Land of Careful Shadows (19 page)

“Nobody knows how to do anything right anymore. I tell the kid: be careful with the stonework. You think he listens? I wouldn't even let him work for me except his father's a good worker and the kid needs money for college. What can I say?” Cruz shrugged.

College?
Adele focused on the boy now. He was dressed like the other men—loose jeans smeared green with bits of fresh-cut grass, scuffed work boots, a frayed hoodie, and a faded baseball cap pulled low across his brow. But there was something about the way he carried himself that suggested a certain detachment from the work. The men Adele saw regularly at La Casa radiated hunger. Their eyes always roamed a room; their bodies seemed forever poised to pitch forward on some new quest—for work, for food, for survival. They wore their desperation like a second skin. It lingered in the set of their jaws, in the way their faces always seemed to pose the questions: “Can I make it?
Will
I make it?” This boy had none of that.

“Is that Kenny Cardenas?”

“Yes. His father, Cesar, is out there mowing the lawn,” said Cruz. “Hector, my usual employee, cut his hand and Kenny was free today so I asked Cesar if his son wanted to pick up some extra cash. I should have just handed the kid a couple of bills. He's going to cost me more than he's worth.”

“He's very smart,” said Adele. “Our board just awarded him a scholarship.”

“Cesar tells me he's smart,” said Cruz. “All the time. But I can't see it. There's book smart. And then there's life smart. Some of these kids, they only got the first one.”

Adele wondered which category Cruz put his daughter Ana Rosa into. Cesar Cardenas had the same ambitions for his child. He just crossed the border too late.

Cruz picked up a set of electric pruning shears and excused himself to do some work. Adele went back to her car and waited for Vega to come outside.

He emerged from a side entrance about ten minutes later. She watched him begin the long walk down the driveway, back to his truck. He took out his cell phone and punched in a number. While he was speaking, he caught sight of Kenny Cardenas and offered a brief nod. Kenny did the same, like they were both embarrassed to see each other. Clearly Vega knew him and clearly Kenny wished he didn't. Vega finished his cell call and noticed Adele for the first time walking toward him.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

He shook his head. “Not now. I'm under the gun.”

“Guzman or Morales?”

“You know I can't talk about it.”

She kept pace beside him. “My clients are going nuts, Jimmy. First you detain Rodrigo Morales without any real evidence—”

“—Oh, we've got evidence now, believe me.”

“What?”

“You'll know when he's charged.” Vega stopped at the end of the driveway and looked at his watch. “I just spoke to Greco and asked him to start the booking process. He'll be arraigned in an hour. I've gotta go.” He unlocked his truck and went to get in.

“How about Luis Guzman?”

Vega made a face. “Not my case.” He opened the driver's side door of his truck.

“Don't hand me this, ‘it's not my case' bullshit. You could do something about this if you wanted to—”

“—Adele—”

“—You could convince Greco to back off his little ploy of getting Guzman deported so that three white football players won't have to go to jail—”

“—Adele!” he shouted over the noise of the mower and Weedwacker. “
I
was the one who told Greco to charge Guzman, okay?”

“
You?
How could you?”

He slapped the side of his truck. “Get in. I'm not having this conversation on the street.”

She sat stiffly in the cab. The closed doors of the truck muted the roar of the gas-powered equipment. It did nothing to tamp down her fury.

“Is this your own vehicle?”

“Yeah.”

“A pickup. It figures.” She checked the rearview mirror.

“What?”

“I wanted to see if you have a gun rack.”

“No gun rack. No deer antlers in my living room or collection of unusual beer cans in my garage. And I don't run a check of unpaid parking tickets on every person who pisses me off either. Though in your case, I might make an exception.”

“Why did you tell Greco to charge Guzman?”

“Because otherwise Guzman will split the moment he leaves the hospital. Greco wants those teenagers to see justice as much as you do. He needs Guzman to make that happen.”

“But you're punishing the victim.”

“Who also happens to have been a drunk with a knife. Sooner or later, that scenario was gonna turn ugly.”

The gardeners turned off their equipment and began packing up. The silence felt so unexpected at first that it seemed to have a weight of its own. Adele couldn't think straight while those engines were roaring. She wondered what it did to the men who operated them all day. She knew most of them wore some sort of ear protection. But even so.

Jeronimo Cruz and Cesar Cardenas were wrestling lawn mowers and equipment onto the truck. Kenny had a leg up on the bumper. He was trying to scrape a coating of fresh-cut grass and mud from the lower legs of his jeans. The men teased him for worrying about a little dirt. He looked embarrassed. He pulled his baseball cap down low and didn't wave good-bye as he climbed into the cab.

