Employee of the Year

Chapter 5 - Cultural Outreach

Thursday, June 16. Third night after after the murder.

Driving home from coffee with Ned Santini, after we’d both been questioned at the station, I noticed the police had sealed off the north lane of Normandie Avenue. It was about a half-mile from my apartment. It was not too far from the Passion building. In the distance, I could see the parking lot where Roland was murdered.

I sat behind the wheel in the twilight, lined up among the other drivers and pedestrians staring into the jumble of yellow tape and flashing lights. One of the onlookers mentioned something about a drive-by shooting. A teenage boy gunned down on his way home from school. Someone on the sidewalk whispered that it must have been the S Gang since the victim was black. The neighborhood had seen several attacks by S Gang members on African Americans in the past few years. These were sometimes followed with Blood and Crip retaliations on young Latinos.

Detective Zenaida Martinez was talking to beat cops in the sealed-off area. She noticed me and came over.

“Don’t talk to me here!” I urged in a low voice when she was close enough to the car. “I don’t want everyone to see me talking to the police, especially if this was the S Gang.”

I backed up and pulled a U-turn into the southbound lane. It took me another ten minutes to weave an alternate route through the side streets to my apartment. When I got home, I took Suzy’s hand and led her to the bedroom. I wanted to be with her in a cocoon, sealed away from all the violence and sadness in the world. I thought about the baby Suzy and I were expecting. I thought about the poor kid who’d died, thought how he’d been some mother’s baby at one point. I couldn’t wait to get out of this neighborhood, away from the poverty and the danger, away from people like the kids in the S Gang, who only understood anger and war.

It wasn’t long before my home phone rang. I knew it was Martinez before I even picked up.

“We need to talk about what happened tonight, Temo.”

“I heard that was the S Gang. What does that have to do with me? What does that have to do with the shooting in the Passion parking lot?”

“We think they could be related.”

“You think the S Gang killed Roland?”

“Well, they made a number of threats against your company last year, didn’t they?”

I knew where she was going with this. She was talking about the Cultural Outreach Program.

“A lot of people in the community were mad about that. Most of them weren’t gangbangers. They were just hard working immigrants. You can’t lump all those people together with the S Gang. They come here with nothing. They have hard lives.”

“You don’t have to give me a speech about political correctness, Mr. McCarthy. My parents brought me to LA to escape the war when I was a little girl. They had to pack their whole lives into two suitcases and leave home forever. I am just saying we have to look at all the possibilities with this case, don’t we? One possibility is that Roland was murdered not because of who he was but because of what he was. He was a Passion employee. The S Gang made a number of statements singling out Passion as an enemy after the Cultural Outreach Program. Of course it’s true, like you said, a lot of people in the community were angry with Passion over what happened.”

“A lot of people are pissed off at Passion and every other bank these days, that’s for sure. If you’re going to suspect everyone who fits that description, you better have a pretty wide net. You’re going to be adding nearly everybody in America to your list.” I was getting tired of playing games with these cops.