by Harper Lin
“Yes, I did. Hablas español?”
I shook my head. “Not really. Pablo was trying to teach me, but I can’t do much more than order a taco.”
He chuckled. “I don’t think that would help you understand most of the speech I gave.”
“No, but by the reactions of the people who did speak Spanish, I could tell it was very moving.” I tipped my head to the side and studied his face again. “I don’t know why I think you look so much more like Pablo today than I did at the funeral.”
He grinned and touched both sides of his face. “I shaved. I used to wear a beard. Now I just have a mustache, like Pablo. So I think of him when I look in the mirror.”
I smiled. It was such a sweet token of remembrance for his brother.
“You want some food?” Isabel asked him. “We are going to eat some of the food Fran brought.”
He shook his head. “I can’t stay. I just need to tell you I set the meeting with the lawyer for tomorrow in the morning.”
A cold look passed over Isabel’s face, and her lips set back into the hard line I’d seen earlier. “Why?” she scoffed. “Nothing can come from it. Pablo had no money. I know this better than the lawyer. If he had money, he would give it to me. For the kids. But there is no money for the kids, so I know Pablo has no money. I don’t need lawyer to tell me what I know. You know too. No money for you either. Both of us, the money he owe us, we say goodbye. There is no money for us. And no money for lawyer either. I will not pay him to tell me what I know. I already pay enough money to bury Pablo. Money for my kids, to have clothes and pay for lessons, I spend it to bury Pablo instead.”
“We need to go to the lawyer, just like the other things we need to do. It’s one of the things we do when a person dies. I think we don’t pay this lawyer though.” Eduardo looked tired, whether from listening to Isabel’s speech or from having to deal with the million little things that have to be taken care of when someone dies, I didn’t know. Maybe it was both. The death of a loved one was hard in more ways than one.
“He works for free, this lawyer? What lawyer works for free?” They were no longer affectionately resting their hands on each other. Now Isabel was standing away from Eduardo with her arms folded across her chest.
“The woman on the phone didn’t say we would owe him. She only said to come in.”
“She will tell us tomorrow. Probably after we talk to him. ‘Too late now. You already talk to him. Now you owe money!’”
The tender-hearted Isabel I’d seen a few minutes before was gone. In her place was an angry woman who was tired of all the million nitpicky little things that had to be done when someone died, most of which you’d never given so much as a passing thought to before. I didn’t blame her though. I was pretty sure I’d snapped at a person or two in the days after my mother’s death. Including the funeral director when he’d persistently insisted that I pick whether to have a singer or just a piano player perform Amazing Grace at the funeral, and not decide by just flipping a coin either. And also my former boss when I gave him my resignation, effective immediately, and he suggested that maybe I could stay on just a little bit longer, at least long enough to deal with a conference call with a new client. On the afternoon of my mother’s funeral. So I couldn’t fault Isabel for getting a little snippy with Eduardo.
“If she says that, I will pay. From my money. You will not have to pay.”
“You should not pay. Pablo should pay. Pablo is the one who owes the money. I should not pay, and you should not pay to have the lawyer tell us there is no money.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. “I know, querida. But we cannot change what we need to do.”
The defiance slowly faded from her face. She nodded.
“I need to go. I will come drive you tomorrow morning.”
She nodded again then hugged him. He turned toward the door.
I wanted to talk to Isabel longer, but I suddenly knew I needed to talk to Eduardo more. “Actually, I need to go too.”
They both turned toward me, looking faintly surprised to see me still standing there. I wondered if they’d forgotten. And if they had, why on earth had they been speaking in English instead of Spanish? I’d assumed it was for my benefit, although why they would want me to know their private family business was beyond me.
“Thank you for coming,” Isabel said.
“Sí, thank you,” Eduardo said.
I tried to ignore the awkwardness. “I’ll just follow you out, Eduardo.”
He nodded, said something quickly in Spanish to Isabel, and walked over to the door. He opened it and held it for me. I stepped outside and, for a moment, was afraid he was going to close the door behind me and stay inside. But he didn’t. After a second, he followed me out and shut the door.
Chapter Sixteen
We walked toward our cars, both parked on the street, and I tried to figure out how to ask him some questions without sounding like a total weirdo. As we neared the sidewalk, I just went for it.
“I’m sorry for eavesdropping”—although I wasn’t sure that it was eavesdropping when people had the conversation right in front of you—“but did I hear you say Pablo owed you money too?”
Eduardo nodded curtly. “Five thousand. He asked to borrow it a few months ago. He needed the money to give to Isabel for the kids.” He looked at me. “He never gave it to her.”
“He didn’t?”
He shook his head. “I thought he did, then a few weeks go by, and Isabel say he doesn’t pay for months. So I ask him. And then he tells me.”
“Tells you what?”
“The money goes—he has no money because he gambles it. He bets on sports. All of them. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey. Even your American football, even though it has the wrong name.” He grinned at me, knowing I would have thought the first mention of football was American football instead of soccer. “Whatever season it was, that’s what he bet on. Isabel knew he liked to bet on horse races and dog races, but this—the sports—was all new. She didn’t know. She maybe suspected, but she did not know for sure.”
