The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  Espinoza didn’t say whether Jaime and the other man, the one in the felt hat, went up the stairs or underneath them when they went inside. Not knowing the layout, I could not anticipate the question or think to ask.

  From the sidewalk I check the upstairs windows at the front of 408. On the first floor one of them shows the glow of a television. Another smaller window, perhaps a bathroom, has a light on inside.

  On the top floor everything is dark. I walk down the sidewalk twenty feet or so and check the left side of the house. There are windows, but they’re all dark. I go back the other way. One light toward the rear on the first floor. I can’t tell how many apartments there are.

  I check to make sure no one is watching from a window or one of the dark porches across the street. I would never hear the end of it from Harry if somebody called the cops and he had to come down and post bail on a peeping and prowling charge.

  From what I can see, it looks clear, so I climb the stairs and find the mailbox on the porch. Underneath each slot is a name on a slip of paper slid into a groove, some of them typed, some written in pencil or pen. I take out my house keys. Attached to the key ring is a small light. I press the button on the side of this, and the muted red beam flashes on the names.

  APT. A: JOHNSON

  APT. B: HERNANDEZ

  No initials.

  APT. C: ROSAS, JAMES

  APT. D: WASHINGTON, LEROY

  APT. E: RUIZ, R.

  APT. F: MORENO

  Again no initials.

  APT. G: SALDADO, H.

  Using the light and a small notepad from my pocket I make notes with a pencil. Completing this task, I head quickly down the stairs. I retrace my steps to the car, and in less than a minute, I’m parked across the street half a block from the house with the driveway. I park between two other vehicles facing toward the house where I can see the front porch and the apartment underneath.

  I check my watch. It is almost ten-thirty. Sarah should be getting home any minute. She has a key. I told her not to wait up. At fifteen, she is a good kid, straight As, and quiet. She is the one person I think about before accepting any cases I suspect might involve risk or before doing foolish things such as I am doing tonight.

  I settle in, one eye on the cross traffic a block away. For some reason all of this business seems to approach in the perpendicular direction of the cross street. Why I don’t know, but it keeps the approaching headlights to a minimum so that slumped down in the driver’s seat it’s not likely anyone is going to see me.

  I snooze a little, one eye open. Every once in a while as business becomes thick at the intersection, traffic jams up, and a car will turn this way, forcing me to slide down a little deeper into the seat.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been dozing, but both eyes are closed when I wake to the sound of tires squealing on pavement. I open my eyes and try to quickly gain my bearings. The street vendors a block down have all disappeared. All I see is the fading glow of taillights from the last car that turned and headed away from me. Within two seconds, they turn on another street and are gone. The intersection is now completely deserted.

  I sit, slumped in the front seat, wondering what’s happened. It doesn’t take long before the answer arrives. It comes in the form of a police cruiser trolling slowly through the intersection, its light bar flashing disconcerting strobes. The cops inside use their spot to light up the bushes and the shadows against the house on the corner. They do a slow drive through the intersection and check the front of the house on the opposite corner. They keep moving slowly, and suddenly, as quickly as they arrived, the reflection of colored light is gone.

  I continue to watch the intersection for several minutes. Nothing. No action. It appears the cops have scared them off.

  Then all of a sudden, vehicle lights round the corner behind me. I slump down deep into the seat so that I am now mostly under the steering wheel, my legs folded at the knees up under the steering column. My head and shoulders are leaning off toward the passenger seat, so I am hunched down below the driver-side window.

  The car approaches slowly. I hear its wheel crushing gravel on the pavement outside. Now I can make out the call signals on their police band even with their windows rolled up.

  They strafe the three parked cars with the spotlight. Jets of streaking bright white flood through the windows, and suddenly the light bar comes on again. If they catch me lying on the floor, parked a block from Super Narco, they are likely to take every screw out my car looking for drugs. They will take my name off my license whether they find anything or not. Within twenty-four hours I’ll be drawing curious glances from prosecutors and clerks in the courthouse. Judges will be peering into my eyes, looking for that glassy stare. God help me if I show up sleepy in court some morning, like tomorrow.

  The patrol car stops next to the vehicle parked behind mine. A door opens. The police band is now loud enough that I can hear the static between calls. Footsteps outside.

  He pulls on the door latch of the car behind me. It slips out of his fingers. Locked. He won’t have this problem if he tries mine. It’s too late to lock it. Besides I know he’s looking through the window with a flashlight.

  I get a mental image. He pops the door and finds me unconscious under the steering wheel. They have to call for the Jaws of Life to pry me out.

  I can tell he is checking carefully now, looking through the windows with a flashlight. A beam moves around through my rear window.

  “Jimmie.”

  “Yeah. I see him.”

  My heart is pounding.

  A car door slams with a thud. Suddenly the engine hits on all cylinders. Tires screech next to my ear, just outside the door. In an instant, it’s dark again, quiet. I hold my breath, waiting. It seems like an eternity. Probably fifteen seconds. I ease my head up, like a turtle coming out of its shell. I shimmy up past the steering wheel, wondering how I fit beneath it. The mysteries of adrenaline. My lower back is killing me.

