No Witness But the Moon

by Suzanne Chazin

  “My mother made an appointment to speak to a homicide detective? As in, she suspected someone of murder? Were you planning on sharing this with me at some point? Or were you just going to slip it into my Christmas stocking?”

  “There’s nothing to share, Vega. Renfro doesn’t know any more than I’m telling you right now.”

  They were in Lake Holly now. Greco made several turns and headed up Pine. Adele’s street.

  “Duran and Wilson aren’t going to know if you just circle the block and drop me somewhere,” said Vega. “I can take a cab back to my truck.”

  “No can do. That wasn’t the deal.”

  “Screw the deal! Look, Grec—Adele doesn’t deserve this. The farther I am from her, the better.”

  “You really think you can go this alone?”

  “At least until this thing is over.”

  “This thing, as you call it, will never be over, Vega. Ever. The paperwork and procedures will end. The whispers and rumors will die down. But taking a man’s life? That’s always going to be a part of who you are from this moment forward. You think it’s not a part of me? It’s been two decades and it’s still a part of me. Every single day. That’s why I gave you that therapist’s name. Don’t you get it? You’re different now. You’re going to have to find a way to live with that. And if you think you can do it alone, then God help you, buddy.”

  Greco’s words pierced something inside of Vega. He’d been holding himself together until now, trying to sooth himself with the notion that if he could just hang on, this nightmare would have a back end to it. And now suddenly, here was Greco telling him that there was no back end—not now. Not ever. He could never wash the stain from his skin. It was his skin now. And he’d wear it until the day he died.

  Vega felt tears gather in his eyes, the salt stinging his swollen flesh. His nasal passages loosened. His lungs shuddered of their own accord. He turned to the passenger side window and wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his eyes. Coño! Of all the people to break down in front of, it had to be Louis Greco.

  Greco kept his eyes on the windshield and his hands on the wheel. His voice spilled out of the darkness, deep and gruff but strangely soothing. “It’s gonna be different, Vega. But that doesn’t mean it’s not gonna be okay. Call Dr. Cantor, will ya? I swear, she won’t be as bad as you think.”

  They were both silent after that. Greco pulled into Adele’s driveway. Her porch lights were on. The colored lights on her Christmas tree glowed softly through the sheer curtains in her front window. She and Sophia had managed to buy a tree, lug it home, and put it up. Without him. Life went on.

  Vega stared at his swollen knuckles. Every part of him felt broken. “What if—what if we can’t make things right between us?”

  “Then shouldn’t you find that out?”

  Adele opened the front door and stood in the doorway, her hand on Diablo’s collar, the two of them backlit by a soft honeyed light. Vega saw the shimmery blue dress he’d always loved on her. She’d been out tonight. Without him. He sank down in his seat, afraid to move, afraid that every single thing he did and said to her from this moment forward would be their last.

  Greco waved a hand like he was brushing crumbs off the seat.

  “Go.”

  Chapter 21

  Even under the sodium haze of streetlight, Adele could see that Vega had gotten the worst of the fight. His left cheek and eye were swollen and bruised. He was holding his right hand at a funny angle. She was so shocked by his appearance that she accidentally let go of Diablo’s collar. The dog bounded down the porch steps and jumped up on him, trying to lick his face.

  “Down, Diablo!” shouted Adele.

  Vega gave Diablo a scratch behind his ears. “Well, I’ve got one fan at least.” He tried to smile. It looked like it hurt.

  She opened the door wider and stood shivering in her stocking feet. She hadn’t even removed her blue dress from this evening. Her heart felt like it was doing a rumba in her chest.

  Vega planted a work boot on the bottom porch step and stood there with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. There was a tear in the sleeve and the gray lining poked through like a wound in need of stitches.

  “Are you going to come in?” she asked. “Or are we going to stand here freezing like this all night?”

  Vega trudged up her front porch steps and into the foyer. Diablo raced ahead like he owned the place, which Adele supposed he sort of did given how his hair covered every surface in the house.

