Weeks before the murder, Yagoda was put on the spot during a debate. One of the moderators asked him about tattoos he’s alleged to have, tattoos of a Viking with a .357, the logo of the Norsmen, a white supremacist gang that’s operating within the LAPD. Yagoda admitted to having the tattoo, but not to any affiliation with the Norsemen.

  On top of everything else, the whole thing seems off to Rocky. To begin with, he calculates, the gangs haven’t resorted to killings with machetes since the early days, when Arnulfo and he worked at the refugee comite in Pico Union. The only ones who keep talking about maras and machetes are the media and politicians who also use outdated images of tattoo-faced gangs. The kids used to buy the machetes at Liborio’s market less to terrorize people than because they couldn’t afford the AKs, Uzis, and other weapons favored by the Mexican Mafia and the other gangs that operated south and east of here. Why would anybody want to resurrect the machete decades later?

  We Salvadoreños know how that “terrorista” takes on its own life when there’s no opposition to it. It will continue to rule like a king, unless somebody gets in its way. Somebody wanted to kill the peace by killing Arnulfo. The question is, who benefits from continued war? Arnulfo’s murder threatens everything he spent his thirty-plus years in LA building.

  The thought of these hypocritical pigs is too much to bear. Fuck it, he decides, I’ll take the case. I may not share Arnulfo’s dreamy Star Wars Jedi code in the causa, but I will investigate.

  They’ve got this thing wrapped up too nicely in the material realm. Seems like this Guardado kid did do it, but the evidence is nonetheless questionable. The killing of Arnulfo in the middle of the park, the use of the machete—it’s all staged, but not by a Salvadoran director. The script doesn’t feel like a Salvadoran wrote it either. He needs to find a witness.

  For the next week, Rocky keeps coming to the same spot at the same late hours, parking his car, listening to boleros, in the hopes of finding a witness, a clue, something that will confirm what the music led his gut to believe about the questionable circumstances surrounding Arnulfo’s murder. Then one night, looking in the direction of Slauson Park, he notices a young male leaving the rec center building off the basketball court.

  Holy shit, he thinks, it’s after midnight! Before Rocky can start his Toyota, the kid speeds off in an old Chevy.

  The next day Rocky returns to the rec center to ask about the guy. He’s greeted by a young man and woman. They’re dressed in the blue-and-white shirts of the Parks and Rec department. He quickly sizes them up and concludes that their demeanor, physical appearance, and especially the way the woman uses her mouth to point, indicate Salvadoran ancestry.

  “What say you, young compatriotas?”

  “Compatriotas?” the young woman replies.

  “Yes,” Rocky says, “I notice you’re sporting the national colors and figured we’re compatriots.”

  The two young people laugh. Rocky knows it’s nice to be recognized as Salvadoran, a people who live in anonymity, oppression, the culture of secrecy imposed by a country with a long history of military dictatorship, and, in the US, the faceless nothing of being “Latino.”

  “My name’s Rocky,” he says. “I’m a private eye looking into the murder of Arnulfo Cartagena. I’m sure you’ve been asked about this before.”

  “Yeah, the cops questioned us once,” the young man says. “But that was it.”

  “So, you’re a real detective and Salvadoran?” the woman asks.

  “Yes,” he says, and shows them his license. He looks at the posters of Che Guevara and the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton in the corner of the rec office. “You know that we had detectives in El Salvador, including in the Frente?”

  “You were in the FMLN?”

  “Yes. We had compañeros who, in addition to being guerrilleros, were doing counterintelligence work.”

  “You mean like chasing spies and infiltres?” the increasingly excited young man says.

  “Yes, and there were many compañeras who did the work too. We also investigated crimes among members of the Frente—you know, rape, beatings, and even killings committed by some of our soldiers.”

  “Wow. You were a guerrillero detective!” says the young woman. “That’s sooo cool.”

  “So, what can you tell me about the people who use the gym at night?”

