In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries) Read online

  Six months ago my father sat down on a bench in his garden and quietly left this world. Mike apologized for missing Dad's funeral, said he had always admired my dad, always enjoyed arguing politics with him, though in life, Mike had given the eulogy.

  When I told Mike I didn't know what to do next, he rose to leave. I reached for his hand to stay him, asked what I should do with all of the stuff he left behind. He laughed, he put his warm hand against my cheek, I woke up.

  The warmth of his hand lingered on my cheek as I emerged, reluctantly, from sleep. I felt vaguely angry with Mike for leaving, again, but I was also glad to see him looking so well. A mixed bag of emotions.

  For a moment, I lay with my eyes closed, trying to remember everything we had said, trying to conjure up his face. But he was gone, and I could not bring him back from that dark place where he had chosen to go.

  I rose, feeling groggy and raw, showered again, and found some breakfast at a coffee shop next door to the motel. Most of the tables were empty so I lingered until it was time for my meeting at the prison. I read again the notes about the disappearance of Jesus Ramon that Mike had left me, trying to reconcile those notes with everything Mike had ever said about Jesus.

  Mike had told me many versions of the Jesus Ramon story. The police reports end when Mike let Jesus out of his car at the mouth of an alley off Third Street downtown and watched the boy walk away toward Broadway. From that point, Mike would spin the moral of the tale to suit whatever point he wanted to make at the moment, making Jesus Ramon a sort of multipurpose allegory. Maybe, I thought sometimes, Mike had been involved with enough crap while working in the City of Angels that he merely lumped together various situations and encounters for story-telling purposes and hung them on Jesus. Or, maybe, Jesus was never very far from his thoughts. The one ending I never heard from Mike was that he had set up the boy to die, though that accusation had certainly been made.

  After my third cup of coffee I got back into my car and drove up the freeway for my appointment at the prison where former LAPD officer Bonifache Erquiaga was consigned to be a lifetime resident.

  • • •

  The guard called him Enriquez.

  Boni didn't correct him. Ever since the first time some guard called him by the wrong name, three years ago when he was being led from the courtroom to a holding cell after his conviction, Boni never corrected any of the dozens of guards who had, through carelessness or ignorance or intended insult, made a mistake with his name.

  Boni told me later that every time he was called Enriquez or Edwards or Esquivel, he let himself savor, if only for an instant, the hope that his incarceration was itself a mistake, that his name, Bonifache Erquiaga--his father's name and his grandfather's--was not properly entered on the roster of lifetime guests housed by the California Department of Corrections. Affirmation that he did not belong in that shit-hole of a place.

  Boni moved up the line queued in the narrow hallway between the cellblock and the portal, waiting for his turn to be strip-searched before he could enter the visitors' room where the guard told him his attorney waited. Like the other waiting prisoners, Boni kept his eyes straight ahead and disengaged his heart from any ordinary human sensibility until the ordeal of the search was finished.

  An attorney visit meant an extra shower as well as half a day off from raking the gravel exercise yard. With luck and persistence, an attorney visit could also mean there would be some extra money deposited into his commissary account. If the price Boni paid for all of this possibility was to submit once again to some form of gratuitous institutional humiliation, then so be it.

  Other than his name, there was a second mistake in this event that Boni also did not bother to point out to the guard who had called him in from his work detail: Boni had no attorney. Had had no attorney of record since he ran out of both money and appeals.

  This lawyer, Margot Duchamps, he thought obviously had come to see someone else. Possibly some con named Enriquez was missing out on a lawyer meeting, and maybe it was an important meeting, who knew? Should Boni feel bad? The mistake wasn't his, Boni told himself, so why should he say anything?

  Later, when he told me, in a long spill of his fathomless, saved-up grief, how he had felt that first day we spoke, he said that when he walked into the visitors' room he expected that as soon as I saw him, saw the mistake, he would be sent right back out to finish raking the yard under the intense morning sun; he was reluctant to make eye contact with me.

