The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(70)

Brandon rang the doorbell promptly at seven. He was in an old T-shirt and frayed khakis, but he’d made some effort to brush his floppy hair into place with gel. His bike was set next to my car on the driveway, and I noticed that the bottle in the holder was covered with a sticker that said REAL MEN RIDE BIKES. “Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Coleman,” he said as he stepped inside.

“My pleasure,” I said.

Ray paused the basketball game and got out of the easy chair to shake hands with our guest. “Hello, young man.”

“This is Brandon,” I said. “He’s in the same grade as Miles.”

“Uh-huh,” Ray said, his eyes darting back to the TV screen.

Miles jostled past me. “Wanna play Battlefield on Xbox?” he asked, and whisked Brandon off to his room. A minute later, the door closed behind them, Ray was back in his chair, and I was alone again.

When I have something on my mind, I try to give my hands something to do, just to keep myself from going crazy, but I had already cleaned the house from top to bottom and was out of ideas. So I sat next to Ray on the couch, biting my nails, a habit I hadn’t been able to break despite his constant nagging about it. When the basketball game was finally over, I dressed the salad and called the boys to the table. The Lakers had won, thankfully, and Ray was in a great mood. He picked up the lemonade pitcher and started filling everyone’s glasses. “So, Brandon. You and Miles are in the same classes?” he asked.

“No, Mr. Coleman. We don’t have any classes together. We’re just in the same grade.”

“Right, right. That’s what I meant.”

The boys started serving themselves from the grilled potato dish. Miles picked up the bottle of ketchup and, without being asked, moved the jar of mustard next to Brandon’s plate.

“Did you grow up here, Brandon?” I asked.

“Yes, but I was born in Torrance. My mom was going to school near there and she only moved back here after she finished.”

“What was she studying?” Ray asked.

“Dental hygiene,” Brandon said, and then he and Miles started laughing at some inside joke. The moment one of them stopped, the other started.

It had been weeks since I’d heard Miles’s laughter, and the sound gave me such pleasure that I chuckled along with them. “What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Nothing, Mom,” Miles said.

Well, at least I was back to being his mom. That was something, even if he was still distant and refused to explain the joke to me. To have been so close to him for thirteen years only to find myself unable to pierce this new shield he’d built around himself was painful to me. I pushed the chicken around on my plate and waited for Ray to say something, but he only shook his head slowly, in a knowing way.

Later that night, when we were getting ready for bed, I asked him what he thought about Brandon. “Well, it takes all kinds,” he said. It was an irritating habit my husband had, resorting to folk wisdom when he didn’t know what to say.

What if I told him that Brandon wasn’t just a friend for Miles? A few years ago, Ray had stopped visiting his cousin in New York after she’d moved in with her girlfriend, even though he always denied that this was the reason. “She changed after she went to grad school,” he would say, “that’s all it is. Nothing more.” And now he was pretending not to notice what was right in front of him, which was strange, because he was such an attentive father. It was making me doubt myself. Maybe there was nothing to notice. Maybe I was making too much of the little things. Miles was happy, that much I could see. Wasn’t it all that mattered?

I went to work the next day feeling drained from lack of sleep. Sitting in the briefing room, I drank a big cup of coffee and tried to pay attention to the daily reports. Vasco was cheerful—he’d gotten some good press after rescuing an abandoned baby and it seemed the Bowden incident was finally receding from the news. As we walked out of the conference room, he asked me where I was on the hit-and-run case. I told him the truth: I hadn’t been able to find solid evidence of intent, so the murder investigation was pretty much dead. “That’s good,” he said. “Time to move on.”

I went back to my desk, answered some emails, and tried to catch up on paperwork. Down the hall, the espresso machine in Murphy’s office screeched. Had he noticed anything with our boys? If he had, he showed no sign of it. When I’d run into him in the break room earlier that morning, he’d given me a friendly smile, but didn’t talk to me. I was about to drive to the Subway for lunch when I got a call from the front office that someone was here to talk to me about the Guerraoui case. A witness.

The notice in the newspaper and the posters I’d left around town nearly a month earlier had yielded a few dozen calls, but they’d all been useless, and anyway the case was essentially closed now. So when I walked into the lobby, I was more irritated than excited, convinced that this would only be a waste of my time. Mr. Aceves stood up quickly, and his hat fell from his lap. Picking it up with his left hand, he offered me his right. Next to him was a tiny woman who introduced herself as his wife. “I can translate for him,” she said.

“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “We have several people here who speak Spanish.”

This came as a disappointment to the couple. I don’t think they wanted to be separated. When I invited Mr. Aceves to the interview room, he limped behind me like a man being led to the gallows.