South by Southeast (28 page)

“So . . . how did you know?”

Sometimes it's a short journey from buffoon to sage. By the next night, my police interrogators had been replaced by special agents from the FBI field office in Miami and one profiler who had flown in from the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia. FBI agents had dealt with me before but never with such civility and respect. Special agents Manuel Perez, Gloria Dozier, and Jessica Jackson had all but laid out a red carpet for me.

Was I hungry? Did I need anything to drink? Was the temperature in the room all right?

The FBI had diverted many of its resources to antiterrorism since 9/11, but apparently a gift-wrapped serial killer still made the Bureau happy. The FBI could take its share of credit for unearthing Escobar's past without any fallout for the spectacle of his death. Once they decided I hadn't broken the law except for a minor concealed-weapons matter, I was Uncle Sam's best friend.

The three of them gathered around me, trying to learn from my wisdom.

“Why were you so sure?” Agent Perez said.

“I didn't know,” I said. “I was investigating a lead. Following a hunch.”

My mouth and lungs still burned from the tear gas, so I could barely speak above a whisper. By then, the blessed numbness had worn off. I was no longer in my jail cell, but I felt caged in the interrogation room. My grief over Dad's death had manifested as a migraine that easily overpowered the pain relievers I was popping like mints. The fluorescent bulbs were high-powered spotlights, every voice a shout. My muscles ached from chasing Escobar, and misery transformed the aches to pains. Back to reality.

Dad was gone. Had died in pain. Alone. Because of me.

“Well, you caught one of the really bad ones, Mr. Hardwick,” Agent Perez said.

Information had been in short supply, but the FBI agents explained that they had found Escobar's trophy room on his boat, with more evidence on his laptop in the bed-and-breakfast suite he shared with Louise Cannon. Like many serial killers, he felt compelled to keep evidence so he could relive his crimes, and he had stored and printed digital photographs of Maria and four other prostitutes he had drowned in his short time in Miami.

But the killings hadn't started in Miami.

Escobar had at least twenty photographs of women, dating back a dozen years. All of them were Latina or black, most were unidentified—“No one might ever come forward to claim some of these girls,” Agent Jackson said sadly—but the oldest photograph was of his own sister, Rosa Escobar, for whom there were few records. When she'd vanished from her Brooklyn apartment in 1998, no one had reported her missing.

Escobar had been bold enough to name his boat after his first victim.

On another hunch, I asked to see the photograph of Rosa Escobar. After a brief huddle, they agreed. Rosa looked exactly like Chela. Gustavo Escobar's skin was pale, but his sister was brown, with dark corkscrew curls like Chela's. She had been pretty in life, but in death, she was a bad dream. She was nude in the photo, splayed in a bathtub after an apparent struggle, her eyes wide with shocked betrayal. I could see dark handprints around her neck where her brother had strangled her and held her under the water.

And I had taken Chela straight to that man. Introduced her to him.

My empty stomach locked tight. I waved to let the agents know they could take the photo away. I couldn't have found my voice if I'd tried.

The agents, by contrast, looked energized. All three of them
were perfectly coiffed and stylishly dressed, camera-ready, and it was probably no coincidence that they were all attractive and fit. They were a media team ready to try to tame the circus.

The agents explained that Escobar had been ruled missing and presumed dead after the boating accident. The Coast Guard was searching for his remains, but so far, only charred scraps of his clothing had been found. Rough seas might have swept him away, and the sharks might have done the rest, they surmised. No one would have to endure a trial.

I'd disclosed Chela's part in steering me toward the case, but they promised to protect her privacy as much as they could—which, as it turned out, was hardly at all. They advised me to say as little as possible to the media until they completed a more thorough investigation of Escobar's past.

“I need to be with my family,” I finally said when I'd had enough.

They nodded with sympathy. Special Agent Jessica Jackson squeezed my shoulder as if she could leech away my pain.

“I know it doesn't feel like it now,” she said, “but you're a bona fide hero, Mr. Hardwick. Your father died for a greater cause. Uncovering Gustavo Escobar will bring closure to a lot of parents, brothers, sisters, and children out there.”

But who would bring closure to me?

All my life, I think I've lived as if acting in a Broadway play. A film. As a character in a book. I'd made a critical mistake. I'd thought this story was a mystery, and I was the hero.

I was wrong.

It was a tragedy, and I was the fool.

I'D ALWAYS BELIEVED
that the LAPD took more from Dad than it gave him, but the department tried to make up for that on his burial day.

Four LAPD helicopters somberly followed our family's limousine from my doorstep at 5450 Gleason to First A.M.E. Church in downtown L.A. News helicopters circled behind them. The noise overhead beat across the limo's rooftop.

I saw Chela's tiny gloved hand on the seat beside me, so I held it. We avoided each other's eyes. I had never seen her wear lace, but Marcela had spent an hour getting her dressed, as if they were preparing for the church wedding my father never had. We'd had some conversation at breakfast over the episode of
Robot Chicken
Chela was playing from the DVR, but the ride in the limousine was silent, all distraction gone.

We couldn't be anywhere else. Do anything else. The day had come.

