Bully

by Gonzalez, J. F.

  “I mean...he was always a prick no matter what kind of mood he was in, but that day he was cool. He didn’t start any trouble.”

  “What about this Jerry Valdez kid?” Detective Jensen was jotting stuff down on his pad. “He was a bit older than the two of you.”

  “Yeah...I think he was maybe sixteen.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  “Pretty well, I guess.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  Danny sighed, looked up at the ceiling. “God...it’s been years. I have no idea.”

  “Twenty years or more?”

  “At least.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know of his whereabouts now, would you?”

  Danny shook his head. He glanced at the nearly empty bottle of Corona on his coffee table and wished he could grab another. “I have no idea.”

  “Anything else you remember about Raul Valesquez you can tell me?”

  Danny glanced at Detective Jensen. “I guess so, but...it might take a while and...well, I don’t know if I can remember it all now. I’m still trying to get my mind around hearing that the guy who killed him is out, you know?”

  Detective Jensen nodded, folded his pad and placed it in his right breast pocket along with the pen. “I understand. Think you can call me when you have the time and you’ve thought about it some more?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great.” Detective Jenson snaked a business card out of his wallet and passed it over to Danny, who glanced at it quickly and placed it in his pocket. The detective headed for the front door and Danny walked with him. “Give me a call in a few days.”

  “Sure thing,” Danny said. Detective Jensen nodded, raised his hand in a wave, and headed down the courtyard of the complex. Danny shut the door and leaned against it, eyes closed.

  And the dread weighed in heavily.

  All those names...those memories...dredged up like old bones that had been left in a remote grave, hidden from sight but now dug up and sifted through, their remnants pawed over by people wanting to get at the truth.

  The truth.

  Fuck me, Danny thought, closing his eyes, feeling his breathing hitch. Fuck me, blind.

  When the headache came back, it returned with a vengeance.

  DETECTIVE TOM JENSEN sat in his unmarked Ford he’d left at the curb near the corner of Van Ness and One Hundred and Fifty-Sixth Street, jotting down notes from his conversation with Danny Hernandez, when it suddenly occurred to him why the man looked so familiar to him.

  Tom flipped back a few pages in his notepad and read over what he’d written. Danny mentioned attending Peary Junior High school in the late 1970’s, which would put them at about the same age. Which meant they’d likely gone to high school together and—

  Suddenly it hit him and Tom was struck with the memories as if they’d happened yesterday. Senior year of high school; hanging out on the quad at Gardena High School during lunch with a gaggle of guys from all walks of life—jocks, stoners, geeks, surfers, metal heads and punkers. Tom hadn’t fit in with either group—he’d just been sort of there; pretty straight, clean-cut, nothing outlandish. He didn’t know what it was he liked about hanging out with this particular group, and thinking back on it now he realized it must have been the diversity of kids that drew themselves together like flies on shit. How they were so different from each other, yet saw so much common ground that they identified with each other on some primal level only they understood. Whatever it was, Tom had felt drawn to that particular circle as well, even though he had nothing else in common with the—many of the kids weren’t even in his grade, and those that were, he had no classes with. The only ones he shared classes with was a guy named Donald Beck and a skinny guy with collar-length, brown hair named Danny Hernandez.

  Tom Jensen tried to match the face of the seventeen-year-old, acne-faced Danny he’d known in high school with the thirty-nine year old weathered man he’d spoken to a few minutes ago. It was like night and day—Tom hadn’t even recognized him. The Danny Hernandez he’d just questioned about the Valesquez case was a little heftier, his face slightly plump, worn with age and living, and his hair was radically different and graying. But it was him; there was no doubt in Tom’s mind the man he just questioned had once been one of his closest friends in high school.

  Memories of Friday nights hanging out at Ted’s arcade came to mind, how they used to spend all night playing foos ball and Donkey Kong, chomping on hamburgers and greasy French fries, hanging out in the arcade’s parking lot and doing stupid kid stuff. There had been the occasional rock concert—Danny had been a metal-head all the way, into Judas Priest and Iron Maiden from what he remembered. Tom had been into music himself and that had been their common bond. It was strong for a while; strong enough for them to become pretty good friends.

