Authors: Steven Gore
T
ansy Amaro was waiting outside Gage's office when he arrived upstairs.
“Can I speak to you for a minute?” Tansy asked.
Gage directed her toward one of two wooden, straight-backed chairs facing his desk, and then asked, “What's on your mind?”
“Charlie Palmer.” Tansy hesitated, eyes searching Gage's. “Well . . . maybe it's really about you.”
Gage leaned forward in his chair and rested his forearms on the desk.
“I don't understand why you have such outrage for Charlie,” Tansy said. “If it's because of Moki, don't. I made my peace with what happened long before we ever met.”
“We don't know exactly what happened,” Gage said. “And with Charlie dead, we never will.”
Tansy shrugged. “Then maybe I've made my peace with never knowing. And . . . and I couldn't bring myself to put Moki through another trial. Doctors and psychologists testing and tormenting him again. He'd suffered enough. He may not recognize me anymore, but he still feels the pain of being treated like an object.”
She paused again, her eyes losing focus. Gage followed her mind back ten years. Moki Amaro, beaten, not by thugs but by Hummer-riding drunk rich kids from Pacific Heights raised on gangster rap and delusions of turf. More than just beaten. Brutalized because he was a brown-skinned boy in hand-me-down sweats jogging through their upscale neighborhood. The four seventeen-year-olds had claimed self-defense. The lone prosecution witness, a city trash collector, fled the day before trial, and the judge dismissed the case. The person last seen by neighbors walking up the witness's front steps: a man who the prosecutor suspected was Charlie Palmer, but which he could never prove.
Tansy blinked and her eyes once again focused on Gage. He knew where the conversation was headed so he took the lead.
“In the end,” Gage said, “it wasn't about any particular thing Charlie did, it was about everything he did. What he was. He had no respect for the truth, even as a cop. That's why he was the favorite of every politician caught with his hands in a lobbyist's pocket or in the pants of some young staffer. His so-called investigations were nothing more than blackmailing people into silence or suborning perjuryâand that's what I believe he did to you and Moki. If the truth had come out, those kids would've gone to jail, their parents would be paying for his care, and you'd still have a nursing career.”
Gage didn't have to finish his thought: If it hadn't been for Charlie's crimes, Gage never would've met Tansy. A couple of years after the beating, Gage's father asked him to travel to the Rio Yaqui valley in Mexico to find out whether insecticide poisoning might account for the cancers of many of his immigrant Yaqui patients and the birth defects and learning disabilities of their children. Gage convinced a farmworker to help him steal samples from the fields and warehouses and smuggle them back into the U.S. A lab analysis revealed that the corporations farming the Yaqui land were using toxaphene, a compound of six hundred and seventy chemicals that had been dumped in Mexico after they were banned in the U.S.
The truth came too late for the man who'd helped him. Gage received a letter from his widow a month after he'd died of toxaphene poisoning. She wrote asking for help, not for herself, but for her niece, Tansy, who'd graduated from nursing school in San Francisco just before Moki had been attacked. Gage sought her out and after talking with her and with the prosecutor, he was convinced Charlie was behind the collapse of the prosecution of the kids who'd destroyed Moki's life.
There was no one in San Francisco other than Charlie who could have done it so perfectly.
Gage repaid the debt his father and his patients owed Tansy's uncle and tried to compensate for Charlie's crime by offering her a job that allowed her to both work and care for her disabled son. He even let her bring Moki into the office on days when she couldn't find a nurse's aide to stay with him at home.
But it was too late to reopen the case, even if Tansy had been willing, because the prosecutor's race against the statute of limitations had already been lost.
“And that's what Charlie did to a thousand other people.” Gage jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Pacific Heights where Moki had been assaulted. “Those kids grew up knowing their parents could buy their way out of anything by hiring somebody like Charlie Palmer.”
Tansy fixed her eyes on Gage. “That's it, isn't it?”
“What?”
“When you hired me, I heard you left police work to study philosophy at Cal. I figured you'd be somebody who talked in theoretical concepts, whether for real or just to impress people.” She grinned. “I had enough of that in the 1980s when graduate students would come out to the reservation thinking they could squat down with an old Deer Singer and he'd spit out their dissertations for them.” She giggled, her face brightening. “There we were, in the middle of the godforsaken desert, trying to build cinder-block houses, and all they'd want to talk about was deconstruction.”
Gage shrugged as if to say academics sometimes got lost in their jargon.
Tansy caught his meaning, but shook her head. Her grin faded.
