by Pete Salgado
“I’m gonna leave her,” Alejandra said. “I can’t do this.” And that’s exactly what she did. After her meeting with Jen, she ended things with Elena and moved back to Mexico.
Meanwhile, Jen was left with this bombshell and Elena’s phone in hand. As she stared at those photos, she kept thinking that this was someone she had considered one of her best friends, someone she had brought into the fold as one of her own, someone she had entrusted with her family. She was completely floored and drove home livid.
The very next day Jenni called a meeting between Elena, herself, and me at Jerry’s Deli down the street from her home. I had no idea what was going on and had driven over there assuming that Jen wanted to open up some more about her marital problems with Esteban, as she had done the last time we met at that same deli. However, when I strolled in with Elena, I knew something was up. As we approached Jen, who was standing there in her red and black Jordan tracksuit, she stared in our direction with teary and enraged eyes. We snagged a booth, sat down, and glanced at one another as an ominous silence hovered over us like daggers. Jen was trying to keep it together, struggling to figure out how to best approach the situation, but she couldn’t hold it in any longer and let loose on Elena with every ounce of her accumulated rage.
“How could you? How could you screw around with my daughter?”
Elena sat with a dumbfounded look on her face, as if the wind had been knocked right out of her lungs, while I just sat there flabbergasted at the new drama unfolding before my eyes.
“I know all about it,” Jen said, furious. “Alejandra showed me pictures and messages on your phone—so don’t deny it.”
“I screwed up,” muttered Elena, blind-sided, with no chance of denial. “It only happened once. It was a long time ago.”
By “it” Elena was referring to an alleged interaction a while back where Chiquis had gone over to Elena’s home for dinner, they’d had one drink too many, and ended the night with a kiss. At least that’s the story Elena told Jen.
“It only happened once?! A long time ago? Bitch, I’ve only known you for two years,” screamed Jen in disbelief. Then she reached into her hoodie’s pocket and hurled a fistful of Elena’s jewelry across the table. “I don’t need anything from you. You’re a disgusting person and I want nothing to do with you. I have been down this road before and it hurts, but I’ll get through this as I always do,” she stated adamantly, then quickly glanced at her coffee cup, looked at me, and added, “Pete, you got this?”
I nodded and she stood up and left without so much as looking at Elena again. All I could think as I stared at the jewelry and at Elena was What the hell just happened!? Now it was my turn to gather myself. It was clear that Jen had felt wronged, and I always had her back, so I looked at Elena and, as she stared back at me like the proverbial deer in the headlights, I said, “How could you do that? She trusted you.”
“It was nothing. It happened a long time ago,” she stammered again.
“Elena—you screwed up,” I stated as I got up, left $5 on the table, and walked out.
Meanwhile, Jen had driven back home and immediately confronted Chiquis, but she denied it all, accusing Jen of acting nuts. “Why did you take Pete and not me?!” Chiquis demanded to know. “I’m your daughter, not him.” Her outbursts were meaningless to Jen, who already had Elena’s confession, so then Chiquis called me. “You don’t believe her, do you?!” she asked.
“I don’t know what to believe, Chiquis. Either way, I think it’s inappropriate.” What was crystal clear was that Elena Jimenez, Jen’s best friend and confidant, had been kicked out of the inner circle for good: loss number two.
Esteban Loaiza
As if losing Elena wasn’t enough, Jen was in for an even bigger surprise that year, one that would signify the final nail in the coffin of her marriage with Esteban, and the most crushing blow of her life.
It was September 2012, and Jen was working on the buildout of her soon-to-be dream-come-true boutique. Julie, her assistant, texted Jen while driving to her house, letting her know the guy who was installing the cameras at the boutique needed a deposit in order to start his work. Once Julie had arrived, she walked into Jen’s bedroom, while Jen went to her safe to grab the cash, since she’d just run out of checks. However, when Jen came back, instead of cash, she just had a completely baffled look on her face.
“Jules, ask him if he can start with two thousand dollars,” she said quietly, brows furrowed in a state of utter confusion.
