In My Dark Dreams (44 page)

The small town he was raised in was the kind of place kids leave when they grow up, and he did. Los Angeles beckoned, through the glamour of television shows. He had a few different jobs when he first arrived—delivering telephone books, hiring out as a day laborer. He fell in with other young men like him, men who had no future plans, and lived in the moment. Which included joining a gang.

There is a stir in the courtroom when Salazar says he was a gangbanger. That is new and interesting information. The prosecution team is certainly jolted by hearing that. One of them, a female paralegal, listens to Loomis as he whispers urgently into her ear, then bolts out of the courtroom. If Salazar has a record, they will know in minutes.

But I know what they don’t—he doesn’t have one. This is the prelude to how Salazar came to Jesus, and turned his life around.

“How old were you when you joined this gang?” I ask.

“Eighteen. Right after I landed in L.A.”

“How long were you a member?”

“Six months. I never was actually a member, it was like I was in training. To prove myself.”

“Did you prove yourself?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I quit.”

“They let you?”

A nod and a shrug. “They didn’t care that much. I didn’t fit their image. I moved to another part of town, to make sure they wouldn’t hassle me, but they never did.”

“While you were in this gang, did you ever commit a crime?”

“No.”

“Beat anybody up? Get into fights?”

“A few,” he admits. “Nothing serious. Just fists and feet, no weapons.”

“So you were never arrested.”

“No.”

At the prosecution table, Loomis puts on a sour face. He says something to another assistant, who scurries out. To catch the first one and tell her not to waste her time, I’m sure. It’s fun to watch your opponent chase his tail.

“What did you do then?” I continue.

“I went to work for Mr. Bayani.” He looks at the jury as he explains. “He was Filipino. Bayani means hero in Tagalog, which was his ancestors’ language.” He smiles. “It was a good name. He was a hero to me.”

“Mr. Bayani was the gardener who taught you the business?”

“Yes. And more.”

“He taught you other things besides gardening?”

“Yes.” He sits up straight. “He taught me to be a responsible man.”

And with that simple, declarative sentence, the atmosphere in the courtroom changes. I can feel it. Everyone can. I steal a backward glance at Joe. He gives me a tight smile and an invisible nod.

Harry Loomis has felt that tectonic shift as much as anyone. He gets to his feet. “I fail to see where this is going, Your Honor,” he says. “Mr. Salazar is not on trial here because of his life story, no matter how compelling or heartwarming it might be. He is on trial for murder, and the questions to him should relate to that. Otherwise, we are going to be here until Los Angeles falls into the sea.”

Judge Suzuki gives me an inquiring eye, inviting me to explain where I’m going with this line of questioning.

“I’m not going to belabor this, Your Honor,” I promise. “But when you accuse someone of murder, especially when it isn’t committed in a split second of mindless passion, you are attacking his moral code, or lack of one. Mr. Salazar has a strong moral code, it governs his entire life. I think it is relevant that the jury understand that.”

Suzuki’s nod of acquiescence is lukewarm. “I’ll allow you to pursue this a bit longer,” he tells me. “But then we have to move on to what we are here for.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. We’ll be there real fast. But first …” I don’t have to spell it out. “Ten-minute recess,” the judge announces.

I leave and make a beeline for the ladies’ room. With the frequency of my piddling, pretty soon there is going to be a groove worn in the floor from the courtroom to the ladies’ room.

Back in action, refreshed and relieved, I take up my questioning again. “You are a minister?” I ask Salazar.

“Yes. A small church, in East Los Angeles. We have about a hundred members.”

“Not a Catholic church, I assume. You are not a priest.”

He smiles at that. “Oh, no. I am not officially ordained by a denomination.” He closes his eyes for a moment, then reopens them. “If I was ordained by anyone, it was by God. And Mr. Bayani.”

Salazar’s conversion and ascension to his rump pulpit came about because of his mentor, the Filipino gardener. December had come up on the calendar. This would be the first Christmas Salazar would spend in his new city. He had no plans for celebration. Grab a six-pack and some take-out food and watch football on the television in the small room he rented, over by MacArthur Park, in a house he shared with ten other young men, all of Mexican and Central American heritage. He would be alone, because the others were going back to Mexico for the holidays or spending the day with family. He was not religious, and he had no family or close friends to celebrate with. Beer, Taco Bell, the Dallas Cowboys on the tube. Christmas in Los Angeles.

