I like getting out and doing this stuff. Confinement in the office is becoming claustrophobic. I can feel my baby inside me, growing every day. So far, I’ve been able to hide my pregnancy, but soon I’m going to show. I’ve already constructed an elaborate fabric of lies to cover my real situation. My boyfriend/fiancé/partner and I aren’t getting married, at least not yet. Plenty of people don’t get married, and they raise fine, healthy, well-adjusted children. Look at all the lesbian and gay parents out there. The single women who adopt. Life is a mosaic, a multilayered tapestry of arrangements. We’re one more patch in that enormous quilt.
I cruise down Whittier Boulevard. I have XM Satellite Radio, which I’ve tuned to a classic soul station. I’m in a Smokey Robinson mood today. The air-conditioning in my car is blasting cold air, which is vital for my well-being. Since I’ve become pregnant, my body has started overheating, a hormonal reaction, I assume. I’ll ask Dr. Schwartzman on my next visit.
I turn off Whittier, drive north, then left at the side street I’ve written down. Garfield High School, a megacampus of almost five thousand students, is a couple blocks away. Half a mile past that is East Los Angeles Junior College. Both, high school and college, are almost completely Latino, predominantly Mexican with smatterings of other Central American countries—Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras—mixed in. A city within a city, a country within a country.
I’m a stranger here, an interloper. It’s a weird feeling to have in the place you have called home your entire life. Not queasy or threatening, but definitely foreign. I wonder how I would feel being here at night, especially if unescorted. Nervous, I’m sure. I don’t plan on coming here after dark, so I won’t find out.
Salazar’s church is a hole-in-the-wall converted store in the middle of a block of similar buildings and small apartment houses. It reminds me of the dozens of little Orthodox Jewish synagogues in the Fairfax-Melrose section of midcity that serve a tiny community living within a few blocks of their sanctuary. Ironically, or perhaps perversely, this place used to sell appliances, including television sets. The old logo, fading but still visible, is etched on the front windows.
I find a parking spot across the street and parallel park with only three back and forths, an accomplishment for me—I’m a lousy parker. I gather up my briefcase, which contains my notes and other necessary information, and get out.
The three-digit heat hits me as if I’d stepped into a sauna. I gasp for breath. According to the radio, the color of the air index today is orange—kids and asthmatics are warned to stay inside. I look both ways to check traffic, dash across the street, and push the door open. They have air-conditioning, but it’s a single window unit in an opening above the entrance, inadequate for little more than lowering the temperature from scorching to uncomfortable. No cross-ventilation; the air in here hangs heavy and still. I pause in the doorway for a moment, taking in the scene.
One blocky room, about twenty by sixty feet. The plastic folding chairs you buy at Target or Home Depot are set up in orderly rows. In the front, at the opposite end from the entrance where I’m standing, there is a small stage on which a portable pulpit rests. The stage is on casters, so it’s movable. The pulpit is draped with a bright woven tapestry that looks Oaxacan. Against the back wall, a guitar and an accordion rest side by side, like images in a Cezanne still life. On the side walls, there are stock paintings of Christ performing miracles. One of the crosses mounted behind the pulpit features a bloody Christ wearing his crown of thorns. The other cross is bare. My guess is that they are hand-me-downs from other, more prosperous congregations.
The three people standing in the front, anxiously awaiting my arrival, have long, mournful faces: Salazar’s wife, and two men. I don’t recognize either of them, they weren’t at the earlier trial. One is dressed in the work clothes of a mechanic or common laborer. He looks as if he is in his mid-thirties, about Salazar’s age. The other is younger, early twenties. He sports several tattoos on his beefy forearms and biceps. His head is shaved, and he’s wearing a wifebeater and low-slung khakis. A gangbanger, probably. His face is incongruously sweet, like a stuffed carnival panda.
“Hola, señora,” I call across the room to Salazar’s wife in greeting. “Hola,” she answers back in her low, almost inaudible voice.
The two men eye me with caution as I approach them. Mrs. Salazar introduces them as Carlos and Juan. I don’t need any more information about them yet—last names, phone numbers, and so forth. If they prove to be useful, I’ll get it. My objective now is to find out if they’re credible. If one or both are, that will be a huge boost for us, because these men are the only two possible alibi witnesses we know about, at least so far.
