The 19th Christmas Read online

  Would I see the next one? I was thinking again about the Job versus Life. Everyone I knew, certainly my closest friends, was trying to balance this conflict every day.

  Joe read me. “You’re thinking about the shootout?”

  “I was feeling bad that I missed the J-Bug hanging balls on the tree.”

  “There will be other Christmas trees,” he said.

  “I know.” I said it again for emphasis and maybe for luck. “I know.”

  But what I was thinking was God willing.

  Part Two

  December 22

  Chapter 13

  Cindy Thomas was in her office at the Chronicle, laptop open and coffee cooling as she dug into the assignment that had just arrived in her inbox.

  The paper’s publisher and editor in chief, Henry Tyler, had asked her to do a piece for the Living section about how undocumented immigrants in San Francisco celebrated the Christmas holidays. Undocumented immigrants were tangential to her usual crime beat, but Cindy was charged up by the story idea. For once she wouldn’t be reporting on bombings or mass murderers or parents who’d locked their babies in hot cars.

  Cindy created a new folder and shut out the sounds around her—the coffee-cart lady’s bell, her coworkers laughing and chatting as they passed her office, and the traffic noise coming from the street below.

  She would begin her research with the Christmas traditions of people from Mexico and Central America, focusing on a central question: Was it possible to keep cultural tradition alive when you were living under a shadow? Sometimes that shadow was decades long.

  Cindy began reading about Las Posadas—“the Inns”—a nine-day Mexican Christmas tradition celebrating Mary and Joseph’s journey to find a safe place to stay while awaiting the birth of their child. How had she never heard of this festival? It sounded so joyful. It started every year on December 16 with a costume parade down a main street, after which friends, families, and neighbors would take turns acting as “innkeepers,” one home hosting a posada each night through December 24. As tradition had it, once the crowd had gathered inside a home, there were prayers and a Bible reading before the good times rolled. Cindy found photos of the piñatas, the hot drinks and yummy food, and the take-home bags of candies for the celebrants.

  Today was the twenty-second. Cindy figured that in some places in San Francisco, Las Posadas was in full swing, but it would be ending soon. She had to work fast if she was going to center her story on that. Research alone did not a story make.

  Five days a week Cindy published a crime blog that was open to her readership for comments. She clicked on her crime-blog page and wondered how to ask for assistance from Latino immigrants without it looking like an ICE-inspired sting.

  She wrote, “If you’re from South or Central America or Mexico and would like to share your Christmas tradition with our readers, please write to me. Your real name is not required.”

  Within the hour she was looking through dozens of responses to her query, and one of them was tantalizing.

  But it had nothing to do with Las Posadas. At all.

  Chapter 14

  The response that grabbed Cindy’s attention was from Maria, who wrote, “My husband is in jail for a murder he didn’t do. We are undocumented and he has been in jail for two years, no trial. I am lost. Please help.”

  Cindy replied, “Thank you for your message, Maria. Can we meet?”

  Maria wrote back in minutes. “Can you come to my apartment? I have to work at noon.”

  Less than an hour later Cindy was driving through the Mission, a neighborhood heavily populated by Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin America.

  She checked off the landmarks Ms. Maria Varela had given her—the tattoo parlor on one corner, a mercado on the opposite one, vividly colored signage and murals on the sides of the three-story wood-frame building on Osage Street where Maria lived.

  Cindy parked in front of a coin-op laundry, walked a block west to Osage, and buzzed the button marked VARELA. A return buzz unlocked the street-level door. With some trepidation, Cindy entered and climbed two flights of stairs.

  Maria was waiting for her outside the apartment door.

  “I love you for coming,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

  Cindy thought Maria looked to be in her forties, average height and weight, hair pulled into a bun. She wore a loose-fitting flowered top over tights and flat shoes, pink lipstick, and a smile at odds with the sadness in her brown eyes.

  The small apartment was tidy with a nice sectional facing the TV, a print of the Crucifixion over the faux fireplace, and Christmas lights strung along the wall above the windows. A small Christmas tree stood on the kitchen table, and there were framed family photos—everywhere.

