The Arraignment (29 page)

“I don’t know. You’d have to talk to them.”

“I did. They wouldn’t discuss it with me without your written consent.”

“I’d have to talk to them about that,” she says. Both Margaret and her lawyers are wary of anything having to do with the divorce and in particular the settlement agreement. They are probably worried that Dana might renew arguments that Margaret had no lawful claim to the insurance.

Susan raises a hand off of the arm of her chair, as if perhaps I shouldn’t press on this any further, that maybe I should move on.

“Have you ever heard the name Grace Gimble?” I ask.

With this she looks at me, almost snaps her neck doing it. “What does Grace have to do with this?”

“You know her?”

“Yes. She’s a friend,” she says. “One of the few friends we both had. I mean one Nick and I both knew, who maintained a friendship with me after the divorce.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“Maybe. But first tell me why you want to know.”

“Her name shows up on documents creating this limited partnership. The one I told you about. Jamaile Enterprises. Can you tell me who she is? Why her name might be on those documents?”

She thinks about this for a second, quietly to herself, eyes studying the oak surface of Susan’s desk, perhaps wondering if someone involved with Nick was a friend after all. “That’s easy,” she says. “After Grace retired from the government, she did some private secretarial work. Paralegal, they call it. To make a little money on the side. I know Nick threw some work her way from time to time, before he went to work for the firm. Before we were . . .”

“I see. Do you know where she lives?”

“I think so.” Margaret fumbles in her purse and comes up with a small black address book, thumbs through it until she
finds Grace Gimble’s address. She reads this to me as I write it on a Post-it note from Susan’s desk.

“Do you have a phone number?”

She gives me this as well.

“Have you talked to her recently?”

She thinks. “Not for at least a year,” she says. “I suppose she was probably at Nick’s funeral. I wouldn’t know since I wasn’t there.”

“How did she know Nick?”

“She was his secretary at the U.S. Attorney’s Office before he left.”

I stop writing on the little slip and look at her. She can tell this is not what I had expected to hear.

“She retired about the same time Nick went into private practice. Nick told me she took some paralegal courses and worked out of her house.”

This would explain her name on the documents forming Jamaile, especially if Nick, for whatever reason, didn’t want them prepared using the clerical staff at the firm.

Before Margaret can say anything more, Susan’s phone rings. Susan looks at me, rolls her eyes. “I told them to hold my calls.” She picks it up. “Yes.” Eyes looking at me, down at the desk, then she cups her hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s for you,” she says.

The only one who knows I’m here is Harry.

“Do you want to take it in the other room?” she says.

“No.”

So Susan moves the phone a little closer and stretches the cord so that I can take it at the edge of her desk.

“Hello.”

“Just a moment.” It’s Susan’s secretary. A second later, Harry’s voice comes on the line.

“Paul.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, I thought you’d want to know. I just got today’s mail.”

“Can this wait? I’m in the middle of a meeting,” I tell him.

“You’re going to want to know what was in it.”

“Fine.”

“A substitution of counsel for Espinoza,” says Harry.

“What?”

“I thought you’d be interested. Some lawyer named Gary Winston down in National City.”

“When was this?”

“Almost a week ago. The notice just arrived in the mail. And that’s not all. Before I wasted your time, I thought I’d check. See if Espinoza is in detention. He’s not.” Harry can tell he has my undivided attention from the silence coming from my end now.

“There was a bail hearing scheduled yesterday. Bail was set at a million dollars.”

“Then it’s probably all right,” I tell him. “Unless I’m wrong, and he’s more flush than I think, he couldn’t raise the ten percent fee, the hundred grand for the bond.”

“Guess again,” says Harry. “He’s been on the street since yesterday afternoon. Are you there?” Harry on the other end, listening to dead air from me.

“Yes. I’m thinking. Who put up the bond?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to see if I can find out?”

“Do it.”

“They may know where he is. At least the address Espinoza gave them.”

