by Michael Nava
We met in a small attorney conference room just outside the sally port that led into the unit, close enough that, when the doors rolled open to bring Theo out, I got a whiff of baked, rancid air. He sat down, his nice suit exchanged for the standard orange jumpsuit, his face more feral in the bleak, fluorescent jail light than in the softer light of the courtroom.
He took a couple of deep breaths. “Nice to get some fresh air,” he said, although fresh was not how I would’ve described the stale jailhouse musk.
“I have to ask some questions about Freddy,” I said. “Were you at the demo where he was picked up on an arrest warrant?”
“You mean at Barney’s Beanery,” he said. “Yeah.”
I made a note. “Do you know what happened after he was arrested?”
He chewed the inside of his cheeks, a nervous tic I hadn’t noticed before.
“The cops released him later that night,” he said after a moment’s thought. “He told me the warrant was for someone else with the same name.”
“Another Freddy Saavedra?”
That would explain why his prints weren’t in the system, but Freeman hadn’t found any Freddy Saavedra with an outstanding arrest warrant for assault.
“Do you know if Freddy was ever arrested for anything?”
He shook his head, chewed his cheek and said, “No. Why are you asking?”
I explained about the fingerprint evidence, concluding, “We need to match prints taken from the apartment to his fingerprints to corroborate your story he built the bombs, but if his prints aren’t in the system—”
“He wore gloves,” Theo interjected.
I stared at him. “He what?”
“When he was making the bombs, he wore plastic gloves. Thin ones, like hospital gloves.”
“You never said anything about gloves before.”
He frowned. “I didn’t remember until just now.”
We sat in silence while I processed this new information. The light buzzed overhead, and just outside the door of the closet-sized conference room the indistinct but hard voices of men shouting directions and orders could be heard. Only one fingerprint on either of the bombs, Theo’s. Because Freddy wore gloves or because Theo had constructed them?
“Nothing connects Freddy to the bombing except your word. All the evidence points to you and only to you. Did you make the bombs? Did you act alone?”
“No,” he said, his voice rising, “it was all Freddy’s idea.”
“You’re HIV positive,” I said. “You have reason to be angry, but what about Freddy? What made him angry enough to want to blow up a church? Was he positive?”
Theo shook his head. “He tested negative.”
“Did he lose someone to AIDS? A lover? A friend? A family member?”
“If he did, he never told me about it.”
“Then what was his motive, Theo?”
Theo tapped his fingers on the table, tapped his foot on the floor, and chewed his cheeks, a compendium of jittery energy.
“You’re asking me what he was thinking? I never knew what he was thinking. That’s part of his appeal. That’s what attracted me the first time I saw him at a QUEER meeting. The hot, mysterious bad boy. During the break I went up to talk to him. I was as nervous as I was turned on. He thought QUEER was a joke. Said they couldn’t plan a brunch, much less a revolution. Asked me if I was a pussy like the rest of them. No way, I said, and he laughed and said, ‘Yes, you are. You’re just a little twinkie fuck boy trying to hit on me.’ That’s when I told him I was positive. I told him I wasn’t there to hit on him, I was there to save my life. He said, ‘you ain’t going to do it with these people’ and walked away. After the meeting, I followed him to his car and said, ‘I am serious. Tell me what to do.’”
“And he told you he wanted you to plant bombs?”
“Not right away,” Theo said. “At first, he just talked to me. Talked about how the system is rigged against people like us, and the only way to change it was to bring it down. Said HIV had been created in a government laboratory and was deliberately spread to gays to exterminate us.”
I’d heard this conspiracy theory before. “You realize that’s crazy.”
He leaned forward, the flicker of fanaticism in his eyes. “Are you sure? Aren’t they trying to put us in concentration camps?”
“That’s not the government,” I said. “It’s a bunch of bigots.”
He leaned back in his chair, shrugged. “Whatever. What Freddy said made sense to me.”
“Are you saying Freddy brainwashed you?”
“I’m saying he was right about a lot of things.”
“Eventually it moved from talk to planning.”
He nodded. “We went to the meeting for the Bash the Church action. Freddy said the plan was lame. He said if we really wanted to make a statement, we should blow up one of the churches. Next thing I knew we ‘re buying stuff to make pipe bombs.”
“How did he know how to make a bomb? Did he use a book?”
“I didn’t watch the whole thing because it made me really nervous, but from what I saw, he knew what he was doing. I asked him where he learned it, and he said someone taught him. I didn’t ask again.”
“If he was the expert, why did you plant the bombs?”
“We went to the church the Sunday before to see where to plant them. Freddy had a camera and was taking pictures. He said the entrance would be a good place because all the glass would make a cool explosion. We were walking around in this courtyard where I guess the guy who started the church is buried. I said let’s blow up his grave. Freddy said, no, it was better to blow up the building where they had their offices and kept their files and stuff. That would cause chaos. Anyway, these two dudes came toward us. One of them had a black T-shirt that said ‘Security’; the other was an old guy. Freddy told me to go wait in the car. When he caught up with me, he said I’d have to plant the bombs because the security guy knew what he looked like.”
