by Alex Segura
When Connie finished her share, she was met with applause. A few people got up to refill their coffees. Hands were raised, and members of the group took turns sharing their own experiences—thanking Connie for her service and relating to her story. Pete sat back and listened. As the clock ticked closer to one in the morning, he felt a slight jab in his side. He turned. Jack met his eyes and raised an eyebrow.
“Well?”
“What?” Pete asked.
“I didn’t bring you here just to listen, buddy.”
Pete raised his hand. Connie noticed and pointed at him.
“Hi, uh, my name’s Pete, and I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “Thanks for your story. I could relate to it. I needed to hear it. I needed to be reminded of why I’m here, and why I should be here.”
Pete cleared his throat. He only had a few minutes to speak, but it felt like he was staring into a vast expanse.
“I’ve been in and out of these rooms ... more in than out,” he continued. “I’ve seen friends die. I’ve lost jobs. Lost relationships. I’ve moved to escape my own past. I’ve done everything you’re not supposed to do. But I didn’t drink. I tried my best not to drink. That saved my life. These rooms continue to save my life.”
He felt his hands begin to shake. He placed them in his lap. Held them together as he made eye contact with the speaker.
“I found something out today,” Pete said. “Something bad. Something ... I don’t even know. Something that changes my entire perspective on not only my life, but how I see my father—a man I always respected. Well, at least after he died I came to understand and appreciate him. And I regretted missing out on time with him. But this ... this news changes a lot. It makes me wonder what else he was hiding. Makes me wonder what else I’ve missed. I feel like life is all about moving forward, doing what we can ... but when you get something that comes out at you, that changes how you see everything else, that’s the kind of stuff that makes you wonder. Makes you think that maybe it is smart to reach for that drink. To blow it all up because, damn, that one thing you thought was good ... that one man or person you thought was an example ... maybe they weren’t what you thought.”
Pete paused and looked at Jack, who gripped his shoulder briefly.
“But I didn’t drink today,” Pete said. “I don’t need to drink. I know what that was like. I don’t need to drink for any reason. I have a friend ... a friend who—I don’t know how to explain it—who I’m tangled up with. We have feelings for each other. And we made some mistakes. She doesn’t want to be my friend anymore. And I understand that. She’s not the only person. I’m feeling really alone and without a tether or anchor. But that’s what this disease wants. It wants you alone. Sitting in the dark and looking out, with the doors and windows closed, so it can sneak up and grab you ... seduce you. Pull you back into the darkness. But I can’t do that. I have too much to live for. I’ve seen that darkness. I’ve looked at death and I know what that is. I’m not ready yet. Thank you.”
A smattering of applause followed as the meeting attendees stood up and formed a loose circle, their hands clenched with each other’s. Pete closed his eyes and felt them coated with tears.
PETE GRIPPED THE steering wheel. He felt his knuckles crack. Felt the faux leather tighten under his fingers. Felt something. He needed to feel something. To push back on the numbness that had dominated his senses for the last twenty-four hours.
What had Graciela Fernandez felt, as the life was choked from her? What did she see in the waning minutes of her life? His mother’s life.
Pete let out a long, shaky breath. He never knew his mother. Would never know her. Even here, sitting outside the house of someone he hoped would shed light on what happened, Pete felt no closer to closing the gap between his deep, unreachable past and present. His mother was dead. That hadn’t changed over the last day. It would never change. Solving her murder wouldn’t unlock a magical box within him, allowing him to be a better man. Immersing himself in the details of her brutal demise wouldn’t solve his problems. But he didn’t want her to exist as a mirage—a spectral figure, impervious and virginal. He wanted to see her, to know her—flaws, bruises, and all.
He stepped out of the car and walked up to the front door of the expansive Coral Gables home. The waterfront home’s tropical landscaping adding a touch of claustrophobia to the wide chunk of property. He rang the doorbell and waited. He heard a faint voice on the other side.
