Not long after I last saw her, Muriel Lichtman moved her theater from Eugene to Manhattan, somewhere off-Broadway. She continued to star in her production of Les hommes fatals and got good reviews from the New York press. There is talk that she’ll be nominated for a Tony Award. I hadn’t spoken to her. She hadn’t called. She hadn’t written.
Jefferson Davis Grubb hadn’t called either, but he had sent me a postcard from Biloxi, Mississippi. He said he was getting into what he called “the religion business.” His card noted that he seemed perfectly suited for it as it was “basically cash and carry and unregulated.” He indicated he had his eye on a religious radio station in Tennessee.
“Are you fucking with me?” is how I responded when Mickey Mahoney called to tell me he was getting married for the fourth time.
“She’s attractive, got money, and doesn’t care that I drink. It’s a marriage made in heaven.” Actually, his marriage was made in Las Vegas on Thanksgiving Day, and I was his Best Man.
Dumpy Doyle became a regular cast member on a successful TV drama. I called to congratulate him and said I hoped that fame and fortune wouldn’t change him. He replied that he would still be, “the same vile and vulgar prick I’ve always been. And how in the fuck did you get my unlisted number?”
Jonas Wiesel and I didn’t discuss Grace Lowell, Sid Lichtman, or the murder of Eve Smith when I called to congratulate him on being named one of the top ten criminal defense attorneys in the Western United States. When he said he hoped that I hadn’t done anything to get indicted again, I replied that after the last go-around I couldn’t afford to. With just a hint of irony in his voice, Wiesel the Weasel said, “Now, who says our criminal justice system doesn’t work?”
In December of that year I moved to the city of Emeryville and used my reward money to buy a foreclosed condo on Emery Bay. For most of its one hundred plus years of existence the town had a sin city reputation, with speakeasies, gambling houses, bordellos, opium dens, and the type of police corruption usually only found in third world countries. When Earl Warren, later to become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was the district attorney of this county, he declared Emeryville “the rottenest city on the Pacific Coast.”
Outside of a legal low stakes cardroom and rumored small-time Asian slave trade activity, the city today is gentrified and respectable. But in keeping with its tradition, within the city limits of Emeryville there are still no synagogues, mosques, ashrams, or churches of any denomination. Yes, today you can still hear some locals proudly refer to their 1.2 square miles of land as the “City Without Churches.”
On New Year’s Eve I met a tall, slender, pretty Japanese woman whose first language wasn’t English and who kept requesting jazz recordings the disc jockey didn’t have. I approached the woman and told her that I had one of the world’s greatest private jazz collections.
“You’re just trying to get me into bed,” said the woman, whose name was Yuki.
“There’s that, too,” I replied. But she came to my place anyway, and when she began to dig into the eight large moving boxes full of my father’s LPs and CDs she stated that most FM jazz stations don’t have as extensive a collection. I wouldn’t let her borrow anything, but told her she could stay as long as she wanted and listen to all she wanted. She did. Three weeks later Yuki officially moved in and began categorizing the collection with all the excitement of a child on Christmas morning.
In early January an article appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune entitled “One More Miracle.” A man died in National City and bequeathed his entire estate to create a scholarship fund for the children of St. Martin’s parish in San Diego. His portfolio of rental real estate generated a net amount of more than $100,000 monthly, and eligible young parishioners could use these funds for trade schools, community colleges, and four-year universities. The will stated that it was to be called the Father Jesus Cortez Memorial Scholarship Fund. “It is a dream come true, and we are grateful to God,” said the pastor of St. Martin’s. I was grateful to Reed Olson, the disbarred attorney who drew up the last will and testament for Dr. John Smith.
It seemed that everyone’s dreams were coming true. Except for mine. I didn’t have any, and what good were dreams to a man like me—a man with a great future behind him? I had once dreamed of being president of a bank, of being married to a beautiful woman, of having money and owning a Jaguar with a Grand Prix racing engine. I had realized each of them, and what had I done, with the exception of the Jaguar, but squander them all? I had been reflecting on all this one rainy February day when I gave Yuki a dozen American Beauty roses and a card that read, “You’re an immigrant, and someday you’ll be in this country long enough to realize you’re too good for me. Until then, please be my Valentine.”
