January Justice

by Athol Dickson

  “You kill too many people. Those two cops were walking away. You could have let them live.”

  “But they recognized me, silly. Everybody recognizes me.”

  “Olivia,” I said, “can you hear me?”

  Olivia’s head hung loosely, but she nodded just a little.

  “Did you tell her where the money is?”

  She shook her head, and a wave of relief passed over me.

  I said, “Way to go.”

  “That’s enough!” screamed Doña Elena. “Shut up or I’ll slice her!”

  “You won’t do that,” I said. “She’s the only link you have to the money.”

  She screamed at the top of her lungs. “You think I can’t get my money back without her? You think I’m too stupid to do that?”

  She was slipping into some kind of psychosis. I recognized the symptoms well, having seen them in my own mirror. It meant Olivia wasn’t safe, even though killing her would mean Doña Elena wouldn’t get her money. I had to distract the woman.

  I said, “Of course I don’t think you’re stupid. You fooled everyone. Arturo, Alejandra, the police, the congressman, the press. I think you play the sex-symbol airhead role so well, people almost always underestimate you. But I also think Olivia is smart enough to hide that money where you’d never find it.”

  Doña Elena went back to her little girl voice. “I’ll bet you know where it is. I’ll bet you could help me. If you did, I’d be very grateful.”

  “Maybe we can work something out. Why don’t you tell me how you got the money in the first place?”

  “Oh, that’s such an old, boring story. Let’s not dwell on the past.”

  “When Arturo told you he had hired Alejandra from the travel agency to be his personal assistant, you suspected something. You were smarter than he was. That’s why you looked into her background.”

  Doña Elena said, “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “I think I do,” I said. “I think you did what Arturo should have done. You were so much smarter than he was. You had Alejandra checked out. You found out she was from Cobán, and her father was one of the disappeared.”

  “You think you understand me? You’re pathetic, just like every other man.”

  “Are you saying you didn’t run a background check on her?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “You’re so smart. You tell me.”

  “Okay. I figure Arturo never admitted he had left Guatemala with a fortune, not even to you. All those millions, and he wouldn’t even tell you, his own wife, that he really had the money. I think you had a right to that money. Or at least half of it. I think that’s all you really wanted. Just your fair share, right? But he wouldn’t give it to you, even though half of it was really yours. Isn’t that how it was?”

  “It wasn’t right,” said the actress.

  “Of course not. Anyone could see that. So you had to do something. But you were too smart to make a move without a solid alibi. Then along came Alejandra. When you learned about her father, and you realized she was really there to get proof against Arturo, you decided you had the perfect patsy. After all, she had every reason to hate him.”

  Doña Elena smiled at that. It was a wicked thing to see, easily as evil as any atrocity I had seen in war, precisely because it was so beautiful.

  I said, “You became Alejandra’s friend. You’re irresistible, after all. You probably told her that your husband was abusive. It would fit her preconceptions of Arturo’s nature and inspire sympathy for you. Or maybe you did it some other way. But somehow you gained her confidence, got her to tell you about her father’s disappearance and admit she was there to try to find proof that Arturo stole money from the disappeared. You said you sympathized. You wanted to help her prove the truth about Arturo’s role in the genocide. You said you would help her get justice for the disappeared of Guatemala. Am I right?”

  “Not completely,” said the woman. “But you’re not a bad guesser.”

  I stood with my weapon hanging at my side, hoping she might forget about it. I said, “Thank you. I’m just trying to think what an intelligent person would do in your position. I know how smart you are. I even think you managed it so Alejandra believed she was helping you come up with the plan. Maybe you even made it seem like the plan was all hers. One way or another, after you and Alejandra became partners against your husband, you came up with the fake kidnapping idea. How am I doing?”

  “It’s a good story,” said Doña Elena from her hiding place behind Olivia. “But shouldn’t we get back to what a big strong man like you can do with a lonely girl like me and all that lovely money?”

  “What about your husband?”

  “He’s not here, silly. But you are.”

