The Reformed

3

There are offices-like the one I sat in with my mother and Eduardo Santiago the previous day-that serve a specific purpose, as a place where one person can sit comfortably to work on a computer. And then there are offices like the one Eduardo Santiago kept for himself at Honrado Incorporated, which was as wide as my loft, contained two leather sofas, a flat-screen television mounted to the wall, a small glass-faced refrigerator filled with bottled water, a round table covered in blueprints and an entire wall dedicated to photos. Eduardo with various celebrities, politicians, athletes and entertainers, certainly, but most of the photos were actually of Eduardo with kids and with young men and women out in the community. There were also framed news stories and features from the Miami Herald, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and even a snappy little color thing from USA Today. I stopped and read a few lines in each. Everything my mother and Sam said was parroted in the pages of the nation’s most esteemed newspapers: Eduardo Santiago had done the impossible and now was using himself as a prime example for the kids coming out of Miami’s battle-hardened neighborhoods.

“You’ll have to pardon my ego,” Eduardo said when he saw me reading his wall.

“It looks like you’ve done some great things,” I said. “My mother didn’t lie.”

“Not this time,” Sam said.

“I’ve been very blessed.” Eduardo motioned to the round conference table. “Please, my friends, have a seat.”

It was very strange. When I had seen Eduardo the previous day, he spoke to me in a kind of refined street patois, but here he spoke as if he’d gone to private schools his entire life. Perhaps that was the surest sign Eduardo Santiago was a different person now-he knew how to change his persona for a given situation. That was a talent I could appreciate.

We sat down at the table, but Eduardo remained standing at first, as if he wasn’t sure this was, in fact, the course of action he wanted to take. How odd it must be to meet with the mayor of the city at one moment and then whatever, or whomever, Sam and I were the next.

The key to making someone comfortable, even in their own home or sanctuary, is to ask him questions about himself. People love to talk about themselves. This is why so many people admit to crimes when police interrogate them-they simply cannot help themselves from themselves.

I picked up one of the blueprints. “Are you expanding?”

“Oh, yes,” Eduardo said. He stood between Sam and me and looked at the blueprint. “That will be our greenhouse. We plan on having more sustainable gardens here in the future, so we can begin providing organic vegetables. Do you know that the average apple you eat contains over fifty trace chemicals in its skin?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“And look at yourself. You should know. You’re fit. You’re smart. Now think about these kids in these neighborhoods. You think any of them have any idea about pesticides in their food?”

“I’d guess that’s the least of their concerns,” Sam said.

“You would guess correctly,” Eduardo said. “Whoever you are.”

“Mikey didn’t tell you I was coming?” Sam said. He shook Eduardo’s hand. “Sam Axe at your service. You’ve got the full faith and credit of the United States government right here in my handshake.”

“That’s not an entity I trust, but I assume if you are with Mr. Westen that you are trustworthy.”

“That’s not a good assumption,” I said.

“Ah, but it is an educated guess,” he said. “Educating someone is different from making them concerned about something. Same with the kids and the organic food. People today, they do not know the difference between education and fear-making.” He sighed then and shook his head. He finally took a seat across from us. “This is precisely what I was talking to the mayor about. All of this money to teach children what to be afraid of, and no money to teach them music or art or, well, you know how it is. Do you know I learned how to play the violin in prison? It’s true.”

“Maybe more people should go to prison,” I said.

“Just because it is true doesn’t mean it isn’t a shame, Mr. Westen.”

I laughed.

“You find that funny?” he said.

“I find it funny you just called me Mr. Westen,” I said. “I was trying to remember the last time I saw you before yesterday. And you know what I remembered? You actually turned my brother, Nate, upside down and shook all of the change out of his pockets.”

“Mikey, that’s what kids do,” Sam said.

“He wasn’t a kid,” I said. “Do you remember this, Eduardo?”

“I’m afraid I do not. Not because it didn’t happen, but because I did it to so many people. How old was I?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe seventeen? Maybe eighteen? Old enough and rich enough not to need a kid’s pocket change.”

“It was never need,” Eduardo said. “And where were you at this time?”

“I was coming up with a bat in my hand to crush over your head,” I said. “Unfortunately, a teacher saw me coming and wouldn’t let me.”

“Unfortunately?” he said.

“Could have saved you and a lot of other people a lot of grief,” I said.

