by Alex Abella
I stayed seated until the contingent of bailiffs cleared the court and only Burr and I were left behind. He pulled out a couple of files, dusted them off.
"Got to start getting ready for tomorrow's cases. Justice never sleeps. "
I nodded, then walked out the side door, down the judge's corridor, to the small service elevator, leaving my briefcase and notes and files on the table. It doesn't matter, I thought, this too will pass.
I exited through the downstairs garage onto Main Street, jaywalking in front of an RTD bus which announced its destination in big yellow letters, Paradise Cove. I entered the parking lot and left in my car, avoiding the swarm of TV reporters doing their stand-ups by the curb against the letters that read Criminal Courts Building. As I drove off, I read on a traffic-light box the latest message from the anonymous porno graffiti artist-"I loves to fuck pregnant women because they carry God inside and I come in Him."
I drove home up Sunset, past Ana's Quinceañera and Bridal Shop, past the Club Tropical with its cumbia and salsa and Nico and the Cohetes playing this weekend, past the brown brick Paradise Motel on a hill overlooking downtown, up the grade into Echo Park and Lupe's Famous Burritos and El Asturiano Restaurant with the best paella in town and El Carmelo with its glazed guava pastries and the hundreds of stores of all kinds where the Hispanic population tries to duplicate the little neighborhood stores of San Salvador, San Pedro Sula, Granada and Sancti Spiritu they had come from, an alien sibilant presence with brown eyes and faces and callused hands and bandannas wearing polyester suits and chino pants with Hush Puppies and white T-shirts and rebozos and serapes and flouncy lacy dresses eating watermelon with paprika on top and paletas of a thousand fruit flavors, a quiet cooker building steam that one day will erupt just as Ramón had done, and I pondered all this and dreaded the day and feared for my soul as I drove up Hillhurst and into a thin pink fog that fell over the whitewalled mansions of Los Feliz, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Rancho Park, from the ocean to the mountains, a cool, clean pink fog draping itself with good intentions and total misunderstanding over my home, the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula, Los Angeles, my one and only love.
23
but that was not the end. The conclusion to the story came after a telephone call from the LAPD, which directed me again to the green halls of County Jail. There, behind the glass partition dividing prisoners from visitors in the attorney's interview room, his left hand shackled to a bar beneath the seat, sat a gaunt man in his late sixties with sad blue eyes and a tuft of white hair standing on the crown of his otherwise bald pate. Although his blue jail jumpsuit hung loosely on him, he was paunchy, the weight having all gone to his stomach.
He recognized me right away and waved at me with fingers gnarled from arthritis. I sat across from him, stunned, drawn by filial desire. The resemblance was uncanny. We stared at each other for a full minute, my heart racing.
The man smiled, revealing stained yellow teeth sprouting from pale pink gums. His breath bore the stench of cigarettes and stale food, his arms were scabbed and, in general, he smelled as if he hadn't seen a shower for longer than it had been since I'd had a good night's sleep. But at that moment all that mattered little. His blue eyes watered in a sad smile identical to my father's.
"You must be Tom Elliot," I said. There was no one else he could be except for another man who had died with countless tubes sprouting from his body in a Miami hospital.
"That's me, Charlie. You don't mind if I call you Charlie? After all, I know all about you."
"No, I don't mind."
"Funny, ain't it?" he said. "To see somebody like me. I figure you must be all spooked by now."
"Not at all. I've been looking forward to this."
"Tell you the truth, so have I. That's why I told the detectives to call you." He patted his bulging stomach. "This is getting pretty big and the doctors say it will be any day now. Shit, I feel like a fucking pregnant woman when I know that I'm going to--"
He stopped, his face contorted into a sudden spasm of fear and pain.
"How bad is it?"
"Doctor can't stop it worth shit. Been giving me radiation treatment but it's too advanced." He stopped, drew a breath. "Three months, tops."
"Sorry to hear that."
"What the hell, we all got to go sometime, don't we?"
"Dust to dust."
"And ashes to ashes. You Catholic too? Of course, I should have known, your being Cuban and all. Yeah. Well, like I said, I got a couple of things I wanted to get off my chest before I check out."
"Should I guess or are you going to tell me?"
"No, I'll tell you. I mean, I don't know if there's somebody up there after all, like they say, but I've never been much of a gambling man. So I suppose I should do all this now, before it gets too late."
"Too late for whom?"
"What? I don't understand."
"Nothing. So where did you meet him?"
His expression switched from apology to injury and he reared in his seat.
"Don't you rush me now! I'm in no hurry to get anywhere."
"Fine. You go ahead at your own speed." I sat back. The old man licked his lips, dry and blistered. "Well, we was sharing a cell together. He'd been brought in for that stuff, oh, about three or four months before and they was housing us here on the Two Block. I was on my way out after doing a year for selling a little dope so they figured-hell, I don't know what they figured, never been able to figure out these fucking sheriffs. So's, when he comes in, after dinner, he starts looking at me funny, real funny. So I grabbed my shank, nice and sharp, and I flashed it, let him know I wasn't gonna get butt-fucked by anybody. So he looks and he smiles and says in that funny accent of his, 'You wanna make some money?'"
