But the other reason Esmeralda Ramirez wasn’t buying the cops’ theory was, in a word, me.
“I knew there was something wrong,” she told me. “I didn’t know what. He mentioned a lawyer. I didn’t understand. I asked him if he was in trouble with the law or something. He told me, ‘Not in the way you think.’ He talked about a lawyer but said it wasn’t a lawyer for him. It was just a lawyer who wanted to know something. A lawyer who was persistent.”
I didn’t want to interrupt her, but when it was clear she was done, I said, “And he was reluctant to talk to that lawyer. To me.”
She nodded. Her eyes trailed up and she started to speak, then stopped.
“Go ahead, Mrs. Ramirez. Ask away.”
“Call me Essie.” She thought for a moment. “You talked to him and then left him alone for a while. And then, after a time, you came back. Is that right?”
It took me a moment, but I realized that she was correct. I’d worked on Ernesto pretty hard about a month out from trial. Then I gave him some space, a few weeks, and called him, at which time he told me to go jump in a lake. I let it lie for months before returning near the end of the trial to make a final, full-court press.
She said, “Whatever it was you did worked, I think. At first, I mean.”
“When I first approached him.”
“Yes. He wouldn’t say much to me. He was so protective, Ernesto. So protective.” Her eyes welled up but she kept her chin high and her voice strong. She cleared her throat. “I think you convinced him to talk about what he knew.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Apparently not. I remember he came home one day—he was very upset.”
“Scared?”
She angled her head. “Upset more than scared. Kind of—
decepcionó.
I don’t—”
“Disappointed,” I translated.
She nodded. “Thank you. He said to me,
‘La verdad no importa.’
The truth doesn’t matter. He said it wasn’t worth prison. And then he said he didn’t want to discuss it with me or with the lawyer or with anyone. That was it. He never brought it up until a few days before—before the—”
Before I returned, accosting him and hounding him.
“And what did he say then?”
She shook her head. “Little. Just that the lawyer was back, and he didn’t want to tell him anything. He couldn’t,” she corrected herself. “He said he couldn’t tell you.”
I put a hand over my face. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “I tried to talk about this to the police after he was killed, but there was nothing to tell them. They kept asking for details and what did I have? I didn’t even have your name.”
It raised a question that hadn’t yet occurred to me. “How
did
you get my name?”
She nodded and reached into her purse. “It’s funny, how long it took me even to clean out his drawers. You don’t want to do those things because it’s so—final, I guess.”
I understood her completely. Talia’s clothes still hung in our closet. Emily’s room was exactly as it was the day she left with her mother for the trip to see Grandma and Grandpa.
“I found this, of all places, as a bookmark in a book he was reading.” She produced a business card, and even across the desk I recognized its style. It was a business card bearing the name of Shaker, Riley and Flemming. She handed it to me. “Your card. Turn it over.”
I did. On the back of my card, in black ink, a small diagram had been written:
“Do you know what that means?” she asked.
I put the card down and blew out a sigh. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want a mystery. I didn’t want to go back. A door that I’d been trying to close was now opening, a crack at a time, only it wasn’t sunlight pouring through but an ugly, lethal darkness. I didn’t want to think about Ernesto Ramirez because it made me think of my wife and daughter.
“ABW is the name of Adalbert Wozniak’s company,” I managed. “I have no idea what the rest of this means.”
“Adal—? Who’s that? Was he a friend of my husband’s?”
“Not particularly, according to your husband.” I gave her the Reader’s Digest on Bert Wozniak, including that I had been investigating his murder and thought that her husband, Ernesto, had information on that subject. “But I never knew what he knew,” I said.
“So we know nothing,” she said, bitter and disappointed. Another dead end.
