“Why?”
“I don’t know. I only know he said it could ruin my job, a detective on the premises. But my job is ruined, anyway-I have no job. And Frank, he was a decent man, he paid good, he did what he could for people, he’s dead. And I wonder, was it because I brought a detective on the premises?”
“You don’t really believe that, do you, Rose? It wasn’t because I was there that someone put rats in the heating ducts or glued the doors shut.”
I went to sit on Julia’s bed. It smelled faintly of María Inés’s diapers. Despite the Dorrados’ Pentecostal religion, a little Virgin of Guadalupe stood on the pasteboard chest of drawers between the two beds. I suppose no matter what you think of God, everyone needs a mother to look after them.
Rose slowly turned her head on the pillow and looked at me. “But maybe they was scared, I mean, whoever did those things, maybe when they saw a detective asking questions they got scared and burned down the factory.”
It was possible, I suppose; the thought made me queasy, but I said, anyway, “And you don’t have any idea who this was?”
She shook her head slowly, as if it weighed a great deal and she could barely move it.
“The second job you took-is that enough to support the children?”
“The second job?” she gave a harsh bark that might have been a crow laughing. “That was also for Frank Zamar. His second business that he was starting. Now-oh, Dios, Dios, in the morning I will go down to By-Smart and join all the other ladies in my church lifting heavy boxes onto trucks. What difference does it make? The work will wear me out faster, I will die sooner and be at rest.”
“Where was the second factory? Why didn’t he just run an extra shift at Fly the Flag?” I asked.
“It was there, it was a different kind of job, but he did run an extra shift, in the middle of the night. I got there right before the shift started on Tuesday night. And the plant was in ruins. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Me and the other women, we stood there not believing it, until some cop came along and sent us home.”
Josie appeared in the doorway. “Ma, Sammy and Betto are hungry. What’s for lunch?”
“Nothing,” Rose said. “There is no food, and no money to buy food. We are not having lunch today.”
Behind their sister, the boys started to cry again, this time out loud. Rose squeezed her eyes shut tightly. She lay still for a moment, seeming not even to breathe, then she pushed herself upright in the bed.
“No, mis queridos, of course there is food, of course I will feed you, while I have blood running through my body I will feed you.”
23 Star-crossed Lovers
The snow had stopped when I got outside. The snows of November are usually light, merely a warning to the city of what lies ahead, and this one had ended with a scant half inch. It was a fine, dry powder, blowing across the walks, disappointing a group of kids in the vacant lot next to me who were trying to turn it into snowballs.
I sat in my car, the engine running and the heater on, and tried to make a few notes while the conversation with the Dorrados was still more or less fresh in my mind, although I was hard put to make sense of anything I’d heard just now.
BILLY, I wrote in block letters in my notebook, and then stared at it, unable to think of anything to add. What was going on with him? When we spoke on Thursday, he told me to tell his father he’d call the company’s shareholders if the family didn’t leave him alone. Was that why Buffalo Bill had come to see me last night? And, if that was the case, what didn’t the Bysens want the shareholders to know? From my perspective, the company did a ton of outrageous things-locking employees in overnight, paying badly, busting unions, leaving families like the Czernins in the lurch when it came to health insurance-but the shareholders must know those things already. What could be so horrible that the shareholders would shy away from it?
I thought back to the prayer meeting out at By-Smart headquarters. The share price had fallen on the rumor that By-Smart was going to allow union organizers. Maybe Billy was just threatening to call and say that was really going to happen. But what would be the “or else”?
Just why had Billy run away from home? Was it because he was in love with Josie, or troubled by his family’s business practices, or ardently committed to the South Side? Certainly he admired Pastor Andrés, but what would make him ally himself with the preacher against his family?
Which brought me to the preacher himself, whom Buffalo Bill had threatened with deportation. Of course, the Buffalo dished out threats like hash at a diner-last night, he’d threatened to get the bank to foreclose on my mortgage and to shut down my business if I didn’t do what he wanted. Maybe it was a form of verbal incontinence-Mildred had kept shutting him up in a nice, deferential way.
At the same time, the Bysens really did have enormous power, more than I could imagine. If you operated a colossus like By-Smart, with its global reach, with annual sales bigger than the GDP of most of the countries in the world, you could get congressmen and immigration officers to do pretty much anything you wanted. Say, Pastor Andrés was here on a green card-the Bysens could probably get that revoked with one phone call. Who knows-if he was naturalized, they might even be able to get his citizenship stripped from him. Perhaps that would take three calls instead of just the one, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear they’d done it.
I printed ANDRÉS on the next page. I didn’t care much about his ties to Billy, but what did he know about the fire at Fly the Flag? He’d met with Frank Zamar ten days ago, the day I’d surprised the punk in the basement.
That punk. Between April’s heart stopping and watching the factory go up in flames, I’d forgotten the punk. Andrés knew who he was. A chavo banda, whom one saw around stealing from jobsites, Andrés had said, and he’d shooed him away from the street where we’d been talking. Maybe Andrés was just protecting his jobsite, but maybe he knew something more about that chavo.
FIND THE CHAVO, I added, followed by FREDDY?? Did he matter in the scheme of things? Seeing his name next to “Find the chavo” made me wonder if he was that chavo. But a punk, what would he be doing in Andrés’s office, able to overhear Buffalo Bill threaten the pastor? Or, or, or. My brain wasn’t working. Despite the heater, my feet were starting to freeze, and I was feeling a dull throb in my wound. I stuck the notebook back in my bag.
I was putting the car into gear when a midnight blue Miata, with a license plate that read “The Kid 1,” pulled up in front of the Dorrado building. I hadn’t suspected Billy of so much whimsy. I hesitated briefly, then shut off the Mustang’s engine and got out to cross the street.
I leaned over the driver’s door as Billy was starting to extricate himself. “Your car is about a hundred times easier to trace than your phone, Billy, especially with that vanity plate. Even I could track you if I wanted to. It will be child’s play for the big agencies that your dad and your grandfather use. You want them charging in on Josie and her family?”
He turned white. “Are you following me? For them?”
“Nope. I came to see Josie and her mom. And realized you’ve been sleeping here. It’s not a great idea, for lots of reasons, one of which is I don’t want Josie having a baby.”
“I-we wouldn’t, we don’t, I respect her. I belong to True Love Waits.”
“Yeah, but teenagers in a bedroom all night, respect only carries you so far for so long. Besides that, they don’t have any money. Ms. Dorrado lost her job-it’s a burden for her to have an extra person there.”
“I wasn’t taking food from them. But you’re right: I should buy some groceries for them.” He flushed. “Only, I’ve never been grocery shopping, I mean for a family, of course I’ve been in a store sometimes. I don’t know what you buy if you want to cook a meal. There are so many ordinary things that I don’t know.”