No Witness But the Moon Read online

  “Dunno.” Torres gestured to Vega with his soda can. “You’re the cop. Not me.”

  “Father Delgado made Ponce out to be this great guy. Very loyal and family-oriented.”

  “So’s the mafia.” Torres’s phone rang in his pocket. He checked the caller ID. “Listen, Jimmy—I gotta take this call. But if there’s something I can help you on with Ponce, just let me know. I’ll drive you to the church as soon as I get off the phone.”

  Torres excused himself. Vega wandered up to the front of the laundromat in search of a garbage for his empty can.

  “Here. I’ll take that,” said Carmela. Vega handed it to her. “The five cent deposits add up.”

  “Sure thing.” Vega noticed that Carmela was reading a Spanish-language fan magazine with an inset picture of Ricardo Luis on the cover. Vega’s stomach turned flips just seeing that Mexican heartthrob grinning back at him. He turned away from the counter and his eye caught a security camera pointed at the front door. It was a standard-issue, hardwired camera, not unlike the ones Vega saw in all the bodegas. Not unlike the one in his mother’s building that hadn’t been working on the night she was murdered.

  “You ever get any problems with those cameras?” Vega asked Carmela.

  She looked up from her magazine. “Problems?”

  “Yeah, you know. Loose wires? The thing doesn’t record? The DVD is just blank.”

  “No,” she looked at him suspiciously.

  “I’m not asking in order to rob the place. I’m thinking of purchasing one of those cameras for myself,” he lied. “I’ve heard the wires can get loose.”

  “I don’t know. It never happened to me. Besides, a loose wire just means the thing’s not recording new stuff. It won’t make the DVD blank. Whatever was last recorded on it will still be there.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes. Of course. That’s what happens when there’s a power failure and I don’t remember to change the battery backup.”

  “Huh.” Vega thought back to Brennan’s notes. He hadn’t written that the security camera had failed to record the night’s events. He’d written that the DVD was blank. There was nothing on it.

  Someone had replaced the used DVD on the night of his mother’s murder with a blank one. Someone with access to the security camera. Someone with an extra seventeen minutes of time before he dialed Father Delgado or 911.

  Hector Ponce.

  Chapter 14

  The doorbell rang just as Adele was trying to zip up her blue silk dress, the one the saleswoman had referred to as “form-fitting.” Adele wondered what form she was referring to. She was already late for Ricardo Luis’s party. She didn’t need any further complications. She tugged on the zipper, raced down the stairs, and shooed Diablo back from the door. The frame was warped. The door gave way all at once.

  Adele’s heart froze.

  “Please excuse me, señora.”

  Marcela Salinez was standing on Adele’s front porch in an oversized jacket with the hood bound so tight around her face that only her eyes and nose poked through.

  “Marcela.” It took all of Adele’s energy just to say her name. Sweat gathered under the armpits of her shrink-wrapped dress. She blushed with a deep shame as if she had pulled the trigger last night. She opened the front door wider and hugged Marcela tightly. The coat was ice-cold to the touch and so soft; it felt like hugging snow. Marcela had obviously walked all the way from her house on the western edge of town.

  “I am so sorry for your loss,” Adele said in Spanish. Her words sounded weak and pathetic the moment they left her lips.

  “Thank you,” Marcela said woodenly. Adele beckoned her inside. She could feel Marcela’s eyes taking in the shimmery festiveness of her dress. “You are going out.” It sounded like an accusation.

  “It’s just a business function for La Casa.”

  “I really need to speak to you. Maybe just for a few minutes?”

  “I’d love to, Marcela. Believe me, I would. But I can’t talk about the—situation.” Adele glanced up the stairs where Sophia was about to get into the shower. “She doesn’t know,” Adele whispered.

  “I’m not here to talk about my father, señora.”

  Señora. Adele felt the full force of the word, the polite and stilted boundary it erected between them. Adele’s own parents were undocumented immigrants from Ecuador. Adele did not see a divide between her and the people she worked with at La Casa. But they did. The honorific, which Adele had shrugged off as simple “good manners,” now brought a dull ache of understanding to her heart. There was a chasm between her and Marcela that could never be breached, not even with the best of intentions.

