Tod Goldberg: The Reformed

“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.”