Simple Justice (5 page)

“And what’s that, Templeton?”

“I’m going to learn everything I can from you. I figure you owe me at least that much.”

“It seems I owe a lot of people.”

“Yes, I think maybe you do.”

I reached for my notebook and jacket. Templeton came around the desk with a big envelope stuffed with her photocopied notes on the Billy Lusk case.

“There’s just one thing I’ve always wondered,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Why did you do it?”

She wasn’t the first person to ask that question. Harry had been the first, followed by countless journalists from around the country and as far away as Australia, whose phone calls I’d never returned.

“Like I said, Templeton, that’s always the most interesting question, isn’t it?”

“And the most difficult to answer,” she said, sounding very pleased with herself.

“That’s right.”

She handed me the envelope. Her eyes were riveted to mine again, and alive with challenge.

“Maybe I’ll try,” she said.

I grabbed a late lunch at Kosher Burrito downtown, paying with some of Harry’s cash.

Then I caught a westbound section of the Hollywood Freeway, driving straight into the sun and jockeying for lane position in the afternoon rush.

The Santa Anas were still blowing hot across the city and tearing at the Mustang’s battered top. I lowered it and let the air hit me full blast, like a furnace door opening.

My destination was the crime scene at The Out Crowd bar, another mile or two down the freeway. But as I approached Echo Park Avenue, I impulsively swung the wheel toward the off-ramp, heading into the neighborhood where Templeton’s notes told me I’d find Gonzalo Albundo’s family home.

At the bottom of the ramp, a squat, flat-nosed Guatemalan offered bags of oranges and unshelled peanuts to drivers trapped for a moment in the congestion of cars. I bought a bag of each, using two more of Harry’s dollars, and peeled an orange as I drove along the eastern perimeter of Echo Park. Around its steak-shaped lake, stately palm trees were rooted at attention like sunburned soldiers in the blistering heat, standing guard over brown-skinned families who lined the shores with picnic baskets and fishing poles, and ragged transients who slept during the day because it was safer to stay awake at night.

I drifted right onto Laguna Avenue, then followed a network of narrower streets up into the hills. Modest older homes perched on the terraced land, which was supported by rows of low, thick concrete walls, many of them spray-painted with gang symbols or recently whitewashed to cover them over.

The Albundo house was near the crest of West Covington Road. It sat at the center of a hilly triangle bordered by the Hollywood Freeway on the south, Sunset Boulevard on the north, and Echo Park Lake on the west, close enough to Dodger Stadium, I suspected, for the Albundos to hear the cheering crowds on nights when the Dodgers were winning.

I made a U-turn, and angled my wheels into the curb before climbing out.

Nearby, on the flat where the road crested, a ’52 Chevy pickup sat on jacks. It was beautifully restored, painted canary yellow, with stenciled detailing along the sides and gleaming moon-shaped hubcaps. Beneath the transmission, someone was wedged face up, their booted feet extended in my direction. I heard the clatter of a heavy wrench, followed by an expletive uttered in Spanish.

Squinting due west through dark lenses, I tried to pinpoint the general location of The Out Crowd. I guessed at less than three miles, no more than ten minutes by car late at night.

Above me, the Albundo house rested at the top of a concrete stairway that had grown crooked over time from the shifting earth and the intrusive roots of an enormous rubber tree that spread out above the house, providing shade. On either side of the steps were terraced gardens of vegetables and roses. The house was a simple stucco, forty or fifty years old but well maintained, with a broad front porch filled with old wicker chairs, not so different from the house in which I’d grown up.

“You need somethin’, man?”

The voice came with an exaggerated Mexican accent and a hostile edge from a man in his late twenties whose skin was the color of brown sugar.

He held a beer in his right hand and in the other a greasy crescent wrench that he clutched at a right angle, suggesting trouble. I recognized his pointed boots as the ones that had protruded from beneath the yellow pickup moments earlier. He was a few inches shorter than me, with weightlifter arms but a belly going to fat, and a droopy, sparse mustache. A few thousand beers ago, he’d probably been a good-looking man.

“Do you happen to know Gonzalo Albundo?”

“Yeah, I happen to know him. He’s my brother. You a cop?”

“I’m from the
Los Angeles Sun
. The newspaper.”

“I know what it is. You think I can’t read, man? Because I got grease on me, from workin’ on my truck? You think I can’t read?”

I glanced at the vintage pickup, propped up on jacks. “Nice machine.”

“I’m not in the mood for talkin’ cars, dude.”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, then. If you don’t mind.”

“Why don’t you reporters write the truth? That my brother killed a fag that tried to jump his bones, man! You make it out like this dude who got blown away was some saint of the church. He was a fuckin’
puto
!”

He tilted back his head and guzzled the rest of his beer.

“You’re saying the killing was justified, then?”

