by Linda Barnes
What if somebody at one of those places had known Manuela, realized I was on her trail, and eliminated her before I could find her? Poor Manuela. Or Aurelia. Or whatever her name really was. The dead woman. The corpse. La mujer muerta.
Or worse, what if I’d been home when the phone rang? I know you will help me.
I swallowed my last doughnut without tasting it and headed for the car.
11
The Cambridge Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, the one that offered sanctuary to illegal aliens, was a whitewashed clapboard cube with a steeple set back twenty feet from Massachusetts Avenue. I had more difficulty parking than getting to talk to somebody in authority. Yesterday I’d been treated with suspicion. Today the handful of people busily stuffing envelopes with church newsletters reacted as if I were a leper. They’d evidently read their morning papers.
While I waited, I studied the walls. A poster advertised a Walk for World Peace beginning on Boston Common. Another begged for volunteers to solicit funds by phone. Three quarters of the signs were in Spanish. I picked up a copy of a handout newspaper, the Central American Reporter, the monthly outlet of CASA, the Central America Solidarity Association. BETWEEN WOMEN THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES was the headline on the front page. I read an article on a women’s peace convoy to Central America. One of the women in the convoy had met with Pancho Villa’s granddaughter.
“Follow me, please,” a cold voice said. “Father Emmons will see you.”
I was ushered into his office by one of the starch-faced women who’d given me the brush-off yesterday. She handed my card to a man seated at an oak desk and gave me a withering look. I assumed it was meant to reek of pity or piety, but I wasn’t sure which.
The minister pushed aside a stack of papers he appeared to be sorting into three unequal piles, stared at my card for a while, and, by means of a curt nod, invited me to sit across from his desk in a straight-backed chair. He was a stoop-shouldered man of over fifty with graying hair, graying skin, and a thin, sharp nose. His eyes were pale watery blue. They reflected the gray of his suit and fit into the overall monochrome. A pot of red geraniums on the corner of the desk seemed positively flamboyant.
“So you’re the one,” he said very quietly, almost as if he were conducting a conversation with himself.
I intruded. “The one what?” I asked.
“They gossip.” He made a vague gesture that included everyone from his immediate staff to the world in general. He didn’t seem to know where to put my card, whether to return it to me or to file it in one of the piles on his desk. “I tell them that gossip can hurt the people we work with, harm them beyond measure, but they gossip nonetheless, and your visit here was, uh, a topic of conversation even before they read about the poor woman’s death, about which I’m somewhat confused, since she seems to have died twice in the newspapers.”
“They misidentified an earlier corpse,” I said tersely, not wanting to explain further, although his watery eyes invited confidences. The rest of his face was curiously immobile; only the eyes seemed really alive.
He made a rumble deep in his throat, coughed into a white handkerchief, and continued his conversation with himself. “They do gossip, I’m afraid. This has made quite a sensation. And now, of course …” His voice faded.
“What?” I asked. “Do they have me pegged as the leader of some right-wing hit squad? Reverend, I assure you—”
“You have no reason to assure me of anything,” he said gently. “I’m not accusing you.” He glanced up at me suddenly, and his eyes no longer seemed vague. “Why did you come here?”
“You’d make a good cop,” I said admiringly. “Catch a lot of people off guard.”
“The question remains,” he said, flushing a little and moving paper from one pile to another, shielding his embarrassment at having been caught in the eye trick.
“Do you trust the people who work for you?” I asked bluntly.
He raised his eyes again, and they were mild this time, under control. “What do you mean, ‘trust’?”
“I mean, how do you get to work here, in this program to save refugees?”
“You walk in the front door and volunteer,” he said.
“I see,” I said. “It’s very selective.”
“It is,” he agreed. “Hard work. You’d be surprised how that narrows the numbers.”
“How can you be sure you’re not employing somebody who also works for, say, a right-wing death squad?”
“How can I be sure you’re not going to pull a gun on me this minute?” he responded.
“You can’t,” I said.
He shuffled a few more papers. “One takes a lot on trust.”
I waited until he looked at me again, then asked, “Are you a trusting man?”
His lips almost formed a smile. “I trust that my fellow humans have all their share of foibles and maybe a few extra kinks I haven’t seen before. I’m a priest, but I live in the world.”
“Do any of your volunteers seem odd?”
“All my volunteers provoke gossip, about the way they dress and the way they raise their children, but none is a suspected spy, if that’s the meaning of your question.”
“That’s the meaning of my question.”
He shuffled papers for a time. I let the silence grow. “Any other questions?” he said finally.
“Yes. Did anyone besides me ever ask about Manuela Estefan?”
“I’ve communicated all I know to the police.”
“About me?” I asked.
“Yes. The women you talked to yesterday gave a fairly accurate description. The red hair, you know. And the height.”
“Did they describe anybody else?”
“No,” he said.
“Did you know Manuela?”
“Me? No, but I don’t make contact with every one of our refugees.”
“Was she known here?” I said, thinking the man would make a good crook as well as a good cop. He answered only what you asked him, didn’t volunteer information.
