After spending years getting educated on the East Coast, he loved everything about California. Even crime paid here, for him as it did in Hollywood. California could transform the most venal crime into a song and dance and success for somebody.
He liked his work. He dealt in issues of life and death. What could be more important? And if lately the rest of his life seemed less vital than usual, well, that was subject to change. That could be remedied instantly, with a certain sway of the right someone's hip.
Today, he had new clients coming in at two o'clock, the Maldonados, Victor and Delilah. They were parents whose son had been shot four times, allegedly by a drive-by shooter. In the hospital now, in intensive care, the teenager was just barely alive. When Paul spoke on the phone to the parents right after the incident, their son had not been expected to live.
Matter-of-fact people who never expected a tragedy to blow their simple dreams for their son and themselves sky-high, he could tell the Maldonados had gone through several phases by the time they called him, using voices calm and hopeful. They had entered the denial phase, one that Paul recognized all too well. Years ago in Nepal, Paul had seen a woman hang a strip of cotton with inked messages on it onto a line, next to a dozen others, multicolored, at various stages of fading. She hung it there as a message to a presumably benevolent god. As the flag faded, her god absorbed the message. The Maldonados had been hanging out their prayer flag, not giving up. He didn't know what to expect from them.
He poured himself another jolt of coffee for fortification. This part of his job could get him down.
Victor Maldonado entered the room first. His wife trailed in behind. They sat side by side in his client chairs, not touching, but bouncing thoughts off each other the way married people did, flinging questions and arguments his way. He imagined they'd been married for a very long time. The wife's whole milk-colored face seemed to be a frame for a generous mouth with perfectly straight white teeth. Her skin had lost its youthful flush, and lines ran along the edges of her lips, but the lines told Paul about a life full of laughter and smiles.
She didn't smile now; the face that was made to smile looked painfully tense. Her husband sat close by, tall and dark and round around the middle, his voice booming, and his body movements closely aligned to hers, responsive to her nuances, physical and verbal. They were close; Paul could see that. Good. They needed each other now. Roman, the shooting victim, nineteen years old, was their only son.
“How's Roman?” Paul asked.
“We called this morning,” said Victor. “They took him out of intensive care. The doctor said he was ‘cautiously optimistic.'”
“Great,” Paul said, surprised. He had steeled himself for bad news, he realized now, as the tension in his neck relaxed, and he felt the ache of holding it stiff for the past few minutes. How amazing to be shot four times and hang in there anyway. Good for Roman. He asked them to fill him in on the events surrounding Roman's shooting.
They explained that he had been working for two months at Taylor 's Corner Store, north, up near Gilroy, being paid under the table, in cash.
“We can't afford college, even though he really wants to go.” Roman's mother spoke in a voice loaded with regret and guilt. “We have just enough on paper so nobody would give him the financial aid he needed, and his test scores were okay but not great. He was sick the day of the test, and too demoralized to try again. He's actually a smart kid. Always got real good grades. I worry about what's going to happen to him. You can't get anywhere today without a college education.”
“Don't beat yourself up about that anymore, Delly. He'll get there. Have a little faith.”
Delilah adjusted her purse on her knees. “Victor buys twenty bucks' worth of faith every week. Thanks to the lottery, he dreams away our bills, our bad health…”
“Our mortgage,” teased her husband, shrugging, looking okay with the characterization.
“Lord,” she said to Paul, “if dreams were real.”
“So your son went to work to save money for college?” Paul prompted.
“So he got this dumb job that hardly kept him in black T-shirts. He never meant to stay long, just until he could get something that paid better and had some benefits,” said Victor.
“He should've been looking for a better job then, shouldn't he have?” his wife said. “None of this would have happened if he had a decent job. Roman's so young. He thinks he can play around, and everything will turn out right anyway.”
“Nothing wrong with being young and expecting a lot of the world, Delly,” her husband said. “Keeps the spirit happy and engaged.”
“His boss, Bert Taylor, has owned that store for twenty years. Now he claims Roman never worked there, that he's always run the place on his own,” Delilah went on. “But why in the world would Roman make up a job?”
Paul could think of a few reasons. Maybe Roman had another way of making money that he felt shy talking about, or maybe he just wanted out from under his mother's eagle eye for a few minutes every day.
“I can't see why it makes a difference,” Victor said with exasperation. “They found Roman lying out front, didn't they? It's nothing to do with his job.”
“He's not out of the woods yet, the doctors say,” said Delilah, reality breaking through as her flag faded but her wishes remained undone. “He could still take a turn… I can't stand to think…”
“Did you talk with Roman's boss, with Taylor, after the accident?” Paul asked.
“Went over to the store when Roman got shot, on Sunday,” Delilah said. “The ambulance had just gone. We were going to hustle over to the hospital. But they said he wasn't expected to make it. We needed a minute… our son's blood was on the sidewalk and Taylor was inside, doing all the normal end-of-the-day stuff. Wiping counters, tidying. You know. It seemed so strange to me.”