  “Well,” the young man says, “the main people who use it are basketball players, mostly young guys playing pickup games and this one team that uses it once a week. Them and the church group from across the street that practices music here Mondays and Thursdays.”

  “Church group?”

  “They bring guitars, an electric drum set, a bass, and singers.”

  “Who leads the band?”

  “The guitar player. I think his name is Alfonso, a guy with a bunch of tattoos. I think he was in a gang. He’s the one we gave the keys to because they asked permission to stay late. And, you know, they’re in a church and they’ve always been respectful.”

  Rocky heads to the church, acting like a feligrés, one of the faithful looking to reconnect with God after backsliding. Sure enough, he quickly locates Alfonso Mejia. He and the other band members use the space at night to rehearse songs of redemption with the blood of Christ.

  Rocky had confirmed with local Salvadoran sources that Alfonso’s a former gang member, now part of the ministry of the church targeting at-risk youth for salvation. He also found out who led him out of the gang and into God: Pablo Guardado, the accused murderer.

  Guardado had actually led the ministry targeting gang kids in South LA. He himself was a kind of peacemaker. What would lead him to go back to la vida loca? Rocky wondered. Maybe he never left it and remained connected. Many a homie has.

  Rocky parks on Compton Avenue, on the same side as la Resurrección. It is about twelve thirty in the morning when the young band members open the door. Rocky steps out of his car.

  “Alfonso?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “I’m Roque Anaya, private investigator. Folks at the Comite Esperanza asked my firm to look into the murder of Arnulfo Cartagena. I just want to ask you some—”

  “Nah, bro. I ain’t got nothin to say to you,” the young church member says. “I’m not in that world anymore and already spoke with the police.”

  “Which world?”

  “Never mind.”

  “The gang world. Actually, I’m told you’re still in la vida loca, using the tithes the faithful give you each week to buy one of God’s gifts: crack. Word is you’re like those Catholic curas who preach beautiful by day and party hard as hell by night.”

  “What the fuck, ey? Who’s tellin you this shit?”

  “People who have a lot more stuff to tell me, they say, stuff I can share with your wife, your friends in the congregation … and Homeland Security.”

  “Fuck them—and fuck you.”

  “Okay. I’m gonna give you a break and let you cool off and think about what you can and can’t tell me. I’d hate for your baby to graduate from elementary school without seeing his dad there.” Rocky had discovered that Mejia has a newborn son, a redeeming force without equal in the world of Salvadoran migrant gangs.

  The young tiger’s balls have been touched. He adopts a pensive posture before speaking again. Rocky knows that deportation can often mean death to young Salvadorans. It also means not seeing their families. He knows precisely how to squeeze Salvadorans, many of whom live under the boot of being undocumented because the US government never recognized how it created a refugee and migration problem when it backed the fascist military dictatorships for all those years. Rocky doesn’t like using this lever, but needs to if he wants to get to the bottom of Arnulfo’s murder.

  “Okay, okay,” Mejia says. “Look, I can’t talk right now. All I can tell you is that it involved escuadrones.” With that, the young man hurries to his Chevy and speeds away.

  Escuadrones? Rocky says to himself, as he stands in the park pondering the possibility that Salvadoran death squads have indeed been resurrected to kill Arnulfo and frame Guardado. He wrestles with sudden feelings of anger and fear. He’s at a loss, but is humble enough to know when he needs help. So he leaves the park to go seek the assistance of the wizard of LA detectives, his boss, Jack Palomino.

  Rocky walks up the stairs of Jack’s house on Silver Lake. The previous night’s rain has left a glitter on the sidewalk of the posh neighborhood.

  Jack had put in the time and earned the house and his stellar reputation. A former hippie-professor, Jack Palomino started doing private investigation with a San Francisco–based firm founded in the early ’70s by a motley crew of poets, philosophers, scientists, Vietnam veterans, lawyers, journalists, former strippers, techies, and literary scholars. It distinguished itself as much for its effectiveness as for the funky backgrounds, swashbuckling swagger, and the unorthodox methods of its founding members. Among such methods were using guns only as a last measure, conducting extensive research, and gaining deep cultural knowledge surrounding the objects of investigation.

