by Rick Riordan
"Tell you what, guys," I said. "I've got some quarters. How about you check out the sticker machines by the entrance. See if you can get me a Betty Boop, okay?"
Jem negotiated for a Felix the Cat, too. I told him he drove a hard bargain. Then I fished out as many quarters as I had and handed them over. I got out of the booth and let Jem and Michael scramble past.
When I scooted back in, I tried to concentrate on Del's Sonora casserole — corn tortilla, cheese, squash, tomato, a hint of salsa and sour cream. Eating was easier than what I needed to say.
"I didn't expect Del," Ines told me. "I wouldn't have brought the boys."
"Why did you sell out?"
She stabbed her fork into the salad. A strip of mirror set into the black wall tiles by Ines' shoulder gave back her reflection, hazy with grease specks.
"I don't want any part of RideWorks," she said. "What's the difference?"
"You really think signing the company over will keep Del silent about you?"
Her hesitation was almost imperceptible. She brought the fork to her mouth, took a bite, only then glanced up. "What are you blathering about?"
"You're Sandra Mara."
She tried to maintain her look of cold annoyance, but something in her eyes spiraled downward. She lowered her fork, arranged it parallel to her plate. "No. I'm not."
At the entrance of the diner, Jem and Michael scrutinized the toy vending machines, looking for just the right investment. Behind them, the second hand on the pink neon bar clock ticked its way between the only two numbers — 4 and 10.
Ines managed a small, bitter laugh.
"You don't know..." she started. "You can't possibly know how many times I've anticipated this conversation. I've imagined facing a cop. Or a veterano with a gun pointed at me. Now I'm sitting across from a pissant private dick who's a closet English teacher and his boss' baby-sitter, and the best I can come up with to save myself is, 'No, I'm not.'"
"I wouldn't call it baby-sitting."
She crumpled her napkin, threw it against the A.l. steak sauce in disgust.
"Well" — her voice dry as a West Texas creekbed— "what now?"
"Wish I knew."
Cheers from across the room. The three Anglos by the window were applauding the waitress as she brought them fresh margaritas.
Ines said, "Tres, I can't lose my son."
"Don't you think I've considered that?"
"The police would find reasons to take him away. If Zeta knew, he'd have me killed. You haven't—"
"Not yet. I wasn't sure until tonight. Paloma has some of your old things, some mementos you meant to get rid of. One of them was a sailor's-head mug. There's three just like it in the farmhouse on Green Road. Something from your grandmother?"
Ines pushed her salad away. "What do you want?"
"Tell me you didn't know about your husband's murder. Tell me you're innocent."
"Why? So your report will be more complete?"
"Come on, Sandra."
"Don't call me that."
"Ines, then. Let me help."
"Zeta will have me killed. Michael will have no one."
"Talk to me. We'll figure it out."
"Ha."
I dropped my fork into the casserole. "You're right. You should be having this conversation with someone else."
I started to slide out of the booth.
Ines said, "Wait."
She studied me, her hands pressed together, fingertips to her lips. She looked like she was weighing a lot of options she didn't like.
"You want to know about Sandra Mara?" she asked. "Let me tell you about Sandra Mara."
She sat forward, tapped the scar on the bridge of her nose. "Sandra Mara got this when she was eleven, trying to fend off her drunk stepfather. She didn't do a very good job. He broke her nose with a beer bottle. If he hadn't scared himself so bad with the amount of blood coming from her face, that would've been her first experience with sex."
"Ines—"
"Just listen," she insisted. "You think that was unusual for a girl in the Bowie Courts? My point is, most girls would've fought better. They would've had their own razor blades by then and known how to use them. At least they would've screamed, raised hell with their mother or their brothers, told somebody the truth about what had happened. Sandra did none of that. She was too afraid. She spent the next five years in the Rosedale Library, every afternoon and evening, reading books, trying to avoid going home. By the time she was thirteen, when the neighborhood locas threatened to kill her if she didn't join a gang, Sandra had read Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, fifty other books — but she had no survival skills. She would've died if her brother Hector hadn't joined Zeta Sanchez's set, got himself shot in the leg so his little sister would have the right connections to be left alone."
