Danny’s head hurt and he realized he was holding his breath. Taking a quick glance down both sides of the rear of the store, he dashed back inside and retreated to his workstation, trying to calm his racing nerves. He hadn’t been imagining things; that detective really had issued a veiled threat. It wouldn’t stand up in court, but Danny considered it a threat nonetheless. Danny never saw the guy before in his life—still didn’t know his fucking name—and the guy knew his schedule, the name of his children, and what school they went to.
Danny sat behind his desk, the urge to call Jerry Valdez strong. He couldn’t call Tom. Somebody obviously didn’t like the idea he’d talked to Tom Jensen about this. But he could call Jerry, who would want to know what was going on. He had been very careful in his communications with Jerry and was positive law enforcement didn’t know anything about his present whereabouts. Besides, he and Jerry made a promise that they would contact each other if the cops came sniffing around too deep, and Jerry needed to know what just happened.
Danny looked at the phone on the shipping and receiving desk, then got up and headed toward the main floor room in the store. There was a pay phone in the hallway that led to the warehouse near the restrooms. He exited the warehouse, ignoring a co-worker who breezed by, and headed straight for the pay phone, digging into his jeans pocket for change. Then, heart racing, still scared and confused about what to do, he plugged two quarters into the pay phone and dialed Jerry’s phone number, thanking God Jerry made him commit it to memory.
JERRY HAD TO walk to a quiet area of the site so he could be heard over the buzz of power saws and the pounding of hammers. He kept one finger in his ear as he listened to Danny’s excited jabber, unable to quell the uneasiness in his belly.
It was a warm day, not too hot, but perfect for working outdoors. He was dressed in a pair of denim shorts, a blue tank top, and white Nike Tennis shoes and white socks. His long hair was pulled back in a ponytail and he had his tool belt slung around his waist. Jerry sighed and wiped a forearm across his sweaty brow. He’d made his living with his hands for pretty much his entire adult life—either on erecting wood frames for the construction business, or working as an auto or motorcycle mechanic—and he did both jobs well. When work dried up in one area he was always able to get work in the other. Since yuppies were always buying brand new homes and condominiums, Jerry pretty much had steady work with a handful of contractors as a carpenter. Working outdoors had its rewards and its flexibility.
It afforded him the time to think.
So when he heard Danny’s panicked voice in his cell phone, he turned to one of the foremen on the job, made eye contact with him and nodded. Carl Sanders nodded back, request to take a step away from the job at hand acknowledged. Jerry had worked for Carl for over ten years, and Carl understood Jerry’s responsibilities to his family and his sobriety. As an AA sponsor himself, Carl always made himself available to those he sponsored as well, and Jerry knew he wouldn’t mind if he stepped away for a moment to take a quick phone call. Talking to Danny would be like talking to a freshly sober alcoholic anyway.
Luckily, Danny didn’t rattle on for very long. He told Jerry all he needed to know: some cop he’d never seen before had issued a veiled threat to not talk to Detective Jensen, and he’d told Jensen himself the other night he believed Raul Valesquez killed those two kids and that family. Jerry only had to ask Danny once if he’d mentioned Jerry’s name and Danny shot back quickly with a “fuck, no!”, and Jerry knew Danny was telling the truth.
What he didn’t like was what happened to Danny today.
“I don’t know who this fucking guy was, man, but he scared the shit out of me, and—”
“Did you tell Jensen about Bobby?” Jerry asked calmly.
“No!” The way Danny responded told Jerry that Danny knew what he was talking about.
“Are you going to?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You’re going to. I know you are. I can tell. You can’t wait to just spit it out.”
“Listen, I’m not going to say anything about you, okay? I mean, if he asks about you, I’ll talk about you in very general terms, but I’m not going to talk about what happened that day or that we’ve seen each other within the past few days.”
Jerry felt anxious. He had that strange, sick feeling he used to get when he knew he was going to be busted again. He could feel it settling in the pit of his stomach. He glanced back at the work site quickly, then turned his attention back to Danny. “You’ve already told him more than I would have hoped you would, but there’s nothing I can do about that now. We need to talk.”
“No shit we need to talk!”
“Can we get together at my place? Maybe Wednesday or Thursday?”
“I’ll have to check my schedule and see if I’m working.”
“If you can come by during the day that would be great. Chrissy and Olivia won’t be home and I can take the afternoon off. We’ll have a couple of beers and talk.”
“I’m sorry man, but I just didn’t know what else to do and I had to tell somebody!” Danny had taken on that whining tone again and it was grating on Jerry’s ears. He winced, his stomach churning as he listened to the numbfuck. “You gotta believe me, Jerry, I haven’t said anything about—”
“I believe you, and quit fucking apologizing. I’ll call you in a day or two to set things up. In the meantime, pay attention to your surroundings. Check and see if you’re being followed. If you are, let me know. I don’t want any cops coming to my house.”
“Maybe we can meet somewhere else, like a bar or something.”
“That’s an even better idea,” Jerry said, already warming to the idea. Get the drunken slob to a bar, get him good and drunk and when he toddles off to take a piss, pour a tiny amount of powdered glass into his beer. That was the ticket.
