Land of Careful Shadows

by Suzanne Chazin

  “Stop it, both of you,” said Adele. “This is a man’s life you’re playing with here. His friends tell me he mortgaged his house to make this journey. It cost him the equivalent of over five thousand American dollars. If you send him back, his family will lose their home. His children will have to leave school.”

  “What are we?” asked Greco. “A freakin’ social services agency?”

  “His personal situation is beside the point,” said Vega. “He stays until we can clear him.”

  “Or yourself more likely,” said Porter.

  Vega was out of his seat. Adele leaned back from the table. She thought he and Porter might actually come to blows. But then Greco put a firm grip on Vega’s shoulder and eased him back into his chair. He nodded to Porter and Adele. “I think we all need a short break.”

  The two detectives left the room, their voices peppered with curses that faded down the hallway. Adele looked at Porter.

  “I don’t really have a problem with the police detaining Rodrigo for a short period if they’re only checking out his story.”

  Porter rolled his eyes. “The police are never just checking out someone’s story, Adele. The longer Morales sits in this station, the greater his chances are of getting charged or, at the very least, deported.”

  “What if he’s guilty of harming that woman?”

  “It’s the police’s job to make that case in a constitutionally protected manner—not turn the station house into Guantanamo Bay.”

  Beyond the conference room, Adele could hear the staccato bursts of calls in progress from a dispatch radio and the beeps and percussive noises of various police scanners and equipment. Voices punctured the white noise, hard and nasal, and then died away, often in a chase of throaty laughter. It was the sound of men with power. She was so used to dealing with men who had none that the experience felt jarring—threatening. She could only imagine what it felt like to Rodrigo.

  “Maybe it would be better if we stopped seeing everything as us and them,” said Adele.

  “There has to be an us,” he shot back. “How else can we keep them in line? Look at Morales’s face and ask yourself: Would they have picked up an American citizen and questioned him in such a cavalier and reckless manner?”

  “I’m just saying perhaps we should try to find common ground.”

  Porter’s lips thinned. He leaned forward. “What happened, Adele? Are you losing your nerve? When you started La Casa, you had so much fire. You wanted to take on the entire Lake Holly community. Lately it seems you just want to make sure there’s enough coffee at the snack bar.”

  “Is that what the board has been saying behind my back? Do you want me to resign?”

  “I want you to have a bigger agenda.”

  “A bigger agenda? What do you think the medical clinic and dental van are? Or the after-school enrichment program? Or our domestic violence support group?”

  “I’m talking about addressing the fundamental inequities in this town.”

  “And I’m talking about what clients really need: jobs and housing and access to education and medical care. You want demonstrations and lawsuits and media coverage. All that will do is invite ICE to draw a big fat bull’s-eye on Lake Holly.” Porter probably thought he was the opposite of the men on the other side of the door. But Adele thought they were quite similar, so certain of their worldview, so contemptuous of others.

  Vega and Greco came back in the room now and took their seats. Vega looked tired and chastened. Adele had to assume that even though he and Greco were partners, the fact that the case was in Lake Holly’s backyard meant Vega was ultimately a guest in another police authority’s jurisdiction. She suspected Greco had reminded him of that, though with Greco, you could never be sure what he was thinking. He gave no hint. Instead, he slowly unwrapped a package of Twizzlers. The cellophane sounded like small firecrackers detonating in the room.

  “So here’s the situation.” Greco leaned against the conference table, his belly taking the brunt of the impact. “Pardon my French, Adele, but I don’t give a flying fuck about Rodrigo Morales. He took a chance and came here illegally. He threw the dice and lost. I didn’t tell him to come and I’m not gonna lose any sleep over sending him back.”

  He held out the package of Twizzlers to the room with a mumbled grunt and shrugged when everyone declined. He took one for himself and bit off the end, chewing it thoughtfully. Scott Porter wasn’t the only one who could hold an audience.

