Silent Joe

Chapter Two

I spent the next three hours at the Anaheim PD with two homicide detectives — the tall pale one was Guy Alagna and the stocky dark one was Lucia Fuentes.

As soon as I told them about Savannah, Fuentes left the interview room and stayed away for half an hour. Alagna, whose nose hooked from his face like a sharp white beak, asked me for the third time if I could describe the tall gunman to him.

“Too dark,” I said for the third time. “Too much fog. They were all wearing long coats.”

I was getting weary. I was beginning to note all the things that had changed. Would change. The rest of my life without him alive. Ever. The world was brand-new to me, and I hated it.

“And those coats again, Joe. What did they look like?”

I described the long overcoats for the third time. I looked down at my hat, balanced on my knee.

“Color?”

“Night, Detective Alagna. Fog. No colors.”

“Okay, all right.”

Then he was silent for a long beat. I could feel his stare on my face. Sooner or later, most people have to gawk.

I drank bad coffee from a foam cup and looked at the two-way mirror, picturing the men in the June fog, Will approaching. June Gloom with the blade of murder hidden in it. I strained to catch a glimpse of the Tall One’s face — just one feature, just one thing to go on. Nothing. Fog. Motion. Exhaust rising, voices. The insulting little pop of that handgun. And again.

Every few minutes a roar would start building in my ears, beginning low, like waves on a distant beach, then getting louder and louder until my head was two inches from a jet turbine. But it wasn’t a jet, it was a voice, and the voice said only three words over and over, louder and louder: you killed him you killed him you killed him you killed him you killed him you killed him you killed him...

Please stop. Remember. Eyes open, mouth shut.

I’ll get rid of this dingleberry.

How did Will know he was a dingleberry?

Will! Ah, Will Trona! Let’s talk.

The deep and resonant voice replayed in my mind with a haunting clarity. I heard the odd lilt of the words, almost cheerful.

Did the shooter know him, or just pretend to?

...you with Alex?

“And you’re sure they didn’t take anything off him?” Alagna asked again.

“They took his life, sir.”

In the corner of my eye I saw him studying me. Then I turned on him and he looked away. People are ashamed of themselves when I catch them staring, but not before I catch them.

“You know what I mean, Joe.”

“Nothing that I saw, Detective.”

“Back to the car again. They take anything from the car?”

“They never touched the car.”

“Okay, all right. So, let me get this straight — the shooter called Will by name. And Will asked if the shooter was with Alex. And Will said a deal’s a deal, or something like that, and the guy shot him in the gut?”

“The shooter said, ‘Now the deal is this.’ ”

And then he asked again about the two men I’d shot, both dead on scene when the cops got there. I told him again, exactly what had happened. He wouldn’t give me their names or anything else about them.

“So, you couldn’t see well enough to describe the man who shot your father, but you could see well enough to drop two guys, moving, with two shots.”

“Like I said, sir, they were close — twenty feet maybe.”

“I guess you’re a good shot.”

“I’m a good shot.”

Everything I told Alagna and Fuentes was correct, though I forgot a few things.

For example, I forgot to mention Will’s briefcase. He rarely went anywhere without it, so it contained the outlines of his life. More than the outlines. It held his calendar and appointment books, his notes and letters, his drafts and reports, his to-do list, his doodles. Everything he might use in a day — from a tiny tape recorder to a toothbrush and paste — Will carried with him in that old leather case. I carried it with me into the interview room and set it beside me as if it were my own. No one questioned it.

And I didn’t consider the tennis bag we’d picked up from the HACF to be Alagna’s business, either.

I wasn’t about to offer too much to a cop I didn’t know, some paleface who had to ask three times what an overcoat looked like.

I also forgot to mention Will’s gift to Jennifer Avila that evening, the two thousand dollars I’d counted and rolled. Likewise, their private words.

I forgot that I heard anything but hello and good-bye between Will, Jaime Medina and the Reverend Daniel Alter.

I forgot to recount Will’s quick conversations on his cell phone, just minutes before he died. And I wondered how I could get a phone company log of those calls. A homicide investigator sure could, but a fourth-year deputy? It would take a while.

