Aztec Sun

by Judith Arnold

  “My career is about writing the truth,” she said, wondering if he could hear the sob constricting her throat. “If you honestly expect me to help you cover up a crime...”

  He breathed deeply, turned from her and muttered an imprecation in Spanish. Then he spun back to her. “Bitch.”

  Her incipient tears vanished, unspent, and a wave of indignation swept through her. How dare he curse her for his own actions? “You think I shouldn’t write that there was cocaine in your office? You think I should keep my mouth shut about your dumping it down the drain?”

  “Zorra. You made yourself a story, didn’t you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You want to see your name in print, right? So there it is.” He waved at the cabinet. “Nice work, lady. Take the man to bed, get to him while he’s grieving, make him trust you... You bitch.”

  “Do you think...” Her forehead ached from her frown; her head ached as comprehension burned away the mist of confusion. “You think I planted those drugs in here?”

  “You deceived me last night, Sandra. You asked me, what does this mean?” He smacked his hand against his upper arm, where his tattoo lurked beneath his sleeve. “If you had already met Ricardo, you knew what it meant. But last night, you were all sweet innocence, right? Just a warm, loving woman setting me up.”

  “Believe me, Rafael, there was enough of a story here without me setting anything or anyone up. If anyone deceived anyone, it was you. Why didn’t you tell me what that tattoo really meant?”

  “I did tell you.”

  “You said it was your heritage.”

  “That’s what it is.”

  “What it is is a gang, Rafael. Gangs aren’t anyone’s heritage.”

  “What do you understand about heritage? You’re a prep school girl from el norte.”

  His words hurt—not because there was anything offensive about being a prep school girl from the north but because of last night, because of what she and Rafael had found in each other’s arms. What he was accusing her of now was so distasteful, so totally appalling she reeled from the assault.

  “I’m not a prep school girl, Rafael,” she said, her voice muted but gritty. “I’m a reporter.”

  “Get out of here,” he growled. “Go see your name in print. That’s all you ever wanted, right?” He stormed to the door, yanked it open and waited for her to leave.

  The instant she crossed the threshold, that would be the end. She and Rafael would never be able to find their way back to what they’d had last night.

  She scrambled for something to say, any way to prove she wasn’t guilty of what he’d insinuated. Honestly, she wouldn’t even begin to know how to buy a bag of cocaine, let alone one as bug as that. All she’d done was notice what was already there.

  And he’d washed it away. He was the one hiding things, breaking laws. The guilt was his alone.

  She felt the last of her anger seeping away, leaving in its wake despair. She’d fallen in love with this man, this crook, this deceitful bastard who was accusing her of crazy things, impossible things. She’d nearly jettisoned her integrity for him. There was nothing left to fight for, nothing but the truth.

  Mustering every ounce of poise inside her, she went to the table to get her tote, then strode across the room to the door and out.

  ***

  SEVERAL REPORTERS MILLED ABOUT in the press room downstairs. Sandra recognized an acquaintance from the L.A. Times, and a TV gossip columnist in an unbearably stylish outfit with that morning’s edition of the Hollywood Reporter tucked under her arm. A stringer from one of the wire services and a couple of people Sandra had never seen before were drooling over a platter of doughnuts on a table against the wall. She moved further into the room, searching for Diego.

  He was talking earnestly to a man brandishing a tape recorder, but when Sandra caught his eye he sent her a smile and excused himself. “Yes,” he said, hurrying over to her. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need a few minutes alone with you.”

  “You look upset. Come.” He returned to the fellow with the tape recorder and murmured a few final words, then chivalrously took Sandra’s arm and ushered her out of the room.

  She wondered if he could feel her trembling through the lightweight wool of her blazer. She wondered how he would react to what she had to tell him. He was Rafael’s best friend. He had saved Rafael’s life once.

  She prayed he could save it again. Rafael was facing a disaster far worse than the fate of White Angel. And no matter what he’d said to her upstairs, no matter what he thought of her or how badly he’d deluded her, she didn’t want to ruin him. Not for a byline. Not for anything.