  “Now my partner? Jimmy Vega here?” Greco nodded. “He’s Hispanic and all, so he’s got a bit of a soft spot for these lawbreakers. So for his sake—and only his sake—I don’t mind detaining Morales at the station without charges or an ICE hold while we check his statement against our evidence. But I want to be crystal clear: we’re not doing this because Porter here thinks he’s got anything on my partner. Excuse my French again, but Scott? You don’t have a limp dick to bat with here. However, if you back off any grandstanding against Detective Vega or this department and you don’t get into bed with the media, we will do our best to clear Morales or find probable cause for an arrest within twenty-four hours.”

  “I want him released now,” said Porter.

  “Not gonna happen, Scott,” said Greco. “Twenty-four hours with no charges and no ICE hold. Take it or leave it.”

  “And if you can’t clear him in that time?” asked Adele.

  Vega gave a dark nod to Porter. “Then I guess your chairman of the board over there will call up the New York Times and fry my culo.”

  Outside, the air felt cool and fragrant, brushing against Adele’s skin like freshly laundered sheets. Something green and earthy lingered in the scent. She checked her watch. Sophia was already at her dad’s for the night. Adele had her dress in the car—a red sleeveless chiffon she hadn’t worn in perhaps two years. She hoped it still fit. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d gone to a party. Since the divorce, all she did was work and take care of Sophia. She fished her car keys out of her pocketbook.

  “Hey Adele, wait up. I need to talk to you a moment.”

  Jimmy Vega hustled across the parking lot. He wasn’t wearing a jacket so he had to hunch his shoulders against the cool night air.

  “Please make this quick,” said Adele. “I have plans for tonight.”

  “Can you break them?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Or just delay them. For an hour. An hour and a half. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “I don’t think you’re in a position to ask anything of me. Not after going behind my back today.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about that. I really am.” He gave her a pained look. “But you saw what went on in there just now. Porter’s gunning for me. I’ve got a daughter almost ready to graduate high school. She lives in town with my ex-wife. I don’t want her to see her old man make the papers this way.”

  “What was it you said about Rodrigo earlier?” She snapped her fingers with the courtroom theatrics of Scott Porter. “Oh yes, I remember: His personal situation is beside the point.”

  Vega winced. “I had that coming, I guess.” He played with a scab on one of his knuckles. He had scrapes on both hands and a bruise along the inside of his left wrist. There were ghostly outlines of mud that had flaked off his shirt and droplets of something rust-colored that did not brush off so easily. Blood. Rodrigo’s blood. Vega caught her looking at it now.

  “I know what it looks like. But for what it’s worth, I swear: I didn’t beat him up.”

  She held his gaze and watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall like he was standing before a judge, awaiting his sentence. “I believe you,” she said finally.

  “You do?” He brightened. “Then you’ll help me?”

  “Help you how?”

  “Let me look through your client files.”

  “What? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I need to find the intake sheet Linda did on Maria. Without that sheet I’m sunk. I’ve got no way to nail down her ide
ntity, no way to clear or charge Morales. Twenty-four hours rolls around, I’m a dead man. I’ll never work as a cop again if Porter makes that police brutality charge stick.”

  “Do you understand what you’re asking? You’re asking as an officer of the law to search the files of people who may be in this country illegally. Do you realize what would happen to my center—to me?—if my clients knew I’d turned over their personal information to the police?”

  “I’m not going to look at anything that doesn’t pertain to Maria.”

  “Get a subpoena if it’s that important to you.”

  “You really want your clients seeing a whole bunch of cops carting their private records out of La Casa? You think that’s not going to create panic?”

  He was bluffing, she suspected. He already knew he’d never be able to convince a judge to order the sort of blanket subpoena he’d need to find Maria’s intake sheet. Still—with cops, you never know.

  “Linda already said she couldn’t find Maria’s intake sheet,” Adele reminded him.

  “She didn’t have all the information I now have from Morales. She didn’t know her full first name was Maria Elena. Or that she’d crossed the border under the surname Vasquez. Or that she was from Aguas Calientes, Guatemala. Who knows? We might find someone else from Aguas Calientes—someone who knew Maria.”

