Coyote

by Linda Barnes

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Bingo. He left me a long, detailed bullshit message about some bureaucratic screwup, but I’m not sure I buy it.”

  I yanked at a strand of my hair and wondered when I’d stop wanting a smoke. “It’s not a counterfeit card, right?” I said slowly. “But it’s not a documented card either.”

  Mooney’s mouth spread into a smug grin, and I knew we were thinking along similar lines. “Sound familiar?” he asked. “Ring any bells?”

  “The fake drivers’ licenses,” I murmured, referring to a local scandal that had been brewing for the past three months.

  “And those were issued by a regular clerk at the Registry of Motor Vehicles,” Mooney agreed. “Legit licenses, no forgery involved. So maybe I can’t get hold of Jamieson because somebody at INS is peddling ‘genuine’ green cards for a fee. Maybe he doesn’t want to air dirty INS linen in front of the Boston cops.” Mooney lit another cigarette from the butt of the one he’d just smoked. “The thing I can’t figure is whether this has anything to do with the killings or if it’s just a sidebar.”

  I started unburdening my soul, telling him everything I knew about the pillow factory with the emphasis slightly bent so it wouldn’t look like I’d been keeping secrets. I’d barely begun when somebody knocked on the door and flung it open at the same moment.

  “Dave,” Mooney said to a narrow-faced man in a leather jacket, “I’m busy here. Can it keep?”

  “Guess so,” the cop answered, shrugging his shoulders. “We picked her up in front of the Westland place. Kind of loitering. I questioned her, sort of, and I don’t think she knows much. Says she’s looking for a place to live and somebody gave her that address, or she read it in the paper, or she saw it on a sign on a tree. She doesn’t remember. Or she doesn’t understand English. Cooperative. I don’t really know what we can hold her on, but I thought—”

  By that time I’d swiveled in my chair. The cop was holding her above the elbow, not gently, but not so tight as to cause any bruises.

  “Jesus Christ, Mooney,” I said. “Jackpot. Bring her in.”

  Green Blouse stared at me. She muttered something under her breath in Spanish and made the sign of the cross on her chest. Then she started to cry.

  30

  “I didn’t realize you had that effect on women,” Mooney said, raising an eyebrow in my direction.

  “Shut up,” I responded automatically. Then I turned to Green Blouse and murmured, “It’s okay, come on, sit down.” To the gawking cop who’d brought her, I said, “Get her some Kleenex or something, for chrissake.” I turned back to the woman and muttered in halting Spanish that everything was going to be all right.

  She cried harder. Close up, she looked even younger, her matronly clothes and plump body lending her a maturity her smooth circle of a face denied. I patted her shoulder awkwardly. Someone slammed a Kleenex box down on Mooney’s desk. I thrust a wad of tissues into the girl’s hand. She dammed her eyes with them and subsided into snuffles and gulps.

  “They won’t hurt you,” I said. Mooney gave me a sharp glance on the they. He caught on quickly. I was on her side, protecting her from the police. It was going to be the two of us against the big bad men. Hell, it might work.

  Her hand closed on mine with a surprisingly firm grip. “No salga,” she pleaded, staring at me from under long lashes. Don’t leave.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, as much for Mooney’s benefit as for hers. I wasn’t sure she understood anything I said in English. “I think we ought to get a translator in here.”

  “A lawyer?”

  I shrugged. “If the conversation seems to point that way, we can back off and get one.”

  “Dave,” Mooney barked, “Mendez at his desk?”

  “Is there a woman?” I asked. Mooney gave me the eye and I said, “Well, I just thought she’d be more comfortable.”

  “Check,” Mooney ordered tersely, and the cop named Dave disappeared.

  “How do you know her?” Mooney spoke as soon as the door closed. He’d been dying to ask but hadn’t wanted to in front of Dave. The lieutenant’s always supposed to know what’s going on. I grinned at him to show I knew his tricks as well as he knew mine.

