If he had told me right off the bat, or never given me the slightest indication that he had anything to tell me, I would have been on my merry way.
Joel Lightner was the private investigator. I was the lawyer. We were in Liberty Park, by which I mean not the southwest-side neighborhood bearing its name but the actual park itself, a city block of unhealthy grass and broken-down playground equipment, with a war-torn aluminum fence on the perimeter and a large wooden park district building with more graffiti on it than actual paint. The spray-painted gang insignia was an even split between the Columbus Street Cannibals and the Latin Lords. This was
La Zona,
disputed territory claimed by each of the gangs.
Almost two years ago to the day, exactly a half-mile straight west from this park, a small business owner named Adalbert Wozniak took five bullets to the chest, neck, and face. My client, State Senator Hector Almundo, was charged with his murder.
Nobody thought that Hector had pulled the trigger, of course. The Wozniak murder was part of a larger federal prosecution that went like this: Senator Almundo, harboring ambitions to be the state’s next attorney general, had cut a deal with the Cannibals street gang to shake down local businesses for monthly payments—an old-fashioned street protection tax—which the Cannibals then shared with Hector’s campaign fund. The government figured that the take was roughly a fifty-fifty split between Hector and the Cannibals. That meant that, over an eighteen-month period, Citizens for Almundo took in about a hundred thousand dollars courtesy of the Cannibals’ extortion of local businesses.
Anyway, Wozniak was one of those business owners but refused to pay. The feds figured that the Cannibals decided to teach Wozniak a lesson and send a message to other like-minded dissenters that the street tax wasn’t optional. The message was sent well enough that Wozniak’s family couldn’t have an open casket at his funeral.
But the feds charged the whole thing, from the shakedown to the murder, as a conspiracy—their favorite word, that one—which meant that all of the crimes that were a part of the overall scheme could be attributed to all of the co-conspirators. Thus, State Senator Hector Almundo, as the supposed architect of the whole extortion scheme, was on the hook for the murder of Adalbert Wozniak, regardless of who pulled the trigger or who made the ultimate decision to pull it.
Joel Lightner and I passed a group of kids playing soccer, using anything they could find—a stone, a brick, a backpack—to frame their goals. I narrowly missed an appointment with a flying soccer ball, which made the kids howl in laughter almost in unison. I felt more than a decade and a half removed from that carefree bliss, having no other responsibility than to run around in a field chasing after a ball, though my sport was the American version of football.
Ernesto Ramirez was standing near the basketball court, in part observing and in part refereeing a four-on-four game of half-court hoops. The backboard was tattered and the rim had no net, but it didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the kids, who looked to be ages six through mid-teens. Ernesto was shouting something to them in Spanish I couldn’t place. I spoke the language pretty well but had trouble keeping up with native speakers.
“We can talk right here,” he said to us, which wasn’t our preference but we didn’t have any leverage over him. I wasn’t used to that. Until recently, I’d been a county prosecutor, where the failure to cooperate meant an arrest for obstruction.
It didn’t take long to learn that Ramirez knew of Senator Almundo, the criminal case, and Adalbert Wozniak. “I didn’t know Wozniak,” he said. He spoke well but it was clear that English was his second language.
“Did you know Eddie Vargas?” asked Lightner.
After Wozniak’s murder, eyewitness accounts of the make and model of a Chevy sedan, together with partial license plate identification, led police to discover what they believed to be the killer’s vehicle in a dump several miles away. The feds used some of their fancy forensic technology to conclude, from sediment found within the tire tracks, that the vehicle had spent some time parked behind a housing project controlled by the Columbus Street Cannibals. They also found a print on the rearview mirror that belonged to a sixteen-year-old Cannibal recruit named Eddie Vargas. When the FBI raided Vargas’s home, they found a small pistol, a Kahr MK40, which could be mistaken for a metal spray nozzle on a garden hose, and which they confirmed was the murder weapon. Young Mr. Vargas has never been located and is strongly believed to have suffered an unfortunate accident of one kind or another, probably involving a machete, the Cannibals’ weapon of choice when silencing potential talkers. Bottom line, the feds had their shooter, and he was a Cannibal, but that shooter wouldn’t be talking.
