Falsely Accused (37 page)

Marlene changed the subject. “Do you know anything about their parents?”

“Not a thing. Hector is remarkably tight-lipped about it. Fear of authority, and no wonder! I haven't notified the juvenile people about him for that reason. I think if I did he'd run completely, and live a … depraved life, on the streets. You know, the Church used to care for strays like him all the time, informally. Maybe there's something to be said for it, the personal or spiritual approach, rather than everything being bureaucratic.”

Marlene gave him a smile so bright that he blinked. She couldn't have agreed more.

In the car, Marlene asked Lucy, “What did you learn about today?”

“The forgiveness of God,” said the child shortly.

“And do you forgive me?”

“I guess,” said Lucy without enthusiasm. “I miss Isabella.”

“So do I. Father Raymond says he knows where she is and that she's safe.”

Lucy's face lit with interest. “Where is she?”

“He wouldn't say. I think he promised that he wouldn't.”

“Are you going to find her? Please, Mommy!”

“You know, I think I will. I think that if she's being chased by the kind of people I think she's being chased by, they're not going to be slowed down much by a bunch of nuns. And I'd like to see if she has any relations in town. It would help a lot if I knew her last name. You don't happen to know, do you, Luce?”

“No,” said Lucy. Aha! thought her mom.

Later, having served a mighty breakfast of French toast, and his lordship having gone out to shoot hoops in the Village, Marlene was washing up and handing the dishes to her daughter for drying when she remarked, “You know, I was thinking: it's pretty easy to decide between doing bad and doing good, but it's a lot harder to decide between two kinds of good. Like, I broke my promise to you, but I really helped Daddy, and like, it's wrong to tell a lie, but sometimes we tell lies to avoid hurting people's feelings.”

“White lies,” said Lucy.

“Yes. Look, put down that plate and look at me. You're seven, which is supposed to be the age you become capable of making moral choices. Let me ask you to make a moral choice. I think Isabella told you her full name, and you promised not to tell anyone else. I think that some very bad men from her old country are chasing her, and that's why she ran away. Now,
I
think that if I had her full name, I could find some relative who might know what the danger was, or where Isabella was, so I could help protect her. Now, maybe nothing will happen. But maybe you keeping your promise prevents me from finding her before the bad guys do. You have to choose, and you have to bear the moral responsibility for whatever happens.”

“But she'll
hate
me if I tell.”

“Yes, she might. In which case you have to decide whether you want Isabella safe and hating you, or loving you and hurt or dead.”

Marlene's heart broke as she watched her daughter's eyes fill with tears, but she held her tongue and resisted the urge to sweep the child into her arms and roll back the implacable years. Suddenly, Lucy sniffed loudly and turned away and ran clattering out of the kitchen. She was back in a moment holding out at full arm's length a piece of folded notebook paper. Marlene took it and spread it out.

Around the outside of the page was a garland of lush flowers, heavily outlined, executed in colored pencil. Birds in yellow and green, beautifully rendered in the same bold style, were set among the blossoms. In the center was written, in a smooth, antique, schoolroom hand:
Lucy, Yo Te Amo, Su Amiga, Isabella Conception Chajul y Machado.

Marlene swallowed a lump and said, “Good call, Luce. Now, do you happen to know her mommy's first name?”

“Corazon,” said the child, and then collapsed, wailing, in her mother's arms.

“That sounds like a Maya name, that Chajul,” said Ariadne Stupenagel over the phone. “You say they're Guatemalans?”

“We think so,” said Marlene. She had called Stupenagel for help with finding out where a Church-connected underground would stash a kid from Guatemala. Stupenagel was one of two people she could think of to call, and the other one, Mattie Duran, was unlikely to have any Church contacts.

“Where from in Guatemala?”

“We don't know that either. Lucy was babbling something about San Francisco, but apparently there are dozens of—”

“Could it have been San Francisco
Nenton
?” Stupenagel asked carefully.

“Possibly. Why?”

“
Jesus
!” A shriek.

Marlene had to take the phone from her ear. “What?”

