by Michael Nava
This was significant information. In a drive-by shooting, the shooter never gets out of the car. Under the cops’ scenario, the shooter had actually been waiting for Peña or someone to come into the lot and had hidden himself while he waited. I turned to the autopsy report, my eye falling briefly on the diagram that showed where the bullets had hit. Gus had been shot five times; whoever had killed him wanted to be sure he was dead. All in all, the killing suggested a degree of planning and premeditation not usually associated with gang shootings.
I kept reading. Despite the gang sweeps in East LA, there had never been a serious suspect other than Michael Ruiz. Included in the book was Chuck Sweeny’s statement, recounting Michael’s threat on Gus’s life, and his absence from SafeHouse the night of the murder. There was a list of people to be interviewed, including the Ruizes and Lonnie Davis. Also briefly noted was Edith Rosen’s consistent refusal to discuss either Peña or Michael Ruiz. Still, the case against Michael had been weak until the police got a break, an eyewitness.
He had surfaced over the weekend, a young man named Pablo Saenz who had been working as a busboy at the restaurant the night Peña was killed. Just before the shooting, Saenz had come into the lot to empty some trash into the Dumpster. He had seen a big, beat-up car parked in the alley, and a man leaning against it. He couldn’t make out the man’s face clearly, but he could tell that he was Latino, about five-seven, thin, and dressed like a gangbanger. Saenz had been in the neighborhood long enough to recognize potential trouble, so he had quickly dumped the trash and started back to the restaurant.
At the foot of the stairs, he saw Peña coming down, and he stepped back to let him pass. He heard the man at the car call out Peña’s name. Fearing violence, Saenz scooted into the shadows. From there, he saw Peña approach the man, and then heard the sound of a gun going off. He flattened himself against the ground and when the shooting stopped, he ran.
Saenz was an illegal, an immigrant from El Salvador. He had not come forward to the police because he was afraid that he would be deported. Eventually, the police tracked him down anyway and got his statement. From it, they prepared a photo lineup that included Michael’s booking picture from his previous arrest. The result: a tentative make on Michael. I looked in vain for the photo lineup. Laverty had neglected to include it.
The tentative identification was the most damaging evidence but also the most fragile. Saenz had told the cops he hadn’t gotten a clear look at the shooter. Despite that, he had identified Michael. It didn’t take much imagination to guess at the pressure that had been brought to bear on the man. Faced with the prospect of deportation, Pablo Saenz would have been more susceptible than most witnesses to the suggestion that it was Michael he had seen. Burdened by the need to make a quick arrest, the cops would have been none-too-subtle in making the suggestion. Perry Mason notwithstanding, it’s the rare case in which a defense lawyer can conclude that the police have arrested the wrong man. This was that case.
Carolina Ruiz was slender and well turned out in a silvery silk dress and blue blazer. Her short black hair was threaded with gray. I could imagine that she had once been lushly beautiful with her clear, dark skin and deep, probing eyes but now she seemed desiccated, drawn and hard-jawed. She sat at the edge of her chair lighting a cigarette. Her husband, Bill Ruiz, was barrel-chested and thick-waisted. His heavy, sweaty face registered worried amiability. He wore handmade Italian loafers, khakis, and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, the little red horseman riding a plump breast. Edith had not yet arrived. I decided to start without her.
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “I checked with the police a few minutes ago and Michael’s been released from the county hospital and taken to county jail. I’ll be talking to him in the morning.”
“How is he?” she demanded.
“He has some bruises and a black eye, but other than that, he’s fine. The police are claiming he was injured trying to resist arrest.”
“What else would they say,” she said scornfully.
“I’ve asked Edith Rosen to be here,” I said.
“Why?” Carolina asked sharply.
“I thought she might have some insight into Michael’s behavior.”
“I can’t stand that woman,” Carolina said. “All she’s done is teach Mikey to hate us. Everything was all right before she got her hands on him.”
“Michael was on probation for armed robbery when he went to SafeHouse,” I said.
“Armed robbery? He took a water gun into a grocery store and they called it armed robbery,” she said.
“Mrs. Ruiz, your son has a serious drug problem.”
She exhaled a thin line of smoke. “It’s those punks he hangs out with at his grandma’s.”
Edith Rosen appeared at the doorway. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“Come in,” I said. “We were just starting.”
She crossed the room and sat on the sofa. Bill Ruiz smiled acknowledgment at her. Carolina Ruiz looked straight ahead.
“Let me tell you where things stand,” I said. “Michael hasn’t been formally charged yet, but I imagine the DA will allege first-degree murder. I don’t know whether they’ll be seeking the death penalty.”
“The death penalty,” Bill Ruiz said anxiously.
“It’s entirely possible,” I said, “but we won’t know until the arraignment.”
“Which is when?” Edith asked. Carolina Ruiz glared at her.
“They have to arraign him by Wednesday at the latest,” I replied. “Of course, he’ll plead not guilty. After that, there’ll be a preliminary hearing. The purpose of the prelim is to determine whether there’s enough evidence to support the charge. If the judge thinks there is, then the case will be set for trial.”
