“A couple.”
“What kinds of intrusions, Mr. Portillo?”
“A couple times kids tried to sneak over the fence. One time a common thief, who didn’t know who he was messing with. Stuff like that. Nothing heavy.”
“Did the people inside respond?”
“Sure they did. That’s why you have a security system.”
“What was the nature of those responses, Mr. Portillo?”
“We intercepted them and asked them to leave.”
“You confronted them.”
“Yeah.”
“With force?”
“Yeah, with force.”
“So you had weapons present at this compound.”
“Of course we did. Who wouldn’t? Valuable piece of property like that, you got to be prepared to protect it.”
“Okay. Now let’s go back to that night, Mr. Portillo. You and Mr. Juarez and about a dozen other friends were in the compound. You were relaxing. You had no illegal substances with you. You were acting in a law-abiding fashion.”
“That’s right.”
“So you didn’t expect anyone to try to invade your property. Because you weren’t doing anything wrong. Against the law.”
“Well, we weren’t doing anything wrong, but we did expect some visitors.”
“Why is that, Mr. Portillo?”
I sat up. We were getting to something. Finally.
“Juarez got a call.”
John Q. took a beat before going on. I was alert now, listening. This was the first I’d heard of this.
“Mr. Juarez got a telephone call? Someone called the compound?”
Portillo nodded. “He got two calls.”
“About what time of the night was that, Mr. Portillo?”
“Late. The first was around three in the morning. The second came about half an hour later.”
“Do you know what these calls were about?”
“I don’t know about the first one. The second was that we were about to have some company pretty soon.” Portillo paused. “A lot of company.”
“Expected company?”
Portillo brayed. “Hell, no.”
“Hostile visitors, then.”
“Very.”
Another pause from the old fox, another show of deep thinking. It was clear to me what the two calls were. The first was to tell them the cocaine wasn’t coming in. The second was to warn them of the raid.
“These telephone calls to Mr. Juarez. Were they to his listed number?”
Portillo laughed. “Rey didn’t have no listed phone numbers. He protected his privacy.”
“To your knowledge, Mr. Portillo, did many people know this particular phone number?”
“No. Hardly any.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Did the other ten men who were present in Mr. Juarez’s home that night know that number?”
Portillo nodded. “Yeah.”
“Would you describe the people who knew that number as Mr. Juarez’s inner circle?”
“The most inner. He changed his secure phone all the time, so people couldn’t track him down.”
“Would it be fair to say that Mr. Juarez was obsessed with privacy and secrecy, Mr. Portillo?”
Portillo laughed. “He made Howard Hughes look like Jay Leno. The man was totally obsessed with his security. With good reason,” he added. “He’d had plenty of attempts on his life.”
“What was Juarez’s reaction when he got the telephone calls?”
“The first one, he was pissed. The second one, he was freaked.”
“Because you were about to be invaded by a hostile force while on private property, minding your own business?”
I stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. Argumentative.”
Judge McBee nodded. “Sustained.”
John Q. was undaunted. “Did Mr. Juarez tell you why he was freaked?”
Portillo nodded. “He said we were going to get busted. That they were coming for him.”
“Did he say who ‘they’ were?”
Another nod. “Federal agents. A task force that had been set up to get him.”
Shit. This was new news to me. And not welcome.
“They were coming for him? Him specifically?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Dead or alive? Did he say dead or alive?”
“Either way. If federal agents are coming after you, they don’t care. Long as they have your body in a bag. Check out Ruby Ridge, Waco, other places tike them.” Portillo glared past John Q. to Jerome, sitting at the defense table, as he said that.
I was utterly confused now. On one hand John Q.’s witness was saying Jerome was going to take Juarez dead or alive, on the other that he had been forewarned. The two didn’t match up. I listened carefully as John Q. went on.
“I want to sidetrack for a moment, Mr. Portillo. Do you know a man named Luis Lopez?”
Portillo practically spat, right there on the witness stand. “Yeah, I know that son of a bitch!”
The courtroom buzzed. McBee gaveled down hard. “There will be no profanity in this courtroom, Mr. Portillo! You are to refrain from using such language in here! Do you understand me?”
Portillo stared up at him. “Yes, Your Honor. I’m sorry. I got carried away.”
