To Selena, With Love (31 page)

We flew to Los Angeles, where the scene was filmed in the Biltmore Hotel, and when we arrived, Selena was really cool and calm. I was the one freaking out.

When it was her call time, we walked downstairs to the lobby of the Biltmore. Johnny Depp was there, and he came right over and introduced himself. Selena was still collected and poised, completely unfazed. She went off to do her scene—over and over again—and I finally went back to the room because the filming took so long.

Selena eventually came back upstairs, exhausted but happy. “Man, that Marlon Brando, he sure likes to flirt,” she said.

Shortly after Yolanda gave Selena the ring, things started going from bad to worse in the boutiques. Our paperwork wasn’t matching up and money was missing. There were charges on our credit cards that weren’t accounted for. Selena noticed these financial discrepancies because she was the one who went over her business accounts and the bills.

Selena hired her cousin Debra to work in the boutiques and help expand the business into Mexico. Debra quit within a week, telling Yolanda that she was unhappy with how staff members weren’t reporting their sales. Yolanda told Selena not to worry about any of this. “I’ll take care of the problem,” Yolanda promised.

Soon after that, Martin Gomez asked Selena to buy him out of his contract, because he felt that he could no longer work with Yolanda. “She’s been mismanaging affairs from the start,” he said, and told Selena that Yolanda had destroyed some of his original designs and hadn’t paid his bills.

Both stores began to suffer losses. Yolanda fired anyone she didn’t like, so employee attrition was steady; the staff had been cut in half and employees continued to complain about the way Yolanda treated everyone. Selena turned a deaf ear, not wanting to believe that Yolanda would ever do anything to hurt her.

Eventually, the employees started talking to Abraham, who in turn expressed his concerns about Yolanda’s business management skills—or lack of them—to Selena. She tried to laugh this off as well.

“Dad always thinks people are bad,” she told me. “You know he never trusts anyone.”

By early March, however, Selena and I could no longer deny that there were problems in every aspect of the business that involved
Yolanda—which was most of them—and in the fan club as well. Certain people had sent in cash or checks to become fan club members, but they had never gotten the T-shirts and other items they were supposed to receive in exchange; they were now writing or calling to complain. Yolanda was even instructing some fans to make checks directly out to her instead of to the fan club.

Abraham started to receive calls from some of Selena’s disappointed, confused fans. On March 9, he called Yolanda into the offices at Q Productions for a private meeting along with Selena and Suzette to find out what was going on.

Yolanda couldn’t explain herself, Selena told me later. As Abraham questioned her, Yolanda kept repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Abraham told Yolanda to get off their property and to never step foot on it again, or he’d have her arrested. He also threatened to take her to court for embezzlement.

Suzette called Yolanda a thief and a liar, and said that she was disgusted that a woman she had trusted enough to have her participate in her wedding had been doing this to the family—and especially to Selena, who had been so good to her.

Selena was the opposite of Abraham in some ways: she was as trusting as he was suspicious. She was torn between feeling betrayed and angry as she watched Yolanda trip over her own lies, and feeling compassion toward the woman she had once considered one of her best friends.

I think that, in many ways, Selena couldn’t believe what she was seeing as Yolanda unraveled right in front of us. However, by this point, she, too, was ready to sever all ties with her former friend—but first she wanted Yolanda to return the missing paperwork. The
fan club had been her breaking point. To Selena, her fans were her family, and now her family had been hurt.

The morning after that meeting with Yolanda, Abraham’s brother Eddie called to let Abraham know that Yolanda was at Q Productions with another employee from the Corpus Christi boutique. Abraham drove straight to the office in order to inform Yolanda again that she was no longer welcome anywhere on his property.

That same day, I heard Selena arguing with Yolanda on the phone. After Selena hung up, she said, “I can’t trust her anymore.”

She was right. The day after Abraham banned Yolanda from Q Productions, she went out and bought a gun.

Selena finally started quizzing various workers at the boutiques about Yolanda’s behavior. They all told her that they had been having problems with Yolanda. What’s more, several employees at the San Antonio salon came forward and told her that Yolanda appeared to be stealing money. Yolanda had even gotten involved in Selena’s perfume line, picking up samples from Leonard Wong, the man she was working with on creating the perfume, but never giving them to Selena.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Selena said to me, distressed because this had all been going unnoticed while we were busy on the road. “I should fire Yolanda, but she’s still holding on to some papers we really need for our taxes. I don’t want to alienate her completely and risk losing those records.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked. I knew that Selena didn’t want to involve Abraham. This was her business, and she wanted to resolve the problems independently from her family.