“No,” he said. “She was not known here. Not until you asked for her.”
“I’m here because I want—I need—to make sure her death isn’t connected to my coming here.”
“I see,” he said. “You feel guilt.”
Ah, yes, I thought. That’s it. Good old guilt. I considered telling this holy minister of God a little about my childhood, about being raised in a half Jewish, half Catholic home by a union-organizing bleeding-heart mother. “It’s all right to beat yourself for your sins,” she used to say in Yiddish, “but don’t enjoy the punishment too much.”
“Guilt is my middle name,” I said instead.
“It does no good.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “It won’t bring back the dead, right?”
He took a deep breath, and his face got almost animated. “I mean that I counsel against guilt in general, but not entirely. I believe in owning up to one’s sins. If you feel that you sinned against Manuela by asking about her here, I hope you’re wrong. We seek to help these people, not harm them.”
“Me too,” I said. “But you can never be sure, can you?”
He bowed his head.
“But you do what you can,” I said.
He looked up and his eyes were clear. “I believe in taking action,” he said, “if one believes one is morally justified.”
“Me too,” I said, holding his glance.
“I haven’t answered any of your questions,” he said.
“Yes, you have,” I said.
The volunteer women buzzed like angry bees as I left his office and walked down the aisle between the pews toward the door.
Outside, I found a pay phone. One of the lawyers I’d spoken to yesterday was out of town, the other one swore he hadn’t mentioned my queries to anyone and wanted to know everything I knew about the murder. I told him to read it in the Herald.
12
My next stop was up Mass. Ave. and into North Cambridge, at the Camb
ridge Legal Collective, a storefront operation that probably spent more on rent than they did on upkeep or impressing the neighbors. Their logo was hand lettered on a square of cardboard and masking-taped to the door. Another sign read: PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and por favor toque antes de entrar. So I knocked and went in. The sign didn’t say you had to wait.
I was hoping for a different secretary, but the same guy who’d treated me like an INS spy was behind the metal desk, speaking rapid-fire Spanish into a phone. He glared at me. I sat down on a folding chair, one of many lined up against the far wall, and decided he had no need to worry about privacy as long as he kept up the clip. I could only catch a few words, and out of context they didn’t mean a thing to me. I was practically in the dark until “Hasta luego.”
“You again,” he said as soon as he got off the phone.
“Nice to see you too,” I said. He blushed, being one of those fair-haired guys who do that, and I felt I’d scored a hit, however minor. I bit my lip. This was a guy whose cooperation I needed.
A woman came out of the back room wearing a navy-blue pin-striped suit and a pale blue bow-collared silk blouse that probably cost more than my entire closetful of Filene’s Basement cast-offs. Her bag and shoes were gray with navy piping, her glasses looked like props she kept around to make people take her seriously. Harvard Law, class of ’87, I thought. Maybe ’88.
I was on my feet before she’d taken two steps. I cut her off at the door.
“Carlotta Carlyle,” I said, holding out my hand and betting she was too well bred not to take it.
She had a firm, cool grip.
“I’m a detective,” I said while the guy at the desk tried to start a sentence several times and failed.
“We need to talk,” I said. “About one of your clients.”
“I already told the other officer everything.”
Bingo, I said to myself.
Harvard Law glanced at her expensive wrist-watch and sighed. “Come in the back, please,” she said. “I really do want to cooperate, but I wish you’d coordinate things better so I didn’t have to plow the same ground over and over again.”
This from a woman who probably specialized in taking depositions.
I kept the smirk of triumph off my face as we bypassed the secretary and headed for the inner office.
Miss Harvard sat behind a desk with another eloquent sigh and gestured me into one of the card-table rejects in front of it. I sat, my tailbone protesting the icy metal. The Cambridge Legal Collective didn’t spend a lot on heat either. I kept my windbreaker on. What I don’t get at Filene’s Basement I buy at the Army-Navy Surplus Store in Central Square. Miss Harvard probably shopped at Bonwit Teller. Maybe eight hundred bucks for the suit.
“So,” she said. Trust a lawyer to give a lot away.
“Manuela Estefan. Did you help her get her green card?”
“Is that the woman the other officer asked about?” She wasn’t being nasty, just trying to remember. “No, I did not get her the green card. And neither did anybody else associated with the Collective.”
“But you recognized the name.”
“Because of the newspapers,” she said. “And that policeman. I wish he’d caught one of the other counselors.” Her look said plainly that she wished I had too.
Damn.
“You’re a lawyer,” I said, plainly fishing.
“I’m sorry,” she responded like the lady she was. “Marian Rutledge. I work for Blaine and Foreman, but I volunteer here—along with a lot of others.”
Blaine and Foreman was a big-time downtown firm. That accounted for the clothes.
“So Manuela had no connections here? No friends?”
“She may have had friends among the other immigrants, but I wouldn’t know about that. I checked our files and she didn’t come in to see us. We weren’t contacted about her by any government agency. Not until after her death.”
