by David Ellis
I couldn’t speak, or at least I couldn’t focus on what Hector was saying. My mind was spinning now, trying to build a story, layer one fact upon another.
“Let’s talk first thing in the morning? Okay, Counselor? Sound like a plan? Let’s have breakfast at Apple Jacks, eight-thirty. Carl’s going to make this up to you, Jason, I’ll make sure of it. Okay?”
I didn’t reply. I killed the cell phone and paced the kitchen, playing a game of what-if in my mind, recognizing holes in my logic but feeling in my gut that I could plug them up with additional information.
I tried it from different angles, questioning myself, playing devil’s advocate, but I kept coming to the same conclusions. I was short on a couple of facts but I knew they were true, even if I didn’t know. I was sure of it.
I felt my senses slowing, my mind shifting to a dead-alert focus. My limbs were trembling with rage.
What do you plan to do when you figure it out? Essie Ramirez had asked me.
So what’s the plan, J? Joel Lightner had said. When you figure out who killed Ernesto? You going to kill that person?
I felt everything break down, all of the walls I’d built up crumbling like a house of cards. Maybe that was a good analogy. Maybe I’d been kidding myself that I could get past this. I thought I’d done so. I thought I’d moved on. I missed my wife and daughter, but I was putting it behind me. I told myself the guilt I felt would ultimately harden, would become a permanent scar but one that would fade with each passing day.
I was backsliding and I didn’t care. How familiar and comfortable it felt, the self-destructive rage and bitterness. This is who you are. The guy who picked fights on the schoolyard with guys twice your size. The guy who blew his ride at State, his career in football, just so he could prove to the team captain how tough he was. Wanting to lash out and hurt, fully knowing the hurt would be returned twice over, wanting that hurt, seeking it out.
This is who you are.
I went upstairs to my bedroom. In the closet, top shelf, I found my old badge from the county attorney’s office. I’d thought I lost it once and had to put in for a replacement. I’d paid a heavy price for doing so—a week’s pay—the prosecutor’s office not having a sense of humor about official badges making their way into the public domain, and when I found it later, my replacement already in my wallet, I figured I’d already paid for the right to keep the original issue. So I did, even when I left my job as an ACA and turned in my replacement badge.
I had a gun, too, which I hardly knew how to use. I’d had the bare amount of training and even spent an afternoon at the FBI shooting range, a Friday perk for us low-paid, hard-working prosecutors, but I hadn’t handled this thing for more than four years and I wasn’t sure I could hit a mountain from a distance of two feet with this weapon at this point.
I didn’t have a plan, either, except that I wasn’t going to wait any longer.
Now I knew. I finally knew. The only remaining question was what I would do about it.
83
IT STARTED TO RAIN AS I DROVE, MASSIVE TEARDROPS splatting my windshield. Dark and stormy seemed appropriate. I was growing cold inside as I worked through everything I knew, feeling like it was all coming up in one direction, no matter how I played it; growing cold as I did math that I knew didn’t add up: If it wasn’t for Adalbert Wozniak’s murder, there’d be no Ernesto Ramirez. If there hadn’t been Ernesto Ramirez, I wouldn’t have been waiting for him that night to call me. If Ernesto hadn’t been murdered, my wife and child would not have traveled alone.
Alone on a night like this, I thought, not cold but rainy, slippery, poor visibility.
I was past the why questions I’d asked for so long afterward. Why didn’t Talia scrap the trip when it started raining so hard? Why didn’t she slow down at the curve? I was past it as a pure function of a time cushion, and I was past it because I knew I was just transferring, because I was bitter and angry and everyone was to blame, me included but not alone.
I took deep breaths as the blackness mounted, coloring everything around me. I was trembling, white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel, my teeth grinding so furiously that I was tasting blood on my tongue.
I’d never been to this place, this townhouse, but I had the address courtesy of Joel Lightner. It wasn’t hard to find. The area had exploded in the last few years, before the housing bubble burst, but these were not the homeowners who defaulted on their loans and left their homes in disarray. This was the near-west side, the lofts and condos all new, purchased by the young professionals and artists.