  Cindy declined an offer of coffee, took a seat on the sofa, and began to interview Ms. Varela, noticing that her English was excellent.

  “Tell me about your husband,” Cindy said.

  Maria lifted a photo from the lamp table and showed it to Cindy. It was a picture of herself and her husband, Eduardo Varela, taken some years before. Maria’s hair hung loose to below her shoulders, Eduardo wore a white linen shirt, and the two had their arms around each other, radiating love and hope.

  Maria said, “We got married in Guadalajara when we were eighteen. Three little ones came the first five years. Then the farm where we worked burned down. We couldn’t get work. We had a cousin here. We tried to get visas for ourselves and our children so we could come to America. The papers never came.”

  Maria told a harrowing story of the type that had become almost commonplace in the pages of the Chronicle and all over the country. She and Eduardo had paid a “coyote” everything they had, and he had arranged for them to be driven in a packed truck to the border and then smuggled over. In the process, they had been separated from their oldest child.

  “But God answered our prayers. We found Roberto in a shelter four months later. He was six.”

  The cousin got Eduardo a job in the tomato fields, and Maria did laundry. They scraped by.

  “We were illegal. We couldn’t apply for green cards.

  “Roberto, Elena, and Geraldo are now in high school. I work at the Trident Hotel. Cleaning. Eduardo had two, sometimes three, jobs to support us all—and then the nightmare happened.”

  Maria seemed stuck in the memory of that nightmare until Cindy encouraged her to go on.

  Maria looked grief-stricken. She told Cindy, “A boy was shot on the street. Some other boys said Eduardo did it. They knew him—knew his name and said that to the police. Ms. Thomas, Eduardo was in his car, sleeping. He doesn’t want to wake us up when he leaves for his night shift. He heard the shots but he had nothing, nothing, to do with the shooting. That night he was arrested for murder at his job, and he is being held for trial two years now.”

  “Two years? Can they do that?”

  Maria nodded sadly. She told Cindy that her husband had prior arrests before the shooting. “He was stopped for speeding. And he had a fake driver license. He needed to work, drive from the auto-body store he cleaned during the day to the gas station where he did the overnight shift,” she said. “But he never hurt anyone in the world. He is the best husband and father. Sweet. Gentle. He has never shot any gun.”

  “Maria, do you have a lawyer?”

  “We did. He got all our money, and Eduardo is still in jail. Now I’m afraid if I fight, I’ll be deported, and then there is no one to protect our children.”

  “I’d love to see more pictures of your family,” Cindy said.

  Maria brought an album over and sat next to Cindy.

  “The pictures are not so good but very valuable to us.”

  She turned the pages slowly, saying who was who in photos of events, birthdays, and gatherings. There was even a picture taken at a parade along Osage Street of the family dressed as peasants and angels in the Christmas pageantry of Las Posadas.

  “But we won’t be celebrating Las Posadas this year.”<
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  “What can I do to help?” Cindy asked.

  “When I saw what you wrote, I felt that God was saying that you are a lifeline. I have no place else to turn.”

  “No promises,” Cindy said, reaching over to take Maria’s hands. “But I’ll talk to a friend who might be able to help.”

  Chapter 15

  Cindy drove back to the Chronicle, thinking about what she could do before she called Yuki and begged her to get involved. There were so many people like Maria, hopeless, living in fear. And there had to be many others who would feel this family’s pain. People who could easily think, There but for the grace of God go I.

  As she drove, Cindy thought of Maria Varela’s sadness and desperation. In her mind she composed a pitch to Henry Tyler about Maria’s family and their tragic situation.

  If Tyler approved, Cindy thought she could write a story about this family that would get attention. It might melt some bureaucrat’s heart or attract a legal pit bull who could take a bite out of the system. Suddenly she was feeling a lot of pressure to write an impassioned story about the Varelas as well as her assigned feature about Las Posadas in time for both pieces to appear in the Christmas edition.

  She just needed to stay focused and keep her fingers on the keys. Research first.

