The Triggerman's Dance Page 4

  “You only stayed in Orange County a few weeks after the shooting. You gave up a pretty plum job, cashed out your retirement, closed up your house in Laguna. Why?”

  John took a drink of the beer and decided that even if, according to the ways men should live, he had wronged Joshua Weinstein, he still didn’t much like him.

  “You’re the spy, Mr. Weinstein. You’re the gatherer. You know a lot more about me than I know about you. Why don’t you tell me why?”

  Weinstein had set his beer on the deck and loosened the knot of his necktie. His nine-to-five pallor was luminous in the sunlight filtered by the awning.

  He looked across with an expression John took to indicate sympathy, but read as little more than a bureaucrat’s professional interest.

  Joshua said, “My mother used to tell me that to be happy in life, you need three things: something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. You had them all. Then you lost Rebecca and tossed the other two away. You traveled some, then came out here to lick your wounds—”

  Rebecca. The sound of the name takes John Menden back to her. As clearly as if it was yesterday, no, as clearly as if she were there right now, he feels the warm October sunlight on his skin the evening they sit on the balcony of the old Laguna Canyon house and he actually touches her for the first time. She has a scar that runs from the base of her right thumb across to the center of her palm, and that clean thin line of tissue—a line he has seen and contemplated so many times before—is soft beneath his finger as he traces its length across her hand, then back to the thumb again. She says a gypsy told her it cut across her lifeline but not to worry because all wounds are superficial compared to fate. She looks at him in a way that is both innocent and knowing, both assured and inquisitive. Rebecca’s hair is golden in this autumn light. Her skin is fair and her eyes are blue. Her nose is longer and sharper than the popular notion of beauty. Her face is slender. Her mouth is wide, full-lipped, healthy. She wears a frank red lipstick that frames, when she smiles, her very white and even teeth. She is vain enough, and practical enough, to know that her smile is her best feature. She also assumes that she is not particularly beautiful. He knows that she is not beautiful, though his eyes have made her perfect.

  John has always believed that he can judge a person’s character by their face, that no amount of acting or cosmetic alteration can change the truth of a face. In the case of Rebecca, he had seen it all very clearly the moment he met her in the Journal lobby. She was bright, curious, forgiving, optimistic and possessed a hopeful soul in spite of the darkness she tried to hide. Rebecca Harris, he immediately saw, was the kind of woman he wanted to spend his life with. He saw her ring, too, and realized he would not.

  And later, sitting on his balcony after touching her scar, then looking away at the arid hillsides of Laguna Canyon, John Menden felt a true sense of honor at having touched her.

  You shouldn’t have done that, she says.

  I’m sorry. I’ve wanted to touch you for a long time. Now you’re here. I never imagined you here. It’s throwing me a bit.

  I’ve imagined me here. Too many times. Maybe that was a mistake, but I couldn’t help myself. Everything starts there, in the imagination, don’t you think?

  No, it starts in the eyes, and then the imagination kidnaps it.

  To where?

  To the heart, I guess. Then the heart makes it real.

  “—to forget, to start over.” Weinstein’s voice severed the reverie like a sword. “So you come here, to nowhere, looking for the next avenue out.”

  John looked at his dogs, asleep in the dirt beneath the trailer. Rebecca’s face fades away. “You’ve boxed me neatly, Mr. Weinstein.”

  Sharon shifted uneasily in her plastic chair. “Mr. Menden,” she asked, “have you thought over what we talked about last time?”

  “Of course I have.” In fact, he had thought about almost nothing else. He understood that he was being vetted and auditioned—for what he could only guess. With the words of Rebecca’s letter still whispering in his mind, it was difficult to hear much else.

  “What are your feelings?” Sharon asked.

  “I want to know more,” said John.

  Joshua nodded and stood, setting his half-empty beer on the chair. “We can’t bring the facts to you, so we’ll bring you to the facts. Get the chopper ready again, Sharon.”

  John was ushered through a back entrance of the Orange County FBI office, Dumars on one side of him and Weinstein on the other. They went down a long hallway covered with a pale green industrial carpet, then turned right and passed down another corridor. No one passed them in either. The building was quiet. After hours, thought John—the Feds are home with their little Fedettes. Joshua unlocked a heavy wood-veneer door and let them in.

