Franklin Navarro definitely would have, and Tom had a feeling Gary Little would have, too. As it turned out, Gary Little had been under surveillance the morning he died. A low rent thug hired by Micah Brooks tracked Gary to his house, where Gary had gone briefly after meeting with Tom at the Cantina. The thug, a guy on his second strike for armed robbery, took Gary down with three shots to the chest in front of his house and finished him off with a shot to the head. Gary hadn’t seen it coming.
The new Police Chief, Arnold Hino, was being very accommodating. For the past three months since the media excitement died down, Tom had been involved in all aspects of the Valesquez/Manning investigation, from leading efforts in compiling witness statements, to working closely with the FBI as official liaison between the Gardena PD and the Feds. The Gardena Police Commission was pleased with his work, and it made Tom feel good that he could work at making things right with his department.
He threaded his way between parked cars, anxious to get home and get his weekend started. A mild October breeze blew from the ocean, ruffling his thinning hair. Tom Jensen drew his sport coat over his bulk, the only thing on his mind getting home and forgetting about the day.
“Detective Jensen!”
Tom stopped and turned toward the sound of the voice, which was female. Ten feet to his right, an attractive woman dressed in a beige power suit strode calmly and purposefully toward him. At first Tom didn’t recognize her, but as she drew closer she became vaguely familiar to him. “Yes?”
The woman approached him, all business. “I don’t believe we’ve met yet,” the woman said, holding out her right hand. “Jessie Archer.”
Recognition set in. “Ah! Doug’s sister.” Tom shook her hand, putting on his tone of civility. He remembered seeing a photo of her in the newspaper shortly after Doug was released from prison. “No, we haven’t met. Please accept my condolences for the—”
“Thank you,” Jessie said. Tom Jensen had heard she was a stunningly attractive woman and she was; she was slim, her features pretty, if possessing an angular edge that no doubt gave her plenty of leverage in the corporate boardroom. She wore her auburn hair in a shoulder-length cut and her clothing was impeccable; beige suit, tan skirt, black shoes, her face bearing enough make-up to bring out her eyes and accent her lips. “I appreciate it,” she said, than got down to business. “I was wondering if you could talk to me about my brother’s case.”
Tom shrugged. “What’s there to talk about? Grecko still your lawyer?”
“The criminal defense work he was hired for is over,” Jessie said, getting to the point. “I’m still preparing a civil suit, and Mr. Grecko won’t be representing me in it. This is just between you and me.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Tom sighed, trying not to let his irritation show. “Look, Ms. Archer—”
“Jessie.”
“All right, look, Jessie, there’s not much I can tell you that the papers don’t already know. Manning’s been indicted in your brother’s murder. The original criminal complaint against Doug has been officially thrown out by a Superior Judge. I know that’s too late now that he’s dead, but—”
“No shit,” Jessie muttered.
Tom continued. “Manning and his associates are being charged with a wide range of criminal charges that will put them away for a long time. It’s basically open and shut. What else can I tell you?”
“You can start by telling me more about Danny Hernandez and Jerry Valdez.”
Tom looked at her; he tried not to let his surprise show, but the look in her eyes told him she’d gotten him. “What for? You read the papers. Whitsett told them he murdered Raul Valesquez. He’s been officially pinned to the murder. What else is there to tell you?”
“You really don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”
“I don’t care what you believe, it’s the truth.”
“Prove it.”
Tom stared at her, his mind racing. What’s she trying to pull? Figuring it was best to treat her the same way he would a journalist and simply tell her, no comment, he picked up his briefcase and attempted to resume his journey. “Listen, I really can’t comment on this. I suggest talking to your lawyer about it. I really can’t help you.”
As he walked away, she called out to him. “Funny how a man with a size ten shoe would be able to leave footprints at the crime scene that came from an seven and a half sized shoe, don’t you think?”
Tom stopped and turned around. “If you’re trying to badger me into divulging what I really don’t know, you’re not going to succeed.”
