Land of Careful Shadows (12 page)

“Please make this quick,” said Adele. “I have plans for tonight.”

“Can you break them?”

“Excuse me?”

“Or just delay them. For an hour. An hour and a half. That's all I'm asking.”

“I don't think you're in a position to ask anything of me. Not after going behind my back today.”

“Look, I'm sorry about that. I really am.” He gave her a pained look. “But you saw what went on in there just now. Porter's gunning for me. I've got a daughter almost ready to graduate high school. She lives in town with my ex-wife. I don't want her to see her old man make the papers this way.”

“What was it you said about Rodrigo earlier?” She snapped her fingers with the courtroom theatrics of Scott Porter. “Oh yes, I remember: His personal situation is beside the point.”

Vega winced. “I had that coming, I guess.” He played with a scab on one of his knuckles. He had scrapes on both hands and a bruise along the inside of his left wrist. There were ghostly outlines of mud that had flaked off his shirt and droplets of something rust-colored that did not brush off so easily. Blood. Rodrigo's blood. Vega caught her looking at it now.

“I know what it looks like. But for what it's worth, I swear: I didn't beat him up.”

She held his gaze and watched his Adam's apple rise and fall like he was standing before a judge, awaiting his sentence. “I believe you,” she said finally.

“You do?” He brightened. “Then you'll help me?”

“Help you how?”

“Let me look through your client files.”

“
What?
Are you out of your mind?”

“I need to find the intake sheet Linda did on Maria. Without that sheet I'm sunk. I've got no way to nail down her identity, no way to clear or charge Morales. Twenty-four hours rolls around, I'm a dead man. I'll never work as a cop again if Porter makes that police brutality charge stick.”

“Do you understand what you're asking? You're asking as an officer of the law to search the files of people who may be in this country illegally. Do you realize what would happen to my center—to
me?
—if my clients knew I'd turned over their personal information to the police?”

“I'm not going to look at anything that doesn't pertain to Maria.”

“Get a subpoena if it's that important to you.”

“You really want your clients seeing a whole bunch of cops carting their private records out of La Casa? You think
that's
not going to create panic?”

He was bluffing, she suspected. He already knew he'd never be able to convince a judge to order the sort of blanket subpoena he'd need to find Maria's intake sheet. Still—with cops, you never know.

“Linda already said she couldn't find Maria's intake sheet,” Adele reminded him.

“She didn't have all the information I now have from Morales. She didn't know her full first name was Maria Elena. Or that she'd crossed the border under the surname Vasquez. Or that she was from Aguas Calientes, Guatemala. Who knows? We might find someone else from Aguas Calientes—someone who knew Maria.”

“I can ask around La Casa and see if anybody is from Aguas Calientes. But I can't give you wholesale access to client files. I'm sorry.”

Adele put her key in her car door. Vega straight-armed it shut. He was close enough for Adele to see the sheen of sweat on his upper lip, the smudge of dirt he'd failed to wash off on the underside of his chin.

“Adele—please.” He touched her elbow. “No one has to know but you and me.” The phosphorous lights of the parking lot picked up the tiny crow's feet in the corners of his eyes. “I won't mess with your clients. I give you my word—which, as it turns out, is a hell of a lot more reliable than Vilma Ortiz's.”

Vega had been right about the Ortizes. Adele sighed. Maybe she owed him something after all.

He saw her wavering. He offered up enticements like a game-show host. “I'll throw in dinner for you and your date. A movie too, if you want it.”

“It's not a date. One of my former clients' daughters is having her
quinceañera.
”

“Then you should thank me for sparing you.”

“I like
quinceañeras.
Didn't your daughter have a big birthday celebration when she turned fifteen?”

Vega shook his head. “Joy's not really—she's only half—and I never—” Something dark crossed his features. Adele had the feeling she was treading on sensitive territory again. He stamped his feet against the cold. “I'm only asking for an hour, Adele.
One hour.
It's not just me you'd be helping either. If Morales is innocent, this might speed things along for him, too. He's in a holding cell in the basement of the station house. A closet, basically. No way to change his clothes or get clean. Nothing. If the guy's innocent, don't you want to help get him out?”

