Adele caught Vega fiddling with a tin of mints on his plate. The tin had Gabby’s name and the date of her quinceañera embossed on the front. “Hope you like the party favors,” said Adele. “I was the madrina who supplied them.”
“You play godmother for the quinces of all your clients?”
“Diego has long stopped being a client,” Adele explained. “He’s got a green card now and he’s studying for his citizenship test. He owns his own landscaping business and a small house in town that was a wreck when he bought it and is now the best-kept house on the block. He grows beautiful tomatoes in his backyard and always brings them to me in season.”
“So he’s a friend,” said Vega.
“And a success story,” said Adele. “A lot of these people are. They’re not all undocumented, you know.”
“How do you know who is and who isn’t?”
“I don’t. Nor do I care one way or the other. Look at them, Jimmy.” Adele gestured around the room to men and women laughing, dancing, eating, bouncing children on their shoulders to the music. “This is who they really are. Not what you see at La Casa. Or when someone in a uniform steps in front of them. They want the same things as you and I: a home, education for their children, security. Is that really such a crime?”
Adele led Vega to the food table where they helped themselves to plates of chicken with mole sauce and tamales stuffed with spicy beef and tomatoes. Vega eyed the seven-tier meringue-frosted cake on a side table with Barbie dolls flanking each of the alternating pink and purple tiers. Gabby may have been turning fifteen, but she was still a little girl at heart. Just like his Joy.
“Did you have a quinceañera when you turned fifteen?” he asked Adele as they walked back to their seats.
She shook her head. “My mother baked a cake and I got to pick out a dress at AJ Newberry’s, a discount store in my neighborhood. My parents said a party was a waste of money. They put everything to my education.”
“Sounds like a wise choice,” said Vega.
“It was. But at fifteen, I wanted a party. So I’m a soft touch when a struggling family approaches me to be a madrina now.”
More people came over and Adele introduced Vega. She didn’t say he was a police officer and no one asked so Vega kept that to himself. It’s not like he was on duty, a fact he reminded himself of when he walked up to the bar to get a glass of white wine for Adele and a second beer for himself. He didn’t pay attention to the stocky, broad-shouldered man in front of him until the man turned. It took Vega a moment to place the face out of context. But the man had no trouble placing him.
“Señor Vega. I didn’t know you knew the Martinez family,” the man said in Spanish.
It was Kenny’s father, Cesar Cardenas. He was wearing a starched white shirt and a dark suit that looked more somber than festive. His hair was wet-combed into place. Vega had never seen him out of work clothes.
“I’m here with a friend,” said Vega. He motioned to Adele at the table. Of course Cardenas would have known Adele. Kenny just got awarded that scholarship from La Casa. Vega would have expected Cardenas to be bursting with pride over his son’s achievement. But he realized after a moment that it wasn’t just the suit that was somber. The man was too. Maybe Cardenas had heard about how Vega had treated Kenny yesterday. Vega fetched the wine and beer from the bar and nodded sheepishly.
“I guess you heard? About last night?” Vega took a sip of beer. He tried to be lighthearted about the whole thing. “Teenagers and breakups,” he shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
“They are failing their classes,” said Cardenas.
“What?”
“My son and your daughter. They are failing chemistry. And math.”
Maybe Kenny was. But not Joy.
“That’s impossible,” Vega insisted. “I’d have heard about it. The school would have called.”
Cardenas was far too traditionally Mexican to contradict another man about his family in public. Instead, he fixed his dark, sad eyes on Vega until Vega understood that perhaps the school had called and his ex-wife hadn’t relayed the message.
“Joy would have told me,” Vega argued. He would have said it with more conviction if he hadn’t just found out yesterday about her blowing off Dr. Feldman for a whole month. Already, Vega felt the weight of Cardenas’s words taking up residence in some dark corner of his heart.
“I don’t understand,” said Vega. “What’s going on?” Cesar Cardenas shook his head very slowly. Vega could see in his lined and leathery face that he had asked that same question of his son. Shouted it. Begged it. And from the slump of the man’s shoulders, Vega understood: Kenny hadn’t told him anything either.
