Rag and Bone (29 page)

“Okay,” he said. “We trade Spanish for English.” In Spanish, he said, “Would you like me to be a witness for Vicky at her trial?”

“It wouldn’t be her trial, Reverend. She pled guilty—admitted the crime. Now the judge will decide how many years Vicky will have to spend in prison. I know you’ve been talking to Vicky and I would like you to testify to help me convince the judge to show mercy.”

“I understand,” he said. “I have done this for other members of the church. I can tell the judge that Vicky is a good woman, a Christian, and she has a good heart.”

“It would help if you could tell the judge that she is very sorry for her crime.”

He gave me a puzzled look, as if working something out, and after a long moment he said, “I can testify that she did what she did to protect Angel.”

“Are you saying she’s not sorry that she killed Pete?”

Another long pause. Something was going on, and then I understood. “Reverend Ortega, I’m not asking you to testify to anything she told you in confidence. The law protects what she told you about the details of the killing. I only need for you to say something that will help me show the judge the killing was not an evil act.”

He frowned. “Killing is an evil act, Señor Rios. I can only testify that Vicky has no evil in her heart. Everything she has done, she has done out of love for Angelito. She has sacrificed everything for her child.”

We appeared to be going around in a circle, but I didn’t know what it was we were circling.

“I understand that, but what I’m asking you is whether she’s told you she’s sorry. If she did, that’s helpful. If she didn’t, I won’t ask you the question.”

“She never told me that she is sorry,” he said. He seemed uncomfortable with his answer, as if he knew it was a half-lie. “You must understand, Señor Rios, that she wanted to protect Angel.”

“By killing his father?”

He was so long in responding that I thought he hadn’t understood, but then he said, “Peter was not Angel’s father. I tell you this in confidence.”

It took a moment to absorb the information, but then I remembered the young man in the casket—fair-skinned, fair-haired, nothing like my black-haired, brown-skinned nephew. Now I understood why Ortega kept repeating that Vicky had sacrificed everything for Angel.

“Was Pete abusing Angel?”

“I cannot say more, Señor Rios. She spoke to me in confidence.”

I inferred from his anguished expression that he regretted having told me as much as he had and nothing would be gained by pressuring him. Vicky had obviously told him something about the circumstances of the killing involving Angel that she had kept from me. I could assume it was that Pete had abused Angel, either physically or sexually. I made a snap decision: Whatever it was Pete had done to Angel was irrelevant at the moment. In fact, I didn’t want to know. I had sold Kim Pearsall on the plea bargain by representing that Vicky had been Pete’s victim and it was clear that she had been, for whatever reason. To switch my theory of the killing at this point would, at the very least, confuse the issues and might even endanger the deal. As for my personal interest in Angel, I would have to hope that as he grew to know and trust me, he would volunteer whatever had happened between Pete and him. Someday I would discover the truth of what had happened in that room, but at the moment I didn’t need the truth, only a plausible and sympathetic scenario.

“I understand. I’m not going to ask you to testify, Reverend Ortega,” I said.

Relief washed over his face. “That is for the best.”

“Someday, though, I may return and ask you to tell me what you know, to help me raise Angel while his mother is in prison.”

“I can never tell you what I know,” he said. “But when Angel is safe, Vicky will tell you.”

I got up. “Thank you for your time. I’ll respect Vicky’s wishes to bring Angel to services here.”

“You are also welcome.”

“I’m not a Christian, Reverend.”

He started to speak, thought better of it, and let me go.

