A Place in the Wind

by Suzanne Chazin

  “I wouldn’t do any of those things,” said Vega.

  “Good,” said Greco. “Didn’t think you would. Then this conversation never happened.”

  * * *

  A uniformed sergeant took Adele’s statement and escorted her home. It took Vega another hour to extricate himself from the scene. He had to give a statement to an investigator from the district attorney’s office. He had to file an incident report with his own department. By the time he drove back to Adele’s, she was curled up on the couch, in the dark, physically and emotionally spent.

  “They arrested Wil.” Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper.

  “The police have to hold him until they can sort this all out,” said Vega.

  “His brother’s dead. His deported mother’s dying in Guatemala—”

  “I’m sorry his mother’s dying. But you didn’t create those circumstances.” Vega bent down and put an arm around her. “Come on, nena. Let me help you upstairs into bed. You’re exhausted. Sleep for a little while. Please?”

  “I need to get food in the house. For Sophia.”

  Sophia was staying at her father’s tonight. Everything could wait until tomorrow. But Vega sensed Adele was desperate to make the house feel like home again. If not for her, at least for her daughter.

  “I can do that,” Vega offered. “Just sleep for me, okay?”

  He got her into bed. Then he drove to the grocery store and ran around the aisles like a madman, shoving foods in his cart he wasn’t even sure she’d want. Grapes—did she let Sophia eat grapes? Cereals—how much sugar was too much? Eggs—did it matter if they were free-range? Organic? Brown? He was anxious to do something—anything—to help.

  By the time he finished up at the grocery store, he was hungry himself—and too tired to cook. He wasn’t far from Pizza City, the tiny joint in the same strip shopping center as Hank’s Deli. It was dark by the time he drove there. Streetlights flickered to life, washing out the nighttime sky. Yesterday’s snow sat in glazed and gritty heaps at the edges of parking lots and driveways.

  The pizzeria was at the far end of the shopping center. Vega pulled his truck into a spot by the hardware store, closed on Sundays, and got out. At the entrance to Hank’s, someone had placed a votive candle emblazoned with an image of the Virgin Mary. It flickered in the cold night air. Rolando Benitez had been dead only a few hours and already people in the community were mourning his death. Not at the preschool. It was crawling with cops and no immigrant wanted to chance an encounter. Hank’s Deli—the last place anyone had seen Rolando Benitez—was the next-best best. Vega felt bad for Oscar. He didn’t need this constant reminder of a notorious murder suspect connected to his store.

  Vega pulled up his collar against the cold and walked over to the pizzeria. It consisted of a counter, two tables with chairs, and a refrigerated soda case. The staff was Latino. The staff at every pizzeria within twenty miles was Latino.

  Vega ordered a pizza with pepperoni and took a seat in one of the chairs to wait. A television was mounted in the corner, turned to the local news. Benitez’s shooting topped the hour, along with a recap of Catherine’s murder. There were head shots of Mike Carp praising the “swift actions” of the Lake Holly Police in “taking down an armed and dangerous suspect.” There were shots of officers walking out of a dilapidated Lake Holly row frame.

  The reporter, who barely looked older than Vega’s daughter, squinted at the teleprompter. “Police have just confirmed that a key chain containing a photograph of Catherine Archer has been identified among the items removed from the SRO Benitez shared with his brother.”

  Vega tuned out the kitchen noise and leaned in closer. The key chain was significant. No way would Catherine have given something like that to an immigrant she was tutoring. He had to have taken it from her. Maybe as a trophy.

  There was a quick establishing shot of La Casa, followed by a head shot of Catherine’s brother, Todd, his voice quaking, as he read a statement from the family, thanking the police for their help in finding his sister’s killer. Vega wondered whether the family felt relief that Benitez was dead, or frustration that they would never have the chance to confront him.

