Gang Mom

by Fred Rosen

  “We talked on the phone. No. He was calling mostly to see how I was.”

  “Did he ever tell you not to say anything to the police?”

  “He asked me what I was telling the police ’cause I had told him the police were at my house. And I said I told them nothing. And he said, ‘Good. Don’t.’ And, that’s all he said about it.”

  “I’m gonna have to switch this tape over. The time right now is 1344 hours,” said Rainey, shutting off the machine.

  While the tape was being changed, Mary went to the bathroom. Rainey had a chance to talk with Michaud and told him of the substance of the interrogation so far, because that’s what it was, an interrogation, pure and simple. While neither cop was expecting Mary Thompson to confess to killing Aaron Iturra, they knew now that their instincts had been right. Mary was involved right up to her big fat neck.

  “Okay, send a detective out to rattle Angel Elstad’s chain,” Michaud advised.

  “She’ll never give up her brother Jim.”

  “Maybe not, but maybe there’s something else she’ll say that’ll help us. And get warrants for Elstad and Brown. I want ’em brought in.”

  SEVEN

  Most times when death occurs, the bereaved can count on family to help out, but in Janyce’s case, that would not happen.

  Janyce Iturra’s family lived in Portland. There were sisters and brothers there, a mother and a father still alive, but there had never been anything between them. To Janyce, they were a narcissistic bunch. To expect anything from them would be to set herself up for further disappointment and grief. Janyce’s opinion was that her kids wouldn’t even know their grandmother if she walked down the road.

  If there was one positive thing about Aaron’s death, it just reinforced in Janyce’s mind that she wasn’t going to allow things to happen to her kids that had happened to her growing up. I love my kids with all my heart, Janyce thought. And they know that. And growing up, I never even knew that was a possibility.

  Like her kids, Janyce was grieving. And like her kids, she was angry too. She wanted Aaron’s killer to die in the worst way. But there was nothing she could do about that anger because she was the one who had to remain in control. Revenge right now would just prevent her from going on. Better to push it down. She’d bring it out when the time was right. What was that old Sicilian proverb that she had heard someplace? Oh, yes, she remembered.

  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

  While her revenge lay thriving in her conscience, there were funeral arrangements to make. That was going to cost $5,000 and she didn’t know where she would get the money to cover the costs. And she needed help with Aaron …

  “Tina, I can’t do everything by myself,” she told her daughter. Tina knew that.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to grow up quick, baby. I want you to go shopping and pick out something he would like.” Janyce was asking her oldest daughter to pick out the clothes her son would be buried in.

  Aaron no longer had to worry about school, but his siblings did. The kids had been out of school since the murder. Time to go back. She needed to get as much normality back into their lives as possible.

  Living arrangements. Since the murder, they’d been living away from home, but she couldn’t impose on her friend any longer so she had to make plans to take her brood of five—no, four, she had to remind herself, four without Aaron—back home. Back to the house where her son had been murdered.

  How do you clean blood off walls?

  Actually, you don’t. Because of its organic origin, blood seeps into the very fabric of the wall. Wipe it as much as you want, paint over it with oil- instead of water-based paint to hide its color, whatever you do, forevermore the blood will always be part of the house. Some part of Aaron will always be there.

  And so, as Tina picked out her brother’s funeral garments, as Janyce simultaneously made plans to bury her son and move her brood back home, just miles away, the cops picked at the detritus of her life and began the second part of the questioning of the one woman who seemed to hold the key to what had really happened the night of Aaron Iturra’s death.

  Despite their inaccuracy, “NYPD Blue” has very dramatic interrogation scenes. Usually, the suspect sits in the green interrogation room with the two-way mirror, at a scarred, pitted table. He sneers at “Sipowicz,” while “Simone” shouts out questions. Then, “Sipowicz” ’s hand lashes out like a whip to slap the suspect who clams up.

  Let’s face it, really dramatic stuff. Real life instead of reel life?

  Not.

  It takes hours for a cop to get the suspect settled and comfortable enough to begin to talk about what really happened, and then, if the cops are very lucky, to make a confession. While there may be some cool revelations that come out during interrogations, for the most part, they are cluttered with boring information. In Mary’s case, it was her fixation on dogs.

  During the second part of her interrogation, Mary went on and on and on and on about her beloved dog Lars. It was Lars this and Lars that, Lars went to the vet, Lars had intravenous therapy, Lars got a new kennel, Lars had a tumor, until finally, thank God, Lars died and they could get back to what was really important, Aaron’s death.

  Mary related better to her dog’s death than Aaron’s. You didn’t have to be an animal lover to find that interesting.

  As she went on to describe Lars’s funeral out back of her house, where Joe Brown dug the beloved pooch a grave, Rainey steered the conversation back to the murder weapon, the gun that Elstad, Brown and Larry Martin, Mary admitted, passed around the week before the murder.

  The Saturday after Lars died, they all came over.