I wished I knew if the police had been in touch after my Manuela’s first supposed, or second actual, demise, but I couldn’t risk the question. It was sheer luck that Marian Rutledge had mistaken me for a detective from the Boston Police. I put it down to lack of experience on her part. I didn’t want to do anything to make her question her assumption, nor did I wish to do anything to make myself liable to a claim that I’d knowingly impersonated a police officer.
I said, “Sometimes you are contacted by the government?”
“Often,” she replied. “Say an immigrant has worked with the Human Rights Commission in El Salvador, well, we have people on our staff who used to work with that commission and who’d be willing to take on the case. So the government sends the immigrant from one of the detention camps—”
I’d stopped thinking of the U.S. in terms of detention camps since they’d rounded up the Japanese during World War II. And that was just something in history books. “Detention camps,” I repeated.
“They prefer detention ‘centers,’” Marian Rutledge said with a grim smile, “but they look like camps. Overcrowded. Barbed wire. The biggest one is in Harlingen, Texas. They might release an inmate of Harlingen on bond and send him or her up here to have the case heard by a Boston Immigration and Naturalization judge. It’s happening less and less. They keep them in Harlingen now. Say it speeds up the hearing process, but that’s not necessarily true. The courts are crowded up here, but down there, well, they’re logjammed.”
She’d stopped glancing at her watch and I got the feeling that this was the part of her work she liked and that Blaine and Foreman and all their pricey civil and property cases could go hang.
“Most of the cases we handle are political refugees. Applications for asylum. And less than one percent of our people ever make the cut.”
“That’s not a whole hell of a lot,” I said, because she seemed to want some response.
“They say the Salvadorans just come here for jobs—and the Nicaraguans too—but if they go back, they’ll be shot. Herbert Anaya, the director of the Human Rights Commission, was shot to death,” she continued indignantly, “right outside his own home. These aren’t frivolous cases. These are life-and-death cases.”
“So it’s hard for a Central American to get a green card.”
“Damn near impossible,” Marian Rutledge said.
“Tell me, are there rumors about Salvadoran death squads around here?”
“If there are, I haven’t heard any,” she said. “I’ve heard rumors about groups operating in Miami and L.A. And Texas. Those are the major ports of call. Boston is pretty small potatoes for immigrants from Central America. Too cold. We get a lot of Irish, but they aren’t treated half so badly.”
“And what about counterfeiting?”
“Counterfeiting?” she said.
“Documents,” I countered.
“You mean, working papers, Social Security cards? It’s getting worse since the Immigration Act of ’86, but I don’t know what else the government expected. If staying home means dying, a lot of people are going to come up here, documents or no documents. And if you have to show documents to work, even with a labor shortage, well, I’m not siding with the counterfeiters, but I probably wouldn’t turn one in to the INS either.”
I like lawyers who aren’t too stuck on the law. I smiled at her, and she seemed quite human in spite of her clothes.
“Any green-card counterfeiting?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her long brown hair swung from side to side.
“It’s too fancy a job,” she said. “I haven’t heard of any counterfeit green cards. But if anybody did figure out how to get a good one, well, that would open the way for all the other documents. Once you’ve got a green card, you’re practically a citizen. Home free.”
“Right,” I said.
She glanced at her watch again, and this time she stood up. “I’ve got to go,” she said, sticking out her hand. “Nice meeting you, and I’m relieved you didn’t want me to look at any more of those awful pictures. All those poor women.”<
br />
All those poor women.
“Just a minute,” I said. “What pictures are you talking about?” I’d already decided the police must have questioned her right after the first victim had been identified. There hadn’t been enough time since my Manuela’s death. Surely she would have commented if I’d been the second cop of the day. So what “poor women,” in the plural, was she talking about?
“Is this a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing or what?” she asked.
I thought we’d built up some sort of rapport and decided now was as good a time as any to test it. I pulled out one of my business cards, which do not feature the Boston Police shield.
“Private,” she snorted, if anyone that classy could be said to snort, “and I fell for it.”
“I won’t tell anybody,” I said. “Please. I know I’ve used up plenty of your time, but I need to know about those photographs.”
“Why? What business is it of yours? Who are you working for?”
“A dead woman,” I said.
She sat back down and sucked in a deep breath. “What do you want to know about the photos?” she asked. “They were just a lot of gruesome scene-of-the-crime shots. I don’t want to look at any more of them.”
“One scene or two?”
“Two,” she said. “Maybe three.”
“And this was when?” I asked, swallowing. “This morning?”
“Two days ago.”
The image came back to me so strongly, I could have drawn a picture of it: Mooney’s door with pushpins on a map. Three of them.
13
That map was the first thing I looked at when I stormed into Mooney’s office thirty minutes later. I banged the door shut, and there it was, with an added pushpin. Number four. Representing the second Manuela Estefan. My Manuela Estefan.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, not giving Mooney a chance to say hello or what’s up or get out. “Why isn’t it in the papers? Because they’re poor women? Because they’re illegals, Hispanics, nobodies? Somebody kills off a bunch of rich white Brahmin ladies, I bet it makes the morning news.”