  Diego led her down the hall, around the bend and into a small lounge. The fluorescent ceiling fixtures glared; the candy and soda machines hummed like gnats. The vinyl furniture looked uninviting, and she chose to remain standing.

  Closing the door, Diego presented Sandra with a helpful smile. She took a deep breath, then said, “Rafael’s in trouble.”

  He looked dismayed, but also resigned. “There’s nothing but trouble here. When someone dies as Melanie did... Of course it’s trouble.”

  “Do you have any idea where Melanie got her drugs?”

  Diego’s pretty brown eyes narrowed. His teeth seemed to glow a cheerful white even though he wasn’t smiling. “I have my suspicions. But nothing to talk about. I have prepared a press release—”

  “Screw the press release, Diego. This is personal.” She took another deep breath, wrestling her anxiety under control. “Rafael trusts you to the ends of the earth. I know you’re his dearest friend. If you love him, you’ve got to help him.”

  “Of course I will help him. That’s what I’m doing now, talking to the press, keeping the lines of communication open—”

  “I found drugs in Rafael’s office.”

  “Ahh.” It was half a sigh, half a groan. He rolled his eyes heavenward, then leveled his gaze on Sandra and gathered her hands in his. “Tell me what you found.”

  “A plastic bag of what appeared to be cocaine. I confronted Rafael and he destroyed it.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t seem very surprised.” Her voice wavered. She had hoped to hear Diego tell her she was mistaken, Rafael always kept talcum powder in his office, it was a prop from a movie... anything. Anything to restore her faith in Rafael, in her own judgment. Anything to reassure her that she hadn’t been out of her mind last night.

  “Look.” He smiled wistfully. “Things happen. Promises are made. You don’t get a star of Melanie Greer’s caliber unless you meet her demands.”

  “She demanded drugs?”

  “I warned Rafael. I told him, ‘She’s not worth the risk. Better to find a lesser known actress without a drug problem.’ But...” Diego shook his head. “He wouldn’t listen to me. He wanted Melanie. So he did as she asked. Who expected that she would die?”

  “Where did he get the cocaine?”

  “From his brother. I don’t know how much you know, Sandra, but... His brother is in prison for dealing cocaine. But from his jail cell he keeps in touch with the outside world. He has connections. I’m sure Rafael could obtain any kind of drug Melanie wished, as long as his brother gave the word.”

  The beat of her heart was a dirge—rolling timpani, clashing cymbals, heavy minor chords. She felt the air closing in on her, squeezing the breath from her lungs. She fought to hang onto her composure. “Everyone at Aztec Sun swears that Rafael is anti-drug,” she said.

  “It’s a cover. What can he do, say he’s in favor of drugs? Look.” Diego sighed again, deeply, ruefully. “I love Rafael, but I’m not blind. I know what he is, what he’s done. He made a dreadful mistake with Melanie.”

  “A dreadful mistake?” Sandra tried to suppress the hysteria that edged her voice. “A woman is dead!”

  “An accident, I’m sure. Rafael never intended for her to hurt herself. He only wanted to make her happy. Pleas
e, please don’t go public with this, Sandra. I beg you, have mercy.” He glanced at his elegant gold watch, then pulled her to him and kissed her cheek again. “I must go. Please, Sandra—don’t destroy Aztec Sun with this.” He released her and swept out of the room, leaving her with the buzzing vending machines and her own thoughts.

  She didn’t know what she would do: destroy Aztec Sun, destroy Rafael...have mercy, even if it meant becoming an accomplice to a criminal...

  Words filtered through her brain, Melanie saying, That’s Rafael—too cool to get down in the mud with the rest of us.

  They had been speaking vaguely that afternoon in her trailer, dancing around the subject, using euphemisms like “happy.” Sandra had asked Melanie what she meant by “happy,” and Melanie had answered, “You know what I mean. Happy.”

  Oh, God, Melanie, why did you have to die? Sandra sank onto one of a chair and moaned. The tears she’d held back in Rafael’s office broke loose now. But she wasn’t just weeping for him, or for his sins, or for the foolish way she’d let herself love him. She was weeping for Melanie.