Jem and Michael had scored their first purchase from the sticker machine. Michael was prying open the plastic capsule while Jem watched impatiently. "You're pretty hard on yourself," I said.
Ines picked a toothpick from the dispenser, rolled it between her thumb and finger. "Sandra Mara couldn't have been a mother, Tres. Her idea of heaven was her grandmother's farm, where she and Hector moved when she was sixteen. No homeboys running through the house. No strung-out mother or drunk stepfather to avoid. Nothing to keep Sandra from losing herself in books. She even got a college scholarship her senior year. But you don't get away from the South Side without a fight. The same afternoon Sandra found out about the scholarship—"
"—was the afternoon Hector brought Zeta Sanchez out to visit," I said. "I read your journal."
Her mouth hardened with distaste. "When you dig into somebody's past, you really dig, don't you?"
"It wasn't hard to find."
Ines snapped her toothpick, flicked the pieces away. "If you read it, you know. Sandra and Zeta hadn't seen each other in two or three years, since back at the Courts, when Sandra hadn't been much to look at. But Zeta looked at her that afternoon, and you know what? Sandra couldn't fight it. Hector couldn't help her. She let herself get claimed. Zeta and Sandra got married two months later. A few months after that, Zeta said, 'You stop college.' Sandra went along with that, too."
"Zeta Sanchez wouldn't be an easy person to fight."
Ines stared at me as if her perspective were shifting, as if she were suddenly aware that I was much farther away than she'd thought. "Maldicion. Always an excuse, eh? Always a reason to give in. You and Sandra Mara would have gotten along fine, Tres. Sandra might've had five or six of Zeta's babies after quitting school, waited for Zeta to get tired of her and leave, or start using her as a punching bag. Sandra saw her mom go through all that. Would've been easy to follow tradition. But that fall while I was at Our Lady of the Lake, something happened that made me want to stop being Sandra Mara."
"You met Aaron," I said.
"I told you the truth. I was in his class that fall. I didn't know Aaron had any connection to Zeta's employer, Ride-Works. I don't think Zeta ever made the connection. He never realized Aaron had been one of my teachers. Aaron was..." She laughed frailly. "Aaron was a lousy lecturer. The other students used to gripe to each other before he came into class each day. Aaron's face would twitch whenever he talked about violent scenes in a book, which of course were the scenes he focused on most. So one time before class, this idiot P.E. major behind me joked that Professor Brandon must've been abused as a child. The other students just laughed. I didn't say anything, but I was furious. I promised myself that I was going to be on Dr. Brandon's side after that. I started going to his office hours, discussing books, having coffee with him in the cafeteria. We understood each other almost immediately. Aaron and I could finish each other's sentences from the first day we talked. By the end of the semester, we'd fallen in love. In the spring, after Zeta had forced me to quit school, Aaron and I still found excuses to cross paths a lot... Things just took their course."
"Aaron got you pregnant in April, and you had to make a choice. You chose to invent a ne
w life."
There were color variations in the deep brown of her eyes that I'd never noticed before — jagged yellow and amber lines, as if her irises too had been fractured in the distant past.
"Sandra couldn't have broken away from Zeta," she said. "Sandra couldn't have protected her child. Weeks before Del ever arranged an ID for me that said I was Ines Garcia from Del Rio, I'd already started thinking of myself as that new person. And I promised myself Ines would do whatever she had to for her baby."
I studied the woman across from me — the fierce sincerity in her face, the disheveled hair, the little crumple of packing tape on her sleeve, and the incongruous explosion of colors on the front of her Fiesta T-shirt.
I tried to reinvoke the chill I'd felt a few minutes before, when she'd first referred to herself in the third person. I couldn't do it. The fact that I'd been accepting her story, starting to understand the way she described herself in two distinct layers, scared me.
"Del knew about you and Aaron," I said.