  Adele closed the front door behind Vega. A chill lingered in the air. He did not unzip his jacket.

  “Let me get you an ice pack for your face and some aspirin and—”

  “Stop.” Vega put his hands firmly on her shoulders and turned her to look at him. “The kindest thing you could do for both of us right now is to call me a cab so I can get back to my truck.”

  “The police said you needed to be here tonight.”

  “I don’t care what they said. I don’t want to put this on you. Last night I couldn’t think straight. Tonight I can.”

  “This?” She gestured to his ripped jacket and swollen face. “This is thinking straight? Getting into fistfights? Pushing everyone who loves you away? You’re behaving like an idiot.”

  “I’m trying to spare you.”

  “You’re trying to self-destruct. That’s what you’re trying to do,” said Adele. “You want to get yourself good and hurt on the outside to match the hurt within. Make yourself so unlovable that everyone who cares about you just tosses up their hands and walks away.”

  “You want to psychoanalyze me? Go ahead. Everyone else does!” Diablo ran out of the front foyer and up the stairs. Vega was too caught up in the argument to notice. “As far as Ruben Tate-Rivera and all your freakin’ rights groups friends are concerned, I’m an executioner!”

  “You’re not helping matters when you refuse to defend your actions.”

  “Ay, puñeta, here it comes!” Vega threw up his hands. “You will never forgive me for what happened. Ever. It doesn’t matter what I say.”

  “But you don’t. What do you expect me to think?”

  “I did my job!”

  “If you believe that, then we definitely don’t belong together!”

  There. She’d said it. In anger, yes. But there was some truth to her words. Witness or no witness, Adele wasn’t sure she could ever reconcile the man she loved with the man who took an innocent life.

  Sophia appeared at the top of the stairs in a T-shirt and fuzzy pajama bottoms with brightly colored cupcakes emblazoned on the fabric. Her long dark brown hair was tangled. She rubbed her eyes. Diablo panted and danced by her side.

  “Mommy? You and Jimmy are yelling. I can’t sleep.”

  Vega shrank into the darkened archway of the dining room. He didn’t want to frighten the child with his battered face. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to Adele. “I didn’t mean for things to—I’ll leave.”

  “No.” She put out a hand to stay him. “Not like this.” She turned to Sophia on the stairs. “Go back to sleep, lucero. We’re just having a discussion. It’s okay. We’ll be quieter, I promise.”

  Sophia looked down at Diablo. “I want a glass of milk and I think Diablo needs to pee.”

  “I’ll take him out,” Vega offered.

  “No. Stay there, out of the way.” Adele turned to Sophia. “Come down and get your milk, lucero. I’ll take the dog out.”

  Sophia was in a half sleep so she glided right through the foyer without even lifting her head in Vega’s direction. Adele guided her around through the living room to the kitchen so that she wouldn’t see Vega. The dog followed dutifully behind. Adele got the child a glass of milk and secured Diablo’s leash to go outside.

  “I want to take Diablo outside,” Sophia insisted.

  “It’s late. You should go back to sleep.”

  “You never let me take him out. I’ll watch him. I promise.”

  “Okay. Just in the back yard.”
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  The child grabbed her purple coat, snow boots, and mittens and went out through the back door. In her wake, there was nothing but cold air and silence. Adele walked back into the foyer where Vega was standing in the shadows. His skin was a tapestry of bruises.

  “I should go,” he said. “I’m like a wrecking ball right now.”

  “No, please. We both need to cool down. And besides, I need your advice on something. Something police-related. But if I tell you, I need your assurance that it will stay between us.”

  “Adele, I can’t know that until you tell me what it is.”

  She closed her eyes, caught between keeping a confidence and maybe saving a life. “It has to do with—a child.”

  “Sophia?”

  “No. Come into the kitchen. I’ll make some coffee.”

  The bright lights in the kitchen felt like an assault. Vega blinked and rubbed his red-rimmed eyes. He eased himself into a chair while Adele scooped coffee into the coffeemaker. He studied her shimmery blue silk dress from behind, the way it pulled tight across her backside. Where had she gone in his favorite dress? Without him? He wiped a swollen hand across his chapped lips. He wanted her. God, he wanted her.