  They’d been such good friends during their senior year of high school that Tom thought he’d known Danny pretty well.

  And then after graduation they just drifted apart.

  Tom didn’t know how it happened. Tom tried keeping in touch with Danny for a while, but by then he was in college and Danny was working as a locksmith and it was hard for them to get together. Soon they stopped calling each other and then the years passed until it drove them here to the present.

  He didn’t even recognize me, Tom thought, putting his pad and pen away and glancing back at the apartment complex. Of course, I didn’t recognize him either. I wonder if I should mention it to him if he calls?

  He decided against that.

  He was going to play this out, work his case the way he approached all his cases. He’d call Danny in a few days, and when they got together for further questioning he would see if the other man recognized him.

  He didn’t want to influence Danny’s memories or testimony in any way by revealing his true identity to him. He wanted Danny to think of him as a cop, not a former friend from high school. If Danny recognized him, remembered who he was, he might clam up if he knew more than what he was telling. Tom didn’t think Danny had anything to do with Raul’s murder—hell, he’d known the guy in high school, had been close friends with him for awhile. Danny hadn’t been that kind of kid. Tom recalled Danny Hernandez as a rather normal, shy boy who never looked for trouble. And even though Tom hadn’t known Danny in Junior High—he’d only moved to the South Bay area from Orange County with his family the summer of his fifteenth year, two years after Raul Valesquez was murdered—he’d learned enough about him in the year or so they hung out that he could honestly say that Danny had not been the type of kid capable of being involved in any way with Raul’s murder. It would have been impossible. During high school, Danny lived on the outskirts of Gardena, near El Camino College; Raul’s body had been found in the backyard of a house in Palos Verdes, fifteen miles away, at the bottom of a partially empty swimming pool, which meant the killer had transported him to the dumping site by car. There were other factors in the murder that indicated the perpetrator was an adult male and not a teenager, especially one three years below the legal driving age. Nope, no way was Danny Hernandez involved. He might have been affected emotionally due to the fact Raul had lived a few blocks away from him—reading back on the case report, Tom learned that a lot of kids had been shocked by the murder. That showed from Danny’s behavior tonight, shocked at the news of Doug Archer’s release and having all those horrible memories come rushing back.

  After all, it had been big news back then: eleven-year-old boy disappears only to be found beaten to death, sexually molested, and drowned fifteen miles away.

  Of course it was a pedophile that did it. Who else?

  Detective Tom Jensen contemplated these thoughts as he finished his notes. He looked at the apartment complex one last time before he left, then started the car and pulled away from the curb.

  As he drove back to the station, his mind tracking on high school, trying to remember things about Danny Hernandez, he suddenly realized that even during the time he kne
w Danny and was friends with him, Danny never once brought up the subject of Raul Valesquez or his murder.

  Two

  DANNY DOWNED TWO beers in the thirty minutes after the Detective left.

  Figuring he’d be too shit-faced to drive when he ran out of beer, and not wanting another DUI on his record, Danny made a quick trip to the liquor store and stocked up. He was back in his apartment twenty minutes later, drinking and watching TV mindlessly, wondering about Detective Jensen’s visit and what it all meant.

  So Doug Archer had been released. That was surely news to Danny. He had followed the Valesquez murder case avidly during the late summer of 1977 to the Spring of the following year when Doug was convicted in his murder. School had been buzzing with the story, especially since Raul’s older brother, Rudy, was in the same grade and in a lot of the same classes as Danny.

  By eight-thirty, Danny was completely shit-faced. Despite gorging on a pizza that he’d had delivered, the food did little to absorb his alcohol consumption and Danny was flying high. He was also tripping down memory lane; he wasn’t so much worried about the Raul Valesquez case being reopened or Doug Archer being released – what was done was done. Instead, he was wondering more about Jerry Valdez.