On Christmas Eve, Salazar and Mr. Bayani finished their last gardening job shortly before dark. It was almost five o’clock. They loaded Mr. Bayani’s truck and climbed in. Mr. Bayani lived in Filipinotown, which is northwest of downtown L.A., near Echo Park. Not too far from Salazar’s flophouse. He would detour by, drop Salazar off as he always did, then go home for Christmas Eve dinner with his wife.

But this night, Mr. Bayani didn’t drop off nineteen-year-old Roberto Salazar at the dump he called home. He waited while Roberto went upstairs, showered, and changed into clean clothes. Then the two of them drove to Bayani’s house. They feasted with Bayani’s neighbors, all Filipinos. Roast pig, goat stew, turkey, dozens of side dishes, wine and beer (San Miguel, of course), pies and cakes. The meal had been three days in preparation. When they were finished, Salazar was as stuffed as the turkey had been, for the first time since his arrival in L.A.

He was ready to go home and sleep it off, but Bayani had more in store for him that night. They packed the extra food (there was plenty) into Tupperware containers and drove to the Union Rescue Mission on San Pedro Street, in the center of L.A.’s homeless population. Their leftovers would be an important part of tomorrow’s Christmas dinner for the hundreds of homeless people who would flock to the mission for a free meal. It was late, so there were people everywhere, including many families. Salazar looked at the little kids gathered on pallets on the floor who had nothing—no home, hardly any clothing, no food. He had never had much, but this hit him in the gut.

The people in charge knew Mr. Bayani. They thanked him and Salazar profusely, praising them for their generosity. Mr. Bayani shrugged the praise off with his typical modesty. If you have, you give. That was his credo.

Roberto Salazar didn’t know it, but that would become his credo, too. The next morning he was all spic and span, waiting outside his place when Mr. and Mrs. Bayani drove up to take him to church. He had not been in a church in years and had forgotten what little about the mass he had learned. But that didn’t matter, because they were not going to a Catholic church.

The Bayani’s church was Pentecostal. It was in a converted furniture store off I-5, near Dodger Stadium. The congregation was a mixed bag. All races, sexes, ages. They had one thing in common—they felt God, alive inside of them.

“I accepted Jesus as my savior that morning,” Salazar says, “and from that moment on, everything in my life changed.”

Loomis is on his feet again. “Your Honor, I again have to object. With all due respect to the accused’s religious beliefs, this is irrelevant and—”

“Your Honor, this man is on trial for his life!” I interrupt, cutting Loomis off. “He should be allowed to tell us who he is and how he got that way. That is not irrelevant or immaterial, it is critical.” I turn and face Loomis. “What are you afraid of?”

Loomis drops his jaw and gapes at me. Lawyers directly attacking each other is considered verboten. When it’s done, it’s usually by innuendo, death by a thousand cuts. Frontal assaults can turn a trial into a mudslinging brawl. Sometimes they do, anyway, but you try not to get down into that gutter.

Loomis is boiling; he’s high atop our legal community’s totem pole, and he’s not used to being confronted head-on. But he masks his anger well; the jury doesn’t pick up on it. I do, though, and I know Joe and Judge Suzuki do, too. Suzuki stares down at me from his perch on high.

“Ms. Thompson—”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor,” I say hastily. “I apologize to my worthy opponent. But my client is on trial for murder. I take that seriously. Which we all do, of course. But please give me a little more time to establish Mr. Salazar’s history before we deal with the case in hand.”

“Ten minutes,” Suzuki gives me, grudgingly. “Then we’re moving forward.”

I rush Salazar through the rest of his personal narrative. He met his wife, got married, had children. He took courses in landscaping and horticulture in community college. When Mr. Bayani decided to retire, he bought the business, which meant he took over Mr. Bayani’s customers. He quickly doubled them. He puts in long hours, but he still takes time to be with his family, work with other kids, and preach. Every Sunday morning, his little church is filled with worshippers.