And I forgot to mention that Mary Ann, my adoptive mother, had been blue lately, and that Will was trying hard to get home by ten.

All of that was Will’s business; none of it was Alagna’s.

Lucia Fuentes barreled back into the room. “One of the shooters is hanging on. No ID on him, but he’s alive.”

Alagna looked at me. “Maybe he can fill in some of Mr. Trona’s sizable gaps.”

I nodded but said nothing. Instead I stared down at Will’s briefcase, noting the drop of dried blood near the handle. I hoped Alagna wouldn’t notice it. I didn’t think he would.

“But I struck out on the girl,” Fuentes continued. “Nothing at all on a missing twelve-year-old named Savannah. The National Center, the FBI, Sacramento — not even Joe’s sheriffs here — nobody’s looking for her. Maybe it’s an alias.”

Alagna stared at me. “I doubt her daddy lets her run around with fifty-year-old guys after dark.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what her daddy does,” snapped Fuentes.

“Joe, you know if the supervisor was bent that way?”

I stared back at Alagna then, and a flush came to his waxy skin.

“Detective Alagna, he was a good man,” I said. “And I’ll pretend you didn’t ask that stupid question.”

“Big words from a fourth-year jailer.”

“We can settle differences any way you’d like, sir.”

“I don’t settle.”

“Come on, you assholes,” said Fuentes. “What’s wrong with you, Guy?”

Alagna looked away, his ears turning red. It was quite a contrast with his white beak of a nose.

What was wrong with Guy was that he was afraid of me, and angry about it. Nothing in the world seems to make healthy, tough cops madder than a twenty-four-year-old monster who can’t be intimidated.

I not only have a face that looks like something made in hell, but I’m tall and strong. I’m conversant with most weapons, and I’ve spent nearly my whole life learning how to defend myself — every method and school, every technique you can imagine — so that what happened when I was nine months old never happens again. I’ve promised myself that it will never happen again.

But my best weapon is that people sense I’m not afraid of anything. Maybe it’s the scar tissue. My eyes. My voice. I really don’t know.

In fact, there are two things I’m afraid of. One is my father, my real father, the one who did this to me when I was nine months old. His name is Thor Svendson and he’s out there somewhere. If he ever appears again I’ll be ready. I have five black belts, two regional Golden Gloves titles and a Sheriff Department Distinguished Marksman pin to prove I’m ready.

The other thing that terrified me — although I didn’t know it until then — was living without Will. And of the two, life without Will was by far the worst.

So, with my ruined face and apparent fearlessness, most people are afraid of me. It’s been true since I was very young. As I grew used to people fearing me, I tried to develop good manners, to strike some balance. I came to believe that they were mandatory for a man with a face like mine. I’ve worked almost as hard at having good manners as I have at mastering Ken-po, or the recoil nuances of the Colt .45 ACP.

“So Joe,” said Lucia Fuentes. “Explain the girl to us. If your father wasn’t that way, then what was he doing with her?”

“I’m not sure. He said he was trying to do a good deed.”

They looked at each other.

Then the voice started building again inside me: you killed him you killed him you killed him...

I felt like I was in that fog again, the fog that rolled in the night before. Secret fog. Killer fog. I wished I could blow it all away, step from it into something clear and sunny and true. I couldn’t do that, but I had a quiet spot I could go to. I can go there any time I want. So I went.

“I’ve told you what I know,” I said, standing, hat in hand. “Call me anytime if I can help more. I’d like to know who the girl was, Detectives. I’d like to help her if I can. Pardon me, but I have to go to work now, or I’ll be late.”

Alagna looked at Fuentes like she should stop me. Fuentes looked at me like someone missing her bus. When I walked out the sun was just starting to come up.

The reporters converged and I was happy to see them. I just gave them the basics, but I made sure they knew that a girl named Savannah was loose in the night. I described her exactly, right down to her clothing and backpack and good manners and fine straight hair. I even sketched her face on my notepad as best I could. It came out slightly better than nothing.

