Fifty Grand (34 page)

Five minutes later I’m walking back down the hill to the crossing.

In town I stop at Starbucks and order an espresso. It comes in a giant cup. Even when I add sugar it’s about as far from a Cuban coffee as
A Few Good Men
is from a real depiction of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. The espresso costs a dollar seventy-five, which is more than the average daily wage in Havana. I can’t bring myself to finish it.

I shoulder the backpack and continue on. Past the trophy-wife stores, the ski shops, the delis, up the other hill to Wetback Mountain.

A police cruiser waiting outside the motel.

Might be a deputy, might be unrelated to me and the garage, but I can’t take the chance. The last thing I want is another encounter with that psychopath. I step off the road and disappear into the woods. I walk through the pine cones and fallen branches and sit on a log.

There’s a river running through the trees. The quiet glade reminds me of Río Jaimanitas, just outside Havana.

Time to think. Think about suspects, think about the clock.

Suspects. Their talk has more or less cleared Esteban. They thought he was involved in a blackmail plot about the accident. Ergo it can’t be him. I never thought it was. Ricky’s hunch—who kills a man and leaves his car unrepaired for six months? Still, I’d like one last interview to ask him about his deer.

Not E. Not Mrs. C., not in a million years. It’s Y.

Jack has given him to me. Jack and his good buddy the sheriff. Y. Y. Y.

The clock. Sunday morning. My flight from Mexico City to Havana is early Tuesday. So by this time tomorrow I need to be on the bus to El Paso. Cross over, to Juárez. Flight from Juárez to Mexico City. Jesus, it’s tight. I certainly don’t have all the information. In Havana I’d call this half a case. I’d need another full week’s work before I’d even think about going to Hector with the file. But that’s there and this is here. Here Briggs is on my neck and my options have collapsed into one simple thought:
If I’m going to do this then it has to be tonight
.

Fairview disappeared. The road narrowed from four lanes to two and the houses on either side quickly became swallowed up by forest. Beech Street was not meant for pedestrians. There was no sidewalk, and when cars approached they pulled all the way over to the left lane, annoyed at the presence of someone on foot.

In another five minutes so thick were the trees that it was hard to believe there were any houses at all. Mailboxes and driveways the only clues. The smell of douglas fir, aspen. The crunch underfoot of golden, red, and black pinecones.

I counted down the addresses on the mailboxes. 94, 92, 90.

A cold, prickly feeling on my scalp as I got closer, and I had to pause for a moment when the mailbox said 88.

“This is it,” I said aloud.

When Ricky came to Fairview, he’d gone to the garage, he’d walked the Old Boulder Road, he’d visited the motel, he’d taken photographs of Jack’s car and Esteban’s Range Rover, but this little job he’d left for me.

I hesitated at the gate and then went in. Cement driveway. Underfoot more pinecones, beech leaves, a flattened Starbucks cup. The path bent to the left and there, suddenly, was the house. Single-story Colorado ranch style. Modest in proportion to other homes in Fairview but boldly painted
yellow and elaborately festooned with flowerpots and hanging baskets, some of the blooms gamely hanging on even though it was December.

It was shady here and frost coated a neat square of garden and several of the close-trimmed rosebushes that surrounded the house like a primitive siege defense.

I stepped over an ornamental gnome with a fishing pole, half a dozen free newspapers, and squirrel shit. I knocked on the door.

She took a minute to open it.

She was pretty. She looked about thirty but I knew she was older than that. She had black hair cut short in bangs, cornflower-blue eyes, arched, surprised-looking dark eyebrows, high cheekbones, full lips with a crease in the lower. If it wasn’t early on Sunday and if the past few months hadn’t been such an obvious trial to her, she’d be a knockout. Dad’s type? Certainly. And I had a feeling that a year from now she wouldn’t be alone.

“Hello?” she said, groggily. Her breath: coffee, cigarettes, last night’s red wine.

“My name is Sue Hernandez, I’m from the Mexican consulate in Denver,” I said and offered her my hand. After a second’s hesitation she shook it.

“What can I do for you, Señorita Hernandez?” she asked.

“We’re looking into the death of Alberto Suarez. I’ve come here to ask you a few questions, if that’s ok.”

She stood there in the doorway, pulled her nightgown tighter about her. It only accentuated her big breasts.

“On a Sunday?”

“I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Fuck it. What’s all this about?” she asked.

“Señora Suarez, your husband was a Mexican citizen, and the embassy routinely investigates all suspicious deaths of Mexican citizens in the United States.”

“Not this again.”

“This will be the last time, I assure you. May I come in?”

She shook her head. “The place is a mess.”

“I don’t mind that,” I said, realizing that I was actually more desperate to get in the house than I was to meet her. I wanted to see relics: family photographs, art, souvenirs. The interior of number 88 would be a ghost house filled with memories.

“No. I’ve been through this before. With the cops and someone who
phoned me from your embassy, already. And now you’re here. Clearly, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing.”

I smiled. “It’s just a few questions. Please, may I come in?”

“No, you can’t. Look, I don’t have all day. What are your questions?”

“They’re about the accident.”

“Yeah, you said that. Just ask the questions.”

“You husband worked as a pest controller.”

“Yeah, he was overqualified for that. He was a smart guy. Killing rats, trapping raccoons, it was gross.”