Yuki laughed at the card, smiled, kissed me, and put the flowers in a vase. She poured herself as glass of merlot and brought me a Steinlager. She put on a LP of Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Smith and we watched the rain falling on the Emery Bay Marina.
“I need to tell you something about me, Yuki. Something about my past.”
“It is about how you used to be a criminal?” she asked as matter-of-factly as if she were talking about a grocery list.
“You know?”
“After a party we were at a month or so ago a colleague came up to me and asked did I know my boyfriend was Doc Holiday? I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said to Google you. I did, and I decided I know Jackson, but no Doc Holiday. As far as I can tell, Doc doesn’t exist anymore.”
“So it doesn’t bother you?”
“For it to bother me, I’d have to make a moral judgment. I see no value in making such judgments.”
She sipped her wine, and then turned to me and said with a smile, “Of course, I’m an immigrant. What do I know?”
It was then, for the first time in my adult life, that I began to believe in something. I began to believe that the past really was past, and I began to hold on to that belief with all the ardor of the converted. I embraced it with the zeal of a tent-revivalist Baptist preacher clutching his Book of Daniel. I held fast to my conversion with the fervor a Scientologist has for his E-meter, and with all the dedication a Zen postulant has to his koan. Yes, and I had all the passion of an aborigine devoutly dancing to his rain gods.
I held fast to this belief for several weeks. I remained steadfast and convinced until that day came. The day that always comes. The day when yesterday drops by to say hello.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Employing the logic that the best person to find hidden assets is someone who made a fine art out of stashing them and keeping them away from the government’s prying eyes, my clientele kept me busy. That April I found myself in the Caribbean, flying in a client’s private plane from Bermuda to St. Martin. I had several hours before my flight to San Juan, Puerto Rico, so I ducked into an empty bar a few blocks from the town square.
A tall, angular albino of about fifty with close-cropped carrot-colored hair, narrow pink eyes and a three-inch saber scar on his left cheek walked in and took the stool next to me. He nodded at the bartender, who disappeared into the backroom, leaving the albino and me alone. I had never seen him before, but when he spoke there was no mistaking the pancake-flat, hollow-sounding voice.
“It’s Good Friday, so I suppose the faithful are all in church. Guess you’re not one of the faithful, Slick,” he remarked in a cordial tone.
I didn’t respond.
“Colonel sends his regards and his thanks for a job well done. Time for you to collect your end.”
“My end?”
“Don’t play dumb, Doc. Be smart; it can be just as easy as coming up with a number with a bunch of zeroes after it. Think about it, but don’t take too long. You’re in the colonel’s good graces, and that’s where you want to stay. You never know, the man may have a job for you, and the colonel always takes care of his people.” He slipped me a business card that was blank except for an 800 telephone number; then h
e rose, tossed a twenty on the bar, said the beer was on him, and left without another word.
Late the next afternoon I sat alone at a sidewalk café on a blue cobblestone street in Old San Juan drinking a bottle of Medalla Light. I pondered how to handle my situation with Ramon de Poores. While I wanted nothing from him, I didn’t consider ignoring him to be an option. How would I handle the blank check he’d offered, and more to the point, what did I want anymore? From life, from the world, from him, from anyone?
I could think of nothing I desired but to go home to a woman without judgments, in a city without churches, where nobody calls me Doc.
“Habla español usted?” a man asked, disturbing my reverie. He wore a broad brimmed hat and with the sun to his back I couldn’t see his face.
“Poquito. Unless your English is better than my Spanish, we’ll have a short conversation,” I said, but as I spoke, I recognized him. When he sat down across from me I took in a sharp, deep breath and felt a chill.
“Then I’ll say this in English,” he said, smiling. “I hear you slept with my girlfriend.”
“You can have her back,” I responded when I was able to speak.
