The Innocents Read online

  “Rodriguez?” Wil looked up from coring a winter nellis.

  “He’s coming up, said it was important. About a friend of his. Said he hoped you were between jobs.”

  “Okay. You want to talk now?”

  “Ruin our one day—isn’t that what you really mean?”

  “What’s it going to solve, Leese? Beyond dredging up a lot of old…”

  “Four years this February, Wil. I love you, and I hate being a bitch, but I’m running out of time.”

  THREE

  While Lisa worked on her computer, Wil settled in front of the window, trying to remember the last time he’d seen Paul Rodriguez. Ten months, a year? The occasion was easier: wrecked in a bar down on lower State where Paul had come to pull him off the reef. Telling his friend to fuck off, leave me alone—taking a swing at him finally and falling down in a cascade of Coors bottles. Vintage Hardesty then.

  His eyes drifted up and down the coast to nineteen years back.

  He had them in the field glasses.

  They were on a small dock; nothing much, a few boards sticking out into the river—the mother waving frantically, the baby under her arm screeching and kicking, the toddler clutching her leg. It was almost dark.

  Miller ordered the Point Marlow slowly toward shore. Full alert: They’d been briefed on the Point Faro ambush, VC snipers picking off a man and ripping up the bridge.

  Wil joined Rodriguez aft at the .50 caliber.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked the gunner’s mate.

  “I’m not too thrilled about them bushes,” Rodriguez said. “Congville, you ask me.”

  Both dripped with the heat and humidity. The smell of rotting vegetation rolled over the deck in waves. Actions clicked as the crew checked their weapons.

  Rodriguez spat. “But hey, women and kids in distress? Semper Paratus, Lieutenant. Watch your ass.”

  Wil could hear the baby’s screams as they made shore. His grip tightened on the M-16; close in now, the mother’s eyes hollow with fear. Miller reversed engines then backed off, preparing to board the trio. The Point Marlow drifted momentarily.

  Then they lucked out. The first mortar round fell short.

  Twenty yards away, the pier dissolved in a dirty wall of mud and flame. Degtyarev fire spat from the undergrowth.

  “Sheeit!” Rodriguez opened up with the .50 caliber.

  Five-foot geysers single-filed along the water’s edge as the ship’s other machine guns hammered at the thicket beyond. Miller shot the Point Marlow ahead and starboard toward the safety of mid-river. The mortar mount was thumping now; bullets pinged and sang in the rigging.

  Turning with the ship, Wil heard himself scream as an arc of automatic rifle fire caught him, the impact spinning him over the side and into the muddy wake.

  He was drowning by the time Rodriguez found him, spitting brown water while Rodriguez somehow kept them afloat and Miller swung the gray patrol craft around and the crew covered them with everything they had.

  Back on deck he remembered the tracers, the explosions, yelling and blood, the numbness becoming pain. And three figures blown apart in a fountain of brackish muck. Then nothing until Rodriguez’s happy wake-up call at the field hospital.

  “Fuck me, it’s alive.”

  Wil watched the Sunday traffic, heavy now with people going home. He’d been lucky as hell: three rounds, clean exits, no extensive damage; scarring and a shoulder that now and then told him when to come out of the water. Four months recuperating.

  A year after that he’d returned—five months aboard his own eighty-two-footer, intercepting Delta contraband before going ashore for port security work: off-loading explosives, boarding vessels, inspecting cargo. The odd run-in with profiteers and hot-shot brass.

  What intrigued him most was the people stuff, the sabotage, assault, smuggling, murder. He’d been drawn to it and in time become well enough known to get requested for a number of inter-service investigations. And the politics that went along.

  Frustrated as he’d been by Vietnam, there were small victories: he’d helped people, been enriched by the diversity, given—and been given—friendship. Indeed, some of the friends had gone from active duty into law enforcement. In a sense, he had, too—well-distanced from administrative structures and chains of command.

  Rodriguez pulled in at six, climbed the stairs puffing and grinning; appraising Wil. “Lookin’ mellow, bro. Glad to see it.”

  “You, too, Jefe.” Wil held him at arm’s length: still the bearish five-ten he remembered but with a layer of softness now over the military muscle. He grinned back. “Always knew you were a man of substance.”

