The Killing of the Saints

by Alex Abella

  The bearded young man behind the counter slurped a cup of ramen noodles as he watched the "$100,000 Pyramid" on a 27-inch Panasonic TV. At first, he ignored me but glared in my direction when I started sticking my fingers in the pile of pennies sprinkled with cigars in front of the figure of the beggar on crutches whose wounds are licked by dogs.

  "How can I help you?" he said in the flat Cuban Spanish.

  "I'm looking for Juan Alfonso."

  He didn't reply but turned around to watch the program as Dick Clark nudged a failed contestant into remembering the word that could have earned him ten thousand dollars or a vacation in Acapulco, all expenses paid.

  "Do you know where to find him?"

  He didn't take his eyes off the screen. "He's out building a better life."

  "Aren't we all."

  "No, he's doing it, chico."

  "Good. I hope he profits from it. Can I interrupt his prayers and see him anyhow?"

  The young man turned and spoke through a mouthful of noodles.

  "That's where he is. The community center. It's called A Better Life. It's on Mariposa and Rayo."

  "He does construction too?"

  "This store is just for the saints, not for lucre. We have our own construction company." He looked around, took out a card from a drawer, handed it over. "Indio Construction Company."

  "We?"

  "He's my father."

  The tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed man leading the construction crew did not look like any Indian I'd ever heard of. The only real Native Americans at the site were the wiry brown Salvadorans and Guatemalans who hustled around carrying buckets of paint, ladders, trowels and bags of plaster. But Juan Alfonso, the man Ramón had sent me to talk to as a possible character witness for the trial, was every inch the Spaniard's son.

  "The Indian is my head," he said.

  "Excuse me?"

  He hollered at a worker for not mixing the right shade of yellow on a door frame, then turned to me again.

  "My head, you know, my spiritual guide. I become his conduit during the session."

  He walked away to scream at another worker for carrying an empty nail gun. I stood on the site, looking at the sky, the door frames, the slanted slab foundation and wondered why anyone would think being an investigator is glamorous work. I was contemplating the downside of being a lifeguard when Juan Alfonso returned.

  "Did my son send you here? That son of a bitch should rot in jail. Tell him I'm not getting him out of any more tight spots. He can throwaway his life for all I care."

  "Your son?"

  "C'mon, are we playing charades or you can't hear me? Didn't Roberto send you here so I'll bail him out? I told him he should stop using those rocks, they're going to kill him. Let him stay in the can awhile. Does he think we came to this country so he can be a wastrel, a drug addict and skirt chaser? I'm not helping him out, you tell him that, and that's that!"

  "Sorry, I'm here about Ramón Valdez."

  Juan Alfonso shifted gears, but barely.

  "Coño, another son of a bitch. You know, for such a smiling man you sure bring a lot of bad memories. What does he want?"

  "He wants to know if you'll testify for him at his trial."

  "Are you crazy? You know what he did?"

  "No, I don't."

  "Look, it would take all day to tell you and I'm really busy here." He wrote down an address on his business card. "Come tonight to my house and we'll talk. I'll tell you all about that son of a bitch, may a bad stroke of lightning break him into little pieces."

  He handed over the card. "You're his lawyer?"

  "His investigator."

  "That's good because you got a lot of investigating to do."

  He paused, squinted at me. "So tell me, is it true women really go for detectives?"

  "Only when they think you got something on them. Then you don't want to, it's too messy."

  "Don't talk to me about messes. How do you think I got to have ten kids? Let me tell you, it's one headache after another. It's dad give me that, papá I need money for a new car, papi a new house, viejo get me out of jail. Then they never thank you for anything. It's like pissing in the wind."

