“Delightful,” I say. “Thank you.”
We are all silent for a moment, but if others feel uncomfortable I’m not aware. For a brief moment, despite the circumstances, I find myself feeling something I haven’t felt in so long, not since before Gran died. I feel…companionship. I feel…not entirely alone. Then I remember what brought everyone here in the first place, and the anxiety begins to churn again. I put my plate aside.
Charlotte does the same. She picks up the pad and pen by her chair. “Well, we’re all here for the same reason, so we better get started. Juan Manuel, I believe my father filled you in about Molly’s predicament? And I believe you yourself are in a very challenging situation.”
Juan Manuel shifts in his chair. “Yes,” he says. “I am.” His big brown eyes look into mine. “Molly,” he says, “I never wanted to see you involved in this, but when they brought you in, I didn’t know what to do. I hope you believe me.”
I swallow and consider his words. It takes me a moment to spot the difference—between a bold-faced lie and the truth. But then it sharpens and I can see it clearly in his face. What he’s saying is the truth. “Thank you, Juan Manuel. I believe you.”
“Tell her what you told me in the kitchen,” Mr. Preston suggests.
“You know how every night I stayed in a different room at the hotel? How you gave me a different keycard each night?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Mr. Rodney, he wasn’t telling you the whole story. It’s true, I don’t have an apartment anymore. And no work permit now either. When I did, everything was great. I sent money back home. It was needed, because after my dad died, there wasn’t enough. My family was so proud of me—‘You’re a good son,’ my mother said. ‘You work hard for us.’ I was so happy. I was doing things the right way.”
Juan Manuel pauses, swallows, then continues to speak. “But then, when I needed my work permit extended, Mr. Rodney said, ‘No problem.’ He introduced me to his lawyer friend. And that lawyer friend took a lot of my money, but in the end, no permit. I complained to Rodney and he said, ‘My lawyer guy can fix anything. You’ll have a new permit in a few days.’ He told me he’d make sure Mr. Snow didn’t find out. But then he said, ‘You have to help me, too, you know. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.’ I didn’t want to scratch his back. I wanted to go back home, to find another way. But I couldn’t go back home. I had no savings left.”
Juan Manuel goes silent.
“What exactly did Rodney make you do?” Charlotte asks.
“At night, after my shift in the kitchen, I’d sneak into whatever hotel room with the keycard Molly gave me. Molly, she’d leave my bag there for me, right?”
“Yes,” I say. “I did. Every night.”
“That bag, it was never mine. It was Mr. Rodney’s. His drugs were inside. Cocaine. And some other things too. He used to bring more drugs later in the night when no one else was around. And then he’d leave. All night, he made me work—sometimes alone, sometimes with Mr. Rodney’s men—and we’d prepare the cocaine for sale. I didn’t know nothing about these things before, I swear. But I learned. I had to learn. Fast.”
“When you say he made you, what do you mean exactly?” Charlotte asks.
Juan Manuel wrings his hands as he speaks. “I told Mr. Rodney, ‘I won’t do this. I can’t. I’d rather be deported than do this. This is wrong.’ But things got worse when I said that. He said he’d kill me. I said, ‘I don’t care. Kill me. This is no life.’ ” Juan Manuel pauses, looks down at his lap, then continues. “But in the end, Mr. Rodney found a way to make me do his bad business.”
Juan Manuel’s face tightens. I notice the dark rings around his eyes and the redness in them. We look the same, he and I—all of our sorrows on full display.
“What did Rodney do then?” Charlotte asks.
“He said if I don’t keep quiet and do his dirty work, he would kill my family back home. You don’t understand. He has bad friends. He knew my address in Mazatlán. He’s a bad man. Sometimes, when I was working late, I got so tired I’d fall asleep in my chair. I’d wake up, forget where I was. Mr. Rodney’s men, they would hit me, throw water at me to keep me awake. Sometimes they burned me with cigars to punish me.” He holds out his arm.
“Molly,” Juan Manuel says. “I made up lies about the dishwasher burning me; I’m sorry. It’s not the truth.” His voice catches and he dissolves into tears. “It’s wrong,” he says. “I know a grown man should not cry like a baby,” he says. He looks up at me. “Molly, when you came in the hotel room that day and saw me with Rodney and his men, I tried to tell you to run away, to go tell someone. I didn’t want them to get you like they got me. But they did. They found a way to get you too.”
Mr. Preston is shaking his head as Juan Manuel continues to sob. My own tears begin to fall.
Suddenly, I feel very tired, more tired than I’ve ever felt in my life. All I want is to get up from the sofa, pad down the hallway to my bedroom, wrap myself up in Gran’s lone-star quilt, and fall asleep forever. I think back to Gran in her last days. Is this what she felt near the end, drained of the will to carry on?
“Looks like we found our rat,” Mr. Preston says.
“Where there’s one, there are more,” Charlotte adds. She turns to Juan Manuel. “Was Rodney working for Mr. Black? Did you ever hear or see anything—anything at all—that might suggest Mr. Black was actually behind this drug operation?”
Juan Manuel wipes the tears from his face. “Mr. Rodney never said much about Mr. Black, but sometimes he took calls. He thinks I’m so stupid that I don’t understand English. But I heard everything. Mr. Rodney would sometimes come into the room late at night with lots and lots of money. He’d set up meetings to give money to Mr. Black. Like more money than I ever seen in my life. Like this.” He makes a gesture with his hands.
“Stacks of bills,” Charlotte said.
“Yes. New. Fresh.”
“There were bundles like that in Mr. Black’s safe the day I found him dead,” I say. “Perfect, clean stacks.”
Juan Manuel continues. “Once, Rodney was really upset because there wasn’t much money coming in that night. He went to meet Mr. Black and when he came back, he had a scar just like mine. But not on his arms. On his chest. That’s how I knew I wasn’t the only one getting punished.”
The pieces come together. I remember the V of Rodney’s crisp, white shirt and the strange round blemish marring his perfectly smooth chest.
“I’ve seen that scar,” I say.
“There’s another thing,” Juan Manuel says. “Mr. Rodney never talked to me directly about Mr. Black. But I know he knows the wife. The new wife. Mrs. Giselle.”
“That’s not possible,” I say. “Rodney assured me he barely ever spoke to her.” But even as I say it, I realize I’m a fool.
“How do you know Rodney knows Giselle?” Charlotte asks.
Juan Manuel takes out his phone from his pocket and flicks through some photos until he finds the one he’s looking for. “Because I caught him,” he says. “How do you say in English en flagrante delito…”
“In flagrante?” Mr. Preston offers.
“Like this,” he says, and turns his phone around to show us a picture.
It’s Rodney and Giselle. They are kissing so passionately in a shadowy hallway of the hotel that they most certainly would not have noticed Juan Manuel taking the picture. My heart feels sore and heavy as I stare at the photo, registering the details—her hair swept across his shoulder, his hand on the small of her arched back. I fear my heart may stop altogether.