  One member of the firm was clued in to the computer revolution rising out of Silicon Valley and expanded the art and science of secret recordings with miniature reel-to-reel tape recorders. On the social front, the firm did for private investigating what Sly Stone did for both soul and psychedelic music: employed women and Black people along with whites. The firm was antiauthoritarian, fueled by sticking it to the Man.

  Rocky liked that Jack’s new firm was also dedicated to taking on leftist causas. Jack had moved to LA in the late ’70s and had done detective work for both God and the Devil, conducting investigations for the Black Panthers, Harvey Weinstein, former president Bill Clinton, and others. He offered Rocky a job as an apprentice investigator after he first migrated from El Salvador during the war. Rocky had been painting the man’s home/office when Jack somehow noticed that he “had some skills” and hired him. Jack’s politics, along with his brilliance and the opportunity to do interesting and good-paying work, persuaded Rocky to resurrect the investigative skills he had learned as a counterintelligence officer in the FMLN. And though he didn’t understand Rocky’s musical methods, Jack loved the lyrical aspect of Rocky’s approach.

  The two men greet each other in the usual joking way before getting straight to the business of murder.

  “The real question here, Jack, is who killed the peace?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Arnulfo was a leader in negotiating gang truces. He’s been doing it since just after the war ended in ’92, the same year gangs started escalating violence. He’s been working between MS-13 and 18th Street since then and has facilitated conversations between Crips, Bloods, and the Salvadoran gangs.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “In Slauson Park, near the corner of Compton and 54th. That’s where I’ve been staking out.”

  “Compton and 54th? Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. What’s the big deal?”

  “That’s the corner of 1466 East 54th. Do you know what happened there in 1974?”

  “No. I was a ten-year-old living in El Salvador, Jack. How the fuck would I know?”

  “That’s the address of the hideout of the Symbionese Liberation Army.”

  “Who?”

  “Some called them the first domestic terrorist group in the United States. I was hired by Patty Hearst’s family to help find her, and that’s where the cops had a shootout with them. The cops ended up burning the house down. It was national news. The shootout was one of the earliest examples of copaganda, a commercial for the new, more militarized police units that were starting to appear: Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT. The cops used the SLA to justify bringing in heavy artillery, tanks, and other stuff that is ‘normal’ today.”

  “This sounds like El Salvador,” Rocky says, “constantly looking for communists, subversivos, and other terroristas to justify the militarization of communities.”

  “Yep. You need terrorists to keep police budgets fat.”

  “Fuck. Arnulfo was one of the loudest voices calling to demilitarize and defund LA’s police force.”

  “But how do death squads fit in when they have what sounds like pretty solid evidence pointing to Guardado? Why not accept their results?”

  “That whole killing-with-a-machete shit feels fake.”

  “So who do you think did this?”

  “Cops are looking at it from a typical US perspective, when what you need is a Salvadoran lens. I tracked down this kid, a young ex–gang member in the church Guardado belonged to. I found out he’s involved in some small-time illicit shit, cornered him, got him to give up some info. He’s scared. Told me it was the escuadrones.”

  “Death squads?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t the death squads operate in tandem with the military, the police, and other security forces in El Salvador?”

  “Uh, yeah, Jack. What’s your point?”

  “Something I’ve learned over the years is that there are people who don’t like to have their hands bloodied with murders, people who use others to do their dirty work.”

  “Hmmm. So the death squads might be working for someone?”

  “Who knows? But it’s something to consider, if you’re Salvadoran sense is that Guardado was set up to kill Arnulfo.”

  “I gotta go speak to Guardado.”

  Rocky waits in the long visitors’ line at the hulking, labyrinthine LA County jail. The line is overwhelmingly made up of Latino and Black women and children going to see loved ones being warehoused by the government. After an hour and a half, Rocky finally steps into the glass-plated room to meet the murder suspect.