Her composure was on the verge of crumbling. She was a proud woman, I could see. Proud like Ernesto as I remembered him. They made a good couple. Ernesto had beaten some odds and made a decent life for himself and Essie and their two kids. He’d come upon some incriminating information, undoubtedly, something dangerous, and he wouldn’t have been the first person who would choose, in that instance, to keep his mouth shut about it. He would have been thinking about his family.
But Essie Ramirez was wrong. I knew two things.
I knew that I got her husband murdered.
And I knew that I would find the person who killed him.
12
I DON’T BELIEVE IN FATE, PER SE, BECAUSE THAT WOULD
be giving more credit for a higher being than I have been willing to concede of late. I grew up a God-fearing Catholic but with a healthy dose of skepticism that was allayed only briefly, when I met Talia and we had little Emily Jane. But if I don’t believe in a predetermined order of events, I do believe there is some higher order in play, that we are one gigantic chemistry experiment, with various actions causing reactions that we often chalk up to coincidence.
Was it divine intervention that former state senator Hector Almundo called me later that same day, after I spoke with Essie Ramirez? Probably more like happenstance. It’s not like he hadn’t reached out to me before. He’d stopped by the funeral back in June. He’d called after the acquittal, though my cell phone was swimming with the fishes, so to speak, at the bottom of a ravine off of County Road 11. He’d even sent me a note after I rejoined the legal community at my own shop.
He’d been facing the possibility of a life sentence, after all, had he been convicted on all counts. Instead, he walked out a free man, however bruised his political career had become. He’d been forced to abandon his run for attorney general and he didn’t bother running for reelection to the senate, having faced a formidable challenge in the Democratic primary while he awaited trial.
But that was then. Having stood up to the G and actually won, Hector Almundo had become a hero of sorts to the city’s Latino community, which often felt as if it drew the short stick on law enforcement’s pursuit of justice. Statewide ambitions were probably permanently erased. No matter the result of a multiple-count felony prosecution, you’re smeared. But more locally, where Hector was within his base constituency, he undoubtedly harbored new ambitions. Certainly another run for the senate seemed in the cards. The county board, perhaps. Maybe the first Latino mayor?
“You never write, you never call.” He gave me a warm smile as the waiter filled our water glasses. The joke fell a little flat, but the gesture was nice enough. I never decided how I felt about Hector. Though he’d never outright admitted as much, I was relatively sure that Hector had enlisted the Columbus Street Cannibals to, shall we say, conduct voter outreach. I figured, at least before Ernesto Ramirez came into my life, that the Cannibals gunned down Adalbert Wozniak, but I didn’t put Hector next to that. Didn’t seem to be his style; Paul and I assumed that the Cannibals had simply taken matters into their own hands. In the end, Hector Almundo had a politician’s lust for cash and power, but I wasn’t sure that put him permanently on the side of evil. I didn’t see the world in black and white. And there is something about being someone’s defense attorney, his protector, that puts a paternalistic gloss on the entire relationship. My role was to be on his side, so the emotions tend to fall in lockstep.
“I’m doing great,” I told him, in response to his question, hoping the crisp answer indicated I wasn’t interested in elaborating. “What are you doing these days?” Hoping my return volley would underscore that point.
Whatever he was doing, he was doing relatively well. He was always a flashy dresser, today in a gray suit and light purple shirt, a pin propping up a tie only a shade darker than the shirt. I never understood the monochromatic thing.
“I’m the deputy director for the Department of Commerce and Community Services,” he said. “Say that three times fast.”
I couldn’t even say it once. I had no idea what it meant, but I wasn’t surprised that Hector had landed a bureaucratic post. I couldn’t imagine him doing an honest day’s work.
“State government,” he said. “Governor Snow tapped me for the post.”
Carlton Snow had been our governor for all of a year. The previous governor, Langdon Trotter, had resigned from office when he was appointed the U.S. attorney general. Unlike Trotter, Snow was a Democrat; in our state, the lieutenant governor runs separately from the governor, and in our typical political schizophrenia, we elected a governor and lieutenant governor from different parties. When Trotter took the federal job, Snow became the governor for the remainder of the term.
