Angels of Catastrophe: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Copyright Page

  for jimmy and donald

  Chapter One

  Late one June evening when the wind had more teeth in it than a shark’s mouth, a policeman was gunned down by an unknown shooter at the corner of Mission and Twentieth.

  A bullet did a dance on his head while he stood in a doorway. How his body hit the ground drew everybody’s eyes when it was too late to see anything.

  The murder of a cop was no trifle. The following day a crowd of unemployed Salvadoreños gathered in front of Hunt’s Donuts to look at the bloodstains where the killing had taken place. A homeless man pushing a shopping cart stacked with beer cans and soda bottles past them ranted: “A cop was shot! God wanted him for a sacrifice!”

  Standing among the Salvadoreños was a two-bit criminal named Ricky Durrutti. What he’d just heard, he didn’t like. More people than he could remember had been rubbed out on Mission Street and God wasn’t the cause—bad luck rode enemies and friends alike into the ground. The cop’s death spooked Durrutti, even though he had nothing to do with it.

  The police bothered him, even the dead ones. Ghosts were everywhere and snuffed out cops were the worst kind. His quick sallow face was impassive as he watched a knot of teenage girls sidle toward Ritmo Latino record store, girls dressed for summer in halter tops and non-designer sweatshop jeans. Durrutti looked at the dried blood on the sidewalk, then across the street. Every third storefront on the block was a neon-lit pawnshop with guns in the window, a Spanish language video rental shop, or a dull-eyed liquor store with more junkies in the doorway than you could shake a stick at. One-hundred-foot tall palm trees pitched drunkenly in the fog. The sidewalks were rife with pillow vendors from Nicaragua, homeless winos, pimps in black leather jackets and Honduran women dealing oranges in five pound bags.

  Durrutti’s vest pocket held a letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. A hand-typed unsigned request urging him to pay them a visit. He’d read and reread the missive so many times in search of an insight that wasn’t forthcoming, the letter was in tatters. He didn’t know what the Feds wanted from him and he was reluctant to go downtown to their office to find out.

  “I swear to Christ,” he muttered to himself. Then, “To hell with it. I’ll go see them. I can handle it.”

  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was lodged in the Federal Building—a twenty-storied 1960s-style blue glass and steel tower of architectural pornography located off Golden Gate Avenue. Clothing defined everyone who did business there. The cops—and there were more varieties than you might imagine: local, state and federal law enforcement officers, each with their own idiosyncratic fashion sense—dressed in a mind-bending range of off-duty Gap store leisure wear. The lawyers, the high class criminal defense lawyers, were garbed in three-piece suits from the Union Square shops. The women had on high heels that’d been rescued from the discount bin at K-Mart. And everybody sported hairdos invented by the Los Angeles Police Department.

  The first cop Durrutti encountered when he walked into the Bureau’s office was a real beauty. A fifty-year-old overweight caucasian male attired in double-knit slacks and a wide-lapel rayon disco shirt from the 1970’s. The way the policeman was glued to his desk, surrounded by military surplus furniture—gunmetal gray filing cabinets stood sentry by a pair of dirty windows—he might have been sitting there for a thousand years. An expensive cotton-candy yellow toupee was plastered to the top of his head. His off-white complexion was pitted, the lifelong acne tracks underscored by the fluorescent lighting. His large, calloused and scarred hands rested on a pile of paper work. The name tag pinned to his shirt said he was Agent Elroy Kulak.

  Durrutti had been waiting his whole life for this moment. It was predestination. Now that his destiny was here, he found it scared him. Specifically, he feared the police and he feared himself—and he was clever enough to hide it. The terror in him was a lake of violence with no bottom. His baritone voice, frogged over by a two-pack a day Marlboro habit, gave away no indication of the distress he was feeling. “I got a letter to come see you guys. It sounded important.”