  The last time he saw Jerry was...what? Twenty-one years ago? He had a vague recollection of running into Jerry at a backyard party the summer he graduated from high school, which would have been 1982. He’d recognized him instantly despite the shorter hair—when Danny had known and skated with Jerry in the seventies, the older boy wore his black hair long, past his shoulders. It had been Jerry at the party though, shorter hair-style, sporting a more stylish wardrobe. He’d been tweaking on coke and offered some to Danny, who’d accepted happily. They’d hung out a bit, catching up with each other but skating around the issue that bonded them together five years before, and Danny didn’t know what the older boy had been thinking that night, but he knew what he’d been thinking of: Bobby Whitsett.

  Dwelling on the memories now while he drank and smoked and mindlessly watched TV made Danny all the more nervous and paranoid.

  At nine o’clock, he went into the second bedroom, which he’d converted to a little office. It wasn’t much to sneeze at: a little desk with a computer, an old Fender Stratocaster electric guitar resting on a stand in the corner, a Marshall amplifier, a bookshelf crowded with paperbacks, old vinyl albums and CDs. Danny belched, opened the desk drawer and began riffling through it. When he found what he was looking for he flipped through it, trying to find the number he was looking for, then figuring, what the fuck?, pulled the phone toward him and dialed the number.

  He made phone calls for the next twenty minutes, mostly getting negative replies to his inquiries. He tried Frank Navarro’s old house; he tried Dave Garcia’s; when he got Paul Katsamata’s place, he got his mother, who wouldn’t give him Paul’s phone number but promised to pass Danny’s number off to her son when she saw him in a few days. Since that was the best Danny knew he was going to get, he rattled it off to her, trying to ignore the fact that he’d once tried to break into Paul’s house fifteen years ago when he was strung out on coke and needed a fix and Paul came after him later that day with a baseball bat. He hung up, his drunken mind spinning, wondering what to do next.

  He headed back downstairs. Jerry Valdez was long gone from the neighborhood; he knew that for a fact. The last he’d heard anything about Jerry was eighteen years ago from one of his sister’s friends, that he’d turned into some kind of yuppie. A yuppie with a coke problem, but didn’t most yuppies have drug problems in the eighties? He plopped himself down on the sofa and turned on the television with a flick of the remote. He had all night and there was still another six-pack of beer in the refrigerator. Might as well sit at home, get fucked up and try to keep his mind off what happened today by channel surfing.

  And while he drank and watched TV, he remembered.

  JULY, 1977

  Danny Hernandez and Bobby Whitsett had purchased two hour tickets for an afternoon at Skateopia Skateboard park, which had only been open for two weeks, and somehow that never seemed to be enough time. But when each session cost five dollars and you also needed money for soda and snacks, and you also needed the money for at least one other session during the week, you had to take what you could get. Add in the fact that Danny only pulled in an average of forty-five bucks a month as a paperboy, he had to make the money last. There was so much to do this summer; movies, mostly afternoon matinees at the South Bay Theaters on Prairie Avenue; bus fare for the forty minute ride to Manhattan Beach for some early morning Boogie-Boarding and body surfing; evenings at Ted’s Arcade on Western. Plus there was always Spider Records, their next-to-favorite place to hang out besides Ted’s. The guy that ran Spider’s was a big hulking biker-looking guy with a ponytail that hung down to his ass and he had all the coolest records—Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Kiss. And he was a cool guy, too; he had to be as old as his mom, but he was hip. He was into the same music as he and Bobby, and he tipped them off to bands they had never heard of that were even heavier than Kiss, something Danny thought was impossible: the Scorpions, Judas Priest, Rush, AC/DC, UFO. Ear blistering stuff, all of it. Danny dug it all.

