Rag and Bone

by Michael Nava

  Inside, there was a surprisingly long-winded message from Dr. Hayward that amounted to asking how I was doing. Hearing him, I realized that I hadn’t exercised in two days. I explained to Angel that I had go down to the high school to run and he asked if he could come with me. I agreed because I needed to ask him about the gun, and it would be easier in a setting where I was not so obviously interrogating him. I took to heart what John had told me about letting Angel be a kid. I didn’t want to rob him of the opportunity if I could help it.

  The light had softened and shadows began to fall across the track. A grove of eucalyptus trees released their rainy scent into the dusty air. On the football field, a group of brown-skinned men shouting to one another in Spanish were kicking around a soccer ball.

  “I don’t run very fast yet,” I told Angel. “So don’t race me.”

  He grinned. “You ’fraid I could beat you?”

  “I’m sure of it, m’ijo. Let’s do our warm-ups.”

  We plopped down on a corner of the field away from the soccer players. Angel watched me stretch and imitated what he saw. He was as limber as a cat, and showed off by grabbing the soles of his feet while I struggled to touch my toes. As I leaned over, my pendant swung free.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  I pulled it over my head and dropped it into his hand. “It’s a heart,” I said. “My friend Edith gave it to me after I came home from the hospital. For luck.”

  He held it in front of his face. “Is it a ruby?”

  “No, I think she said it was called red jasper.”

  He looked at me. “How come you were in the hospital?”

  “I had a heart attack,” I said. “My heart wasn’t getting enough blood because there was some stuff in the veins, so it stopped working for a minute.” I got up. “That’s why I have to run, to keep my heart healthy.”

  He looked anxious. “Are you okay now, Uncle Henry?”

  “As long as I take care of myself. You like it?” I asked, referring to the pendant.

  “It’s cool.”

  “Keep it,” I said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, now let’s get started.”

  He hung the pendant around his neck and trotted beside me. I went slowly, but my legs were considerably longer than his and it was a struggle for him to keep up. After three laps, I slowed to a walk, as much for my sake as his.

  “You’re too much for me,” I said. “Let’s walk the last lap.”

  “How far did we run? Five miles?”

  “Three-quarters of a mile.”

  He smirked in disbelief. The pendant hung around his neck almost to his belly button. I would have to shorten the cord. Edith had told me always to keep it as a spare unless I met a special man. Angel qualified. He was practically skipping beside me. I remembered that I needed to ask him about the gun. I hated to spoil the moment, but there would never be a moment that it didn’t spoil.

  “Angel, I have to ask you a couple of questions about the shooting.”

  His pace slowed. “Like what?”

  “Do you remember you told me you saw a gun in the room?”

  He answered reluctantly. “Yeah.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “If I’m going to help your mom in court, I have to understand everything that happened that night. That’s the only reason I’m asking you these questions. Not to upset you.”

  “Okay,” he said, shaking me off.

  “The police say they didn’t find a gun. Are you sure you saw one?”

  “Uh-huh, it was by my dad.”

  “When you were in the room, where was your mother?”

  “She was on the floor.” He flinched as he replied. He was seeing the room.

  “Did your mother say anything to you?”

  We walked a few more steps before he answered. “She told me to call you, but the phone was pulled out of the wall.” He flinched, remembering. “I ran to the gas station.”

  “When she told you to call me, was she upset?”

  “She was hurt,” he whispered.

  “And when you left, the gun was still there?”

  He ran ahead of me. I let him go. His posture said it all: the little soldier. I knew what had happened to the gun. When I caught up with him at the finish line, he was crying and I saw the fear in his face that I had seen the night of the killing. It hurt me that I had brought it back, but there was no other way. I knelt down so we were at eye level and wiped his face with my T-shirt.

  “What did you do with the gun, m’ijo?”

  “I hid it,” he blubbered.

  “Did your mom ask you to do that?”

  He shook his head. “No. I was trying to help her.”

  “I know you were.”

  He shook. “Are you mad at me, Uncle Henry?”

  I hugged him to me and said, “No, m’ijo, I’m not mad at you. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he whispered.

  I let him go. “Come on, then, let’s go get the gun.”

  We drove to the Arco where I had picked him up. I told him to wait for me in the car while I went into the minimart and bought a carton of sandwich baggies. Then he led me around the side of the station and pointed to the drainpipe. Gloving my hand with a baggie, I reached into the pipe, touched metal and slowly extracted the gun by its butt. I looked at it and then at him.

  “This is it, Angel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you found this beside your dad?”

  He nodded.

  I slipped the gun into another baggie, jammed it into my waistband and covered it with my T-shirt.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you for telling me, Angel. For now, this is just between you and me, okay? I don’t want anyone else to know, not your mother and not John.”

  He nodded understanding, ready to keep our secret. I wondered how many more he was keeping. I wondered if one of them was that he knew this wasn’t the gun that had killed his father.