We sat in silence for a few minutes until a waitress approached and he ordered a Cuba Libre, specifying Bacardi 151.
“I see death hasn’t changed your taste in liquor, Jesus, or is it Estefan? Or maybe Che?” He had a beard now and looked like Che Guevara, only with softer eyes and without the beret.
“Now it’s another name, another country, and another life.” As he said it, I recalled those were Grace’s exact words, according to Mary. “I have come to apologize for what I unwittingly put you through. I must say, it is good to see you, my friend.”
“It’s good to see you, too, but I don’t need an apology. An explanation might be in order.” I stopped the waitress and ordered my second beer. It took him three Cuba Libres to tell the whole story.
He told me that since I had met his father, I should understand why he wanted no part of Ramon de Poores’ business; he had no stomach for the merchandising of sanctioned murder. He told of when he was young and ran away to Italy and was abducted by his father’s enemies, of whom Ramon de Poores has many. Along with other concessions, they demanded a large ransom.
He turned around in his chair, leaned his head backward and pushed back his hair to show me a jagged scar in back of his ear. When I looked closely I could see the seam where his prosthetic ear was attached. His kidnappers had stuffed a rag in his mouth and cut off his left ear with a steak knife, then sent it to his father with their demands. He had never forgotten the pain and the fear. Because he was the son of Ramon de Poores the outside world would always be fraught with danger, but still he couldn’t tolerate the self-imposed Devil’s Island of his father’s compound. He’d also grown weary of monasteries, seminaries, and bishops’ mansions, so with a half dozen of his father’s henchmen as bodyguards, he spent more than five years in what he called “the phantasmagorical netherworld of opiates and whores in Northern Africa.” He said he was not unlike Sisyphus, who rolled a rock up the hill, but he not only chased the dragon up the hill but also the proverbial whores of Babylon up and down the hill in this Hades of his own making. Even debauchery got boring after a while, and he ached to live in what he increasingly came to refer to as the real world. What would it be like to have a woman who wasn’t a prostitute? What was friendship like? What about a profession?
“My father, ever the poet, told me my going into the outside world was only the forging of a fresh set of shackles, and the trading of one prison for another. He said the modern world was nothing more than one large penal colony,” said Jesus, the rum now relaxing him into the loquacious and charming man I knew. “Father said that when I got there I would have to decide whether I wished to be a guard or a prisoner. While I didn’t necessarily accept his metaphor, I had to accept his premise and his plan that the only way I could live safely: I was to go there in disguise. He said he would take steps to keep me out of danger; he would handle the details.” Jesus scratched his beard and laughed sardonically. “If ever the devil were in the details ….”
After a few months in San Diego one of his father’s men came to Jesus and told him that the plan was in motion. Word was to be leaked that Jesus Cortez was indeed Ramon de Poores’ son and then his death faked. The door would close behind him, and he would be free to be anyone and anything he wanted, anywhere in the world. But there were complications: first of all, he liked being a priest.
Actually, he hadn’t just liked it; he’d become intoxicated with the role. He had never before witnessed the poverty, the exploitation, and the denial of basic needs that the poor Mexican-American and Mexican illegals of his parish suffered. With only a few dollars, they could keep their cars running, get to the jobs they needed, buy medicine for their children, pay their landlords and their immigration attorneys, and put food on the table. From the pulpit he preached about the lilies of the field, and that every conscious moment, we must choose faith over despair. When his parishioners came to him with their needs, their prayers were answered. These answered prayers were soon known as milagros or miracles, events that were salted with money provided by his father.
But this created the second complication.
As much as he cautioned his people never to discuss any so-called milagros, the results of praying with Father Cortez were making him too high profile. Word came down to his father that the cardinal was not happy about the celebrity of Jesus, and they decided he would have to be moved to another diocese. To further complicate things, there were now women in his life. He had fallen for Muriel, and then when he met Grace, decided to break it off. One night when he was spending the weekend away with Muriel, one of his father’s men came and told him the plan: Jesus had a double, and this double would be the corpse. Jesus was angry, got drunk and told Muriel who he was and that he couldn’t see her anymore, as it wasn’t safe. She was to tell no one, but the whole break-up didn’t go well.
