Despite Rocky’s resistance to the assignment from his boss, longtime LA private detective Jack Palomino, memories of Arnulfo — the murdered man and him as barefoot boys hiding between the tin walls, playing ladrón librado as they took turns being cop and crook with other kids — roll in the movie screen of his mind.
Poor cerote, he thinks, never stopped believing he and the social movements could change this fabulously corrupt system. I used to believe that shit. No más. You died for another grand causa, left in the middle of the green grass of Slauson Park. Tied up like that, you must’ve looked like the saint the public made you, the “Peacemaker,” out to be.
He smiles. They can believe what they want, but I remember how the “Peacemaker” learned his trade — as a “terorista” fighting a war against a fascist military dictatorship.
The photos he saw from the crime scene he just visited — Arnulfo’s nose hacked off, his arms tied behind his back and gashed, and his head ready to fall off with another chop — run through his head.
Of my life, I give my best
I’m so poor, what else can I give?
Even as kids, Arnulfo was charismatic. He was a guy able to get others to do stuff, including Rocky. He was also a fucking blowhard — a young blowhard who became an adult media hound for his causas. But he was an effective organizer, he knew how to conspirar like we were taught. Ego or not, he died with that Jedi belief: Revolucíon. He didn’t deserve to die, especially not like this, like one of the escuadrones de la muerte death squad killings from back when they were fighting the fascistas of the Salvadoran government.
He looked eastward, toward the gigantic projects stuck between the warehouses and small factories that LA’s powers that be squeezed into the eastern part of South Central. Slauson Park, where Arnulfo was killed, stands out as a green patch in the gray and black lines of concrete, prison stripes coloring the satellite maps of South LA. Different parts of the scenery — the tropical rain, lots overrun with weeds and graffiti, la Resurrección church, the industrial warehouses and small factories, railroad tracks, the general browning of South LA — give Arnulfo’s machete murder a sultry, sad Salvadoran feel. Sometimes, LA itself feels very Salvadoreño, a dark, ugly feeling Rocky rejects as if it were a gun in his gut. But the comparison is limited. War is war. Even during the worst of the ’92 riots here, weeks and months in LA never came close to a single day of absolute terror in El Salvador.
“Sabor a Mi” seduces Rocky back into detective mode.
“There are lots of people who have wanted to kill Arnulfo,” he says out loud. He really was that good of an organizer, one who, as they say in good Salvadoran, knew how to touch los guevos del tigre. Arnulfo’s touched a lot of tiger balls.
Pero tú llevas también sabor a mi...
Rocky rockets through the mental Rolodex of possible suspects besides Guardado, the guy they have in custody: smaller cliques of MS-13 or 18th Street gangs opposed to the gang truce he was organizing; the Mexican Mafia or Crips or Bloods wanting to foment and grow with continued violence; the escuadrones de la muerte that have operated in LA since the ’80s and still carry a big ax — or machete — to grind.
He grits his teeth and shakes his head at the thought of how the cops are compounding the problem. The cops hated Arnulfo too. His loud, articulate, and passionate — and very public — calls to “abolish the police” as part of the larger movement guaranteed the cops were celebrating his death. Arnulfo’s prominence also guaranteed that the cops would do little to nothing to investigate the circumstances surrounding his murder.
The real question, he thought, is who wanted to kill the peace by killing the Peacemaker?
This was Jack’s brilliant idea, he says to himself, the disheveled but brilliant old-school Italian Jew version of Columbo. Jack’s old friends from Comite Esperanza, a Salvadoran advocacy organization Rocky volunteered at years ago, approached him with Arnulfo’s case. Jack has always been solidario. Like good Salvadorans, they don’t buy the official story.
Fucking Jack figured Rocky’d dive headfirst into this case because he went back years with Arnulfo. Jack figured wrong. He’s not so into it. Rocky’s gonna let Jack know he should find someone else as soon as possible. This isn’t good for him.
The deeper sources of Rocky’s Salvadoran malaise are known only to him, but have something to do with his relationship to the music. Whatever the sources, there, between the lines of these sublime bolero songs, is something else: the sweet-and-sour secrets of the better life left to him by his parents, two extremely poor Salvadorans who danced and struggled their way through a Great Depression and other calamities that made Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath look like a wine festival. Whatever the relationship between his parents’ music, the malaise, and his preternatural ability to connect dots that are invisible to most, Rocky keeps it deep in himself, like it’s a plan to attack the Ilopango airport from clandestine safe houses in San Salvador during the war. But as mysterious as the madness in his detective method is, it is effective enough to keep Jack giving him work.
Rocky turns back to the case, his closed eyes and the sultry sweetness of El Chicano’s version of “Sabor a Mi” making him look like he’s serenading his ex-wife or one of the other women he never managed to stay in a relationship with beyond a few years. Except Marivel. His head moves as if he’s painting a circle with it.
Rocky’s lover seems to be the crime itself. While a mystery even to him, his alchemical method involves transforming the rhythms and lyrics into an incantation, a spell that makes the background music the fuel for his analytical and emotional processes.
Rocky, an avid reader and quick study, hears a connection between the lyrics “I keep your taste like you carry the taste of me” and Locard’s Exchange Principle, a forensic theory he learned about from Jack, a former professor of Romance literature at Berkeley back when.
Locard’s Principle, the foundation of forensics and detection, is premised on a simple but powerful idea Rocky adores, one that feels, for him, like the bridge between the love of poetry and science he learned in El Salvador before the war collapsed everything: every crime leaves a bit of itself on the criminal, and criminals also leave a part of themselves at the scene of the crime. This is what Rocky hears and feels in “Sabor a Mi.”
At one level, the physical evidence of the crime would indicate that the accused killer, Pablo Guardado, did in fact leave a lot of his sabor at the Slauson Park scene. Serena, a very smart and buxom Chicana LAPD clerk Rocky once dated, managed to sneak a look at the case file. She let him know that the evidence includes hair samples, DNA, fingerprints, and other materials gathered by LA’s less-than-finest, all matching with Guardado. And, of course, the bloody machete the cops say Guardado bought at Liborio’s market in Mid-City.
Despite (or probably because of) their especially sloppy work, the LAPD wrapped the case up in a neat package, putting the responsibility squarely on Guardado, a thirty-five-year-old former member of the LAPD’s favorite group of “terrorists,” MS-13. Before finding salvation in Jesús, Guardado, the former “Smiley,” was an MS shot caller — turned — born again believer bro and pastor. Being “saved” is, more often than not, the only way to escape la vida loca. Prior to his salvation, Guardado was hard as hard can be, leading the Hoover Street Locos, an MS-13 clique whose intrepid actions and violence were legendary. Prior to his arrest, everything looked like Guardado was trying to follow Saint Paul and Buddhist saint Milarepa’s path from murderous violence to holy redemption. Maybe not.