"So you said yes."
"First I asked him what I had to do to earn it. Wasn't going to suck his dick for it either, if you know what I mean. So he pulls out this folder from his file, the case file he always carried with him. He starts going through all the papers and then he pulls out this picture, a real old photograph, I don't know where he got it from. It's in black and white and shows a little kid on horseback with a man and he looks at the picture and I look at the picture and I say 'I'll be damned' and he says, 'That's right.' I mean, it was really weird how this fellow looked like me, I mean, with a little change here and there. Had to paint this birthmark here on the cheek but that was about all."
"He told you to follow me."
He looked down, then up, then sideways and spoke without looking at me.
"I really shouldn't have done it. Never done anything like that. I tell you, I didn't know he wanted to really do it. He told me it was your pa and that he just wanted to scare you. He thought you'd be easier to control that way. So I went along. I mean, you were easy enough to find. Tailing you was pretty easy. The hard part was running away in time. Most of the time, that was hard. I'm proud of that. Bet you never thought it was somebody for real."
"No, I didn't."
He took a deep breath, stared at his grimy fingernails.
"Then he put the squeeze on me."
"What do you mean?"
"He sent some of his voodoo people over to my place, those guys dress in white and stuff."
"Yeah."
"They came with a message he'd written, instructions, money. When I read it, I tried to back out but these guys, you should have seen them, six four, six six, all muscle, like some heavy hitters. A fuckin' nightmare. Well, these guys said he'd told them if I didn't follow the instructions, they'd be back, cut my dick off, stick it down my throat and then cut me up into little pieces and leave me to bleed."
He glanced up. "You believe me, don't you."
"Sounds believable so far. What was the message?"
Tom made eye contact with the deputy and signaled at him that the interview was over. As the deputy climbed off his platform and walked over to us, Tom blurted out, "That I should go hire those black boys to ram your car down t
he gully."
The deputy bent down, inserted the key in the hole, released the cuff.
"I'm sorry, Charlie. Didn't wanna do it, it was circumstances, you understand."
He stood, hunched over, belly like a basketball, trembling, the weight of guilty conscience relieved. I wanted to get on my knees and ask him to forgive me, that I knew not what I had done. Instead: "I understand."
I also stood, picked up my briefcase. "Sleep in peace."
"Thank you."
"Let's go, Elliot. Back to your cell," said the deputy, hustling the image of my father away.
Looking back, I can't recall if the events that followed happened all on the same day. Even if they didn't it amounts to the same thing, for the evidence of my manipulation by Ramón and Lucinda's betrayal was a pall that bridged both instances, foreshortening time, rendering the end of this affair a darkened prism shot through with loss and regret.
The photograph Elliot had mentioned was the last one taken of us in Cuba. I kept it in the leather-bound photo album in my office. I found it, but looking at the back of the picture I saw it had been unglued, then hastily stuck again with cheap tape. It was all of a piece, including Lucinda's quitting her job at Enzo's the same day that Ramón was acquitted.
The sad-faced Ligurian had knocked on my door that day, gesturing with open hands.
"Dov'é la bella?" he asked. "All my people they ask, where is she, where is she? I call up her place and there's no answer, I go there and nobody knows where she went."
"I don't know, Enzo. I haven't seen her in weeks. You remember the night."
"Oh, I thought, well, you know, you two were so close, maybe ..."
"Enzo, let me tell you something about Cubans. We believe in final acts, in keeping our word if it kills us. I'd never go back to her. "
"Scusa, you know, I ... You take life too hard. Well, OK, I'll find somebody else. Eh, it's only a girl. Life goes on." He walked away from the door, then turned and looked at me as though for the first time.
"I didn't know you were Cuban. You don't look it."
"What do Cubans look like?"
"Ah, I don't know. Like Castro or Desi Arnaz or, you know, negri, black."
"I'm not black, a revolutionary or a band leader. I'm a white lawyer without a beard, that's all."
He shrugged, the eternal Italian acceptance of life as given.
"Eh, OK. You're a good man, I don't care. You call me if you see her, va bene?"
"Va bene."
I was sitting in the living room, watching the searchlight at the Griffith Park Observatory scan the night sky.
I glanced around, taking in the stubs of the cigarettes I'd started smoking again, the carpet askew, the tossed pillow, the dusty windowsills, the discarded empty beer bottles, the unopened L.A. Times still in its plastic rain bag, the half-empty bottle of pepper vodka and I started laughing. You're turning into a cliché, I told myself. The heartbroken sap weeps for his lost love. I thought that was the funniest thing I'd thought of in weeks, the laughs issuing from me in a long-denied eruption, a belch or a vomit. I fell out of the couch, knowing all the while how pathetic anyone watching would have thought me, how out of control and helpless, as I choked in my own glee, tears coming out unheeded, laughing at the observatory, the bottles, the room, the city, my family, my child, my loves and my life, everything that flashed before me was covered with laughter and derision, it was all laughable, it was all contemptible, it was all a joke. Then I heard the loud report of a hand gun being fired.