  “This is my tipster. At least I think she is. She ran like a scared rabbit when I tried to find out. You must have gone to Westland Avenue right after you got away from me in Woolworth’s.” I addressed the last sentence to the woman. I might as well have saved my breath. Her eyes darted around the small room as if she were searching for a secret exit.

  A thin cop with a wispy mustache followed Dave through the door. Five was a crowd for Mooney’s office, but I didn’t think a switch to an interrogation room would improve things. The mustached cop shot off a quick Spanish volley at our guest, shook her hand formally, nodded at each of us as he made introductions. I could follow him pretty well. I don’t think Mooney caught more than his own name.

  “Her name is Ana Uribe Palma. She’s scared,” the cop said.

  Why not, I thought.

  Then Mooney announced, “Since Ms. Carlyle already knows Señorita Uribe, she’ll start things off.” Mooney’s a master at stuff like that. I mean, look at that one sentence. Dumps the work on me and at the same time lets the other guys know he’s in charge.

  There were so many questions I wanted to ask that for a moment my mind went blank. I decided to start at ground zero.

  “Señorita Uribe—¿La puedo llama Ana?” May I call you Ana?

  “Sí.”

  “Ana,” I said gently, “¿Quién es Manuela Estefan?” Who is Manuela Estefan?

  She must have expected it, but the name startled her all the same. Her eyes made the circuit of the tiny room again, came up with the same answer: no way out.

  “Una mujer,” she answered cautiously. “A woman like me works at the factory.”

  Mooney sat up straighten. Someone who actually knew Manuela Estefan.

  I said, “You could find her for us at the factory. Point her out to us.” I spoke English now and waited for Mendez to translate. I didn’t want to make a mistake.

  “No. No, she no work there anymore.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “No sé.” I don’t know. Her chin quivered and tears formed standing pools in her eyes.

  “Mooney, do you have Manuela’s green card?” I asked, signaling to Mendez not to translate the aside.

  “Yeah.”

  “Give it to me.”

  I asked Mooney if I could remove it from the evidence bag and he nodded. I passed it over to Ana, and she took it solemnly, stared at it, and pressed it to her breast. The tears welled up and started to fall.

  “Please, have you seen her?” she asked eagerly.

  “Is this a picture of Manuela?” I asked.

  “Sí.”

  “Was Manuela your friend?”

  “Sí.” Oh, yes. Manuela was her good friend.

  Her cheerful burst of words made my throat dry. “Ana, I’m sorry to tell you this, but I believe the woman who had this card is dead. No one can hurt her. Nothing you tell me can hurt her anymore.” Manuela Estefan had to be one of the dead women. Why cut off the hands unless the killer was afraid of identification? What identification did we have except the lone green card?

  “No,” Ana said, her dark eyes narrowing with suspicion, “you try to trick me.”

  “No tricks.”

  “I no betray my friend,” she insisted, gulping, glancing from Mooney to Dave as if she expected them to haul out the rubber hoses.

  I said, “Listen to me. If Manuela was your friend, you betray her with your silence. Please, for her sake and yours, talk about her. Talk about the women at the factory, the apartment on Westland, the—”

  “You know, then.”

  “Some I know.”

  She murmured, “Manuela, she is the strong one, the one who decides, the one who speaks well and acts brave. I must go to church and light a candle for her.”r />
  I thought she might start to weep again, so I slipped another question in quickly. “How long since you’ve seen Manuela?”

  “Many months. With her green card she is like a North American. She can work anywhere, go anywhere—to California, even, where it is always warm like home. She is a free woman, like you.”

  “How did Manuela get her green card?”

  “You say she is dead, not in jail, not in El Salvador? I would not tell you if—”

  “She’s dead.” God forgive me if I’m wrong, I thought.

  Ana hung her head. “Then I, too, am dead.”

  “Ana.” I took her hand and squeezed her plump fingers. “Help us and we can make you safe.”

