The Killing of the Saints Read online

  Up in my neck of Los Angeles, the landscaped hills and terraces of Los Feliz, we have a similar situation with Griffith Park. The difference is that instead of a beach we have dales with picnic benches, in place of the ocean there's a narrow polluted creek wending around littered roads and crowded parking lots, and the lucky few are the thousands of Central Americans who flock to the park in their Datsuns and Toyotas. These refugees from war and poverty cram six and eight at a time into their Japanese jalopies, patched up with spit and bondo, rolling on bald tires, tinny radio turned to Radio Amor, K-Love, tremulous love ballads by Julio Iglesias, José José, Emanuel, floating out of the car window as a pink pompom flies from the antenna and the pair of Styrofoam dice dangle from the rearview mirror. Lines of cars miles long head into the park, where the families-it is always families, no matter if the group is made up of six men thrown together by poverty and circumstance, they are all familia-park their cars, take out the ice chest with meats and chicken to be grilled at the barbecues by the benches, pop open a few cervezas and toss out the soccer ball. Within minutes the pickup games start, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans and Hondurans, mixed groups of brown flesh and desire recreating in the park the old game of bola their Indian forefathers played in the jungles of Petén, Tikal and Tazumal.

  These are the lucky ones. They are not the ones who crossed battlefields, trekked across deserts, dodged border guards, out-smiled coyotes and escaped landlords to make it to El Lay for a job paying the minimum wage. There are plenty of those, hundreds of thousands if not millions of menials who keep the Southland engines humming. These here in the park are the ones who have already tasted a measure of success, think of families and outings and roots, who look to a future in this country when they will have their own mercado and their own casita in Pacoima. And now on weekends, they pack little Juan, Enrique, Joséfina, Fernando, Miguel, Eleazar, Aurora and the old lady into the Datsun to go out to the park.

  I always envied them their dreams, small and constricted as they might seem to an outsider. Even if flawed, their compass had a setting. I, on the other hand, felt adrift, with not much going for me other than an Ivy League education and a thankless job that kept me twirling, spinning without reason, in a peeling golden cage.

  That Sunday I knocked downstairs at my landlord's apartment door, framed by bushes of cool, fragrant lilies and honeysuckle. But Enzo Baldocchi's Ligurian face peered out the door and shook his head no at my invitation, pasty breath still reeking of vodka and amaretto, while a woman's voice in the background queried in Sicilian the identity of the son of a bitch who didn't know what time it was. So I set off on my own, starting at an easy loping pace up the hill. For a week the temperature had been slowly rising, a few degrees per day, so that now on that Sunday at eight the air was as warm and treacherous as a Latin embrace. Mild Santa Ana winds sweeping down from the high desert had wiped the sky clean, to the baby blue of an O'Keeffe painting. Sprinklers on the deep front lawns of the Mediterranean mansions up the hill raised clouds of vapor, wafting occasional hints of juniper and citrus.

  Two blocks up from my apartment, the road takes a sharp hairpin turn left, rising a quarter-mile in a matter of a few hundred feet. I leaned forward and swung alternately with my arms, my upper body at an angle to the ground, feeling the strains on my quads and buttocks, my wobbly knees, the pinpoints of perspiration on my T-shirt coalescing into wide swaths of sweat. Breathing hard, I reached the corner and glanced down at the skyline of downtown ten miles away, the office towers standing like upended shoeboxes against the girthing Baldwin Hills. I couldn't see them but I knew that behind those hills the endlessly bobbing oil derricks, greedy maniacal jays, kept pumping out the oil that first made the city wealthy, before Hollywood, aerospace and sweatshop labor.

  I tried to catch a glimpse of County Jail, where Ramón and José were being housed, but even with fifty-mile visibility from my vantage point I was unable to pinpoint the squat gray bunker at the foot of Chinatown. They were due in court on Tuesday for their arraignment and motions and I still had not been able to interview Ramón. Two weeks had passed since he had petitioned the court for my appointment. During that time I'd been unable to do anything other than review the paperwork, hampered by his refusal to give me leads to support an investigation. I had no idea how he intended to proceed or what part I would play in his defense. Maybe on Tuesday he'd change his mind and ask for a public defender after all. Maybe I would simply pass on the case.

  This last thought cheered my day. I came out on Longfellow, then ducked and slithered under the rusty barbed wire fence with the NO TRESPASSING sign covered with the blue graffiti of the neighborhood white punks, Stoners, and ran clear into the brush. The yellowish dust swirled around me as I beat a painful climb up the well-worn path to the top. I bumped against an oak tree but felt no pain, seeing with curious detachment how the broken branch gashed the skin off my forearm and the dark red blood oozed out. Finally, panting and cursing under the little breath I had left, with a last back kick, I surged to the top of the hill, to the dusty clearing looking out on the entire basin.

  A smell of orange blossoms and eucalyptus drifted my way as I stood panting, drinking in the view of the city at my feet. I kicked a couple of old beer cans and grinned at a bluebird pecking on a used condom. Los Angeles, city of love.

  The phone was ringing by the time I got back to my desk. I picked it up before the fourth ring to shortcut the answering machine.

