The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  Ten or fifteen seconds pass. During this brief time span, she searches his face for an indication of how her recitation went over. She’s still angry at herself for the clumsy comment about the loss of his family. He didn’t need to hear that, and she didn’t need to say it. He’s probably thinking, as so many men have, that she spends too much time alone in left field.

  What he’s actually thinking is that she possesses an attribute he’s lost, though he hasn’t admitted it’s gone until now. It’s impossible to assign a single word to it. “Relentlessness” comes closest but is too cold for his taste. “Doggedness” could work, but it implies lack of talent, whereas he doubts she’s operating at a deficit. Later, he’ll remember this moment as evidence that at least as of today he still understood a thing or two about character and motivation.

  “After Central beat Texas down in Austin,” he tells her, “an editor at a nationally circulated general-interest magazine contacted me to see if I’d be interested in writing an article about Major. He’d beaten Washington the week before the Texas game, and though it turned out they weren’t half as good as people thought and would finish the season with six losses, UCC suddenly had wins over two teams that were in the top twenty-five when they whipped them. The guy who got in touch with me was interested in how quickly an entire region with a very diverse population had coalesced behind a coach and a football team.”

  He tells her that the proposal was not without appeal, so he asked for a little time to think it over. Then one evening a few days after the conversation, he pulled into the Whole Foods parking lot, and there was Nick Major climbing out of a black Jaguar.

  “I trailed him into the store and kept an eye on him while I did my own shopping. You didn’t have to watch very long to see that he loved attention. He signed an autograph while waiting for the butcher to carve him a couple of forty- or fifty-dollar steaks, posed for a photo with a young woman and her daughters, and threw an imaginary pass to a chubby kid in a UCC Cowboys tee shirt.

  “I introduced myself to him in the wine section. I told him which magazine had asked me to write about him and said I’d love to chat if he could find a little time over the next few days, because I was trying to find an angle for the story. I have to admit I figured he’d be plenty eager, since this was not a sports publication but a pretty tony outlet. So he pulls a bottle from the rack and examines it for an inordinately long time, then informs me that if I don’t know what I’m doing, I probably ought to let somebody else write the piece.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she says. “Are you serious? What’d you say?”

  “I assured him I’d heed his advice and wished him good-night. They were upset the following Saturday by Utah State. I considered getting drunk to celebrate.”

  He picks up the remaining half of his grilled cheese, handling it carefully because it’s dripping butter. He sticks a corner of it in his mouth, takes a bite, and starts to chew. He will not say another word, he decides, until she tells him what link she’s found, if any, between Nick Major, the Golden Palomino, and Jacinta Aguilera.

  As if she’s read his mind, she says, “I guess you’re wondering why I brought up Nick Major. So here’s the answer, insofar as I’ve got one.”

  She tells him that something about the second FPD press conference, where the chief and Joe Garcia responded to questions about the Aguilera shootings, just didn’t sit right. The chief, it seemed to her, was acting nervous, whereas Garcia exuded confidence, and the disparity began to trouble her. “The night of the shootings, I remember, you went one way talking to neighbors,” she says, “and I went the other. Did you speak with the woman two houses east of the Aguileras, on the opposite side of the street?”

  He calls up an image of the residence: beige stucco and something he’d never encountered before, a carport where the driveway ran straight to the front door. One of the oldest International pickups he’d ever seen was parked right there, the grill nearly touching the doorknob. He didn’t even attempt to reach the bell. “No,” he says. “Did you?”

  “Not that night. But after the FPD press conference, I went back.”

  She tells him that a family from El Salvador lives there, and if she had to guess, she’d bet not everyone is legal. The woman who opened the door is named Ascension, and she’s probably about sixty, a small, gray-haired lady whose relationship to the rest of the family is unclear. “The first time I went there,” she says, “she was home alone, and we talked for close to an hour. The second time, a man of about forty opened the door, and when I asked to speak to her again, he said nobody with that name lived there and shut it in my face. I’ve been back twice with no luck.”

  She says that on her initial visit, Ascension told her she didn’t know the Aguileras but that their children used to play in the yard, and sometimes she saw their father playing with them, acting like he was a kid too. She never noticed anything unusual over there, she said, except for a few times when a fancy car stopped and the woman climbed out and went inside. “‘What woman?’ I asked. She said she thought it was the one who got shot. So I asked her if she could describe the car, and she said she couldn’t, that she didn’t know a lot about cars. And then, if you can believe this, she said, ‘But I make picture,’ and while I sit there dumbfounded, she pulls out a cell phone and shows me the photo.”

  She reaches under the table for a leather shoulder bag he didn’t know was there. She unzips it, pulls a manila envelope out, and undoes the clasp. She’s enjoying the moment, and he can’t blame her. He used to enjoy this kind of thing himself.

  “Does this look familiar?” she asks, handing him the glossy eight-by-eleven.