“Is there enough?” Bill Ruiz asked.
“Yes,” I said, “but it takes very little.”
“What evidence?” Carolina snapped, crushing her cigarette in the ash tray.
“I’ll come to that. At the trial, the DA has to prove that Michael’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s a very heavy burden. Michael doesn’t have to prove anything. He doesn’t even have to testify.”
Unable to restrain herself, Carolina broke in. “It’s all lies. Mikey wouldn’t hurt anyone. We knew Gus Peña, for God’s sake.”
I glanced at Edith who seemed as surprised as I was.
“Really?”
“My husband,” she said, tugging at his arm. “He’s an important man. He gave Peña money for his campaigns.”
I looked at Bill Ruiz. “Did you know Gus well?”
He shrugged modestly. “Not to be friends,” he said. “We went to a couple of fund-raisers for him when he was thinking about running for mayor. He came to our Christmas party last year. I talked to him once in a while. It was no big deal. When Mikey had his trouble, I called Gus to see if he could do anything for him.”
“And?” I asked.
“He said jail would do him good.”
“I see. Did you ever ask Gus for any other favors for Michael?”
“We tried to put him into the same school with Tino, Gus’s boy. A Catholic school. They didn’t want to take him so I asked Gus to talk to the principal.”
“Did it help?”
He nodded. “Mikey went for a semester,” he spread his hands on his knees. “Then there was some trouble.”
Carolina broke in. “You said there was evidence against Mikey. What evidence?”
“There was a witness to the shooting,” I said. “He saw the man who killed Gus, not close up, but close enough to give the cops a description. The cops gave him a photo lineup with Michael’s picture in it, and he identified Michael as the man he saw.” She started to speak, but I cut her off. “He wasn’t certain, and there wasn’t anyone else around when the cops showed him the lineup. The witness is undocumented, from El Salvador.”
“They threatened to send him back if he didn’t say it was Mikey,” Carolina surmised.
“There is that possibility
,” I replied. “As it is, there’s an immigration hold on him.”
“Would the police really do that?” Edith asked.
“Lady, you don’t know the cops,” Carolina said, addressing her directly for the first time. “I grew up in Boyle Heights. Those bastards have always had it in for Chicanos.”
“I’m going to request a live lineup,” I said. “One that I can monitor, to make sure it’s conducted fairly. Then we’ll see how things stand.”
“Mikey didn’t do anything,” Carolina said, “and I don’t care who says different.”
“What I’d like to know,” I said, “is where he’s been for the past week. That doesn’t look good at all.”
“He was with his grandma,” Carolina said.
I looked at her hard. “You told Edith he wasn’t there.”
“It was none of her business,” she said.
“You realize he was in violation of probation,” I told her.
She shrugged. “He was scared. He didn’t trust the people at that place anymore.” She glanced at Edith. “Can you blame him?”
From deep within his chair, Bill Ruiz asked, “What do you think, Henry?”
“About Michael killing Peña? I want to talk to him, of course, but except for the photo ID the evidence seems pretty weak to me.”
“But do you think he did it?” Carolina asked.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
Bill smiled. “Then you’re our man, Henry.”
“Unless you have other questions,” I said, “that’s all I’ve got for now.”
They all sat there. Finally, Bill Ruiz bestirred himself and got up, his wife following reluctantly.
“Thank you,” he said, and lumbered out, with Carolina behind him. She stopped at the doorway, glanced back suspiciously at Edith, then me, and left. I heard them arguing in Spanish on their way out.
“Mrs. Ruiz is a lioness,” I told Edith. “I’m surprised. From what you’d told me about her, I would have expected indifference.”
Edith said, “That’s confusing guilt with love.”
“Why do you say that?”
She came over to my desk. “I don’t want to talk about Carolina. I want to talk about Michael.”
“OK, what about him?”
“Well, actually,” she said, taking the chair Carolina had been sitting in, “it’s about you, too.”
“Goon.”
“You told them you don’t think he killed Gus. Do you believe that?”
“This killing is beginning to look like it was carefully planned,” I said. “Michael Ruiz is a punk, impulsive, short-sighted and self-destructive. I can’t see him carrying it off.”
She frowned. “You’re supposed to be on his side.”
“I’m supposed to defend him,” I replied. “I don’t have to like him.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Don’t write him off the way everyone else has.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re a lot like Gus, Henry, you know that? You pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps and you’re not particularly tolerant of weakness in others.”
I leaned back in my chair. “I don’t think I’d be in this line of work if that were true.”
“I’m not criticizing you,” she said quickly, “just making an observation. Let’s talk about Gus, then. Gus was idealistic, too. He believed that things could be changed, made better, and he believed that he could do it. After all, he had transformed his own life, hadn’t he?”
“But.”
“But not everyone is that strong,” she said. “Don’t be so quick to judge Michael. He has his story, same as you. He has his reasons, his motives, his aspirations. Maybe he can teach you something you need to know about this case.”
“You know him better than any of us,” I said. “What are his aspirations, Edith?”
“He wants to be loved,” she said. “That’s all he’s ever wanted.”
