No Witness But the Moon

by Suzanne Chazin

  Greco tossed off a low-throttle laugh. It sounded like a furnace kicking in. “I can think of one.”

  “You can always think of one.”

  Greco pulled off the highway and turned into the county police parking lot. Several camera crews were already setting up near the front doors.

  “I have a feeling those guys aren’t there to film the latest budget talks,” said Greco.

  “My department’s holding a press conference this morning to talk about the shooting,” said Vega. “A bunch of brass who weren’t there are gonna tell the world how I fucked up. And I can’t even be there to defend myself.”

  “There should be a special circle of hell reserved just for the bureaucrats in our job,” said Greco. “Which reminds me: Where does that Ricky Ricardo guy fit into all of this?”

  “You mean Ricardo Luis?”

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  Leave it to Greco to turn every Latin singer into a knockoff from I Love Lucy. “He was a homeowner protecting his turf. His gun was legit. He called nine-one-one.”

  Greco frowned. “A Mexican entertainer? From Miami? And he doesn’t have a bodyguard with him twenty-four-seven? You believe that and there’s some swampland down in Florida I’d like to sell you.”

  “Nobody outside the Latin community knows who he is,” said Vega. “And besides, he didn’t kill Ponce—remember? I did.”

  Greco grunted as he pulled up to Vega’s truck. Fortunately, from this vantage point, the building blocked them from the camera crews. Vega could make an exit without being spotted.

  Greco put the Buick in park, pulled out a scrap of paper, and copied a phone number off his cell. Then he handed it to Vega.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Dr. Ellen Cantor.”

  “A shrink?”

  “She’ll help you, Vega. She helped me. Call her.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Your department’s gonna make you do it. Why not get someone good?”

  “I’d rather talk to you.” Vega rolled his eyes. “Jesus—did I just say that? I must be in bad shape.”

  Greco grinned. “Nobody said you can’t talk to me. Even in the middle of the night. I’ll curse your unborn descendants. But I’ll try to help you through this. That said however, I still think you should call her.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Vega tucked the slip of paper into his wallet. He put his hand on the door then hesitated.

  “Hey, Grec?”

  “Yeah?”

  Vega sat back in his seat. He didn’t know how to formulate the question that was swimming around in his brain.

  “You’re still a cop,” he said finally. “You’re still married to Joanna.” Duh.

  “And you want to know how I got through it. You want a road map. Is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Greco was silent for a long moment. Then he let out a long slow breath like the last vestiges of that terrible day had finally been expelled. “Make something good happen.”

  “Huh?”

  “Something really bad happened here. You can’t deny it. Can’t run away from it. So? You gotta make something good come out of it.”

  “How?”

  “In my case, I started reading up on how to handle mentally ill people. I pushed for department-wide training on how to de-escalate situations involving the mentally ill. A few years after the shooting, I talked a schizophrenic man out of taking his life and his girlfriend’s life. If I’d quit the job, I’d never have done any of that. I found my good. And when I found it, it saved my life.”

  “What’s my good?”

  “I can’t find it for you, buddy. You’ve got to find it for yourself.”

  “I don’t even know where to look.”

  “You’ve got to start by realizing that you can’t just go back to the person you used to be. That’s where guys get in trouble. You either work on that or it works on you.”

  Greco frowned at the steering wheel. He seemed to want to say something and be afraid of saying it at the same time. “I heard the suspect was reaching for a photograph when you shot him.”

  “Yeah.” It pained Vega more than anything to have to admit that. “I’ve got a copy of the picture on my cell. I keep looking at it even though I shouldn’t. It just makes me feel worse.”

  Greco shifted in his seat so that the full force of his gaze was on Vega. He had dark, grandfatherly eyes. The kind of eyes that saw you for who you were but imagined in you something better.

  “Think about it, Vega. You had a gun trained on this guy. And yet that photograph was so important, he gave his life to show it to you.”

  “I guess.”

  “You want to find your good? Figure out why that picture mattered.”

