by Michael Nava
“I see why you can’t ask Angel, if that’s what you mean.”
“Obviously I’m not going to ask you to testify. No offense.”
“None taken,” she said. “But Vicky will have to testify, won’t she? What are you going to do about her?”
I was wondering the same thing.
And then Elena called. “I talked to the director of the women’s shelter that Vicky said she went to after Pete was released,” she said. “She told me something very curious.”
“What?”
“Vicky said they asked her to leave because she was proselytizing. This woman said they asked her to leave because their psychologist talked to her and concluded that she wasn’t a victim of domestic violence.”
“How did they decide that?”
“She told me that was privileged,” Elena replied. “She said if we wanted to know, we’d have to ask Vicky.”
“I will,” I said.
Vicky was immediately on her guard when I turned up unannounced at the jail that afternoon. “Hello, Uncle Henry,” she said. “Did Angel come with you?”
“Why did you kill Pete?”
“What?” she asked, but I saw in her eyes she was scrambling for a strategy.
“The director of the women’s shelter in San Francisco said you were asked to leave because they didn’t believe you were a battered woman. I had a psychologist look at the police reports in this case and she said the same thing. I read Pete’s rap sheet. He had never been arrested for domestic violence. I just assumed that was because you had never called the cops on him. Even Angel told me that Pete never struck you. I thought he was just covering for his father, but it’s true, isn’t it? Until that night, Pete had never struck you before.”
It seemed at first that she would deny it, but then she gave a small sigh, as if of relief, slowly shook her head. “No.”
“So why did you shoot him?”
“Why does it matter?” she replied, meeting my eyes. “I said I was guilty Everyone’s happy.”
Her calm audacity rendered me mute.
“I got you this deal by convincing the D.A. that you’re a battered woman. That’s what you told your mother. That’s what I believed. You lied to both of us. Why?”
“I wasn’t lying when I said I had to get away from Pete. I needed help to do that.”
“If he wasn’t beating you, why were you running away from him?”
She looked away from me. “I can’t tell you.”
“Does it involve Angel?”
“No.”
“You’re still lying to me. I know that Pete wasn’t Angel’s father. Was he doing something to him?”
She lifted her head and stared at me. “What do you mean ‘doing something do him’?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No,” she said sharply. “Pete never touched Angel.”
“But he wasn’t Angel’s father.”
“No,” she conceded. “He wasn’t.”
“Listen to me, Vicky, I know you consider yourself a Christian, and maybe in your book it’s all right to lie to your mother and me because we’re not. But are you ready to go to court and swear before God to tell the truth and then tell more lies? Do you think I could let you do that?”
“Do I have to testify?”
“If you don’t, the D.A. will know something’s up. If I can’t give him an explanation, there’s nothing to stop him from asking the judge to give you the upper term for voluntary manslaughter. That’s eleven years.”
“You don’t understand,” she exploded. “I have to protect Angel. I’ll go to jail. I don’t care how long.”
“Protect him from what?”
Sobbing, she buried her face in her arms. “Leave me alone. I want to go back to my cell.”
I now recognized that her tears were the equivalent of a squid under attack spraying ink to escape its attacker.
I waited until the sobs subsided. “I know you don’t like me and I’m sorry about that, but even you have to admit that I love Angel. You don’t have to trust me about anything else, but trust me that I won’t let anyone hurt him.”
She raised her head and wiped her face on the sleeves of her jumpsuit. “I want to talk to Reverend Ortega.”
I nodded. “You do that, Vicky, but remember, the hearing is in four days. We don’t have much time to come up with a plan.”
“How did you find out that Pete’s not Angel’s dad?”
“Ortega. He didn’t mean to tell, but I kind of backed him into a corner and he blurted it out.”
With a ghost of a smile, she said, “You do that good.”
That evening before dinner, we went to the high school where I ran. I was up to eight laps, two miles. Angel usually ran partway with me, and then when I finished, we played catch in the summer dusk on the football field. He had a strong arm and I could already tell that he would soon outgrow my fumbling catches and wobbly returns, but for now I had just enough muscle over him not to look like a complete fool. Tonight, he dropped out after three laps and went off to amuse himself by throwing his baseball as hard and as high as he could, then dashing beneath it to make the catch. I could hear him chattering commentary to himself about an imaginary game. As I huffed around the track watching him, I wondered what it was that Vicky thought she had been protecting him from by killing Pete Trujillo. Her shock when I suggested that Pete had abused the boy seemed real enough, but by now I was beginning to realize how fluent a liar my niece could be when the need arose. Ortega, who had less invested, had not been as shocked. Of course, there were forms of abuse other than sexual or physical. Maybe, I thought, Angel didn’t know he wasn’t Pete’s son, and for some reason Pete had threatened to reveal it. That was a weak motive for her to have killed him and it didn’t explain why he had beaten her. Whatever they had quarreled about had been something that had enraged him enough to beat her. What could it have been? His drug use? That was a possibility. The three of them crowded into that cramped motel room and Pete blowing whatever money they had on drugs. Maybe she had hoped they would start a new life and instead she found herself being dragged down with him. That could’ve sparked a pretty nasty fight, but one that would end in a killing? And how did that protect Angel? Unless…good God. Was that it? I looked for Angel and saw him lying in the grass on his back watching a sliver of moon rise in the pink and violet sky.