  “Larry came over with Jim,” Mary recalled. “Because Wayde, Larry, Angel and this Linda all stayed at Linda’s house the night before ’cause Angel was smacking on [flirting with] Larry. And Angel was wanting me to fix things up with her and Larry. And Larry was going, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’ Angel was pregnant out to here.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Larry came over. Wayde and Linda were there for a little bit. And Angel. Anyway, Larry and Joe ended up staying. And they all knew that, you know, I told them Lars died. And, I told everybody that we thought it was cancer. And Larry said that Aaron’s ‘evil’ caused the cancer.”

  “Evil?” Rainey questioned.

  “Larry is one of these that’s totally convinced that Aaron’s demons were after him,” Mary answered.

  “Is he pretty gullible, you think? Larry?” Rainey asked matter-of-factly, which was a credit to his poker face considering how the situation really warranted sarcasm.

  “Larry? I think Larry’s pretty baked [stoned]. He called me and said that him and Aaron had been in a fight on Thursday. And he goes, ‘Mary, what did I do on Thursday?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ ‘I’d remember if I got in a fight ’cause I like to fight.’ But I wasn’t with him on Thursday. ’Cause he had went to a party or something Aaron had and puked all over Aaron’s bedroom and was quite pleased with himself for doing that. I guess that was the weekend before this last weekend that he was over at Aaron’s house, and they had been drinking beers, and Aaron had pizza, and he ate the pizza and got sick and puked all over Aaron’s bedroom. ‘All over his stuff’ was the way he put it.”

  “So when did you have this conversation with Jim?” Raynor asked.

  “It had to be on Saturday ’cause I didn’t see anybody on Sunday.”

  “Okay. You remember the gist of that conversation?” Raynor continued.

  “I said that it was either poisoning or cancer that killed Lars. Somebody said, and I don’t remember who it was, ‘Here’s another thing Aaron did.’ I says, ‘No, you can’t blame this on Aaron because we’re not sure what he died of. All I know is he’s dead.’ And, I don’t even remember if Jim was there for sure. I really don’t, now that I think about it. I was very, very upset. These guys know how upset I was the day Beau was arrested. I was
really about the same.”

  “Right.”

  “But I wasn’t blaming anybody,” Mary added hastily. “I was blaming the frigging vet for not saving Lars.”

  The conversation was straying from the mark. Rainey needed to turn things around, and fast, before he lost the momentum of the interrogation. So he gently came in with questions about the gun, trying to trace how it wound up being used to kill Aaron. The idea was to see how many hands it had passed through; how many accessories to murder there might be. But, what with Beau’s troubles, and the grief over Lars’s death, her recollection was hazy at best. Rainey moved on.

  “So jumping up to Monday morning, after Aaron is dead, these guys show up. Joe has the gun at that time? Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Joe have it in his hand when they walk up? Or, does he pull it out of someplace, or what?”

  “In front of his pants.”

  “So he lifted the top of his shirt to show you the gun tucked into his waistband?”

  “I think he took it out once. See, Angel was in labor, I was dealing with that and then I went to the door, and it went back in his pants.”

  “So you mean you were busy helping Angel when they showed up? But didn’t you tell one of us during the first interview that Angel drove up in a car, that she never got out?”

  “No. She never did.”

  “So what do you mean that you were so busy dealing with Angel in labor that it was hard to pay attention when two guys show up with a gun tucked in their belt?”

  Mary thought quickly. “I was dealing with everybody at the door, getting them to leave.”

  “Remember what they were wearing that night?” Raynor interjected.

  “I can’t remember. I didn’t turn the light on while Jim was there. And, they’re all calm and kicked-back about it.”

  “How about Joe?” Raynor asked.

  “Had on orange shorts.”

  “Were they sweat-type shorts or pants or the baggy kind?”

  “Baggy denim. They were orange denim. And I thought, that’s close enough to red that I wouldn’t wear it if I was claiming what he was claiming.”

  Mary meant it would be the wrong gang color to wear during a killing. He should be wearing the gang’s colors instead. Mary described the way the two boys were dressed that night.

  “Is it possible,” Rainey wanted to know, “if Larry Martin could have been with them and involved in the killing?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t see Larry. I had talked to Larry earlier on the phone. Larry and I talked on Monday and see, Larry went underground on Monday. And he called and told me he was scared. And I says, ‘Where’s Wayde?’ And he said that he thought that Wayde and Linda were gonna hook it up (meet) and go to Seattle.”

  “Well, if Larry wasn’t involved in the murder, what was he worried about? I don’t understand.”

  “Before he went underground, a detective, Dick Grimes, told him, ‘You better pull up your pants. You better start walking the line because you’re next.’”

  Gang members typically wear their pants down off their waists in such a way that it indicates gang membership. Grimes was supposedly warning Larry that if he didn’t start wearing his clothes normally, he’d be a target for whomever had killed Aaron.

  “And so, he thought he was gonna get killed,” Mary continued.

  “But, he knew all these people. Why not just go to the source and say, ‘Man, you know, I’m hearing this crap. What’s going on?’”

  “Because I don’t think Larry thought they did it, either. ’Cause I think Larry thought it was bigger than this.”

  Aha, back to the theory of Sonny, the hit man from Portland.

  “There was a lot of publicity of course after the homicide in the media Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, today. Has any of that publicity prompted anybody that you know of to, you know, make any comments to you about the killing and what’s going on?”