She didn't really know Rodrigo. But she knew Enrique and Anibal. They'd been coming to La Casa for about four years now, ever since they first arrived in Lake Holly. She didn't want to have to tell them that their friend was still locked up knowing she might have done more to help get him out.

“We go right now,” she said, ticking off her list of demands. “We go in my car so no one knows you were ever there. You look only in the drawers that contain intake files since last September. And you can't remove anything. Do we have a deal? I open my drawers, you don't make me regret it.”

Vega laughed. Adele suddenly caught the double meaning of her words. She blushed.

“Hey,” he teased. “The night is young.”

A
dele's car was a Prius. Somehow it figured. All that good earnest Anglo training at Harvard. She probably gave to the Sierra Club and Amnesty International as well. Just like Wendy—Wendy who, when they were dating, took one look at Vega's red Pontiac Firebird with its magnesium alloy wheels, tinted windows, and subwoofers and asked him where he kept his fuzzy dice. His next car was a powder blue Honda Civic where the radio was preset to NPR. Welcome to the world of Anglo sensibilities. Parties without dancing. Food without spice. Women who dressed nearly the same as their men. It was like living with a coffee filter over your senses.

Then again, Adele wasn't Wendy. She had a candy-apple red dress under dry cleaner's plastic hanging from a hook in the backseat.

Adele unlocked her passenger-side door. Vega tried to brush the mud off his clothes before he climbed in.

“It's okay. The car's not that clean anyway.”

It looked pretty clean to him. There was a booster seat in back along with a girl's backpack covered in pink and purple peace signs. Vega had already noted the lack of a wedding band. He'd bet the store at this moment that her ex wasn't Ecuadorian or even Latino. Vega and Adele were more alike than she'd probably care to admit.

“Thanks.” He got in.

“You owe me big time, Vega.”

“Agreed.”

She pulled away from the curb. “You can start paying me back now.”

“Okay. How?”

“Tell me how you found Rodrigo so quickly today.”

He reached for a CD that was lying on the floor. On the front was a picture of a good-looking dark-haired guy in tight jeans and a T-shirt.

“You like Chayanne, huh?” asked Vega. His mother used to love listening to his songs. Love songs, all of them. They filled a void for her, gave her a safe place to tuck her passion. She kept the real men who flittered briefly through her life at arm's length from Vega when he was growing up. Better no man, she reasoned, than the wrong one.

“Chayanne's Puerto Rican, you know,” said Vega.

“You're changing the subject.”

He rubbed his palms along the thighs of his dark blue mud-stained trousers. He'd lied to find Rodrigo, of course. Called up La Casa ten minutes after he left Linda and Adele at the preschool and pretended to be a contractor. He told Kay, the woman in the front office, that he needed to deliver some compost to the landscaper who'd hired three of La Casa's clients for a job in Wickford that morning but he didn't have the contractor's contact information on him. Kay innocently gave up the name and phone number of the company: Green Acres Landscaping. He then dialed Green Acres and gave them the same line about needing a delivery address. He had a GPS location on Rodrigo in under ten minutes.

“How come you're so reluctant to tell me?” Adele pressed.

Because he knew she'd never understand his job and what it entailed. Some lies for the greater truth. Some pain for the greater salvation. If he told her he'd lied—played her own people against her—she'd think less of him, and for some reason that had nothing to do with the case, he didn't want that to happen. Do you stop being a good person when good people stop judging you as one?

“I got lucky,” he said, forcing a smile. “Somebody at the station knew a couple of contractors in town and one of them knew where Rodrigo and his friends were working.”

Adele's eyes settled on Vega's face for only a moment before turning sad and defeated. Something in his smile—he didn't know what—had given him away. It made him wish he'd told her the truth. But the moment was gone. He couldn't call it back.

There were no cars on the street when they rolled up to La Casa. The town dump was closed, as were the two auto-body shops. The security lights blazed brightly in the parking lot, pushing back the darkness. There was no moon tonight, only a gauzy wash of clouds that muffled the stars and reflected the man-made light back on itself. It was the sort of darkness Vega had known as a boy in the Bronx where day and night were relative measures, never pure or complete.

