“Here he comes,” Robo says under his breath, looking past Boone to the front door of the restaurant. “Get ready, Officer Whitey.”
Robo raises his hand and shouts a greeting in Spanish. A little man, not more than five feet tall, approaches the table. He has dark skin and broad Indian features. Robo motions for him to sit next to Boone, but the man hesitates, eyes downcast. Robo explains that Boone is a police officer, a friend who can help them, and the guy finally removes his blue Dodgers cap and lowers himself into the booth, keeping to the edge of the seat.
Robo asks him if he wants coffee, and he says no. Boone’s Spanish is pretty good, but the man speaks so softly, he’s often drowned out by the clatter of plates and conversations at other tables. Boone struggles to follow what’s being said, scowling alternately at the man and at Robo, whoever is speaking. That’s about as much cop attitude as he can muster this early in the morning.
Señor Rosales is from the town of Zunil in Guatemala. He’s been in the United States for thirty years and works as a janitor at a sweatshop downtown. The dead kid on the bus was his grandson, Oscar, who’d come to L.A. three years ago, after his father died in a car crash in Guatemala, to try to make some money to keep the family afloat.
Rosales and Oscar met for the first time when the boy arrived in town, Rosales having left Zunil long before the kid was born. Oscar looked so much like his father, Rosales’s son, that at first Rosales thought he was talking to a phantom.
They got together for dinner, and Rosales gave Oscar a few leads on jobs, but after that they didn’t see much of each other because both were working all the time. Then Oscar met a girl and had a baby with her and was even busier. The old man hadn’t heard from his grandson in three months when he saw his picture in the newspaper and learned that he was dead.
Rosales hasn’t been able to sleep since. His dreams are spiked with horrible scenes of Oscar dying alone and scared and in pain, far from home. How could something like this happen? Dog bites! Infection! To such a good boy. In the U.S. It’s a mystery he can’t live with, and he wants Robo to solve it, to uncover the chronology of Oscar’s final days.
Robo leans back and strokes his mustache with his thumb and forefinger after Rosales makes his request, as if he’s debating whether to take on the job. It’s all an act, though, Boone’s sure of it, because Robo has never turned down a job.
A girl with blue hair sitting in the next booth says, “I asked for cottage cheese instead of potatoes. Can I get cottage cheese?” The waitress refills Boone’s and Robo’s cups.
“Why didn’t he claim the boy’s body?” Boone asks Robo, interrupting his deliberation.
“Qué?” Robo says. “What?”
It bugs Boone that the old guy didn’t make the trip to the morgue. He says, “Ask him why, if he cares so much, if it bothers him so much now, he didn’t claim his grandson’s body.”
“You ask him,” Robo replies.
Boone puts the question to the old man, and for the first time since sitting down, Rosales lifts his gaze from the tabletop. He glares at Boone briefly, fire in his bloodshot eyes, then turns to give his answer to Robo.
He says that, of course, Boone doesn’t understand why he was afraid, because Boone is rich and white and doesn’t know what it’s like to get fucked with every time you turn around. He says that he’s illegal and didn’t want any trouble. He says that if they’d arrested him when he went to get the kid, where would he be then? He has a job, a house, and a woman who depends on him.
He pauses for a second, then adds, And I drink, okay? I am not strong inside.
He goes back to staring at the table, at his gnarled hands curled into fists there. His bottom lip quivers ever so slightly.
Robo shoots Boone a look like, “See what you did?” but Boone keeps his cop face on. It was a legitimate question. He realizes he’s only here for window dressing, but Robo should find out what he’s stepping in before he’s knee-deep in it.
Robo tells Rosales that he’ll help him out, but he’ll need to hear anything the old man knows about Oscar’s whereabouts before he died.
Rosales gives Robo a scrap of paper with an address on it for Oscar’s girlfriend, the mother of Oscar’s child. This is all he has, he says, but she might know something. Where he was working, people he associated with. Then he hands over an envelope stuffed with wrinkled tens and twenties, Robo’s fee.