  Guardado looks Rocky over as he strolls gangster-style to his seat in front of the glass. The evangelical minister is nowhere in sight. “You’re that guerrillero detective that used to hang at Casa Esperanza, right?”

  “Yes,” Rocky says. “I knew your uncles from the movement.”

  “Yeah, my tíos gave everything for that causa, and what do they have to show for it? Ni mierda.”

  “No argument from me,” Rocky responds, as his stomach tightens. “This whole situation smells funny to me.”

  “Funny? Funny how?”

  “They’re saying you went and bought a machete at Liborio’s to kill Arnulfo.”

  “And?”

  “And that’s not how your homies in the gangs kill people anymore. Come on. You know that, you know MS and 18th have graduated to where their weapons of choice are revolvers or the occasional semiautomatic. Killing Arnulfo with a machete feels out of synch with where Salvadorans are now, including the gangs.”

  “So fucking what, ey? What difference does that make to me? I’m fucked and gonna be put away for the rest of my life.”

  “Yeah, but what about your story?”

  “My story?”

  “Yeah, you know. The way people remember you and what you did. You were on your way to heaven before all this. I want to understand why you returned to hell.”

  Guardado stays silent.

  “Look, I’ve been checking out your case and have a hunch about it.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “That you were working with somebody to kill Arnulfo,” says Rocky.

  “Somebody like who?”

  “I dunno. The escuadrones de la muerte, maybe? Who even operated in LA, until a few years ago.”

  “Well, Mr. Guerrillero Detective, that seems like a smart theory. Too bad it’s wrong. Look, man, you’re right. For my family’s sake, I ain’t never gonna tell you or anyone else anything. But I will say that there’s someone else, someone who wants to terrorize people. Though they don’t sport gang or death squad outfits.”

  “And what kind of outfits do they wear?”

  “El de la chota. Take it easy, terrorista.” Guardado turns around and leaves his side of the glass-plated room.

  Holy shit, Rocky thinks as he walks back to the parking lot. The fucking cops in the gangs are the ones who put Guardado up to this murder in order to shut Arnulfo up and send a message to those who want to “abolish the police.” Fuck, fuck, fuck. Mejia was talking about the escuadrones like he was in El Salvador, where the police and military were the escuadrones, the terroristas.

  Rocky drives back to South Central and parks his car on Compton. He plays “Sabor a Mi” and thinks about telling Yagoda that he knows what his cop gang buddies did. But this terrorist thing is bigger than Yagoda and him. Rocky will listen to what the boleros tell him about diving into this bottomless pit of lies and corruption, murder and cover-ups.

  “Sabor a Mi” begins again.

  IF FOUND PLEASE RETURN TO ABIGAIL SERNA158 3/4E MLK BLVD

  BY DÉSIRÉE ZAMORANO

  Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard

  My school counselor said that I have to do this. She said she wouldn’t, ever, read what I wrote. She added: not that she didn’t want to know what was going on in my head, it was just rude to assume someone could read the words you had just written. She would need my permission.

  Her name is Ms. Cifuentes and she’s glaring at the two boys in the back who are mumbling to each other. I know why I’m here, but I’m not sure why they are.

  Ms. Cifuentes seems to always have a bunch of us come see her, though we’re not in her office, which is tiny. Today we’re in an area of the cafeteria not far from where a bunch of other kids are messing around in the after-school program. That’s where kids pretend to work on their homework and people pretend to help them. What is real are the snacks that are handed out. I’ve tried to sign up a couple of times for that, but they looked me up and said my grades were too good for that.

  Too good for free apples and string cheese? What’s up with that?

  I am not thinking about my grades right now. I’m thinking about Ms. Cifuentes. She’s old, not as old as my mom, but she must be thirty at least. She wears black plastic glass frames that end up on the tip of her nose. She could be super pretty, if she wore makeup. If I had a face like that I’d fill in my eyebrows, do a cat’s-eye and a cherry lip.