I paid up and headed for North Campus.

13

It was my first trip to UCLA since I’d dropped out twenty years prior, and it blindsided me. The campus, with its chipper youth and brick towers in the classical mode couldn’t stop the memories from flooding in waves of ache. Wanting to please Uncle Herschel, I’d given this place the college try, but my heart was wrapped up in song, and I couldn’t concentrate. Grandiose MTV daydreams dogged me at every turn. Playing the clubs seemed ten times realer then—now it felt like I’d been tricked, hypnotized by the neon lights on the Strip like Pinocchio at the carnival. When, for a third semester, my grade point average dipped like bad stocks, I tore up Uncle Herschel’s tuition check and told him I was quitting. Naturally, he was furious.

“You want applause for this?” His droopy frog eyes swelled with fury. “This is the biggest mistake you will ever make.”

“Uncle Hersch, it’s my mistake to make. Please. Let me suffer the consequences.”

“What did I work for all these years?!” His hands locked in a spasm of grief. “I swore to your mother, may she rest in peace, this one thing. An education is something nobody can take away from you—and you throw it away.”

The packed auditorium made it easy to blend. I took a seat in the back, maybe the sole person over thirty besides Professor Durazo. She was majestic, striking—but very rigid, like somebody’d struck her with an arrow and the poison was taking hold. Her jet-black hair had streaks of forbidding gray. She ignored the opened notebook at her lectern and spoke with grave parataxis, only ever moving to click through the giant overhead PowerPoint: comic book panels, voting stats, questionable headlines en Espanol, photos of the massacred.

“You may have noticed. In these comic books, there are no fathers. No sons. Only uncles, cousins. And yet, in reality…how…are children oriented? By mother. And father. So…so what are we seeing here? A bold act, of distortion. The Walt Disney Corporation…has created…an alternate reality. The ultimate capitalist reality. Without blood hierarchy. In the duck world, the only hierarchy is possession. Competition, at every level. And yet…your smarts don’t count. Your efforts don’t count. Without luck, no social mobility.” And then, she added, with fake sorrow and acid sarcasm, “No social mobility, for the ducks.”

When it was over, I waited for class to file out, as the last of the students chirped their questions at her. Then I made my move down the steps to the podium.

“Professor Durazo, hi. I’m Adam Zantz. Do you have a few minutes?”

She looked at me but didn’t answer.

“I’m a private investigator looking into the death of your cousin Reynaldo.”

She surveyed me now in that brain-churning way particular to the academic intellectual. Wryly, she said, “Aren’t you a little late?”

“Better late than never?”

Again she didn’t answer. She closed her notebook, gathered papers, fussed with her laptop. When her briefcase was packed, she said, “I have a meeting across campus. Walk with me if you like.”

You can tell a lot about a person from how they walk. Socorro Durazo moved through the great quad with an animal sense of purpose that underscored her power and made her impossible to ignore. I couldn’t help but wonder if some of these college dudes shlepping backpacks hadn’t enrolled in her class just to breathe the air around a woman like that without really caring too much about Marxist theory and the cultural exploitation of Latin America.

“Do you remember Reynaldo well?” I said.

“Who hired you?”

“Charles Elkaim—the suspect’s father.”

“I know who Charles Elkaim is. You know you’re not the first Dudley Do-Right to try and tackle this?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“They’ve been throwing their money at it for years.”

“Who’s they?”

“All of them. Anything to clear the names of their precious children. And of course, Devon Hawley—the most deluded of them all. He pisses away half his life savings paying hacks like you—he can’t let it go.”

My belly tightened. “Is that right?”

“Yup—last one was an ex-cop named Gladstone, one of these so-called experts in closed-case investigation.”

“What happened?”

“I’m guessing zilch.”

“So…you know Hawley.”

“Not exactly. We met twice to compare notes.”

“Notes?”

“That’s right. I’ve been conducting a little investigation of my own.”

“Really.”

“Oh yeah. I spoke to all of ’em—I even went to county lockup to talk to that white trash piece of shit singer.”

“What…what is it you’re trying to figure out exactly?”

She stopped to face me. “Who killed my cousin—obviously. Because it sure as shit wasn’t Emil Elkaim.”

“No?”

“Of course not. Rey-Rey loved Emil. They were best buds—thick as thieves. Rey called him the Israeli Keith Richards—they had a band together.”

“I heard that.”

“They had big dreams together. People don’t kill their own dreams.”

“So they were really close,” I mumbled. For one moment the whole campus seemed to go into slo-mo. Then she smiled a fake one and kept walking and I followed.

“To answer your question,” she said, “I think about my cousin Reynaldo every fucking day. Too much maybe. I see his face in all these young men.”

“What was he like?”

“Rey-Rey? Enthusiastic. That’s what got him killed.”

“Enthusiasm gets you killed?”

“Absolutely. People like their Mexicans lazy. Rey had gusto. Too upbeat and they take you down.” When I didn’t comment, she said, “He was my angel, my guardian. When he was alive, I mean. I looked up to him.”

“How old were you—”

“When Rey was murdered? Eleven years, eight months. I remember it like yesterday. I suppose I was in love with him in a way. We all were. He was the family hero.”

“I read a newspaper article that claimed the whole thing was over some drugs.”

“Don’t talk to me about what you read in the white man’s newspapers. It’s unreliable now, but then? They wrote about us like we were gerbils.”