by Karin Tanabe
“Okay,” agreed Payton. “But the sex can’t be a footnote. That’s what this whole thing is about, remember? Hot nights in Middleburg, Virginia.”
“Or maybe she just fell for him,” I suggested after a few minutes. “Maybe I just haven’t been able to see that since I’m salivating over her husband and can’t believe she isn’t, too.”
“Maybe,” said Payton.
Tall, thin cactuses lined the sides of the road, and we blasted the air-conditioning to save us from the dry heat outside. Payton’s notebook paper fluttered from the burst of air. She took a hair clip out of her purse and pinched the pages together.
“Let’s talk about Olivia and the love of your life,” said Payton, switching gears. “They got married to keep him in the country, and they stayed in Texas, right?”
“Yes,” I said. We passed yet another yellow sign about immigration patrols. “She worked at the Corpus Christi Caller Times right after college for two years, so they must have stayed there. And then after that she was at the El Paso Times for almost two more years before coming to Washington three months after the List was launched.”
“El Paso,” said Payton, doodling the lone star of Texas onto her notes. “Do you think she was still involved with immigration reform when she lived there?”
“Well,” I said, “Sandro worked for a nonprofit immigrants’ rights group there called the Border Community for Human Rights. It was a very by-the-book nonprofit, nothing extreme. Olivia could have worked with them, too, or with another group, but she couldn’t do it openly. Neutral journalism and all that. I imagine immigration is an especially touchy issue in Texas. She couldn’t have been associated with anything publicly. I looked up her work for those papers, and she wrote about immigration, but probably not any more or less than other state reporters in Texas. No red flags.”
“Let’s just assume that she stayed involved and that Sandro stayed involved,” said Payton, scribbling again.
“So eventually she hears about this paper being launched and she lands a job there,” I said. “It seems like a pretty big step up from the El Paso Times, but there are a few reporters like that at the List, people coming from practically nowhere, and it was early days, so I’m not reading into her move too much. She’s good at her job, and let’s just say the List recognized that. So she comes to Washington, a place she’s always dreamed of living, with Sandro in tow.”
“Okay,” said Payton. “And they just happen to live in a huge town house in Dupont?”
“I think they pay her pretty damn well at the List. They love her. Like six figures love her, so she could pay for it, even without a lot of help from Sandro.”
“What does Sandro do at OAS?”
“I don’t know. There’s no bio or title listed on the site. Just his name and a few committee assignments.”
“And you think he’s still involved in immigration reform?”
“In one way or another, yes,” I said. “He told me his entire family is still in Mexico.”
I stepped on the breaks as a small rodent scurried across the road, and both of our bodies were jerked forward.
“Let’s try not to die today,” said Payton dryly as she readjusted her seat belt. The GPS signaled that we were only thirty miles away from Ajo. “So where do we go from here,” Payton murmured, looking at her notes.
I shook my head and kept on driving. I had no idea.
As the scenery turned from highway to town, Payton pointed out a building coming up on our left.
It was a huge white stucco church. We pulled up next to it and looked at the sign. “Immaculate Conception Catholic Church,” read Payton, looking up at the cross on top.
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” I said. It looked like a building that belonged underneath a sunset in Italy. “I would never have guessed.”
Payton tried to stretch her long legs, her black linen shorts creasing slightly as she bent at the waist.
“Okay, now listen to my plan B. Ready?”
“Sure,” said Payton, her arms crossed in front of her.
“Plan B. We find nothing here. The Readers are just two people who died very unfortunate deaths. We drive to Corpus Christi, we try finding Olivia and Sandro’s former colleagues, but we find nothing there. And while we’re down here, Olivia is plotting my demise at the Capitolist.”
“That plan sounds depressing.”
“If that happens, I turn in the affair story, plain and simple, like you said. It’s still huge and you’re right, it’s time.”
“It is still huge,” said Payton. “Huge. You don’t really need motive and all that when you have a poster-size color photo of them screwing. More information would just be icing on the cake.”
More information—some unethical, terrible motive—would make me feel better about being a meddling whistle-blower.
“You have an amazing story to print,” Payton assured me.
“I’m way past it being a story,” I said. “This just feels like my life now.”
CHAPTER 18
It was early afternoon by the time we left our small motel with a list of destinations to cover. We had found addresses for almost everyone quoted in the court article. Five people had been mentioned by name. Payton had determined that one had died, which left us with four.
“Jeffrey Diaz, Michael O’Brien, Travis Turner, and Manuel Reyes,” I said, looking at their names and addresses in Payton’s notebook. “And we know for sure these guys are all still alive?” I asked as I turned the car back onto Highway 85.
“No, we don’t,” she said. We were both already starting to sweat. I looked down at the thermostat in the car. 105 degrees.
“We’ll find out soon,” said Payton. “It’s that kind of town. Everyone knows who’s dead.”
We were driving to the first house, where we hoped Jeffrey Diaz lived, when I realized I hadn’t looked at my BlackBerry since Virginia.
“Oh Jesus, what are you doing!” Payton screamed as I swerved off the road and onto the shoulder like I was a race car driver in need of a tire change.
