Innocence

by David Hosp

  Mac hated the place. He’d never found comfort in or use for modern police tactics; he was old-school through and through. He missed the days when cops were given free rein to get their job done.

  And now look at me, he thought. He was pushing fifty sitting behind his desk, his gut falling farther and farther over his belt every day. His hair, which he’d always kept at military length, was nearly gone on top. His barber still passed the clippers over his crown, but it was more a courtesy than a necessity, and Mac suspected the man would have dispensed with all pretense if he hadn’t been so afraid. Was this really what Mac had fought and clawed so hard to get?

  “Sergeant?” a female voice called from across the roomful of desks. It was Detective Sarah Koontz, whose surname had thrilled Mac when she’d joined the squad because it allowed him to make clear his distaste for chick cops through a minor mispronunciation for which he’d never be reported. “You’ve got a call that was misdirected to my line,” she said. “I’m transferring it.” That was fine with Mac; handling incoming calls was the extent of what women should be doing for the police department anyway.

  He pushed a button on his phone and hoisted the handset to his ear. “Mac here,” he said.

  “Mac, it’s Dave Johnson.”

  “Johnson,” Mac grunted. The two of them had worked together years ago. Mac had always regarded Johnson as soft, and they’d never been friends. “How’s retirement treating you?” Johnson had taken his pension at twenty years, a decision Mac considered a betrayal. He was pretty sure Johnson had taken another job, as most ex-cops did after finding that the pension wouldn’t support a man in his forties for long.

  “Retirement.” Johnson laughed nervously. “Right. It’d be great if it wasn’t for my job. You still got a weekly poker game? I could use the cash.”

  “More like every other week, but yeah.” Mac stopped short of inviting Johnson to join. As far as he was concerned, cop poker was for cops.

  “Gimme a shout the next time you get together. It’d be good to see you guys, and like I said, I could use your money.”

  “What d’you want, Johnson?” Mac didn’t even try to feign civility.

  Johnson said nothing for a moment. Then he forced a laugh. “Same old Mac. Listen, you were one of the point people on the Madeline Steele shooting back in the nineties, right?”

  Mac’s ears perked up. “It was before I made sergeant, so it wasn’t my case,” he said. “But yeah, I was involved in the investigation.”

  “I thought so. That’s why I’m calling. I’m up here at Billerica. I’m an assistant supervisor of the corrections officers now.”

  He said it as though Mac should be impressed. He wasn’t. But Johnson did have his full attention. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s not too bad. Beats the streets for me. At least it’s easier to tell who the bad guys are; they’re usually the ones wearing prison fatigues.”

  “That’s a good one.” There was no laughter in Mac’s voice, only impatience. “I’ll have to remember that.”

  “Anyways, listen, Vincente Salazar’s got some people up here visiting. Lawyers, looks like. Word on the block is he’s trying to get himself a new trial.”

  “Every con wants a new trial,” Mac commented cautiously.

  “Yeah, I know. Salazar’s been writing to anyone he thinks’ll listen to him for fifteen years, right? So it’s probably nothing. But it looks like a couple of people are listening. I just thought you’d want to know. It’d be a damn shame if some spic could put a cop on wheels for life and walk free, you know?”

  Mac considered this. “Yeah, it would,” he agreed. Every synapse in his brain was firing, but he kept his voice even. “It’s probably nothing, though. No court’s gonna let a guy like Salazar back on the street, not after what he did.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” Johnson sounded like he suddenly regretted calling. “I just thought you’d wanna know, being as you were involved in the investigation and all. I didn’t mean to give you any headaches.”

  “No headaches, Johnson,” Mac said. “I always appreciate hearing what’s going on with any of my old cases—particularly when they involve a guy who shot one of ours.”

  “Yeah. Well, that’s all I figured. Like you said, it’s probably nothing.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay. Well, it was good to talk to you again, Mac. It’s not too bad up here, but it’s not the same as being on the job. I sometimes miss the guys at the station, y’know? Tell them I said hello, would you?”

  “Tell ’em yourself,” Mac said. “We’re playing poker over at Henderson’s next Wednesday. I’m sure no one would mind if you sat in.”

  “Really?” The schmuck actually sounded excited. Pathetic. “That’d be great. I’ll see you there.”

  “Looking forward to it.” Mac hung up the phone before Johnson could say anything else. He couldn’t listen to the man anymore.

  He sat quietly at his desk, mulling over the information. Most of what he’d said to Johnson was true. It probably was nothing. Convicts were always looking to get a new trial; hell, they had nothing else to do with their time. And the likelihood that a court would ever listen to a plea from a guy with the kind of conviction for which Salazar was serving time was almost nonexistent. So there really wasn’t anything for him to be concerned about.

  And yet he was concerned. He had the kind of feeling that cops get when they know something’s going bad. Intuition. Fuck the computers; silicone would never have hunches, and hunches were what made a cop effective.

  He picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory. “We gotta talk,” he said when the line was picked up on the other end.

  z

  “Maria was pregnant when we arrived in this country,” Salazar said. “She was so happy. It was difficult for both of us to leave our home, but we were excited to be in America, to have a fresh start away from the violence.”

