The Hidden Law (21 page)

Michael’s room had been furnished by his parents’ fantasy of what their son should be. The neat double bed was covered with a goose down bedspread, and on the wall above it was a map of the world, as if Michael had ever dreamed of going any place other than where drugs could take him. A rolltop desk sat unused in the corner. Bookshelves held only a few paperbacks, a baseball mitt cracked from disuse, and a tennis racquet in need of re-stringing. Michael sat on his bed in jeans and a black T-shirt, smoking a cigarette, watching me warily.

“I visited your grandmother this afternoon,” I said. “She told me you had had visitors while you were staying with her last time.”

He made a show of tapping ash from the cigarette. “So what?”

“A boy and a girl who came in a little white sports car,” I said. “Angela and Tino Peña.”

He shook his head. “She’s an old woman, she doesn’t know.”

I ignored him. “She knows what she saw, and now I know, too. It’s time to tell the truth.”

He leaned back, against the headboard. “I told you the truth, you just don’t believe me.”

“Michael, Tino killed his father. That makes him guilty of murder, but if you participated, if you helped him in any way, before or after, that makes you guilty, too, as an accomplice or a co-conspirator. Michael,” I said, “you can’t protect him anymore. He’s going to jail. The only question is whether you’re going with him.”

He stared at me from behind a screen of cigarette smoke. His parents’ voices drifted from down the hall. They were arguing, in Spanish. He took a drag from the cigarette, put it out. “I didn’t know.”

“You better tell me about it.”

“Tino has a girlfriend, she was in the court.”

“The one in gold lamé,” I said.

He looked at me blankly. “Yeah, I guess, the blond one. She’s like, thirty or something. His dad told him to break up with her. Tino said he would, but he kept going out with her. The old man found out about it and made him change schools and come back to LA.”

“He met this woman in Berkeley? What was she doing down here?”

“She came with him. His dad beat the shit out of him when she showed up. He told Tino if he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, he would cut it off for him. He made the bitch go back up to Berkeley. After that, he kept his eye on Tino, checked up on him. Like, when Tino was studying in the library at night, his dad would call and make sure he was there.”

“The woman came back,” I said.

“Yeah, he rented her an apartment in Hollywood.”

“Peña called Tino in the library the night he was killed,” I said, “but it wasn’t Tino who answered, was it? It was you.”

“How did you know that?”

I didn’t answer, wanting him to imagine I knew more than I actually did.

“Tino would tell the old man he was going to the library at night, then pick me up and drop me off there, while he went to screw his girlfriend. When the old man called, I talked to him.”

“He must have recognized your voice,” I said.

Michael snickered. “By that time of night, the old man was so drunk he didn’t even know his own voice. I never said much, anyway. Mostly he just talked about what a great man he was, what a fine father, how much he sacrificed for his kids.”

I remembered the night Peña had called my house and Josh had answered. Josh had also said Peña was so drunk he could hardly make out what he was saying.

“Go on,” I told Michael.

He stubbed his cigarette into the ashtray. “Tino picked me up when the library closed at midnight and dropped me off, then he went home.”

“What happened the day Peña was killed?”

“Tino called me and asked me to go to the library for him. So I went, you know. No big deal. But when he picked me up, he was, dressed down, you know, like a homeboy. It was real funny because Tino’s particular about his clothes. And he wasn’t driving his own car. He had this old beater.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“Sure,” he said. “He told me he was playing a joke on his girlfriend. He said it was her fantasy to fuck a homeboy, so he was going to surprise her. I thought, whatever.”

“And the next day you heard about Peña’s murder and you figured it out.”

“Later,” he said. “Not right away, but I started asking him questions. Finally, he told me. And he told me I had to help him.”

“Why?”

“Cause he said, if I didn’t help him, he would claim I was in on it, too.”

“Yes,” I said, “I can see how he would say that, but you knew you were clean. Why didn’t you just tell him to go fuck himself?”

For a moment, he didn’t answer. He was staring at a picture inside his head and it was hurting. “For Angela,” he said, finally. “Angela knew.” He looked at me, as if I could tell him why she had helped her brother kill their father, but all he said was, “She knew.”

