The Oxford Book of American Det (111 page)

“helping with the trouble with the judge.”

Alex, a stocky youth with a tracery of moustache on his upper lip, seemed disinterested. He shrugged out of his high school letter jacket and vanished through a door to the rear of the house. Isabel studied me with frank curiosity. She was a slender beauty, with black hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders; her features had a delicacy lacking in those of her mother and brother. Unfortunately, bright blue eyeshadow and garish orange lipstick detracted from her natural good looks, and she wore an imitation leather outfit in a particularly gaudy shade of purple. However, she was polite and well-spoken as she questioned me about what I could do to help her mother. Then, after a comment to Amor about an assignment that was due the next day, she left through the door her brother had used.

I turned to Amor, who was fingering the leaves of a philodendron plant that stood on a stand near the front window. Her posture was stiff, and when I spoke to her she didn’t meet my eyes. Now I was aware of a tension in her that hadn’t been there before her children returned home. Anxiety, because of the danger her witnessing the shooting had placed them in? Or something else? It might have had to do with the quarrel they’d been having, but weren’t arguments between siblings fairly common? They certainly had been in my childhood home in San Diego.

I told Amor I’d be back to check on her in a couple of hours. Then, after a few precautionary and probably unnecessary reminders about locking doors and staying clear of windows, I went out into the chill November afternoon.

The first name on my list was Madeline Dawson, the slain gang leader’s widow. I glanced at the house next door and saw with some relief that the guard dog no longer paced in its yard. When I pushed through the gate in the chain link fence, the creature’s whereabouts quickly became apparent: a bellowing emanated from the small, shabby cottage. I went up a broken walk bordered by weeds, climbed the sagging front steps, and pressed the bell. A woman’s voice yelled for the dog to shut up, then a door slammed somewhere within, muffling the barking. Footsteps approached, and the woman called, “Yes, who is it?”

“My name’s Sharon McCone, from All Souls Legal Cooperative. I’m investigating the threats your neighbour, Mrs. Angeles, has been receiving.” A couple of locks turned and the door opened on its chain. The face that peered out at me was very thin and pale, with wisps of red hair straggling over the high forehead; the Dawson marriage had been an interracial one, then. The woman stared at me for a moment before she asked, “What threats?”

“You don’t know that Mrs. Angeles and her children have been threatened because she’s to testify against the man who shot your husband?” She shook her head and stepped back, shivering slightly—whether from the cold outside or the memory of the murder, I couldn’t tell. “I... don’t get out much these days.”

“May I come in, talk with you about the shooting?”

She shrugged, unhooked the chain, and opened the door. “I don’t know what good it will do. Amor’s a damned fool for saying she’d testify in the first place.”

“Aren’t you glad she did? The man killed your husband.” She shrugged again and motioned me into a living room the same size as that in the Angeles house. All resemblance stopped there, however. Dirty glasses and dishes, full ashtrays, piles of newspapers and magazines covered every surface; dust balls the size of rats lurked under the shabby Danish modern furniture. Madeline Dawson picked up a heap of tabloids from the couch and dumped it on the floor, then indicated I should sit there and took a hassock for herself.

I said, “You are glad that Mrs. Angeles was willing to testify, aren’t you?”

“Not particularly.”

“You don’t care if your husband’s killer is convicted or not?”

“Reg was asking to be killed. Not that I wouldn’t mind seeing the Dragon get the gas chamber—he may not have killed Reg, but he killed plenty of other people—“

“What did you say?” I spoke sharply, and Madeline Dawson blinked in surprise. It made me pay closer attention to her eyes; they were glassy, their pupils dilated. The woman, I realised, was high.

“I said the Dragon killed plenty of other people.”

“No, about him not killing Reg.”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine why. I mean, Amor must know. She was up there in the window watching for sweet Isabel like always.”

“You don’t sound as if you like Isabel Angeles.”

“I’m not fond of flips in general. Look at the way they’re taking over this area. Daly City’s turning into another Manila. All they do is buy, buy, buy—houses, cars, stuff by the truckload. You know, there’s a joke that the first three words their babies learn are

‘Mama, Papa, and Serramonte.’” Serramonte was a large shopping mall south of San Francisco.