“I’m sure he can, but why can’t we do the full deposit? What’s wrong?” asked Julie.
“I don’t have any money,” she said.
“What do you mean?” asked Julie, equally confused, as she had recently helped her put away some cash in the safe and other spots around the room.
“I have four thousand dollars, and I wanted to give my mom money, but I have no money to give. Take half and see what you can do. I’m going to my mom’s.”
Jen kept replaying the last few months over and over again in her mind the rest of the day. There were only three people who knew the combination to Jen’s safe: Jen, Julie, and Jen’s cousin, Tere, her home office assistant. In fact, she’d had the combination changed when Chiquis moved out earlier that year, so not even Chiquis had access to her savings. Additionally, a couple of months earlier, in July 2012, sometime around her birthday, Jen and I had spent four hours counting all her earnings from her tours, so she and I both knew that two months earlier there had been well over $900,000 in that safe. Where did all that loot go between July and September? Something was crazy wrong. Jen didn’t want to think it was Julie, but she also didn’t know what to think. Then she started suspecting Esteban. The night before, she had finally asked him for some space, having been feeling that their marriage had been off kilter for a while. So he went to his mother’s and took a small piece of luggage with him. She’d assumed it held his belongings, but now she wasn’t so sure.
The following morning, when Julie arrived at the house, Jen asked her to go up to Esteban’s man cave and look around.
“Look for what?” Julie asked.
“I don’t know, but I have a feeling you will find something,” Jen said, now on a mission to get to the bottom of the mysterious disappearance of her cash.
Julie agreed, went upstairs, and turned the man cave upside down, coming across endless binders filled with Esteban’s account statements. As she flipped through them, she quickly noticed that he had blown through all his money. There were also IRS letters and other receipts. She was shuffling through everything when she noticed an envelope hiding behind an old shoe box. When she grabbed it she immediately saw the safe’s combination scribbled down in Esteban’s handwriting, with exact instructions, “Number, turn left three times, number, turn right.” She brought this piece of paper to Jen, who simply said, “Dumbass couldn’t just write the numbers, he had to write the damn instructions too.”
That’s when they reached out to me, and I in turn contacted our lawyer, Anthony, and filled him in on what was going on. After hearing all the details, Anthony decided to send someone to fingerprint the safe. The more evidence we could gather, the better. When the lady arrived at Jen’s house, they mentioned the envelope, but in order to fingerprint it, it would have to go through a specific chemical that would inevitably destroy the paper, so we all decided against that. Instead, Julie went out and bought a smaller safe, put the envelope in a Ziploc bag, and Jen stored it in the new safe, feeling that her old one had now been completely compromised.
There was only one thing left to do: review the surveillance footage. Jen had surveillance cameras set up throughout the house, so she decided to grab the video and start reviewing about a week back, unaware that what she was about to see would wreck her heart. As she glanced through the footage, one specific moment caught her attention, so she paused, rewound, and carefully observed the image sequence. The light in her bedroom bathroom was on, and she saw two people going into her huge walk-in
closet. The closet lights were off, so it was impossible to see exactly what happened in there, but it was clear that the two people walked out of the closet thirty-nine minutes later. What blew Jen’s mind was that the two people leaving the room, the two people who had just spent thirty-nine minutes in her closet, in the dark, were none other than Chiquis and Esteban. Her heart stopped. The next shot was one of Chiquis leaving the room, crossing the hallway, walking down the stairs and out the front door. Shortly after, Esteban can be seen going into the bathroom. If that bathroom light hadn’t been on, Jen would’ve never noticed this strange and agonizing sequence of events.
As if all this weren’t enough, Jen noticed that this little stint in the closet had gone down on the same night Jen was listening to Alejandra as she spilled the beans on the whole Elena and Chiquis affair. Then, in addition to this troublesome discovery, she also found footage of Esteban going into her safe, taking bricks of cash, and stuffing them into a black Prada bag. Suddenly tangled in a web of lies and deception, she wasn’t sure what to tackle first. She paused and then called me.
