Above the Law (31 page)

“With your investigation. I want to help.”

I shook my head. “You’re the one who’s being investigated, remember?”

“You think I did it?” he asked incredulously.

“It doesn’t matter what I think. You’re still under investigation. Everyone who was there that night is under investigation.” I waited a beat.
“My
investigation.”

He nodded, stealing a glance around the enclosure like the walls had ears. They might have; I hoped not.

“Don’t worry,” he said, reading my mind. “I have this place swept weekly. I still have buddies in D.C. who want to see me weather this shit-storm. It’s only a three-hour drive. Although it might as well be a million, as far as the power train goes.” He plucked at his starched white dress shirt, sticking to his body. “What I was going to say was, I know that technically I’m under investigation, by you. But I can help you. You’re going to come across names of people and organizations I’ll know more about than you ever can. You could wind up stumbling over the killer and not knowing it—but I would. If I knew what you were doing.”

I didn’t want to deal with this. Not now. “I’ll think about it,” I told him. “We’ll see.”

He came around the side of the desk, so that we were face-to-face, inches apart.

“This is my life, Garrison,” he implored me. “Don’t cut me out like the pricks in Washington did. I didn’t want Juarez dead. That night ruined my career. My marriage, everything.”

I backed away from him—this was too intense, too personal. That call from his wife that I’d eavesdropped on could have been her telling him she had hired a divorce lawyer. That’s one of the worst calls a man can get; I know, I got one myself once.

“You want this,” he beseeched me again. “But man—this is my life. I
need
it.”

R
EYNALDO JUAREZ ENTERED THE
United States under the wire east of San Diego when he was two years old. He was the baby; he came with his mother, father, five older brothers and sisters. His father carried him wrapped up in a shawl, pressed close to his body, the two tied together with clothesline. The smell of his father’s body, combined with that of the dirt they crawled over for hours too many to count, the stomach-wrenching stench of rotting food left behind by previous groups combined with that of human excrement that clung to them like a second skin, plus the fear sweat from the dozens of Mexican men, women, and children who were in their group, was one of his first and most indelible memories. That and the gleaming red eyes of the thousands of rats who inhabited their dark passage and took bites out of some of them. One of his sisters died from rat-bite poisoning less than forty-eight hours after they had reached the promised land; for the rest of his life, Reynaldo Juarez lived in deathly fear of rats.

At least they hadn’t been robbed, murdered, or raped, the fate of many wetbacks he later met when he was growing up in east L.A., some of whom became lifelong friends and members of his gang. That his own people would prey on others when they were in a hopeless situation was also part of his memory bank. After he was grown, and rich, he helped bring many Mexicans to the United States, especially those from his home region high in the central mountains, and he made sure they were treated decently on their journey.

The first man he killed, when he was in his midteens and already an established dealer and supplier, rich enough at sixteen to buy his parents a nice house in Tustin and himself a Jaguar convertible, suites in Vegas, and expensive hookers, was a coyote who had savagely raped two young girls during a crossing, while their parents and others who were with them had to stand by helplessly and watch. The girls were not even old enough yet to have started their monthly bleeding. One of Juarez’s closest friends, a cousin of the girls, went crazy with anger and vengefulness when he was informed of the atrocity. The cousin and Juarez had crossed the border to Tijuana, tracked the coyote down, abducted him from his house, and brutally tortured him for hours, before slitting his throat with a dull knife and leaving the body to rot within sight of the border, a clear signal to other smugglers who were disrespectful of their less fortunate brothers and sisters that they must behave around Reynaldo Juarez’s family and friends, a large and extended group, or face a similarly grisly demise.

That was an honorable killing, as murders go; others he committed or authorized—of opposing gang leaders, members of rival drug cartels, cops who got in his path—were not. He was a ruthless businessman who did whatever he had to do to sell his product, an outlaw known and feared in his subculture, his community, and by law officers of every stripe. In the end, nobody wept when he died, except for his family and the others in his organization. His family cried because he was blood; the others, because he was money.

