The Oxford Book of American Det (110 page)

“But we don’t really have a witch case now,” Chee said. He spoke earnestly. “The shoes were still on, so the skin wasn’t taken from the soles of his feet. No bones missing from the neck. You need those to make corpse powder.” Wells was pulling his undershirt over his head. Chee hurried.

“What we have now is another little puzzle,” Chee said. “If you’re not collecting stuff for corpse powder, why cut the skin off this guy’s hands?”

“I’m going to take a shower,” Wells said. “Got to get my Begay back to L.A.

tomorrow.”

Outside the temperature had dropped. The air moved softly from the west, carrying the smell of rain. Over the Utah border, over the Cococino Rim, over the Rainbow Plateau, lightning flickered and glowed. The storm had formed. The storm was moving. The sky was black with it. Chee stood in the darkness, listening to the mutter of thunder, inhaling the perfume, exulting in it.

He climbed into the truck and started it. How had they set it up, and why? Perhaps the FBI agent who knew Begay had been ready to retire. Perhaps an accident had been arranged. Getting rid of the assistant prosecutor who knew the witness would have been even simpler—a matter of hiring him away from the government job. That left no one who knew this minor witness was not Simon Begay. And who was he? Probably they had other Navajos from the Los Angeles community stealing cars for them.

Perhaps that’s what had suggested the scheme. To most white men all Navajos looked pretty much alike, just as in his first years at college all Chee had seen in white men was pink skin, freckles, and light-coloured eyes. And what would the impostor say?

Chee grinned. He’d say whatever was necessary to cast doubt on the prosecution, to cast the fatal ‘reasonable doubt,’ to make—as Wells had put it—the U.S. District Attorney look like a horse’s ass.

Chee drove into the rain twenty miles west of Kayenta. Huge, cold drops drummed on the pickup roof and turned the highway into a ribbon of water. Tomorrow the backcountry roads would be impassable. As soon as they dried and the washouts had been repaired, he’d go back to the Tsossie hogan, and the Tso place, and to all the other places from which the word would quickly spread. He’d tell the people that the witch was in custody of the FBI and was gone forever from the Rainbow Plateau.

MARCIA MULLER (b. 1944)

Marcia Muller has won her way into the record books of detective fiction as the creator of the first well-known, fully licensed, totally believable, hard-boiled female private investigator. While Muller has used two other women sleuths, both amateurs, Sharon McCone remains her best-known creation.

Muller was born in Detroit and studied English and journalism at the University of Michigan before moving to California, where she worked on the staff of Sunset magazine, as an interviewer in San Francisco for the University of Michigan’s Institute of Social Research, and as a partner in Invisible Ink, a consulting service for writers.

Although Maxine O’Callaghan introduced a female private eye, Delilah West, in a 1974 short story, Muller’s first McCone mystery,
Edwin of the Iron Shoes,
published in 1977, is credited with establishing conventions for such characters that are still observed today. Muller provided her sleuth with a family of characters that includes professional associates at the All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco. She also endowed her with a sense of humour, a mission to see justice prevail, and a concern for the powerless. Many of McCone’s cases arise from problems faced by people whom she knows personally, and they take place in notably realistic settings, generally in California. The verbal skills—in particular, the interviewing expertise—that McCone employs are very significant to solving her cases, making verbal acuity another strength emulated by later writers.

Muller’s two other series characters are Elena Oliverez, curator at the Museum of Mexican Arts in Santa Barbara, and Joanna Stark, who heads an art security firm. The books in which these characters appear often focus on secrets of the past that affect the present.

In addition to producing fiction, Muller is an accomplished critic and anthologist having collaborated on a dozen books, including three detective novels written with her husband, Bill Pronzini. In
Double,
for instance, the story is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Muller’s McCone and Pronzini’s detective, Nameless.

Benny’s Space
provides an excellent illustration of Muller’s technique: McCone’s confident personality emerges; the problem she confronts is contemporary; the sociology of the neighbourhood is genuine; the dialogue rings true; and, despite the brevity the form requires, Muller’s quick sketches bring even the secondary characters so fully to life that the reader is truly moved by their circumstances.