It was decided by Ramon de Poores and the cardinal that Jesus would be best suited for a parish that was heavily Hispanic, so he was sent to St. Peter’s parish in San Pablo, in the east San Francisco Bay Area. He wasn’t happy to be there, but Grace told him of a bar not too far from his parish. She knew the woman who owned and ran the place—although Grace never mentioned the nature of her relationship to Mary—and that he would be safe and happy there. Grace said it would be safe for them to meet at John and Mary’s Saloon, although they never did. However, early on, he and I met and became friends.
We both paused to watch two young beautiful Puerto Rican women walk past. A wind from off San Juan Bay blew through their hair; it ruffled their dresses and brought them up mid-thigh.
“World-class beauties,” he sighed.
“World-class, but neither one is as beautiful as Muriel Lichtman,” I said. And they weren’t.
He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the clear evening sky. “Muriel. Muriel … that ….” He ordered a fourth Cuba Libre. “When I broke it off with her and told her it was dangerous to know me, she threatened me, so I told her I was the son of Ramon de Poores, and that she didn’t know who she was dealing with. She said I didn’t know who I was dealing with.” He laughed and said, “Was she ever right about that.”
He sipped from his fresh drink. “Every Wednesday I would fly to Portland to be with Grace at her boathouse. She would pick me up at the airport until I ran into a priest from Portland who I’d met, so she quit meeting me. I’d just take a cab. A few weeks before the real Jesus Cortez was murdered, I began getting calls from Grace. She told me that she’d had her late husband, Muriel’s father, murdered. I didn’t know what to make of it, and when I called her and saw her again, she denied that she had told me. Grace, who was always cool and collected, suddenly became very upset.
“The Wednesday of the murder, as I arrived in Portland and was still at the airport, I got a call from Grace. She said that the people she had hire
d to kill her ex-husband were threatening her and she was in danger. She said they knew who I was and that I was in danger, too. She said she would meet me in the Bay Area, and I flew back there. I couldn’t go to the police if Grace had been involved in a murder. Finally, I called my handlers and told them of my situation, and they told me to stay put at John and Mary’s Saloon until they came. I told them I had to rescue Grace, but they seemed to demur, and I doubted I could trust them to help her. I panicked—I didn’t know what to do—but I was sure you would. I remember thinking ‘Jackson is so confident and resourceful, he’ll figure it out,’ and so I came to see you. And by the way, the money I had in the briefcase I was going to give to you because of our good friendship. It was my ‘miracle money.’ But on my way, my father’s people abducted me and replaced me with the real Jesus Cortez. They seemed very proud and my father very happy about how well it had all worked out. ‘Quite fortuitous,’ my father said.”
He put his head in his hands and then, looking through his fingers, said, “Not so fortuitous for Jesus Cortez. As for me, how could I be so stupid not to realize that it was Muriel, not Grace, making those calls?”
Of course it was Muriel, I thought, and whatever she’d paid Danny Boy Devlin, he had earned his fee. I didn’t mention that Muriel’s impersonation had fooled me, too.
“My doppelgänger, the man in my grave,” he said, “was, as far as I know, really named Jesus Cortez and actually a Catholic priest. I am told that he had just been ordained and assigned to this parish in Northern Mexico—a town controlled by a Mexican drug cartel being supplied with arms by my father. Whether this town was rife with informers, or for some other strategic reason, the cartel decided this village must be destroyed and all its people wiped out. This young priest comes to my father and begs for his intercession. My father tells him he has no influence on the inner workings of the cartel, but then he realizes that this man is my physical mirror-image, and this realization fills Father’s über-sociopathic imagination with possibilities. Father tells the priest that he will see his village spared, but in return, he must do his bidding for the rest of his life. The priest makes the bargain.” Jesus scratched his beard and looked away. “Of course, I didn’t know of this until I had been living as Father Cortez in America for more than a year.
The Big Bitch Page 26