I stopped laughing, sat on the floor, my heart racing. I wanted to think it was a car backfiring, but I knew the sound of a gun, that peculiar loud snap of cordite thrusting brutal steel through the air. There came a second shot, but this one was muffled, as though through a clumsy silencer, a pillow or blanket.
I glanced at the clock on the mantel. Ten to five in the morning. Outside my window, banners of fog melted under the streetlights. No cars or pedestrians on the street, just a stray possum slithering into some bushes across the way. Then I heard a third shot, and a noise like a jar or a vase crashing violently. I got up and went to look for my gun. I couldn't find it. I grabbed the only weapon I had in the house, an old machete from a trip to Yucatan and headed toward the source of the noise- Enzo's apartment downstairs.
I tried Enzo's front door but it was bolted. Sticking my ear to the door, I detected faint voices of people inside, in the rapid-fire delivery of fear of discovery. I went to jump the side fence but someone had already gone through it. The padlock was snapped open, probably by the bolt cutter now lying under the camellias. I pushed open the gate and dashed to the backyard, to the French doors facing Enzo's precious rose and herb garden. Those doors were open too, although the curtains were closed and I couldn't see inside. I raised my machete, ready to strike, and glided silently through the drapes.
My eyes fell on Enzo's body, fallen by the side of the oblong rosewood dining table. Strewn awkwardly, he was facedown, his right hand pushed over and out, palm down, as though in death he had incongruously wanted to give a parting Fascist salute. His white T-shirt was soaked with blood on one side, the crimson liquid forming a glistening puddle around the waistband of his flower-printed boxer shorts. On the far side of the dining room I saw a splattering of gristle and brain, which followed the trajectory of the bullet when it embedded itself in the wall. The table had been set for two; calamari had slopped over onto the lace placemat, while an open bottle of Montefalcone sloshed onto the basket of bread.
To my right I saw Lucinda going through the drawers in the ornate side buffet, tossing papers hurriedly to the ground, a mad desperate dash as she trampled on photographs, recipes, clippings, bills. She was wearing a black teddy, the same one I'd bought her at Magnin's our first week together.
"Lost something?"
She turned with a gasp, her face livid with fatigue, surprise and degradation, wide black rings spreading under her eyes. She was thinner, more awkward and jittery than I had ever seen her. She found the presence of mind to calm herself down. "Oh, Charlie!" she said, rushing toward me. I put my machete forward. She stopped.
"I was looking for the number to call the police. You wouldn't believe what happened."
"Tell me anyway."
She breathed fitfully through her mouth. "We were having dinner, Enzo and I."
"When did this happen? Just the other day he had given you up for lost."
"What? Oh, that, you mean, because I took some days off, the poor man, he didn't know but now-"
She broke into tears, head down, sobbing.
"Skip it. What the fuck happened here?"
She looked up, her face contorted into the same rictus of agony I'd seen under another guise, when once she writhed in my arms.
"We were eating and this burglar shows up. I guess he came in through the window. He asked Enzo for money and when he wouldn't give it to him, he shot him. Enzo fought but he shot him again. "
I moved around, looked again at the table, then at Lucinda.
"You were sitting right here, to his left?" I pointed at the upturned seat.
"Yes, I was."
"That's funny. How come you didn't get any blood on you, baby?"
"I don't know. I stood up, I guess."
"And why did he let you live? You're a witness. Why kill Enzo and not you?"
"I don't know, I guess because ... "
I felt a gun stuck into my side and a familiar fetid breath, the dank putrescence of the dark.
"Put down your machete, Carlitos," said Ramón, standing behind me. I dropped the weapon on the floor. It landed next to Enzo.
Ramón pushed me to the side, against the buffet.
"So that's what this was," I said. "A fucking holdup. For that you got to kill him."
"Shut up, you don't know what you're talking about. You find it?"
Lucinda produced a key to a bank safety box.
"What are you going to say now, Ramón? Which god made you do it?"
&nbs
p; Ramón took the key, put it in his pocket.
"No god. This is something for us humans. You"-he waved the gun at Lucinda. "Go put on some clothes. We're going right now."
Lucinda moved to the bedroom down the hall. I saw the gun Ramón was holding was my own, the same .38 I'd been searching for before coming down.
"He took Oggún's jewelry too?"
Ramón looked startled for a moment, then laughed.
"I told you, this has nothing to do with the saints. This key is very special, because I know in that box he's holding fifty thousand dollars-and two keys of cocaine. "
"Enzo a drug dealer?"
"Not really but it was like money, you know? I guess he thought it was as good as gold."
We stared at each other. The sun began to break through, the drapes becoming progressively whiter with the light.