  They were digging it now, standing behind the metal rail at the top of a nine-foot half pipe that was in the middle of the largest snake run in the park, watching as some guy was rocking back and forth, popping off the lip, occasionally getting three wheels out. Bobby claimed that a few nights ago, his father had taken him to Skateopia and Jay Adams had been there, but Danny hadn’t believed him. A few months before, Bobby had gone to the Concrete Wave Skate park in Anaheim and claimed Tony Alva showed up. But then Bobby was the guy who claimed he had flown completely out of an empty pool—four wheels out!—and made it; which was bullshit. Nobody could do that! It was impossible!

  The guy currently skating the half-pipe looked to be about seventeen, with brown curly hair and a Logan Earth Ski board. He wasn’t that bad; actually, most of the guys skating this afternoon weren’t that bad, but there were no hotshots around, which was a bummer. Whenever somebody really good showed up—somebody who could get three wheels out of the half-pipe or do an axle grind, it pushed Danny and Bobby to be just as good. It made them bolder, more willing to try maneuvers they never would have thought of on their own. It’s how Danny finally mustered up the courage to hit the vertical section of the half-pipe frontside rather than back. Before that he was always afraid that if he fell from that high up while performing a frontside maneuver he would land on his ass or his head, but that hadn’t happened yet.

  Danny turned to Bobby. “I’m thirsty. I’m gonna get a coke.”

  “Me, too.”

  The boys walked back to the snack bar, threading their way through the concrete path where skaters and curious spectators wandered and watched the action. The outdoor sound system blasted the local hard rock station, KMET, which so far hadn’t played any of the new bands the Spider Records guy turned them on to, but at least they played Kiss.

  They got their sodas and sat at an empty table that gave them a full view of a hill that ended in a wide sloping bowl. There were a couple of kids skating down the hill, carving long lines along the rim of the bowl. To their left was a free-style area, a concrete section that was wide and flat bordered by sloping banks. Behind the snack bar was an arcade and they could hear the buzzing and whirs of pinball machines and the jabbers of other kids’ voices as they laughed and cursed at each other. Danny glanced at the clock above the entranceway to the main lobby of the skate park and saw that only an hour had passed and they had another hour left on their session. “Wanna do the bowl next?”

  Bobby shrugged. “Sure.”

  The bowl lay up the steps past the freestyle area. A short drop propelled the skater down a forty-five degree run into a wide open bowl that ended at near vertical walls. It was where Danny first learned to master his equilibrium in bowl and pool riding, which in turn helped him master the vertical
wall of the half-pipe.

  “Maybe we can go to the Reseda Skatepark,” Bobby ventured, sipping his coke.

  “That would be cool,” Danny mused, nodding. “The place I want to go is the one in Upland.”

  “The one with the big, giant pipe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, yeah, I wanna go to that one too!”

  “Wish it wasn’t so far.” According to the article in Skateboarder magazine, the Upland park was near a bunch of mountains like Mt. Baldy, which Bobby’s father assured him was far away.

  “I know. I wish they would add a full pipe here.”

  “That would be awesome!”

  “I bet I could get ten o’clock in a pipe.”

  Danny almost laughed and looked at Bobby. “Ten o’clock? What are you talking about?”

  “You saw the cover of last issue’s Skateboarder, didn’t you?” Bobby was looking at him as if he was a dummy. “It had that story of all those big giant pipes out in the desert and how those guys went out there and skated them.”

  “Oh yeah.” Danny remembered the photo in question now, as well as the other photos in the magazine. According to the article, some construction firm was laying giant pipes deep in the desert of Arizona for some big project. Danny couldn’t imagine why they needed pipes that were twenty-five feet high, but they were the perfect things to skate. Apparently somebody found out about them, and the magazine had sent their photographer and a couple of professional skateboarders to skate them. The cover photo of the issue in question showed one of the skaters well above the vertical line.

  “The guy on the cover of that issue is at the ten o’clock mark of the pipe,” Bobby explained, pointing at the clock on the wall behind them. “Look at the clock. See where the ten is? That’s how high he got in that big-ass pipe. I bet I could get that high in the pipe at the Upland Park.”