“I’m sayin’ I’m proud of my little brother, man. He did what was right. Any fag looks twice at me, man, I do the same thing.”

“Why was your brother in that part of town Monday night?”

“It’s a free country. He can be where he wants.”

“Can you tell me what gang he belongs to?”

“I don’t tell you nothin’. Except get your ass outta this neighborhood.”

“I thought it was a free country.”

He flung the beer bottle to the curb, where it splintered with an ominous tinkling of glass, and shifted the wrench to his right hand.

“You don’t want to mess with me,
pendejo
.”

A car door slammed and a woman’s voice yelled, “Luis!”

The woman hurried toward us on pumps, clutching a leather briefcase hand-tooled with intricate Mexican designs. Her suit was attractive but all business, and seemed to add height and heft to her slight stature.

“Luis!”

She stood between us, glaring at him with eyes as dark as his, while blood flushed her dusky skin.

“He’s from the newspaper,” he said, his accent suddenly lightening up to only a trace, like hers. “Trying to get more things to write about
nuestro hermanito
.”

Nuestro hermanito
, “our little brother.” Which made her the sister of Gonzalo Albundo.

She turned to me with a questioning look. I removed my dark glasses, hoping to appear less guarded.

“I’m from the
Sun
. We’ll be doing a follow-up story on the murder.”

“If it is murder,” she said.

“What else would it be?”

Her brother stepped aggressively toward me.

“I told you, man. Self-defense. What the police would find out if they did their job. But since it’s a white dude who’s dead, and they got a Chicano to pin it on, they don’t do shit.”

“They have a confession,” I said. “How do you explain that?”

He took another step toward me, almost in my face.

“I don’t have to explain nothing!”

“Luis!”

His sister wedged between us. He took a step back, but continued to grip his wrench like a weapon. She turned to me with suspicious eyes.

“Why did you come here? What do you want from us?”

“I wanted to see where Gonzalo Albundo lived.”

“For what reason?”

“The more I know about him, the more fair we can be.”

I felt her probing eyes on my face, and wondered what she saw that made her relax.

“I’m Paca Albundo, Gonzalo’s sister. This is Luis, one of his brothers. The one who doesn’t work and likes to make trouble.”

They exchanged a flurry of sharp words in Spanish. I was able to make out references to family and honor, but not much else. When she turned back to me, I told her my name.

“Yes. I know who you are.”

“How’s that?”

“I work as a librarian at the central branch downtown. A Native American specialist, history section. Six years ago, I was finishing up my degree in library science, cataloging stories published in the
Los Angeles Times
. At the time, you were big news.”

“You have quite a memory.”

“It was your face I remembered. From the TV coverage. There was a great deal of pain in it. There still is.”

Luis looked me over, as if he was semi-impressed.

“This guy’s a big shot?”

She spoke to him in Spanish again. This time I heard the word
periodista
, for “Journalist,” and
SIDA
, for “AIDS.”

I assumed she was telling him about the series I’d written, because when he looked me over again, he laughed contemptuously.

“Since you know my history,” I said to her, “maybe you don’t trust me.”

“Maybe I don’t have a choice.”

She smiled like someone who didn’t enjoy having so little power, but understood how it worked. She invited me into the house.

“Write about the perverts!” Luis shouted, as we made our way up the steps. “Tell the truth about what happened! Unless maybe you’re a pervert yourself!”

Paca Albundo ignored him.

As we climbed, she talked about the terraced gardens, proudly pointing out her father’s roses.

Entering the shaded house was like stepping into a deep cave. Window curtains shut out most of the light, and the air was cool.

I smelled soup simmering, maybe a sauce, and heard a television set tuned to a Spanish language station.

Paca Albundo led me through the living room, where an old woman with leathery brown skin knitted while she watched a South American soap opera. She looked up, smiled vacantly, then directed her attention back to the TV.

“My father’s mother,” Paca said. “She and my grandfather live in the small house out back. My mother’s parents are still in Mexico. We go down every year.”

“All alive?”

“Three generations. My oldest brother, Ramon, is about to become a father. So that will be four.”

We passed down a hallway hung with dozens of family photographs, framed and arranged chronologically to show the children growing up. Interspersed among them were crucifixes and framed verses from the Bible. As we walked, I glimpsed Gonzalo as he aged from a tiny brown cherub to a slim, thoughtful-looking teenager, almost unrecognizable as the boy I’d seen on the nightly news.

“Gonzalo’s room,” Paca said, when we reached the end.

She stepped in and raised the venetian blinds for light.

“Does this look like the room of a gang member, Mr. Justice?”

I scanned the neat bedroom. An old Fernando Valenzuela poster, curling at the edges and signed by the former Dodger pitcher, was tacked to a wall by the bed. A rock collection filled a corner of the room, each sample labeled in tidy block handwriting. A set of Boy Scout merit badges, including several for first aid, decorated another wall. A personal computer sat on a desk below a shelf heavy with books.

