Breach of Trust

11

I hadn’t thought of Ernesto Ramirez for six months. After Talia’s and Emily’s deaths, I had dropped out of society. The trial finished without me. I hadn’t followed up with Ernesto and, presumably, neither had anyone else.

That was kind of funny, as I thought about it, because I had spent the last six months blaming myself for not being the driver of that SUV that night, allowing my sleep-deprived wife to navigate a winding road in the rain, but I had never included the reason for my absence-Ernesto-in the equation.

It came flooding back now, images from that time, mostly the haunting ones by the roadside, the identification of the bodies, the phone call to Talia’s parents, but also Ernesto-his ambiguous expression when we first interviewed him about the Wozniak murder; the fear in his voice later on, as I homed in on him.

And most of all, the panic in his eyes when I’d slapped him with a subpoena, forcing him to testify to whatever knowledge he possessed. I wondered, for no particular reason, if Ernesto had shown up in court that following week. I was bluffing more than anything. The subpoena was real, no question, but I had threatened to put him on the stand and question him all day long, when in fact I wouldn’t have done so. I wouldn’t have flown blind in front of the jury. I hadn’t even given notice of the subpoena to the federal prosecutors yet. I was just trying to force Ernesto into a corner.

Esmeralda Ramirez walked in behind Marie. She was a tiny woman with long black hair pulled back, a youthful face save for prominent worry lines dancing along her forehead, and what appeared to me to be a very modest demeanor, gripping her purse with both hands in front and only briefly making eye contact as she walked in. I took her hand and she squeezed mine softly.

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said. “Do you know who I am?” She was from Mexico, I recalled, and the accent confirmed it, but she spoke English comfortably.

“I know your husband.”

She watched me a second. Her expression changed a bit. “You know him?”

“A bit, yes.” I didn’t understand her inquiry.

“My husband is dead,” she said.

“Oh, well, I’m very sor-”

I didn’t, I couldn’t finish that sentence. Dread filled my chest. Ernesto Ramirez was dead, and here was his widow in my office. And she wasn’t here, I gathered, to have me administer his estate.

“You didn’t know,” she said.

I shook my head, no.

“But you were the lawyer, weren’t you?”

The lawyer. I put my hands flat on my desk. “Six months ago, I was trying to get some information about a case from him, yes. Is that what you’re referring to?”

“I don’t know what I’m referring to.” A trace of frustration had crept into her voice. “My husband, his way-he wouldn’t talk about something like that with me. It would be his job to worry about things like that, not mine. I knew only a little bit.”

“Tell me how he died, Mrs. Ramirez.”

“He was shot to death.” Her dark eyes trailed off.

I steeled myself, not wanting to ask the next question. I felt like I knew what the answer was going to be before I asked. “When was he shot?”

“June twenty-second. A Friday.”

I closed my eyes. June twenty-second was the day I served him with the subpoena. June twenty-second was the day I waited in my office for him to call, rather than traveling with Talia and Emily to my in-laws. June twenty-second was when life, as I knew it, ended.

“Does that mean anything to you?” she asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, but it seemed like a whole lot more than maybe. “Did they catch the shooter?”

“No. He was killed in Liberty Park. That’s in La Zona. Do you know what that is?”

I nodded. And I could see where the police would have a hard time making a case. “They figure it was a gang shooting,” I said. “But in the ‘zone,’ that gang could be the Cannibals, could be the Lords. Could be random gang violence, could be intentional because your husband was trying to steal away their recruits from gang life. No way of knowing, and next to impossible to get anyone to admit they saw anything. Is that about how they explained it?”

Her eyebrows rose, almost imperceptibly. “Pretty much exactly.”

“But you think they’re wrong.”

She was quiet for a while. No, of course she hadn’t accepted the cops’ conclusion. That’s in part because no one ever really accepts an unsolved murder of a loved one. The crime becomes all they have left of their spouse or child, whatever, and knowing that your loved one was murdered, but that nobody will pay for it, is like walking around with a missing limb.

But the other reason Esmeralda Ramirez wasn’t buying the cops’ theory was, in a word, me.

