by Steven Gore
It had been a cryptic line among all these that had put Donnally on the road now.
Chico Gallegos. Sweating. Chen.
When Donnally had called him, Judge McMullin looked at his original notes and recalled that Gallegos had been perspiring more than any witness he’d ever seen, either as a judge or as a lawyer. Sweat had soaked through his collar, dampening his tie knot, and left his chest striped, zebralike, when his coat fell open.
At first, McMullin wasn’t sure what the Chen reference was about, then he recalled that Chen was the detective who’d been responsible for Gallegos’s security and had escorted him to court. He also recalled that both Oscar Benaga and Gallegos had been housed out of state between the time they were identified and interviewed as witnesses to the homicide and the time of their testimony for fear that the Sureños would kill them to prevent them from appearing.
Donnally was on his way to Salinas because it was where Gallegos had been murdered in a drive-by outside his parents’ home.
What Donnally knew about crime in Salinas, or at least the way he pictured it in his mind as he descended from the Gabilan Mountain Range into the farmland encircling the city, he’d learned in gang seminars both in the department and at the police officer training center in Sacramento.
To think of Salinas now was to imagine it as the Norteño Mecca. It was the outside-of-prison headquarters of their parent gang, the Nuestra Familia, formed in the 1960s in a Central Valley prison to protect imprisoned northern Mexican immigrants.
Looking out his truck window at the men and women bent low over the rows of artichoke plants, thinking back to when the Nuestra Familia was founded, when farmers and grape growers smuggled workers across the border into indentured servitude, it wasn’t hard to understand how the gang had come to see itself as the protector of farm workers, and later their descendants, from both the police and from the urban Mexican Mafia that had already established the Sureños.
Donnally remembered having some sympathy for the outcasts who needed to defend themselves in prison. The L.A.-based Mexicans considered themselves sophisticated and viewed the northerners, stooping with short-handled hoes, and handpicking artichokes and lettuce, as ignorant and stupid and weak. At the same time, the northerners were tired of being coerced into the subservient roles in the California state prison system and having their money and food and drugs extorted from them.
The first battle between the gangs was over shoes stolen by a southerner from a northerner in 1968.
Everyone but Donnally attending the gang seminar laughed when the instructor from the Orange County sheriff’s department described the Norteño’s surprise and shame when he spotted a Sureño wearing his shoes in the prison exercise yard.
Donnally had wondered at the time whether the reason he hadn’t laughed with the others was that he’d learned growing up watching his father’s movies to be suspicious of the appearance of early humor in a serious film, for it was usually a setup for later tragedy.
The officers stopped laughing when the instructor told them that the theft and the retaliation that followed set off the longest-running gang war in the history of California, one that left behind a thousand-body chain of revenge murders that ripped up and down the length of the state, tearing into every Hispanic neighborhood from Calexico in the south to Yreka in the north.
And one link in that chain was the bullet-ridden corpse of the Norteño Chico Gallegos, killed twelve months after he testified in the murder trial of Israel Dominguez, while he was posted up alone on his block in Salinas, guarding their territory while his partners made a run to resupply the weed they sold on the corner.
As Donnally pulled to a stop in front of the stucco bungalow where Chico’s mother still lived, he glanced over at the spot in the driveway where Chico had been found, bled out from bullet wounds to his chest and back.
Donnally wondered whether the young Norteños now sitting on the porch across the street, leaning back in their chairs and drinking beer, even knew, or remembered, that one of their gang ancestors had fallen just fifty feet away.
CHAPTER 29
The sounds of dogs barking in the fenced front yards and chickens clucking in the back met Donnally as he got down out of his truck. The only thing that distinguished this block from any of those in the hundreds of small towns in northern Mexico were the license plates on the cars and the words meat, fish, and vegetables printed in English under the Spanish words carne, pescado, and legumbre painted on the wall of Mi Tierra Mercado, the corner grocery.
He didn’t look over at the junior gangsters, and after the quick glances cast his way when he drove up, they’d stopped looking at him. There was nothing to see. Their war wasn’t against a middle-aged white guy who could be a plumber or contractor or city inspector. It was against other young men, enemies who were nothing but reflected images of themselves, distorted in the mirror of their borderland lives.
Donnally was there, fifteen yards away, still existing in their space, but psychologically compartmentalized, an inert thing, not a living being.
The loose screen door rattled against its frame as Donnally knocked. He wasn’t sure whether it struck loud enough to be heard on the inside. As he reached up again to rap on the wood siding of the house, the inner door opened and a woman appeared on the other side. Filtered by the dusty screen, she was more shape than matter, a five-foot three-inch figure backlit by dim inner light.
He guessed he also was a gray shape, the setting sun behind him presenting her with just his form.
She opened the screen door to get a better look at him. Heavy, in her sixties, and dressed in a brown Uptown Buffet uniform as though she’d just returned from work.
Donnally introduced himself only by his name and asked if she was Rosa Gallegos.
