No Witness But the Moon(76)
Outside Chez Martine, Adele checked her watch. She had a little over two hours before she had to pick up Sophia. Her sister Grace’s birthday card would have to wait. She fished that scrap of paper out of her wallet with Ricardo Luis’s cell phone scribbled across it.
It wasn’t guitars she wanted to see anymore. It was him.
*
There were only five houses at the top of Oak Hill Road. Four of them were clapboard-and-cobblestone colonials set back from the road with wide front porches and gabled roofs. In the middle was a fifth house, a Spanish hacienda the color of a sun-bleached lawn flamingo. It had a red clay tile roof, stucco arches and enormous windows with black wrought-iron grilles. Adele wondered what the old-money CEOs thought of this second coming of the Alamo among their stately gray-and-white New England charmers.
Adele parked her Prius by the curb and walked down the driveway, past several sedans and SUVs. It looked like Luis had other guests this morning. A housekeeper answered the door and Adele gave her name. She’d called before she drove over. She’d have never had the nerve to show up otherwise.
The housekeeper told Adele to wait in the marble entrance hall by a sweeping staircase. Children’s laughter floated up from somewhere inside the house. Luis’s family must have flown in last night or this morning to be with him. Adele wondered if she’d get a glimpse of his fashion model wife, Victoria. From the pictures in Luis’s book, Victoria was an elegant Panamanian, slightly taller than her husband with blond-streaked hair and high cheekbones.
Oh God, she was becoming such a groupie.
The housekeeper reappeared. “The se?or will see you now.”
Adele followed her through a hallway with a vaulted ceiling and dark polished wood floors. Their footsteps echoed. They turned and turned again until they were in a hallway lined with framed gold records and photographs of Luis holding up Grammy awards on the covers of various Latin magazines. The woman entered a small paneled room and gestured for Adele to have a seat. It felt like a doctor’s waiting area. Then a door opened. Adele recognized the stocky Hispanic man in the black beret from last night at Harvest. He nodded to her but didn’t give his name. Adele already knew it from speed-reading through most of Luis’s memoir last night when she couldn’t sleep. This was his producer, Oscar Cifuentes.
“Ric’s in the studio.”
“I interrupted a recording session? Oh my.”
“Nah. We’re just fooling around. If he were really doing a recording session, you couldn’t be anywhere near the place. But he’s just hamming it up for a magazine photo shoot. Come,” said Cifuentes. “I’ll show you.”
Cifuentes led Adele into a recording booth. A console that looked something like an air traffic controller’s workstation stared back at her. On the other side of the soundproof glass was Luis. He was dressed in a bright blue T-shirt with a swordfish on the front and a chambray work shirt over it. A set of headphones straddled his tousled black hair. His feet were bare, his khakis, unpressed. On one side of him was a guitarist, a black man with a shaved head. On the other was a Hispanic drummer with a skinny ponytail that looked like some pelted animal had died and ossified on his back.
Vega would have been in seventh heaven to be in a recording studio like this with musicians of the caliber of the men with Ricardo Luis. Adele felt guilty she was here without him. Then she remembered last night at the hospital—the way he’d so cavalierly betrayed her. The way he’d refused to tell her anything about why Marcela and Byron were even there.
There was a photographer in the recording studio along with Luis and the two musicians—a young Asian woman with a long braid of silky black hair. Luis mugged for the camera, offering up his trademark dimpled grin, pretending his drummer’s ponytail was a microphone. He was a natural comedic actor who could make his features bigger and bolder on command.
“He’s just having fun in there,” said Cifuentes. “Do you sing? Play? You’re welcome to join him.”
Adele thought about Vega’s frozen smile when she tried to sing and shook her head.
“I’m afraid growing up I showed more skill at torturing notes than carrying them,” said Adele. “So they stuck a sword in my hand instead.”
“A sword?” asked Cifuentes.
“I fenced as a teenager.”
“Yeah? Me, too.”
“Really?” Adele seldom met anyone who fenced.
“Sure.” Cifuentes winked at her. “You wanted a new set of hubcaps or a stereo, I was your man. That was fencing in my neighborhood.”
Mine, too, Adele wanted to say. But it was too exhausting to explain that she was a scholarship kid in a YMCA program who happened to show some talent. Poverty was always exhausting—first, when you’re in it and later, when you try to explain how you outran it. So she changed the topic.
“Do you think I could borrow Mr. Luis for a second? I have a couple of questions I want to ask him.”
Cifuentes pushed a button on an intercom. “Hey, Ric. The lady from La Casa’s here. Can you take five?”
Luis took off his headphones and stepped into the booth.
“Hey, where’s the detective?” He probably thought that’s why Adele was here. She didn’t make it clear over the phone.
“It’s just me, I’m afraid.”
“ ‘Just you’ is good, too.” He touched her arm. “What can I do for a pretty lady?”