“Give me a second,” the woman said. The locks were shifted and the door swung inward, revealing a thin, well-dressed woman with short, graying hair. Diane Atkins, now Diane Crowther, looked well put together and at ease. She seemed slightly confused, probably expecting a delivery or perhaps a neighbor. Pete was neither.
“Can I help you?”
“Diane? I’m Pete Fernandez. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh, well,” she said, hesitating. “How can I help? I don’t practice law anymore, I’ve retired—”
“I want to talk to you about my mother,” Pete said. “Graciela Fernandez.”
Her face steeled and her eyes regained clarity. She nodded almost imperceptibly.
“Come in,” she said, motioning for him to follow her. “Come in, please.”
He followed her down a winding hallway, walls covered in framed black-and-white photos from decades past, pictures of what Pete assumed were family and friends long gone. The hallway looped around and ended in a large foyer or waiting room, dark wood paneling collecting the Miami heat and giving the space an oppressive, sauna-like feeling. She motioned for him to sit on a well-built, expensive chair. Pete did. She positioned herself across from him on another, equally high-end perch.
“How did you find me?”
Pete shrugged. “It’s what I do,” he said. “Find people. You changed your last name, moved around a bit, but you stayed.”
“I’m from here,” Diane Crowther said. “Why would I leave?”
“Just speculating,” Pete said. “Your name appears on the police report—the file that outlines the details of my mother’s death. But I couldn’t find anything about you until about a decade later, when you got married. Then you became a lawyer. Then you retired. It was almost as if you went dormant for a—”
“What can I help you with, son? I’m starting to regret letting you in.”
“You were friends with her—with Graciela,” Pete said, trying to soften his tone, not lose the thread. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to her.”
She sighed, straightening her dark slacks, delaying the words that she’d been bottling up for decades, Pete thought.
“Your mother was my best friend,” she said. “We were like sisters. Since high school. We both went to school together—first Miami Dade, then Barry, then ... well, then she got married. And we stayed in touch, for the most part, but it was different. Less, I dunno, less fun.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, look, you’re not a baby,” Diane said. “Your dad was a cop. A cop’s cop. Most cops back then were on the take or directly working for one drug gang or another. Your dad was one of the exceptions, or so I was told. He was a stickler for the rules. Once they got together—well, Gracie had to change. Had to behave, basically.”
“What was she like?”
Pete felt his voice tremble as he asked the question and it took him by surprise. His mother was an enigma to him, an empty space that had never been filled—so feeling anything, a rush of pain, seemed bizarre. Yet it felt right.
Diane seemed to recognize this, gripping his hand for a moment.
“She was the best,” she said. “Fun, funny, smart, beautiful—a great dancer. Loved to dance. She had this long, glowing black hair and was just a stunner. Amazing. We’d walk into a bar and every eye would be on her. She could keep up with everyone. She was tougher than the guys and sexier than the girls. She was a powerful woman.”
“But you lost touch with her when she married my dad?”
�
��No, I wouldn’t say that. We just saw each other less. She got married. That takes up some time, as you may know. Then she had you, and she was gone, basically. Not really, but I just assumed I wouldn’t see her much.”
“What were you doing?” Pete asked, trying to keep the question casual, not pointed. “While Graciela was settling into this life?”
“I was partying,” Diane said. “I can say that because I’m a different person now, but I was a mess. I was drinking, doing a lot of coke, sleeping with anyone that bought me a drink, dancing all night and passing out all day. I loved it at the time, until it stopped being fun. Then I stopped. I didn’t even have to hit a rehab. It had to stop, and I stopped. But when your mom was off playing house, I was partying as if every night was my last on earth.”
“Where did she meet my father?”
“A bar, of course, some dive in Little Havana—Oso de Oro,” Diane said, her Spanish precise if not authentic. “Your dad went in to talk to the manager about something, I dunno, maybe a break-in? And he saw your mom there. They hit it off and she gave him her number, thinking ‘no way this stiff is gonna call me,’ but he did, and he pursued her, let me tell you. Couldn’t stop. Eventually, they fell in love and the rest is—well, you get it.”