  On the one hand, they wouldn’t have to suffer through a trial and watch this guy smirking or fidgeting a few feet ahead of them in a courtroom, while their daughter and sister lay six feet underground. On the other, Vega had the sensation of having caught the ending of a movie before he’d watched the middle. There were so many unanswered questions—at least for him. How did Benitez convince Catherine to walk into the woods with him? Why didn’t the crime scene show more of a struggle? If Catherine’s key chain was at Benitez’s, why not her phone or wallet?

  “Your pizza’s ready,” said one of the men behind the counter. Vega paid, then headed out to his truck. He placed the pizza on the seat beside him. He looked over at the makeshift shrine next to Oscar’s front door. There were two Virgin Mary votive candles now. Someone else had heard the news. Someone else had come to pay respects.

  Vega didn’t think Benitez sounded like the sort of man anyone should feel too broken up over losing. But poor communities could be funny that way. Sometimes the ones most at the fringes of life commanded the most respect in death. Vega had only to think of his own grandmother’s endless treks to wakes and funerals—even for people who were a neighborhood nuisance in life or whom she barely knew. Grief for her was cathartic—less a matter of the individual’s loss and more for the suffering that the world unleashed on those least able to bear it.

  Vega hopped in the cab of his truck and cranked up the heater. His phone rang. He thought it might be Adele. But it was his boss, Frank Waring.

  “Captain?” The only good thing about desk duty was that Vega didn’t have to work evenings and weekends, the way he did when he was catching cases. His heart quickened at a hopeful thought. It was a Sunday night. Was Waring putting him back to full duty? Giving him a case?

  “I received a call this afternoon from an investigator in the DA’s office.” Waring’s tone was measured. “He told me that you were involved in this police shooting incident today in Lake Holly.”

  “I wasn’t involved exactly. I was there. But I had nothing to do with the arrest or shooting.” Vega began to sweat. He felt like Captain Waring had tugged at a small thread that had seemed so inconsequential this morning when he and the Lake Holly Police were sitting around Adele’s dining-room table. And now, all of a sudden, it was starting to unravel. “I just . . . helped facilitate a meeting.”

  “A meeting that you were present at.”

  “But not involved—”

  “A meeting that resulted in a hostage standoff and a suspect’s fatal shooting.”

  “I didn’t know it would . . .” Vega saw the futility of his explanation. He took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “So in other words,” said Waring, “you were party to another police department’s tactical operations without clearance or authorization.”

  Waring never raised his voice, never exhibited anything that would qualify as a temper. And yet Vega would have preferred a stream of invectives to the steely assuredness of Waring’s accusations. The events today had slipped by in such small increments that Vega hadn’t realized the magnitude of his mistakes until Waring put them together. His presence at the meeting with the Lake Holly PD. His decision to involve himself in Benitez’s surrender. His concerns over Adele that just bogged him down further—drained him of objectivity and twisted his judgment. He’d done it all because Adele was so vulnerable right now. She needed him the way he’d needed her after that shooting in December. He just wanted to help. To ensure that she was safe. And now, it had all come crashing down on him.

  Vega tried to backpedal. “This whole situation went down in a couple of hours, Captain. On a Sunday! I didn’t have time to ask for permission. The suspect could have skipped by then.”

  “That’s the Lake Holly PD’s concern—not yours, Detective,” said Waring. “This w
asn’t a bank robbery in progress. You are a county police officer—on modified duty, I might add. It never occurred to you to seek clearance?”

  Vega stopped himself from arguing. If there was one thing Captain Waring couldn’t forgive, it was an officer who couldn’t own up to his mistakes. “I apologize, Captain. I should have informed you. Things snowballed quickly. I regret my actions.”

  “So do I, Detective. I want to see you in my office at oh-nine-hundred tomorrow morning. In full-dress uniform.”

  “In . . . uniform?” Vega had a uniform, of course. Dark blue pants. Double-breasted jacket with brass buttons down each side. Epaulettes on the shoulders. An eight-point cap with a shiny black brim. He wore it to formal police ceremonies and funerals, then stuffed it back in its garment bag and hung it in the rear of his closet, behind his old rock concert T-shirts and threadbare flannel shirts that Adele said were long overdue for the Goodwill bin. He didn’t normally wear his uniform to work. “Am I . . . facing charges?”

