The Angels of Catastrophe (5 page)

Jimmy Ramirez wasn't at any of his usual haunts. He hadn't been to the Social Security office on Valencia Street or to the Otis Street food stamps office. He wasn't in the fly-by-night repair shops on lower Shotwell. He wasn't socializing with the hookers and the nickel bag dealers in Alioto Park on Twentieth Street. He hadn't stopped in at El Faro taqueria on Folsom Street for lunch and he wasn't at El Tico Nica Cocktails or at McCarthy's, his favorite bars.

Maimonides suggested they redirect their efforts and search for his buddy Fleeta Bolton. This sounded like a promising alternative to Durrutti and he seconded the scheme. The plucky duo went to the Jerry Hotel, the Casanova Lounge on Valencia Street, the Crown Hotel and the Cafe Macondo on Sixteenth Street, but to no avail.
Fleeta Bolton and Jimmy Ramirez had dropped off the face of the earth.

Maimonides noticed Durrutti was anxious and sought to pacify him. “Relax. This is a piece of cake. We'll find the guy before tonight. You ain't got a thing to worry about. Where's he gonna go? Nowhere, that's where. Worse comes to worse, he'll be at Hunt's. Before the evening's done, you'll be celebrating.”

Durrutti wasn't convinced, not by a long shot.

His last encounter with Jimmy Ramirez prior to today's phone call had been a month ago. At the time it hadn't been a significant meeting. Jimmy had been explaining—and Durrutti could hear it now: “I'm going to do something motherfucking magnificent, you wait and see. I'm going to make some shit fly.”

If he didn't find the Mexican, he might as well put his head in an oven and turn on the gas. Kulak and the Feds would dig a graveyard just for him if they couldn't pin the gun and the cop killing on a plausible suspect. Regardless of what Durrutti had done or didn't do—the facts were irrelevant. The only thing that counted was the murder's own momentum and it was heading straight at him like a bullet.

The Cadillac was adrift, stuck in the rush hour traffic on Sixteenth Street next to the Altamont Hotel. Crackheads and winos congregated under the trees in front of the Wells Fargo Bank. Maimonides leaned on the horn while
Durrutti watched two junkies fight over a loaf of bread in the mouth of Wiese Alley. Maimonides exhibited his customary impatience and said, “This is getting stupid. Forget I ever said anything. I don't know where that little fuck Jimmy Ramirez is. The
putz
has disappeared into thin air.”

Durrutti felt a warmth for his friend, a glow in his solar plexus. Somebody understood what he was experiencing. The pent-up frustration. The idiotic suspense. The shaving rash on his neck it was causing. “I know, I know. That's what I was trying to tell you. I've got a problem here.”

Maimonides wasn't impressed. He never was by anything. His powers of detachment were acute, honed by years of solitary confinement in prison. “Oh, yeah? Well, that's too bad because I'm gonna take you home. I don't want to do this no more.”

The warmth Durrutti had kindled for Maimonides was extinguished on the spot. Anger flowered from him. “What for? You gonna desert me now, just when I need you? What's going on here?”

Maimonides paused to give his friend a chary look. “What's going on here? I need to do some chores around the house. Do you mind? And to be candid, you look like shit. Go take a vitamin or something and just stop worrying so goddamn much. You're gonna wear yourself out.”

Durrutti was less than thrilled about the delay, but there was nothing else he could do at the moment. He was too tired to argue. Too frustrated to plan another move. Too woozy to think clearly. Maimonides drove him back to the El Capitán, using Guerrero Street to avoid any further traffic. He said, “Get some rest and we'll talk in a few hours.”

I
nstead of going to his room, Durrutti hit the street. He was mad about having given the gun to Jimmy. What kind of craziness had prompted him to do that? He was infuriated with himself for ever having bought the gat in the first place. He'd never even used the piece-he was scared of guns—and now he was facing the possibility of going to prison over it. He was sick to his stomach and he felt dizzy. He walked, blinded by the midday sun, not caring where he went. Ten minutes later he ran into Lonely Boy at the corner of Sixteenth and Mission Streets.

