Red Light (17 page)

Two of the baseball
bats used on Acuna were found at the scene. Footprints in the barnyard, tire
tracks on the dirt road. Charlie saw three men get into the getaway truck—a
light-colored pickup, no camper, big tires, went fast. Big men, he said, masks
on. Charlie was scared mute three days before he could even speak.

The farm was a
hundred acres of rolling hills down in the south part of Orange County.

Merci scanned
through, filling in, connecting the story with memory of it: no arrests, no
suspects.

Five weeks after the
beating, Acuna's story hit both the
Times
and the
Register.
He said that his one hundred acre orange grove—owned his family since the early
1800s—was located between two valuable parcels of land. The parcels were worth
millions if the land was subdivided, developed and sold. But the parcels were
worth "many, many millions more" if they could be connected by a
major road through the hills that separated them. That land was his.

He'd refused to sell
it or grant a road easement through it, in spite of offers that were a hundred
times what he'd make in a good year on his oranges.

He'd been sued by two
cities and the county itself, trying to stretch their powers of eminent
domain—and he'd won all three suits in court.

He'd had his land
annexed by one city, which condemned the buildings for code violations
committed at a time before codes; then seen his land annexed by another city
that said he could stay right where he was.

Then came the
threats. First by some small-time real-estate hustlers who thought hired muscle
and a fire in the machine shed would scare him off. Another who suggested
Acuna's children—he had eleven— might come to harm on their way home from
school someday. He'd had his brood driven to and from school by a couple of
able-bodied farmhands for nearly two years.

He'd had his trees
poisoned with herbicide right before harvest; he'd had his wells poisoned right
before Christmas; he'd had gunmen shoot out the windows of his home while he
slept with his wife of thirty years, Teresa.

Acuna said that none
of that had really frightened him. It strengthened his resolve to stay. He
said that farming was in his blood for generations, all the way back to the
ranchos
and before that. He said that oranges were all he knew; they had
fed his parents and his children and his grandchildren and he saw no reason why
they couldn't feed
their
children and grandchildren. Everybody ate.
Everybody worked. His oranges were good.

None of it frightened
him until one hot spring morning that year, when two men drove up in a white
Mercedes-Benz and told him they had a terrific offer for his land. He offered
them fresh juice, which they drank in the shade of the courtyard. He listened
carefully to their offer. Acuna said it was extravagantly large, but he was
forced to say no for the usual reasons. He wouldn't disclose the figure to
reporters, because it was "private." They told him there would be
trouble if he didn't accept. He asked what kind. They wouldn't say. But Acuna
told papers that he could tell from their faces that they meant what they said
and he knew when they left that some calamity would soon befall him.

Two
months later, it did.

When
he could talk again, Acuna told reporters he had no intention of selling his
farm: It would have been like selling his heart.

Six
months after Acuna had been beaten, the headlines were considerably smaller,
the articles much farther back in the papers.

The
county re-annexed a large piece of south county ground when a fledgling city
defaulted on services payments. Acuna's farm was part of it. The county then
rezoned the whole one hundred acres R-l, residential. Acuna was shortly
presented with deadlines for sewer construction and hookup. He was ordered to
pay residential rates for municipal water, electricity and natural gas—an
increase of roughly 500 percent. The land received a new tax assessment and
Acuna got a staggering property tax increase—close to 700 percent. Farm
subsidies and a cultural tax breaks no longer applied. He was ordered to pave
all his roads, then apply for a conditional-use permit under the
"existing, non-conforming" clause. Acuna did, and his petition was
immediately denied by the County Board of Supervisors on January 14, 1970.

After
doing the math and thinking it over, Jesse Acuna finally sold the land and
everything on it to Orange Coast Capital for 4.2 million dollars.

Merci
found nothing about cops being blamed for the beating until the following year,
when the anniversary articles all came out.

Acuna,
speaking from his new home in San Juan Capistrano, told the local newspaper
that he believed the men who came to make an offer and threaten him that day
last spring had been "the police." He thought this because he was
sixty-four years old at the time, a Mexican farmer in a world of white
Republicans, and he knew cops. He knew what they looked like, how they acted
and how they walked and talked, how they thought.

In
answering the reporter's six million dollar question, Acuna admitted that he'd
never seen those men before or since the Fourth of July, 1969. His attackers
wore masks. The article carefully noted that Acuna had no evidence to
substantiate his attackers as police, just his own observations and opinions
about the men who had driven a white Mercedes-Benz into his life one hot
spring morning and shared a pitcher of orange juice with him in the courtyard.

The reporter had gone
back through the original police interviews and found not one instance in which
Acuna had speculated that his attackers were policemen.

At this, Acuna
shrugged and "stared off at his small garden with his one good remaining
eye."

Merci thought: I
might not tell the police if I
thought
my attackers were policemen,
either.

Merci continued
forward, noting the way the rumor grew, until the ACLU was calling for internal
investigations and the Los Angeles
Times
was treating Acuna's opinion as
if it was in all likelihood true. The county's other large daily—the Santa Ana
Register
—was far less convinced. Their editorials said that Acuna's story
wasn't substantiated, and they'd take it seriously if it ever was.

The
Register
subtly insinuated that Jesse Acuna might have suffered brain damage in the
beating, thus coloring his recollection of faces and events.

The
Times
said
that if Acuna's story was born of brain damage from the beating, then law
enforcement should be
eager
to remove the cloud of suspicion from over
its own head.