  "Hello," I said, breathless.

  "Out for a run, I bet," said Livie, and the room turned dark.

  I must have held my breath a few seconds for she asked querulously, "You still there?"

  "Of course." I glanced around my desk, trying to stop the sinking feeling, anchoring myself in the dull safety of the everyday. Papers and files, a creased calendar book, a clock whose batteries had run out, pencil holder, staplers, a rarely used thesaurus. I looked at my runner's watch. Half hour to lunchtime in Miami. A drop of blood from my scrape fell on the white phone. "Good morning. How are you? How's Julian?"

  As always, the rapierlike answer struck deep.

  "I didn't call to trade amenities, Charlie. I'm still like the last time you saw me, angry and abandoned."

  "Let's not get into that again."

  "No, let's not. Drifters are like drunks, all the moralizing in the world won't do them or you any good. They'll still break your heart."

  "Please. You sound like a country-western song. What do you want? Didn't you get my check?"

  "I got it, all right. But don't you think you've forgotten something?"

  A loaded question, that. I try very hard to put a thousand and one things out of my mind. More often than not, the very things I try to exorcise come back to haunt me and taunt me, parking themselves at my mind's door so they can spring on me like a collections man saying, We got stuff to talk about. "No, what?"

  "It's April seventh. Someone wants to talk to you."

  She passed the phone and before the party got on the line I knew already who it would be and my heart leaped in pain and joy.

  "Hi, Daddy."

  "Hello, Julian. Happy Birthday. Did you get my present yet?"

  Julian squealed with delight. "You didn't forget! Mom said maybe you were too busy."

  "How could I forget you, guy. I'm sure you'll get it in a day or two. The mail is late sometimes."

  "Yeah, Dad, that's it, the mail's late."

  Julian. Golden curls, hazel eyes, dewy skin smelling of Pears soap and baby powder. Noisy, hyperactive Julian, who today turns seven.

  "So what you doing, champ? Going to any parties?"

  "Well, Mom made me a cake and I'm having all my friends over. Philie, Bobby, Carlos, Rene and Donna. Then we're going to Lucaya. It's rad!"

  "I'm sure it is."

  "What did you send me, Daddy? I wanna know 'cause I already got all these presents but nobody gave me what I wanted, what I really wanted."

  A true son of Livie, I thought, comparison s
hopping already.

  "And what do you want? Maybe that's what 1 sent you."

  "A Robocop! A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Video Game!"

  "Well, maybe you'll like my presents then."

  Julian made a whooping noise.

  "All right! You're the greatest dad! When you coming to Miami?"

  "I don't know, sport. But I'll tell you what, maybe you'd like to come out to Los Angeles soon. We can go to Disneyland-"

  "I don't know, Daddy. Everybody says Disney World is better and Mom's taken me there three times already."

  "OK, then we'll go to Universal Studios and you can watch King Kong and]aws."

  "That sounds cool!"

  Julian turned to Livie, who must have been standing next to him, ready to protect her child from his feckless, heartless father.

  "Can we go to L.A. and go to Universal, Mom? Can we?"

  I overheard her say something I could not make out. Julian came back on the line, disappointed.

  "Mom says she doesn't know." Then a whisper, "She still doesn't like you."

  "That's all right. Things change."

  "Mom wants to talk to you so I'm gonna go now."

  "OK, champ. Happy Birthday."

  A rattle, then Livie's stern and well-modulated voice, which resonates so beautifully when she anchors the evening news.

  "Don't even think about taking him away."

  "Just for a vacation."

  "No way. You want to see him, you come here. I don't trust you and we both know why. By the way, I'm getting married. I'll write to you. Goodbye."

  "Who is it? When?" I didn't ask the why since it was so obvious. But Livie hung up before I could ask more, the ringing of the line a blank to be filled by the failures of my past.

  The widow Chambers was in a bad mood. A San Diego attorney who had the misfortune of arriving twenty minutes late to her court for a continued 1538.5 hearing had been found in contempt and fined a hundred dollars. When he had protested at the unusual and stern punishment, knowing that although the court officially opened at 8:30 the doors weren't even unlocked until 9:00, the widow ordered the bailiff to drag the screaming and shocked counsel to lockup to ponder his alternatives until a full contempt hearing later that day. His puzzled client looked dumbfoundedly around, saying, "I'll get you out, Counsel, I'll get you out!"

  Deputy Bill Smith came out of the lockup grinning, his dun-colored features animated by the sweet thought of revenge against the kind who will get shot first come the revolution.

  "He should have known better," he confided. "Now he's hollering for a lawyer."

  "I wonder how he feels being in such close quarters with the people he defends."

  "The custodies aren't in yet, bus got delayed coming from Wayside, so he's there all alone. You here to see who?"

  "Hey, to see you, talk about old times, shoot the breeze."

  "Fuck, yeah. Your boys, the Cuban twins, are not in either."

  "Thanks. So, how's business?"

  Bill had a small video company on the side, taping weddings and anniversaries for the citizens of Moreno Valley, a new development two hours away in the rattlesnake center of Southern California, Riverside County.