  Back at the Chronicle, Cindy found the coffee wagon, brought a cup of cocoa and a muffin, took both back to her desk, and began looking up resources about immigration law, which she knew to be complex and sometimes arbitrary. She pulled several articles from LexisNexis and read for hours. In regard to law enforcement, she learned that ICE could bring an unauthorized migrant to immigration court, where he or she would most likely be deported and barred from reentering the United States for ten years or more. Depending on the offense, the individual might also be prosecuted under the laws in his or her home country.

  In Eduardo’s case, the officers had chosen to hold him on criminal charges. He’d been indicted by a grand jury and then left in jail in San Francisco pending trial—whenever that would be. Cindy now knew that long-term pretrial detention happened with regularity. Courts had backlogs, and detention ensured court appearances and preserved public safety. But the real reason many stayed in jail was that most undocumented immigrants couldn’t afford bail.

  Maria had told Cindy that Eduardo was sleeping in his car when he heard the shots. She said that the witnesses had lied—he didn’t own and had never fired a gun. Maybe when they’d seen Eduardo, they had decided on the spot to pin the shooting on him.

  Cindy thought about the possible outcomes of a trial. Could those witness statements be refuted? Or was it more likely that two years after that murder, in a transient neighborhood with an immigrant population, no one would testify in Eduardo’s defense? And if the case went to trial and Eduardo was found guilty of murder despite the sketchy evidence, he would go to prison, probably for life.

  With her new understanding of Eduardo’s situation and what he was up against, Cindy decided it was time to pitch Tyler the story and then, if he approved it, go see Yuki Castellano and try to get her on board.

  Chapter 16

  Yuki was behind her tidy desk in her office when Cindy came to the door. She said to Cindy, “Come on in. Have a seat. Put your feet up. What’s going on?”

  Yuki was usually the fast talker of the group, but Cindy could put some speed on when she was worked up. The two friends went over to the small sofa, where Cindy filled Yuki in on her meeting with Maria and the research she had done.

  Her proposed article about Eduardo Varela wasn’t an investigative report. It was an opinion piece, a human-interest story. She hadn’t interviewed cops or the ME or gone over crime scene photos.

  She had pitched Eduardo’s story to Henry Tyler, the publisher and editor in chief, saying that she believed, based on talks with his family, that this undocumented immigrant had been wrongfully charged and jailed without trial for two years.

  Cindy had told Tyler that she was convinced that an injustice had been done, and she and Tyler had discussed the Varela family’s backstory.

  After ten intense minutes Tyler had said, “Go for it.” And he was holding space for her on the front page of the Christmas edition.

  Now she had to write it—and fast. Could Yuki help Eduardo?

  Yuki said, “Are you asking me to lean on an ADA and get this man out of jail? Today?”

  “Can you?”

  “Hell no.”

  Cindy laughed. “I thought you could do anything.”

  “Not exactly,” said Yuki. “I can do nothing to defend this man. I’m a prosecutor, remember? But I have some questions for you.”

  “Shoot,” said Cindy.

  Yuki asked for the names of the victim, the arresting officers, and the witnesses against Eduardo. Cindy referred to her notes.

  “The victim was Gordon Perez, twenty years old, body found on Bartlett Street two blocks from Eduardo and Maria’s apartment. Here’s a transcript of the arresting officers’ statements,” Cindy said as she emailed the police report to Yuki from her phone.

  “Let me see,” said Yuki. She went to her laptop, read the report, then looked up and said, “The police didn’t find the gun.”

  “That’s good or bad?”

  “If they’d found a gun that belonged to Eduardo, there’s your slam-dunk conviction. If they’d found the murder weapon and it was registered to someone else but Eduardo’s prints were on it, ditto. Slam dunk. If they’d found the gun but there were no prints, that would have worked in Eduardo’s favor. Without a gun, it’s much harder to prove that he’s the shooter. Did Eduardo know the victim?”

  “Yes. They were acquainted.”

  “How did they get along?”

  “From what Maria told me, they just lived on the same street. That was all.”

