Indeed. Sheriff Pitchess was not alone in his inability to digest the garbled swill that his office was doling out. The official version of the Salazar killing was so crude and illogical -- even after revisions -- that not even the sheriff seemed surprised when it began to fall apart even before Chicano partisans had a chance to attack it. Which they would, of course. The sheriff had already got wind of what was coming: many eyewitnesses, sworn statements, first-hand accounts -- all of them hostile.

The history of Chicano complaints against cops in East L.A. is not a happy one. “The cops never lose,” Acosta told me, “and they won't lose this one either. They just murdered the only guy in the community they were really afraid of, and I guarantee you no cop will ever stand trial for it. Not even for manslaughter.”

I could accept that. But it was difficult, even for me, to believe that the cops had killed him deliberately. I knew they were capable of it, but I was not quite ready to believe they had actually done it. . . because once I believed that, I also had to accept the idea that they are prepared to kill anybody who seemed to be annoying them. Even me.

As for Acosta's charge of murder, I knew him well enough to understand how he could make that charge publicly . . . I also knew him well enough to he sure he wouldn't try to hang that kind of monstrous bullshit on me. So our phone talk naturally disturbed me. . . and I fell to brooding about it, hung on my own dark suspicions that Oscar had told me the truth.

On the plane to L.A. I tried to make some kind of a case -- either pro or con -- from my bundle of notes and news-clips relating to Salazar's death. By that time at least six reportedly reliable witnesses had made sworn statements that differed drastically, on several crucial points, with the original police version -- which nobody believed anyway. There was something very disturbing about the sheriff's account of that accident; it wasn't even a good lie.

Within hours after the Times hit the streets with the news that Ruben Salazar had in fact been killed by cops -- rather than street-snipers -- the sheriff unleashed a furious assault on “known dissidents” who had flocked into East Los Angeles that weekend, he said, to provoke a disastrous riot in the Mexican-American community. He praised his deputies for the skillful zeal they displayed in restoring order to the area within two and a half hours, “thus averting a major holocaust of much greater proportions.”