  She didn’t want to destroy Aztec Sun, or even Rafael But for Melanie’s sake, she couldn’t stay silent.

  ***

  IT TOOK HER A HALF HOUR to get back to the Post building. A half hour during which she’d neglected to turn on the air conditioning or the radio. The only thing she’d wanted to listen to was her heart.

  She’d thought about her first fling with journalism, back in the heady days of high school, when she had had no interest in shades of gray. If someone had done something wrong, his transgression would get reported in the school newspaper. Mitigating circumstances didn’t matter. Right was right and wrong was wrong.

  What would her friends from the high school paper advise her to do? They’d tell her to go after Rafael with both barrels blazing—although Laurel would also remind her to listen to her heart.

  What was her heart telling her? That Rafael’s deprived youth didn’t justify his criminal behavior as an adult. That at some point gangs and loyalty and even the blood ties of brothers could not take precedence over morality. That he’d lied to Sandra about too many things.

  That when he’d held her in his arms she’d seen the goodness in him. That he had created something from nothing, that he was charitable, that he guided other troubled youths out of the barrio. That, as Father Andreas had said, he had faith.

  That the honesty in his lovemaking was just as important as the evasiveness of his words. That there was more to Rafael than just right and wrong.

  She parked her car in the garage and took the elevator up to the metro news room. Russo was pounding away at his computer keyboard when she approached his desk.

  “Here,” she said, unpacking her tote in the clear space next to his monitor.

  He peered up at her, his forehead shiny with sweat, his tie dangling loose from his collar. “Hey, Sandra—what’s going on? What did you get?”

  She opened her pad and tore her pages of notes from the spiral binding. Then she placed the memory chip from her recorder next to it. “That’s what I’ve got. It’s your story now.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t bother to answer. Lifting her depleted bag, she marched back out of the news room, ignoring Russo’s puzzled expression, ignoring Flannagan shouting “Sandy!” at her as she passed his desk. She went straight to the elevator, rode back down to the garage, unlocked her car and slumped into the driver’s seat.

  Shades of gray she could understand. Forgiveness was a gift, a grace she liked to believe she possessed. But some things simply could not be forgiven.

  A shudder gripped her shoulders, slid down her back and drained away, leaving her weary yet resolved. There was no other way. She had to do this.

  She lifted her car phone and punched in a number. Static whistled through the ear piece, the concrete walls of the garage interfering with her reception.

  After two rings, she heard a voice through the hissing: “Los Angeles Police Department. This phone call is being recorded.”

  No more tears, no more anguish. Just respect for the truth, for the distinction between right and wrong. Just faith in herself. “I’m calling,” she said, “to report that I saw drugs in Rafael Perez’s office at Aztec Sun.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “YOU’VE GOT COMPANY,” said the guard.

  Rafael glared at him through the iron bars. It wasn’t the first time he had ever been inside a holding cell. It was, however, the first time he’d been inside one without having done anything to deserve it.

  Not true. He had done something. He had let down his defenses with Sandra Garcia—and she’d demolished him.

  Evidently mid-afternoon wasn’t a peak time for criminal activity in this part of the city. He was sharing the cell with only two other men, one of whom talked to himself and apparently hadn’t bathed in some time, the other of whom was dressed as a woman. Fortunately, neither of them had shown any inclination to strike up a friendship with Rafael. They’d left him alone on the bench with nothing but his thoughts for company.

  Lousy company. His thoughts circled like scavengers around a piece of carrion, intent on their purpose, never straying far from the realization that the life he had known had been stolen from him. It no longer existed. And Sandra was to blame.

  The police had descended upon his office, three of them, storming the place like a small army fresh out of Gestapo school. The oldest of the three had thrust a search warrant under his nose while the other two had torn the rooms apart, overturning trash cans, emptying drawers onto the floor, yanking on the doors of his credenza and shoving everything off the shelves. After serving him the warrant, the first one had moved unerringly to the kitchen, where he’d quickly sifted through the garbage and located the plastic bag, still beaded with droplets of water.