  “Brought you some’n, smart guy. Homemade tamales.” He handed Lisa a paper sack. “Compliments of Raeann.”

  “Thank you Raeann,” she said, putting the bag in the fridge. “Can I get you something, Paul? Nachos?”

  “No thanks, chica, ate before I left.” He hugged her. “You still crunchin’ them numbers?”

  “Them crunching me is more like it. It’s been crazy lately.”

  Paul laughed. “Must be pretty good judging by that little black number in the carport. LISA CPA, no less.”

  “Keeps the corporate types impressed.”

  “Oh, right, can’t be fun or anything.” Paul rested an arm on her shoulder, faced Wil. “Must be nice, huh?”

  Wil nodded. Despite himself, the Acura was an issue—nothing rational, Lisa deserved it and they weren’t hurting for money. Her money. “How’s retirement?” he said to change the subject.

  Paul went with it. “Should’a stayed in, man. I sleep late, eat good, chase mama and the checks come in regular as ever. Que vida!”

  Late fifties by now, Wil figured. At his retirement bash everyone turned out, admirals to E-1s: E-9 gunnery Paul Rodriguez had played well over thirty years. The face was round and weathered and quick to let you know where you stood with it, the lines etched deep. Service length hair, ebbed back a bit now, was remarkably free of gray as was the mustache he’d let bush out.

  Lisa popped him a Corona as Wil freshened coffees they’d been working on. For a while they admired the Channel oil rigs, Christmas-tree-festive on the horizon. Talked of old times. And new.

  “Man I know needs help, Wil. I thought of you—who else, huh?”

  “Not that I made it easy.”

  Paul dismissed the remark with a wave.

  “It’s appreciated,” Wil said. “You know how it’s been.”

  “Hey, por nada, okay? Anyway, Rae and I are friends with this guy, Ignacio Reyes. Little hard to get close to, but a good man. Couple times a week we eat in his restaurant.”

  Paul drained his beer. “Lately he’s been real stand-offish. Looks tired, drawn out—like his blood forgot to circulate. I ask him polite what’s the matter. He shines me, nice, but distant. I persist—friends, right?

  “So he pulls me off in this corner booth. Time he tells somebody, he says. Then he comes out with it—you ready for this?” Paul got himself another Corona, swigged some and sat back down.

  “My friend tells me he’s a murderer. Yeah, sure, I think. Tears come then, he tells me he killed his son. More tears. Benito, he says. Now this man ain’t just anybody. He’s made it, owns ten restaurants—Papa Gomez, chicken places, good ones. He works like a mother and goes to church and minds his own business. I know this man’s family, know his wife’s dead and mostly by himself he’s raised six kids. No way the guy’s a murderer.”

  He paused. “But there ain’t no Benito. At least not that I’m aware of.”

  Lisa set down her mug. A crawl started in Wil’s scalp.

  “It’s late, so he closes the restaurant, gets out the mescal. The one with the worm? We drink a while, the mescal works. He tells me the bodies they found in the desert, one of ’em’s Benito’s.”

  Lisa joined Wil in the big chair.

  “It’s the medal, he says, the Saint Christopher medal. In the desert, he says.” Paul massaged the back of his nec
k. “Then I get what he’s talking about. Sheeit.”

  Wil sat forward. “Saddleback?”

  He watched Paul nod. For days there’d been little else in the news: gallons of ink, grim-faced TV reporters, sagebrush, solemn lawmen, Saddleback Butte silhouetted against the sky. The Innocents, they were calling it, child murders. Seven graves they’d found, bones and the medal—all that had been released, anyway, that and the inscription in the hope that someone would come forward.

  No one had. Without breaks the national news had eased up some. Local pubs, however, were still in a frenzy, aspiring politicians demanding greater efforts of the sheriff’s department. Dead kids stuck in the public’s craw.

  Wil said, “You think he’s serious?”

  Paul drew a breath, exhaled. “I’m out of my league here, man, that’s why I told him about you. But I saw his face.” He paused. “Hell yes, he’s serious.”

  “Has he been to the police about it?” Lisa asked.

