David Ellis: Breach of Trust

My own personal to-do list was moving quite nicely. I had tasks scribbled on pieces of paper plastered haphazardly on my wall and most of them had been completed. But one prominent item remained: Ernesto Ramirez. Joel Lightner had once again labeled it a lost cause-“Either he doesn’t know anything or he does, but he won’t tell you; a dead end either way”-but that only motivated me more. I was sure I saw something in his face, and I let my imagination take me to places where his revelation was a game-changer at trial, a Perry Mason moment. If everyone else on Team Almundo doubted me, so much the better; the glory would belong only to me.

“How we doing?” I spoke into my cell phone.

“It’s going to be soon,” Talia said.

“Wishful thinking.”

“When are you coming home?”

“One thing I gotta do first.”

My one thing was Ernesto Ramirez. I’d made Lightner assign someone to give me a full workup on the guy in case I wanted to pursue him further. Ernesto Javier Ramirez, former member of the Latin Lords street gang; working for a nonprofit off-the-streets program called La Otra Familia that tried to pull kids out of gangs; wife Esmeralda and two kids, ages six and nine. He pumped iron at the YMCA three times a week. He had dinner with his mother once a week. He took a shop class every Tuesday. Otherwise, he went to work and spent time with his family.

Most important, he still had ties to the Latin Lords, which was promising because that gave him access to on-the-ground information about all sorts of criminal activity should he desire it. I was working on the assumption that if he knew something about Wozniak’s murder, the information might well have come from the Lords-and play that out another step and maybe it was the Lords, not the Columbus Street Cannibals, who killed Wozniak. A wild thought, maybe, but imagine the bombshell at Hector’s trial: The government got the wrong street gang. It would blow a hole in a big part of their case, the Wozniak murder. It wouldn’t exonerate Hector from the part about the street shakedown, but once we knocked out one leg, that other limb would look mighty shaky.

His branch of the YMCA was over in the Liberty Park neighborhood, close to his office and his home. I drove there. The sun had fallen behind the buildings on the city’s southwest side but it was not yet dusk, casting a dull glow over the broken streets and rundown shops-check-cashing facilities, liquor stores with chains over their windows, a bakery, and a couple of carnicerias. I didn’t know this neighborhood well. I grew up only a few miles to the south and east, in Leland Park, but it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Back then, the white Catholics didn’t cross the unofficial borders, and nobody else crossed theirs unless they wanted a beating.

I turned onto Knapp Avenue, which for wealthy whites served as nothing more than a major westbound artery to the interstate highway. The area was teeming with pedestrians, mostly brown faces, some kids darting suicidally between cars across the avenue like a real-time urban video game.

I didn’t have a membership to the Y and I didn’t know what I’d be able to manage at the front desk. But it couldn’t hurt to try. A pleasant young woman told me I could have a one-time pass as a tryout. I gave her my driver’s license so she could be sure I wasn’t living off of free passes, and once she typed in my name and confirmed I was a first-timer, she handed me a green ticket and a couple of towels. If she’d noticed that I had no gym bag or any other evidence of workout gear, she didn’t say so.

I went downstairs to the workout facility and found Ernesto Ramirez pretty easily. There were only five people pumping iron. He was wearing baggy shorts and a gray tank top stained with his sweat. He was bench-pressing two plates on each side of the bar-two hundred twenty-five pounds. The bar is forty-five and each plate is forty-five. A standard test in the NFL draft is bench presses of this weight, with your hands no wider than your shoulders, emulating a lineman’s shiver block. Or at least it was a standard test when I was playing college ball. I managed eleven presses my freshman year. I didn’t make it to the end of my sophomore year, having settled a disagreement with one of our team captains by breaking his jaw and ending my football career.

Ernesto managed one shaky press, with his arms spread wide and his back arched for additional leverage. Not bad for a little guy in his early thirties. Not bad for anybody.

His eyes swept past mine but quickly returned. I was a white guy in a suit, not exactly fitting in, and then his eyes registered that I was a white guy in a suit whom he knew. It probably spooked him a little that I knew where to find him. I’d obviously done my homework. But I didn’t want to catch him at home, where he could close a door in my face, and the time for diplomacy had come and gone.

He picked the towel up off the weight bench and wiped his face. He said something in Spanish to the guy spotting him, who was just as short as him but much stockier.

“I told you,” he said before he’d even reached me, “that I got nothing to say to you.”

“You have something to say to me. You just don’t want to say it.”

Fresh sweat broke on his forehead. He wiped at it with his hand towel. “Either way,” he said, “I’m not talking to you anymore. Don’t contact me. Leave me alone.”

“Whoever killed Bert Wozniak is going to walk from it,” I said. “You okay with that?”

“Not my problem.”

“Your whole life is worrying about other people’s problems.”

“Well, not this one.”

“You stay quiet, everyone blames your friend, Eddie Vargas. That okay with you?”

“Now you got me worrying about a dead man’s problems.”

I nodded slowly, watching him. He looked over his shoulder. All four of the other weightlifters, especially his spotter, were watching me. Ernesto was scared. I could read it all over him. And that was meaningful. Ernesto was clearly a proud man. Nobody who puts up vanity reps at a weight bench is anything but proud. You work out, at his age, to stay in shape. You choose weights that you can press eight, ten times. You don’t go for your max weight unless you take some pride in how much you can press. Nothing wrong with that, but it meant he wouldn’t want to show anyone his fear, and he wasn’t doing a very good job of hiding it right now.

“I can protect you,” I said.

“Oh?” He laughed at me without humor. “Who you gonna protect me from?”

“Whoever.”

His eyes narrowed. “You know anything at all about my world?”

“Then tell me confidentially. I won’t disclose you as a source. Give me a name-give me something-and I’ll take it from there. Nobody will ever know.”

He was quiet for a long moment. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my proposal or considering the best way to blow me off. Finally, he squared up and spoke to me in what he intended to be a conclusive statement on the matter.

“They’ll know,” he said. “Now good-bye.”

I called after him, my heartbeat escalating. “Who’s they ?”

“Excuse me,” said some muscle-bound guy wearing a Y t-shirt that was two sizes too small. “If you’re not here to check out the facility, we need to ask you to leave.”

“Who’s they, Ernesto?” I tried again, speaking to his back as he returned to the bench press.

“Sir, c’mon, now.”

I worked my arm out of his grip. But there was no sense making a scene.

They’ll know, he’d said.

There was something there. I knew it.

My cell phone rang. I fumbled with it, revealing some nerves. I might actually be onto something big here.