Disturbed Ground (46 page)

Reba now read for the jury:

LEAVING FOR PALM SPRINGS 11:30 A.M. TODAY. TRIED TO CALL BUT LINE WAS BUSY. DECIDED TO GO ON. YOU'D TRY TO STOP ME. WILL RETURN TO DOROTHEAS FOR  THANKSGIVING BUT WILL BE IN TOUCH WITH YOU BEFORE. PLEASE DONT WORRY.

EVERSON

As soon as she'd finished reading, O'Mara asked incredulously, "Did you ever in your life try to stop Everson from doing anything?"

 Clymo’s objection was overruled, so Reba told the court that, no, she'd never tried to stop her brother from doing anything.

A final, audacious correspondence had come to the family in April 1986—four months after Everson Gillmouth's body had been found alongside the river. The outside of the card said "Thinking of You," and Reba also read this into the record
:

Hello,

We came to Sacramento to pick up the rest of Eversons things from storage, they told us you had been worried & had the police over. We are O.K. he had a small stroke in January, he can't drive any more, he sold his trailer for truck—But we have a new car—I got it in Dec.

We love the desert and the warm and dry weather.

We are going to Canada in August so will stop and see you. Everson wrote to you in Feb.

When we get the phone in in June we will call.

Hes lost about 15 lbs. and feels much better.

We are both health nuts so we are doing O.K.

And I also work so our Income is pretty good.

We go to church each week.

It was 90 all week, he did not care for Tulsa at all—But guess well buy a small home with the money from my home.

Take care.

Irene &
Everson

Irene? The handwriting was familiar, the postmark was Sacramento, even the pacing sounded the same. From the word choice to the short paragraphs, these letters were obviously—even blatantly—written by Dorothea Puente. (And a handwriting expert would confirm that Dorothea and "Irene" were one and the same.)

After locking horns with Clymo at the preliminary hearing, Reba Nicklous had steeled herself for a rough cross-examination. But to her surprise, the defense passed. "No questions," Clymo said softly, and she was excused.

When O'Mara came out into the hall to bid her good-bye a few minutes later, Reba asked why they'd let her off so easy.

"They wanted to get you out of the courtroom," O'Mara explained, chuckling. "You're like a hand grenade: With every question you blow up and hurt them." Reba smiled at this.

"You're one of the few
real
people I've had in this trial," he continued. "There have been scientists, toxicologists, criminalists, but not many flesh-and-blood relatives."

"Well, I hope I helped you some."

"You helped me," he assured her, shaking her hand. "You helped me a great deal."

He only wished he had more witnesses like her.

The question of whether or not Dorothea Puente would testify seemed
moot as witness after witness revealed facets of her character. She was noth
ing if not skilled. She played the system like a musical instrument, coaxing
from it the familiar music of lucre. Social Security and SSI checks were only
what attracted the most attention—the high notes, so to speak. There were
also checks from pensions, General Assistance, tax refunds
,
Renter's Assis
tance, and more. Federal, state, and county agencies played to her tune.

Senior Document Examiner David Moore attested to Dorothea Puente's forged signatures on seemingly endless checks and forms.
Her applications for the Heat and Energy Assistance Program (HEAP) displayed true virtuosity. Under this program, as the name suggests, low-income households can apply for a bit of help in paying the heating bills. One household, one check. So legitimately, 1426 F Street could receive only a single, puny payment. Instead, the landlady had filled out applications for assorted boarders, assigning each one an apartment number: for example, Bert in Apt. 12, Ben Fink in Apt. 8, Brenda Trujillo in Apt. 4, Dorothea Puente in Apt. 1, and Dorothea Montalvo in Apt. 35.

Clearly, the woman had devoted terrific energy to orchestrating this complex and clever larceny.

And one needn't die to have funds pilfered. Shore-term boarders were fair game, as long as the landlady could come down off her porch and snag the check out of the mailbox. Even her loyal friend John McCauley had been ripped off (but apparently he'd been too drunk to notice).

The postman also brought mail-order catalogues from which she ordered shoes, clothes, linens, even Giorgio perfume. In payment, she merely signed over this or that government check.

That was just some of the money. With a handful of forged checks, Dorothea would regularly pop over to Joe's Corner Bar, which she used as Joe's Corner Bank. The proprietor, Mr. Vogeli, sheepishly testified that when she brought over checks at the first of the month, he would make a special trip to the bank to cash them for her, returning with three or four thousand dollars.

In early June, O'Mara finally called Puente's long-awaited landlord and "nephew" to the stand. He came as a big surprise in a small package. Surely none of the jurors had anticipated that the owner of the F Street house, Ricardo Ordorica, would enter the court so sad-faced and short, standing just shy of four and a half feet.

The man who had funneled so many of the dead tenants' checks through his accounts had been given immunity for his testimony. He spoke with heavily accented English, mostly forgoing the aid of an interpreter, and on two consecutive days, labored through his lilting explanations of how his signatures had come to be on the backs of so many U.S. Treasury checks.

"Mrs. Puente would give them to me to pay the rent," he explained.

