The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller (2 page)

Investigator Will Bright gained a thumbnail history of Nita Estevez. Six months ago she paid a cousin a thousand dollars to sweep her along a hazardous route from a little border town in Mexico to opportunity in the U.S. La Grullita was the name of the town; translation, Little Crane—just below Yuma. She was
ushered in to work in a Garden Grove garment factory, making tank-tops for women and swim trunks for men at a wage that should but doesn’t shame the sweatshop owners.

It took a few days for the news to reach the girl’s mother through a series of calls from the morgue to the Border Patrol, Mexican police, and friends of friends. Now Mrs. Estevez had come to claim her daughter’s body, using most of the money her daughter had sent home which she had been saving for the only child of hers who would get to go to high school,
this
year, because of Nita. I was at the morgue for a meeting about a different case when Mrs. Estevez was shown the photo that would serve as official ID for her deceased daughter.

From my vantage point, in an office across the hall, I watched her take the photo in her hand, suck in a long breath and turn a peculiar greenish color. She dropped the picture, rose from her chair, and walked stiffly to the side door, batting aside a young male companion’s hands extended in solace. I excused myself from the meeting and went after her, but she was moving fast and rounded the corner to the front of the building before I got to her. Her companion jogged up to me, and the two of us watched helplessly as she cried “
Asesinos!
” then plopped down hard on the sidewalk, leaned to one side, and vomited into the flower bed.

Years ago when I first became a cop in Oakland, I studied criminal justice textbooks, read department case histories, and listened to the brief or embellished tales from cops, the lies and truths from punks, the stories from emergency teams, and the anguished cries of victims’ relatives. As a consequence, I grew alert to the way ordinary people talk to one another in violent phrasings, to the unthinking vocabulary of mayhem we all use: killer this, hammer that, tear his throat out. Placid scenes in others’ eyes—a park, a trail, the beach at dusk—signified danger zones to me. Self-murder, war murder, murder in all the degrees.
Through its study, I soon saw that in no way can man’s imagination exceed his capacity for killing. Every contemplated method for exacting agony has at some time or another been proficiently, even proudly, performed.

Murder, big and small. This was my obsession.

After a while a certain peace settled in, as if by owning murder’s gravity I could face all other things down.

I was young then, mid-twenties. Ten years have passed, and I am no longer obsessed. Then there was Nita. In my off hours I grieved for a girl who came looking for work who found death instead, who would never walk on perfect sand and smirk at seagulls, nor lift a child to feel a peach on a tree. Never would she move to the magic of music, enjoy the inexpressible touch of a lover, or thrill to challenges within her own mind, and I wanted someone to be held accountable; someone. For the violated girl in the Santa Ana hovel, I would do my part to render justice.

Yet I knew the primary burden of solving this case was not mine. I’m not a sheriff’s investigator. I’m a forensics specialist in a buck-strapped, shorthanded county crime lab where, after a county bankruptcy, layoffs continue, retirements are urged, and the concept of hiring seems archaic. This crime was not even as bad, one might say, as the surpassing brutality of those against children or the elderly, if one can put a scale to the gravity of murder.

But Joe was right—you can’t un-see a picture.

I wanted the killer of the young woman I silently re-named Little Crane because at times the vessel of disgust just spills over. Without justice for Nita Estevez, she would be three times abandoned: first to poverty, then to death, last to memory.

I wanted her killer because, under the merciless green tint of fluorescent lights as she lay in the cool chamber of the dead, we had come to learn she had been
alive
when she was beaten, throttled, raped, and had her nipple bitten off.

TWO

A
 week later we had no more meaningful evidence than the day we walked out of the murder scene.

I had worked that case and several others all week and had gone four days before that without a day off. I thought I had Sunday finally, and planned to meet my pal, Ray Vega, in San Juan Capistrano for the Swallow’s Day Parade. Then Stu Hollings, my supervisor, called at six a.m. and asked me to cover a scene in an area of the city of Irvine named Technology Park where computer geeks toil. “Remember,” he said, “victims don’t get a day off.” I could argue the point but didn’t.