“For you, it was never about abstract ideas, justice with a capital J and truth with a capital T. I've watched you. Everyone thinks you live in your head”âshe tapped her chestâ“but this is where you live. You understand heartache. That's what moves you. I've been told that's what the old people used to say about your father, and everything I've seen since I started working here shows me you're your father's son. I even can see it in Faith's eyes when she looks at you now.”
She lowered her hand and fell silent. After a few seconds she nodded as though she'd found the just right words to express her thoughts, and said, “I'm thinking it probably would've been better if you'd been born a Yaqui.”
“Why's that?”
“Because of the way your mind works. It's just like how we approach the world. It's even in our language. In English you say, âI see the earth.' The emphasis is on the person seeing, the filtering through the mind. In Yaqui we say,
Inepo bwia vitchu
, I earth see. The emphasis is on us facing the thing as it exists in the world. It makes us a humble people.”
Gage was quick to respond. “Too humble.”
As a child, Gage had watched Yaquis traveling through Nogales from Mexico on their annual Easter migration, wondering whether they were like the Bedouins he was reading about in
Lawrence of Arabia
, except unarmed and nearly defeated, run out of Mexico by a government attempting to break their will and harassed by immigration agents and police at the border. They were only safe when they arrived at a patch of desert a six-year-old Apache schoolmate of Gage's once called a resignation, instead of a reservation. Gage remembered driving up to Tucson from Nogales with his father in the 1960s, when he went to stand with Yaquis at city council meetings protesting real estate developers encroaching Old Pascua village, a collection of dusty one-room shacks and shotgun brick houses founded by refugees fleeing Mexican government persecution.
“But we survived,” Tansy said.
“Maybe the tribe should've gotten a cut from the Carlos Castaneda books,” Gage said, finally offering a smile back. “And made some money selling tickets to watch him and that Yaqui shaman turn into crows and fly around the Sedona vortexes.”
“Carlos who? I don't recall such a person dropping by, as a man or a bird. And the only vortex any Yaqui ever saw was a dust devil.”
Gage shook his head in mock sadness.
“Lots of new age folks in San Francisco will be really disappointed to learn that.”
“Not from me. When I see them heading my way, I pretend I'm a Navajo.”
G
age had been the only one at the San Francisco Police Department who knew why they all called him Spike.
Homicide Lieutenant Humberto Pacheco, too short to play volleyball when he and Gage were growing up together, and now looking more like a mallet than a nail, lumbered through the entrance of the Fiesta Brava Taqueria on Mission Street a little after 1:30
P.M.
Tan sports coat, brown pants, pale yellow shirt, and a blue tie painted with tiny footballs. He didn't pause to survey the interior of the storefront restaurant before heading toward a table in the far corner where Gage already sat. The rest of the tables were empty, the lunch crowd having already moved on.
Spike waved to their usual waiter, then dropped a manila envelope onto the table and sat down to the right of Gage, a plate of chicken in chili-laced cream sauce already cooling before him. A warming Coke stood next to it.
“Sorry I'm late,” Spike said. “I got hung up at a meeting with the chief. The mayor is pissed because some Japanese woman got mugged coming out of the St. Francis Hotel. Cut up pretty bad. He's worried about losing the Asian tourist business.”
Gage set down his fork. “I've got an idea. Maybe he should hire the homeless to paint targets on the Nicaraguans and Sudanese so the crooks would know who he wants mugged.”
Spike grinned. “Why didn't I think of that?”
“You did, you just didn't say it because you know the chief doesn't appreciate that kind of sarcasm.” Gage pointed at Spike's plate. “You want it heated up?”
Spike mixed a little of the sauce with the rice, then tasted it. “No, it's okay.” He tilted his head toward the half-eaten roasted
birra
in front of Gage. “You're still the only white guy I know who eats goat.”
Spike dug into his chicken while Gage opened the envelope and thumbed through the thirty pages of police reports about Palmer's shooting.
“I appreciate you taking over the case yourself instead of leaving it with your underlings,” Gage said. “Anything else besides what's in here?”
“There's also a ballistics check on the slug. A .38. Five lands and grooves, right twist. Could be just about any Saturday night special.”
“What about the shooter?”
“Charlie gave us almost nothing to go on. The guy he described couldn't have been more average if Charlie had made him up.”
“And that's what you think he did?”
“The uniforms at the scene pushed him real hard for a descriptionâa dying declaration in case he didn't survive. All they got was a cardboard John Doe. At first I thought maybe shock scrambled his brain, but it didn't get any better when I went to see him two days later. It was like he did some kind of statistical survey and came up with the mean . . .” Spike cocked his head and squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at Gage. “Is it mean or median?”
“I think it's called the mode. Mode is what there's most of.”