  Near the intersection of action I see the patrol car stopped, the light bar sparkling in its disorienting rhythm of red and blue. Spread across the front of the police unit is the kid in the dark-hooded sweatshirt. The hood is now pulled down so that a buzz cut is visible, dark stubble on his scalp.

  One of the cops spreads his feet, then speed cuffs the suspect’s hands behind his back. His partner is gingerly going through the guy’s pockets.

  The cop doing the search keeps depositing little discoveries on the hood of the car, poking different ones every once in a while with a finger, examining it under the glare of a flashlight like a miner checking for nuggets.

  The other cop is down on his haunches now, feeling around the kid’s ankles. Maybe looking for a gun.

  Then suddenly, Eureka! I can almost hear him. When he stands up he’s holding a roll of bills from inside the kid’s sock, along with what appears to be some product, some little plastic packets. I can see them glitter in the beam of the spotlight that is now focused on the hood of the patrol car.

  Another police car, a backup unit, approaches from the opposite direction. Within seconds there’s a convention of blue standing in the middle of the intersection, light bars flashing.

  They continue searching the kid. One of the cops comes up with a shoe in one hand and a sock in the other. He looks in the shoe and flips it on the ground. He starts shaking the sock. Little white packets fall out all over the hood of the car.

  His colleague keeps shaking the sock. Things keep falling out. A regular horn of plenty. There are smiles all around from the guys in uniform.

  Another patrol car pulls up. I’m starting to get nervous. They may camp here for the night, decide to go on a safari looking for the guy’s friends.

  Enough excitement for one night. I check my watch. It is now nearly one in the morning. The house across the street is pitched in darkness all across the front. The glow of the television in the upstairs window is gone. I’m wasting my time. Espinoza is jerking my chain. He’s probably
given me the address of one of his coyote caves, a place where he deposits illegals, part of the underground railroad to the promised land.

  I watch as the cops put the kid into the backseat of one of the patrol cars. Ten minutes later, it begins to mist again, and the street party breaks up. Light bars extinguished, they head off in different directions. No doubt they figure they’ve chilled the action at the intersection for the night.

  I reach for the key and I’m just about to turn the ignition, when I see the silhouette of a figure across the street.

  He has stepped out of the shadows near the front door where I couldn’t see him. He leans out, looks to see if the cops are gone. I can see him from the thighs up, as he leans against the solid three-foot-wall of the porch railing, both hands slipped into the pockets of his jeans. He is tall, slender, the dark outline of his head rounded to a point. He is wearing a hat to ward off the rain, a felt crusher with the brim turned down.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The next day I stumbled through an early morning court call downtown. Luckily it wasn’t something that required mental dexterity. It was only a first appearance. I stood next to my client in the dock for a reading of charges and thumbed through my calendar to fix a date for entry of a plea. Between calendar pages, I wiped sleep from my eyes, having been up half the night looking for the man in the funny hat.

  I have whittled down the names on the mailboxes to five possibilities. Given that Espinoza told me the guy was Hispanic, this is not rocket science.

  Hernandez; James Rosas; R. Ruiz; someone with the last name of Moreno; and H. Saldado. Narrowing it beyond this, assuming the guy’s name is even on the box and that he hasn’t used an alias, will be more difficult. Then, assuming I can identify him, and assuming further that I trace some link between this man and the Ibarras down in Mexico, the two brothers Metz told me about, I might have something. I’m laughing at myself. What I have is a pile of assumptions. I’m beginning to think Harry was right: I should forget it.

  While I’m thinking this, I’m thumbing the white pages of the San Diego phone book. I find Hernandez, two pages of them. Without an initial, I’m left to check for the street address. Using a ruler to scan down the first page, I flip to the second. I’m actually surprised when I find it. “Susan.” I scratch the name off my list. It might be easier than I thought.

  A half hour later I have found James Rosas and R. Ruiz, first name Richard, both at the right address. I write down their phone numbers. There are lots of Morenos but none of them on the right street. Several of them show phone numbers with no address. Without a first initial, I draw a blank. I have the same problem with Saldado, even with the first initial H. Assuming it’s a man, he either has no phone or he’s unlisted. I flop the white pages closed in the middle of my desk, lean back in my chair, and think.

  After a couple of seconds, I access my computer phone directory, do a search for a name, and when it pops up, I hit the auto dial. On the third ring, I get an answer. I grab the receiver off the cradle before she’s finished saying: “Carlton Collections.”

  It’s a woman’s voice, raspy, with a lot of phlegm.

  “Joyce?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?” Lisping like she has a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

  “Paul Madriani.”

  “Ahh, my favorite lawyer.” I can hear her wheezing on the intake. This is followed by a coughing jag, several wretched hacks, like a wood rasp working over a piece of pine.

  I move the phone a couple of inches away from my ear to save my hearing.

  “Hey, Bennie, it’s Paul Madriani.”

  “Who?” I hear her husband in the background.

  “Paul Madriani. You know, the lawyer.”

  “Don’t tell me the fuckin’ D.A. wants to talk to us again.”

