South by Southeast (11 page)

The way her voice broke at the end, the loss fresh, gave me unwelcome insight into Marcela's attraction to Dad. It was hard to imagine parents being desperate enough to send their children off to a new country, but my long relationship with Miami had taught me that Fidel was a dirty word to the 1960s generation of Cubans. Miami had been the only American city to picket Nelson Mandela when he arrived after his release from a South African prison in the 1990s—because he had refused to renounce Fidel as a friend. Alice, who had met Mandela, had ranted about it for days.

Alice again. Why did she keep popping into my head?

“Anyway,” Marcela went on, her tone lighter, “I was one of the lucky ones. I got to stay in Miami, where it was warm, because I
had blood relations here. My friends Isabel and Pilar were sent to New Jersey to strangers. We were scattered everywhere.”

“Weren't you scared?” Chela said to Marcela. “All alone on the boat?”

Marcela closed her eyes for an instant, transported back in time. “My older cousin, Maria, looked out for me. Without her, I don't know how I would have survived.”

Chela's face froze, and her eyes darted away from Marcela's. I don't think Marcela noticed, but I wished her friend's name hadn't been Maria. I tried to put my arm around Chela, but she wriggled away and pretended to study the graffiti etched on the wooden bench.

Chela had made contact with the girl who called her about Maria's disappearance, extracting a promise that she would report everything she knew to the police, but Chela wasn't satisfied. I was committed to a late afternoon and evening on the set, mostly because of my director's tardiness the day before, but I'd promised Chela I would help her follow up the next day. I'd said I would go to Club Phoenixx with her, if it came to that. All I needed was a day.

The door to the wedding room opened, and two happy teenagers bounded out. The wispy-haired girl was clearly pregnant, but her new husband looked buoyant instead of trapped. They wore matching Metallica concert T-shirts. They might be as young as Chela.
Good luck with that
, I thought.

The couple next in line stood up, both in beachwear. Instead of following the clerk into their waiting future, they walked to Dad and Marcela.

“Perdoname,”
the man said to Marcela, hushed. “I couldn't help overhearing. My father's a Pedro Pan kid, too. He's a county school administrator. He talks about it all the time.”

Marcela's face lit up, but she glanced nervously at the waiting clerk. “
Fantástico,
but you don't want to miss your turn.”

The woman rested her hand on Dad's shoulder. “We think
you're the cutest couple,” she said. “We'd like to give you our place in line.”

Dad and Marcela tried to refuse, but the whole waiting room insisted. The other couples applauded as Marcela and Dad made their way carefully across the room to the open door; the woman standing proud in her glitter dress and veil, her beau walking with a cane.

Romance wasn't dead after all.

Dad shoved the ring case into my hand as an afterthought on the way in, his way of asking me to be his best man. Dad and Marcela hadn't written special vows, so the ceremony was brief and unremarkable, the clerk reading from an index card with a bent head. He recited the vows in English and Spanish. He sounded like a bureaucrat.

Finally, the clerk looked up to meet their eyes with a grin. “And nowwww . . .” he said like a game-show announcer. “You may kiss the bride!”

I swear the clouds broke when their lips touched.

Suddenly, the windows flooded the room with light.

CHELA HAD DISCOVERED
the art of telling lies early in life, having been raised by a grandmother whose hearing and eyesight were poor, and from time to time by her mother, an addict who knew no other means of communication. She most often lied about her age, adjusting up or down according to her needs, but even her name was a lie. Maria's lie. Gramma had always said that lies would catch up to her, and Chela liked lying less and less.

Especially to Ten.

“You doing okay?” he said during his third call to check on her.

Hell no, she wasn't okay. If she hadn't ducked into the gas station's bathroom, she wouldn't have been able to answer the phone, because Ten would have heard the traffic noise from Fifth Street. She'd hoped he would stop calling after nine, but he wanted to make sure she was at home. Ten always tried to keep one step ahead of her. But not this time.

Like most gas-station bathrooms, the floor stank of piss. Maybe vomit.
Great.

“Everything's fine,” she said, breathing through her mouth. “Get to work and stop worrying about me.”

“Dad in bed?”

Marcela and Captain Hardwick had been in their room by nine thirty. Some honeymoon. Giddy from the wedding, they had talked and laughed longer than usual. God help her, they might have been having sex. Chela had waited an hour before slipping out.

But Ten didn't want to talk to his father; he wanted to make sure she was where she said she was. A woman outside the restroom door yelled at someone in Spanish, and Chela's heart skipped.

“Who's that?” Ten said, missing nothing.

“Some soap-opera crap on Telemundo,” she said. “That'll show you how desperate I am to find something good on TV.” Quickly, she muted her phone to block the woman's voice.

“You should go to sleep, Chela,” Ten said. “We'll get on this tomorrow—I promise.”

The shout vanished, but someone rattled the doorknob so hard Chela thought it would break. “Hello—I'm busy in here!” she snapped, and the rattling abruptly stopped.

“Hello?” Ten's voice said.

Deftly, she unmuted the phone. “Yeah, Ten, I'm trying to dry my hair,” she said, another easy lie. “Like I said, I'm fine. Don't keep calling me, okay? Or I'll turn off my phone.”

