Fifty Grand (26 page)

Mrs. Cooper thinks.

Time slows.

The angel holds his breath. He knows. He can see the half dozen lifelines beating in the air above her head.

“I think it was on Ashleigh Street,” she says.

I write that down in the notebook. “Ashleigh Street?” I ask for confirmation and show her my spelling, which she corrects.

“Yes, that tree on the bend there, where the old liquor store used to be, just after the turn,” Mrs. Cooper says and looks at her son. “It wasn’t my fault, dear, there was ice on the road, I know it was May but you have no idea what it’s been like up here.”

Ashleigh Street. A tree at a bend in front of a former liquor store. Might be possible to check. Paint scrape, glass, a million things.

I nod and smile. “At any point during that day, Mrs. Cooper, did you happen to drive on the Old Boulder Road?”

“The what?”

“The Old Boulder Road,” I repeat.

“The Old Boulder Road? Never heard of it,” she says gruffly, not too gruffly but enough to raise my interest.

Hmmmm. Maybe Ricky’s hunch was wrong. Could this be our girl? And what the hell would I do if she was? Probably nothing. Probably I’d get the two o’clock bus to Denver and the first night bus to El Paso. Slip over the border. The plane from Juárez to Mexico City and an earlier flight back to Havana.

No one would be the wiser.

Hector would breathe a huge sigh of relief. Ricky wouldn’t care. Better for everyone.

“The Old Boulder Road is the road that goes from Main Street to what they call Malibu Mountain,” Jimmy says.

Mrs. Cooper nods to herself. “I know what you are talking about. Yes, that
was
the Old Boulder Road before they built the Eisenhower Tunnel. That
was a long time ago. It is a freak-show road nowadays. Those movie-star types. Their helicopters. They’re all in that cult, they can control things with their minds. Jane Adams’s son, Jeff, he’s in with them. She cries every night. He never calls her, they do not allow him.”

Bring her back. “Mrs. Cooper, did you have any occasion to be on the Old Boulder Road on the twenty-seventh or even the twenty-eighth of May?”

The old lady shrugs. “I don’t think so. I don’t know, but I don’t think so. My thing wasn’t there though.”

“Your accident wasn’t there?”

“No. I just said. That’s completely out of my way. Haven’t been there for a long time. Not this year.”

“Can you take me through the accident in detail?”

“I don’t know about detail, but I remember it ok. I was driving on Ashleigh and I had on NPR, it was
Colorado Matters.
I hate that show ever since Dan Drayer left, he was good. Anyway, I slipped on the road and hit the tree and then, when I was pulling out, I don’t know, I was all shaken up, I turned the car and I hit the stop sign at the corner of Ashleigh and Rochdale Road. Knocked it clean over. That’s why we had all those dents on the hood.”

“You knocked over a stop sign?” her son interjects, looking at me nervously.

“I did. They have it planted right in the road with a couple of whatchama-call-’em orange lines painted in front of it. How are you supposed to see those?”

“Mother, did you report the fact that you knocked over the stop sign?”

“Well, not exactly. I didn’t tell the other woman.”

“What other woman?” Jimmy asks.

“From the insurance company,” Mrs. Cooper says.

Two women from the insurance company? Jimmy gives me a suspicious look.

“What was the name of this other woman?” I ask.

Mrs. Cooper fishes around in a giant glass bowl on the phone table. It takes forever but finally she passes me the card. “Sally Wren. Great Northern Insurance Claims Adjuster,” I read out loud and pass the card to the son. “Miss Wren is no longer with the company,” I say with mild disdain, and lowering my voice, I add, “That explains the delay. I’ll make sure I expedite this very quickly.”

Jimmy looks at the card and frowns at Miss Wren’s imaginary crimes. He turns to me. “Is Mom going to get in trouble for the stop sign?”

I shake my head. “It is not my job to give information to the police, in fact it would be illegal for me to do so. If you or your mother want to report it, that’s fine, but it is nothing to do with me,” I bluff, assuming this to be the case from all those Yuma lawyer movies. I don’t really know, though, and of course in Cuba anyone who fails to report a crime can be sentenced to up to ten years in prison under the general category “Enemy of the Revolution.”

Relief courses over Jimmy’s face. “You’re a good person, Miss Inez. Tancredo’s wrong about M—about immigrants.”

But I’m hardly paying attention. The accident did not take place on the Old Boulder Road. She hasn’t been on the Old Boulder Road at all this year.

Satisfied, I get up and Jimmy shows me to the door. He thanks me.

“Thank you, Mr. Cooper,” I tell him and then, remembering my American TV, I add, “Have a nice day.”

“I will, thank you. And when will that check be coming?”

“Oh, very soon,” I say.

“Excellent. Thank you. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” I walk to the path and before the door closes I look at Jimmy. “Uh, you weren’t driving the car anytime around the twenty-seventh, were you?”

“Me? No. I was in San Francisco,” he says flatly.

“Ok, thank you.”

When I’m out of sight of the house I let the air out of my lungs.

“Closer,” I tell myself.

Now what?

Walk back. Process it.

Only a couple of kilometers to Fairview and another half a klick to Wetback Mountain.

Yeah, walk back, let it bubble like rum in the kettle.

The road, the trees, the endless mountains.

Beautiful, really.

No wonder you hid here, Dad.

The afternoon gone mad with migrating geese, volery after volery. Thousands of them. Where are you going? Mexico? Farther south? I wish you could appreciate what I can see. The cobalt sky, the light bending over the mountains, the vapor trails.

That why you came here, Pop? A landscape that is in every way the opposite of Havana? Or was there another reason?

