“What’s the charge?” I ask, tossing the folder onto my cluttered desktop. I’ll look at it later; I don’t mix lunch with work.
“Grand theft. Sony hi-def televisions. Plasma, top of the line. It’s in the arrest report, which I trust you’ll read before your initial meet and greet.”
“I could use a new TV,” I banter back. Joe’s an easy boss to work for; he isn’t full of himself. “Think there’s any spares?”
“You mean after the boys in blue took their piece off the top?” he replies. “Chat up the arresting officers; maybe you can cut a deal. Eyes wide shut.”
“I’m on the wrong side of the aisle, Chief. As you always remind us.”
“All cats are gray in the dark,” he tells me with no wit at all. Meaning, we’re all part of the same system, even though we like to pretend we aren’t. Joe has been a public defender for decades. His cynicism is deeply ingrained.
“It’s bright daylight out,” I reply, cocking a thumb at my window, where the half-drawn Venetian blinds are dissecting the piercing sunlight into long shadowy strips across the room. You can count on me to take the other side of almost any argument and mount a stout defense.
“For you, it is.” Joe raps a knuckle on the thin file. “For this chump and the rest of his tribe, it’s always lights out.”
I’m ahead of schedule, so I duck into the eighth-floor coffee bar to get a milkshake. I normally go with chocolate, but today I decide to be daring and try strawberry. The strawberry is sweeter, and I want an extra dose of sugar to knock down the garlic residue that’s still percolating in my stomach. I need to cut my salad dressing recipe back to two cloves.
“Did you hear the news?” a man asks from behind me.
I turn. It’s my nocturnal friend, LAPD detective Luis Cordova. Last night, when I saw him on his lonely vigil, he was wearing jeans, a black pocket T-shirt, scruffy New Balance running shoes, the same brand as mine, which is why I noticed them. Today, on the job, he’s dressed in a charcoal-gray blazer, white dress shirt fresh out of the dry cleaner’s box, the collar and cuffs stiff with starch, dark slacks with a sharp crease. His cordovan dress shoes are spit-shined. I’d lay odds he was in the military when he was younger; a lot of Latino men go that route out of high school, then segue into police work. Probably the marines, he gives off that “the few, the proud,” vibe. To me, it’s macho bullshit. But I’m a woman, and Anglo. He and I breathe the same air, but we live in different worlds. This building, and what it represents, is our lone common denominator.
“What news?” I ask him, not tuned in. I take a sip of my milkshake. Yummy! It’s wonderful what you can get away with when you’re running eight to ten miles a day, six days a week.
“We found another victim.”
A cold tremor runs down my back. I put the milkshake cup on a nearby table so I won’t spill any of it, because my hands are shaking. “Same MO as the others?”
He gives me a tight nod. “Close enough.”
“Where?” I ask. I’m both repulsed and wired, the way you feel when you’re driving on the freeway and pass a bad car wreck. You don’t want to look, but you can’t help yourself. Human tragedy can be both ugly and compelling. “When?”
“A mile from where I saw you last night.” His voice is a deep, rumbling baritone. Big and strong, like the rest of him. “Off Gretna Green. The medical examiners don’t know when yet. Last night, sometime. The body was only found a few hours ago.”
“Who knows?”
“Almost no one, yet. I’m telling you because …”
Because I was there. Inwardly, I shudder.
“We’re keeping it under wraps until we can notify the family,” he continues. “We haven’t been able to get in touch with her husband yet; he’s on the road and we don’t want to tell him over the phone, especially if he’s driving. After that, there will be a news conference.” He grunts. “White women murdered by a serial killer. This is going to be a disaster.”
Less than a mile from where I was running through the streets, alone. Jesus.
A good cop can read minds, and bend them. Luis Cordova is a very good cop. “It could have been you.”
My reply is firm. “But it wasn’t.”
I’m not a victim. I haven’t been a victim for more than twenty years, and I have vowed never to be one again. Besides, this man doesn’t know me. I’m one of thousands of faces who have passed in front of him over the years; ditto him for me. Until last night, we had never had a real conversation. He’s a cop, I’m a defense lawyer. We work the opposite sides of the street.
“There’s one thing you won’t have to worry about for the rest of the month,” Cordova tells me.
I don’t want to rise to the bait, but I can’t help myself. “What’s that?”