“I haven’t looked at my BlackBerry in hours!” I shouted, almost tearing up. “I could have missed something. I . . . where is it!” I screamed, throwing things out of my bag.
“Calm down,” said Payton. “It’s Saturday, and they know you’re off this weekend. I’m sure no one emailed you.”
“You don’t get it at all. They don’t care if I’m off. If there’s a story Hardy feels like I should write, then I’ll have to write it, vacation or not.”
“That’s disturbing,” said Payton, grabbing my hairbrush off the floor. “You can’t work there anymore. Who wants to live like that?”
She brushed her beautiful frizz-free hair off her tan forehead and frowned. “I hate July,” she grumbled. “It’s so hot and patriotic.”
I looked down at my messages. There was one from Hardy asking me to write about a Twitter feud brewing between Tucker Carlson and Meghan McCain, but his message had come in four hours ago.
“I just . . . I knew it,” I said, tears filling my eyes. I wrote Hardy back and apologized for not having my phone on. I wrote that I had been with my sister at her doctor’s appointment and that there was no cell-phone use allowed in the sterile clinic.
“Long doctor’s appointment,” he wrote back immediately. “I had Libby write it. Be back on the grid tomorrow.”
I threw the phone onto the floor mat and started driving again. I screamed, “I am so sick of writing about crap!” and started hitting the steering wheel.
Payton grabbed my hands and put hers on the wheel.
“Calm down or pull over,” she said, trying to keep the car straight.
“I’ll calm down,” I said, feeling about as calm as Venus Williams losing the Wimbledon final.
“You’re poised to write something that’s not crap, so let’s go ahead and finish this mess. It’s your career to change. Change it.”
Instead of screaming some more, I drove us to the addre
ss we had for Jeffrey Diaz.
“Eight-eleven West Cholla Avenue,” said Payton. “I think it’s this one. There, with the cactuses in front.” She pointed to a very humble white house behind a chain link fence.
When we pulled up outside, we just sat there and looked at each other.
“You’re the reporter,” said Payton. “Go report.”
Right. I got out of the car like I was about to deliver my own eulogy and opened the unwelcoming gate. At the bright blue door, I balled up my fist and pounded gently. I stood there for two minutes but didn’t hear a sound. Payton was watching me from the car. I looked away from her serene face and pounded harder. This time I heard movement inside.
A woman in pink leggings and an oversize T-shirt opened the door and looked at me from behind a screen door.
“Hello, ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you,” I said as politely as I could. “My name is Adrienne Brown. I’m a newspaper reporter at the Capitolist in Washington, D.C., and I’m looking for Jeffrey Diaz.”
The woman gasped, started yelling in Spanish, and then slammed the door in my face. A great beginning. I should clearly start writing my nomination letter for the Pulitzer committee.
I turned around and saw Payton come out of the car and open the aluminum gate. She opened the screen door, banged on the wooden one, and shouted “Donde está Jeffrey Diaz!”
I wondered what it felt like to get shot from point-blank range? I imagined it was like having your face lit on fire and then scraped up with sandpaper.
The woman opened the door again, surprisingly less irate. Payton switched tones and started speaking calmly to her.
“Tell her I’m a reporter,” I said. “We have to be transparent.”
“Shut up, please,” said Payton, swinging back into English to chide me.
After about three minutes of back-and-forth, I heard Payton thank her. Then she grabbed my hand and led me back to the car.
“What did she say?” I pressed as soon as our doors closed.
“She said she has no idea where Jeffrey Diaz is. That was his daughter, but she said no one in her family has seen him for ten years. She said that if we found him we should tell him he’s a worthless piece of pig shit.”
“Fantastic,” I replied. “Very helpful information.”
“I also asked when he stopped working at the meatpacking plant, and she said he worked there right up until he left. She also said that the slave drivers he worked for pushed him over the edge.”
“Really?” I said excitedly. “She called them slave drivers?”
“She said it a little bit more colorfully than that, but that was the gist of it,” said Payton.
I made her speak the exact line in Spanish into my tape recorder just in case I needed an offensive quote for later.
“Don’t get too excited,” said Payton. “Everyone thinks their boss is a slave driver.”
I entered the next address in the GPS.
“I’m like Erin Brockovich,” I said, adjusting my seat belt and shimmying my poor excuse for boobs up a little higher in my push-up bra. “I’m bringing justice to this one horse town.”
“You’re like an enormous loser playing with her tiny boobs,” said Payton, pushing the car into reverse.
I scowled at her and looked down at the notebook. “Michael O’Brien,” I read from Payton’s notes. “The GPS says he lives by Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.”
“What is that?” asked Payton, looking suspiciously at the image of a national park that showed up on the small screen.
“What do you think it is? It’s a park filled with cactuses that look like organ pipes.”
The stop at O’Brien’s house went a little smoother than my first attempt. His wife, a plump, smiling woman of about seventy, said it was God’s grace that had taken him out of plant work and let him enjoy the outdoors again in his new job at the national park. He was a security guard, protecting the cactuses from vandals and the like.
