Yesterday, I thought maybe I knew one gay politician; now I was sure I knew two.
“Hector, no bullshit, I wouldn’t—”
My throat closed involuntarily. I couldn’t finish the sentence. My heart started racing, my instincts outpacing my brain.
I asked myself a simple question, and I thought I knew the answer.
“You still there?” Hector said. “Hello?”
I braced my arm on the kitchen counter and played it out in my head.
Hector said, “I told Carl, if there was anyone I knew who could keep a secret, it was you. So I’m not gonna be wrong about that, am I? Jason. Am I gonna be wrong?”
I couldn’t speak, or at least I couldn’t focus on what Hector was saying. My mind was spinning now, trying to build a story, layer one fact upon another.
“Let’s talk first thing in the morning? Okay, Counselor? Sound like a plan? Let’s have breakfast at Apple Jacks, eight-thirty. Carl’s going to make this up to you, Jason, I’ll make sure of it. Okay?”
I didn’t reply. I killed the cell phone and paced the kitchen, playing a game of what-if in my mind, recognizing holes in my logic but feeling in my gut that I could plug them up with additional information.
I tried it from different angles, questioning myself, playing devil’s advocate, but I kept coming to the same conclusions. I was short on a couple of facts but I knew they were true, even if I
didn’t
know. I was sure of it.
I felt my senses slowing, my mind shifting to a dead-alert focus. My limbs were trembling with rage.
What do you plan to do when you figure it out?
Essie Ramirez had asked me.
So what’s the plan, J?
Joel Lightner had said.
When you figure out who killed Ernesto? You going to kill that person?
I felt everything break down, all of the walls I’d built up crumbling like a house of cards. Maybe that was a good analogy. Maybe I’d been kidding myself that I could get past this. I thought I’d done so. I thought I’d moved on. I missed my wife and daughter, but I was putting it behind me. I told myself the guilt I felt would ultimately harden, would become a permanent scar but one that would fade with each passing day.
I was backsliding and I didn’t care. How familiar and comfortable it felt, the self-destructive rage and bitterness.
This is who you are.
The guy who picked fights on the schoolyard with guys twice your size. The guy who blew his ride at State, his career in football, just so he could prove to the team captain how tough he was. Wanting to lash out and hurt, fully knowing the hurt would be returned twice over, wanting that hurt, seeking it out.
This is who you are.
I went upstairs to my bedroom. In the closet, top shelf, I found my old badge from the county attorney’s office. I’d thought I lost it once and had to put in for a replacement. I’d paid a heavy price for doing so—a week’s pay—the prosecutor’s office not having a sense of humor about official badges making their way into the public domain, and when I found it later, my replacement already in my wallet, I figured I’d already paid for the right to keep the original issue. So I did, even when I left my job as an ACA and turned in my replacement badge.
I had a gun, too, which I hardly knew how to use. I’d had the bare amount of training and even spent an afternoon at the FBI shooting range, a Friday perk for us low-paid, hard-working prosecutors, but I hadn’t handled this thing for more than four years and I wasn’t sure I could hit a mountain from a distance of two feet with this weapon at this point.
I didn’t have a plan, either, except that I wasn’t going to wait any longer.
Now I knew. I finally knew. The only remaining question was what I would do about it.
83
IT STARTED TO RAIN AS I DROVE, MASSIVE TEARDROPS
splatting my windshield. Dark and stormy seemed appropriate. I was growing cold inside as I worked through everything I knew, feeling like it was all coming up in one direction, no matter how I played it; growing cold as I did math that I knew
didn’t
add up: If it wasn’t for Adalbert Wozniak’s murder, there’d be no Ernesto Ramirez. If there hadn’t been Ernesto Ramirez, I wouldn’t have been waiting for him that night to call me. If Ernesto hadn’t been murdered, my wife and child would not have traveled alone.
Alone on a night like this, I thought, not cold but rainy, slippery, poor visibility.
I was past the
why
questions I’d asked for so long afterward.