“Okay,” Danny said, sighing. “Okay, that’s a plan.”
“I’ll call you. I’ll name a date and time and place, and you meet me there.”
“Fine. Make it anytime after ten p.m. I don’t work nights hardly anymore, and the latest I do work is eight if I have overtime.”
“Fine. Talk to you later.”
When he replaced the cell phone back in his pocket, he sauntered back over to the job site, trying not to look too troubled. Carl would inquire if everything was okay and would probably want to ask what the situation was. They talked about that kind of thing often—how they helped and talked their brothers in the throes of alcoholism down from the bottle or something. It was like they were talking about the tools of their trade, the way lawyers discussed depositions. He got back to his site and resumed his work—nailing a pair of two by fours into the frame he’d just constructed. That would keep him busy.
And it would give him the time to think.
After his brief panic attack two days ago after seeing Danny Hernandez for the first time in twenty-three years, Jerry finally broached the subject of moving to Baja California to Chrissy. His uncle’s house was still down there, paid for free and clear, and she knew it was theirs if they wanted to occupy it. They had entertained the idea more than once and Chrissy loved the area the few times they’d gone down on long weekends. When he brought the subject up to her again a few nights ago she’d looked at him funny and asked, “Why? I mean, why now?”
“I’ve just been thinking about it a lot and the more I think about it, the more I like the idea,” Jerry had said. Olivia was in her room playing with her dolls, and Jerry and Chrissy had been sitting on the sofa watching the evening news. The anchor was recounting a grisly story about a drive-by shooting that killed four people in Carson none of them were gang members. “I’m just getting tired of this!” he said, indicating the news subject with a wave of his hand. “We’ve talked for over a year now about getting Olivia away from this and we both love Baja. And where my uncle has his house? It’s perfect. It’s an area rife with Americans who already live there, or maintain part-time homes, and I can set
up an auto-shop or do some carpentry work. You know it won’t take much for me to find work down there. And we have money in our savings ... we could coast down there for awhile.”
“We don’t have that much in savings!” Chrissy had protested.
“Between the two of us we have ten thousand dollars. I know that’s not much, but it’s a start. We have enough vacation days saved up at our jobs that we could take cash outs against them when we quit. That might give us another few thousand bucks.”
The talk had warmed Chrissy up to the idea and he’d brought the subject up to her again last night. She hadn’t even asked him if he was in trouble—four years ago she would have, but since he’d gotten sober he’d won back her complete trust in him. He’d become a good husband and a wonderful father and she knew that. She knew he was devoted to her and Olivia now, that the drugs and drinking were way behind him. She knew he wasn’t entirely happy in the Los Angeles area, that he’d always longed for Baja California with its crystal clear beaches, the laid back lifestyle. They had always talked about the desire to escape the rat race that had encroached into the everyday lives of people who lived in California. They wanted to leave all that behind, start fresh, get away from it all and live far away from the pressures of modern living that required one to always be on the go, to do things better, faster, to make more money, to work more, do more, always do more and more everyday and every year whether it was needed or not.
Carl Sanders, who stopped by on his way to the rear of the site, interrupted his thoughts. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad,” Jerry said. He put his nail gun down and surveyed his work. Perfect.
“You going to the meeting tonight?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll be there.”
“Want me to pick you up?”
“Sure.”
Carl nodded. “Was that Sammy?” Sammy Gardener was a nineteen-year-old ex-heroin addict Jerry was sponsoring. He was melodramatic and was always involved in some crisis or another and Jerry had told Carl about dealing with Sammy’s mood swings.
“Nah,” Jerry said, the lie coming to him quickly. “New guy. Actually a friend of Chrissy’s who just entered the program.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Jerry went back to work and shot Carl a grin. “Come pick me up at five.”
“You got it.” Carl waved, taking the hint that Jerry would talk to him about the imaginary new convert to the program if it was needed, then he headed to the rear of the job site. Jerry went back to his physical labors and the mental work of trying to figure out what to do with Danny Hernandez and the problems he would surely face if he allowed Danny to fumble along like the drunken lout he was.
Ten
IT DIDN'T TAKE long for Tom Jensen to track down David Bartell.
He was sitting in a corner booth at Peanuts on Santa Monica Boulevard, a half finished mug of beer on the table in front of him. According to the sources that pointed him to David Bartell’s whereabouts, it was his favorite hangout spot. David Bartell was leaning over the table, the makeup and hormone injections making the teenage mug shots Tom had viewed of his fifteen-year-old self a ghastly caricature. David’s hair was still a very pale blonde and was longer now, shoulder-length. His complexion was still milky but from there all resemblances ended. No longer skinny, he was now fat. He reminded Tom of Divine, the actor/character from the John Waters films. A middle-age drag queen with a long record for prostitution and drugs, David Bartell now went by the name Diana Macy and, according to him, he still had all his original plumbing. Tom Jensen didn’t give a shit about Diana/David’s current sexual history or his problems. He wanted to know about Raul Valesquez and he wanted to hear all of it.