  The second party that Ramón wanted me to find proved as elusive as a smogless day in August. Lucinda Luz, a relative with whom he'd stayed when coming to Los Angeles, no longer worked at the dressmaker's on Alvarado. The store manager, a square-faced old woman with a hairy wart on her forehead, said she'd pass on the message but she wasn't too hopeful she'd see her soon. As I understood it, Luz had sponsored Ramón and Pimienta when they'd been released from Atlanta, but judging from the address where she lived, a crowded noisy tenement with a large courtyard overrun with half-naked children and lines of laundry, their living quarters must have been as oppressively confining as their cells. Luz wasn't at the apartment, so I slipped my card under the door then went up to Enzo's for lunch.

  My landlord was the owner of Baldocchi's, a landmark Italian restaurant in Los Feliz, the kind with singing waiters, oregano-reeking pastas and yes, straw-covered bottles dangling from an overhead trellis draped with dusty plastic ivy. Enzo was ecstatic to see me.

  "Hi, Charlie, take a seat. Be with you shortly."

  So I did, in front of a mural of a typical Italian port village with multicolored boats, umber buildings and harmoniously cresting hillsides in the background. Enzo sat at the table with a glass of Frascati.

  "Problems, Charlie?" he said in the Tuscan dialect he learned on his nonna's knee.

  "What else is new. How you doing?" My question opened the door to the Italian's favorite subject, himself. Enzo marched in with gusto.

  "Business is great, I can't complain, but this help, Dio Santo, they're going to give me a heart attack! You know these people ... " He jerked his head at the Mexican busboy collecting dishes. "They have no sense of pride in their work, they don't want to do something good. They just want to get it over with e via, let's go home. Like right now, look at Sergio."

  We watched the maître d', a lantern-jawed fellow with a pencil-thin mustache and a golden earring in his left ear, flitting around a table with two blond, permed USC coeds.

  "He should be keeping an eye on the house, not the girls. He mixes up reservations, forgets seating arrangements, it's murder. I don't know what to do."

  "Why don't you get some Italians to come help you?"

  Enzo looked indignantly at me. "Are you kidding? They wouldn't last a week here before some fancy West Side place would snatch them up."

  "You mean only Mexicans will take the job?"

  "Listen, I'm not prejudiced. Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, I don't care where they're from, as long as they do the job. Maybe you know somebody?"

  "If I hear of someone, I'll holler."

  Juan Alfonso's house, in the hills around Silverlake, was a Craftsman from the early 1900s, two river-stone pillars in the porch propping up a sagging roofline. He'd planted a sea of flowers in his gated front yard, lilies, clematis, calendulas, poppies, bluebells, gladiolus, which grew in careful abandon around the cottage. I parked a half block away under a lemony-scented magnolia tree, its white blossoms littering the pavement. The water in the reservoir glowed a reddish orange from the dying rays of the dying sun as I walked up. An old woman with long gray locks glared out the window of the ramshackle house next door the moment I opened the gate to Juan Alfonso's, then she slammed her shutters closed. An owl hooted from a nearby rafter. The door was open. I walked

  through.

  In the living room, two couples sat on a flowered print plastic-slipcovered sofa, watching "Jeopardy" on the rear-projection 40-inch TV set. Juan Alfonso's son sprawled in the middle of the couch, still munching, this time from a bowl of smoked almonds he held tightly in his lap. One of the couples, with the yellow complexion and low forehead of Nicaraguans, was dressed all in white, she in a form-fitting dress that emphasized her heavy breasts, he in a sheer guayabera, smoking a cigar. The other couple was mulatto, with the broad no
se, narrow forehead and small eyes of Caribbean blacks. Dressed in nondescript clothes, the woman slowly massaged the man's shoulders. They all looked up as I walked in, eyeing me curiously but not unkindly.

  I heard laughter just then and Juan Alfonso came out of the kitchen at the rear of the room, a can of Sprite in his hand. Next to him was a young woman, not much older than a girl, with cinnamon skin, high cheekbones and large hazel eyes, waves of dark hair with sun-bleached accents falling on her shoulders. She wore a mottled green and yellow dress, the colors of a fallen leaf. Tall and slender, she smiled as though she knew me, her eyes shining with equal portions of malice and innocence. Juan Alfonso shook my hand.

