The McCone Files

by Marcia Muller

  She turned from the window now, her face taut with fear, deep lines bracketing her full lips. I asked, “Is someone out there?”

  She shook her head and walked wearily to the worn recliner opposite me. I occupied the place of honor on a red brocade sofa encased in the same plastic that had doubtless protected it long ago upon delivery from the store. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Not till it’s too late.”

  “Mrs. Angeles, Jack Stuart told me about your problem, but I’d like to hear it in your own words—from the beginning, if you would.”

  She nodded, smoothing her bright dress over her plump thighs. “It goes back a long time, to when Benny Crespo was…they called him the Prince of Omega Street, you know.”

  Hearing the name of her street spoken made me aware of its ironic appropriateness: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is symbolic of endings, and for most of the people living here, Omega Street was the end of a steady decline into poverty.

  Mrs. Angeles went on, “Benny Crespo was Filipino. His gang controlled the drugs here. A lot of people looked up to him; he had power, and that don’t happen much with our people. Once I caught Alex and one of my older boys calling him a hero. I let them have it pretty good, you bet, and there wasn’t any more of that kind of talk around this house. I got no use for the gangs—Filipino or otherwise.”

  “What was the name of Benny Crespo’s gang?”

  “The Kabalyeros. That’s Tagalog for Knights.”

  “Okay—what happened to Benny?”

  “The house next door, the one with the dog—that was where Benny lived. He always parked his fancy Corvette out front, and people knew better than to mess with it. Late one night he was getting out of the car and somebody shot him. A drug burn, they say. After that the Kabalyeros decided to make the parking space a shrine to Benny. They roped it off, put flowers there every week. On All Saints Day and the other fiestas, it was something to see.”

  “And that brings us to last March thirteenth,” I said.

  Mrs. Angeles bit her lower lip and smoothed her dress again.

  When she didn’t speak, I prompted her. “You’d just come home from work.”

  “Yeah. It was late, dark. Isabel wasn’t here, and I got worried. I kept looking out the window, like a mother does.”

  “And you saw…?”

  “The guy who moved into the house next door after Benny got shot, Reg Dawson. He was black, one of a gang called the Victors. They say he moved into that house to show the Kabalyeros that the Victors were taking over their turf. Anyway, he drives up and stops a little way down the block. Waits there, revving his engine. People start showing up; the word’s been put out that something’s gonna go down. And when there’s a big crowd, Reg Dawson guns his car and drives right into Benny’s space, over the rope and the flowers.

  “Well, that started one hell of a fight—Victors and Kabalyeros and folks from the neighborhood. And while it’s going on Reg Dawson just stands there in Benny’s space acting macho. That’s when it happened, what I saw.”

  “And what was that?”

  She hesitated, wet her lips. “The leader of the Kabalyeros, Tommy Dragón—the Dragon, they call him—was over by the fence in front of Reg Dawson’s house, where you couldn’t see him unless you were really looking. I was, ‘cause I was trying to see if Isabel was anyplace out there. And I saw Tommy Dragón point his gun at Reg Dawson and shoot him dead.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Ran and hid in the bathroom. That’s where I was when the cops came to the door. Somebody told them I was in the window when it all went down and then ran away when Reg got shot. Well, what was I supposed to do? I got no use for the Kabalyeros or the Victors, so I told the truth. And now here I am in this mess.”

  Mrs. Angeles had been slated to be the chief prosecution witness at Tommy Dragón’s trial this week. But a month ago the threats had started: anonymous letters and phone calls warning her against testifying. As the trial date approached this had escalated into blatant intimidation: a fire was set in her trash can; someone shot out her kitchen window; a dead dog turned up in her doorstep. The previous Friday, Isabel had been accosted on her way home from the bus stop by two masked men with guns. And that had finally made Mrs. Angeles capitulate; in court yesterday, she’d refused to take the stand against Dragón.