  Chapter 7

  Marcela Salinez didn’t sleep Friday night. There were calls to make. To her mother in Honduras. To Alma, the mother of her father’s two young sons in the Bronx.

  “The police will not get away with this!” sobbed Alma. “I will make them pay!” Alma had taken over her father’s life when he came to the United States. Now it seemed she planned to take over his death as well.

  “You must not listen to that woman. She talks crazy,” said Byron early the next morning, as he got dressed for work. His “fish clothes,” he called them. Jeans and T-shirts reserved exclusively for when he worked gutting and slicing fish at the smoked seafood plant in town. No matter how much Marcela washed those clothes, they always smelled faintly of fish, brine, and charcoal.

  “Alma just became a widow,” said Marcela. “And I lost my father. All because of a police officer’s recklessness. We have a right to be upset.”

  “Of course you do,” said Byron. “But not like this. Alma wants to tell the whole world that her sons’ father was shot robbing a house. Is that a good thing for those boys? No! She can do what she wants. But you, Marcela? You must not talk to anyone about this.”

  “Not tell anyone my father just died?” Marcela put down the spatula from frying his eggs. She was incredulous. She tried to keep her voice low. Yovanna and Damon were still asleep.

  “Tell them he was sick.”

  “But it’s all over the news.”

  “It’s all over the news that the police shot and killed a Honduran dishwasher. No one has to know he was your father. You don’t use his last name.”

  “You want me to deny my father?” Marcela couldn’t hold back the catch in her voice.

  Byron came up behind her and gave her a hug. Then he turned her around to face him. He was a broad-shouldered man with a nose like a block of granite and hair that had started to thin like beach grass across his scalp. She fell in love with him not so much for his looks but for his temperament. Unlike so many other Latin American men she’d known, he truly considered her his partner. They asked each other’s advice on everything—which was probably part of the reason it pained him so much that she’d brought Yovanna here against his wishes.

  “I would never ask you to deny your father,” said Byron. “Only the circumstances of his death.”

  “You mean pretend I didn’t see what the police did to him?”

  Byron winced. He knew the enormity of what he was asking. “Tell as few people as possible then—and no norteamericanos, especially not your housecleaning and babysitting clients. If they hear that your father robbed a house and was shot by the police, they won’t side with you. They’ll side with the police. They’ll figure, like father, like daughter.”

  “But they know I’m honest.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Byron. “They won’t take that chance, especially with their children. They’ll find a reason to let you go. They’ll tell you it’s for some other reason. But they’ll still let you go.”

  He was right, Marcela realized. Something like this would travel through the Lake Holly Moms Facebook page faster than a report of bed bugs or lice.

  “We need the money,” Byron pleaded with her. “You say you want this to work out with Yovan
na? Then do as I ask. Please. Go to work today and don’t tell anyone about what happened.”

  Marcela had just two houses to clean on Saturdays. The first was a couple whose son and daughter were in high school. They were all usually coming out of their own bathroom showers when she arrived, often draped in nothing but towels. Marcela was always amazed at how casual and informal norteamericanos were in her presence. The daughter and son usually had headphones on so they barely acknowledged her. Señora Garner was always friendly, if a bit frazzled, running around in her tennis whites with her cell phone at her ear. Señor Garner wandered in and out of the kitchen wearing a one-piece bright green spandex outfit, fluorescent orange sneakers, and a yellow bike helmet that jutted out like a wing in back. He looked like one of Damon’s comic book figures. Marcela tried hard not to giggle. All the men she knew in town rode bikes to work—including her husband. They wouldn’t be caught dead in a getup like that even if they could afford such a thing.

  Señora Garner grabbed her tennis racket and car keys and motioned to Marcela that she’d left cash for her on the kitchen counter.

  “Thank you, missus.”

  If the señora knew anything about the shooting, it wasn’t apparent from the big smile on her face.

  “We’re all very excited,” the señora told Marcela. “Jackson just got accepted to Brown.”

