by Alex Gilly
“I will arrange to bring her here.”
Finn could feel the awkwardness. He heard Mona say, “The government will pay for it.” She glanced at him. He knew it wasn’t true. Mona presented another piece of paper.
“This document authorizes me to represent you in the United States,” said Mona. “It means I can arrange to have Carmen’s body sent back to you.”
She handed Maria Elena a pen and pointed where to sign. The mother made her mark. The father did the same. Mona put the paper in her briefcase. Then she put another one in front of Maria Elena.
“Señora, it is my belief that the authorities at the prison should have done more to protect Carmen. I believe they should have treated her more quickly. I want to sue them for negligence. But I cannot sue them directly; I need to do it on your behalf. If I win in court, then they will be forced to do something to protect others. This document authorizes me to sue the prison in your name. I want to make sure no other family suffers what Carmen suffered. What you have suffered,” she said. Her voice sounded strained.
“I don’t understand. You want to sue the American government?” said Maria Elena.
Mona explained how the government had outsourced the detention center to a corporation. “We think you have a strong legal case against the Border Security Corporation of America—the company that the government paid to look after Carmen. We believe we can make the company pay compensation. For your loss.”
Now it was the father’s turn to speak. “How much?” he said.
Mona told him about the man from El Salvador whose family was awarded $2 million after he died in a detention center in Texas. Carmen’s father looked at his wife, but Señora Vega did not meet his gaze.
She looked at Carmen’s last postcard, pressed between her hands. “From when she was a little girl, Carmen always wanted to be on television. Everyone told her, ‘Forget it, muchacha. People from Neza don’t go on television.’”
“Dos millones de dólares,” said the father, to no one in particular.
“But I always said to her, ‘Why not? You’re so beautiful.’”
Mona nodded. “She looked like Dolores Romero.”
“We are humble people,” said Maria Elena. “I don’t know how we can fight a big American company. We have nothing.”
“You don’t have to fight them. I will. All you have to do is sign.”
“You?” said Maria Elena. She didn’t sound convinced.
“Dos millones de dólares,” said the father again.
The pig grunted.
“I used to watch the telenovelas with Carmen,” said Maria Elena. “If one of us missed an episode, the other would tell her what happened. She loved Aprendí a Llorar. She liked the romantic ones. She was young, but she tried to pretend she wasn’t.”
Maria Elena wept. When she was finished, she looked directly at Mona and said, “Do you think you can win, Señora?”
Mona said, “I don’t have an answer, Señora. But I will fight with everything I have.”
Maria Elena absorbed this. Then she said, “I have another daughter, Clara. This is going to break her heart.”
“I know of no greater grief than yours,” said Mona.
Maria Elena wiped her tears. “Women here don’t live lives like they do on television. Carmen tried to live a different life. I will remember her for her courage.”
She asked Mona where on the document she wanted her to sign.
Then, in a hard voice, she said to her husband, “If there is money, it will be for Clara. To take her away from here. It will be Carmen’s final gift to her.”
* * *
Out on the street, walking back toward the bus stop, Finn—who didn’t have a knack for languages but who was trying to improve his Spanish—said, “You told Carmen’s mother, ‘Creen que una Vibora de cascabel la mordiò’; that’s the third person, right? ‘They think a rattlesnake bit her’?”
“Correct.”
“You don’t?”
“No, I do think a snake bit her.”
“But you don’t think it was an accident?”
Mona let out a sigh. “I’ve got a thought going through my head I can’t shake, Nick. What if Soto had found her? Like in the dream she told me about? What if he found a way to get into the detention center and put Carmen in a box with snakes, like she said he did to another girl? I know snakes bite people. But everything about this is wrong: the fact that it bit her three times, that no one noticed, that she died from it … I need to talk to someone who knows about snakes.”