“Assuming it’s the same psychotic bastard who killed all three, and that the pattern stays the same, he has his victim for this month. You’re safe for the next thirty days.” He gives me a sad-eyed look, as if we’re friends and he really cares.
“After that, you had better run in the daytime,” he cautions me. “Or carry protection when you go out at night.”
T
HE NEW PRISONER’S NAME
is Roberto Salazar. Like over 90 percent of people arrested each year in Los Angeles, he can’t afford a private lawyer, so we were assigned to defend him.
Salazar is in his mid-thirties, handsome in an androgynous way, like Mick Jagger back in the day, or Johnny Depp. His eyes are fawnlike, Bambi as a young stag. He looks as if he could be part Anglo—his eyes are hazel-green, not brown, and his nose and lips are northern European thin. This is not uncommon in Los Angeles, where the different races have been intermingling for generations, going back to the Spanish land-grant families.
Salazar is dressed in a forest-green, short-sleeved khaki shirt, matching pants with shiny knees, well-scuffed work boots. It’s the uniform you see on thousands of gardeners all over the Southland. His ingratiating smile doesn’t convince either of us—this man is scared shitless.
I’m interviewing him in the small room off Judge Rosen’s courtroom that’s set up for client-lawyer meetings. In fifteen minutes, Salazar goes up before the judge. A formal copy of the complaint will be entered, he’ll plead not guilty, and a date will be set for his bail hearing. It’s all boilerplate; we’ll be in and out of court in less than five minutes.
“Breaking and entering, grand theft, transporting stolen property,” I read, flipping through the pages in his folder, which I did get to skim, barely. “Those are serious charges and, I’m sorry to say, it looks as if they caught you red-handed, Mr. Salazar. These televisions match the serial numbers of a load that was stolen out of a Best Buy shipping container down in San Pedro, the day before yesterday.” San Pedro is the hub of the Port of Los Angeles, the largest shipping depot in the United States. The incidence of robbery is astronomical, in the billions of dollars.
I put the folder aside. “You don’t happen to have any paperwork for these televisions, do you?” I ask Salazar.
He stares at the floor. “No.” His voice is soft, barely audible. It doesn’t matter that I can hardly hear him; I knew the answer already.
He’s shaking his head from side to side as I’m reciting the damning bill of particulars. “I didn’t steal them,” he declares. His English is almost without accent, just a touch of Latino inflection. We won’t need to converse through an interpreter, which is always an impediment. “I swear it,” he tells me. “Get me a Bible. I’ll swear on it.”
In a situation like this, where the evidence against the accused is strong, you assume he is lying, but you have to hear him out. “So what happened?” I ask. “They just jumped into your truck all by themselves?”
He stares at me balefully. He isn’t in the mood for humor. “No, they did not jump into my truck. I loaded them in. Me and Armando.” He looks at me again with a combination of fear, anger, and, yes, contempt. For how I’m disrespecting him.
I take a mental step back. You’re patronizing him, I chastise myself. It’s easy to slide into cynicism—witness Joe, my boss, and lots of other lawyers in this building, probably the majority. Most of them are good men and women who don’t think of themselves as cynics at all, but realists. I’m not that tough skinned yet. Will I ever be? Maybe, if I stay the course and put in my thirty years, like old-man Sam, my office mate. Right now, my uncynical inner voice is reminding me that I am this man’s advocate, his only voice in a system that has been designed to crush him. You have to give him your best effort, even if the outcome, like most, is preordained.
“Who is Armando?” I ask. I pick up the file and leaf through the few pages. “I don’t see any Armando in here. Was he arrested along with you?”
He shakes his head. “He wasn’t there.”
Of course not. “Okay. Tell me what happened. Try not to leave anything out.” I glance at my watch. It’s a TAG Heuer, an expensive athlete’s timepiece. My boyfriend gave it to me last Christmas, when he realized I was serious about running a marathon. It’s too heavy to actually run with, but it’s a lovely piece of wrist candy. “You have ten minutes before we see the judge,” I notify my client, “so make it crisp.”
My first surprise: Salazar has never been arrested, not even for stealing a pack of bubble gum from the neighborhood candy store as a kid. That’s shocking, given where he comes from: the area east of the L.A. River, where Boyle Heights meets East Los Angeles, one of the toughest neighborhoods in L.A. County; his ethnicity, Latino; and the basic life for minority men on the gang-infested streets of our wonderful city. I didn’t see anything incriminating in his file, but I’d only had time to give it a cursory look-over.