The security guy had seen Freddy at the church a few days before the bombing, a potential witness if I could track him down.
“That’s how I figured out that he’d set me up,” he was saying.
“What?”
His jaw cracked when he opened his mouth, and his teeth were ground down. Speed freak dentition.
“Why would he be worried about the security guard seeing him if there wasn’t going to be anyone at the church?” he asked. “Freddy knew there’d be people around. Maybe the guard, maybe someone else.”
“The pastor?”
He massaged his cheeks. “I don’t know, but someone. He meant for the explosion to kill someone, and he wanted me to plant the bombs so if there were witnesses, they’d see me.”
We sat there for a moment. This version of events was clearer than any he’d given me before and less self-serving in a way— no claims of being abused or coerced— so it rang true, or at least, truer. And it gave me an idea about who Freddy Saavedra was, if that was even his name. Someone had taught him to make pipe bombs. That was a skill I associated with terrorists.
“Did Freddy ever say anything to you that suggested he might belong to some kind of politically radical group?”
He replied with a puzzled, “You mean QUEER?”
“No, a different group.”
“Like who?” he asked, confused.
“That’s what I’m asking you, Theo. Did you ever overhear him on the phone talking about the bombing or see him with someone you didn’t recognize who struck you as, I don’t know, sketchy? Anything at all like that?”
“No, but I wasn’t with him twenty-four seven. I don’t know what he was doing when he was on his own.”
I’d only had Freeman run Freddy through the CII— the Criminal Investigation and Identification database kept by California’s Department of Justice. After talking to Theo, I decided it was time to expand the search to other databases, the kind that kept track of terrorists.
TWELVE
When I talked to
Freeman on the phone the next day, he was skeptical of my theory that Freddy was a terrorist of some kind. He reported that his skip trace had turned up plenty of Freddy Saavedras, but none of them matched our Freddy’s description, confirming the name was an alias.
“Why do you think my idea that Freddy’s a terrorist is crazy?” I asked.
I heard the flick of his cigarette lighter, followed by a quick inhale and slow exhale. I pictured smoke rings. “I wouldn’t say crazy,” he said, “but definitely old school.”
“Old school?”
“Blowing up buildings went out with bell bottoms and love beads. Last time I heard about something like that in LA was back in ’69 when a bunch of Brown Berets tried to burn down the Biltmore when Ronald Reagan was giving a speech.”
“The Brown Berets? That takes me back. I never heard about that incident.”
“You don’t know about the Biltmore Six? They got railroaded into jail.” He puffed away on his cigarette. “You think this Freddy is an agent of the revolution? What revolution would that be?”
“Maybe a radical gay group that no one’s heard of until now.”
“Don’t bomb throwers like to take credit for the bombs?”
“Maybe they’re waiting for the right moment,” I suggested.
“Which would be when?”
I remembered the headline in the Times about the new poll showing the quarantine initiative gaining ground.
“Election day, after the voters decide to quarantine at least a quarter of the gay male population. How hard would it be to turn that anger into violent action? I’d be tempted myself.”
“Not worth it,” Freeman cautioned. “You can’t fight the system from a jail cell unless you’re Doctor King, and he wasn’t doing the kind of time in Birmingham you’d get if you start blowing things up.” A long, final nicotine exhale. “Anyway, bombing churches before the votes are cast ain’t no way to make friends and influence people.”
“The point of a revolutionary action isn’t to win friends; it’s to precipitate the revolution,” I said, paraphrasing a half-remembered college lecture in a class on twentieth-century revolutionary movements. “If you want to radicalize gay people, you need the quarantine initiative to pass.”
Freedman chuckled sardonically. “You’re really in love with this theory of yours. You really think Freddy’s some kind of gay Maoist?”
“I don’t know, Freeman,” I said, with some asperity. “What I do know is that I need a defense, and the best one I have is to deflect moral responsibility for the bombing from Theo to Freddy. Unless you have a better idea, start checking terrorist databases, and see if anything or anyone pops up.”
“Sure,” he said, “but you’ve got your ear to the ground in the gay community. You might ask around yourself while I’m at it.”
“Good idea.”
“Look, Henry,” he said. “Not to burst your bubble, but there’s another angle here. What do you know about the victim? Did he have any secrets that made him a target?”
“Daniel Herron? Why do you ask?”
“I looked at the follow-up reports from the bomb squad,” he said. “The bomb planted in the building where he died was twice as powerful as the bomb planted at the entrance. What does that mean to you?”
I thought about what Theo had told me, that he believed Freddy had always intended to kill someone. “The bomber wanted to make sure that if someone was in the building, he wouldn’t come out of it alive. But no one knew Herron was there.”
“His wife told the cops he counseled people on Thursday night, and if she knew, other people had to know. The people he counseled, for example.”
“That’s true,” I said. ‘Herron’s secrets? He has a gay son who’s HIV positive from a woman who wasn’t his wife.”
“How do you know that? It sure wasn’t in his obit.”
I told him how I’d first met Daniel Herron and pointed out that the absence of any mention in the obit of his son suggested another woman. “Of course,” I said, “I’m only assuming the boy is gay. He could be straight and hemophiliac.”