“I get the sense you don’t believe I am a changed person,” Eduardo said.

“You sense correctly.”

“I need your help, Michael,” Eduardo said. “So I hope I can convince you that I am worthy of it.”

“How did you even know I exist?”

“You helped a friend of mine,” he said. “Ernie Paseo. He was having trouble with some gangsters.”

Can no one keep a secret anymore? Ernie Paseo had been one of the first people I’d helped in Miami. He had also been sworn to tell no one that I’d helped him, and had subsequently referred people to me like I was a Merry Maid.

Ernie was not the kind of person to engage with crooks, and the mere fact that he’d mentioned me to Eduardo was a good sign.

“Ernie’s been good for business,” Sam said.

“Remind me not to give him any secret launch codes,” I said.

“He told me I could trust you,” Eduardo said. “He told me you were a good and honest man and that you weren’t scared of anything. Your name sounded familiar, so I asked some of our old… associates… if you were the same person as I recalled from childhood.”

Associates. That could mean only that Eduardo made some phone calls to a few of the less desirables we’d both gone to school with and maybe he’d rolled with. “No one you knew from school knows I’m back,” I said.

“That’s funny,” he said. “You have a friend who sells guns?”

Fiona.

“No,” I said.

“A girl, maybe? Wears short skirts and always has automatic weapons?”

Fiona, for sure.

“Nope. Sam, you know anyone like that?”

“Can’t say I do, Mikey. Sounds like a very dangerous person. If I see her, I’ll call nine-one-one.”

We both gave Eduardo our most professional smiles.

“I don’t care, Mr. Westen, who you know. Just know people are aware of your presence in town. The right kind of people and the wrong kind of people. Just like you and me. The difference is that I have a path guided by the Lord, and that path tells me that at every turn I’ll need to make right the sins of my youth. I don’t think you feel the same way.”

“I’m not a criminal, Eduardo. I never was.”

“Maybe not in your eyes. But, Mr. Westen, you have killed, have you not?”

“I have,” I said.

“That’s against someone’s law,” he said.

He certainly had a way of evening the scales. And the truth is, I believed him. The evidence was all around, and his demeanor suggested a man who’d changed his life and was dedicated to helping others.

“You’ve done an excellent job letting me know that we are cut from the same cloth, that you’ve been saved and that the world is going to be just fine now that you’re on the job. So, Eduardo, what do you need me for? You need help getting out of the sand trap the mayor left you in?”

Eduardo exhaled through his mouth and his entire body wilted a bit inside his expensive suit. He loosened his tie and took off his coat, and then held up another blueprint. “You see this?” he asked. “This is going to be our new library. Paid for entirely through donations. It will be state-of-the-art-computer retrieval system, digital library of every newspaper in America-everything-and we will be training librarians here. It’s true. Library science classes will take place on Northwest Fourth Street. This?” He pointed at yet another blueprint. “This is going to be an auto shop. We had one before, but it wasn’t here. It was out near the juvie, so I couldn’t watch it, and soon it became a chop shop. You know? Kids, they will fall back into bad habits. So many plans. Next year, I’ll have another hundred fifty people working, if everything goes as planned.”

“Who is shaking you down?” I said.

Eduardo got up, went to his desk and came back with a thick manila envelope. “I can trust you?” he asked.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

He handed me the envelope and then sat behind us on one of the leather sofas. It was as if he didn’t even want to be in proximity to the contents I was pulling out and sharing with Sam. But the thing was, there wasn’t anything particularly incriminating in the envelope, just old photos of Eduardo with various other members of the Latin Emperors. There were several photos that featured pictures of Eduardo with guns and a few that showed drugs, but none of this was a mystery to anyone-it was, apparently, what had made Eduardo such a superstar.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Those men,” he said, “most of them are dead.”

“Did you kill them?” I said.

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“No one knows where their bodies are, either,” he said.

I gave Sam a look. This was where things tended to get dicey. I reminded myself to give Ernie Paseo a call at some point to tell him to forget I ever existed. “Do you know where the bodies are?” I said.

“No, no, of course not,” he said. “But someone does.”

“Here’s the deal, Eduardo,” I said, “I need you to just tell me what the problem is. I’ll tell you if I can solve it, and this will all be over in a matter of moments.”

“I have divorced myself from this life, you understand,” he said.

