“The crime stats would say you’re wrong.”
“The crime stats would say I did it.”
“Did you?” The question came out before Weir could stop it. It was the kind of question a cop would ask a cop. Ten years of law enforcement lead to habits.
Raymond answered without a beat. “No.”
“Sorry.”
Raymond shook his head. “Don’t be.” He sighed heavily, slid the battery-compartment lid back onto the opener, put the opener in his pocket. “I’ll get this into evidence, where it belongs.”
They rifled through the glove compartment and under the floor mats, through the usual oddments that collect in a car. Impound tags indicated the goods looted by Innelman, then by Robbins’s minions, for further study: two coffee mugs, an unlabeled audio tape, the lighter and ashtray, an envelope of “snapshots, personal,” two hairs taken from the driver’s side headrest, one from the passenger’s side.
Raymond opened the door for air and breathed deeply. “I spent some time in the hospital, realizing some things. Ann and I were good together — we had our ups and downs — but overall we were good. She’d had a hard winter; she was locked up inside like she’d get when she’d think about not being able to have a child. I knew the pattern, so I didn’t press it. When I got out of the hospital yesterday afternoon, I didn’t go home. I went down and parked by the Whale’s Tale, then I drove to where they found her car. A couple of things hit me. One was, Annie was probably going to see a lover. So I started wondering what kind of man he would be. What I think is, he would be different from me, totally different. You have affairs because you feel neglected or bored, right? So you seek out someone... fresh. I’m just a cop. I act like a cop, I think like a cop, I make the money a cop makes. So let’s say she’s met a high roller at work. Maybe a guy with lots of money coming in — a privileged man, a mover. She sees him, they come together, it’s good. One night after work, she changes into something real sexy. She’s offering herself to him, her body for his pleasure. Say for a minute that he was the one who killed her. What’s hard for me to imagine is the arrogance, the waste of it. What I see is a guy used to getting what he wants, used to that kind of destruction. A guy with a towering ego, who could actually think of Ann as property, a consumer good. Someone with power and bucks. Some guy who thinks he’s above the law. She goes to see him, he takes her to the Back Bay, and he’s so sure of himself, he leaves her car in his neighborhood. I sat in my car on the street there, where they found Ann’s, and it’s the high-rent district — money and power. I think she got mixed up with a man who thought he owned her.”
Weir listened. Raymond’s profile made sense. Ann would choose the opposite of Raymond, someone to be the jewel of intrigue in her secret life. “It would be in the journal. The journal would be at home.”
Raymond brought his hands to his face, pressing his fingers into his temples. “Innelman and Deak turned our place inside out. I spent last night doing the same thing, then I went down to the preschool and did it again. She either hid it awfully good, or someone else has it. Maybe, she took it to him.”
“Along with a dozen purple roses.”.
“Right.”
“Why?”
They got out and shut the doors. Raymond didn’t answer until they were back in Jim’s truck.
“I think,” said Raymond, “she was telling him it was over. She was going to be a mother and her fling was done. Maybe she took him the diary because it was like letters to him, his story, something he could have to remember her by.”
Weir played it through. “It would make more sense to just chuck it in the bay, get rid of it.”
Raymond shook his head. “That’s not her character. Annie kept things — friends, memories, pictures — you name it. Annie was a keeper. If she wrote a diary, she wouldn’t just toss it in the water.”
“She wouldn’t give it away, either.”
“She gave more than that away, my friend.” Raymond went quiet for a moment. Weir could hear the hiss of his breathing, slow and deliberate. “How old is Horton Goins, twenty-four? Maybe that’s all it was. A tumble with a good-looking kid who turns out to carry a knife.”
Weir said nothing. It didn’t play. But on the other hand that’s exactly what Horton Goins had been to a girl named Lucy Galen in Hardin County, Ohio.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Raymond.
