Lonesome Point (6 page)

She’d say it wasn’t what he said, it was how he acted. And how was that? With this freaking, insufferable sense of entitlement, she’d say. As if somehow he’d achieved everything by his hard work and intelligence and not because he’d been lucky enough to be born into the right family and lucky enough to marry a woman like her. Modesty wasn’t one of Celina’s traits.

Then they’d get into this whole am-I-a-good-spouse argument that always led nowhere. Hell, he
was
a good husband. Tried to be, every single day. At least he wasn’t like Leo, who did everything to avoid responsibilities like marriage and a career, including remaining a teenager deep into his twenties. Look where that got him. Working a menial job, living hand to mouth at age thirty-two. What kind of father was he going to make?

Leo had caused their parents enough grief to last two genera
tions. Suspended from high school twice; arrested for marijuana possession back in Belize; dropped out of college; then his testifying about that assault on the drug dealers, which Patrick had never divulged to their parents. Leo’s inability to stay under the radar had been a disappointment to the old man, who had built a lucrative under-the-table business over several years without a hint of a criminal record.

As for himself—Patrick thought he was a good father: attentive, affectionate, like their father had been before business consumed his life. And Patrick was certainly a better husband. Patrick had never cheated on Celina.

And Leo? Had he ever been faithful to anyone he dated before breaking their hearts? His fiancée had a disappointing marriage ahead, only she didn’t know that yet. Patrick was positive that Celina, way back, had sensed that Leo would amount to nothing, which was why she had ended it with him. For crying out loud, the man wasn’t even faithful to himself because he hardly knew himself, he was a moving target.

Patrick rose with his cell phone and walked away from the pool and the house, toward the seawall. The lights of downtown Miami high-rises glinted from across the water. They said to him: Enjoy the view, but keep your distance. Admire the beauty, but remain clean. So far he was listening. Trying real hard to keep his name unsullied. He scrolled through the numbers on the cell and found the one he needed.

He glanced back at the house, lights on in the living room, kitchen, kids’ rooms. Cassie probably lying on her side in bed yapping on the phone, schoolbooks she hadn’t cracked strewn amid magazines like
Seventeen
and
CosmoGirl.
Ethan probably
doodling in his notebook, trying to avoid deciphering math problems on his own, preferring to wait for Patrick to explain.

It struck Patrick, as it had before, standing there about to make a private phone call, that maybe he was more like his father than he was willing to admit. Ivan Varela would sometimes disappear down in the yard to discuss business. This was back in the eighties, early nineties, and he’d take out one of those old brick-looking analog cell phones and talk standing by the fence, admiring the view of the harbor.

But no, Patrick was decidedly
not
like his father. He’d discovered that years ago.

P
ATRICK MADE THE BIGGEST DISCOVERY of his life when he was twenty, back home from college on spring break. He walked into the kitchen one morning and saw his mother stirring cake batter, crying quietly. She was not an emotional woman, so this alarmed him. He asked her what was the matter.

She wouldn’t say, averting her eyes and telling him to just leave her be a minute.

He hovered, knowing it had to be something about Leo. What had he done this time? Her mother said it wasn’t him. Patrick refused to leave the room, he and his mother had this bond.

“It’s your father,” she finally said to him.

“Is he okay? Did something happen?”

She poured the cake mix into a pan. She tilted the pan to level the mix. Put the mixing bowl into the sink. Wiped her hands on a dish towel.

“Mom?”

“He’s okay. He may have lost his mind, but he’s okay.”

Patrick didn’t know what to say. He’d never seen his mother acting so weird. He watched her turn on the oven to preheat. He moved out of the way when she said excuse me, please, and reached around him for the sponge by the sink. She started washing the mixing bowl, her back to him.

“Mom. Please tell me what’s going on.”

“It doesn’t concern you, Patrick. It’s your father I should be talking to, not you.”

“Mom, I’m twenty years old. I think I deserve to know when I see you behaving like this. What did Dad do?”