Ernesto Ramirez stared forward in the direction of the hoops game, but his eyes weren’t tracking the players or the movement of the ball. He’d drifted away momentarily at the mention of the name.
“Eddie was a sixteen-year-old kid,” he said. “A sweet kid.”
Though Ramirez was only thirty-two, his skin was weathered and his wavy dark hair was flecked with gray. He was a former Latin Lord member and drug addict who had managed to break free of both problems, but not without some residual wear. He spent his time these days running youth programs to provide alternatives to gangs. Eddie Vargas had been one of those youths.
“He didn’t shoot nobody,” Ramirez added.
Lightner shrugged. “The federal government is saying he did. Can you help us out?”
Ramirez’s jaw clenched and his left eye twitched. He was still making a show of watching that stupid basketball game. But I thought he was thinking. His mouth parted and his tongue moistened his lips, like he was on the verge of speaking.
“Senator Almundo shouldn’t have to go down for something he didn’t do,” Joel said.
Ramirez snapped out of his trance, turning on Joel. A vein throbbed near his left eye. “Hector Almundo can go to hell. I don’t know nothin’ about this, anyway. I can’t ‘help you out.’ Okay, guy?”
Another satisfied customer,
Joel would say; I’d done a few of these interviews with him. Joel tried a couple more times, but Ernesto Ramirez wasn’t going to budge.
“Almundo shouldn’t go down for something he didn’t do?” I said to Joel, when we got back in his car.
Joel laughed. “It sounded good at the time.” Neither of us thought we were representing an innocent man. We didn’t think Hector had ordered a hit on Adalbert Wozniak, but the part about working out a deal with the Cannibals to shake down the local businesses? We figured the government had that part right.
“ ‘He didn’t shoot nobody,’ ”I said, quoting Ramirez.
“He was speaking well of his friend. Doesn’t mean he has any information. A dead end, kid,” Joel pronounced. “Mr. Ernesto Ramirez doesn’t know anything.”
Maybe. But I thought differently. Joel was pretty good with these things, but I thought he’d made a misstep. I thought Ernesto was about to tell us something back there, before Joel had invoked a name that clearly upset Ramirez and knocked him off the rails.
Joel kicked his Audi into gear and drove off. I looked back at Liberty Park.
Ernesto Ramirez was watching us drive away.
2
I REACHED OVER WITH BLEARY EYES AND TOOK A GOOD
whack at my alarm clock. My head sank back into the pillow until I got a nudge in my rib cage.
“It’s five, babe.”
I rolled over and peeked up at my wife, Talia, who was sitting up in bed, wide awake.
“Can’t sleep?” I moaned. “Your back still?” I nestled up against her warm body and moved my hand onto the hump of her belly. Technically, the due date was ten days away, but Doctor Waite said it could be anytime. “Hurry up, Emily Jane. Daddy’s big trial is starting soon. I want to see you as much as possible before—She kicked.” I popped up in bed. “I felt her.”
Emily Jane—we’d already named her—had made an art of kicking for her mommy but never for me.
“She’s been doing that for over an hour.” Talia ran her hand through my hair. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
“A few hours.” I was trying to get as much done for the Almundo trial as I could before I had to take some time off for the arrival of Emily Jane. Her due date was five days before jury selection.
There were all sorts of reasons for me not to work as second chair on the Almundo trial, given Emily’s impending arrival. But there were even more reasons for me to take the assignment. Starting with this: Every single associate at Shaker, Riley and Flemming would give a major organ to be in my position. This case could make my career if it went well. And it was the chance to work alongside Paul Riley, our senior partner and, by most people’s accounts, the best trial lawyer in the city. I was new to Shaker, Riley and to private practice in general when Hector Almundo walked through the door and hired Paul to defend him in one of the biggest public corruption cases the city had ever seen. I don’t know what I did to catch Paul’s attention. I’d handled a few projects for him but nothing huge. Maybe he’d asked about me at the county attorney’s office, where I’d cut my teeth before landing at the firm. I didn’t know and didn’t care. I said “yes” to this assignment before it was out of Paul’s mouth. I couldn’t have known at the time that my wife and I would be expecting our first child just as the trial opened.