  “So you went out tonight?” He asked the question as casually as he could.

  “A business function.” After a few beats she added, “A party. Given by Ricardo Luis.”

  “Huh.” He felt like someone had stuffed an old sock into his chest where his heart used to be.

  “Jimmy, it wasn’t my choice. Dave Lindsey ordered me to go. What could I do? The man gave La Casa a donation after the shooting.”

  “How nice for him. He gets applauded and I get lynched. Maybe I should start unbuttoning my shirts down to my navel and sing forgettable songs.”

  “He offered for you to go see his guitar collection sometime.”

  “I’m sure Captain Waring would be thrilled for me to have a heart-to-heart with someone who might very well testify against me.”

  “It was still a nice gesture. He gave me his cell number if you ever change your mind.”

  “He gave you his cell number?” Vega noticed Ricardo Luis’s autobiography lying on the kitchen table. “And you’re reading his book, too?”

  “He gave autographed copies of his book and CD to all the board members. You don’t have to get jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous.” Vega began thumbing through the well of photographs. The more current shots were full of color and life—even the candid ones of Luis roughhousing with his three children by an enormous pool next to a whitewashed mansion surrounded by palm trees. The old photos were much grittier and darker. His dimpled smile was absent. His closed lips were a slash devoid of emotion. There was only a gritty, hard-muscled look to his body and a dull, hungry cast to his eyes. Even his facial proportions were different. His nose was broader. His cheekbones were less defined. His eyelids had more droop. This wasn’t genetics. This was plastic surgery. No doubt every tooth in his head had been straightened or replaced as well.

  “I started reading the book a little this evening,” said Adele. “He wrote a lot about his childhood in Nogales, Mexico. It was pretty rough.”

  “He didn’t write anything, Adele. It’s fluff—probably made-up fluff—written by some ghostwriter. I’ll bet Ricardo Luis isn’t even his real name.”

  “Well, it’s part of his real name. His full name is Jesús Ricardo Luis Alvarez-Da Silva.”

  “Man, you really do have a crush on him!”

  “I do not!” Her eyes told otherwise.

  Vega slammed the book shut and tossed it on the table. “It doesn’t matter.” It felt better to tell himself that. “You said there was a child you wanted to talk to me about.”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “A thirteen-year-old girl. She just came over from Honduras.”

  “You mean she was smuggled over,” said Vega. “Nobody just ‘comes.’”

  Adele poured water in the coffeemaker without answering.

  Vega sighed. “Not a pretty choice—deciding whether your kid’s safer in the hands of a bunch of sleazy coyotes or walking the gang-infested streets of Honduras. But if she’s here now, what’s the problem? She’s got a court date with immigration or something?” They both knew that even if the child had been caught at the border and ordered to plead her case with immigration, court cases could drag on for years so she was in no immediate danger of being sent back.

  “I wish it were that simple,” said Adele. “To pay for her passage, her family took out a loan and now some gangster is trying to collect on it. The girl is the collateral.”

  “If the family gives me a cell phone contact for this loan shark,” said Vega, “I can get one of my guys to run a trace and maybe set up a sting. If it crosses state lines, I might even be able to pull the FBI into this. Who’s the family?”

  Adele hesitated. “Is it risky? To the girl or her family?”

  “It was risky the moment they decided to smuggle her over here,” said Vega. “It was risky the moment they started working with gangsters. So yeah, of course it’s risky. The police don’t make guarantees, Adele. Give me the family’s number. I’ll contact them.”

  “The mother’s afraid to work with the police.”

  “If she wants help, she’s going to have to trust somebody.”

  “She trusts me.”

  “Then the question is, do you trust me? Or is that the deal breaker these days?”

  Her silence told him everything he feared.

  She turned away and looked out her kitchen window at the blackness of her backyard. Something shifted in her face. Her eyes narrowed and took on a singular focus. All the color seemed to drain from her skin. A small gasp escaped from her lips.