“So, he was gambling away all his child support money.”
Eduardo nodded sadly. “At first, when I found out, I was angry. I yelled at him. But then after a while, when he didn’t stop, I just felt sad. I talked to him, and he would cry. ‘Just one more bet. Just one more,’ he always said. ‘I can make the money back,’ he said. ‘Just one more bet.’ But he never made the money back.”
With a pang, I remembered that last night. How hopeful Pablo had been. How excited he was about the lottery. How he watched the screen long after everyone else looked away. And how his mood had changed so suddenly after. Had the excitement, followed so quickly by the disappointment, been too much for his body to handle and caused the stroke? Or was that what someone wanted it to look like? Maybe someone else who was holding out for Pablo to make one more bet?
“Eduardo, did Pablo owe anyone else money?”
Eduardo looked down with a look I could best call shame. “He did. He owed a lot of people. People at the restaurant. His friends. He owed everyone. He owed his bookie too. He owed his bookie the most.”
“His bookie?” My voice held more shock than I’d intended. I’d wanted it to sound like it was just a casual question—oh, he had a bookie?—but it came out sounding more aghast at the level he’d gotten to. Of course, sports betting was illegal, so, outside of regular trips out of state that no one had mentioned to places where it actually was legal, it wasn’t like he could be betting huge sums without the aid of a bookie.
He nodded. “That’s why one more bet was never enough. The bookie always took his cut. And always paid himself first.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, feeling genuinely sorry for him.
“He couldn’t stop. He tried. He tried to work more and repay the money that way, but it was slow. He owed a lot of money, and it takes a long time to make a lot of money. So he started gambling again. It was a circle. He couldn’
t stop. I hear people say gambling is an addiction, and with Pablo, it was. He tried to bet small, and he won sometimes. So then he’d bet bigger. And soon, he was back in the starting place.”
I nodded, trying to take it all in and reconcile it with the boisterous, joyful, happy-go-lucky Pablo I knew. Or didn’t know. I just thought I knew him. But apparently I didn’t, not at all. I wondered if Isabel felt a little bit the same way. But then again, Eduardo said she didn’t know how bad the gambling was. But I’d seen her face, the look in her eyes when she talked about the money he owed her. And I thought she knew. Maybe not everything. But she knew enough. Enough to be angry, because she was. And enough to be brokenhearted, because I knew she was that too.
I tried to set the emotional part aside for the time being. Meditating on the sorrows and complexities of life and the fact that we could never really know another person wasn’t going to get Pablo’s murder solved. And I was increasingly convinced that that’s what his death was—a murder. It wasn’t like he’d be the first person to push their bookie beyond the limits of their patience.
“Had he been threatened at all?”
For a second, he looked suspicious, but I guess he decided it didn’t matter now. He nodded. “I don’t know what they expected him to do. Where was he going to get money like that? He already worked sixty hours each week. He needed that money to pay for his apartment and for the house Isabel and the kids live in. And food. And sports equipment and lessons. How did they think he could get that much money to pay them? That is what kept him betting. Put in a little money, get a lot back. But you have to be lucky. Very, very lucky. And Pablo never was lucky. Only lucky things he ever did in his life were come to this country and get Isabel to marry him. Only lucky things. Everything else, he was unlucky. He even lost when you flip a coin. You know what—that’s how his bookie could have made the money back. Whatever Pablo bet, he could bet the opposite. He would have his money back fast.”
He shook his head. “But I don’t think bookies make bets on sports. I think they are too smart for that. I think they make bets on people like my brother Pablo. They bet that he will lose and bet that he will bet again. They bet that he will bet until it kills him.” He gave me a sad smile. “Pablo was even unlucky in dying.”
After a minute, he shook his head like he was getting rid of cobwebs. “You didn’t ask me for all that information. I am sorry. It is a very emotional time.”
I nodded. “You’re fine. I completely understand. I don’t blame you at all.”
He took a deep breath. “Thank you.” He started to move toward his car again, but I stopped him.
“I hope this isn’t me prying into something that’s none of my business,” I started, knowing full well that it was, “but I heard that Pablo may have been getting some threatening notes at work. Do you know anything about that?”
Eduardo sighed and nodded. “He was. The bookie was having the people who work for him come to the restaurant. This, I do not understand either. Did the bookie think maybe Pablo will forget that he owes the money? That he needs to have reminders? Pfft! Makes no sense. Pablo told me sometimes the guys come and sit at the table all day and stare. They drink water, they eat chips, maybe they order a little bit of food so the owner doesn’t kick them out. But always, they stare. Because, I guess, they think somehow this makes Pablo more money, taking up one of his tables all day. Makes no sense. Sometimes they stare, but sometimes they do what you say with the notes. The notes scare him because he never sees who they are from. They show up in his apron, but he never sees who put them there. They show up in the book—the little book the bill is in?—you know what I mean? Is it the person at the table, or does someone else put it in? Maybe it’s someone who works at the restaurant. He says he does not know who he can trust. He is scared. All the time, he is scared.”