“Marlene, in November of the year before last, a special unit of the Guatemalan Army, trained by the U.S. government, entered the village of San Francisco Nenton and massacred the entire population, 434 men, women, and children. Or so we thought. God, I've got the trembles, Champ! If this fucking kid is an eyewitness to the Nenton massacre … my God, the junta would go crazy if they knew she was wandering around in the States. And you say she's got a brother to confirm it? Christ, Marlene, you got to find her. And let me have first crack at her, of course.”

“Of course,” lied Marlene. “But look, what about my original question?”

“Oh, who they'd shunt her to for cover? God, I couldn't begin to figure …”

“What about those nuns you mentioned that time—the Sisters of Perpetual Dysentery? Are they in the States?”

“Damn! You're right, I must be getting senile. I've been so focused on this cab driver thing. They're the Sisters of Perpetual Help.”

“I never heard of them,” said Marlene.

“No, they're small, and they only turn up where nobody else'll go. A daughter house of the Poor Clares, I think. They're all R.N.'s or nurse practitioners, plus they're all cross-trained in mucky stuff—agronomy, sanitation. They jump out of airplanes too. A far cry from the penguins. They have a rest house someplace in Jersey. Just a sec, I'll get it for you.” Clunk and rustlings. “Yo. It's in Chester, Pee Ay.” She read off the address. “By the way, speaking of the cabbies …”

Marlene brought her up to date, closing with her visit to the Twenty-fifth Precinct and her conversation with Clancy. Marlene heard the scratch of note taking. “Oh, also,” she added, “you'll be interested to know I saw Jimmy Dalton up there schmoozing with a couple of dicks, waving his stinky—” “What?”

“Jimmy Dalton at the Two-Five. I thought—” “Thanks, Champ—look, keep in touch, this is great, gotta go.” She left Marlene staring puzzled at the dead phone. She pushed down the button and called Harry Bello.

Hector Roberto Chajul y Machado, aged twelve, slipped from the basement room in the rectory of Old St. Patrick's, where he had passed the night, and walked north on Mulberry Street until he came to Houston, where he turned east. He paused at the corner and, as he did habitually, turned to see if someone was following him. He saw no one and went on his way. He saw no one because the man who was following was very good.

The boy entered the Lexington Avenue IRT subway station on Houston. In the dank underground, he checked to see that he was unobserved and then darted under the turnstile. He took the Lex up to 116th Street, left the subway, and walked to a tenement at 117th Street. At the third-floor front apartment, he listened carefully at the door, as he had been taught. There were no sounds. He drew out a key that hung around his neck by a long, dirty string, opened the lock, and went in.

From his perch on the stairwell, one floor above, Harry Bello heard the boy cry out. In an instant he was down the stairs and through the door. Like most tenement apartments, it had a railroad layout, living room, kitchen, and a narrow hall leading to two bedrooms and a bath. The place had been tossed, and crudely too. The couch in the living room had been overturned and slashed, the small television knocked off its table and tossed into a corner. Harry moved into the kitchen.

Hector was in the center of the room, surrounded by ruin. The refrigerator and the pantry had been emptied, the food containers broken and spilled onto the floor, which was covered with a swill of liquids, rice, corn flakes, dried beans, and broken crockery. The counter drawers hung open, their contents scooped out and strewn in piles beneath them.

The boy cried out when he saw Harry and grabbed a long knife from a pile. He charged but slipped on the mess and fell to his knees. Harry stepped on the knife, knelt, and hugged the boy to him.

“Listen! I'm not here to hurt you. I didn't do this. I'm Lucy's godfather.
Soy el padrino de Lucy. Comprende
? Lucy!”

Hector stopped struggling. They both stood up. Harry asked, “Do you know where your mother is?”

He nodded. “She's working.”

“You got a number?” Nod.

“Okay, let's call her.”

“The lady say not to call.”

“Yeah, well, this is an emergency. Give me the number.”

Harry called and got an irate woman who told him that Corazon had not shown up for work that morning, and that she was highly inconvenienced, and that as far as she was concerned—

Harry hung up. “Hector,” he said, “I'm going to look around here for a minute, and then you and me are going to go up to Lucy's house and you're going to stay there for a while. And then we need to go get your sister and bring her back to the City. I think you all need to stay at Lucy's until we figure out who did this and who's after you.”