Heroin alley, the police called it.

Catholic school kids were milling at the bus stop; the junkies next to the BART hole and the Parisian-style public toilets peddled syringes. The Honduran
abuelitas
—since the temperature was skyrocketing—were selling homemade tamales from under the shade of a multi-striped beach umbrella by the California Savings and Loan Bank.

Lonely Boy had shaved his head to the scalp; his round brown-skinned skull gleamed to perfection like a chrome hubcap. He was wearing blue Nike trainers, white athletic socks pulled up to the kneecaps, a pair of ankle-length overalls and a starched black Fruit of the Loom T-shirt.
He unhooked the bib on his overalls, fingered his armpits and said to Durrutti, “You know the
pendejo,
the cop who got himself killed? Let me tell you something about that.”

The dead policeman was named Chamorro, a Nicaraguan born kid assigned to the narc squad. He was twenty-six years old when he bit the dust—missing his next birthday by three weeks—and he had left behind a wife and two kids. People on the street were saying he'd double-crossed a
clica,
some gangsters he was in cahoots with. His body had been discovered propped up against a tiled wall next to the Ton-Jo Cocktail Lounge with a dumdum bullet planted between his eyes and a rat stuffed in his mouth.

The bullet had torn his skull apart, making sure there would be no open casket at his funeral. The rat let everyone know he was a snitch. Chamorro's death had been coming; no one was surprised when it happened. The growing tension in the Mission between the gangs and the police was one piece of the mosaic. Every day you saw more homeless, more nouveau-cuisine restaurants catering to the Silicon Valley clientele, more cops in their squad cars and another low-income residential hotel succumbing to fire.

Lonely Boy's fatigued brown eyes shined when he turned to Durrutti and grinned, saying almost shyly, “I shouldn't be speaking about this shit, but I know who did the shooting.”

He was teasing Durrutti and he knew it. Ricky could ask him directly who it was and Lonely Boy would never tell. He was too disciplined, a veteran
soldado.
He might
insinuate and drop a coy hint, but his self-restraint would never permit a full confession so the air between the two men felt heavy with unspoken meaning.

A murder was a murder. Durrutti was no stranger to it. When he was a dope dealer, his nearest competitor had been a kid named Bobby Matlock. They were both eighteen and had attended the same crappy public school. He controlled the distribution of weed in the neighborhood and Durrutti dominated whatever LSD was being sold. Another dealer ripped off Bobby for two thousand dollars worth of sinsemilla and he had the kid assassinated for eight hundred and fifty bucks. No one batted an eye and Bobby Matlock was never caught.

Lonely Boy was another saga. His family was from El Salvador. He had a younger brother in juvenile hall on an assault charge and another one buried in a village cemetery back in Colmillo. His father worked as a part-time janitor at St. Martin de Porres and his mother sold flowers in front of Walgreen's almost every day of the week. Because it would drive his parents mad with grief, he worried about getting arrested by the cops and deported.

He said to Durrutti, bending the harsh syllables of his adopted language, softening them with Spanish inflections, “That Chamorro, you know what he was doing, don't you? It was messed up. The
puto
was trying to play the game from both sides. First, he came across all brotherly, saying he wouldn't bust us if we played with him. He wanted us to run
mota
through him. He got a percentage and we wouldn't get arrested. Safety guaranteed, that's what he said. But then he stabbed us in the back. Chamorro said
it was his job. My theory is, you do that, you lose. A man who betrays you, he deserves to die.”