“I understand. Everyone does. President Clinton does. God does. Now, spill it.”

Eduardo peeled himself off the sofa and came back to the table, went through the photos one time, very quickly, and then stopped when he landed on a picture of himself at maybe twenty-five, his shirtless torso thick with muscles and ink, his eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses, standing beside a man who could have been his twin, right down to the prison tattoos. “This is Jaime Gonzalez. People called him Junior. He’s a few years older than me, but was held back two years. Played football, too.”

“He ever smack around Mike’s brother?” Sam asked.

“Most likely,” Eduardo said.

“I don’t remember him,” I said.

“He recruited me into the Latin Emperors, jumped me in, helped me run the set. We both went up at the same time, ended up taking over the prison branch, diversified our interests.”

“He help with El Salvador?” Sam asked.

Eduardo actually twitched backward in surprise. “How did you…” he began. “Never mind. Never mind. But yes. His mother is from El Salvador, so he had dual citizenship. It was his idea to start moving into the voids there.”

It was actually a smart move on Gonzalez’ part, even if it was an illegal one that caught the attention of the United States government and certain covert operatives. I didn’t bother to tell Eduardo that, but I believed it to be true nevertheless.

“Let me guess,” I said, “you snitched on Junior to get a break on your sentence.”

“It wasn’t snitching,” Eduardo said. “It was a calling. It was the right thing. I didn’t know it would reduce my sentence, and I, frankly, didn’t care. It was the right thing to do.”

I took a look at the photo again. Junior Gonzalez had muscles where other people had hair follicles. “Where was he when this all went down?” I asked. “Because I can’t see him not putting a shank in you if he knew about it.”

“I’d already been transferred to the minimum-security section,” he said. “I was a priest, after all.”

“What did you give up?” I asked.

Eduardo did that big exhaling thing he seemed to enjoy. A guy that big, when he exhaled through his mouth, it was like a jet engine starting. “Everything,” he said. “Me, you know, I didn’t get dirty. I kept up above the game, you know? Slang here and there. Set up jobs. Maybe move a little product myself. Maybe make a big deal about someone disrespecting us, but I didn’t put a cap in anyone, you know?”

There was that weird language shift. It was funny. When Eduardo Santiago was in his element, talking about his mission in life now, he sounded like a CEO, but when he got involved in the old times, he started to sound like a gangster again.

“You talk like that when you speak with the kids?” I asked.

“Like what?” he said.

“You just sounded like you were still on the streets.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Five minutes ago, I thought you were running for Congress. Just now, I thought you were going to ask me to spot you in the chow line.”

“I guess I don’t even notice it,” he said. “The devil, he’s in all of us, or he tries to be. Maybe that’s him trying to weed his way out into the world.”

This devil-and-God talk was wearing thin-if I had a core belief, it was probably one my dad taught me: never write bad checks. He’d done it enough to know, but when applied to every aspect of your life, it was good advice.

“Anyway,” Eduardo said. He cleared his throat, and I could tell he was about to try to tell his story without sounding like a thug. “I told the feds who Junior had killed, what shots he’d called, gave them information on the drug trade we had. But mostly? Mostly they wanted to get control of the prisons. At the time, Latin Emperors ran all the prisons up from Florida to New York. La Eme had the West Coast; Texas Syndicate was running Texas, Oklahoma-that cowboy shit. Black Guerilla Family and all those Blood and Crip sets run the South and places like Rikers. But we were political, too, and that made it different. We had clout.”

“Funny,” Sam said, “I don’t see the Latin Emperors running some Attica game.”

“Not from the outside, you don’t,” he said. “But it’s a whole other culture on the inside. And we ran it. By the time I was running the show, I was like Obama. All hope and change and all that. Junior, he didn’t see it like I saw it. He was down for crime, not empowerment. That’s where we diverged. So I gave up what I gave up and things got easier for me, relations cooled inside, and eventually I got my release and now here I am.”

“And where is Junior?” I said.

“He was released last year,” he said.

“Blood in, blood out,” I said. “So I take it he’s looking for yours now?”

“More a pound of flesh,” Eduardo said. “He wants in on this business, says because of our oath to each other, every dime that passes through Honrado, half is his. And he wants to run Latin Emperor business through here, launder their money through my organization. And he wants payback. I think that is the largest issue. He did twenty-five years.”