  "Chico, coño, it was about time you got here. We were going to start without you."

  "What are you doing?"

  "I thought I told you. We're going to have a little conversation with the gods."

  "Not a bembé?"

  "That's what you white folks call it. We, the initiated people of color-for I may have a white skin but my soul is black as a runaway slave-we call it a conversation, a visit, if you like. You got questions, they got answers. Let me introduce you to someone I'm sure you want to know."

  He turned with a satisfied grin to the girl.

  "Lucinda, this is the man who came to see you, Charlie Morell."

  She proffered her hand. It felt smooth and scented of jasmine. For the first time in years, my heart skipped a beat. Watch it, I thought.

  "Did you get my card?" No sooner had I said that than I realized the silliness of thequestion but she played along, a schoolgirl teasing the class dummy.

  "What card?"

  "You should have called me. I want to ask you some questions. When's a good time to talk?"

  "We can talk right now." She looked at Juan Alfonso as though seeking guidance. He, perhaps thinking of his ten children, shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

  "Remember Albertico is about to arrive," he said indifferently. He headed for the living room table, picked up a flower arrangement and walked down a creaky stairwell to the basement.

  Lucinda grabbed my hand and steered me to a loveseat at the far corner of the room, where the blare of the TV was not as painful. She snuggled next to me in the chair, fine skin and solid bones, a dark doll smelling of perfume, playful and conspiratorial.

  "Who's Albertico?" I said, as I pressed her slender hand in mine. I felt the compulsion of the gambler set loose at the green-felt heaven of the gaming table-one lucky roll is all I need and everything will be fine, Lord.

  "Oh, he's the drum. Juan Alfonso doesn't like to start without the roll to Our Lady, Yemayá. He's always late."

  Up close I realized that the impression of youth was due to demeanor and slimness, that the small net of fine lines around her eyes put her closer to thirty than twenty, as I had first thought. Her perfume struck me like a cresting wave, a lover's tug.

  "What did you want to ask me? Ask me anything."

  "Not so fast, maybe you won't like it. It's about Ramón Valdez and José Pimienta."

  She wrinkled her nose as though detecting a foul smell. "Those two? Let me tell you, they've done nothing but give me trouble since I sponsored them. Maybe I should have let them stay in Atlanta."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  She paused, claimed back her hand. "What is it that you'll be doing for them exactly? You're not a cop, are you?"

  "I'm their court-appointed investigator. Ramón was the one who said I should contact you. He thought you and Juan Alfonso could testify for him at the trial. About his character."

  I had allayed her suspicions somewhat, but then her slender face flew into a welter of emotions. "And what character!" She paused. "That was incredible, what happened at the store. Those poor people. And that little girl. It's so sad. You know, it's all because of the rocks."

  "What do you mean?"-

  "They were both OK, until they started doing rocks and then, forget it, you couldn't deal with them anymore."

  "Rock cocaine?"

  "Is there anything else? Listen, when they came out here I was working as a domestic for this Cuban lady in Pasadena. She had a big house, up there in the hills. It was beautiful, like something out of a sugar plantation. White walls, red tiles, muy linda. Well, she said she had space to put them out back in the guest house. She felt she had to do her part to help Cubans who fled, you know? So I guaranteed that Ramón was OK, that he learned his lesson. Well, it was all right for a while. You know how Ramón completely dominates José, it's something incredible, so whatever Ramón said, that was the law. Now this lady was impressed with Ramón. Did you know he has two university degrees from Cuba?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "Psychology and civil engineering. He speaks Russian and French, too. Well, so the old lady was really impressed and got him a job in a construction site. She and her husband-she's a widow, he got cancer-they made their money in construction in the fifties when they left the island and came here so she knew people. That's how Ramón met Juan Alfonso. They started making good money fixing up houses and bought a couple in Altadena. But then he took to smoking that stuff and went crazy. He lost the job and the houses he'd bought and then one of them, I don't know which one, broke into the main house and stole some jewelry and silver. The gardener saw them as they were running away. So the old lady had enough and threw them out and then fired me too, thinking I was in on it. That's when they really started going crazy."

