In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  People gathered outside in yards and courts and on the grass verges of the sidewalk, hovering over portable barbecues laden with slabs of spicy carne asada and ice chests stocked with beer and soda. Steam wafting through open kitchen windows promised savory sauces and slow-cooked meat, pork carnitas maybe, or chicken boiled with peppers and tomatillos until it falls off its bones, and vats of red or black beans and rice. This was food that would feed the families of working parents for several days, until the next payday. I began plotting ruses to get invited into one of those yards for samples. I had managed to find a sandwich at the studio commissary, but it was hardly a meal.

  Jesus Ramon's mother, Julia, leaned against the frame of her bodega's open door, blocking the entry, arms crossed over her chest, perhaps curious about the video crew on her sidewalk, but not so curious that she ventured all the way outside; I recognized her from news footage. When I asked him, Guido said he hadn't spoken with her yet, that he was waiting for me. I walked over to her and introduced myself.

  "Mrs. Ramon?" I said. "My name is Maggie MacGowen."

  "Si. I know." She did not unfold her arms to accept either the hand or the business card I extended to her but she looked at the card. She said, "I heard about what the officer did to himself, that Mr. Flint. May God have mercy on his soul."

  "You knew him?" I asked, knowing Mike must have spoken with her when her son disappeared, but hoping she would say more.

  She nodded. "He talked to my son, my Jesus, many times. The officer wanted Jesus to listen on the street for anything he could hear about this big drug dealer that got himself shot."

  "Who was that?" I asked.

  "Rogelio Higgins," she said, narrowing her eyes to appraise me. "But you know."

  I nodded. I asked her, "Do you know what Jesus might have told Mike Flint?"

  "No. Jesus, he would never tell me about those things." She looked at me. "Do you have children?"

  "Yes, one, a daughter. She's nineteen."

  "Does she tell you everything?"

  I chuckled at that, thinking of things my own mother never knew about me. I said, "No, I'm sure she doesn't."

  When she spoke about Mike, she didn't show any sort of anger or resentment toward him. Maybe the passage of time had softened those emotions, or maybe she never believed that Mike had harmed Jesus. I leaned against the other side of her doorframe, crossed my arms, and looked out at the street where kids were mugging for Guido's cameras.

  "This some kind of movie they're doing?" she asked.

  "Television," I said. "We're taking another look at the day your son disappeared, hoping to find out something new. Maybe after so many years someone who was afraid to talk back then is ready to say something now."

  She thought that over for a moment. "Who?"

  "Don't know yet." I shrugged. "Maybe Nelda Ruiz has something to say. She was there that day."

  "Ah!" Mrs. Ramon rolled her eyes and color rose in her cheeks. "That one. She is big trouble. That's why they put her in the prison."

  "She made parole." That bit of information got a stir from her, a shudder as if a cold hand had run up her back. I asked, "Have you seen Nelda?"

  "No. That one, she wouldn't come over here." Mrs. Ramon uncoiled her arms to wag a finger in the direction of my face. "She is evil, but she is not stupid. She will not come near me, not ever."

  "Evil?" An opening line. "Why do you say, evil?"

  "What she does to my family, that girl. My boy, my little sister." Her eyes flashed hot through a film of tears. "I hoped they would eat her alive in that awful place, that prison for women."

  "Tell me what she did to your family."

  "Drogas," she spat. "She got them hooked on her garbage, got them working for her just so she would keep getting them their junk."

  "Crack cocaine?" I asked.

  "Si." Now Mrs. Ramon was fully animated, fire in her face, venom in her voice. She started counting off on her fingers: "And heroin and meth and marijuana. Anything you can think of swallowing or snorting or huffing or smoking or shooting up to scramble your brains, she'd get it for you. She was a regular farmacia de los muertos, that girl."

  "Your sister?" I said, remembering that Eldon had mentioned the sister. Mike reported that he took Jesus downtown to see his aunt; she owed him money. "That last day, Jesus told Detective Flint he wanted to go see his aunt. Is that the same sister? She had a taco stand--"

  "Taco stand," she said with scorn. "Si, she sold tacos. And she'd sell you some damn expensive hot sauce from under her counter if you had the money."