She finished washing, stacked the bowl in the dish rack. She put the cake in the oven, turned on the timer, and sponged the countertops clean. Patrick simply refused to leave the room. When she started talking, she was still bustling about the kitchen: folding dish towels, pulling a chicken out of the freezer to thaw in the sink. “Your father has a very short memory, it appears.”

“Explain, please.”

“I will say about as much as I need to. This is still a matter for him and me, so don’t
explain please
me. Now, if I’m not happy at the moment, it’s because I sense that my home is threatened. Your father has lost sight of what makes us a family. He’s doing things that are highly upsetting. He knows there’re some people who resent his standing and what he’s achieved with his business, so you’d expect him to be more prudent. But another thing he’s lost is his respect for this family, it seems that way to me, and should he continue, oh, I pray and hope he doesn’t lose us.”

“Mom, I don’t under—”

“Shh. Your father, Patrick, is a loving, fine man who has deep flaws. No different from lots of people. But he’s also a man of certain appetites that I can’t satisfy and I’ll never be able to.” She rearranged pots in a high cabinet with a clatter. “I’m not saying any more about this. But I want you to know, I’ve never felt …” Her eyes welled up. “I’ve never felt so alone in my marriage.” She turned to the sink and poured water over the frozen chicken. “What’s been happening has been going on for a while.
It’s becoming disrespectful and I won’t put up with it, I simply won’t. But it’s between him and me, it’s something we’ll do our best to resolve. I’m being honest with you, dear. You saw me upset, so I’m telling you this, but I won’t say any more for the time being.”

Patrick kissed his mother on the neck and walked out of the room. He sat on the front steps and wondered awhile before he got up and walked to his friend Fonso’s house.

IT WAS around six P.M., a Friday. People were getting off work, driving faster than usual, streets crowded.

Workmen waited at the bus stop at the beginning of the Northern for the bus to take them home to the districts. Bicyclists flowed into the spaces between cars and pedestrians.

Patrick headed up the Northern in Fonso’s old pickup. He pulled into the parking lot of a dingy Chinese restaurant across the road from his father’s place. He parked behind an SUV so that he was partially hidden but could still see the glass building, lights on in his father’s third-floor corner office. The BMW was parked in the front lot behind closed gates.

Patrick bought a Fanta from the restaurant and drank it in the truck as night came on. Around seven-thirty, the office lights went out, and some minutes later his father emerged from the building, briefcase in hand.

Patrick followed the BMW into the city, staying well back, allowing a car or two to get between them. He tried to keep his mind blank. Not wishing for any unpleasant revelation yet expecting it, even more so when his father turned right at the roundabout instead of circling around toward home.

Where was he going? Patrick didn’t know of any business dealings his father had in southside Belize City.

They drove over the Belcan Bridge and down Central American Boulevard, the uneven road jostling Patrick. His father turned right onto a narrow street, entering a rough area that Patrick usually avoided and where—as far as he knew—none of his father’s business associates lived. Workers, maybe, but not associates. His father hung another right, a narrow dirt street that ran past stilt houses in yards choked with weeds, shanty shops here and there, tires and other debris streetside. Patrick maintained a fifty-yard distance from the BMW. There were only a few other cars on the street, everybody creeping around the potholes.

Another right, past shacks and empty lots, and Patrick was lost.

The dirt road stretched ahead in the night. Only he and his father on the road, dust billowing on both sides. Patrick focused on the taillights.

When the brake lights flashed, he inhaled deeply and his mind started spinning.

How did he know he was about to see something he didn’t want to, that would change his life? He just knew. This was a knot in his heart that needed to be untangled.

He parked far away from the concrete, tin-roofed house where his father had stopped. He watched him get out of the car, open a wrought-iron gate, and enter the yard. In the driveway was a car Patrick recognized, the Reverend’s silver Jaguar. But this wasn’t the Reverend’s house.