I stood next to the mailbox, a cold shower of rain pelting me, forcing me to squint as I peered at the three-story home. At two in the morning, all the interior lights in the townhouse were out. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and dialed the number. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
I hung up. Then I dialed it again.
A light went on up on the third floor, presumably the bedroom. That’s really all I needed to know.
“Yeah, hello? Jason?”
“Hey,” I said into my cell phone. My voice was even and flat. “I think the reception was bad on the phone before. Just wanted to tell you, I’m not going to say anything to anybody.”
I could hear Hector clearing his throat, shaking out the cobwebs. “Okay, good. That’s good. Hey, breakfast tomorrow, eight-thirty? Apple Jacks?”
“Breakfast tomorrow.” I punched out the cell phone.
Five seconds later, the light went out in the third-floor bedroom again.
Hector was down for the night, sleeping more peacefully now that I had reassured him that I would not divulge the secret held by Hector’s political coattails, Governor Carlton Snow. I wondered how often Hector stayed out here at this townhouse. For a guy who liked to keep his private life private, I suppose it made more sense to stay at his partner’s place, not the other way around. He probably parked his car in a garage, maybe slinked out in the early morning hours before anyone could see him. Or maybe he figured he was sufficiently anonymous out here in the artsy-yuppie near-west side, several miles from the legislative district he used to represent.
I looked at the mailbox marked D. BAILEY. According to Joel Lightner, Delroy Bailey had moved here after his divorce from Joey Espinoza’s sister. Lightner, in his typical flair for completeness, had even noted the grounds for divorce in the petition filed by Joey’s sister: irreconcilable differences. Yeah, I guess it’s pretty irreconcilable when your husband is gay.
If it wasn’t hard for me, it wouldn’t have been hard for Adalbert Wozniak, either. He was claiming that he’d been treated unfairly by the Procurement and Construction Board when the beverage contract was given to Delroy’s company over his own. Did he actually figure out that someone very close to the PCB, Hector, was sleeping with the contract award winner? My guess was no. If Wozniak had gotten that far, there would have been some documentation of his finding. But no doubt, in his lawsuit, he was going to seek depositions of the interested parties, including Delroy Bailey. Wozniak and his lawyers would be sniffing around, and Hector would be in jeopardy. The story, from Hector’s viewpoint, would be devastating. Not merely allegations of influence peddling—politicians live with those accusations all the time—but something that would be far more controversial to someone who was, at the time, seeking the Democratic nomination for the office of attorney general. It would be hard enough to become the first Latino statewide officeholder; the first Latino and gay statewide officeholder would probably be too much.
What had Hector said tonight about Governor Snow? He’s finished, if word got out about his sexual preferences. Hector would have thought the same thing about himself. He was looking at a revelation that would end his statewide political ambitions. He didn’t know that was coming, anyway, thanks to a federal indictment. He didn’t know the feds were all over him, that they had flipped Joey Espinoza and were investigating the Columbus Street Cannibals.
What to do with Adalbert Wozniak, the ma
n who could ruin him? Hector didn’t turn to the Cannibals. He didn’t know them. He admitted as much to me last night in the limo. The Cannibals shakedown was his idea, but he needed Joey Espinoza to deliver the message, to orchestrate everything with the Cannibals. And Hector couldn’t turn to Joey for the Wozniak problem. He couldn’t very well tell Joey, I’m sleeping with your ex-brother-in-law, and it’s about to be exposed if we don’t kill this Polish guy.
So he turned to a different street gang, the one that didn’t dominate his legislative district, that wouldn’t be so easily connected to him. He went straight to the top. He went to Kiko, the top assassin for the Latin Lords. He needed Adalbert Wozniak dead to keep him quiet.
To cover up Hector’s connection to Delroy.
Hector. Hidden in plain sight, right in front of me. I must have missed about fifty clues along the way. An attorney’s instinct, I guess, for his own client.