  Like Boni, I did not correct the "mistake" that I was his lawyer because it got me inside the prison for an interview much faster than the protocols for journalists' visits would have allowed. The name on the form, Margot Duchamps, was not a mistake. That is my legal, pre-marriage, pre-TV-career name. The name my family gave me.

  When he walked in, Boni Erquiaga looked smaller than I remembered him at the time of his trial. His black curly hair was now thinner on top and steel gray--hair dye is not allowed in prison--the contours of his square jaw had softened, and much of his open good humor and cocky self-assurance belonged to the past. The pride that some interpreted as stubbornness was still evident, undiminished by the fetters that hobbled his gait and chained his hands to his waist. He shuffled into the narrow passage on the prisoner's side of the visiting room with his chin thrust forward, resolute, apparently unbroken and unrepentant after a few years of the humiliations of the high-security segregation unit set aside for defrocked, dishonored, convicted cops.

  The woman in the seat next to me, a woman who had gone through the security check point ahead of me at the visitor reception center, and had cried the entire time, began to sob anew. As a small, dispirited man took his place opposite her, she flattened her palm against the thick glass screen that separated prisoners from their visitors. I wondered if human heat would pass through the barrier; sound did not. The woman could only cry into her telephone handset, and the little man could only listen to her sob.

  When Boni sat down opposite me, I didn't know if I was expected to put my palm against the glass, did not know how intimate that gesture was meant to be. I was certainly not on handholding terms with Boni, but some sort of handshake seemed called for. Instead, tentatively, nervously, I rested the fingertips of my free hand, my left hand, on the little ledge at the bottom of the glass when I picked up the telephone handset and waited for Boni to pick up his.

  The guard sat Boni on the stool opposite me, freed his left hand from the handcuffs, but kept the right hand locked to his waist chain. As Boni settled himself, the guard met his eyes and delivered a warning of some sort that I could not hear but could certainly read the intention of. Some firm version of "Behave yourself."

  It was only after the guard had gone down the line that Boni looked directly at me. First, he paled. And then he crossed himself, jerking on the chains so that he could touch his fingertips to his lips. He managed to say, "You?"

  I pointed to his handset and waited for him to pick it up. When I heard his breath through the line, I said, "Mr. Erquiaga, I'm Maggie MacGowen."

  "I know who you are. I just didn't expect you. They said an attorney visit, someone named Duchamps. But it's you." He leaned so close to the window that his exhalation made a circle of steam on the glass. "You look good. Damn good. How are you, honey?"

  "Fine, thanks." Smarmy, horny bastard, I thought, but I kept what I hoped passed for a polite smile on my face.

  There was something I sensed about Boni the first time I saw him in court that made me want to stand back from him, for self-preservation. He's a textbook example of a sociopath, a man with immense charm but absolutely no conscience or empathy. Perhaps the only person other than himself that he cared about was the recently paroled con, Nelda Ruiz. He never snitched on her, even when it could have helped him.

  I said only, "How are you?"

  "Seeing you, it gives me hope I'm not buried in here, forgotten," he said. Tears filled his eyes and he dropped the receiver to flatten his free hand against the glass. I
declined to put mine against his, and I must have looked confused or maybe alarmed by his raw emotional state--or was he a good actor?--because he withdrew his hand. I pointed to his handset and he put it against his ear again.

  "Are you all right, Mr. Erquiaga?"

  "You don't know how it's been," he said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. His words poured out in an agitated rush. "For the last three years it's like they locked me up and lost the key when I shouldn't have been locked up to begin with. The charges against me were all political, anti-cop BS. But I have no one who'll listen to me, no one with the balls to stand up and help me. Then I see you and I think maybe you will do something. I know who you are, I see your reports on TV, I know you aren't afraid to go after anyone. Maybe you'll tell my story. I know you're my old friend Mike Flint's girl for a long time. I think you understand what we cops have to put up with out there."

  "I do my best to understand," I said. "It isn't always easy."