“Hurry up, Uncle Henry,” he shouted. “It’s getting dark.”
“Okay, this is my last lap.”
He smiled. I loved him so much, but not as much as his mother who was willing to go to prison for something Angel had done.
That night, after Angel had gone to bed, I called John to get a reality check. He knew immediately something was preying on me.
“You sound sad, Rico,” he said.
That cut to the heart of it. I was sad. I didn’t want to believe the conclusion I had talked myself into, because if I was right, I would have to do something about it that could potentially cause serious injury to several people, all of them related to me.
“I need your advice.”
“I’m here for you.”
“Are you sitting down?”
There was a pause. “This is serious, huh?”
“John, I think Angel killed his—killed Pete Trujillo, and Vicky’s prepared to go to prison to cover for him.”
“Angelito?” He was shocked. “Did he tell you something?”
“No,” I said. “I pieced it together and maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. That’s why I called you. Can I tell you?”
“Yeah, I’m listening.”
“Pete Trujillo’s not Angel’s father.”
“Angel know he’s not Pete’s son?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Well, he may know now, but I don’t think he knew before the shooting. Pete must have known all along. I think at best he put up with Angel for Vicky’s sake. He may have mistreated him, especially when he was high. Pete was a drug addict. A junkie, mostly, but I’m sure he u
sed whatever was available. He was in and out of prison most of Angel’s life. When he was on the outside, he always went back to Vicky and to drugs. Living with an addict is like watching someone commit slow-motion suicide. Every day they use, a little piece of them dies.”
“Yeah,” John said softly, and I remembered that, he had first hand experience with addiction.
“That’s what it must have been like for Vicky and Pete. From what I’ve learned about him, he wasn’t a bad kid. He had this evil cousin who dragged him into some serious criminal activity, but left on his own, the worst things he did were to himself. And to her.”
“And Angel,” John added. “Even if Pete never laid a hand on him, any kid who grows up around that kind of sadness, it hurts him.”
I remembered that John had kids. “He told me once he would never use drugs,” I said. “He was so quiet and serious when I first met him. You don’t know how good it makes me feel when he laughs.”
Tenderly John said, “I think I do.”
“This last time Pete got out of prison, Vicky tried to run away from him. She took Angel to a shelter for battered women in San Francisco, but they asked her to leave when they figured out she wasn’t battered. Then she appealed to my sister for help, telling her the same story—that she was running away from Pete because he beat her. In a way, she wasn’t lying. Maybe she didn’t know herself that she was speaking in metaphor.”
“Meta-what?”
“She lied about Pete beating her to get help, but it wasn’t a complete lie. What she was really saying was that he’d broken her heart, not her bones.”
“Really saying it to who?”
“To herself,” I said. “I think she knew if she went back to him this time, something bad was going to happen. In the end, she couldn’t help herself. Pete and Angel were all she had.”
“Like they say, hope springs eternal.”
“Yeah, especially with junkies. They’re not violent, like drunks. They’re charming and tragic. Easy to fall in love in with.”
“You talking from experience?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But that’s another story. Vicky went back to Pete and they ended up in this little motel room in Hollywood, with him using and her at the end of her rope and Angel being left pretty much on his own.” I remembered how he had told me about his walks through Hollywood. “Plus Pete was turning paranoid. He had at least two guns in the room.”
“He was paranoid?”
“He had reason to be. I’m not sure of the details, but I think he ratted out his homeboys to get a deal on his last felony.”
“You sure one of them didn’t shoot him?”
“That doesn’t fit the evidence. What I think happened is that he and Vicky were fighting all the time, and for the first time in their marriage, the fights started getting violent. I figured Angel had to have been there for some of it, maybe some of it was directed at him. The night Pete was killed, he and Vicky got into a bad fight.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw her face the next day,” I said. “I think Pete may even have taken a shot at her. Angel was either in the room or just returning to the room and he tried to protect his mom by picking up the other gun and firing it at Pete. Two shots were wild, the last one killed him.”
For a moment, the line was quiet. Then John said, “He’s just a kid, Henry.”
I hadn’t told him about the episode at the stadium. I did now.
“That just proves he knows how to take care of himself,” John said.
“That’s my point,” I replied. “Angel’s trapped in this motel room with these two people locked in a dance of death. He sees his mother getting more desperate and the man he thinks is his father getting crazier and crazier. Then one night, everything snaps. Pete beats the stuffing out of Vicky and then pulls a gun on her. Angel has to believe at that instant that Pete’s going to kill her. She’s the only parent, the only protection Angel has ever had. Simple self-preservation would have told him to kill Pete. He may even have thought if Pete killed her, he would be next. I’m not saying this is how it happened, I’m saying this is how it could have happened. Am I crazy?”