  “I can ask around La Casa and see if anybody is from Aguas Calientes. But I can’t give you wholesale access to client files. I’m sorry.”

  Adele put her key in her car door. Vega straight-armed it shut. He was close enough for Adele to see the sheen of sweat on his upper lip, the smudge of dirt he’d failed to wash off on the underside of his chin.

  “Adele—please.” He touched her elbow. “No one has to know but you and me.” The phosphorous lights of the parking lot picked up the tiny crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes. “I won’t mess with your clients. I give you my word—which, as it turns out, is a hell of a lot more reliable than Vilma Ortiz’s.”

  Vega had been right about the Ortizes. Adele sighed. Maybe she owed him something after all.

  He saw her wavering. He offered up enticements like a game-show host. “I’ll throw in dinner for you and your date. A movie too, if you want it.”

  “It’s not a date. One of my former clients’ daughters is having her quinceañera.”

  “Then you should thank me for sparing you.”

  “I like quinceañeras. Didn’t your daughter have a big birthday celebration when she turned fifteen?”

  Vega shook his head. “Joy’s not really—she’s only half—and I never—” Something dark crossed his features. Adele had the feeling she was treading on sensitive territory again. He stamped his feet against the cold. “I’m only asking for an hour, Adele. One hour. It’s not just me you’d be helping either. If Morales is innocent, this might speed things along for him, too. He’s in a holding cell in the basement of the station house. A closet, basically. No way to change his clothes or get clean. Nothing. If the guy’s innocent, don’t you want to help get him out?”

  She didn’t really know Rodrigo. But she knew Enrique and Anibal. They’d been coming to La Casa for about four years now, ever since they first arrived in Lake Holly. She didn’t want to have to tell them that their friend was still locked up knowing she might have done more to help get him out.

  “We go right now,” she said, ticking off her list of demands. “We go in my car so no one knows you were ever there. You look only in the drawers that contain intake files since last September. And you can’t remove anything. Do we have a deal? I open my drawers, you don’t make me regret it.”

  Vega laughed. Adele suddenly caught the double meaning of her words. She blushed.

  “Hey,” he teased. “The night is young.”

  Chapter 12

  Adele’s car was a Prius. Somehow it figured. All that good earnest Anglo training at Harvard. She probably gave to the Sierra Club and Amnesty International as well. Just like Wendy—Wendy who, when they were dating, took one look at Vega’s red Pontiac Firebird with its magnesium alloy wheels, tinted windows, and subwoofers and asked him where he kept his fuzzy dice. His next car was a powder blue Honda Civic where the radio was preset to NPR. Welcome to the world of Anglo sensibilities. Parties without dancing. Food without spice. Women who dressed nearly the same as their men. It was like living with a coffee filter over your senses.

  Then again, Adele wasn’t Wendy. She had a candy-apple red dress under dry cleaner’s plastic hanging from a hook in the backseat.

  Adele unlocked her passenger-side door. Vega tried to brush the mud off his clothes before he climbed in.

  “It’s okay. The car’s not that clean anyway.”

  It looked pretty clean to him. There was a booster seat in back along with a girl’s backpack covered in pink and purple peace signs. Vega had already noted the lack of a wedding band. He’d bet the store at this moment that her ex wasn’t Ecuadorian or even Latino. Vega and Adele were more alike than she’d probably care to admit.

  “Thanks.” He got in.

  “You owe me big time, Vega.”

  “Agreed.”

  She pulled away from the curb. “You can start paying me back now.”

  “Okay. How?”

  “Tell me how you found Rodrigo so quickly today.”

  He reached for a CD that was lying on the floor. On the front was a picture of a good-looking dark-haired guy in tight jeans and a T-shirt.

  “You like Chayanne, huh?” asked Vega. His mother used to love listening to his songs. Love songs, all of them. They filled a void for her, gave her a safe place to tuck her passion. She kept the real men who flittered briefly through her life at arm’s length from Vega when he was growing up. Better no man, she reasoned, than the wrong one.

