by Laila Lalami
How daring this Guerrero had become. He had burst into my home, made himself comfortable on the corner chair, inserted himself into a conversation between Marisela and me. It reminded me of the old days, when I was still courting her. Back then, she would often lapse into long silences, her thoughts drifting to her first husband, dead only a year after they were married. Once or twice she even called me by his name—Ernesto. “There are plenty of beautiful girls in Torreón,” my cousin Alonso said, staring at my left ear. “Why are you still pining after this one?” But I didn’t give up, and look at us now. Twelve years, two kids.
After she put the children to bed, Marisela asked if I wanted to eat dinner now. “I saved you a plate,” she said.
“Maybe later. I’m not hungry right now.”
She came to sit beside me on the sofa. “Who’s winning?”
I hadn’t paid attention to the match, and now I couldn’t answer. The light from the television screen colored the living room in shades of green and red and blue. Years ago, I had waited out her dead husband. Worn him out until he left. Surely I could do the same with Guerrero.
Coleman
At home, all I heard for the next week was Brandon this or Brandon that. “Brandon thinks the Dodgers suck this year.” “Brandon invited me to go to the drive-in on Saturday.” “Brandon let me borrow the new Call of Duty.” It wasn’t much of a conversation, but at least Miles was talking to us now, he wasn’t shuttered up in his room all the time. He even volunteered to make waffles for breakfast, with strawberries and whipped cream, which he hadn’t done since we’d moved to California. “See?” Ray said as he loaded up the dishwasher afterward. “He just needed a little time to adjust. Like I told you, baby. He’s fine.” But I was still worried about his grades, so after breakfast that Saturday morning, I told Miles that if he planned to go to the drive-in with Brandon, he had to come to the library with me for a couple of hours. I wanted him to get away from his video games and do a set of problems from the new math workbook we’d bought for him. “Fine,” he grumbled, then stared at his phone the whole way to the library. When we got out of the car, he slammed the door so hard I thought it might go off its hinges. “I told you before not to do that,” I said.
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“Of course, I can. I just did.”
“You’re not my mom.”
This hurt me so much, I could hardly breathe. Miles was an infant when Ray and I met, at a Fourth of July party given by one of my colleagues at Metro, a forensic pathologist who lived in Bethesda, Maryland. I got lost on the way there and by the time I arrived the only seats available in the backyard were next to Sharon from H.R. or next to Ray and the baby. It was an easy choice. The minute I sat down, Miles raised his chubby little arms up for me to hold him—and I did. Like I said, he was a mama’s boy. Later on, I found out that Ray’s ex-wife had decided shortly after giving birth that she had no interest in either marriage or motherhood, and had freed herself of both by filing for divorce and moving to Florida. My marriage to Ray hasn’t always been easy, either—we’ve had our share of tough times, especially after we bought our place in D.C. and money was tight for a while—but I’ve never had any doubt about Miles. He wasn’t my blood, but he was mine all the same. The way he smiled just before he made a winning move on the chessboard, that was me. The persistence he showed whenever he tried to solve a puzzle, that was me, too. I saw myself in him every day. Our bond, woven moment by loving moment for thirteen years, was strong. Yet now, glaring at me on the sidewalk, he was trying to break it. I couldn’t understand what had caused him to disown me, or why he’d chosen this particular moment to do it. “Why are you saying this?” I asked, my voice dropping to a whisper.
“Because it’s true.”
“It’s not true. Why are you talking like this? What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, something’s going on.” I put my hand on his cheek and when he raised his eyes to me, I saw that he was fighting tears. My poor, sweet son. “Tell me, baby. What happened?”
“Brandon says we can’t go to the movies.”
“He said that? When?”
“He just texted me.”
“So maybe his plans changed. Why are you so upset? You can go next week.”
“No, he’s going with Sam.”
“Which one is Sam? The one with the red hair?”
He shrugged and got all quiet again. I wondered if this was about race, the other kids were white, but whenever I had seen Miles with Brandon, the two of them seemed to get along well. It’s a terrible thing to watch your child suffer, a terrible thing. It made me feel helpless. There was nothing I could do to make my son’s pain go away. I couldn’t even comfort him with a hug, because we were standing outside the library and it might embarrass him and make things worse between us. “Tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you work on your math, and then Dad will take you to the drive-in tonight? You can get popcorn and those Sour Patch Kids you like so much.”
He shrugged.
“Is that a yes? Say yes, it’ll be fun.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
We went inside, found a spot between an old man in a baseball cap reading one of those Left Behind books and a teenage girl leafing through brochures for the community college. Miles started a set of problems in his workbook, and I pulled out my laptop. The $25,000 reward that Nora Guerraoui had offered had been announced in the Hi-Desert Star and on KDGL three days earlier, and I’d put up posters everywhere I could think of, including the bus stop and the grocery stores, but I didn’t have any serious takers yet, just the usual white noise that comes with any announcement of a monetary reward. I wrote another email to Vasco, asking yet again if I could have that recanvass. Someone had to have seen something. I just needed to find them.
