Mission Road (22 page)

He was almost at her car door, intolerably close, before she got out to meet him.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Who’s in the car, Frankie?”

He glared at her as if she were a traffic signal—some annoying mechanism of society. He probably didn’t remember or care that they’d met before, that she’d warned him to stay away from her beat. Why should he? He’d been dealing with cops for years. They all called him by his first name. He was like their goddamn foster child.

“Nobody’s in the car,” he said. “I’m alone.”

Lucia glanced at the tinted windows of the Mercedes. She couldn’t see anyone inside, but back on South Alamo, when she’d first spotted him, she thought she saw a silhouette in his passenger’s seat—a young woman. When Frankie had turned on Mission Road, she’d had no choice but to follow.

“You don’t mind if I check it out.” She started forward.

He surprised her by grabbing her forearm. She yanked it away, felt his fingernails rip into her skin.

“Back off.”
Her heart was pounding. “Kneel on the ground.
Now.
”

“Go away, lady,” Frankie told her, not moving. “Get out of here while you still can.”

“You threatening me? A police officer?”

His eyes were icy with rage. “The police are a fucking joke. You couldn’t arrest my father. What makes you think you can touch me?”

He pushed her shoulders, hard enough to send her staggering backward a few steps.

She drew her nightstick.

“Stop.”
Her voice sounded shrill, even to herself.

She knew she should follow procedure. She had a violent subject. She should call for backup. She should not be arguing with him.

But her training was dissolving—the heavy blue thread she’d used to stitch her life together was swiftly coming unraveled. She was nineteen again—a young girl being shown that her power was nothing but an illusion.

“Get on the ground,” she ordered. She heard the wobble in her voice and hated it.

“Fuck you.”

“Do it, Frankie.”

“
You
get on the ground, bitch.”

Lucia’s arm was bleeding. He’d broken the skin.

So much like his father, yet the anger in his eyes was more volatile—more like what Lucia saw when she looked in the mirror, when she thought about Mission Road.

You couldn’t arrest my father.

Frankie turned. He started back toward his car.

He would drive away, leave her standing there. She was meaningless to him. The years with the badge, the years building herself back up from a thousand shattered pieces, they meant nothing.

She was a girl again, abandoned in a cold ditch, her back snagged on a line of barbed wire, the orange moon glowing above her through the naked branches. Another man was walking away—a man in a beige suit who had just crushed her soul like a balsa wood toy.

Later, she would not remember raising the nightstick, but she felt the crack of wood against bone reverberate in her fingers. Franklin White crumpled.

Her rage left her. Years of police officer composure shed off her like winter clothes. She was alone, horrified.

Afterward, talking to Etch, she would realize how many mistakes she’d made. She would try to piece together what really happened and wonder if she was going crazy. Had she only hit him once? Hadn’t she left the murder weapon with her fingerprints on the handle?

At the time, she had no thought but getting away, running from that place.

She dropped the bloodied nightstick and fled.

THE STATE OF TEXAS LET ME KEEP MY PI LICENSE.

My less-than-heartening conclusion: They looked at how many times it had almost gotten me killed and decided that letting me keep my job was the best possible punishment.

As for Guy White, his only punishment was living his final months under his daughter’s care. Madeleine got him a private nurse, allowed no visitors without her permission. The fire damage Ralph and I caused to the White house was not that extensive, but Madeleine announced that the mock-presidential mansion which had been the symbol of her family’s power for a generation would be razed by New Year’s. She would rebuild to better suit her tastes.

A new police lieutenant was shuffled into Etch Hernandez’s homicide position, but Detective Kelsey became the true power in the department. He moved into Ana’s office. Word was he’d make sergeant by the end of the month. Given that the department had few options for positive publicity, they were using Kelsey as a hero—proof that the SAPD would not tolerate wrongdoing within its ranks, even if it meant busting a superior officer.

The real support of the rank and file went to Ana DeLeon. A cruiser was almost always parked in front of her house—some colleague, making sure she and the baby were okay. Gift baskets, home-cooked dinners, offers for baby-sitting poured in. The police fraternal organization set up a college scholarship fund for Lucia Jr.

Once, and only once, Johnny Zapata sent his lackey Ignacio around to talk to Ana, to see if she would sell off Ralph’s pawnshops. Within forty-eight hours, the SAPD had found reasons to shut down all of Zapata’s front businesses. Ignacio was tossed in jail on several outstanding warrants. Madeleine White personally visited Zapata’s mother at Mission San José to let her know that her son was bothering a defenseless widow who happened to be a close friend of the White family.

Johnny Shoes got the message. Ana never heard from him again.

As for Ralph’s legacy, nobody, even the cops, had a negative word to say about him. He’d given his life to stop the man who shot his wife. He was a hero. Who had ever doubted that Ana’s marriage to him had been the right choice?

