“We were survivors, okay? Brothers. We kept each other alive and we kept Rosa safe. It was the way we knew how to live.”
“Does Rafael have a police record?”
Ricardo shrugged. “He went through the juvenile system a few times. He never got in trouble like this.” He waved vaguely at the barred window, the cement walls. “This was not for Rafael. He was always luckier than me.”
“Was your gang into drugs?”
“We sold, we clocked. Raf tagged along. He was torn in two. He would have died for a brother—not just me but any of the hermanos. He would have laid down his life for us, I know this for a fact. He would die for us today if he had to. But the drugs always scared him. And a Chicano man can not let anyone know he’s scared.”
“I’m a little unclear. Did he actually sell drugs?”
“He did what he had to do.”
She wished Ricardo would be specific, but he clearly had no intention of going into detail. “So he was—is—a member of your gang.”
“Ask him to show you his arm,” Ricardo said, tapping his finger a couple of inches below his right shoulder, at the spot where his skin wore the mark of the Aztec Sun. “He has it there. Fancy businessman, rich sonofabitch, with his noble attitude and his donations to the Church. But look at his arm and you’ll see what he really is, senorita. He’s a Hermano. No better than the rest of us. Just luckier.”
Luckier was right. She mentally reviewed the press packet Diego had given her on her first day at Aztec Sun, with its emphasis on the studio and White Angel and its dearth of information on Rafael’s background. “What about Diego Salazar?” she asked. “He and Rafael have known each other since childhood.
“Salazar.” Ricardo sneered. “He’s a poco perro.”
“A little dog?”
“He yaps. He pants. He runs and fetches and he humps anything that stands still too long.”
“Was he a Hermano?”
“In his dreams, maybe.”
“Rafael is close to him, though. He told me Diego is one of the few people he trusts.”
“In his own way, Salazar can be dependable.”
“It’s more than just dependable,” Sandra said. “I got the impression they were very good friends.”
“Yeah, okay, the whole lifesaving thing.”
“What lifesaving thing?”
Ricardo studied her for a minute. “Raf doesn’t like to talk about it. I thought maybe Salazar would have told you.”
“Told me what?”
Ricardo mulled over his response. “It was a long time ago. Rafael was hurt and Salazar got him to a hospital in time. Raf is still grateful for that.”
“I should think he would be. To save a person’s life—”
“Look. The thing about Salazar, he’s a perro. Man’s best friend, right? All he wants is to be loved. He’ll do anything for a scratch behind the ears.”
“Is he your friend as well as Rafael’s?”
“Raf owes him. I don’t.” Diego studied the cylinder of ashes on his cigarette before tapping them onto the floor. “Diego does what he wants to do. He’s got his own story. You want to know, you ask him.”
Sandra could imagine how much good that would do. If she asked Diego for his story, he’d give her his usual speech about Aztec Sun’s wonderful star, Melanie Greer, and about the high expectations everyone had for White Angel.
She double-checked her recorder to make sure the record light was still on. “What about Rosa?”
“What about her? She’s my sister. Raf and I did what we could to protect her. Now she’s got Jesus and the Order of the Sacred Heart to protect her.”
“Why did you have to protect her? She’s an adult—”
“She was a beautiful girl, the most beautiful girl in the neighborhood. We had no father, our mother was away all the time working, and every boy on the block was baying at Rosa’s window like a hungry wolf. Raf promised our mother we’d keep Rosa safe. I guess he’s still trying to keep her safe, even if she doesn’t need it anymore.” He sighed. “That was the way it worked out. I took care of things, and Raf took care of Rosa.”
“Rafael still takes care of her,” said Sandra. “He told me if I interviewed her he’d make my life hell.”
Ricardo chuckled. “He could make anyone’s life hell if he wanted to.”
Don’t I know it, she muttered to herself. Before she could form her next question, the door swung open. “It’s time,” the guard declared.
Ricardo ground his cigarette under his heel and stood. “Do you have any messages for Rafael?” she asked as she turned off the tape recorder and folded her pad shut.
