“You don’t know that.”
He shrugged. “It’s a deer, Adele. We’ve got too freakin’ many of them in New York anyway.”
“Okay, fine. Go. They’re waiting for you at Rodrigo’s arraignment.”
“Let ’em wait. I’m not leaving you here until an officer arrives.”
“Then if you’re staying, I want you to make sure that deer isn’t bleeding to death in the bushes.”
“Puñeta, coño!” he cursed. “Stay in your car.” He reached across her and turned on her hazard lights. “I don’t want you getting run over.” Then he crossed the two-lane and stomped off into the bushes. They were about a quarter mile west of the main entrance to the reservoir. Even this time of year, the trees and bushes were dense. It was like looking through crossed fingers. She could see a sliver of the lake through the branches, the white of its surface so blinding, it sucked the color from everything around it. But that only made the woods less articulated, made the whole place feel like the entrance to a movie theater.
Adele waited, then waited some more. She had expected Vega to emerge almost immediately and assure her that the deer was gone. She wondered if the deer was more wounded than he’d led her to believe.
She powered down her window. “Jimmy?”
“Over here. Don’t come any closer.”
“Why? Bladder control problems?” she joked.
She heard his footsteps break free of the brush. He crossed the street, a grim look on his face.
“Is the deer dead?”
“The deer’s long gone.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled out his cell phone and hit a number on speed dial. “Greco? If you’re there, man, pick up. It’s Vega. I need to talk to you right away. Call me on my cell, ASAP.”
He hung up and tried another number. “Where’s Greco?” he demanded of the voice on the other end. He didn’t even bother identifying himself. “Has he fingerprinted Morales yet?—Shit!—Has he sent the card out?—What do you mean, you don’t know?—Yeah, I need him. Tell him to call Jimmy Vega on his cell right away. Tell him he can’t even take a piss before he calls me. Got that?”
Adele went to speak but he motioned for her to stay quiet and dialed another number.
“Hey, Nick? Can you send a couple of our guys over to the reservoir in Lake Holly to do a workup ASAP?”
A reply.
“Are Joe and Dave working today?—Tell them it’s an accident reconstruction, not a crime scene—Yeah, I’m sure—Tell them I need them to get here right away. There will be a Lake Holly cop on site.” He got off the phone.
“What did you find in the bushes?” asked Adele.
“Let’s just say I’m beginning to think Rodrigo Morales really didn’t kill Maria.”
Chapter 20
Two uniformed police officers came down to Rodrigo Morales’s cell. One had short blond hair. The other had a shaved head and a brown mustache that sat like a caterpillar across his upper lip. Rodrigo had never seen either of them before. Good news would have come with one police officer. Or maybe that Spanish detective. But two? In uniform? His breath fell away before they even yanked open the outer door of the cellblock.
“Stick your hands through the bars,” the officer with the shaved head barked out in toneless Spanish. Rodrigo had a sense the officer knew only the Spanish commands he’d been taught. Rodrigo didn’t even try to speak. He did what the officer asked of him and thrust out his hands. He showed no emotion. Inside, he was trembling like a child’s wind-up toy. Thoughts spun through his brain so fast, he couldn’t catch them long enough to understand their meaning. He caught the trivial ones. He needed to take a piss. He’d left his few meager belongings—his nonworking cell phone, a few changes of clothes, a razor, a little necklace for Juliza that someone had discarded in the trash—back in his room. He had ten dollars of emergency money sewn into the waistband of his jeans, the ones they would likely take from him as soon as he got to the county jail.
He missed the big thoughts, the ones that were too terrible to contemplate: What would happen to Triza and the children? How would they survive? Would he ever see them again?
The officer with the shaved head slapped a set of handcuffs around Rodrigo’s wrists. “Back away from the door,” he commanded. “Turn to face the wall.”