Spike smiled. “Mr. Salazar will be thrilled to know ninth grade math stuck.” He took a sip of his Coke. “It's like Charlie came up with the mode, and then said, âThat's the guy.' ”
“You have a theory?”
“I think he didn't want us to catch him.”
“And do it himself after he got better?”
“Except he didn't get better. When I called Socorro last week, the doctor had just told him he'd recovered as much as he ever would. Might not get worse, but wouldn't get better. He was never gonna work again, that's for sure. Maybe never even get out of bed.”
“That must be why he called me.”
Spike shook his head. “I don't think so. He knew you're not a vigilante. He had to have guessed you'd be doing exactly what you're doing, not roaming the streets with a six-shooter.”
“Then why didn't he reach out to you if he changed his mind and wanted to get the guy?”
Spike shrugged. “Maybe it has to do with one of his cases. Attorney-client privilege and all that.” He aimed his fork at the file. “You know what he was working on the day he was shot? He wouldn't tell me.”
“A tax evasion case. Yachts. He was interviewing marine appraisers.”
“Like those car donation scams?”
“But in the multimillion-dollar range. And knowing Charlie, he was probably trying to get one of them to commit perjury by testifying the appraisals were accurate.”
Gage caught Spike's eye, then glanced toward the glass entrance doors. Two silver-adorned Jalisco cowboys entered, dressed in the style of their home state in Mexico. Silver belt buckles, silver toe tips on rattlesnake-skin boots, silver bands on their hats, and silver buttons and lapel points on their shirts. The men paused just inside the door and scanned the restaurant, then took a small table near the front window. One slid a black briefcase underneath, while the other pulled out a cell phone, punched in a number, spoke a few words, and disconnected.
“Must be door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen,” Gage said, as a waiter delivered the men a basket of tortilla chips and salsa.
Spike slipped in a Bluetooth earpiece, punched in a number on his cell phone, and turned slightly away and passed on his location and a description of the Jaliscos. He rested his phone on the table, waited until the men were both looking down and reaching for chips, and then snapped a photo of them and sent it.
“It's just like riding a bike, isn't it?” Spike said.
“Don't you ever just want to get off it at least long enough to enjoy a meal?”
“Can't. It's like having the television on all the time in the back of your head.”
“I used to think of it as white noise,” Gage said, poking around in his
birra
. “Charlie used to alert to guys like that from a mile away.”
“But that was more about like attracting like.”
Spike reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a wallet-sized Mexican prayer card encased in plastic.
“My brother bought this for Faith at a shrine in Culiacán. He's still playing amateur anthropologist. He wanted to give it to her at your father's funeral, but it didn't seem appropriate.”
He handed it to Gage.
“She still interested in Catholic
animas
?” Spike asked.
Gage nodded as he examined the image of folk saint Jesús Malverde, protector of drug dealers, overlaid on a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. He dipped his head toward the Jaliscos. “Those guys may need this thing a lot more than Faith.”
“I'm sure they never leave home without one.”
“They also don't leave home unarmed,” Gage said. “Check out the front pocket of the guy on the right.”
Spike's cell phone vibrated a couple of minutes later as the Mexicans ate shrimp cocktails from bulbous sundae glasses.
“
Hola, Mama.
” Spike spoke loudly, smiling at Gage. “
Estoy en la Fiesta Brava
.” He listened for fifteen seconds, then in a lower voice passed on the warning about weapons and disconnected.
“You know what else Charlie was working on?” Spike asked.
“Off the record?”
“I don't know. Tell me a little more.”
“He was trying to recover the wallet of somebody who got robbed.”
“Why off the record?”
“It was a government official.”
“There's no law saying people have to report crimes against themselves,” Spike said. “Off the record is okay.”
“Brandon Meyer was mugged a week or two before Charlie got shot.”
“No shit?”
“He wanted Charlie to get his wallet back.”
“Why didn't Meyer report it?”
“I think he was afraid it would slop back on his brother.”
“I don't get it. A mugging is a mugging. Happens all the time.”
“But this one happened at night in the Tenderloin.”
“The Tenderloin?” Even Spike wouldn't walk through the Tenderloin after sunset, and he carried two handguns and Mace. “What was the brother of a presidential candidate doing in there? That has
National Enquirer
written all over it.”
“Meyer claimed he cut through on his way to a meeting, but I don't believe him.”
Spike clucked. “You not believing an exalted federal judge like him. I'm shocked, simply shocked.”
They watched the waiter deliver two Dos XXs to the Jaliscos.
“How'd you find out about the mugging?” Spike asked.
“From Socorro. Then Meyer called me to drop by, but only to make sure I didn't pursue it.”
“Why didn't he just cancel the credit cards and forget the whole thing?”