From the time the investigation started, Kate had been trying to trace Juarez’s life, from his distant past to his recent death. She had learned that the boy who had entered his adopted country tied to his father’s chest, stinking of human shit and Big Macs, had made it big, a modern version, in the barrios and ghettos, of a success story: he was a multimillionaire, paid taxes on almost none of his earnings, lived like a rajah, and had never been convicted of a major crime. That he had never spent a night in jail as an adult was part of his legend, because his nefarious exploits were no secret to anyone—his slipperiness in avoiding the arm of the law was a huge thorn in law-enforcement agencies’ sides nationwide. Accordingly, what had happened in Muir County was a source of great, if clandestinely acknowledged, satisfaction to the police; Sterling Jerome was a hero to them, fuck the bureaucrats and the horses—make them asses—they rode in on.

All these elements, the fear and adulation in the barrio, along with the hate toward Juarez in the police forces, were making Kate’s task more difficult than it already was, which was plenty difficult by itself. Juarez was like a Latino Howard Hughes. He had houses scattered all over—besides the lodge in Blue River, he owned lavish estates in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, even a villa on the coast of Spain—but hardly anyone ever knew where he was at any particular time, whether he was sleeping in one of his own beds or was on the move, living in hotels under assumed names. His official residence was his L.A. home on St. Cloud Drive in Bel Air, close to the Bel Air Hotel and Bel Air Golf Club. The proximity to those elite establishments seemed to mean nothing to him; to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he had never played golf and had not taken a meal in the hotel restaurant or used any of their facilities.

Which is not to say he didn’t; it’s that there wasn’t anything on record to substantiate that. He kept a low profile, he didn’t hobnob with movie stars or famous jocks, like gangsters of an earlier era. It was rumored that welterweight boxing champ Oscar De La Hoya was a friend, that the two had hung out at Juarez’s home to shoot pool, sweat in the Jacuzzi, and screw beautiful women by the carload, but that was one more rumor that couldn’t be confirmed, and De La Hoya’s people flatly denied it.

There was one gaping hole in his personal history. From the ages of eighteen to twenty-one, it was a complete blank. It was rumored—another rumor, there were hundreds of rumors about Juarez, many more rumors than known facts—that he had lived in Europe or the Middle East. That he had studied Tibetan Buddhism in a remote mountaintop monastery in northern India. That he had tried to go straight and bought a Honda dealership in Houston. That he was married to a WASP socialite from New England and had children with her.

All, some, or none of these stories might have been true. No one had been able to track any of them down—it was as if Juarez had dropped off the face of the earth for that period. What was known was that after living under the radar for several years he had surfaced in his hometown, Los Angeles, and almost immediately thereafter became the leader of a major drug organization, moving millions of dollars of product a month into the streets. And that he’d done this, overcoming all opposition, for the rest of his life, almost two decades.

Kate was looking for connections. People who had known Juarez and could be linked to his most recent drug operations; competitors who wanted him gone; confederates who felt they had been fucked over and wanted to bring him down; people in law enforcement, like Jerome and countless others, who were sick of Juarez getting away with murder, literally, and who might have gotten to someone close to him, either through bribery, threats, or appeals to masculine pride, which runs deep in Latino culture. She was also trying to reach out to family members and close friends who wanted to know who had killed their shining light. So they could take revenge.

It had been difficult getting people to talk. No one in law enforcement would, for the record. They were all glad the bastard had been taken out, but they didn’t know anyone who had tried to do it or tried to recruit someone with access to Juarez. All the cops knew about the DEA investigation and its conclusions and were loath to publicly criticize a sister agency, even if it was one they often feuded with. The best anyone would say, strictly not for attribution, was that Jerome, more than almost anyone else in the entire world, had a raging hard-on for Juarez, that he had consecrated his life to capturing him. Everyone Kate talked to, from LAPD beat cops and sheriff’s deputies up to captains and chiefs, as well as several FBI agents, believed that Jerome would gladly have killed Juarez and thrown his remains to the buzzards if he hadn’t been under orders not to; it was also sworn to, emphatically, that Jerome was honorable, that he would not place himself above the law and above his orders.