“That’s terrible.” I thought again of happy, boisterous Pablo and how hard he must have worked to push all of this down, to keep it out of his mind while he was working, to seem so content with the world around him while dealing with dark and terrifying things. It made an already-unpleasant situation even worse. “Did he report it to anyone? The police? Threatening someone like that is illegal.”
He looked at me like I was hopelessly naïve. “And gambling is illegal.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess that does complicate matters.” And now I felt hopelessly naïve.
He sighed heavily. “I will tell you something. A few weeks ago, Pablo tells me he wants to talk to the police. But not only tell them about the notes. Tell them about everything, all the gambling. He wants to turn them in. He tells me this because he is going to tell the bookie that he will talk to the police and tell them everything about the bookie and the gambling.”
“But wouldn’t Pablo get in trouble too? He could go to jail for the sports betting, couldn’t he? You just said that’s why he didn’t tell the police about the threatening notes.”
“It’s because of how scared he is. He says he wants to be scared no more. He wants to be free. He thinks that the bookie would have more jail than him, so he wants to make a deal with the bookie. He wants the bookie to forget the money he owes. Bookie forgets money, Pablo doesn’t tell. He does not know if the bookie will do this, so that is why he tells me. He wants me to know for if the bookie hurts him.”
“That’s—that’s horrifying.” I tried to imagine being in a situation where I was so upset and frightened by the circumstances that I was willing to risk life, limb, and the possibility of a jail sentence to get out of it. I couldn’t.
Eduardo and I stood there for a minute or two, both lost in thought as we stared at the grass, the trees, the clouds, anything but each other. I think he knew I had more questions to ask, and he wasn’t any more eager to answer them than I was to ask them. But Eduardo had the answers I was looking for, and I needed to get them, for Pablo’s sake and for my own peace of mind.
“Do you know where he did his betting? Was it somewhere up in Boston, or…” I trailed off, hoping against hope that it was somewhere up in Boston. Or somewhere even more remote. Maybe he actually was taking regular trips out to Nevada to place his bets. But sports betting was legal in Nevada, so he wouldn’t need a bookie, would he? It didn’t matter though. I just wanted it to be far enough away that I stood a chance of convincing myself not to get involved. Or at least to tell Mike and then wash my hands of it. Although, in all honesty, the likelihood of me doing either was slim, no matter where the bookie was based. But I hoped it wasn’t Cape Bay.
“Why do you want to know, Fran? You do not want to start gambling, I hope.”
I shook my head. “No, no, not at all. I’m just curious, I guess. I just think of Cape Bay as a quiet, safe, sleepy little town, and an illegal gambling operation doesn’t seem like it fits in.” I realized the irony of my calling Cape Bay quiet, safe, and sleepy when we had had more than our fair share of murders over the past year. I also knew for a fact that there had been a gambling ring in operation, as well as some other seediness, but I thought all that was shut down. I didn’t actually want to know that there was something even more organized and maybe more sinister in my little town.
“Cape Bay is a beautiful town.” Eduardo nodded. “But sometimes beauty conceals ugliness. I think if the bookie was in Boston, Pablo could have gotten away from the gambling. But he is here. You know the restaurant the Sand Bar? There is a room in the back. That is where they are.”
I knew the place. I knew they had a tendency to have live, very loud, not terribly good music and an occasional drunken bar fight, but I didn’t know about the gambling.
“Now you know. You stay away from that place. It’s a bad place.”
I nodded. “Thank you, I will.” Not like it was the kind of place I hung out regularly anyway. I’d been there once the previous summer, and I didn’t feel like I could hear properly for days. There was a new wine bar in town that seemed more my speed, but I hadn’t been there yet either. Bars weren’t really my thing.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Now you know Pablo do dangerous things. You stay away. You protect yourself.”
“Thank you.”
Eduardo began walking to his car. He was just getting in when I remembered something. I jogged over to his passenger-side window and tapped on it. He rolled it down, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Eduardo, do you think those men—the bookie and all—do you think they actually would have hurt Pablo? Do you think they could have?”
Eduardo looked even more suspicious. “Why you want to know?”
“I—I—” I tried to think of a good reason other than that I suspected his brother may have been murdered and thought the bookie might be my prime suspect. “I—”
“These men are dangerous, Fran. I know this. I believe this. Keep yourself safe. Stay far away from them.” He studied me to see if I’d taken in his warning. “I go now. Bye, Fran.”
He rolled up his window and drove away before I had a chance to speak or even wonder what he knew that made him so concerned for my safety.
I watched him drive away until his car turned a corner and I lost sight of it. Then I went to get in my own car. I figured Rhonda would appreciate it if I made an appearance back at the café sometime before closing.
I got in the car and turned it on. Some awful new song where the singer alternately moaned and sounded like her voice had gone through a meat grinder came on, and I lunged for the radio. I found a Celine Dion power ballad from my teenage years and settled on that, immediately jumping in to sing along. I might have also done a few diva-on-stage hand motions, clenching my fist and then pushing my imaginary lover away.
I was so caught up in the song and imagining myself chasing a mysterious man through a crumbling castle (like in the video, of course) I didn’t notice the real-life man walk around my car or approach my door. I didn’t notice anything at all until I heard the sound of metal tapping the glass next to my head.
