Breach of Trust

50

Scarface was worn down, I thought, spent from the emotion and from unloading everything. I’d seen that as a prosecutor, the effect of purging information, especially revelations that triggered guilt. The release of the burden was palpable across their faces. I once had a suspect fall asleep in the interrogation room after confessing to stabbing his pregnant girlfriend.

“One more thing,” I said. I had regained my balance. The adrenaline surge had passed. I was relatively sure now that this guy was not going to put a bullet in my head. “Essie Ramirez said that Ernesto was going to do something about this. She said I’d convinced him to talk. Do you know if he did? If he talked to anyone about this?”

I thought I saw him smile. But it wasn’t one of those whimsical grins. It was a smile of pain. Bitterness. He was reliving the memory. And, I thought, he was deciding to share it with me, something he hadn’t planned to give up. I saw that all the time in interrogations, too. The breakthrough. You get past that initial wall of denial and deception, and inside is a messy, gooey mix of truth and emotion. They end up telling you more than you even knew to ask.

“Man, Nesto didn’t say nothin’.”

I wasn’t clear on his emphasis. It took me a minute. Finally, I got there.

“But you did,” I said.

He nodded his head. “Nesto said it was the right thing to do.”

“He convinced you to do something about this. So-what did you do?”

“We went to the cops, Nesto and me. That’s what we did.” He flapped his arms. The gun remained in his right hand. “I fuckin’ told’em. I told ’em, Kiko did the Polish guy, and Joey fuckin’ Espinoza was the guy who called it.”

“The cops-”

He burst out laughing, waving his arms and the gun, pacing around in a circle. “Oh, man, they fuckin’ loved me. They was all in my face. They said, how do you know? What proof you got? How you know it was Joey? Just like you did, man. Kept askin’, did Kiko say it was Joey? Did he say Joey? Just like you.”

Cops not believing a gang member when he offered information? Not hard to believe.

“They said I was a liar, ese. They told me, liars go to prison. We gonna lock you up. One-thousand-one, they kept sayin’. The fuckin’ brownies, they pull out my sheet, they tell me, who’d believe you, convict? They tell me, ten years, man. Ten years for lying to us, the priors you got.” He looked at me. “You like that? They gonna lock me up for that. For doing somethin’ good. Nesto, he grabbed me, he said, forget it. Forget it. Not worth it.”

Not worth prison, Ernesto had told his wife. Ernesto hadn’t been talking about himself. He’d been talking about his friend here, Scarface.

Scarface kicked an empty cardboard box into the air, almost falling down in the process. He was drunk with rage and despair, which wouldn’t have bothered me so much if he wasn’t holding a gun.

“Go home, lawyer-man,” he said.

“Wait.”

But he wasn’t listening. He’d worked himself into a lather now, the pain and anger meshing together, making him about the last person who should be walking the city streets with a loaded weapon. But I wasn’t going to be able to stop him. So I let him go.

I felt the cold wind, really felt it, for the first time that evening. But I stood alone in that alley for a long time. I’d learned three things tonight. The first was that Federico Hurtado-Kiko-had been the one who killed Adalbert Wozniak. Second, Kiko had all but named Joey Espinoza as the person behind the murder-to cover up a connection to Delroy, his former brother-in-law who was handed a beverage contract over Wozniak’s company. And third, Ernesto Ramirez and his friend here, Scarface, had tried to do the right thing and report the information they had to the authorities, and for their troubles had been threatened with perjury and sent packing.

I was getting closer. But there was someone else. Joey Espinoza couldn’t have had a direct conversation with Kiko. He’d have to have balls the size of Jupiter to meet with someone like Kiko while he was also meeting on a daily basis with Christopher Moody and his federal agents, helping them nail Hector. Was it Charlie Cimino? Greg Connolly, the chair of the state board who gave Joey Espinoza’s brother-in-law the contract over Wozniak’s company?

I didn’t know. There was someone else, and I had suspects but no facts.

I reached into my pocket and turned off the tape recorder. I hit rewind and played it to make sure I’d captured everything okay. Then I stuffed it back in my pocket and walked out of the alley.