  “Yes I am, and I want to hear all about how you tricked everyone.”

  “Oh, that was easy,” she said. “I told that stupid Alejandra how we could make Arturo admit he had the money. I told her he would give it up for me. Alejandra was always talking about her husband, how he loved her and would do anything for her, so it wasn’t hard to make her believe Arturo would give up everything for me.”

  Strapped to the ladder with her head still hanging down, Olivia rolled her eyes up to look at me through the tangled black curtain of her hair. There was more than pain in her eyes. There was something fierce and merciless.

  Doña Elena said, “I told her all we had to do was tape some scenes and pretend I had been kidnapped, and Arturo would agree to pay the millions, and then we could expose him for the animal he was. So we came up here one morning and made a little set. It was like a play, with me as the helpless victim and Alejandra as the nasty terrorist. We giggled a lot when we were off camera. She said it was an honor to work with such a talented star, and I told her she should get an Oscar.”

  “But you changed the script,” I said. “When it came time to make your ransom demands at the end of the last video, you dropped the amount and insisted your husband had to deliver it himself.”

  “Of course,” said Doña Elena, adjusting her hold on the knife at Olivia’s throat. “To get that silly woman up here, I had to tell her we would force Arturo to try to wire ten million to a fake account, just so the authorities would see he had all that money. But I knew Arturo would never admit he had that much, not even for me, so I went off script in the last video and only asked for two hundred thousand.”

  I said, “In that final video, Alejandra says, ‘You weren’t supposed—’ Then she’s cut off. She was saying you weren’t supposed to tell Arturo to bring the money, right? And you weren’t supposed to ask for just two hundred thousand?”

  “Of course. She said two hundred thousand wasn’t nearly enough to make Arturo out to be the monster she thought he was. Oh, that stupid little woman. She actually thought all I ever planned to do was get Arturo to admit he had the money.” Doña Elena’s laughter had all the humor of a swarm of locusts.

  The knife had drawn more blood from Olivia neck. Just another fraction of an inch, and the jugular would be severed. I had to say something to distract Doña Elena. All I could think of was the awful truth.

  I said, “How did it go after that? Did you let Alejandra watch you torture Arturo until he told you where the money was? Did you let her see you kill him? Did you tell her you were going to put the blame on her while you marched her out, shot her in the head and rolled her into some deep hole up there in the rocks?”

  Olivia let out a moan. It wasn’t a sound driven by pain. It was the first rumblings of volcanic rage.

  Doña Elena didn’t understand. She said, “Shut up, or I’ll cut your hands some more.”

  Olivia only moaned louder. She pressed her neck forward against the knife, forcing the blade to dig deeper. Blood began to trickle down. Doña Elena pulled back a fraction. “Oh, no, you don’t. Not until I know where you put the money.”

  But Olivia didn’t stop. She pressed her head and neck forward and then
pulled back and then pressed forward again, forcing Doña Elena to move with her to keep the knife pressed against her neck without slitting through her artery. Olivia cursed Doña Elena in Spanish, flinging filthy words at her, daring her to cut. Then Olivia screamed, “What are you waiting for! Shoot her! SHOOT HER!”

  Doña Elena’s nostrils flared. I saw her lift her elbow to get leverage and knew what she was about to do. Although she was behind Olivia, and although I had only an inch or so for error, I knew I had to take the shot.

  The bullet drove the madwoman back against the wall. The knife dropped harmlessly into the pool of blood at Olivia’s feet. Later I would learn from the police that Doña Elena fell in exactly the same place where they had found Toledo’s body seven years before.

  50

  I cut Olivia down and helped her to one of the cots, where she sat stoically while I did my best to tend to her hands and neck, staunching the blood flow with paper towels, which I secured in place with the same duct tape they had used to bind her to the ladder.

  “She never meant to leave us,” said Olivia.

  “No,” I said, “she never did.”

  “She only wanted justice for her family.”

  I said, “Yes.”