When we arrived at the church, two dozen police officers in formal dress waited in two regimented lines to create a passage to the church door past the crowd. Overhead, the helicopters split off in four directions in a “missing man” fly-over formation that had been carefully explained by the LAPD liaison from the chief's office.

I was ushered to my place beside the rosewood casket draped with an American flag.
This isn't my father
, I told the casket, just so I could hold on.
It's the body my father wore
. I was the only pallbearer who wasn't wearing LAPD colors. The casket was closed, the result of an argument I had won with Marcela; every detail had been a negotiation. Dad wouldn't have wanted his body on display. Instead, youthful photographs at the pulpit better captured his memory. In his US Army photo, he looked just like me.

Booming percussion and the trumpet solo from Aaron Copland's “Fanfare for the Common Man” pealed inside the church during the processional. Dad had told Marcela that he wanted the piece played when this day came, along with his beloved gospel music. The trumpet sounded like upward flight toward heaven, a proclamation. The music's majestic beauty made my teeth lock tight as I shouldered the casket's weight.

Dad had done two tours in Vietnam, but the LAPD claimed rights to him that day. Between his long police career and his affiliation with the church, Dad might as well have been the mayor. Nothing was spared in his honor. After the trumpet fanfare finished, the full men's gospel choir—clad all in black except for their kente-cloth vests—swayed with Dad's favorite hymn, “Precious Lord Take My Hand.” Muted sobs broke free behind us. The swollen pews and beautiful voices were a testament to how much we had lost.

When I took my seat, Chela pushed close to me. “I can't do this,” she whispered.

The same thing I was thinking.

“You're already doing it,” I said to both of us.

Retired or not, Dad was a cop who had died in the course of his duty. It didn't matter that most of the police officers in that room hadn't called Dad to talk to him since his stroke, even men he'd known well. Or that Dad had waged vicious political battles with the sitting chief. The public nature of Dad's death
had thrust the LAPD into a positive national light, and at his funeral, Dad was treated like one of the department's most valuable treasures.

If only Dad could see this,
I thought. I wanted to believe he was watching us all from heaven, but I couldn't feel that certainty even when it would have mattered most. Marcela wore her faith like a warm cloak; when she crossed herself in careful gestures across her chest, it looked as if she were bundling against the cold.

Marcela was Catholic, and Dad was A.M.E., so the only clergy missing was a rabbi. From the list of speakers—the mayor, several council members, a federal judge, and the police chief—we might have been at a political rally instead of a funeral. Dad had saved lives, steered careers, brightened the world. Dad was Jimmy Stewart in
It's a Wonderful Life,
and L.A. was Bedford Falls.

Family addresses came last, after the choir got us on our feet with “Soon and Very Soon We Are Going to See the King.” I listened for God peeking through in the music's promise.

Marcela's face streamed with tears, and she leaned on me while we walked to the pulpit, but she stayed on her feet and didn't trip on the steps. First, she read a statement Chela had asked her to read, a simply worded message of gratitude and second chances.

Then Marcela raised her eyes. She didn't need notes for what she wanted to say.

“My brother is a police officer. My father was a soldier,” she said. “I know what it means to stay up nights worrying. But since Captain was retired and didn't like to walk far from his TV, I thought all of that was behind me.” She smiled, inviting the congregation to laugh. I heard myself laugh, too. “As I like to say,
no hay miel sin hiel,
or ‘you can't have the honey without the sting.' In other words, there's always a catch.”

More laughter. For one instant, grief and anger dissolved from Marcela's face. But Marcela was silent for a long time, her emotions
catching up to her. I laid my hand across the small of her back, and she found her voice again.

“Even when I first met him as a patient—when he could barely talk or move—he was concerned about others. How was the lady across the hall who yelled in such pain? Why didn't anyone ever come to visit the man in the bed next to his? Or he was telling jokes, trying to make me smile. His body ailed him, but his spirit was full of life. And oh, he was such a fighter! People would say, ‘How could you fall in love with a man who was so much older?' But the question I had for them was, how could I
not
fall in love with Captain Richard Hardwick?”

Marcela and I had known two different versions of Dad while he healed in that facility. She had been the true family to him when I was just a visitor.

Marcela said a prayer in Spanish, and then she was finished.

Once I'd helped Marcela take a seat behind the pulpit, I realized with horror that it was my turn to speak. The silence in the massive church echoed as I reached into my jacket to try to find the index cards I'd stayed up half the night trying to fill with the right words. The only honest thing to say would have been
I got my father killed
.

Marcela knew it. Chela knew it. Everyone in that church knew it. Anyone who had heard the story of that night with Gustavo Escobar knew that Dad was dead because of me.

My hand shook, and the words blurred as if I still had tear gas in my eyes.

“All my life,” I began with half a voice, “I wanted to make Dad half as proud to be my father as I am to be his son.”

I gazed out at the sea of faces. The lights from the news cameras felt like an indictment. My eyes rested on Lieutenant Rodrick Nelson, Dad's protégé, one of his few colleagues who had visited him in the past year. Lieutenant Nelson had spoken about my father at length with easy elegance. In his dress uniform, he looked like the son Dad should have had.

“I love you, Dad. Miss you.” My voice sounded muffled on the loudspeaker.

More words were scribbled on my cards, but I had nothing left to say.