Rodrigo obeyed. The blond cop shackled his ankles. Did they think he would try to escape? In these boots? He could barely walk. But he didn’t protest. He stayed limp and compliant. There was no point in resisting. He was going to jail. That much he understood. There was a process, sure. There had been a process in Rhode Island two years ago when he got arrested. They assigned him a case number. They took a black-and-white headshot. They covered his fingertips with black ink that took forever to wear off and made him press down on a special card. They sent him before a judge with some man who claimed to be his lawyer but never spoke to him.
It was all for the Norte Americanos’ benefit. Their sense of order and precision. Their charts and records and legal proceedings and case files. They had a million ways to count him and a million ways to tell him he didn’t count. They might as well have thrown him into the back of a truck and driven off. The results would have been the same: jail-court-prison. It would be the same this time. Only the jail part might be longer and the prison part would be much, much longer.
The officers led him through the hallway, up a flight of stairs, and into a big room with a lot of partitions. The fat, white detective was waiting behind one of the partitions, chewing on some sort of red licorice candy. He looked at Rodrigo like he already wasn’t there. A bag of garbage that needed to be dumped at the curb.
The officer with the shaved head pushed Rodrigo down into a chair. He said something to the detective and they all laughed. Yaw-yaw-yaw. That’s what English sounded like to Rodrigo. Hard and angry, without any of the whispered rhythms of Spanish. No wonder Anglos couldn’t dance, didn’t even seem to particularly like music. Their whole language was devoid of it.
The two officers disappeared and the detective slipped on a pair of heavy, black-rimmed glasses and turned to his computer screen. He read off a series of questions in mangled Spanish: full name, aliases, birth date, place of birth, marital status, citizenship. Rodrigo answered in a soft, tight voice—so soft that twice the detective yelled at him to speak louder. He said it in English but Rodrigo got the gist.
The detective yawned a couple of times while he was typing and fished some more licorice out of the bag on his desk. He didn’t offer anything to Rodrigo. Not that Rodrigo was the least bit hungry. It had been like this the last time he was arrested too. Every sensation left him. He ate the starchy bland food but never felt sated. He slept on a thin prison mattress but always felt exhausted.
He spent a total of two months in jail and five months in federal prison, all of it in a shadow world of filth and noise and random cruelty that carved him out so completely that it took three weeks back in Esperanza before he could even speak about the experience to Triza. She held him like a baby the night he told her about the punches he took, the shanking he narrowly avoided. He cried in her arms while beyond their cement block walls, the guava trees rustled and the crickets and insects stood in mute witness. When he was in Esperanza, everything here had the flatness of a dream. Even now, his life here felt two-dimensional and devoid of texture, a netherworld that forever ensnared him between desire and memory, ambition and regret. God, how he wished he could talk to Triza just one more time, to hear her voice calling out to him in the humid night air.
The detective finished up and then escorted Rodrigo to a small room with a white wall. The detective motioned for Rodrigo to stand against the wall and look into the camera. He took a flash picture. Then he turned Rodrigo to the right and took another. The flash was bright. When Rodrigo closed his eyes, big black spots floated in front of them. The detective said something to him in English. Rodrigo shook his head. He didn’t unde
rstand. The detective consulted his little postcard of Spanish words.
“A-bo-ga-do?” the detective grunted out, pronouncing every part of the word like he was ordering one off a menu. “Su abogado? Scott Porter? Sí?”
“Sí,” said Rodrigo. “Puedo llamarlo?”
The detective gave Rodrigo a confused look so he mimed making a phone call to his lawyer. It was hard to do in handcuffs but the detective understood. He shook his head and answered in English. “Not now. Later.”
Rodrigo needed no translation. He didn’t know what Porter could do anyway. Probably the señor would want him to lie and say the Spanish detective hit him. But what would that accomplish? It wouldn’t get him out of being charged for Maria’s murder. And if he lied about that, how could anyone believe he was telling the truth about anything else? No. He would not lie. He had sinned and he would ask God’s forgiveness and Triza’s, if he ever got the chance. But he would not compound one sin with another.