“The soldiers,” said Hector.

“Yeah, them.” Harry started to go through the trash from the kitchen drawers. People whose equipage does not run to desks and filing cabinets use kitchen drawers as a depository of sorts. Harry found a bank book, electric and phone bills, but no pay stubs and no personal papers. He also found two keys on a ring, which caught his eye, because they had red embossed-tape labels on them. The labels read “800 18 Fr” and “800 18 B.” He thought for a while and then made a phone call, and asked a cop he knew to use the reverse-number directory on the phone number he had just called. The cop gave him an answer. He grunted thanks, and when he left the apartment with Hector the keys were in his pocket.

Shortly after passing the Joyce Kilmer service plaza on the New Jersey Turnpike, Harry thought of the keys. He reached them out of his pocket and tossed them to Marlene, who was in the passenger seat of the tan Plymouth.

“Funny.”

Marlene looked at them, as always trying to stay in step with Harry's jumps. “Work keys,” she reasoned out loud. “Somebody's apartment; she's a maid. But not her current employer?” Harry nodded. “So: another employer, or a former employer, to whom she didn't give back the keys, because … she ran? She was canned under unpleasant circumstances?”

Harry shrugged. “Front and back. And no letter.”

Marlene inspected the key labels. She had a peculiar feeling, almost a déja vu, something tugging at her mind. “Front and back doors means either a private residence, something in the burbs, or an apartment in an old-fashioned, high-tone building. The 800/18? Eight hundred Eighteenth Street? No such place in Manhattan. Or the eighteenth floor of 800 some avenue? Oh, I see, you think the floor having no letters after it means there's only one apartment on the floor, so, somebody with money.” She laughed and handed the keys back. “Or maybe she just picked them up on the street.” But she didn't believe that.

The Sisters of Perpetual Help were housed in what used to be a cheap motel, one of several along a strip of mixed zoning cut off from the rest of Chester, Pennsylvania, by the roaring mass of the 1-95 freeway. The motel signs had been removed, and a black and white sign with the name of the order had been placed in the window of the former motel office. Here Marlene and Harry entered.

A rugged-faced young woman with short brown hair, wearing a modest blouse and jumper combination, looked up and smiled and asked if she could be of help. Marlene explained who they were and asked if they could see Isabella Machado. The young woman looked blank, and said that she had no information about a guest with that name, but if they cared to wait, she would refer them to Sister Gregory, who was out at the moment. If they wanted to get something to eat while they waited, the restaurant in the motel across the road was open. You understand, things are always a little slow on Sundays. They understood, but short of rousting the place with drawn guns, they could do nothing, and so they said they'd be back and traipsed across the street to the Keystone Motel, 24-Hour Service, Truckers Welcome, an arc of aqua-colored huts terminating in a diner-like office and restaurant.

Several truckers had, in fact, been welcomed at the Keystone, as witnessed by their rigs parked in a row on the motel's large gravel lot. There were also private cars in slots in front of three of the huts.

They went in and sat at the counter. Marlene was not hungry; she ordered a bran muffin and coffee. Harry ordered a cheese steak, the specialty of the house.

“What are you staring at, Harry?”

“The Fury with the New York plates in the lot there.”

“What's wrong with it?”

Harry bit into his sandwich and chewed for a while. Then he said, “It looks like an unmarked.”

Marlene frowned. “Harry, that doesn't make any sense. Why would an NYPD car be parked in a motel lot in Chester?”

Harry shrugged. He didn't seem interested in his sandwich anymore. He stared at the black Fury some more and then abruptly rose, slapped some bills on the table, and walked out. Marlene ran after him.

“It is an unmarked,” said Harry, shading his eyes with his face pushed up against the glass of the Fury's window. He stared at the door of the cabin number twelve, the one closest to the car, as if trying to see through it.

“Come on, Harry,” said Marlene. “It could be a fugitive bust, a police convention, anything … come on, I want to see Isabella.”