“Yes. But what was your husband doing on the Old Boulder Road? According to our records his last job was at the Hermès store on Pearl Street. He didn’t have—”

“He was drinking.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I didn’t like him to drink, so he used to go up there. There’s a viewpoint two-thirds of the way up, a cliff where you can see the whole Front Range. A couple of kids committed suicide there. He used to go there, drink, look at the mountains, walk it off before he saw me.”

“So he
was
drunk the night of the accident?” I asked. The local paper had said he was drunk but there hadn’t been obvious signs of alcohol and the consulate hadn’t felt the need to conduct a tox report.

Karen shook her head. “I doubt it. We had a big blowup last year, I threatened to leave him, I’ve never seen him blind drunk since then. He was smart about it.”

“I see, so he may have been drinking when the car hit, but he wasn’t intoxicated.”

“Something like that.”

Hmm. Ricky said that it was just a coincidence that it had happened on my birthday. But maybe not. All those years without letters, without sending us a dime, maybe guilt had finally got to him. Had he had too many? Was he staggering all over the road? Maybe the consulate in Denver had hushed up the toxicology for fear of contributing to a stereotype. Maybe a million things.

Karen sniffed. “I hope he was drunk. I hope he was totally hammered.”

“Why?”

“Lady who found him, walking her dog. I know her. She talked to me. She told me the truth, the people around here are pretty blunt.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Told me his face was frozen. It was May but it’s been cold up here. Face frozen, fingers broken, blood and dirt all over him, he’d been trying to climb up that slope all night. It took him four or five hours to die. Drowning in his own blood the whole time, drowning, freezing, ribs broken, the pain must have been awful, and just a few feet from rescue up on the embankment. The goddamn torment. I wouldn’t put my worst enemy through that. So yeah, I hope he was drunk.”

My head felt light. I swayed back on my heels.

“I, uh, I only have a couple more questions. Are you sure we wouldn’t be more comfortable inside?”

Karen gave me a skeptical glance. Feelers out. Nervous.

Damn it.

“All this is irrelevant anyway,” she said.

“How so?”

“I told you guys, Albert, or I should say Juan, wasn’t Mexican,” she said.

“I don’t understand,” I said, affecting surprise.

“He was Cuban. A defector. He came over in the early nineties.”

“But our information was that—”

“He bought that passport in Kansas City. It cost two thousand dollars. A passport and a Social Security number and a green card.”

“But—”

“So you see, Señorita Hernandez, you’ve wasted your time. This isn’t a job for your people at all. I told you guys already, ok? Who do you think called his family in Cuba? Me. They flew his son out.
From Cuba
. Christ, how dumb are you people? So thanks for the interest but really, I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

The brush-off.

“Well, that certainly contradicts the information I’ve been given. I’ll need to confirm this against our records. Do you have any photographs or—”

“For Christ’s sake. Wait here.”

She took a step backward and went into a side room. Now I could see tantalizing glimpses of a smallish living room. Hardwood floor, white sofa, white chairs. More flowers and paintings, perhaps done by Karen herself. Dad was never much in the drawing line and I couldn’t imagine that he had changed so greatly that he taken to painting fairies in forest glades and white horses galloping across impossibly sandy beaches. Karen’s “mess” appeared to be a few piles of laundry on the living room floor.

She came back with a fifteen-year-old Cuban driver’s license and handed it over.

“You can have this if you want. No good to me.”

I looked at the black-and-white photograph of Dad in his Russian wool suit and that little mustache he thought made him a dead ringer for Clark Gable. Ricky and I used to tease him about it, but in fact he really did resemble the late Yuma movie star. Quickly I put the license in my purse for fear she’d snatch it back.

“This doesn’t much look like the man in the autopsy photographs. Do you have a more recent photograph?”

“Oh, Jesus. Never ends. Hold on. I’ll get you one.”

An inner voice warned me that this wasn’t necessary, I didn’t
need
a photograph, I just wanted to open the floodgates, to wallow in the emotion.
Careful, Mercado, once the sluices open, they’re pretty hard to close.
She came back with something she’d just taken out of a frame.

“Here,” she said. “I put them all away. It was too painful to have him around looking at me, but I couldn’t throw any of them out.”

The photograph was of her standing next to a bearded man, a little heavier, but with sharp brown eyes and mostly black hair. He had a sarcastic, self-mocking expression on his face. I hadn’t seen him for fourteen years but it was definitely him. He looked like one of those public intellectuals on Channel 1, talking about trade with China or the Glorious Revolution’s prospects in the twenty-first century.

“Satisfied?” Karen asked, taking the photo back.

“Perhaps I could ask you a few more questions for the record?” I wondered.

“You can have one more minute. This is all still pretty hard on me. And
Jeopardy!
’s on early on Sundays and I never miss it. It’s a routine. Routines help you get through the day, don’t you find?”

“Yes. I don’t mind if you watch while we talk. Perhaps if I could come in for just a—”

“I’d prefer not.”

“So there seems to be at least some confusion, regarding Señor—”

“There’s no confusion. He bought that passport because he wanted to pose as a Mexican permanent resident called Suarez, so he could work in the United States.”

I smiled. “Ah, but this is where I am confused, Señora Suarez. Cuban
defectors are automatically granted green cards, Social Security numbers, and so on, are they not? Why would your husband even need to pose as a Mexican?”