  His biography was compact and short, but his rap sheet was long. Ricky Durrutti was at that strangest of all crossroads, having lived long enough to make a lot of mistakes, but not long enough to fix any of them—and the cumulative body of mistakes made was starting to amount to quicksand. He was thirty-five years old. His police record was substantial. His rap sheet was a heaping dish of misdemeanor weapons convictions seasoned with shoplifting offenses—stealing socks from Macy’s and getting caught with them stuffed down his pants had been his last bit of mess. His father had died young from tuberculosis contracted in the penitentiary, followed by his wife. From the old man, Durrutti had acquired a swarthy, sharp-featured jaw and a gift for trouble. From his mother he inherited nearsightedness, a bellicose chin and an abundant porcelain forehead. To remember his parents, he laid flowers on their tombstones every year when their wedding anniversary came up.

  He gave the cop a flinty stare, slitting one brown eye, the one that still functioned reasonably well, and said, “They call me Ricky Durrutti.”

  Kulak lent the visitor his ear, a malformed squib of pinkish flesh, not quite sure what he’d heard. “Durrutti?”

  “That’s right ... Ricky Durrutti. Do I get to sit down or what?”

  The Fed hesitated, making him wait, torturing him with a cop’s flagrant love of prolonging a moment until it has no more meaning, then wearily said, “Take a chair.”

  Kulak’s coarse-skinned face was yellow and pink and red under the office lights, bumpy, uneven and covered with shaving nicks and ingrown hairs. A dermatologist’s delight. He skimmed a file from his desk and gave Durrutti a corrosive smile. When a cop smiled at you, it was a guarantee there could be hell to pay. A tax that would eliminate several years from your life. Kulak’s smile was ornamented by several missing teeth. He fixed his Aryan blue eyes on Durrutti’s unpolished shoes, cocked his head with a flourish and droned, “It says here you sold a revolver to a Mister Jimmy Ramirez. Is that correct?”

  Durrutti gulped once and his heart jumped and did a skip. Every now and then he did someone a favor. Altruism came naturally to him. Sharing was automatic. Among friends being generous was a good thing. It fostered empathy and mutual respect, the thongs of male bonding. Men felt closer to each other after they exchanged weapons. He’d owned a revolver he didn’t want and he gave it to Jimmy for Christmas. Thinking fast he offered the cop a blip of double-talk.

  “Is that what this visit is about? Why didn’t you say so in the damn letter? Then I wouldn’t have had to come down here and everything and shit.”

  The Fed didn’t fall for it. Law enforcement agents hate it when you pretend ignorance. They can smell the dissimu
lation; it acts like a stimulant on them. They get high on lies.

  “And I don’t know no Jimmy Ramirez. I could have told you that over the phone.”

  Kulak’s eyes dilated and his smile got even toothier. Then he frowned gorgeously. “No?”

  Durrutti masked his discomfort. “No way. Don’t know him.”

  Kulak nodded and threw the report down on the desk. “Of course not. You don’t know shit. You’re an imbecile. A mollusk.” He paused to pick his nose, unmindful of the other man’s presence. Then he said, “Can you tell me why the gun that Jimmy Ramirez ended up with had its serial numbers filed off?”

  The answer was simple. A masterpiece of simplicity. He leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees and stared at the blank wall behind Kulak’s toupee. He had planned to use the pistol to rob a bank. A large bank, something downtown, nothing that would hurt the little man in the street. In case the job went bad, or even if it was successful, he’d filed off the registration numbers on the piece to hinder its identification. It was an elementary procedure. No big deal. By the time he had completed the task, the idea of pulling a heist had worn thin—banks were not his forte—and he’d unloaded the gun on Jimmy.

  He kept his understanding of the situation to himself and said to Kulak, bold as a rat caught with a piece of cheese in its mouth, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The beefy Fed picked up a pencil from his desk and chewed it, giving the eraser a thorough gnawing. Then he said, trying to be helpful, “Okay, you gave a weapon to Mr. Ramirez. He’s a felon. Did you know Jimmy Ramirez had done time in Corcoran for manslaughter?”