The moments shot out at me now like asteroids from my subconscious: During Hector’s trial, when I told Hector and Paul Riley about this witness I liked, Ernesto Ramirez, a guy who seemed to know something and who was close to the Latin Lords. Maybe the Lords killed Wozniak, I said. Why would they do that? Hector responded, doing a very good job of playing dumb. I might as well have signed Ernesto’s death warrant at that moment.
And the night my world changed, as I waited impatiently in my office for a call from Ernesto Ramirez. The call from Paul Riley, asking me why I was still at the office, and my response—that I was waiting on this witness, this long-shot, Ernesto. Hector in the background with Paul, laughing, knowing that the call from Ernesto would never come, knowing that I’d sit there all night.
I reached into my trench coat pocket and felt the gun, caressed it, pondered it.
The rest made sense, too. Greg Connolly was the chair of the PCB. He’d been the one Hector turned to for the favor, skipping over Adalbert Wozniak’s company to give the beverage contract to Delroy Bailey and Starlight Catering. Surely Greg was aware of the lawsuit filed by Wozniak’s company. Surely it gave him some amount of unrest, at the very least, to know that a legal process was under way to sniff around this sordid affair. And surely, it caught his attention when the plaintiff in that lawsuit, Bert Wozniak, wound up dead from multiple gunshot wounds.
Did Greg know that Hector was behind the Wozniak murder? Hector wouldn’t have had to say it outright, though he might have. Hector liked to flex his muscles. I wouldn’t put it past him to tell Connolly straight up. Or just as likely, something vague enough for Hector to take credit without making an admission—Took care of that problem or Don’t worry about that thing.
Did Greg know about Ernesto Ramirez, too? Hard to say, but I assumed so. Probably when Hector first heard the name from me, he reached out to Greg to see if he knew anything. This was in the heat of a trial whose headline charge was the Wozniak murder. Hector would have panicked upon learning that someone knew the truth about that murder.
The irony is that Ernesto Ramirez didn’t know that Hector was the bad guy. Ernesto and his friend Scarface assumed it was Delroy’s former brother-in-law, Joey Espinoza, who got Delroy the contract. Ernesto had no idea about a gay relationship between Delroy and Hector. He thought the “connection to Delroy” that Bert Wozniak was going to expose was the ex-brother-in-law relationship between Delroy Bailey and Joey.
But Hector didn’t know that. All he knew, thanks to me, was that there was a guy out there who seemed to know something about the murder of Bert Wozniak, which included—again, thanks to my speculation—the involvement of the Latin Lords street gang, Kiko’s gang. Hector would have been desperate to silence Ernesto. And he used another person who would be just as desperate, Kiko, to carry it out.
Greg Connolly might not have known every detail but he would have known enough. If he had any brains, he’d know that Hector had Wozniak taken out. Same for Ernesto Ramirez. So what was Hector to think when, one day, he discovered that Mr. Gregory Connolly was wearing a wire for the federal government? I mean, killing an aide to the governor is no small thing, but murder to cover up two other murders is less of a leap. What did he have to lose at that point? If Greg was flapping his mouth about Adalbert Wozniak and Delroy Bailey and Ernesto Ramirez, then on a risk-reward calculation, the pros of killing Greg Connolly far outweighed the cons.
Charlie Cimino, of course, was all around the PCB back then, too. Surely he knew all about the Delroy Bailey contract. He and Hector were two of the main pigs feeding at that trough. So one of them figured out about Greg wearing a wire—I don’t know which—and told the other. Then they jumped Greg and did a little water boarding routine on him to find out what he’d told the federal government before they killed him and dumped him on Seagram Hill. Had Greg told the feds about Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez? I didn’t know. But either way, Hector couldn’t let Greg just walk away and carry on as a snitch for the government. Greg had to die.
One of them—again, I didn’t know which—also decided that I might be a threat, and treated me to the same fun-filled question-and-answer session. Only I managed to pass and live another day. They’d have been far better off killing me that night.
Regardless, it was Hector calling the shots, not Charlie. That was clear to me now. I didn’t know where he got those guys working me over, but they were his guys, not Charlie’s.