  Vega came up behind her and stared out at the yard, trying to understand what had spooked her. For a moment, all he noted was the reflection of their faces in the glass. It took him another second or two to comprehend what Adele had seen—or rather, what she hadn’t.

  “Where’s Sophia?”

  Chapter 22

  Adele turned to Vega. “I don’t see Sophia outside.”

  Vega raced to the back door and opened it. “Sophia?” he called out across the yard.

  Silence. No little girl laugh. No jingle of dog tags. Vega ran into the backyard and called her name again. Adele grabbed her coat and shoes and Vega’s jacket from the coat rack in the foyer and went out the front door. Maybe Sophia and Diablo were in the driveway.

  “Sophia!”

  Nothing. Vega ran around front to find her. He held up his hands. “She’s not in the backyard either.”

  “She wouldn’t just leave like this.”

  Vega stuck his thumb and middle finger in his mouth and made a loud, long whistle. They both listened but all that greeted them was the hum of a car on an adjoining street and the disembodied voice from a television when a neighbor opened a door.

  Adele tried to calm the panicky flutter in her chest. How far could they have gone? It was a safe neighborhood. Well-lit. Plenty of people on the block knew Adele and Sophia.

  But it was winter. And dark. People were inside. Who would notice a stranger? An unfamiliar car? A moment of youthful indiscretion?

  “Where could she be?” Adele could feel the cinch in her vocal cords, the tight knot of worry that had traveled from her throat to her chest. What kind of mother was she to get so carried away arguing with her boyfriend that she hadn’t noticed her child running off into the night?

  “She took Diablo on the leash, didn’t she?” asked Vega.

  “Sure. But she wouldn’t just wander off with him.”

  “Maybe she lost control and chased him.” Vega grabbed his jacket from Adele. “Stay here. I’ll find her.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No,” said Vega. “Better we split up. You go left and I’ll go right and if we spot them, we can check in by cell, okay?”

  “Okay.” She walked quickly down the sidewalk calling out her daughter
’s name. She’d walked this short distance thousands of times in her life—when Sophia was a baby in her stroller and later when the child was learning to ride her bike. She’d walked it to cool off after fights with Peter. Or just to get fresh air on a nice spring day. But the terror in her step now obliterated every past journey. It was as if she were walking the block for the very first time. Every buckle in the sidewalk, every shadow of a tree or lip of a driveway felt foreign to her. The sharp bite of air felt serrated in her lungs. She was breathing too hard. Or maybe the problem was, she wasn’t breathing at all.

  She felt as if she were watching herself from a great distance. She was in a movie playing Adele looking for her daughter. This couldn’t really be happening. She tried to push the darker thoughts from her head. Vega was clearly a target right now. Someone had just slashed Joy’s tires because of what he’d done. But surely no one would hurt a child.

  Surely.

  She was a block from her house when her cell phone rang. Relief flooded her body when she heard Vega’s voice. “You’ve got them?”

  “I’ve got Diablo. He’s by himself.”

  “Oh no!”

  “His leash is still attached. He seems to want me to follow him. I’m on the corner of Pine and Sequoia heading toward Spring. Can you catch up to us?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  It felt like an eternity before she caught up with them. Spring Street was a road full of capes and ranches on quarter-acre plots of hyperpruned bushes, swing sets, and stubby fruit trees. It dead-ended beside a deep thicket of woods and streams. Adele never let Sophia play near the area. In summer, teenagers and homeless people congregated in those woods. The police made regular sweeps to clear out the vagrants and trash left behind. But this time of year, the woods were dark and silent, the bare limbs like iron bars to a prison that no one was meant to enter or leave.

  Vega was breathing hard, keeping a tight grip on Diablo’s leash. Adele noticed the leash was muddy and wet. Where had he been?

  “Damn this dog!” said Adele.

  “Don’t damn him yet,” cautioned Vega. “He may be the only one who can lead us to Sophia.”