“Coffee, Grant? Wine?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“We have whisky, if you prefer?”
“No, really.”
Used as he is to bad smells, this takes the biscuit. Mind, he’d expected as much. It’s why he’d made it his last call of the day. But that stink—
“Go on in the lounge, Grant, I won’t be a minute. Got some sausage rolls in the oven.”
Lounge? You can’t see the sofas for the junk, much less the telly, and for pity’s sake, is that a dead cat under there? The pink collar reads Mitzi, but whatever this thing used to be, it’s long past the putrefaction stage.
“The mother! Holy crap, where’s the bloody mother—?”
Fighting piles of debris on the stairs, he found the answer on the bed, hair splayed prettily on a pillow scattered with wizened rose petals. On the bedside table, clear of clutter, clear of dust, were photo frames of silver. Inside one, a couple on their wedding day. Another with that same handsome man, older now and with a little less hair, playing football on a beach with two freckle-faced boys, as alike as two peas in a pod. The third photo showed a young girl, tall and blond with legs up to her armpits, smiling broadly with her arm around her mother.
“Poor bitch,” Matt mutters, texting his contact in the police force. “You poor, poor woman, you.”
Not the remains mummifying on the bed. Lindsey. For all she’s been through, all she’s had to suffer and endure, without any psychiatric help.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, barging in on Mum?”
A blow sends Matt flying forward on his face. He tries to lift his head. To turn.
The second thwack leaves him out of options.
“How rude.”
Lindsey drags him into the bedroom across the hall, crammed with newspapers and linens, and all the other stuff she can’t bring herself to throw away, because you never know when you might need it. Like this piece of four-by-two that fell off the garden fence awhile back.
“Honestly, Grant, I thought you were better than that, I really did.”
Since she can’t close the door, she covers him with bin liners bursting at the seams with kitchen rubbish. It’s only decent. Besides, he’ll be company for Derek from pest control, another one who took liberties on their first date, along with Robert-Roger-Rupert, that self-centred social-worker prat. Why, oh why, couldn’t more men be like Gareth?
“Looks like another night in, Mum, just the two of us.”
Lindsey works her way downstairs.
“Sausage rolls all right?”
As sirens blare, coming ever closer, she opens a tin of cat food, salmon and tuna, the label reads, and scrapes it into the bowl.
“Mitzi, Minzi... Dinner...”
The Cuban Prisoner
by John Lantigua
John Lantigua is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who made his fiction debut in 1988 with the Edgar-nominated Heat Lightning. He is best known, as a action writer, for his Willie Cuesta private-eye series, to which this new story (as well as several earlier tales for EQMM) belongs. Recently, all four novels in the Cuesta series were reissued in e-editions.
Private investigator Willie Cuesta leaned against a palm tree in a park just blocks from his Little Havana home, watching seven-year-olds play soccer. The kids dashed madly up and down the field in their striped jerseys, occasionally running into collisions that left several of them strewn on the grass. They sprang up right away and took off hell bent in the opposite direction, the careening ball never firmly in anyone’s control and never quite making it into a net. On the sidelines, parents cheered them, gossiped a bit, and then cheered some more when their kid touched the ball. Willie understood why soccer had become such a popular sport in the U.S.: If you wanted to tire out your seven-year-old so that he or she went to sleep early and soundly, allowing you to sit comfortably with your carafe of wine, you nudged your child into soccer. In Willie’s young days, he had played a lot of baseball, a more static, contemplative game, and had never wanted to sleep. His mother would have been better served if she’d been born thirty years later.
A pileup occurred near one goal, a whistle sounded, and the referee called for a penalty kick. A young player with a mop of jet black hair reared back, booted the ball at a forty-five-degree angle, far from the net, into the crowd, and hung his head. Shouts of reassurance rang out and the mad scramble resumed.
“Mr. Cuesta?”
Willie turned to a woman who had walked up. She was about forty, raven-haired, attractive, wearing a lime-green blouse, black Capri pants, and comfortable mom sneakers for standing on the sidelines.
“You’re Ursula Estevez?” Willie asked.
“Si, señor.” They shook hands.
Willie had received a call from Ms. Estevez about two hours before, midmorning Saturday. She said she might need his services. He had asked her what her problem was, but she preferred to meet in person. Her son was playing in a soccer game that started at noon not far from Willie’s house and he had agreed to meet her.
“Which of the boys is yours?” he asked.
She pointed at the organized disorder on the field.
“Number nine, in green.”
Willie saw a smallish kid with her black hair and pale skin scurrying around the fringes of the action.
“But he’s not why I called you. It’s my mother, his grandmother.” She pointed to the end of the line of spectators, where an elderly woman sat about ten feet from the sideline in a canvas chair. She wore a flowered dress, a sun visor, and shades. Her hair was brown, although almost certainly with the help of her hairdresser. Willie guessed that she was in her mid to late seventies. She was fixed on the field of play with a smile on her face, apparently content watching her grandson, and probably not all that concerned with the score.
“She appears to be doing pretty well,” Willie said. “She looks happy.”
Ursula Estevez nodded. “Yes, right now she is especially happy. But I’m worried that someone is out to take advantage of her, possibly hurt her, and that her life could turn very dark. I’m worried that would finish her.”
The statement was stark and was matched by her tone.
“You better tell me what’s going on,” Willie said.
A park bench stood nearby and they sat on it, still able to see the field and the lady in question. Ms. Estevez folded her hands on her lap.
“My parents escaped Cuba in the early nineteen sixties, soon after Castro took power. Like a lot of other Cuban exiles, they settled here in Miami. They started an insurance business together, largely serving other Cubans, and in time it did very well. Once they were solidly on their feet, my sister and I were born. Everything continued to go well and they retired a few years ago with a comfortable nest egg. Their only plan was to spend as much time as possible enjoying their grandkids.”
She gestured toward the obviously contented lady in the canvas chair.
“But something must have spoiled that plan,” Willie said.
Ursula’s lips curdled and she nodded.
“My father died two years ago of a heart attack. From one moment to the next he was taken from us. Because of their history, escaping Cuba together, my parents had been unusually close, and my mother was lost. I mean terribly, terribly lost. She cried for months and then she was almost completely quiet for many months more. She was so sad we were afraid she might do something to hurt herself. She refused to move in with either me or my sister because she didn’t want to leave the house that reminded her of him. We had to be there as much as possible to make sure she was all right and didn’t do anything crazy.”