  Adele gave Marcela a pained look. “I grieve for you, Marcela. If there was something I could do right now, I would. But I’m already running late and I still have to take Sophia to her friend’s house.”

  “It’s about my daughter, señora. She’s in danger.”

  “Yovanna?” Adele frowned. “But she’s here now. She’s safe.” It was a miracle the child had made it at all. Adele heard so many terrible stories from clients. If a person was lucky enough to make it out of the cesspool of violence that was Central America these days, they faced rape, robberies, and beatings on the journey north through Mexico—assuming the Mexican authorities didn’t deport them first. At the Texas border (that’s where they almost always crossed), if they weren’t detained by U.S. immigration, smugglers often packed them thirty to a room in safe houses and held them for ransom.

  Every moment of the 2000-mile journey was frightening and perilous. But here? In suburban Lake Holly? This was where they could finally begin to decompress and deal with the longer-term problems of being undocumented, uneducated, and non-English speaking in a country that wanted to deport them. Stressful? Absolutely. But far less dire than what they’d already endured.

  “By danger—do you mean from the immigration authorities?” asked Adele.

  Marcela started to cry. In the nine years Adele had known her, she’d only see Marcela cry once: the day she got word that her brother Reimundo had been shot and killed in San Pedro Sula by a fourteen-year-old gang member on a bicycle. Adele put her arm around her.

  “It’s okay. Come. We can talk for a few minutes. At least until Sophia gets out of the shower.”

  In the kitchen, Adele got Marcela a box of tissues. She offered to make coffee but Marcela declined.

  “I am fine. Thank you.” Marcela perched herself on the corner of one of the kitchen chairs and blotted her tears. Adele took a seat across from her. There was a heaviness in Marcela that Adele had never seen before. Her shoulders looked weighted down. Her hair, dyed auburn for the fall, was growing out at the roots. She usually wore makeup, but not tonight. Her eyes carried an intensity that didn’t need any embellishment.

  “I need to borrow eight thousand dollars.”

  The words sprang from Marcela’s lips so suddenly, Adele wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.

  “Eight thousand dollars?” Adele repeated. “Dios mío, why?”

  Marcela shook her head. “I can’t say. Not to you. Not to anyone. But I promise you, I will pay you back. If it takes the rest of my life. If it takes the rest of my children’s lives—”

  “Does this have anything to do with why your father was at Ricardo Luis’s house?”

  “My father was not a thief!”

  “I didn’t say he was.” Adele put a hand on her arm. “But you have to tell me what’s going on. Is someone threatening you? Threatening Yovanna?”

  It was a smuggler, Adele decided. It had to be. Yovanna had been in Lake Holly—what? A week? After probably a five- or six-week journey from Honduras. That sort of trip didn’t come cheap. And now the smuggler was demanding repayment.

  No. That didn’t make sense, thought Adele. Smugglers always got paid up front. They disappeared as soon as a deal was completed—often before. This wasn’t money to pay for the journey. It was money to pay someone back for the
journey. That sort of borrowing only comes from two places: family and loan sharks. If Marcela was coming to her, then it wasn’t to pay back family—unless family was the reason she was in this mess in the first place.

  “Marcela, did your father borrow money from someone that he couldn’t pay back?”

  “Please, señora. There is nothing you can ask that will help me. It will only cause more trouble.”

  “Have you spoken to the police?”

  “After what they just did to my father?”

  Adele had a sudden panicked thought: was it possible that Marcela had no idea Vega was the man who shot her father? Adele didn’t want to be the one to tell her. She didn’t want to leave something like that unspoken, either.

  “Marcela,” she began slowly. “You do know—that is—the police officer who confronted your father—” Adele still had a hard time saying “shot” or “killed.”

  “I know about el detective, señora. I know what he did.”

  Marcela held Adele’s gaze. Her eyes were hard. She had always been timid before this but anger had sharpened her resolve. “Now you understand how hard this is for me to come to you. But you are my only hope. I need to repay this money my father borrowed, or this man—he will kill my daughter.”