  The state needed her testimony; there were no other witnesses, Dragón insisted on his innocence, and the murder gun had not been found. The judge tried to reason with Mrs. Angeles, then cited her for contempt—reluctantly, he said. “The court is aware that there have been threats made against you and your family,” he told her, “but it is unable to guarantee your protection.” Then he gave her forty-eight hours to reconsider her decision.

  As it turned out, Mrs. Angeles had a champion in her employer. The owner of the sewing factory was unwilling to allow one of his long-term workers to go to jail or to risk her own and her family’s safety. He brought her to All Souls, where he held a membership in our legal-services plan, and this morning Jack Stuart asked me to do something for her.

  What? I’d asked. What could I do that the SFPD couldn’t to stop vicious harassment by a street gang?

  Well, he said, get proof against whoever was threatening her so that they could be arrested and she’d feel free to testify.

  Sure, Jack, I said. And exactly why hadn’t the police been able to do anything about the situation?

  His answer was not surprising: lack of funds. Intimidation of prosecution witnesses in cases relating to gang violence was becoming more and more prevalent and open in San Francisco, but the city did not have the resources to protect them. An old story nowadays—not enough money to go around.

  Mrs. Angeles was watching my face, her eyes tentative. As I looked back at her, her gaze began to waver. She’d experienced too much disappointment in her life to expect much in the way of help from me.

  I said, “Yes, you certainly are in a mess. Let’s see if we can get you out of it.”

  We talked for a while longer, and I soon realized that Amore—as she asked me to call her—held the misconception that there was some way I could get the contempt citation dropped. I asked her if she’d known beforehand that a balky witness could be sent to jail. She shook her head. A person had a right to change their mind, hadn’t she? When I set her straight on that, she seemed to lose interest in the conversation; it was difficult to get her to focus long enough to compile a list of people I should talk with, I settled for enough names to keep me occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

  I was ready to leave when angry voices came from the front steps. A young man and woman entered. They stopped speaking when they saw the room was occupied, but their faces remained set in lines of contention. Amor hastened to introduce them as her son and daughter, Alex and Isabel. To them she explained that I was a detective “helping with the trouble with the judge.”

  Alex, a stocky youth with a tracery of mustache on his upper lip, seemed disinterested. He shrugged out of his high school letter jacket and vanished through a door to the rear of the house. Isabel studied me with frank curiosity. She was a slender beauty, with black hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders; her features had a delicacy lacking in those of her mother and brother. Unfortunately, bright blue eye shadow and garish orange lipstick detracted from her natural good looks, and she wore an imitation leather outfit in a particularly gaudy shade of purple. However, she was polite and well-spoken as she questioned me about what I could do to help her mother. Then, after a comment to Amor about an assignment that was due the next day, she left through the door her brother had used.

  I turned to Amor, who was fingering the leaves of a philodendron plant that stood in a stand near the front window. Her posture was stiff, and when I spoke to her she didn’t meet my eyes. Now I was aware of a tension in her that hadn’t been there before her children returned home. Anxiety, because of the danger her witnessing the shooting had placed them in? Or something else? It m
ight have had to do with the quarrel they’d been having, but weren’t arguments between siblings fairly common? They certainly had been in my childhood home in San Diego.

  I told Amor I’d be back to check on her in a couple of hours. Then, after a few precautionary and probably unnecessary reminders about locking doors and staying clear of windows, I went out into the chill November afternoon.

  The first name on my list was Madeline Dawson, the slain gang leader’s widow. I glanced at the house next door and saw with some relief that the guard dog no longer paced in its yard. When I pushed through the gate in chain link fence, the creature’s whereabouts became apparent: a bellowing emanated from the small, shabby cottage. I went up a broken walk bordered by weeds, climbed the sagging front steps, and pressed the bell. A woman’s voice yelled for the dog to shut up, then a door slammed somewhere within, muffling the barking. Footsteps approached, and woman called, “Yes, who is it?”

  “My name’s Sharon McCone, from All Souls Legal Cooperative. I’m investigating the threats your neighbor, Mrs. Angeles, has been receiving.”