  "Doing OK. Did the local Lion's Club Ball the other day."

  The clerk, a dark-haired man with the impressive name of Curtis Franklin Burr-a direct descendant of the saturnine little man who killed Alex Hamilton-waved at me.

  "Judge would like to see you in chambers."

  "Right away."

  The judge's name, Connie, was spelled out in needlepoint and framed between two fuchsia hearts behind her high-back leather chair. On her desk was another picture frame, with snapshots of her three daughters. Up on the shelf of the Swedish teak bookcase all judges get with their office, more pictures of the daughters- one in cap and gown, another in dress whites at Annapolis, the third with a pink baby and a fat husband. Hanging from the paneled walls were diplomas from law school, plaques from when Chambers was a D.A., a picture of her hugging the former street cop who rose to become L.A.'s first black mayor. Nowhere did I see a trace of the man to whom she owed her name and position, John Chambers, the former Pasadena jurist so popular among the good white citizens of that smogbucket that upon his death the governor felt compelled to name the widow to the post. But that had been six years ago, practically a generation by California standards.

  The judge looked up from her opened Cal Jurist tome. Blond, heavyset and apple cheeked, she was the little Dutch boy grown up, with a hundred extra pounds and a sex change operation. She let out a short hacking laugh to hide her discomfort at having a stranger in her sanctum.

  "Hello, Charlie. Sit down, sit down."

  I did as I was told. I wasn't about to contradict her.

  "Yes, ma'am?"

  "I want to talk to you about this case of yours, Valdez and Pimienta."

  "Well, Judge, actually I'm just here for Valdez. Pimienta is represented by Clay Smith."

  "I know that," she snapped, the faint semblance of bonhomie wiped from her voice. "But you and I both know that Pimienta won't shit unless Valdez tells him to, if you'll pardon my French."

  "I can't really vouch for that, but that's the way it seems, yes."

  "Well, let me tell you, I'm not going to have any scenes in my court during this trial, you understand?"

  "I'm not really sure I know what you mean."

  "I don't want any dramatics, posturing or pouting by anyone. I've already told Clay what I'm telling you, whatever my decision is, it sticks. I don't want grandstanding for the jury or restatements of positions I've already ruled on or any questions that might accidentally, underline that, disclose unwarranted information to the jury, understand? I want a clean record, no hung jury, no mistrials, no reversals. We start at the beginning and end at the end, like a nice train ride. Get on board, you understand?"

  Chambers hacked again. I leaned back in my chair.

  "Perfectly, Judge. But I'm not counsel for Valdez, he's going pro per. I'm only a P.I."

  The judge didn't respond directly to that. She swung around in her chair and walked over to the Mr. Coffee atop the filing cabinet by the wall.

  "Want some?" she asked.

  "Black, please."

  She handed me a mug decorated with more fuchsia hearts. I briefly considered whether the profusion of hearts was from regret or a bad conscience but couldn't decide. The judge brushed against the black robe hanging from a rack as she wobbled back to her desk, then dropped into her chair. Blowing at the steaming mug, she barreled her eyebrows at me with a mischievous smile.

  "What's this I hear about Florida?"

  "It's a big state, Judge. What was it you heard?"

  Chambers took a sip of her coffee, her smile broadening her already wide cheeks.

  "Something about you and a case in Dade County, when you were still practicing. You were censured, weren't you?"

  "If the truth be known, I was suspended for a year by the bar. That's when I decided it would be best for me to start anew out here in California. But I was never found guilty of anything. Even if I had been, you know that convicted felons can take the bar and practice in California. However, I'm not practicing, so excuse me for saying this, but I don't see what you're getting at or what business it is of yours."

  "Well, the way I hear it, and this is just hearsay, mind you, not admissible in court, I hear you were indicted but you had good friends in the State House. Good friends who got the indictment dropped."

  "Funny, that's not the way I remember it."

  "Well, be that as it may." She put down her mug, her suspicions confirmed. "I'm telling you all this because I feel your client needs the benefit of counsel."

  Saved at last. But why was I starting to think of this case in terms of salvation and burning perdition?

  "Does that mean you're denying his pro per status?"

  Chambers leaned forward, her full weight on the elbow planted on the green blotter.

  "Not for now. I ma
y later. It depends on how effective his defense is. I don't want this trial to be a travesty, to have him screaming his head off for things that are not germane. That's why I want to make sure you advise him thoroughly on the case. I know this is unorthodox but I don't believe in standby counsel, waste of taxpayers' money. If the man wants to hang himself, well, let him. But I want him to do it the right way. The legal way. I think this is the only way to assure he has decent representation. He didn't want a public defender, he didn't want a private attorney and under our system of law, he has every right to be his own counsel. If he knows what he's doing. I'll be the judge of that." She caught herself at her unintended pun and chuckled. "Naturally, that's what they pay me for."

  This was it.

  "Sorry, Judge, I'm bowing out."

  She jerked herself upright. "What do you mean?"

  "I don't want to take this appointment."

  "For what reason?"

  "I can't even talk to the man, he's not been cooperative. Besides, it's a loser case."