Robo tells him that he’ll start the investigation immediately and report back to him with anything he comes up with. God bless you, Rosales says. He shakes hands with Robo but ignores Boone, then walks slowly to the door, leaving an air of such deep sadness behind that Boone and Robo sit in gloomy silence long after he’s gone.
Finally, Robo says, “Want breakfast? It’s on me.”
“Nah, bro, I have to go,” Boone replies.
“Come on. That Grand Slam is good. Bacon and sausage.”
“One of my tenants has a broken window, and I promised to fix it.”
Robo rubs the side of his shaved head and raises his eyebrows. “Okay, uh, check it out,” he says. “Here’s the real deal: my car’s in the shop.”
Boone knew he’d heard something coming. “No, Robo.”
“Take you twenty minutes to drive me down to talk to the kid’s baby momma. I’ll be in and out in ten, then twenty minutes to get back. What’s that? An hour?” Robo slides the money out of the envelope and counts out a few bills. “When’s the last time you made fifty dollars in an hour?”
Boone bites his tongue. His base rate as a bodyguard was a thousand a day, but Robo doesn’t need to know that. He looks at his watch, looks at the money. Tips have been lousy at the Tick Tock lately, his phone bill is due, and the way Rosales reacted when Boone asked about his grandson’s body makes him feel like he owes the old man a little something.
“It’s a hundred dollars,” he says. “You haven’t paid me yet for showing up here.”
Robo peels a few more battered bills off the stack. “Eighty okay?”
“And I’ll have that breakfast first.”
3
BOONE AND ROBO HIT THE LAST OF RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC as they drive south on the Harbor to talk to Oscar Rosales’s girlfriend. It locks up coming out of downtown and stays tight all the way past USC. The city spreads out flat and gray on both sides of the freeway and seems to go on forever. An easy place to get lost, Boone thinks. Which is good if you’re running from something, but hell if you’re not.
The Cutlass’s air-conditioning doesn’t work, so they ride with the windows down. Robo punches in a classic rock station on the radio and sings along. “I dreamed I was in a Hollywood movie.” Boone gives up trying to find the perfect lane, the one that’s moving steadily. He just stays in the middle all the way to the Florence exit.
On Florence, they head west, cruising past grim, graffiti-covered liquor stores, muffler shops, and burger-and-burrito joints. Ten, fifteen years ago these neighborhoods were all black, but now the crumbling apartment buildings and sun-bleached stucco houses with bars on their doors and windows are filled mostly with Latinos.
“Holy shit. Florence and Normandie,” Robo says as they roll through the intersection. “You remember the riots?”
“That was ninety-two, right?” Boone replies. “I was a senior in high school. We watched it on TV.” And his mom said, “Look at those stupid niggers burning up their own shit.” He leaves that part out.
“It was wild, ese,” Robo says. “The first day, when the verdict came down, I got home from this car wash I was working at and watched the brothers beat the shit out of that dude, that truck driver, on TV. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ All kinds of craziness was jumping off, and the cops were too scared to go in and do anything about it.
“Then the next day they shut the car wash down and told us to go home because there was some kind of curfew. The shit was spreading out of South Central into the rest of the city. We could smell the smoke and see the fires from the roof of our apartment building
.
“A bunch of vatos were hanging out on Whittier Boulevard, and me and my homie, Sneaky, walked over to see what was up. Guys were blasting their stereos, and girls were dancing. It was like a party. There were no cops anywhere, and everyone was screaming ‘Fuck the police’ and ‘Viva la raza’ and all kinds of stupidness.
“Then someone chucked a bottle at a fire truck, and someone broke a window on a shoe store, and all of a sudden everybody lost it and was snatching shit and wrecking shit and trying to turn over cars.
“I followed some people into a market, and we started grabbing candy and cigarettes. I don’t know what we were thinking. We weren’t thinking. The owner, this Korean pendejo everybody in the neighborhood hated, yelled for us to stop, but nobody gave a fuck. Fools just kept crowding into the store and taking whatever they wanted.
“A couple of vatos jumped the counter and tried to open the register, and the Korean came up with a piece and started shooting. Everybody panicked and rushed for the door. I was in back by the cooler, and you’ve never seen this fat boy run so fast.
