No Witness But the Moon(85)

“Going out I see.”

“Out would be good,” said Adele. “This is more like presiding over a funeral.” Adele threw her black leather clutch on a table next to the canned carrots. “I have to deliver a speech tonight to a coalition of immigrant groups. And when it’s over, somebody’s career is going to be over, too. Either mine or Detective Vega’s.”

“I see.” Margaret grabbed a can of corn and studied an ink stamp on the top. She held it out to Adele. “Do you see an expiration date on this? The stamp doesn’t seem to correspond to anything.”

Adele fished a pair of glasses out of her clutch to check the tiny print. “That’s not a sell-by date,” said Adele. “I think it’s safe to give to clients.” She handed the corn back to Margaret. That’s when it hit her.

“You’re not wearing glasses.” Adele had never seen Margaret without her wire-framed glasses. “Did you just get contacts?”

“I was never any good with contacts,” said Margaret.

“I had LASIK surgery about a month ago. For the first time since first grade, I don’t have to have a piece of glass between me and the world.”

“So you didn’t need glasses on Friday night, I take it?”

“I can see perfectly without them now.”

Great, thought Adele. Vega not only shot and killed a man in front of a witness, he picked one with twenty-twenty vision.

Margaret turned her back to Adele and began stacking the cans on a shelf. There was an uncomfortable silence between them, punctuated by the bass thump of music and teenagers’ voices below. Adele got the sense Margaret had offered up this meeting and then instantly regretted it.

“I spoke to my attorney again, Adele. I don’t see how anything I say to you is going to be helpful to either of us.”

“We won’t know if you don’t tell me.” Adele grabbed a can of carrots off a shelf and studied the label. Some off-brand with a wholesome picture on the front that bore no resemblance to the mushy contents inside. “I lived off this stuff when I was a kid. To this day, I can’t eat anything canned.”

Margaret stopped stacking and turned to her. “Your family shopped—here?”

“There was a place in Port Carroll where I grew up,” said Adele. “Not this nice. Or maybe it was just the times. I remember it stank of cheddar cheese.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Adele. “I don’t mention it for the most part. It’s not something I like to dwell on.” Even now, some thirty years later, Adele could still see the pain in her mother’s face when she had to line up in front of that warehouse by the library for stale bread, hunks of cheese gone hard and white around the edges, and nearly expired cans of vegetables.

“Your parents lost their jobs?”

“My parents worked every day of their lives,” said Adele. “They were teachers in Ecuador. Here, they cleaned office buildings. But they dreamed of something better. So they started a business. Sort of like a FedEx store for immigrants. Wire transfers. Courier services. Phone lines in the era before cell phones. That sort of thing.”

“And it failed?”

“No. It was a huge success. So much so that their neighbor stole it from them.”

“You’re kidding,” said Margaret. “Couldn’t they file a police report or something?”

“The neighbor was the business owner on paper. On account of the fact that she was here legally and my parents weren’t. End of story as far as the police were concerned.” Adele still burned with the memory of her father trying to file a theft report—and the police laughing at him.

“There was nothing my parents could do,” she explained. “When you don’t have papers, you don’t count and neither does anything you try to accomplish. My parents lost all their savings. After that, we had to make choices. If my sister or I got sick, a doctor’s visit meant my father couldn’t afford bus fare for the week and had to walk three miles to work. A school trip to the museum meant a week of no lunches for my mother. People used to heckle us when we visited the pantry. They’d shout ‘Learn English’ or ‘Get a job.’ My parents did everything they could to build a better life for our family. And in one fell swoop, it was gone.”

Margaret leaned against the table and studied Adele for a moment. “Is that going to happen tonight?” she asked softly.

Adele felt embarrassed. She didn’t want this woman’s pity. “I’m not my parents,” she said stiffly. “And Detective Vega’s a big boy, too. We’ll survive. I’d just prefer to know the truth, that’s all.”

Margaret exhaled. She seemed too spent to argue anymore. She grabbed one of the empty cardboard cartons and began ripping it apart and flattening it for recycling as she talked.

“I was getting my three-year-old out of the bath around six-thirty,” Margaret began. “My son’s bathroom window overlooks our side yard. I looked out and saw two men standing on the edge of a pool of floodlight in the woods adjoining our yard. They were standing right next to each other.”

“Can you describe them?”

“One was wearing a dark puffy coat and the other was wearing a smooth nylon one that was also dark in color. They both appeared to be Hispanic, at least from my vantage point. I dried off Tyler, picked up the phone, and dialed nine-one-one. The dispatcher told me the police were already on the scene. Right after that I heard gunshots and looked out the window. The man in the puffy jacket was lying on the ground and the other man was backing away.”