  “We’ll talk about that tomorrow,” said Waring. “I’ll see you then.” He hung up.

  Vega stared at the pizza, growing cold on the passenger seat of his truck. Another votive candle had been placed at the entrance to Hank’s Deli. Benitez’s death at the hands of police had not gone unnoticed in the Latino community. Vega had a sick feeling that for all their good intentions, Adele was going to have to pay for this.

  And so, it seemed, was he.

  Chapter 16

  Adele’s phone rang Monday morning while she was fixing Sophia’s breakfast and getting her ready for the school bus. It was Dave Lindsey, La Casa’s chairman of the board.

  “We’re meeting at Frank Espinoza’s law office at nine,” said Lindsey. He sounded testy. He’d been kind when Adele called him about the shooting last night. He was cooler this morning. Maybe the weight of the situation was sinking in. Everywhere Adele went in town, there were reminders of Catherine. At the high school, a posterboard-size enlargement of her varsity tennis team photo was mounted outside. In front of it sat a huge impromptu memorial with candles and flowers and stuffed elephants, apparently her favorite animal. All the lampposts in town were adorned with turquoise ribbons, her favorite color. There were banners strung across Main Street calling the community together for a candlelight vigil this evening in her honor.

  But beneath the call to remember Catherine, Adele sensed a seething resentment. She saw it in emails and texts from clients and her Latino friends. The police shooting of Rolando Benitez had been applauded by Anglos as swift retribution for a heinous crime. For Adele’s friends and clients, the shooting wasn’t so simple. Not that they didn’t feel terrible that this girl had been murdered. But for them, there was another part of this tragedy. A man from their community had been tried by public opinion and executed without so much as a hearing. His kid brother, the one who’d turned him in—a teenager with no criminal record—languished in jail. Nobody seemed to be voicing any outrage over that.

  “You’ve heard the news, right?” said Lindsey.

  “Which news, Dave? We’ve had so much lately.”

  “Carp is holding a press conference this morning to announce some new county law he wants passed to clamp down on immigrants. He’s naming it after Catherine.”

  “He’s not wasting a minute, is he? I’ll get over to Espinoza’s as soon as I can.”

  Adele hung up the phone and tried to concentrate on getting Sophia ready for school. She packed her lunch and braided her hair. She tried to pay attention to a long story about Sophia’s best friends, Emma and Madison, and some argument that put Sophia in the middle. But inside, Adele felt like a swarm of bees was buzzing through her brain. She couldn’t concentrate on anything.

  Catherine’s murder had rippled across the country, spurred on by the relentless press coverage Mike Carp was giving it—and himself. Now that Benitez was dead, Anglos and Latinos alike wanted to hold someone accountable. And that someone seemed to be Adele and La Casa. To the anti-immigrant faction, she and her community center were the careless radicals who’d cavalierly turned an undocumented rapist and ex-con loose on the community. To immigrants and their advocates, she and La Casa were in collusion with the police, offering up Benitez’s head and “arranging” his execution to appease a lynch-mob mentality.

  She couldn’t win.

  Adele dropped Sophia off at the elementary school—where more turquoise-colored ribbons fluttered from the flagpole—and then headed over to Frank Espinoza’s one-man law office. It was the third firm La Casa had employed in its ten years of operations. Not that this was surprising. Adele basically arm-twisted the firms to do most of La Casa’s work pro bono. Their first law firm was big and impressive. White men in Brooks Brothers suits and thousand-dollar watches. They took lots of photos of La Casa for their walls—then dodged the work or palmed it off on their most junior associates. Their second law firm was headed by a man who eventually got disbarred.

