Question of Trust

by Laura Caldwell

  José Ramon often envied lives like Carol’s—wealth without knowledge or concern where the money came from.

  As Vincente’s cries turned to wails, his parents looked at each other. Finally, his father nodded at his mother, a woman who did care where her family’s money came from. And wasn’t afraid to take some responsibility for it. Or make sure others took their own.

  His mother stood, crossing to Vincente, her youngest son, sinking to her knees in front of him and wrapping her arms around his neck. He fell upon her, literally fell off the chair and onto her body weight, which had grown heavier over the years as she’d grown more comfortable. She and his father had grown into their retirement, knowing the money they’d made, that their quiet men in Mexico continued to make, was safely being hidden in legitimate businesses in the United States.

  Until Vincente started to lose control. And then until the girl died.

  She was José’s underling. She worked for him. And it was he alone who controlled her fate—or so he had thought. Her murder made them realize they weren’t the only dogs in this race, the race they were losing because of Vincente. And so his parents had come to the U.S., something they’d done only once before. It was considered too dangerous for them to travel here, but now, it was too dangerous for them not to, when their world in this country was running away like a wild animal.

  From behind his desk, José looked at his father, who was short and fat but always elegant, now wearing a beautifully tailored black suit. His father simply nodded at him. José stood and walked to his mother and brother. He pulled another chair close to where his brother sat.

  When they first arrived, he had told his brother to sit, isolated, in the center of the room. He wanted to sit behind his desk, with his parents sitting together, so that Vincente could feel the drift, the soon-to-be severing of his place in the family. His parents had wanted it that way, too, but no one had expected this show of emotion.

  José arranged another chair so that his mother could sit next to his brother. She hauled Vincente by the shoulders until he was upright again.

  But he couldn’t stop sobbing. José looked over his shoulder at his father again.

  His father shook his head in disgust. His words, though, sounded kind, as they were intended to. “Está bien, Vincente. Hablaremos mañana.” Tomorrow. Vincente had been granted a reprieve.

  47

  After Kim was killed, Theo shaved his head.

  I couldn’t understand. He had the most gorgeous hair. Tawny brown, soft, thick, hanging to his shoulders, framing his face, drawing attention to those lips.

  It’s not that he didn’t look handsome without hair. He did. He couldn’t avoid being handsome no matter how hard he tried. But the lack of hair took away whatever curves Theo had, the rounded-out parts of him. He was edgy now, always—edgy in mood, and in other things, too. His music became less restrained, louder, sharper.

  Constantly, he picked through his boxes of belongings, the ones he moved into my house only a few weeks before. He rarely put anything away in the same box. At first, I wondered what he was looking for. Eventually I started to wonder if he was trying to say something with all the arranging.

  Sometimes, when he wasn’t home, I would stand above one of those boxes. I didn’t touch anything like I did last time. But I let my eyes travel over everything he had grouped in the boxes now. A framed dollar bill—the first he and Eric made with the company, he’d said. Before all this. A silver monogrammed pen holder his mother gave him. Some DVDs, some CDs. Nothing jumped out at me.

  Finally, I decided he didn’t know what he was saying, either. Rather, he was searching—that’s what he was doing. I could tell now. He rarely stopped moving. His eyes didn’t linger on me anymore. He was searching for answers. We all were.

  48

  A week after we found Kim dead, after Thanksgiving weekend, I arrived at the quiet office of Bristol & Associates at 6:30 a.m.

  And Maggie was already there.

  In fact, she looked like she’d been there for hours in her tornado mode, which is when she shot into hyperspace activity and would pick up steam from anything and anyone around her. I suspected that this particular tornado mode was not due to any particular case or trial, but rather because her best friend had found herself in trouble. Again. And Maggie Bristol wanted to be ready to do anything that was needed.

  And yet as I stepped in her office, I sensed there was something else going on, too. That mysteriousness Maggie had been wearing for weeks was still there. But my intuition was off anyway. Clearly. Because I had no intuitive guess about why Kim was in my condo when I wasn’t and why someone killed her—punching her, according to the autopsy, scratching her, beating her against the floor or a wall or some other hard surface, and finally throwing her to the floor, causing a brain bleed that brought about death.

  Death. Why does it seem to keep seeking me? What does it want?

  I stepped farther into Maggie’s office. Such thoughts of morbidity and fear were never helpful. I knew that. But they were always near lately. They were downright tenacious.

  She waved me to a seat in front of her desk, and we talked like we always did—What’s going on? How’s Bernard? How was the holiday?

  “Oh, the holiday,” I said. “Odd.”

  “I’m sure,” Maggie said. “After all that happened last week. Was Theo with you for Thanksgiving?”

  “No, he always spends it with his mother. That’s what we’d decided before…before all this anyway.”

  Theo had gone to his mom’s, had returned pensive, saying he was worried about her health. He always feared her breast cancer could return, and although she said she was fine, she was thin lately, seeming frail, the way she got when she had health issues. She’d promised she would see a doctor.

  “I was at Mom and Spence’s,” I told Maggie. “Charlie was there, of course.”