To hell with Wendy. This time, Vega was going straight to Joy and demanding that she answer him. She was no better than her mother at returning phone calls but he knew from experience, she’d return a text. He put Adele’s white wine on the table and felt relieved when he saw her talking to a group of people on the other side of the room. He sat down, took a gulp of beer to fortify himself and pulled out his phone. Hunching over the screen, he texted two simple questions:
RU failing schl? Whts goin on???
Back came: Out tonite. Talk tomrw.
Tomrw when? he texted back. But he received no reply. He looked up to see Adele beckoning him from the other side of the room. He pretended not to notice as he stared at his phone, willing Joy to answer. He had no idea how long he’d sat like that, oblivious to the voices and thumping music around him. All of a sudden he felt Adele’s hand on his sleeve. He looked up from his phone to see her standing there with Gabby Martinez, all decked out in her pink frills with a look of nervous expectation in her chestnut eyes.
“Gabby wants you to dance with her.”
“Adele, I can’t. Not now—”
“—Come on, Jimmy. You know the custom. Every man has to dance one song with the quince. Don’t tell me a musician like you can’t dance.”
Vega looked at Gabby. Gabby looked at the floor. She still had those baby cheeks that he pictured showing up on all her elementary school photos. Her bed probably overflowed with stuffed animals, her backpack with strawberry lip-gloss and packages of bubblegum. She was standing on that threshold between childhood and womanhood. So fragile. So easily undone by a look, a word, a gesture. Like Joy—Joy, who was unraveling faster than Vega could pick up the pieces. His daughter was not going to text him back tonight. All he’d be doing by refusing to dance would be to make another girl feel bad. He didn’t want that.
He slipped his phone into his pocket and offered Gabby his arm. “I would love to dance with you.”
They went out onto the center of the floor. The girl was nervous and timid when the music started. Her hands were sweaty. She apologized when she turned the wrong way. But it was a salsa and it was hard to resist the pull of the beat for long. Vega had forgotten how much he loved to dance. His grandmother had taught him how to salsa and, after all these years, it was still in his blood. He gave himself over to the music, moving his hips and twirling the girl this way and that until she was giggling with delight. The floor was crowded and a boy soon took her off Vega’s hands. Vega turned to leave but a hand grabbed his. Not a child’s this time. The confident grip of a woman.
“Don’t quit yet,” she whispered into his ear. “You’re good.”
His heart raced unexpectedly. He felt the heat in his cheeks. “You’re only saying that because you don’t know me yet.”
He put his hand around the cinched red chiffon of her waist, feeling the gyration of her hips, the way they moved in perfect timing to his own. The music transported him, shut down all that nervous energy thrumming inside his chest and redirected it to his legs, his hips, his hands. Made it into something pure and beautiful.
Adele moved effortlessly beneath his touch, spinning and dipping, her body flexing and relaxing at just the right moments. Having her in his arms felt so natural, so instinctive. It had been years since Vega had held a wo
man who had real breasts and a backside that didn’t look like it belonged on a thirteen-year-old boy. He had no words for the pleasure and sensuality it stirred within him so he just laughed. She laughed too, her red lips parting just enough for him to feel her hot breath on his neck, soft as kisses. He rested his sweaty palms on her hips and swallowed back the fantasy of what it would be like to make love to such a woman. She made him feel whole, made him forget for just a moment all the pain and worry he was feeling: for his job, for this case, and most of all, for Joy.
A sound brought him back to earth. A woman’s scream.
It came from the front steps of the assembly hall where some of the partygoers had gathered to smoke. Vega broke from Adele’s grasp, grabbed his jacket, and ran to the front doors. Outside, the darkness felt flat and unyielding. It took Vega’s eyes a moment to adjust. The screamer was being hugged by two other female partygoers. They were all talking feverishly.
“I’m a police officer,” he said in Spanish. “What’s the matter?” All three women started speaking at once.
“There’s a man—”
“—In the bushes in the lot across the street—”
“—I think he’s dead—”
“—Or maybe he’s just drunk.”
