The Death Factory (5 page)

There it was, the choice I’d confronted so often in life: the path of least resistance, or the walk over hot coals. I thought about Sarah lying inside, floating on a carpet of Dilaudid, my mother tending her constantly. It was hard to summon the motivation to help someone else. Vargas was talking again, more about his wife and son and his miserable pay.

“We’re straddling the poverty line, actually,” he said.

“Whereas I—”

“You were the boss’s
mano derecha
at that office, Mr. Cage. Two hundred attorneys up there, and everybody knows Cantor listened to you like nobody else. Wyatt Earp, right? Most of the cops say you could have run against Cantor and beaten him in the last election, or at least been his handpicked successor. And I know you never let that
culero
Gaines intimidate you.”

“Felix . . . you said the plea deal’s been signed. The perp’s already gone before the judge.”

“Yes, this morning.” He sucked on his cigarette. “But I heard sometimes they vacate those plea deals.”

I shook my head firmly. “Only for material breach by the defendant, almost exclusively. That’s as rare as snow in Houston.”

“But not impossible?”

“The next thing to it. A plea bargain is like a contract between the state and the felon. You can’t simply break it.”

Vargas looked desperate. “But we must do something, no? That bastard is guilty.”

The more I thought about what Vargas had told me, the more hopeless I realized the case was. Joe Cantor wasn’t going to undercut one of his top prosecutors on a plea deal that had already been made. He wouldn’t want to create that kind of ill will in his office, and he damn sure wouldn’t want to bring down that kind of scrutiny on the crime lab. He would address the crime lab problems if I raised them—privately. But he wouldn’t want TV crews hounding him while he was doing it, or legions of convicts filing appeals.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do,” I told Vargas. “Unless maybe you could find that photo the rapist shot. I know it sucks, but sometimes cases slip through the cracks. I’ll push Cantor to check out the crime lab. But reversing a completed plea deal isn’t going to happen.”

Vargas stared at me for several seconds, then turned as if to go. I wanted to say something more, but before I could, he looked back and said, “There’s one more thing, Mr. Cage.”

“What’s that?”

“You know this girl.”

I couldn’t believe him at first. It didn’t seem possible. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“The victim. You know her. Maribel Avila.”

The name took me a minute. Because the people he was referring to, I hadn’t seen since 1988. Then it was like a grenade went off in my brain. “You mean—”

“Dominic Avila,” said the tech. “A brick mason. One of your first capital cases, I heard. An Anglo contractor killed him on a construction site. You sent the killer to death row.”

In a flash, I saw three pretty little girls in a row sitting in the courtroom watching a murder trial. “And Maribel was . . .”

“The youngest daughter,” said Vargas. “She was eleven years old at that time.”

“That’s who got raped with a bottle?”

Vargas gave me the slow nod. “She’s twenty-one now. She just got released from the hospital. She’s hurt bad.”

“She had two sisters,” I said in a monotone. “The mother was named Rosabel.”

“
Sí
. Rosa, she goes by now.”

It all came back to me then. Dominic was a talented bricklayer, not some poor schlub fresh over the border who barely knew his trade. A white contractor had been paying him peanuts to do jobs in River Oaks and Tanglewood. Nobody liked the contractor much, but everybody loved Dominic. So the next time they had a job, they tracked him down, not the contractor. Dom resisted at first, but the money was too good, so he started taking the jobs. This contractor was a mean son of a bitch named Cole. Cole told Dominic he was taking food out of his kids’ mouths, and threatened to hurt him if Dom didn’t stop taking jobs in those neighborhoods. Dominic tried to keep his head down, but he needed that high-end work. So one day Cole showed up drunk at a job site and went after Dom with a hammer. Dom defended himself. Cole went back to his truck, got a .45 from under the seat, and blew Dom’s brains out in front of five Mexican workers.

Two miracles made that case different from so many I’d seen before. The first was that the homeowner’s wife had walked outside right before the shooting. She’d heard the yelling, and she saw the murder. That wiped out any wiggle room the jury might have had to take the word of a white shooter over the testimony of some illegals who could barely speak English. The second miracle was that Dominic Avila had been an American citizen for eleven months at the time he was shot.

“How do you know all this detail?” I asked Vargas. “You didn’t hear that in the crime lab.”

