When Ernesto Sandoval got home, he told his family about Griff Slocum’s mother coming to see Mr. Avila. “His mom wanted to thank Julio’s father for being kind to him,” Ernesto said. “She said Griff was really into baseball. He collected baseball cards as a kid.”
“Lot of us did that,” Luis Sandoval said. “My dad treasured his cards. Traded some of them away, but he gave me some of his treasures. Roberto Clemente, for one.”
“I got a few cards too,” Ernesto said. “I got Derek Jeter.”
Katalina, Ernesto’s nine-year-old sister said, “I got a Sandy Koufax. It’s all wrinkled. Was he important?”
“Yeah, he was great,” Dad said.
“Some boy gave me a Dennis Kinney,” Juanita, who was seven, said.
“I never heard of Dennis Kinney,” Ernesto told his little sister.
“Sunday’s the fiesta at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church you know, you guys,” Maria Sandoval said. “Remember, we’re all going around one o’clock. They’ve got games for the kids and face painting and all kinds of stuff, plus wonderful food.”
Lena Sandoval, Ernesto’s grandmother who lived with the family, smiled and said, “I’m making tortilla española like I do every year. People look forward to it. I’ll be at the food booth with Conchita Ibarra. I make my tortillas the old way, and everybody expects them.” A look of pride shone in her eyes.
“Good for you, Mama,” Luis Sandoval said.
“They’re raffling off a car this year,” Mom said. “I bought ten tickets. Our car is getting a little creaky. It’d be something if we won the Jeep Patriot.”
“You think we’ll win, Mama?” Juanita asked.
Maria Sandoval laughed. “No, but I can dream, can’t I? It was so nice of Mr. Carillo, the Jeep dealer, to donate the car. I know he’s rich, but with the economy still hurting, it’s difficult for people to give.”
“Are we rich, Mama?” Juanita demanded.
This time, Luis Sandoval laughed. “No, mi hija, not in money but in blessings. In love and happiness. When I look at my beautiful esposa, my muchachos and muchachas, I feel like the richest man in the world,” he said.
On Sunday, there was a huge crowd at the fiesta. Ernesto thought that just about everybody he knew was there. Along with the Jeep Patriot, other items were being raffled off, including a beautiful painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The painting was unusual in that the Virgin was appearing not only to Juan Diego, the young farmer, but to other young people, boys and girls who looked like teenagers from the barrio stood around her.
Padre Benito stood by the painting and said, “This was donated by two boys who are seniors at Cesar Chavez High School. They made this painting for the fiesta and gave it to us. Isn’t it remarkable? Look how radiant the Virgin is, and how happy she is to see so many boys and girls. It is a masterpiece!”
“Oh, I want that for my mom’s birthday,” Carmen Ibarra cried. “I bought thirty tickets. Mom would just love that in the den. The Virgin looks just like us!”
Paul Morales was at Carmen’s side and he said, “Babe, I bought some tickets too, and if I win, it’s yours.”
“See how nice he is?” Carmen giggled. “Even if he does have a rattlesnake tattooed on his hand!”
Ernesto, Julio, Mona, Naomi, and Carmen were in line for fish tacos when loud, angry voices exploded from the church parking lot.
Padre Benito looked alarmed. “Oh,” he groaned. “One year a fight broke out and a boy was stabbed!”
Ernesto shouted to Abel and Paul, “We gotta go check the parking lot, dudes. Trouble out there.”
Ernesto, Abel, Paul, and Julio ran to the parking lot. They were all big, muscular boys who could handle pretty much anything. They were likely to intimidate whoever was yelling.
As they approached the parking lot, Ernesto recognized Clay’s voice. He had the shrillest voice Ernesto ever heard. “You idiot! What kind of a fool drops his ID right where he’s hassling some old bum?”
“I was drunk,” Rod Garcia said. “You were drunk too, man!”
“Yeah, but I had the sense to stay in the car and try to sleep it off, man. You and those psycho friends of yours had to look for trouble. You and Gomez and Alanzar had to hassle that bum. You’re morons!” Clay snarled. “And you made trouble for me. I was called into Ms. Sanchez’s office, and she lectured me about underage drinking and being mixed up with dudes who’d pull such a rotten stunt. She told me I could be kicked off the football team because of you idiots!”