“Let’s hope maybe a bondsman’s watching him.” If they knew what kind of a flight risk he was, they wouldn’t have taken the fee unless they had some guarantee.

“And Harry . . .”

“Yeah?”

“See what you can find out about the lawyer, this Winston. Call me on the cell line as soon as you have anything. I’ll be in the car.”

I pocket the Post-it with Grace Gimble’s address and phone number and apologize to Susan and Margaret for a hasty departure.

“There’s nothing else you want to ask?” says Margaret.

“Not right now. I’ll call Susan if I have more questions. Next time we can do it over lunch. My treat.”

Margaret is not sure what to do with this, whether to say no now or later. She doesn’t say anything. I tell Susan I’ll call her, and I’m out the door.

Without more information, I am forced to make decisions based on assumptions. Whoever hired the lawyer to spring Espinoza also coughed up his bail. This is a chunk of change. Unless she won the lottery, it wasn’t his wife. Whoever it is wants him out for a reason. And since they dealt directly with the man himself, it had to be someone Espinoza either met or had seen previously. Espinoza may know a hundred people that fit this bill, but the only one I know is the man in the felt hat, the man Joyce told me goes by the name Hector Saldado.

There’s a little vibration against my leg. It’s coming from the pocket of my suit coat lying on the seat next to me. It’s my cell phone ringing. I fish it out.

“Hello.”

“Can you hear me?” It’s Harry.

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

“I got ahold of the lawyer, this guy Winston.”

“Yes.”

“Says he never met Espinoza before he saw him in court, at the bail hearing. Catch this. The guy’s been admitted to practice for only four months. Says he was retained by phone, a male voice. This person identified himself as Espinoza’s brother. A check for the retainer came by courier a few hours later, along with a substitution of counsel already signed by Espinoza. The kid says he set the hearing. He called it a cakewalk. I got the sense it may have been his first time in court.”

“Why?”

“He thought he was doing his client a favor with a million-dollar bail. Apparently he caught the deputy U.S. attorney, the one assigned to bail hearings that day, off guard. The prosecutor asked the court for a quarter million, then looked
at the file and realized what he was dealing with. He immediately jumped it to a million, figuring like you that Espinoza couldn’t raise it. The kid tried to knock it down, but the court said no. Espinoza told the kid on the way back to his cell not to worry about it. It wasn’t gonna be a problem. The lawyer says he knows about the bond. He says somebody else must have arranged it.”

My worst fears. “Did you talk to the bondsman?”

“He’s out of the office.”

I’m still hoping that maybe he’s watching his investment, keeping an eye on Espinoza.

“Where are you headed?” asks Harry.

“South on I-5,” I tell him.

“Are you coming back to the office?”

“No. Listen, what time do you have?”

“It’s about eleven-twenty,” says Harry.

“If I don’t call you in one hour, do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Call the police in San Diego and give them this address.” I give the address to Harry, so he can write it down and read it back to me.

“What’s going on?” he says.

“Just do it.”

“You want me to have ’em send a squad car?”

“More than one,” I tell him. “But give me one hour.”

“You got it.”

I
pull up to the curb under the shade of an old elm tree half a block up and across the street from the old house with its cut-up flats and sagging front porch.

The large two-story wooden frame house at 408 appears larger and more run-down in daylight. I also notice something that wasn’t there on my last visit, an older model SUV parked in front. The body is boxy and beat-up, primed, but unpainted. Parked on the short gravel drive on the other side of the stairs, its front bumper is into the bushes against the house with the large, aggressive tread of the rear tires sitting halfway onto the sidewalk.

What catches my attention most, however, is the car’s back window. It’s covered by a piece of wrinkled black plastic, taped and wrapped around the window frame. This vehicle fits to a tee the Chevy Blazer that Espinoza described on my visit with him at the lockup.

I sit and watch for a few minutes. Signs of life in one of the houses, the one at 408. The front door opens, the screen door pushing out.