  "She sold drugs?" Maybe I said that with more surprise than I wanted to. "Aunt" conjures up in my mind a blue-haired old lady who knits scarves and slips you fivers on your birthday, not a junkie and a dealer.

  "Mayra, such a pretty girl." I still heard anger in Mrs. Ramon's voice, but there was regret around the edges. "She was always the favorite, so sweet with everyone when she was little. That garbage she put in her body made her ugly. Old. A regular bruja--a witch."

  "Now that I think about it," I said, "I don't remember reading an interview with Mayra in the police reports." I turned to her. "Did she use another name? Maybe her married name?"

  "Just Mayra, Mayra Escobedo. She never got married." Mrs. Ramon shook her head. "She was ruined too soon, too young. A good man wants to marry a mother for his children, not some wreck."

  "Did the police question her about Jesus?"

  "Si. Officer Flint, he tried." She sighed heavily. "But she was too sick from the drugs to talk to him."

  "Too sick?"

  She nodded. "They called me from the county hospital the day after Jesus was gone. I thought I would lose her at the same time I lost my Jesus."

  "Bad drugs?" I asked, prodding.

  "Bad, too good, it's the same." Mrs. Ramon looked up at me. "Pure H, they said. Uncut."

  "The police said?"

  "No, the doctors said. They said that if she lived, she needed to get the junk washed out of her. They said it would take months in the hospital, and they said it would cost a lot of money to make her better. We don't have insurance."

  "What did you do?"

  "I took her to a clinic down in Baja." Anger gave way to grief; her voice broke. "My boy was lost. We were looking everywhere for my boy. But I left him alone, I didn't know where he was, to drive Mayra down to a clinic in Rosarito Beach. All night I drove and came home to find out, still no Jesus."

  "That night, was that the first night ever that Jesus didn't come home?"

  She shook her head. "He was a boy. He had a girlfriend. He did what boys do."

  "So what made that night different?" I asked. "You wanted the police to go find Jesus as soon as you heard he was taken away by Detective Flint."

  "The girlfriend, Teresa, told me something bad was going to happen to Jesus."

  "What was going to happen to him?"

  "She wouldn't say. She just said I had to go get my Jesus right now and bring him home." Tears coursed down her cheeks. "A mother feels when something is wrong. And that time I felt it. I knew Jesus was in trouble."

  I put my hand on her shoulder. "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Ramon."

  She wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. "You have a daughter. You know."

  "Yes. I know."

  We stood, halfway inside her shop, halfway out, mothers together. I wanted to tell her about the sister I lost, and my father. And Mike. How I still wake up in the middle of the night knowing some of the worst possibilities the world can offer, wondering if Casey is all right, wondering if my mother, alone in her house in Berkeley, has fallen. But I still had my daughter and my mother, and Mrs. Ramon had lost her son when he was young. No loss, no fear I could imagine could measure up to half hers. I must have sighed heavily because she put her hand on my elbow and led me inside the quiet of her store. She took a Diet Coke out of her refrigerator case, opened it, and handed it to me.

  "What happened to Mayra?" I asked. "Did she make it?"

  "Mayra." S
he looked out the door, watched the children running past, acting goofy the way kids do, uncontrolled energy. "She lost a kidney. She had a stroke. Sometimes she has a seizure and we think, this is the end. But, by the grace of God, she is still here."

  "Where is she?"

  Mrs. Ramon looked at me and a canny smile crossed her face. "You want to talk to Mayra?"

  "Yes, very much."

  "Okay." She checked her watch; it was after five. "Why not? I close at six. You come to our house tonight. Seven o'clock. Mayra doesn't get too much company."

  She wrote down her address on a receipt pad, a street a few blocks over. When I thanked her, she asked, "Tamales?"

  I shrugged. "Tamales?"

  "I took some tamales we made last Christmas out of the freezer. You like tamales?"

  "Homemade tamales," I said, feeling joy over the prospect of that particular and rare opportunity. "I'll bring wine."

  This time, she patted my arm. "We'll talk. Madre a madre."

  I shook her hand. "Mother to mother."

  She followed me to the door. "You want to bring those cameras?"

  "May I?"

