Rag and Bone (8 page)

“You wanna go home, or would you like to get coffee somewhere?”

“Coffee.”

We fought over the check, but as it turned out our meals were on Mr. Huerta, who came over and thanked John effusively for the work he’d done in the restaurant’s kitchen, for which, I pieced together, he’d only charged for supplies. When I mentioned it in the truck, he shrugged and changed the subject.

We ended up at a coffeehouse on Beverly at the edge of West Hollywood as austere as Maria’s had been over the top: concrete floors, metal tables, actor-waiters clad in black and Edith Piaf singing softly beneath the din of cell phone conversations.

“This is different,” I said at the doorway.

“I was the contractor on this place,” he said. “There’s a table by the window. Grab it, I’ll get coffee.”

I comandeered the table and watched him approach the counter, completely out of place and totally comfortable. After a moment, I realized I was admiring his body: the long legs and wide shoulders and even the lap of love handles over his belt. The young athlete was still present in the easy way with which he carried himself. His body had never failed him. He returned to the table with two cups of coffee and a large piece of chocolate cake with two forks. He said, “You’re gonna love this cake.”

We dug in. “Why did you get divorced?” I asked John, picking up the conversation we’d started in his truck.

“After I stopped drinking, things changed. I changed.” He cut off a chunk of cake and wolfed it down. “You know what that’s like. A year later, you’re an entirely different person. Five years later, and it’s like another lifetime. I hung in there until the kids were in high school, but at the end, it was either a divorce or hit the bottle again.”

“Things were that bad with you and your wife?”

“There wasn’t anything wrong with Suzie.” He mashed cake crumbs beneath his fork. “It was all me. The divorce was hard on her, hard on the kids, too. My daughter still holds it against me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment. “What about you? After your friend died, why didn’t you hook up with someone else?”

I had the feeling this was not what he had intended to say, but something to divert the conversation away from him. I had been in what Josh used to call my cross-examination mode, and in that mode I sometimes overstepped. Maybe he was just showing me he could also ask painfully personal questions.

“It’s not that easy, John,” I said. “I never believed in just hooking up. A friend of mine once told me that my problem is that my dick’s connected to my heart.”

The words were out of my mouth before I considered that a gay man referring to his dick might push the limits of John’s tolerance, but all he said was, “Me, too.”

“You think you’ll get married again?”

“If I met the right person. I been dating this girl off and on for a while now, but it’s real casual. How are you holding up, man?”

“The caffeine and sugar rush is wearing off. I think it’s time for me to turn in.”

We drove back to my house in companionable silence, listening to a Mexican radio station.

John pulled into the driveway. I said, “I had a great time, John. Thanks for coming over.”

“I was wondering if you’d like to go to a ball game sometime.”

“You know, I’ve lived here ten years and I’ve never been to Dodger Stadium.”

“Then it’s time,” he said. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow. We’ll figure out a day.”

“Great. Good night, John.”

I held out my hand but he reached over it and hugged me. For a second, his cheek brushed against mine with that familiar sensation of stubble and heat. He released me, patted my back and said, “Sleep tight, man.”

I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I dreamed I was in a pawn shop on Spring Street, a neighborhood that seemed like it belonged in Mexico City rather than L.A. A greasy old woman stood behind the counter, arms crossed, an unlit cigarette clamped between her lips. I was frantically searching my pockets for my pawn ticket while she barked in Spanish,
“Apreté, señor, quiero cerrar.
” Finally, she came out from behind the counter, went to the door and was about to turn the sign from
OPEN
to
CLOSED,
when I found the ticket and waved it in her face. Grudgingly, she grabbed it out of my hand, went back around the counter and through a door that led into the dark recesses of the store. When she returned, she opened her palm. I saw the glint of gold and then I woke up.