The reporters liked this: here was a chance to help find her, maybe do something good. They’re the second most cynical people, after cops.

Sunrise in the county, and me alone in Will’s car, the freeways jammed already, everybody acting like Will was still alive. What was wrong with these fools? And what was wrong with Alagna and Fuentes, letting me drive off in a car that was part of a homicide scene, instead of impounding it?

I got through to Mom on my cell phone again. Reverend Daniel Alter had met her at the hospital and she was now in the Chapel of Light sanctuary. She had taken a mild sedative. Her voice sounded light and insubstantial. One of the assistant ministers was going to take her home because she felt too woozy to drive. I told her I’d drive her home myself, but she insisted that I work, stay focused, stay useful. I told her I’d be over as soon as my shift was over.

In the sheriff’s gym I showered, shaved and put on my uniform, then walked across the compound to my job.

Orange County Jail. Sixth largest in the nation. Three thousand inmates, three thousand orange jumpsuits. Seventy percent of them are felons. And a hundred jailers like me, mostly young guys, armed only with pepper spray, trying to keep order. Hundreds of new inmates come through the Intake-Release Center every day, a total of seventy thousand every year. Hundreds are released back into society, every day. In and out. In and out. We call it The Loop. The jail is an enormous rotating swirl, a storm system of defeat, fury, violence and boredom.

During the day, Men’s Central is my world. It’s a world of strict order and, usually, quiet compliance. Power and submission. Good guys green, bad guys orange. Hands in your pockets, eyes forward, shut-up. Pull your pockets, show your socks. Them and us. It’s also a world of shanks whittled from bed frames, clubs made of knotted T-shirts filled with bars of soap, of rotgut liquor made from leftover bits of fruit and bread smuggled in from the mess hall, of drugs and black tattoos and kites — notes — smuggled down from the shot-callers in Tank 29 of Module F, or from protective custody in Module J, to the low-security guys who can pass them along to friends and allies on the outside. It’s a world of silence. It’s a world of dimly lit guard stations, so the inmates can’t watch us watching them. A world of racial gangs, of respect and vengeance, of endless lies and infinite bullshit.

I like it. I like my friends and coworkers, and the delicate predatory balance between us and the inmates. I like some of the inmates at times. Their scams are clever and they manage to get away with things that surprise me. But what I like most is the orderliness of things: the buzzers and bells and schedules and rules, the heavy keys, the food we eat in the staff dining room. These are institutional things, and as an institutional boy I came to rely on them. My four years at Hillview Home for Children brought those things into my blood in a way I can’t get rid of.

That morning I was scheduled to work in Module J, which is set up for the protective custody of the particularly dangerous, the notorious, the well-known, for child molesters and sexual deviants who would upset the general population, sometimes even for law enforcement personnel doing time on the wrong side of the bars.

Mod J is set up in four sectors, with a total of one hundred seventy inmates. It’s one big circle, with our guard station in the center. Between the cells and the guard station are the day rooms, which have picnic-style benches and tables, and a TV. From the dimly lit confines of the station, we can look through the glass and see into every cell. In-cell cameras make every inmate visible on the station video console, and each cell is wired for sound.

It’s very quiet in Module J, and the inmates are slightly more respectful of us than they are in the other mods. Maybe it’s because of the seriousness of their crimes, or because many of them are on trial and facing very long, or perhaps capital, sentences. Whatever the reasons, the men in Mod J are a little less likely to amuse themselves with chatter about my face.

My first two years I rotated between the Men’s Central modules and got my fill of “shitface,” “acidhead,” “Frankenstein,” whatever. The names didn’t get to me, though the repetition almost did. I never cracked, showed my anger or lost my manners. I just learned to withdraw into the quiet spot and view the inmates with the detached interest of a birdwatcher.

Happened to you?

Nothing, why?

’Cause you got shit all over your face, shitface!

You get the picture.

Of course, people behind bars are braver than most. You’re protected from them, but they’re protected from you, too. Even my most sincerely murderous stare often brings nothing but added volume: OH, look at SHIT-face starin ’ at me NOW! As a keeper, once you step through the heavy doors of the jail, you’re not just working there, you’re in it. Sometimes, you forget. Sometimes, it feels like you’ve been there forever and you’re going to be there another forever. It’s hard on a guy who tries to have good manners.