“They won’t kick you off,” Rod said. “We didn’t even do anything. We didn’t touch the bum. We just kinda waved our sticks at him. We were having fun. Sanchez talked to me and the other guys too, but she didn’t say we’d be suspended or anything. She just gave us a warning not to step over the line again.”
“And then the dude gets murdered the same night,” Clay ranted. “What do you think all this does to my reputation? People think I was mixed up in something horrible—I slept through the whole thing!”
Ernesto led the way into the parking lot with the other three behind him. “You guys,” Ernesto said, “keep it down. You’re scaring people over at the fiesta.” Paul, Abel, and Julio stood behind Ernesto, looking menacing.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Clay yelled. “This fool here and his creepy junior friends started it all. Why do you have to hang out with junior punks anyway?”
“Humberto Gomez is my cousin,” Rod Garcia said. “Rick Alanzar is his best friend.”
Clay Aguirre was strident and angry, but Rod Garcia seemed subdued. Rod turned to Ernesto and spoke almost apologetically. “We were drunk, and old Slocum was staggering around, and we just on the spur of the moment picked up sticks and pretended he was a bull and we were matadors. We were just kidding around. Nobody woulda got hurt.”
“Well,” Ernesto said, “stop yelling over here. You’re scaring the women and kids. This is a fiesta for kids and families. If you guys got a beef, take it somewhere else, okay?” With that, Ernesto and the others returned to the fiesta.
When Ernesto and his friends were gone, Clay turned to Rod and said bitterly, “You see what you’ve done, fool? You’ve given that jackass Sandoval the chance to lecture us like we’re punks.”
When Ernesto returned to the fiesta, he took another look at the painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe. He smiled to read the name “Cardom” scrawled on the bottom. Carlos Negrete and Dom Reynosa. The minute he saw the painting with its raw, natural beauty, he knew it was theirs.
Ernesto and his friends then sat down to eat their fish tacos and drink their sodas. “Man, these fish tacos are good,” Ernesto said. “They’re as good as you make, Abel.”
Abel smiled.
“You made the fish tacos for this booth, didn’t you?” Ernesto cried.
“Could be,” Abel said. He planned to enter culinary school once he graduated from Chavez. He was growing more skilled by the day because he worked part time at an upscale eatery, the Sting Ray.
Julio told everybody about Mrs. Slocum coming to their house then. “The poor lady appreciated the fact that Pop treated her son like a human being. She told us a lot of stuff about him that we never knew. He wanted to play professional baseball, but the drugs got in the way. And since he was a kid, he collected baseball cards. I guess he traded them all away for drugs.”
Abel shook his head. “Too bad. Some of those baseball cards get really valuable. Griff coulda used some cash,” he said.
“Yeah,” Paul Morales said. “It was on the Internet the other day that some old person left a baseball card to some charity, and when they went to turn it in, it was worth several hundred thousand dollars. It blew them away.”
“Wow,” Mona said. “Whose card would be that valuable? My grandfather used to talk about Babe Ruth. Was it his card?”
“No,” Paul said. “It was a Honus Wagner.”
“Who?” Carmen asked. “I never heard of him.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “He was the first guy to get into the Baseball Hall of Fame when they started that place in the 1930s. Wagner made like three thousand four hundred hits or something.”
“Well, yeah,” Julio said. “It’s way better than some of the guys who came along later. Like Tony Gwynn, he got a little over three thousand hits, and he’s one of the alltime greats, but Wagner made four hundred more.”
“The guy on the Internet said a Honus Wagner card, even in fair condition, is worth a fortune,” Paul said.
“Poor Griff Slocum,” Naomi said. “If he was really into collecting baseball cards, and if he’d saved them, that might have been a way off the streets.”
“He wasn’t a very lucky guy, I guess,” Julio said. “Probably owned a bunch of baseball cards featuring stiffs who never even made it to the World Series.”
“I’ll say he wasn’t lucky,” Mona said sadly. “Think about what happened to the poor guy in one night! First he gets hassled by some mean punks, and then he gets murdered by somebody else. I mean, is that terrible or what?”
“You know,” Julio said, “I got a suspicious mind. I’m not denying that, but I don’t believe in coincidences. I can’t believe that the murder and the hassling by those creeps was totally disconnected. I’ve got no idea how they fit together, but it’s just too much to swallow that at eleven o’clock he’s getting tormented by those three punks, and he’s dead an hour later.”
