Desperado

by Manuel Ramos

  The door banged open and she strutted in like the queen bee. “Hey, Gus,” she shouted. “What’s goin’ on?” The cops flinched—truth is, I shrunk back a little myself.

  Her yellow sweatpants and sweatshirt did what they could to cover most of her bulk. She rolled like a lemon across the floor—a giant lemon with a brown pudgy face and a voice a decibel too high for indoors.

  The policemen separated and gave her room. She ended up standing next to me in front of the table. I was so happy to see her I gave her a hug. She stepped away, surprised by my unusual brotherly affection.

  “These two policemen have some questions,” I said. “Something about Artie Baca and a check. I told them I don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, but they seem to think I’m involved in whatever happened to Artie.”

  Her carefully trimmed and shaped eyebrows arched sharply at the two detectives.

  “We’re talking to Mr. Corral, uh, Miss, uh . . . ” Reese stammered.

  “Corrine, his sister,” as though he should have known that important fact all along. “I don’t know you. Been on the force for long?”

  “Maybe you don’t come in contact with homicide cops that much?” Robbins said. “I’d say that’s a good thing, right?”

  “The less contact I have with cops, the better all around, you and me. You ever work out of District 1?”

  “We’ll ask the questions, okay?” Reese said.

  Corrine turned away from them. “They asking you about Artie?” I nodded. “Don’t say anything.” She spoke with the authority of experience. “In case they haven’t filled you in, he’s dead.” She emphasized the word “dead.” “I saw it on the morning news. They found his body in one of the new condos he’s building over by Saint Patrick’s. Somebody shot him. A real mess. You better keep your mouth shut, Gus. I hope you haven’t already opened your trap. Be like you to dig yourself into a hole without knowing what’s going on.”

  My older sister always knew what was best for me.

  “Hold on a minute.” Reese rushed to recover his momentum. “You can’t tell your brother not to cooperate. That wouldn’t be in his interest, or yours.”

  Anger slipped into his words. But he couldn’t intimidate Corrine. She stood toe-to-toe with cops since before she had a license to drive a car. She believed she had to protect her family and her turf, and he made the mistake of messing with both.

  “Unless you got a warrant or you’re arresting Gus, he shouldn’t even say prayers with you guys.” Corrine’s voice did not waver. “Anybody knows that. It’s like basic survival, one-oh-one.”

  The cops now stared at Corrine. She stared back.

  I knew she wouldn’t back off. I’d found myself in the same spot as the cops several times and I’d never worked my way through her attitude.

  Reese scratched his head. Robbins stuck his hands in the pockets of his sports coat. He said, “This sucks.” His words were meant only for Reese, but we all heard them.

  Reese straightened himself to his full six feet plus. “We can take care of this now if Gus will answer a few simple questions.” He didn’t know any better, so he kept trying to convince her that I needed to do the right thing. “We can do it now, or later at the station. It gets real ugly if we have to go downtown. You don’t have anything to hide, right?” Reese’s question was directed at me but he looked at Corrine.

  “Ask away,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” I was feeling all chingón with my sister at my side.

  “No way,” Corrine insisted. She folded her arms in front of her sweatshirt and twisted her body into something like a gangster lean. I liked what she was doing but it made me nervous.

  “For once,” she said, “think this through. If they want to question you about a murder, you need legal help. I’ll call a lawyer. Downtown or here at the shop, either way someone has to represent you. This is serious.”

  She unfolded her arms and dug around in her sweatpants until she produced a cell phone. She punched buttons, looking for the number of an attorney, I hoped.

  “If Gus has nothing to hide he doesn’t need a lawyer.” Detective Reese flipped through a notebook as though he was going to write notes for his file.

  “Yeah, right.” Corrine looked up from her phone. “Spoken like a TV cop. How many times have I heard that one? Just understand that my brother isn’t talking to you unless he has a lawyer. If that means we need to go to your house, let’s get with it.”

  My sister certainly was brave with my personal freedom.