“It is funny, though.” Jessie’s demeanor was still clearly all business, but it had a biting sense of humor in it, as if she were toying with him. “I mean, how would James fit into a size seven and a half shoe?”
“I really don’t know. Who says he even left footprints that day?”
Jessie nodded. “True. It’s possible he never did. It’s a good chance your friends, Jerry and Danny, left them, though.”
“I don’t think so,” Tom said. He’d heard enough of this bullshit. He turned and started heading toward his car again.
“I do think so,” Jessie said. “And it might behoove you to take a look at this picture. Look.”
He didn’t want to stop again; he knew he shouldn’t let Jessie Archer get to him, but he was letting her pull his strings. He tried to keep his nervousness at bay, but he could tell that she’d seen his weak spot and was now working her way in deeper, using her edge to push his buttons. “I got this on Ebay from a magazine dealer,” she said, pulling out a magazine from her purse, flipping through its pages. Tom took a step toward her and saw it was an issue of Skateboarder. His heart froze. “Paid twenty dollars for it,” she continued, flipping through the pages, honing in on the page she was seeking. “Actually, I bought an entire run of the magazine and I’ve spent the past week looking through them. Amazing what you can find in old magazines, don’t you think, Detective Jensen?”
Tom Jensen didn’t answer. He watched as Jessie Archer found the page she was looking for, grinning as she passed the magazine over to him. “Take a look at that photo right there on page forty-three, top right hand corner. What do you see?”
Tom took the magazine and looked at the photo. It was an action shot of a male skateboarder riding up the walls of an empty swimming pool. At first Tom didn’t recognize the location, or the skater, until he read the caption beneath the photo: “Jerry Valdez in a spectacular frontside at the Fruit Bowl in Palos Verdes. Photo by Glenn Freeman.”
Tom tried to suppress the bad feeling he was beginning to get. This is no big deal. So she was able to place Jerry at the scene of the crime weeks, probably months before it happened, in an old photo. She still has nothing on him, and if anything, it just explains the shoe print that was found at the crime scene...and further establishes it might have been placed there weeks, maybe months earlier.
Tom passed the magazine back to her. “Nice,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything, though.”
“Did you get a look at the other two kids in the photo?”
“What other kids?” Tom took the magazine back and looked at it more closely.
“The kids at the shallow end waiting their turn.”
Tom peered closely at the photo. There were two kids in the photo, in the background waiting for their turn at the shallow end of the pool. Both appeared to be twelve, maybe thirteen years old. It was hard to make out faces, but Tom instinctively recognized one of them; dark hair, slight in build, as Danny Hernandez.
“I took the liberty of comparing the kids in the background with a picture from Danny’s seventh grade yearbook from Peary Junior High,” Jessie continued, her voice bearing a trace of malevolence. “And the comparison is rather striking.” She pointed at the second kid, who was slightly shorter than the one Tom recognized as Danny, and who appeared to have collar-length brown hair. “That’s definitely Bobby Whitsett. The other one? I say he’s a dead
ringer for Danny.”
Tom beat back the nervous feeling he had about this and handed the magazine back to Jessie. “It probably is Danny, but if so, it still doesn’t mean anything.”
“Raul picked on Danny,” Jessie said, her eyes locked on him. “He picked on a lot of kids. There’s speculation he killed a ten-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy the summer he was murdered.”
This time Tom did a better job at hiding his surprise; the FBI and the Gardena PD was keeping the theory that Raul was the killer of Jessica Sampson, Teddy Etchison, Bobby Whitsett, and the Sanders family a closely guarded secret for the time being. For Jessie to have found out something so hush-hush would have required an enormous amount of resources, which was very possible considering she was one of the most highly paid female CEOs in the country. No doubt, if she wanted information bad enough, she could pay for it. “People still speculate that the Duke of Clarence was Jack the Ripper, too. Again, this doesn’t mean anything.”
Jessie Archer folded up the Skateboarder magazine and placed it back in her purse, her eyes still locked on Tom’s. “Fine. You keep telling me that. But I’m going to find out the truth.”