  As Salazar spoke, Finn was captivated. From his own experience growing up shuttled from state homes to foster care to the streets, Finn knew about hardship. He’d made something of his life, to be sure, but he still felt alone. Salazar, on the other hand, had gone through a different sort of hell: Ripped from his home and stuck in a tin can for a decade and a half, and yet he seemed at peace. There was no hint of loneliness about him, only evidence of an invincible spirit. The difference, Finn suspected, was family. Salazar had one; Finn didn’t.

  “When Maria’s father told us we had to leave, I asked him to make arrangements for my mother and my brother, Miguel, as well. If I’d left them, the death squads would have hunted them down. My father died the year after Maria and I married, and my brother was still only seventeen, so he and my mother were living with me and Maria.

  “VDS, the criminal gang that arranged for our escape through Mexico and across the border, is very organized. It controls much of the drug smuggling from Central America. It has contacts in many of America’s cities: Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Boston. With some of my own money, I arranged for them to take us here.”

  “Why Boston?” Finn asked.

  “There is a significant El Salvadoran community here. Besides, I am a doctor, and Boston’s reputation as a center for the medical profession was familiar to me. In honesty, I was young and foolish. I thought I would be able to get a job in a hospital, maybe even find a patron who would be a sponsor of sorts and help me get a license to practice as a doctor here.”

  Kozlowski laughed derisively. “You have to be a citizen, or at least a legal alien, to practice medicine here.”

  “As I said, Mr. Kozlowski, I was foolish. You see, in places like El Salvador, America is still viewed with a sense of romanticism; there are few stories about the hardships immigrants encounter here. Of course, I hadn’t realized that hospitals are very careful about who they hire. They want records, and without them, it is impossible to get a job, even as a janitor. As a result, I had to accept employment at a convenience store for less than m
inimum wage.” He looked at Kozlowski. “At least I didn’t have to pay taxes.”

  Kozlowski nodded. “Touché.”

  “We lived in a small apartment in Roxbury, but we were excited about the baby, and I made some extra money treating other immigrants in the neighborhood.”

  “Practicing medicine without a license is a crime,” Kozlowski pointed out. Finn frowned; he was beginning to wonder whether bringing the detective had been a good idea.

  “And failing to treat the sick is a sin,” Salazar replied. “Besides, I wasn’t dispensing any prescription drugs. I only examined people; handed out over-the-counter medications; sometimes delivered babies. If someone needed more treatment than I could provide, I told them to go to an emergency room.” He sighed. “They never did, of course. If you are an illegal and you go to the emergency room, there is always a chance that you will be reported. You risk deportation. Many felt that they had a better chance of surviving with disease than deportation.”

  “Mark told us that’s how the police found you—when you took Maria to the hospital,” Finn said.

  “Yes. Things were going well in many respects. Between my job at the convenience store and the small amounts I made treating poor people, we were getting by. My brother, Miguel, was doing well in school—one of the few places where immigrants seem to be able to participate without repercussion. He had learned English, like me, in a private school in El Salvador, and he was always the smartest in his classes. Things started to fall apart when Maria went into labor.”

  Salazar took a deep breath before continuing. “In her thirty-seventh week, Maria began experiencing pain. It isn’t so unusual at that point in a pregnancy, so I wasn’t concerned. I told her to stay off her feet, but we didn’t want to go to the hospital because we were afraid. I thought everything would be all right. I didn’t know it, but she had a fibroid tumor that was blocking the birth canal. Shortly after she went into labor, her womb ruptured. There was so much blood . . .” His voice trailed off, and he went quiet. No one spoke.

  “I rushed her to the emergency room, but it was too late. She lived through the cesarean section and even heard Rosita cry before she bled to death. I suppose I take some small comfort from that.”

  “And your daughter was born blind?” Finn asked.

  “No, she was fine when she was born.”

  “So what happened?”

  “That happened when I was arrested,” Salazar explained. “You see, when I took Maria to the hospital, the authorities learned that we were in the country illegally. Nothing came of it for several months, but then the police began a program to identify and deport illegal immigrants— South and Central American immigrants in particular. My name was put on a list, and an investigation was started. The goal was to have us deported. Officer Steele, the woman who was attacked, was the officer in charge of my case.”

  “So you had a good idea that your time in this country was limited unless Steele’s investigation was stopped,” Kozlowski pointed out. “That’s one hell of a good motive to take her out.”

  “That was the argument that the prosecution made,” Salazar confirmed. “Except that I probably wouldn’t have been deported in the end. I was going through the process of applying for asylum in this country. As long as I could prove that I faced the risk of political retribution if I was forced to go back to El Salvador, I would have been permitted to stay here in America. Given my circumstances, I believe I would have been successful.”

  Finn was skeptical. “I don’t know. My understanding is that the standards for asylum are very strict. Getting the evidence necessary to prove that you were in real danger would have been difficult.”

  “Perhaps,” Salazar admitted. “But the legal process can take a very long time, I was told. Besides, what good would it do to ‘take out’ Officer Steele, as Mr. Kozlowski puts it so colorfully? Do you really think her cases wouldn’t be reassigned?”

