“You give him up?”
“In a heartbeat,” I said, wondering at the same time if it was true.
Cesar stared at the pic of his brother some more and leaned forward. He whispered into the receiver.
“Jax Abana.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Traidor.”
“Traidor? Traitor? Did you say traitor?”
Cesar hung up the phone without answering, left the visiting room, and made his way back to his prison cell.
* * *
I called Bobby Dunston from the prison parking lot.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“It’s nine o’clock,” he told me. “At nine thirty I’m leaving the house. I’m taking Shelby and the girls to TCF Stadium to watch the alma mater play Ohio State.”
“The Gophers are going to get crushed.”
“You are the most negative person I know, McKenzie. How do you even get through the day?”
“I need a favor.”
“So you said. I’m saying if I can’t do it in the next thirty minutes, it’s not going to get done.”
“Can you reach out to someone for me?”
“Who?”
“Anyone involved with the Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia thing that’s still around.”
“Everyone’s still around, McKenzie. You’re the only one who quit.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Like you haven’t heard that before, my inner voice said.
“There’s a detective in West St. Paul that worked the case,” Bobby told me. “He’s the guy I spoke to Thursday morning—the one who gave me the intel I passed on to you.”
“Can you ask him to meet with me?”
“I can ask, but he’ll want to know what the meeting’s about.”
“Tell him the confidential informant that burned the Nine-Thirty-Seven to the ground is back in town.”
* * *
“Jax Abana,” the detective said. “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a good long time.”
“Seven years,” I said.
“Closer to eight.”
I met Ted Ihns for an early lunch at Boca Chica Restaurante on Cesar Chavez Street in an area we call District del Sol on St. Paul’s west side—which was not to be confused with the City of West St. Paul a mile down the road, where Ihns worked as a police detective. West St. Paul, in fact, was actually located due south of downtown St. Paul. It got its name because it happened to be on the west side of the Mississippi River. Don’t ask me why they didn’t call it something else, I only live here.
Boca Chica might have been the oldest Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities. It was also one of the finest. Ihns ordered Mole Poblano con Pollo—chicken served on a bed of Spanish rice with a chile ancho and Mexican chocolate sauce poured over the top—and I had Pescado ala Boca Chica, a broiled walleye fillet smothered with the owner’s renowned poblano sauce. The meals were so good that neither of us spoke until we were nearly finished eating.
“Where did you hear the name?” Ihns asked.
“Cesar Nunez.”
“He does have reason to remember it. How’s he look, Cesar?”
“Like he wishes he were somewhere else.”
“Ain’t gonna get out of the jug for quite a while yet.”
“Because of Jax Abana?”
“Exactly because of Abana.”
“He was a traitor, then.”
“Oh, yes. Indeed he was. He served up the Nine-Thirty-Seven on a platter, gave us everything. We thought, at first, that he was putting us on. He had no reason to turn, no reason to make a deal. We had nothing on Abana. All I knew, all I heard was that he was an up-and-comer in the gang. I could have ID’d most of the Nine-Thirty-Seven by sight back then. Not him.”
“Just came forward like a good little citizen, did he?”
“Yeah, right. Turned out that Abana was the gang’s CFO. Eighteen and right out of high school and he was handling all of the Nine-Thirty-Seven’s finances.”
“So why did he turn?”
“For the money. Why else?”
“Did you pay him?”
“Of course not. What happened, Abana gave us the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes, the gamblers, an annotated list of all the Nine-Thirty-Seven’s customers, and, of course, all the leaders. What he didn’t give us was two hundred and sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash, pretty much the Nine-Thirty-Seven’s entire treasury. He neglected to share that with us. We wouldn’t have even known it existed except Nunez and some others accused us of stealing it. We didn’t steal it, by the way.”
“Never thought you did.”
“Others aren’t so sure. I blame TV. Have you ever seen a cop show where half the force wasn’t dirty?”
“Barney Miller?”
“I mean in the last forty years.”
Nothing came to mind.
“What happened to Abana?” I asked.
Ihns brought his closed fingers to his mouth, blew on them, and let his fingers fly open.
“Poof,” he said.
“Poof?”
“Gone, baby, gone. Disappeared with all that cash. Which explained a lot.”
“Explain it to me.”
“Abana was happy to give us information on the Nine-Thirty-Seven, yet he refused to go on the record. He refused to testify. We told him we could put him in Witsec, give him a new identity, give him protection if he took the stand. He wouldn’t even consider it. The feds pushed hard, too. I didn’t know why he was so adamant until I heard about the money. If he had entered the Witness Security Program, he would have had to give it up.”
“Did you look for him?”
“No, why would I?”
“To get the money back,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it was a small price to pay to take so many assholes off the street at one time, you know?”
“It was a good bust.”
“Best of my career. Now you say he’s back.” I showed Ihns the photograph Riley had sent to my smartphone.
