Steven Havill - Privileged to Kill

Rudy’s middle-school career managed to last another six months, during which time he cut his left wrist once and drank himself into oblivion on numerous occasions. By the spring of his eighth-grade year-the last time school officials saw him-he was a scrawny, vacant-eyed little hoodlum.

At that time, the Davilas were living at 198 North Fifth Street in the back apartment of a three-unit, story-and-a-half rental. Mrs. Davila was still working, although only part-time, at a grocery store down the street. Vanessa was in fourth grade.

I wondered if Vanessa had been an elementary school version of the oversized bully she’d managed to become since. Maybe back then, before the hormones kicked in, she was still playing with clay and cutting out paper chains and hearts and doing all those other things that elementary kids did.

On a hot August evening that year, Rudy Davila was in his gable bedroom of the small upstairs apartment. He had drunk enough cheap bourbon that he thought he felt no pain. Mrs. Davila was home, watching television downstairs in the living room. Vanessa was somewhere, Mrs. Davila had told police, but she wasn’t sure just where. According to the report taken by Posadas Chief Eduardo Martinez, Vanessa was two doors down the street, playing with friends.

A few minutes after nine that night, the report said, Rudy Davila sat down on the edge of his bed, the window open so that he had an unrestricted view of the neighbor’s garage roof. He loaded a semiautomatic.22-caliber rifle with ten rounds. The police report indicated that he might have had trouble managing the process in his inebriated state, since.22-caliber shells were scattered over the bed, some even rolling onto the floor.

Rudy had almost made a hash of the final process, too. He’d managed to shoot himself three times before he could no longer control the gun, and the condition of the room indicated that he’d thrashed around a good deal-enough to attract his mother’s attention away from the television.

He’d locked his bedroom door, though, and by the time his mother and a neighbor had gained access, Rudy Davila had made peace with this world.

Vanessa Davila hadn’t told Chief Eduardo Martinez much. He accepted her account at face value. She had come home when she heard sirens and saw police cars parked in front of her house. She was not overwhelmed with grief to the point that she cared to tell Martinez what she told us four years later…Perhaps at that time, her distrust and fear of her brother were too fresh in her mind.

Chief Martinez had accepted Mrs. Davila’s bewildered account, maybe because no one in the village had ever seriously expected Rudy to make it to his eighteenth birthday anyway. The.22 rifle was his, Mrs. Davila was quoted as saying. She’d signed the affidavit to that effect. Maybe so, but four years later, Vanessa Davila put a different slant on things. The rifle had been given to her brother, Vanessa said, by a friend.

I sat down and rested an elbow on the table, rubbing my forehead. “Have you ever heard of a youngster who gives away something like a.22 rifle? I mean, those things are next to sacred to a kid.” I reached out and nudged the bagged cassette that held Mrs. Davila’s interview. “Let’s hear what her actual words were,” I said.

And after twenty minutes of start and stop, we found the right spot on the tape recording and heard Chief Teddy Martinez ask, “Did the rifle belong to Rudy, ma’am?” His voice was soft and dripping with sympathy.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Davila said. “I think so. I guess so.”

“Do you remember him buying it?” the chief asked.

“No,” Mrs. Davila said, “but you know, he goes about his own business. He don’t listen to me. So, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe he got it, or traded for it, or something.”

And at that point, Chief Martinez dropped the subject. The “or something” covered all the bases.

I reached over and punched off the tape player. “So we go from a resounding ‘I don’t know’ on the tape to a written, sworn statement that has her saying the gun was Rudy’s. Outstanding.”

“It won’t be hard to trace, sir,” Estelle said. “If Dennis Wilton purchased that rifle, or if it was purchased by someone else and given to him as a gift, then it won’t be hard to trace.”

“What remains is to find out who actually pulled the trigger of the rifle,” I said. “Vanessa claims that she saw the Wilton kid slip out of her brother’s upstairs window shortly after the three shots.” I held up two fingers. “She says that number one, the rifle was Wilton’s. Number two, she says that he was there when the shooting occurred.”

“That’s interesting,” Estelle mused.

“What is?”

She leaned over the table and tapped one of the folders. “There was no reason for Dennis Wilton to be friends with Rudy Davila. In fact, I’m willing to bet a week’s pay that he wasn’t, until his eighth-grade year. And if Dennis Wilton wasn’t in that same history class when Davila tried the pill trick, he would have been near by. He would have heard all the gory details from any number of kids before the morning was out. He latches onto a kid who’s teetering on the very edge. A self-destructive, violent kid who has nothing going for himself. Giving him that little extra push was easy. Wilton might even have pulled the trigger himself, figuring he’d get away with it.”

“You’re talking about a manipulative, scheming monster, Estelle,” I said.

“History is full of them,” she said. “Only I’d call him a psychotic opportunist.”

I grimaced. “I’m no shrink, but I don’t know if I buy it. None of it explains the business with Ryan House.”

“Maybe, maybe not. It might have been easy to strike up a friendship with Ryan House during their senior year. In a small school, there are endless opportunities. Also, remember that House had just broken up with his girlfriend of three years.”

I frowned. “You’re saying that Wilton might have been planning something all along?”

“No, sir. I don’t think so. At first, they might even have liked each other. Who knows? But it’s dirt common for one kid to talk another into doing things that he normally wouldn’t have considered. Maybe the date with Maria Ibarra was a bet, I don’t know. Maybe it was genuine curiosity on their parts. We’re tending to paint Ryan House lily white in all this, but maybe that’s not the way it went down. But when things went wrong, Dennis Wilton reacted in a predictable fashion, from what this evidence tells us.”

“He was afraid Ryan House would start talking, so he killed him.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what I think happened. And I think it was impulsive, when he saw that Ryan wasn’t going to go along.”

I picked up a pencil and toyed with it for a minute. “It would have been thoughtful of Vanessa Davila if she had spoken up earlier about seeing Wilton coming out of her brother’s bedroom window.”

“I suspect she was grateful to him,” Estelle said, and I looked up sharply.

“Grateful?”

“Yes, sir. I suspect that her relationship with her brother was a carbon copy of what she went through with her father before he left home.”

“We don’t know that.”

“No,” Estelle said and took a deep breath. “But I can guess. The signs are there.”

“And the rage this time? She steals a gun and sets out to ravenge a friend? Maria?”

Estelle nodded. “It’ll take a while to put a profile together, but I’ll bet the election that you’ll find the two were inseparable, Maria and Vanessa. For once, Vanessa had a pal whose life was more miserable than her own.”

“Kindred spirits,” I said. “Misery loves company.” I smiled. “And I won’t bet.”