  “How did he contact you? By phone? The police can run a trace.”

  “They will never find him,” said Marcela. “These sorts of people, they have a way . . .” Her voice died in her throat.

  “Maybe in Honduras, that’s true,” said Adele. “But this man is probably here. In the United States. I’m sure the police—”

  “Can do nothing!” Marcela shook her head. “It doesn’t matter if he’s in Honduras or Lake Holly or anywhere in between. If he loaned my father money, then he has the power to make my family pay. You cannot fight a man like that. You can only pay him or worse things will happen.”

  Adele got up from her chair and paced the kitchen floor. “Marcela—you’re not seriously asking me to give you eight thousand dollars, are you? I don’t have that sort of cash just lying around. I’m a single working mother.”

  “But you have important friends and donors. They do.”

  “Do you realize what you’re asking? You’re asking me to approach law-abiding citizens and prominent people in the community and ask them to contribute funds to pay off some gangster to aid in the smuggling of an undocumented—”

  “But she’s already here in Lake Holly. You aren’t smuggling her anywhere.”

  “As far as the United States government is concerned, I’m engaged in facilitating the funding of an illegal enterprise involving the transport of an undocumented minor. That’s a felony, Marcela. It doesn’t matter whether I stick her in my car and drive her over the border or pay off someone who already got her here.”

  “But you’d only be doing it to help me. Not for profit.”

  “Which means I’d get five years in prison, not ten. That’s the only difference.”

  “You could say you gave me money to go to school. You had no idea what I was using it for.”

  “That would be a lie. Under oath, that would be perjury. I could be disbarred as a lawyer. I could go to jail and lose custody of my own daughter. Not to mention the fact that I’d be drummed out of La Casa and the entire immigrant services community for asking such a thing of others. There are people in this country who already believe that the humanitarian work we do should be illegal. How would it look if I do something that really is?”

  “But I wouldn’t tell anyone. Please, señora. She’s my daughter. And this man—he will kill her if he doesn’t get his money. He gave me a week. A week! I have no other way to raise eight thousand dollars in a week.”

  “Does Byron know?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  Adele stopped pacing and braced her hands on her kitchen sink. She kept her back to Marcela and looked out her kitchen window, past Sophia’s pinch pots and clay turtles that lined the sill. The refrigerator was covered in Sophia’s drawings of unicorns and rainbows. Adele couldn’t imagine a time when she wasn’t a mother, when Sophia wasn’t the center of her universe. If she were in Marcela’s shoes, she would do whatever she had to to make sure her daughter was safe. How could she ask Marcela to do less?

  “Let me call Detective Vega—”

  “No!”

  “He did a terrible thing, Marcela. I understand that you are furious with him. But he would try to help you now. I know he would. He would put you in touch with the right people at the very least.”

  Marcela leaned forward. Her eyes were dark and sober. “If you were me, after what happened, would you trust such a man with your daughter’s life?”

  I don’t even know what happened, Adele wanted to say. That was the worst part. The not knowing. No, scratch that. The worst part was that Vega did know—and he wouldn’t tell her. Was he holding back in some rigid adherence to duty? Or because he’d done something too terrible to admit, even to her?

  He couldn’t have.

  He wouldn’t have.

  But we’re all capable of the couldn’ts, Adele knew. They’re often only a second of indiscretion away from our coulds.

  The shower knobs squeaked off upstairs. The water stopped rushing through the pipes. “Mom!” Sophia called out.

  “Be right there, Sophia!” Adele reached for Marcela’s hand. “I understand your concerns—”

  Marcela yanked her hand away. “No, you don’t, señora. With all due respect, you cannot. Your daughter is safe upstairs. She hasn’t spent the last ten years with a picture of you taped to her wall so she remembers what you look like. She didn’t just survive a trip that no child should ever have to make only to die here because her family can’t repay a loan. Do you know what she has endured already? She cries every night. I’m afraid to ask her about it. What can I say to make it better? All I can do is make her safe now. That’s what I’m trying to do, señora: make her safe. If she was your daughter, wouldn’t you do the same?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Then you’ll help me get the money?”

