Finnegan's week

by Joseph Wambaugh

  Shelby spotted a new four-wheel-drive Jeep Grand Cherokee and said, “Times must be changin.”

  “Oh yes,” Abel said. “Soltero, he like four-wheel-drive.”

  Shelby didn’t see any short leathery Indians up here, except for those who were wheeling small children in strollers and prams. And there were a lot of young people on the streets, leaning into cars, chatting, listening to boom boxes. Mostly they were tall and fair, well groomed, expensively clothed. Some of the boys had ponytails, and diamond studs in their ears. Most wore huge gold watches and leather bomber jackets.

  “Juniors,” Abel said, gesturing toward them. “We call them Juniors. They do what they wan’. They do sometheeng wrong, their father pay mordida. They got the life, Buey. No’ like us.”

  “I ain’t even gonna get to see the inside of a Tia-juana whorehouse!” Shelby moaned. “I knew I shouldn’ta got involved stealin shoes.”

  Abel stopped at a blue whale of a house constructed of concrete and Mexican terrazzo. It was situated near the top of Lomas de Agua Caliente, with a view of the city. The ox stayed in the truck while Abel got out, pushed the gate button, and spoke on an intercom. A moment later a middle-aged man emerged from the two-story mansion and stormed across the pebbled motor court toward the ten-foot wrought-iron gate where Abel waited.

  Inside the motor court, held securely by a steel chain, was a snarling pit bull that looked like it wanted to eat the skinny Mexican. Abel kept looking from the dog to the man while they talked, but Shelby could see that Flaco wasn’t about to win an argument with either of them. The man had a salt-and-pepper ponytail, and wore a lemon-colored guayabera shirt with epaulets on the shoulders. Shelby hated his guts without even knowing him.

  When Abel started raising his voice the man turned toward the snarling tethered dog as though he was going to loose the chain. Then Abel walked away from the gated motor court, and the man in the guayabera shirt calmly reentered his house through a door twelve feet tall. Shelby wondered how many hinges that door needed.

  “I come back here someday to keel that dog,” Abel said.

  “What’s the story, dude? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

  “Soltero say he geev money to guy from Ensenada to pay for cocaine cargo. He say he don’ got our money now.”

  “No fuckin money! What’re we gonna do with a million fuckin navy shoes?”

  “He say we must leave them een garage at house of hees mamá back in Colonia Libertad. He say he geev us money nex’ week.”

  “Fuck him! His goddamn front door’s worth six grand! He ain’t never gonna give us a penny!”

  “Wha’ we do, ’mano?”

  “What do we do? This is your fuckin country, remember? You’re the one talkin big and makin all the plans! What do we do?”

  “Maybe we go to hees mamá. Leave shoes. Get out of Tijuana.”

  “Shit!” the ox said, turning his Mötley Crüe hat around frontwards again. “I mighta known!” After a moment he said, “Okay, drive this piece a shit bobtail back to where that kid was.”

  “Where?”

  “Back where Soltero’s mother lives.”

  “We put shoes een her garage?”

  “Yeah, what choice we got? But I wanna give that kid some shoes. Let him trade em fer some good dope or somethin.”

  “Okay, Buey,” Abel said. “Okay.”

  “And let’s leave this van as close to the border as we can,” Shelby said. “Some fuckin mastermind!”

  When they got back to Colonia Libertad, Shelby told Abel to drive around the streets for a few minutes until he spotted the kid with the chewing gum. When he did, he ordered Abel to stop.

  “Hey, kid!” the ox yelled at the little boy. “C’mere!”

  When the child came forward with a handful of gum, the ox said to Abel, “How you say shoe in Mexican?”

  “Zapato.”

  “Zapato!” Shelby said to the kid. “Zapato!”

  Then he startled the boy by pushing open the door and heaving himself out. Shelby lumbered around to the back of the bobtail truck, opened the cargo door, climbed into the van and ripped open a carton.

  Shelby tossed two dozen pair of shoes onto the dusty street, yelling: “Zapato. Viva fuckin zapato!”

  Suddenly, a swarm of people emerged from the jumble of houses and began crawling all over the pile of shoes. By the time Abel got the truck turned around, the little boy was running off with his arms full.