  Rafael had thought that was as bad as it would get, but he’d been wrong. In the course of their search, the police had located a second bag of cocaine in the hollow of the ceramic sun.

  If he had considered the criminal justice system at all reasonable, this discovery would have put his mind at ease. The bag in the kitchen might have his fingerprints on it, but he had never touched the bag inside the sculpture. The forensic experts of the LAPD would dust the plastic surface and discover it covered with someone else’s prints.

  Sandra’s.

  Christ. How could a reporter do such things just to get a story? How could she plant evidence, telephone it in to the police—he knew she’d had to have made the call, since she’d been the only one who had seen where he’d put the first bag once he’d emptied it—and call herself a journalist? How could he have trusted her?

  That was the worst part of all, worse than being in trouble with the law. Sandra had duped him, exploited him for her story. Sandra, with her tawny skin and her firm flesh, with her eyes misting with passion and her body taking him, loving him... Sandra, who had salved his wounds last night, and soothed his soul, and made him believe that even the greatest sadness could be borne when a man had a woman like her to help him through it...

  She had sold his future for a byline.

  That was worse than the prospect of being charged with possession, with supplying the drugs that had killed Melanie. Worse than the likelihood that he would lose his studio, his home, his freedom, his ability to view the world without bitterness. Sandra’s betrayal cut deeper than any knife blade, straight into the softest part of him, and he was bleeding.

  The guard eyed him impatiently through the bars. “You gonna come with me, or what?”

  Instinctively Rafael glanced at his wrist, but it was bare. They’d taken his watch, along with his belt, his wallet and his keys. He wondered how long he’d been seated on the hard bench, listening to the foul-smelling man mumbling his litany of paranoia and watching the transvestite nibble nervously on his crimson manicure. Without a window, Rafael had no way of knowing how many hours had passed since the cops had run him in.

  He
pushed himself off the bench, aware of his companions’ envious gazes following him out of the cell. At the end of a short hall, the guard opened a door. Tracy Hester stood on the other side.

  Ordinarily Rafael found his lawyer’s severe appearance—close-cropped ash-blond hair brushed sleek to the nape of her neck, pale lipstick, the military-style double-breasted suits she favored—not to his taste. But right now he couldn’t think of a more welcome sight.

  “We’ve got to talk, pal,” she said.

  The guard showed them to a small interrogation room. Tracy headed straight for the table at its center, swung her leather briefcase onto the scarred wooden surface and snapped the brass latches open. She waited until the guard closed the door, leaving them in privacy, and then cut loose with a remarkably unladylike blasphemy. “This is not the happiest moment of my life,” she declared dryly, pulling a legal pad from her briefcase and nodding for him to take a chair across the table from her. “When you called me I thought it was because the insurance company was busting your chops. I didn’t expect to hear you say you were at the police station, using your one phone call on me.” She twisted her pen open and wrote the date at the top of the page. “You’ve really done it this time, Rafael.”

  “I didn’t do a thing,” he insisted.

  “You poured evidence down the sink. They took tracings of the drain, Raf. Destroying evidence is not the sort of thing an innocent man does.” She jotted a note on the pad, then trained her pale hazel eyes on him. “I’m going to have Mike Broylan assisting me on this. He’s one of the top guys in our criminal litigation department. You won’t find anyone better.”

  “Fine.”

  “Which isn’t to say you’re giving him an easy job. Why the hell did you do it, Raf?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “The sink. Why did you dump it down the sink?”

  Because Sandra goaded me, he almost said.

  The muscles in his jaw clenched with tension, sending a dull ache down into his neck. He wondered whether it was worth the effort to explain his actions to a privileged Anglo woman like Tracy, who had never known a life like his. “When I was young,” he told her, “my brother used to bring home his junk. I knew what he was doing. I saw him get busted, time and again. That was the life he chose for himself, and he was my elder, so I kept quiet. But I wouldn’t have his poison in the house. I got rid of it, down the drain. After a couple of times, he stopped bringing it home.”