The more Salazar tells me about his history, the weirder this stolen-television episode feels. It’s totally out of character with everything else in his life. Besides never having been arrested for any crime, not even a minor misdemeanor, he is married and is the father of two small children; he is a self-employed gardener with a full client list, including customers who live in Beverly Hills and the Westside; and he is a lay preacher in a storefront church. To top off his pristine résumé, he’s also a youth counselor for his local Boys and Girls Club. That someone with these credentials would be involved in stolen goods, or any criminal activity, doesn’t make sense. His entire life has been about staying out of trouble, not courting it.
I check the time on my expensive watch. “This is all good and helpful, Mr. Salazar,” I nudge him, “but I need the facts of what happened last night. You can fill in the rest of your life story later. We’ve got five minutes, so cut to the chase.”
All this woe has befallen him, he tells me mournfully, because he was trying to do the right thing: help a friend in need. The aforementioned Armando, last name Gonzalez. Gonzalez is a wholesaler who buys goods in Mexico and then resells them for a higher price in the states. Sometimes, if he needs help transporting a shipment, he hires Salazar to help him. There has never been a problem. As far as he knows, everything Gonzalez did was legal and aboveboard.
“I wouldn’t do anything against the law,” Salazar tells me. He sounds honest. They all do, at first.
“I’m glad to hear it. Go on,” I prompt him.
He continues with his story. Gonzalez had bought a load of Sony televisions in Tijuana, which he planned to sell in Los Angeles. Late last night, he had called Salazar in a panic. He was en route to Panorama City, an industrial location in the San Fernando Valley, where he was supposed to deliver the televisions, but his truck had broken down in Wilmington, which is the next city up the 110 freeway from San Pedro. He had managed to pull off the 110 onto a surface street, but he couldn’t go any farther—his generator was shot. The televisions had to be in the delivery warehouse by six in the morning, when the retailer’s truck would show up. If he, Gonzalez, didn’t get them to the Panorama City location, he wouldn’t be paid; and worse, he would lose his contact with the man who had contracted with him to buy the televisions. He was in a real bind, and he didn’t know who else he could call. Would Roberto drive down to Wilmington, load the TVs into his truck, and take them to Panorama City?
Normally, this proposed delivery would be a nightmare commute, because the L.A. freeways, particularly the 110 and the 405, are the most congested freeways in the country. But in the middle of the night, the traffic is manageable. Salazar could jump onto the 60 on-ramp near his house, connect to the I-10, then the 110, and be in Wilmington in half an hour. He and Armando would load the crates into his cube truck, he could take the 405 over the pass, deliver the shipment to Panorama City, off-load them, and be home in time to wake his children before heading back out for his day’s work. There wouldn’t be any problems, Gonzalez assured him, and he would be doing a friend in need a huge favor.
“You use a cube truck for gardening?” I interrupt.
“No,” Salazar answers doggedly. “I have a pickup for gardening. The cube truck is for deliveries and local moving.” He allows himself a small smile. “It’s a sideline business. I’m cheaper than the big companies, and the people in my neighborhood know me.” His smile fades. “And trust me.”
A second business? Plus raising a family, running a rump church, and doing youth work? This guy’s practically a poster boy for upward mobility in the barrio.
“Armando must think you’re an awfully good friend to get out of bed in the middle of the night and do this for him,” I say.
He shrugs. “What could I do?” he says. “He needed help.” He hesitates a moment. “And he was going to pay me for helping him.”
So it wasn’t all about the milk of human kindness. I feel better, learning this. It makes the episode seem more believable. “How much?” I ask.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars.” He ducks his head, as if pronouncing the figure embarrasses him. “More than my usual hourly rate, but it was a big favor to ask.”
Considering the circumstances, $250 doesn’t seem like an overcharge to me, but I’d guess his pay scale is pretty low. There are thousands of gardeners in L.A.; you can get a good one for under $20 an hour. “You named the price, I assume.”
He nods.
“If you feel guilty that you overcharged Mr. Gonzalez, you shouldn’t,” I tell him. “Asking a man to get out of bed in the middle of the night and drive sixty miles is a big favor.” I pause. “Especially if the cargo you’re being asked to deliver is stolen goods.” I look at him critically. “Did Armando know those television sets were stolen?”