Rag and Bone (27 page)

She made a wry face. “Thanks, but at the rate the Senate is confirming the president’s nominations, this may turn out to be a posthumous appointment.” She glanced down at her file. “We’re here for trial setting on
People
versus
Trujillo.”
She looked at Vicky. “Good morning, Mrs. Trujillo.”

“Good morning, Your Honor,” Vicky said, awestruck. “Thank you.”

The judge smiled. “For what?”

“Seeing me,” my niece said.

It was exactly the right thing to say. The judge nodded. “People can get lost in the system, but not in my court. I understand from my clerk that you’ve worked out a plea on this case. Is that right, Mr. Pearsall?”

The young D.A. was on his feet so fast, I thought he was going to kneel. Judge Ryan had that effect on men. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Gentlemen, all I know about this case is the charge, which is a serious one. May I read the police report?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “After you do, may I add a couple of details that don’t appear?”

“Of course,” she said.

For a few minutes, the court was silent while the judge read the police reports. I glanced over my shoulder to the gallery at. Elena and Angel and smiled what I hoped was a confident smile.

“Mr. Rios,” Judge Ryan said, “what did you want to add?”

“Your Honor, I’m not only the defendant’s lawyer, I’m also her uncle. My sister, her mother, is in the court, as is her son, my grand-nephew. I know from past experience here that you are a judge who always thinks of the human consequences of her decisions. As it happens, in this case those consequences hit pretty close to home. The People have agreed that in exchange for my niece’s plea to voluntary manslaughter, we will submit to you on sentencing. I would request that the case be put over after the plea for a sentencing hearing to give you the fullest picture possible of this family tragedy.”

“Mr. Pearsall, is this the agreement?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” he said.

“Your Honor,” I said, “I also want to mention that the People have agreed, for purposes of sentencing only, to stipulate that my client’s statement to the police was taken in violation
of Miranda.”

She raised her eyebrow. “Is that true, Mr. Pearsall?”

“For sentencing only,” he said.

“Well, this is an unusual case. The victim was Mrs. Trujillo’s husband?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Are any of his family here, Mr. Rios?”

“No, Your Honor, but I hope to have one of his sisters here at the sentencing hearing to testify on my niece’s behalf.”

Judge Ryan nodded. “Yes, I’d like to hear her. Well, I guess all we’re going to do this morning is take the plea. Mr. Pearsall, will you do the honors, please?”

“Yes. Mrs. Trujillo, would you please stand up?”

Vicky and I stood up, and Pearsall began the familiar sequence of questions with which she waived her constitutional rights.

“Mrs. Trujillo,” he said, after she waived her rights, “on the charge of the voluntary manslaughter of Peter Trujillo, how do you plead?”

She seemed to hold back a sob. “Guilty,” she whispered.

Pearsall turned to me. “Does counsel join the waivers and the plea?”

“Join,” I said, committing my niece to prison.

“The People move to dismiss count one, second-degree murder,” Pearsall said to the judge.

“Count one is dismissed,” Judge Ryan said. “The defendant’s plea to voluntary manslaughter is entered into the minutes of the court. How much time for the sentencing hearing, Mr. Rios?”

“I only need a week, Your Honor.”

“You have it,” she said.

I heard my sister quietly weeping.

“Mr. Rios,” the judge said, “I’m going to give your family a few minutes together before I remand the defendant.”

“Thank you, Judge.”

Vicky turned to the gallery and said, “Angel? Mama?”

Her voice catching, Judge Ryan said, “We’re in recess.”

Late that night, after we had put Angel to bed, Elena and I sat on my deck, where she polished off the last of Josh’s Scotch. The night was warm and the blaze of city lights made a red glow in the sky as if from a gigantic furnace.

“I think that’s the first time she ever called me Mama,” Elena said, rattling the ice in her glass. “What will you do at this sentencing hearing, Henry?”

“Try to persuade the judge to give Vicky the least time possible.”

“The judge seems persuadable,” she said. “Do you want me to testify?”

“It would really help if you could track down someone from the women’s shelter she was staying at in San Francisco before she came to you.”