  A couple of locks turned and the door opened on its chain. The face that peered out at me was very thin and pale, with wisps of red hair straggling over the high forehead; the Dawson marriage had been an interracial one, then. The woman stared at me for a moment before she asked, “What threats?”

  “You don’t know that Mrs. Angeles and her children have been threatened because she’s to testify against the man who shot your husband?”

  She shook her head and stepped back, shivering slightly—whether from the cold outside or the memory of the murder, I couldn’t tell. “I …don’t get out much these days.”

  “May I come in, talk with you about the shooting?”

  She shrugged, unhooked the chain, and opened the door. “I don’t know what good it will do. Amor’s a damned fool for saying she’d testify in the first place.”

  “Aren’t you glad she did? The man killed your husband.”

  She shrugged again and motioned me into a living room the same size as that in the Angeles house. All resemblance stopped there, however, dirty glasses and dishes, full ashtrays, piles of newspapers and magazines covered every surface; dust balls the size of rats lurked under the shabby Danish furniture. Madeline Dawson picked up a heap of tabloids from the couch and dumped it on the floor, then indicated I should sit there and took a hassock for herself.

  I said, “You are glad that Mrs. Angeles was willing to testify, aren’t you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “You don’t care if your husband’s killer is convicted or not?”

  “Reg was asking to be killed. Not that I wouldn’t mind seeing the Dragon get the gas chamber—he may not have killed Reg, but he killed plenty of other people—“

  “What did you say?” I spoke sharply, and Madeline Dawson blinked in surprise. It made me pay closer attention to her eyes; they were glassy, their pupil dilated. The woman, I realized was high.

  “I said the Dragon killed plenty of other people.”

  “No, about him not killing Reg.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t imagine why. I mean, Amor must know. She was up there in the window watching for sweet Isabel like always.”

  “You don’t sound as if you like Isabel Angeles.”

  “I’m not fond of flips in general. Look at the way they’re taking over this area. Daly City’s turning into another Manila. All they do is buy, buy, buy—houses, cars, stuff by the truckload. You know, there’s a joke that the first three words their babies learn are ‘Mama, Papa, and Serramonte.’” Serramonte was a large shopping mall south of San Francisco.

  The roots of the resentment she voiced were clear to me. One of our largest immigrant groups today, the Filipinos are highly westernized and by and large better educated and more affluent than other recently arrived Asians—or many of their neighbors, black or white. Isabel Angeles, for all her bright, cheap clothing and excessive makeup, had behind her a tradition of industriousness and upward mobility that might help her to secure a better place in the world than Madeline Dawson could aspire to.

  I wasn’t going to allow Madeline’s biases to interfere with my line of questioning. I said, “About Dragón not having shot your husband—”

  “Hey, who knows — or cares? The bastard’s dead, and good riddance.”

  “Why good riddance?”

  “The man was a pig. A pusher who cheated and gouged people—people like me who need the stuff to get through. You think I was always like this lady? No way. I was a nice Irish Catholic girl from the Avenues when Reg got his hands on me. Turned me on to coke and a lot of other things when I was only thirteen. Likes his pussy young, Reg did. But then I got old—I’m all of nineteen now—and I needed more and more stuff just to keep going, and all of a sudden Reg didn’t ever see me anymore. Yeah, the man was a pig, and I’m glad he’s dead.”

  “But you don’t think Dragón killed him.”

  She sighed in exasperation. “I don’t know what I think. It’s just that I always supposed that when Reg got it, it would be for something more personal than driving his car into a stupid shrine in a parking space. You know what I mean? But what does it matter who killed him, anyway?”

  “It matters to Tommy Dragón, for one.”

  She dismissed the accused man’s life with a flick of her hand. “Like I said, the Dragon’s a killer. He might as well die for Reg’s murder as for any of the others. In a way, it’d be the one good thing Reg did for the world.”