“I saw you nod to Kenny Cardenas earlier,” said Adele. “Do you know him?”

“Yeah.” Vega fiddled with his car keys.

“He cuts my grass,” said Adele.

“He dates my daughter.” It had the whispered angst of a confession.

“Really? You know he's—”

“—Illegal. I know.”

She rolled her eyes. “I was going to say, ‘a really nice, smart kid.' And no one's illegal, only undocumented.”

“Call it what you will. Without that precious paperwork, he's got no more hold on this town than Guzman or Morales.” Vega checked his watch. “I've got to get back to the station.”

“Can I at least tell my clients what you've told me about why the police charged Guzman?”

“Sure. But do me a favor? Don't say it came from me. Guzman's not my case. Greco might get sore.”

“Deal.”

She got out of his truck and into her car, intending to follow him back to town. But like all cops, he drove too fast, as if the laws of the road didn't apply to him. The sun was blinding at this hour. To her left, the lake reflected the light with the hard brilliance of liquid mercury. She cracked a window and felt the breeze on her face. It would be a long time, if ever, before Rodrigo and Luis felt such a breeze again.

She tried to keep up with Vega's truck but he took the bends at a much faster clip than she was used to. She would not want to be with him on a car chase. She sensed he'd actually enjoy it. She looked away for just a second to adjust her visor. Something large and gray scampered in front of Vega's pickup. A young buck. Antlers like two halves of a rib cage, eyes like a puppy. Adele could see its panic as Vega's truck bore down on it.

Vega swerved the wheel, missed the buck, and pulled back sharply into the bend of the road without even braking. But the animal seemed momentarily disoriented. It froze an instant in front of Adele's car. She could see the sharp in-and-out breaths along its sinewy torso, the whites of its eyes. She turned her wheel. There was a thud—not nearly as big a thud as Adele had expected. But still a jolt. A counter jolt. A jostling of plastic and metal that took milliseconds to fold and would take thousands of dollars to unfold. Adele pulled her car to the side of the road. The deer scampered off into the deep brush on the other side. There was a snap of dried twigs as the white tail rose up in the air and disappeared.

She wasn't hurt. Her air bag hadn't even deployed. Mostly, she was embarrassed. And annoyed. Vega shouldn't have been driving so fast. She shouldn't have been trying to keep up with him. She was competing with him even if she didn't want to admit it.

Vega's pickup did a one-eighty and screeched to a halt behind her car. He ran up to the driver's side. She opened her door.

“You okay?” he asked breathlessly.

“I'm fine. Just a little shaken up. You shouldn't drive so fast.”

“I didn't have the accident.”

“You could've.”

He pulled out his radio and called for a patrol car and an ambulance.

“No ambulance,” she insisted. “I'm fine.”

“At least to check you out?”

“No!”

He relayed that they just needed an officer on the scene. Then he hung up and walked around to the front of her car to inspect the damage. “It's just a broken headlamp and a little hood compression. The cosmetic damage will set you back a grand perhaps. But you could probably drive the car forever with just a headlamp replacement. Pop the hood, will ya?”

She did as instructed. He stuck his head inside and nosed around.

“What about that deer?” asked Adele.

“What about him?”

“You think he's okay?”

“If this is all the damage he did, he's not hurt, either.” Vega closed the hood.

“You don't know that.”

He shrugged. “It's a deer, Adele. We've got too freakin' many of them in New York anyway.”

“Okay, fine. Go. They're waiting for you at Rodrigo's arraignment.”

“Let 'em wait. I'm not leaving you here until an officer arrives.”

“Then if you're staying, I want you to make sure that deer isn't bleeding to death in the bushes.”

“Puñeta, coño!”
he cursed. “Stay in your car.” He reached across her and turned on her hazard lights. “I don't want you getting run over.” Then he crossed the two-lane and stomped off into the bushes. They were about a quarter mile west of the main entrance to the reservoir. Even this time of year, the trees and bushes were dense. It was like looking through crossed fingers. She could see a sliver of the lake through the branches, the white of its surface so blinding, it sucked the color from everything around it. But that only made the woods less articulated, made the whole place feel like the entrance to a movie theater.

Adele waited, then waited some more. She had expected Vega to emerge almost immediately and assure her that the deer was gone. She wondered if the deer was more wounded than he'd led her to believe.