“Keep your temper in check,” McBee warned him.
“I’ll be careful, Your Honor.”
McBee nodded at John Q. “Proceed, Counselor.”
“Thank you, Your Honor. I apologize for my witness’s outburst. This is a very emotional issue with him. His best friend was murdered that night, and Mr. Lopez was a party to that.”
Again, I thought of protesting, and again, I decided not to.
John Q. turned to Portillo again. “Was Mr. Lopez one of the men who was at the compound on the night of September twenty-eighth?”
Portillo darkened. “Yeah, he was there.” He paused. “Some of the time.”
“Some of the time?” John Q. asked, pretending to be confused. “Why would anyone leave a remote place like that in the middle of the night? Unless he was trying to get away because of this impending assault on Mr. Juarez’s private property.”
“You’ll have to ask Lopez that. I don’t think that’s why.”
I was starting to see where this was going. The old fox still had some tricks left in his repertoire.
“Do you know who that second call was from?” John Q. asked.
That question caught me off-guard. I looked around. Nobody else seemed to realize how important this was.
Portillo answered in the negative. “No. Reynaldo didn’t say.”
John Q. looked at some more notes. “Did Mr. Juarez ever talk about Sterling Jerome?” John Q. turned and pointed to Jerome, sitting up straight at the defense table. “This man. Did Mr. Juarez ever mention him?”
Portillo nodded vigorously. “All the time. He talked about him for years.”
“For years? Would you say that Mr. Juarez was obsessed with Mr. Jerome?”
“Obsessed
ain’t the word. It was like Jerome was a what’s the word…succubus to Reynaldo, you know? Like that thing in
Alien
that grows inside you and eats your guts out? That’s what Jerome was to Reynaldo, a virus that was trying to kill him. Like a cancer growing inside of him.”
“He wasn’t friendly with Mr. Jerome, then.”
Portillo almost came out of his chair, he was so agitated. “He hated him! He hated him worse than anybody on earth!”
“Calm down, Mr. Portillo,” John Q. begged. “Please.”
Portillo was almost hyperventilating. “This is really hard for me, man. To be sitting here, in the same room with him…”
“I understand, I understand. Then it would be fair to say,” John Q. continued, lowering the intensity, “that Mr. Jerome would
not
have been the person on the other end of either of those telephone calls with Mr. Juarez. Particularly the call that warned Mr. Juarez that he and the rest of you were about to be placed in a state of siege.”
Portillo shook his head at the temerity of that question. “Jerome would be the last man on earth Reynaldo would ever talk to. They were blood enemies to the bitter end. Jerome would go to the ends of the earth to get Reynaldo. And Reynaldo knew it.”
I could feel the vibe going through the courtroom: this man was saying everything I’d said, he was buttressing my case a thousand-fold. But I knew better; old John Q. was setting this up beautifully. I hated him for doing it, but I had to admire his talent.
“Okay. I hear you,” John Q. said. “I want to make this point one more time, so there’s no question. Sometime that night, Reynaldo Juarez was called on a telephone that almost no one had the number for and told that you were about to be heavily attacked. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“By Mr. Jerome and other agents of the DEA?”
“Yes.”
John Q. was moving closer to his target. “Obviously, whoever tried to warn Mr. Juarez had to be very close to him, didn’t he? Close enough that he had Mr. Juarez’s most secure telephone number.”
“Yes. Whoever it was had to be real tight with Reynaldo. Supertight.”
The old lawyer leaned in to Portillo. “If you knew in advance you were going to be attacked, Mr. Portillo, why didn’t you try to escape?”
Portillo stared at him. “It was too late. We were surrounded.”
“You knew that.”
“Yes.”
“From this telephone call.”
“Yes.”
John Q. pondered for a moment. “You knew the attack was coming. It wasn’t a breach of security in the compound.”
Portillo again said it wasn’t. “We knew they were coming.”
“Why didn’t you simply let them in? What could have happened?”
“They would have killed us. They were armed to the teeth. They did try to kill us, didn’t they? We had to defend ourselves, it was our only chance for surviving.” He bristled. “Why should we just let them in, anyway? We were on our own private property. We weren’t doing anything wrong. Somebody comes onto your property, armed like they do, you’re just going to let them? Who does that?”