Then you take a deep breath and remember that you’ve got a shift and they’ve got a sentence. It’s like coming out of a nightmare.

In the briefing room I signed in and sat down for roll call. After that, Sergeant Delano gave us the morning book: yesterday ten blacks and ten Latinos got into it in the mess hall. It was over quickly, didn’t escalate, no time for us to get out the bats and hats — our batons and riot helmets. A few bruises, a few cuts. No weapons. As a result, we were 9-13 — cleared and ready — to conduct a Module F cell search at 1300. We call a surprise search a shake. Deputy Smith had discovered a shank hidden in the sole of a shower sandal — sharpened and slid directly through the rubber. There were rumors of trouble upstate. They say that inmate violence trickles down from the max pens to the jails, and at first I thought it was myth. But after three years here, I can tell you that it’s true, so rumors of trouble at Pelican Bay or Folsom or Cochran or San Quentin are always taken seriously. We took up a collection for a barbecue to celebrate our captain getting a promotion, then broke.

I checked out my radio and keys, then walked the tunnel down to Mod J. When I got to the guard station I glanced at the video monitors to check my prisoners. Everybody looked fine. Gary Sargola, the Ice-Box Killer, was asleep with one leg raised because he suffers phlebitis.

Dave Hauser, assistant district attorney turned drug dealer, was watching Good Morning America.

Dr. Chapin Fortnell, child psychiatrist awaiting trial on thirty-eight counts of molestation of six boys over the last ten years, sat upright and alert on his cot, writing something in crayon, the sharpest instrument we allow him since he tried to open a vein with a felt-tipped marker two months ago.

Serial rapist Frankie Dilsey, convicted of three forcibles and waiting sentencing for three more, was making faces in the steel mirror over his basin, drumming his long fingers on the rim, swaying his hips to a song playing only in his head.

Sammy Nguyen, a young Vietnamese gangster charged with killing a police officer during a traffic stop, lay on his bunk staring at a picture of his girlfriend that we had allowed him to tape to the ceiling. He glanced toward the video camera like he knew I was watching, smiled, turned back to his picture of Bernadette. He’s a bright guy, Sammy. Quiet for the most part, fairly polite, has his code of honor and sticks with it. He’s high up in the Vietnamese gang structure, probably has fifty guys under him.

Will and Sammy had a history. They’d only met once, about two months before, in the Bamboo 33 nightclub. Will had gone there to help some of his Vietnamese friends. It was the club’s grand opening, and the owners wanted Will there to certify their importance, maybe get their pictures in the papers. Will had taken Mary Ann, driven them himself, and that’s why I wasn’t there.

The grand opening went fine, Will said, but this handsome hood named Sammy Nguyen and his girlfriend, Bernadette, kept approaching him with some chatter about opening a savings and loan in Little Saigon. Will said he’d get back to them and tried to steer away, but Sammy and Bernadette kept hanging around until Will took Mary Ann to another table.

Next thing he knew, this Sammy cat was staring blankly at him. The gangsters call it a mad-dog, and you’re supposed to show respect by looking away.

Will knew the score. He was a deputy for twenty-plus years. So he mad-dogged Sammy back, digging down deep for the thoughts that let you keep a stare. He told me he thought about ’Nam and some friends of his who died there so jerks like Sammy could live here. But a lot of good people came here, too, and he wondered what that whole war was worth. Will said he kind of got lost in the thought and time passed. And the next he knew, Sammy had looked away. That meant Sammy still hadn’t gotten his respect, and according to the rules of gangland, he was entitled to murder Will Trona in order to finally get some.

Punk shit, was what Will had called it. He forgot about him until the next day, when Sammy Nguyen was arrested for allegedly gunning down a Westminster cop named Dennis Franklin. The shooting had taken place just a couple of hours after Will and Sammy talked at Bamboo 33.

