Girl in Snow(23)
While Detective Williams interviews the ex-boyfriend, the news vans multiply—the local channels that span across the Front Range and even a van from CNN. A reporter with glossy hair speaks reverently into a microphone.
They’ve already gotten hundreds of calls from terrified neighbors and overbearing parents: We have to make sure our children are safe! One anonymous phone call from a man with a drawling redneck accent, claiming conspiracy, the same conspiracy that had overtaken Denver International Airport. New-Age Nazi-ism, he said—a fresh holocaust coming for anyone who doesn’t love God, a concentration camp beneath Terminal B. Lucinda was a warning, he said, just the locusts or the frogs. Afterwards, the officers had laughed together at the man’s expense, but not with their usual fervor. This time, uneasy.
Detective Williams went to the Whitleys’ house last night, too. Cameron was already asleep, and Cynthia had refused to wake him up. There had been no hope for that one from the start.
Come back when you have a warrant, she’d said. Or at least probable cause.
They have neither of those things, for anyone. The news vans pull up and spike their antennas. The television in the corner threatens them all with images of themselves, their own building, their own shiny bald heads as they walk in and out of it. No comment, no comment.
Russ and Ines met again a few weeks after that summer day in the park.
It was a narcotics call. The Broomsville police had been chasing these guys for months. They were notorious, Ivan’s friends: they dealt in shelled-out houses, places so far beyond repair that no desperate Broomsville real estate agent would go near.
This was the north side of town, where tiny, peeling structures housed sardine-packed families. Broken grills and sun-faded plastic chairs littered lawns. Mexico City, Russ’s cop friends called it, snickering from air-conditioned cars. Russ laughed along, vaguely recognizing his own participation in this active coward’s ignorance. Of course, he knew there was more to this neighborhood, so different from the manicured suburbs, but he did not know the shape of these differences, how they tasted, how they felt.
Russ had followed the squad into a building on Fulcrum Street. Outside, families were grilling meat and drinking Pacifico. Children ran through the sprinklers, shrieking in Spanish.
Ivan’s friends wore Walmart shoes with low-sagging shorts, tattoos crawling up their necks like skin disease. But Ivan himself was clean-shaven and straight-backed in a blue linen shirt. Marco, the only man Ivan was personally close to, had a tattoo scrawled beneath his chin that read “DAHLIA,” the name like an allcaps slit in his throat. Though Marco had never been formally involved with the drug ring, the squad still parked outside his house sometimes to keep watch.
In all his years as a police officer, Russ had arrested only a handful of people. He was always shocked and a bit disgusted by the satisfaction: a surging release as the metal pieces found their places. That clink. He’d memorized the Mirandas as a child, playing with a toy cop car on the back porch, his father watching from behind the sliding glass door. Russ had a lisp as a kid. You have the wight to wemain siwent.
After Ivan and his friends had been tackled and shoved violently into cars, the lieutenant sent Russ back into the house to collect the Junk. The house was dilapidated, the roof nearly caved in. Uncooked pasta spilled across the grimy kitchen counter. It smelled like rotting fruit.
There were two bedrooms. The first held only a mattress, half covered with stained navy sheets. The closets were empty. So were the vents. The second room didn’t have a bed, just a rocking chair by the window. It was missing three slats in the frame. And in the rocking chair: Ines.
She wore a pair of basketball shorts and a men’s tank top. Her hair was stuck to her cheeks; the room was stifling and covered in peeling wallpaper. An old, ailing floral print. She didn’t see Russ. Not at first. She had her elbows on the windowsill, chin cupped in her palm, watching, paralyzed, as they drove her brother away.
Ines looked up at the sound of Russ, her face round and greasy, a splotchy red with panic. And in her eyes, recognition: man from park. Márquez. The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.
Only later, when Ines had made her statement—she didn’t know anything about the drugs in that house, where she had been living only a few weeks, having just arrived to visit her brother, with a valid Border Crossing Card and B-2 tourist visa—when the social worker had given her a new shirt (a black T-shirt from the gas station, with Colorado’s flag emblazoned next to a proud American eagle, because Ines’s suitcase was being processed as evidence), after Russ had driven her to the station, just the two of them in the car, and as she watched Broomsville flick by in blurs of summer green, Ines had said, I didn’t know police could be nice, and Russ said, They usually aren’t, but it doesn’t matter; are you thirsty? He bought two cans of Coke at a 7-Eleven. When Ines unbraided her hair beneath the bright station-house lights and unleashed it in clumps that reeked of smoke—then, Ines looked beautiful. Like the girl he’d met in the park, sun-glazed, with a hint of flirt. They sipped their Cokes in the stifling car and Russ decided: he would invite her home. She wouldn’t have to go back to that house, covered in Junk. No funny business, he promised. Funny business. Ines would tease him, always.
Russ had stuck the page from Love in the Time of Cholera on his refrigerator, held down with a magnet that doubled as a beer opener, a souvenir from his sister’s vacation to Key West. That night, they drank whiskey in mugs at the kitchen table and Ines slept on Russ’s couch, which had never been professionally cleaned, but was comfortable enough.