have happened to you and here you are sitting here with me.”

“And you’re going to help my mom and me,” he mused aloud, constructing the first fragile link between the book and his life.

I wanted him to make that connection, to give him the beginning of a narrative that might help sustain him through the troubles that were coming.

He looked at me. “What’s going to happen to my mom?”

“Her situation is very complicated,” I replied. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my shirt to feel the sun on my throat. “Listen, Angel, I’m going to talk to you the same way I would to another grown-up, so if there’s something you don’t understand, stop me and I’ll explain.”

“Okay,” he said, half-anxious, half-proud to be addressed like an adult.

“Your mother is going to be charged with the murder of your father. I tried to stop that from happening, but I couldn’t. Now we’re going to the next stage, where I’ll try to convince the lawyer on the other side, the district attorney, to lower the charge against your mother down from murder to something less serious. Do you understand?”

“Plea bargain,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“That’s what they did to my dad.”

I remembered his father had been cut an exceptionally good deal the last time he was arrested. “That’s right. I’m going to try to get a plea bargain for your mother so that she’ll spend as little time in jail as possible. If the district attorney won’t agree, then we’ll go to the next step, to a trial. I think I have a decent chance of getting your mother off completely if I can convince the jury that she shot your father to defend herself because he had been hitting her—”

“My dad never hit my mom,” he said.

“What?”

“My dad loves us.”

I made the split second decision that it was better to burst this illusion now than to let it harden into even deeper denial.

“Angel, I saw your mom at the jail. She’d been beaten up.”

“She said he did it?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “No way.”

“What happened when you left here with your mom?”