“I’m going to file for divorce. The minute I have the paperwork we’ll drive to San Diego, where his family lives. Will you serve him his papers?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” I said, ready to do whatever was necessary to help my sister out.
A woman of action, Jen filed for divorce on October 1, and we drove down to serve him on October 2. It was his mother’s birthday, so she had already previously arranged this visit, but Esteban had no idea what was about to hit him. Clueless, he simply thought Jen was driving down to have dinner with him and help celebrate his mom’s day. Meanwhile, Jen had also asked her Mexican lawyer, Mario Macías, to fly to San Diego, so he could be there with us when it all went down, and he did.
I drove on our way over there while Jen quietly sat by my side in the passenger’s seat, focused on the message she was drafting. At one point, I interrupted her, as I felt the urge to tell her something. Chiquis and Jen had been on the outs for a while, so I knew what I was about to say could cost me, but I wanted to be frank with her.
“I want you to know that I considered working with Chiquis.”
She stopped what she was doing, rested her back against the car door, stared at me, and said, “Okay …”
“I met with her at my house and also met with Angel,” I continued. Angel was Chiquis’s boyfriend at the time. I explained that I thought Chiquis definitely had potential and could do something, but in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to leave my friend for her daughter.
Jen’s eyes softened as she smiled and said, “I know you, and I knew you wouldn’t leave me.”
I didn’t want to cause her any more pain, but I also didn’t want to take any part in the web of lies and deception that surrounded her. She was my sister by choice and I always wanted to do right by her.
After clearing the air, we picked up Mario, and, as we drove the last stretch to Esteban’s house, Jen turned her attention back to her phone. She was furiously drafting an e-mail to Esteban and Chiquis, with one subject line: “You should have turned the lights off.” She took the time to detail everything she saw on the tape, revised it three times, and read it out loud to us in the car. Those thirty-nine minutes killed my friend. Those were the thirty-nine minutes that managed to pulverize her world and her heart.
As we neared Esteban’s house, Jen laid out the plan. “I’ll go into his house and when I’m ready, I’ll text you and Mario, and then you guys ring the doorbell.”
Jen got out of the car, walked up to the main entrance, and rang the doorbell and his parents let her in. Esteban was out running an errand, so Jen excused herself, pretending she needed to use the bathroom, but as she headed down the hallway, she snuck into Esteban’s room and started grabbing all the jewelry she could get her hands on. “The asshole stole from me? Well, Imma steal from his ass.” No way was he going to get away with it all without suffering the wrath of Jenni. Meanwhile, Mario and I noticed Esteban’s Lamborghini pulling around the corner, so we got ready, knowing all hell was about to break loose.
A few minutes after he stepped into his house, we got the text from Jen to make our move. When the door opened, Jen let Esteban have it. “I know everything, you piece of shit.” He stared back at her in a daze, not knowing exactly what she was talking about. Then Jen turned and addressed his family, given that they had been so adamant about her signing a prenup. “Did you know that your prince of a son has been stealing money from me?” she asked his mom. And then she proceeded to tell them everything, from the footage of him stealing, to the paper with the combination in his writing, and the mysterious time he spent with her daughter in the closet. She wanted to make sure they knew what their freeloading son had been up to those past few months; she wanted them to feel ashamed for having raised someone like him in this world.
Esteban’s only response to Jen’s outrage was, “I got my own money.” Then, Jen pulled out her wedding photo and handed it to Esteban’s mom. “Here—all yours. So you can remember.” Meanwhile, I tried to serve him the divorce papers, but he didn’t want to take them from me. He followed Jen outside and threw the photo at us, aggression pouring out of his pores, as if he were on the brink of hitting her. His mom followed him outside, screaming and calling Jen names. “¡Puta! Our son has no reason to steal from anyone! We raised a good son!”
Then I turned to Esteban and said, “Let it go,” trying to keep him at bay. “It’s over.” And with that, I gave him the papers and we left. Once we were in the car, Jen showed us she had also made out with his iPad, which now she had good reason to believe was likely paid for with her own money. As she was showing it to us, we noticed it was still connected to his iPhone and, thanks to the synergy of Apple products, we saw Esteban was texting Chiquis. “Delete my messages. Your mom is on to us,” read his text.