By the time we left the library, it was the middle of the afternoon and the air had cooled considerably. The arthritis in my elbow joints flared when the weather changed abruptly like this, and I buttoned my jacket against the wind. I wondered if we might be getting a thunderstorm later, which would mean no movie at the drive-in, and I looked up worriedly at the gray sky. That’s when I spotted the security cameras mounted on the eaves of the library building.
Nora
The call from Detective Coleman came while I was in the grocery aisle of the Stater Brothers. I can still recall every detail of that moment. A special on red seedless grapes was blaring from the loudspeaker, a woman was cradling her infant as she bagged navel oranges, two retirees were arguing over how many bananas they should buy, and I was picking out medjool dates. Sweet, chewy, locally produced. They came from palms a USDA botanist brought to the Coachella Valley in the 1920s from the oasis of Boudenib, in Morocco. The trees took root easily in California, and soon an industry developed around them. Now you could walk into any supermarket in the United States and buy dates that once grew only in the shade of the Atlas Mountains. I’d placed two boxes in my shopping cart and was wheeling it toward the leafy greens when my cell phone rang.
I left the cart where it was. Ten minutes later I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house, where I picked up my mother. With the glare of the midday sun scrambling the road before me like a Hockney collage, I drove down the 62 toward the police station. A helicopter droned in the sky, heading toward the Marine base. “You’re going too fast,” my mother said, reaching for the handle above her window. Only then did I notice that my knuckles had whitened from gripping the steering wheel. I lifted my foot off the pedal. We passed a string of motels and fast-food joints, a tall crane on which a man in uniform was doing some work, and finally the stretch of trendy boutiques and organic restaurants that made up the town of Joshua Tree. The police station was just a couple of miles past Park Boulevard, in an orange and white building next to the courthouse.
At the station, Detective Coleman walked us through
the main office, where deputies, some in uniform and others in plainclothes, sat at their cubicles. From somewhere came the sound of a printer jamming, people talking, a phone ringing—all the ordinary signs of a workplace on a Tuesday morning. And yet I felt my skin break into goose bumps, as though I were someplace alien or dangerous. The room was small, and the window shade hung sideways, casting a slanted light over the furniture. Four chairs were arranged around a table that was covered with round tracks left behind by cups and glasses. “Would you like some coffee? Or maybe some water?” the detective asked us.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Water,” my mother said.
For heaven’s sake, this wasn’t a social call. But I held back from saying anything because it would only cause further delays. Detective Coleman walked out and returned a moment later with a cup of water. “Please,” I said. “Just tell us who it is.”
Coleman put a manila file folder on the table and sat down. “The driver of the vehicle that struck your father was Anderson Baker. He’s given us a full statement and turned in the keys to his car. It’s a silver Ford Crown Vic, 1992 model.”
“Wait. Anderson Baker, who owns the bowling alley?”
“Yes.”
I turned to my mother, who sat slumped in her chair with her hand over her mouth. When she drew her breath again, she spoke at a clipped pace, her voice full of frustration at her pronunciation, which always got worse when she became emotional. “That man was always trying to start trouble. He said our customers took up all the parking spots and he didn’t have any spaces left for his business. My husband bought the special signs, you know, with the name on them…”
“Custom parking signs,” I offered.
“Right. But the tourists coming from Joshua Tree, they don’t pay attention. They just park wherever they can. So Baker was angry.”
I knew about the trouble with Baker only in the broadest of terms. One of the things I had been relieved about when I left home at eighteen was that I didn’t need to hear about the family business—no more talk of shift schedules, food orders, late deliveries, trash pickup, or sewer-line repairs. When I spoke on the phone with my father, I didn’t ask him about his restaurant, and if he mentioned it, it was usually in connection with some new idea he wanted to try, like these custom parking signs. The lot had twenty-three spaces, thirteen of which belonged to the Pantry and ten to Desert Bowling Arcade. The custom signs were meant to clear up any ambiguity about space, but obviously that hadn’t worked. I turned to Coleman. “What my mom is trying to say is, this is premeditated.”
“I understand what she’s saying,” Coleman said levelly. She opened the manila file folder on the table. “In his affidavit, Mr. Baker states that it was very dark out that night and there is no signal light at the intersection of Highway 62 and Chemehuevi Way. He said he didn’t know it was your father he’d hit until he read about it in the newspaper.”
“Who did he think he hit?”
“A coyote.”
“So he left my father out to die?” I asked. “If it was just an accident,” I said, my voice rising, “then why didn’t he turn himself in right away? Why did he wait until you found him?”
“He said he was worried about losing his license. He lives all the way out in Landers and he needs his car to get to his place of business.”
“That’s a load of bullshit.” I couldn’t tell if Coleman believed Baker’s lies; she gave no verbal hint of her views, and her face retained the careful composure of an experienced investigator. After a moment, I asked, “What are you charging him with?”
“The D.A. makes that decision.”
“Okay. But what are the charges?”
“Felony hit-and-run.”
“That’s it? He killed my dad.” The words came out in a helpless croak. It seemed to me as if the past I had left behind years ago had suddenly come crowding up against me and might choke me if I wasn’t careful. “Do you know,” I said, “I went to high school with Baker’s son, Anderson Junior. A.J., everyone called him. Nasty kid. One time he wrote raghead on my locker.”