“You’ll be wasting your time,” Tom said, trying one last time to talk some sense into her. “James Whitsett killed Raul, that is the official stance of the Gardena PD and the FBI whether you like it or not. As for your brother, I would think you’d be happy that Manning confessed to killing him. I mean, isn’t that what this is all about? Getting justice for Douglas?”
“You’re absolutely right,” Jessie said, her voice taking on a dark edge. “This is all about getting justice for my brother. Because let’s face it...if Raul Valesquez was never murdered, my brother would never have been arrested, and my family would never have gone through the kind of hell we were put through.”
Tom was about to say something, then stopped quickly and shifted gears. “And we’re prosecuting the people that framed your brother, Ms. Archer. We’re prosecuting them. They’re going to be punished.”
“You don’t understand what I’m talking about,” Jessie said.
“Maybe I don’t,” Tom said, the urge to leave suddenly taking hold again. “But you can’t rewrite history, as much as we would like to. I’m sorry for your brother and your family and what you went through, but—”
“Do you know what my family went through when my brother was convicted in Raul’s murder?” Jessie asked, and now Tom detected a subtle change in her tone of voice. One that was more emotional, one dripping with hurt. “Let me tell you. I knew my brother was gay when I was twelve. I was the first person he came out to, and I promised him I wouldn’t tell our parents. I loved my brother, Detective Jensen. He was the world to me. He was the most perfect big brother a girl could have; he never once complained to our parents when I was forced to tag along with him and his friends; he always made me feel welcome, always took the time to do things with me, help me with schoolwork, whatever. To put it bluntly, he was the best thing that happened to me.”
Tom listened as Jessie continued. “When Doug was arrested, my parents were devastated. Of course, we rallied to his defense. But my parents were not rich people. They were solid, hard-working, blue-collar people. We weren’t poor by any means, but we weren’t living on easy street, either. My folks put their house up as collateral to fund my brother’s defense and the city did everything they could to win a conviction. We all knew that the testimony coming out of those so-called prosecution witnesses were lies. The hardest thing for Doug was when he finally admitted that he had been in West Hollywood that night looking to have a sexual encounter with a man. He finally came out because he realized it was the only thing he could do to save himself. He was so afraid of our parents finding out he was gay, that he let those men—those cops—bully him and beat a confession out of him. He was afraid our parents would be crushed, that they would disown him if they found out he was gay. So he said nothing. He lied because he didn’t want our parents to think badly of him. If he’d known that they would have accepted him for who he was, he would have gladly come out of the closet in the beginning and told the truth right off the bat. But he was more concerned for the feelings of our parents that he didn’t want to let them down. That should give you an idea of the kind of man my brother was.”
It did. As Tom Jensen listened to Jessie Archer, he felt more of a sense of sadness over the whole affair.
“The trial financially bankrupted my parents,” Jessie continued. “When it was over, they had to sell the house. We moved to an apartment off Western Avenue. The strain of the trial was heavy on my father. He was laid off from his job at Free State Insurance and never did find steady employment after that. He died of a heart attack in June of 1979. I was only fifteen, and I was never the same after that. My brother and my father were very dear to me and I felt I’d lost both of them.
