T. Parker: The Triggerman Dance

John has always believed that he can judge a person's character by their face, that no amount of acting or cosmetic alteration can change the truth of a face. In the case of Rebecca, he had seen it all very clearly the moment he met her in the Journal lobby. She was bright, curious, forgiving, optimistic and possessed a hopeful soul in spite of the darkness she tried to hide. Rebecca Harris, he immediately saw, was the kind of woman he wanted to spend his life with. He saw her ring, too, and realized he would not.

And later, sitting on his balcony after touching her scar, then looking away at the arid hillsides of Laguna Canyon, John Menden felt a true sense of honor at having touched her.

You shouldn't have done that, she says.

I'm sorry. I've wanted to touch you for a long time. Now you're here. I never imagined you here. It's throwing me a bit.

I've imagined me here. Too many times. Maybe that was a mistake, but I couldn't help myself. Everything starts there, in the imagination, don't you think?

No, it starts in the eyes, and then the imagination kidnaps it.

To where?

To the heart, I guess. Then the heart makes it real."-to forget, to start over." Weinstein's voice severed the reverie like a sword. "So you come here, to nowhere, looking for the next avenue out."

John looked at his dogs, asleep in the dirt beneath the trailer. Rebecca's face fades away. "You've boxed me neatly, Mr. Weinstein."

Sharon shifted uneasily in her plastic chair. "Mr. Menden," she asked, "have you thought over what we talked about last time?"

"Of course I have." In fact, he had thought about almost nothing else. He understood that he was being vetted and auditioned-for what he could only guess. With the words of Rebecca's letter still whispering in his mind, it was difficult to hear much else.

"What are your feelings?" Sharon asked.

"I want to know more," said John.

Joshua nodded and stood, setting his half-empty beer on the chair. "We can't bring the facts to you, so we'll bring you to the facts. Get the chopper ready again, Sharon."

John was ushered through a back entrance of the Orange County FBI office, Dumars on one side of him and Weinstein on the other. They went down a long hallway covered with a pale green industrial carpet, then turned right and passed down another corridor. No one passed them in either. The building was quiet. After hours, thought John-the Feds are home with their little Fedettes. Joshua unlocked a heavy wood-veneer door and let them in.

It was a small room, set up like a theater. Joshua flipped on the lights, bright overhead fluorescents that bathed the air in a chilly, efficient glow. A large television monitor sat on a stand near a wall, and ten feet in front of it were three seats.

"Sit," said Weinstein. "I'm about to show you some things that very few people have seen. Sharon has seen them and my supervisor here. Select people in Washington-two to be exact. All three others know what Sharon and I are doing, but I've managed to get almost a sole proprietorship of this operation. As sole as anyone gets in a bureaucracy like ours. I was lucky. The President cut loose federal funds as part of his crime package and Orange County got some of it. That's where the money comes from. Like any other organization, in the Bureau, everyone wants to know where the money is coming from. Right now, I've got a clean supply. It isn't a lot, and it isn't inexhaustible, and it doesn't flow without scrutiny from Washington. But for now, it's mine. Who knows, Mr. Menden, maybe it will be ours. May I call you John?"

"Fine."

Weinstein smiled then, which John took to indicate a new bonhomie. Then, like a dead leaf, it fell away.

"I'm going to ask you to relax now, John, just sit back, look at the screen and listen to a story. I'll narrate. You'll have questions, I'm sure, but wait on them-if you can. Of course, if you're missing what you think is an urgent piece of information, just speak up." Again, Weinstein smiled. It looked like something rationed, by his soul perhaps, leaving him only so many to spend in a day. His teeth were small and even, but his lips parted around them only momentarily, and with reluctance. It gave John a small shudder. The larynx wrestled beneath his skin. And Weinstein's voice now, so, well… welcoming. It sounded to John like something calling out from the first rung of hell.