Benny’s Space

Amorfina Angeles was terrified, and I could fully empathise with her. Merely living in the neighbourhood would have terrified me—all the more so had I been harassed by members of one of its many street gangs.

Hers was a rundown side street in the extreme southeast of San Francisco, only blocks from the drug - and crime - infested Sunnydale public housing projects. There were bars over the windows and grilles on the doors of the small stucco houses; dead and vandalised cars stood at the broken curbs; in the weed-choked yard next door, a mangy guard dog of indeterminate breed paced and snarled. Fear was written on this street as plainly as the graffiti on the walls and fences. Fear and hopelessness and a dull resignation to a life that none of its residents would willingly have opted to lead.

I watched Mrs. Angeles as she crossed her tiny living room to the front window, pulled the edge of the curtain aside a fraction, and peered out at the street. She was no more than five feet tall, with rounded shoulders, sallow skin, and graying black hair that curled in short, unruly ringlets. Her shapeless flower-printed dress did little to conceal a body made soft and fleshy by bad food and too much childbearing. Although she was only forty, she moved like a much older woman.

Her attorney and my colleague, Jack Stuart of All Souls Legal Cooperative, had given me a brief history of his client when he’d asked me to undertake an investigation on her behalf. She was a Filipina who had emigrated to the states with her husband in search of their own piece of the good life that was reputed to be had here. But as with many of their countrymen and women, things hadn’t worked out as the Angel-eses had envisioned: first Amorfina’s husband had gone into the import-export business with a friend from Manila; the friend absconded two years later with Joe Angeles’s life savings. Then, a year after that, Joe was killed in a freak accident at a construction site where he was working. Amorfina and their six children were left with no means of support, and in the years since Joe’s death their circumstances had gradually been reduced to this two-bedroom rental cottage in one of the worst areas of the city.

Mrs. Angeles, Jack told me, had done the best she could for her family, keeping them off the welfare rolls with a daytime job at a Mission district sewing factory and night-time work doing alterations. As they grew older, the children helped with part-time jobs. Now there were only two left at home: sixteen-year-old Alex and fourteen-year-old Isabel. It was typical of their mother, Jack said, that in the current crisis she was more concerned for them than for herself.

She turned from the window now, her face taut with fear, deep lines bracketing her full lips. I asked, “Is someone out there?”

She shook her head and walked wearily to the worn recliner opposite me. I occupied the place of honour on a red brocade sofa encased in the same plastic that doubtless had protected it long ago upon delivery from the store. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Not till it’s too late.”

“Mrs. Angeles, Jack Stuart told me about your problem, but I’d like to hear it in your own words—from the beginning, if you would.”

She nodded, smoothing her bright dress over her plump thighs. “It goes back a long time, to when Benny Crespo was... they called him the Prince of Omega Street, you know.”

Hearing the name of her street spoken made me aware of its ironic appropriateness: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is symbolic of endings, and for most of the people living here, Omega Street was the end of a steady decline into poverty.

Mrs. Angeles went on, “Benny Crespo was Filipino. His gang controlled the drugs here. A lot of people looked up to him; he had power, and that don’t happen much with our people. Once I caught Alex and one of my older boys calling him a hero. I let them have it pretty good, you bet, and there wasn’t any more of that kind of talk around this house. I got no use for the gangs—Filipino or otherwise.”

“What was the name of Benny Crespo’s gang?”

“The
Kabalyeros.
That’s Tagalog for Knights.”

“Okay—what happened to Benny?”

“The house next door, the one with the dog—that was where Benny lived. He always parked his fancy Corvette out front, and people knew better than to mess with it. Late one night he was getting out of the car and somebody shot him. A drug burn, they say.

After that the
Kabalyeros
decided to make the parking space a shrine to Benny. They roped it off, put flowers there every week. On All Saints Day and the other fiestas, it was something to see.”

“And that brings us to last March thirteenth,” I said.

Mrs. Angeles bit her lower lip and smoothed her dress again.

When she didn’t speak, I prompted her. “You’d just come home from work.”

