Джонатан Келлерман - When the Bough Breaks

She put her hand on the door and started to close it. I blocked it with the heel of my palm.

“I feel for your loss, señora, but if Elena’s death is to take on meaning, it can be through preventing more killing. Through stopping the deaths of others. Please.”

Her hands started shaking. The needles rattled like chopsticks in the grasp of a spastic. She dropped them and the ball of yarn. I bent and retrieved them.

“Here.”

She took them, held them to her bosom.

“Come in, please,” she said, in English that was barely accented. I was too edgy to want to sit but when she motioned me to the green velvet sofa I settled in it. She sat across from me as if awaiting sentence.

“First,” I said, “you must understand that darkening Elena’s memory is the last thing I want to do. If other lives were not at stake I wouldn’t be here at all.”

“I understand,” she said.

“The money – is it here?”

She nodded, got up, left the room and came back minutes later with a cigar box.

“Take.” She gave me the box as if it held something alive and dangerous.

The bills were in large denominations – twenties, fifties, hundreds – neatly rolled and held together by thick rubber bands. I made a cursory count. There was at least fifty thousand dollars in the box, probably a good deal more.

“Take it,” I said.

“No, no. I don’t want. Black money.”

“Just keep it here, until I come back for it. Does anyone else know about it – either of your sons?”

“No.” She shook her head adamantly. “Rafael know he take it and buy the dope. No. Only me.”

“How long have you had it here?”

“Elena, she bring it over the day before she was killed.” The mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I say, what is this, where you get this. She say, can’t tell you, Mama. Just keep it for me. I come back for it. She never come back.” She pulled a lace-trimmed handkerchief from up her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.

“Please. Take it back. Hide it again.”

“Only a little while, señor, okay? Black money. Bad eye. Mal ojo.”

“I’ll come back for it if that’s what you want.”

She took the box, disappeared again, and returned shortly.

“You’re sure Rafael didn’t know?”

“I sure. He know, it would all be gone.”

That made sense. Junkies weren’t known for being able to hold on to their nickels and dimes, let alone a small fortune.

“Another question, señora. Raquel told me that Elena had in her possession certain tapes – recorded tapes. Of music, and of relaxation exercises given to her by Dr. Handler. When I went through her things I found no such tapes. Do you know anything about that?”

“I don’ know. This is the truth.”

“Has anyone been through those boxes before I got here?”

“No. Only Rafael an’ Antonio, they look for books, things to read. The policia take boxes first. Nothin’ else.”

“Where are your sons, now?”

She stood up, suddenly agitated.

“Don’ hurt. They good boys. They don’ know nothin’.”

“I won’t. I just want to talk to them.”

She looked to one side, at the wall covered with family portraits. At her three children, young, innocent and smiling; the boys with short hair, slicked and parted, and open-necked white shirts; the girl in a frilly blouse between them. At the graduation picture: Elena in mortarboard and gown, wearing a look of eagerness and confidence, ready to take on the world with her brains and her charm and her looks. At the somber tinted photo of her long-dead husband, stiff and solemn in starched collar and gray serge suit, a workingman unaccustomed to the fuss and fiddling that went with having one’s countenance recorded for posterity.

She looked at the pictures and her lips moved, almost imperceptibly. Like a general surveying a smoldering battlefield, she conducted a silent body count.

“Andy working,” she said, and gave me the address of a garage on Figueroa.

“And Rafael?”

“Rafael I don’ know. He say he go look for work.”

She and I both knew where he was. But I’d opened enough wounds for one day, so I kept my mouth shut, except to thank her.

I found him after a half-hour’s cruising up and down Sunset and in and out of several side streets. He was walking south on Alvarado, if you could call the stumbling, self-absorbed lurch that propelled him headfirst, feet following, a walk. He stayed close to buildings, veering toward the street when people or objects got in his way, quickly returning to the shadow of awnings. It was close to eighty but he wore a long sleeved flannel shirt hanging loose over khakis and buttoned to the neck. On his feet were high-topped sneakers; the laces on one of them had come loose. He looked even thinner than I remembered.

I drove slowly, staying in the right lane, out of his field of vision, and keeping pace with him. Once he passed a group of middle-aged men, merchants. They pointed at him behind his back, shook their heads and frowned. He was oblivious to them, cut off from the external world. He pointed with his face, like a setter homing in on a scent. His nose ran continuously and he wiped it with his sleeve. His eyes shifted from side to side as his body kept moving. He ran his tongue over his lips, slapped his thin thighs in a steady tattoo, pursed his lips as if in song, bobbed his head up and down. He was making a concentrated effort at looking cool but he fooled no one. Like a drunk working hard at coming across sober his mannerisms were exaggerated, unnatural and lacking spontaneity. They produced the opposite effect: He appeared to be a hungry jackal on the prowl, desperate, gnawed upon from within and hurting all over. His skin was glossy with sweat, pale and ghostly. People got out of his way as he boogied toward them.

I sped up and down two blocks before pulling to the curb and parking near an alley behind a three-story building that housed a Latin grocery on the ground floor and apartments on the upper two.

A quick look shot backward confirmed that he was still coming.

I got out of the car and ducked into the alley, which stunk of rotting produce and urine. Empty and broken wine bottles littered the pavement. A hundred feet away was a loading dock, unattended, its steel doors closed and bolted. A dozen vehicles were illegally parked on both sides; exit from the alley was blocked by a half-ton pickup left perpendicular to the walls. Somewhere off in the distance a mariachi band played “Cielito Lindo.” A cat screeched. Horns honked out on the boulevard. A baby cried.

I peeked my head out and retracted it. He was half a block away. I got ready for him. When he began crossing the alley I said in a stage whisper: “Hey, man. I got what you need.”

That stopped him. He looked at me with great love, thinking he’d found salvation. It threw him off when I grabbed him by his scrawny arm and pulled him into the alley. I dragged him several feet until we’d found cover behind an old Chevy with peeling paint and two flat tires. I slammed him against the wall. His hands went up protectively. I pushed them down and pinioned both of them with one of my own. He struggled but he had no strength. It was like tussling with a toddler.

“Whadyou want, man?”

“Answers, Rafael. Remember me? I visited you a few days ago. With Raquel.”

“Hey, yeah, sure,” he said, but there was only confusion in the watery hazel eyes. Snot ran down one nostril and into his mouth. He let it sit there a while before reaching up with his tongue and trying to flick it away. “Yeah, I remember, man. With Raquel, sure, man.” He looked up and down the alley.

“You remember, then, that I’m investigating your sister’s murder.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Elena. Bad stuff, man.” He said it without feeling. His sister had been sliced up and all he could think of was that he needed a packet of white powder that could be transformed into his own special type of milk. I’d read dozens of tomes on addiction, but it was there, in that alley, that the true power of the needle became clear to me.