The detective brought him over to a small table and unlocked his handcuffs. Rodrigo’s fingers were ice cold. His hands were shaking. He had quieted all the nerves in his body even though he was thrumming on the inside. But his hands refused to listen. They shook of their own volition.
The detective stared at Rodrigo’s shaking hands and cursed. Rodrigo knew very few English words but he knew all the curses. He’d heard them often enough. On the table sat a white fingerprint card and a pad of ink. Rodrigo suspected it was more difficult to do prints on a shaking suspect.
The detective said something in English and mimed what he was going to do. Rodrigo nodded and surrendered his right hand. The detective pressed Rodrigo’s thumb into the ink and then rolled it across a box on the card. He lifted the print, held it up to the light and cursed. He threw away the card and tried again, pressing down hard. Rodrigo felt the pressure on his nail bed. It hurt but he didn’t know what to say or if, when he said it, the detective would understand or care.
It made no difference. The second print didn’t work either. The detective opened the door to the room and called out to someone. The officer with the shaved head came in and tried. Both men were inking and pressing and cursing in equal measure. Rodrigo’s hand felt like something that wasn’t even part of him. Black at the tips. Wet and discolored. Shaking and cold. It was as if he could see himself from a very far distance in that room. His T-shirt, hoodie, and jeans, sour-smelling and crusted with blood that had turned brown and mud that had turned beige. His unshaven cheeks. His scabbed and swollen lip. His floppy boot. Rodrigo didn’t recognize this man. Neither would anyone in Esperanza. Not his family. Not his friends. This was not Rodrigo Eliseo Morales-Aguirre. This was an imposter. A man who had misused Rodrigo’s body, stolen his soul, taken all the best parts—his honor, his pride, his dignity—and sold them off for pennies somewhere between Mexico and Lake Holly for the price of a trip across the border and the chance to earn ten dollars an hour.
They were filling up the card now, the officer and the detective. Together, they’d found a way to get Rodrigo’s prints by shaking out the hand first, getting the blood flowing. They were chatting and laughing on either side of him. Chatting and laughing like he was a cow they needed to brand before they sent him off to slaughter.
And the worst part of it was—Rodrigo saw himself the same way.
Chapter 21
Jimmy Vega would have walked right past the few shards of broken glass. He would have walked by the cracked tree limb with the round three-inch depression that turned the bark concave and stringy like the inside of an underripe pumpkin. In a month, the woods would have leafed out too much to have ever found it. In a year, the limb would be too rotted, the glass too fragmented and scattered.
He found it only because he happened to look down and see something metallic. He’d assumed it was a bit of foil from a gum wrapper or the crushed remnants of a beer can. But it was a crucifix. Mud caked the carved depressions on Christ’s tarnished body. Rust stains pitted the bird wings that dangled from each side of Christ’s outstretched arms. The metal was already being reclaimed by the earth that had once delivered it up. But even with the damage, Vega recognized the crucifix as the one he’d seen around Maria’s neck in the picture of her and her baby. He took a picture of it on his cell phone now to show Greco. Maria Elena had been in this spot, maybe even died in it, next to shards of broken glass and that odd round depression in a cracked tree stump.
“You think Maria was killed by a hit-and-run?” asked Adele while they were both sitting in his pickup, waiting for the police to show up.
“Don’t know,” Vega grunted, staring at the picture on his cell phone. The truth was, he’d stake his badge on it, but he didn’t want to say that to Adele right now. He didn’t want to say anything that could come back to bite him on a witness stand. It didn’t mean he wasn’t sure. Vega had spent too many years in uniform documenting car accidents not to recognize the telltale signs. He’d stood no more than ten feet from the side of Lake Holly Road, a winding two-lane that Adele herself had just had a collision on, albeit with a deer. There was no shoulder, no streetlights, and he already knew that Maria walked this way to meet up with Morales.
“If that’s the case,” said Adele. “Then Rodrigo is innocent.”
“Maybe,” said Vega. But there were no maybes about it in Vega’s opinion. Morales didn’t have a car. There was no way he could have killed Maria like this and no way he’d have stood by and let her die if someone else had. As Morales said himself, he and Maria had been through too much together.