  Durrutti maintained a laissez-faire policy toward other people’s personal lives. Gossip was deadly; not only did it sicken the spirit, it could get you killed. If someone had served a sentence in the California prison system, that wasn’t his concern. He didn’t stick his nose into these things. It was one of the reasons he was still alive. Scared and alive.

  “Hell, no,” he crowed. “That’s news to me. I never heard anything about no gun. Or this guy you’re talking about—”

  Kulak talked over Durrutti, as if he was conversing with himself, having started a thought in his own head. “Somewhere, someone had the gun’s serial numbers removed. I don’t have to tell you this is a serious offense.”

  As if Durrutti didn’t know it. He was literate. He knew the penal code. The whole affair reeked of a ten year sentence with baloney sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner at Folsom State Prison. But all he said, mincing his words until they sounded inoffensive, was, “Did you guys talk to this Jimmy Ramirez dude? What did he say?”

  Kulak rubbed his freckled temples with his fingertips, massaging them. “Mr. Ramirez was contacted by us after he took the weapon to a gunsmith to get it re-blued. The owner of the shop called us when he noticed the problem.”

  It had taken Durrutti the better part of an entire day to file off the serial numbers on the gun with a set of files. A task like that wasn’t for amateurs and he had done an excellent job. He’d been proud of his craftsmanship. Proud of his diligence. He said to Kulak, “I’m sorry. I never gave a gun to this guy. I don’t know what this is about.”

  The atmosphere in the office was still polite, nothing heavy. Any vibes in the air were more or less under control. No need for him to retain a lawyer, not yet. Kulak knew he was lying. Durrutti could hear it in the cop’s voice, how he phrased his questions, the weariness in them, the weight of them dragging him down. He took childish delight in provoking the policeman.

  “You haven’t heard from Mister Ramirez recently?”

  “How could I? Listen, you’ve got to understand this. He’s a stranger. Even if we slept in the same bed, I wouldn’t know him.”

  Kulak wasn’t enamored of his response. “You haven’t talked to him about the gun?”

  “No, I haven’t. Not now, not ever. I could walk by the dude in the street and I wouldn’t recognize him. I don’t know anything about this stuff.”

  The weapon in question was a Smith and Wesson .32 revolver Durrutti had acquired for sixty-five dollars from a Wackenhut Corporation security guard who’d used it to shoot the mallard ducks at Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. The gat had a tendency to veer an inch to the right when you shot it, so it wasn’t accurate. Durrutti had never fired it. Guns were a nice idea, but having one around made him twitchy. The temptation to use it was too great.

  “According to the report, there is also another problem.”

  How Kulak said it, dry and matter-of-fact, made Durrutti’s skin crawl, but he didn’t take the bait. The fine and brittle ghetto bone structure of his face remained arctic as Kulak fed him another tidbit of hearsay. Whatever a cop told you was always second-hand, a xeroxed version of the truth. Something to be taken with a grain of salt.

  “After Jimmy Ramirez got the pistol back from the gunsmith he said it was stolen from him. He told us the name of the person he thinks did it. We are very interested in talking to this individual. The man who took the gun has been identified by the police as the alleged perpetrator in a homicide.”

  Durrutti’s curiosity was shameful, running smack dab into his instinct for self-preservation. It made him loquacious. “You’re kidding me? Who did this guy kill?”

  Kulak’s comeback was just as naked. “A police officer.”

  “When?”

  “Very recently.”

  “You mean the cop that got shot on Mission Street?”

  “Correct.”

  “With a gun that belongs to this Jimmy Ramirez?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And who is the killer?”

  “A bag of shit named Paul Stevens.”

  Hearing the name, Durrutti almost fainted. His fingertips began to tingle. His left foot fell asleep. A spear point of paranoia jabbed him in the gut. A vicious spasm rippled through his colon. Paul Stevens was someone he knew. Someone who had passed away three years ago at the All-Star Hotel on Sixteenth Street. Complications from AIDS after going in and out of the hospital. He didn’t explain this to Kulak. If the Feds were after a dead man, he wasn’t going to stop them. He blithely said, “I’ve never heard of the dude.”

