“There was no evidence of the girl or baby in the building where it happened,” he told me after the preamble about how he shouldn’t be telling me this information, that it is still an ongoing investigation, etc. He was probably doing it for the recording machines at police headquarters. “And no evidence of her being at the victim’s condo,” he preempted my question.
“What’s the collective view on the kidnapping?”
“There’s some disagreement. Most think she and the Portillo boy were in on it all along, that it was some sort of blackmailing scheme. What they had on the old man no one is really sure. A minority think they were just two dumb kids duped into participating. In both scenarios we think she and the baby are dead. That’s the one area where everyone agrees.”
I thought that through but something didn’t fit.
“You don’t like it,” he stated.
“I am not sure I know enough to like or not like it,” I told him. “But it doesn’t seem right.”
“Not everything ties up into a nice little bow, you know.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, as unappealing as those words were.
“Are you done?” he asked.
“I can’t think of any other questions.”
“No, are you done with the whole thing?” I didn’t know how to answer him. It felt like there was more to do. My internal deliberation gave him his answer. “I didn’t think you would be. This will fall on deaf ears, but don’t be an idiot.”
“I’ll try not to,” I laughed.
“Seriously, don’t be an idiot.”
“That’s sound advice, Detective.”
“Make sure you take it.”
A FAMILIAR SOUND
This time I came prepared.
I parked my car in an open spot fifty yards or so from the house. I brought food and water to last for some indeterminate length of time, enough backlogged newspapers to occupy my mind, and a blanket and pillow, but I didn’t end up using the latter. For a day and a half I stewed in my car in the merciless heat and picked at the flaw in the consensus thinking around the blackmailing scheme. If Jeanette and Nelson were complicit, wittingly or unwittingly, why would she be the only one who had to lose her life?
In the time outside his house, I never saw Nelson but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of activity. It mostly revolved around Nelson’s brother, often accompanied by his grandmother but sometimes alone, coming and going from the house on an endless stream of errands, most of the time returning with arms laden with giant shopping bags of unknown contents.
Things settled down in the evening. The lights burned behind the curtains for so long that I thought no one ever turned them off. They eventually went dark sometime after midnight and stayed dark until a brief moment in the early hours when a light from somewhere deep in the house clicked on. The faint yellow spoke of insomnia or thirst or something else. It didn’t last long and the house remained dark for the rest of the night.
I never went to sleep. I turned the car on once or twice to pump some heat into the cabin and to activate the wipers to clear the collection of dew from the front windshield. The city was remarkably still in those few hours before sunrise. A beautiful sun eventually inched its way in between the houses and lit up the side of my face. The wonderfully sad pink of an early Sunday morning befell the neighborhood.
I watched the abuelita waddle out in a floral print dress and fake pearls and purse heavy with the words of God. Her son, reluctantly “dressed up” in black slacks and a white t-shirt, trailed behind her at a distance that conveyed a preference for doing something else with his free morning. I checked my watch — quarter to nine. Fifteen minutes until the service began. I placed a quick call, gave it a few minutes in case they returned home for some forgotten donation envelope, then got out of my car and pushed my stiff legs to the front door of the house.
My knock rattled the metal door like tin plates used to scare crows out of a cornfield. I didn’t think Nelson would run but the delay in answering the door led me to doubt that assumption. Just as I was about to loop around the back, the door opened and the kid stood there looking disheveled and sleepy-eyed. He still had his pajamas on. I gently brushed past him before he mustered up any form of defiance. There was an unmistakable smell lingering in the air, something sour. I helped myself to the couch with the overworked springs. Nelson remained by the door, his hand still on the knob.
“Hey, what are you doing?” he started three seconds too late because I was already seated and had no intention of leaving. “You can’t come in here. You’ll wake everyone up.”
“They already left for church,” I told him.
“Oh,” he said, looking around like someone trying to get their bearings.
“Why don’t you sit down,” I instructed. “I have a couple of questions for you.”
“I already talked to the police.”
He came and sat opposite me anyway.
“I know. I want you to talk to me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I asked you to.” I spied one of the shopping bags in the corner. “What’s all that?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, looking annoyed.
“Mind if I take a look?” I had no intention of getting up, but Nelson did and made a move to intercept me. It was the fastest I had ever seen him move. “Must be something important.”
“What do you want?” he asked. He was getting his legs under him and stood over me in as threatening a pose as he could probably ever muster.
“Can you tell her to come out, please?”
“What?”
“Come on, kid, stop screwing around and tell her to come out here so we can all talk.”
“She’s not even here,” he tried. “I don’t know where she is.”
“It’s okay,” said a soft voice.
Jeanette stood at the edge of the hallway. She wore a nightgown that looked borrowed from an old woman and probably was. Her hair was loosely pulled together in a band and rested limply on her shoulder. Her eyes were heavy from interrupted sleep and spoke of a mother’s weariness. Even her voice, made deeper from having just awoken, added a few years to her.
“You’re the man working for my grandfather?”
She was the only one who questioned my temporary job whose gaze didn’t include a judgment with it.
“Right now, I work for a faceless corporation. But yes, your grandfather hired me to find you.”
“You found me,” she smiled. “Now what?”
“Let’s talk about it.”
Jeanette joined Nelson on the couch. He took her hand in his to offer up support but it was clear in the gesture and in the way she sat there that she was the one providing the support to him.
“So, tell me the plan.”
Neither wanted to start but it was clear by their shared look that they had thought something out in fairly deep detail. It took some coaxing by me to get it out of them. Jeanette eventually took the helm and explained their next move and that’s when youth finally revealed itself in all its glorious stupidity.
They had some vague plan involving a cousin in Mexico and fifty grand they thought they were going to get to live off but didn’t. They made it sound a hundred times that because, as they reminded me numerous times, “everything is super cheap in Mexico.” Nelson had relatives to help with the baby and they could work and live some simple life and get away from the “meanness of people” in our city. Apparently, only happy, caring people lived south of the border. I let them blabber on because there was something charming about their irrational hope and the total conviction in which they expressed it. They were just a couple of knuckleheads too delusional to see the inanity of a “plan” that didn’t deserve that name.