I never thought of Hector as “above” Charlie, and in many senses he was not. But he had the ear of the governor, and even if he wasn’t respected by anyone else in the inner circle, he was probably feared because the governor seemed to listen to him as much as anyone.
My fingers formed around the gun in my pocket. I looked up at the bedroom on the third floor, where Hector Almundo was sleeping peacefully next to Delroy Bailey. My entire body—every limb, every muscle—ached from the tension, the flowing rage.
“Have a nice sleep, Senator,” I whispered. Doing this right now, it would let him off too easily.
I released the grip on the gun. I headed back to the car and drove off, mindful of the speed limit, focused now on the last stop I would make tonight.
To the home of the man who carried out Hector’s wet work, who killed Adalbert Wozniak, Ernesto Ramirez, and Greg Connolly.
84
THE SKIES EASED UP AS I DROVE, THE PELTING RAIN turning to soft drops. The roads were empty and I was making good time, not that it mattered. I was doing math that didn’t add up, logic that had no linear path. The law does not permit unlimited cause and effect. A guy commits a crime, you can’t blame his mother for giving birth to him, even though if she hadn’t, the crime wouldn’t have been committed. The law talks about “proximate cause,” meaning reasonably foreseeable cause and effect. But there was probably nothing reasonable about my thinking right now.
It was a song I’d been singing, I realized, since this whole thing started. If he hadn’t killed Wozniak, Ernesto Ramirez wouldn’t have mattered. And if he hadn’t killed Ernesto, I would have taken that trip with my wife. Different parts of my brain were battling this out but it was clear who was winning, who had won in a knockout.
By the time I pulled up in the alley that ran behind a line of houses including Kiko’s, the rain had stopped. My chest was heaving. Everything was dark. The rain in my hair, on my wet coat and collar, felt like ice water.
I got out and closed the car door, which made a recognizable noise but probably one so familiar as to be innocuous, even at two in the morning.
I moved down the alley, thinking about obstacles. Probably a guy at his rank in the Latin Lords had a security system. Probably a guy like Kiko had several weapons at his disposal, too.
I stopped when I was positioned in the alley so that I could see the back of Kiko’s house. The light downstairs was on. Through a sliding glass door I could see him, sitting on the carpet, his back against the couch, alternating lights emanating from a television set. So, even if he had an alarm system, it probably wasn’t armed. And he seemed to be alone, consistent with my int
el from Joel Lightner that he lived by himself.
I didn’t have a definitive plan, and nothing particularly effective. Misdirection always works. Ring his front doorbell, maybe have something outside his front door—a note or something, to make him actually leave the house, occupy his attention on the front porch—while running around to the back of the house and breaking in, ready to surprise him when he returns. There was a side window, as well, probably to a bedroom, as an alternative point of entry.
All of those made sense, until the calculator started tabulating in my head again, as I watched Federico “Kiko” Hurtado lazily stretched out on his floor watching something on the tube. The man who took everything from me, from Essie Ramirez, from Adalbert Wozniak’s and Greg Connolly’s families, was resting in the comfort of his own home watching some inane sitcom or infomercial or soft-core porn.
Those other ideas would work, the misdirection. But other ways were effective, as well, especially if you had nothing to lose.
My walk was steady, one deliberate step after the other, but I found myself picking up the pace as I crossed his backyard and removed the gun from my pocket. I took an angle head-on toward the sliding glass door, out of his sight line, seeing only his outstretched legs. I raised the gun as I approached. When I was within about ten, nine, now five yards, I started shooting.
The bullets splintered the glass in five spiderwebs, one of them wildly apart from the others but the other four close enough to compromise the glass’s integrity. I lowered my shoulder and crashed through, just as Kiko’s feet began to move. I kicked out my leg with everything I had to complete my entry, to get my legs inside. I had the gun trained on him before he’d had the chance to react.
He looked up at me. His matted hair and puffy, unfocused eyes told me he’d been asleep. The multiple beer bottles lying sideways and the odor of cannabis told me that it had been an intoxicated slumber. Good for me. A guy quick on his feet might have had the chance to at least get some headway toward another room and, at that point, a real chance at escape. But none of that mattered now.