“I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. Could be there was something in the wallet.”
Spike grinned. “Like maybe a Viagra tablet and the cell number of a Tenderloin prostitute?”
Gage shook his head. “Unlikely. I'm not sure sex is his thing anymore. He gets off screwing over whoever shows up in his court.”
Spike laughed. “Talk about a helluva photo op. That pale-butted pipsqueak bouncing up and down between the legs of some methed-up hooker in a skid-row hotel.”
Gage cast him a sour expression. “I'm glad I already finished my lunch,” Gage said, pushing away his plate. Spike was still grinning, now red-faced. “You better finish the thought before you explode.”
“And Meyer working his little
pene
, yelling, âMotion denied! Motion denied!' ”
Spike laughed, stomach bouncing, until tears formed at the corners of his eyes. He wiped them with his napkin. “Man, what an image.”
“Are you done ruining my meal?”
“I hope so.” Spike rubbed his side. “I think I pulled a muscle.”
One of the Jaliscos walked over to the jukebox, dropped in fifty cents, then punched a button. He returned to his table as an accordion blast began “El Corrido Contrabando,” a ballad celebrating Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Lord of the Skies, a Mexican who smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine in 727s, then faked dying during plastic surgery and retired to Colombia.
“Is that song for your benefit?” Gage asked.
“No. They think I'm an insurance salesman. Just a guy selling term life.” Spike grinned again. “When I'm really pushing life terms.”
Gage shook his head. “You still get a kick out of this.”
“That's why I can't bring myself to retire. It's even hard to think about it.”
Spike's grin faded as his sentence trailed off. He paused, his face turned somber.
“Middle age is weird. You think about things you never thought about before. It hit me the other night that from the moment my father came across the border, he never felt at home again anywhere. Not in Mexico and not in Arizona, even after he became a citizen.” Spike tapped the gold badge clipped to his belt under his jacket. “And I'm not sure I really felt at home until I got this piece of metal. Maybe that's why he wanted me to follow you up here. Kinda makes it hard to give it up.”
Spike paused again, thinking, then his eyes brightened. “Well, that and Placita. She couldn't stand me hanging around the house all the time.”
“She tell you that?”
“Straight out, the first time I talked about it. Then she reached for the phone and threatened to make her nephew give me a job driving one of his cabsâuntil I showed her a news article saying it was more dangerous than being a cop.”
“But she'd made her point.”
“Yeah, big time.”
Spike pulled his case log out of the manila envelope.
“That's another thing.” Spike skimmed down the chronology. “Charlie wouldn't tell me how he got over to Geary Street where he got shot, but I think he took a taxi. A Checker cab driver remembered dropping off somebody who resembled Charlie two blocks away about twenty minutes before it happened. Charlie denied it was him. But I think it was.”
“So he didn't want to use a car that could be traced to him?”
“That's what it looks like.”
“Sounds like you spent as much time investigating Charlie as you did whoever shot him.”
“More. He was stonewalling. There had to be a reason, and it wasn't a no-harm, no-foul case. A few days after he was shot he got pneumonia and it seemed like he wasn't going to make it. Would've made it a homicide right then.”
“What did the neighborhood canvass turn up?”
“We got a possible ID of Charlie at a coffee shop. Eyewitness IDs are bad enough, but this was one where the clerk had no reason to pay attention at the time. So I'm not sure what to make of it.”
Spike tilted his head toward the two men, one of whom was opening his phone. The man held it to his ear, nodded, then snapped it closed. Thirty seconds later, a younger Hispanic man entered and pulled a chair up to the Jaliscos' table and set down a small black canvas duffel, stretched tight by its contents. He was dressed in Levi's and oversized sweatshirt and wearing wraparound sunglasses.
“Looks like they're going to do the deal right here,” Gage said. “I wouldn't be surprised if there was heroin in that bag. They wouldn't need a briefcase of money to buy so few kilos of cocaine.”
Spike punched redial on his phone, reported in to the surveillance officers driving down Mission Street toward the restaurant, then disconnected.
The three men kept casting quick glances around the restaurant, too often for Spike to risk another photo.
“They're bringing a dog,” Spike said, sliding his phone into his jacket pocket. “He'll take a little sniff as they walk outside.” He smiled. “Then off to the pokey.” He pushed his plate away. “What're you working on besides Charlie?”
“The main one is a trade secrets case. Fiber-optic switches. My clients developed a switchâa kind of splitterâthat tripled fiber-optic line capacity. FiberLink. The owners mortgaged their houses and borrowed from their retirement accounts to fund their research. Really nice people. The brains were two women who used to work at Intel. They came up with the switch on their own time, then brought in some friends to form the company.”