“You know,” he said, “I wouldn’t have made this offer while you were at Shaker, Riley. But since you’re out on your own and all—there are opportunities for lawyers in state government. I could work out a contract for you, if you like.”
Right. I imagined a guy in a short-sleeved shirt and polyester tie, denying a claim because someone forgot to check a box, and therules-clearly-state-that-if-you-don’t-check-the-box-we-can’t-process- the-application.
Hector seemed amused. “You can stay in private practice,” he said. “The state would just be another client you have. You have any idea how many outside law firms have contracts with the administration?” he asked me. “Litigation. Transactional work. There’s a lot of money to be made there. And some of the work is interesting.”
“I suppose. How does that work, exactly? Is there a list?”
A waiter took our orders. Hector had a chef salad. I had a turkey sandwich and soup. When the waiter left, Hector sliced open a roll and buttered it. “No list,” he said, as if that were an understatement. I didn’t catch the point and didn’t ask.
“Now, a referral from someone the governor trusts,” Hector said. “Someone who thinks you’re an excellent attorney and who would be happy to sponsor you. That would help.”
“Now I just have to find someone like that,” I quipped. It was nice of Hector to make the offer. He probably felt like he owed me. In fact, he did not. He’d paid his considerable legal fees to the firm, and that was all that was required. But I could see it from his perspective. We did more than perform good legal work. For all practical purposes, we saved his life. He surely felt the same toward Paul Riley, but Paul was wealthy beyond need and had a nomination to the federal bench pending. I, on the other hand, had just suffered a personal tragedy and, from an outside viewpoint, my life probably seemed to be off-track. Actually, that sounded pretty accurate from an inside viewpoint, too.
“Snow is the new game in town,” he said. “He’s going to run for a full term and he thinks he’s going to be president someday.”
“Is he right about that?”
Hector deferred on that. “He’s raising a helluva lot of money,” he answered, which seemed to be his way of saying,
maybe.
“It might not be a bad train to get on, Jason. Just as it’s leaving the station.” He nodded to me. “Are you a Democrat?”
I drew back. “Does that matter?”
“Yes, of course it does. Are you?”
“I’m a south-side Irish Catholic, Hector. It’s a prerequisite to baptism.” The real answer was, I generally dislike both political parties and don’t feel loyal to either one.
“In the primaries,” he said. “Do you pull a Republican or a Democratic ballot?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever voted in a primary.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Hector shook his head, as if I were hopeless. “Okay, well, I’ll see what I can do. This is something you’d want?”
I told him the truth: I wasn’t sure. But the clients weren’t exactly streaming through the door, and maybe Hector could find me something interesting.
I had no idea just how “interesting” it would be.
13
THAT AFTERNOON, I PUT IN A CALL TO JOEL LIGHTNER,
private eye extraordinaire—just ask him—and put in for a favor. Then I stared at the ceiling and thought about Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez. I had to start with the safe assumption that their murders were related. And the federal government had more or less conclusively fingered Wozniak’s actual killer. It was that teenage Cannibal—Eddie Vargas was the name, if memory served. But a sixteen-year-old gangbanger didn’t commit that murder without say-so, without some direction. And that same person saw Ernesto as a threat and ordered his death.
Good. I had mastered the obvious. Also, one plus one equals two.
What had Essie said? She thought my initial visits with Ernesto had been successful. I’d appealed to him. But then one day he returned home upset.
Decepcionó.
Disappointed. Upset.
La verdad no importa,
he’d told his wife. It wasn’t worth prison, he’d told her. Prison—for Ernesto? Had he been part of something illegal? I didn’t know. But clearly, my powers of persuasion had moved him to talk to somebody. And more to the point, somebody had talked to him. Threatened him. He’d gone from wanting to come forth with his information to sealing the vault. He’d cut me off at the knees when I’d called him.