I
GOT OUT OF BED
filled with energy, and after breakfast went into my office for the first time since the heart attack. I turned on the computer and spent a couple of hours organizing my calendar, which showed about twenty appeals in various stages of progress. On most I was either waiting for oral argument to be scheduled or for an opinion to be filed. Fortunately, as it turned out, just before the heart attack I had been trying to clear the decks for a death penalty appeal with a ten-thousand-page transcript. The handful of trial court matters left on my docket I could either continue or hand off to other lawyers. When I finished working out my calendar, I saw the disk with the judicial application that Inez had brought me and copied it onto my hard drive. The application ran to ten pages, with almost a hundred questions, many of which, in typical legal fashion, had subpart piled upon subpart. The bar exam had been less complicated. The first question was easy enough, though: applicant’s name.

I had worked on the application for nearly an hour when the phone rang in the kitchen. I let the machine take the call, but when my office line rang, I picked it up.

“Law offices.”

“Henry? Is that you?”

“Hi, Elena. Did you just call on the other line?”

“Yes, when you didn’t answer, I called this number. Are you working?” she asked with a note of concern in her voice.

“A little.”

“Is that wise?”

“I’m not doing any heavy lifting. How are you?”

“I heard from Vicky.”

“She called?”

“She wrote me a letter,” Elena replied. “She said her husband found out she was staying with me and that’s why she left. She apologized for taking the money and she returned the credit card.”

“Did she use it?”

“I haven’t called to check.”

“Where’s the letter postmarked from?”

There was a pause, a rattle of papers. “San Francisco.”

“Well, at least you know she’s still up there.”

“Do you have any ideas about how I can find her?”

“She’s not missing, she’s hiding. She doesn’t want to be found.” An alarm went off in my head. “She said her husband learned she was staying with you. Did she tell you how?”

“No,” Elena replied. She was silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she told him.”

That tallied with my assumption. “Maybe she’s gone back to him and she’s ashamed to tell you.”

“I doubt that my disapproval means much to her,” she said. “If she was with Pete, she would have said so in her letter. I think she was struggling with what to do, and in a moment of weakness, called him and told him to come get her and Angel, but then changed her mind and ran. Well, at least I know she didn’t leave because she was mad at me. I’ve got to talk to her.”

“What can you do for her that she can’t do for herself?”

“Persuade her to do what you suggested and call his parole officer or, if that doesn’t work, get a restraining order.”

“What’s going to restrain her if she changes her mind again?”

Exasperated, she said, “Henry, she needs help. She may not accept it from me, but she’s certainly not going to get any out there on the streets and neither is Angelito.” She paused. “Do you think I should call the police?”

“She’s not missing and she’s not the victim of a crime,” I said. “They won’t be interested.”

“He beat her,” she reminded me.

“And she didn’t report it,” I said. “They’re not going to pick him up on a stale complaint. Did she mention a friend or someone she might have gone to or who would know where she is?”

“She seems to be close to her mother-in-law,” Elena ventured.

“Pete’s mom? Wouldn’t she be on his side?”

“The way Vicky talked about her, she could have been her mother, too,” Elena said. I could hear that the admission pained her.

“What’s her name?”

“Jesusita. She lives down there in a town called Garden Grove. You know where that is?”

“Just south of L.A.,” I said. “Jesusita. I assume her last name is Trujillo.”

“As far as I know.”

“I’ll have my investigator try to track her down. If she’s in touch with Vicky, maybe she’ll get a message to her from you.”

“Thank you, Henry.”

“Elena, I know this is hard for you.”

“I’ll be all right,” she replied. “You really sound like you’re having a good day today.”

“I feel good.”

“Well, whatever you’re doing, keep it up.”

I called my investigator, Freeman Vidor, and gave him the assignment of finding Jesusita Trujillo. Freeman was suffering from a form of arthritis that was slowly crippling his spine and might have forced him to retire had his career not been saved by the internet. The dingy office he occupied on Broadway now looked like the headquarters of some dot-com startup.

“Of course,” I told him, “Trujillo is a guess. She might have divorced and remarried.”

“You don’t have anything else? DOB? Social Security?”

“Just a name and a town,” I said. “I thought you could get anything on the internet these days.”

Freeman snorted. “You think the web’s like a Ouija board. I’ll get back to you.”

