James Grippando - Hear No Evil

The prosecutor paused, eyes narrowing as his gaze drifted toward the defendant. “Because Lindsey Hart is a liar and a murderer.” He faced the jury and said, “Treat her like one.”

A honking horn jolted Jack from his thoughts. Traffic was moving again, but just barely. Jack inched his car forward a few feet, then hit the brake, slowing to a dead stop in a forty-five-mile-per-hour zone. A long trail of orange tail lights blinked on and off ahead of him. Enrique Iglesias sang his heart out on not one but three different stations that Jack tried on the radio. Latin dance music blasted from the boom box in the convertible that was caught in traffic beside him. Driving south out of downtown Miami after four o’clock in the afternoon was like getting stuck at the end of the world’s longest conga line.

He turned off U.S. 1, wound his way behind a car dealership, and found himself next to Mario’s, that little Cuban market where Abuela loved to shop-which got him to thinking.

He steered into a parking space and reached for his wallet. Tucked behind his driver’s license was the business card that Kiko had given him when Jack and Abuela had visited the market in the middle of trial, though now it seemed like a thousand years ago. He removed it, then checked the name and the telephone number that Kiko had written for him on the backside.

El Pidio-the man who had told Kiko that Hector Torres looked like Jorge Bustón, the man who’d dated Jack’s mother back in Cuba.

Jack had never followed up, too caught up in Lindsey’s trial to be searching for additional distractions. Or maybe he was like Abuela, not sure that he wanted to know the truth. But the way this case had played out-or was about to play out-he felt as though he needed more truth in his life. If nothing else, his meeting with Torres’s ex-wife had his curiosity about his own mother flowing once again. It bothered him that she’d used the word obsessed to describe Torres’s attraction to his mother. The more he considered it, the more curious it seemed that his half brother-“Ramón,” according to that gravestone back in Cuba -had died the day he was born. Jack’s instincts continued to tell him that something was not quite right.

He flipped open his cell phone and dialed the number.

An old man answered in Spanish. Jack responded in kind, if you called Spanish with a John Wayne accent “in kind.”

“Mr. El Pidio?”

“Not ‘Mr. El Pidio,’ ” the man said, grousing. “Just El Pidio.”

“This is Jack Swyteck. I’m-”

“Ah, Swyteck. I know who you are. Kiko told me you’d probably give me a call.”

“I understand you knew my mother in Bejucal.”

“Yes. I was her doctor. I delivered her baby.”

Her doctor? So many questions were suddenly racing through Jack’s head, but he got back to what was most important, the one thing that was almost too difficult to ask. “Then you must know… How did my brother die?”

There was silence. Finally, his voice crackled as he breathed a heavy sigh and said, “That’s a very complicated matter, young man.”

At dusk, Jack caught up with his father at the Biltmore driving range. Harry was perched atop a grassy knoll, dressed in knickers, argyle socks, and a classic tweed golfer’s cap, the kind of getup that a man didn’t dare wear without a single-digit handicap. Jack watched from the bench as Harry, deep into his rhythm, popped one ball afer another onto the range. It looked as if manna had fallen from heaven, hundreds of little white balls scattered across the green grass before them.

“Dad?”

Harry halted in the middle of his backswing, slightly annoyed by his son’s timing. “Yes?”

“Do you think there’s anything a man shouldn’t know about his wife?”

Harry paused, as if bowled over by the question. “If a man asks his wife a question, he should get the truth.”

“What if he doesn’t ask? Should someone tell him?”

“You mean should his wife tell him?”

“No. Let’s say she can’t. Should someone else tell him? Someone who knows the truth.”

Harry seemed somewhere between confused and suspicious. “What’s this about, son?”

Jack was speechless. What would he possibly tell his father? That Ana Maria had borne a son who died in Cuba? That she, herself, never would have died if Jack had never been born? That she would have known the dangers if it hadn’t been for her obsessive old boyfriend-Harry’s old friend, Hector Torres? Thirty-six-year-old memories were all Harry Swyteck had of his first wife. Jack was at a loss for any good reason to trample all over them, but he still wasn’t sure how to handle it.

Jack said, “I’ve been thinking of Lindsey Hart, all the horrible things that came out at trial. The way Oscar treated her. If she’s acquitted and remarries, would her new husband want to know all the details? Would he have a right to know?”

“I suppose that knowing those things could help him understand her fears, her moods. If it would make the new marriage stronger, then he should know.”

“But knowing just for the sake of knowing-”

“What’s the point? It’s like looking your wife in the eye on your deathbed, after fifty years of marriage, and telling her that you kissed another woman forty-nine years ago. It doesn’t accomplish anything, unless your goal is to break her heart.”

“Exactly,” said Jack, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. “So, if it were you, you wouldn’t want to know all those details.”

Harry laid his five iron aside. His confusion was tipping more toward suspicion. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

Jack was searching for clues in his father’s eyes-a need to know, a desire to know. He saw nothing of the sort. But Jack suddenly felt something from within, a realization that there comes a point in every child’s life when it’s no longer time for the parent to watch out for the child, that it’s the child who protects the parent.

“No, nothing,” said Jack. “Like I said, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Brian Pintado and his mother.”

“You sure that’s what this is about?”

The answer didn’t come right away, but Jack spoke as firmly as he could. “Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is such a mess, and it will only get more complicated as Brian gets older. What’s he going to think about his mother a few years down the road?”

Harry studied his son’s expression, as if sensing that Jack had subtly changed the subject from what a husband should know about his wife to a son’s feelings toward his mother. But the older man let it go. “It will depend on what the jury’s verdict is, I suppose.”

“Hopefully, she’ll be acquitted.”

“Then what? Will the juvenile authorities come after Brian for murdering his father?”

Jack was silent. That was something he didn’t want to think about. “Hard to say. It’s not as if Brian came right out and confessed to the murder on the witness stand.”

“You took him to the brink, though. Got him to admit that he wished his father was dead.”

They exchanged glances. The estrangement was over between this father and son, but even the distant past never completely washed away. Neither one said a word, but Jack knew they were sharing the same thought: As a boy, how many times had Jack gotten angry at his old man and told him flat out, “I wish you were dead”?

“Kids have those thoughts and don’t mean it,” said Jack.

“Yes,” said Harry. “That’s true.”

More silence. Then Harry took a half step closer and laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I’m proud of what you did in that courtroom. You took a tough case, and you did one hell of a job. However it turns out, you have nothing to be ashamed of.”