“You shouldn't have yelled at him, Delly,” her husband said, looking softly at his wife.
“No, I guess not. But my son nearly died in front of his store and he's so concerned about all that blood on his precious sidewalk.”
“People don't know what to say,” said Victor. “Keeping busy helps. You know that.”
“But Roman wouldn't lie to me,” Mrs. Maldonado said, getting a little weepy.
Putting an arm around his wife, Victor gave Paul a look. The brown depths of his eyes told Paul he knew their son better than his wife did. All sons lied to their mothers.
“Have you talked to Roman since he was shot? Is he conscious?”
Victor Maldonado picked up the thread while his wife sniffed into a tissue. “He is. He's foggy about what happened. They say it's a miracle he's survived. Nobody expected it. The police said they'd send someone over to see him today, see if he remembered anything helpful about the car.”
“We're going over there to see our boy right now,” piped Delilah, obviously relieved by her tears, more relaxed, ready to reenter the fray.
Paul decided to tag along. He could walk down to the water tomorrow.
He followed the Maldonados in his car to the hospital in Monterey, met them in front, and walked with them up slippery floors to Roman Maldonado's room. The boy's parents kissed him gently. His mother smoothed the hair off his broad, wet forehead. A mouth as wide as his mother's, but wrecked and torn, was patched together with neat black rows of stitches ending in small knots. The couple introduced Paul, and left their son with promises to return shortly. Until Paul knew if the kid was lying, the parents were better occupied elsewhere.
Roman lay on the bed, his muscular body so long his feet hung off the end. Thick white bandages broke the dark expansive skin of his chest, a sheet furled down around his waist, and his eyes remained closed.
“Roman, I just want to ask you a couple of questions about what happened, okay?”
Roman nodded slightly, opening his eyes.
“You know you've been shot?”
He nodded.
“Were you clerking at Taylor 's store yesterday?”
He nodded again.
“He paid you in cash?”
“Yes.” He groaned. The puffy red lips strained against their stitches.
“We'd like to find out if you saw the person in the car. Do you remember anything about that person? Or the car? What color was it?”
The boy's face, splotched white and red, screwed up. “What car?” he asked.
“You remember going outside right before you got shot?”
He shook his head, eyes wide-open now, looking perplexed.
“You don't remember going outside?”
“No.”
The word came out simple and clear. Dang, no memory of the incident. Well, these things sometimes came back with time.
“I never went outside. There was no car.”
Paul looked at him for a moment, hands in his pockets, pondering the many lies he had told his mother and other inquisitive adults while he was growing up. Then he said, “You know you're in the hospital, Roman? You know how badly hurt you are?” He didn't add, They took four bullets out of you yesterday and you could die any minute.
From Roman's face, his father's clear brown eyes told Paul Roman knew he could die.
“Who shot you?”
“I never saw him before.”
“Okay. Then what happened in the store that day?”
But Roman had closed his eyes again and sunk back into his pain. He stiffened his body in the bed as if preparing for some private ordeal.
Paul pushed a button to call the nurse, who took the time to frown at him on the way to her patient.
Well, thought Paul, a mystery. He trotted off to bribe a talkative cop.
He invited Armano Hernandez out for a beer after his shift.
They met at five that evening at the Pine Inn, a few blocks from Paul's office. A decade younger than Paul, around thirty, Hernandez had worked under Paul when he had managed a special homicide task force a few years before. Small and agile, with fine features, he was a handsome and funny guy who loved being a cop; when Paul left his job in minor disgrace, Hernandez took his place. Hernandez seemed to feel he owed Paul something, and although Paul couldn't agree, he found Armano's loyalty both touching and useful.
Hernandez needed two beers and several long minutes to vent his misgivings about sharing cop business with Paul, the latest fracas between him and Chief Carsey and a brief update on the ongoing soap opera starring his younger sister Lena before settling into a conversation.
“There's two things you got to remember, Paulo,” he started out. He never intended to patronize Paul, but to him and to all of his friends on the police force, Paul fell into that category of pitiable creatures, cops without a badge. Once an ex-cop, always a disreputable failure. “Number one, the parents know nothing. Correction: the dad knows more than the mom and he doesn't know shit. Number two, when you're talking to a nineteen-year-old boy who's got nothing going for him, assume a drug connection.”
That said, he apparently felt he had imparted something valuable, for he tossed a handful of nuts down his throat, crunched forcefully, and smacked his lips.
Paul liked Armano. He only hated the way he ate. “What's the blood evidence, Armano?” he asked eventually, giving him the chance to polish off a second handful.
“Forensics took some off the sidewalk, all his. No evidence of a fight. Nothing under his fingernails. Nothing like that. Just four messy shots.”
“They find the casings?”
“Yeah, two lying on the ground near him. From the same weapon, a thirty-eight. One funny thing. One of the casings had a partial print on it. Turned out to be Taylor 's. He said when he got outside and saw all the blood, he picked it up without thinking. With all the TV, you'd think people would know better.”
