The Famous and the Dead

4



Awaiting his grand inquisitor, Deputy Bradley Jones slouched in a conference room chair, legs crossed and boots on the table beside his hat, rounding off his snagged left thumbnail with a pocketknife. He was twenty-two years old, clean-cut and good looking, a second-year patrolman. He had been a rising star with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department but was now a falling one, suspected of involvement in the L.A. drug trade, and more. By all signs that he could gather, LASD was going to eat him alive and enjoy doing it.

Lieutenant Jim Warren, Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau, came through the door, set a laptop on the table, and sat across from the young deputy. He wore pressed jeans and black wingtips and a crisp white shirt. His face was craggy and brown and his hair was a gray buzz cut. Bradley knew that the feared Warren came from a checkered background: Decades ago he had founded the Renegades, a gang of mostly white deputies, some of whom did some bad things to people of color. Warren had turned them over to Internal Affairs, but caught the brunt of the backlash and the hostility of his own department. Years later he became an IA crusader, and Bradley figured it was his atonement. Bradley put him at seventy if a day and wondered why he hadn’t retired over a decade ago as most cops would have. How much did atonement did Warren need?

“Feet on the floor, son.”

“Sir.”

Bradley put his feet down and Jim Warren squared the laptop and opened it. “Tell me about Carlos Herredia.”

“Not again.”

“Why not again?”

“You think if you make me repeat myself enough times I’ll finally say what you want to hear.”

“Just once more, Bradley. I’ll listen better this time.”

Bradley spun through Carlos Herredia’s well-known bio: nicknamed El Tigre, head of the North Baja Cartel, fingers deep in L.A. drug distribution through Eme and the Florencia gangsters. Mota, junk, meth, coke, murder, kidnapping, extortion.

“And enemy of the Gulf Cartel,” said Warren. “Don’t forget that.”

“What’s left of the Gulf Cartel. I’ll tell you this one more time—I’ve never favored Herredia’s cutthroats in L.A. over the Gulf’s cutthroats in L.A. The way I do things here is simple, sir: A gangsta is a creep is a punk is a dirtball. They’re all the same. So I don’t play favorites on patrol. And I resent you self-righteous dinosaurs making me out to be a bad guy. Of course I don’t mean you, personally, Lieutenant Warren. Personally, I respect and like you.”

“My lucky day.”

Bradley folded the blade down and slipped the knife back into his pocket. He gave Warren a flat glance then focused on the repaired thumbnail.

“I’ve got sworn testimony against you, Brad. Octavio Leyal knows Herredia’s organization from the inside. He says Herredia pays you to leave his L.A. distributors alone and focus on the Maras and Eighteenth Street, who are teamed up with the Gulf. He says you’re a courier for the cash runs south, taking Herredia’s money back to him. He says he’s seen you in Baja, at one of Herredia’s compounds known as El Dorado. Quite a place, according to Leyal.”

“I know, sir. But Leyal is a low-level criminal and a liar. You want to believe a prison snitch over a second-year deputy? When did you sell your soul?”

“Easy now.”

“There’s nothing easy about this. Can’t you just figure out what you’re doing, then do it?”

“We’re close. I do appreciate your cooperation.”

“You want me to just walk away from the job? Well, I can’t, because I have a pregnant wife and a son I’d like to feed. Oh, I made your watchers weeks ago. The new ones, the two men so bland looking I’m not supposed to know they’re following me.”

Warren looked over the screen at Jones and shrugged, then tapped something on the keyboard. “You’re friendly with Eme and Florencia people here in L.A. Such as Rocky Carrasco. Whose son you rescued from kidnappers on your first day as a patrol deputy.”

“I should apologize for that?”

Warren studied him. “You knew exactly when and where Herredia’s men would try to buy a hundred machine pistols up in Lancaster. The Love Thirty-twos. One of the runners being Octavio Leyal.”

“I was working an informant, a damned good one. All of it came from him.”

“But you could never deliver your informant to us for questioning.”

“He did what people under pressure do, Jim. He vanished. I’ve told you a hundred times, too.”

Warren tapped the keyboard again. “Tell me about those two weeks you took off last October. Four months ago.”