“Still, Michael,” I said, softly, “even if you loved her, it’s still your life you were risking, your freedom.”

“I don’t have any life without Angela,” he said. “And Mr. Rios, she’s pregnant. She’s pregnant with my baby.”

After a moment, I said, “So you were willing to risk prison for her by letting yourself get tried for Gus Peña’s murder.”

“It’s no big deal,” he explained wearily. “It’s not like I got a life. She told me she would wait for me.”

“And you have a record,” I said, fitting together another piece. “For armed robbery. Did Tino know you had used a toy gun?”

He went red. “I couldn’t tell anyone about that.”

“So Tino assumed you’d used a real gun which, of course, made you an even better suspect in his father’s murder.” I looked at him, shook my head. “Maybe you thought you were helping Angela, but it was Tino you were doing the real favor for.”

“For her, too,” he insisted. “It’s how I showed her how much I loved her. My baby girl. I can take care of her. Her old man was such an asshole to her.”

“Did Peña know you were going out with her?”

“Fuck no. He would have killed me.”

“When did you first start seeing her?” I asked, a thought forming in the back of my mind.

“She brought him to SafeHouse, and she, like, saw me, and remembered me from when she came here.” He frowned. “She was pretty stuck up, but then, you know, she got to know me better. That’s when it started. She’s not stuck up, Mr. Rios. She’s just real shy, really quiet.” He said it as tenderly as if he was speaking to her. “She’s my baby. My baby girl.”

I was drawing my own conclusions about Angela Peña, and they weren’t charitable. She had played on his attraction to her to bring him into the plot to kill her father, because anyone could see that Michael Ruiz was starved for love. He was dying for lack of it, and from the drugs he used as a substitute. He had been born not belonging, not in this room and not in this family. He had tried to win acceptance from the homeboys in his father’s old neighborhood, but they had seen him for what he was: a suburban kid who had fried his brains on drugs, not the kind of survivor you needed to be to make it on the streets. The only place he had really belonged was at his grandmother’s reliquary of a house, where he could be half-dead and no one minded.

And then Angela had come into his life, and had given him something even drugs had failed to provide him, someone seemingly weaker than himself whom he could take care of. I wondered whether it was she or Tino who thought up telling Michael she was pregnant. Tino, probably; he seemed to be the real moving force behind all of this, but it was hard to believe Angela was blameless. For a moment, I considered disillusioning Michael to enlist his cooperation in what I wanted to do next, but the way he had talked about her, I didn’t think it would work. I took another tack. If I could persuade him she wasn’t involved, he might not warn her that I knew.

“Michael, have you considered the possibility that Angela didn’t know that Tino was going to kill their father?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, Tino is the one with the problem. In his situation, I would use anyone I could to protect myself. Maybe even my sister.”

He seized upon this, wanting to believe in her innocence. “You mean, like, he told her if she didn’t talk to me, he would say she was in it all along?”

“Something like that.”

“What a prick,” he said. “He’s the same as his old man. Wait until I tell her it’s OK.”

“Michael,” I said, “do me this favor. Don’t call her until I tell you it’s all right.” “Why?”

“Because I’m going to try to talk Tino into turning himself in.”

“Good luck, man,” he said, genuinely alarmed for me.

I
WAS WAITING IN
my office for Tino Peña to keep our appointment. It was nearly seven. That morning, I had gone to Southland University where Tino went to law school—had gone to law school, rather, having dropped out two days after his father’s funeral—and tracked down the student worker who had checked IDs at the law library the night Gus was killed. She had remembered the boy with the peculiar mole beneath his eye who had come in that night. Later, playing out a hunch, I’d called the vital records department at the Hall of Administration for Alameda County, where Berkeley was located, and confirmed Agustin Peña, Jr., and Jamie Starr had obtained a marriage license the previous December. Then, I’d dictated a long memorandum detailing every fact that connected Tino to his father’s murder and left it in Emma’s in-basket to be transcribed in the morning.