"Of course. He warned us our lives were in danger if Zeta or Jeremiah ever found out. He was probably right. He offered to arrange a new ID for me, a few other papers, and get me safely out of town. That was easy for Del — he'd done it often enough for his father's cronies. In return, Aaron was supposed to hand over his share of RideWorks when the time came to inherit. What did Aaron care about that damn company? He loved me and we wanted to be together. He agreed. He'd already lined up his Permian Basin job for the following fall, so I disappeared into West Texas to wait for him and have our baby."
"And you got married. Again."
"Fuck 'again.' That was Sandra. That wasn't a marriage." She spat the word.
"The law wouldn't see it that way. Del knew that — knew your secret could be used as leverage against you and Aaron in the future. You played into his hands."
Ines was silent.
"After you left," I said, "Del went to Zeta. Del convinced him you'd left town because you were having an affair with Jeremiah."
"It was total fiction."
"Of course. But your husband didn't know that, and the fiction suited Del perfectly. Zeta knew all about Jeremiah's reputation with young women. Del didn't have to do much convincing. Zeta shot Jeremiah. Then Del helped Zeta leave the country. Del inherited Jeremiah's company and got rid of all his competition at once — Aaron, Jeremiah, Zeta."
"We had no idea," Ines said. "Del was horrible, but we never thought he was capable of anything like murder. Aaron — it destroyed him when he learned about his father."
"And Del wasn't even done. Afterward, he hit up Aaron for RideWorks. After all, wasn't that Aaron's side of the bargain? Only Aaron had never counted on his dad being gunned down as part of their deal. So Aaron refused. Del took matters into his own hands again. He stole the company from Aaron in a legal maneuver. That pissed Aaron off. He filed a suit, but the minute he did, Del threatened to expose your identity."
"Yes."
"The police would want to talk to you, of course — a woman who'd fled town with the victim's son and a new identity right after her legal husband had committed a murder. At the very least the investigation would ruin your chances at a new life, nullify your second marriage, make Michael a—" At the look in her eyes, I stopped. I folded my napkin, tossed it over my Sonora casserole. "At worst, it would attract the attention of Zeta and his pals. Del had something to worry about too if the story got to the police, but he must've been fairly sure no one could prove anything on him, especially with Sanchez gone. You, on the other hand, had everything to lose. Aaron had no choice but to drop his claim to RideWorks. How old was Michael at the time? Two months? Three?"
"Two months. We had our first terrible argument, Aaron and I. His father's death was entirely my fault."
"Then Del paid a visit to your brother Hector, who also knew the truth about your disappearance. Del used the same leverage with Hector that he'd used on Aaron — 'Do some business with me or I'll see that your sister gets crucified.'"
"I don't know what Del told Hector."
"Del was just following up on Zeta's good idea — to move heroin through the carnival circuit. Hector arranged the purchases from a friend of his, Chich Gutierrez. Del distributed the heroin, keeping the amounts small so as not to attract too much attention, but large enough to make RideWorks a nice fat supplementary income."
She raised her hands slowly off the table. "I — don't — know. I don't know anything about that."
I looked at the kids. They'd each gotten another plastic egg from the machine and were prying them open.
"You take it for granted," Ines said hoarsely.
I refocused on her. Her face was hard as copper.
"What?"
"That you can have a child like Jem someday," she said. "Raise him without seeing him shot in the crossfire, without having him go on lookout for the locos at age five. You can be in a place where they don't keep the needles and the baby bottles in the same cabinet, have a spouse who isn't in jail for murder or dealing. You take that for granted."
"I take it for granted you'd kill to protect Michael from your past."
"Oh, you're right. You're absolutely right. That's the difference between me and Sandra Mara. I would kill to protect my son."
"How's your batting average so far?"
Ines shook her head, as if she were disappointed in me. "I won't lie to you. I didn't feel guilty that Jeremiah Brandon got killed, or that Zeta had to flee the country. In fact, I was disappointed Zeta didn't get shot in that barroom, too. I can't say I care much if Hector and Del were moving heroin through RideWorks, either, if it bought me and my son some extra years of anonymity. None of that matters. But you think I killed my husband? Or had him killed?"