  It was a small room, set up like a theater. Joshua flipped on the lights, bright overhead fluorescents that bathed the air in a chilly, efficient glow. A large television monitor sat on a stand near a wall, and ten feet in front of it were three seats.

  “Sit,” said Weinstein. “I’m about to show you some things that very few people have seen. Sharon has seen them and my supervisor here. Select people in Washington—two to be exact. All three others know what Sharon and I are doing, but I’ve managed to get almost a sole proprietorship of this operation. As sole as anyone gets in a bureaucracy like ours. I was lucky. The President cut loose federal funds as part of his crime package and Orange County got some of it. That’s where the money comes from. Like any other organization, in the Bureau, everyone wants to know where the money is coming from. Right now, I’ve got a clean supply. It isn’t a lot, and it isn’t inexhaustible, and it doesn’t flow without scrutiny from Washington. But for now, it’s mine. Who knows, Mr. Menden, maybe it will be ours. May I call you John?”

  “Fine.”

  Weinstein smiled then, which John took to indicate a new bonhomie. Then, like a dead leaf, it fell away.

  “I’m going to ask you to relax now, John, just sit back, look at the screen and listen to a story. I’ll narrate. You’ll have questions, I’m sure, but wait on them—if you can. Of course, if you’re missing what you think is an urgent piece of information, just speak up.”

  Again, Weinstein smiled. It looked like something rationed, by his soul perhaps, leaving him only so many to spend in a day. His teeth were small and even, but his lips parted around them only momentarily, and with reluctance. It gave John a small shudder. The larynx wrestled beneath his skin. And Weinstein’s voice now, so, well . . . welcoming. It sounded to John like something calling out from the first rung of hell.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  A man’s face appeared on the screen. The image was a still photograph, in color. He looked to be in his early fifties, with short silver-gray hair combed back, a heavily lined and sun-darkened face, a wide jaw that spoke of resolve, and gray, level eyes much the color of John’s own. He was wearing a white knit shirt, unbuttoned. The overall impression he made on John Menden—the self-professed analyst of faces—was of bearing, competence, experience and intelligence.

  “Let’s call him Puma, for right now,” said Weinstein. “He’s a family man. See? He’s married, with a twenty-two-year-old son just graduating from Stanford, and an eighteen-year-old daughter at the University of California, in Irvine. There they are, up in Palo Alto for the commencement.”

  On screen, the photographic portrait gave way to what looked like home-video footage of Puma with his wife and children. They are outside. The son is dressed in gown and mortar-board for a graduation. The daughter wears a white dress. The wife is in pink, smiling widely, and Puma himself has his arms around all three of them, scrunching them in toward him, his tan, lined face smiling and quite obviously proud. He tips the mortarboard down onto his son’s face, and his wife rearranges it, revealing the young man’s grin.

  “Call the son Patrick,” said Weinstein. “The daughter Valerie, the mother Carolyn.”

  John watched. Some
of it was video tape, some were stills.

  The family on the steps of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The family—years earlier—at the beach. Patrick fast-breaking down the Stanford court. Valerie graduating from what must have been high school. Carolyn giving baths to a litter of wriggling puppies in a back yard toddler’s pool. Puma kneeling alone on a vast white boulder, the body of a ram before him and the ram’s head and enormous horns resting on his lap. Patrick, Valerie and Puma walking a gully in what looked to John like the Sand Hills of Nebraska, shotguns in their arms and a pair of springers working out in front of them. The pheasants come up; the camera jostles to frame them; the pops of guns send two of the cock pheasants plummeting to the ground. Then a sequence in which the daughter commands a springer during a field-trial retrieve—hand signals only—directing the eager dog into a river, across it, then left into a dense stand of cattails from which the dog emerges with a pigeon. Then Valerie kneeling beside her dog and a trophy.

  “Now,” said Weinstein. “August, five years ago. The day it all changed.”