Chapter 16
They started off for the coast, threading first through the barrio side streets of Santa Ana where the houses stood behind wrought-iron fence work to keep the thieves out — even the windows were latticed with metal that tried to look decorative but was, in fact, a barrier against the junkies, crackheads, gangbangers, drifters, home invaders, cutthroats, and occasional killers who wanted in. Then down Fourth Street, past the cafés and shoe stores and taco stands; past the record stores blasting mournful Mexican ballads; past the pawnshops and the beauty parlors; through the crosswalks filled with women in dresses, burdened by groceries, laboring flatfooted from the marketplaces toward home. Men moved even more slowly along the sidewalks, men with cowboy hats and heavy jackets and sun-darkened faces, men without work, without applicable skills or pressing destinations, with weary legs and exhausted backs and expressions — barely visible beneath their hat brims — of acceptance, resignation, and faith that the Virgin Mary or certain saints would eventually deliver them from this hostile land of dreams manana, manana, manana.
Raymond watched them go by from behind his sunglasses. “I wish they had more to do,” he said finally. “They’re wasting their lives.”
“They’re trying,” said Jim.
“They don’t understand the system. If they understood the system, they’d be running this place. All they are now is cheap labor. This whole county’s nothing but a day-work center for them. It’s pitiful.”
“Another ten years, thing’s will be different,” said Jim. “Someone will get them together, and they’ll find out what numbers mean.”
Raymond’s relation to his own race always had baffled him. Sometimes Ray seemed proud of his blood, other times ashamed of his people. What struck Jim was Raymond’s indecision, his unpredictable swings between sympathy and contempt. Raymond, for instance, hadn’t associated with the other Mexicans in school. He hung with the white kids, and took German. He had devoted himself to an Anglo — two years his senior — from an age so young that Weir couldn’t specifically place it anymore. But Raymond, among his family, was different. Weir spent hours with Ray at the Eight Peso Cantina when they were boys, eye-high to the great bar that runs the length of the place, checking the floor for dropped change, running minor errands and accomplishing minor chores, always under the quietly watchful eyes of Raymond’s father and mother, Nesto and Irena Cruz. And there, among parents and relatives, Raymond’s Spanish rolled off his tongue with rapid grace, his face took on a fresh new physiology as his lips and cheeks formed the words, even his eyes seemed to glitter with a new energy when he was in the Eight Peso. Later, Weir had come to understand it as the face of belonging.
One incident stood out in Jim’s memory. They were high school sophomores, standing together in the quad one afternoon before lunch. Ann was with them. A fight broke out between a big white kid named Lance and a little Mexican named Ernie. Later, Jim found out it was something about Lance’s girl. Lance was a football player, a nice-looking boy with an athlete’s body and a head of sun-bleached hair. Ernie was a dark, silent boy nobody seemed to know. A crowd closed in on them as Lance’s fist slammed into Ernie’s face, the sudden eruption of blood hushing the students, but drawing them closer, as if in witness of some holy act. Lance threw Ernie against the brick wall of the cafeteria and started punching again. Jim could hear the pop of knuckles on flesh. Ann begged Raymond to stop it. And Weir could still remember the look on Ray’s face as he turned to him, a look of sadness so profound that he stood paralyzed, deaf to Ann’s entreaties, hypnotized by the heavy precision of Lance’s big arms as he slammed away at the Mexican. Without looking at either Jim or Ann, Raymond simply said, “Watch.” And to Jim’s astonishment, Ernie began to slip the punches and dodge the blows. His face was bleeding hard. Lance tired and slowed, hit the wall with a fist intended for Ernie’s stomach, and suddenly, the Mexican was all over him. His hands were lighter and faster than the big boy’s, and no single punch seemed to take more out of him than another, but they chopped away at Lance-straightening him, backing him up, moving him away from the wall and back into the open space, where for a moment he swayed, his head tossing side to side like a treetop in some violent storm, before his knees buckled and he fell — one comely, well-developed muscle group at a time — flat on his face, moaning already and trying to cover himself with the fallen brown needles of the quad’s centerpiece pine.