T
HE PHONE WAS RINGING
when I stepped into my office the next morning after a long breakfast with Angel at which we discussed the tests he would be taking later that week at his new school. He was enthusiastic about going back to school but worried that he would have to repeat the fourth grade. Listening to him, one would have thought that the humiliation of being held back a year was the most traumatizing event he had ever faced. Unless I brought her up, he rarely spoke about his mother and never about the shooting. He still woke up some nights screaming, but resisted my attempts to coax him into describing the bad dreams. I clung to the belief that his inability to talk about these things was because they were still so fresh, but I worried that, like a splinter, the memories were working themselves deeper and deeper into his consciousness, where they would fester and become ever more difficult to extract. Furthermore, after talking to Reverend Ortega, I had a new fear—that the powder keg of unexpressed feeling beneath Angel was not only from the shooting but from whatever abuse he had suffered at Pete Trujillo’s hands preceding it. I didn’t want my nephew’s life distorted by unexpressed rage toward his father or drowned in alcohol, as mine had been, or for him to pick up some other equally self-destructive club with which to beat himself. Yet I was reluctant to force him to talk. I was afraid if my timing was off, I would destroy the still-fragile bond of trust growing between us. All this was passing through my head while Angel cheerfully gobbled cereal and rattled on about the previous day’s baseball scores and wondered if the school’s baseball team needed a shortstop.

Still preoccupied with these thoughts in my office, I picked up the phone as it rang. It was Edith Rosen.

“Henry, I read the material in Vicky’s case you faxed me and I’ve given it a lot of thought.”

I didn’t like the apologetic tone I was hearing in her voice.

“What do you think?”

“I’m still not convinced it was BWS,” she said.

Ordinarily I would have lobbied her, but I thought about Reverend Ortega’s intimation about the shooting, so all I said was, “Tell me why.”

“Battered women don’t ordinarily kill their batterers in the midst of an attack because they know they can’t win that kind of confrontation,” she reminded me. “These reports make it seem that Vicky shot him while he was coming at her.”

“Exactly,” I said. “She shot him. She didn’t try to overpower him physically.”

“Unless she ran out during the fight and bought the gun, she must have had it available before,” Edith said. “Why did she choose that moment? Also, Henry, if he was beating her, it was very risky for her to escalate things by introducing a gun. He still had the physical advantage and he could have used it to get the gun away from her.”

“She shot him in the back,” I said.

Edith was silent for a moment. “Had the attack stopped or had he just turned his back for an instant?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not clear. There’s a chance he could have been reaching for his own gun.”

“That’s not in any of these reports,” she said.

“I know. Does it make a difference to your opinion if you throw that into the mix?”

“Actually, that supports my point. If she knew he had access to his own gun, then why didn’t she wait until the attack was over rather than get into a gunfight? Remember, Henry, the core of BWS is that the abused spouse has been terrorized. Someone in that kind of fear is trying to avoid confrontations, not provoke them. If she was going to kill him, she wouldn’t do it while he was enraged and at his most dangerous. She would have waited until she could catch him off guard.”

She was making a persuasive case and I could hear her on the witness stand, methodically discrediting my theory of the shooting.

“Is there anything else that makes you skeptical this was BWS?”

“Yes,” she said. “Two things. First, she had the presence of mind to hide the gun before the police arrived. The other thing—and it’s related to the first—is that she was reluctant to admit that she had killed him.”

“Why are those things significant?”

“Battered women don’t usually try to hide or deny what they’ve done. They’re filled with remorse and anxious to explain it.”

“She did tell the police she shot him because he beat her,” I said.

“Well, no,” Edith said. “I read her statement. She agrees with them that that’s what she did when they put it to her in question form. That’s different than making an affirmative statement.”

“Not for purposes of the law.”

“It is for purposes of my opinion.”

“What exactly is your opinion of what happened that night, Edith? She had been beaten. There’s physical evidence of that. I saw her.”

There was a long, thoughtful silence on the other end of the line. “I’m not saying they didn’t fight or that he didn’t strike her,” she said. “What I’m saying is that it wasn’t something he did routinely. BWS requires a pattern of abuse, not a one-time quarrel, however violent. They were fighting about something specific and very serious.”

About Angel. “You offered to work with Angel. I’d like you to start right away.”

This time the silence was puzzled. Then she understood. “This is still about the shooting. You know something you haven’t told me,” she said in a seriously annoyed tone. “Henry, you know better than to try to withhold information from me to get favorable testimony.”