“When I got outside I felt something wet on my face and thought I’d been winged. I didn’t realize that one of the Korean’s rounds had put holes in a couple of the cans in the twelve-pack I was carrying.
“Nobody got hurt, but a couple of locos still wanted to burn the store down. They didn’t, though, because they were too chickenshit to go back. The owner stood in the doorway of the place with his pistol in his hand until the crowd finally broke up.
“The car wash stayed closed until Monday, and I lost a whole weekend of work. Something like sixty people got killed, and they had the National Guard in some neighborhoods, tanks and shit.
“It’s weird, but I haven’t looked at things the same since. I mean, one on one, everybody’s cool, but crowds make me real nervous, just thinking about how people turned on each other like animals. Mi abuelita kept saying it was the devil out there, loose in the streets, and maybe she was right. You got a better explanation?”
THE ADDRESS ROSALES gave them on Seventy-fourth Street is a tiny pink Spanish-style house with a small yard and a couple of raggedy rose bushes, all surrounded by a low chain-link fence. Boone parks in front, and Robo hauls himself out of the Olds with a groan, buttons his uniform shirt over his gut, and tucks it into his pants. Leaning over to look in the window of the car, he says, “You want to come in with me? It’s kinda hot out here.”
“Am I on the clock?” Boone asks.
“Huh?”
“Do I have to wear the cop jacket?”
“Might as well, right? You brought it.”
Might as well. Boone shakes his head at how stupid Robo is for trying to pretend that he hadn’t been planning this all along. It is hotter than hell, though, and he has to piss after all that coffee, so he gets out of the car and leans in to grab his jacket off the backseat, where he stowed it when they left Denny’s.
He follows Robo through a gate in the fence and up the concrete walk to the porch. There’s a white plastic chair sitting there, and a dusty hummingbird feeder that looks like it hasn’t been filled in years hangs from the eaves. The front door is open, but the house is dark beyond the heavy black security screen. Boone hears people speaking Spanish on a TV somewhere inside.
Robo bangs on the screen and calls out, “Hola?”
A young girl coalesces out of the murk with a baby perched on her hip. The girl’s black hair is cut short, and she’s wearing jeans and a white tank top with the word DIVA spelled out in rhinestones. The baby is naked except for a diaper.
“Si?” the girl says.
“Maribel está aqui?” Robo asks.
“Soy Maribel.”
Robo tells her that he’s a friend of Oscar’s grandfather and would like to talk to her for a minute. She asks if he’s police. No, no, I’m too honest for that, he says in Spanish. Maribel looks past him at Boone, and Robo adds, Now him, he’s not so honest, but he’s working for me today.
Maribel flashes a little smile, then says something over her shoulder to someone else in the room. Another girl appears with a key that Maribel uses to unlock the screen.
“Bet you a million she doesn’t know he’s dead,” Boone whispers.
He and Robo step into the living room. It smells like baby powder and Pine-Sol. The sofa is covered with a colorful blanket, and there’s an unmade bed in the dining room. A framed painting of Jesus hangs on one wall and a poster of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on another. A Mexican soap opera is playing on the TV.
An older woman in a bathrobe comes walking up the hallway from the back of the house. Her hair is wet, and she’s wiping her hands on a towel. She stops short, startled, when she sees the men, and draws her robe tighter around herself.
What’s happening? she asks.
They’ve come about Oscar, Maribel replies.
The woman’s shoulders sag like she knows it’s going to be bad news. She rattles off a stream of curses under her breath — pinche this and pinche that — then offers the men coffee. They say no, gracias, really, but she hustles off to the kitchen anyway.
Turns out the woman is Maribel’s aunt, and the other girl is Maribel’s cousin. The uncle also lives there, and the cousin’s husband, but they’re at work.
Maribel motions for Robo and Boone to sit on the couch. She drops into a torn recliner and uses a remote to mute the TV.
This is Oscar’s son, Alex, she tells Robo. The baby grabs the thin gold chain and crucifix around her neck, and she has to pry them out of his little fingers. Have you seen Oscar?