  Reese jammed his notebook back in his pocket. “This doesn’t look good for you. You’re acting like a guilty man. Your sister’s advice is all bad.”

  I opened my mouth but Corrine stepped in front of me, closer to the cops.

  “Funny how a cop thinks that when a citizen exercises his rights he must be guilty of something.” She put the phone up to her ear. “Hello, Luis? This is Corrine Corral. Yeah, long time. I’d like to catch up but my brother needs help. Like now. You busy for the next couple of hours?”

  It did not surprise me that Corrine could get directly to a lawyer on her first call.

  Robbins didn’t make a sound but it was obvious he was not happy with the way the situation played out. He looked at his watch and fumbled with something in one of his pockets. Then he grabbed Reese by the coat sleeve. “We don’t want to waste our time,” he said. “We’re not getting anything done here today.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Reese said.

  “Hold on, Luis.” She spoke to her cell. “The cops are saying something.”

  “Don’t think for a second that this is over, Gus,” Reese said. “We’re watching you and your sister, now that she’s jumped into this business. You just made number one on our shit list, Gus. You can thank her for that.” He pointed his finger at Corrine. The two men walked out of the store.

  The room darkened as clouds covered the sun. A gust of wind pushed trash along the street. Tree limbs swayed over the sidewalk. The latest rain rolled in to Wheat Ridge at the western edge of the city and waited.

  Reese pulled up the lapels of his coat. Robbins squinted against flying dust. I couldn’t hear what they said but Robbins clearly was upset. He waved his arms and shook his head while Reese simply nodded. Eventually they drove away without looking back at us.

  I filled a glass with water from the sink in the back room, took a drink and a few deep breaths and then walked back to the front.

  “Christ, that could have gone bad, Corrine. You should have checked with me first about what you were gonna do. Why . . . ” My voice trailed off when I saw that she was still on the phone.

  “It’s okay, Luis. I’ll get back to you.” She shut her phone and punched my upper arm.

  “Thanks, I guess.” I rubbed the instant charley horse in my triceps. “But I could have answered their questions and ended this. They got nothing on me because I haven’t done anything.”

  “Yeah, and only the guilty go to prison. You know better.”

  “Now they’re coming after me, hard. Thanks.”

  “No problem.” She shook her head.

  I couldn’t tell if she was pissed at me or the cops. Probably both.

  “These cops,” she said. “They’re not used to a woman who knows her rights and has the sense to stand up to them.” Corrine could not resist an opportunity to toot her own horn. “But then, they never met me before.”

  Ah, my older sister. What a jewel. Several women made an impact on my life. Corrine headed the list. She bailed me out of jams, or forced me into situations where I never belonged—situations that only Corrine could have set up—since we were scruffy kids running wild in the alleys and weedy lots of the North Side. The thing that happened not so long ago with Pancho Villa’s skull—now that’s a classic piece of Corrine drama.

  5

  The story is repeated every so often in magazines and the Internet. How someone robbed Pancho Villa’s grave in 1926 and snatched his head. Emil Homdahl, a mercenary a
nd pre-CIA spy, what they used to call a soldier of fortune, was usually “credited” with the theft. He was arrested in Mexico but released because of lack of evidence—some say because of political pressure from north of the border. Eventually, the story goes, he sold his trophy to Prescott Bush, grandfather of you-know-who. Bush stashed the skull at a fancy college back East.

  That’s all bull, of course. Oh yeah, Villa’s corpse was minus a skull but Homdahl never had it, the poor sap. Everyone overlooked one detail. There was another guy arrested with Homdahl, a Chicano from Los Angeles by the name of Alberto Corral. He was quickly released, too, and then he disappeared off the historical page, unlike Homdahl, who apparently liked the attention and actually enjoyed his grave-robbing notoriety. The public ignored or forgot about Corral’s role in the tale. If he’s remembered at all, it’s as Homdahl’s flunky, the muscle who dug up the grave or broke into the tomb, depending on the version of the story, and who was paid with a few pesos and a bottle of tequila while the gringo made twenty-five grand off old man Bush.