"That was my original question."
"You're wrong. Aaron was putting Michael and me in terrible danger — that's true. When Aaron wanted to move back here to San Antonio, I told him it was too much of a risk. Too many people here who might recognize me. Aaron insisted. He had all these ideas about challenging Del — getting back that damn company. He seemed to forget what Del would do if he tried. I was desperate, but I'd never—"
"You wrote those threats to the University."
"I—" She faltered. "All right. Yes. I wrote them. Aaron had brought the first letter home, the one addressed to Dr. Haimer. It wasn't hard. Before I knew it I'd sent six of them."
"You thought if things got unpleasant enough, Aaron would agree to move away again, out of San Antonio."
"There had been two other offers, Tres — one in Iowa, one in Connecticut. Not wonderful jobs, but we should have gone there. We would've been safe there. But Aaron was so damned determined to come home."
"And the bomb?"
"Hector's idea, before we even knew Zeta was back in town. Hector was sure the University police would discover the bomb before it ever went off, that they'd blame it on campus radicals. Hector just wanted to convince Aaron the threats weren't idle. He didn't intend for anyone to get hurt."
"Why were you away the weekend Aaron was shot?"
"We'd found out Zeta was back in San Antonio. Hector and I were both insane with fear. Hector told me to get out of town for a while."
"—so you couldn't be implicated. Hector was timing a murder."
"No," Ines insisted. The word was a little shrill. "He swore to me. He didn't shoot Aaron."
"Then who?"
"God damn you, Tres. Leave it alone."
"Paloma knows," I said. "She was the witness."
"Paloma wouldn't talk to me."
"You must've guessed she was lying about Zeta being at your house that night. But you haven't pressed her too hard on that point, have you?"
Ines flattened her hands on the Formica. "No. I haven't."
"You knew she was lying to protect you. You figured if somebody had to go down for Aaron's death, it might as well be your husband."
"Zeta isn't my husband anymore. Why can't you see that?"
The w
aitress came to our table, sensed the tension, took a step back. She asked skeptically if we were finished with our food. We said we were. She slowly loaded our plates onto her tray. She smelled of black-eyed peas.
"I'll bring y'all the check." Before leaving, she shot me a chastising look.
"Those are two cute boys over there."
The old couple at the next table had gotten up and were shuffling toward the door. The margarita-drinkers on the opposite side of the room kept doing their best to ensure prizewinning hangovers for the following morning.
Jem and Michael were making a pretty good dent in my quarter supply now. Their pockets bulged obscenely with prize capsules.
"I've told you the truth," Ines told me. "What now?"
"There's still the matter of my friend."
She frowned, not immediately understanding who I meant. That irritated me. "George Berton," I said. "He got himself shot poking around in your past after Zeta Sanchez was arrested. George talked to Hector, then visited your family farm. He must have found a photo of you there, used it to get an ID from the woman at the Poco Mas. He realized that the real story was you, but he didn't know all the details, and he was a little too soft-hearted to put a widow and her five-year-old boy in harm's way. So he set up another meeting with your brother. Probably George wanted to figure out a bargain whereby you could be spared discovery and Hector could give Del Brandon to the police on a skewer. It would've meant Hector getting jail time for the heroin, but this is the guy who'd got himself shot in the leg for you once. Hector would take the fall. Before that could happen, somebody interrupted his meeting with Berton — murdered Hector, almost killed George Berton."
"You're accusing me of that, too? Of murdering my own brother?"
"The police will wonder."
"I don't intend to talk with the police."
"Two people have died. Aaron. Hector."
"Don't you think I know that?"
"That's a lot of blood, Ines. A lot of blood even for a secret worth keeping."
She gazed across the room at her son, watching Michael's every move like she was trying desperately to memorize him. "Are you in love with somebody, Tres?"
The question struck me mute.