  I locked the gun in the safe in my office before John returned carrying a gym bag with his clothes for the next day, a sack of Chinese takeout and Field of Dreams, which he explained to Angel and me was his favorite movie. Ever. I taught Angel how to use chopsticks and we sat around the dining table passing around the little white cartons, not even bothering with plates. Angel showed John the pendant I had given him and John adjusted the length of the cord. He showed Angel the small gold crucifix he wore, which made me remember how it looked in the thicket of his chest hair when he was naked. He caught the look in my eye and grinned.

  “Uncle Henry doesn’t have a necklace,” Angel said.

  “We’ll have to get him one for his birthday,” John said. “When is your birthday, Henry?”

  “September fourth. When is yours?”

  “November seventeenth. When is yours, m’ijo?”

  “October fifth,” he said proudly. “September,” he said, pointing at me, and then “October,” pointing at himself and then to John, “November.”

  John raised his glass of Coke. “Feliz cumpleaños a todos.”

  We touched glasses. “Happy birthday!”

  I had forgotten all about the gun and the questions it raised.

  Much later, I watched John emerge from the bathroom wearing only his crucifix. He paused at the foot of the bed, scooped up the bedding that had been kicked to the floor and dumped it on the bed.

  “Look at the mess we made,” he said, perching at the edge of the bed beside me.

  Yellow lamplight fanned across his wide shoulders, deepening the red in his dark flesh. The heavy mat of hair on his chest thinned to a dark line that trailed over his paunch and then thickened again around his genitals. His green eyes flicked back and forth, watching me like fish moving through deep water.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I can look into your eyes and see all the way into your heart.”

  “You make it sound like such a long way.”

  “It is. You play your cards close. I understand that. You
gotta be careful of who you let know your business. But sometimes I think you hold things back from me that you don’t have to, Rico.” Rico from Enrique, Spanish for Henry; that was the nickname he had bestowed on me that afternoon up in Griffith Park. He got into bed beside me. “You can tell me anything.”

  I had an image of my retrieving a gun from a drainpipe. “I love you, Johnny, but my world can be pretty scary.”

  He rested his head on my chest. “I don’t scare easy, man.”

  He got into bed and we covered ourselves. I switched off the light and we lay there, bodies touching.

  “Deanna called me,” he said. “She wants to talk.”

  “Yeah? That’s good. Isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to have dinner with her.” His hand reached for mine. “I owe it to her.”

  “You just told me you loved me. I’m not worried.”

  “Good,” he said. “’Cause there’s nothing to be worried about.”

  I was still awake when his hand fell away from mine and he began to softly snore. I thought about the gun in my safe. The .22-caliber handgun I’d recovered from the drainpipe at the gas station. There had been a .22-caliber bullet in the baseboard of the motel room where Vicky had killed her husband with a .380 semiautomatic, in what now looked less like self-defense than the shootout at the O.K. Corral.

  On Monday, as Angel and I were headed out of the house to court for Vicky’s arraignment, the phone rang. I let the machine take it.

  14.

  I REALIZED, AS I SAT beside my sister and nephew waiting for Vicky to be arraigned, that this was the first time I’d been back in a courtroom since my heart attack at the Court of Appeal two months earlier. This room could not have been more different than that hushed and somber chamber where the high dais of the appellate justices presumably alluded to their God’s-eye view of the law. The Hollywood arraignment court was the street level of the law: a graceless square lit by fluorescent lights behind plastic panels in the low acoustic-tiled ceiling. The cheap veneers that covered the drywall were blistering, the linoleum was woebegone, and masking tape was strung across the broken seats among the plastic folding chairs in the gallery. The reek of a back alley lurked beneath the antiseptic smell of the industrial-strength cleaner with which the floor was washed. A vagrant snored audibly from one of the back rows. Voices rose contentiously or dropped to accusatory whispers and mixed with the tinny sounds of Walkmans, mothers hushing their babies and crazy street people addressing themselves at eloquent length. In the well of the court, two bailiffs lolled over coffee, every now and then barking for silence. The court clerks frantically shuffled the day’s papers behind their enclosure at the right side of the bench. To the left, the court reporter chatted with one of the D.A.’s at the long table where the prosecutors sat shuffling their own files. Their paralegals staffed the phones, calling witnesses to confirm their standby status, or consoled the disillusioned victims of crimes who had come here expecting justice and stumbled into a pigpen. Across the well of the court was the defense table, where three public defenders dealt with their own recalcitrant witnesses and anxious clients. Behind their table, along the wall, was the jury box, used, in this case, not for juries but for defendants in custody, who were brought out in groups often through a door behind the bailiffs’ station that led to the holding cells. The only decoration in the room was a gilded replica of the Great Seal on the wall behind the dais, the flags of the United States and California, and an orchid that adorned the desk of a clerk.

  I had spoken to Inez over the weekend. She had received my judicial application and was going to hand-deliver it to the governor because, as she reminded me, a politician’s gratitude has the shelf-life of a snowflake on a hot griddle. If she was successful and I was appointed, this would be the kind of court to which I would be initially assigned. I looked around the squalid courtroom and thought, Yes, I would love to be the judge that presided over it. My family, however, did not seem to find the place as inspiring.