“All right. Stay here,” said Vega. “I’ll go check it out. ”
The church was on a side street that housed a plumbing manufacturer and two tire distributors. The lot was on Main Street, diagonally across from the church and tucked between two three-story stucco apartment buildings with mismatching front steps and filmy windows covered over in bed sheets. A mile or so north of here was the Main Street Anglos frequented, the one with organic grocery stores, sushi bars, Realtors, and nail spas. This part of Main was mostly warehouses, auto body shops, and cheap rental units. It was a part of town Anglos drove through rather than to. But it was not dangerous.
Not normally.
Vega heard a gurgle in the bushes.
“Police,” he called out in English. “Do you need assistance?” No answer. He tried again in Spanish. The Spanish produced a moan. He removed a small flashlight from a pocket of his jacket and raked it along the brush. An overturned shopping cart—part silver, part rust—played hide and seek behind a tangle of thorny brambles. A pile of soggy insulation lay beneath a mound of dead leaves left over from last fall. The bright pink was still visible, poking through the leaves like cotton candy. Vega stepped closer and zeroed his flashlight on a bundle of bright red rags next to the insulation. The rags twitched. A man. The red had a slickness to it. Blood.
Vega took him for Latino but he’d been beaten so badly, it was hard to tell. His face was swollen and bruised. Blood congealed in his hair and stained his sweatshirt and jeans. Vega scanned the lot and road for a fleeing suspect. He saw no one. A crowd gathered on the steps of the assembly hall. Adele ran over.
“Keep everyone back and don’t let them leave,” he told her. “Call nine-one-one and tell them we have a man in need of medical assistance and ask them to get the Lake Holly cops on the scene.” Vega had no authority here—as Greco would so quickly remind him if he could. Adele pulled out her phone and called in the information.
Vega picked his way closer to the man and crouched next to him. He managed to locate a pair of latex gloves in his jacket and slipped them on. He checked the man’s pulse and the response of his pupils to light. His pulse was slow. His pupils were dilated. They didn’t respond evenly. He probably had a concussion.
“Have you been shot? Stabbed?” Vega asked the man in Spanish. He searched for obvious wounds but didn’t see any knife or gunshot penetrations. The man tried to get to his feet. Vega eased him back down. He could smell liquor on the man’s breath. It was possible he was too drunk to know the full extent of his injuries. Most likely, the cops wouldn’t know until he was assessed at the hospital. “An ambulance is coming. Relax, man. Who did this?”
The man’s lips moved. His voice was a rasp.
“Nadie.” (“No one.”)
“C’mon, man. Somebody messed you up. Did they do it here? Or did they just dump you here?”
The man clutched his stomach and doubled over. He vomited blood. Vega wondered if his spleen had ruptured.
“You’re hurt bad, brother,” said Vega. “C’mon. Put the finger on those pendejos.”
Vega heard the sirens. Ambulance, police, he couldn’t tell. Some of the guests at the quinceañera were going to give the police the slip—that was certain. They didn’t all have green cards like Diego Martinez. He spoke to the man again. “C’mon, brother. This is your chance to tell what happened. You don’t tell now, later, everyone will say you made it up.”
The man fell backward on the dirt and wiped a bloody hand across his face. “Espero que lo hagan.” (“I hope they do.”)
Chapter 14
“Please tell me you haven’t been drinking.” Greco’s first words when Vega met up with him at Lake Holly Hospital. Adele had driven Vega to the hospital—a decision that, upon reflection, Vega realized hadn’t been the wisest of choices. It didn’t help that Adele was still in her red chiffon dress, getting looks from every male doctor who passed by. Even Greco shot a sideways glance at her backside when he thought no one was looking. Beneath the armor plating, the man apparently still had a heartbeat—and a few other working parts besides.
“I was off-duty, Grec. I had two beers. Two. Do a Breathalyzer on me if you want.”
Greco ran his eyes down Vega’s black guayabera shirt. “You going native on me?”
“I was trying to get some leads.”
Greco shot another glance at Adele who was at the nurses’ station, getting an update on the beaten man. “I’ll just bet you were.”
