The McCone Files (37 page)

“Week, ten days ago.”

Long before Isabel had been accosted. Before the dead dog and the shooting incidents, too. “Are you sure?”

“It's what I hear. You know, in a way I'm surprised that they'd go after Mrs. Angeles at all.”

“Why?”

“The Filipinos have this macho tradition. ‘Specially when it comes to their women. They don't like them messed with, ‘specially by non-Filipinos. So how come they'd turn around and mess with one of their own?”

“Well, her testimony
would
jeopardize the life of one of their fellow gang member. It's an extreme situation.”

“Can't argue with that.”

Jimmy Willis and I talked a bit more, but he couldn't—or wouldn't—offer any further information. I bought him a second beer, then went out to where I'd left my car.

And came face-to-face with Hector Bulis and the man called Sal.

Sal grabbed me by the arm, twisted it behind me, and forced me up against the latticework fence surrounding the garbage cans. The stench from them filled my nostrils; Sal's breath rivaled it in foulness. I struggled, but he got hold of my other arm and pinned me tighter. I looked around, saw no one, nothing but the chill face and high board fence of the auto dismantler's yard, Bulis approached, flicking open a switch-blade, his twisty face intense. I stiffened, went very still, eyes on the knife.

Bulis placed the tip of the knife against my jawbone, then traced a line across my cheek. “Don't want to hurt you, bitch,” he said. “You do what I say, I won't have to mess you up.”

The Tagalog phrase that Anna Smith had translated for me—
kumukuló ang dugó
—flashed through my mind.
The blood is boiling
. I sensed Bullis' was—and dangerously so.

I wet my dry lips, tried to keep my voice from shaking as I said, “What do you want me to do?”

“We hear you're asking around about Dawson's murder, trying to prove the Dragon did it.”

“That's not—”

“We want you to quit. Go back to your own part of town and leave our business alone.”

“Whoever told you that is lying, I'm only trying to help the Angeles family.”

“They wouldn't lie.” He moved the knife's tip to the hollow at the base of my throat. I felt it pierce my skin—a mere pinprick, but frightening enough.

When I could speak, I did so slowly, phrasing my words carefully. “What I hear is that Dragón is innocent. And that the
Kabalyeros
aren't behind the harassment of the Angeles—at least not for a week or ten days.”

Bullis exchanged a look with his companion—quick, unreadable.

“Someone's trying to frame you,” I added. “Just like they did Dragón.”

Bullis continued to hold the knife to my throat, his hand firm. His gazed wavered, however, as if he was considering what I'd said. After a moment he asked, “All right—who?”

“I'm not sure, but I think I can find out.”

He thought a bit longer, then let his arm drop and snapped the knife shut. “I'll give you till this time tomorrow,” he said. Then he stuffed the knife into his pocket, motioned for Sal to let go of me, and the two quickly walked away.

I sagged against the latticework fence, feeling my throat where the knife had priced it. It had bled a little, but the flow already was clotting. My knees were weak and my breath came fast, but I was too caught up in the possibilities to panic. There were plenty of them—and the most likely was the most unpleasant.

Kumukuló and dugó
. The blood is boiling…

Two hours later I was back at the Angeles house on Omega Street. When Amor admitted me, the tension I'd felt in her earlier had drained. Her body sagged, as if the extra weight she carried had finally proved to be too much for frail bones; the skin of her face looked flaccid, like melting putty; her eyes were sunken and vague. After she shut the door and motioned for me to sit, she sank in to the recliner, expelling a sigh. The house was quite—too quite.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “What does ‘tick-tick' mean in Tagalog?”

Her eyes flickered with dull interest. “
Tiktik
.” She corrected my pronunciation. “It's a word for detective.”

Ever since Hector Bulis and Sal had accosted me I'd supposed as much.

“Where did you hear that?” Amor asked.

“One of the
Kabalyeros
said it when I went to Fat Robbie's earlier. Someone had told them I was a detective, probably described me. Whoever it was said I was trying to prove Tommy Dragón killed Reg Dawson.”

“Why would—”

“More to the point,
who
would? At the time, only four people knew that I'm a detective.”

She wet her lips, but remained silent.

“Amor, the night of the shooting, you were standing in your front window, watching for Isabel.”

“Yes.”

“Do you do that often?”

“…Yes.”

“Because Isabel is often late coming home. Because you're afraid she may have gotten into trouble.”

“A mother worries—”

“Especially when she's given good cause. Isabel is running out of control, isn't she?”

“No, she—”

“Amor, when I spoke with Madeline Dawson, she said you were standing in the window watching for ‘sweet Isabel, like always.' She didn't say ‘sweet' in a pleasant way. Later, Jimmy Willis implied that your daughter is not…exactly a vulnerable young girl.”

Amor's eyes sparked. “The Dawson woman is jealous.”

“Of course she is. There's something else: when I asked the waitress at Fat Robbie's if she'd ever overheard
the Kabalyeros
discussing you, she said, ‘No, not that one.' It didn't register at the time, but when I talked to her again a little while ago, she told me Isabel is the member of your family they discuss. They say she's wild, runs around with the men in the gangs. You know that, so does Alex. And so does Madeline Dawson. She just told me the first man Isabel became involved with was her husband.”

Amore seemed to shrivel. She gripped the arms of the chair, white-knuckled.

“It's true, isn't it?” I asked more gently.

She lowered her eyes, nodding. When she spoke her voice was ragged. “I don't know what to do with her anymore. Ever since that Reg Dawson got to her, she's been different, not my girl at all.”