Lonely Boy's eyes burned into Durrutti's face. Sherm-fired brown eyes that had not a glimmer of light in them, as if all the hope in Lonely Boy had been vacuumed out of his soul and replaced with the dark soil of resentment. He clenched his jaw and waited for a reaction, waiting to see if Durrutti would flinch at the mention of death and betrayal. When the other man didn't, he continued, asserting, “Yeah, the
pendejo
turned around after taking our money and weed and he busted the
vatos.
He laughed at us when we said it was unfair. In a case like that, there is only one way out. You know how it is, the more a man has, the weaker it makes him. Greed kills you, homes. That's what happened to that
pinche
Chamorro.”

Durrutti ventured into unknown territory and hazarded a new topic and said to him, “I'm trying to track down Jimmy Ramirez, but I can't find him.”

Lonely Boy laughed, not kindly. “Of course not. With this kind of heat on Mission Street, the homeboy's made himself scarce. Don't you know he's always been like that? Jimmy's only out for himself, the fucking Mexican.” Lonely Boy angled his head, regarding Durrutti with suspicion. “Anyway, what do you need from him? Anything he got, I got too, you know.”

Durrutti blanched and backpedaled, saying neutrally, “Jimmy? I just want to talk with him.”

“What for when you can talk to me?” Lonely Boy nagged. “I talk better than him all the time.”

“It's strictly business, nothing personal.”

“Well, your business is your business. But you better watch yourself around his shit, that's all I can say. He's a fucking hoo-banging maniac.”

Durrutti's paranoid radar went up. Unwanted advice was the last thing he needed. It just added to the static in his head. He was all ears and fears when he asked Lonely Boy what he meant. “Why's that?”

Lonely Boy warmed up to the question. It was a role he relished, saying how he saw things, his view of the world. “For one,” he said, “the homeboy is unstable and his reputation is shit. He owes everyone money. He went through all my nephews, You know them? They live on York Street. And then his girlfriend left him after he ripped her off. That's a no-no. You can steal from a man, but not from a woman, especially if you are sleeping with her.”

Lonely Boy folded his muscular arms over his chest and looked resigned. “But you know, I still try to be friendly and shit with him. I have gone out of my way to tell that Mexican that even though he can't be down with the Mara Salvatrucha, on account of us being Salvadoreños and everything, it don't mean he can't hang out and party with us. He can come over and do the social thing. Casual shit. Nothing heavy. But no, he's tight with that black guy, what's his name? You know, the one with
el grande
Afro.”

“That's Fleeta Bolton.”

“What's up with that shit? The dude is black.”

“I don't know. They're close friends.”

“It's fucked up is what it is. And another thing.” Lonely Boy spat on the sidewalk, narrowly missing a
pigeon, who flew off in a flutter of grimy feathers. “Chamorro? That's just the beginning. We've got a war going on out here. Only the
locos
will survive it.”

Lonely Boy was five foot tall,
puro indio
and built like a brick shithouse. He radiated a force field of malice. The
vato loco
snapped the fingers of his right hand and asked proudly, “Who do you think rules Mission Street?” He answered his own question with a smile, showing a row of brilliantly white and even teeth. “The motherfuckers who are willing to die for it, that's who.”

D
urrutti's parents had the wisdom to leave him with an education in law and order. Vocational training was necessary—in San Francisco, you can't start too early.

The hoopla began three months after his birth. His mother was a vivacious, sometimes malicious brunette who went by the moniker of Doby. She was a young woman entering post-adolescence, not pleased with being a mother and a wife. Doby had anticipated her husband's exit from prison by renting a three room place on Geneva Avenue in Visitacion Valley, a grubby blue-collar neighborhood near the Cow Palace.

Durrutti's father was a ferret-faced teenager with atrocious teeth known as Frankie. After his release from Chino following a one year bit for burglary, he joined Doby and their baby boy, bringing with him his friend Freddy.

Doby was very upset about this. Brush fires on San Bruno Mountain and the Zebra serial killings were the big stories in the local newspapers. The racially motivated murders had the city terrified. Doby could have cared less. She wanted to murder Freddy.