“Mom started drinking when Doug was convicted. Dad and I tried to get her to stop and I joined her after Dad died. If it wasn’t for my brother, I would have wound up like her. Even though I was partying heavily during those years, I still managed to make my weekly bus trips to Chino Prison where Doug was being housed at the time. That’s probably what kept me sane during those two years; seeing my brother, listening to his advice, being able to talk to him about everything I was going through. He saw what was happening, what our mother was going through, and even though he was powerless to stop it from where he was, his words and advice helped more than any social worker’s. When I was sixteen I straightened up, quit the drugs and the drinking, and moved in with my aunt in Orange County. By then, Mom was a lost cause. We tried to get her help—mostly my aunt’s doing. Mom was effectively homeless from the time I was a high school sophomore until her death eleven years ago. We had her committed to a psychiatric facility when I was a senior in high school, and thanks to the combined efforts of my aunt and Doug, I let them handle my mother and concentrated on my studies. Thankfully, my grades didn’t slip that badly when I was drinking, and I put all my efforts into my studies. I knew getting into a good college was my ticket out, and I won a full scholarship to Harvard. By then my mother was in a state hospital and I thought she was safe, so I went off to college, hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the state cut funding for mental health services to the poor and my mother was discharged in 1986. I was working on my MBA then, still at Harvard, and my Aunt Debbie tried to get Mom into another facility but she was unsuccessful. Doug couldn’t help her considering where he was. By then I already had a career goal, one that was decided upon in high school in an effort to help my family—to get an MBA and rise as quickly up the ranks of the corporate world as fast as I could so I could get that big, fat paycheck. I already had the money spent. I was going to pay for the best treatment money could buy for my mother, and I was going to hire the best lawyer I could find to help overturn my brother’s conviction.” For the first time, a small grin surfaced on her regal features. “It wasn’t easy being a ball-breaking bitch in a corporate world run by men, but I made it. I made it because I was determined to draw as big a salary as I could to help my family. I was finally able to get something going with my brother’s case. Thanks to my efforts, my work attracted the attention of Professor Jenkins at UCLA. Unfortunately, I was too late to save my mother, although God knows I tried. I did everything I could to keep her off the streets and in rehabilitation clinics, but she was too far gone. She died from exposure in May of 1993 on a park bench in Los Angeles. If you ask me, she died of a broken heart.”
There was a pause. Tom Jensen didn’t know what to say. How does one respond to such personal tragedy?
“If Raul Valesquez had never been murdered, what happened to my family wouldn’t have happened,” Jessie continued, her face taking on that stony, hard-ass corporate look again. “That’s the bottom line. Manning and his friends never would have settled on him as their scapegoat, and Doug and my parents would be alive now. I wouldn’t have had to sacrifice over twenty years of failed relationships
and financial and emotional hardship to get where I am, but that’s not important. My family would have been better off if Raul wasn’t killed.”
“And what about the families of Teddy Etchison and Jessica Sampson?” Tom asked, the question popping into his mind quickly. “If you think Raul was responsible for their deaths, what about their families? What about their suffering?”
“Their suffering isn’t mine.”
“Assuming Raul was a killer, what about the families of children he might have killed had he not been murdered himself?”
“Do you think I care about what might have happened to other families?” Jessie asked. “If you do, you’re seriously wrong.”
“So I see,” Tom said, not wanting to carry this discussion further. Talking to Jessie Archer was beginning to creep him out. “And I am deeply sorry for your family and what you went through, but you will get justice. The men who framed Doug are going away for a long time.”
Jessie smiled. Looking at that smile sent shivers of ice down Tom’s spine. It was a smile devoid of all humor; it seemed to come from the deepest pit of anger and hatred that had lain dormant in Jessie Archer’s soul for the past twenty-eight years. “I want the person or persons responsible for killing Raul Valesquez, because that’s what it all boils down to. If Raul had not been killed, my family would be alive. Raul would have been caught eventually; Manning’s little criminal empire would have fallen apart at some point and he and those scumbags would’ve been caught. And my family would still be here. That’s why I want who’s responsible for Raul’s murder. I know James Whitsett isn’t responsible. That leaves your friends, Danny Hernandez and Jerry Valdez.”
Tom’s demeanor was stony. “You’ll be wasting your time, then.” He turned to leave.
“I have a private detective working for me,” Jessie called out. “He has a copy of that shoe print. It came from a pair of Van’s tennis shoes, size seven and a half, model number K9786. They were produced between 1976 and 1979. James Whitsett never owned a pair, but Danny and Jerry Valdez did.” There was a flapping, rustling sound, as if she were waving a newspaper in the air. “I have the proof right here in this magazine.”
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