Why
didn’t Talia scrap the trip when it started raining so hard?
Why
didn’t she slow down at the curve? I was past it as a pure function of a time cushion, and I was past it because I knew I was just transferring, because I was bitter and angry and everyone was to blame, me included but not alone.
I took deep breaths as the blackness mounted, coloring everything around me. I was trembling, white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel, my teeth grinding so furiously that I was tasting blood on my tongue.
I’d never been to this place, this townhouse, but I had the address courtesy of Joel Lightner. It wasn’t hard to find. The area had exploded in the last few years, before the housing bubble burst, but these were not the homeowners who defaulted on their loans and left their homes in disarray. This was the near-west side, the lofts and condos all new, purchased by the young professionals and artists.
I stood next to the mailbox, a cold shower of rain pelting me, forcing me to squint as I peered at the three-story home. At two in the morning, all the interior lights in the townhouse were out. I removed my cell phone from my pocket and dialed the number. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
I hung up. Then I dialed it again.
A light went on up on the third floor, presumably the bedroom. That’s really all I needed to know.
“Yeah, hello? Jason?”
“Hey,” I said into my cell phone. My voice was even and flat. “I think the reception was bad on the phone before. Just wanted to tell you, I’m not going to say anything to anybody.”
I could hear Hector clearing his throat, shaking out the cobwebs. “Okay, good. That’s good. Hey, breakfast tomorrow, eight-thirty? Apple Jacks?”
“Breakfast tomorrow.” I punched out the cell phone.
Five seconds later, the light went out in the third-floor bedroom again.
Hector was down for the night, sleeping more peacefully now that I had reassured him that I would not divulge the secret held by Hector’s political coattails, Governor Carlton Snow. I wondered how often Hector stayed out here at this townhouse. For a guy who liked to keep his private life private, I suppose it made more sense to stay at his partner’s place, not the other way around. He probably parked his car in a garage, maybe slinked out in the early morning hours before anyone could see him. Or maybe he figured he was sufficiently anonymous out here in the artsy-yuppie near-west side, several miles from the legislative district he used to represent.
I looked at the mailbox marked D. BAILEY. According to Joel Lightner, Delroy Bailey had moved here after his divorce from Joey Espinoza’s sister. Lightner, in his typical flair for completeness, had even noted the grounds for divorce in the petition filed by Joey’s sister: irreconcilable differences. Yeah, I guess it’s pretty irreconcilable when your husband is gay.
If it wasn’t hard for me, it wouldn’t have been hard for Adalbert Wozniak, either. He was claiming that he’d been treated unfairly by the Procurement and Construction Board when the beverage contract was given to Delroy’s company over his own. Did he actually figure out that someone very close to the PCB, Hector, was sleeping with the contract award winner? My guess was no. If Wozniak had gotten that far, there would have been some documentation of his finding. But no doubt, in his lawsuit, he was going to seek depositions of the interested parties, including Delroy Bailey. Wozniak and his lawyers would be sniffing around, and Hector would be in jeopardy. The story, from Hector’s viewpoint, would be devastating. Not merely allegations of influence peddling—politicians live with those accusations all the time—but something that would be far more controversial to someone who was, at the time, seeking the Democratic nomination for the office of attorney general. It would be hard enough to become the first Latino statewide officeholder; the first Latino
and gay
statewide officeholder would probably be too much.
What had Hector said tonight about Governor Snow?
He’s finished,
if word got out about his sexual preferences. Hector would have thought the same thing about himself. He was looking at a revelation that would end his statewide political ambitions. He didn’t know that was coming, anyway, thanks to a federal indictment. He didn’t know the feds were all over him, that they had flipped Joey Espinoza and were investigating the Columbus Street Cannibals.
