26 Holiday specials The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
1I
n 1944 RaymondChandlerdescribedthe
ideal character of a fictional private eye
as a man comfortable on mean streets, but
“who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid.” He is:
...a relatively poor man, or he would not be a
detective at all. He is a common man or he
could not go among common people. He has
a sense of character, or he would not know
his job. He will take no man’s money dishon-
estly and no man’s insolence without a due
and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely
man and his pride is that you will treat him
as a proud man.
To meet a real-life version of Chandler’s
private eye, drive 40 miles (60km) north
from Houston to Conroe, a fast-growing
Texan city strung along either side of Inter-
state 45. Settle into a booth at Taqueria Ja-
lisco, a Mexican breakfast joint in a low-
slung strip-mall. It is summer, early morn-
ing, and already feels hot. A battered
Nissan pulls up; a thickset man steps out.
He wears black boots, pressed silver-grey
trousers and a blue, short-sleeved shirt. A
Rolex glints on one muscular arm. He car-
ries himself with a slight swagger. Heads
turn as he makes for his usual seat.
Richard Reyna is handsome. He has an
open, convivial face behind gold-rimmed
glasses. He appears young for someone
who just drove his grandson to college—
and he wants to keep it that way. He neither
smokes nor drinks. His hair has the slick,
uniform blackness that comes only from a
bottle. He doesn’t want his age published.
Is he vain? He chuckles. Clients expect a
youthful man in his line of work.
Mr Reyna stands out among the 90,000
inhabitants of Conroe. He also stands out
among America’s private eyes—who also
happen to number about 90,000. Mr Reyna
has a speciality. He is a death-row sleuth.
He is hired, usually, as a late dice roll by the condemned, after
their trial “went wrong” at state courts and as federal appeals and
eventual lethal injection loom. His paymasters tend to be defence
lawyers, the federal public defender, or European donors eager to
expose America’s misuse of its death penalty.
The Taqueria is his favourite spot in a city still divided by race.
Not every place would be welcoming: “This is the middle of red-
neck country. Lots of Klan, hell yeah.” He calls the café “my rat-
hole”, pressing his fork into a grease-soaked omelette until a small
oily puddle appears. “Usually I go home and think of getting my
stomach pumped,” he says. But he spends several hours there, re-
turning early the next day for more eggs and conversation.
On first meeting the detective, some people ask if he is Native
American, a question he finds puzzling. He is Hispanic with roots
in Mexico. He grew up in a government housing project in Hous-
ton’s Second Ward, where migrants flocked as whites fled for thesuburbs. His father died “when I was a little bitty guy”;
his mother single-handedly raised nine children in a
tiny apartment, relying on handouts—rice, cheese,
powdered milk—from a nearby hospital. For fun he
and friends sniffed lighter fluid from handkerchiefs in
back alleys or devised ways to steal from ice-cream
vans. “Our idea of the Olympics was how fast we could
strip a car,” he says.
Fifty years on, little has changed in the ward, where
“macho men all beat their wives before the neigh-
bours.” At reunions there, he finds that his siblings,
and some of his old friends, “still don’t understand
what I do.” They have preserved a way of walking, in-
stilled in childhood, that he has mostly dropped. “Peo-
ple come in doing that duck walk, wearing pointed
shoes, still blaming society for all their woes,” he says.Watchingthe
detective
CONROE, TEXASThe sleuth of death row Richard Reyna, a death-row investigator,
is one of the last of a kind