I’d heard the name Eduardo Zapata my entire life. Just as she’d blamed my father when I was impolite to Vincent Cardeno earlier, I’d heard “you must get that from the Zapata side” every time I’d misbehaved as a child. As a firm believer in nurture over nature, I thought Chava should take some responsibility for the more challenging aspects of my personality.
Looking at the man who’d given me half my chromosomes, however, I realized nature might have a little more to do with things than I’d originally believed. He had my build and I could see where I got my hair color. In fact, the face I couldn’t stop staring at explained every one of my features.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. What else should one say when meeting one’s father for the first time as an adult?
“I’m good, I’m okay. No one worry about me,” Chava said as she struggled to sit up from where she’d fallen back on the sofa.
I went over to her and grabbed her arm, taking her pulse. It was fast, but strong.
“You’ll live. Let me get you a glass of water.”
“Sit, Eddie,” Vincent said. “Lonnie will get that.”
Lonnie? The muscle man’s name was Lonnie? I guess with a physique like his no one was going to make fun of him. Or maybe he worked so hard at his physical prowess because he’d been bullied as a kid.
Lonnie walked over and poured Chava a glass of water. My father moved a chair over from where it sat near the window and joined our little group. Chava and I now sat flanked on either side by Vegas Mafiosi, or whatever my father was.
I was starting to wish I’d let the whole Kendra business go.
“So,” I said, looking at my father, “what’s new?”
Eduardo smiled at me. “Eddie. I’ve been wanting to meet you, but I never pictured our reunion quite like this.”
His voice was low pitched, soft. It carried well, but I found myself leaning forward slightly so I didn’t miss anything.
This guy was good.
“So what’s the word on Kendra Hallings?” I said.
Eduardo laughed and looked at Vincent, volumes of information shuttled between them. The image of Chance and his partner Kate communicating the same way rose up in my mind’s eye; I quickly quashed it, not wanting to be distracted from the situation at hand.
“You’re single-minded in your purpose, mija.”
“If you’ve got her, I’d like her back,” I said, ignoring the reference he made to our familial relationship, “Otherwise I’ll just be on my way.”
“Thank you,” Chava said to Lonnie, taking the water glass. She began to sip slowly, her eyes focused on some distant horizon, as if none of us existed at all.
A silence settled on the room. Lonnie also stared off into space at his own private movie screen. I wondered for a moment what a guy like that thought about. New ways to kill without leaving a mark? Maybe I was being unfair. He could be writing poetry in his head for all I knew. Or designing a new hair removal product.
“You never introduced us,” I finally said to Chava, gesturing toward Eduardo, “When I came out to Vegas to visit you.”
“I haven’t seen your father since ….” Chava blushed. It may have been the first time in my life I saw my mother embarrassed.
Not wanting to hear details about her sexual escapades, especially with the man in question not only in the room, but my long absent father, I shifted the subject back to Kendra.
“So about Mrs. Hallings—”
“We have no idea as to the whereabouts of this Kendra Hallings,” Eduardo said.
“But Matthew Hallings does owe you something close to the tune of half a million dollars,” I said. “Which I assume is gathering interest by the day.”
“Our dealings with Mr. Hallings are really none of your concern,” Vincent said.
Boy, these guys could say mundane things in a conversational tone and still make me wonder if I was going to get out of the room alive.
“But Kendra is,” I said, wearing the false bravado on my sleeve like a flag.
“Why are you so concerned about this woman?” my father asked.
“She’s my client. She’s missing. I just want to know if she’s okay.”
“And she owes Eddie money,” Chava said, then giggled. “Eddie Money, get it? Like the singer?”
Chava has a habit of saying totally inappropriate things when she’s nervous. I wondered if her nerves were from our being in actual physical danger from the Mob or the presence of my father, who apparently worked for the Vegas Mafia too.
No wonder she never talked about him.
I was having enough trouble focusing at the moment myself. I started to ask her how she got involved with Eduardo Zapata in Spokane, Washington, of all places, but realized this was not the time or the place.
It was all a bit much.
Eduardo smiled again, raising the hairs on the back of my neck. “Ah, she doesn’t pay you, so you go after her. I understand that completely. We aren’t so different, Edwina.”
Great, now I had two people using that name.
“Eddie,” I said.
“Eddie,” he repeated and the smile disappeared. I couldn’t decide which expression was worse.
“Look, Chava and I don’t want to be any trouble to you. I don’t care what your deal is with Hallings. You’re right, he’s not my concern. But, if you’ve got Kendra stashed around here someplace, why not just hand her over and we’ll be on our way? I’m sure you’ve got other leverage for Hallings. I don’t even need to let him know Kendra’s with me.”
Eduardo looked at me for a very long moment. His face was impassive; only his eyes were alight with something that might have been interest, or maybe they always looked like that—as if a pilot light glowed inside him, ready to start a fire in an instant if the situation called for one.