Bradley sighed and picked up his hat and slouched back down into the chair. The hat was the Corazón Espinado, a shantung Panama designed by Carlos Santana. His wife had given it to him. Bradley loved the graphic of the guitar stabbing through a human heart and considered the ninety-five-dollar cost a bargain. “One last time? I took Erin to Mexico. She was pregnant and exhausted from work and we wanted to relax. You’ve seen my passport with the customs stamps on it, so you know I’m telling the truth.”

“You fished for tarpon and snorkeled.”

Bradley looked at Warren for a long beat, then turned his attention to the hat in his hands. Finally he nodded and closed his eyes. Think up something pleasant, he thought. He imagined Erin, pregnant with his son and lovely. He imagined her onstage, belting one out. He imagined his home in Valley Center, the barn and the big oak tree. He imagined Carlos Herredia’s compound, El Dorado, and its sprawling adobe house and casitas, and the pool that shimmered with cool salt water, and the golf course upon which Herredia happily cheated, and the thoroughbreds and the food and wine and the time Herredia had thrown Bradley’s gift—an expensive fishing reel—into the air and blown it to bits with one round from a .50-caliber Desert Eagle handgun.

“Snorkeling and tarpon fishing in the Yucatán. You live large, Bradley. Don’t you?”

“You exhaust my soul.”

“Explain your riches.”

“My mother left me a bundle and my wife is a popular performer. You know these things. I’ve told you. You’ve seen my tax returns—good enough for the IRS, I might add. If you don’t believe my answers, make up some of your own.”

“You know, Bradley, when IA kicked this investigation up to me two months ago, I was pulling for you. I’d followed your ups and downs. I figured you were a spirited deputy, young and lucky. But the more I talk to you and the people around you, the more I think you’re in it up to your eyes. Carrasco and Florencia, the North Baja Cartel. Your arrest and interview reports—ninety percent of your narcotics contacts comes from Mara Salvatrucha and Eighteenth Street, both lined up with the Gulf Cartel. Then suddenly you vanish for two weeks to the Yucatán with two more of my deputies, on a so-called fishing trip, and who dies in a gun battle five miles from where you’re fishing? Benjamin Armenta, head of the Gulf Cartel and Herredia’s biggest rival. All three of you deputies come home sick and beat up. You’ve got two teeth missing and your lips are split open, Cleary’s got a broken nose and wrist. Vega has an infected arm and a thousand mosquito bites and she comes down with dysentery within the week. Want to tell me about the great tarpon hunt again? Maybe add some truth?”

Bradley put his feet back up on the table. It disturbed him that in the last month or so Warren was apparently getting new and better information. Where? His friends, fellow deputies Caroline Vega and Jack Cleary, were also being questioned by the Criminal Investigation Bureau, and he wondered now if one or both of them might have finally made a mistake, or cracked. The truth was that none of the deputies had even seen a tarpon. For Bradley, those two weeks had been the longest and most miserable of his life, although he had finally gotten the only thing he wanted: Erin, freed from Benjamin Armenta, her abductor. Caroline and Cleary had gotten what they wanted too—some dark action and lots of cash.

Bradley looked at his shoes on the table. Ankle-high boots actually, expensive ones. Worry ate at him. Octavio was bad enough, but what if Caroline and Cleary were having trouble keeping their stories straight? Or what if Rocky was saving his ass by singing? Then there was another, far worse scenario, one he was almost afraid to consider: Charlie Hood talking his crazy brains out to CIB. Hood had also been a participant in the great tarpon hunt. But these days he reported to ATF, not LASD, and he’d stayed down in Mexico for another week, then quietly returned stateside to continue his furtive ATF work along the border. Which had left him off the sheriff’s department’s radar. Or was he? If Warren found out that Hood had been in Yucatán, then they were all dead in the water because Hood wouldn’t lie. Hood was too square to lie. Hood had the goods on him in more ways than one. Hood was a self-righteous pain in the ass. If Hood was talking to Warren, Bradley knew he would fall hard and far.

So he told Warren again about the four of them fishing the Bacalar Lagoon, described the Hotel Laguna where they stayed and the Panga they rented and the fishing they did. Told him about the fight that he and Cleary got into with a half dozen very rough local fishermen who didn’t care for gringo tourists fishing in their flats. He again described the food and the rooms, and the weather, and plenty of details, right down to which songs Erin played on a cheap guitar in a small cantina one night. And told again the story of dropping his camera into the dark warm water on the third day, losing probably fifty pictures that would have established his story better than did the Hotel Laguna owner who, speaking on a poor long-distance connection, was only able to loosely corroborate it.