  For a minute I thought she would spill everything. Her eyes wavered. She stared at the green card as if the image of Manuela Estefan could speak to her. “But I know nothing,” she said finally, her voice close to a moan. She avoided my eyes, ducking her head and staring at the desktop.

  “Tell me about the apartment, about the factory,” I insisted, keeping my voice low and even.

  “There is nothing to tell. Nada I live at the apartment with other women. We work at the factory.”

  “What women? What are their names? Can we talk to them?”

  The tears started to fall again. “They are gone. They go away. The women at the factory, when they get their papers, they go away.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. The boss at the factory says they get papers, they get green cards, they go.”

  “What’s the name of this factory?” Dave asked. Mooney frowned at him.

  “Go on, Ana,” I prompted.

  “Maybe they all go to California. We talk about California. Maybe they get jobs selling pretty dresses at fine stores, or better, selling clothes to rich men who look for girls to marry.”

  Mendez repeated everything. His words became a regular echo, background noise. His droning voice hardly interrupted the flow.

  Ana’s fantasies sounded singsong-rehearsed, as if she’d repeated them to herself a thousand times. While she spoke, she stared at Manuela’s green card, grasping it so tightly that her thumb and forefingers whitened.

  “Why did you leave the message at the newspaper office?” I asked.

  “Someone reads me the words from the newspaper. I think maybe Manuela tries to reach me, or one of the others—I think after so long there is no harm in it, but then I am frightened.”

  “But you recognized me.”

  She stared at the card for inspiration. “No, señorita,” she said dully. “You are mistaken. Please, what will they do with me now? ¿La policía? I have no papers.”

  I ignored her query. “But you did work with Manuela Estefan, and you lived at Westland Avenue—also with Manuela?”

  “Sí.”

  “And how many others?”

  “Maybe three other women.”

  “And why did you leave Westland Avenue?”

  “The boss says La Migra knows about the apartment. We must go.”

  “You packed up your clothes?”

  “No, one of the men from the factory goes and does that while we work. It happens too fast.”

  “Which man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why did you decide to go back to the apartment today?”

  She consulted the image of Manuela. “I, uh, I think maybe I leave something there.”

  Sure. Something that was worth taking a risk with La Migra. Whatever she saw in the depths of that green card was telling her to lie.

  “Do you drive a car?”

  “I have no license, señorita.”

  “How long have you been in this country?”

  “Four months only.”

  “Did Manuela bring you here? Was she your coyote, your guide?”

  She seemed puzzled by my question. “No, señorita.”

  “How did you get here, how did you come to Boston?”

  “I walk many miles. I take the bus.”

  “Who helped you?”

  “I walk and take the bus. That is all.”

  I breathed in and out, staring at Mooney. I realized who Ana was starting to remind me of. Marta. Marta in one of her stubborn moods. I changed direction, hoping to surprise the woman into a truthful response. “What are the names of the women who lived with you at the apartment?”

  She hesitated. “Manuela you know. The others are Aurelia—”

  “Aurelia Gaitan?” Mooney interrupted.

  “Yes, I think. And then there is Delores and Amalia and me.”

  “Last names? Family names?”

  “No sé. Please, señorita, what will happen to me?”

  Dave said, “Maybe she can clear up the IDs on the stiffs.”

  Mooney glanced at him sharply. He seemed to be remembering what the dead women looked like with their butchered hands and mauled faces. He said, “First we’ll have her look at their personal effects. See if you can get them up here.”

  I wondered if Ana, quietly sobbing at the table, would identify the silver filigree ring as belonging to Manuela or Aurelia or Delores or Amalia.

  The words of an old Woody Guthrie song came unbidden to my mind. He wrote it in the fifties after a plane crash in California, over Los Gatos Canyon.

  Good-bye to my Juan, good-bye Rosalita,

  Adiós, mis amigos, Jesús y María,

  You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane,

  All they will call you will be deportees.

  When the plane crashed and everyone died, nobody knew who the passengers were. Nobody knew how many died. They were just illegal aliens, just deportees.