Irvine is a vast, flat, master-planned and virtually aseptic city so dirt-free you could drop a sandwich, pick it up, and eat it without a thought. A breeze could blow between buildings of the business park where the body was found and not lift a single leaf. It was not a place you might imagine a man to be sitting against a white wall with a bullet drilled through his head.

I found the slug bored into the stucco behind him, and stood by while the coroner’s investigator taped bags over the victim’s hands so fingernail scrapings could be taken at the morgue. The scene was shut down in under three hours with precious little to show for it. But the man did have ID; plenty of it. He was supposed to be twenty-one years old. With the damage of death, it was hard to hazard a guess. On his employee badge and driver’s license he was Hector Victor Flores. The name on an old Border Crosser card forbidding work in the U.S. was Hector Ramon Gonzales. And the name on a fake Resident Alien card, known
as a “green card” although it is actually pink, was Hector Joaquin René Martinez. I examined that one carefully because I knew something was not quite right about it, then realized it bore a full-face photo instead of the required one showing an ear.

As I took my small collection of evidence to Property at the lab, I was thinking that the young man should be just now stirring in a bedroom on this day of rest, or reading a Spanish version of the Sunday paper to find a new used car, or chomping on a cold tortilla stuffed with leftovers while he figured out which movie or air show to attend. Where he shouldn’t be, was lying on a steel gurney at the morgue.

“Having a good
T-I-M-E?
”

The giant bird bobbed toward me and Ray Vega, gold beak flapping. We stood beneath a huge sycamore tree along the parade route. The celebration was to mark the day the tiny gunmetal-blue birds known as barn swallows return from their winter retreat. They would build mud cups beneath town eaves and mission arches while issuing soft
vit-vits, slip-lips
, and long musical twitters. But this big-footed, ugly, slightly frightening, man-sized swallow stirred edgy giggles as he advanced on spectators. He whirled, drew his six-shooter, and plugged a cow-dude sneaking up on him smack dead in the street. The crowd shrieked, laughed, then applauded.

I looked down the line of parade watchers. Most were Anglos but many bore the dark hair and tawny skin of Hispanic/Indian mix like Ray, by my side, and the victim who only hours ago leaned against a building in what now seemed another world.

“Damn it,” Ray said, “I want to see some swallows floculating.”

I said, “Your mouth, son.”

“No, really. They swoop, they dive, they get it
on
.”

“Me, I’m mad I missed the Hairiest Man Contest,” I said. At that, Ray milked his chin, feeling for a beard. “Forget it, sweetie,” I said, “they had two months’ head start.”

The jumbo swallow was headed for our side again. I told Ray the bird’s beak was the wrong color. Let him know, Ray said. So I did, amateur birder that I am. “Your bill should be yellow,” I called, and immediately regretted it.

The giant swallow froze and glared at me, folded a wing onto his hip, and said, “I beg your
P-A-R-DON?!
” He touched his holster. I shrank back, and with that the critter was well appeased, for he whirled again and went for a troop of small Indians alongside a rickety covered wagon with the word BUCKAROOS painted on the canvas, but not before flipping his long, dragging, split tail at us.

“Mooned by a swallow,” I said.

“I hate a parade,” said Ray. He was out of his usual beige-and-khaki California Highway Patrol uniform, wearing instead the outfit of the Fiesta Posse: white shirt, black hat, jeans, and boots, and a bolo cinched by a blob of turquoise. If he were of a mind today, he’d haul off any man found clean-shaven or any outlaw of either sex found drinking nonalcoholic beverages or not wearing Western attire. They’d be thrown in the hoosegow—
husgado
, Ray called it—till they could pay their dollar fines and be set free.