  “It’s a fair point.”

  “In any event, I was going through the process legally, and I hadn’t even heard of the attack on Officer Steele. Then one evening the police broke into our apartment. Miguel wasn’t there, fortunately. He was eighteen and full of adolescent anger. He probably would have fought back, and that would have only made things worse. As it was, they broke my arm and my nose and beat me very badly. But it was Rosita who suffered most.”

  “What happened?”

  Salazar hung his head and rubbed his temples. When he looked up again, his eyes were red. “She was just a baby at the time. When they came in, they knocked her high chair over, and her head slammed into the floor. I tried to get to her. I tried to tell them that I was a doctor, that she needed help, but they wouldn’t listen.” He wiped his eyes and cleared his throat before he continued. “She suffered a traumatic brain injury similar to what happens when you shake a baby violently. She lost her vision, and she’s had some learning disabilities. She is wonderful, though, and for the most part she is happy, thank God.”

  “How did your family get by after you were arrested?” Finn asked. “With a child who needed that kind of care, and with no money?”

  “That was the great irony. You see, Rosita was born in this country—she’s an American. Because of that, she could get benefits under Medicaid and other social services. When the social workers found out what had happened, they worked with immigration officials to keep my mother and my brother in this country. And then there was Miguel. He was always the smartest in the family. He worked two jobs while finishing school and graduated at the top of his class. He even got a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, and he excelled there as well, all the time supporting my mother and Rosita. He has essentially been her father while I’ve been in jail. He’s a doctor now—and a naturalized American citizen.” Salazar beamed as he spoke about his brother. “He is a great American success story.”

  “You must be bitter,” Kozlowski said.

  Salazar frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  Kozlowski looked at Finn, and it was Finn who answered. “When you think of everything you could have been—everything that’s happened to you and your daughter—how could you help but be angry?”

  Salazar looked back and forth between the two of them. “You don’t have children, do you?” Both men shook their heads. “When the police stormed my apartment, I watched Rosita’s head hit the floor. I heard her scream and then heard her go quiet. I’m a doctor, and I know what kind of damage a fall like that can do to an infant. I thought she was dead.”

  Finn and Kozlowski continued to look at him, not comprehending his point.

  “You see, when you are a parent, and you believe that your child has been killed, you die as well. I couldn’t imagine my life without my daughter; everything lost meaning to me in an instant. When I found out that she was alive—that she would survive—it was like being reborn. Am I angry at the men who blinded my daughter? Yes. Am I angry at the men who put me here? Yes. But bitter?” He shook his head. “My daughter is alive. Blind, yes, but a happy, healthy, beautiful girl. She is safe, and she knows how much I love her. As long as I know that, the bitterness will not swallow me.”

  He leaned forward, staring hard at Finn. Finn thought Salazar’s eyes might bore a hole through him with their intensity. “Now, Mr. Finn,” he said slowly. “Would you like to hear more about the specifics of my case?”

  Finn could feel Kozlowski stiffen in the chair next to him, but he refused to look at him. He didn’t hesitate in his answer. “Yes, Mr. Salazar,” he replied. “I think I would.”

  Chapter Five

  “He’s a remarkable man, isn’t he?” Dobson asked as he emerged from

  the Billerica House of Correction with Finn and Kozlowski.

  “He’s different, I’ll give you that,” Finn replied.

  “On the inside, because he’s got a medical background, he was assigned a work detail as an orderly in the infirmary. Doctors in there say he’s one of the best physicians they’ve seen. They obvious
ly have to ‘oversee’ everything he does because he’s a prisoner and because he never got his license in the U.S., but there isn’t one of the doctors who wouldn’t want him treating them.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Impressed enough to take the case?”

  Finn looked at Kozlowski, who hadn’t said a word since they’d left Salazar. “I gotta think about it a little,” Finn said. “I’ll give you a call one way or another later this afternoon.”

  Dobson looked disappointed but held his tongue. “I’ll wait for your call” was all he said before heading over to his car.

  Finn turned in the other direction, toward the far end of the large parking lot where he’d left his car. The wind whipped across the open fields that surrounded the prison, stinging Finn’s eyes. Kozlowski fell into step with him silently. “What’d you think?” Finn asked.

  Kozlowski said nothing; he just kept walking next to Finn, not even looking at him.

  “I mean, you gotta admit, the guy seemed to have his shit together. I know that doesn’t mean he didn’t do some bad things in the past, but you ask me now whether I think this guy tried to rape and kill a cop? I’m not buying it. And it sure sounds like the investigation had some significant holes in it.” Finn’s eyes darted over toward the large detective. “You said you were friends with Steele, right?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Finn waited to see if there were any additional thoughts Kozlowski cared to reveal, but trying to get information out of the man was like trying to get money from an old-line Brahmin. “Right. So you may have a different view of the guy. Me? I’m just trying to figure out whether this is worth my time. I mean, if the guy’s innocent, I’d like to help him. Plus, if I get him out, we could really hit the jackpot on a civil rights lawsuit against the city. I mean, fifteen years in that hellhole? What’s a jury gonna value that at? Ten million? Maybe fifteen?”