“Do you speak English?” I ask them, mentally kicking myself for not having thought to ask Mrs. Salazar about that earlier, so I could have brought a translator with me in case they didn’t. To my relief, they both do. One has a thick accent, so I assume he’s foreign-born, and might not be here legally. The other man’s inflection is the pure Southern California Mexican accent you hear from every homeboy’s lips.
“Thank you for coming to meet with me,” I commend them. They are here voluntarily; it’s a brave thing they are doing. They mutter
de nada
in response, and stare at me from under hooded eyelids.
“I have to speak to each of you individually,” I tell them. I can’t have one listening to the other’s story, it could later be construed as coaching the witnesses. “Who wants to go first?”
They look at each other, then the older one says, “I’ll do it. I must return to work as soon as I can.”
There is a coffee shop around the corner. Mrs. Salazar and the other man will wait there. I’ll call Mrs. Salazar on her cell when I’m finished with the first man. I fish a ten out of my wallet and hand it to her. “On the state,” I say as I press the bill into her reluctant palm. “The least we can do.” Which isn’t much.
They leave. I sit down with the first man, and begin to ask him questions.
On the night before the early morning discovery of murder number two, Carlos and Salazar drove a local youth-group soccer team to a game in Alhambra. Salazar had driven to the Boys and Girls Club, the pickup location, straight from work, all the way on the other side of the city. They played under the lights at an outdoor rec center. The game was over at nine-thirty, then they took the boys to a local Jack in the Box for a late meal. The tab came to almost one hundred dollars, which Salazar paid for out of his pocket. He shrugged off the expense, telling his friend Carlos that he could afford it, and these kids couldn’t. He did that often, Carlos informs me. A notorious soft touch.
By the time they got back to the Boys and Girls Club in East Los Angeles, it was after eleven (the game was on a Friday night, so the kids didn’t have to get up early the next day for school). Most of the boys’ parents were waiting for them, but a few kids had been left to get home on their own. Although Salazar had been on the go since five that morning, he insisted on driving each boy home. He wasn’t going to leave any of them alone on these dark streets at night. Carlos had gamely accompanied him. After they dropped the last boy off, Salazar drove Carlos back to the club, where he had left his car. Carlos recalled checking the time on his cell phone: twelve-forty-five. It had been a long, tiring day.
“So you went home and then what?” I ask, rummaging through my files to find the coroner’s estimated time of death for that victim. One to three in the morning, more likely closer to one. If she had been murdered at one, or half an hour to forty-five minutes later, it would have been impossible for Salazar to drive clear across the city, even if the freeways were deserted, accost the victim, and kill her in that time frame.
“I went to sleep. My wife waited up for me; you can check the time with her. She was angry that I was so late, but when I explained the reason, she forgave me. Roberto has such a big heart, you can’t be mad at him for keeping you out late.”
What he’s told me is all well and good, but it isn’t good enough. The window for Salazar to have committed that murder is narrow, but it’s still open. This isn’t the airtight alibi we need. We won’t be able to sway a jury to our side if this is the best we have. I will check with Salazar’s wife to find out if she was awake when her husband got home, although she might not remember.
“Thank you,” I tell Carlos. “You’ve been very helpful.” I shake his hand and take down his last name, phone number, the other information I’ll need. “I’ll be in touch. You can go now.” I open my cell phone and start to punch in Mrs. Salazar’s number.
“Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
I close the phone. “What else is there?”
Carlos gets a sheepish look on his face, as if he’s embarrassed over what he’s about to tell me. “The next morning, me and Roberto met up at the club at six-thirty. There was a girls’ softball game in Exposition Park, at eight. Roberto was their coach too.”
“You must have been exhausted,” I say, writing these new details down.
“I was. But I promised Roberto. I had to keep my promise.” He smiles shyly. “He drove the van. I slept on the way over.”
Getting better. “When Roberto showed up, how did he look?”
“Tired. We both were.”
“I mean, what was he wearing? Had he changed clothes? Taken a shower?”
“He was wearing clean clothes, and his hair was still wet, so he must have showered,” Carlos confirms.