But by the look of it, Ray would do no more than tip his hat to the ladies and be the handsome cop-dude he was. Ray is funny, naughty, sexy and single, my friend and only my friend, though sometimes there’s a lot of flirting going on. Not to flirt, to Ray, is not to breathe. “Where’s Sanders?” he said. “He owes me a beer.”

“Joe’s bringing his son,” I said. “I’m a little nervous. ‘The other woman’ thing.”

“You’re not the other woman.”

“His parents break up after twenty-three years of marriage and then there’s this, this—”

“—babe,” Ray offered.

“—in his dad’s life.”

“You know it wasn’t that way.”

“Does that help a kid deal with it?” I said. “I don’t know.”

Behind the buckaroos came a pitiful-sounding junior high school band, the girls with flat chests and orange legs from choosing the wrong shade of panty hose. Close on their heels a herd of dogs in cowboy scarves towed volunteers from the animal shelter by leashes.

Ray said, “What’s David now, twenty? He’s way more interested in his own next piece of ass than his father’s.”

“Thanks for framing it so delicately.” Ray formed his middle finger into a circle with his thumb and moved it toward me as if to flick me on side of the head. “Watch it,” I said.

“I could give a dink about the rest of this,” he said. “Where’s those Soiled Doves they promised?” He let his gaze follow a woman astride an ebony horse whose hair matched her horse’s color. She was dressed in a turn-of-the-century green velvet dress. The gleaming strands of the mount’s tail spilled to the blacktop, then broke for another six inches like dark water over a fall. For a reason I didn’t know I flashed on the scene with Nita Estevez in the Santa Ana hovel.

When Ray hiked up on a low stone wall and sat there banging his boots against the rock, I joined him. “I almost didn’t make it today. I had a callout this morning in Irvine, off Alton. Single round to the head.”

“Gang stuff? I’m tellin’ ya, we should build a camp. Shut down San Onofre Nuclear Plant, put all the wetbacks down there cleanin’ it up, no spacesuits to wear. Fry their
frijoles
.”

“How can you say that? Your ancestors were from over the border.”

“
My
ancestors didn’t have any border—
comprende?
You guys stole
California
and
made up
a border.”

“Get over it,” I said.

He rubbed his hand over my back. “Mm. No bra.”

“Come on. Let’s see if Joe’s here yet,” I said. We threaded through the crowd, which thickened near makeshift
mercados
displaying souvenirs, and made our way to the front of a saloon
called The Swallow’s Inn. Men and women stood jammed in the doorway holding beers. The women wore lacy garter belts over their jeans and the men sported giant brass sheriff’s badges and hats slid high on their foreheads.

Ray said he’d forge one way looking for Joe and I could take the other. A woman squeezed by Ray with an appreciative look. She wore a shirt printed like the Classified ads, one circled in red: “Cowboy Wanted.”

I detoured to the room where the band was playing for all it was worth and dancers had about a foot to move in. Glued to the ceiling were tin buckets, tractor seats, boots, ballet slippers, and a naked, chubby toy doll with a cigarette dangling from her rosebud lips. I didn’t see Joe and came back up to the main room, then spied him in a line by the restrooms. He was with his son. David looked like him. Taller, maybe six feet, but his blue eyes were Joe’s and his hair was a mass of dark curls already shot with silver. He wore white jeans and a brick-colored Western shirt to his dad’s blue denim. David shook my hand, and if there was anything readable in his eyes having to do with me being his dad’s girlfriend, I missed it.

Ray came up on the side, and Joe introduced him too. “Don’t mess with these two,” Joe said. “They’ll pop you for ripping labels off pillows.” Ray was eye-flirting with every woman within ten feet.

I asked if I should order them something while they were standing in line. Joe cut his hand across his eyebrows, full to there, while David shook his head no. “Okay, see you in a minute,” I said, and headed for the bar just as a woman tapped Ray on the elbow and nodded toward the dance floor. Next time I looked, the two were scrunched among the born to boogie, making moves to “Teach Your Children” by the Red Hots. I snagged a beer, then worked my way outside.