Dying for the Highlife (19 page)

Eventually Sanzini scraped up the cash, using up every favor he could muster. When he paid the Mexicans, they laughed and called him a
pendajo
and a dumbass gringo, then told him to get lost.

• • •

Sitting in his room, Sanzini pulled out his electronic scale. It had been inactive for almost three years. Sanzini had not given up on finding Jimmy Homestead, and in fact felt confident that eventually he’d turn up and then would regret the day he was born. Until then, though, he needed cash, and the temporary job scene wasn’t working out. Dealing was easy money, but he would need to reconnect with the Mexicans and get back on the program. Might it be possible? Three years had passed, but Sanzini still had connections. He picked up his address book and was scanning through the names when his doorbell rang. Probably a solicitor, Sanzini thought, a scowl on his face. But he got up and went to the door anyway.

The gorgeous blond woman waiting on the porch made Sanzini’s eyes bulge and jaw drop.

“Shelly?”

“Nice try.”

“No, Sheila, right?”

“Want to go get a drink, big boy?” she said.

T
he next morning Cody and I were drinking coffee on my deck under a gray sky. The cold wind blowing off Lake Tahoe was spitting tiny needles of rain, and the grass in my yard looked hard and brittle. Cody sat bundled in his huge green parka.

“Let’s go inside and cook some more bacon,” he said.

“Remember I told you I knew Jimmy Homestead from high school?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Everyone we went to school with came from middle class white suburbia. Some kids had parents better off than others, but for the most part, we were all just middle class, right?”

“Pretty much.”

“I know a few guys from back then who ended up with good careers. But I know a lot more who can’t even hold a job.”

“Not everyone is destined to live the highlife, Dirt.”

“Who said anything about the highlife? Look, I’m not trying to judge someone by how much money they make. I’m just saying I’m surprised to see so many guys, the products of hardworking parents, become jobless derelicts. I don’t buy that was their destiny.”

“You getting philosophical on me again?”

I shook my head. “I look at Jimmy Homestead, and I see someone born into a decent family, with a decent amount of intelligence. But he doesn’t make it through high school and lives for almost twenty years as a bum. It’s the result of a character defect.”

“I thought he was just an alcoholic.”

“Maybe, but it’s more than that. He was too lazy to work, or maybe thought he was above it. He thought the world owed him something.”

“Looks like he was right.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

When we went inside, my cell phone was beeping with an alert for the GPS. “Son of a bitch,” I said, waiting for the satellite to locate the Lamborghini.

“What’s up?” Cody said.

“This thing’s gone haywire. I’m not sure if it’s working right.”

“Let me see.”

“Hold on. Now it says the car’s stopped on Spooner Pass.”

“Gimme that thing,” Cody said. He stared at it for a second, then tossed it back to me. “What the hell? Damn it, man, let’s go.”

We jumped into my truck, and I sprayed gravel onto Highway 50 and raced into Nevada, passing the casinos at double the speed limit. Fifteen minutes later the Lamborghini started moving again. “He’s heading over the pass, into Carson,” I said.

“How far are we behind him?”

“About half an hour.”

“How come we didn’t get alerted sooner?”

“I don’t know. The technology’s not always that reliable, I guess.”

A few minutes later, the red arrow on the GPS stopped. I pushed my foot to the floor, and we barreled over the summit.

We rolled into Carson City and stopped at an auto shop in the center of town. The Lamborghini was parked out front, its flattened tire folded under a rim that had obviously taken the brunt of a collision. Cody and I walked into the small, dirty lobby, where a man with white hair and spectacles was working behind a computer.

“Is the guy who owns the Lamborghini around?” I said.

“You just missed him,” the man said. “He and his father drove off not five minutes ago.” He looked up from his screen.

“His father?” Cody said.

“He called him ‘Pop.’”

“What were they driving?” I asked.

“A Ford, if it’s any of your business.” The man was staring at us now, and Cody and I left and walked back to my truck.

“Jimmy Homestead has now officially become a pain in my ass,” Cody said.

We stood in the gritty parking lot, kicking at pebbles and looking around at the bleak desert features, as if a clue to Jimmy’s whereabouts might magically appear.