The roots of the resentment she voiced were clear to me. One of our largest immigrant groups today, the Filipinos are highly westernised and by and large better educated and more affluent than other recently arrived Asians—or many of their neighbours, black or white. Isabel Angeles, for all her bright, cheap clothing and excessive makeup, had behind her a tradition of industriousness and upward mobility that might help her to secure a better place in the world than Madeline Dawson could aspire to.

I wasn’t going to allow Madeline’s biases to interfere with my line of questioning. I said, “About Dragon not having shot your husband—“

“Hey, who knows? Or cares? The bastard’s dead, and good riddance.”

“Why good riddance?”

“The man was a pig. A pusher who cheated and gouged people—people like me who need the stuff to get through. You think I was always like this, lady? No way. I was a nice Irish Catholic girl from the Avenues when Reg got his hands on me. Turned me on to coke and a lot of other things when I was only thirteen. Liked his pussy young, Reg did. But then I got old—I’m all of nineteen now—and I needed more and more stuff just to keep going, and all of a sudden Reg didn’t even see me anymore. Yeah, the man was a pig, and I’m glad he’s dead.”

“But you don’t think Dragon killed him.”

She sighed in exasperation. “I don’t know what I think. It’s just that I always supposed that when Reg got it it would be for something more personal than driving his car into a stupid shrine in a parking space. You know what I mean? But what does it matter who killed him, anyway?”

“It matters to Tommy Dragon, for one.”

She dismissed the accused man’s life with a flick of her hand. “Like I said, the Dragon’s a killer. He might as well die for Reg’s murder as for any of the others. In a way it’d be the one good thing Reg did for the world.” Perhaps in a certain primitive sense she was right, but her offhandedness made me uncomfortable. I changed the subject. “About the threats to Mrs. Angeles—which of the
Kabalyeros
would be behind them?”

“All of them. The guys in the gangs, they work together.” But I knew enough about the structure of street gangs—my degree in sociology from UC Berkeley hadn’t been totally worthless—to be reasonably sure that wasn’t so.

There is usually one dominant personality, supported by two or three lieutenants; take away these leaders, and the followers become ineffectual, purposeless. If I could turn up enough evidence against the leaders of the Kabalyeros to have them arrested, the harassment would stop.

I asked, “Who took over the
Kabalyeros
after Dragon went to jail?”

“Hector Bulis.”

It was a name that didn’t appear on my list; Amor had claimed not to know who was the current head of the Filipino gang. “Where can I find him?”

“There’s a fast-food joint over on Geneva, near the Cow Palace. Fat Robbie’s. That’s where the
Kabalyeros
hang out.”

The second person I’d intended to talk with was the young man who had reportedly taken over the leadership of the Victors after Dawson’s death, Jimmy Willis. Willis could generally be found at a bowling alley, also on Geneva Avenue near the Cow Palace. I thanked Madeline for taking the time to talk with me and headed for the Daly City line.

The first of the two establishments that I spotted was Fat Robbie’s, a cinderblock-and-glass relic of the early sixties whose specialties appeared to be burgers and chicken-in-a-basket. I turned into a parking lot that was half-full of mostly shabby cars and left my MG beside one of the defunct drive-in speaker poles.

The interior of the restaurant took me back to my high school days: orange leatherette booths beside the plate glass windows; a long Formica counter with stools; laminated colour pictures of disgusting-looking food on the wall above the pass-through counter from the kitchen. Instead of a jukebox there was a bank of video games along one wall. Three Filipino youths in jeans and denim jackets gathered around one called

‘Invader!’ The
Kabalyeros,
I assumed.

I crossed to the counter with only a cursory glance at the trio, sat, and ordered coffee from a young waitress who looked to be Eurasian. The
Kabalyeros
didn’t conceal their interest in me; they stared openly, and after a moment one of them said something that sounded like ‘tick-tick,’ and they all laughed nastily. Some sort of Tagalog obscenity, I supposed. I ignored them, sipping the dishwater-weak coffee, and after a bit they went back to their game.