  Olivia sat perfectly still as tears flowed from her eyes.

  I wanted to hold her, but across the room, Medallion began to moan. I went to him. He had lost a lot of blood. There was no fight left in him, and very little hope. A gut wound like his had to be treated almost immediately, but there was no cell-phone service that high in the mountains, and no way for me to get him to a hospital in less than an hour. Still, I did my best, rolling him onto his side, cutting away his shirt, and using it to press into the ugly exit wound to try to stanch the blood. As I had with Olivia, I used the tape to hold the shirt in place. Since the entrance wound in front was barely bleeding, I spent no time on that.

  I removed his wallet and found his DEA identification card. His name was Donald Ortiz. I searched his front pockets and found the keys to the Navigator. I also found the little computer chip he had removed from the patrol car, which contained the video of him and his partner murdering the two patrolmen.

  I leaned close to his ear and said, “Ortiz? Can you hear me?”

  His eyes didn’t open, but he nodded slightly.

  “I’m doing my best for you, but I need to know something. Can you still hear me?”

  Again, a little nod.

  “The bomb,” I said. “Did you guys contract with Jawarski for the bomb?”

  At first I thought he had lost consciousness, but then I saw his lips were moving. I leaned closer. His voice was a mere whisper. “What bomb?”

  I sat back and wondered how much Doña Elena had promised the two agents, what it took to turn them. Had it been only money, or had she also offered them what millions of men had lusted for on the silver screen?

  I took his empty holster and clipped it to my belt beside my own weapon. I said, “Ortiz. I’ll send help as fast as I can.”

  I helped Olivia stand up. On the way out the door, I picked up Ortiz’s M9, slipped the safety on, and put it in the holster. I also took a roll of tape.

  Outside in the rain, Olivia was as tough as any marine. She walked down the hill under her own power. She held her hands up at chest height to reduce the bleeding. She never complained and never used me for support.

  I paused at the boulder where I had hidden the other agent’s gun. I removed it and stuck it in my hip pocket. So I had two M9s and an M11 on me. A walking arsenal.

  When we reached the side trail up to the ledge where I had left Nunez, I asked Olivia to wait. I climbed up and found him lying exactly as he was before, totally drenched and still unconscious. It was hard to believe, but only thirty minutes had passed.

  I used the tape to further secure his hands and feet, and I left him there. It crossed my mind that he might have a problem with coyotes, but I couldn’t carry him, and I really didn’t care.

  We got to the Navigator and drove down off the mountain.

  As soon as I had a cell-phone signal, I called Harper. Of course, the LAPD had called him after I gave them his name, so he already knew the Venice situation. I explained my side of things, told him I had video to prove I hadn’t killed the two policemen, and arranged to surrender myself to him at the Kaiser Permanente emergency room on the 5, which was the closest hospital to the Ortega Highway. In case the word of my innocence didn’t get out fast enough, I asked him not to notify the LAPD until I was already in his custody. He agreed my chances of surviving the arrest would be much better that way.

  I spent most of the next three days in various interrogation rooms in Orange County and LA. One does not witness the murder of two policemen, assault two DEA agents, and kill a US congressman’s wife without spending a few days answering the same questions over and over. Teru showed up about two hours into the first round of interrogation, announced he was my attorney, and demanded to be present during questioning.

  Even with the patrol car’s dashboard video, and even with Teru at my side, it did not look good at first. I was already under indictment for the home invasion at Doña Elena’s place, and Olivia Delarosa admitted she had been working for Doña Elena while using an assumed name. Now the woman whose home I had allegedly invaded, the woman Olivia had deceived, the woman Olivia’s mother had allegedly kidnapped, was dead by my hand, and Olivia was the only living witness.

  But the ballistics on the bullets they took out of the two dead policemen matched the sidearms registered to Nuñez and Ortiz, and the video from the patrol car’s dashboard camera was indeed conclusive. Forensics also confirmed the only fingerprints on the knife found alongside Doña Elena’s body were hers, and Detective Russo verified that the wounds to Olivia’s hands were virtually identical to those that had been found on the corpse of Arturo Toledo seven years before, a fact that had never been released to the press.