  The video now showed what could only be police footage. The scene is outside a fast food restaurant and the atmosphere is one of disaster. There is a perimeter of tape set up, and beside it dozens of people, mostly youths, mostly Latino in appearance, stare in glum acceptance toward the restaurant. When the scene shifts inside, two bodies are heaped beneath a table next to a window pocked with holes.

  “August fourth,” said Weinstein. “These are the facts. Patrick was shot dead. Twenty-two years old, just out of Stanford with a degree in history, engaged to be married in the Salt Lake City Temple the following spring. His mother, Carolyn, was injured, shot in the head. The bullet went through her son first, likely because he saw what was going down and tried to cover her. She lived, sort of. She’s been paralyzed from the waist down for five years, bedridden and brain-damaged. She talks, though not well. Collateral damage was three wounded, one seriously. Depending on your beliefs, one of two things happened. One version is that an innocent person was murdered in cold blood and another paralyzed for life by a racist punk, simply for being white, and for being where they shouldn’t have been. A hate crime, with all the special penalties hate crimes carry. That’s what the DA tried to go with, at first. The other version was that a decent young Latino boy had defended his aunt from a man who had raped and beaten her the week before and who he feared had come back to do it again. That’s what he was doing when he took out Patrick through the window of the fast food place. Carolyn, in this scenario, was a tragic accident. That the boy’s aunt had been beaten and likely raped was established—bruises, cuts, vaginal abrasions. But she didn’t report it until after her son had shot Patrick. She was afraid of being deported. The public defender struggled to establish that Patrick had committed the rape, but couldn’t get far—no fluids, no blood—nothing but Teresa Descanso’s word and a dead accused. During the trial, in this land of orange blossoms, rolling surf and Mickey Mouse, you defined your soul by what version you believed. You wanted the shooter’s blood, or you thought he was a hero. It was ugly and divisive and unnecessary. But then, a lot of life is, it seems.”

  “I read about it,” said Menden.

  Next were still shots of the funeral, several showing the demolished countenance of Puma, his hair unkempt and his eyes swollen. Valerie’s face looked like that of someone who had seen something she would never be able to unsee again.

  The video ended. Weinstein used the remote to hit rewind. Silence filled the little room.

  Weinstein took a hearty sip of water. His big Adam’s apple bobbed with the swallow. “The alleged shooter was a boy of fifteen—good student, no gang involvement—a minor Latino activist of sorts. He’d written some rather . . . what, Sharon, vehement articles?”

  “Childish articles.”

  “No, they were better than childish, but they were naive and strident. Anyway, he’d done some articles about La Raza and Aztlán for a class at his high school. You know, the stuff about the Mexicans reclaiming California for their race. Naive stuff, like I said, but it came up in court. He admitted the shooting, on the strength of his aunt’s identification of Patrick, governed by fear for her safety and life. The jury finally hung on murder two, so he went back to jail. For reasons championed by the media and press, and finally agreed to by the DA, he wasn’t tried again for Patrick. He got four years for mayhem on Carolyn, walked after two, moved to Mexico, they say. A controversial decision, to say the least. Maybe it was supposed to keep the lid on the pressure cooker. Maybe it was supposed to be a concession to an emotionally charged county minority that truly believed the kid was defending his family. This was before your time at the paper. You were in Key West, fishing, I believe.”

  John felt, not for the first time, that his skin had been peeled back by Joshua and his people, affording them a full view of everything inside.

  “I read about the trial,” he said. “It wasn’t big in the papers back there.”

  “It was big here. On the heels of O.J. and Prop. 187. God, what a summer that was.”

  Weinstein sighed deeply, removed his glasses and massaged the sides of his nose. “How’d you do down in Key West, fish-wise?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It couldn’t possibly matter less.”

  “Then get on with it.”

  “Yeah, that’s the spirit.”