I warmed up a couple of breakfast sandwiches in the microwave and brought them up to Talia before I left for work. Last week, these sausage-and-egg biscuits would have made her gag; this week she couldn’t live without them. “I miss coffee,” she told me. She’d forsworn it, even though her doctor told her she could have a little caffeine now and then. This was our first, and Talia was taking no chances.
Even sleep-deprived and uncomfortable, my wife was a classic Italian beauty. I wiped her flattened bangs off her forehead and kissed her there, then her nose and cheeks and soft, warm mouth. “I miss sex,” I told her. “Unless—”
“Sorry, mate. If you touch my boobs, I’ll scream.” She pulled on my tie. “Get home early, okay?” By
early,
she meant some time before she went to bed.
“And keep that cell phone handy,” she added.
3
“THE TAPES, THE TAPES, AND THE TAPES,” SAID PAUL
Riley, his feet up on his desk and his tie pulled down. “That’s what it comes down to. Hector’s own words caught on tape.”
“And Joey Espinoza,” said our investigator, Joel Lightner. Joey Espinoza was Senator Hector Almundo’s chief of staff. The feds, who had caught wind of the Cannibals’ shakedown scheme as early as February of 2005, liked Espinoza for one of the ringleaders. Thus, one early morning in April of 2005, as Joey Espinoza carried a mug of coffee and briefcase to his car, FBI agents stormed his garage and did what FBI agents do best—they scared the shit out of him. They told him his life, as he knew it, was over. They had him cold. His only chance of survival? Wear a wire and help them nail his boss, Senator Hector Almundo.
Joey eagerly complied and covertly recorded four conversations with Hector before Adalbert Wozniak’s murder in May. At that point, the feds made the call that they couldn’t continue to lie low and risk more bloodshed, so they closed in, arresting eleven gang members, fourteen co-conspirators, and the illustrious Senator Almundo.
“Joey’s not the problem,” Paul argued. “He’s a scumbag, but that doesn’t change what’s on the tapes. Hector still said what he said.”
Hector’s words on the tapes were pretty damning, instructing his chief of staff, Espinoza, to continue working with the Columbus Street Cannibals and their extortion scheme. We didn’t have much to refute it, other than to argue that Joey was really calling the shots, and Hector was an absent-minded leader who didn’t sweat the details. That wasn’t the easiest sell, however, when he was on tape telling Joey to keep doing what he was doing with the street gang.
“So find a way to refute it,” Lightner said.
“Oh. Thanks, Joel.” Paul turned to me. “You get that, Jason? Lightner says we should find a way to refute it. You can’t put a price on those pearls of wisdom.”
Paul and Lightner went back to the eighties, during a mass murder in the south suburbs, when Paul was the prosecutor and Joel the cop. Lightner left the job fifteen years ago and opened a private investigation agency that has benefited mightily from its association with this law firm.
“Jason,” Lightner said to me, “you’re new, so you may not know—when Paul gets frustrated, he takes it out on poor underlings like me. What he really means is he appreciates my contribution to this case. Also, I don’t know if he told you yet, but as a condition of working on this case, you have to name your child after Paul.”
“Jason’s child is going to be a girl, Lightner, which you would know if you didn’t start drinking before noon every day,” Paul replied.
“Okay, Paulina, then. Paulina Kolarich.”
This usually happened at the end of the workday, these two getting on each other before they went out for steaks and martinis that night. They were both bachelors, Paul once-divorced and Lightner twice. They could be pretty amusing when they got going. Their deliveries were so dry that it still took me an extra moment to separate sarcasm from sincerity.