  It’s a black Jag. In the photo you can see the back of the woman who’s walking away from it. She has dark, shoulder-length hair and is wearing a black blouse beneath some kind of gold vest. It’s a sunny day, and the gold is so glittery that it must have sequins on it. You can’t see the driver from this angle. What you can see is the rear bumper with the California license plate.

  He can’t make out the entire number, but it begins 4RQW.

  “KRK,” he told Stefan’s friend from the Krakow police department, Malinowski, when the detective came to see him in the hospital two and a half years ago. “I don’t remember the numbers. Just the letters.”

  The detective was about his own age, maybe a little older. With a long, sad face, large ears, and a wispy mustache, he resembled Charles de Gaulle, which was exactly how Stefan described the philandering hero of his crime novels. Discovering the real-life version might have proved mildly entertaining had he been there for a different reason.

  “KRK would indicate a Krakow license plate,” Malinowski said from his seat near the foot of the bed.

  “I know.”

  “Except that the KR would be at the top, followed by a set of numbers below, usually five, at the end of which would come another K. So are you saying you saw the letters KRK at the top of the plate?”

  “I don’t know where I saw them. I just know those letters were somewhere on it.”

  “And you don’t recall any of the numbers, not even the first?”

  “No. I only saw it for what, maybe two or three seconds?”

  The detective sighed while Stefan stood near the head of the bed with his hand on Richard’s undamaged shoulder, patting it every now and then in a touching but futile effort to offer comfort. His brother-in-law wore a black jacket that would look just fine on Sunday at St. Mary’s. Underneath it, a psychedelic tee shirt, Jerry Garcia with rattlesnake hair. The grave and the grotesque.

  “It’s amazing that you can recall anything whatsoever,” Malinowski said. “But if you were able to remember even the first of the five numbers, it’d make our task a lot easier. That would rule out at least ninety percent of the registrations, if not more.”

  “It was a 7-series BMW. There can’t be that many in Krakow. And it was either gray or silver. Wouldn’t that narrow the field?”

  “You might be surprised,”
the detective said, offering a prophecy that would not prove true.

  There were, Richard learned a few days later, exactly three. The first belonged to a retired brewer, whose passport proved that he’d been in London with his family on the 22nd. The second was owned by the city president, but he was spending Christmas with his wife in a Zakopane B&B, and because the storm was especially severe in the Tatras, the roads had been closed all day. Malinowski made it clear that he had acquired this information at no small personal peril. The inquiry hadn’t sat well with his superiors. For one thing, since the wreck had occurred beyond the city limits, it didn’t fall within his jurisdiction—though this being Poland, everyone understood that when friends requested your help, you gave it, and Stefan had been his friend for quite a while.

  The third car presented a more interesting possibility. The registered owner was twenty-eight years old. He lived in a six-room apartment near Planty, a prime location. He held no job and didn’t seem to have worked anywhere in his entire adult life. His income, he told police, came from “investments,” but it appeared insufficient to support his opulent lifestyle. Over the last year he’d visited Turkey twice, gone to Russia three times, and taken so many trips to Sweden that they weren’t worth enumerating. The curious thing about the BMW, however, was that he’d purchased it new in Krakow on December 19th, and when the police examined it on the morning of January 3rd, the odometer read 33 kilometers. Insufficient to drive to the site of the accident and back.

  Richard was sitting in an armchair when the detective gave him this news. It was late afternoon, already pitch-dark outside, snow falling again. An hour or so earlier, a doctor had informed him that he was well enough to leave the hospital. And go where? he wondered. And see whom? Meet somebody for a drink? If he hadn’t drunk too much two weeks ago, he would have been behind the wheel that night, and by now he’d be in California with his wife and daughter. Reentry, he knew, was going to burn him to a crisp.

  “The odometer reading can be rolled back,” he told Malinowski. “In the U.S., when you drive a new car away from the dealer’s, it usually has at least a hundred miles on it.”

  “I agree. The reading is extremely suspicious. But I’m afraid there’s another matter we have to deal with.” The detective said that the BMW had stood in a guarded parking lot on Karmelicka from three fifty-one a.m. on December 21 through one sixteen a.m. on December 27th. Footage from three security cameras confirmed its presence.

  “Who buys himself a new car,” Richard asked, “and parks it for a week?”

  “I wouldn’t. But he did.”

  “And what was he doing the whole time?”

  “Celebrating the holidays with his girlfriend, he says. And she confirms it.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you think he’s innocent.”

  “I didn’t say that either. I strongly suspect he’s involved in criminal activity—most likely the opium trade—and now that we’re aware of it, I’m hopeful we can make his life unpleasant. But with respect to the accident, we have no case. And by the way, he looks nothing like the man you describe.”

  As far as Richard could remember, the last time he’d succumbed to rage was after getting bounced off a seesaw on his elementary school playground. He’d picked himself up, chased down the guilty playmate, and punched him in the stomach. He’d been given detention every day for a week.

  He couldn’t punch the driver of the BMW because Malinowski couldn’t find him. And he couldn’t punch Malinowski without ripping an IV from his arm. So he vented the only way he could, and if anything it was even more childish than cornering his friend and socking him in the gut. “Why don’t you just get out of here,” he said, “and go fuck somebody you’re not married to, like the guy in Stefan’s novels?”