  Thanks to my conversation in the limo with Sid Gold about money laundering, I suggested that deposits for the sales from Doña Elena’s book should be compared to withdrawals from the numbered account Olivia had discovered. That was done, and although it caused him great trepidation, the Los Angeles district attorney eventually found enough political courage to announce that Congressman Montes’s wife had been laundering money through her self-publishing enterprise, blood money that had apparently been stolen from the Guatemalan people by her first husband, Arturo Toledo, whom she was now suspected to have murdered.

  Special Agent Ortiz was dead when the authorities reached the cabin that night, but Special Agent Nunez was alive, untouched by the coyotes and screaming for help. After being told that charges wouldn’t be filed against me, and after negotiating a plea bargain, Nunez admitted he and Ortiz had met Doña Elena when they were detailed to Congressman Montes’s task force on the war on drugs in Guatemala.

  Through contacts in Pico-Union, Doña Elena had learned that Valentín Vega was in town looking for a way to prove the URNG was innocent in the matter of Arturo Toledo’s murder. Of course she knew if they had been successful, it might well have given fresh momentum to the cold case, so she had paid the two DEA agents handsomely to discourage such an investigation.

  They had been following Vega and Castro for about a week when I blundered into the picture. When I didn’t stop investigating after their first warning, and when the murder attempt in the mountains failed, they had decided to kill Castro and frame me and the URNG for the home invasion. With all his nosing around, Castro was probably onto them by that time, so it solved that problem for them too.

  Under pressure from leaders in his own political party, Congressman Hector Montes stepped down as chairman of the Congressional Caucus on Central America. One week after that, I received a cashier’s check from a Guatemalan bank for twenty thousand dollars. With it came a handwritten note that said only, “Gracias. V.V.”

  They used dogs to find Alejandra Delarosa’s skeletal remains. They found her at the bottom
of a crevasse in a pile of boulders about one hundred yards up the mountainside behind the shack. Because the crevasse was so deep, no large animals had managed to disturb the body. That seemed to be a comfort to Olivia.

  It may have been a disappointment to the Guatemalans of Pico-Union to learn that the donations they believed had come from La Alejandra had actually come from Arturo Toledo’s wife in an effort to make it look like Alejandra Delarosa was alive. But the story of Alejandra’s ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of justice for her people soon overshadowed that.

  An artist in Laguna Beach created an iconic image from a photograph taken of her as a young woman. The image was reproduced on thousands of websites, T-shirts, and bumper stickers above the word “Justicia.” Throughout the Latin American world, Alejandra Delarosa became a symbol of the struggle against tyranny.

  During the next three months, Olivia made frequent calls to me from Guatemala, where she had gone to accompany her mother’s remains for burial and stay with her father. She told me the news of his wife’s death had somehow snapped Emilio Delarosa out of his seven-year-long lethargy. He had stopped drinking. He had moved to a better apartment. He had begun considering his career again. I reminded Olivia how she had once told me she would rather be orphaned than deliberately abandoned. We agreed her father had probably felt the same.

  There was some controversy about the disposition of the nine and a half million dollars that remained in Olivia’s numbered Swiss bank account. At first the Guatemalan government had attempted to convince the Swiss authorities that the money rightfully belonged to them. Public outcry was so universal all around the world that the Swiss government announced the money would be deposited with a nongovernmental organization serving families of the disappeared in the city of Cobán.

  One day, about a month after Olivia went to Guatemala, I decided to paint again. I didn’t finish the canvas that had been in progress when Haley was killed. I put that one aside. But I did start a new series, images of Newport Harbor, and I spent as much free time as possible at my easel working en plein air around the grounds. Sid Gold seemed to think it was amusing that a bodyguard might love to paint. He teased me about it now and then. Then one day he saw my work, and I noticed that the teasing mostly stopped.