I kept waiting for the shock to wear off. I kept busy, took new clients, spent a lot of time with Maia. I knew the pain was somewhere inside, waiting to rip me apart, but my heart felt like it had been given a shot of morphine.

I drove past Ralph’s old childhood home, now occupied by another enormous family. I brought marigolds to San Fernando Cemetery, where Ralph’s simple gray tombstone stood next to his mother’s, near a spot where we’d once had lunch during
Día de los Muertos.
I visited Sunken Gardens, the Blanco Café, the stadium at Alamo Heights High School—all the places that had defined our friendship. I kept remembering Ralph’s irreverent grin, his wisecracks, the way he treated the world as a dangerous toy.

And every day I talked to Ana DeLeon, until eventually I got up my nerve to ask her advice about a problem.

•                           •                           •

CHRISTMAS EVENING, I PUT TISH HINOJOSA’S
“Arbolito” on the stereo.

The Southtown house smelled like homemade tamales—a gift from some of our neighbors. I hadn’t had the heart to tell them I could no longer tolerate the smell of steamed venison and
masa
without thinking of Guy White.

Mrs. Loomis, miracle worker that she was, had decorated the house, bought a ten-foot Scotch pine for the living room, and cooked us all turkey dinner.

Sam still had a bandaged ear, but otherwise he seemed in a good mood. He and I had decorated the tree. We’d made
ojos de dios
out of string and Popsicle sticks to keep away evil spirits. I got a bunch of small frames and helped Sam make ornaments with pictures of his relatives. We made one for Ralph, which Sam seemed happy to add to his collection.

Santa Claus brought Robert Johnson a new scratching post, which he sniffed disdainfully. Then he jumped under the wrapping paper and got crazy eyes.

Sam got a bigger-caliber water gun. Mrs. Loomis got a raise and a new set of kitchen knives, since she couldn’t stand to keep the cleaver she’d used on Titus Roe. She protested that I couldn’t afford either luxury.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, and tried to smile confidently.

I told Maia not to open her present yet.

She gave me a funny look, but set the poorly wrapped shoebox aside.

“After dinner,” I said, and gestured with my eyes toward the front porch.

•                           •                           •

WE LEFT MRS. LOOMIS AND SAM
in the living room, drinking spiked eggnog and getting sentimental about Nat King Cole.

Maia, the party pooper, was nursing a mug of herbal tea.

She leaned against the porch rail. “Thirty years in America, and I still don’t get Christmas.”

“You decorate a tree,” I said. “Spend a month shopping for crap nobody wants. Pretend there’s a fat guy in red velvet who flies around the world. What’s to get?”

“Thanks for clearing it up.”

Maia’s unopened present sat next to me on the rail. I tried to get up my nerve to say what I needed to say. “Hey, uh, Maia . . .”

She looked at me hesitantly.

“. . . I know you’re pregnant.”

Her eyes were amber, beautiful and immensely sad.

An electric current arced through my chest.

She folded her hands around her tea mug, looked out at South Alamo Street. In the window seat of the café across the street, an old couple was having dinner, dressed in their church best. They must’ve been eighty-something. They were holding hands.

“How’d you figure it out?” she asked.

“The night at the Whites’ party, you mentioned your mom. I kept thinking about that. And the way you’d been acting. Besides, I’m a detective.”

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes were glistening. “I’m really messed up about it.”

I felt like I’d been ripped out of my own life and placed in someone else’s. I was used to solving family problems for other people. I was used to custody battles, adoptions gone wrong, unfit parents, delinquent kids—all the horrors of parenthood from the outside.

This . . . this was like reading through a mirror. Everything felt backward.

I wondered if Ralph had felt this way when he learned he was going to be a father. I realized I’d never be able to ask him.

Suddenly, the morphine wore off. My best friend was dead. I’d spent the last two years of his life trying to push him away.

You want to understand somebody,
Ralph had once told me,
look at what he’s willing to give up.

I steadied myself against the porch rail.

“Tres?” Maia asked.

“I’m all right.”

She studied my face, knowing damn well I wasn’t all right.

Across the street, the older couple toasted each other with glasses of champagne. Nat King Cole kept singing from the living room.

“I want this baby,” Maia told me. “But it’s dangerous.”

“Better health care,” I managed. “The doctors are good.”

“No. There’s something else. My brother.”

“You don’t have any siblings.”

“Present tense, that’s true. But . . . I did. An older brother. He died at age ten. He never saw a doctor. We couldn’t get good treatment because of who my family was—warlords, landowners, traitors. We didn’t even know what was wrong with him. He was frail, clumsy. He broke bones a lot. Finally his body just . . . quit on him. Since then, since I came to America, I’ve figured out what he had.”

I was silent for a verse of “We Three Kings.” “Muscular dystrophy?”