“Is she on drugs?”

“Alex says no, but I'm not sure.”

I let it go; really didn't matter. “When she came home earlier,” I said, “Isabel seemed very interested in me. She asked questions, looked me over carefully enough to be able to describe to the
Kabalyeros
. She was afraid of what I might find out. For instance, that she wasn't accosted by any men with guns last Friday.”

“She was!”

“No, Amor. That was just a story, to make it look as if your life—and your children's—were in danger if you testified. In spite of what you said early on, you haven't wanted to testify against Tommy Dragón since the very beginning.”

“When the
Kabalyeros
began harassing you a month ago, you saw that as the perfect excuse not to take the stand. But you didn't foresee that Dragon's lawyer would convince the gang to stop the harassment. When that happened, you and Isabel, and probably Alex, too, manufactured incidents—the shot-out window, the dead dog on the doorstop, the men with the guns—to make it look as if the harassment was still going on.”

“Why would I? They're going to put me in jail.”

“But at the time you didn't know they could do that—or that your employer would hire me. My investigating poses yet another danger to you and your family.”

“This is…why would I do all that?”

“Because basically you're and honest woman, a good woman. You didn't want to testify because you knew Dragón didn't shoot Dawson. It's my guess you gave the police his name because it was the first one that came to mind.”

“I had no reason to—”

“You had the best reason in the world: a mother's desire to protect her child.”

She was silent, sunken eyes registering despair and defeat.

I kept on, even though I hated to inflict further pain on her. “The day he died, Dawson had let word out that he was going to desecrate Benny's space. The person who shot him knew there would be fighting and confusion, counted on that as a cover. The killer hated Dawson—”

“Lots of people did.”

“But only one person you'd want to protect so badly that you'd accuse an innocent man.”

“Leave my mother alone. She's suffered enough on account of what I did.”

I turned. Alex had come into the room so quietly I hadn't noticed. Now he moved midway between Amor and me, a Saturday night special clutched in his right hand.

The missing murder weapon.

I tensed, but one look at his face told me he didn't intend to use it. Instead he raised his arm and extended the gun, grip first.

“Take this,” he said. “I never should of bought it. Never should of used it. I hated Dawson on account of what he did to my sister. But killing him wasn't worth what we've all gone through since.”

I glanced at Amor; tears were trickling down her face.

Alex said, “Mama, don't cry. I'm not worth it.”

When she spoke, it was to me. “What will happen to him?”

“Nothing like what might have happened to Dragón; Alex is a juvenile. You, however—”

“I don't care about myself, only my children.”

Maybe that was the trouble. She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions—and in the end doing them irreparable harm.

There were times when I felt thankful that I had no children. And there were times when I was thankful that Jack Stuart was a very good criminal lawyer. This was a time I was thankful on both counts. I went to the phone, called Jack, and asked him to come over here. At least I could leave the Angeles family in good legal hands.

After he arrived, I went out into the gathering dusk. An old yellow VW was pulling out of Benny's space. I walked down there and stood on the curb. Nothing remained of the shrine to Benny Crespo. Nothing remained to show that blood had boiled and been shed here. It was merely a stretch of cracked asphalt, splotched with oil drippings, littered with the detritus of urban life. I stared at it for close to a minute, then turned away from the bleak landscape of Omega Street.

CALIFORNIA'S Lost Coast is at the same time one of the most desolate and beautiful of shorelines. Northerly winds whip the sand into dust-devil frenzy; eerie, stationary fogs hang in the trees and distort the driftwood until it resembles the bones of prehistoric mammals; bruised clouds hover above the peaks of the distant King Range, then blow down to sea level and dump icy torrents. But on a fair day the sea and sky show infinite shading of blue, and the wildflowers are a riot of color. If you wait quietly, you can spot deer, peregrine falcons, foxes, otters, even black bears and mountain lions.

A contradictory and oddly compelling place, this seventy-three-mile stretch of coast southwest of Eureka, where—as with most worthwhile things or people—you must take the bad with the good.

Unfortunately, on my first visit there I was taking mostly the bad. Strong winds pushed my MG all over the steep, narrow road, making hairpin turns ever more perilous. Early October rain cut my visibility to a few yards. After I crossed the swollen Bear River, the road continued to twist and wind, and I began to understand why the natives had dubbed it The Wildcat.

Somewhere ahead, my client had told me, was the hamlet of Petrolia—site of the first oil well drilled in California, he'd irrelevantly added. The man was a conservative politician, a former lumber-company attorney, and given what I knew of his voting record on the environment, I was certain we disagreed on the desirability of that event, as well as any number of similar issues. But the urgency of the current situation dictated that I keep my opinions to myself, so I'd simply written down the directions he gave me—omitting his travelogue-like asides—and gotten under way.

I drove through Petrolia—a handful of new buildings, since the village had been all but leveled in the disastrous earthquake in 1992—and turned toward the sea on an unpaved road. After two miles I began looking for the orange post that marked the dirt track to the client's cabin.

The whole time I was wishing I was back in San Francisco. This wasn't my kind of case; I didn't like the client, Steve Shoemaker; and even though the fee was good, this was the week I'd scheduled to take off a few personal business days from All Souls Legal Cooperative, where I'm chief investigator. But Jack Stuart, our criminal specialist, had asked me to take on the job as a favor to him. Steve Shoemaker was Jack's old friend from college in Southern California, and he'd asked for a referral to a private detective. Jack owed Steve a favor; I owed Jack several, so there was no way I could gracefully refuse.