A framed photo also sat on the desk and I again saw the face of Gonzalo Albundo, taken a year or two before. Beside him in the photo was a pretty girl about his age, with fairer skin but similar Hispanic features.

“Gonzalo was the baby of the family, but he wasn’t spoiled,” Paca said. “He’s always been a model son. Not just a good student, but top grades in almost every subject. He wants to be a teacher, like his brother Ramon.”

“Maybe he takes after his other brother, Luis.”

“Luis has his problems, but he’s never been in serious trouble.”

“He has a temper. And he’s homophobic.”

“Gonzalo isn’t like that. We’re a traditional family, Mr. Justice, but my parents never taught us to hate anyone. And Gonzalo has never been in trouble. You can check.”

“We will.”

“And when you find out what I’ve told you is true, will you still believe he could do what the police say he did?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe or what the police say, Paca. Gonzalo said he did it and gave a plausible reason.”

The conviction suddenly disappeared from her face.

“I don’t understand that. That confession, that talk about a gang. It makes no sense.”

She straightened a pile of school papers on his desk. The top sheet was marked with an A-, but I noticed the date on it was nearly a year old. Perhaps she’d set all this up, I thought, for a reporter like myself, or for detectives who might return for another visit.

“He was afraid of gangs, Mr. Justice. And he hated what they are doing to our community. I don’t know why he said what he did, but I know he had nothing to do with any gang. And I know he didn’t kill that man.”

“That man’s name was Billy Lusk.”

“Yes, Mr. Lusk. I’m sorry.”

She turned away from me, straightened the pillows, smoothed out a wrinkle on the bed.

“I’m so confused. It makes no sense. Any of it.”

“Tell me more about Gonzalo. Any recent sign of drugs, drinking, anything like that?”

“I asked his girlfriend about that. Angela, a very sweet girl.”

Paca handed me the photo from Gonzalo’s desk.

“They used to be very close. She said nothing like that was happening.”

“How long have they been going together?”

“They’ve been best friends since grade school. Gonzalo was always a happy boy, but shy, very quiet. Angela was the only girl he was ever interested in. We all thought, you know, some day they would marry. Then, about a year ago, he changed.”

“When he turned seventeen?”

“About then, yes.”

“In what way?”

“He suddenly withdrew from us. From his family, Angela, everyone. He seemed distant, moody. In his own world. He kept to himself a lot, his grades started to slip. Something was bothering him, I could tell. I tried to talk to him about it, so did my father, but it only made things worse. Gonzalo pulled away even more. It was like we were losing him, but we didn’t know why.”

“Who were his friends? Where did he go when he went out?”

“He didn’t have a lot of close friends. Just Angela. Then he didn’t even see her. Mostly, he just stayed in his room, reading.”

I glanced out the window. The drop to the ground was only a few feet, and the screen was unlatched.

“Did Gonzalo have his own car?”

“Yes. The one they say he was driving the night of the murder. My parents gave it to him for his seventeenth birthday, because his grades had been so good. He had to pay the insurance himself, from a part-time job.”

I commented on the heat outside, and asked her if I might have a glass of water, with ice.

She left to get it. The kitchen was all the way down the hall, through the living room and dining room, on the north side of the house. I figured I had close to a minute, and began to quickly but systematically go through the desk and dresser drawers.

I saw nothing unusual and turned to the closet. Shirts and pants, all neatly pressed, hung from hangers; half a dozen pairs of shoes were lined up on the floor. There was nothing remotely resembling gang attire.

I stepped out to the hall and found it empty. I stepped back in, kneeled down, and looked under the bed, but found only more spotless floor.

Then I lifted the mattress.

Tucked deep in the center was a copy of
Frontiers
, a local gay magazine, open to a page of bar listings. Next to it was a package of latex condoms.

I heard a floorboard creak from the direction of the hallway and quickly lowered the mattress.

As I stood and turned, Paca stepped in with a tall glass of water over ice cubes. I sensed from her averted eyes that she’d also seen the items hidden in the layers of her brother’s bed but was pretending otherwise.

I drank the water halfway down, then asked her if she thought Gonzalo would talk to me in jail.

“He won’t even see us, Mr. Justice.”

She went to the bed and straightened out the wrinkles I’d created in my haste. This was a family, I thought, that would prefer to smooth over troubling matters than deal with them directly, if at all.

“I tried to speak with Gonzalo right after his arrest,” she said, “but it was like talking to a stranger. He pretended to be so tough, all his talk about a gang, pretending to be a
cholo vago
. But I know my brother. That wasn’t Gonzalo.”