  "Si. But bring just one; my house is too small for all these people." She tipped her head toward Guido and smiled. "Bring that cute one. For Mayra."

  Poor Guido had a tough choice to make, tamales and a potentially dynamite video opportunity, or dinner out with an especially attentive female film student? In the end he made the safer choice, the ethical choice: do the work and don't diddle the students.

  The sun was low in the sky, good light was gone before six; the filming day was over. Guido and I spent the hour until we were due at Mrs. Ramon's sitting in his van running through the afternoon's footage, making notes, making comments: "Use this, file that, what is that?" I noticed, as we viewed some of the footage, that Guido had let his camera linger on that particular attentive student more than once, embracing her with light that flattered her contours, made her appear more beautiful than she actually was.

  I nudged Guido. "Be careful."

  "What?" Faux innocence.

  "You know what I mean."

  He rubbed his chin as if it had suddenly sprouted a beard, or been smacked. "Damn, it's hard. Youth is so pretty, so available, Maggie."

  "All I can say, be careful."

  Mrs. Ramon, Julia, lived in a little green house in a tidy enclave of single-family homes just north of the Santa Monica Freeway, in a pocket of similar houses that had somehow escaped the assault of graffiti and other imposed blight. When we walked inside, the aroma of savory broth coming from the tamale steamer enveloped us. Guido, holding a bottle of red wine in one hand and a dozen yellow roses acquired from a street vendor in the other, stopped inside the front door to let the richness of the scent coming from the kitchen wash over him. Guido loves food.

  "Cumin, poblano chiles," he said. "And what? Nutmeg?"

  "Si," Mrs. Ramon said, accepting the roses with a shy drop of her head. "My sister's secret, a little nutmeg in the broth."

  She called out, "Mayra, company is here."

  Mayra came from the direction of the kitchen, rolling herself in a wheelchair. Her graying hair was freshly brushed, her lipstick was newly applied, her face glowed as if with anticipation; a once pretty woman, withered on her right side, a claw of a hand, a foot turned in at an impossible angle. Julia had told me that Mayra was only a few years older than Jesus, that they were raised together and were more like sister and brother than aunt and nephew. I did the math; she looked far older than a woman in her late twenties should look.

  "Mayra, this is the TV lady wants to talk about Jesus."

  "Maggie," I said, extending my hand. "And this is Guido."

  "Mucho gusto." She extended her healthy left hand toward me, then Guido. "Welcome. How nice to have visitors."

  The food was even better than anticipated, corn masa dough spread with a filling of spicy, stringy goat meat sweetened with raisins, rolled up in dry corn husks and steamed over seasoned broth. We unwrapped tamales and smothered them with hot, homemade green tomatillo salsa. A crisp salad, a decent red wine, here was the perfect setting for conversation.

  I had expected the two women to be reserved, but they were eager to talk to us. Mrs. Ramon said she was afraid that everyone had forgotten that her son was still missing, that no one was looking for him. She was glad we were asking questions. If his story was back on television, maybe someone would come forward. Mayra seemed to hold nothing back, had nothing to hide, expressed guilty feelings because she had not been helpful when Jesus disappeared, indeed had become a burden at the very worst time.

  After we ate, Guido asked for permission to film the conversation. Both women agreed, but first, Mrs. Ramon said, she wanted to clear the table, make it look nice. She removed the plates and the pile of empty tamale wrappers and came back from the kitchen with coffee and a plate of cookies--colorful pan dulce that she had brought home out of the bakery case in her store.

  While Julia set the scene, Guido moved some furniture around, lit Mayra and Julia with a spot and fill lights, found a perch behind my left shoulder and trained his lens on the two women. Self-conscious at first, after a few minutes they both seemed to forget that he and his camera were there and that they were encapsulated within a ring of bright lights.

  Mayra began to speak in a soft, clear voice.

  She always wanted to open her own restaurant, she said. After school, she worked for an old man who owned a taco cart that he parked downtown on Broadway. She saved her earnings and, after he had a heart attack, she bought the cart from his widow. The money she made was fair, but the hours were long. All night she would be up preparing the ingredients for the tacos she would sell the next day, and then she would be on her feet all day, serving tacos with her homemade sauces. Always, she saved her money and kept her eye out for a good restaurant location.

