by Alex Abella
"You packing? If you are, please secure the gun in the locker," said Lurch, his reedy voice magnified by the intercom.
"I'm clean."
"Let me see your briefcase."
I flashed its contents at the peering giant. He grunted, satisfied it contained only files and records, useless papers that would never stop the likes of him from delivering justice the American way.
"Walk through the metal detector."
I stepped around the machine as a test. By that time he'd already pushed the button that opens the gate. It would be so easy, I thought.
The sally port, bars and crossbars painted forest green, clanked as it slowly slid open. I stepped into the passageway between the two gates. The deputy should have waited until the first sally port was closed before opening the second, but I suppose he was afraid he'd forget Archie's story so he flicked the switch that opened the second gate right away. Way too easy.
Walking inside the interview room I was assaulted by the sweet and sour smell of fear and Pine-Sol common to all lockups in California. A slow afternoon in County Jail. Only a handful of attorneys and probation officers were in there, sitting down at the two long benches, reviewing their cases, waiting for their manacled clients to poke through the door at the end of the room. I signaled to the deputy at the desk by the door, waving at one of the empty booths on the left. I closed the door, sat on the metal chair and spread out my file, awaiting the arrival of Ramón de la Concepción Armas Valdez, the so-called brains behind the Jewelry Mart massacre.
Ramón's record up to that outburst of garish violence was fairly representative of those of the Marielito criminals who have graced our shores since 1980. The five to ten thousand jailbirds and lunatics that Castro folded into the mass of his fleeing political enemies made an already suspect bunch of uneducated blacks, mulattoes and recalcitrant whites hard to digest. Among law enforcement agents, the term Marielito had come to mean the roughest, most heartless type of criminal, who would use force way beyond what was necessary, who took sadistic pleasure in creaming the opposition, any opposition-shooting someone full of bullets out of suspicion he might throw a punch, cutting off someone's tongue for talking to the police, spraying acid in his girlfriend's face for giving someone else the eye-small, loving details like that. Ramón had been different only in degree, not in spirit.
His official entry to this country was registered in Key West aboard the Jason, a fishing scow so overwhelmed with refugees that its decks were only inches above the waterline. The inspecting INS agent had written down, "Possible criminal element-recommend internment." Ramón admitted doing time in Cuban prisons, yes, but only for political crimes, a wide category of illegal conduct that in Cuba encompassed everything from speaking badly of your boss to being caught in an act of sabotage. According to the INS records, Ramón never volunteered many details about his life or why he felt it necessary to voice his opposition to Castro. A veteran of Angola, he had a cushy job at a munitions factory, with a wife and a daughter and a modest but comfortable apartment near El Prado in Havana. But after his unspecified defiance of the regime, he lost his job, house, wife and the kid, until all he had left was either outright banditry or suicide-then the port of Mariel opened. The INS had its doubts about him, but ultimately waved him on, reasoning he couldn't be any worse than the thousands of others who were rushing in.
"Señor Morell?" asked a heavy voice with the thick, pasty accent of Cuban blacks. I looked up from my files. A large black man, about two hundred fifty pounds in a six-foot-two frame, stood like a Nubian statue, his shadow falling expectantly over me.
"Yes?"
There was something respectful about this giant. His expression was at peace, brown eyes seeming to shine with a request for forgiveness. He had such quiet strength that I thought either I'd been sent the wrong man or he'd found Jesus in jail (and I don't mean Jesus Lopez). I looked for the telltale jailhouse string cross hanging from his neck or the New Testament clutched in sweaty hand but failed to see them.
"Habla español?" he asked, almost tremulously, as though the question itself were a sort of imposition that might land him in trouble with a trusty. It was hard to believe this was one of the men accused of murdering six people.
"Sí, cómo no, siéntate." I motioned at him to take a seat. His hands were broad, calloused, his fingernails still harboring the ingrained engine oil and lube grease of the manual worker. A mechanic? Double-check his file.
"My name is José Pimienta. They call me Bobo," he said, with a benevolent smile. "Ramón sent me. He says he wants you to talk to me first."
"What, what? Wait a minute. You guys are getting this whole thing wrong. You're not calling the shots. You need me, I don't need you. And if I want to talk to one of you, that's who I want to talk to. You're not running the show, I am. Deputy!"
"No, listen to me. He can't talk to you."
"Why not?
He hesitated, his ebony face tremulous from contained emotion, the pain stored inside bursting from every black crease. The deputy rushed over, the clinking of his handcuffs like the bell on a billy goat. José talked fast.
"He's sick."
"What do you mean he's sick? What does he have?"
"I mean he's praying."
"What? Come on, make up your mind, what's with him?
"He's sick, he's sick from praying. He's a man of God."
"Great, that's all we need. A killer priest."
"No, don't you understand?
The deputy stood behind José, his brown shirtsleeve taut from contained muscle. He gripped a blackjack in his right hand.
"Something wrong?" asked the deputy with the nervous quaking of Dobermans before they leap.
"He's a santero," added José, "he's praying and he can't talk, he's sick."
I waved the deputy away.
"That's all right, he's going to behave."
"You sure?"