Will took it hard. He didn’t know Franklin but he wondered if he’d talked to Sammy better that night, heard him out about the savings and loan idea, didn’t mad-dog him, maybe the hood would have left Bamboo 33 in a hopeful mood rather than a murderous one.

All Franklin had done to Sammy was pull him over for speeding on Bolsa Avenue. Will and Mary Ann contributed fifty thousand dollars to a trust for Franklin’s widow and their two-year-old. The papers loved that, and wanted to know why the Tronas had singled out Dennis Franklin’s family. Will said because he was a good cop, didn’t mention what had happened between him and Sammy Nguyen.

I left the guard station and walked to Sammy’s cell. Dim lights, near silence, the hushed setting of a dream. The he-she’s — men in various stages of gender reassignment — stared at me. Clarkson, a mass murderer of children, ignored me. I walked up behind the runner — a trusty — as he pushed Sammy’s breakfast tray through the slot.

“Hello, Deputy Joe. Sorry about your father.”

Jailhouse gossip travels at the speed of light.

“Thank you.”

Sammy sat down with the tray across his knees, but he didn’t look at the food. “I met him once, you know.”

I looked at him but said nothing. He’d shared this information before.

“And he was insulting to me and Bernadette. I could have had him killed for his behavior that night and been within my rights.”

“Yes, you told me that before. It’s baby-like, Sammy, that kind of thinking.”

Sammy thought about this for a moment. He took off his glasses and set them on his pillow.

“But I didn’t. I had nothing to do with this.”

I believed him, because we’d been opening Sammy’s incoming and outgoing mail since his arrest. I knew he was directing gang business through Bernadette. She was his lieutenant as well as his woman, and he told her everything in those letters. Sammy was inside on a murder rap, all right, but he was up to his elbows in gun trafficking, fraud, home invasion and stolen goods. He’d never once mentioned Will, or the insult, in any of his letters. If he let a contract on Will, he’d have done it through the mail with his woman.

It amazes me that a guy as bright and suspicious as Sammy wouldn’t think that his mail was being read.

“Did you see it happen?”

“Yes. Five men.”

“That’s a contract, Joe.”

“That’s what it looked like.”

“Were you close?”

“The fog was bad. They all wore long coats, collars up. The leader was tall.”

Suspicion spread across Sammy’s wide, guileful face. I routinely lie to Sammy and the other inmates — some lies too big to be believed, others too small to even sound untrue. If the inmates get only the truth, they’ll strip it off you like piranha. You need some bluff to keep them back. You need a rap. That’s what they use on us and that’s what they get from us.

So even when you tell them the truth, like I was doing, they assume you’re lying. In jail, not even the truth sounds true.

“The Cobra Kings,” said Sammy. “They wear long coats, dress good. Not predictable, Joe, because their blood is mixed. Vietnamese and American. Vietnamese and black American. Vietnamese and Mexican American. GI’s fucky-fucky and out comes — what do the newspapers call them, ‘children of the war’? Mutts. Everybody hates them. They grow up, they find each other, make a gang in Saigon. Everybody still hates them. So they come here, land of the free. All that.”

“Friends of yours?”

He shook his head no.

“The shooter knew Will by name,” I said. “But I don’t think Will knew him.”

He smiled a flash of straight white teeth.

“Your father, maybe he had some friends that aren’t so good for him. That happens in politics. People help you, but they’re not good for you.”

“That’s not exactly news.”

The smile again, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “You see the shooter’s face, Joe?”

“Hard to see.”

At this, Sammy’s face was all cynicism and doubt. “You heard him say your father’s name, but you didn’t see his face?”

“Fog,” I said.

He studied me, guessing my levels of treachery. I was happy to let him do that. Something like victory crossed his face and I wanted him to have it.

“I heard three guys got stepped on. One still alive. You do that?”

I nodded. “Two.”

“How did it feel?”

“Not bad. Compared to watching my father die.”

“You ever kill before?”

“No.”

“This is sad, Joe. A very sad development. Who shot the other two?”

“The Tall One tried to thin the witness list.”

Sammy considered. “Bad leadership. Very cold. Very Cobra King. I’d guess it was the money, though, Joe — less people to split it with.”