  Boni canted his head as if perhaps looking at me from a different angle might reveal something. He asked, "How is Mike? He still working detectives out of Robbery-Homicide?"

  "He went out on medical leave a while ago," I said. True as far as it went. I knew Boni was a practiced liar, but chances were he had not been told about Mike. "I've decided to look into the Jesus Ramon disappearance for my next film. I hoped you would talk to me about what you remember from that day. Anything about the boy, any ideas about what might have happened to him."

  "Yeah?" The intensity of Boni's scrutiny of me was disconcerting. "That's why you're here?"

  "That's why I'm here."

  "I remember your eyes," he said, off on a new tangent. "I come in here today and I see those eyes and I think, What is this, a ghost? I am so rattled, my hand is shaking. See?"

  He held out the hand to show me. "It's been a long time since anyone visited me."

  "I'm no ghost," I said.

  "I guess not." He smiled wryly. "So, this lawyer couldn't show and you took her place? They told me a lawyer was coming."

  I glanced at the guard at the far end of the room. "Maybe a friend of mine checked the wrong box on the visitor-request questionnaire. It can take months for a journalist to get into this place."

  "You lied?" His eyes were dark slits; a seasoned prisoner is always wary. "What's the hurry to see me? I'm going nowhere. They catch you in a lie and all kinds of shit can come down on me. You trying to get me in trouble?"

  "Do you want me to leave?"

  First he checked to see if the guard was watching, then he shook his head. "Maybe I can help you. Get me the Jesus Ramon investigation book. I'll put my nose in it and see what I can find out."

  "I can't bring in anything." I showed him my empty hands. One of Boni's convictions was for arranging a hit on a witness from the county jail. I thought it was a bad idea to give him access to police reports that might mention any potential witnesses. I asked, "What is it you expect to find in those reports?"

  "I have a lot of time to think in here," he said. "I just thought that if I could spend a little time with the investigation files for half a day I might find something that's been missed. Maybe I can help you out."

  "With all the charges that were brought against you, the drug involvement, you aren't worried that a connection might be suggested?"

  "Me?" He shrugged. "Had nothing to do with Jesus. Had a good alibi, in case you're wondering."

  I said, "Nelda Ruiz."

  "Nelda." He nodded. "I was at the Glass House with Nelda when Jesus was last seen. Up at police headquarters, waiting for Mike to come in."

  Without a pause or segue, I said, "Nelda Ruiz was paroled from the women's prison at Frontera about a month ago."

  "Paroled, you say?" His head snapped back as if I had slugged him on the chin. Then he thought that over for a moment. "She's out." A statement, not a question. His handsome face grew bloodless, white. He took a few shallow breaths, then he slumped forward. I half rose, afraid he had fainted.

  "Enriquez!" The guard came over and shook his shoulder. "You sick?"

  "No." Boni pulled himself together so that the guard wouldn't take him away. His face glistened with cold sweat. When he saw me staring at him he sat up straight again.

  "Where is Nelda?" he asked.

  "That's one of the questions I have for you. She hasn't checked in with her parole officer," I said. "You're an old friend, I thought she might try to contact you."

  "There's no way she can do that."

  "You used to write to her," I said.

  "For a while, yeah. Until they put a stop to it."

  "Who are 'they'?"

  "They. Just they. For her in that place and me in here, they decide everything. They said no more contact."

  "I read some of your letters to her," I said.

  He shrugged. There was nothing he could do to stop me, on the outside, from doing anything, and his gesture said so. Convicts have no expectation of privacy.

  I said, "You told her you would always take care of her."

  "Men say things to women," he said. "Protecting Nelda got me deep into something I knew better than to get involved with. That man-woman thing is very powerful, you know. Can screw up your good judgment."

  I said, "Been happening since Adam met Eve."