Now, as the time approached, I switched on the intercom button on my phone, connecting me to an office at the end of the hall where Freeman Vidor was waiting to listen in on my conversation with Tino. When I had told Freeman what I planned to do, he had urged me to call the police, and turn my evidence over to them. I had refused.

Tino Peña was not just a boy who had killed his father. He was my mirror and I wanted to look into him, and for him to look into me. I wanted to give him a chance to explain to me and himself why he had done it. He would need to know, for the long road ahead of him, not just to the inevitable trial, but also to the rest of his life.

I’d been thinking about the hidden law. The hidden law that takes us for what we are, and answers nothing when we lie. Gus Peña’s life had been a lie, a whirlwind by which he sought to distract himself from the abiding sadness at his core. With his long El Greco face, he was a martyr to
machismo,
the tragic code by which his father and mine had lived, mistaking fearlessness for courage. They weren’t the same, I knew that now. Courage requires hope. That’s what I wanted to tell Tino, who had already demonstrated his lack of fear.

I heard footsteps coming up the hall, and then he was standing in the doorway. Looking at him, in jeans and a bulky Berkeley sweatshirt, his hair plastered down and gleaming, I saw the resemblance between Tino Peña and Michael Ruiz. I had missed it before, but before I hadn’t been looking for it.

“Come in, Tino, have a seat.”

The boy walked slowly toward me, and sat down. He said, “You said you had something to tell me about my dad’s murder.”

His eyes were watchful. His hands lay uneasily in his lap, pushed against something hard beneath the sweatshirt, tucked into his waistband. A gun.

“I understand you’ve dropped out of law school,” I said.

It caught him off-guard and made him even more nervous. He said, “No, I’m just taking a quarter off. My mom needs me at home.”

“What kind of law do you plan to practice?”

He relaxed. These questions were familiar to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll probably go into politics.”

“Like your father,” I said. “You ought to be extremely successful, judging from the eulogy you gave at his funeral. It was very moving.”

“Thanks,” he muttered.

“It didn’t seem odd until later, when I thought about it,” I said. “You never once used the word ‘love.’”

He stiffened. “You didn’t hear right.”

“No, I listened very carefully. You know, Tino, working on Michael’s defense, I’ve learned a lot about your father. Everyone agrees he was a dazzling politician, but a hard man to know and a hard man to love.”

“My father was the best,” he said, passionately.

“The best father?” I wondered. “The best husband?”

“What do you want, Mr. Rios?” he asked carefully.

“The truth,” I said. “I want to give you the opportunity to tell me the truth.”

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t understand.”

“Let me tell you a few things about your father, and you add them up for me, OK?” Without waiting for a response, I said, “Your father was drunk when he died, Tino, even though he’d made a speech just a couple of weeks earlier claiming that he’d overcome his alcoholism. Even before then, after he’d killed that man in Sacramento, after he’d gone into SafeHouse, he sent your mother to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s with a busted lip and a black eye. You drove her there.”

He watched me intently, his dark eyes cold and hard, his hands pressing against his waist.

“And while he was at SafeHouse, he conducted business as usual, in violation of every rule of the house. He got away with it because SafeHouse depends on state money and he knew it. I think that’s probably why he went there in the first place. Am I right?”

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.

“It was all a show,” I said. “Something for public consumption. In private, he hadn’t changed at all. He still drank, he still beat your mother. He forced you to transfer from Berkeley to break up your marriage.”

He opened his mouth in astonishment. “How did you—”

“A hunch.”

The astonishment faded. Grimly, he said, “That punk talked.”

“Not willingly,” I said. “I went to visit his grandmother. She told me he had had visitors, you and your sister. She thought you were very nice. But that’s always been your role, hasn’t it, Tino? The nice boy, the obedient son.”

“He’ll get off,” he said. “The eyewitness couldn’t identify him in a million years.”

“Because he wasn’t there,” I said. “I know. He was sitting in your carrel at the law library at Southland. The girl who let him in remembered the mole,” I touched my face where Michael’s teardrop was tattooed. “You’re right. He’ll get off, but that raises interesting questions about where you were.”