She powered down her window. “Jimmy?”

“Over here. Don't come any closer.”

“Why? Bladder control problems?” she joked.

She heard his footsteps break free of the brush. He crossed the street, a grim look on his face.

“Is the deer dead?”

“The deer's long gone.”

“Then what's the matter?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he pulled out his cell phone and hit a number on speed dial. “Greco? If you're there, man, pick up. It's Vega. I need to talk to you right away. Call me on my cell, ASAP.”

He hung up and tried another number. “Where's Greco?” he demanded of the voice on the other end. He didn't even bother identifying himself. “Has he fingerprinted Morales yet?—
Shit!
—Has he sent the card out?—What do you mean, you don't know?—Yeah, I need him. Tell him to call Jimmy Vega on his cell right away. Tell him he can't even take a piss before he calls me. Got that?”

Adele went to speak but he motioned for her to stay quiet and dialed another number.

“Hey, Nick? Can you send a couple of our guys over to the reservoir in Lake Holly to do a workup ASAP?”

A reply.

“Are Joe and Dave working today?—Tell them it's an accident reconstruction, not a crime scene—Yeah, I'm sure—Tell them I need them to get here right away. There will be a Lake Holly cop on site.” He got off the phone.

“What did you find in the bushes?” asked Adele.

“Let's just say I'm beginning to think Rodrigo Morales really didn't kill Maria.”

T
wo uniformed police officers came down to Rodrigo Morales's cell. One had short blond hair. The other had a shaved head and a brown mustache that sat like a caterpillar across his upper lip. Rodrigo had never seen either of them before. Good news would have come with one police officer. Or maybe that Spanish detective. But two? In uniform? His breath fell away before they even yanked open the outer door of the cellblock.

“Stick your hands through the bars,” the officer with the shaved head barked out in toneless Spanish. Rodrigo had a sense the officer knew only the Spanish commands he'd been taught. Rodrigo didn't even try to speak. He did what the officer asked of him and thrust out his hands. He showed no emotion. Inside, he was trembling like a child's wind-up toy. Thoughts spun through his brain so fast, he couldn't catch them long enough to understand their meaning. He caught the trivial ones. He needed to take a piss. He'd left his few meager belongings—his nonworking cell phone, a few changes of clothes, a razor, a little necklace for Juliza that someone had discarded in the trash—back in his room. He had ten dollars of emergency money sewn into the waistband of his jeans, the ones they would likely take from him as soon as he got to the county jail.

He missed the big thoughts, the ones that were too terrible to contemplate: What would happen to Triza and the children? How would they survive? Would he ever see them again?

The officer with the shaved head slapped a set of handcuffs around Rodrigo's wrists. “Back away from the door,” he commanded. “Turn to face the wall.”

Rodrigo obeyed. The blond cop shackled his ankles. Did they think he would try to escape? In these boots? He could barely walk. But he didn't protest. He stayed limp and compliant. There was no point in resisting. He was going to jail. That much he understood. There was a process, sure. There had been a process in Rhode Island two years ago when he got arrested. They assigned him a case number. They took a black-and-white headshot. They covered his fingertips with black ink that took forever to wear off and made him press down on a special card. They sent him before a judge with some man who claimed to be his lawyer but never spoke to him.

It was all for the
Norte Americanos'
benefit. Their sense of order and precision. Their charts and records and legal proceedings and case files. They had a million ways to count him and a million ways to tell him he didn't count. They might as well have thrown him into the back of a truck and driven off. The results would have been the same: jail-court-prison. It would be the same this time. Only the jail part might be longer and the prison part would be much, much longer.

The officers led him through the hallway, up a flight of stairs, and into a big room with a lot of partitions. The fat, white detective was waiting behind one of the partitions, chewing on some sort of red licorice candy. He looked at Rodrigo like he already wasn't there. A bag of garbage that needed to be dumped at the curb.

The officer with the shaved head pushed Rodrigo down into a chair. He said something to the detective and they all laughed.
Yaw-yaw-yaw.
That's what English sounded like to Rodrigo. Hard and angry, without any of the whispered rhythms of Spanish. No wonder Anglos couldn't dance, didn't even seem to particularly like music. Their whole language was devoid of it.

The two officers disappeared and the detective slipped on a pair of heavy, black-rimmed glasses and turned to his computer screen. He read off a series of questions in mangled Spanish: full name, aliases, birth date, place of birth, marital status, citizenship. Rodrigo answered in a soft, tight voice—so soft that twice the detective yelled at him to speak louder. He said it in English but Rodrigo got the gist.