She nodded. “Yes, I have it written down somewhere. Who else will testify?”

“Vicky, of course—”

“What about her privilege against self-incrimination?”

“She waived that right when she pled. Judge Ryan will want to hear her story. She’s really the only one who can tell it. What I need is to support it. I’ll call Socorro Cerda, Reverend Ortega, maybe Edith Rosen. I’ve also got a call in to Pete’s last lawyer in San Francisco, see if I can get any useful information from her to rough him up a little.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes you really do have to blame the victim. This is one of those times.”

“Henry, remember, Angel will be there. Whatever you say about his father will remain with him for the rest of his life.”

I hadn’t thought about that. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I’ll be careful.”

“It’s odd,” she said. “I don’t really have much of an impression of Pete. There must have been some good in him. She did keep going back to him.”

“Aren’t you the one who said it was because she dreamed of creating the family she didn’t have for herself?”

She sipped her drink. “Ironically, she has created a family. The four of us. Joanne. I suppose this is what they call a nontraditional family.”

“What other kind of family could you create out of material like us?”

She looked at me. “And John DeLeon? Will he be part of it?”

“That remains to be seen,” I replied. “He’s up at a monastery in Santa Barbara with his dad, on a retreat. He said he’d pray for us. For him and me, I mean.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“I don’t think God concerns Himself with the details of my love life.”

After a moment, she said, “What do you think God is but the opportunity to love other people? If God’s not interested in those details, then God doesn’t exist.”

“That doesn’t sound like the God I grew up with.”

She smiled. “Then maybe you need a new God.”

E
LENA HAD FOUND A COUPLE
of schools she thought might be suitable for Angel, and the next morning they went for a preliminary look while I worked. Half-a-dozen calls to friends in San Francisco yielded the name of Pete Trujillo’s public defender, Morgan Yee. I reached her voice mail and left a message. Then I phoned Edith Rosen to ask her to be my expert witness on battered women’s syndrome at the sentencing hearing. I wanted Edith because ordinarily she testified as the court’s expert and commanded more respect than the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say. BWS was a little out of her field of expertise, but I doubted that the D.A. would challenge her qualifications.

“You remember I had my doubts about whether Vicky was battered,” she said.

“She killed her husband after he beat her up,” I said. “Doesn’t that change your opinion?”

“I’d have to know all the facts,” she said. “This isn’t exactly my area. There are more qualified experts.”

“I want you,” I said. “Judge Ryan trusts you and you already know Vicky. Will you at least read the police reports before you make up your mind? I can fax them to you now and you could let me know on Monday.”

“All right” she said. “I can do that. How is everyone bearing up?”

“We’ve decided Angel will live with me while his mother’s in prison.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Are you asking me as a friend or a therapist?”

She chuckled. “Both.”

“I’m anxious and excited,” I said. “I want to do right by him, but I’m not entirely sure I know how.”

“You can’t know that in advance,” she observed. “Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error.” She paused. “The issue I see with Angel is that you’re coming into his life pretty late.”

“I know,” I said. “I also know that he’s had the kind of childhood I usually read about in probation reports, but you’re the one who said he was invulnerable.”

“Surviving trauma doesn’t mean you’re not affected by it,” she said.

“You have any idea what I can expect?”

“There are effects of trauma that don’t become apparent until the traumatizing experience is over. I know you’ll give him a stable and loving home, but don’t be surprised if he responds by acting out.”

“Acting out how?”

“That’s the question,” she said. “One of my kids is in a really good foster home, with fine, experienced foster parents. They discovered she was hoarding food in her room. I’m not talking about candy bars, I mean a pound of lunchmeat, an entire loaf of bread, cans of soup. Her mother was a crackhead and used to leave the girl alone for two or three days at a time without any food. Now that she has access to it, she stockpiles it. Whatever Angel didn’t get, he’ll be greedy for.”

“I don’t think Vicky ever did anything like that to him.”

“I agree,” Edith said. “From what I saw, she was very loving, but I wouldn’t say she was exactly parental. In a way, she and Angel seemed more like siblings than mother and son.”