“I knew there was something wrong,” she told me. “I didn’t know what. He mentioned a lawyer. I didn’t understand. I asked him if he was in trouble with the law or something. He told me, ‘Not in the way you think.’ He talked about a lawyer but said it wasn’t a lawyer for him. It was just a lawyer who wanted to know something. A lawyer who was persistent.”

I didn’t want to interrupt her, but when it was clear she was done, I said, “And he was reluctant to talk to that lawyer. To me.”

She nodded. Her eyes trailed up and she started to speak, then stopped.

“Go ahead, Mrs. Ramirez. Ask away.”

“Call me Essie.” She thought for a moment. “You talked to him and then left him alone for a while. And then, after a time, you came back. Is that right?”

It took me a moment, but I realized that she was correct. I’d worked on Ernesto pretty hard about a month out from trial. Then I gave him some space, a few weeks, and called him, at which time he told me to go jump in a lake. I let it lie for months before returning near the end of the trial to make a final, full-court press.

She said, “Whatever it was you did worked, I think. At first, I mean.”

“When I first approached him.”

“Yes. He wouldn’t say much to me. He was so protective, Ernesto. So protective.” Her eyes welled up but she kept her chin high and her voice strong. She cleared her throat. “I think you convinced him to talk about what he knew.”

“But he didn’t.”

“Apparently not. I remember he came home one day-he was very upset.”

“Scared?”

She angled her head. “Upset more than scared. Kind of-decepciono. I don’t-”

“Disappointed,” I translated.

She nodded. “Thank you. He said to me, ‘La verdad no importa.’ The truth doesn’t matter. He said it wasn’t worth prison. And then he said he didn’t want to discuss it with me or with the lawyer or with anyone. That was it. He never brought it up until a few days before-before the-”

Before I returned, accosting him and hounding him.

“And what did he say then?”

She shook her head. “Little. Just that the lawyer was back, and he didn’t want to tell him anything. He couldn’t,” she corrected herself. “He said he couldn’t tell you.”

I put a hand over my face. I couldn’t believe this was happening. “I tried to talk about this to the police after he was killed, but there was nothing to tell them. They kept asking for details and what did I have? I didn’t even have your name.”

It raised a question that hadn’t yet occurred to me. “How did you get my name?”

She nodded and reached into her purse. “It’s funny, how long it took me even to clean out his drawers. You don’t want to do those things because it’s so-final, I guess.”

I understood her completely. Talia’s clothes still hung in our closet. Emily’s room was exactly as it was the day she left with her mother for the trip to see Grandma and Grandpa.

“I found this, of all places, as a bookmark in a book he was reading.” She produced a business card, and even across the desk I recognized its style. It was a business card bearing the name of Shaker, Riley and Flemming. She handed it to me. “Your card. Turn it over.”

I did. On the back of my card, in black ink, a small diagram had been written:

ABW > PCB > IG > CC?

“Do you know what that means?” she asked.

I put the card down and blew out a sigh. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want a mystery. I didn’t want to go back. A door that I’d been trying to close was now opening, a crack at a time, only it wasn’t sunlight pouring through but an ugly, lethal darkness. I didn’t want to think about Ernesto Ramirez because it made me think of my wife and daughter.

“ABW is the name of Adalbert Wozniak’s company,” I managed. “I have no idea what the rest of this means.”

“Adal-? Who’s that? Was he a friend of my husband’s?”

“Not particularly, according to your husband.” I gave her the Reader’s Digest on Bert Wozniak, including that I had been investigating his murder and thought that her husband, Ernesto, had information on that subject. “But I never knew what he knew,” I said.

“So we know nothing,” she said, bitter and disappointed. Another dead end.

Her composure was on the verge of crumbling. She was a proud woman, I could see. Proud like Ernesto as I remembered him. They made a good couple. Ernesto had beaten some odds and made a decent life for himself and Essie and their two kids. He’d come upon some incriminating information, undoubtedly, something dangerous, and he wouldn’t have been the first person who would choose, in that instance, to keep his mouth shut about it. He would have been thinking about his family.

But Essie Ramirez was wrong. I knew two things.

I knew that I got her husband murdered.

And I knew that I would find the person who killed him.