“I’ve been talking to doctors,” Maia said. “It passes through the mother’s side, even if the mother doesn’t have it. A boy child would have about a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease.”

“And . . . is it a boy?”

“I don’t know yet, Tres. I kind of don’t want to know.”

Maia’s present was still next to me on the porch rail. I stared at the green bow and said nothing.

“You didn’t choose to be a dad, Tres. You’re not obligated to help. Especially not . . .”

She didn’t finish, but I understood:
Especially not after Ralph’s death.

I slid her the present. “Open it.”

She looked at the battered shoebox. One of the many things I’ve never mastered is gift-wrapping. The box looked like it had been packaged by a clumsy, color-blind kindergartner.

Maia set her tea on the railing and opened the box. Inside, wads of tissue paper and a smaller box. Inside that, a still smaller box. This one black velvet.

She opened the hinged lid.

“Corny, I know,” I said. “Ana helped me. She guessed the right size.”

Maia held up the ring like it was critical case evidence. “Tres—”

“I didn’t know about diamonds. The guy said that one was good. I didn’t figure you for a diamond person, but Ana thought it was the right thing. So—”

“Tres—”

“If you think it’s a bad idea . . .” My face felt hot. “I mean, I know it’s weird.”

“You’re proposing to me?”

“You could keep the Austin apartment for business. The house here is huge. I mean . . . I never figured myself for old-fashioned, but the kid needs a dad. I mean, he’s got one, but he
needs
one full-time. So, yeah. I’m proposing. Marriage, I mean.”

“Jesus.”

“Is that a no?”

She threw her arms around me and kissed me hard. The tea hit the porch and went rolling, splattering all over the place. The diamond ring dug into my neck.

When she finally let go I felt dizzy, like I’d just been pulled back from the edge of a cliff.

“That’s a yes, stupid,” she told me. “A very big yes.”

She kissed me again, and I tried to force myself back into my life, but I couldn’t do it. Something had changed. Something huge.

Nat King Cole was playing inside. The air outside was getting colder.

Mrs. Loomis called to us from the front door. She had
atole
for us to try. She and Sam were waiting to play Old Maid. We’d promised them a game.

Maia ran her hands through my hair. “Tres, do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into?”

“None,” I admitted. “Absolutely none.”

“That makes two of us,” she said. “Come on.”

She took my hand and led me inside, where the rest of our makeshift family was waiting.

JULY 14, 1987

WHEN SHE WAS SURE THE POLICEWOMAN
was gone, thirteen-year-old Madeleine White opened the passenger’s door of the Mercedes and got out.

She stared at her brother’s body. A halo of blood glistened around his head. His fingers were curled like claws into the dirt.

She didn’t want to get closer. She wanted to run. But a hot, scratchy rope knotted around her heart, pulling her forward.

She had watched the argument.

Until the end, she’d been more afraid of Frankie than the policewoman. Even now, as he lay motionless on the pavement, Madeleine was certain he’d get up. He was dazed, or faking it. You couldn’t kill Frankie that easily.

She took another step toward him. Rain began to splatter her clothes, soaking into the cheap green cotton of her patient scrubs.

She wanted to be back at the facility. She hated the security guard for springing her from her room, shuffling her without explanation to a service exit where Frankie had been waiting. Frankie had handed him a thick roll of cash, told him,
You didn’t see anything,
then driven away with her.

She wasn’t supposed to leave. The judge had said so. She hadn’t been outside Stokes-McLean in four months.

“I’m going to show you something,” Frankie told her. “I’m going to make you understand.”

He wouldn’t say where they were going. All she knew: This wasn’t the way home.

He took a lazy route through the South Side, past dark fields and clapboard houses, store signs in Spanish, Hispanic men sitting in pools of yellow light outside cantinas. He seemed to be giving her a tour, going slow so she could memorize every storefront, every turn.

She wondered how much he’d heard from her counselors. She’d started talking about him in therapy. She hated him now, for the times he’d hit her, the things he’d said, the nights she’d awakened and found him sitting at the foot of her bed.

She knew now that Frankie had killed those women. She’d even toyed with the idea of talking to the police.

In art class, she’d made a clay sculpture of his face. The counselors said it would make her feel better if she smashed it, to get power over him. Most of the kids were younger than she. They’d all been sexually or physically abused before they did whatever violence got them committed. Their clay images were crude little voodoo dolls which they smashed with enthusiasm. But Madeleine was an artist. She made Frankie’s clay bust with the same care as the blue self-portrait she’d drawn him for Christmas.

The bust looked just like him. Even the counselors said so. But she couldn’t smash it. Every day they would encourage her to do so, but the clay hardened, drying in splotchy white patches like mold.

The counselors must’ve broken confidentiality to warn Frankie. They’d probably taken his money just like that son-of-a-bitch security guard.