I make it to the outskirts of Fairview, take out my map, and find Ashleigh Street. I go along about a kilometer before I find a burned-out liquor store. Sure enough, the stop sign on Rochdale Road has recently been replaced. I walk back a few meters and examine the trees. One of them looks bruised, bent, like it may have been hit fairly recently by a vehicle. I look close and change my angle to get the sunlight. Tiny fragments of gray paint on the trunk. I dab my finger on my tongue and raise one of them from the tree. I hold it in the palm of my hand.

The garage report said she drove a cream Mercedes-Benz.

Six months later cream and white probably weather to just about the same shade of gray.

I sit down on a nearby tree trunk.

The sky changes color as the sun sinks behind the Front Range.

Get up. Start back.

The road begins a long, slow incline toward town, and I find myself thinking about what Esteban told me. Not too long ago this road and the Malecón in Havana were both Spain.

Spain. Hard to believe it. Of course, they have long since parted and they don’t remember that they were kin. Here, unlike the Malecón, no one walks. Cars slow, people stare. Who is that person on foot? What can they be about? No good, I’ll be—

“María! María, is that you?”

I look up. A Toyota pickup with half a dozen Mexicans crammed in the back.

“How do you know—”

“It’s me,” Paco says from under a disguise of grime.

He helps me into the truck.

Handshakes. Hellos.

The boys pass me a Corona. I drink it. They tell me they’ve come from a garbage dump on the far side of the mountain, where they threw out perfectly good refrigerators, radiators, air-conditioning units, and other obsolescences that they’ve taken from the building they’re remodeling on Pearl Street. The boys are mostly from Mexico City or Chiapas. None of them is over twenty-five. Paco seems happy to be with them. Sitting there with the others, drinking beer, telling jokes. He’s a different person among these guys, more himself, funnier, younger. I’m a weight. A drag. “We shouldn’t be sharing a room anymore, Paco, you should be with your friends,” I tell him.

“No, no, I like staying with you,” he insists.

“I’m a cramp on your style,” I say.

“Never.”

He grins, finishes another Corona, shakes his head. Someone passes me a bottle of tequila but I decline and the bottle moves on.

“Did you have a good day?” Paco asks.

A good day? Yes. A productive day. Unless she’s got an Oscar stashed away, Mrs. Cooper was not the person who hit my father and left him to die in a ditch. Only one name left on Ricky’s garage list. The perfect suspect. Arrogant, rich, careless. He clearly takes meth, pot, alcohol. Gotta be him.

In fact, he’s almost too perfect, and if I were in Havana and investigating this case for Hector I’d at least look at a DGI angle—the prime suspect being set up as cover for a Party man. But this isn’t Cuba. This is a simpler country.

And Esteban and his deer? A deeper look to take care of that. Maybe also see about that Scientology golf cart. Just to be on the safe side.

We bump along the road. Paco, utterly wiped, lies against me. His eyes are dark and weary. He’s definitely not used to manual labor, no matter what he said before.

“Lie on my lap, little Francisco,” I tell him.

“I’m dirty,” he says.

“Lie down, close your eyes,” I tell him.

He smiles and lies down. Some of the other men give him an obscene roar but he tells them to fuck off. I stroke his hair and his smile widens.

“Keep a look out for the motel,” he says. “When you see it, tell Hernando to bang on the roof. They won’t stop. Angelo’s crew are all going to Denver.”

More bumps. More beer. “Plenty of food, plenty of beer, plenty of fun, that’s America,” he mutters. America. Yes. In Cuba it’s different. In Cuba you think only with your belly. And at the end of the month when the ration book is running thin, your belly tells you what to do.

“What are you thinking about?” Paco asks dreamily.

“My belly,” I tell him, and he laughs and laughs.

“You don’t even have one,” he says finally.

I do, Paco. I have a cop gut and it tells me that Mrs. Cooper is innocent and time is running out and the real killer’s days to walk this Earth are few.

B
lack orchid sky. Black moon. Black dreams. Back on bruised-mouth island. The beat in Vedado. Doctors. Informers. Tourists. Whores. Secret policemen. Secret asylums. Secret prisons. Calling me home. But not yet, I’ll come, but not yet.

I dream the song of waking and lie under the sheet, awake.

I pull back the curtain, look through the window.

It’s well before dawn. The night is full of dying stars and hidden mass.

A noise on the outside steps. A person.

Who is that over there?

My eyes adapt to the light.

It’s Paco. Kneeling. Fingering his rosary.

Does he do this every morning?

Poor kid. Must be scared shitless to be here.

I watch him, fascinated.

He finishes, lifts his head. I let the curtain fall back, lie down again.

A key in the lock. The door creaks open. He comes in.

He looks in my direction, squints, tries to see if I’m awake. Deciding that I’m not, he tiptoes to his bed and takes off his shoes. He removes a white bag of powder from his pocket and puts it carefully in the drawer next to his bed. He lifts the duvet, slithers under it, and rolls onto his side.

He drapes an arm over his eyes and tries to sleep. After a couple of minutes the arm falls to his side. His face assumes a different, more feminine
posture. His eyebrows are thick and his features fine, his hair wiry but containable. It’s the eyes that give up his wildness, his begging years, his time running with gangs in Managua, or his time—probably exaggerated—as a camp follower of the Sandinistas, a wannabe boy soldier.

Sleeping, he has the face of someone deeper than the front he projects to the world. It’s a shame, Paco, that you love America so. You shouldn’t fall so hard on the first date.

Not me. In matters of love I take my time. Too choosy, everyone says. The Havana girl whose exception proves the rule.

But you, Francisco, everything’s coming to you too easily and too fast. Didn’t you listen to Esteban? There’s another side to this land, there’s a—

His eyes flip open and he catches me staring at him.

“I could feel your look,” he says.

“Did I wake you?”

“No. I was awake.”