  “And your dad?”

  “Yep.”

  I told her about Spence’s attempt to have my father partake in a Thanksgiving wine tasting. “Doesn’t he know that Dad lived in Italy for decades? He probably knows way more about wine than Spence,” Charlie had said while we watched the setup.

  I had laughed. “I don’t think Spence cares. He’s just trying to establish a connection any way he can.” Spence had been doing this for a few months now—reaching out to my father and trying to make him a part of our family.

  Charlie and I watched as my father’s eyes squinted behind his copper glasses and he swished wine around in his mouth. Then he spit it out into an empty glass.

  Spence blinked a few times. I’d once heard him say that he’d never understood why people tasted wine like that. What a waste! he’d said. I mean I know technically it’s the right way, but it’s just pathologically stupid. My mother, also an avid wine lover, had agreed.

  They both watched, their faces slightly pained, as Christopher McNeil picked up the second glass.

  Spence held his hand out. “Chris, maybe you should just taste it. You know. Really taste it, swallow it. Because we’re trying to figure out what wine we’ll pair with dinner.”

  My dad blinked, looked up at Spence. “You want me to drink it?”

  “Right. Drink it. You know, we’re trying to see what we like here.”

  I could tell my father wanted to explain something, probably that the best way not to fatigue your taste buds was to taste wine without swallowing it.

  My dad looked at Spence’s face and seemed to understand that this drinking thing meant a lot to the man. He gave a silent, succinct nod. He sipped the second wine, then the third. He pointed at the second. “I enjoy this one the most.”

  A massive smile spread over Spence’s face. “Me, too! Me, too! Great minds, eh?”

  Charlie turned to me. “God, life is weird.”

  “Amen, brother.” I sighed. “I suppose it would be weirder if Theo were here.”

  “Huh,” Charlie said. “That’s true.”

  I stopped talking to
Maggie then, when I realized she hadn’t said anything during my retelling of Thanksgiving. Instead she was peering at me, as if trying to read something in my face.

  “A couple of weeks ago, you said you felt like you were falling in love with Theo,” she said.

  “I know,” I answered quickly.

  “And now you look like you have some doubts,” Maggie said. “I mean, hey, I don’t blame you. You’ve got reason.”

  I thought about that. Then I thought about the emotions I’d felt through my time with Theo. From the beginning. And it seemed those emotions had gone through a journey. First, a lifting—a lift of any darkness around my soul, any shadow over my psyche. Back then, I wanted to hug him and kiss him and have sex with him and then hold him and then do it all again. My next emotion was awareness. So maybe I am still in love.

  But then a questioning came in. At first it was only because I had begun to realize what a massive risk it was to fall in love. Because if I was in love with Theo and I was going to accept that—to continue to take it in, to revel in it the way love was intended (or at least the way I’d always assumed it was intended)—I was going to have to open my arms wide. My eyes wide. I was going to have to trust him. And because everything started happening then, I realized I would have to give myself, entirely and with all of me. I would also have to provide him with trust so that he could confide in me. But how could I do all that now that he’d been arrested, and Kim had been killed and now that I had so many questions?

  Maggie must have seen the warring emotions on my face. “Hard to explain?”

  “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “I think I need to get my head away from all that. Let’s talk work.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  She paused for a moment, then said decisively, “Okay. So what’s going on with coke-on-a-boat?”

  “The U.S. Attorneys let me know that they’re ready to go forward with the case. I’m not sure what their rush is, but now they say we’ll get the FBI 302s any day.”

  Maggie clapped. The 302s would provide us documentation about the FBI’s investigative reports, interview transcripts, witness statements, bank records and any subpoenas the government had issued. In short, all the evidence they had against the Cortaderos. The 302s in Theo’s case, alas, weren’t due for a while.

  “Great,” Mags said. “Let me know what you find. And what else do you have today?”

  “Ah, well. In addition to playing catch-up, I have a meeting with Vaughn after work.”

  “Detective Vaughn?” Maggie asked.

  “Yeah. I gotta tell you about that.”

  “I have something to tell you, too. But Vaughn…” She waved a hand at me to continue.

  “Well, he was there that night. About thirty minutes after we found Kim and called the police.” I paused. Thought. “It was all so surreal.”

  That night, the bizarre nature of what was unfolding before me—Kim’s body, the EMTs, the police, more police—had rendered me shocked. And scared. And my fear increased—went sky- high—when I saw Vaughn cross the threshold of my doorway. But in one look, and a quick shake of his head, as if to say, It’s okay, I felt strangely better. I suppose that during all of the time I’d spent despising Vaughn, pissed off and bitter at the indignities I’d felt he put me through, I had come into a belief about him—namely, regardless of all his spite and jackassery, he was a good detective. And he always seemed to ferret out the truth, eventually—and usually that was the real truth, not just the truth as he saw it.

  Sure enough, Vaughn stepped in that doorway, listened for a minute to the update his cops gave him, then began giving a lecture on suspects—“potential suspects,” he said—and how it was better to have a number of them. “Keep your fricking minds open,” he told the cops.