A man's face appeared on the screen. The image was a still photograph, in color. He looked to be in his early fifties, with short silver-gray hair combed back, a heavily lined and sun-darkened face, a wide jaw that spoke of resolve, and gray, level eyes much the color of John's own. He was wearing a white knit shirt, unbuttoned. The overall impression he made on John Menden-the self-professed analyst of faces-was of bearing, competence, experience and intelligence.

"Let's call him Puma, for right now," said Weinstein. "He's a family man. See? He's married, with a twenty-two-year-old son just graduating from Stanford, and an eighteen-year-old daughter at the University of California, in Irvine. There they are, up in Palo Alto for the commencement."

On screen, the photographic portrait gave way to what looked like home-video footage of Puma with his wife and children. They are outside. The son is dressed in gown and mortarboard for a graduation. The daughter wears a white dress. The wife is in pink, smiling widely, and Puma himself has his arms around all three of them, scrunching them in toward him, his tan, lined face smiling and quite obviously proud. He tips the mortarboard down onto his son's face, and his wife rearranges it, revealing the young man's grin.

"Call the son Patrick," said Weinstein. "The daughter Valerie, the mother Carolyn."

John watched. Some of it was videotape, some were stills.

The family on the steps of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City The family-years earlier-at the beach. Patrick fast-breaking down the Stanford court. Valerie graduating from what must have been high school. Carolyn giving baths to a litter of wriggling puppies in a back yard toddler's pool. Puma kneeling alone on a vast white boulder, the body of a ram before him and that ram's head and enormous horns resting on his lap. Patrick, Valerie and Puma walking a gully in what looked to John like the Sand Hills of Nebraska, shotguns in their arms and a pair of springers working out in front of them. The pheasants come up the camera jostles to frame them; the pops of guns send two o the cock pheasants plummeting to the ground. Then a sequence in which the daughter commands a springer during a field-trial retrieve-hand signals only-directing the eager dog into a river across it, then left into a dense stand of cattails from which the dog emerges with a pigeon. Then Valerie kneeling beside her dog and a trophy.

"Now," said Weinstein. "August, five years ago. The day it all changed."

The video now showed what could only be police footage The scene is outside a fast food restaurant and the atmosphere is one of disaster. There is a perimeter of tape set up, and beside it dozens of people, mostly youths, mostly Latino in appearance stare in glum acceptance toward the restaurant. When the scene shifts inside, two bodies are heaped beneath a table next to a window pocked with holes.

"August fourth," said Weinstein. "These are the facts. Patrick was shot dead. Twenty-two years old, just out of Stanfon with a degree in history, engaged to be married in the Salt Lake City Temple the following spring. His mother, Carolyn, was injured, shot in the head. The bullet went through her son first likely because he saw what was going down and tried to cover her. She lived, sort of. She's been paralyzed from the waist down for five years, bedridden and brain-damaged. She talks, though not well. Collateral damage was three wounded, one seriously Depending on your beliefs, one of two things happened. One version is that an innocent person was murdered in cold blood and another paralyzed for life by a racist punk, simply for being white, and for being where they shouldn't have been. A hate crime, with all the special penalties hate crimes carry. That's what the DA tried to go with, at first. The other version was that; decent young Latino boy had defended his aunt from a man who had raped and beaten her the week before and who he feared had come back to do it again. That's what he was doing when he took out Patrick through the window of the fast food place. Carolyn, in this scenario, was a tragic accident. That the boy's aunt had been beaten and likely raped was established-bruises, cuts, vaginal abrasions. But she didn't report it until after her son had shot Patrick. She was afraid of being deported. The public defender struggled to establish that Patrick had committed the rape, but couldn't get far-no fluids, no blood-nothing but Teresa Descanso's word and a dead accused. During the trial, in this land of orange blossoms, rolling surf and Mickey Mouse, you defined your soul by what version you believed. You wanted the shooter's blood, or you thought he was a hero. It was ugly and divisive and unnecessary. But then, a lot of life is, it seems."