In my mind, I knew it wasn’t life or death paperwork—I probably would have just let lawyers try to wrest it from Yolanda—but I also knew that it wasn’t in Selena’s nature to leave any stone unturned. Selena was stubborn, which is partly what made her so successful professionally; she just wanted Yolanda to return what was rightfully ours before she washed her hands of the woman whom she had once trusted so completely.

Selena and I went back and forth about possible solutions that ranged from firing Yolanda on the spot to calling in a private investigator. Finally, Selena said, “I can’t let Yolanda know that we suspect her of misusing our credit cards or stealing money. I doubt that she really has any proof that she’s not stealing money, like she says. But we need to get our business papers back from her for the taxes. We can’t let her know that we’re thinking about firing her. Not yet.”

I agreed, and that’s when the real game of cat-and-mouse began. Over the next two weeks, Yolanda kept claiming that she had proof that she wasn’t stealing from the boutiques or embezzling money from the fan club, but every time Selena met her to see the receipts and other papers that would be evidence of Yolanda’s innocence, she somehow didn’t bring the right documents.

Sometime around March 15, Selena told me that she was going to meet Yolanda in a restaurant on the outskirts of Corpus to collect the necessary paperwork.

“Why can’t she just bring the papers to the boutiques?” I asked.

“She’s afraid,” Selena said. “Yolanda won’t drive into Corpus because she says she’s been getting threatening phone calls.”

At the restaurant, they sat in Selena’s car because Yolanda was too nervous to go inside. Yolanda gave Selena almost all of the paperwork that we needed for our business—but not quite.

“Maybe I should work someplace else,” Yolanda said. “This is too much for me.”

I doubt very much that Yolanda really intended to resign. She was just trying to manipulate Selena. And Selena did feel sorry for Yolanda, because her former friend looked so despondent. At the same time, Selena had her own reasons for pretending to believe in Yolanda’s friendship: she was still very intent on recovering our paperwork.

Thinking fast, Selena decided that the best stance to take would be a conciliatory one, at least for the time being. “No, no, no,” Selena told Yolanda. “Please don’t quit. I need you for the Mexico deal. I really need your help. You can’t quit, not when we’re so close!”

When Selena said this, Yolanda’s demeanor changed completely. “She was suddenly in a good mood again, all buddy-buddy with me and laughing like we were friends,” Selena told me afterward.

Then Yolanda said, “You want to see something?”

“Sure,” Selena said. “What is it?”

Yolanda reached into her purse and pulled out a gun.

As Selena told me this later, I had a sinking feeling. I knew now that Yolanda was even crazier than I thought. “What the hell?” I said. “She had a gun in the car?”

“Uh-huh,” Selena said, but she didn’t seem at all unnerved by this. “Yolanda pulled the gun out and said she’d bought it for protection.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I went off on her and said that she needed to take that gun back to the store right now, of course,” Selena said.

Later, investigators discovered that Yolanda had gone on March 11 to a gun range and store called A Place to Shoot in San Antonio.
Yolanda had told one of the employees there that she was a private home nurse and that some family members of a patient had threatened her. She wanted the gun for protection.

Yolanda had to wait for three days for a background check, then picked up the pistol and bought twenty hollow-point bullets—the kind designed to open up fast on impact, causing maximum damage. The next day, she brought the gun when she met Selena at the restaurant.

After her meeting with Selena, Yolanda thought that they were still friends. She returned the gun to the store and told the clerk that she’d changed her mind and didn’t need the pistol after all.

I still wonder sometimes if Yolanda might have shot Selena on the day she first showed her the pistol if Selena had gone ahead and dismissed her. Maybe. I carry a certain sense of guilt that I never said anything about Yolanda having shown Selena the gun in her purse.

What if I had told the police? Or Abraham? Who knows how Abraham would have reacted? Maybe he would have called in a favor with the police and had them scare Yolanda, and it would have been over. I still live with those questions.

A few weeks earlier, Selena had gone into Q Productions to work on “Dreaming of You,” the song that would become the biggest hit on the mainstream English-language album we were scheduled to release later that year. I was going to go with her, but on the same day, Abraham asked me to work with the lead singer in that rock band that he was trying to promote—the one I had been working with at
our house when Selena showed me how one of the songs I’d written for them should sound.

“Do you mind if I help out your dad instead of going to the studio with you?” I asked Selena.

“No, that’s fine,” Selena said. “You do the best you can do with this guy, and I’ll be right back.” She gave me a hug and a kiss. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” I said.

I wish that I could say that I had some kind of premonition that the end of my time with Selena was rapidly drawing near, but I did not. I just went to work. But I’ll always have regrets about what happened later that day.

I worked with the singer from Abraham’s rock band in our home studio right through the afternoon and into the night. I had my cell phone set to vibrate on the mixing board; I was trying to mold this singer’s vocals when the cell phone went off. It was Selena.