“I reached out to one of the cops who worked the rape scene,” he said. “Then I visited the Avila family.”

“Christ, Felix. You’re trying hard to get fired, aren’t you?”

“I couldn’t help it. I knew Dr. Kirmani had screwed up bad, and not for the first time. I had to put a face on the victim to get up the courage to do something about it.”

“That’s what put me in your mind, isn’t it? When you found out about my connection to the Avilas.”

Vargas shrugged, but any sense of guilt had left him. He’d already transferred much of the burden of his knowledge onto my back. “Señora Avila wanted to come to you herself, but when she heard how sick your wife was, she said she couldn’t bother you at a time like this. ‘We must all bear our misfortunes,’ she said. ‘The Lord tests us all.’ ”

“Goddamn it,” I said, angry that he’d told me. I’m a sucker for nobility, humility, stoicism. And Rosabel Avila had it all, in spades. “There couldn’t possibly be a worse time for this, Felix.”

At last a little guilt showed in his eyes. “I know.” He looked back at his car as though he couldn’t wait to leave. “Was I wrong to tell you?”

I got up from the swing, walked up and down the porch, still thinking of Sarah and my duty to her. “No.”

“
Gracias,
Mr. Cage. So . . . what are you gonna do?”

“Talk to Mitch Gaines, I guess.”

“Shit. Is there any way you can leave my name out of that?”

“I can try. But in the end . . .”

Vargas sighed. “
Sí
. I know. Fuck.”

I made Felix give me his cell number, and then he got out of there like he wished he’d never come. And he was right to wish it.

“I’ve got the distinct feeling this story doesn’t end well,” Jack says from his seat beside me. “And I want to hear the rest of it. But I need a quick intermission. That coffee’s hit my bladder. I’m going to take a leak in the river.”

“Jack, that might be danger—”

Before I can finish, he’s out of the BMW and making his way down the tumble of gray rocks with surprising agility. At the water’s edge, he unzips his fly, takes a stance, and starts urinating into the Mississippi like Patton pissing into the Rhine. When the proud arc finally diminishes to nothing, he zips up, then shields his eyes with the flat of his hand and looks north, then south, as if making some momentous decision. Apparently satisfied, he squats on his haunches and dips his hands into the brown water. Lifting them carefully, he studies the water running through his fingers.

Inside the car, insulated from the wind and sun, I’m suddenly conscious that I’m sitting in the seat my father has occupied almost every day for the past five years. And someday soon—perhaps very soon—I will be taking his place as head of the family. My mother is strong in will, if not in body, but she has always observed the code of southern patriarchy, not out of submission, but out of a sense of tradition that probably predates the Bible. Traditional southern women never yielded all power to men—quite the opposite, in fact—but in formal social intercourse, an eldest son is expected to take up the mantle of his father.

My father did it when his father passed, and Jack, as the youngest son, accepted that as the natural order of things. What does he see, squatting by the river with water running through his fingers? Forty yards beyond him, in the main current of the river, a half-submerged log floats past. That tree might have been lifted off the bank only a few miles upstream, or eight hundred miles north, in Minnesota, but Jack is oblivious.

Fifteen hundred miles to the west, his wife is locked in a battle with her own immune system, which is relentlessly trying to kill her. Someday he will go through the agony I endured with Sarah; yet my greatest fear, losing my father, he endured years ago. How long, I wonder, until we exchange each other’s grief? How long before I drop the last spadeful of earth on my father’s grave in the cemetery up the hill?

“NOW THAT I’VE marked my territory,” Jack says, nearly startling me out of my skin, “let’s ride up to the cemetery. We can watch the sun go down the way the birds do, while you finish your story.”

As I turn the BMW in a 180, he says, “So you called Gaines, the ADA who’d pled down the rape case?”

“Yeah. I didn’t want to do it—first because I’d been out of the office three years, and it was none of my business. Second, even if I’d still been in, it was considered bad form to interfere in another prosecutor’s case. And third, I’d never liked the son of a bitch.”

“Why not?”