“So,” Ernesto said, “you think one of those guys who was hassling him came back and killed him? Dude, that makes no sense. They’re creeps, but they’re not criminals. Why would they do a thing like that?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said. “I know Rod Garcia is a jerk, and I’ve talked to that Humberto a few times, and he’s a jerk too. But I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that one of those boys beat poor Griff Slocum to death.”
“And why?” Abel said. “Maybe the poor guy said some bad words to them while they were hassling him, though I doubt it. Griff was as meek a human being as I’ve ever seen, even more of a wimp than my father, who’s a class-A wimp. But even if he’d said something, it couldn’t have made them mad enough to come back and kill the dude.”
“It’s all so horrible,” Naomi said. “It makes my skin crawl to think a student at Cesar Chavez High could have killed a helpless man in cold blood.”
Julio looked over at Mona, his girlfriend. He and Mona had been dating just a short time. Julio had a hard time convincing her parents to let him date their precious only daughter. Julio struck the Corsellas as a tough, even dangerous street kid, and in many ways he was. He sometimes carried a switchblade to use for self-defense if he had to.
When Julio and his father had been homeless, they had camped in the ravine—in Turkey Neck, a homeless camp for all kinds of men. Most were poor souls wasted by life, and some were runaway kids, but a few were bad to the bone, and you needed a switchblade to fight off a dude who would cut your throat for five dollars.
“Naomi, I know it’s hard to think of a kid going to classes at Chavez turning into a murderer, but you never know. We don’t know what evil lurks in people. We don’t even know sometimes what kind of evil lurks in our own souls.”
“I hope the police find the guy who did it,” Mona said. “I hope they find him and put him in jail for the rest of his life. Griff Slocum never hurt anybody. He didn’t deserve to end up like that.”
“I know Rod and Humberto a little, but does anybody know this Rick Alanzar?” Naomi asked.
Paul Morales grinned. “It’s always easier to think it was some dude we don’t know, somebody we’ve never had a burrito with. The stranger out there. He’s the one who did it,” Paul said in a sarcastic voice.
Naomi looked at Paul, “Do you know Rick?”
“He’s come in the electronics store a few times to buy stuff. He looks like an ordinary guy, Naomi. No hair growing out of his ears, no red glow to his eyes,” Paul said.
Naomi looked at Carmen. “Carmen, your boyfriend is making fun of me,” she complained, half smiling.
Carmen laughed. “That’s Paul. He does it to me all the time.”
That evening was the raffle for the Jeep Patriot and the Our Lady of Guadalupe painting, plus some smaller items like gift baskets full of wine, cheese, and gourmet chocolates.
A family nobody knew, who had bought a few tickets at the fiesta just to help the poor little church with the leaky roof, won the Jeep Patriot.
Carmen Ibarra won the painting because she had told everyone she wanted it as a gift for her mother. And because Carmen was so well loved, as was Conchita Ibarra, Carmen’s mother, most people, not just Ernesto, had bought tickets in Carmen’s name.
Everyone had a great time at the fiesta, and the church had raised enough money to fix their roof. They also raised enough to keep the outreach to the poor going for another year, including distributing food to needy families twice a week.
That night, Ernesto Sandoval had trouble sleeping. He kept thinking about what Julio had said, that there was some connection between the three boys who had hassled Griff Slocum and his murder just hours later. Ernesto hated to admit it, but he agreed with Julio. He didn’t much believe in coincidences either.
Ernesto knew and disliked Rod Garcia, but he was pretty sure the guy wasn’t a murderer. Ernesto had lost respect for Humberto Gomez, Rod’s cousin, when he saw him bullying kids at school. He was a tough, mean kid. Though Ernesto had never talked to Rick Alanzar, he thought he seemed like a quiet loner. Whenever some crime was committed, they often said the culprit was a loner.
But Ernesto just couldn’t imagine any of the three harming Griff Slocum.
What if one of the guys had spotted something of value on Griff? As they hassled him, maybe he dropped a wad of money he had stashed. Some homeless people had quite a sum.
Maybe Griff quickly retrieved the money, and one of the three came back alone for it. Maybe the person thought he’d be sleeping, and they could just roll a drunk. Maybe Griff fought for his money.