  “Like cock-a-roaches,” Shelby said. “They jist crawl outta nowhere like cock-a-roaches.”

  The house of Soltero’s mother was near the top of a promontory overlooking The Soccer Field, a desolate barren wasteland of relatively flat U.S. soil that served as a place for the poor of this colonia to play soccer unmolested by day, and to gather for their rush north by night. Scanning the soccer field as always was la migra, who captured only a fraction of the pilgrims and deported them just about long enough for them to gather themselves again for the next attempt. And so it went.

  But after the soccer field lay El Cañon de los Muertos, better known to the U.S. cops as Deadman’s Canyon, where Mexican bandits preyed upon the pollos coming across in the night. The house of Soltero’s mother looked down on all that, on the misery of those border people who gazed across at el norte. Who could play soccer on U.S. soil anytime they wished.

  The house was not a flat-roofed shack like the others. It had a pitched roof, the only one of its kind in the colonia, and a great deal of wood had been used in its construction, including wood siding. There were two mature cypress trees, one on each side of the asphalt driveway, and they too distinguished this home. The entire street had been blacktopped, probably as a result of Soltero paying mordida to the right street-maintenance supervisor, and the new blacktop extended from the curbless street in front, into a spacious two-car garage that was an unheard-of luxury in the colonia.

  Abel backed the van into the driveway and walked to a side door that seemed to lead to a patio. No one answered his knock. Shelby discovered that the overhead garage door was not locked, so he swung it open.

  When Abel raised the van’s cargo door, Shelby said, “Somebody better get here quick and lock this fucker after we get them shoes inside.”

  “I theenk,” Abel said, “somebody watch us now. Maybe mamá of Soltero. When we drive away somebody weel lock the door. Don’ worry.”

  Abel climbed into the van and shoved the large cartons to Shelby, who eased them onto the ground, scooting them into the empty garage. The truckers were finished in minutes, and Shelby closed the overhead door, sliding an aluminum bolt in place.

  “I ain’t gonna run out and buy a new TV or nothin,” the ox said, “if it depends on money from this.”

  “Soltero pay us,” Abel said. “Or we come back and keel his dog.”

  “How ’bout him? Shelby said. “He’s the one we oughtta smoke if we don’t get our money.”

  Abel said, “We take care of Soltero too.”

  Big talk, Shelby thought. If Soltero didn’t pay them, what could they do? This was his town, his country, and he probably had his friends, plenty of them, to deal with the likes of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. Shelby knew that if they didn’t get paid, they’d just have to slink back north.

  But maybe they could at least snuff that red-assed dog. Shelby made a mental note to bring some poisoned hamburger when they returned to that big blue house up on rich man’s hill overlooking the Caliente racetrack.

  The haulers parked the truck in the Rio Zone, among other cars and trucks, in a parking lot three blocks from the border. Abel broke the driver’s side window with a crowbar; then the ox used it to pop out the ignition. It took a few minutes to make a theft look plausible to any American insurance agent.

  As they walked to the pedestrian gate at the border, Shelby asked, “Whadda ya think the Mexican cops’ll do with the drums?”

  Abel said, “They leave een truck. Maybe take two, three week before they call San Diego police. They don’ mo
ve too fast down here.”

  They walked in silence until they got to the San Ysidro crossing, where all twenty-four lanes of traffic were backed up. On the Mexican side, the huge white arched pedestrian bridge that spanned half a dozen lanes and funneled into eighteen other lanes looked to Shelby Pate like a set of animal ears, with fleas swarming in one ear, crossing the curve of the skull, and swarming out the other one. But these fleas were human beings. People swarmed in this fucking town, Shelby thought.

  On the U.S. side, the building was conventionally modern with a large flat brown roof resembling a Hershey bar. A bite of chocolate didn’t intimidate Shelby Pate like animal ears did.

  As they were going through the entrance to U.S. Customs, they saw a female customs officer and a dope-dog sniffing at the people walking past. Abel turned and said, “Tell me, Buey, why you make me find boy with chicle? Why?”

