South Central Noir

Nobody would guess what he’s actually doing: deciding whether he really wants to investigate the murder of a Salvadoran man hacked to death with a machete across the street from la Resurrección. Neither would they believe that he’s up at this late hour on a hot August night figuring things out while listening to, of all things, “Sabor a Mi,” a sultry bolero classic loved for decades by generations of local lowriders, young and old people across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Latino United States. And even his closest friends don’t know he’s listening to the music to ponder the savage murder of Arnulfo Cartagena, a man he’s known since their childhood in the Barrio Santa Cruz slum in prewar El Salvador.

Lyrics fill his head and body as he ponders the possibilities and pitfalls associated with the tiny country of titanic sorrows named for the Savior.

If you deny my presence in your life, it would be enough to hug you and talk...

Fuck. Why the fuck am I here? he wondered. My goddamn stomach’s bloating like I’ve been dead for three or four days.

Rocky’s jaw tightens.

He’s fine occasionally doing Jack’s “Latino” cases — finding migrants kidnapped by cartels, figuring out if “disappeared” means “dead,” surveilling Hollywood hotshots, surveilling cheating spouses, corporations doing dirty work in Latin America or the Latino United States, investigating links between local power brokers and narcos, etc. But this Salvadoran shit is the last thing he wants to investigate.

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.