37

The Balestro residence is in a pleasant neighborhood near the state psychiatric hospital, a mix of single-family homes and small apartment houses. After a long night of keeping an eye on the house from their SUV in the parking lot of an apartment building a half-block away, the two men Sino sent to Big Spring rented a second-floor apartment in the building and have since maintained surveillance of the Tri-Cross van driver’s house from a street window.

The neighborhood has been in gloom since the sheriff and a medical technician came last night and notified Mrs Balestro of her husband’s death, and the word along the block is that she is under sedation. Neighbors have been taking covered-dish meals to the house and looking after the widow and her four girls.

Sino’s men will get their first look at her three days later when she leaves for the funeral. Through careful eavesdropping and solicitous conversational gambits at the corner washateria, the two men will learn that the couple who accompanied her and her children to the cemetery were her brother and his wife, who live in Castroville. They will learn, too, of the widow’s plan to go stay at her brother’s house for a week or so, wanting to be with family for a while.

The two men will phone this information to Sino and discuss the possibility that Balestro told his wife of the money and she might know where it is. If she knows, and if they don’t find it while she’s visiting her brother, they can extract it from her easily enough when she returns. But if she doesn’t know, then their interrogation of her would both be fruitless and become a police matter, which would then make it much harder to ever find the money.

Sino will agree with their thinking but tell them they’re getting ahead of themselves. First see if it’s in the house.

The following day the bereaved family will depart for Castroville in the brother’s station wagon, and late that night, the neighborhood in deep sleep, the two men will slip the back-door lock and enter the house and secure the drapes and blinds against any leakage of light and search the place. It will prove a short job, the house only a small two-bedroom. In the closet of the parental bedroom they will find a locked carrying case for a rifle or shotgun, a hand-printed notice taped to it—”DANGER. DO NOT TOUCH. ORDER OF DADDY.” They’ll break its lock and see that the case holds a bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle and, tightly packed with it, three plastic bags containing a sum of twenty-five thousand dollars.

Finding no other money in the house, they will turn off the lights and then cross the backyard to a large shed secured with a heavy but uncomplicated padlock which they easily open. They’ll shut the shed door and by the glow of a butane lighter find the switch for the overhead bulb and begin their search among the clutter of toolboxes and disordered shelves, cursing the owner for his untidiness that makes their own work more difficult. When they push aside a large heavy tool cabinet they will uncover a square of four juxtaposed floor bricks, under which is packed a plastic bag holding another twenty-five thousand dollars.

To exit the shed, they’ll have to push the big cabinet back over the hidey-hole. They will return to the house and sift through a small ring of keys they earlier noted on a little hook next to the kitchen door and find the one they need and remove it from the ring, then turn off the lights and go out and around to the side of the house where Balestro’s old Chevy Lumina is parked. One of them will get in it and wait until the other has walked away and is almost back to the apartment, then start the car and drive off. A short time later he will pay a seventeen-year-old member of a street gang called Los Fuerzos to drive the car to a certain garage in San Antonio. The man will then take a taxi to the state hospital and from there walk to the apartment. His partner will by then have reported to Sino their recovery of half of the Balestro money. Before noon the next day the Lumina will lie strewn in dozens of parts over the floor of the San Antonio garage, and the owner of the place, a member of the same organization to which Sino belongs, will notify him by phone that the only money found in the car amounted to a dollar and forty-two cents in coins recovered from the floorboards and under the seats. Sino will then go to his chief and apprise him of the situation, and the chief will ask if the van driver was the one with a little girl who has a medical problem. After their meeting, Sino will phone his two men in Big Spring and tell them the job is finished and to come home with the fifty thousand.

On her return from Castroville the first thing Mrs Balestro will notice when her brother pulls up in front of the house is that the family sedan is gone. She will be perplexed, but her husband had often let friends borrow it, and her first thought will be that one of them has done that. But when they find the front door unlocked and the house rummaged, her brother will immediately call the police while Mrs Balestro calms her alarmed daughters. A careful probe of the house will establish that nothing has been stolen, not the television nor any of the kitchen appliances or the hunting rifle whose case was broken open. Though the shed will be found to be lacking its padlock, the widow will not note anything missing from its cluttered contents, either, though she is not really familiar with them and can’t be sure that everything’s there. The police will commiserate with the widow over the violation of her home, especially so soon after the death of her husband, but will have no reason to suppose a tie between the two events. They will guess that the intruders were in search of something specific, most likely a drug stash, but had been misinformed about the address where they would find it. Such errors were not uncommon among their kind. When they’d come across the car keys, it had been a no-brainer to take the old Lumina and get a few hundred dollars from a chop shop for their evening’s work. The police will encourage everyone in the neighborhood to call 911 at any sign of suspicious activity, and will promise a more pervasive street patrol in the evenings.

Over the next few weeks, the grieving Mrs Balestro will bit by bit resume a daily routine. She will tend to the house, visit with neighbors, help her daughters with their homework, light a weekly candle for her husband’s soul, and pray daily to the Holy Mother to ease the younger girl’s affliction. Balestro’s employer-provided life insurance will suffice to meet the family’s basic financial needs for the present, but she will have to rely on the free clinic for the minor treatments and generic medicines it can provide her daughter, will grudgingly accept the small monetary contributions her brother presses on her to help with expenses, and will despair about the girl’s future care. To try to distract herself, she will resume puttering with her long-neglected potted plants along the rear wall of the house, deriving emotional respite from the perfunctory acts of ridding the pots of their old dirt and desiccated contents and refilling them with fresh soil and rooting them with new cuttings. One late afternoon she will empty an oversized clay pot and find in the encrusted dirt a tightly packed black plastic bag sealed with duct tape which she’ll cut open with a pair of shears to reveal a jumble of packets of one-hundred-dollar bills. For a long minute she will stare at the money, confused and feeling a sickly turn in her stomach. Then carefully look around and see that no one is in sight and scoop up the bag and take it into the house. And there learn that the contents amount to fifty thousand dollars. She will mull the matter through the long night, will several times pick up the phone before once again putting it down, not knowing who to call or what to say. She is not a stupid woman and will know that the money has something to do with the break-in of her house and almost certainly something to do with her husband. She will slowly accept the frightening explanation that he must have received it for abetting the escape and was paid beforehand and hid the money in the potted dirt. Of all the questions that will beset her, the easiest to answer will be whether to notify the police—of course not.

The next morning, after feeding the girls breakfast and waiting with them at the corner for the school bus, she will go back to her kitchen, brew a pot of tea, and decide on a course of action. Then she’ll go back to bed and sleep more soundly for the next few hours than she has since becoming a widow. That evening she will phone her brother to share the happy news of the life insurance payment she’s to receive on a private policy she hadn’t known her husband had purchased. In less than three months she will have sold the house in Big Spring and be residing in San Antonio, only a short drive from her brother in Castroville. And she will be working on the maintenance staff of a large hospital, a job that includes excellent medical benefits for her and her family.