“Tell him to watch his ass,” Ricardo said. “It’s a dangerous world.” Then he turned and slouched past the guard, through the door.
The guard waited for Sandra to gather her things. He accompanied her out of the room and down the hall to the entry, where she signed out. The female warden who had frisked her was stationed behind the desk. She glared at Sandra as if she were as low-life as the criminals in custody.
Sandra mumbled her thanks to the various officers loitering in the entry, then bolted for the parking lot. Desert-hot air, pungent with the scent of hot tar, slapped her in the face as she raced to her car and sank onto the seat. She slammed the door, ignited the engine, punched the air-conditioning button and wilted against the upholstery.
Los Hermanos del Sol . Brothers of the Sun. Aztec Sun.
Sandra had lived a sheltered life in the bosom of her family. She’d been nurtured by the Berkeley School, surrounded by friends as academically gifted and ambitious as she. She’d had her own bedroom in a modest but comfortable house not far from the ritzy Berkeley Hills neighborhood. She’d worked hard, studied hard, earned what she had accomplished—but she’d never known the kind of desperation that led a person to welcome the embrace of a gang.
On the other hand, she was a reporter, and she liked to think of herself as reasonably hardheaded. She knew from living in Los Angeles and writing “daily miseries” what gang membership entailed. She knew the boys who joined Hispanic gangs did so not just for the sake of safety or identity but to prove their machismo. They had to be cockier than the others, tougher, meaner. A man’s ego was measured by just how cool and fearless he was.
The gangs of East Los Angeles were male enclaves; the gentling influence of women was rarely felt. The gangs were societies where boys tried to become men by tattooing their arms, drinking too much, cruising in customized low-riders and indulging in criminal activity.
That was who Rafael was. According to Ricardo, that was who he would be until the day he died.
Then again, it was possible that Ricardo had deliberately misled her. His envy of Rafael’s success was palpable. Perhaps he’d insinuated that his brother had a dark, ugly side just to get back at him for having transcended his past. Perhaps Ricardo had chosen to undermine his brother’s sterling reputation just because he knew everyone else had only glowing things to say about Rafael. Sibling rivalry was obviously alive and well in the Perez family.
But what if Ricardo wasn’t lying? What if Rafael was a punk in a movie producer’s clothing? What if he had, in fact, financed Aztec Sun with money he’d raised through gang activity? What if he bore the mark of Los Hermanos on his arm, etched in ink beneath his skin?
What if the man Sandra had been fantasizing about since the moment she’d seen him, the man who could shatter her defenses with a kiss, who could impale her soul merely by standing close to her, gazing into her eyes, brushing his hand along her shoulder… What if he was truly a Hermano, his money tainted, his movie studio built on a foundation of crime and drugs and shady dealings? What if all his gritty, R-rated movies—Vendetta and El Diablo and the like—were actually autobiographical?
She was overdramatizing. Assuming the worst of Rafael was no more objective than assuming the best of him. If he had a tattoo on his arm, it might be there because he didn’t want to go through the complicated procedure of
having the tattoo removed. Just because he’d made a mistake in his youth didn’t mean he was still a gang member.
And maybe he didn’t have a tattoo. Maybe Ricardo had made the entire story up.
Her phone chirped. She swore out loud. She was trying to think! She couldn’t handle an interruption right now.
It chirped again. Groaning, she lifted the receiver. “Sandra Garcia here.”
“Sandra? It’s Ella Connors. I’ve been ringing this number for an hour! Where the hell are you?”
“In Chino, doing an interview.” The urgency in Ella’s voice made Sandra sit straighter. Of all her colleagues in the news room, Ella was the most reliable. She wouldn’t have been trying to reach Sandra for an hour unless she had a good reason. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But you’d better get back to town, pronto.”
“Oh, God. Is Flannagan demoting me to Lifestyles?”