"Did she give you a receipt?" O'Mara asked.

"No." Usually, she would bring him two signed Social Security checks to make up the seven-hundred-dollar rent. "She gave me two checks, from Dorothy Miller, or sometimes a check with a different name."

"Treasury checks?"

"These kinds of checks," he said, indicating the stack of Treasury checks before him.

Struggling to catch O'Mara's racing questions, he further explained, "Sometimes Mrs. Puente told me, ‘Ricardo, can you cash this check?' And I say, 'Okay,' and I go to the bank and I give her the money."

It was an arrangement that Ordorica scarcely questioned. He did it, he said, "to make a favor to her."

Some tenants he had met, some he had not. He explained he scarcely spoke with them except at chance encounters while visiting Mrs. Puente. "I just, hi, hi," he said, waving his child-sized hand in greeting.

O'Mara took special care with the largest check, a $9,930 tax refund that had been sent to Julius Kelley, the now-deceased tenant who had testified via videotape that he'd known nothing of it. O'Mara asked Ordorica if he'd ever received this check, and Ordorica unhesitatingly said he had.

Supplementing his weak vocabulary with body language, he explained with choppy sentences and fluttering hands. "Okay, she went to the place I work and she told me, 'Ricardo, can you cash this check?' And she told me, ‘Take three months' rent, deposit some, and give me the rest of the money. Because I'm afraid that the owner of the check, he drink a lot, and I am afraid that if he went to Joe's Comer, people can stealing his money.'"

O'Mara clarified, "Is this something that Mrs. Puente told you, or is this something that you knew about the person?"

"Mrs. Puente told me."

O'Mara urged him to continue.

"I told her, ‘This is a lot of money, I don't know if the bank cash the check or not.' I went to the bank, and they know me very well. When they saw the check,
'
You're not Julius, Ricardo,' the teller told
me. And then she told me this check needed to be endorsed. Next day, she [Puente] gave me again the check, and I took some money and I gave to Mrs. Puente the rest of the money."

If his unquestioning faith in Dorothea Puente seemed suspiciously convenient, Ordorica deflated skepticism with a spontaneous testament to her kindness: "I make all the time favors to her because she was like part of my family."

O'Mara asked, "You would sometimes refer to her as your aunt, or
tia?

"Yes."

"Was she, in fact, your aunt?"

"No."

"You were just close?"

"Very close. That's why I cash this check for her when the owner of Joe's Corner don't have money or wasn't there, she went to me, and I go to the bank ... I make a favor to her, because she was like my aunt, like my mother, like
tia,
you know, very close. We are like family because she was living upstairs, and we was living downstairs [prior to 1987]. And we was like one family."

When Dorothea was in state prison from 1982 to 1985, Ordorica had power of attorney to deposit her SSI checks into an account for her. He explained this so unabashedly that it seemed he was unaware that it was illegal for her to continue receiving this money while incarcerated. He seemed most eager to explain that he did not use this money for himself. "I can cash her checks. I send to her a lot of things—boxes of food, perfume, colognes, a lot of things—every month, I send to her with her money."

Clearly, little Ricardo Ordorica would have preferred to have been a defense witness.

Leaving the stand at the lunch break, he did the unthinkable: While the jurors were exiting the jury box and the bailiff’s back was turned, he crossed over to where his old friend was seated, whispered in her ear, and kissed her on the cheek.

During Peter Vlautin's cross-examination, Ordorica gave his most
exonerating testimony. Ordorica had testified that the last time he'd seen Everson Gillmouth, he'd had "some pain in his face."

Vlautin asked for clarification, and with the help of the interpreter, Ordorica explained, 'When I saw him, in his face, it seemed like some
sort of pain in his chest. And he was limping somewhat when he walked.
And I saw him take a pill from his pocket and put it in his mouth."

"Could you show us?" Vlautin urged.

The little man stood, grimacing, his small hands clutching at his chest.

Had seventy-seven-year-old Everson Gillmouth died of natural causes? Or was Dorothea's loyal little pal lying for her?

As Vlautin reviewed each element with Ordorica, O'Mara was watching intently, the end of a pen clamped between his teeth.

Leaning forward in her seat, Dorothea Puente was also riveted.

Now Vlautin gave the witness full opportunity to vouch for his friend. "You mentioned this morning that you consider Mrs. Puente part of your family?"

"That's corrrrect," Ordorica replied, trilling his rs.

"And why was it that you considered her part of your family?"

Ordorica seemed relieved to be able to convey some important information to the jury. "Okay," he said eagerly, "when we met Mrs. Puente, we start talking, and we saw picture with big personality, for example, the Bishop Quinn."

"The Catholic bishop of Sacramento?"

"That's corrrrect. And with Governor Deukmejian. And we saw, he sent to her flowers. And we saw letters from the Vatican, the secretary of the Vatican. And we saw letters from Shaw of Iran Two," he said, holding up two fingers and urgently repeating, "Shaw of Iran Two. And we saw pictures of the babies of King Jordan, the king sent to her. And, and, we saw her with the sheriff, the chief of police, and she was political relationship with."