  “Cause I was that poor when we lived in Stockton,” Shelby said. “Only I didn’t sell gum, I sold turnips. And when I went to school for the first time they all ran away like I was a goddamn leper. Cause I had ringworm. Now let’s get the fuck back to the United States of America!”

  That night, many in the adult male population of Colonia Libertad were swapping, selling, trading, brand-new, steel-toe, high-top, U.S. Navy shoes.

  CHAPTER 6

  There were eight detectives working at the Southern Division substation, also called Southbay by the cops. One of those detectives subscribed to The Hollywood Reporter, and was trying to read it without much luck. That’s because another detective who worked juvenile-a buxom female named Maya Tevitch-was outraged by a newspaper story concerning a fisherman in San Diego Harbor who had bill-chopped a pelican that stole his catch. That is, he’d cut off the pelican’s bill and then nailed the wounded bird to a derelict sailboat “as a lesson to other pelicans.”

  Maya said she’d like to chop off the fisherman’s nuts and nail them to the downtown fishing pier as a lesson to other bill-choppers. Maya was a tree-cuddler and animal rights vigilante, whose secondary mission in life was to liquidate all gun-toting rednecks who rode dirt bikes in “her” peaceful desert around Borrego Springs, shooting their rifles at everything larger than a computer mouse. Her primary mission was to prove that she was ballsier than any male cop in Southern Division, of which Fin Finnegan had no doubts.

  Maya’s voice invariably grew high-pitched when she was this excited so Fin couldn’t concentrate on a semi-interesting story about a Screen Actors Guild wage dispute that might conceivably affect him if Orson got him that job.

  At last, Maya’s moral indignation made reading absolutely impossible so he got up and was heading for the station lobby when she said, “Fin, whadda you think they oughtta do about bill-chopping? Continue to treat it like some chickenshit misdemeanor or make it a felony?”

  “Beats me,” Fin said. “My thing is sea gulls. Last time out, I couldn’t decide whether to crucify a sea gull or get a tattoo on my butt. I settled on the tattoo, but the guy ran outta ink after he wrote: ‘Born to.…’ I told him to leave it like that. The tattoo described me perfectly. I’ll show it to you sometime if you got a strong stomach, Maya.”

  With that he made his exit, and another detective said to Maya, “That’s what happens to guys with three divorces after they turn forty-five. He sees everything in terms of his own misery. Fin thinks most pelicans live better than he does.”

  In Southern Division they worked in quasi-retirement, or so it was said around the police department. Fin called Southern Division “Sleepy Hollow,” that southwestern corner of the United States, in a neighborhood called San Ysidro. The substation that housed Southern Division had 1950’s architecture written all over it, both inside and outside. That is, there was no architecture. It was a nondescript rectangle constructed on the cheap, except that the inner walls were made of whitewashed concrete block that could probably withstand a direct hit from a mortar round. In somewhere like Los Angeles, a police station might have to do just that, some said, but not down in Sleepy Hollow.

  They did get some action sometimes, being a block from the international border, the busiest port of entry in the world. But ordinarily it was quiet down there in San Ysidro. Except for one day in 1984 when James O. Huberty walked into McDonald’s hamburgers carrying assault weapons and massacred twenty-one people including himself.

  Eight detectives were jammed into one tiny office littered with metal desks, metal filing cabinets and one computer to fight over. Three worked crimes against persons, three including Fin worked crimes against property. One worked juvenile, and one worked diversion, which meant diverting young people from crime, a thankless and impossible task.

  The front counter area was almost as bad off as the detective squad room. What should have been an adequate lobby had been turned into an open office, with three metal desks behind a counter. Two civilians did the division’s paperwork, and a police officer manned a third desk as well as the counter itself, and had to deal with the walk-in traffic.

  The parking lot had to be surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire, or the police vehicles would’ve ended up in worse shape than the California budget. Unprotected police cars, like street hookers, were irresistible targets for violent acts. At 5:00 P.M. the front door got locked, and anyone needing a cop would have to use the telephone in front of the building.