“Just hit the road, Garcia. Get yourself down to Aztec Sun as fast as you can. There’s already a zillion reporters crawling all over the place—”
Sandra propped the receiver between her shoulder and her chin and shifted the engine into reverse. “Why?” she demanded, checking the rearview mirror and backing out of the parking space. “What happened?”
“—Including Russo, the pig. Wouldn’t you know Flannagan would put him on it the minute it turned into something big? But it’s your story, Sandra. So get your ass down there before Russo steals it out from under you.”
“What are you talking about? There’s nothing there for Russo to pursue.” He couldn’t know about Rafael’s relation to a convicted drug dealer. As far as Flannagan was concerned, this was simply a human-interest piece about a Chicano community leader. Definitely not Russo’s kind of story.
“What’s-her-name. Melanie Greer, is that it? She collapsed on the set this morning. She got taken to Cedars-Sinai. Nobody’s talking at the hospital—or at Aztec Sun, either. Everyone’s stonewalling like crazy. But the buzz is, she O.D.-ed. She’s dead, Sandra.”
“Dead!” Sandra thought she’d screamed it, but in fact she’d whispered it. Her hardheaded-reporter veneer cracked, allowing tears to leak, to slide down her cheeks. “Melanie’s dead?”
“You’ve been cultivating those folks for two days. Get back here and see if they’ll talk to you. Elbow Russo out of the way. It’s your assignment.”
It was Sandra’s assignment, all right. But suddenly she couldn’t think of it as an assignment. She could think of it only as a tragedy, the grievous tale of a friendly, flaky blond actress who was dead and a movie mogul whose life was about to come crashing down around him.
She thanked Ella for contacting her, folded her phone shut and navigated back to the highway. Then, blinking away her tears, she floored the gas pedal, heading west, chasing the biggest story of her career, a story she was no longer sure she wanted to write.
Chapter Nine
*
HE REMEMBERED A STORY his mother used to tell him, about a little boy named Filipe who lived in a village in the mountains west of Hermosillo. Standing on a promontory high above the sea, Filipe would watch the condors soar from the cliffs. Their wings wide and proud, the condors possessed the sky.
Filipe wanted to possess the sky, too. He spent many days and nights collecting the feathers that molted from the noble condors. He mixed an adobe paste and plastered the feathers together, shaping them into artificial wings which he tied to his arms with vines. Then he, too, jumped from the promontory. The condors gathered around him, believing him to be one of them. They welcomed him into their midst. But as they soared higher, he fell down, down until he crashed against the bottom of the cliffs. Condors could possess the sky, but a boy could possess only the earth.
Rafael recalled the day he’d told his third grade teacher the legend of Filipe and the condors. “That’s not a Aztec folk tale,” Miss Allston had scoffed. “It’s an ancient Greek myth about Icarus, who made wings of wax but flew so close to the sun his wings melted and he plunged into the sea.”
Rafael hadn’t cared about Greek myths or wings of wax. Filipe had been his story, and he believed it in a way he would never believe Greek mythology.
I am Filipe, he thought, falling to the rocks below. A lovely blond bird had led him off the edge of a cliff, and he’d foolishly believed that he could fly. She’d flown and crashed, and now he was following her down.
Damn her. Damn her for being so stupid, so young and adorable and certain of her indestructibility. He wanted to hate Melanie for having taken a fatal dose of cocaine, but he was too shocked, too sad. All he could feel was grief.
In the hours since the hospital had informed him that Melanie had died, he had remained holed up in his office, taking calls from investors, the insurance company, the attorneys at Freeman, Barr, and Melanie’s agent and publicist. Carlotta screened each call, filtering out those from the media, nosy fans and gossip-mongers. Rafael had spoken to no one from any of the news organizations. Diego was better at coddling them than Rafael would ever be.
Diego had spent those hours outside in the parking lot, handling the press with his usual skill, managing to field their questions without saying a thing. Diego excelled at the art of mouthing platitudes, making empty assertions. Thank God for that; Rafael couldn’t have faced the media in his current mood.