"No problem, Ray. We're OK."
Yemayá. Ecué. Shangó. Oggún. Yamba-O. The polyphonous names of the African deities of santería, the mystery cult that claims millions of followers and powers beyond description.
"Is that why he sent you first?"
"Yes. He wants me to tell you his story first."
"Do I have a choice?"
"I can go."
"I don't believe this. All right, go ahead. But make it short."
José said he and Ramón had met at an initiation rite in Regla, a suburb across the bay from Havana peopled almost exclusively by blacks, the center of santería activity in the province. The Cuban government had outlawed the cult as counterrevolutionary superstition, so Ramón and José's meeting was held late at night in a secret place, far from the prying eyes of the comités de vigilancia, the neighborhood committees who keep a detailed ledger of the comings and goings of all the residents of each block in each city. The initiate, a ten-year-old blind black albino boy draped in a coat of many colors, met with his god in the basement of an abandoned bakery near the wharf, in the presence of two hundred men and women who risked their jobs and freedom for the privilege of watching the divinity possess its disciples. After the drumming and the dancing and the possession, when fear and suspicion had given way to the giddiness of communion and exaltation, José and Ramón were introduced by an old woman, Macucha, who had known the families of both men. She predicted that the two would become inseparable, like the twin gods the Ibeyi, messengers of the Yoruba pantheon.
José had just registered for the military service, while Ramón was already a veteran of Angola, where he'd fought against the Unita-led forces of Jonah Savimbi. Both were marginally employed, as cook and shoemaker, when the gates of the Peruvian Embassy were rammed open and thousands flooded in. Ramón had been among the first few hundred to scale the spikes and land on the precious patch of Peruvian soil. José, on the other hand, had been quietly walking to work at the kitchen of La Estrella Restaurant when the neighborhood committeemen, knowing of his counter- revolutionary feelings, picked h
im up in an old U.S. Jeep, told him, "You're going!" and drove him straight to Mariel, where he was dumped with the restless crowd awaiting embarkation.
Without family, friends or sponsors to spring them from the refugee camps, José and Ramón languished as guests of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for a full year after their arrival. They were finally released when the Catholic Relief agency located a distant relative, a maternal aunt of José's living in Caguas, Puerto Rico, who reluctantly agreed to be responsible for their welfare. They never made it to the island. Once freed, they stayed among other boat-lift refugees in the decaying waterfront art deco hotels of Miami Beach. In the Cuban affinity for diminutives, they were now Marielitos, the little people of Mariel, instant pariahs of two nations. The self-fulfilling prophecy of a crime wave came all too true.
"Yeah, sure, but that's no excuse, José. Plenty of people are down and out and don't turn to crime."
"You Americans don't understand. Let me explain."
Ramón and José's first contact with U.S. law was over a minor transgression, an unauthorized knife hidden in their tent in the settlement quarter for the refugees put up under downtown Miami's freeway overpasses. An unidentified assailant had stabbed several people in the camp, taking their money and food. The INS suspected Ramón and José, but since no witnesses dared step forward, no formal charges were filed.
In their second contact, the two were detained as suspects in the fatal robbery of a convenience store near the Tamiami Trail. An informant told the cops José had been crying into his beer, remorseful over what he and Ramón had done to the owner of the El Cebollón. It turned out the proprietor had been hogtied one night while alone in the store, then murdered execution-style in the storeroom, next to boxes of rotting plantains. Although clumsy detectives questioned José and Ramón separately-clumsy in that the suspects somehow endured an awful fall at the station house that broke José's ribs and smashed Ramón's nose-neither of the men confessed. They were released and the case was closed shortly thereafter when the informant was found floating facedown by the piers near the Miami River bridge. His mouth had been sewn shut, apparently while he was still alive.
After that, José and Ramón faced charges with regularity. Aggravated assault, robbery, possession of stolen merchandise, bookmaking, possession of a controlled substance, sale of a controlled substance, sexual battery, fondling a minor, a litany of charges José blamed on prejudice, resentment and mistaken identity. But at no time was there ever a conviction-no one would press charges or come forward to testify. Law enforcement finally got its break when the DEA nabbed both of them as they were riding in the backseat of a car driven by Aníbal Gutiérrez, a well-known art connoisseur and holder of the local Pizza Man franchise. During their search, agents found that Ramón and José were carrying concealed Sten submachine guns; in the trunk, stuffed inside supermarket brown paper bags, officials stumbled on fifty kilos of cocaine packed in neat, plastic-wrapped bricks with the legend "Bolivar's Best." Gutiérrez's lawyers were able to suppress the evidence of the drugs, arguing there was no probable cause to stop the car and thus the agents had no right to search the vehicle. Gutiérrez returned to his Degas, dough and drugs with hardly a worry. But Ramón and José were sentenced to sixteen months each and after doing their time were sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, pending deportation to Cuba.
Their fate took yet another turn when the Reagan administration botched the deportation agreement and informed the prisoners they would soon be returning to the land of their nightmares. The prisoners rioted and after taking dozens of hostages, set the facilities on fire. In the negotiations following, the Justice Department agreed to review all the cases and somehow, in the pell-mell rush to comply, José and Ramón slipped between the bars.