“Edwina,” he finally said, “out of respect for your mother, and because you are my daughter. I’m going to give you one free pass here. We do not have Kendra. It’s none of your business, but I will tell you that our dealings with Hallings have been resolved. We never included his wife in any way, that would be … gauche. She may be missing, but it’s not our doing. Do you understand me?”
I nodded yes. What else could I do?
“Lonnie will see you out,” Vincent said. “You’re feeling better, Cha-cha?” he asked, bending over Chava to help her stand. In that moment, when Vincent used an endearment with Chava, I saw a crack in Eduardo’s façade. A flicker of expression that said he didn’t quite approve. I wondered if he didn’t like that another man knew my mother better than he did.
What had happened between these two people? How had they come together just long enough to produce me?
And what had Chava known about him all these years? Her story had always been that she didn’t know where he’d gone or what had happened to him, and that he knew nothing about me.
Had all that been a lie?
Taking my cue from Chava, I stood and walked behind her toward the door, with Lonnie in the lead.
“Edwina,” I heard my father’s voice behind us. I turned. Would I get a moment of paternal interest? A question about my well-being? A request to meet again?
“You understand what a free pass is, right?” he asked.
“I do.”
“And you understand there will not be another one.”
I did.
I guess that was it for paternal advice.
Sitting in my car in the parking lot, I put my head on the steering wheel and took several deep breaths. I felt pressure on my shoulder blade, and realized Chava was stroking my back like you would a sick child.
It felt good.
“What the hell was that, Cha-cha?” I asked bolting upright and getting my indignation fired up. “Really? Cha-cha? From a mobster? Not to mention my father ….”
“Edwina …” she said. I glared. “Eddie,” she corrected, “you’re upset. I get that. But you’ve got to believe me. I had no idea your father was here. I had no idea he even knew Vincent. Do you really think I’d bring you here without a word of warning if I did? I’m in shock myself.”
One thing I knew about my mother—she liked to control a situation—so no, I didn’t think she’d have brought us over here if she’d had any idea what would happen.
“How come you never told me my father worked for the Mafia?”
“I didn’t know he worked for the Mafia, Edwina. I haven’t seen the man in thirty years.”
I let the Edwina slip for the time being. We were both a little tense.
“How does he know about me?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
Looking sharply at her, I could see she was telling the truth. Her tongue never left her mouth, her tell firmly in place. Looking up at the penthouse side of the casino’s hotel we’d just exited, I could imagine the room they were in. Vincent Careno, money launderer, and my father—what exactly did he do for them? He was an outsider, not an Italian, but a Latino from Mexico. Like I was, or half was, anyway. If Chava could reconnect to her Jewish roots, should I investigate the part of me from Mexico? It was something I’d never thought about before, despite my looks. I didn’t even speak Spanish very well, just a few years in high school and some bits and pieces picked up from living on the West Coast.
I was a failure as a Jew and a Latina. What did that say about me?
Time enough to think about that later. Now I needed to focus on my father as a person of interest, not as half my genetic code. What role did he play with the Vegas crew?
A contract killer or a cleaner seemed the two most obvious choices. Was my father someone who came in and cleared out a crime scene before the police arrived? Like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction? Or worse, did he do the actual hitting?
“Do we believe they don’t have Kendra?” I asked, shoving thoughts of my father off into a dusty room in my head and slamming the door.
“I do,” Chava said. “They don’t need to lie to us.”
“Why not? If they killed her, they certainly weren’t going to announce it to us.”
“Because if they had Kendra, they never would have taken us upstairs to begin with. We never would have seen them at all.”
“Vincent, in the casino. That was a setup.”
“I think so. I think they knew when we came in and Eduardo decided he wanted to learn what was up. He had Vincent come down to verify it was us, then Lonnie got us upstairs. He didn’t want that reunion happening in a public place.”
“How would they know we’d come in?”
“Surveillance, probably. There are cameras all over the casino. Maybe they have access in some way. Or they just got lucky and were looking out the window. Or Vincent saw us when we came in and called up to your father in the room. There’s lots of ways we could have been made.”
“What kind of trouble did you really get into down in Vegas?” I said, wondering why Chava was suddenly an expert on video surveillance and the activities of mobsters.
Chava fell silent. She looked out the window for a long moment, then got out of the car. Taking a seat on a concrete bench in front of the hotel side of the casino, she pulled a pack of menthols out of her bag. She lit up and took a long drag, eyes closed. She never opened them the whole time she smoked the cigarette down, expertly flicking ashes into a clump of bushes without looking. When she reached the end, she opened her eyes, stubbed it out on the matching concrete ashtray, and tossed the butt inside. Then she walked back to the car, some kind of decision made.