What to do with Adalbert Wozniak, the man who could ruin him? Hector didn’t turn to the Cannibals. He didn’t know them. He admitted as much to me last night in the limo. The Cannibals shakedown was his idea, but he needed Joey Espinoza to deliver the message, to orchestrate everything with the Cannibals. And Hector couldn’t turn to Joey for the Wozniak problem. He couldn’t very well tell Joey,
I’m sleeping with your ex-brother-in-law, and it’s about to be exposed if we don’t kill this Polish guy.
So he turned to a different street gang, the one that didn’t dominate his legislative district, that wouldn’t be so easily connected to him. He went straight to the top. He went to Kiko, the top assassin for the Latin Lords. He needed Adalbert Wozniak dead to keep him quiet.
To cover up Hector’s connection to Delroy.
Hector. Hidden in plain sight, right in front of me. I must have missed about fifty clues along the way. An attorney’s instinct, I guess, for his own client.
The moments shot out at me now like asteroids from my subconscious: During Hector’s trial, when I told Hector and Paul Riley about this witness I liked, Ernesto Ramirez, a guy who seemed to know something and who was close to the Latin Lords.
Maybe the Lords killed Wozniak,
I said.
Why would they do that?
Hector responded, doing a very good job of playing dumb. I might as well have signed Ernesto’s death warrant at that moment.
And the night my world changed, as I waited impatiently in my office for a call from Ernesto Ramirez. The call from Paul Riley, asking me why I was still at the office, and my response—that I was waiting on this witness, this long-shot, Ernesto. Hector in the background with Paul, laughing, knowing that the call from Ernesto would never come, knowing that I’d sit there all night.
I reached into my trench coat pocket and felt the gun, caressed it, pondered it.
The rest made sense, too. Greg Connolly was the chair of the PCB. He’d been the one Hector turned to for the favor, skipping over Adalbert Wozniak’s company to give the beverage contract to Delroy Bailey and Starlight Catering. Surely Greg was aware of the lawsuit filed by Wozniak’s company. Surely it gave him some amount of unrest, at the very least, to know that a legal process was under way to sniff around this sordid affair. And surely, it caught his attention when the plaintiff in that lawsuit, Bert Wozniak, wound up dead from multiple gunshot wounds.
Did Greg know that Hector was behind the Wozniak murder? Hector wouldn’t have had to say it outright, though he might have. Hector liked to flex his muscles. I wouldn’t put it past him to tell Connolly straight up. Or just as likely, something vague enough for Hector to take credit without making an admission—
Took care of that problem
or
Don’t worry about that thing.
Did Greg know about Ernesto Ramirez, too? Hard to say, but I assumed so. Probably when Hector first heard the name from me, he reached out to Greg to see if he knew anything. This was in the heat of a trial whose headline charge was the Wozniak murder. Hector would have panicked upon learning that someone knew the truth about that murder.
The irony is that Ernesto Ramirez didn’t know that Hector was the bad guy. Ernesto and his friend Scarface assumed it was Delroy’s former brother-in-law, Joey Espinoza, who got Delroy the contract. Ernesto had no idea about a gay relationship between Delroy and Hector. He thought the “connection to Delroy” that Bert Wozniak was going to expose was the ex-brother-in-law relationship between Delroy Bailey and Joey.
But Hector didn’t know that. All he knew, thanks to me, was that there was a guy out there who seemed to know something about the murder of Bert Wozniak, which included—again, thanks to my speculation—the involvement of the Latin Lords street gang, Kiko’s gang. Hector would have been desperate to silence Ernesto. And he used another person who would be just as desperate, Kiko, to carry it out.
Greg Connolly might not have known every detail but he would have known enough. If he had any brains, he’d know that Hector had Wozniak taken out. Same for Ernesto Ramirez. So what was Hector to think when, one day, he discovered that Mr. Gregory Connolly was wearing a wire for the federal government? I mean, killing an aide to the governor is no small thing, but murder to cover up two other murders is less of a leap. What did he have to lose at that point? If Greg was flapping his mouth about Adalbert Wozniak and Delroy Bailey and Ernesto Ramirez, then on a risk-reward calculation, the pros of killing Greg Connolly far outweighed the cons.