“Yeah, that’s the superglue I mentioned.”
“Is making me sick,” he said, and he didn’t sound good.
“Do you think alcohol might have something to do with that?”
“Real sick,” he said.
“Kelvin,” I said, glancing in the rearview mirror, “if you throw up in my car, I’m going to ask the prosecutor for special circumstances.”
Special K, cowed by the thought of a vomiting-in-an-official-vehicle enhancement to whatever charge he believed he was facing, kept it together until we arrived at the towers.
I helped him out of the car, but as soon as I let go, he stumbled and nearly fell, sinking to his knees. He looked up, squinting, at the south tower.
“Home?” he asked, blinking.
“I told you that I wasn’t arresting you,” I reminded him.
“Oh good,” Kelvin said. Then his gaze clouded, his attention focused inward like a newscaster receiving breaking news through his earpiece, and he doubled over to vomit on my running shoes.
“You broke my streak,” I said.
An older sister, almost heartbreakingly beautiful in a cheap sateen robe, took in the sight of Kelvin with a disapproving thinning of the lips that told me this wasn’t the first time he’d been delivered home in such a state. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then, looking at my shoes, “Sorry.”
When I was outside again, my eyes strayed involuntarily upward, at the north tower.
Oh, why not? You’re here already.
In the confines of the little elevator, the odor of the vomit I’d mostly scraped off my shoes was unmistakable. I couldn’t go visiting like this. On the 26th floor, I detoured back from the elevator to the stairs, and took my shoes off on the landing, behind the stairwell door. There was no worry that they would tempt thieves. I took off my socks as well. There’s a dignity to bare feet that stocking feet just don’t have.
When Cicero answered the door, I said, “I was just in the neighborhood. I’ll leave if I’m interrupting something.”
“Where are your shoes?”
“They’re in the stairwell,” I said.
“I see,” Cicero said, as though this were completely reasonable. “Every time I consider asking you more about your personal life, something like this happens, and I realize how much more fascinating it is not to know.” He rolled backward in the doorway, admitting me.
I declined anything to eat, but Cicero made us both tea, and we went into his bedroom.
“Who’s this?” I said.
“Who?” Cicero asked.
I was looking at the photos on the low bookcase in his bedroom. “Him,” I said, tapping what looked like the oldest of the photos, in weathered black-and-white.
It was a young man on a horse. The man, a teenage boy, really, wore a broad-brimmed hat and what might have been his nicest clothes, dark trousers and a cream-colored collarless shirt. The horse was beautifuclass="underline" obviously nearly as young as the boy, with a dark-brown or black coat that gleamed even in an old photo, neck arched with impatience at being reined in long enough for the photo to be taken.
“That’s my grandfather,” Cicero said. “In Guatemala.”
“How old is he, in the photo?”
“Eighteen,” Cicero said. “I never knew him; he died not long after I was born. But I’m told that he loved that horse. Back then, a fast horse was your five-liter. I guess it wasn’t really his, it was the family’s. But he thought of the horse as his, until one day he came home to find his father had sold it to pay for his sister’s wedding dress.”
“No shit?” I said, amused.
“Oh, yes. He was just beside himself,” Cicero said. “At least, that’s how the story goes.”
“Were you born there?” I asked.
“In Guatemala? No,” Cicero said. “Here in America. My parents wouldn’t even let Ulises and me learn Spanish until we were well grounded in English.”
“You know,” I said, “we were going to get back to the story of your brother, and we never did.”
Cicero picked up an unrelated photo on his bookcase, one in which he seemed to be hiking with a female friend, and set it back down. “There’s not much to tell,” he said.
His pointless action with the photo told me differently, and I waited for the rest.
“Ulises moved here with a girlfriend,” Cicero went on. “She quit him eventually, but he liked it here, so he stayed. They sent me up here to live with him about four years ago, after rehab, and he died a year after that.”
It wasn’t the end; in fact, it was a prologue.
“Ulises was a baker,” Cicero said. “He had screwy hours, starting work at two in the morning, at a little bakery in St. Paul.”
Immediately I knew the story Cicero was going to tell.
“The neighborhood wasn’t the best. There was some drug activity there,” Cicero said. “One night, as Ulises was going to work, there was an APB in Ramsey County for a drug suspect who’d taken a shot at some cops. Ulises drove a car similar to the one they were looking for. A couple of plainclothes Narcotics officers saw him parking behind the bakery and they braced him as he got out of the car.”
“And they shot him,” I said. You didn’t have to be a cop to have heard about it.
Cicero nodded. “They said afterward that he ignored commands to raise his hands and reached for a weapon instead. Both of them opened fire. They hit him seven times and killed him.”
“I remember,” I said. “It was awful.”
“I believe them when they say he was reaching into his jacket. Ulises was probably reaching for his wallet. They were in street clothes, in a bad neighborhood, at two in the morning, pointing guns at him. Ulises probably thought he was being robbed. There was even a newspaper columnist who floated that theory, but the police never lent it any credence at all.”
Oh, yes they did, I thought, just never in public forums. I remembered the days of heated debate that had gone on in locker rooms and shooting ranges, anywhere cops talked among themselves.
“They also suggested, early on, that Ulises had ignored their commands because his English wasn’t good enough. They had to back down from that idea. English was his first language, just like it was mine, and everyone who knew him knew that.” He paused. “Naturally, the review board found no fault with the officers. They went back to work, and a week or so later, I had to move up here.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” Cicero said. “It’s not your fault.”
“ Cicero,” I said, “I probably should tell you something.”
My lie of omission- about being a cop- no longer rested lightly on my shoulders. I looked over at the photos, found the one of a younger Cicero and his brother. There was something lighter in Ulises’s expression. A physician’s seriousness informed Cicero ’s face, even at rest; Ulises looked more easygoing.
“I’m right here,” Cicero said patiently.
Come on, Sarah, it’s not that hard. Three little words: I’m a cop.
Then we both heard it, the muffled shrill sound that was my cell phone ringing in the depths of my shoulder bag. I turned from the photos on the table, shot Cicero an apologetic look, and dug the phone from the bag.
“Sarah?” It was Marlinchen. “I’m sorry to bother you, but-”
“What is it?” I asked, antenna up.
“I think someone’s outside the house. Liam heard noises earlier, when he went out to take a break from studying, and I just heard something outside the bathroom window while I was brushing my teeth. They don’t sound like animal noises to me.”
I could easily have told her to call the police in her area, but noises outside a house weren’t likely to be a top priority, and ten at night wasn’t a peak time for staffing at most smaller departments. The Hennessys would likely get a ten-minute visit, sometime in the next two hours. I couldn’t leave it at that. The Hennessy kids were my responsibility.