Adele pulled a key out of her bag and undid three locks on the front door, then opened it and flicked on the overhead light. Devoid of people, the rooms looked small, almost staged. Like a kindergarten during off-hours. The blackboards had been washed down. The computer keyboards rested above their monitors. The molded plastic chairs were upended onto a long table in the center. Adele explained that some of the immigrants who couldn't find work on a given day were offered a few dollars to mop and clean the center at closing. It's what kept some men at La Casa long after there was any chance a contractor was going to offer them a job. Five or ten dollars was the world to many of them.

Adele walked over to the glassed-in front office and unlocked it. The neatness did not extend to this room. There were still towers of folders and papers on every surface. A red light blinked on a phone. Adele punched in a code and listened to the message, then scribbled something on a Post-it note and stuck it to the front of one of the computers. How the person was likely to notice it in this chaos was beyond Vega.

Another key on her ring unlocked a file cabinet in the corner. The cabinet itself lay buried under a carton labeled
CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS.
There was no rhyme or reason to this office. No wonder Linda hadn't been able to find Maria's intake sheet.

Vega and Adele sloughed off their jackets and threw them over one of the two chairs in the room. Vega caught Adele eyeing his nine-millimeter service weapon in his hip holster.

“What?”

“Ever shoot anyone?”

“Only before I deport them.”

“Smartass.”

She fished a pair of glasses out of her handbag and began to thumb through folders in the top drawer, keeping her back to him. Vega leaned against the doorway, not sure what he should do or touch. She would probably think he was snooping even if all he did was move a pile of papers, so he kept his hands where she could see them. His eyes drifted lazily to the round firmness of her backside, the soft hourglass curve of her hips, the way her bob of shiny black hair reflected a halo of light. He'd always been attracted to skinny gringas, women who were all stretched sinew and pencil limbs. His last girlfriend was like that. So was Wendy. A vegetarian, lean as a matchstick. Clothes looked great on her. She looked great on him. But at night in bed, when he reached for her, it was like grabbing a chest of drawers—all sharp angles and edges that never quite wore down. Or maybe he wasn't talking about the physical Wendy at all. Maybe he was talking about something else.

She'd never called him back today. She could be like that sometimes, as if she forgot that Joy was his child too, not simply an extension of her life with Alan. It didn't help that her world had the gravitational pull of family, home, and faith that his so sorely lacked. There was no comparison. So he deferred. Again and again until he himself had to admit that he'd become a ghost in his daughter's life.

The funny thing was, he and Wendy had started out being charmed by each other's differences: Wendy, the Jewish, Barnard-educated psychologist, five years his senior; Vega, the fatherless, Puerto Rican working-class musician. Romance is built on such differences. Marriage and parenthood—they soon discovered—was not. When they first made love, it turned her on when he spoke Spanish to her. After Joy was born, she got annoyed if he blasted his salsa in the house. She considered everything brightly colored or sexy as “too Puerto Rican.” Anything boisterous or playful made her stiffen and sulk. His friends thought she was a snob. Her friends treated him like a simpleton.

Their home didn't even feel like it belonged to him. Their shelves were lined with dreary tomes about the Holocaust and self-help books full of complaints disguised as advice. Her mother got upset every year when Vega put up a Christmas tree and made sure that by age six, Joy knew there was no Santa Claus. Wendy left him because she'd been fooling around with Alan and had gotten pregnant with twins—a devastating blow to Vega on so many levels. But on their divorce decree they cited “irreconcilable differences” as the reason for their split. Vega thought in many ways it was closer to the truth.

“There are so many stories here,” said Adele, stacking folders on every surface that would take them. “Every life has a story, I suppose.”

“In most cases, more than one.” Vega felt like he'd lived about a dozen already.