  “He’s afraid of the law, chica, doesn’t know what to do. I told him I thought Wil could help. After a while, he said okay.”

  Wil rubbed the scar between his eyebrows. “You tell him anything about me?”

  “Sure. That you’re a private dick and real close-mouthed. Faster than a speeding bullet, more or less.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Lighten up, man. The guy wants to hire you.”

  “To do what?”

  “Said he’ll tell you himself,” Paul said.

  FOUR

  Wil covered the seventy-five miles to the San Fernando Valley in just over an hour. Winter Santa Anas had blown out the usual murk leaving a tapestry ringed by unexpected mountains, the effect one of revelation, like focusing a lens or seeing the girl next door in a party dress. Sharply defined, the Valley, like L.A., wasn’t pretty—he’d never call it that—but it made you look.

  For over a year now, most of his jobs—those that panned out—had taken him south, away from the local rep he earned during the two-year tailspin after Devin. Anything to cut the pain, slice through the black paralyzing bouts of depression, he’d done: pills, booze, dope, women, insane risks—hazy flashbacks that still raised a sweat. Lost in her own grief, Lisa stuck it out, but the investigations business Wil built up after Nam had nearly foundered. As it was, area law enforcement agencies and insurance companies were still gun-shy. Lawyers called occasionally, new ones who didn’t know him. But unlike before, they were now the ambulance chasers, accident stagers, workman’s comp shaders. Fringe types who worked the system’s cracks—and who didn’t give a damn about how good you’d been and how far you’d been down and that you were finally getting it back. Long as you were flexible.

  Following Paul’s directions, he took Topanga to Ventura Boulevard. On both sides things sprawled: supermarkets, shops, malls, multimovies, billboards. The empty-promise land.

  Wil made a turn toward the hills and thought about the Innocents.

  Seven kids they’d found, one of them fathered by the man he was going now to meet, a man whose pain was his, the wound still fresh. For the umpteenth time he pondered motives: pedophilia—serial murders—a smuggling deal gone sideways. Somewhere somebody knew something. Maybe Reyes.

  He took a peppertree’d drive to a looping cul-de-sac and parked, looked the place over. The house was newish, pseudo-Spanish and white except where storm runoff had left a brownish residue around the foundation. Curving red tile undulated on the roof, the three-car garage and what looked to be a cabaña in back. Under a Chinese elm, patchy lawn spread out, bisected by a resined pebble walk.

  His bing-bong was answered by a Mexican woman who studied him for a moment, then took his card. “Venga,” she said. Looking back frequently, she led him through a tiled entryway, watched his feet for tracks down gold shag stairs, across a vast living room to a pair of oak doors.

  As the housekeeper rapped, Wil glanced around at dated sectionals with matching chairs, arched brick fireplace, a big-screen. Nondescript landscapes claimed vertical surfaces, family pictures in various frames, the horizontal ones. The Virgin Mary smiled forgivingly from a distressed triptych. The oak doors opened.

  The man was dressed in a navy jogging suit with white piping and appeared older than the mid-sixties Rodriguez had described. He was tall, pale-skinned and blotchy with a line of mustache under a hawkish nose and eyes that hungered for sleep. Second thoughts seemed to compete with resolve until he motioned Wil inside.

  “Pase, por favor,” Ignacio Reyes said. “Come in, come in.”

  The den had a lounge-like comfort. Bookcases lined three walls; against the shuttered window was a desk, on it a coffee set and two china cups. Reyes motioned Wil toward a small couch, seated himself in a chair. He examined Wil’s card, then spoke quietly, as if it were an effort.

  “Private investigator. My friend Rodriguez said you were good at it. That he’d known you a long time.”

  “Since Vietnam,” Wil answered.

  Reyes poured them each a coffee from which rose the faint aroma of chocolate. “How old are you, Mr. Hardesty?”

  “Forty-six.”

  “You have little ones?”

  Wil shook his head, flashing on a brief ceremony: Dev’s ashes scattered from the back of a boat. In My Life playing on the tape deck.

  “I have six, grown now,” Reyes said. “My children have been everything. They run my places, worry about me. They keep Serafina alive, I see her constantly in them.” He pointed to a small ornate frame.