  Perhaps in a certain primitive sense she was right, but her offhandedness made me uncomfortable. I changed the subject. “About the threat to Mrs. Angeles—which of the Kabalyeros would be behind them?”

  “All of them. These guys in the gangs, they work together.”

  But I knew about the structure of street gangs—my degree in sociology from U.C. Berkeley hadn’t been totally worthless—to be reasonably sure that wasn’t so. There is usually one dominant personality, supported by two or three lieutenants; take away these leaders, and the followers become ineffectual, purposeless. If I could turn up enough evidence against the leaders of the Kabalyeros to have them arrested, the harassment would stop.

  I asked, “Who took over the Kabalyeros after Dragón went to jail?”

  “Hector Bulis.”

  It was a name that didn’t appear on my list; Amor had claimed not to know who was the current head of the Filipino gang. “Where can I find him?”

  “There’s a fast-food joint over on Geneva, near the Cow Palace. Fat Robbie’s. That’s where the Kabalyeros hang out.”

  The second person I’d intended to talk with was the young man who had reportedly taken over the leadership of the Victors after Dawson’s death, Jimmy Willis. Willis could generally be found at a bowling alley, also on Geneva Avenue near the Cow Palace. I thanked Madeline for taking the time to talk with me and headed for the Daly City line.

  The first of the two establishments that I spotted was Fat Robbie’s, a cinderblock-and-glass relic of the early sixties whose specialties appeared to be burgers and chicken-in-a-basket. I turned into a parking lot that was half-full of mostly shabby cars and left my MG beside one of the defunct drive-in speaker poles.

  The interior of the restaurant took me back to my high school days: orange leatherette booths beside the plate glass windows, a long Formica counter with stools, laminated color pictures of disgusting-looking food on the wall above the pass-through counter from the kitchen. Instead of a jukebox there was a bank of video games along one wall. Three Filipino youths in jeans and denim jackets gathered around one called “Invader!” The Kabalyeros, I assumed.

  I crossed to the counter with only a cursory glance at the trio, sat, and ordered coffee from a young woman who looked to be Eurasian. The Kabalyeros didn’t conceal their interest in me; they stared openly, and after a moment one of them said something that sounded like “tick-tick.” And they all
laughed nastily. Some sort of Tagalog obscenity, I supposed. I ignored them, sipping the dishwater-weak coffee, and after a bit they went back to their game.

  I took out the paperback that I keep in my bag for protective coloration and pretended to read, listening to the few snatches of conversation that drifted over from the three. I caught the names of two: Sal and Hector—the latter presumably Bulis, the gang’s leader. When I glanced covertly at him, I saw he was tallish and thin, with long hair caught in a ponytail; his features were razor-sharp and slightly skewed, creating the impression of a perpetual sneer. The trio kept their voices low, and although I strained to hear, I could make out nothing of what they were saying. After about five minutes Hector turned away from the video machine. With a final glance at me he motioned to his companions, and they all left the restaurant.

  I waited until they’d driven away in an old green Pontiac before I called the waitress over and showed her my identification. “The three men who just left,” I said. “Is the tall one Hector Bulis?”

  He lips formed a little “O” as she stared at the I.D. Finally she nodded.

  “May I talk with you about them?”

  She glanced toward the pass-through to the kitchen. “My boss, he don’t like me talking with the customers when I’m supposed to be working.”

  “Take a break. Just five minutes.”

  Now she looked nervously around the restaurant. “I shouldn’t—”

  I slipped a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and showed it to her. “Just five minutes.”

  She still seemed edgy, but fear lost out to greed. “Okay, but I don’t want anybody to see me talking to you. Go back to the restroom—it’s through that door by the video games. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

  I got up and found the ladies’ room. It was tiny, dimly lit, with a badly cracked mirror. The walls were covered with a mass of graffiti; some of it looked as if it had been painted over and had later worked its way back into view through the fading layers of enamel. The air in there was redolent of grease, cheap perfume, and stale cigarette and marijuana smoke. I leaned against the sink as I waited.