“You told me Sheila had seen Jimmy’s dad in Tahoe,” I said. “And she felt sure he was looking for Jimmy.”

“It looks like he found him. She said the guy’s a pathetic asshole. Those were her exact words. She thinks he’s desperate and probably unstable.”

“His name is John, if I remember,” I said, thinking back to my original interview with Sheila.

“We find him, we find Jimmy,” Cody said.

• • •

As an ex-cop, Lou Calgaretti still had friends on the force, not only in Chicago, but also in Southern California, where his career started. His first assignment as a rookie patrolman had been in Compton, the infamous ghetto near Los Angeles. The Bloods and the Crips ran the show there in the 1980s, when the crack trade was rapidly becoming a huge business. In the process, the ghettos were turned into a war zone. Lou made his name busting black gangsters born into a world where the only hope of exit was through drug money. He attacked the street thugs with an imposing fearlessness that made his more experienced partners doubt his sanity. After three years of battles and a stellar record of arrests, he was shot in the shoulder during a raid. When he recovered, he was promoted to plainclothes, and then assigned to homicide.

The day after Jimmy and his father spent the night, Lou sat in his office and ran all the usual reports on Sheila Majorie. She lived in an apartment in central San Jose that cost $1,345 a month. She owned a ten-year-old white Toyota Camry, and worked as a cosmetologist, with a declared annual income of $49,000.

Lou dialed an old friend from LAPD who owed him a favor, and asked if he could get Sheila’s cell phone records for the last thirty days. When Lou got the report, he spent an hour identifying every number through a reverse directory. Not a single Hispanic name was on her call record. He set the records aside and studied the notes from his interview with the Homesteads. The story about Mexican drug dealers coming after Jimmy through Sheila seemed unlikely, almost ridiculous, but Lou had seen crazier shit happen.

He circled Tony Sanzini’s name with a red pen. If there was any truth to the story, it would start with him. Within a few minutes, his printer started chugging out information on Sanzini: his employment records, address history, arrest jacket, even a mug shot. Lou picked up one of the pages and studied Sanzini’s photo. Small eyes, broad nose, broken teeth, scraggly beard—a textbook caricature of a hard-partying, white-trash loser. “What a prize,” he muttered. Sanzini’s arrest record confirmed the impression. He had spent time in jail for a number of petty offenses, with one felony conviction, for assault and battery. One of his misdemeanor convictions was for possession of a half gram of cocaine.

The next morning, Lou drove the four hours to San Jose and found Sheila’s apartment complex. Her Camry was not in the parking lot. He drove to the hair salon where she was employed but didn’t see her car there either. He walked into the salon.

“I’d like to make an appointment with Sheila,” he told the teenage girl working behind the counter.

“She’s off today, but she’s working tomorrow afternoon,” the girl said.

Lou left the salon and drove to the address he had for Tony Sanzini. The faded yellow house sat quietly under skies heavy with clouds moving in from the north. There was no landscaping, no shrubs or flowers behind the chain link fence surrounding the yard. From his vantage point parked down the street, Lou would have guessed the house was empty, except a Harley was parked on the walkway next to the dirt and weeds where a front lawn might have once grown. A few raindrops splattered on Lou’s windshield. The neighborhood seemed deserted in the midafternoon. It started raining harder, and after a minute, Lou saw Sanzini walk outside and lug open the garage door. It was an old fashioned spring loaded unit that swung outward, and when Lou heard its tired squeak, it made him think of his childhood home in Illinois. Sanzini pushed his motorcycle into the garage.

Two hours later the rain stopped, and Sanzini rolled down the driveway on his Harley, the loud rumble shattering the damp stillness of the day. Lou followed him for a half mile to a bar called the Iron Door. The windowless building stood alone between two strip malls on Bascom Avenue. The parking lot was half full with pickup trucks, choppers, and gas guzzlers. Two bicycles were propped near the front door, where a fat man wearing a dirty T-shirt stood smoking a cigarette.