Not one gang member—Latino, black, Aryan, Asian—would talk to her. The only person who had spoken for attribution was Curtis Jackson, to Keith Green. That had been brother to brother, and it had been for a purpose, to confuse and fuck with the investigators’ heads; so Luke thought, and she was inclined to go along with that, having known and dealt with a lot of Curtis Jacksons.

Louis, being Latino, talked to members of the family and a few close friends, those who dared talk to him. Wary conversations, almost no meat on the bones. Although Louis was an
hermano,
he was also a cop. They wanted to know who did it, but they had no idea who, so they said. They all swore that his “associates,” as they characterized the other members of his inner circle, would never have betrayed him. He was good to them, like a father, even though he was not an old man, younger than some of them. These associates were all rich because of Reynaldo’s industriousness (no one admitted that his organization was a criminal gang that brutalized people, murdered opponents and innocents alike, and caused massive hardship) and would not speak against their leader.

“They’re scared to talk,” Kate said.

It was the end of what had been a long and basically fruitless day for Kate and Louis. They sat in a rear booth in EI Coyote on Beverly Boulevard in Hollywood, drinking tall margaritas and eating chips with salsa and guacamole. Kate loaded up a blue-corn tortilla chip with guacamole and ingested the whole affair in one big bite.

“Yummy.” She looked around. “This is a great place, Louis.”

“They’ve been here forever,” Louis told her. “My dad used to take me as a kid. Across the river, the great divide.”

When Louis was a boy, growing up in the fifties, east L.A. had been home. Crossing the L.A. River was a big deal then. Now Los Angeles is Hispanic all over, from the desert to the sea.

“You want to eat dinner here?” he asked, reaching for a menu. “Or do you have to drive home tonight?”

He wasn’t hitting on Kate; they’re friends, colleagues, even though, in her early forties, she’s a very attractive woman. He knows that she’s long been divorced from a former cop up in Oakland who was tossed off the force for abusing her, a real prick. She won’t try marriage again, not in the foreseeable future, anyway.

He’s divorced, too. It goes with being a cop, he guesses, so many of his friends who were on the force with him are, but he has a nice girlfriend his age, a paralegal with one of the big downtown firms. He’s too old to stray, not when he has a good thing going. Male cops have been partnered up with female cops for so long now, because of affirmative action and similar minority-supporting programs, that the male/female arrangement is taken for granted. You can do the job or you can’t, sex doesn’t come into play that much. A good thing, Louis thought. In the old days, office romances killed a lot of marriages that weren’t that bad.

“I’m staying over. I booked a room in Santa Monica.”

“You like the beach?” He signaled for a waitress.

“Yep. It’s cooler down there, and I can get up in the morning and run before starting up work.”

The waitress took their orders. Kate ordered a combo plate—after a tough day in the field, she was ravenous. Louis, a big man with a waistline problem, opted for a fish dinner, hold the beans.

“Are we getting anywhere?” Louis asked. He liked this job; the pay was good, ditto the players, but it was frustrating not knowing exactly what you were looking for. This wasn’t like regular detective work, interviewing witnesses, taking depositions, tracking down husbands or wives who had flown the coop, etc. Reynaldo Juarez was a spook, a phantom. Trying to find out who he was connected to in relation to this case, if in fact there was any connection, a dubious prospect, was turning out to be a study in exasperation.

His not to wonder why, not at 125 dollars an hour plus full expenses. Still, he liked to produce results. He knew Kate felt the same.

The waitress put their plates down in front of them. “Everything okay?” she asked pleasantly.

“Smells great,” Kate told her with a smile.

She turned back to Louis. “We’re eliminating all the blind alleys and dead ends,” she said, attacking her food with gusto. Catching the waitress before the woman was out of earshot: “Can I have a beer, please? Bohemia, if you’ve got it.”