  "Yeah." He sighed, contemplative for a moment. "I gotta tell you, it's been a whole long time since I was as close to a pretty woman as I am to you right now. You can't know how much it hurts for a man to be cut off from women for so long. Nelda and me, we had something good for a while. She had her problems, no denying that. Big problems. But when I think about her, I see her as a shining angel; she was good to me. You might think I'm crazy for saying this--I know she's a junkie, a tweaker--and getting involved in her 'business' got me in here. But I would do anything, put up with any grief they can dish out to me, if I could believe that one more time before I die I would feel Nelda's flesh against my flesh. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

  "I understand." I did. Nelda Ruiz was a convicted crack cocaine dealer, a user. But I had read in Boni's letters to her his immense and genuine passion for her. Love, I suppose.

  Boni was right when he said that man-woman thing could screw up a reasonable person's good judgment. In the back of my head, where I supposed reason might still lurk, I replayed the question Boni had asked. What was I doing there? If Mike couldn't find Jesus, how could I? I didn't know. This I did know: remote as the possibility was, Boni had a better chance of someday putting his flesh next to Nelda's than I did of ever again cuddling up next to Mike Flint.

  Boni pulled himself together. "How does Nelda look?"

  "I don't know," I said. "As I told you, no one seems to know where she is. Have you any idea where she might be?"

  He narrowed his eyes again. "Where's her father?"

  "He passed away."

  "Yeah? Well, rest in hell." The words snapped with venom. "If the old man's really and truly gone, she'll go home. It's her house, you know, passed down to her from her grandfather. Her old man set himself up in the property like he's the don of the hacienda, but he was just a nobody, a do-nothing low-life. It was her house and he tried to steal it from her."

  Boni took a deep breath, seemed again near tears. "We were going to live there together, when we got straight again."

  "Women say things, too."

  "She couldn't lie to me."

  I asked, "How did you hook up with Nelda?"

  "We grew up in the same neighborhood."

  "Childhood sweethearts?"

  "Not exactly. She's a few years younger. More than a few. But I knew her family. I ran into her later."

  "When you arrested her on a drug charge?"

  "Yeah." A little shrug, dismissing the importance of this tidbit.

  "The day Jesus Ramon disappeared?"

  "Long time before then." Boni looked around for the guard, always knew exactly where the guard was.

  "So Nelda was your friend before she was your alibi," I said. "It
just occurred to me that you're also her alibi for that afternoon."

  He turned his face to me again. "I don't want to talk about Nelda anymore."

  "Jesus was a Sleepy Lagoon Crip. So was Nelda. At least, she was in the girls' auxiliary. Were they close?"

  "I don't remember." Same little shrug.

  "What inducement can I offer you to remember?"

  Boni smirked. "Short of a parole?"

  "Short of a parole."

  "Okay." He sat up taller and looked me in the eye, ready to bargain. "Get me a good appellate lawyer. I don't belong in here."

  "No promises, but I may know some people. I'll make some calls. Anything else?"

  "When you came in, did they tell you in Reception how you can deposit a few dollars in my commissary account?" he asked. "You know, so I can get some little things like candy and writing paper and telephone cards and such."

  "Yes."

  "I think the limit's fifty bucks a month. You give it to the guard in Reception and he gives you a receipt." Boni grinned. "Maybe you can deduct it from your income tax. Call it charity."

  "I'll make a deposit on my way out."

  "Okay." He seemed cocky again. "What's the fifty-dollar question?"

  "The truth. You said you wanted to go over the case files. But is there anything you know that might not be in those case files that could help me find out what happened to Jesus?"

  "Holy Mary, Mother of God," Boni groaned. "Don't ask me that. I'm already serving one life sentence."

  "At the moment, I don't have anyone else to ask, just you and Nelda."

  "Ask Mike."

  "I can't ask Mike."

  "Then leave it." The color rose in his face again.

  "I can't do that either," I said.

  "You have some beef with Mike?" Boni said, "Why bring that up so long after? You have any clue what people in the neighborhood were saying about Mike? You ready to risk getting Mike put inside like me?"