  “Congratulations, missus.” Marcela knew from the tone of the señora’s words that Brown must be something other than a color. But she had no idea if it was a team, a college, or a company. Not that she would ever ask. Being someone’s housekeeper was both deeply intimate and oddly impersonal. She scrubbed the toilets and folded the underwear of people she rarely if ever saw. And yet she was privy to their deepest secrets. Husbands who slept apart from their wives. Closet drinkers who buried the evidence at the bottoms of their trash. The bulimic soccer moms who stashed huge bags of candy and bottles of laxatives in their closets. The teenagers who kept baggies of marijuana and packages of condoms under their beds.

  And yet most of these families knew almost nothing about her—not how long she’d lived in the country or where she was originally from. Not her little boy’s name or where her husband worked. Certainly not that she’d just smuggled her thirteen-year-old daughter here after ten years of them being apart. Most of her clients passed her with a smile and a wave as they headed out the door, their eyes on their watches and a cell phone at their ear. Byron had been right all along. The norteamericanos had no idea that Marcela was related to the man the police had just shot—if indeed they knew there’d been a shooting at all.

  She wished she were cleaning for a family with lots of children today. She craved distraction. But the Garners all ran out the door early. Marcela was alone. She tried to lose herself in the rhythm of housework but she ended up crying openly as she scrubbed the Garners’ marble bathroom tiles, her tears mixing with the vinegar cleaning solution (Señora Garner didn’t allow bleach in the house).

  Everything brought the horror of last night back: the chrome appliances in the Garners’ kitchen. The rubber gloves by the sink. The smell of disinfectant. It still seemed unreal to Marcela to imagine her father lying on that shiny steel gurney in the medical examiner’s office last night, his face so ravaged that the attendant left a sheet over it during most of the viewing. But worse than the carnage and the circuslike atmosphere was the aura of smugness and condescension in the police. As polite as that detective (Dooley? Doyle?) who spoke to her was, there was no mistaking that he believed her father was entirely at fault for what had happened to him.

  Marcela took a quick break from cleaning and called to check on how Yovanna was faring babysitting Damon. Then she flicked on the Garners’ kitchen television and caught the local Spanish-language news while she wiped down the countertops. She stared at yet another helicopter view of Ricardo Luis’s Wickford estate with its swimming pool, tennis courts, and fountain. The footage was interspersed with headshots of police officers and reporters babbling on camera. There was a quick segment showing Alma, her tweezed eyebrows moving in angry animation across her puffy face as she held up one of those department-store portraits of her, her two boys, and Marcela’s father. Next to her on camera was a black man with dark-framed glasses and a red bowtie. A lawyer perhaps. Marcela couldn’t say. His Spanish carried an American accent. He seemed far more interested in criticizing the police than in getting restitution for her father’s killing.

  The news showed a small inset photograph of the police officer who had shot her father. In all the upset last night, Marcela had never asked his name. She’d assumed at first that he was this Dooley guy with his shaved head and blond mustache. Only later did she understand that it was someone else.

  She stared at the inset shot and the name below it: James O. Vega. The newscaster said he was a county police detective.

  James O. Vega. Detective James Vega.

  Marcela stood frozen at the screen with a wet rag in her hand. This couldn’t be the same man who drove her home several weeks ago when she babysat for Sophia. It was raining that night. He walked her to her door under his umbrella and waited until she’d made it safely inside. How could a man like that do something like this?

  How could Señora Adele be involved with such a man?

  Marcela’s cell phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She picked it up, expecting Yovanna with a question. Or Byron on one of his fifteen-minute factory breaks.

  “Marcela?”

  Marcela heard the sharp drawn-in breath, that familiar aggrieved tone that was always there, even before this happened. Of all her father’s mysteries, none was more puzzling than why he’d chosen to settle down with Alma, a woman who defined her loyalties more by the people she held at bay than the ones she embraced. Loneliness and guilt can make you do strange things, Marcela supposed. She had only to look at her own life to realize that.