“How’d he get out?” Sam asked.

“Overcrowding,” Eduardo said. He gave a shrug. “Good behavior. Paid off the right people. These things happen. He may have been the kingpin all these years, but I suspect even he saw after a while that the path to getting out of prison was paved with nonviolence.”

“So, call the cops,” I said. “That’s an easy extortion case.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I got pulled over two weeks ago right here on the corner. I thought maybe I’d run through the stop sign. Instead, the officer came to my window and handed me that envelope. Didn’t say a word. Just dropped it on my lap. Three days ago, there’s a knock on my door, at my home, and it’s another officer. He tells me he was just in the area and wanted to make sure I was still alive. That’s all he says.”

“You recognize this cop?” Sam asked.

“No, I’d never seen him.”

“Thing is,” Sam said, “anyone can get a cop uniform, and anyone with a little time and money can get a cop car. So you don’t know if you’re dealing with real police.”

Eduardo squirmed in his seat. He was being eaten up by this, but there was something more. We just hadn’t gotten to it yet. “You see, that’s true. But the fact is, we’ve… they’ve… had police on the payroll for thirty years.”

“You telling me the Latin Emperors employ crooked cops?” Sam said.

“Mr. Axe, please, tell me you are aware that the Miami PD has a rich history of being on the take. Since the days of Al Capone.”

“Okay,” I said, “so the Emperors have bad cops on their books. Fine. Why not call your friend the mayor?”

Eduardo did that squirming thing again. I was beginning to know his tells-he might be a pious man, but he was also a nervous man. “Junior called the other day. Understand, I have not spoken to this man in almost twenty years. He said to me that he was happy to see that I was prospering and that I was doing good things in the community, and that I’d helped Emperors that had been released from prison get jobs,” Eduardo said. “And then he told me that if I didn’t do as he asked, he’d go public with what he knows about our past, about where the bodies are buried-literally, where the bodies are buried.”

“I thought you didn’t kill anyone. I thought you never got arrested for violent crimes,” I said.

“How do you get arrested for a crime no one knows was committed?” Eduardo said. “These men, they weren’t missed by anyone. These are criminals, Michael, that maybe rolled down to Miami after getting out of prison, or they’re people who never had families, or people whose families never expected to hear from them again. These were not good people. But the fact is, I did not kill them. I did not order their deaths.”

“How can that be if you ran the gang?” Sam said.

“Division of labor,” Eduardo said, “and plausible deniability, I suppose. In terms you can both understand, Junior ran the defense and the judicial, and I was in charge of the economy and outreach. Those were our skill sets.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“And if I am arrested again,” Eduardo says, “I’m in prison for life. And that would be a short life. I would be dead within an hour, I assure you. Even though I am innocent, it wouldn’t matter. I’m confident my involvement at all would constitute a conspiracy charge, and I am confident that the judicial system would happily use me as a public relations target. All of this, all of what you see here, would be gone. This is all because of me, Michael, because of my desire to atone and my desire to help these kids so that they don’t necessarily make the mistakes I made. And here, my past can ruin it. I did my time. I admit my mistakes. I admit my crimes. I will not let all of the good I am doing fall to waste. And that-that, Mr. Westen-is why I cannot call the mayor or the president or anyone. You are my only hope.”

The room fell silent. I frankly didn’t know what I was going to do to help Eduardo, but I had the sense that he was right-no one else could help him, and without help, all that he’d done would crumble.

Plus, I liked being called his only hope. I felt a little like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

“Okay,” I said. “I need time to think about this.”

“And I can pay you whatever you require,” he said.

“Well,” Sam said, “there are going to be some expenses…”

I put a hand up to stop Sam, which is a bit like hoping a feather could stop a freight train, but luckily it was still pretty early in the day for Sam, and he didn’t quite have his normal midafternoon head of steam yet. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I need the karma. And so does Sam.”

“One question,” Eduardo said. “Are you actually a spy?”

“I am,” I said. “Or I was. You and me, we’ve both been excommunicated from our organizations. You by choice, me by someone working behind me, trying to discredit the good I did, so I understand uniquely the situation you’re in.”

“How did you go from here to there?” Eduardo said. “And why are you back?”

“I could ask you the same question,” I said. “We all make choices, Eduardo. I made the right ones. You made the wrong ones. And yet here we both are.”