  The glasses back on now, Joshua contemplated John with his voracious eyes. “Cut now to Puma. You need to know something about him. He came from a wealthy family that had been in the county since the early eighteen hundreds. A very wealthy family—bought land grants on the cheap, made a go with cattle and crops, sent sons into the assembly and Congress and watched the land value go out of sight after World War II. Puma was working at the time, that dreary August when he lost his son and most of his wife. He quit his job. He sold his house in Tustin and moved onto family land—a couple of thousand acres down in the south part of the county. The land is hilly and dry, but it overlooks the coast. It backs up against Pendleton Marine Base. It’s got a lake. It’s got oak savanna, coastal scrub, two hundred acres of orange trees. There was only one road into it, and Puma kept it that way. He built an eight-foot fence around it and wired it full of voltage. There’s a guard house where the road comes into his property. He could have afforded electricity, gas and water, but he installed generators, propane and wells instead. He rebuilt the old mission-era house, which ran him almost a half a million dollars. When it was ready, he moved in with his paralyzed wife and his daughter. He began a business that is now thriving. And since then, no one sees him. He’s there, of course—I don’t mean he’s disappeared—but he rarely leaves the place. Oh yes, it has a name. Liberty Ridge.”

  Liberty, thought John. He liked the sound of the word, though it wasn’t a word you heard much anymore. And he knew the land that Weinstein was talking about. It was gorgeous land, tough land, filled with wildlife, nourished by the lake, with a commanding view from its peak. As a kid, John had hiked it, camped it, scavenged it for fossils and rocks and reptiles a hundred times.

  John looked around the room, at the bare walls, the blank television monitor, the pale green carpet. For a moment, Puma’s paralyzed wife and Liberty Ridge were just blips on the screen of his awareness. But then they grew in size, and he remembered why his stomach had tightened and his heart was now beating so loudly inside his rib cage. Puma was behind Rebecca.

  Rebecca.

  “Now,” said Weinstein, “we need to look forward, to the van used in the . . . assassination. Rather, to the repair shop from which the van was lifted. Sharon? You’re on.”

  With this, Sharon Dumars rose and began pacing. At first she went back and forth in front of the screen, then extended her run to include the entire perimeter of the room. She looked for all the world, thought John, like a female version of Joshua.

  “The shop is owned by someone whose name you don’t need to know,” she began. John detected the r
elish of power in her voice, the pride of one who commands. “This man has a brother-in-law. Brother-in-law works for Puma. Coincidence? Maybe, or maybe not. Let’s say it is. Puma, we learn, is a competent amateur engraver. He actually earned money during college working for a trophy company, even though his family was rich. Coincidence that the bullet casings left behind for us were engraved? Let’s say that’s a coincidence, too. Then, there’s this—Puma loves to hunt big game, and big game hunters use big rifles, sometimes a .30/06 caliber because it’s powerful and accurate. Puma—and the men he hunts with—have taken and made four hundred and eighty yard shots. We know this because he’s listed in the Boone & Crockett record books, and in the Safari Club International record books. Coincidence again? Yes, let’s call it all coincidence, again. We can afford to be generous.”

  With this, Dumars stopped at the table and drained the rest of her water. John noted the sheen of sweat on her forehead and the way her hair stuck at the temples.

  “Then,” she continued, “there’s the fact, too, that Susan Baum broke the story about Teresa Descanso—the shooter’s aunt—accusing Patrick of rape. It was explosive. The accused murderer dumped the public defender because he couldn’t get results on Patrick, and let Glory Redmond take the case pro bono. You can imagine the circus she made of it. She didn’t even try to link Patrick to Descanso with physical evidence, which was smart. What better could they do—Redmond argued—than an eyewitness? All the while, Baum crusaded in print, with a series of articles in which Descanso, then another woman, accused Patrick not only of the rape, but of solicitations for prostitution, public drunkenness and aggravated assault. Baum argued to her readers what Redmond was arguing to her jury, that a white-male-establishment-Orange County DA was ignoring the facts while prosecuting a fifteen-year old scholar for defending his family. Orange County is supposed to be the hotbed of conservatism, the Republican citadel, the land of the John Birch Society, right? Redmond and Baum set out to challenge that assumption. And the question of Patrick’s supposed exploits in the barrio—dramatized by Baum’s articles—probably helped deadlock the jury. The shooter’s name, by the way, was Jimmy Ruiz.”