I shift the BMW into low gear and start climbing the steep incline of Pierce’s Mill Road, wondering how log trucks ever made it up and down this slope in the winter. “Huge chip on his shoulder. Gaines went to the University of South Houston Law School, then served in the JAG Corps in the army. I’d gone to Rice, and then UT in Austin, like Joe Cantor. Gaines was four years older, and he resented my rapid rise in the office. To him I was still a Mississippi boy, while he was Texas right down to the Colt he carried in his briefcase. Gaines was a hard-ass, right-wing, Bible-thumping, law-and-order ex-soldier, and he’d never doubted he was right. Not once. The day I resigned from that office was a blue-ribbon day on his calendar.”

“And he just loved you sticking your nose into a case he’d just closed.”

I share Jack’s ironic laugh. “The first thing he said was ‘You researching a new book? You wanna make me the hero?’

“I said, ‘You’re not going to like this, Mitch.’

“I told him somebody had called me about the Avila case. I could feel his asshole pucker through the telephone. He got aggressive from the first second. The plea was signed and already ancient history, he said, not worth talking about. When I mentioned the crime lab, he shut me down right away. But I couldn’t figure out why. Gaines had always been a fairly straight shooter. ‘If the crime lab has problems,’ I said, ‘it’s going to bite you on the ass eventually. Why not deal with it now?’

“That’s when I heard a cagey tone come into his voice. ‘Why do you care?’ he asked. ‘You’re a celebrity lawyer now, hobnobbing with the Hollywood crowd. We’re still fighting down in the street. We don’t need your help, and we don’t want it.’

“‘Come on, Mitch. I know you don’t want a guilty man going free. What are you so afraid of?’

“‘Okay, screw it,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a big case coming up. Huge. A conspiracy case. We’re going to nail one of the biggest traffickers bringing weight over the border.’

“‘Who?’

“‘Victor Luna.’

“That stopped me. Luna was a cartel lieutenant. He owned a house in Houston, and he was seriously bad news. ‘What do you have on Luna?’ I asked.

“‘We’ve got him for killing an informant. He pulled the trigger himself. There’s DNA evidence critical to that case. So the last thing we need is somebody calling the integrity of the HPD lab into question, especially the serology section.’

“‘I get that,’ I told him, ‘but the Avila case was just a simple fuckup. Dr. Kirmani should have done a chemical test and didn’t. That’s easy to explain.’

“Gaines only grunted. I felt like I was missing something. ‘I don’t get it,’ I told him. ‘Is this like the tip of an iceberg over there?’

“‘Wake up, Opie!’ he snapped. ‘There were problems in that lab when you were trying cases here. Anybody who didn’t see that was wearing blinders. We all know they operate on a shoestring. And like everything else, you get what you pay for.’

“‘That lab work is deciding whether or not people go to the injection chamber,’ I said.

“But Gaines had heard all he wanted to hear. ‘I don’t have time for your holier-than-thou bullshit,’ he said. ‘I still work for a living. You want to stick your nose in this, go ahead. But the boss is liable to break it for you. You might have been his heir apparent back in the day, but you quit the team. Joe’s got his priorities, and he wants Luna locked in the Walls Unit, waiting for the needle. See how far you get trying to screw that up.’ And then he slammed down the phone.”

At the top of the hill, I turn left, then left again a block later onto Linton Avenue, the heart of Natchez’s Garden District. On both sides of the broad street, three-story Victorians sited on steep hills peer down at us like mansions in a child’s fairy tale. “Clearly I was going to be swimming against the current,” I say to Jack.

“Did you kick it up the chain to your old boss, the DA?”

“No. I decided to go down and see the Avila family—at least the mother—and to talk to Maribel if I could. I felt I owed them that much.”

“Even with Sarah as sick as she was?”

“The whole thing only took an hour. The Avilas lived down in Gulfton, which was just a few miles south of Tanglewood. Gulfton was one of the original areas of Hispanic settlement in Houston. By the late seventies, it was wall-to-wall apartment complexes, built for young singles who’d moved in during the oil boom. When the oil industry crashed, those complexes emptied out. The ones that didn’t go bankrupt filled up with Latino families. By the late eighties, a lot of Salvadorans were moving in. Crime skyrocketed with overcrowding, and the rest of Houston started calling it the Gulfton Ghetto. This was a stone’s throw from an ex-president, right down Chimney Rock Road. I drove down there while Sarah was dozing and Annie was watching a movie with Mom.”