  Wil leaned for a closer look: a hopeful-looking bride and groom, restored and hand-tinted, gazing into each other’s eyes.

  “Twenty years she’s been gone,” Reyes said. And then, “I killed her too.”

  A brass clock chimed the hour. Beyond the doors a vacuum cleaner prowled; over the hum, something being sung in Spanish. Reyes struggled with his thoughts.

  “We lived in the Sierra Madre, northern Mexico, in one of the mountain villages.” He looked around the den. “There was no heat, no running water, no electricity. In the summer we baked, in winter we froze. All the time we were sick. We had barely enough food—a little cornmeal, greens we grew. Every so often, if we were fortunate, a squirrel or chicken.” He put a hand to his temples.

  “We had nowhere to go, our families were as poor as we were. Our only hope was in coming here.” He reached for his cup. “But that was no hope at all because we had no money.”

  Wil shifted on the couch and wondered where this was going.

  “Then we heard about this man, a border runner. We expressed interest. After a few days he came, in the night. It didn’t take him long to see we had nothing—and how badly we wanted to go. He made”—Reyes sipped, set down the cup unsteadily—”a proposal. First he told us we were lucky to have such a fine family. People he knew in Los Angeles were not as fortunate, people who wanted children, wanted to give them a good home. They would have every advantage. Be loved, have clothes, go to school. Be something. I remember the way he looked at us and at the house.

  “He told us he would take us where we wanted to go.” Reyes pulled an earlobe. “If…”

  Wil waited.

  “If we would let him have Benito.” A hoarseness crept in. “He kept saying Benito was perfect for the people he knew.”

  There was a knock. The housekeeper entered with cold turkey and a blood pressure pill for her employer, rellenos and a disapproving stare for Hardesty. As they ate, Reyes went on.

  “At first Serafina and I were adamant: Unthinkable, we said, absolutely not. But he was persuasive. He kept asking us how we could deny Benito such a life. Didn’t we want to save the family? And hadn’t we already been blessed with six fine babies, and Serafina pregnant again. Over and over. Finally we had no more answers. Finally we agreed.”

  He shut his eyes, fought for control.

  “Try to understand, Mr. Hardesty. We adored him. But we were also desperate. Giving him up seemed the only way.” He got up stiffly, moved to the desk, where he rea
ched into a drawer, emerging with a yellowed envelope. As Reyes eased back into the chair, Wil pulled out a small photo.

  “He was the youngest,” Reyes said. “Our baby.”

  Wil looked into the face of Mexico: dark eyes, large and full of promise under thin brows; black hair parted over a high forehead; a guarded smile. The boy stood there trying to fill out a coarsely woven shirt. Around his neck was a homemade drum, the sticks poised to play.

  “What could I give him?” Reyes said. “I could see the life he had, the life he could have.” His voice broke. Slowly at first, then harder, he began to weep.

  “God forgive me. He was six.”

  Drying his hands, Wil took in the gold fixtures, hand-painted tile, expensive mirrors, and thought about the boy with the big eyes. Of guilt like a millstone around a father’s neck; wounds denied their healing: things he understood too well. Reyes’ decision had gotten him here, brought him what he wanted. Then, like an Aztec priest, it had ripped his heart out.

  Reyes was picking at his lunch when Wil returned. “The rellenos were quite good,” Wil said.

  The older man raised his head. “My doctor says they’re bad for me, too much fat. All my life I’ve eaten chile rellenos. Pleasures become fewer and fewer, Mr. Hardesty. My due, perhaps.”

  “The man who took your son, who was he?”

  Reyes put down his fork, regarded his hands. “His name was Zavala—a bad man, it turned out. We crossed over a month after he took Benito. Seventeen of us he put in a small delivery van, twelve hours, no food or water. We could barely breathe. I heard later one of his trucks broke down crossing the desert, that everyone inside perished.” He swallowed his pills with a gulp. “Bolo Zavala.”

  “You know what happened to him?”

  “No, but he would be a hard one to kill. I know that.”

  Wil got out a notebook and pen. “Can you describe him?”

  “I wish to God I remembered more. Short, young then, and very muscular. Broken nose, I think…” He shrugged, refreshed their coffees.