  “About?”

  “Just their involvement or what they know about it. Who else would they have confided in?”

  “Who?”

  “The people that are responsible for the killing! Or have firsthand knowledge.”

  “You mean the two that went?”

  “Right.”

  “I think Angel knows. I think Cameron knows. I think Larry knows.”

  “You think they’d tell Larry? Or do you think he was there?”

  “I think they’d tell him. I don’t know what Larry knows. It’s so hard to tell with Larry.”

  “Anybody else?” Rainey continued.

  “Maybe Wayde?” Raynor added.

  “Maybe they called Wayde.”

  “Let’s say we have information that you provided the gun. Okay? Let’s say we sit down with Crazy Joe or Elstad or somebody that says, ‘Well, I don’t know what Mary’s trying to pull here, but she’s the one who gave us the gun.’ Is there any truth to that?”

  “No.”

  “No way?”

  “None. No way in Frosty’s butt.”

  “Or that it might have come through you or anything like that? Right?”

  “Right. None.”

  “Or,” Rainey continued casually, “let’s say the statement is made from one of these other people that, ‘Well, the only reason why we did the killing is ’cause Mary asked us to.’”

  Bingo! It was right out there. Now Mary knew for sure what Rainey thought.

  “See, that’s where part of my guilty feelings come into this. I didn’t say, ‘I want you guys to get together, pick one, go kill him. Go do this.’”

  “What statements did you make that, that you think that they could have somehow interpreted—”

  “That first day that Beau had been arrested. I know I had to have said I wished he were dead. I mean I was out of control.”

  “Okay.”

  “It was all I could do to get home, drive myself home from Willamette High School after Beau was arrested.”

  “Do you think it’s likely that you made statements like, you know, ‘People who narc [inform] get killed’?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “I mean that’s a pretty typical reaction when your son is arrested.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah.”

  “Okay. And so, if somebody says, ‘We did this because Mary told us to and she promised that we would get something for it, money, whatever …’”

  Mary laughed at the absurdity of it all.

  “I’m sorry,” Rainey apologized sincerely, “I’m just trying to throw out all the possibilities here that we might later, you know, have thrown at us by some of these other people. Is there any truth—”

  “No. None,” Mary interrupted.

  “Was anything given to anybody, you know …”

  “No!”

  “… that might have even been mistaken for or in lieu of payment for …”

  “No!”

  Mary vehemently denied putting anyone up to killing Aaron so that he couldn’t testify against Beau in the Grocery Cart knifing incident. “But I did bring it up about the hearing coming up that Aaron can’t go and say what he said in that police report,” Mary added.

  “And by that you meant he can’t be saying that kind of junk against Beau?”

  “Right. Right.”

  “That ain’t right.”

  “Right. It’s not right. He’s lying.”

  “Okay.”

  “He lied in the police report. He lied. He cannot continue to tell these lies.”

  “Okay. So when this statement is made, is there a hearing that was about to occur or that was pending?”

  “No. There was none scheduled.”

  “Okay.”

  Mary stopped and listened.

  “I keep hearing something going click, click, click,” she said. “I’m wondering if it’s all my stuff.”

  “It could be my radio,” Rainey said, pulling out his walkie talkie and adjusting one of the knobs.

  “Oh.”

  “That probab
ly is what it is. If his radio is going, every time it’s keyed it would click.”

  “’Cause I have a little TV in here,” said Mary, pointing to her purse. “And I have my pull-out stereo from my car. My Walkman. You know, that kind of stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “But, I never said to do it, to kill him.”

  “Okay. And did you say, you know, I’m asking this question just like we have before, did you say anything indirectly which you intended to cause them to kill Aaron?”

  “No. But indirectly, I worry about that. You know, ‘He can’t testify. I hate him.’”

  “Okay. But we’re talking about intent here, what you intended by an indirect statement …”

  “No,” said Mary again, emphatically denying any involvement in a plot to kill Aaron. “I never intended anything that I said to get Aaron killed.”

  “Okay, so what is your best understanding of why Aaron was killed?”

  “My best understanding of why Aaron was killed, because of him being a part of Beau going back to MacLaren, the hurt he was putting me through by the stuff he was saying about Beau in the police reports and because he had stole from me. And it could have something to do with them thinking that maybe Lars was poisoned by Aaron. And because of the demons.”

  “Okay.”

  “Aaron’s demons.”

  Mary went on to recall how some of the kids who hung around her place had discussions about “hurting Aaron,” by “getting him” as he went to pick up his girlfriend. “They were gonna run up and cap him twice and keep on running.” But she couldn’t remember who said that. Then Mary advanced the theory that Aaron might have been killed because he set Larry up for a robbery at school.

  Rainey leaned in closer to Mary, crowding her into the corner. “Who was it who was basically talking about putting the hurt on Aaron?”

  “All of them.”

  “When we say ‘All of them,’ I mean somebody who was serious, somebody who’s just really got a hard-on about it.”

  “I couldn’t even really say that these guys really had a hard-on about it. They didn’t come off like that. They weren’t consumed with even half their waking hours trying to figure out how to do Aaron in.”