  “Chayanne’s Puerto Rican, you know,” said Vega.

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  He rubbed his palms along the thighs of his dark blue mud-stained trousers. He’d lied to find Rodrigo, of course. Called up La Casa ten minutes after he left Linda and Adele at the preschool and pretended to be a contractor. He told Kay, the woman in the front office, that he needed to deliver some compost to the landscaper who’d hired three of La Casa’s clients for a job in Wickford that morning but he didn’t have the contractor’s contact information on him. Kay innocently gave up the name and phone number of the company: Green Acres Landscaping. He then dialed Green Acres and gave them the same line about needing a delivery address. He had a GPS location on Rodrigo in under ten minutes.

  “How come you’re so reluctant to tell me?” Adele pressed.

  Because he knew she’d never understand his job and what it entailed. Some lies for the greater truth. Some pain for the greater salvation. If he told her he’d lied—played her own people against her—she’d think less of him, and for some reason that had nothing to do with the case, he didn’t want that to happen. Do you stop being a good person when good people stop judging you as one?

  “I got lucky,” he said, forcing a smile. “Somebody at the station knew a couple of contractors in town and one of them knew where Rodrigo and his friends were working.”

  Adele’s eyes settled on Vega’s face for only a moment before turning sad and defeated. Something in his smile—he didn’t know what—had given him away. It made him wish he’d told her the truth. But the moment was gone. He couldn’t call it back.

  There were no cars on the street when they rolled up to La Casa. The town dump was closed, as were the two auto-body shops. The security lights blazed brightly in the parking lot, pushing back the darkness. There was no moon tonight, only a gauzy wash of clouds that muffled the stars and reflected the man-made light back on itself. It was the sort of darkness Vega had known as a boy in the Bronx where day and night were relative measures, never pure or complete.

  Adele pulled a key out of her bag and undid three locks on the front door, then opened it and flicked on the overhead light. Devoid of people, the room
s looked small, almost staged. Like a kindergarten during off-hours. The blackboards had been washed down. The computer keyboards rested above their monitors. The molded plastic chairs were upended onto a long table in the center. Adele explained that some of the immigrants who couldn’t find work on a given day were offered a few dollars to mop and clean the center at closing. It’s what kept some men at La Casa long after there was any chance a contractor was going to offer them a job. Five or ten dollars was the world to many of them.

  Adele walked over to the glassed-in front office and unlocked it. The neatness did not extend to this room. There were still towers of folders and papers on every surface. A red light blinked on a phone. Adele punched in a code and listened to the message, then scribbled something on a Post-it note and stuck it to the front of one of the computers. How the person was likely to notice it in this chaos was beyond Vega.

  Another key on her ring unlocked a file cabinet in the corner. The cabinet itself lay buried under a carton labeled CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS. There was no rhyme or reason to this office. No wonder Linda hadn’t been able to find Maria’s intake sheet.

  Vega and Adele sloughed off their jackets and threw them over one of the two chairs in the room. Vega caught Adele eyeing his nine-millimeter service weapon in his hip holster.

  “What?”

  “Ever shoot anyone?”

  “Only before I deport them.”

  “Smartass.”

  She fished a pair of glasses out of her handbag and began to thumb through folders in the top drawer, keeping her back to him. Vega leaned against the doorway, not sure what he should do or touch. She would probably think he was snooping even if all he did was move a pile of papers, so he kept his hands where she could see them. His eyes drifted lazily to the round firmness of her backside, the soft hourglass curve of her hips, the way her bob of shiny black hair reflected a halo of light. He’d always been attracted to skinny gringas, women who were all stretched sinew and pencil limbs. His last girlfriend was like that. So was Wendy. A vegetarian, lean as a matchstick. Clothes looked great on her. She looked great on him. But at night in bed, when he reached for her, it was like grabbing a chest of drawers—all sharp angles and edges that never quite wore down. Or maybe he wasn’t talking about the physical Wendy at all. Maybe he was talking about something else.