  Yuki said, “Okay. Assuming Eduardo Varela had no motive to shoot Gordon Perez, the case against him is based on witness statements. Varela has a crappy alibi. As it says here, he was sleeping in his car, heard shots, got out, and saw some boys run off.”

  “He didn’t call the police,” said Cindy. “He just drove to his second job.”

  “Hmm. Or, as the state will put it, he shot the guy, got rid of his gun, then drove to his second job.”

  Yuki had worked for a nonprofit lawyers’ organization. Cindy knew she had defended a couple of undocumented immigrants while assisting the head of the Defense League, who was now a friend.

  Yuki said, “I’m thinking about that big case that gets talked about a lot. Jorge Alvarez was deported five times and got back into San Francisco, where he fatally stabbed a man in a hotel lobby. It was an unfortunate criminal career path,” Yuki said, “but it made a big impression on the public consciousness, and it hardened the courts against illegal immigrants.”

  “What happened to Alvarez?” Cindy asked.

  “He’s awaiting trial. He could be your guy’s cell mate, for all we know. But there’s another guy I just read about, an immigrant convicted of murder, Jaime Ochoa. Ochoa got a break—after twenty years.”

  “Twenty?”

  “The one and only witness retracted her statement. She maintained that she had told the cops she wasn’t sure at the time, but the state ran with the witness testimony and got a conviction. After twenty years, the witness was willing to swear she’d ID’d the wrong man.”

  “Holy crap. Twenty years of life, wasted.”

  “Ochoa walked out a free man. He wasn’t deported, and he thanked the court and went home to his family,” Yuki said. “He was undocumented, but he had no prior record.

  “Varela, on the other hand, is not only here illegally, he’s a repeat offender with a murder indictment.”

  “So there’s no hope at all?”

  “I’ll make a call to Zac Jordan, the lawyer I worked for at the Defense League. He’s good, Cin. He’s smart as can be. Still, I wouldn’t bank on Eduardo Varela walking on this one. He has the right to a fair trial. But unless he has a brilliant lawye
r and the state is too overwhelmed to pay attention, odds are he’s going to prison for the rest of his life.”

  “Please call your friend, Yuki,” Cindy said. “I believe in miracles.”

  Chapter 17

  The day after the shootout at the Anthony Hotel, the bullpen was standing room only, packed wall to wall to wall with investigators from our station and representatives from Northern and Central as well.

  Brady had called an emergency meeting. Two FBI agents had been hit; one had died, and the other had been moments from bleeding out. The tension in the room was expressed with tight body language and nervous chatter.

  I watched Brady leave his office at the back of the bullpen and edge through the crowd. When he got to the front, he grabbed a chair, stepped up onto it, batted away a garland of tinsel tacked to the ceiling, then ripped it down.

  He said, “Good morning, everyone.”

  The chatter immediately shut down, and our lieutenant and acting chief got right to it.

  He said, “We’ve been tipped off that there is going to be a big, likely heavily armed robbery in the next few days. We’d like to head that off.

  “Here’s what we know.”

  Talking over the fresh round of murmurs, Brady detailed the chase and capture of petty thief Julian Lambert, the info he’d given us on a hitter hired to work the upcoming robbery, and the tip that the hitter was staying at the Anthony Hotel.

  “That hitter,” said Brady, “is now laid out at the morgue. Everyone here heard what happened last night?”

  A murmur of “Yes, sir”s rumbled through the room. The story of the one-man ambush and Dietz’s utter obliteration on the sixth floor had traveled fast, first over the police and fire department channels, then by word of mouth, then via the internet, and finally as a “Sources tell us” piece on the broadcast news.

  Conklin and I exchanged looks, both of us still shell-shocked, hoping for answers. After this, we planned to go back to the Anthony and meet with CSI director Charlie Clapper. He and his team had been processing the scene all night, and I was dying to find out what he had learned from Chris Dietz’s rented room. Julian Lambert was still in our custody, and Brady would interrogate him again. If Lambert was holding anything back, I was pretty sure he’d give it up to Brady.