Young lady, Robo says, I don’t know a gentle way to put this, but Oscar is dead.
Maribel slumps in the recliner and raises one hand to her mouth. Her dark eyes fill with tears, but she doesn’t break down. Her cousin, however, gasps and runs for the kitchen, shouting, “Mamá! Mamá!” This frightens little Alex, who begins to cry.
I’m sorry, Robo says. Boone looks down at the floor, out the window. It’s as awful a moment as he’s had in a while, everything laid bare like this.
The aunt and cousin return, both hysterical, and Robo has to calm them down before he can tell the story. How Oscar was found on the bus; how he died from infected dog bites; and how Oscar’s grandfather hired him to find out what happened.
Maribel’s face is blank, but her stoicism is betrayed by occasional sharp intakes of breath, stillborn sobs. Her aunt sits on the arm of the recliner and strokes the girl’s hair as Robo explains to her that he needs her help to uncover the truth.
The baby wants down. Maribel props him against the coffee table. He bounces a few times to test his legs, then loses his balance and sits abruptly on the floor.
Just start at the beginning, Robo says. Tell me everything.
She says it was like a dream, some of it. She and Oscar met at a nightclub downtown. He was a good dancer. Looking at him you wouldn’t think it — he was a little bowlegged, a little stocky — but he was naturally graceful. When he approached their table, Maribel’s girlfriends all hoped he was coming to ask them, but she knew it was her he wanted.
His eyes could never keep a secret, she said. Never.
They danced to a few songs, and he bought her a Coke. He wasn’t crude like the other boys, cracking dirty jokes and talking tough into their phones. He asked her about her life and actually listened when she told him about it. Then he told her about his.
He was washing dishes at a restaurant but wanted to get into construction. His father had died the year before, and Oscar was sending most of the money he made to his mother in Guatemala, to buy food for his little brother and sister and keep them in school. Eventually, he told Maribel, he’d move back to Zunil, where he’d build a big house and open a store that sold computers.
I said, “Oh, so you’re a dreamer,” Maribel recalls. And he said to me, “Dreams are for children. A man makes plans.”
Maribel says she’d been lonely since coming from Guatemala herself the year before, and Boone guesses that So
uth Central, with its razor wire, bulletproof Plexiglas, and dead lawns, wasn’t what she’d pictured when she fantasized about California.
Shortly after she arrived, a gang of black boys surrounded her while she was on her way home from the market. They grabbed her breasts and ran off with the bread and eggs her aunt had sent her for. After that she rarely ventured out, except to help her aunt clean houses. She spent her days watching TV and writing letters to friends back home.
The night she met Oscar was the first time she’d been to a club in L.A., and she fell in love with him before he’d even asked if he could call her sometime. She was sixteen, he was nineteen, and they were made for each other. He took her to the beach, to Disneyland. He bought her a pair of sandals she admired at a swap meet and showed her how to play a few songs on the old guitar her uncle had lying around the house.
Her family liked him too. Didn’t you? Maribel says to her aunt and cousin. Both nod and say, Yes, yes. They fed him, let him sleep on the couch rather than ride the bus home late at night.
And then Maribel found out that she was pregnant. She was scared when the doctor gave her the news, wondering how Oscar would react, but her heart was saved when he shouted with joy and said they’d been blessed by God. When she began to show, he’d put his mouth to her belly and whisper messages to the child, telling it to take its time, grow strong and healthy, and he cried when they found out it was a boy.
He promised her aunt and uncle that he’d marry Maribel as soon as he’d saved enough money to rent a place of their own. He was starting to get painting jobs, which paid a lot better than restaurant work, and two or three months were all he’d need. Until then, he said, he’d give them fifty dollars a week for Maribel’s room and board.
And he did, Maribel’s aunt interjects. Every week, fifty dollars.
The only problem, Maribel continues, was that he couldn’t manage to put any money away, no matter how hard he worked. Between what he sent home to Guatemala and what he paid her aunt and uncle, he was still just getting by, even with the extra he earned collecting cans and newspapers during his off-hours.
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