The detective yawned a couple of times while he was typing and fished some more licorice out of the bag on his desk. He didn't offer anything to Rodrigo. Not that Rodrigo was the least bit hungry. It had been like this the last time he was arrested too. Every sensation left him. He ate the starchy bland food but never felt sated. He slept on a thin prison mattress but always felt exhausted.

He spent a total of two months in jail and five months in federal prison, all of it in a shadow world of filth and noise and random cruelty that carved him out so completely that it took three weeks back in Esperanza before he could even speak about the experience to Triza. She held him like a baby the night he told her about the punches he took, the shanking he narrowly avoided. He cried in her arms while beyond their cement block walls, the guava trees rustled and the crickets and insects stood in mute witness. When he was in Esperanza, everything here had the flatness of a dream. Even now, his life here felt two-dimensional and devoid of texture, a netherworld that forever ensnared him between desire and memory, ambition and regret. God, how he wished he could talk to Triza just one more time, to hear her voice calling out to him in the humid night air.

The detective finished up and then escorted Rodrigo to a small room with a white wall. The detective motioned for Rodrigo to stand against the wall and look into the camera. He took a flash picture. Then he turned Rodrigo to the right and took another. The flash was bright. When Rodrigo closed his eyes, big black spots floated in front of them. The detective said something to him in English. Rodrigo shook his head. He didn't understand. The detective consulted his little postcard of Spanish words.

“A-bo-ga-do?
” the detective grunted out, pronouncing every part of the word like he was ordering one off a menu. “
Su abogado?
Scott Porter?
Sí?
”

“
Sí
,” said Rodrigo. “
Puedo llamarlo?”

The detective gave Rodrigo a confused look so he mimed making a phone call to his lawyer. It was hard to do in handcuffs but the detective understood. He shook his head and answered in English. “Not now. Later.”

Rodrigo needed no translation. He didn't know what Porter could do anyway. Probably the señor would want him to lie and say the Spanish detective hit him. But what would that accomplish? It wouldn't get him out of being charged for Maria's murder. And if he lied about that, how could anyone believe he was telling the truth about anything else? No. He would not lie. He had sinned and he would ask God's forgiveness and Triza's, if he ever got the chance. But he would not compound one sin with another.

The detective brought him over to a small table and unlocked his handcuffs. Rodrigo's fingers were ice cold. His hands were shaking. He had quieted all the nerves in his body even though he was thrumming on the inside. But his hands refused to listen. They shook of their own volition.

The detective stared at Rodrigo's shaking hands and cursed. Rodrigo knew very few English words but he knew all the curses. He'd heard them often enough. On the table sat a white fingerprint card and a pad of ink. Rodrigo suspected it was more difficult to do prints on a shaking suspect.

The detective said something in English and mimed what he was going to do. Rodrigo nodded and surrendered his right hand. The detective pressed Rodrigo's thumb into the ink and then rolled it across a box on the card. He lifted the print, held it up to the light and cursed. He threw away the card and tried again, pressing down hard. Rodrigo felt the pressure on his nail bed. It hurt but he didn't know what to say or if, when he said it, the detective would understand or care.

It made no difference. The second print didn't work either. The detective opened the door to the room and called out to someone. The officer with the shaved head came in and tried. Both men were inking and pressing and cursing in equal measure. Rodrigo's hand felt like something that wasn't even part of him. Black at the tips. Wet and discolored. Shaking and cold. It was as if he could see himself from a very far distance in that room. His T-shirt, hoodie, and jeans, sour-smelling and crusted with blood that had turned brown and mud that had turned beige. His unshaven cheeks. His scabbed and swollen lip. His floppy boot. Rodrigo didn't recognize this man. Neither would anyone in Esperanza. Not his family. Not his friends. This was not Rodrigo Eliseo Morales-Aguirre. This was an imposter. A man who had misused Rodrigo's body, stolen his soul, taken all the best parts—his honor, his pride, his dignity—and sold them off for pennies somewhere between Mexico and Lake Holly for the price of a trip across the border and the chance to earn ten dollars an hour.

They were filling up the card now, the officer and the detective. Together, they'd found a way to get Rodrigo's prints by shaking out the hand first, getting the blood flowing. They were chatting and laughing on either side of him. Chatting and laughing like he was a cow they needed to brand before they sent him off to slaughter.

And the worst part of it was—Rodrigo saw himself the same way.