I took out the paperback that I keep in my bag for protective coloration and pretended to read, listening to the few snatches of conversation that drifted over from the three. I caught the names of two: Sal and Hector—the latter presumably Bulis, the gang’s leader. When I glanced covertly at him, I saw he was tallish and thin, with long hair caught back in a ponytail; his features were razor-sharp and slightly skewed, creating the impression of a perpetual sneer. The trio kept their voices low, and although I strained to hear, I could make out nothing of what they were saying. After about five minutes Hector turned away from the video machine. With a final glance at me he motioned to his companions, and they all left the restaurant.

I waited until they’d driven away in an old green Pontiac before I called the waitress over and showed her my identification. “The three men who just left,” I said. “Is the tall one Hector Bulis?”

Her lips formed a little “O” as she stared at the ID. Finally she nodded.

“May I talk with you about them?”

She glanced toward the pass-through to the kitchen. “My boss, he don’t like me talking with the customers when I’m supposed to be working.”

“Take a break. Just five minutes.”

Now she looked nervously around the restaurant. “I shouldn’t—“ I slipped a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and showed it to her. “Just five minutes.” She still seemed edgy, but fear lost out to greed. “Okay, but I don’t want anybody to see me talking to you. Go back to the restroom—it’s through that door by the video games. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

I got up and found the ladies room. It was tiny, dimly lit, with a badly cracked mirror.

The walls were covered with a mass of graffiti; some of it looked as if it had been painted over and had later worked its way back into view through the fading layers of enamel. The air in there was redolent of grease, cheap perfume, and stale cigarette and marijuana smoke. I leaned against the sink as I waited.

The young Eurasian woman appeared a few minutes later. “Bastard gave me a hard time,” she said. “Tried to tell me I’d already taken my break.”

“What’s your name?”

“Anna Smith.”

“Anna, the three men who just left—do they come in here often?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Keep pretty much to themselves, don’t they?”

“It’s more like other people stay away from them.” She hesitated. “They’re from one of the gangs; you don’t mess with them. That’s why I wanted to talk with you back here.”

“Have you ever heard them say anything about Tommy Dragon?”

“The Dragon? Sure. He’s in jail; they say he was framed.” Of course they would claim that. “What about a Mrs. Angeles—Amorfina Angeles?”

“... Not that one, no.”

“What about trying to intimidate someone? Setting fires, going after someone with a gun?”

“Uh-uh. That’s gang business; they keep it pretty close. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Filipinos—I’m part Filipina myself, my mom met my dad when he was stationed at Subic Bay—they’ve got this saying,
kumukulo ang dugo.
It means ‘the blood is boiling.’ They can get pretty damn mad, ‘specially the men. So stuff like what you said—sure they do it.”

“Do you work on Fridays?”

“Yeah, two to ten.”

“Did you see any of the
Kabalyeros
in here last Friday around six?” That was the time when Isabel had been accosted.

Anna Smith scrunched up her face in concentration. “Last Friday... oh, yeah, sure.

That was when they had the big meeting, all of them.”

“All of them?”

“Uh-huh. Started around five thirty, went on a couple of hours. My boss, he was worried something heavy was gonna go down, but the way it turned out, all he did was sell a lot of food.”

“What was this meeting about?”

“Had to do with the Dragon, who was gonna be character witnesses at the trial, what they’d say.”

The image of the three I’d seen earlier—or any of their ilk—as character witnesses was somewhat ludicrous, but I supposed in Tommy Dragon’s position you took what you could get. “Are you sure they were all there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And no one at the meeting said anything about trying to keep Mrs. Angeles from testifying?”

“No. That lawyer the Dragon’s got, he was there too.” Now that was odd. Why had Dragon’s public defender chosen to meet with his witnesses in a public place? I could think of one good reason: he was afraid of them, didn’t want them in his office. But what if the
Kabalyeros
had set the time and place—

as an alibi for when Isabel was to be assaulted?

“I better get back to work,” Anna Smith said. “Before the boss comes looking for me.” I gave her the twenty dollars. “Thanks for your time.”

“Sure.” Halfway out the door she paused, frowning. “I hope I didn’t get any of the Kabalyeros in trouble.”