The tattooed teardrop trembled at the edge of Michael’s eyes as he blinked at the harsh light in the interviewing room at county jail. He was pitifully thin in the blue jail jumpsuit and his face and wrists were still discolored with bruises. He didn’t look as if he had slept much. I tried to keep in mind what Edith had told me the previous afternoon as I began our interview.
“How do you feel, Michael?”
“You got any cigarettes?” he asked in a raw voice.
I reached into my briefcase for the pack of Winstons I always carried for such occasions and pushed them toward him with a pack of matches. He tore at the wrapping and lit one with a shaky hand.
“Edith Rosen said you went to SafeHouse yesterday to turn yourself in. Is that true?”
“I wanted her to talk to the cops for me,” he said, sucking at the cigarette. “See what kind of deal I could make.”
“Deal for what?”
“If I copped to killing him.”
I studied the boy across the table from me. I’d seen all kinds of killers, and couldn’t rule him out just because he didn’t fit the profile. “Did you kill him, Michael?”
“The cops said they got someone who saw me.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
He looked blankly around the room, smoking loudly.
“It’s not a hard question, Michael,” I said. “Did you kill him?”
“What kind of deal can you get me?” he rasped.
“I don’t plead people who aren’t guilty.”
He looked at me coldly. “Yeah, I killed the asshole. You happy?”
“Tell me about it.”
“I went down to the park and met up with some homeboys,” he said, after a moment.
“Which park?” I asked, jotting notes on a legal pad.
“Griffith,” he said. “There was some people there having a party. I got high, you know. Started talking shit to them about Peña. They’re my people, man,” he said, tapping his chest. “My enemies are their enemies.”
“What happened next?” I deadpanned.
“One of them, Shorty, he’s got a gun in his car, and he asks me, ‘You want to go for a ride?’ I said, ‘Sure, let’s go look for the asshole.’ We drove over to his house.”
“How did you know where he lived?” I asked.
“My dad knows him,” he said. “He took me there a couple of times. He wanted me to meet his kid. Thought he would be a good influence on me,” he added caustically. “We saw his car pulling out of the driveway, so we followed him. He went over to that restaurant.”
“What did you do then?”
“Sat in the car and smoked some crack. Did a little wine. I got pretty fucked up. And we waited for him to come out.”
“How long were you parked there?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Couple of hours.”
“Where did you park?”
“There’s a big tree. We parked underneath it.”
Exactly where the police had placed the shooter, I thought, making a note. “OK, then what?”
“Then I saw him coming out, and I got out of the car with the gun. I called him. He started coming over, and I guess I shot him. I jumped back into the car and we split. They dropped me off and I went back into the house.”
“Did you see anyone else in the lot?”
“Some guy,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “Looked like a waiter or something. He was dumping garbage.”
For the next half-hour, I questioned him intensely about the details of the shooting. Every answer he gave was consistent with what the police had reported in their investigation. By the time we finished, I had little choice but to believe Michael Ruiz had murdered Gus Peña, but some part of me still doubted. I was still clinging to my original assessment of him as a punk dangerous only to himself; he lacked the metallic hardness I associated with murderers.
“You gotta get me a deal,” he said again.
“If what you say is true,” I told him, “then you haven’t left me much room to deal in.”
“
You don’t believe me?”
“I’ve sat in a lot of rooms with killers,” I said. “You don’t seem like a killer to me.”
“Check it out,” he said, laughing to himself. “My lawyer thinks I’m innocent.”
I got up. “Yeah, it’s funny all right, except that you may be going to prison for a long time.”
His face darkened. “I ain’t afraid of that.”
“You think about that carefully, Michael. We’ll talk tomorrow at the arraignment.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FROM THE JAIL, I drove back to my office for a meeting with my investigator, Freeman Vidor. He was just getting out of his car, and I pulled up behind him. He stood on the sidewalk, watching a girl in a purple halter and matching pumps shimmy down Sunset waving at passing cars.
“I could use a little of that,” he said, appreciatively.
I watched her sway toward the corner. “It’s not like you’d have to ask her Dad’s permission for a date.”
On the way up to my office, he said, “You see the girls out here all day long. Don’t you even get a little curious?”
“I satisfied my curiosity about girls when I was six years old and played doctor with Monica Parra. I saw what she had and I saw what I had, and I liked mine better.”
He held open the door for me. “Six, huh? They get better when they grow up.”
“I’ll have to take your word on that.”
“Hey, beautiful thing,” he said to Emma as we passed her desk.
She lifted her hair from her computer. “Hey, yourself.” To me, she said, “Josh called, said to tell you he would stop by the house tonight.”
“Thanks. You want some coffee, Freeman?” I asked, ducking into the kitchen.
“Yeah, black and sweet as Emma.”
“You are so full of shit,” I heard Emma tell him as I poured the coffee, wondering why Josh was coming by. I hadn’t seen him since the night Steven had gone into the hospital.
Freeman was in my office sitting on the couch, lighting a cigarette. I handed him his coffee and sat down next to him, opened my briefcase and got out my notes from my interview with Michael Ruiz.
“I see you got yourself another page-one case,” he said.