Pete straightened up in his seat, trying to focus. The dark room and the heat were lulling him a bit, but he had to focus. He had to see this interview through, and ask the question he’d come to get answered.
“When did my mom ... when did she come back?” Pete asked. “Back to you? When she left my father?”
Diane stammered for a second, confused, as if she’d just seen a car driving on the wrong side of the road.
“Leave your father?” she said. “No, no. Gracie didn’t leave. You father kicked her out. He asked her to go.”
“What? Why?”
“Pete, your mother was a drunk,” Diane said, her eyes burying themselves in Pete’s brain, an expression on her face he would never forget. “She was an alcoholic, the worst kind. Day drinking, hiding bottles, bringing you—her toddler—to bars with her, riding in strangers’ cars, disappearing for days. She was spiraling out of control and your father couldn’t leave her alone with you.”
Pete felt the floor disappear, his body fuzz out of focus. He let the words replay in his mind: Pete, your mother was a drunk.
The mother he’d never really known, who lived in his brain as a cross-cut of buried memories and stories his father had told him, had been so much more. She’d struggled with the same problem that had dragged Pete to the edge of death more times than he cared to think about. Pete shook his head. Felt the tears welling up. The kind you can’t control. He looked down, hoping to hide his face from Diane and failing.
Had she sought help? Did she find peace? What had his father done to support her? Had it played a part in her death? He needed these questions answered, he realized. More than anything else in the world.
He looked up, eyes red, and spoke.
“When did she come to live with you?” Pete asked, his voice sounding like the final cracks and scrapes of a car crash. “What happened?”
“It was a Sunday, I remember that,” Diane continued, the light from the window dimming from a sharp white to a muted gray. “I was in my apartment, a small studio in South Miami, near my job, which I think I’d just lost—just a stupid waitressing job. But I hear a knock and my first thought is, who the hell is coming to my place at this hour? And it was your mom. She was dragging a bag, a Hefty bag or something, loaded with clothes. She looked terrible—dark streaks under her eyes, lipstick smeared, and just ... dirty. Like she needed a shower. She needed a place to stay, is what she needed. Pedro had kicked her out, told her she was a mess—made threats that he’d take the kid—well, you—away, and Gracie needed a place to be for a day or two.
“I mean, I hadn’t seen her in months, the last time was at a friend’s wedding, this guy—jeez, what was his name?—some guy we both dated at one point, totally blanking on his name. Handsome, I remember that. Anyway, it’d been a while. She’d even come to that wedding alone. Pedro was already getting sick of her. So, anyway, I bring her in and we talk for a while, she showers, she naps, then it’s like she’d never been gone. We’re back partying that very night—all about ‘Fuck him!’ and ‘I do what I fucking want! Who the hell is he?’ You know what I mean?”
Pete nodded, nothing to add—he wanted to hear her story, not guide it. He wanted to feel like he was there, experiencing this woman, this person who was his mother, for what felt like the first time.
“And, look, it was a blast. Your mom—she was, like I said, amazing,” Diane said, a smile cracking through her lawyerly veneer. “We drank, we smoked, I think we both brought guys home—I’m sorry, is this weird? Well, whatever. She was single again, or on her way to it, and she knew she had a few days before she’d have to come back and figure out the logistics of what was happening, so she wanted to have fun, to blow off some steam. So we did. I introduced her to a lot of my friends, we stayed up late. It was beautiful. Until it wasn’t.”
“She was killed soon after, right?”
“It was a few months later,” Diane said. “By then, Gracie had moved in with me. She’d gotten a job tending bar at this jazz club, Terraza. I think it’s still open? She was working the bar, dating the owner, or one of them. Blanking on the guy’s name. He was connected, though.”