That was it, that was the final straw that broke this camel’s back. Jen went absolutely ape-shit. She opened the e-mail she’d been drafting on the drive down and hit send with zero qualms and no remorse. Moments later our phones started blowing up. I began getting calls from Angel, Juan, Chiquis, and Esteban. Nonstop. Everyone wanted to tell me Jenni was crazy, but no one wanted to believe or even be sympathetic to her. In the two hours it took us to get home, the fire had been ignited and lines were drawn in the sand. The family was divided and so was the team. Loss number three was disappointing and embittering, but loss number four was the final blow.
Chapter 11
Paloma Negra
Losing a man wasn’t a big deal for Jen, but losing a daughter was unthinkable. The pain she felt by Chiquis’s betrayal was seeded with profound and unquestionable love. In order to understand the depths of this agony, you must first understand their deep-seated bond.
Chiquis was so much more than Jen’s first-born. She was her beloved daughter, her best friend, and her sergeant at home. Since Jen was only sixteen when she had her, their relationship didn’t follow the traditional mother and daughter roles. They’d been in the trenches together, dealing with abuse and poverty, learning from their mistakes, celebrating each success, and building a bond based on trust and transparency. So when Jen decided to give her musical career a real shot, when she decided to take herself seriously as an artist, when she realized there was a business opportunity within arm’s reach for her to do what she loved and make a living out of it, she dove in head first, while Chiquis held down the fort at home. By this time, it wasn’t just the two of them. Jen already had another four children in tow, so Chiquis’s support was invaluable.
While Jen was out on tour, building her career and providing for her family, Chiquis was at home tending to her siblings’ needs. Unknowingly, Jen had slowly taken on the dad’s role in the family, working long hours to put food on the table, and Chiquis naturally gravitated to the mom’s role, taking care of the kids and managing the money at home. Mind you, we’re not talking about a grown woman here, we’re talking about a young girl taking
on these adult responsibilities to lend a helping hand to her hardworking mom. While Jen went off to work, Chiquis sacrificed going to college to support her family. Chiquis was actually the one who allowed Jen to become the star everyone knows and loves. Jen couldn’t have done it without her.
Not only did Chiquis hold down the fort at home, she also served as her mom’s stylist, driving downtown to buy Jen’s costume jewelry and clothing, making sure to pick out the most figure-flattering dresses for her mom. And Jen trusted and relied on her blindly. Chiquis was without a doubt her right hand for many years and she knew her mom inside and out. So much so that when I joined Jen’s team, if I had a question and Jen wasn’t available to answer it, I’d turn to Chiquis, who was always there, sharp and bubbly, ready to provide the necessary information for all of us to get the job done.
Chiquis was Jen’s everything. Now, this doesn’t mean their relationship was not without its own strains. One time, yearning for her independence like any normal teenager, Chiquis dropped everything and ran away from home. She sought shelter with her Tío Lupillo, a decision that was a direct jab at Jen. It almost felt intentional because Chiquis knew all too well how difficult it was for Jen to deal with Lupillo’s lack of support for her career, so that move definitely hurt her. To Chiquis’s credit, in seeking her independence and running away, she did try to break away from her family by getting a job at the mall; however, Lupillo ended up putting her up at one of his apartments and made sure she was cared for financially. Jen was seething inside. It was difficult to watch her partner in crime cross that line and, out of all people, go to Lupillo for help. Hoping to ease her pain, I often reminded Jen that he was still her uncle, and it was better she reached out to him than a stranger off the street, but I’m not sure how much that helped her deal with this situation.
Nevertheless, their bond was so strong that two months later, mother and daughter reconciled and, although Jen had made a few changes and had hired a personal assistant, Chiquis stepped right back into her role as house manager, caregiver, daughter, sister, and princess. No matter what they went through, no matter the ups and downs, the fights, the rebellions, Jen absolutely adored her children. She considered her sons princes and her daughters princesses, and often called them prince and princess endearingly.