  Another of the detectives, Jimmy Estrada, worked crimes against property with Fin, and he did most of the Spanish-language translating. The others were, like Fin, middle-aged guys of European descent. Which meant that they didn’t have a prayer in a Bill Clinton America, controlled by special-interest tribes and aggrieved ethnics. Or so they complained during the presidential campaign.

  There were quite a few older cops working uniformed patrol at Southern Division, and at the front counter was one of them, a dinosaur who’d worked with Fin twenty-three years earlier when Fin was a rookie. Sam Zahn was fifty years old, on light duty from a heart attack, and biding his time till retirement. He was reading the sports page when Fin passed the counter seeking refuge from Maya’s pelican lament.

  Without lifting his gaze from the page he said, “Why’re you guys working overtime? It’s after six.”

  “They think our esteemed and slightly autistic vice-president might show up for a photo op at the border. We gotta be available for security if he shows.”

  Sam Zahn just grunted, then said, “I see where the Dodgers’re bringing Tommy Lasorda back for another year. They don’t think he’s too old to manage. Whadda you think is too old, Fin?”

  Fin said, “I think it’s when you couldn’t pump up the old noodle with a cylinder of helium. That’s when you’re old.”

  Talking bravely, Sam Zahn said, “No problem here. But if it ever does happen there’s always zinc. They say zinc makes it stiff.”

  “Only if you paint it on,” Fin said sadly. “Mother Nature doesn’t let us off that easy, the rotten bitch.”

  Just then Fin saw two guys come through the door: one a skinny Mexican, one a huge slob in a Mötley Crüe cap.

  Abel Durazo said to the counter cop, “Sir, we got to make report for our truck.”

  “Our van got stolen,” Shelby Pate said, “when we was havin a bite up on Palm Avenue. At Angel’s Café? Know where it is?”

  Sam Zahn said to the detective, “Fin, do you work persons or property?”

  “Property,” Fin said, “but as you well know, Sam, truck thefts are handled by the good folks downtown.”

  Since he was in his loafing-intensive mode, Sam Zahn said, “Maybe you’d like to talk to them anyways. They might need a detective.”

  “Was it hijacked?” Fin asked, which would make it a crime-against-person, not property, and he could easily kiss it off to anybody else. “Did somebody use a gun or force?”

  “No,” Abel said. “We don’ see thief.”

  “It was gone when we came outta Angel’s,” Shelby said. “Jist wasn’t there on the street no more.
”

  “I’ll do the fact sheet for you, Fin,” Sam Zahn said magnanimously. “You might wanna finish it?”

  “Do the whole report, Sam,” Fin said. “Then send it downtown.”

  The counter cop sighed and fetched a blank report, saying, “What’s the name of the truck’s registered owner?”

  “Green Earth,” Shelby said. “Green Earth Hauling and Disposal.”

  “You drivers’re always leaving your keys in your trucks,” Fin griped. “Somebody’s forever stealing one up there by Angel’s.”

  “We didn’, sir,” Abel said. “The thief they pop out ignition.”

  “How do you know they popped it?” Sam Zahn asked.

  “He means they musta popped it or somethin,” Shelby said quickly, “cause he’s got the keys in his pocket.”

  Of course Fin was pleased that Central would get this one. They had plenty of paper-shuffling detectives up there, and they didn’t have to battle for computer access. Each central investigator had his or her own cubicle instead of being jammed together like the refugees in the Southern Division gulag. Fin didn’t need another piece of paper to file.

  “Might end up in Mexico,” Fin said. “They often do when they’re stolen around these parts.”

  “Yeah?” Shelby said. “When you think the boss’ll get it back?”

  “They ain’t in no hurry down in T.J.,” Sam Zahn said. “Weeks, maybe. Could be a lot sooner if your boss’s insurance company’s on the ball. The Mexican cops like a ‘reward’ for finding hot cars. By the way, Angel’s is four miles away. Did you boys walk clear down here or what?”

  “Taxi,” Shelby said. “Caught a cab.”

  “You coulda just phoned for a patrol unit,” Sam Zahn grumbled. “They woulda come to you and took the report.”

  Shelby Pate said, “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. There was money in the glove box that we picked up on our last job. Five hunnerd bucks. Sure hope the thief don’t look in there, but he prob’ly will.”