Lou watched Sanzini walk into the bar, then climbed into the back seat of his Lexus and changed into blue jeans and an old sweatshirt. He fitted a Giants cap over his professionally styled hair and followed Sanzini into the joint. A few heads turned to size him up as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. Even by the low standards of dive bars, the Iron Door was a dump. The furniture was so old and rickety half the patrons stood rather than risk collapsing a chair. Two broken barstools were stacked in a gloomy corner, next to a table with only three legs. The carpet was worn through to the floorboards in many places, and the wood surface of the bar was peeling, water stained, and splintered.

The bartender was a woman probably not thirty, obviously hired to bring some life to this cheerless place. She was dark skinned, perhaps Filipina, and wore a top cut so low her large breasts seemed ready to fall out with the slightest motion.

She greeted Lou with a big smile. “Whatcha drinkin’, stranger?”

“How about a draft,” Lou said, and when she reached below for a mug her brown nipples were plainly visible.

Down the bar, Sanzini sat drinking a beer.

The day drinkers began to filter out, replaced by a blue collar happy-hour crowd. Sanzini kept to himself, sipping beer and watching television for an hour or so until a stocky Latino man in his twenties walked in. He wore a loose-fitting white T-shirt and a red bandana knotted behind his head and pulled low over his eyebrows. Blue tattoos stitched his skin, beginning at his knuckles and crawling up his arms and out from his collar.

The Latino surveyed the bar, and everyone in the place turned to stare at him. He sauntered to where Sanzini was sitting, and Lou got up and walked by them to the jukebox. When he passed, he saw the tattoos on the Latino’s fingers. Four small circles configured in a square on one finger, and on the next, two horizontal lines beneath three vertical ones.

“You Sanzini?” the man sneered, his tone clearly declaring his disdain and disrespect not only for Sanzini, but for everyone in the bar.

“Yeah,” Sanzini said.

“Then let’s go, homeboy.”

Sanzini kick-started his Harley and followed the man’s customized purple pickup truck onto the boulevard. Lou fell in a few cars behind and tailed them to the freeway, scribbling the license plate number as he drove. It was dusk, and the rush hour traffic was heavy. The pickup exited on 7th street and headed east, away from downtown. A couple miles later, the neighborhoods turned increasingly darker and poorer, until they entered the Mexican barrios in east San Jose.

In the seventies, the greater San Jose area was mostly orchard land. Traffic was nonexistent, downtown’s tallest building was three stories high, and the suburbs were quiet pockets of middle-class Americana. Then, almost overnight, Santa Clara County was transformed into the epicenter of the technology revolution. Within five years the orchards vanished, replaced by office complexes to house the hundreds of computer and electronics companies that flooded the area. Real estate prices skyrocketed, affluent neighborhoods with multimillion-dollar homes became commonplace, and the population exploded as hordes of ambitious professionals rushed in to participate in Silicon Valley’s newfound prosperity.

But for the slums of east San Jose, there was no benefit to be had from the technology boom. The barrios existed, much as they always had, as home to people who worked as janitors, yard laborers, or dishwashers. Old, dilapidated, graffiti-covered stucco homes with flat roofs lined the narrow streets, some partially torn down and boarded up, most with iron security bars covering the windows and doorways. Residents parked rusted junkers on their lawns and sat on weathered couches watching the streets from their front porches. Groups of men hung out on the corners, drinking forties, flashing gang signs, and looking for action.

Lou kept his lights off and pulled over down the street from the house where Sanzini parked his motorcycle. He was painfully aware his black Lexus would not do for surveillance in this neighborhood. To make matters worse, Lou knew he looked like a cop, and Mexican immigrants distrusted and hated the police more than anyone, based on their experiences with the mostly corrupt
policia
in Mexico.

The skies were now dark, which afforded Lou a bit of comfort, but it also prevented him from seeing if anything was happening at the house. After a minute he pulled forward, stopped in front of the house, and took down the address and the license plate of a Chevy Impala parked in the driveway. Figures were moving inside a lighted room visible through partially opened drapes. Lou peered at the window, but was startled by a thump that jostled the springs of his car. A face appeared in his rearview mirror. Lou pushed a button and lowered his window.

“You in the wrong part of town, homes,” the face said. Red bandana, gold-plated front tooth, thin goatee, black eyes, gang tats on his forehead.

“Did you touch my car?” Lou said.

The
cholo
blinked. “That’s right, homes. You got a problem with that?”