“Why didn’t Cleary or Vega bring a camera?”

“I told them not to because mine was waterproof.”

“If it was waterproof, why didn’t you jump in after it?”

“Did. Failed. Deep.”

Warren was leaning against the wall now, arms crossed, listening. For a long moment he seemed distracted, then he came back, pushed away, sat back down. He looked unamused. He tapped away on the laptop, then turned the computer to face Bradley. Bradley saw the image of his mother, Suzanne, on the screen, an enlarged version of the photo on her Los Angeles Unified School District employee badge.

“It’s been five years since she died,” said Warren.

“I know how long it’s been.”

“You must miss her.”

Bradley looked at him. “You have deep insight.”

“My mother died when I was young.”

“You told me that.”

“Bradley, did Suzanne Jones really believe she was a direct descendant of Joaquin Murrieta? Or was that more of a marketing decision? Or maybe a delusion?”

“Marketing.”

He looked at the picture of his mother for a long beat. Then he conjured the first time he had seen the head of El Famoso, Joaquin Murrieta, severed and preserved in a glass jar, hidden in their Valley Center barn. No delusion. He’d trembled.

“Marketing,” Bradley said again.

Warren took back the computer and typed some keys and turned it around again for Bradley to see. Now his mother shared the screen with her alter ego, Allison Murrieta. Allison wore a black wig over Suzanne’s wavy brown hair, and a black satin mask with a crystal fastened to the cheek. She held a small derringer up to her lips, as if blowing off the smoke. Bradley stared at the image. The picture was a hit during her crazy summer of ’08. It was everywhere you looked. That was the summer that Allison held up fast-food places and boosted expensive cars and donated bags of cash to her favorite charities, posing mid-robbery for cell phone photos from bystanders. The summer she’d run wild with Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputy Charlie Hood. The summer she’d died. Bradley hadn’t looked at this particular picture in a long while. His mother and Allison Murrieta. Very different. But the same. Strange, he thought, for maybe the thousandth time, that in all of L.A., out of the ten million people in the county, not to mention the rest of Southern California, only one other person had seen the pictures of Allison and recognized her for who she really was. Charlie Hood.

“Do you believe you’re related to an infamous outlaw? Do you feel that your blood is calling you into a life of crime? That you’re battling your genetic destiny?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, sir.”

“Deon Miller’s murder is still unsolved,” said Warren. “And the witness description of the shooter matches you pretty damned well.”

“It matches a million other young men in L.A., too,” said Bradley. Miller was the young gangsta who’d shot down Allison Murrieta, believing he’d get a reward. Shotgunning Deon Miller had given Bradley genuine satisfaction, but it couldn’t touch the loss of his mother.

“Bradley, I’m going to let you help this department. As of tomorrow you’re assigned to the STAR Unit.”

“No. I can’t do the STAR Unit.”

“You will do it or resign.”

“Lieutenant, this assignment is worse than a demotion. It’s everything I don’t want to do.”

“Report to Sergeant Gail Padilla in the morning up in Lancaster. She’ll be your supervisor. How bad can it be, Jones? You go out to the schools, you tell the kids to stay off dope and away from gangs. They look up to you. You tell them a story or two. Show them your sidearm. Show them what good people we sheriffs are. You hardly break a sweat. What could be easier?”

Warren turned the computer back, pushed some buttons, closed the lid. “We’re going to do this one more time, Jones. But we’ll have a polygraph examiner ask the questions. I’ll let you know when.”

He stood up and walked out. It was dark already and the night-shift deputies were rolling into the employee parking area in their pickups and Mustangs and Camaros and SUVs. He got into his Porsche Cayenne Turbo and gunned it when he hit the avenue.

His hands were tight to the wheel. His shirt billowed in the blast through the open windows and when the winter air had cooled his skin and calmed, if only a little, his riotous heart, Bradley pressed the back of his head into the rest and drove fast.

Three hours home in the evening traffic. And another hour forty to Erin, heavy with his child. Erin, fire of his life, his sin and soul.