She sat next to me in a haze of menthol smoke and Aqua Net, that familiar smell that took me back to childhood. I could see the younger Chava in the lines of her face and wondered what it had really been like for her, raising a child alone. I knew I was more than just a burden, but that didn’t mean it was easy.
“For a private investigator, you certainly never showed any interest in learning about your father,” she said, surprising me with her twist in the conversation.
“You always said you didn’t know much about him.”
“And that kept you from looking into him?”
“I respected your privacy.”
“How would I even know you’d done any research? Come on, Eddie, is that really what kept you from searching for him? I never lied about his name. You chose not to look.”
This sat me back in my seat. I’d always believed I didn’t look into my father because of what Chava told me. It never occurred to me it was because deep down, I didn’t want to know.
What was I afraid of?
That he knew about me and didn’t want me? Well, it looked like that was true.
“How did you meet him?” I finally asked, aware I never had before.
“Your grandfather. They worked together.”
“Wait, what? Opa introduced you?”
Chava nodded, her eyes unfocused, her mind in the past.
“But if he worked for Opa, that means—”
“Yes,” Chava said, tucking her lighter back into her bag, she’d held it in her hand all this time, like a talisman. “Your father was a butcher.”
The thought gave me the willies. It meant he was perfectly capable of taking another human being apart, methodically and easily, for disposal.
Maybe he really was a cleaner. How much of my ethics had I inherited from this man?
I sat for a moment thinking about how little I knew about my own family history. On my mother’s side, Opa died when I was five. My strongest memory of my grandfather was the blue numbers tattooed on his arm, though it would be years before I understood what they signified.
He immigrated to the United States as soon as he could after his release from Bergen-Belsen, a Sephardic Jew working his way ever westward until he settled in Spokane. There was a history of Jewish immigrants in Eastern Washington. The Native Indian tribes told stories of other “egg-eaters,” as they called the white men who wouldn’t eat meat, as it wouldn’t be kosher.
My grandmother’s family relocated to Spokane during the pogroms in Russia in the early 1900s; she was an Ashkenazi Jew. My grandmother’s parents disowned her for marrying a Sephardic Jew, though Opa never practiced anything after the war. In solidarity, my grandmother also stopped practicing her religion. My mother was born two years after the wedding, and Chava grew up without learning the traditions of either branch.
Though Opa didn’t practice, he did keep his butcher shop kosher, allowing him to sell to the Jewish population, a small but steady customer base. We lived on the edge of the Jewish neighborhood, always outsiders looking in.
Chava had told me how much she hated the shop. The smell of blood, the sight of the carcasses taken apart, piece by piece, the feel of raw meat on her hands. After my grandfather died, she sold the store and began moving from job to job until I left town and she went south.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
“How long did you know him,” I asked. “Eduardo. You know, before—”
“Before I got pregnant with you?” she said, that faraway look returning to her eyes. “Not long. A few months. He was so handsome—those dark eyes, all that black hair. That accent. He was different from anyone else I knew. He kind of swept me off my feet.”
“Why did you stop seeing each other?”
“He was restless. Back then. Maybe he still is—I don’t know. He left me a note. It just said he was leaving town. I found it after I learned I was pregnant with you, but before I had time to tell him. I took it as a sign and let it go.”
“Why did you decide to have me? Or keep me?”
“I wasn’t sure I would,” Chava said, “at first.” Her admission was barely audible. “Abortions were legal, and I thought about it. But I kept putting it off. Then I felt you move for the first time. Did you know they call that the quickening? When you start to feel your baby move. I knew then, whatever the sacrifice it was to keep you, it would be worth it.”
I wanted to ask if she regretted that choice. But I held my tongue. I’d had enough revelations for one day.
“What now?” Chava finally asked when I didn’t acknowledge her confession.
“I’m not sure,” I said, shaking off the unexpected trip down memory lane. “With the Mob connection a dead end, I’m not sure where Kendra’s gone. Maybe the mysterious male caller really was telling the truth, and she’s gone off somewhere on her own. Maybe she fled her marriage when she realized Hallings wasn’t worth anything. She also might choose not to have the baby or give it away. None of which is my problem. Maybe it’s time I just let the whole thing go.”
“But we know there’s a killer out there,” Chava said. “And Kendra could still be in trouble.”
“The police are handling the investigation,” I said. “I should probably just leave all of this to them.”
I could do that, right?
“I’ll take you out to lunch instead,” I told Chava. “We’ll head over to the Skylark.”
I didn’t tell her it sat across the street from the Rustic Coffee Bar and that maybe we’d catch a glimpse of Chance Parker. Even if I let the Kendra thing go, the outcome of the investigation into Deirdre’s death still mattered to me. I wanted to know who killed her and why, though maybe I wasn’t the person who should track that killer down. Chance Parker and Kate Jarek would do their jobs, and when it was finished maybe Chance would be willing to sit down and talk to me.
A girl can dream, right?