“If I hadn’t been at that quinceañera this evening, you’d be doing another homicide investigation instead of an assault.” Vega tried to explain the chain of events that started with finding Maria’s potential employer, Cindy Klein, but Greco cut him off.
“Get some coffee in you and jeez—hide that shirt. You look like you just stepped off a cruise from Cancún. And tell your girlfriend to get lost. Happy hour’s over. You’re working now.”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Keep it that way, you hear? For your sake and mine.”
Greco had snagged a small, windowless conference room down the hall from radiology. Vega grabbed a coffee from the vending machine and followed Greco inside. The man did not look happy. He started talking before Vega sat down.
“We’ve got a situation on our hands that’s going to blow this town out of the water and I can’t keep a lid on it the way I did that chick up at the lake.”
“You mean Maria Elena,” Vega corrected. That “chick” had a name now. He wanted it used. Greco gave Vega a sour look.
“You can call her Carmen Miranda for all I care right now. We’ve got more immediate concerns.” Greco slipped a black-and-white photo of the beaten man’s face in front of Vega. The man’s nose appeared to be broken, both eyes were swelled shut, and blood crusted his hair. “We’ve identified the victim as Luis Guzman,” said Greco. “He’s a regular in town. Been picked up before for drinking and urinating in public—that sort of thing. No papers, of course. He’s in the ICU right now with a concussion, a ruptured spleen, and numerous fractures.”
“You get a statement from him?” asked Vega. “He wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“He can’t tell anyone anything right now,” said Greco.
“He’s unconscious. But I don’t need him to tell me what happened. Because I’ve got this.”
Greco pulled out his smartphone and brought up a Facebook page. He scrolled down to a photograph of a pale bicep with an American flag and eagle tattooed across it. The words 100 PERCENT AMERICAN, were tattooed beneath. The picture was posted on Facebook at nine-thirty this evening. Beneath it was a caption: GOT A NEW TAT WITH BRENDAN AND EDDIE. THINK WE’LL CELEBRATE WITH A LITTLE BEANER HOPPING TONITE. Vega looked at the name of the holder of
the page: Matthew Rowland.
“Bobby Rowland’s teenage son? This is the guy who beat up Guzman?”
“It gets worse,” said Greco. “I got the post because forty minutes before you called in the Guzman assault, Matt Rowland’s two friends brought him into the emergency room with a knife wound to his abdomen. It’s a superficial wound, but it matches a penknife one of my officers recovered near Guzman’s body. Which means, depending on how you look at it, we’ve got Matt Rowland and his friends Brendan Delaney and Eddie Giordano for a hate-crime gang assault. And/or we’ve got Guzman for assault with a deadly weapon.”
“Sounds to me like Guzman was defending himself.”
“Maybe,” said Greco. “But I’m screwed no matter what I do here. If Lake Holly lets Guzman walk on the ADW charge, we’ll be called out for being soft on crime and illegals. Plus, you and I both know a guy like Guzman ain’t gonna stick around to testify against Rowland and his pals. He’ll jackrabbit faster than José Ortiz. No victim? No case.”
“But if you charge Guzman on the ADW,” said Vega, “the same thing’s going to happen.”
“Yep,” said Greco. “Soon as I put his fingerprints through the system along with an ADW charge, the Feds are gonna slap an ICE hold on him. Even if he’s found innocent, he’ll be deported on immigration violations. Which once again leaves us without a victim to testify against those punks.”
“You could file for a U visa for Guzman,” Vega suggested.
“And what’s the likelihood a judge is going to grant that sort of privilege to a drunk with a knife?”
“None,” Vega agreed. “Which leaves only one option: charge Guzman with ADW and see if the DA’s office can keep him locked up until after he testifies against Rowland and his pals.” Which meant Guzman could look forward to a lengthy stay in the county jail followed by a one-way ticket out of the country. Meanwhile, Rowland, Delaney, and Giordano would remain free on bail until their trials. Nobody but another cop could understand how tough it could be to do the right thing and still end up looking like a creep.
Land of Careful Shadows Page 14