Beyond was Fort Rooster. The walls resounded with roosters in full cry, roosters pacing back and forth on their sawdust runways, roosters pecking at whole corncobs and their reflections in small mirrors. Combs engorged, metallic feathers flashing, mindless bright eyes reflecting us. These birds, with their herky-jerky movements, seemed more reptilian than avian.
I noticed metal bowls in a lot of the cages that seemed to have what looked like steak tartar, diced cubes of dark flesh. I pointed. “You feed them meat?”
“Horse meat,” Mike said, “low fat, lots of protein.”
“Chickens eat meat?”
“In the wild,” Mike said, “chickens eat anything: bugs, lizards, snakes, rats, other chickens — people too, if they find a body.”
At the end of the room was a deep pit; two young men were standing in it, holding what looked like younger roosters, one black, one red. They were thrusting the birds forward to excite them. They dropped the birds and there was a flurry of kicks, squawks, slashing beaks, kicking heels, and loose feathers flying. Until one bird, the red, turned away.
The men stepped in and gathered the frantic birds up, turned in different directions, and calmed them, stroking and soothing.
I looked at the confined space. “Is this where it all happens?”
“No, no, no,” Mike said. “This is the practice palenque. Come on, I’ll show you the real deal.” As we went through the back door, he turned back and spoke to the men. One nodded, and wrung the neck of the red bird.
We walked to a section of Corralitos Creek that was different from the small stream I knew. Here it was wider and deeper, twenty feet across at least. Mike pointed downstream and up: “Two check dams. We close the gates when we want to stop waders. Now, come round the corner.” There was a tall, dense eugenia hedge; on the other side was what looked like a boat landing. “I’m not actually going to show you the real palenque. It’s a quarter-mile walk on the other side.”
“On your brother’s land?”
Mike’s eyes gleamed with amusement. “I am going to show you how we get there.” He lifted the top of one of the pilings. Inside was a panel with four buttons. He pushed the top one. From beneath the deck, a metal rectangle emerged and kept emerging, like the ladder on a fire truck extending up the side of a building. The smoothness suggested hydraulics. The metal span crossed twenty feet of creek and locked into a slot on the other side. Mike pressed a second button, railings unfolded from the bed and swayed upright to lock into place. I was looking at a perfect bridge. The whole process had taken about a minute. Mike pressed the third button, the rails collapsed, and then the fourth. The return trip was less than thirty seconds.
The big ranch had parking, public events, all legal and family friendly. Across the creek at the secluded arena, there was no traffic, no cars, and enough security precautions that if anyone came snooping, the high rollers would fade back across an uncrossable creek to join innocent crowds at the rodeo.
“Ridiculous, no?” Mike tugged on his mustache. “A rope bridge would have worked as well and cost nothing. This bridge is designed to impress. I showed it to you to give you an idea how much money is involved in these events.”
“I’m guessing a lot.”
“This ain’t Prunedale. Cops bust some flaky Filipinos and they think they’ve wrapped it up. Santa Cruz County has been the center of cockfighting in the US since the 1950s. The prize for our last tournament was fifty grand. More than a million dollars changes hands on side bets... So, now that I’ve told you this, do you want to ask me about Leonard Wong?”
“How did you know?”
“Leobardo saw Kelly on your stoop this morning. He’s known her since she was a little girl. She used to come to the cockfights with her dad. If you hadn’t asked, he would have told you to come see me.”
“Do you know where Leonard is?”
“I think I know who’s behind this, but I want you to finish your investigation. I have some prejudices, I don’t like the family. I want to have an independent eye on this.”
“What’s your interest?”
“Leonard Wong was my friend — and he taught me — me, un hombre de Michoacán — most of what I know about chickens. People forget, cockfighting started in China, before Jesús. We Mexicans have only been doing this a couple hundred years.
“Leonard was a genius with birds. He used to say, ‘I know how to cook them and I know how to pick ’em,’ and he was right. He never lost money betting on cockfighting. Just last week he made three hundred large, and he made me a lot of money. He helped me build my line of birds to where they are today, champions, just using his eye to pick mates. He taught me how to train, correct their faults.”
“So why is he in money trouble?”
“He was as bad at poker as he was good at cockfighting. He thought he could read gabachos the same way he read chickens.”
Mike closed the cover on the bridge button and went businessman on me: “I gotta go, I have a meeting. Do your digging. If you find out what happened, there’s a bonus in it for you. I don’t want to make a serious move without being sure. You have my number.”
I drove back to the office, a little dazed. There was one little red flag that flew up during that drive. Mike had said that Leobardo had seen Kelly Wong on my stoop. That he had known her since she was a little girl.
I’d watched Kelly walk down Center, past Manuel’s where Leobardo was sitting on the bench in front. He didn’t look at her, not even to study her schoolgirl ass. I thought at the time it was odd, but then I thought, well, maybe Socorro was over his shoulder, watching.
But how do you explain childhood friends not even looking at each other? That was a red flag that might stay up.
It took about three calls for me to connect the dots. What I said was, “Big-time, big-money poker games. Cross-category: cocaine access. Santa Cruz County.” The answer was the same each time: Joe Morielli.
It was a name I knew but a profile so low he’d never showed up on my screen. Joe Morielli was a black sheep, and perhaps the most successful member of the Watsonville apple cider vinegar clan.
I’d first heard about him at the public defender’s office, but even then he was a rumor. Joe, unlike the rest of the Moriellis, hated apples. He’d gone to work at local nightclubs, first as a busboy, then tending bar, then tending bar as a hobby while dealing cocaine. It was a fairly common progression. But Joe was smart and made a smart move. He started giving discounts to local law enforcement and from there moved up the food chain to the legal community: DAs, prosecutors, eventually judges. By then, he was midlevel and no longer had any contact with the buyers, but he knew who they were. They knew he knew.
Joe had never been busted, not even when some competitors disappeared and he took over the longest-running poker game in town. Then the man seemed to vanish. No one I knew could put me in touch with Joe. He was a ghost. No presence. More than that, he was an absence, which spoke to his layers of legal protection. The best intel I could manage was that his regular players were only informed the day of the card game where the game would be held.
I called it a night and trudged home — Campbell’s chicken noodle, sprawled on the couch, soothed by Perry Mason and the gentle happy din from downstairs.
Friday, I hired a temp to cover for me with Kelly and anyone else. The temp loved the script I gave her: “I get to say that? You’re tracking leads? That is so cool!”
I’d decided the only way to smoke Joe out was to tap into the ground from which he was raised. I hit every bar, lounge, and tavern in Santa Cruz County. I was depending on the loose confederacy of bartenders and cocktail waitresses to pass the word along. I pressed my card and the promise of cash.