As we turned to leave, the last thing I noticed was a portrait of the Virgin Mary above the light switch, next to a picture of a praying Jesus.

In the living room, the old woman was still engrossed in her soap opera, talking earnestly in Spanish to the TV as if the characters were real.

“We haven’t told the old ones,” Paca said. “But they keep asking where he is.”

I thought about where Gonzalo Albundo was at that moment, and Paca apparently shared a similar vision.

“He’s just a boy, Mr. Justice. Gonzalo won’t survive in a place like that.”

She opened the door, and sunlight sliced across the dim interior.

“You said you know your brother, Paca.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you know more about him than you’re willing to admit. More than you’re willing to share with me, or even with your parents.”

She dropped her eyes uncharacteristically.

“My mother and father are very religious, Mr. Justice. Their faith, their church, its rules are all very important to them.”

“More important than the survival of their own son?” She looked up at me but said nothing. I thanked her for her help, and said good-bye.

*

Down on the street, I found Luis Albundo sitting on the hood of the Mustang, flipping the wrench in his right hand, watching me as I approached.

He slid off and stood between me and my car.

“I’m not looking for trouble, Luis.”

“Sometimes, trouble finds you,
pendejo
, whether you look for it or not.”

The exaggerated accent was back, along with a nasty sneer that was more laughable than frightening. Still, the man had a two-pound wrench in his hand.

“Did you ever stop to think how much damage someone could do with a heavy tool like that, Luis?”

“Yeah, I thought about it.”

He flipped the wrench menacingly again, but failed to catch it as it came down. It clanged to the street like a bell chiming to the world what a screw-up he was. As he bent awkwardly to snatch it up, I tried to gauge the depth of his humiliation, and how much more anger it might generate.

“Of course, a real man wouldn’t hide behind a weapon, would he, Luis?”

The question cracked his surly facade. He cocked his head and waited.

“I mean, a five-year-old girl could probably hurt me with a weapon like that. Or even a
puto
.”

He slammed the wrench down on the hood, and left it there.

“I don’t need no weapon.”

He took a step away from the car, closer to where I stood.

“We’re two grown men, Luis. This really isn’t necessary, is it?”

“I say what’s necessary, faggot-lover.”

He shoved my chest with both his hands, leaving greasy prints. It rocked me a little, but my feet held.

I figured he was right-handed, from the way he’d gripped the wrench. I also knew that if I shoved him in return, and he came instinctively back at me, his momentum would be moving forward, with his weight on his left foot as he prepared to swing his right fist. The street’s slope would propel him forward even more. At least that would be the natural motion.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Reporter? All words, no action?”

“Tell me, Luis, how are you with basic physics?”

“What?”

“For example, the laws of gravity.”

I thrust my hands hard against his solid chest, moving him back a step or two, then set my feet, with my knees slightly bent and my weight on my toes.

He reacted predictably, coming back fast, planting his left foot as he cocked his right arm. I dropped away to his left, sweeping his foot from under him as I skimmed the ground. In college wrestling terminology, it was known as a single leg pickup. It worked about as well as I’d hoped. His momentum pitched him forward, and he landed flat on his soft belly.

As he started to rise, I mounted him around the waist, like a rider atop a horse, slipping my legs under both of his, then spreading them as I raised my heels back and upward. It knocked his legs out from under him, flattening him again and holding him there.

With my right hand, I drew his right arm into a hammerlock. I snaked my left hand around his left arm, under the inside joint of the elbow, then up around his shoulder, cinching it tight in a hold known as a chicken wing. From there, I reached farther to secure his throat in a chokehold, the only move among the ones I’d just executed that would have been illegal on a college wrestling mat.

He struggled, so I cinched everything up tight, well beyond the allowable limit. It caused him to emit a high-pitched squeal. I lowered my mouth to his ear.

“Old wrestlers get out of shape,” I said, “but we never forget our best moves.”

He cursed me in Spanish and started squirming, so I cinched the hammerlock up so tight that another inch would have snapped his shoulder blade. This time, the pain was enough to make him scream. I could have broken either of his arms in a matter of seconds, or choked off the blood to his brain. It was a feeling of pure power, and I liked it.

I loosened the chokehold a little, before I started to like it too much.

“I told you, Luis, I don’t want trouble. Understand?”

He sank his teeth into my arm, so I cranked up the chicken wing, forcing a thin, constricted sound from his throat and leaving him gasping.

“Don’t ever threaten me again, Luis. I’m just as capable of inflicting punishment as you.
¿
Comprende?
”

He nodded furiously, moaning; tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.

I let go of him all at once, leaving him facedown in the street to work the painful kinks from his twisted limbs.

I flung the wrench up toward the house, among his father’s roses, climbed into the Mustang, and set the odometer at zero. Before pulling out, I glanced at the dashboard clock.