“Or a junkie. You don’t think that’s provocative?” Freeman said. “Evangelical with a secret gay son?”
“I’d say more hypocritical than provocative. But I don’t see how it’s the kind of secret that would’ve gotten him blown up.”
“Don’t make assumptions,” he said. “Let me look into Pastor Herron’s history. Maybe we find a connection between him and Saavedra.”
“Okay, but your idea that Herron was targeted isn’t inconsistent with Freddy being a terrorist. You said yourself he could’ve known Herron would be in his office. Maybe he got that tip from an infiltrator in the church.”
“You have someone in mind?”
I remembered the security guard Theo said had accosted them when they’d gone to scout the church. A security guard, perfect cover for a spy. I told Freeman about it and suggested he track down the guy.
••••
I ate lunch at my desk while I triaged my cases to clear as much time as possible to devote to Theo. The office was closed at lunch. My new full-time secretary, Emma Austin, locked the door from the reception room to the outside corridor from noon to one. At one, I stepped outside my office and saw she hadn’t yet returned so I unlocked the door myself. I opened it and found a woman standing in the hall, evidently waiting to be let in. That wasn’t unusual. I often came back to potential clients standing patiently at the door or pacing around the hall in agitation.
This woman, however, didn’t look like a potential client. For one thing, she was white. Most of my clients weren’t. There was also something antiquated in the way she was put together— a lilac blazer and matching calf-length skirt, white blouse, low heels, stockings, big purse, helmet hair— as if she’d stepped out of a woman’s clothing catalogue circa 1958, again not the kind of client who made her way to my office. On the other hand, her lipstick was smudged at the corners and her makeup spotty, as if it had been applied with a hasty or an unsteady hand. Also, from the heavy whiff of mouthwash that didn’t quite cover the booze on her breath, I could tell she’d been drinking.
With wary, watery eyes, she asked, “Mr. Rios?”
“Yes, I’m Henry Rios, and you are—”
“Mrs. Daniel Herron.”
••••
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Herron?”
She sat across from me, her big handbag in her lap, looking as if she was as dumbfounded to find herself in my office as I was to have her here. My question seemed to focus her.
“You’re defending the man who killed my husband.”
Her words were confrontational, but her tone was merely inquisitive.
“The man accused of killing your husband,” I said, emphasizing accused.
She looked surprised. “Oh, you don’t think he did it?”
“I can’t discuss that with you.”
She folded her hands on her bag and we sat in silence. I was about to politely ask her to leave when she blurted out, “Someone helped him.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your . . . client. Someone helped him kill Daniel.”
“Who helped him?” I asked.
“Someone in the church.”
“You’re saying someone in your church conspired with my client to kill your husband?”
She nodded vigorously. “Yes.”
“Was it a man named Freddy Saavedra?”
She looked at me blankly. “Who?”
I showed her the photograph of Freddy and Theo taken at the demonstration. I tapped Freddy’s image. “This man.”
She peered at the photo intently, then reached into her bag and fumbled with its contents before extracting a thick manila folder. She dumped its contents on my desk: a sheaf of typed pages and a stack of eight-by-ten photographs. She tore through the pictures, examining each one briefly before she stopped at one, appraised it carefully, and slid it toward me. I held it up: it was a photograph of Fred
dy Saavedra arguing with a meter maid who looked like she was about to write him a ticket.
“What is this?”
“I hired a private investigator to follow my husband. He took this photograph at the airport where Daniel was getting on a plane to San Francisco.” She handed over the rest of the photographs. “There’s another picture of this man somewhere in the pile. Here’s the report.”
“Do you know this man?” I asked, tapping Saavedra’s image again.
“No,” she replied firmly. “I’ve never seen him before, and I don’t know why the investigator took his picture, but if you think he was involved . . .” She trailed off into vagueness.
There was definitely something off about Mrs. Daniel Herron. “What makes you think someone at the church had a hand in your husband’s death?”
“They’re trying to throw me out of my own home!” she exclaimed.
I realized she hadn’t just been drinking; she was drunk. Very drunk but, in the way of hard-core alcoholics, able to semi-function even with an amount of liquor in her system that would have knocked out a normal person. She might even have been in a blackout.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked patiently.
“The Overseers. Well, some of them. Bob Metzger. He’s the ringleader.”
“The ringleader in your husband’s death?”
“They wanted to get rid of him, but it takes a unanimous vote; my father made sure of that, oh, how they regretted it but, you see, that’s how it was, so they killed him,” she babbled.
“Let me see if I understand you,” I said. “A dissident group on the governing board was so determined to remove your husband as pastor that they plotted to kill him?”
Her watery eyes brightened for a second. “That’s right.”
“And you’re angry because you’ve been asked to leave your house?”
“They claim it belongs to the church, but my father built the house. The church, too.” She leaned toward me, giving me a blast of Scope mixed with Smirnoff. “It’s outrageous! I’m his daughter. I have rights . . . don’t I? Legal rights. To the house? You’re a lawyer. Don’t I have rights?”