Finn thought for a moment. Then he said, “I know a guy at Fish and Wildlife who might be able to help you. Greg Wilkins, out at LAX. Last time I saw him, he was saying how they caught this one guy who flew in from Vietnam with ten snakes taped to his body. Live snakes, I mean. Venomous. Anyway, Greg told me how they weren’t too sure how to handle it at the airport. None of them wanted to pull the snakes off the guy’s body, and they couldn’t figure out how to deal with the situation without hurting the guy or the snakes. One of them had a contact, a guy out in Pasadena, who’s apparently a world expert on venomous snakes. They call this guy, this snake guy, he comes down, gets all the snakes off the smuggler. I can ask Greg for his name, if you want.”
They passed the school again. It was lunchtime, and kids were crowded round the carnitas cart. Finn got the uneasy feeling that the guy under the umbrella was watching them, keeping track of their movements. Mona said she would very much like to speak to the snake expert. “How’d he do it?”
“What?”
“Get the snakes off the smuggler from Vietnam?”
“He got the guy to stand in a cold room for fifteen minutes. The cold numbed the snakes. Then he just picked them off him with his bare hands.”
Mona smiled. The bus came and they got on it, heading back to the airport. Finn looked out the rear window and saw Carmen’s mother standing at the school gate. A girl with long black hair came out. Maria Elena held open her arms.
A little farther down the street, Finn noticed the man at the food cart talking into a cell phone.
TWELVE
BACK home, Mona spent the weekend glued to her laptop, drafting her complaint. At midnight on Sunday, she printed out the final draft, put it in a manila envelope, and went to bed.
She was on the road to Paradise by 6:00 A.M. the next morning, the envelope in her briefcase on the passenger seat. It was still dark, and she turned up the volume on the radio, partly to pep herself up, and partly to cover the irritating rattle coming from the AC. It was a long drive, and she was tired of it.
She could have saved herself a lot of time and hassle by simply filing her suit downtown—the BSCA, though incorporated in Delaware, had a representative in LA. But Carmen had died in Paradise, and Mona felt strongly that justice must prevail even in that bright, burning place. And anyway, another task awaited her there, one that only she could do. Mona had arranged to meet the funeral director at the coroner’s office. Felix Diaz had said over the phone that he had sent dozens of bodies back to Mexico. He knew the procedure.
* * *
The Paradise coroner’s office was in a single-story building on the same block as the courthouse where Judge Ross had refused Carmen bail. Everything was the color of sand—the coroner’s building and the crop fields beyond it—except for the patch of lawn in front of the building. The lawn had a towering flagpole on it, from which the Stars and Stripes hung listlessly. Beneath the flag, sprinklers scattered water on the emerald grass.
Inside, a stocky man in a suit got up from the bench. He introduced himself to Mona as Felix Diaz.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said in Spanish.
“Can you tell me what the procedure is to send her home?”
“First, I must embalm her—otherwise, the airline won’t take her. This I will do in my funeral home. Then I will place her in a coffin and drive her to the airport. I will liaise with the airline. They know me.”
“What do I need to do?” said Mona.
“You have the authorizations from the family?”
Mona nodded.
“Then there is just one form from the consulate that you will need to complete—it concerns the repatriation of human remains—and the payment.”
Mona told Diaz about the acid burns to Carmen’s body. “I don’t want you to get a shock,” she said. The sad look on his face didn’t change.
“I will make her look right for her family,” he said.
A moment later, a young woman with straight bangs and an unwavering gaze appeared. She introduced herself as Brigid Bauer, the coroner. In English, she greeted Diaz by his first name. She thanked Mona for sending through the authorization to release Carmen’s body, then led Mona and Diaz to the examination room: tiled floor, stainless steel washbasins, adjustable overhead lights, no windows. Along one wall were two rows of coolers. The room itself was very cold. For Mona, the worst thing was the smell: the sting of formaldehyde competing with the stench of decomposing bodies. In the middle of the room was a stainless steel dissection table on which lay a body covered with a sheet. On the toenails of the feet sticking out, Mona saw beige nail polish.