Now the window is really narrow. Salazar drives to the Westside, accosts his victim, who probably knew him. Some time has to pass before he kills her. Then he drives all the way back home, goes to bed, wakes up, takes a shower, and shows up back at the club five and a half hours after a witness says he left it. Maybe Superman could have made that schedule, but Roberto Salazar is not faster than a speeding bullet. Certainly not in the crappy trucks he drives.
“You’re sure of these times?” I question Carlos. “Both late that night and early the next morning.”
“I checked on my cell phone, both times. So, yes.”
Everyone tells time from their cell now. It’s as accurate as DNA, and you don’t have to hire a five-thousand-dollar-a-day expert to explain it.
Juan, the younger man, is less helpful. He was with Salazar the night of the first murder, but they parted company early enough that Salazar would have had time to get over to the Westside, kill that victim, and be back on his home turf before sunup. So that’s a bust.
He does, however, give me a startling piece of information we could use if the prosecution is allowed to introduce Salazar’s earlier arrest as corroboration of his being at the right time and place (for them) when victim number three was killed.
“Armando Gonzalez. Shady little asshole. I wouldn’t trust him to clean my toilet bowl, but Roberto, man, he trusts everyone. I’m always warning him: don’t be so trustful; but he always smiles and says that’s how he is. Which is true, and it sometimes backfires on him. Like with Armando. Armando left Roberto holding the bag on that deal. Sucker skipped town so fast he left a vapor trail.”
“So you knew Armando was dealing hot goods? And that he really does exist.”
“Oh, yeah. He definitely exists. Except, see, his name ain’t Armando. It’s Reynaldo. He uses Armando as an alias, so the pigs can’t track him. Got some fake ID down at MacArthur Park, sails right through.”
MacArthur Park. Where my own fake ID came from, all those years ago. Some things never change. “Do you have any idea where Armando is at present?” I ask Juan.
He shakes his head. “If he had come back, he would have taken off again when Roberto was arrested for these murders. Guilty by association, if you know what I mean.”
Of course I do. That’s why half the people in jail are there. “Why didn’t you come forward with this when Salazar was arrested for those stolen television sets?” I scold Juan. “It really would have helped.”
He gives me a half-assed grin. “Wasn’t available.”
I get it. “County or state?”
“Lompoc. Aggravated assault. Got out the month before last.”
Ex-cons make bad witnesses, but I may have to use him anyway. “Do you have a job now?” I ask him. Rehabilitation can be a mitigating factor. The odds are that some of the jurors will have had a friend or relative who’s done time.
He nods. “Mechanic. For the MTD.”
“I didn’t know they hire ex-felons.”
“They need good mechanics. A friend of my mother pulled some strings. But I’ve got to stay clean, that’s the deal.”
“Are you?”
“So far.” He shrugs. “Who knows what the future will bring?”
My sentiments exactly.
“W
HAT?
”
“Nothing.” Joe turns away and stirs sugar into his coffee.
“You were giving me this weird look.”
“You look different, that’s all. More …” Groping for the diplomatic word: “Filled out.”
“Are you telling me I’m fat?” I don’t drink coffee anymore—just green tea, organic, loaded with vitamin C and antioxidants. My eating habits are so healthy now they’re disgusting.
“No, no. You look fine, great. Never better.”
“I’m not running sixty miles a week anymore. I would expect to put on a few pounds, here and there.”
“Of course. You look great, you really do.”
It’s time to let the world know I’m pregnant. I can’t fake it much longer, and covering it up is wearing me out. “Thanks,” I say, not too sarcastically. “You cut a dashing figure yourself.” For a fifty-seven-year-old man whose most strenuous exercise is lifting his finger to push the elevator button.
We’re in his office. I’m giving him a rundown on my latest interviews. He listens attentively, but nothing I tell him is cause for celebration.
“Close but no cigar on this Carlos fellow,” he pronounces after I’m done. “We’ll use him if we can’t come up with anything better, but he doesn’t close the window. Narrows it, but it’s still open.” He rocks back and forth on his heels. “We’re spinning our wheels. Trying to prove a negative. That Salazar can’t account for every second of his time when those murders were committed makes him guilty. Ipso facto.”