  “Mom!” called Sophia again.

  “Let me think about what to do.”

  Chapter 15

  “So you’re sure you’ll be okay by yourself?” asked Joy as she finger-combed her long dark hair and checked her eyeliner in the reflection on the stove.

  “I’m okay, chispita. Really. It’s a Saturday night. You’re a young girl. Go out with your friends. And then go back to your mother’s place.” Vega began hefting Joy’s suitcase down the stairs before she could voice any protest.

  “I can’t believe you’re throwing me out.”

  “I’m not throwing you out. I love when you visit. But it’s not practical for you to be so far from school and friends.” And not safe either, Vega decided. He’d been so consumed with grief last night and earlier today that he couldn’t process his actions. But driving back from the Bronx this afternoon after his frightening encounter, he’d begun to take stock of his situation and the toll it could exact on the people he loved. Anyone associated with him was at risk—emotionally and, God forbid, physically.

  “I’ll make it up to you this summer,” said Vega. “You can stay all summer if you want.” He wondered if he were being overly optimistic to presume that by summer things would be better. He tried to imagine warmth and green but everything outside and inside of him felt cold and dead.

  Joy hesitated by the front door. “So I spoke to Danielle today.”

  “Who?”

  “Danielle Camino? My friend at Fordham? She said I could take the train down and visit the campus tomorrow.”

  Vega dropped her suitcase at his feet. “You want to go back to the Bronx? Tomorrow? Are you crazy?”

  “I had fun today—”

  “Look, Joy—”

  “Dr. Torres said after I finished up at Fordham tomorrow, he’d give me a tour of his school and talk to me about what it takes to become a teacher—”

 
“No!”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? Because you’re still fixated on me becoming a doctor?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that—I don’t like you wandering around the Bronx.”

  “I’ll be fine. You worry too much.”

  He picked up her suitcase and carried it out to the trunk of her Volvo. She kissed him on the cheek. He wagged a finger at her.

  “Keep a close eye on your surroundings. Don’t travel alone. And whatever you do, don’t tell anyone you’re related to me.”

  “Roger that, Double-O-Seven,” she teased.

  “C’mon, Joy, I’m serious.”

  “Chill, Dad. I’ll be careful—and in the meantime, you need to make an appointment to talk to a therapist.”

  “Mmm.”

  Joy frowned. “That sounds suspiciously like a ‘no.’ ” Then she got into her car and Vega heard the pop and crunch of gravel beneath her tires as she backed out of his driveway. He watched her red taillights fade and then disappear.

  He was alone. Already the sky had darkened, closing like a curtain around his house. He’d always liked his own company before this. But as soon as Joy left, Vega felt jumpy and restless. The normal sounds of the house—the creak of the floorboards, the hum of the refrigerator—all felt magnified and predatory tonight. He stared out the sliding glass doors onto his deck. The world was a solid sheet of black that reflected his face back at him. He looked older and gaunter. He still hadn’t shaved. Could he really have aged in only twenty-four hours?

  Food. He should eat. His stomach felt hollow but he had no appetite. He was afraid to get takeout right now. He was afraid some restaurant worker with a chip on his shoulder would recognize Vega and mess with his food. He searched the refrigerator for something that appealed to him but it was filled with Joy’s gluten-free, vegan crap. Tofu. Organic beets. Soy burgers. Kale. In the freezer, he found a frozen Stouffer’s Lasagna covered in ice crystals. He stuck it in the microwave then popped open a beer and drained it too quickly, feeling the slight buzz on an empty stomach.

  Joy had left his mother’s photo albums open on the dining table. Vega began to close them and return them to their carton. One day, he’d put all these prints onto discs. There had to be hundreds of shots here. Weddings and christenings in the Bronx and Puerto Rico. He had dozens of relatives but they lived mainly in pictures scattered all over his mother’s apartment as a child, following Vega around like ghosts who didn’t age or did so only in giant leaps between mailings. His mother and grandmother, Abuelita Dolores, always had one foot here and one foot back on the island. Their gossip was just as likely to do with a cousin’s neighbor back in their mountain town of Barranquitas as it was one down the hall.