Bauer pulled the sheet back. She didn’t uncover Carmen’s whole body, where the acid burns were. Just her untouched face.
Mona looked at Carmen and tried to think of a way to describe what she was seeing. She could think of none. She remembered the person she’d met on April Fools’ Day, the attractive young woman bearing a startling likeness to Dolores Romero, a character in a Colombian soap. A young woman who’d risked her life in order to come to the United States to escape a sadistic torturer and to find a plastic surgeon to repair the damage he’d done to her body. The parallels between truth and fiction struck Mona as uncanny. Except the ending. In Aprendí a Llorar, Dolores is cured of her disfigurement and marries the man she loves in a spectacular finale watched by millions. Carmen, her body burned and poisoned, was going home alone in a coffin.
Mona brought her focus back into the moment. She noted that the skin on Carmen’s face and neck wasn’t black, as she had expected it to be. If anything, it looked a little greasy, as if Carmen had applied skin lotion before she had died.
“I thought snake venom caused necrosis,” she said to the coroner. Bauer pulled back the sheet a little further. Carmen’s arm was entirely black. It looked like a shriveled limb belonging to a mummy Mona had seen once in the anthropological museum in Mexico City. Bauer replaced the sheet, then suggested Mona join her in her office to sign the release-of-remains document.
Diaz lingered by the corpse.
“There’s a weird smell,” he said. He looked at the coroner. “Like vegetable oil. Can you smell it?” The coroner said no, she couldn’t. Mona said she could only smell antiseptic. After a moment, Diaz shook his head and said, “I’ve been doing this a long time. There’s a weird smell.”
* * *
Mona signed the necessary documents, left Diaz to arrange transport of Carmen’s corpse to his premises, and drove over to the courthouse.
She sat in her car in the parking lot and read over her complaint one last time. On the final page, she had listed the compensation she was claiming on behalf of Carmen’s family: $50,000 in general damages, and $50 million in punitive damages. Her argument was that the BSCA owed its inmates a duty of care, but that the corporation’s cost-cutting program placed it in breach of that obligation. For lack of antivenin and adequate staff training, Carmen had died. The scale of the claim was far greater than any case she’d litigated before. She thought of Michael Marvin, with his fake tan and white teeth.
Mona strode into the clerk’s office. The filing process took less than ten minutes—Mona handed over the complaint, paid a fee, received a receipt. Now she stepped back out onto the courthouse’s steps and stood in the morning sunlight for a moment with her eyes closed. She could still see Carmen’s blackened limb in her mind’s eye. Suddenly, she felt very tired. She went back inside to ask the clerk where she might find a decent cup of coffee nearby. At the counter, she noticed a court schedule. Mona checked which of the town’s two judges was sitting today.
Judge Ross.
Mona drove about a mile down the road to the place the clerk had recommended, picked up coffee and a sandwich, and headed back to the courthouse. She sat on a bench in the main hall, drank her coffee, and ate her sandwich. In an alcove in the wall opposite her was a statue of Lady Justice, with her blindfold and scales.
She threw her empty cup and sandwich bag into a trash can and went into the courtroom. Inside, it was as chaotic and overcrowded as it had been at Carmen’s arraignment. There were no spare seats in the gallery, so she stood against the back wall and scanned the room. She saw dozens of detainees in jumpsuits. Mona recognized Kristin Chase, the public defender she had sat next to at Carmen’s arraignment. Next to her was a man in a suit that needed pressing. Mona surmised he was the no-show from last time. Both lawyers were staring at their mobile phones like teenagers at a bus stop. That made Mona angry. Couldn’t they at least pretend like they had a hope?