  Since then, nothing had really happened on the case, I told Maggie. But Vaughn had been calling me a few times a day, leaving a message if I wasn’t around. “Hello, this is Detective Vaughn, calling from Area 3. We’re going to be talking to the neighbors today. We’ll let you know when we find anything significant.”

  It almost made me laugh sometimes, Vaughn’s professional formality, although we’d had nothing but professional dealings together. And the fact was, that was exactly what I needed from him now—a continued, professional focus on Kim’s case. Because if I didn’t find out why my neighbor was in my condo and why she was killed there, I was going to have to sell said condo, and soon. Or I was going to go nuts.

  “Theo, meanwhile,” I said to Maggie. “He doesn’t seem quite as concerned about Kim.”

  “What?” Maggie made a disgusted face.

  “No, I mean he feels awful, and he wants to know what’s going on, but I don’t think he sees it as tied to him or his problems in any way. And I’m not sure it is, either. It just seems like we’re both freaked out and concerned but about different stuff. Lately, he’s been telling me half stories about his father, Brad.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “About his involvement in HeadFirst from the beginning. And about this foreign trust that Brad had set up to keep some of the holdings and how more and more of the money seems to have gone there.”

  “We need all of that,” Maggie said. “Every bit of information he’s got.”

  “I know, but every time we talk about it, I mention Kim and then he gets irritated and then we both get sad, and just want to end the pain for a minute. Either Theo hasn’t figured anything else out, or he hasn’t told me.”

  We were both silent. Maggie chewed at her bottom lip.

  “I figure since it’s our evidence,” I continued, “then technically, if we can get our hands on anything, we can keep it.”

  “Hell yeah,” Maggie said. “We’ll keep it and use it.” We both looked at each other. I think we both knew that Theo’s would not be an easy case. And that thought made me nauseous.

  “I thought I’d run it all by Vaughn,” I said.

  Maggie nodded. “Never hurts to have ten eyes on a case.” She paused for a moment. “What does Theo’s dad say?” Maggie asked.

  “They haven’t been able to connect. Theo wants to have the conversation in person.”

  Q sailed into Maggie’s office. “Did I hear someone mention the name of Vaughn from down the hallway?” he said. “Do we like him now?”

  “Kinda,” I said. “We’re meeting after work so I can try and figure out exactly what the cops are doing about Kim’s death or if I can help. I can’t just sit around and hope for the best anymore. And he actually said something to me about how we should get over our differences.”

  Q plopped himself in the other visitor’s chair. “That’s goddamned priceless. Your differences. I’m sure he means his. But it would be nice not to have to hate him anymore. Then I can admit that I’ve always had a little crush on Damon Vaughn.”

  “What?” Maggie and I yelled.

  “Yeah, ever since he came to Baltimore & Brown. Remember that, Iz?”

  “Unfortunately.” It had been a hellish time—Sam gone, and suddenly two police detectives were in my office.

  “His partner was a big guy, remember that?” Q asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “He was yummy, too.”

  Maggie and I shook our heads.

  “Speaking of yummy,” Q said. “How’s Theo holding up?”

  “He cut his hair.”

  Q’s hand flew to his chest. “That man has the best hair in the business. Tell me he just got a trim.”

  I made the sound of a razor and drew a fist over my head to mimic shaving.

  “No!” Q said.

  “That’s some serious shit,” Maggie said.

  “It’s symbolic,” I said.

  “Of what?” Q asked. “Temporary insanity? That’s like taking a hammer to a stained-glass window. If you ain’t Demi Moore, put the clippers down. Damn, girl. Samson done lost his power.”

  Maggie laughed. “I’ve got to get some work done, people.”

>   “Okay, sure thing,” Q said, looking from Maggie to me and back. When no one said anything, he stood. Then almost immediately he sat down again. “Are we going to talk about the other thing?”

  “What other thing?” Maggie asked.

  He stared at her, and stared.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What?” Maggie repeated.

  Q shifted in his chair, opened and closed his mouth a few times. “Uh…” He looked at me, then back at Maggie.

  “Q, for cripes sake,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  His eyebrows drew lower on his face. “You know how I have no gay-dar?” he said to me.

  “Yeah. That’s because you were straight for so long. Or forcing yourself to be straight, so your processing got messed up.” I was repeating things Q had told me after years in therapy, and he nodded vigorously at my summation.

  “Right. And that’s why I’m attracted to super-straight guys like Damon Vaughn. But do you remember what I do have a good radar for?”

  “Um…guys who wax their backs? Didn’t you tell me something like that once?”

  Q nodded appreciatively. “Yes, that’s true. Remember the other radar?”

  Maggie untucked her legs, started putting her feet back in her boots. “Okay, kids, you continue this fun trip down memory lane while I go in search of more caffeine.”

  Q held up a hand. “You will not be drinking caffeine. You’re pregnant, Maggie Bristol.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Q!” I said. “You—”

  But Maggie didn’t look indignant. She just looked surprised. “How did you know?”