I parked across her driveway and went up and leaned on her doorbell. No response. But when I let up on the button I thought I heard steps inside; then the curtain in the adjacent window flicked a little and I had a glimpse of her face as she peered out. I pushed the bell again and said loudly, “You’d better talk to me, Teresa. Unless you want to talk to the police instead.”
Still no response.
“Which is it going to be? Me or the cops? Make up your mind.”
I counted to six, silently, before the latch clicked and the door popped inward a couple of inches. She was already walking away from it when I entered. Halfway across the room she stopped and stood slump-shouldered without turning while I shut the door behind me. It wasn’t much of a room, because it had no discernible stamp of individuality; it might have been a living room in anybody’s house anywhere, filled with nondescript furniture and nondescript trimmings and painted and carpeted in nondescript colors. It might have been an Anglo’s living room; there was nothing Mexican or Spanish in it that I could see. The room told me as much about Teresa Melendez and the life she led as I needed to know.
Still without turning she said, “Rafael isn’t here,” in a dull, emotionless voice.
“I know.”
“He’s in the hospital.”
“I know that too.”
She came around slowly to face me. She was wearing an old housecoat over a slip and blouse. Her long hair had been hastily combed; the lipstick and makeup she wore, just as hastily applied, didn’t hide the dark bags under her eyes or the sallowness of her skin. The bored sexpot and the defiant mistress were both gone today. In their place was a shopworn, bitter woman, puffily soft and unattractive-the woman she would probably be in another ten or fifteen years.
She said, “You put him there?”
“In the hospital? No.”
“You know who did?”
“Coleman Lujack,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and nodded once, and shaped her lips as if she wanted to spit. “Big Savior. Big Judas.”
She moved a couple of paces, sat heavily on the arm of a shapeless couch. I stayed where I was. The room smelled of stale cigar smoke and stale liquor and fried food and something else I couldn’t define. Despair, maybe.
“All night I waited for him,” she said. “I knew it was bad when he didn’t come. Bad for him, bad for me …finito. This morning … the newspaper … I went to the hospital but they wouldn’t let me see him. They said I wasn’t a relative. They wanted to know who I was and why I was there. I ran out quick and came home. Where else am I gonna go?” She looked up at me. “You think he’ll die?”
“I‘m not a doctor.”
“I hope he does,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“He’ll go to prison if he doesn’t. He’s afraid of prison. He told me that once. Be better for him if he dies.”
“Tell me why he’ll go to prison.”
“Why do you think? His work with the illegals.”
“The coyotes, you mean.”
“He was only helping our people,” she said. “But the INS, the Anglos in their big government offices … they don’t understand. They’d put him in prison for that.”
“Not for that,” I said. “For robbing your people, for feeding on their poverty.”
She didn’t want to hear that; she shook her head.
“That’s why they’re called coyotes, Teresa.”
“No,” she said. “He wasn’t one of them.”
“All right, have it your way. He’s a good man, just a pawn in the Lujacks’ hands. It was their idea, then. Coleman and Thomas. They financed his work with the illegals.”
She made the spitting mouth again. “El jefes,” she said.
“Was Frank Hanauer in on it too?”
“I don’t know.”
“Rafael didn’t say?”
Headshake.
“Why was Hanauer killed? Some kind of doublecross? Or was it because he wasn’t involved and made a stink when he found out?”
Headshake.
“Who ran him down? Rafael?”
“No!”
“Who then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Rafael kill Thomas Lujack?”
“No! He wouldn’t do nothing like that.”
The hell he wouldn’t, I thought. “He’s been living here with you the past week, hasn’t he? Since Monday.”
Shrug.
“He came here late that night, after he’d been to see Coleman.”
Another shrug.
“Were you expecting him?”
“No. I was sleeping. He was all shook up.”
“Why?”
“Something el jefe wanted him to do.”
“But he didn’t tell you what it was.”
“No.”
“What did he say?”
“He said we’d go away together. He said he’d had enough of his fat cow of a wife.”
“And you agreed to go along.”
“I love him,” she said, and shrugged again.
“Where were you going? Mexico?”
“Mexico City. He knows people there.”
“Sure he does. How soon did you plan to leave?”
“When his business was finished.”
“The business he was doing for Coleman.”
“El jefe was paying him a lot of money.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Rafael, he said we would live good in Mexico City. He said I would have servants….”
“Why did he want to go back to Mexico? Why couldn’t the two of you just stay here?”
“They’d be after him pretty soon, he said. Here they’d find him; in Mexico, no.”
“The INS?”
“Pigs,” she said.
“So he was afraid of being arrested. That’s the real reason he moved in with you, you know. To hide out until he was ready to leave for Mexico.”
“What if it is? What does it matter?”
“Was Coleman afraid of being arrested too? Was he planning to leave the country?”
“He’s an Anglo,” Teresa said bitterly. “El jefes don’t have to run away. They don’t get punished.”
“Sometimes they don’t; this isn’t one of them. Did Rafael talk to Coleman yesterday?”
Nod. “El jefe called him.”
“Here? He knew Rafael was staying here with you?”
“He knew. Rafael told him.”
“What time did he call?”
“Seven o’clock. Just after Rafael came back.”
“Back from where?”
“Seeing people, making arrangements.”
“For your trip to Mexico City?”
Nod.
“Did you tell him I’d been here?” “I told him.”
“And what I said about him and the coyotes?”
“Everything you said.”
“Did it upset him? Make him angry, more afraid?”
“What you think? He called you names. Hijo de puta. Maricon. You know what those names mean?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know what they mean. Is that all he said?”
“You wouldn’t bother us again-no Anglo would.”
“Were you in the room when he talked to Coleman?”
“No. He made me go in the kitchen.”
“So you don’t know what they talked about.”
“I didn’t want to know.”
“How soon afterward did Rafael leave again?”
“A few minutes.” She had the hem of her housecoat bunched in one hand; she twisted it even more tightly now, so that I heard the thin tearing of threads of material. “All night I waited,” she said to her lap. “No more waiting now. Just … finito. I won’t see him again, never. All finito.”
“For him,” I said, “and living good in Mexico City. But not for you, Teresa.”
“For me,” she said.
“No. You’ll come out of this all right. You’re not mixed up in anything illegal. The police won’t hassle you, and neither will the INS as long as you’ve got a green card.”
“You think I care? I don’t have Rafael, I don’t have a job pretty soon, I don’t have money to go anywhere. I don’t have nothing except a green card.”