He didn’t want to listen. The expletives began, first in Spanish, ending in English. “... Filthy scum-sucking fascist pig! Parasite!...” I let him go on and on.
When he ran out of epithets and breath, I spoke soothingly: “The man who was responsible for killing your brother is dead. Murdered. He’s lying in an old shack outside of T.J. I’ll show him to you, if you want. No tricks this time. I’ll tell you the whole story of my involvement in this thing. The truth. You want to listen?”
“I’ll listen, puto. I got nothing better to do.”
“Good. It’s a long story. Let’s find a cantina.”
I gave Gonzalez a handkerchief to wipe the blood from his battered nose. It wasn’t broken, which made me feel good. After a block’s walk, we found a combination restaurant-bar that looked clean and wasn’t too crowded. From the window by our table we could see fireworks begin to light up the twilight sky. I told Omar everything — from the beginning, including the incredible coincidence of my recognizing Kupferman from a split-second meeting years before. The only thing I omitted was my involvement with Jane. Watching him as I recounted the tragedy that had been the central fact of his life for a decade I saw anger, grief, and fierce love light up his face. After I finished I sipped my coffee in silence and waited for his response. Finally it came, much more stoic than stunned. “Who do you think killed Fat Dog?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. He’s tied in to Ralston from Hillcrest, ten years ago. They’re connected by the similar ledgers they both had in their possession. It could well be that Fat Dog was trying to blackmail Ralston. I’m not sure. We’ll know more when we decipher this ledger.” I handed him the leather bound book. “You read Spanish, don’t you?”
“Of course, yo soy Chicano.” He said it with pride. We were moving toward becoming allies, but he was keeping his distance. I respected him for it.
“Read it,” I said, “then we’ll go and bury Fat Dog. Or I will, I should say. You can wait here.”
“No, I’ll go. I want to see this putrid piece of dog shit with its guts hanging out. I want to burn the sight into my brain.”
“Then hurry up and read the ledger. It’s getting dark. I want to be sure we can find the place.”
Omar read fast, his eyes skimming the pages, showing no emotion. He read page by page for several minutes, then closed the book and stared at me. “It’s not a bookie ledger like the ones I found at Ralston’s house,” he said. “The first four columns are the same thing. Names, some Latino, some Anglo, some that sound kind of black, followed by initials — R.R., that would have to be Ralston, J.L., H.H., D.D., G.V. Don’t ask me what that means. The next column is odd amounts of money, with a dash, then a date, no particular order. The dates go back eight years to ’72. After the dates, there’s all these really odd amounts of dough — 211.83, 367.00, 411.10. Like that. Funny. With no dollar signs, just the decimal points. Weird. In the next column there’s another name, most of the time matching the one in the first column. Then, there’s comments — spooky stuff. For instance — ‘Cousin, dead ten years,’ ‘Uncle, born here, valid D.O.B., died Mexico, ’55,’ ‘Played ball with R.R., died 6–21–59.’ Every line in this last column seems to refer to some dead person, or one of their relatives. Spooky. What do you think, repo?”
Another loose end seemed to be tying itself up. “I think maybe this ledger details some kind of welfare scam. Remember those blank checks stuck in the ledgers you ripped off of Ralston? Everything in this new ledger seems to bear it out — the names, the amounts of money — all small and within the range of a monthly Welfare payment, and the comments in the last column — died such and such a date. I think that Ralston is working a Welfare ripoff, and that Fat Dog was involved somehow, or found out about it, and tried to blackmail Ralston, and was killed.”
Omar was nodding his head, taking in the information and kicking it around. “What do we do now?” he said.
“Let’s bury Fat Dog and head back to L.A. Ralston is the key to this case, I’m sure of that. When we get back I’m going to brace him.”
We got up and left the cantina, my coffee and his beer practically untouched. We walked to the car, then headed for the Ensenada Toll Road.
It was almost dark and cooling off. We drove south on the toll road, skirting the ocean. As we pulled out of Tijuana I could see bonfires being lit in the shanty towns that filled the canyons on the land side of the road. The people who lived in the makeshift communities had no electricity, but their fires provided light and a glow that swept all the way across the highway to illuminate the Pacific with strands of gold. Given the corruption of Tijuana, where most of them probably worked, I wondered if they were jaded beyond redemption, as I was, or innocent enough to fill their lives with the simple beauty that surrounded them. Omar was evidently thinking along parallel lines.
“So much fucking beauty, and so much fucking poverty. But it’s the poverty that finally gets you. So you come to America, meaning L.A., and you find some kind of chickenshit job and raise a big family, and stay poor. And you know what kills me, repo? There’s not a goddamned thing I can do about it. Except to help the kids who rebel at the poverty and look for the answer in dope. You win one, and you lose twenty. But you know, it’s worth the effort.”
“Yeah. One thing you haven’t mentioned: How the hell did you find me? How did you know to come to T.J.?”
“Easy. There was no place else to go. The only lead I had was those porno pictures, which spelled T.J. Also, you shanghaied me north, in the opposite direction. I cut through the rope about three in the morning and hitched into Santa Barbara. I caught the six o’clock bus to Dago and walked across the border. I been looking all over town for your car since eleven o’clock. Finally, I spotted it. Then I found you.
“You’re a smart, resourceful guy, Omar. I have no doubt you’ll go far in life, now that you’re free of your obsession.”
“But it’s not over, repo. This puto Fat Dog is dead, but there’s a lot more going on, you said so yourself. I want to know all of it.”
“You will. But you’re strictly a noncombatant. Remember that. When we get back to L.A., I’m going after Ralston alone. We’re dealing with killers here, not Barrio punks with switchblades and a snootful of angel dust. So you take a good look at Fat Dog’s corpse, and hold your nose while you’re doing it. If you’ve got the stomach for it, I’ll even let you desecrate it before the burial. He’s the one who killed your brother, no one else. The rest is icing on the cake and that’s my obsession. So when we get back to L.A., you keep out of it. You got shot once and survived. You were lucky. I’m going to find you a place with some friends of mine. You can stay there until this thing blows over.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You’ll do it. I’ll make sure you know what’s happening. Just stay out of sight.”
“All right. You know, this feels strange. I’ve been waiting for this moment for over ten years, but it feels like a big letdown. I wanted to kill the puto myself, slowly. And I would have done it. Scum like this Fat Dog don’t deserve to live.”
“You’ve got that all wrong, amigo. You might have killed Fat Dog — if the timing had been right and your conscience and conditioning shut off long enough for you to do it. I might have, too, if I hadn’t been able to get him to confess and thought he might kill again. But he deserved to live. He just never had the chance. He had no choice in the matter. It was locked in, from the beginning. He was destined to become what he became. I’m no liberal, but I learned one thing from being a cop: that some people have to do what they are doing, that they can’t help it. I tried to explain this to my fellow officers, but they laughed me off as a bleeding heart. I’m doing what I have to do, so are you, so was Fat Dog. The only difference between us and Fat Dog is that our conditioning was tempered with some love and gentleness. His wasn’t. All he knew was anger, hatred, and meanness. That’s why I’m going back to bury him. He deserved better.”