  Kulak pressed him. “You don’t know him? He attempted to kill another policeman some years ago. That makes him our first suspect.”

  “Nope. Not in my life. I’ve never heard of these guys before.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure.”

  Durrutti stopped and thought about what he was saying. For refusing to talk, Kulak might arrest him for obstructing justice. He had to watch himself, how far he stonewalled the cop. Going to jail wasn’t anything he wanted to contemplate. The prospect made his testicles shrink in their sac. What Kulak did to him next was worse.

  “Let’s stop here,” he said. “I’ve got what I want. You can leave now.”

  This took Durrutti aback. He was settling into the groove of the interrogation, how the fear flowed from him into Kulak, as if he was giving a blood transfusion to the cop. He was getting addicted to the logic of answering questions with lies. He wasn’t prepared to depart and he protested, unwilling to go. “You done talking to me? That’s great. Now what do I do?”

  “You wait.”

  “I wait? For what?”

  Kulak pinned him with a glance that could’ve cut a man’s throat from ear to ear. A glance that let him know his journey with the law had just begun—he was an accessory to the murder of a police officer. Durrutti’s spirits fell into his socks. His entire life had just changed. He said to himself, “Fucking hell,” and exited the office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

  Chapter Two

  Most Americans pay taxes, vote, think of death as something they can take or leave. Lowlife in the street are another story. They know something the citizens don’t—every dollar bill is marked, every killing has a witness, and nobody gets away with anything.

  The first thing Durrutti had to do was locate
Jimmy Ramirez. Exiting the Federal Building, he conjured up a plan. He’d commence his search with a visit to Hunt’s Donuts and was confident he would find the man by night-fall. All he had to do was walk the streets and talk to people. Jimmy had a public profile; someone would know where he was. It would be a cinch. A breeze.

  Walking with an awkward limp, a condition that had afflicted him since birth, he toddled south on Mission Street toward the doughnut shop, humping it past Lady Seikko’s Japanese Restaurant. He remembered what Kulak had said about Paul Stevens, him being the prime suspect in the cop’s murder.

  Durrutti had met Paul four years ago while shackled to a modular concrete bench in the city prison’s holding cell at 850 Bryant Street. They were the only prisoners in the fly-smeared, blood-spattered, whitewashed pen. Paul was wearing a nurse’s medical smock, a pair of dungarees and tan desert boots. Tall and gray-haired with humorous blue-green eyes, his paste-white face was gaunt and covered with a weedy field of beard. He introduced himself by saying, “Don’t listen to any of the assholes in this place. Never do that to yourself. You gotta be careful because everyone in here is just a worthless fuck, swear to God.”

  It made sense to Durrutti. He took Paul’s advice to heart and they started to talk. The hoosegow quickly filled up with parole violators, winos and burglars, the usual Monday night suspects. Booking was slow—the warders were the county sheriffs and they were moving only as fast as their union contract made them—he and Paul Stevens had plenty of time to get acquainted. Durrutti had been busted on a public nuisance charge and for resisting arrest after getting shortchanged by the cashier in a Mission Street taqueria. He expected to be treated with respect. When he didn’t get any, he usually ended up in jail. This was the fourteenth time so far. Paul said he was taken into custody for fighting with a cop by the Midnight Sun bar on Eighteenth Street.

  Paul spoke a little more about himself, declaring how one summer a few years back he’d shot at a cop on Albion Street near the Valencia Gardens housing project. He did seven years in Soledad Prison for it. The policeman was John Bigarani, notorious for repeatedly attacking and beating Bob Kaufman, a union organizer and an outspoken poet. Kaufman had passed away penniless and sick in the streets at the age of sixty—no doubt helped to the cemetery by what Bigarani had done to him.