Steve Martini - The Arraignment

I see lights at the next corner, so I slow down. As I get closer, I see some teenagers, one of them in a dark hooded sweatshirt leaning into the passenger window of a car stopped in the middle of the street halfway into the intersection. The car is rocking to the beat of salsa jive from a sound system that vibrates the roots of my teeth whenever it hits bass.

The kid in the sweatshirt and his two friends check me out as I drive by. Maybe I’m a customer or maybe I’m undercover. They lose interest as I head down the street.

I’m moving slowly, looking for street numbers. The drizzle and the lack of streetlights make it impossible. I check the scrap of paper on the console next to me, the notes I’d made following my meeting with Espinoza at the lockup earlier in the week. This is the place. Espinoza was cryptic, but he did give up some information.

According to him, the man Jaime had an alternate hangout whenever he was in town. He had gone there several times for meetings and on two occasions did not return at night. Espinoza told me that he drove Jaime to this place once, just before he left San Diego for Mexico. Espinoza dropped him off and said the number was either 406 or 408, he couldn’t remember. But he told me that he saw the man that Jaime met. The guy was tall, over six feet, and skinny. Like a pole, according to Espinoza. The man was Hispanic and had a straggly dark beard, black hair, and wore a dirty gray felt hat. He watched this man talk to Jaime for a few seconds out in front of the house before the two of them went inside and Espinoza drove off. The only other thing he could remember was an older-model Chevy Blazer parked along the side of the house. He said he remembered it because the large window in the back was smashed in and someone had covered it with a large piece of black plastic wrapped in duct tape around the window frame.

I drive past kids’ toys on the sidewalk. Over the front door on a house near the end of the block, I see what appear to be three rusted metal numerals nailed to the frame in the shadows. I squint, trying to penetrate the darkness. It looks like 486.

I drive on, and this time I turn at the corner, pull a short distance up the cross street, and park at the curb, turning off my lights.

I had changed from my suit and tie at the house. I’m wearing an old pair of jeans, a navy blue slipover shirt, and a faded denim jacket I use for outdoor work. On my feet are a pair of running shoes.

I step out of the car, lock the door, then check my watch. It’s almost nine-thirty.

It takes only a few seconds to make my way back to the corner and head down the street. I stop two doors down at the house where I saw the street number over the door. The drizzle has turned to a light mist, so in the dark I cannot see rain falling. Still I can feel wet pin pricks of moisture on my forehead and the back of my neck. I turn the collar of my jacket up and walk down the street. Moving slowly on foot, and being closer to the house, up on the sidewalk, I now have no difficulty making out the number over the door. As I approach the bottom of the steps, the tin numbers 486 are clearly visible above the front door. Even numbers are on this side of the street. Unless Espinoza has sent me on a goose chase, the house I’m looking for is on this side.

I hear the hot salsa and see the red taillights from the vehicle a block and a half down still stopped in the intersection. I move quickly down the sidewalk until I’m two doors from the end of the block, when suddenly a beam of light bounces off the wet pavement in the center of the street. The headlights are coming from behind me and moving fast. I skip across a damp patch of grass in front of one of the houses and duck under the front stairway. I have no desire to be silhouetted from behind for the crowd around the car, now just a little more than a block away.

I take a deep breath and settle under the stairs for a couple of seconds to get my bearings. Just as I’m about to step out, I look behind me. There on a door leading to a ground-level apartment is the number 406A. It is stenciled in faded block letters. I can hear the muted sounds of a television from somewhere inside, either upstairs or beyond the door behind me.

I step back out to the sidewalk and check the car with the salsa crowd still in the intersection at the end of the next block. Another vehicle has now joined them, pulling up behind the first car. The guys on foot have now divided forces, talking commerce through the open windows of both vehicles.

I look back at the house. There’s a large bush against the front. Behind it partially concealed is a ground-floor window through which I can see the flickering translucent blue light of a television reflected against the pulled-down shade inside.

I look to my left at the house next door, and notice that there’s a ground-level apartment under its front staircase as well. Running in from the sidewalk and dead-ending against this other house is a double strip of concrete each a little wider than the width of a car tire. Between them is a little gravel and what is now wet, packed hardpan with a light rainbow sheen of motor oil floating in the puddles. This driveway dead-ends into the front of what used to be a garage, now finished off as the exterior wall of a downstairs apartment.

I step across the two strips of pavement, through the grass and look at the door under the stairs of the second house. It is numbered 408A.

I walk back out to the sidewalk and check 406. There is no driveway on the other side. Here the long blades of grass on both sides of the stairs stick up like spikes. I’m not a gardener, but it doesn’t take an expert to tell that these weeds and crabgrass have not been crushed under the wheels of a heavy vehicle anytime recently. Nor is there a ramp through the curb to the sidewalk.

If Espinoza was telling the truth, and his memory wasn’t clouded as to the Blazer with its broken rear window and where it was parked, I’m betting that 408 is the address for the man with the beard and the felt hat.

I look over again. The downstairs apartment appears dark, as least as much of it as I can see through a small side window on the house. I back away, all the way to the sidewalk, and check the action in the intersection to my right one more time. There’s a regular traffic jam there now. Enough cars that I can’t count them all. A land office business, some coming, some going, music and the sound of voices, what passes for the commerce of the night in this neighborhood. I check my watch. It’s now after ten.

Espinoza didn’t say whether Jaime and the other man, the one in the felt hat, went up the stairs or underneath them when they went inside. Not knowing the layout, I could not anticipate the question or think to ask.

From the sidewalk I check the upstairs windows at the front of 408. On the first floor one of them shows the glow of a television. Another smaller window, perhaps a bathroom, has a light on inside.

On the top floor everything is dark. I walk down the sidewalk twenty feet or so and check the left side of the house. There are windows, but they’re all dark. I go back the other way. One light toward the rear on the first floor. I can’t tell how many apartments there are.

I check to make sure no one is watching from a window or one of the dark porches across the street. I would never hear the end of it from Harry if somebody called the cops and he had to come down and post bail on a peeping and prowling charge.

From what I can see, it looks clear, so I climb the stairs and find the mailbox on the porch. Underneath each slot is a name on a slip of paper slid into a groove, some of them typed, some written in pencil or pen. I take out my house keys. Attached to the key ring is a small light. I press the button on the side of this, and the muted red beam flashes on the names.