“A strange fact of life,” he said.

I couldn’t imagine a stranger one. “When are you supposed to have an answer for Junior?” I said.

“Two days,” he said.

“You have a way of contacting him?”

“One of his soldiers is to come by tomorrow to confirm.”

“No phone number?”

“No, no,” Eduardo said. “I have no idea where he’s even living. My people on the streets say he is not in the old neighborhoods.”

“All right. When his guy comes, you tell him you want a face-to-face meeting here. When is this place the busiest?”

“All day,” Eduardo said. “We have a shift that starts at seven, another at four, though we feed the workers at three thirty for the night shift.”

“Tell him to be here at three thirty, then,” I said. “Let him see the full workforce.”

“What will we be telling him?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I have a few ideas.”

Sam and I wound through the shaded lawn of Honrado Industries as we walked back to the car. There were flags in places where the new buildings were planned and signs, propped up with artist renderings of what the buildings would look like. The weird thing was that just across the street from this small bit of paradise-paradise built on the religious reformation of a gangster and put in peril by his past-was the real world: a teenage girl pushing a baby stroller, a homeless man asleep in an apartment complex carport, a stray dog nosing around for scraps.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Sam said. “Why come back here? If you’re Father Eduardo, I mean. Why not just move to Idaho and start all over? He had to expect that he’d run into these kinds of problems eventually.”

“Home is home,” I said. “And besides, he’s paying penance.”

“I dunno, Mikey,” Sam said. “I don’t see myself running over to Fallujah when I retire just to pay penance. I could live my whole life without seeing the Republican Guard again and I’d be perfectly fine. Know what I mean?”

“You can’t discount ego, either,” I said. “Eduardo wouldn’t be lunching with the mayor if he lived in Boise. He might be doing it all for the good, but there’s still a little bit of the showboat gangster I remember in him.”

“You gotta have that to make it in the God game,” Sam said. “Look at Tammy Faye Baker. She wasn’t exactly reserved and refined.”

He was right. He usually is. “Listen,” I said, “I want you to find out what you can on Junior Gonzalez. I need to know just what kind of guy we’re up against.”

“If he’s got cops,” Sam said, “I’m a little limited on my sources. People tend to talk when they think something of interest is happening, and you never know who knows who in law enforcement.”

“I’m sure you’ll find someone who can help,” I said.

“I can go back to my guy in Corrections, but he’ll only know so much. I’ve got a buddy who did some time at the same prison while Junior was there,” Sam said. “That might be a place to start. And I’m pretty sure he’s no friend of the local law. He runs a pretty lucrative post-lockup business these days, is my understanding. You know how Father Eduardo gets kids back on the road to good? My buddy, he paves the road with the papers they might one day need if they ever want to work a real job.”

“What was your friend in for?” I asked, which is probably the wrong question to ask anyone when they say they have a friend who’s done time.

“Oh, you know, fraud, some passport business, minor nonviolent acts meant to increase his personal wealth. That sort of thing. Good guy. You’d love him. I’ll call him and see if we can meet up for drinks. He’s the kind of guy who likes a little lubrication.”

“I know the type,” I said.

“Ah, Mikey, you only know the half. My guy? He still makes pruno at home. You’d love it. Puts a little spice in there that’ll make you jump out of your socks. Of course, if he makes it wrong, it can also kill you. So it adds a bit of thrill to the evening.”

“That’s great,” I said.

When we reached my Charger, there was a young man of about twenty walking slow circles around it. He had on the same polo shirt as the rest of the kids working at the facility. “This yours?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Nineteen seventy-three?” he asked.

“Nineteen seventy-four,” I said.

“Original interior?”

“It’s had a few accidents,” I said, though I opted not to tell him the number of times I’d fixed bullet holes in the leather… or the scrubbing that goes into getting scorch marks out… or, well, the periodic exercise involved with removing blood. “But yes, the original interior.”

“The body looks good. You should lower it,” he said.

“Not my style,” I said.

The kid considered this. “Then at least you should buff out the bullet marks on the passenger’s side.”

“I’m going to get on that,” I said.

“You pull it to the auto shop around back. I’ll do it free of charge. Good practice, homes. Know what I’m saying?”

Unfortunately, I did.

I looked at Sam. “You got twenty minutes?” I said.