The jury has been listening sympathetically. Now it’s time for me to wrap this up and move on. “What has happened to your church since your arrest and confinement?” I ask.

“It’s falling apart.” He sounds more sad about it than anything else. “They are going to other churches. Even when this is over, I don’t know if they will come back.”

“Well, I hope they do,” I commiserate. “For them, and for you.”

We break for lunch. I approach Loomis, who gives me the fisheye.

“I apologize. I lost my head.”

I’ll give him this—he doesn’t hold a grudge. “Apology accepted.” He looks past me to Salazar, who is being led out by his deputy escort. “Hell of a story,” he comments. He starts to turn away, then turns back to me. “But it wouldn’t be the first time a man who claims to have found God broke His most important rule.”

T
HE NIGHT OF THE
last Full Moon Murder, and Salazar’s arrest, early the next morning. We go over everything in painstaking detail. I want to cover every base I can think of, and I also don’t want Loomis to be able to start his cross-examination today, so I take my sweet time. Not that I wouldn’t anyway—how Salazar comes across is pretty much our entire case. When we get to that fateful morning, he tells it the way he told Joe and me months before, when we were interrogating him again and again. No deviations, no hesitations.

He was sitting in his truck, minding his own business, when the police accosted him. Having been arrested before, for a crime for which he was ultimately found not guilty, he was wary and hostile—a natural reaction.

I see a few jurors flinch. They may have been stopped and questioned for something they didn’t do. It’s a natural reaction to be leery of the police when they do that.

“Did they tell you why they were searching your truck?” I ask him. We’re on our third hour of direct now, I’ve already taken two bathroom breaks. The clock reads a few minutes after four. By the time I finish we will be done for the day, as I’ve planned it.

“No,” he answers.

“They didn’t give you a reason?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Why did you let them?”

He stares at me as if I have suddenly grown another head. “They are the police. You do not say no to the police.”

Some people do. People who are savvy about the police, people who know that if you stonewall them, you can blow them off. Those people are the ones who have had dealings with cops—criminals. Salazar only had the one encounter, and it had turned out disastrously. But there were no television sets in his truck this time, so he had nothing to worry about, as far as he was concerned.

“What did you think was going to happen?” I ask.

“Nothing,” he answers. “I did not know what they were looking for, but I was not hiding anything,” he says with conviction.

“The woman’s underpants that Lieutenant Cordova found in your truck. Did he show them to you?”

“No. He did not.”

“He just arrested you. Did he say why?”

Salazar corrects me. “He did not arrest me, at first. He told me he wanted to take me in for questioning.”

“Questioning,” I repeat. I know how everything went down, of course, but I want the initial evasiveness of the police to register with the jury. “Did he say what for?”

“No.”

“But you went with him anyway. Voluntarily. Of your free choice,” I clarify.

He stares at me balefully. “You do not have free choice when the police want to talk to you.”

“So at the time, you had no idea why you were being brought in to be questioned?”

“None.”

“And when did they formally arrest you?”

“Later that day.”

I leave the podium and walk over to him, so that we are a few feet apart. “Mr. Salazar. Did you know any of the women you are accused of killing?”

“No.”

“Had you ever seen them? Even if just on the street?”

“No.”

“Never spoke to them? A friendly hello in passing?”

“No.”

“So you never, under any circumstances, had any contact with any of these women whatsoever? Not the latest victim or any of the previous ones?”

“No.”

I walk back to the podium, turn, and face him. “Mr. Salazar. Did you kill Cheryl Lynn Steinmetz?”

His face darkens. He shudders and closes his eyes for a moment. When he reopens them, he looks at me without blinking, without twitching a muscle.

“No, I did not. I have never killed anyone.”

The courtroom is quiet. I take a moment to let everything we have done over the past four hours sink in. Then I turn to the judge. “No more questions, Your Honor.”

It’s windy tonight. Santa Anas are blowing in from the desert. I sit on my tiny front porch on my weathered green Adirondack, eating butter pecan ice cream out of the container. My baby kicks, stops, kicks again. My back is sore, I squirm around, trying to find a comfortable position. There isn’t one.