  “No,” she says. “He’s just callin’ to say hello.”

  “Tell him hello,” he says.

  “Bennie says to say hello. You are just calling to say hello?”

  I tell her to pass greetings the other way. She does.

  “So, what is it you want? A busy lawyer like you doesn’t call just to chew the fat. Lemme guess. You got a deadbeat client you want us to find? Am I right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Like I tol’ you in court that day, my word is my bond. This one’s on the house. Didn’t I tell him that, Bennie?”

  Joyce shouts this so loud I have to pull the phone away, but I can hear Bennie.

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Gimme the name, I’ll draw ’n’ quarter the bastard,” she says.

  Joyce and Ben Swartz own Carlton Collections. Where they got the company name I don’t know. Probably off a pack of cigarettes. It sounded more WASPish than Swartz. This might be a plus if Joyce wasn’t answering the phone.

  The one thing I do know, phlegm or no phlegm, if you owe money, you don’t want Joyce, her nose to the ground sniffing along in your trail of bad debts.

  I have seen people suffer less who have had their knees capped by the mob. She will find you at your house, at your neighbor’s, at your mother’s, floating down the Merced River, in Yosemite, on your vacation. Your children will come home from school with notes in their lunch pails, telling you to pay up. If you go to a wedding, your name and the amount you owe will be printed in lipstick on the back window of the groom’s car. Joyce views federal and state debt collection laws as a challenge. If she can’t call you at your job, she will hire a skywriter to fly over your place of employment and print your name in block letters at five thousand feet, followed by the word “deadbeat” in pink smoke.

  Most collectors have a series of dunning letters, starting with a polite request and ending with suggestions that your kids may be sold into slavery. With Joyce, you get one polite letter. After that your ass belongs to her.

  About a year ago, she pushed beyond the bounds when she lowered the boom on a local church that was waiting for the second coming to pay a printing bill. One Sunday at services she showed up dressed to the nines, with a hat, and sporting a name tag. She stood at one of the main doors out front, smiling at the gray-haired usher on the other side as he greeted the morning congregation and wondered who the nice lady volunteer was. Joyce handed out morning bulletins to a few hundred of the faithful.

  When the pastor took to the pulpit, he couldn’t figure why members of his flock kept laughing every time he mentioned hell. Joyce had stuffed the bulletins with a dunning letter for the printing bill, and it reminded the readers that the devil is a deadbeat. They all stopped laughing when a sheriff’s deputy showed up, armed with papers to do a till tap on the morning offering. Unfortunately for Joyce, one of the church elders was the chief deputy district attorney.

  “So what’s the guy’s name?” she says. “This guy you want us to find.”

  There is no client, I tell her. “The State Bar frowns on my using your services for that.”

  “Why? They don’t like us?”

  “It’s nothing personal,” I tell her. “They make us arbitrate any unpaid bills by clients.”

  “You’re a lawyer. You telling me you don’t win those?” she says.

  “Even if we win, it’s usually suggested that we forget it. It’s bad P.R. Too many people already hate lawyers,” I say.

  “This bar, with an organization like that, it’s a wonder you can stay in business.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “So wad is it you want?”

  “I’d like you to check some names, see if you can get information on some people.”

  “What? Like their credit history?”

  “Maybe. That might help.”

  “You wanna skip trace maybe?”

  “Not exactly. I know where these people live. What I don’t have in some cases is a first name, a telephone number, employment information if you can find it. Where they bank. Who their friends are.” I give her the names from my list, and the street address.

  “And so that you don’t get in any trouble,�
�� I tell her. “This is not a neighborhood you want to visit. Only what you can get at arm’s length, understand?”

  “Hey. I don’t go anywhere I don’t take Bennie with me.”

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  “What else have you got?” she says. “No social security number? Maybe a vehicle license plate?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “That’s it? Last name—first initial? And you don’t even got that for some of these people.”

  “And the street address,” I remind her.

  “You don’t want much,” she says.

  “One other thing. The man I’m looking for. It’s possible he deals drugs.”

  “Hmm. Well, now, that could help,” she says.

  “How is that?”

  “This guy deals drugs, he’s gotta have a pager, right? A cell phone? You ever seen a drug dealer doesn’t have a pager and cell phone?”

  “I don’t know that many drug dealers,” I tell her.

  “Take it from me. They got pagers and cell phones. People like that they always do. Of course sometimes these belong to somebody else,” she says. “That’s the business to be in.”

  “What, cell phones?”

  “Stealing them,” she says. Knowing Joyce, I know she is only half kidding.

  “So I guess we start by doin’ the big five,” she says.

  “What is that? Jump in the air and slap hands?”

  “Noo. Noo.” Joyce has no sense of humor. “That’s the high five,” she says. “This is the big five. Different thing. These are the carriers. There’s five major ones offer all the wireless in this county. I know. We collect for them all. So, this guy you’re looking for. He’s got a cell phone; I’ll get his number. You want I should get you a copy of his monthly cell statement? Won’t cost you any more, seeing as it’s on the house.”

  “You can do that?”

  She hesitates for just a second. “For you, sure. When do you need this?”