CHAPTER 21

Bento turned twelve before learning he was part Samoan. She’d have informed him earlier, his mother said, if she thought it were worth mentioning. She could be quite talkative but rarely gave straight answers, and he used to wonder what other surprises she might spring on him. Easily slighted, she got fired a lot and wasn’t a great tenant either. It seemed like they skipped out of their lodgings every few months. How she found new landlords to accept them was a mystery. She’d always try to make an adventure out of it, but Bento wasn’t fooled.

He started working when he was thirteen—busing tables, bagging groceries. Tall for his age, he met age requirements by flashing false ID he’d picked up in Chinatown. When he was nineteen he bought an ounce of weed from two dealers who tried to rob him. He slammed one full in the face with a paint bucket and the other across the side of his head, taking off with a roll of cash and a pound of what they claimed was Northern Lights weed. But he immediately ran into three motorcycle cops, and they quickly connected him to the fight with the thieving dealers, one of whom had suffered a broken cheekbone. The DA made Bento out to be Baby Face Nelson.

The Orange County Jail reeked with subterranean madness and hopelessness, and the prosecutors, who had all the time in the world, used it as a torture device to extract confessions. Bento waited them out five months while his case inched through the pipeline.

“Why’d you hit them with a paint can?” asked Liz.

“ ’Cause I didn’t have a flamethrower.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I had a week’s construction wages on me.”

“Was there paint in the can?”

“About half full.”

“Okay, how did the police know about the dope deal?”

He explained that the two dealers were snitches. After he foiled their rip-off they called their police pals. He was, he conceded, an idiot.

“But you’re a cute idiot,” Liz said helpfully.

His court-appointed attorney had been a middle-aged man with gorgeous hair and a chipper, devil-may-care persona. At first Bento misinterpreted his smile, thinking it reflected a positive attitude about the case. He never showed up at the jail to interview Bento, who saw him two or three minutes at a time, just before hearings. The hearings themselves were mostly about small points of evidence that might or might not be trickling in. Usually they didn’t trickle, so the judge would set a date for another hearing. His lawyer and the prosecutor never spoke on the phone. Their only communications channels were within the hearings themselves and sometimes in the corridor outside the courtroom, when they might or might not do a little negotiating before going inside.

After one particular hearing the judge tried to set the next one ten days ahead, but Bento’s lawyer, consulting his calendar, said he’d be busy in a trial and requested a three-week delay. He failed to consult jailed Bento, who at that moment realized that everyone in the courtroom—the lawyers, the judge, the bailiffs, the court secretary, everybody—viewed his freedom as an expired commodity. All that remained were details. He’d been halfway through a semester at community college when he was busted. Unable to follow withdrawal procedures from inside the jail, he flunked his courses. His job was vaporized too. The entire system seemed designed to fling him into a pit and pull up any ladders that might lead him back to where his life used to be.

THE MANACLED defendants being herded from place to place were usually guilty, but the word guilty was a flexible term that involved all manner of predicaments and perplexities. Most of them were charged with drug crimes, so there rarely were any victims.

One day Bento’s lawyer came into the holding room and his customary smile was wider than usual. The DA was offering immediate release in exchange for time served, but he’d have to plead guilty to a felony count and accept a “strike.” Bento wasn’t even sure what all that meant, but his lawyer assured him it was the best deal they were going to get. “It’s a one-day sale,” the lawyer said.

Bento took the deal. Afterward he became more reliant on weed to help him float above the miseries inflicted by his diminished status. But he didn’t space out or become vegetative on marijuana the way so many people did. In fact, he often turned mischievous, perhaps searching for a childhood that had been squelched. Almost two years after getting out of jail he swiped a bicycle out of an open garage door. He only meant it as a prank. The bike had two flat tires, no chain, and rust that got all over his shorts. It seemed terribly humorous at the time. He was wheeling the thing down the driveway when a middle-aged man yelled at him from a balcony. Still laughing, Bento dropped the bike and jumped into his friend’s pickup. It became just another funny story—but only for a while because the friend got nabbed for something more serious and turned over on Bento, identifying him as the dangerous bicycle thief. The statutes treated the attached garage as part of the home, so Bento, who already had a violent strike on his record, was charged with burgling a home while the residents were on the premises. The DA’s office applied the same statute that gets used against home invaders who smash their way into a living room. After Bento was picked out of a lineup, his new court-appointed attorney said the DA was pressing for twenty years but would let him off with ten if he moved now. If he waited too long, the prosecutor would have to prepare a court case, and that would upset him and make him less charitable.

Every time Bento was taken to the courthouse for a hearing he expected the light of reason to shine at last on this panoply of absurdities, but no one was laughing. He felt as though mad extraterrestrials were dissecting him in a sound-proofed flying saucer from whence earthlings below couldn’t hear his screams.

They tossed around years like they were tossing Frisbees in a park, he told Liz. This time he sat in county jail fourteen months. It felt like three or four lifetimes. His last thought before sleep and his first thought upon rising was the twenty-year sentence waiting to roll over him like a ten-ton boulder. An hour before his scheduled trial he was offered four years and three months along with a second strike.

Bullshit, he told his lawyer. No jury would put him away at all—and certainly not for twenty years—for grabbing a broken-down bike and wheeling it thirty feet. “But they’ll probably agree you stole the bike,” his lawyer explained. The sentencing hammer wouldn’t come down until after the judge sent the jurors home.

“So I’m thinking, ‘You’ll be forty-two when you get out,’ ” he told Liz. “I visualized it very clearly. In jail you hear stories all the time about guys who made the mistake of going to trial.” Once again, Bento took the deal.

“You did four years for almost stealing a bicycle?” Bento could see she was trying to hold in her laughter—or tears. Possibly both.

There were much worse jailhouse stories than his, he told her. Sometimes they went in the opposite direction—unimaginably cruel scumbags treated with inexplicable gentleness or walking away over absurd technicalities. And sometimes justice was, like the real estate business, all about location. DAs and judges in one county might routinely pursue sentences twice as long as those imposed next door. Kafka got the criminal justice system almost right, Bento said, but Salvador Dalí came closer.

THE LOCKSMITH, a chubby Filipino, was drilling out the lock at Apartment B. “What’s going on?” Bento asked him. The locksmith warily asked him whether this was his apartment.

“No, just wondered what’s the rush, that’s all,” Bento said. A wave of relief passed over the man’s face. This particular tenant, he told Bento, made a startlingly tidy departure. Even scrubbed the toilet. “I’d let you in to see, but—” His voice trailed off.

“That’s okay,” said Bento.

“If you’re interested in renting it, you can call ’em in the morning.”

Bento carried the bag of Chinese food back to Liz’s car. Her photographer schmo no longer had an address.