“All of it?” David asked, feigning surprise. His full lips were painted with a gaudy red lipstick, his cheeks tinted with red rouge. “You sure you want to hear all of it, darling? It was pretty scandalous. I wasn’t the same man back then. I wasn’t even the same woman!”
“That’s the impression I get,” Tom said. “From what I’ve been able to gather, you were just another white-trash, stoner punk who hung out with Raul and Louie McWiggin.”
“Louie! Boy, I haven’t heard that name in years. Poor dear.”
Tom had his notebook out, pen poised to write. “I’ve been trying to track him down, as well. You know where I can reach him?”
“Forest Lawn in Inglewood,” David said. He took a quick sip of the beer Tom had bought him. The bar was surprisingly quiet for this time of the afternoon, but it was still doing pretty good business, mostly from hookers of both sexes who were hanging out at the bar. “Can’t remember the exact plot location, but—"
“Louie’s dead?” Tom asked, both surprised and a little disappointed.
David nodded, looking solemn. He smoothed his long blonde hair back behind his ears. A gaudy blue earring dangled from his left ear. “Poor dear died almost ten years ago. Heroin OD.”
Tom jotted this down. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So you say Doug Archer was let out?” David cocked a questioning eyebrow at him. He’d looked surprised when Tom had sidled up to him an hour ago and informed him that Doug had been released and that he was a detective working on a newly opened case to look into Raul’s murder. David had been combative at first, refusing to tell Tom anything, saying he’d “told the fucking cops everything I knew back in ’78. You want to know what happened, read about it in the goddamn files!” But when Tom offered David free drinks, the drag queen leaped at the chance. Tom figured he would. The stories he’d heard this morning when he was working on tracking David down told him the drag queen would do anything for sex, booze, or drugs. Another plus was that David was already well underway to being drunk when Tom approached him.
“Yes, he’s been released. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. It was a big deal in the local news a few weeks ago.” He provided David Bartell a quick summary of the events that led to David’s murder conviction being overturned and the case reopened. David listened calmly, drinking steadily, paying close attention. Tom revealed the direction his end of the investigation had taken, skimming over how he was focusing on learning more about Raul’s movements and whereabouts the last seven months or so of his life. He told David he’d talked to as many of the kids that lived in the surrounding four or five blocks that might have known Raul or come across him. David’s eyes lit up at that bit of information and Tom pretended not to notice; surely David would know that Tom learned of his own role in whatever alleged crimes he would have participated in with Raul. He didn’t tell David anything about his suspicions that Raul was responsible for at least two murders, possibly six. He was playing that hand close to his chest. He did tell David that he was now beginning to focus on Raul’s home life and that he was learning that Raul’s mother, Eva, had a long record for selling drugs and prostitution, charges that appeared to be dropped with growing regularity the more time went on. David’s features became pensive, troubled, and Tom waited a beat when he was finished bringing David up to speed, hoping he might be forthcoming and reveal something on his own.
That wasn’t going to happen. Instead David sighed, finished his beer and signaled a waitress for a refill. “Well, you pretty much summed it up. I know it’s not kind to speak ill of the dead, but Raul’s mother was a cunt and a half. The crowd she hung out with made her look like a saint, though.” He looked at Tom with a quick look of surprise and continued. “Of course there’s not much I can tell you that you haven’t already told me.”
“Are you sure?” Tom asked, deciding to play this new hand that had been dealt to him. He waited until a fresh mug of beer was placed in front of David and continued. “It’s the people she hung out with that I’m now trying to find out about. You and Louie McWiggin were over at Raul’s house a lot, weren’t you?”
David took a sip of beer and shrugged. “I suppose.”
“You were. You pretty much admitted that everything I’ve just laid out to you is the truth.
That you and Louie were friends with Raul and you either went to his house or he was hanging out at yours.”
“If that’s what I said, that’s what I said.”
“What did you guys usually do?”
David shrugged. “Nothing much. Got stoned most of the time. Hung out at a couple of arcades. When my folks weren’t home, we’d watch TV at my house and get stoned some more. The usual shit.”
“What about picking on neighborhood kids?”
David feigned a who, me? look. “Okay, so we teased some kids in the neighborhood. Big deal! Most of that was Raul’s doing.”
“He always initiated it?”
David took a sip of beer and nodded. “All the time. Louie and I went along with it and participated only to a certain degree.”
“Ever stop the teasing from going too far?”
“All the time.”
Tom Jensen thought about this, his mind racing. “What about when Raul was by himself ... did he pick on other kids then?”
“I suppose he did,” David said, his tone of voice taking on a slightly heavy edge that told Tom he was hiding something. “But then I wasn’t around to see it happen, okay?”
“But you most likely heard the rumors?” Tom continued. “I heard Raul beat up one kid so bad that the kid lost his eye.”
“I remember that. I didn’t see it happen, but Raul told me about it.”
“He told you?”
“Yep.” Another sip of beer. “Said he beat up some kid from Torrance because the kid was a faggot. Kicked the shit out of him, said that he just kicked the kid in the face, in his eye, and the eye just fell out and blood gushed all over the place.”
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