  I didn’t know why Great-grandpa Alberto ended up with the skull and I didn’t care. No one ever told me how he was connected to Homdahl or whatever possessed him to want to steal Pancho’s head and I didn’t expect to find out. What I did know was that the Corral family took care of the skull for as long as I could remember. I doubted that I would ever forget the image of the skull wrapped in old rags or plastic bags and stored in various containers like hatboxes or cardboard chests. As kids we whispered about the skull when we caught glimpses of the creepy yellowish thing whenever the adults dragged it out, usually on the nights when the tequila and beer and whiskey flowed long and strong.

  My grandmother Otilia sang to it, the “Corrido de Pancho Villa,” of course. The tiny old woman, hunched under a shawl and often with a bandana wrapped around her gray fine hair, drank slowly from a glass of whiskey while she stared at the box that held Panchito—that’s what she called it—for several minutes, and meanwhile all the kids waited for what we knew was coming. Without warning, Otilia ripped off the box top, grabbed the skull, exposed it to the light and burst into weepy lyrics about the Robin Hood of Mexico. One of my uncles, also into his cups, would join in with loud strumming on an old guitar. Shouts and whoops and ay-yay-yays erupted from whoever else was in the house, making the little kids scatter from the room, shrieking and crying, while us older ones were hypnotized by the dark eye sockets and crooked teeth of the skull of Pancho Villa.

  You can imagine what a jolt it was when the skull was stolen from my sister’s house.

  I knew Corrine shouldn’t have had the skull, but she was the oldest. She claimed rights to the skull and took it out of our parents’ house before Maxine, my younger sister, or I knew what was happening. Corrine always said she hated that “disgusting cosa.” But there she was, all over Panchito like he was gold. I kind of understood. Panchito was one of the few things our parents left us. The only connection we had to the old-timers of the family.

  I argued with Corrine about Panchito. I pointed out that the parade of losers that camped out at her house was a major security risk. I added that I could keep the skull at Sylvia’s shop. It fit in with the assorted debris Sylvia liked to stock, but Corrine clutched that skull like a baby and it was clear that the only way I would get my hands on it was to rip it from hers, which I wasn’t going to even attempt.

  The other thing in Corrine’s favor was that she owned a house and lived a fairly respectable life, considering her history and friends. She hired on at the Department of Social Services right out of high school as an office aide and worked herself up through the bureaucracy. When her twenty years were up she got a nice retirement package while she was young enough to enjoy it. Corrine received checks every month from various sources—exes, dividends and other places that were a mystery to me. She had it figured out.

  Corrine called me one night around midnight. Not all that unusual, for Corrine. One crisis after another. One of her boys—they all had brats of their own but Corrine still called them her boys—needed to get bailed. Did I have about five hundred dollars? Or she slipped and banged up her knee and couldn’t walk or drive. Would I pick her up for bingo? Or the latest love of her sad life went out for a six-pack about a week ago. Could I go look for him?

  Corrine’s call woke me from a bad dream about a job where I had to kill all the flies, gnats and mosquitoes I chased from a dirty swimming pool. Sylvia was my boss. I crawled off my cot and answered the shop’s phone.

  “You got your nerve, Gus,” Corrine shouted over the line. “I can’t believe you took it. What’d you do, pawn it for beer money?”

  “What the hell are you screaming about? It’s midnight, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Panchito! Panchito!”

  As if that explained everything.

  A half hour later I had the story and she started to consider that I hadn’t broken into her house and stolen the skull. She’d come home from an evening with the girls and found the back door wide open and a pair of her panties on the lawn. She freaked immediately and called the cops. She waited outside, not chancing that the intruder might still be inside. When the cops gave her the all-clear she entered a house torn upside down and inside out. She found her clothes scattered everywhere, drawers ripped from dressers, bowls of food splattered on the kitchen floor and a trail of CD cases snaked from her CD player to the useless back door. The final straw made her hysterical. A large piss puddle stained the middle of her carpet.

  Did she think I was really capable of that? I could see how she might be suspicious of me concerning the skull, but to trash her place and pee on her rug? Please.