My mother turned to me. “When?”
“Sophomore year.”
“You never told me.”
“What would you have done if I had told you?”
Across the table Coleman shifted in her seat. With her thumbnail, she scratched at the scar on her eyebrow. It was an old wound, but the skin still looked pink in places. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice completely different now, “but what happened to you in high school is probably not relevant to this hit-and-run case.”
“What is relevant? The fact that Baker was fighting with my dad?”
“How long has this dispute been going on?” Coleman asked.
I waited for my mother to answer. The truth was, there hadn’t always been a dispute, or whatever it was Coleman wanted to call it. There was a time when we got along. In 2002, when my father had just bought the Pantry, I had gone into the bowling alley with him to meet Anderson Baker. It was just a little after dusk, but already half of the lanes were taken and it seemed they were getting ready for a busy night. Baker was talking to the cash-register clerk, but he turned around when we came in and smiled and shook hands with my father. He had been cordial, then. Distant, but cordial. There had been some talk early on about having food orders delivered to the arcade, but that had never led anywhere and the two businesses kept to themselves. All that changed a few years later.
“Since we expanded the restaurant,” my mother said quietly.
“What happened was,” I said, “a writer for Los Angeles Magazine came out here to do a feature about Joshua Tree, and she included the Pantry in her write-up. The article had a picture of my dad pouring coffee for a customer, and the restaurant quickly got popular with tourists. My dad ended up buying the little dry cleaner’s shop next door, and he got the three parking spaces that came with it, too. I guess that’s when the trouble with Baker started. Right, Mom? When he expanded.”
“All right,” Coleman said, “I will look into it. But I should also mention that Mr. Baker made no attempt to fix the dent on his car, which is consistent with his contention that it was just an accident.”
“It was no accident. You heard what my mom said.”
“I will look into it,” Coleman said again, closing her file folder.
“Did any witnesses come forward?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Can I ask you something about the investigation?”
“Sure.”
“How did you find out it was Baker?”
“I told you about my son?”
“Yes. Miles, right?”
“That’s right. I was at the library with him on Saturday, helping him with his math homework, and I noticed their security cameras. The accident took place at the intersection of Highway 62 and Chemehuevi, but the location of the body suggests that the driver took a left turn. If he did that, he would’ve had the option of making a right on Martinez Trail, which runs parallel to the highway and sometimes can be faster. It’s a popular shortcut. But he would’ve been captured on the library’s cameras. Only twenty-eight cars drove by between nine thirty and ten thirty p.m. And just three were silver Fords. It was a matter of checking out each one.”
“So he would’ve gotten away with it if he hadn’t taken a shortcut?”
“But he did,” Coleman said. “And now we have a confession.”
“All right,” I said. “Thank you so much, Detective Coleman. Thank you.”
I followed my mother out of the police station. Neither of us spoke. I was trying to put a name to the feeling that filled my heart now that the driver had been identified, but I found that I couldn’t. It wasn’t relief, though there was some of that. It wasn’t closure, though there was some of that, too. It was a different kind of pain. Outside, the midday sun bea
t down with such force that a wisp of steam rose from the pavement. I called my sister to tell her what we had just learned, but she didn’t pick up. I left her a voicemail asking her to please call me, that I had some news.
As I drove my mother home, I reviewed everything the detective had said about the murder. That’s how I thought of it now, as a murder. I had feared all along that it would be, and it came to me then that what had made me linger in town past the funeral wasn’t just the fog of grief, it was the presentiment that my father had been killed in cold blood.
“Red light,” my mother warned. “Slow down.”
“Sorry,” I said as I came to an abrupt stop. I turned to look at my mother. “Did something happen recently with Baker?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, something that could have prompted this. They’d been arguing about something or other since Dad expanded, right? So why now?”
My mother thought for a minute. “There was the thing with the Land Rover.”
“What thing with the Land Rover?”
“Green light.”
The story came out in pieces and it took two or three tellings for all of its details to settle into place. Afterward, I pulled into the driveway of my parents’ house. My childhood home, with its little porch and its overgrown sage bush and the screen that never quite fit into the doorjamb. For the first time since I’d heard that my father was dead, my mind began to function again. The aimless fury that had trailed me since I’d left town at eighteen had found a purpose: I would make sure that Anderson Baker was brought to justice. I just wasn’t sure how yet.
Driss
I remember that the park rangers had to put up a sign on the highway warning visitors that campsites at Joshua Tree were booked. The town was packed with hikers, bike riders, families from Los Angeles and San Diego who wanted out of the big city for Presidents’ Day weekend. Business had been a little slow that winter, so I was thrilled to see several parties waiting at the Pantry, spilling out from the entrance onto the sidewalk. A young woman in a bohemian shirt came in to ask if she could order a mimosa while she waited. Not for the first time, I wondered whether I should apply for an alcohol license, try to appeal to the kind of people who had been coming to the Mojave lately. I was working the cash register when Anderson Baker burst in. “Who here has a Land Rover Defender?” he asked. “It’s in one of my spots.”