I looked over at the jury. Some of them were actually nodding in agreement. Up here you don’t trespass lightly.
“So your security was in place on the night in question?” John Q. asked Portillo again.
Portillo leaned forward, gripping the rails of the witness box. “It turned out it wasn’t,” he said. “If we hadn’t gotten that phone call, they would have caught us bare-assed naked. We would’ve been ducks in a barrel.”
John Q. turned to the jury for his next question. “What happened? Why wasn’t this tight, complex security of yours working that night?”
“Because Luis Lopez disabled it.”
I was up on my feet for that one. “Objection!” I called out. This was hurting me, I couldn’t be a fly on the wall any longer. “Hearsay.”
“Sustained,” McBee backed me up. “There’s no foundation for that,” he told John Q.
John Q. turned back to Portillo. “You saw Mr. Lopez disarm the security system?”
“No,” Portillo answered before I could object again. “But he was the only one who wasn’t there at the end, so it had—”
“Objection!”
I yelled as loud as I could.
“Sustained!” McBee turned to the jury. “This part of the witness’s testimony is not admissible. Strike it,” he instructed the court reporter. “Do not pursue this line of questioning any further, Mr. Jones, or I won’t let you continue.”
“That’s fine, Your Honor.” John Q. smiled as he turned away. “Because I don’t have any more questions.”
I had to change direction, get the jurors’ minds off thinking about who had tipped off Juarez’s group.
“After the attack was over, Mr. Portillo,” I began, “was Mr. Juarez alive? He wasn’t killed during the attack on the compound, was he?”
“No. He was alive.”
“He was found in a walk-in freezer and taken prisoner, is that correct?”
“Yeah,” Portillo answered in a surly tone.
“You saw him with your own eyes. You know that he was alive and was not killed during the raid on your compound. His compound.”
“I saw him. He was alive.”
“Did you see where he was taken?”
He nodded. “In this command trailer they had.”
“Okay.” I wanted to be clear on where I was going; John Q. had thrown me a curve. “Did you see who went into that trailer, after Mr. Juarez was put there?”
“Some DEA agents.”
“How many do you think that was? Three or four, ten or twelve, twenty or thirty?”
“Three or four. Jerome and a couple others.”
“So only a few agents had physical access to Mr. Juarez.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see anyone else go in that trailer, Mr. Portillo?”
“Like who?”
“Another prisoner, someone else who was out there.”
Portillo scoffed at that. “All of us were handcuffed, we weren’t going anywhere. There was only agents out there. Agents and us.”
I nodded. “Agent Jerome was in there the most, is that right?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“And at some point, after he’d been in there for some time, presumably questioning Mr. Juarez, he came out. Is that right?”
“Yeah. He came out and talked to some other agents.”
“And at some point while he was talking to these other agents, Mr. Juarez escaped from that trailer, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
I moved over to the jury box, “To the best of your recollection, was Agent Jerome the last person who had been in that trailer before Mr. Juarez escaped?”
Portillo thought for a moment. “I guess,” he said, looking at me, and by doing so looking at the jury as well.
I repeated my question, so it would stick in the jurors’ minds. “The last person who was in that trailer—before Mr. Juarez escaped—was Agent Sterling Jerome.”
“He was the last one I saw.”
It was too hot to continue—people were squirming in the hard wooden seats, plucking their garments from their backs and rear ends, fanning themselves with newspapers, magazines, anything stiff. The jurors, their chairs perched on risers in the jury box, looked especially uncomfortable. During the recess that followed my cross-examination of Portillo, Judge McBee conferred with the air-conditioning technicians, who promised him the replacements for the defective parts would arrive via FedEx and could be installed in time for the courtroom to be properly cooled off by tomorrow morning. With that, he adjourned us for the day.
I went home. Riva, dressed for the weather in shorts and a halter top, had the air-conditioning turned up, so our rental box was nice and cool. Joan was out shopping. I played with Bucky for a few minutes, filled Riva in on the general tenor of the action in the courtroom, then retired to the third bedroom, which I use as a home office. It’s Spartan—a sixty-five-dollar, put-it-together-yourself desk from Staples, two chairs snitched from my regular office, filing cabinets, my laptop, and copies of our investigations, the grand jury proceedings, current trial information.