“What are you going to do?” Adele asked him.
“If the fingerprints haven’t gone through the system, we’ll release Morales.”
“And if Greco already put them through?”
Vega stared straight ahead at her reflection in the windshield. “It’s not my fault, Adele. I couldn’t have known.”
“You mean he’ll be deported?”
“As soon as ICE gets the prints, they’ll run them through their database and see that he’s got a criminal record and a prior deportation order. They’re bound to fax over an immigration detainer. I’ve seen it happen in under twenty minutes.”
“Can’t you call it back?”
Vega shook his head. “On what grounds? That he’s not here illegally? He is. We caught him. For the wrong reasons, but he’s been caught all the same. It’s toothpaste from a tube, Adele. It only flows in one direction.”
Two cars barreled along Lake Holly Road in quick succession, one in each direction, sucking the currents of air along with them. Each time Vega’s body geared up for the police cruiser and each time he felt the tension of knowing it hadn’t yet arrived. He couldn’t leave the scene until a Lake Holly uniform showed up—first for Adele, and second, to secure the accident scene across the road until the specialists arrived. Not that time was really the issue here. If Morales’s fingerprints had already been entered into the federal database, Vega could be at the station right now and it wouldn’t matter.
“A man’s whole future is at stake here,” said Adele.
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“So that’s it? You’re just going to shrug it off?”
“What do you want me to do?”
She turned her face away from him. “Nothing. You’re good at that.”
He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to a rhythm only he could hear, a habit when he was nervous.
“My mother was murdered last year at her apartment in the Bronx,” Vega said softly. “A botched robbery.” His voice sounded oddly compacted, like it was traveling through snow. “I drove down as soon as I found out. Spoke to a detective on the scene. He barely acknowledged me. He kept forgetting my mother’s name. While I was trying to get information from him, he took two cell calls about his girlfriend’s birthday party. I’m a fellow officer, this was my mother he was talking about and he treated the whole thing like we were discussing a piece of broken furniture.” Vega fought the choke in his vo
ice. “So I know what it feels like to be on the other end, Adele. I’m not indifferent here. Just powerless.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry about your mother.” Then she placed her hand on top of his. It was a momentary gesture—she took the hand away quickly—but so unexpected that it undid something inside of Vega, shook loose all his thoughts, made them seem as petty as pocket change. It had been awhile since he’d felt this zero gravity sensation around a woman. He didn’t think it was possible anymore.
Vega studied her reflection in the windshield. Her makeup was soft and blurry around the eyes and her lips had the pouty texture of a pillow just waiting for someone to press against it. He’d been fantasizing about those lips ever since he left the dance floor last night. He pictured himself pressing down on them now, running his hands along the curves of her thighs, cupping those full breasts to his chest—
—Puñeta, coño! Was he crazy? Bad enough that he was looking at a possible police brutality charge. Did he want to tack on sexual harassment as well?
A siren broke the spell. Vega was almost glad of it. He jumped out of his truck like it was on fire and drank in the cool air as he flagged down the cruiser. As soon as it pulled behind him, he ran over and tried to get the officer up to speed on the situation. Then he tried Greco’s cell again. Still no answer. He tried the desk sergeant. He was handling another call.
“Go,” Adele urged him as she stepped out of his truck. “I’ll catch up with you at the station.”
“Are you sure—?”
“—Go.” He noticed a flush to her cheeks. He wondered if she’d read his thoughts in the truck. He hoped he hadn’t embarrassed her. He felt pretty embarrassed himself right now. He ducked into his truck and pulled back on the road. He tried Greco again. Still no answer. He came around a blind curve and had to bear down on the brake. In front of him was a long line of traffic behind a payloader crawling along at fifteen miles per hour. The entire road was one long no-passing zone. Not that he could have passed anyway. There were three cars between him and the payloader. He didn’t even have his light bar with him today.
Land of Careful Shadows Page 20