“Are you with parole?” she asked, then her voice hardened. “I told Juan he can’t come back here again. You’re wasting your time.”
“I’m not with parole. I’m looking into the death of Edgar Rojo Senior in San Francisco a long time ago.”
Rosa shook her head. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Your son testified in the case.”
Donnally watched her stiffen but wasn’t sure why. It was very old news. She’d had twenty years to get used to it, and whatever fallout there had been must have settled since then, perhaps even been washed away by time and by lives that went on.
“If you don’t mind,” Donnally said. “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes. I promise I won’t take long, but it’s important to me.”
He knew she did mind but guessed that an immigrant Hispanic mentality would cause her to let him in. He’d relied on that countless times in his police career to execute searches by consent that otherwise would’ve required search warrants, and he’d felt like a colonial master every time he’d done it.
Rosa backed away from the door in a motion that reminded him of Edgar Sr.’s mother letting him into her apartment in San Francisco, resignation with an undercurrent of puzzlement regarding his aims.
They sat down on the couch in the living room. On the wall to Donnally’s left was an unused fireplace, the logs inside dusty, and to the right, a small desk, neat with credit card, utility, and cell-phone bills in piles.
Rosa lit a cigarette. As she shook the flame from the match, she said, “Sorry for being so short with you. I was afraid my brother-in-law convinced the parole people that he could live here. I’ve told him over and over that he couldn’t.”
“When’s he getting out?”
Rosa drew on her cigarette and smiled the smile of a woman who’d seen and lived through too much.
“You mean this time?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Next month.”
Donnally looked over at the family photos standing in frames on the fireplace mantel and on the bookcase. He spotted a wedding photo. The bride in a traditional Mexican wedding dress, slim, white and with a bolero jacket, the groom in a bright double-knit, bell-bottomed tuxedo.
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“You and your husband?” he asked, gesturing toward it.
Rosa nodded.
“He at work?”
“I assume so. It’s dinnertime in Pelican Bay. He works in the prison kitchen.” Another drag on her cigarette. “He’s a lifer. A murder in L.A. Been in since before Chico passed.”
Rosa glanced in the direction of the driveway, perhaps her stream of consciousness carrying her from a distant killing to a nearer one.
Donnally wondered what it was about these two mothers, Rosa Gallegos and Magdalena Rojo, both still living where their only children had been killed.
And he didn’t think they remained in these homes because either one was trapped, at least in any physical sense.
The two of them still living in the shadow of their sons’ deaths seemed to him to be a symptom of a disease he couldn’t comprehend, that he didn’t even have a name for.
He wondered whether Janie could even understand it. It seemed as much sociological or anthropological as psychological, a prison without bars, walls, and razor wire, but somehow too difficult, or too painful, to break out of.
But maybe he, looking through the lens of the past, was seeing more than was there.
Perhaps the Rojo apartment window and the Gallegos driveway had finally devolved from symbolic places anchoring living memories into lifeless things one simply looked through or drove over. After all, his own mother still lived in the last place she’d seen his older brother alive, standing at the threshold, wearing the dress uniform he was later buried in.
“Is his father how Chico got involved with the Norteños?”
“His uncle, Juan. My brother-in-law. My son got recruited on the street. His father joined in prison.”
Rosa pointed toward a poster of Cesar Chavez marching along a rural road and carrying a flag bearing the huelga black Aztec eagle.
“My father marched with Cesar. Went to jail with him many times for La Causa.”
Donnally felt a moment of uncertainty as he tried to follow the leap from gangsters in state prison who committed crimes against the weak to those Cesar Chavez had defended against the powerful.
Then he thought of Rojo Junior identifying himself with the cause and of the Aztec and the águila tattoos, the eagles covering Norteños’ chests or backs he’d seen when he was in the police department.
And he grasped the connection she was trying to make and that had been the source of his sympathy. The cause in prison had been protecting the weak farmeros living in the north from the powerful Mexican Mafia in the south. And the cause in the fields had been protecting the poor campesinos laboring in the fields against the wealthy growers and the human traffickers.
“What was your son’s cause?”
Rosa stared at him for a long moment, as though she hadn’t expected such a blunt question, one that put her son’s life on trial.
“He thought it was about dignity and respect. Solidarity.” She shrugged. “But what do kids know.”
“When you say ‘he thought,’ does that mean he came to have doubts?”
Donnally watched Rosa’s eyes survey the living room, the curios and souvenirs from Mexico and Los Angeles and San Francisco, the photos of family members, the funeral brochures, even a photograph of a prison inmate taken in front of the forest scene on San Quentin’s death row.
“After a friend was killed, of course he would have doubts, but it was mostly driven by anger.” Rosa looked back at Donnally. “But, you see, they were all boys under the control of men.”
She pointed upward. “They didn’t understand that the orders issued from the Pelican Bay prison were not for any cause, but only for the benefit of La Mesa, the leadership.”
Donnally thought of Rosa’s husband in Pelican Bay.
“Is Chico’s father part of the leadership?”
