J. Jance - Fire and Ice

“I’m Detective Caldwell,” Lucy said, holding up her badge. “Is your father here? Or your mother?”

He simply stared at her and didn’t answer. Finally he turned back into the house, letting go with a volley of rapid-fire Spanish. I picked out something that sounded like police, but that was about it. From inside a woman said something back to him in equally quick Spanish. The boy started to close the door, but Jaime Carbajal stepped forward. In the very best door-to-door salesman tradition, he put the toe of his shoe inside the door and spoke softly to the boy in what sounded like fluent Spanish. When Jaime finished, there was another long pause. At last the door was wrenched open, revealing a dark-haired young woman who shoved the boy aside and then barred our way herself.

“What do you want?” she asked, speaking slowly in heavily accented English.

“We’d like to talk to you,” Lucy began. “To ask you some questions.”

The woman shook her head. “No comprendo,” she said vehemently, even though her English, although hesitant, had been entirely understandable. She was young, probably somewhere in her early thirties. She wore a sweatshirt and a pair of threadbare jeans. Not fashionably threadbare-really threadbare. She looked haggard and frightened. There were dark circles under her eyes, and it looked as though she might have been crying.

Jaime glanced questioningly at Lucy, who nodded imperceptibly, giving him the go-ahead to join in. Jaime spoke to the woman in Spanish once again. I picked out something that sounded like esposo . My foreign language skills are pretty limited. My Spanish comes from what I’ve gleaned from perusing menus in Mexican food joints like Mama’s. Even so, I believe the word esposo means husband.

Jaime said something else. For a moment I thought she was going to slam the door shut in our faces despite Jaime’s still intervening toe. But she didn’t. Instead, relenting, she stepped aside, held the door open, and beckoned us into the house.

We trooped into a tiny but immaculately clean living room. In one corner sat a still-warm wood-burning stove, which I suspected was the house’s only source of heat. On the wall next to it, a gold-framed picture of the Virgin Mary hung over a small table where a glass-encased candle burned. Other than the table, the only furniture consisted of a small couch, no bigger than a love seat, a single cushioned chair, and a hulking television set that looked as though it was a refugee from the eighties.

As we came into the room, a second boy, a year or so younger than the first one, hovered warily in the doorway of the next room. The woman barked an order, and the two kids scampered away, returning moments later with a mismatched pair of kitchen chairs. The woman took one of those and gestured the rest of us into the other seats while the boys sank down on the floor and huddled near their mother’s knees. There was no disguising the anxious looks on their faces.

Under most circumstances, someone as close to the investigation as the victim’s brother would never have been allowed into that kind of interview, but we needed a translator on the spot, and if it hadn’t been for Jaime Carbajal’s presence there on the front porch, I don’t think we would have gotten anywhere near Lupe Rivera.

He mostly asked questions that were framed by Mel and Detective Caldwell, who had spent the afternoon gathering as much information as possible about Tomas Rivera. Once the suspect’s wife answered, Jaime would translate what she said while both Mel and Lucy Caldwell took copious notes.

Where was her husband? Lupe didn’t know. Was she aware he hadn’t gone to work that day? Yes, she was. Was he sick? That question produced a long thoughtful pause followed by a dubious maybe. Had she noticed anything unusual in her husband’s behavior lately? Another maybe. It didn’t surprise me that Mel and Lucy were deliberately beating around the bush, having Jaime Carbajal ask questions without giving away the bottom line-that Lupe’s husband was now the prime suspect in a homicide investigation. Even so, each time Lupe answered she glanced at her children. It seemed to me that she was deciding how she should answer based on the fact that her sons were sitting there listening.

Jaime seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. He turned to me. “If you wouldn’t mind taking the boys out of here…”

Before I could object, Mel and Lucy nodded in unison. I got the hint. It was more than a little embarrassing to be voted off homicide island by the woman of my dreams, but I set about doing what I’d been asked to do without complaint.

“I think I have a teddy bear out in the trunk of my car,” I said, holding out my hand to the younger boy. His name was Tomas. He didn’t look to be any older than six or seven. “Would you like to go see it?”

He nodded and scrambled to his feet.

“How about you?” I asked Alfonso.

“I’m too old for teddy bears,” Alfonso declared, but he got to his feet and followed Tomas and me outside. It was a good thing Alfonso didn’t want one, because the truth is, my vehicle was equipped with only one Teddy Bear Patrol teddy bear. Tomas’s small face brightened as I handed it over. Then, with him cradling his bear, we walked back to the front porch and sat down on the top step.

We sat there in silence for a time while I struggled to find something reasonable to say.

Mel had passed me part of the paperwork. Tomas Rivera had a Social Security number, so he was most likely in the country legally. I doubted the same held true for his wife and sons. If they were illegal immigrants, having a collection of cops show up on their doorstep had to be scary for all concerned. From their point of view, the prospect of being busted by Immigration might seem catastrophic. But this was far more serious than that since we were investigating a homicide.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

Alfonso glared at me and shook his head, pretending he didn’t understand when he was really refusing to answer. When Tomas started to, Alfonso elbowed him to shut up.

Another long period of silence passed. Then, because Tomas seemed the more approachable of the two, I addressed my next question to him. “What does your daddy do?” I asked.

“He works in the woods,” Tomas answered with undisguised pride. “He cuts down big trees and saws them up so people can build houses.”

Alfonso elbowed Tomas again. “Shut up,” he said aloud.

I ignored him. So did Tomas.

“Your mom seemed real sad when we got here, like she’d been crying. How come?”

“Because of the picture,” Tomas told me.

“What picture?”

He shrugged. “Just a picture,” he said.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“In her pocket,” he said.

I stood up. “Wait here,” I told the boys. “I’ll be right back.”

Once inside, I spoke to Jaime. “Ask her about the picture.”

“Picture?” he asked. “What picture?”

He turned back to Lupe and asked the question. Her face seemed to dissolve. For a long time she said nothing at all. Finally she reached into the pocket of her jeans. Slowly she removed a photo-a small wallet-size color photo, the kind of head shot that comes home each year with every school-age kid.

She held it out to me. I was about to reach for it, but Jaime Carbajal beat me to it. “Oh my God,” he croaked, grabbing the picture out of her hand.

“It’s Luis!” he exclaimed, staring at it. “That’s my nephew. Where the hell did you get this?”

Where indeed!

For several long seconds after Butch turned off the ignition, Joanna sat in the car staring up at the towering steeple of Saint Dominick’s Catholic Church.