The sky was clear and bright above the tiers of half-filled seats in Dodger Stadium. The typical Dodger fan, John had explained to me, arrived around the middle of the third inning and skipped out at the seventh inning stretch to avoid traffic. Out on the field, the visiting Giants were taking batting practice. The sight of the Giants’ black and orange took me back to childhood and going with my father to Candlestick, when the Giants had more Latin players than other teams in the majors: Orlando Cepeda, the Alou brothers, José Pagan and Juan Marichal, the first living Latino player inducted into the Hall of Fame. Almost more than the game itself, I think what my father loved was the sight of those dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking men outplaying the
americanos
at their own game. Their heroics on the field, and a couple of beers, must have made him feel bigger in his own life—for a few hours, anyway. On the long drive home, we regaled each other by reliving the big plays of the game, a sweet catch by Pagan or a strike-out by Marichal or another Cepeda homer. Those were the happiest moments I ever had with my dad. By the time I was ten, our expeditions to
el béisbol
were over, and after that there were no happy memories.

“Hey, Henry,” John said, nudging me. He’d gone off to buy a couple of Dodger dogs and had returned to his seat while I was lost in the past. “You with me?”

“I was thinking about my dad.”

“Must have been a good memory,” he said. “You were smiling. Here’s your dog.
Con todo,
like you said. Mustard, relish, onion—you sure it’s okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?”

“If it’s not,” I said, biting into the hot dog, “I’ll die a happy man.”

He looked momentarily alarmed, then relaxed and grinned. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a short-sleeved yellow silk shirt, half-unbuttoned to take in the sun. His Dodgers cap covered his graying hair and I could almost see the teenage prospect he had been when he played for the Dodgers farm teams.
He must have been a beautiful boy,
I thought, and then wondered who I was protecting by putting it in the past tense.

“You don’t wish sometimes you were down there on the field?”

“Ancient history,” he said, then relented. “Yeah, sometimes. I can remember going out to the mound at the beginning of the season and being totally focused on throwing the ball, like my whole life was behind that pitch.” He slurped some lemonade. “Getting the ball over the plate was the easiest thing in the world and the hardest at the same time. I haven’t felt that intense about anything since. Man, I was so alive I could feel the hair on the back of my neck.
Pues,
if I’d known at the time I was playing that this was as good as life was gonna get, I woulda paid more attention.”

“That was the peak for you?”

“Sure,” he said, cramming the last of his dog into his mouth. “There’ve been other things that were beautiful, like when my kids were born, but playing baseball, that belonged to me. That was my moment. You ever experience something like that?”

“Nothing that intense. Well, maybe my first couple of trials. You have mustard on your chin.”

“I eat like a pig, don’t I? Sorry. You ever play baseball?”

“Only as a kid. I was a decent batter and I could run, but I couldn’t catch a watermelon.”

The Giants finished up, and a local chanteuse came on the field and sang a breathy version of the national anthem that made it sound like a Cole Porter ballad. The line-ups were announced, Kevin Brown threw the first pitch—a ball—to Benard, the Giants’ centerfielder, and the game began. Within seconds, I was eight years old again, mesmerized by nonchalant heroics on the field: balls that whizzed by at 90-plus miles an hour, a hop-up catch at the fence, a runner thrown out from across the diamond, a long slide almost beneath the baseman’s cleats into second.

Somewhere around the bottom of the third, John said, “You having fun, Henry?”

“You can’t imagine.”

“I think I can,” he said quietly.

I glanced at him. “Yeah, I guess you can.” I put my arm around him and gave his shoulder a squeeze. He grinned without taking his eyes off the game.

We were out on the deck finishing a dinner of Chinese takeout and watching the sun set. I was still buzzing from the game. The sky was filled with dusty reds and pinks, and the moon had begun to emerge.

John, standing at the railing, pointed at the sky. “Pretty colors, huh? What would you call that one?”

“Pollution pink.”

He grinned and said, “Gonna be a full moon. Want to do something wild?”