They returned to Miami but things were different by then. Gutiérrez had been killed in an accident, after his speedboat flipped outside Lauderdale and exploded. The Marielitos had moved out
of Miami Beach, the old art deco hotels and apartment buildings having been taken over by yuppies, who waxed orgasmically over the etched glass windows and sinuous modernist lines. Even the authorities had changed. A Cuban mayor had taken office in Miami and he was determined to root out the undesirables of his own kind. Police, who before only showed up on emergencies, patrolled the area constantly. That's when Ramón and José, still together after all their travails, decided to head out west, to the city of dreams by the Pacific.
I looked up at the clock. Three hours had gone by and I still hadn't started questioning José on their new life or the crime on hand.
"Look, that's all fine and dandy, but let's talk about what happened that day, José."
"OK, sure, but I got to tell you something."
"What's that?
"I don't remember anything that happened."
"That's his defense, you understand," said José's attorney, splaying his manicured fingers on the edge of the Biedermeier desk, varnished nails glistening in the sunbeam piercing the picture window. Outside, a lonely hawk circled the canyons of Bunker Hill, hunting for a field mouse amid the rubble of construction sites.
Clayton Finch Whitmore Smith III seemed at ease in his legal aerie, surrounded by Hockneys, Rushas and Diebenkorns, his California hipness only heightened by the tiny Fragonard by the door. The fine wool crepe fabric of his Clacton Fricton custom-made suit draped as elegantly as the arguments he propounded in court when defending his usual array of wealthy businessmen and Hollywood stars.
"We're going to hold a competency hearing as soon as the two shrinks pick him over. I think the guy's flipped, all that voodoo stuff."
"Santería," I said. "Voodoo is from Haiti."
"No matter, the effect is the same, to temporarily derange the participant into believing a divinity has manifested itself."
"Sounds like Mass."
That stopped his argument in midbreath. He stroked his cropped reddish beard and smiled.
"It does, doesn't it?" He chuckled. The glint of his smile and the pleasant folding of the wrinkles around his gray eyes gave Clay an appealing boyish look. I could see why jurors, especially women, were swayed by his oratory. Now he turned stern, his hand wagging the Mont Blanc pen at me to press his point.
"What we have in santería is a prehistoric, anti-Western cult that possesses its participants, deprives them of the use of reason and makes them commit offenses that in their ordinary state of mind they would never dream of carrying out. To me, that is one of the best definitions of insanity ever propounded and that's why we're using it."
He leaned back in his leather chair, expecting my insincere praise.
"Are you saying I should tell Valdez to cop to the same thing?"
"Charlie, I wouldn't presume to tell you what to do, that's between you and him. By the way, when's the arraignment?"
"Next Tuesday. Judge Chambers."
"Good." He scribbled quickly in his calendar, then looked up.
"I hear there's no way she's going to allow him to go pro per in trial. I suppose you told your guy he's not exactly doing himself the greatest service."
"If I ever get to talk to him. I've been to see him twice at Old County. The first time he claims he's sick but it turns out he's in chapel, praying. Second time, they can't find him. They lock down the place, search the whole joint. He'd been laying in bed the whole time but somehow the guards didn't see him."
"Quite a guy. I just thought of something. Your guy cannot use the same defense we're using. He is the priest, the one who brings people into a trance, so he did it knowingly, casting aside his rationality to invoke the dark forces. Evil, not just malice, aforethought."
"So dramatic. Is that why you're doing this pro bono, Clay? You're gonna sell it to the movies?"
Clay slammed the desk so hard the clasp of his Rolex came undone.
"Dammit, Charlie, can't you take anything seriously?" he said as he reclasped his watch. "I know all about you. I know why you came out here, running from
Dade County with your tail between your legs. You were great and you fucked up."
"Mind your manners," I said. "You're swearing."
Clay's expression darkened and I saw the flinty streak that got him out of the shadow of the sugar refinery in Vallejo where he was born and that impelled him through Stanford, Harvard and the State Department, making him partner by age thirty in Manuel, Caesar, Brewer and Smith and multimillionaire by age forty.
"Don't play fucking games with me," he said. "You know perfectly well why we took this case. This office has a pro bono policy and everyone here, from Caesar to the rawest recruit from USC, has got to do it. It's my turn, that's all. And no, I'm not selling it to the movies. Are you?"
"If I can, I will. I got bills to pay."
4
It was the kind of Sunday when everyone in L.A. wishes for a beach house in Malibu. Except for those who have one-they wish for a beach house in southern France. Although those happy few might detest having to put up with the town's cinderblock surf shops, neon-lit fast-food stores and miles of traffic on weekends when the entire San Fernando Valley is on its way to Zuma Beach, at least the beachsiders know they have what everyone desires, their own private ocean. The azure windswept waters lapping at the yellow dunes, the surfers bobbing in the swells, the occasional spinnaker raking the horizon, the smell of salt spray and jasmine, these are the precious reasons why they paid a million dollars for a thirty-foot stretch of beachfront, these are the treasures for which they lied, cheated, hustled and swindled.