“He cleans up real good, doesn’t he?”
“Abana didn’t have short hair and a polo shirt when he was Mexican Mafia?” I asked.
“Hardly. He was also trying to grow a mustache. Pitiful thing. You say he calls himself Juan Carlos Navarre now?”
“That’s what the passport says.”
“Passport?”
“Spanish. Apparently he’s a lot wealthier than two hundred and sixty-seven Gs, too.”
“Well, good for him. What you need to understand, McKenzie, I have no interest in Abana. There’s no paper on him. He’s not wanted. As far as I know, he’s just another law-abiding citizen.”
“Where did he get his millions? His passport?”
“Maybe he invested in hog futures. Maybe he moved to Spain. All I know, McKenzie, what I knew about him from the moment he opened his mouth—Abana is ungodly smart. We’re talking genius smart.”
“Not so smart,” I said. “He came back home, didn’t he?”
“West St. Paul is home. Compared to this place, Lake Minnetonka is some mythical kingdom beyond the sea.”
“Hardly.”
“I’m just saying it’s pure dumb luck that he bought into the same restaurant where Cesar Nunez’s little sister worked. I mean, what are the odds?”
“They would have been a lot better if he had stayed away.”
“Like I said, Abana’s smart. If he came back, there’s a reason.”
“Does he have family here?”
“A mother. A sister.”
“Think he might have been in contact with them?”
“Now that wouldn’t have been very smart at all, would it?”
* * *
I found Delfina Abana sitting on the top of three concrete steps that had sunk several inches below their original forms, her back to the screen door of her small house. The steps ended at a chipped sidewalk that divided her spotty front lawn in half, a lawn about the size of the paper napkins you find in fast-f
ood joints. Her sidewalk intersected the city’s sidewalk, although the way the concrete slabs rose, fell, and tilted this way and that, I didn’t think West St. Paul took much pride in it. The kids playing up and down the street didn’t seem to notice, though. They just went about their business as if everything was exactly as it should be.
You don’t see that much anymore, I told myself—kids running around a neighborhood on an early Saturday afternoon as if they owned the place. These days you’re considered a poor parent if you allow your children freedom of movement, if you don’t carefully arrange their playdates and chaperone every outdoor excursion. Which was unfortunate. I thought about how I had been raised, how Bobby Dunston and I spent our days roaming hither and yon without a care in the world and without adult supervision. Kids today are missing out on a lot, I told myself.
I found a place to park and locked the SUV, thankful that I hadn’t embarrassed the neighborhood by driving my Audi into it. Delfina watched every movement intently from her stoop, and it occurred to me as I crossed the street that I had been mistaken. The kids were being supervised, not by their parents perhaps, but by people like her who watched out for people like me. They just didn’t know it.
“Who you?” she asked.
I stopped on the boulevard, a three-foot-wide strip of packed dirt between the sidewalk and the broken asphalt street, and introduced myself.
“You police? I got nothing to say to police.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not the police.”
She waved me forward. At the same time she glanced up and down the street as if she were concerned that someone might be watching. I had no doubt that someone was. The houses were set only a few feet apart. Residents standing at their windows could look through their neighbor’s window and read the label on the jar of pasta sauce Mom was pouring over the spaghetti. There were few secrets in a neighborhood like that.
I stopped at the foot of the steps.
“What you want?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Jax.”
“You said you weren’t police.”
“I’m not.”
“Why you asking questions ’bout Jax, then, if you ain’t police? Jax gone a long time now.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“Haven’t spoken to my Jax since he was forced to run away. Why you come here talking about my baby I ain’t seen for so long? You go ’way.”
I pulled my cell from my pocket and called up Abana’s photograph, the one where he was pretending to be Juan Carlos Navarre. I held it up for Delfina to see.
“Is this Jax?” I asked.
She stared at the pic, blinking several times as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She stood slowly and extended her hands. I climbed a step so she could reach the cell easily. She took it in both hands, caressing it the way a fortune-teller might caress a crystal ball. Her head came up. Instead of the joy I had expected to see in her eyes, there was fear.
“You come inside,” Delfina said. “Come inside now.”
She stood and opened the screen door. I stepped into her living room and she followed, closing first the screen and then the interior door. The living room was awash in blue except for a broad water stain on the wall behind the couch that was gray. Forest green drapes that were fading to a color that matched the stain framed the windows. She waved the cell at me.
“Where is my baby? Where is Jax?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I came to see you.”
Delfina shook her head as if she were having trouble comprehending what I was telling her.
“He is here?” she asked. “In the Cities? He’s not in West St. Paul. If he was in West St. Paul people would know. People would tell me.”
“He was,” I said. “In the Cities, I mean. I don’t know where he is now.”
“He is okay? My Jax is okay?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes became moist and her expression tightened. She took a fist and beat it against her breast, and for a moment I thought she might start weeping. She didn’t, though.