Adele closed the drawer and handed some of the folders to Vega. They began carting them into the front room where Adele piled them on one side of the table. At first she wouldn't let Vega look through the folders. He just sat there balancing his chair on two back legs like a kid in detention. But finally, faced with the overwhelming amount of material she had to look through and her desire to make the
quinceañera,
she relented and handed him part of the pile.

Vega was struck right away by the variety of people who came through the center: a social worker from Colombia with a college degree, a stone mason from Guatemala taking basic literacy classes, a preacher from Honduras, a car mechanic from Mexico. He noted the less appealing aspects in some files too: the addict who crossed the border to break his drug habit, the alcoholic trying to get sober, the manic depressive who needed medications he couldn't afford. Adele snatched one file he was reading right out of Vega's hands.

“I thought this was about finding Maria Elena.”

“It is. I'm not going to do anything with the information. I told you.”

“You appear a bit too interested.”

“I'll make a point to look bored.”

She gave him an exasperated look. “You don't get it, do you? This isn't a game, Vega. These people have given up everything to be here and one arrest could take it all away. You have no idea what it feels like to be on the other end of your job.”

She went back to reading a file. He went back to balancing on two legs of his chair.

“I've been on the other end,” he said softly.

“For what? A DWI after some cop's stag party?”

His eyes got hooded. The irises turned inky. She didn't know he wounded so easily.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I just assumed—”

“—I've never been like that.” Not as a teenager, not even after Wendy left him. He was tempted, mightily tempted. He put a few fists through a few walls, but he kept his dignity. And most of all, he obeyed the law.

“What happened?”

“I borrowed a friend's car when I was seventeen and accidentally ran a red light. A cop stopped me, searched the trunk, and found a pretty sizable stash of marijuana and cocaine my friend was keeping in there.”

“Did you tell them it wasn't yours?”

“Oh, right. Of course.” He smacked himself on the head. “Why didn't I think of that? The police are always sooo trusting of minorities, especially considering my friend was white and his dad owned the hardware store here in Lake Holly.”

“You mean Rowland's Ace Hardware?”

“That's the one.”

“Your friend was Bob Rowland?”

He seemed to realize belatedly where this was headed. “This is ancient history, you understand.”

“You mean the drug use? Or the friendship?”

“Both.”

“You didn't do jail time, did you?”

“Almost. The cop started calling me the usual names so I took a swing at him and got assault added to the charge. I did a night in jail but I had no priors so I got probation.” Vega could still see himself, a skinny kid sweating through a borrowed sports coat before an indifferent and patronizing judge. “It was a juvenile offense, fortunately, so it got expunged from my record when I turned eighteen. Still, it cost me a scholarship to study music. And not that it matters now, but it cost me my girl.”

“Linda.” It wasn't even a question.

Vega closed a folder without answering and slapped it on the finished stack. Maria Elena wasn't here. There were plenty of Marias, all right. But they were from El Salvador or Mexico or Peru. They were too young or too old or had come over at the wrong time. If anybody was from Aguas Calientes, Guatemala, they hadn't mentioned it on their intake sheet.

“Anybody else have access to these files?” asked Vega.

“All my front office staff,” said Adele. “Kay and Linda and Rafael and Ramona. Plus, the board members, but they'd really have no reason to remove an individual sheet.”

“You keep any records on people who hire your clients?”

“Some.” Adele answered slowly. Vega caught her checking her watch. He was conscious of becoming that last party guest who wouldn't take the cue to leave. But he had to explore every option.

“Morales said he brought Maria to La Casa to find a job,” said Vega. “If she found a job, wouldn't you have some sort of contact information for the employer?”

“Not necessarily. Look, Vega—” She pointed to her watch. “—I've got to go.”

“But if you have that information—”

“—No—”

“—No, you don't have it?”

She sighed. “Even if I had such a file, there wouldn't be that much personal information about a client in it.”

“That doesn't matter. If I can track down the employer, I might be able to fill in the blanks from there.”

“It's possible Maria never even got a job through La Casa. Or she did, but she didn't give us enough information to verify that the person in our files is her.” Adele began to gather the files to put away. Vega took out his wallet and slapped a fifty-dollar bill on the table.