The then-small Orange
County
Journal
weighed in with a call for justice for men and women of
all races and colors, enthusiastically ignoring the cop accusation altogether.

Cesar Chavez
appeared, neither endorsing nor rejecting Acuna's story, but using the unrest
as a focal point for promoting the United Farm Workers Union. His talks on the
Fullerton and UC Irvine campuses drew thousands.

Merci remembered a
rally she went to around that time. A much smaller rally. Mom and Dad took her.
It was outside, in the parking lot of a new church. It was very hot—summer or
early fall. The rally was to give the police a vote of confidence, and it was
sponsored by the local membership of the John Birch Society. There were picket
signs and buttons with pictures of a man's face and the word
LIAR.
She
could remember the bumper stickers that were given out:
Support Your Local
Police.

The thing that made
it all stick in her mind wasn't any of that, the tremendous wind that blew that
day, out of the desert toward the sea, so strong that picket signs were torn
from their sticks and blew around like leaves. Her mother got furious when she
discovered Merci with some other kids atop the fellowship hall hurling signs
that would fly flat as boomerangs fifty yards then bank up abruptly when they
hit the gusts then skip out over the new tracts of houses and pinwheel
corner-by-conner across the sky like it was hard.

Jesse
Acuna signs, she thought. She'd never realized that until now.

At any rate, the ACLU
and the
Times
lost. The Federal Ninth Circuit Court heard arguments,
then declined to order Orange County police or Sheriff Departments to supply
personnel photographs of employee so Acuna could search for the men who'd
threatened him.

By then it was nearly
two years after the beating, and the article of the circuit court's decision
was one small column in the
Regis,
"Local Notes" section, and
on page B-22 of the
Times.

History had closed
another of its small, colorful, but not hugely significant chapters.

The headline of that day's
Journal
was:

Bugliosi
Argues Accused Manson Followers "Deranged"

Shortly after that, Merci
discovered, two police forces and the Sheriff Department had voluntarily
supplied photographs for the farmer examine, but Acuna didn't find his men.

She rolled her chair
back, stood, walked to a window and stared out at the clear, windy day. The
storm was gone and the sky was a pale, foreign blue. It looked wrong, like it
had blown in from somewhere. Iceland? The trees in the quad outside the library
were stripped from the wind and black from the rain. Yellow leaves on the
concrete. She wondered why college campuses always had so many flyers
everywhere—ranks of white and yellow and pink sheets with phone-number strips
cut into the bottoms, plastered to the railings and kiosks, soaked and torn by
the storm.

She'd enjoyed her
years at Fullerton. Psych major, emphasis in criminal justice. Plenty of
imbeciles in psych, she'd found, a catchall for do-gooders with low ambitions
and petite IQs. But she got to read a lot of good books. And spend a lot of
time alone. Or with Ben, her kind-of boyfriend. Ben could chugalug two twenty-four
ounce Fosters in a row without throwing up. Joined the Forest Service, never
called, never wrote. Good days, really, and just a few thousand years ago.

She kept looking out
the window, then covered one eye. The colors were still good, but the distance
went to hell. No perspective.

Might be hard for
Acuna to find his torturers with just one eye, she thought.

Even
with two.

But she wouldn't have
put much stock in Acuna's theory, even if he'd had three good eyes.

Why cops?
Back in '69, it was always the cops. The cops were
pigs. All those cartoons with the hogs tucked into tight little uniforms, beating
with their big billy clubs and blasting away with their enormous revolvers.
Cops were the first scapegoat for every violent, whining victim, right? You
got struck by lightning, bitten by a snake, had a bad dream, you could always
blame it on the big, bad pigs.

So Jesse Acuna didn't
like cops, that was fine. Merci wasn't in love with every one of them, either.
It didn't mean they beat him over half to death with baseball bats when he came
out of his chicken coop July 4.

He said it because he
believed it. They printed it because he said it and it made good copy. It fit
the political sway of the day. And it was probably just bullshit.

But Patti Bailey knew
the truth, or claimed she did. One of her johns let it slip. And Patti Bailey
was living in a hotel rumored to be a cops-and-girls playground.

She went back,
printed it all out, thanked Sir Arthur and asked a favor of him. She wanted to
draw a line between Bailey, Acuna and the cops.

"Crooked cops in
Orange County, circa nineteen sixty-nine," she said. "I want to know
all about them."

He gave her a
sly smile. "Give me a day, Sergeant."

I
t was almost six when she got back to headquarters,
Friday night coming on, most of the plainclothes already gone for the weekend
but the uniforms of the night shift looking brisk and fresh and ready to go
eight.

Good news on the
message box: The phone company would provide the numbers, names and addresses
of Aubrey Whittaker's outgoing and incoming calls for the week leading up to
her murder. Give them until Monday afternoon.

Gary Brice at the
Journal
had "some things for you," please call back at her
convenience.

Mike had left two
more messages for her to call him as soon as she could.

Evan had left another
message about wanting to talk. Merci noted the lack of a wiseguy tone in
O'Brien's voice. It made an impression her because he rarely said anything
without it.

O'Brien was down in
the lab, using a magnifier and an ultraviolet light to examine a white sheet of
paper with a black shoeprint on it. The purple of the ultraviolet played off
his face, gave him the look of a low-budget alien.

"What
have you got there?" she asked, pulling up a stool next to him

"To me it looks
suspiciously like the shoeprint from Aubrey Wittaker's kitchen."

So
much for Evan's serious message.