“There was a girl,” I said.

“What girl?”

“Savannah.”

“Did they step on her, too?”

“No. Do you know her?”

“I do not.”

“Something on a girl named Savannah would help me, Sammy. Maybe in connection with someone named Alex. No last name on either.”

Sammy registers emotions convincingly and clearly, like an actor. I’ve watched him during interviews and visitations and he’s a master of surprise, outrage, innocence, threat. He loves exaggeration.

But when he wants to give nothing away his cunning face becomes depthless and mute as a daisy. You can’t see anything at all behind it, no matter how hard you look. That’s what he gave me.

Then Sammy’s blank look broke into a frankly optimistic expression.

“You get my rat trap yet?”

“You can’t have a rat trap.”

“I’ve got a huge rat in here. He comes and goes whenever he wants. Through the ducts.”

We do have our share of rats, mice and cockroaches. But I thought he wanted the trap for something else, though I’m not sure what. Sammy likes gadgets, tools. In a cell search last week we found a pair of canine nail clippers, brand-new, still in the package. They’re the kind with the small sharp blade that slides through the oval hole, and the heavy curved handles for power. He could make a good shank out of them, but I don’t think he had anything that lowly in mind. Sammy isn’t just a punk — Will was wrong about that. He’s something more intelligent and more dangerous, and far less predictable.

Like I said, we’ve got stops on all of Sammy Nguyen’s mail, incoming and outgoing, so the clippers didn’t come through the post office. Sammy might have got them from Frankie Dilsey, in the adjacent cell, or in the day room. Maybe in the exercise pen, which is on the roof of the building. Or maybe from one of the guards. He also might have gotten them from a visitor, or his lawyer, which could get him disbarred.

I stared into Sammy Nguyen’s dark eyes as he stared back into mine. His temper is well known. Not counting officer Dennis Franklin, our homicide detectives suspect Sammy Nguyen of personally carrying out eight murders. Seven are considered to be gangland business. The other was a young man they think was moving in on Bernadette Lee, shot three times in the face in a Garden Grove parking lot.

I thought of the shooter in the fog and wondered if Sammy could have let a contract on Will some other way than in a letter to Bernadette. Sammy got fifteen minutes a day on one of the Mod J pay phones — maybe he used that.

Then the voice inside my head again, just a taunting whisper: you killed him you killed him you killed him...

I could have stepped through the bars of the cell and forced the truth out of Sammy — if he had any truth in him. He was a clever man and a murderer, but he wouldn’t stand a chance against me.

Whatever I got from him would be unconstitutional and not evidentiary, but a courtroom wouldn’t be the point. I could arrange with the other deputies here so that no one would ever know what really happened in Sammy’s cell, or why. Those things occur, though more rarely than you might think.

But inside my mind I climbed up and got to the quiet spot and I looked out of it and told myself that if I wasn’t smart enough to figure out a guy like Sammy, then maybe I shouldn’t be a deputy in the first place.

Like he’d been reading my thoughts, Sammy smiled and opened his hands, palms up. “I’m sorry your father got shot, Joe. This girl, Savannah — maybe I can find something out. You get me that trap, I’ll see what I can do.”

In the briefing room I heated up one of the breakfast sandwiches I keep frozen in the refrigerator. While the microwave groaned I stared down at the floor. Tears fell from my eyes and I could feel them on my cheeks and on my big scar, where tears always feel cooler, and in my mind the fog started rolling in again, trying to choke off the noise.

I had had enough.

You killed him you killed him you...

Through the clamor, I tried to think. And this is what I came up with: I didn’t think Sammy was behind what happened. I didn’t think that Sammy knew this was going to go down. I think it surprised him as much as it did Will.

The real surprise was Savannah. I could tell by his empty look when I first asked about her that Sammy was hiding something. Something he didn’t want to give me right away. Something that might be valuable to me.

I didn’t get it. A sweet young girl sees terrible things, she runs away into the night, and a guy like Sammy Nguyen wants to parlay her into a new rat trap.

You tell me about human nature. I give up.