Sara Paretsky - A Woman’s Eye

She nodded, smoothing her bright dress over her plump thighs. “It goes back a long time, to when Benny Crespo was… they called him the Prince of Omega Street, you know.”

Hearing the name of her street spoken made me aware of its ironic appropriateness: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is symbolic of endings, and for most of the people living here, Omega Street was the end of a steady decline into poverty.

Mrs. Angeles went on, “Benny Crespo was Filipino. His gang controlled the drugs here. A lot of people looked up to him; he had power, and that don’t happen much with our people. Once I caught Alex and one of my older boys calling him a hero. I let them have it pretty good, you bet, and there wasn’t any more of that kind of talk around this house. I got no use for the gangs-Filipino or otherwise.”

“What was the name of Benny Crespo’s gang?”

“The Kabalyeros. That’s Tagalog for Knights.”

“Okay-what happened to Benny?”

“The house next door, the one with the dog-that was where Benny lived. He always parked his fancy Corvette out front, and people knew better than to mess with it. Late one night he was getting out of the car and somebody shot him. A drug burn, they say. After that the Kabalyeros decided to make the parking space a shrine to Benny. They roped it off, put flowers there every week. On All Saints Day and the other fiestas, it was something to see.”

“And that brings us to last March thirteenth,” I said.

Mrs. Angeles bit her lower lip and smoothed her dress again.

When she didn’t speak, I prompted her. “You’d just come home from work.”

“Yeah. It was late, dark. Isabel wasn’t here, and I got worried. I kept looking out the window, like a mother does.”

“And you saw…?”

“The guy who moved into the house next door after Benny got shot, Reg Dawson. He was black, one of a gang called the Victors. They say he moved into that house to show the Kabalyeros that the Victors were taking over their turf. Anyway, he drives up and stops a little way down the block. Waits there, revving his engine. People start showing up; the word’s been put out that something’s gonna go down. And when there’s a big crowd, Reg Dawson guns his car and drives right into Benny’s space, over the rope and the flowers.

“Well, that started one hell of a fight-Victors and Kabalyeros and folks from the neighborhood. And while it’s going on, Reg Dawson just stands there in Benny’s space acting macho. That’s when it happened, what I saw.”

“And what was that?”

She hesitated, wet her lips. “The leader of the Kabalyeros, Tommy Dragón-the Dragon, they call him-was over by the fence in front of Reg Dawson’s house, where you couldn’t see him unless you were really looking. I was, ’cause I was trying to see if Isabel was anyplace out there. And I saw Tommy Dragón point this gun at Reg Dawson and shoot him dead.”

“What did you do then?”

“Ran and hid in the bathroom. That’s where I was when the cops came to the door. Somebody’d told them I was in the window when it all went down and then ran away when Reg got shot. Well, what was I supposed to do? I got no use for the Kabalyeros or the Victors, so I told the truth. And now here I am in this mess.”

Mrs. Angeles had been slated to be the chief prosecution witness at Tommy Oragón’s trial this week. But a month ago the threats had started: anonymous letters and phone calls warning her against testifying. As the trial date approached, this had escalated into blatant intimidation: a fire was set in her trash can; someone shot out her kitchen window; a dead dog turned up on her doorstep. The previous Friday, Isabel had been accosted on her way home from the bus stop by two masked men with guns. And that had finally made Mrs. Angeles capitulate; in court yesterday, she’d refused to take the stand against Dragón.

The state needed her testimony; there were no other witnesses, Dragon insisted on his innocence, and the murder gun had not been found. The judge had tried to reason with Mrs. Angeles, then cited her for contempt-reluctantly, he said. “The court is aware that there have been threats made against you and your family,” he told her, “but it is unable to guarantee your protection.” Then he gave her forty-eight hours to reconsider her decision.

As it turned out, Mrs. Angeles had a champion in her employer. The owner of the sewing factory was unwilling to allow one of his long-term workers to go to jail or to risk her own and her family’s safety. He brought her to All Souls, where he held a membership in our legal-services plan, and this morning Jack Stuart had asked me to do something for her.

What? I’d asked. What could I do that the SFPD couldn’t to stop vicious harassment by a street gang?

Well, he said, get proof against whoever was threatening her so they could be arrested and she’d feel free to testify.

Sure, Jack, I said. And exactly why hadn’t the police been able to do anything about the situation?

His answer was not surprising: lack of funds. Intimidation of prosecution witnesses in cases relating to gang violence was becoming more and more prevalent and open in San Francisco, but the city did not have the resources to protect them. An old story nowadays-not enough money to go around.

Mrs. Angeles was watching my face, her eyes tentative. As I looked back at her, her gaze began to waver. She’d experienced too much disappointment in her life to expect much in the way of help from me.

I said, “Yes, you certainly are in a mess. Let’s see if we can get you out of it.”

We talked for a while longer, and I soon realized that Amor-as she asked me to call her-held the misconception that there was some way I could get the contempt citation dropped. I asked her if she’d known beforehand that a balky witness could be sent to jail. She shook her head. A person had a right to change her mind, didn’t she? When I set her straight on that, she seemed to lose interest in the conversation; it was difficult to get her to focus long enough to compile a list of people I should talk with. I settled for enough names to keep me occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

I was ready to leave when angry voices came from the front steps. A young man and woman entered. They stopped speaking when they saw the room was occupied, but their faces remained set in lines of contention. Amor hastened to introduce them as her son and daughter, Alex and Isabel. To them she explained that I was a detective “helping with the trouble with the judge.”

Alex, a stocky youth with a tracery of moustache on his upper lip, seemed disinterested. He shrugged out of his high school letter jacket and vanished through a door to the rear of the house. Isabel studied me with frank curiosity. She was a slender beauty, with black hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders; her features had a delicacy lacking in those of her mother and brother. Unfortunately, bright blue eyeshadow and garish orange lipstick detracted from her natural good looks, and she wore an imitation leather outfit in a particularly gaudy shade of purple. However, she was polite and well-spoken as she questioned me about what I could do to help her mother. Then, after a comment to Amor about an assignment that was due the next day, she left through the door her brother had used.

I turned to Amor, who was fingering the leaves of a philodendron plant that stood on a stand near the front window. Her posture was stiff, and when I spoke to her she didn’t meet my eyes. Now I was aware of a tension in her that hadn’t been there before her children returned home. Anxiety, because of the danger her witnessing the shooting had placed them in? Or something else? It might have had to do with the quarrel they’d been having, but weren’t arguments between siblings fairly common? They certainly had been in my childhood home in San Diego.