The judge’s door opened, and a hush came over the dark-paneled room. Perhaps because she was seeing him from behind the bar rather than in front of it, Judge Ross looked even smaller than she’d remembered. Were it not for his gray hair, she might’ve mistaken him for a boy. The judge sat down. Proceedings began. Three men, arrested together, were being arraigned for illegal reentry. The judge appeared to be doodling while the charges were read out. He never once looked in their direction, not even when they pleaded guilty. When he remanded them to twelve months in Paradise Detention Center, he sounded bored. A group of officers took hold of the men by their elbows and led them out, the men shuffling their shackled feet and looking bewildered. The whole procedure had taken no longer than five minutes. Mona felt as discombobulated as she had the first time, as though she had again entered some parallel universe where all the rules and protocols of court no longer applied, where the judge ruled with absolute authority like some despot from ancient history. What disconcerted her most was not so much the judge—who was nothing but a bully, a trivial and cruel man—but the near-conspiracy among all the other legal and law-enforcement professionals in the room, people she considered her peers. Not just the public defenders but the court officials, the clerks, the police officers, even the ICE agents and assistant district attorneys prosecuting the undocumented immigrants. All of them were witnessing the same thing Mona was witnessing. All could see that Judge Ross was brushing aside any semblance of due process, wasn’t even bothering to make a show of it, yet none of them displayed any of the shock that Mona felt. They were like fish who couldn’t see the water they were swimming in.
That evening, utterly drained, Mona got in her car and headed west. The sun set. The vents rattled. She pictured Carmen lying on the stainless steel table. For long stretches, her headlights were the only ones she could see.
THIRTEEN
TUESDAY morning, Mona slept late. At noon, she made her to-do list for the day. She put only three things on it. The first was to locate Michael Marvin, the CEO of BSCA, and serve her complaint and the court summons on him. The second was to start building her case for court. The third was to book her car in for a service.
She got to the office, adjusted the tilt of the vertical blinds to deflect the afternoon glare off her computer screen, and got to work.
From Marvin’s bio on the BSCA’s slick corporate website, Mona learned that he had grown up in Orange County. He had been with the company for twenty years. Prior to getting the top job, he had been vice president of new development and quality assurance, which made Mona laugh out loud. She wondered whether the vice president of quality assurance had ever smelled the stink of twenty-eight backed-up lavatories out in Paradise.
The corporate website didn’t give his home address, of course, but the company was now headquartered in Washington, D.C., so Mona presumed Marvin was based out there. Serving the papers on Marvin herself would’v
e given her enormous satisfaction, but she didn’t have the time to fly across the country, so she contacted a process server she sometimes used to find elusive defendants.
Next, she started prepping her case for court. Ordinarily, Mona would’ve waited until hearing the defendant’s answer, but she expected this to go to trial. More than expected. She wanted it to go to trial. She pictured the statue of Lady Justice she’d seen in the hall of the Paradise County courthouse. Court was where she would fight for justice for Carmen. Not around a negotiating table.
Mona’s case depended on her being able to prove that the BSCA had cut costs with criminal disregard for the well-being of the people in its care. She needed to find evidence supporting her argument. She was an adherent of the adage “Follow the money,” and her first step was to download a copy of the BSCA’s annual report. She wanted to comb through its budget statement. She knew evidence of a crime would be easy to miss—the slick website and glossy annual report told her that the BSCA spent a lot of money projecting itself as a responsible corporate citizen—but she had faith in her own diligence and was confident that she would know it when she saw it: some business practice of dubious legality, some statutory irregularity, some calculation that seemed off—anything that gave her purchase on the corporation’s slippery carapace; any weak spot where she could begin burrowing.
Four hours later, she rushed into Joaquin’s office.
“I’ve found something,” she said.
Joaquin put down his pen.
“Shoot,” he said.
“The BSCA subcontracts its services, including its catering. All the meals they serve out in Paradise Detention Center are actually preprepared in Anaheim by a company called AmeriCo Food Services. You know how much the BSCA paid AmeriCo for the year ending December 31?”
Joaquin shook his head.
“It paid $5,837,700,” said Mona. “You know how much it costs the State of California to feed three meals a day to the inmates in its prisons?”