Or more like conspirators,
I thought, remembering the day I had watched them through the mirror at the jail.

“You’re not being very reassuring,” I said.

She laughed. “Not to worry. He is a very bright and resilient boy. If you want, I’d be happy to work with him.”

“I would be grateful.”

“All right,” she said. “You fax me the police reports on Vicky and we’ll talk again on Monday. By the way, Henry, how is your health?”

“I see the doc next week, but I feel almost my old self.”

“You seemed to improve dramatically after Vicky and Angel came into your life,” she observed.

“Don’t you start giving me the family values lecture, too,” I said. “I get enough of that from my sister and John.”

“All right, dear,” she said. “Sometime we’ll talk about denial. Good-bye.”

The doorbell buzzed. I went down the hall to the front door and looked out the peephole. A white-haired, slightly stooped old man stared back. He was wearing a flannel shirt and gray work pants, but even if the clothes hadn’t tipped me off, I would have known who he was from his slanting green eyes. I opened the door.

“Hello,” I said.

“Mr. Rios? I’m Armando DeLeon, John’s dad.”

His voice was deep but suprisingly soft, with a rich timbre I associated with singers and public radio anchors. He spoke English with the rolled “r” and Spanish intonation of a first-generation immigrant.

“Is John all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “He told me about you. I wanted to meet you.”

“Please come in.”

I took him to my office, thinking that the somber room would level the disadvantage I felt with this handsome old man. He did not appear to be angry, but I felt the tension creeping up my spine into my shoulders. Why was he here? Had John sent him? Or had he come on his own to plead the case for his son’s heterosexuality? He stood for a moment, looking at my degrees, the bookshelves crammed with case reports and treatises and the piles of transcripts.

“Johnny said you were a lawyer. Criminal lawyer, yes?”

“That’s right. Have a seat, Mr. DeLeon. Can I get you some coffee?”

“No,
gracias”
he said, lowering himself slowly to the sofa. “I came to talk.”

John had said his father was in his seventies; now I saw they were a workingman’s seventies, hard years that had left a worn-out body. He settled into the couch with a grimace.

“Did John send you?”

“John’s not like that,” he replied. “He says what he has to say himself.”

I sat down at the opposite end of the couch and decided to get this over with. “I bet he got that from you.”

I thought that, for an instant, I detected a twinkle in his eyes, but his expression remained somber.

“John says he’s in love with you,” he said, without any kind of emphasis.

“John’s old enough to know what he feels and for whom,” I said, sounding tongue-twistingly lawyerly even to myself. “I love John, too. I’m sorry if that causes problems, but really this is between him and me.”

It was a challenge and I expected some heat in return, but in his mild, rich voice, he said, “Johnny’s my youngest. Thank God, because if he had come first, no more kids for me. When he was a baby, he almost died. The whooping cough, they called it. When he was five, he ran out into the street to catch a baseball and a car hit him.” He touched a spot on his forehead above his right eye. “You can still see the scar. Playing baseball, he was always breaking something until he finally had to quit. That broke his heart. He went wild. His mother suffered. I wasn’t proud of him. Then he got married, had kids, stopped drinking. His mother thought he had straightened himself out. Next thing, he leaves his wife for a man.” He shook his head. “His mother begged him to go to a priest for—what’s is the word?
Para tirar el diablo.”

“Exorcism?”

He nodded. “Me, I knew.”

“You knew? What?”

“I knew what my son was. I knew when he was a boy.”

“He likes women, too.” I would have to tell John how I defended his bisexuality to his father.

“Con respecto, señor, usted no es mujer.
”

John was right, in Spanish his father was not a tired old man but a formidable patriarch.

“No,” I agreed. “I’m not a woman. How did you know about John?”

Mr. DeLeon shrugged. “My brother was like John.” He looked at me. “My father found him with another boy. My brother hanged himself. I cut his body down. My brother was a good boy, like Johnny. A good boy. I don’t understand why he is
un homosexual,
and if I could make him different, I would.
Pero
what happened to my brother will never happen to my son. God gives us children to love, not to hurt.”