When we left Payton made the point that cactuses should be able to protect themselves, being, after all, something like naturally occurring medieval spike balls, but I told her to suck it. I had a good feeling about Michael O’Brien.
The organ-pipe cactuses were the biggest cactuses I had ever seen. Many were at least four times my height. I was no cactus connoisseur, but the humongous things were actually terrifying. Payton tried to get me to touch one, “for old times’ sake.” Instead, I left her to marvel at it and approached a park ranger for information on Michael O’Brien.
“He’s in the back,” he said, pointing to a vast sweep of dry land where nothing but cactuses and dry shrubs grew.
“In the back of . . . ”
“In the back! He’s in the back,” he pointed again. He turned away to tend to a group of tourists and left me standing like a bewildered idiot.
“He’s in the back,” I said to Payton as she caught up with me.
O’Brien, as it turns out, was in the back. He was just standing there in his olive-drab uniform, looking confused, guarding a big patch of earth.
“Good Lord, if that’s not the personification of dementia, I don’t know what is,” said Payton, turning back around. “I’ll leave you to it.”
He was old. He looked eighty, maybe older. He must have been nearly retired when he was quoted in the paper twenty-two years ago. I wasn’t going to let my fear of failure (or the indigenous plants that were pricking my bare legs) keep me from talking to him. I approached him with a smile on my face. When he lifted his face to mine, I saw that he had two different colored eyes. Hepetochromia. I had a cat with the same condition when I was a kid.
“I’m terribly sorry to bother you, sir,” I said, sticking out my hand.
“I don’t know why,” he replied slowly. “That’s what I’m here for.”
I laughed nervously as he shook my hand. His was very warm from working outside and trembling slightly from old age.
Even though the sun was blinding me, I kept my sunglasses off because I wanted to look trustworthy and approachable. Squinting through the strong desert light, I disclosed that I was a reporter for the Capitolist in Washington, D.C., and doing a story on the John F. Stanton & Company meatpacking plant.
“Did you work there?” I asked. “I found an old article written in the early nineties that said you did.”
He tipped his wide-brimmed hat up and frowned. “I did work at John F. Stanton’s, yes I did. I worked there for forty-three years, in fact. But I like it better here. Why’d ya ask?”
Why did I ask? Oh, no reason. I just wanted to get to the bottom of a death that occurred over twenty years ago, and he was one of four people I had on my list to question. But the first was probably dead or in prison, so it was really down to three.
“I had a friend who worked there,” I said. “Well, a friend of a friend really, but someone important to me. Maybe you knew him?”
O’Brien shifted his old legs around a bit and squinted into my squinting eyes. “Maybe I did,” he said. “What’d he go by?”
“Well, he went by Drew Reader.”
“Did you know Drew Reader? You look too young. He died years ago. Ten years ago.”
“Twenty-three, actually. And no, sadly, I never knew him. I just would like to know a little bit more information about him.”
“Well, I am afraid that’s gonna be real hard, Miss . . . ”
“Brown. Adrienne. Just call me . . . Adrienne is fine.”
“Well, Adrienne, like I said, Drew Reader died ten years back. You’re asking questions ’bout a ghost, I’m afraid.”
“Yes,” I replied. “But I’m just looking into how exactly he passed away. I know it was reported as an accident. But I’m wondering if the company was negligent. If it should have been declared a wrongful death instead of an accident.”
“He fell into the grinder. Got trapped in,” said O’Brien. “I believe that was reported.”
“Yes, it was.”
“He was cleaning during t
he night shift. He always worked the night shift. I remember because he was real young, and that’s always who they made work the late-night hours.”
“I know it was a long time ago, but do you remember anything about that night? Did you see it happen?”
“No, I didn’t see it. Thank the Lord for that. I don’t know if I would be standing here today if I had. I didn’t see it, but I heard the screams and I saw . . . well, I saw the result, let’s just say.”
The result. I could argue that twenty-three years later, the result was still happening. “Do you know who was there that did see him fall? I have some names, but maybe you know other people. Men who were not in the courtroom when John F. Stanton & Company was declared innocent of any negligence or wrongdoing?”
“Who was there now, I don’t know. It was so long ago. I think that Mexican Jesus Diaz was with ’em.”
“Jeffrey Diaz?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s it,” he said, lighting up. “Jeffrey Diaz. He run out of town now, though. I think he was there. Him and a few other guys. All guys who worked that tough late shift. Mine wasn’t as late as Drew’s, but it overlapped. It was late all the same. Never saw my wife at normal hours. I like things so much better now.”
I imagined he did.
“Did you know Drew well?” I asked. “Did you know his wife, Joanne, or his daughter, Olivia? I believe her last name is Campo now. Olivia Campo. She might not live here anymore.”
“No. I don’t remember any of that. Definitely don’t. I just remember him dying too young. It was a shame. But I was much older than those boys. I had a wife and my own family. I kept to myself.”
I thanked O’Brien, trying not to show my extreme disappointment, and went to rejoin Payton.
“Better,” I said when I found her. She was drinking a Diet Coke, still analyzing the cactus.
“He could form full sentences? Didn’t drool on you?”