“I didn’t know this until yesterday”

“Know what?”

“Angel’s not Pete’s son. There’s some suggestion that Pete may have abused him somehow.”

“Sexually?”

“I don’t know, Edith. That’s what I’d like you to find out for me.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I sold the D.A. this deal with Vicky by representing that she was a battered woman. It’s a little late for me to change theories. I mean, if you’re right and she shot him in the heat of an argument, then it really is second-degree murder. The DA. took her plea on voluntary manslaughter.”

She said, “I’m not a lawyer, Henry, but as I understand it, the D.A.’s stuck with that plea.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Unless the plea was obtained by fraud. If I know the facts to be different from what I’ve represented them to be, well, you see where I’m going.”

“I see why you can’t ask Angel, if that’s what you mean.”

“Obviously I’m not going to ask you to testify. No offense.”

“None taken,” she said. “But Vicky will have to testify, won’t she? What are you going to do about her?”

I was wondering the same thing.

And then Elena called. “I talked to the director of the women’s shelter that Vicky said she went to after Pete was released,” she said. “She told me something very curious.”

“What?”

“Vicky said they asked her to leave because she was proselytizing. This woman said they asked her to leave because their psychologist talked to her and concluded that she wasn’t a victim of domestic violence.”

“How did they decide that?”

“She told me that was privileged,” Elena replied. “She said if we wanted to know, we’d have to ask Vicky.”

“I will,” I said.

Vicky was immediately on her guard when I turned up unannounced at the jail that afternoon. “Hello, Uncle Henry,” she said. “Did Angel come with you?”

“Why did you kill Pete?”

“What?” she asked, but I saw in her eyes she was scrambling for a strategy.

“The director of the women’s shelter in San Francisco said you were asked to leave because they didn’t believe you were a battered woman. I had a psychologist look at the police reports in this case and she said the same thing. I read Pete’s rap sheet. He had never been arrested for domestic violence. I just assumed that was because you had never called the cops on him. Even Angel told me that Pete never struck you. I thought he was just covering for his father, but it’s true, isn’t it? Until that night, Pete had never struck you before.”

It seemed at first that she would deny it, but then she gave a small sigh, as if of relief, slowly shook her head. “No.”

“So why did you shoot him?”

“Why does it matter?” she replied, meeting my eyes. “I said I was guilty Everyone’s happy.”

Her calm audacity rendered me mute.

“I got you this deal by convincing the D.A. that you’re a battered woman. That’s what you told your mother. That’s what I believed. You lied to both of us. Why?”

“I wasn’t lying when I said I had to get away from Pete. I needed help to do that.”

“If he wasn’t beating you, why were you running away from him?”

She looked away from me. “I can’t tell you.”

“Does it involve Angel?”

“No.”

“You’re still lying to me. I know that Pete wasn’t Angel’s father. Was he doing something to him?”

She lifted her head and stared at me. “What do you mean ‘doing something do him’?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” she said sharply. “Pete never touched Angel.”

“But he wasn’t Angel’s father.”

“No,” she conceded. “He wasn’t.”

“Listen to me, Vicky, I know you consider yourself a Christian, and maybe in your book it’s all right to lie to your mother and me because we’re not. But are you ready to go to court and swear before God to tell the truth and then tell more lies? Do you think I could let you do that?”

“Do I have to testify?”

“If you don’t, the D.A. will know something’s up. If I can’t give him an explanation, there’s nothing to stop him from asking the judge to give you the upper term for voluntary manslaughter. That’s eleven years.”

“You don’t understand,” she exploded. “I have to protect Angel. I’ll go to jail. I don’t care how long.”

“Protect him from what?”

Sobbing, she buried her face in her arms. “Leave me alone. I want to go back to my cell.”

I now recognized that her tears were the equivalent of a squid under attack spraying ink to escape its attacker.

I waited until the sobs subsided. “I know you don’t like me and I’m sorry about that, but even you have to admit that I love Angel. You don’t have to trust me about anything else, but trust me that I won’t let anyone hurt him.”