After a moment, John said, “No, you’re not crazy. Is this all guesswork, or did Vicky tell you something?”
“When I found out she’d been lying about being a battered woman, I asked her about it and all she would say is that she had to protect Angel. Reverend Ortega, when I talked to him, said the same doing. He said she’d sacrificed everything to see that Angel was safe. At first I thought they meant Vicky had killed Pete to protect Angel from him, from some kind of abuse, but they were saying it as if she was still trying to protect him. I began to wonder how she could be trying to protect him from her jail cell. Then I figured it out.”
“You’re not sure, are you?”
“I am sure, but I don’t want to be. Angel wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. The first time it happened, he told me it was because he dreamed of how Pete died. I thought he was remembering how Pete looked after he’d been shot. Now I think he dreams about the shooting. I don’t know, he won’t talk to me about the dreams anymore. The gun that was used to kill Pete disappeared and so did the gun that Pete used to shoot at Vicky. She was in no shape to get rid of them, but Angel was.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“On the night Pete was killed, Angel called me from a gas station across the street from the motel within a few minutes of the shooting. A couple of weeks ago, he took me back to the same gas station and showed me where he had hidden the gun that I think Pete fired at Vicky. You understand, John? He didn’t give me the gun he used to shoot Pete, because he can’t face that. Instead, he gave me the gun Pete used, because in his mind that justified what he did.”
“He trusts you. Why wouldn’t he tell you the truth?”
“Because Vicky has told him to keep his mouth shut,” I said. “She’s ready to take the blame to protect him.”
“From what? You’re not going to turn him in?” When I didn’t immediately answer, he said, “Hey, you’re not going to turn him in.”
“In this situation, I’m not just Angel’s uncle,” I said. “And Vicky’s not just my niece. I’m a lawyer and she’s my client. If there were no blood relation here, I would never let her plead guilty to a crime she didn’t commit.”
“That’s her choice,” he said.
“I can’t allow her to make that choice.”
“Man, you can’t be serious.”
“If I let her plead guilty, I’ll be allowing her to spend maybe six, ten years in prison. That’s hard time, man. She’ll suffer, and when she gets out, she’ll have a manslaughter conviction that follows her around for the rest of her life. She’s not a woman with an unlimited future as it is. What kind of future would she have as a convicted felon? And what about Angel? What’s the lesson here for him? That you never have to face up to the things you do because someone will take the fall for you? And me? I’ll be an accomplice to a homicide.”
“You’ll destroy his life.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He is a kid, John. He’d be tried in juvenile court. I can make the same case for him I was going to make for Vicky. He acted in defense of his mother and himself. That’s justifiable homicide, and when you throw in the incredible stress he was under, no judge is going to convict him.”
“Yeah?” John said skeptically. “You a hundred percent certain?”
I hesitated, then admitted, “No. There’s no such thing in the law.”
“So there’s a chance they could commit him to, what’s it called, the youth authority? Prison for kids.” He paused to allow it to sink in. “Listen, Henry, you don’t know that Angel killed his—Pete. You don’t know that.”
“What’s your point?”
“Hey, man, you’re the lawyer. If you can’t prove it was Angel, what right do you have to sacrifice him for your theory?”
“I have no direct evidence, it’s true. Onl
y circumstantial evidence.”
“That means you’re guessing.”
“It’s an educated guess.”
“It’s a guess,” he insisted. “You gonna go to the judge with a guess?”
Heart sinking, I thought about Friday and the sentencing hearing. “Okay, I get it,” I said. “I can’t prove it was Angel, I can’t prove it wasn’t Vicky, so I have a little moral wiggle room. But in my heart, I know.”
“Maybe what’s in Vicky’s heart is more important than what’s in your heart,” he said. “She’s his mother. Hey, Henry, if it was one of my kids, I might do the same thing.”
“Are you serious? You’d take the rap for a crime they committed?”
“You don’t stop loving your kids because they fuck up,” he said. “You love them more.”
I remembered that his father had said basically the same thing about him.
“How will they learn what’s right and wrong if you go on picking up the pieces all their lives?”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “This is about settling things in the family versus letting some outsider settle them for you. Angel’s gotta know what he did is wrong. He’s gotta know his mother will pay for his mistake with hard time, like you said. He’s a good boy, Henry, he won’t blow this off. He is being punished. That’s what those nightmares are all about. But it’s in the family. Keep it there.”
My years of legal training, my veneration for the law, made me want to argue the point, but something stopped me: the memory of seeing a small boy standing at my doorstep and the sensation of looking through time into a distant mirror. I saw him now as Ulysses must have seen Telemachus at the end of his long voyage, the innocent son on the verge of his own journey, who might yet be taught how to avoid the dark places. I had never wanted a family, but Angel had shown me that what I wanted was irrelevant. I carried him in my veins; I couldn’t not love him.
“Henry?”
“Yeah, I’m still here. Listen, maybe you’re right. Everything I told you, it’s just a guess. If Vicky wants to plead to protect her son, maybe I have to let her.”
“He’s your boy, too.” After a moment, he asked, “Should I come over?”