  31

  Dave made a brief phone call and took off for the property room downstairs.

  Mooney murmured, “Think we can talk in front of her?”

  I shook my head no. I wasn’t sure how much English Ana understood. My buddy Marta certainly caught a lot more than she let on. Ana’s eyes were the same deep brown. They gave little away. Mooney nodded me out the door after telling Mendez to stay put.

  “Please, señorita. No salga, por favor. No salga.”

  I assured her I’d be right back. She clutched at my hand and regarded the slightly built Mendez with suspicion. Why she wanted me to stay and listen to her evasions, I wasn’t sure. She didn’t trust me.

  “She’s lying,” I said as soon as we’d put some distance between us and the closed office door.

  “Well, of course she’s lying,” Mooney growled, leaning against the coffee machine. “She’s scared. She didn’t choose to come in here and dump the bag. The question is how she’s lying. Is what she says a lie, or is the lie in what she isn’t saying?”

  “She’s leaving stuff out. There’s a link between the dead women and Westland Avenue. We knew that. And now we know there’s another link, to this Hunneman Pillow Factory.”

  Mooney ran a hand over his jaw as if he were checking to see when he’d last shaved. “At least I can call off the decoys at the bus station. I’ve got every Hispanic woman on the force playing hooker down in Park Square, trying to lure some random psycho. Our psycho has to have a connection to one of those two places, preferably both.”

  “If she identifies the effects—or the bodies.”

  “Yeah. If. What was that stuff about coyotes, about the Estefan woman bringing in illegals? Where’d you get that?”

  “INS. They thought she might have been killed by someone who didn’t like her line of work.”

  “Hell, your guy’s freer with his theories than mine is. I’ve got to get everybody associated with that factory in here for questioning.”

  Dave and a uniform appeared, each holding two large brown-paper bags. I turned to go back into the office.

  Mooney stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “You ever find out why that woman came to you? Back at the beginning? The dead woman?”

  I couldn’t keep her out of it any longer. “Paolina’s mother works at the factory every once
in a while. She didn’t want to tell me about it, afraid Welfare will cut her benefits if they find out she works.”

  “I’ll need to talk to her.”

  “Oh, Mooney, you know how she is with cops. I’ll get more out of her in her kitchen than you’ll ever get from her down here.”

  “I want a list of every man she’s ever seen at the factory. Full descriptions. Names.”

  “Everything,” I promised. I didn’t tell him I’d already tried.

  Dave and Mendez cleared Mooney’s desk and set down the brown-paper bags. The property officer departed. Ana, scrunched down small in her chair, seemed relieved to see me.

  The bags were stapled shut. Each was fastened with a manila tag looped to a string closure. You had to sign the tags if you authorized examination of the contents. Mooney signed. Dave started removing staples, and I joined in. Dave had a gadget designed for the task. I used a scissors blade and managed to cut myself. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had a tetanus shot.

  “Should we take the stuff out or let her do it?” I asked. I was whispering. I don’t know why. Ana was staring apprehensively at the bags. I reached over and touched her shoulder.

  The bags smelled musty.

  Mooney told Mendez to help Ana unload the bags and to keep track of exactly what she said, translating every word. He told Dave to take notes.

  For a while there was only the noise of crinkling paper, rustling cloth.

  Mooney looked away, addressed me. “This ‘boss,’ the factory owner, could be the key. He must know something’s going on, even if he isn’t the crazy.”

  I recalled my brief encounter with James Hunneman. He’d reminded me of a schoolyard bully, with his florid face and arrogant manner. But a killer?

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off Ana. She didn’t want to look in the bags. Mendez was taking it slowly, explaining that it was only clothing and maybe she could help us if she saw something familiar. Nothing to be afraid of.

  “Carlotta,” Mooney said.

  “Canfield,” I said. “The landlord at Westland Avenue. It would be nice if he had a connection to the pillow factory.”

  “Yeah. We can bring him in and talk it over. It’ll take time. Guys who own apartments have money and lawyers.”