He wondered whether Sandra Garcia was in the parking lot with the other reporters, shouting questions at Diego. Perhaps she had tried to telephone Rafael personally, but had been shunted aside by Carlotta. He hoped…
He hoped she wouldn’t call. He hoped she would. He hoped she would call not as a journalist but as a human being, someone who had known Melanie, however briefly, and who shared his sorrow at the young actress’s death. But he had no reason to assume Sandra saw Melanie as anything other than a headline story for her newspaper.
He needed to talk to John Rhee, his casting director and his accountants, to discuss the feasibility of replacing Melanie in White Angel and starting over. But right now John was being interviewed by a policeman in the conference room down the hall. And when Rafael thought about starting over, he thought not about a single movie but about his career, his studio, his entire life.
Rafael could start over with the movie if his insurance company and investors stuck by him—and that was a big if. It was just as likely this episode would leave them viewing him as a beaner, a wetback who either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on at his studio. They could be making snap judgments about his venality, his ineptitude, all the bigoted presumptions they could come up with when it came to Hispanics and criminal activity. God knew, someone might at that very minute be figuring out that Rafael’s own brother was a convicted drug dealer. If they dug that deep, they’d unearth Rafael’s own past, his sins, the marks on his soul. They would never trust him again.
The hell with it. He didn’t want to think about trust, or movies, or all those fucking vultures downstairs feasting on the flesh of Aztec Sun. All Rafael wanted to think about was that a young woman was dead.
Carlotta had closed the blinds in his office to protect him—”The reporters have got telephoto lenses on their cameras, and they’ll shoot your picture if they see you”—but he was able to flex the slats and peek out at the parking lot. A few journalists lingered, but Diego was no longer posted by Building A behind a bank of microphones and a stack of press releases. It was nearly three o’clock. No doubt the media flock had migrated to the more fertile pastures of the hospital. Rafael could count only a few reporters still milling below his window. None of them had long black hair and a determined chin, slim legs and eyes that could snare a man’s heart.
Where was she? If she’d been among the journalists hounding Diego, why hadn’t she made an attempt to talk to Rafael? Carlotta had been under orders to keep the crowds away—but she knew Sandra had been a presence at the studio over the past couple of days. Surely she would have let Rafael know if Sandra had tried to see him.
This was what she was after, wasn’t it? Breaking news. A major story. Not the PR crap Diego pushed on her, but the real thing. She’d been investigating, probing, snooping—just as Rafael had feared. That morning she’d been sniffing around the subject of Ricardo. Rafael didn’t kid himself into thinking his lies would discourage her from uncovering the facts. She was as much a vulture as the rest of them, as eager for a page-one story.
If only he’d kissed her when she’d been in his office, maybe everything else would have gone differently. She would have kissed him back with a passion to match his. She would have remained all morning in his office, in his arms, and her curiosity about his brother would have gone forgotten. The earth would have spun at a different tempo, and Melanie wouldn’t have died, and a boy would have leaped from the cliffs and flown with the condors.
The absurdity of that fantasy forced a bitter laugh from him. What gave him the audacity to think he could change the world with a kiss?
Restless and uneasy, he let the blinds fall back into alignment. His intercom buzzed, and he crossed back to his desk. “Rafael?” Carlotta’s voice emerged through the speaker, hoarse with fatigue. “Detective Rooney wants to talk to you. He says you don’t have to go to the conference room; your office is fine.”
“Okay.” Rafael understood that Rooney was offering him a courtesy by not demanding that he troop down the hall to the conference room like his employees.
Not that such a small courtesy softened Rafael toward the cop. He’d spent a lifetime distrusting the city’s finest, a lifetime knowing that the police were never around when he needed them but always around at the worst times.
Still, this had to be done, for Melanie’s sake. He sat at his desk and waited for the cop to enter.
A stone-faced man of middle age, Rooney was the head of the investigation into Melanie’s death. Rafael had already met him earlier in the day. Now he welcomed him into the office with a quiet nod.
Bad Boy Heroes Boxed Set Page 49