“Promise you'll hang tight and wait for me,” Ten said.

Chela sighed, exasperated with herself because her mouth wouldn't say the words. “Promise me you'll stop treating me like a baby,” she said instead.

Ten laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Deal.”

Chela blinked, her eyes stinging with tears. Lying had never been so hard. Ten's laugh had done it; he believed her, and it made her sad. He thought she was in her room toweling off her hair and watching Telemundo, and Chela wished her lie were real. If she waited for Ten, he'd see so many things she wouldn't. He knew how to run a real investigation.

But Ten was too cautious. He wasn't moving fast enough. He
was afraid of bad publicity. A dozen things were more important to him than Maria, especially since she was a working girl. Ten had walked away from that life, and he didn't like to get close to the memory.

But someone needed to pay for what had happened to Maria. Someone needed to stop her killer before he stole someone else's life. Someone else's mother.

The odor in the bathroom was suddenly overwhelming. Chela felt her stomach heave. “Ten, I have to go,” she said.

“Yeah, me, too,” Ten said. “I'll be home as soon as I can?”

His tone said,
Don't even try it
.

Maybe he knew he was already too late.

The familiar white van finally showed up at 10:33, pulling into the same gravel lot beside a construction site, an old hotel being rehabbed, where Maria had brought her only two nights before. Chela could almost smell Maria's perfume and her weed-scented hair. Her mind swam with the differences between then and now.

Now, as always, Chela noticed more shadows when Maria wasn't with her. She was wearing a beach wrap to cover her provocative clubbing costume and its plunging neckline. She felt exposed. She wanted to run to the van but walked slowly both because of her stilettos and because she wanted to be cautious. What if it wasn't the right van? And even if it were, a single past transaction didn't mean she could trust this guy. Hell, he was a suspect! Like her, he'd been one of the last people to see Maria alive.

Salsa played softly through his open driver's-side window, the old-school sound Marcela liked to play. She saw him bobbing his head to the beat. She tried to remember his name. Julio?

Five yards away from him, Chela hesitated when she heard his
voice speaking in low Spanish. Was someone else with him, or was he just talking on the phone? Chela's heart pounded. Maria's ghost whispered to her:
You were never such a princess.

Chela jumped when the driver whistled to get her attention. He waved to her. “
Oye
, what are you doing? You'll attract attention standing out there like that.”

Chela remembered the routine from when she'd come with Maria. They'd climbed into the van through the passenger-side door, where there was an easy path to the rear of the van and its well-lighted array of fake IDs, condoms, and knockoff perfumes and colognes—a convenience store on wheels. Now the idea of climbing inside his van felt crazy.

“I'm staying outside,” Chela said firmly, avoiding his eyes. “I want an ID.”

The man grunted and spoke in Spanish again, wrapping up his call. He peered out of his window to get a better look at Chela. “Ahhh . . .” he said. “Maria's friend.”

From his voice, she could tell he knew Maria was dead. For an instant, neither of them spoke again. His sigh seemed so heartfelt that Chela wanted to tell him about her suspicions and her search.

“Please,” he said gently. “If you stand by my window, you know what it looks like. Cops cruise up and down pretending to be cabbies.”

Chela's face flushed with embarrassment. She would look like a prostitute if she climbed inside, too, but if she moved to the passenger side, at least she would be out of view from the street. When she stood at the closed passenger window, he whirred the window down and leaned over.

“Cops looking for me?” he said.

The question jarred Chela so much that she took a step back. “Why? Should they be?”

Instead of answering, he said, “Did you know her a long time?”

“Yes.” Chela couldn't bring out more than one word.

He sighed again. “I only knew her a short time, but she was like sunshine, you know? Always smiling.”

Chela didn't ask if he had identified Maria to the police. A guy who sold fake IDs out of his van on South Beach wasn't a candidate for citizen of the year.
Like you're any better
, Chela thought, remembering how she'd let Ten talk her out of going to the police.

“So you were very close?” he said.

“Like sisters.”

He nodded thoughtfully. When he reached under his seat, Chela wondered if he was about to pull out a gun. Instead, he showed her a California driver's license. Chela's eyes went wide when she saw the jet cascade of hair in the photo: Maria!

“She asked me to hang on to this, remember?” he said. “The other night?”

Chela's heart slowed, and her veins stopped racing with electrified blood. Memories beat back her mind's haze. Maria had brought her own fake ID to go clubbing, her cousin's license, but she
had
asked Julio to hold her license for her when she brought Chela. Maybe she hadn't wanted to have two licenses in case she was questioned by police. Chela remembered how he'd slipped it into his pocket. But even after she remembered, Chela's knees trembled from the shock of seeing Maria's smiling face.

“I wondered why she wasn't with you that night, why she never came back for it,” he said. “Then I turned on the news. Take it. You should have it, not me.”

So there's no evidence of Maria near you
. Chela took the license, but she held it carefully, her fingertips touching only the razor-thin edges. This guy's fingerprints were all over the license, if he hadn't wiped it clean. Evidence. Hell, she watched
Criminal Minds
and
CSI.
She wished she had a baggie, but the empty change compartment in her purse would have to do.