  Angel slumped on the bench between Elena and me, reading Baseball America. My sister sat upright with an expression of wonder and dismay. She wore a black suit, a white silk blouse, and looked, I thought, like the proverbial nun at the whorehouse.

  “Is Vicky here yet?” she asked me.

  “Probably in a holding cell. They’ll bring her out when they call her case.”

  “Will we be able to talk to her?”

  “No, only I can talk to her here.”

  “What’s going to happen exactly?”

  I had explained this to her before, so I knew she was asking out of nervousness. “She’ll plead not guilty, the judge will set bail and a date for what’s called the preliminary hearing.”

  “Is that the same as the trial?”

  “No,” I said. “The purpose of the prelim is to require the prosecution to show the judge that there’s enough evidence to warrant a trial. It’s pretty much a formality. Once the judge finds there’s sufficient evidence, he, or she, will bind the defendant over for trial.”

  “What kind of time frame are we talking about?” she asked, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her skirt.

  “They’ll set the prelim within ten days. Trial has to be set within sixty days thereafter because of a defendant’s constitutional right to a speedy trial. The defendant can waive the right and set the trial for later, but I don’t think we gain anything by doing that in Vicky’s case.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not the kind of case any reasonable prosecutor is going to want to take to trial,” I said. “If we keep it on the front burner, they’ll deal it rather than go to trial.”

  “If it weren’t Vicky, this would be just a routine case for you, wouldn’t it?” she asked, not in anger but genuine curiosity. “I mean, you seem to know exactly how it will play out.”

  “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” I replied. “While every case has its twists and turns, over time you get a pretty good sense of what particular cases are worth, including homicides.”

  “I suppose everything has its measure,” she reflected. “Even the value of a life.” In a low voice, she asked, “Will Vicky go to prison?”

  “Very likely,” I said.

  She turned away, but a moment later asked, “What do you think bail will be?”

  “I don’t know, maybe a hundred thousand. We’ll have to talk to a bail bondsman about—”

  “I have it,” she said.

  I looked at her. “Elena, where do you come by that kind of money?”

  She smiled haughtily. “Oh, really, Henry, do you imagine I spend my evenings drinking sherry and watching PBS? I manage the family investments. We’ve done quite well in technologies. I assume you’ve got a retirement plan?”

  I laughed. “My plan is not to retire.”

  She looked alarmed and had started to reply when the bailiff rose and shouted over the throng, “Come to order. Department one is now in session, the Honorable Judge Edgar Kline presiding.”

  A tall, pale, rather fat young man who wore his judicial robe with the air of a high school valedictorian stepped up to the bench, lowered himself into the highback leather chair and faced the courtroom with an expression that seemed to alternate between contempt and terror. A brand-new judge, I thought, tossed into arraignment court by his presiding judge to sink or swim.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Judge Kline said in a surprisingly authoritative baritone. “We have one hundred and ten cases on the calendar and the sooner you settle down, the faster we’ll get through them. Now, I want you all to make sure that you’re where you’re supposed to be. This is a criminal arraignment court. We don’t do traffic tickets or settle small claims. Those of you who are lucky enough to be criminal defendants, a word. I am not interested in your life stories. All I want is to hear a plea. If you have a lawyer, I don’t even want you to talk to me. If you don’t have a lawyer, some conversation is inevitable, but let’s keep it to a minimum.” He smirked. “All right,
let’s begin with the guests of the county.”

  Ten prisoners were brought out of the holding cells; Vicky was second to the last. I heard Elena’s shocked intake of breath, but it was Angel I watched. He carefully closed his magazine and lay it in his lap. As he watched her being led out in handcuffs and an ill-fitting jumpsuit, his eyes filled with horror and grief and helplessness. How much worse must it have been, I thought, when he had walked into that room at the Hollywood Inn. I understood viscerally, as I had not before, that whatever happened, he would carry the images of these days to his grave, and whatever explanation was finally adduced, it would never be enough to wipe them away.

  The plump young judge showed considerably more patience than his snide little speech suggested, and a half-hour passed before he called Vicky’s case.

  “Victoria Trujillo,” the judge intoned. “Is Ms. Trujillo represented?”

  I went into the well of the court to stand beside her. “Yes, Your Honor, Henry Rios for the defendant.”

  Across the room, a tall blond young man in a very nicely cut suit stood up and said, “Kim Pearsall for the People.”

  Kline looked at him. “I beg your pardon, counsel?”

  “Uh, this is my case. I mean, I’m the deputy assigned to try it.”

  “Counsel, this is an arraignment court, not a trial court. You do understand the difference.”

  “Yes, Your Honor, I worked misdemeanor arraignment court in Santa Monica.”

  Misdemeanor arraignments in Santa Monica? This was the greenhorn Tony Earl had promised me. He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands. Santa Monica was easy duty; he had probably gone surfing before work.

  Kline was no more impressed than I was. “How very nice for you, counsel. Ms. Trujillo is charged with second-degree murder. Is there a plea?”

  “Say not guilty,” I whispered to her.

  “Not guilty,” she said.

  “You’ll have speak up for the court reporter,” the judge said.

  “Not guilty,” she said in a firmer voice.