I left the garage at a quick clip, trotting toward the street. I had to find a telephone and call the cops. I had just started my car, shoving it into gear, when I saw a dark green VW van pass on the far side of the divider and circle back in my direction, headed toward the Laytons’ drive. The fellow driving was the man I’d seen at the accident. Judy’s brother? The similarities were obvious, now that I thought of it No wonder she’d been unwilling to tell me what was going on! He slowed for the turn, and that’s when he spotted me.
If I’d had any doubts about his guilt, they vanished the minute he and I locked eyes. His surprise was replaced by panic, and he gunned his engine, taking off. I peeled after him, flooring it. At the corner he skidded sideways and recovered, speeding out of sight. I went after him, zigzagging crazily through a residential area that was laid out like a maze. I could almost chart his course ahead of me by the whine of his transmission. He was heading toward the freeway.
At the overpass, I caught a glimpse of him in the southbound lane. He wasn’t hard to track, the boxy shape of the van clearly visible as we tore toward town. The traffic began to slow, massing in one of those inexplicable logjams on the road. I couldn’t tell if the problem was a fender-bender in the northbound lane, or a bottleneck in ours, but it gave me the advantage I needed. I was catching him.
As I eased up on his left, I saw him lean on the accelerator, cutting to his right. He hit the shoulder of the road, his tires spewing out gravel as he widened the gap between us. He was bypassing stalled cars, hugging the shrubbery as he flew down the berm. I was right behind him, keeping as close to him as I dared. My car wasn’t very swift, but then neither was his van. I jammed my accelerator to the floor and pinned myself to his tail. He was watching me steadily in his rear-view mirror, our eyes meeting in a deadlock of determination and grit,
I spotted the maintenance crew just seconds before he did; guys in bright orange vests working with a crane that was parked squarely in his path. There was no way for him to slow in time and no place else to go. His van plowed into the rear of the crane with a crash that made my blood freeze as I slammed on my brakes. I was luckier than he. My VW came to a stop just a kiss away from death.
Like a nightmare, we repeated all the horror of the first wreck. Police and paramedics, the wailing of the ambulance. When I finally stopped shaking, I realized where I was. The road crew was replacing the big green highway sign sheared in half when Caroline Spurrier’s car had smashed into it. Terry Layton died at the very spot where he killed her.
Caroline’s smile has shifted back to impishness in the photograph above my desk. I keep it there as a reminder, but of what I couldn’t say. The brevity of life, perhaps, the finality of death… the irony of events that sometimes connect the two. We live in a world in which justice is skewed.
BENNY’S SPACE by Marcia Muller
Regarded as the person most responsible for introducing the new, realistic, and modem woman detective, MARCIA MULLER has three exciting series characters-Sharon McCone, in Eye of the Storm and others; Joanna Stark, in There Hangs the Knife and others; and Elena Oliverez in powerful novels like The Tree of Death. These three characters all exhibit a keen ability to understand themselves as well as their suspects. Ms. Muller lives in Sonoma, California.
Amorfina Angeles was terrified, and I could fully empathize with her. Merely living in the neighborhood would have terrified me-all the more so had I been harassed by members of one of its many street gangs.
Hers was a rundown side street in the extreme southeast of San Francisco, only blocks from the drug- and crime-infested Sunnydale public housing projects. There were bars over the windows and grilles on the doors of the small stucco houses; dead and vandalized cars stood at the broken curbs; in the weed-choked yard next door, a mangy guard dog of indeterminate breed paced and snarled. Fear was written on this street as plainly as the graffiti on the walls and fences. Fear and hopelessness and a dull resignation to a life that none of its residents would willingly have opted to lead.
I watched Mrs. Angeles as she crossed her tiny living room to the front window, pulled the edge of the curtain aside a fraction, and peered out at the street. She was no more than five feet tall, with rounded shoulders, sallow skin, and graying black hair that curled in short, unruly ringlets. Her shapeless flower-printed dress did little to conceal a body made soft and fleshy by bad food and too much childbearing. Although she was only forty, she moved like a much older woman.
Her attorney and my colleague, Jack Stuart of All Souls Legal Cooperative, had given me a brief history of his client when he’d asked me to undertake an investigation on her behalf. She was a Filipina who had emigrated to the states with her husband in search of their own piece of the good life that was reputed to be had here. But as with many of their countrymen and -women, things hadn’t worked out as the Angeleses had envisioned: first Amorfina’s husband had gone into the import-export business with a friend from Manila; the friend absconded two years later with Joe Angeles’s life savings. Then, a year after that, Joe was killed in a freak accident at a construction site where he was working. Amorfina and their six children were left with no means of support, and in the years since Joe’s death their circumstances had gradually been reduced to this two-bedroom rental cottage in one of the worst areas of the city.
Mrs. Angeles, Jack told me, had done the best she could for her family, keeping them off the welfare rolls with a daytime job at a Mission district sewing factory and nighttime work doing alterations. As they grew older, the children helped with part-time jobs. Now there were only two left at home: sixteen-year-old Alex and fourteen-year-old Isabel. It was typical of their mother, Jack said, that in the current crisis she was more concerned for them than for herself.
She turned from the window now, her face taut with fear, deep lines bracketing her full lips. I asked, “Is someone out there?”
She shook her head and walked wearily to the worn recliner opposite me. I occupied the place of honor on a red brocade sofa encased in the same plastic that doubtless had protected it long ago upon delivery from the store. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Not till it’s too late.”
“Mrs. Angeles, Jack Stuart told me about your problem, but I’d like to hear it in your own words-from the beginning, if you would.”
She nodded, smoothing her bright dress over her plump thighs. “It goes back a long time, to when Benny Crespo was… they called him the Prince of Omega Street, you know.”
Hearing the name of her street spoken made me aware of its ironic appropriateness: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is symbolic of endings, and for most of the people living here, Omega Street was the end of a steady decline into poverty.
Mrs. Angeles went on, “Benny Crespo was Filipino. His gang controlled the drugs here. A lot of people looked up to him; he had power, and that don’t happen much with our people. Once I caught Alex and one of my older boys calling him a hero. I let them have it pretty good, you bet, and there wasn’t any more of that kind of talk around this house. I got no use for the gangs-Filipino or otherwise.”
“What was the name of Benny Crespo’s gang?”
“The Kabalyeros. That’s Tagalog for Knights.”
“Okay-what happened to Benny?”
“The house next door, the one with the dog-that was where Benny lived. He always parked his fancy Corvette out front, and people knew better than to mess with it. Late one night he was getting out of the car and somebody shot him. A drug burn, they say. After that the Kabalyeros decided to make the parking space a shrine to Benny. They roped it off, put flowers there every week. On All Saints Day and the other fiestas, it was something to see.”