“Yeah. It was late, dark. Isabel wasn’t here, and I got worried. I kept looking out the window, like a mother does.”

“And you saw...”

“The guy who moved into the house next door after Benny got shot, Reg Dawson. He was black, one of a gang called the Victors. They say he moved into that house to show the Kabalyeros that the Victors were taking over their turf. Anyway, he drives up and stops a little way down the block. Waits there, revving his engine. People start showing up; the word’s been put out that something’s gonna go down. And when there’s a big crowd, Reg Dawson guns his car and drives right into Benny’s space, over the rope and the flowers.

“Well, that started one hell of a fight—Victors and
Kabalyeros
and folks from the neighbourhood. And while it’s going on, Reg Dawson just stands there in Benny’s space acting macho. That’s when it happened, what I saw.”

“And what was that?”

She hesitated, wet her lips. “The leader of the
Kabalyeros,
Tommy Dragon—the Dragon, they call him—was over by the fence in front of Reg Dawson’s house, where you couldn’t see him unless you were really looking. I was, ‘cause I was trying to see if Isabel was anyplace out there. And I saw Tommy Dragon point this gun at Reg Dawson and shoot him dead.”

“What did you do then?”

“Ran and hid in the bathroom. That’s where I was when the cops came to the door.

Somebody’d told them I was in the window when it all went down and then ran away when Reg got shot. Well, what was I supposed to do? I got no use for the
Kabalyeros
or the Victors, so I told the truth. And now here I am in this mess.” Mrs. Angeles had been slated to be the chief prosecution witness at Tommy Dragon’s trial this week. But a month ago the threats had started: anonymous letters and phone calls warning her against testifying. As the trial date approached, this had escalated into blatant intimidation: a fire was set in her trash can; someone shot out her kitchen window; a dead dog turned up on her doorstep. The previous Friday, Isabel had been accosted on her way home from the bus stop by two masked men with guns. And that had finally made Mrs. Angeles capitulate; in court yesterday, she’d refused to take the stand against Dragon.

The state needed her testimony; there were no other witnesses, Dragon insisted on his innocence, and the murder gun had not been found. The judge had tried to reason with Mrs. Angeles, then cited her for contempt—reluctantly, he said. “The court is aware that there have been threats made against you and your family,” he told her, “but it is unable to guarantee your protection.” Then he gave her forty-eight hours to reconsider her decision.

As it turned out, Mrs. Angeles had a champion in her employer. The owner of the sewing factory was unwilling to allow one of his long-term workers to go to jail or to risk her own and her family’s safety. He brought her to All Souls, where he held a membership in our legal-services plan, and this morning Jack Stuart had asked me to do something for her.

What? I’d asked. What could I do that the SFPD couldn’t to stop vicious harassment by a street gang?

Well, he said, get proof against whoever was threatening her so they could be arrested and she’d feel free to testify.

Sure, Jack, I said. And exactly why
hadn’t
the police been able to do anything about the situation?

His answer was not surprising: lack of funds. Intimidation of prosecution witnesses in cases relating to gang violence was becoming more and more prevalent and open in San Francisco, but the city did not have the resources to protect them. An old story nowadays—not enough money to go around.

Mrs. Angeles was watching my face, her eyes tentative. As I looked back at her, her gaze began to waver. She’d experienced too much disappointment in her life to expect much in the way of help from me.

I said, “Yes, you certainly are in a mess. Let’s see if we can get you out of it.” We talked for a while longer, and I soon realised that Amor—as she asked me to call her—held the misconception that there was some way I could get the contempt citation dropped. I asked her if she’d known beforehand that a balky witness could be sent to jail. She shook her head. A person had a right to change her mind, didn’t she?

When I set her straight on that, she seemed to lose interest in the conversation; it was difficult to get her to focus long enough to compile a list of people I should talk with. I settled for enough names to keep me occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

I was ready to leave when angry voices came from the front steps. A young man and woman entered. They stopped speaking when they saw the room was occupied, but their faces remained set in lines of contention. Amor hastened to introduce them as her son and daughter, Alex and Isabel. To them she explained that I was a detective