“But he set up the mother of his child to be deported. I sat with that little girl last night.”
Warren gears up to reply but then his phone rings.
“Hold on.” He answers his call and tells one of his reporters to stay on the street. Apparently, some guy has been driving around to elementary schools in Santa Ana, trying to get little girls into his car. Warren hangs up.
He leans forward to turn his monitor around. The desk leaves a temporary imprint against his belly. I’m staring at a file photo of Jim Westfall.
I scoot closer. Westfall wears a too-tight white shirt under a flak jacket with big white letters: ICE. Behind his sunglasses, I sense the condemning gaze of an inquisitor.
“Okay, so you want to go to this guy, an acknowledged elder-in-training in one of the biggest churches here in Orange County, and ask about how he set up his mistress to be deported?” Warren pauses to let this sink in. “What do you think he’ll say to you, if you have the proof?”
“We took on America’s Sheriff,” Jake chimes in. “We knew he was dirty.”
“When the feds had evidence of his wrongdoing,” Warren says as he turns his monitor back around. “Okay, here’s what we can do. Mario is following the ICE activities—”
“Raids,” Jake interrupts.
“Activities,” Warren insists. “Maybe Mario can make this part of a larger story.”
Mario Landrey is the reporter who covers immigration issues. They call him “Ice, Ice, Baby,” and he posts online pictures of himself with agents and their guns. According to Jake, Mario hasn’t written one word about the ICE vans parked outside Santa Ana’s elementary schools or the day-worker stops. But he’s spilled a lot of ink about the arrests of illegals with warrants for drug dealing, rape, and murder. Mario guards his territory like a pit bull.
“Dani should have this story,” Jake pleads.
“We have a good relationship with law enforcement and I want to keep it that way,” Warren says, standing up to dismiss us. “Even if it’s true, Dani’s not ready for this kind of story.”
I stay in my seat. “But I know the grandmother. She’ll talk to me.”
“Mario has a lot of connections in the Latino community. He’s got the expertise to handle guys like Westfall.” Warren grins at me. “Sorry, Dani. Westfall would eat you alive.”
My nana calls me. Gina phoned her mother’s cell from Central Jail in Santa Ana. She had been questioned and was offered the option of waiving her right to a court hearing, which would’ve put her on the first bus to Mexico. Gina told them no and now she’s waiting to be arraigned.
“Gina and her mother were fighting over the phone so I took the little girl outside to pick lemons.” Nana keeps her voice low and I strain to understand her.
“Do you think Gina will get deported?”
“You’re the one with the college degree, mi’ja. What do you think?”
“What about Pricila? If she was born here—”
“She’ll go with her mama. It’s the way things are. You know that.”
Anger gathers in my throat, like I’m being suffocated from the inside out. Westfall is a bastard for doing this. No, wait; under his commando posing, he’s a cowardly bastard for trying to hide his little girl. If people don’t want kids, they shouldn’t screw around.
It’s moments like this that I think I made the right decision when I was twenty-three and starting my advertising career. I’d be like Gina now, irrevocably shackled to a man who might hate me for having his kid. My mother got off easy. Her husband, whose last name I bear, kicked her out when he discovered she’d been sleeping with a fellow grad student. She thinks my real father is a guy from England.
“Is Pricila still there?”
“Yes,” Nana sighs. “Ay, Dani, you shouldn’t have gotten us involved in this. I had to take the day off and I have briefs to type up for Mr. Levine—”
“You think I should’ve shooed them from the back door?”
“No, but—”
“I’ll come home.”
“And do what?”
“Interview the grandmother. I’m a reporter. I’ll write a story to help them.”
“Don’t. You’ll only make it worse, mi’ja.”
My boss and team leader Jolene buzzes me right after I hang up. Checking the mirror taped to my monitor, affixed there so no one catches me checking job listings online, I see Jolene painting her nails with her phone pressed between her ear and shoulder.
I pull my purse strap over my shoulder and slip out before she hunts me down in the newsroom.
When I turn on Nana’s street, there’s an unmarked white Suburban parked facing the wrong way in front of her house. The shotgun mounted in the center console is a dead giveaway that it’s the cops.
As I get out of the car, I sense eyes watching from behind curtains. Even the dogs are quiet as everyone is on full alert that The Man has entered the forest.
Through the screen door, a man I instinctively know is Jim Westfall turns; my heart freezes when our eyes lock. Bettina is sitting on the couch, her hands behind her back. I make out Nana sitting in Grandpa’s chair.
“Wait outside!” Westfall barks.
His partner then walks out and approaches me with his hand hitched on his gun. “Which one works for you?” he asks.
“My grandmother lives here.” The wind blows hard against my back and a spray of water dripping off the eaves sprinkles my cheek.
He smiles instead of apologizing for assuming I’m a Newport mommy here to fetch my nanny. “Well, your grandma has been harboring an unauthorized immigrant.”
So that’s what they call them now, huh?
“We don’t card our neighbors when they’re afraid to sleep in their own homes.”
“You know Bettina Duran?”
“Yeah, she’s our neighbor.”
“You know where the little girl is?”
“In school, I guess.”
He surveys the street from behind his sunglasses. I want to flash my press badge and yell, Stop right there, bud, I demand you let my grandma go!
The screen door hits the front of the house as Westfall walks out with Bettina. She doesn’t look at me and I’m hoping Pricila is upstairs.
But she’s not. Nana pulls me inside and tells me that a woman with a baby came to the house less than twenty minutes before Westfall showed up. Bettina bundled Pricila in a white coat and her backpack and sent her out the door with her birth certificate and a hundred dollars cash.
“Where did she take her?”
Nana shrugs as she checks her briefcase. “Mexico.”
“By herself?”
“This is not our business. Let it go.”
“Does Gina know?”
“Yes. That’s why they were arguing.”
My cell phone buzzes angrily. It’s Jolene ordering me back, no doubt. I think about sitting with Pricila in the TV room last night, watching Justice League and explaining Wonder Woman to her. Girls these days, they don’t even know who Wonder Woman is. Then again, a girl like Pricila has more important things on her mind, like if her mom will be there when she comes home from school.
“Danielle, listen to me. We have no concern in this and we don’t want nothing to do with the police. Understand?”
“But they came to us for help! Where are they sending Pricila? What if something happens to her along the way?”
Nana sighs.
“I’m supposed to just let it go, huh?”
“Yes, mi’ja. Let it go.”
Today, 1 p.m.
Obviously I refuse, and that’s how I wind up in the Santa Ana Police Department.
When Officer Kravetz walks back in, he brings a female officer who looks like she should be running for ASB president.