  Frank Espinoza—Venezuelan-born, Lake Holly–raised—was the best of the lot. A reedy man with collar-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he looked more like a sociology professor than an attorney. Adele’s best friend, Paola, also a criminal defense attorney, recommended Espinoza for the job after he and Paola worked together on a case to free two immigrants wrongfully accused of setting a fire. Paola had all the resources of her big-bucks law firm in Broad Plains. But it was Espinoza, a one-man operation, who uncovered the witness whose testimony freed the men. He’d been representing La Casa ever since.

  Espinoza’s office was three boxy rooms on a second-floor walk-up above a beauty salon. At regular intervals, the rotten-egg stench of hair dyes wafted up through the floorboards. On Fridays, when the salon had its manicure-pedicure specials, the whole place reeked of nail polish remover. Espinoza’s secretary was a cousin named Alecia.

  Adele was ten minutes late to the meeting because Sophia couldn’t find her homework. Adele ran across the parking lot and raced up the stairs so fast that by the time she was standing in front of Alecia’s desk, she was sweating.

  “They’re waiting for you,” said Alecia.

  “I figured.” Adele opened the door. Espinoza and five others stared back at her—the five people who made up the volunteer board of directors of La Casa. Two women. Three men. All of them white. Adele hadn’t planned it that way. She’d sought out people in the community who had the know-how and contacts to bring in resources and talent to build the organization. Her idealistic side wanted them to be a blend of ethnic groups. But her practical side understood that money and connections were needed to keep the place afloat. So her board consisted of a well-known philanthropist, the head of Lake Holly Hospital’s emergency medicine department, a tax partner in a blue-chip accounting firm, the owner of a local car dealership, and Lindsey, the chairman, who owned the largest real-estate firm in the area.

  The room went silent as Adele pushed open the door. She felt the way she used to during her freshman year at Harvard, like she was this little brown-skinned Latina walking around with a big “fraud” sign on her head. The memory still haunted her. Flushed her cheeks, dampened her armpits, and twisted her tongue so tight that even saying “good morning” sounded hesitant.

  “Sorry I’m late.” She took a seat that had been squeezed in at the table. No one but Espinoza looked at her—not even Dave Lindsey. They all looked at their notepads before them.

  “We were just going over our options with Frank,” said Lindsey. He folded his long, bony fingers until they formed an imaginary wall in front of him. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a massive jaw and long legs he never seemed to know where to stow. Right now, they were taking up most of the room under the table, folded on top of each other like a set of hedge clippers. Although Adele was the founder of La Casa and ran its day-to-day operations, the real power resided in Lindsey and the board. They held the purse strings and could hire and fire at will. Adele was in effect a straw boss—something her ex liked to remind her often.

&nbs
p; Espinoza shuffled some papers in front of him. The steam radiator clanked and hissed, turning the room even hotter and stuffier than it already was.

  “As everyone in this room already knows,” he began, “La Casa is facing its greatest crisis in over a decade of operations. Our entire budget comes from grants, fund-raisers, and donations, which will be severely impacted by the negative publicity and reduction of goodwill that Catherine Archer’s murder has created in the community.”

  “That’s why we need to impress upon our donors and the community at large that now more than ever, Lake Holly needs La Casa,” said Adele. “We need a safe harbor, a place where people can come together to air their concerns.” Adele pressed her palms to the table. “As soon as possible, we have to get everybody in the same room. Community and business leaders. Clergy. Concerned citizens. Folks at the high school.” Adele took a deep breath. She was in her element now. Navigating her way out of a crisis. “I’ve also put a call in to the Archer family to express our condolences and see if they’ll meet with us.”

  “You contacted the Archers without consulting the board?” asked Lindsey.

  “If the family expressed any interest in a meeting, I would, of course, have notified you. Dave, Catherine was one of us. A member of our family of volunteers. We need to let the family know that we’re grieving her death too. Just as we’re grieving the police decision to open fire on Benitez. There’s no reason for this situation to degenerate into an us-versus-them sort of thing. Mike Carp would love that. He’s banking that all our funding dries up and we fold. We have to show him that Lake Holly and La Casa are stronger than that.”