  "Did she ever report it to the police?"

  "No. She figured it wouldn't be worth the trouble of going to court and testifying and all that. She said she'd learned her lesson."

  "What was that?"

  "Never trust a fellow Cuban again, especially a Marielito."

  The rhythmic clapping of a tribal drum broke through the din of the TV and our conversation. I turned to the door and saw a small, heavyset black man with a small carved batá drum hanging from a golden string around his neck, grinning. Everybody in the room turned to him and a hubbub of voices rose in greeting.

  "Albertico! About time you showed up!"

  "Where have you been? You think the saints don't have better things to do?"

  The drummer walked lightly into the house but lost his winning smile when he saw me sitting so close to Lucinda.

  "Who is this one?" he asked her. She stood up, took his hand.

  "Don't be jealous. This is Charlie, he's here about Ramón and José."

  "Those two? Bad children of Oggún, they got what they deserved. What are you going to do for them?"

  "I don't know that there's anything I can do."

  "He's their detective," added Lucinda.

  "Investigator," I said.

  "He wants to talk to people who know them," she continued.

  "I already talked to the police," said Albertico, his lips turning downward.

  "Well, this is different, this is for them, not the police, chico," said Lucinda.

  "We'll see," he said and turned his back to us. "Everybody

  ready?"

  Juan Alfonso stuck his head out the stairwell.

  "Vamos, vamos!" So Albertico led the way down the creaky steps, a drum major leading the spiritual parade.

  The altar was set up at the northeast end of the basement, a converted rumpus room lined with fiberboard panels pretending to be fine wood, its floor covered with a shaggy orange carpet. A plastic bucket full of water freshened bunches of verbena, sweet basil and nightshade, the offerings to the image of Saint Lazarus. Next to the spurious saint disowned by the Catholic church stood a framed print of Saint Barbara, the crowned amazon with the sword who signifies the Dionysian god Shangó. At her feet, baskets of offerings-bananas, ears of corn, pine cones, bay leaves, a vase of red geraniums. Other figures crowded the altar-a large black doll dressed in calico, Saint George on his steed, the Holy Child of Atocha, a profusion of objects dedicated to the cult all illuminated by twelve votive candles, the only source of light in the cool damp room.

 
We sat in a semicircle of metal folding chairs facing the altar. Juan Alfonso produced a bottle of rum, which we passed from mouth to mouth, then he handed out cigars for all to smoke. Mine was an Old Dutch, brittle and dried out in its plastic wrapping. I contemplated walking out at that moment, leaving these benighted people the blessings of their rituals and returning some other time, when the light of day would allow for clear questions and forward answers-that is, as forward as any of these people were ever likely to be. But then I committed the gravest sin possible for an investigator, I became curious beyond the demands of the job. It's a risky proposition to let your curiosity lead you into opening bundles that should be left tied, into wiping clean the glass and prying open the paint-encrusted doors just so you can take in the view. Still, I couldn't help it. I fooled myself into believing participating in the ritual would draw me closer to these people, that this way I would gain their trust and get the answers I was seeking. Never mind that essentially I had no questions worth asking and that any answer they could give me could only partially solve the puzzle of the two murderers who now sat deservedly in jail. It was more than that. I wanted to know about these people and by so doing to come to know myself as well, the pieces of myself that were scattered among these Caribbean exiles like the arms of a starfish, which, torn from the body, will grow a new center to replace the missing heart. I wanted to hear my own story, I suppose, and it was soon delivered to me, in drunken tones, amid banging of drums and clouds of rank smoke.