  She didn't date: "Men, they just want to spend your money," she said, glancing shyly at Guido.

  She said she did nothing except work. But the accumulated weariness of too many long days and too many long nights began to take a toll. When her old school friend Nelda Ruiz offered her something to pep her up, she accepted. A little at first, and then more and more until she wanted the drugs, the high they gave her, more than she wanted the restaurant. Her savings went into her veins. To stay supplied, she began selling small quantities of drugs to people Nelda would send over.

  I turned to Mayra. "Mike Flint said that on the day he drove away with Jesus, Jesus told him that you owed him some money and he wanted to collect it. Mike said he dropped off Jesus behind the block where your taco cart was."

  "The officer told me the same thing," Mayra said.

  "Did you see Jesus that day?"

  "I don't know." She glanced at her sister, chagrin reddening her cheeks. "I don't remember that day, or the ones before, or a lot of days after that."

  "She was sick," Julia Ramon offered, covering her sister's withered hand with her strong one. As Mayra's surrogate mother, she seemed to have forgiven more than a sister might. "She was out of her head, her memory from that time is gone."

  "Because of a drug overdose?" I said.

  "Yes. And the seizures."

  "When did you take the drugs?"

  For the answer, Mayra turned expectantly to her sister.

  "We don't know," Julia shrugged. "We couldn't find Mayra when we were looking for Jesus. We wanted her to help us."

  "Where was she?"

  "Officer Flint called me early in the morning, the next morning after Jesus was gone. He said the police found her in some abandoned building down on First Street. When he called me, she was already in the hospital, unconscious, almost dead."

  I sipped some coffee, looked from one face to another. They were waiting for a question, some help finding the answer to this puzzle.

  I asked, "Do you remember owing Jesus money?"

  "In a way," Mayra said. "He would make the deliveries to me from Nelda, and then he wo
uld take money back to her."

  "Did he get a cut?"

  "Yes. Nelda paid him, sometimes in money and sometimes in a little bit of drugs he could sell to the boys in his set. Mostly, I think, some pot, a little crack or meth. He rarely sold the hard junk."

  "You overdosed on heroin because it was uncut," I said.

  She nodded. "I didn't know that when I took it."

  "You got it from Nelda?"

  "Probably. Whatever I had, Jesus brought it to me from Nelda."

  "Did anyone else get sick?"

  Again, she turned to her sister for the answer. Julia raised her hands, empty of an answer.

  "Did Jesus use heroin?" I asked.

  "I don't know if he did. Officer Flint asked me that, too. Like I said, usually a little pot. Jesus was a pretty good boy, not loco like some of them. He told me sometimes I should kick the stuff, that it would kill me one day."

  Julia looked ill, heartsick. "This world is too crazy. How can you bring up children safe in such a crazy world?"

  I sipped more coffee, waited for the air to settle again.

  "Mayra," I said, "do you remember seeing Detective Flint at the hospital?"

  "No. Nothing from that time. I even forgot how to talk for a while."

  "So when did you speak with Detective Flint about Jesus?"

  "Now and then he would come to see me, maybe once or twice every year. Last time, it was around Christmas. He came over here."

  "This last Christmas?"

  She nodded.

  A surprise answer. At Christmas Mike was having trouble with his balance, was losing sight in his right eye. He wasn't driving anymore. At least, not that I knew. But, he had a lot of friends. "Any way you can pin down the date?"

  She thought, had a conversation with her sister about when she had gone to the doctor last, because it was during that week that Mike had come by. Together they decided that it had been about two weeks after Christmas

  When I raised the coffee cup again, my hand shook. Using both hands, I set it back down.

  "Was he alone when he came?" I asked.

  "He was alone when he knocked on my door," Mayra said. "At first I didn't know who he was, because he didn't look like a policeman anymore. He shaved his head I think. I'm not sure because he wore a hat. And he was wearing blue jeans, not a suit. He was..." She turned up her palm, empty, couldn't find exactly the words she wanted at first. "He didn't scare me anymore. I think, looking at him, Maybe he is the scared one now."