Tall and slender, carrying a suitcase in each hand, I recognize the build. It’s the Mexican I’d seen that night, the one Espinoza had described, but without the hat this time. If the name on the mailbox is real, and Joyce’s information is accurate, this is Hector Saldado, who makes calls daily on his cell phone to the area around Cancún.

Saldado carries the suitcases down the stairs to the back of the beat-up Blazer, where he swings the rack with the spare tire out of the way and lifts the hinged rear door with the plastic-covered window. As he tosses the suitcases inside, another figure comes shooting out the door. Running barefoot, half naked, carrying a child in her arms, she makes it to the top step when Saldado turns and sees her.

She tries to get past him on the stairs, but he reaches out and grabs her by one arm, almost ripping the child out of her hands.

She tries to pull free, and he swings her around so the baby is nearly propelled from her arms by the centrifugal force.

The Mexican is powerful, wiry. With his hands gripping her upper arms from behind he lifts her, the child still sheltered in her arms, off her feet. Quickly he has her back up the stairs, inside the door, and beyond the shadows, where he stops, turns, and looks, making sure no one has seen him. I slide off to one side behind the wheel. Then he disappears.

The entire episode took less than twenty seconds. Anybody watching would consider it overly aggressive for any husband to treat his wife in this way. Some might call the cops, though I wouldn’t want my own life to hang on that slender thread. What she is doing here I don’t know, but Robin Watkins, Espinoza’s child-wife, is in serious trouble.

I grab my cell phone and dial nine-one-one. The operator comes on.

“I want to report domestic violence.”

“Is this an emergency?”

“It is.”

“Is the act occurring at this time?”

“Yes.” I give her the address, my name, and cell number.

“We will dispatch a car.”

“How long?”

“It may take a few minutes,” she says.

“How many minutes?”

“I can’t give you an estimate. We don’t have any officers in the area at the moment. As soon as a unit is available.”

I hang up, take a deep breath, and step out of the car. From the backseat I grab my old attache case, Samsonite, hard-sided and heavy. I close the car door and step back to the trunk. Inside, under the spare, I find the tire iron, a half-inch steel rod, about eighteen inches long, straight with a chisel point at one end for fitting into the jack, and curved to a forty-five-degree angle with a welded tire lug socket on the other end. This state now has two yammering U.S. senators who would strip every implement of defense from the hands of its citizens. That they haven’t banned lug wrenches and hammers is only a question of time.

I take the documents and files out of my briefcase and lay the iron diagonally inside, the only way it will fit, then close the briefcase and slam the trunk. As I head across the street, I hit the auto-lock button on my key ring and listen as the doors lock. The heat is oppressive, the sun beating down, reflecting up off the street’s fractured concrete.

At the top of the stairs I check the mailbox. Saldado, H. is still listed as residing in apartment G.

I pull open the screen. The front door is still open, so I step inside. It’s cooler here, dark, with a current of air drifting down the hallway from the back of the house.

The apartment at the foot of the stairs directly on my right is lettered “A” in dented brass, screwed into the top cross brace of the old three-panel door.

There is another door directly across the hall to my left; apartment B. Farther on, there are two more doors on that same side, apartments D and E. Apartment G, Saldado’s, has to be upstairs.

I climb the stairs two at time, watching where I step,
trying to make as little noise as possible. Near the top, my eyes come level with the floor of the hallway on two. This traverses the second story directly over the hallway below.

I continue my climb until I see the door on the right just beyond the top of the stairs: G.

From the layout of the building, Saldado’s apartment appears to be larger than the other flats. With only a single door on the right because of the open stairwell, his unit spans the entire length of the building, front to back on that side.

I press my ear against the soiled plaster of the wall just above the level of the floor. I am still standing six or seven steps from the top as I listen. What sounds like noises from a television inside, voices followed by canned laughter.

I check my watch, hoping to hear the screeching tires of a patrol unit pulling up out front. Instead what I hear is the cry of a woman, a single wail, followed by a dense thud as something or someone slams up against the wall on the other side. The vibration against the walls causes me to pull my head away. It is followed by a muted scream and what sounds like sobbing.