“He can’t be here. Jax. Bad people looking for him. Bad men. Do you know about the bad men?”
“Yes.”
“They want to hurt him.”
“The Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia.”
“They say he was one of them. Say he betrayed them. It’s not so. He was never one of them. He was a good boy. A good boy. Good in school. Look. Look.”
Delfina left the room quickly. When she returned she was carrying a box that originally held a pair of boots. She waved me toward the kitchen—the walls were painted a sickly yellow and the dirty white linoleum on the floor had been worn through in spots. She set the box on a table made of metal and covered with a thick white lacquer trimmed with red.
“Here, here,” she said. “Jax is a good boy. An honor student. Look.”
Delfina took a certificate from the box and handed it to me. It stated that the President’s Award for Educational Excellence had been presented to Jax Abana. Another certificate said Abana won an AP Scholar Award. Another boasted that he was an AP Literature and Composition Class MVP. Delfina produced a faded clipping taken from the St. Paul Pioneer Press that cataloged the top students in every high school graduation class in the area. By virtue of his name, Abana was listed first among the honor students at Henry Sibley Senior High School. Under “Favorite Quote” he’d written: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—Vince Lombardi. Under “College” he’d designated Undecided.
“Here, here,” she said again. She handed me a heavy medal attached to a ribbon. The medal was engraved with images of a book, star, Olympic torch, globe, and what looked like a magic lamp. “The lieutenant governor of the state of Minnesota put this around his neck at the graduation ceremony. The lieutenant governor. It means he graduated, my baby graduated, in the top one percent of his class. Number one.”
After that there was an 8½ × 11 glossy photograph of six students standing together on a stage, each dressed in a black graduation gown and mortarboard, each with a medal draped around their neck, each smiling brightly. Jax was the only male.
I have to admit I was impressed. The closest I came to the top one percent of my high school graduating class was passing them in the hallway.
Delfina reached into the box and retrieved a college-lined notebook. She opened the notebook and showed me what Abana had written on the first page.
Daily Schedule
6:30 AM—Exercise
7:00 AM—Shower and dress
7:30 AM—Breakfast (most important meal of the day)
8:10 AM—School bus
8:30 AM—Period one
9:22 AM—Period two
10:14 AM—Period three
11:06 AM—Period four
11:59 AM—Lunch
12:34 PM—Period five
1:24 PM—Period six
2:16 PM—Period seven
3:30 PM (time approx.)—Home from school/quick snack
4 PM—Work at car wash
6:30 PM—Home for dinner
7 PM—Homework/study
9:30 PM (if time permits)—Read for pleasure
10:30 PM—Sleep
Off to the side of the page Abana had written, Only children play video games, underlining the sentence several times. It was an opinion I shared. Beneath that he’d written another word that he’d drawn a thick circle around. The word was Muffie.
“Jax was not what they said,” Delfina said. “A gangster. He was never that. He was a good boy. I don’t know why they say those things about him. He had to run away because they said those things.”
“He came back,” I said.
Delfina stared at the pic on my smartphone some more.
“You have seen him?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “We’ve never met.”
She turned to me, her large eyes filled with questions. I answered the most obvious.
“I don’t know where he
went,” I said. “I only know he disappeared and his girlfriend asked me to help find him.”
“Jax has a girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes, I think so. Very pretty.”
“She come from a good family, this pretty girl?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I just nodded my head. That made her smile for the first time since we met.
We both heard the front door open, and we turned to face it. A woman, dark like her brother and not much older than Riley Brodin, stepped inside the house. She called absent-mindedly while she wrestled with a white shopping bag adorned with a bunch of red targets.
“Mama, I’m home,” she said.
She saw us standing in the kitchen. Her eyes locked on my face, and her head cocked to one side.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Delfina moved quickly toward her, letting my cell phone lead the way.
“Abril,” she said. “Jax. Jax is home. He’s seen him.”
“What are you talking about?” the young woman asked. She set the bag down and took the cell from Delfina’s hands, examining it closely. After a moment, her head came up and she started walking toward me.
“Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
I explained.
“Get out,” she said.
I tried to argue with her.
“What right do you have coming here, putting us at risk again?” she said. “Do you know how many people around here were hurt by what Jax did? How many went to jail? I could point to houses up and down this street where they lived, where their families still live. Even today some of them spit on the sidewalk when we walk by. Now you say he’s back. He’s back! Damn him.”
“No, no,” Delfina said. “It’s a lie. Jax didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a good boy. Now he’s come home.”
“He can’t come home,” Abril said.
“He has.”
“Mama, he was one of them…”
“No.”
“If he came home…”
“No. It is not true.”
Abril threw her arms around her mother and drew her close.
“Maybe you’re right, Mama,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.”
The Devil May Care Page 16