Patrick stepped out onto the road, darkness all around, toads
bleating in the bushes. There were no other homes nearby and a single streetlight shone where the road dead-ended up ahead.

He watched his father climb the stairs. The front porch light was on. A screen door opened and a young man Patrick had never seen before greeted his father. The young man put a hand on his father’s arm, they embraced. They went inside, the screen door slapped shut, and a wooden door closed after that.

Patrick sat in the car with the windows down. Music and men’s laughter filtered into the street. Lights in one part of the house blinked off, and a light in a bedroom window came on.

Five minutes later, the bedroom lights were out, the entire house in darkness, with Patrick watching it, alone with his fears.

C
ELL PHONE IN HAND, Patrick gazed at the lights of the downtown high-rises. No way was he like his father. He knew how to separate business from pleasure. How to detect false friends. When it was time to cut someone from your life. Where to find information so as to prevent rude surprises. He dialed and put the cell phone to his ear.

The old Cuban’s voice came on the line. “Good evening, Patrick.”

“Cómo estás, Oscar?”

“Very fine, considering the alternatives.”

“I’d like to discuss something that I found out this evening. Have a minute?”

Oscar said he did. Then, “But what kind of business is it?”

Patrick cleared his throat. “It’s that kind of business.”

“I thought as much. Give me a second, I’ll call you back.”

A minute later, Patrick’s cell chirped.

Oscar said, “Sorry, but one can never be too cautious. What can I do for you this evening, my friend? I’m staring at a Bolívar on my desk that’s begging me to wrap my lips around her, so please let’s make this quick, or failing that, interesting; you think you’ll do that?”

“A fellow by the name of Freddy Robinson paid my brother a visit yesterday at his work, Jefferson Memorial psych ward. It
concerns a patient there. Somebody wants him out, wants my brother to let him out. If not, they, whoever these people are, are threatening to spill something about my past in Belize. Which I can’t go into right now, but that’s the situation. Needless to say, I’m troubled by this and I can’t just let it lie. I need to know what’s going on, who’s behind this. What I need, actually, is for Freddy Robinson to go away.”

Oscar breathed heavily into the phone. Patrick could picture him in his home office, the dark cherrywood chair and desk, a crystal ashtray, cigar cutter, and humidor on the desk next to a stack of manila folders of “paperwork”—Oscar’s name for it—of his diverse dealings with businessmen and politicos, detailed reports of meetings and conversations, all of it a record of his association with Miami’s movers and shakers and would-be leaders. Patrick heard the click of the lighter and lip-smacking as Oscar fired up the Bolívar.

After a slow exhale, Oscar said, “Freddy Robinson. Where have I heard that name before?”

“He’s the guy from Belize who I defended years ago, an aggravated battery case. He went to prison. Before that he worked off and on for our mutual friend, the late Alejandro Parra.”

“Oh? I don’t remember him.”

“You remember the Hialeah car-dumping scandal? Involved about a couple dozen cars bought from Parra’s son’s dealership. They were reported stolen and the owners all received insurance claim payments. But what investigators came to find out, young Bobby Parra was in money trouble so had hired this fellow, Freddy Robinson, to strip the cars, sell the parts to salvage yards, and Bobby, Freddy Robinson and the car owners split all
the money from the insurance and car parts. You remember that?”

“Ah, yes, it’s coming to me. A stupid little business. But nobody was convicted for it, if I recall. So this Robinson is something of a small-timer?”

“That he is. But now he’s working for somebody else. Can’t be Bobby Parra because he’s in prison for racketeering. I hate to bother you about this, but I thought you might know, seeing as how Robinson once worked for Alejandro.” Patrick could hear Oscar sucking on the cigar.

“You hate to bother me? Don’t lie. You relish it because you’re a nervous man and you know I’ll calm your troubled mind. Too bad you can’t trust me enough to tell me the nature of this bad news that Robinson claims to know about you.”