  The cops said they couldn’t find any evidence of a forced entry. They concluded that Corrine had left the back door open and one of the neighborhood kids probably had seen it from the alley. A crime of opportunity, they told her. I can picture her face when she heard that. She must have screamed that she was absolutely sure she’d locked the door and then most likely turned into a blubbery mess, but she was just covering. My tough, street-wise sister could also occasionally act scatter-brained.

  One time she came home and found a pot of beans completely black, the beans nothing more than a congealed mass. Smoke as thick as her chubby arms filled every room. A fire truck roared up a few minutes later. The drapes and walls smelled like burnt beans for months. She told me she couldn’t remember doing anything with beans, much less leaving the stove on.

  I agreed with the cops’ take on the break-in. The way Corrine’s house was messed up and the stuff that was taken—CDs, video tapes, a jar full of pennies and a bag of potato chips—sounded like a kid’s thing. But what the hell would he do with a skull?

  Corrine never mentioned Panchito to the cops. She told me she had it in a Styrofoam cooler at the back of her coat closet near the front door. The cooler sat in the closet, empty. She guessed the thief took the skull in one of the pillowcases missing from her bed. The cops said that was a tried-and-true method for burglars to haul away their booty, in the vic’s own pillowcases or trash bags.

  The cops would never arrest anyone. We had so many unsolved break-ins on the North Side that the police gave victims a number to use when they called in to ask about their cases—no name or address, just the number.

  The next day I closed the shop early to start asking around but I couldn’t say too much. The Corral family hadn’t been up front about Panchito. We assumed possession of Pancho’s skull was illegal and the desecration of the grave of a Mexican hero certainly wouldn’t do anything for the family reputation. Mexico could demand the return of Panchito’s head and the U.S. government could back away from us and might declare that we were as illegal as the skull and deport us.

  For two days I looked for kids trying to get rid of CDs that didn’t seem right for them—Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Miguel Aceves Mejía—and a jar of pennies.

  I asked old friends who still called me bro’. I quizzed waitresses at a couple of
Mexican restaurants. My questions made more than one pool player nervous. The ballers that crowded the court at Chaffee Park swore they didn’t know nada. Those NBA wannabes wouldn’t tell me anything anyway.

  On the second day my search took me to the beer joints.

  I got nothing from the barflies, naturally. They scowled as if I’d asked for money, never a popular question in any bar I’d ever been in. A couple of the souses didn’t even look at me when I spoke to them. I decided to take a break. Detective work made me thirsty and the Holiday Bar and Grill served cold beer, but there wasn’t a grill in sight.

  Accordion music played in the background and a pair of muscular women wearing their boyfriends’ colors played eight ball along a side wall. Counting me, three customers at the bar were entertained by Jackie, the bartender who worked the day shift at the Holiday.

  Jackie methodically wiped a glass with a bright yellow bar rag and blinked her inch-long eyelashes at me. I worried for a hot sec that the weight of what looked like caterpillars sitting on her eyelids might permanently shut Jackie O’s eyes, but it didn’t seem to be a problem. Jackie O—that’s what she wanted to be called, but I remembered when she was just plain old Javier Ortega, which is another story entirely. I hardly ever used the O in her name. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I had to comment about her outfit and headdress.

  “Trying for the Carmen Miranda look today, Jackie?”

  “Don’t be foolish. These are just a few old things I had around the house. A summer adventure. You like?” She twirled and clapped her hands, kind of in flamenco style. The two guys down the bar coughed up their beer. I kept a straight face. “Nice. That shade is good on you.”

  “What you been up to, Gus? I don’t see you in here too much anymore.”

  “Same old, you know how it is.” She nodded. “But Corrine got ripped off the other night, maybe you heard about it? They broke in her house and took a couple thousand dollars worth of stuff. At least that’s what she told the insurance. Too much, huh? I’m trying to find out who would do such a thing, maybe get some of Corrine’s junk back. Maybe kick some ass.” I threw that last part in but I knew she knew it was just talk.