  “Listen to me,” said Alma breathlessly. “If you and your father made some kind of deal, that’s your problem. Not mine! Don’t drag me into this.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about: your daughter!”

  “Yovanna?” Marcela’s heart hammered in her chest. “What about her?”

  “Don’t play dumb. I just got a call from the man you were dealing with. I gave him your cell phone number.”

  “What man, Alma? I don’t know who you mean.”

  Alma’s voice got soft and steely. “It’s your fault this happened, you know. My Hector would never have gotten into this mess if not for your daughter.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “You think he broke into Ricardo Luis’s house for no reason?”

  “I don’t know what to believe.” Ever since Marcela had gotten that call from the detective last night, she’d tried to convince herself that the police were mistaken. Her father was no thief. But Alma’s words gave her pause. She’d been apart from her father for too many years to say for sure that she really knew him. He’d lecture her on the importance of family and then go for weeks without calling. He’d complain that he couldn’t afford new sneakers for Aaron and Felix, his sons by Alma—and then for no reason at all mail Marcela fifty dollars. Sober, he blamed Marcela’s mother—whom he’d never divorced—for his terrible, fateful journey to the United States. After a few beers, he always blamed himself.

  “Abuelita hated him,” said Yovanna last night after they got the news. Marcela’s mother had been raising the girl and no doubt Yovanna had gotten an earful about her grandfather and how he’d abandoned the family. But Marcela had come to realize that her father’s actions were more complicated than she’d believed as a child. She was a parent herself now. She’d seen how the border could slice families in two. No one ever came out of it the same.

  The coyotes and moneylenders always told you it was easy. So easy. Go to the United States! Make lots of money! Everywhere in San Pedro Sula when Marcela was a girl, there were symbols of families wi
th someone doing well in El Norte. New concrete homes with big American flags painted on their exteriors. Cell phones. Electronics. Stylish clothes with brand-name labels. She was ten when her father made his fateful journey. She didn’t see him again for eighteen years. No one told any of them what the real cost would be. They were still paying it.

  They would forever be paying it.

  “This man who called you,” Marcela said to Alma. “Did he give you his name? A phone number?”

  Alma tossed off a bitter laugh. “Do you think this was one of your father’s friends from the neighborhood? Someone he played dominoes with? Wake up, Marcela! This was not that sort of call. This man knew my address. He knew where Aaron and Felix go to school. We may live in New York. But even here, there are people who play by the same rules as the ones we left in Honduras. You don’t say no to them.”

  “Did he say what he wants from me?”

  Alma seemed to be weighing her words. “He called your daughter—‘collateral.’” Marcela heard the tightness in Alma’s voice. As cool as the woman had always been toward Marcela, she was still a mother. She understood the gravity of what she was saying.

  “ ‘Collateral’? Like for a loan?” asked Marcela. “But I didn’t make any deal!”

  “Then I guess you’d better make one now. If Yovanna’s the collateral, I would hate to think what happens if you forfeit.”

  Chapter 8

  Vega lived in a former summer cottage overlooking a wooded natural lake. When he bought his place after the divorce almost six years ago, friends told him he was crazy to bury himself in the middle of nowhere, a whole county north of where he worked. But there was one terrific thing about living in a summer lake community in December.

  There was no chance of being followed by the media.

  Vega’s home address and phone number were unlisted. Even if someone tried to find him up here, it would be difficult. The mailboxes were at the entrance to the community. The streets were barely marked and his tiny cul-de-sac had only three houses.

  Vega collected his mail at his mailbox—bills mostly. Then he drove his pickup truck along the main community road. He was still in the same clothes he’d worn since the shooting. He was dying to step out of them and into a hot shower as soon as possible. Through the trees to his left, he could see the lake, soft and milky like a pearl. It soothed him to see it. Nature always soothed him—which was funny in a way, when he considered that he lived his first eleven years of life in a Bronx tenement where the great outdoors consisted of a makeshift ball field in a garbage-strewn lot and a water view meant hanging out his mother’s fire escape above an uncapped hydrant.