“They were a couple?”
“I mean, yes and no,” Diane said. “They were sleeping together and they spent a lot of time in the same place because she worked for him, but I think he was married, too, so it was complicated. But I don’t think Gracie was particularly concerned with marriage and monogamy at that point. She was cutting loose, too, drinking all the time. I remember a lot of nights where I’d had enough—I’d hit this wall, just couldn’t, and she’d want to keep going. I had to leave her a few times, get a cab or try to drive. That ... that night ... was one of those. One of those nights I couldn’t keep up with her anymore.”
Pete nodded for her to continue.
“It was New Year’s Eve. We were at Terraza, I think, or a bar around there,” Diane said. “The owner ... Dammit, why am I blanking on his name? Anyway, he’d closed the place down, private party. Big deal. VIPs only, invite-only. We were all having a blast. Open bar, great music ... then the coke arrives and the party got really good. Just one of those crazy nights that had become routine for us. Do you know what I mean?”
“I—yeah, I think so,” Pete said.
He knew exactly what she meant. Drinking wasn’t all about painful falls, blackouts, and regrets. Most alcoholics will readily admit there was a time when drinking was fun. Vibrant. Lively. Most of your drinking life is spent chasing the high that comes from that first drink—the sense of completion and power that had previously eluded you. But that moment is a mirage, Pete knew. Another drink didn’t take you back to the beginning. It shunted you right back where you left off, in the darkness, alone, desperate and craving. Pete relived some form of those final moments as a drinker every day. He had to, if he wanted to avoid going back down that path.
“Anyway, it was a crazy, crazy night,” Diane said. “I can’t remember much of it, but one thing sticks with me—there’s one thing I’ll never forget.”
“What?”
“Just, and this is going to sound weird, but just the look on Gracie’s—your mom’s—face, as I was walking away, as I was leaving her with her boyfriend and the party, this look of complete fear. She didn’t say anything, but it seemed that, even in the haze of whatever was in her body—drugs, alcohol, whatever—something cut through. Something sliced through the fog and she felt it. She felt very afraid. And I will always regret not staying with her that night.”
Pete lost track of himself then, for a moment, but it was enough time—when he returned to himself, his head was in his hands and all he could see was blackness, even with his eyes straining to open wider, desperate for any glimmer of light.
He walked up the steps, still reeling from his conversation with Diane Crowther. His mother had been a drunk. Like him. They’d walked the same field, tried to dodge the same land mines. Pete survived, for now. His mother hadn’t been as lucky. What lessons could she have passed on to him if she’d lived? What bullets could he have dodged with her insight? Even after spending hours talking to Diane Crowther, Pete felt no closer to knowing this woman than when he first learned of her murder. He intended to rectify that.
He reached for the front door and noticed it was unlocked. He was only half surprised. As he stepped in, he announced himself.
“Whoever you are, you’d better have a really good reason for breaking into my house.”
“Hello, Pete.”
Pete saw Eddie Rosen and Alvaro Mujica, the latter flanked by two large bodyguards not bothering to hide their handguns. The men were burly, dressed in matching khaki pants and black polos, and wearing sunglasses, having mastered the art of looking tough and menacing. Pete wasn’t impressed.
“Hey gents,” he said. “What brings you to Westchester? It can’t be the beaches. The pizza’s no good here, either.”
“My client wants to speak with you,” Rosen said, a strained smile on his face. “It’s urgent, which is why we made the trip out here, and waited patiently for you to come back.”
“I check my phone pretty regularly, Eddie, and I don’t have a missed call from you,” Pete said. “Maybe it didn’t go through? Verizon can really suck sometimes.”
“We didn’t call you, Fernandez, all right?” Rosen said, stepping around Pete’s dining room table. “Let’s talk.”
“I’m off the case,” Pete said. “I shouldn’t have accepted it to begin with. I was retired. Now I’m working on something else—something more important.”