“That doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. Why was Serena so angry then that night in the bar?”
Jorge looked surprised. “You know about that?”
Joanna nodded.
He shrugged. “She saw my truck.”
“Your truck?”
“I bought a new truck. A Jimmy. Not brand-new, but new to me. Serena said it wasn’t fair for me to have a new truck when she didn’t have any transportation at all, when she was having to walk to work. I tried to tell her that the other truck needed a new engine and that if I couldn’t get to work, I couldn’t pay any child support. It didn’t make any difference.”
“Speaking of kids. Did you see Ceci and Pablo that night?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Jorge Grijalva hung his head and didn’t answer.
“Why not?” Joanna repeated.
“Because I didn’t want them to know I was in town,” he said huskily. “Because Serena didn’t,” he added. “She said if the kids saw me there, they’d think we were getting back together, but we weren’t.”
“So you and Serena met at the bar to discuss arrangements for Thanksgiving?”
Jorge Grijalva shook his head. “Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“Serena was very beautiful,” he answered. “And she was much younger.... But you knew that, didn’t you?”
He paused and looked at Joanna, his features screwed into an unreadable grimace.
“Yes,” she said.
“I used to be good-looking, too,” Jorge said. “Back when I was younger.”
Again he stopped speaking. Joanna was having difficulty following his train of thought. “What difference does that make?” she prompted.
He looked at her then. The silent, soul-deep pain in his dark eyes cut through the cloudy plastic between them and seared into Joanna’s own heart. Slowly both his eyes filled with tears. “So beautiful,” he murmured. “And me? Compared to her, I was nothing but an old man. But sometimes ...”
He stopped yet again. Despite the plastic barrier between them, an unlikely intimacy had sprouted between Joanna Brady and Jorge Grijalva as they sat facing each other in the harsh glare of fluorescent light in those two equally grim rooms.
“Sometimes what?” Joanna whispered urgently.
Jorge Grijalva’s head stayed bowed. “Sometimes she would go with me. If I brought her something extra along with the child support. Sometimes she would...” His voice faded away.
“Would what?” Joanna asked. “Go to bed with you? Is that what you mean?”
Jorge nodded but didn’t speak. His silence now gave Joanna some inkling of the depth of Jorge Grijalva’s shame, and also of his pride. Serena Duffy Grijalva had been a whore, all right. Even with him. Even with her husband.
“So you came to see her,” Joanna said, after a long pause. “Did you bring both the child support and . . . the extra?”
He nodded again.
“But after she found out about the truck—about your new truck—then she refused to go with you and you killed her. Is that what happened?”
“That’s what the bruja thinks,” Jorge answered sullenly. For the first time, there was something else his voice, something besides hurt.
“What witch?” Joanna asked.
“The black-haired one. The detective.”
“The detective from Peoria? Carol Strong?”
“Yes. That’s the one, but it didn’t happen the way she thinks. I didn’t kill Serena. She left the bar first. After a while, so did I.”
Joanna leaned back in her chair and regarded Jorge speculatively. “Your mother is right then, isn’t she, Jorge? You’re going to plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit”
With effort, Jorge Grijalva pulled himself together. He sat up straighter in his chair. His gaze met and held Joanna’s. “I told you my wife was a whore,” he said quietly, “but I will not go to court to prove it. Serena’s dead. Ceci and Pablo don’t need worse than that.”
“But you’re their father. If you go to prison for murdering the children’s mother, isn’t that worse?”
“Pablo is mine,” he said softly. “But I’m not Ceci’s father. She doesn’t know that. Serena was already pregnant when I met her.”
That soft-spoken, self-effacing revelation came like a bolt out of the blue and stunned Joanna into her own momentary silence. “Still,” she said finally, “you’re the only father she’s ever known. Think what it will be like for her with you in prison.”
“Think what it would be like for her with me dead,” Jorge countered. He shrugged his shoulders. “Manslaughter isn’t murder. You’re an Anglo. Why would you understand?”
“Understand what?”
“Supposing I go to court, say all those things about Serena to a judge and jury and then they find me guilty anyway. Of murder. They’ve got themselves one more dirty Mexican to send to the gas chamber. This way, if I take the plea bargain, maybe I’ll still be alive long enough to see my kids grow up. By the time they’re grown, maybe I’ll be out. Maybe then Ceci will be old enough so I can tell her the truth and she’ll be able to understand.”
“But ...” Joanna began.
Jorge shook his head, squelching her objection. “If you see my mother, tell her what I told y That way, maybe she’ll understand, too. Tell her me that I’m sorry.”
With that, Jorge Grijalva put down his phone and signaled to the guard that he was ready to go. He got up and walked away, leaving Joanna sitting on her side of the Plexiglas barrier, sputtering to herself.
As he walked out of the room, Joanna was filled with the terrible knowledge that she had heard the truth. Juanita Grijalva was right. Her son, Jorge, hadn’t killed Serena, but he would accept the blame. In order to protect his children from hearing an awful truth about their mother, he would willingly go to prison for a crime he hadn’t commit. Meanwhile, the real killer—whoever that was—would go free.
Sitting there by herself, all those separate realizations came to Joanna almost simultaneously. They were followed immediately by a thought was even worse: There wasn’t a damn thing she could do about any of them.
Drained, Joanna pressed the buzzer for a guard to come let her out. As she was led back to the jail’s guarded entrance, through a maze of electronically locked gates that clanged shut behind her, Joanna realized something else as well.
M r. Bailey, her high school social studies teacher, had done his best to drum the words into the heads each Bisbee High School senior who came through his civics class. “We hold these truths to self-evident,” he had read reverently from the textbook, “that all men are created equal.... “
For the first time, as clearly as if she’d heard a pane of glass shatter into a thousand pieces, Joanna Brady understood with absolute clarity that those words weren’t necessarily true, not for everyone. Certainly not for Jorge Grijalva.
And not for his mother, either.
CHAPTER TEN
Joanna left the jail complex and headed north with her mind in a complete turmoil. What should she do? Drop it? Forget everything she had heard in that grim interview room and go on about business as usual as if nothing had happened? What then? That would mean Jorge would most likely go to prison on a manslaughter charge while Serena’s killer would be on the loose, carrying on with his own life, free as a bird. Those two separate outcomes went against everything Joanna Brady stood for and believed in, against her sense of justice and fair play.
Joanna Lathrop Brady had grown up under her mother’s critical eye with Eleanor telling her constantly, day after day, how headstrong and hard to handle she was, how she never had sense enough to mind her own business or leave well enough alone. Maybe what was about to happen to Jorge Grijalva’s already shattered life wasn’t any of her business, but if she didn’t do something to prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice, who would? Carol Strong, the local homicide detective on the case, the one Jorge had called the bruja? No, if the prosecutors and defense attorneys were negotiating a plea bargain, that meant the case was officially closed and out of the hands of police investigators.