  The other man sighed, crossed his arms, and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “I’m not married to anyone, Mr. Brennan. My wife died four years ago. Breast cancer. It runs in her family.”

  In that moment, before he rose from his chair and dragged his cast and the IV stand a few feet so he could offer the detective his hand and ask forgiveness, he understood what he would become: a lost man who went quietly about his job, doing the best he could, though he didn’t care very much about any of the things that remained for him to do.

  He studies the photo a moment longer. “There’s no time stamp on here,” he tells Maria Cantrell.

  “No, but there was a time stamp just above it, in her camera roll. It was taken on Thursday, July 30th, at eight twenty-three a.m.”

  He hands the photo back. “You checked the registration, I assume?”

  “I don’t need to. A black Jaguar with the license plate 4RQW150 is parked outside the University of Central California athletic building every day in the spot labeled ‘Head Football Coach.’”

  “What made you look there?”

  “I learned that Major likes to have a drink at the Palomino. There are a couple of private rooms there, and anytime he wants one, he gets it. Once I found that out, I decided to see what kind of car he drove and discovered it was the one in the photo.”

  “So what do you think that picture proves?”

  She pushes her salad to the side of the table so she can prop her elbows there, then brings her hands together and rests her chin on her knuckles. “Honestly?”

  She’s not that much younger than he is—ten or twelve years, he would guess, though he will learn it’s only nine—but he feels the need to play devil’s advocate, to protect her from whatever impulse made her ask him here to look at the photo. She hasn’t been in town long enough to understand that the tree she’s barking up has some gnarly roots. Fresno and the Valley don’t have a whole lot going for them: they’re dirty, hot, poverty-stricken and crime-ridden, with an inferiority complex the size of El Capitan. But one thing they do have is that football team. “Yes, honestly,” he says. “Because I can’t see how it proves much of anything.”

  She glances around the diner, which has gotten a lot busier than it was half an hour ago. “Well, for starters,” she says, “it proves the good coach brought Jacinta Aguilera home very early one morning.”

  “You can’t see the driver in that photo. It could be Major’s wife.”

  “But it wasn’t. Ascension told me that every time she saw the car, a man was driving.”

  “Yes, but she won’t talk to you anymore, and for all you know she could be in Ilopango.”

  “Where the fuck is that?”

  Her crudity surprises him, but he’s still as adept as anybody when it’s time to look impassive. “A city in El Salvador. INS catches undocumented aliens in the Valley every day. This is not central Massachusetts.”

  “It also proves that when he brought her home, she had on her hostess clothes. That’s what they wear at the Palomino: gold vests over black blouses that reveal plenty of cleavage, black miniskirts that barely cover the South Pole. She spent the night with him somewhere.”

  “Maybe she babysat on the side and took care of their kids the previous night.”

  “Would you have hired a babysitter who dressed like that?”

  “No. But I also wouldn’t have bought that kind of car, even if I could afford it. And I wouldn’t coach football for all the money in Fresno—and there’s more money here, by the way, than you may think. There are a lot of things I wouldn’t do that other guys might.”

  “She spent the night with him.”

  “So what if she did?”

  “And a short time after they spent a night together, her husband supposedly shot her and his kids, though everybody I talked to said he doted on those children, that he tried to take them somewhere every weekend. His boss at the body shop said nothing had ever stunned him more than to hear he’d shot his family.”

  “That’s usually how people react to tragedy,” he says quietly. “They have a hard time believing it. Partly because they don’t want to.”

  There’s
movement beneath the table. He feels pressure in his toes, and it increases almost to the point of pain. One of her feet is on top of one of his. She’s pushing down as hard as she can.

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  “Trying to wake you up.” The pressure eases off. “Your friend Joe Garcia likes to drink at the Palomino too.”

  “Quite a few people do.”

  “Did you know he sometimes handles security for private gatherings?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he does. And he’s done several events at Major’s house.”

  He’s in no rush to speak. He takes a little time to process the info and factor in her need to share it with someone who works for another paper. Then the dots begin to connect. Sometimes they do that on their own. Sometimes they don’t.

  He mentions the name of her editor, a man he’s known for twenty years and one who has never impressed him. “Have you discussed this with him?”

  “Of course, I did. Would you care to guess his response?”

  “If he was having a good day, he probably pointed out the circumstantial nature of your ‘evidence,’ emphasizing the unreliability of a possibly undocumented immigrant who can no longer be found and most likely wouldn’t talk to you again if you did find her. And then I imagine he administered a gentle lecture, explaining what the football team means to Fresno and the Valley, how important it is to both their economy and their morale.”

  “He wasn’t having a good day.”

  “So he told you to fuck off.”

  “Lyrically speaking.”

  “And now, since you feel certain you’ve got a story, which he’s warned you not to pursue, you hope to pull me in, on the theory that if I break it in some form or fashion, he’ll have no choice but to let you off the leash.”