Rosa shook her head. “If he was, he’d be locked down with the rest instead of working in the kitchen. It’s Chico’s uncle Juan who’s part of La Mesa. That’s why I don’t want him living here again.”
Her eyes flicked toward the wall opposite the door. Donnally looked over. He could see nine or ten patched bullet holes in an angled path, climbing toward the ceiling, and imagined what had been their trajectory, probably fired from an automatic weapon into the house from the passenger seat of a car by someone aiming for her brother-in-law.
Rosa glanced at her watch.
Donnally realized that he’d caught her not returning from work, but getting ready to leave.
“I’m not sure what this has to do with why you came here,” Rosa said.
Donnally shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t.” But he was sure it did.
“Did your son talk about the shooting of Edgar Rojo Senior after the trial?”
“Not much. He got scared afterward and came back down here. He had doubts about staying in the gang, a lot of young people dying for nothing, and was terrified of being in the middle any longer.”
“In the middle?”
Donnally didn’t see how he could be in the middle of anything. He was on one side, the Norteños, and they’d protect him. And his face must have shown his ignorance.
“Between his uncle’s side and Rojo’s side.”
Rosa first stared at him as though surprised he didn’t understand the simplest fact about the Norteños during those years, then she swallowed hard and looked away, her hands now gripped together on her lap, as if trying to restrain herself after having revealed too much.
She seemed to be saying that the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. wasn’t a Sureño hit on a Norteño aimed at taking over a link in the drug trade, but part of a war among the leadership of the Norteños.
Donnally wondered whether she’d blurted it out because she was angry at her brother-in-law for trying to move back in with her.
There had been repeated references in the wiretap affidavits Donnally had read about internal power struggles among the Norteño leadership, but nothing—nothing—even hinting that the Rojo murder was part of it. It was described as a straight-up Sureño hit on a Norteño.
But what she was saying still didn’t mean that Israel Dominguez hadn’t pulled the trigger.
“Did your son ever express any doubts to you about whether Dominguez was the shooter?”
Rosa shook her head. “Never. Chico was there and saw his face and saw him fire the gun. It was more like he couldn’t understand how Dominguez got himself into the middle of it.”
Which meant that Rojo Sr.’s murder simply served ends that the Sureños hadn’t anticipated when they had ordered it.
“Did he ever go back to San Francisco?”
“Later and only for a little while. A friend of his was killed at Twenty-Fourth and Mission, and he came down here again. He said he’d gone up for there for the last time. He wasn’t going back.”
From her tone, Donnally recognized it really had been for the last time and the reason had nothing to do with his long-term decision to make it so, but because he’d been murdered thirty feet from where they sat.
Rosa stood up and glanced again at her watch. “I need to get to work. My shift is from six until midnight.”
Donnally also rose. He remembered there was no car in the driveway, and it gave him an idea about how to extend their conversation and give him time to find his feet again.
Once again, he felt like he was missing something in what she’d said to him, like when he was driving away from Chen’s foothill home near Lake Shasta. Except this time he had the feeling Rosa also didn’t understand the implications of her own words, like a witness to a homicide who hears a dying cry—a name or a phrase—and doesn’t grasp the meaning.
“Can I give you a ride?”
Rosa looked at Donnally for a moment, then nodded. “I loaned my car to my niece. Let me get my purse.”
After she walked down the hallway, Donnally surveyed the room, the curios, the paintings, the crosses on the walls, and the figures of Jesus and Mary. It felt like something was wrong, either there was to
o much of something or not enough.
Even more, and even if she didn’t want it to be, her house was a Norteño hub. Her brother-in-law wouldn’t have been expecting to stay with her unless he’d already made some kind of claim, maybe sending money to support her and the family after her husband had been imprisoned.
Or maybe she was his outside connection, willingly or not, for passing messages from La Mesa in the Special Housing Unit in Pelican Bay to the gang members on the streets.
Donnally stepped over to the desk and pulled out an envelope containing a credit card bill and another containing a cell-phone bill from the bottom of each stack, then folded them and slid them into his back pocket.
He heard a door close and walked over to the fireplace and was looking at her wedding photo as she entered the room.
Her footsteps came to a stop next to him and she said, “It now seems like someone else’s life.”
Donnally’s gaze shifted toward a framed funeral brochure, her son’s photo on the cover below the words Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, Obregon, Sonora. Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
“You buried your son in Mexico.”
Rosa nodded, staring at the photo. “He was born there. Here was only suffering, so it was only right.”
Donnally turned toward her, and they walked to the door. It was now dusk. She paused at the screen and looked out at the young Norteños across the street, creeping along the sidewalk and pacing the shadowed porches like wharf rats.
“Maybe I better take the bus. There are already too many questions I’ll have to answer when Chico’s uncle shows up. There’s really nothing I can do to stop him.”
Donnally reached to open the door for her, then paused with his hand against it. “Why not get out of here?” He pointed at the words Uptown Buffet stitched on her uniform. “There are lots of those around the state to work at.”