FOURTEEN
The face of Cesar Nunez bore all the marks of a trouble-prone life. Despite that—and the tattoos that peeked out from around the collar of his white T-shirt and up and down his arms—he had the forlorn expression of a businessman who fought all the way to the top only to discover it hadn’t been worth the effort. He yawned at me, and I wondered what kind of hours he kept and whether he had any choice in the matter. Probably not.
Since both Maria and Arnaldo refused to provide any more information to me, I decided to go to the top.
After all, my inner voice told me, if you want someone to break the rules, go see the people who actually make the rules, because they do it all the time.
Unfortunately, visiting hours for the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater had already expired by the time I left Chaska late Friday afternoon. My first chance to see Cesar was at eight fifteen Saturday morning in the prison’s noncontact visiting room. So that’s where I was, sitting on a stool attached to the wall that resembled a toilet seat. Cesar was sitting on a molded chair inside a tiled room the size of a closet. A brick wall, iron bars, and reinforced glass separated the two of us.
I picked up the black telephone receiver so I could speak to him, yet he did not pick up his. Instead, he merely gazed at me through half-closed eyes, his expression as vague as the dark side of the moon.
I returned the receiver to the cradle and found my cell phone. I called up the photograph of Navarre that Riley had sent me and pressed the phone to the glass. Cesar glanced at it and yawned some more. I called up the photo of an angry-looking Arnaldo, the one where he was wearing a 937 Mexican Mafia T-shirt, and pressed that against the glass. Cesar took one look at it and snatched his telephone receiver off the wall. I quickly grabbed mine.
“Where did that come from?” he asked.
“I took it in the parking lot of a restaurant that your brother and his Mexican Mafia friends set on fire Wednesday night.”
“Nine-Thirty-Seven don’t exist no more. It’s gone.”
“Arnaldo seems to be reviving it. Both he and Maria.”
I used the names of Cesar’s brother and sister on purpose to see what kind of reaction it would provoke. Yet Cesar gave me nothing but a blank stare. I recalled the photograph of Navarre and pressed it against the glass again.
“He calls himself Juan Carlos Navarre,” I said. “Who is he really?”
“You a cop?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Who are you then?”
“My name is McKenzie. Look, you’re not the only one searching for Navarre. There are a couple of others, too. One of them raped and murdered a friend of mine to get information. That’s who I want.”
“I don’t care about you or your friend.”
“You do care about Navarre. Help me find him.”
Cesar leaned back and prepared to hang up his phone. I rapped on the glass with my receiver.
“You dumb jerk,” I shouted.
Cesar brought the receiver up to his mouth as if he wanted to give me a few choice words before hanging up. I beat him to it.
“Hey, asshole. Do you want Arnaldo to join you in here? He’s looking at an arson rap. Maybe you can share a cell with him. And Maria? Pretty girl. Why don’t you just punch her ticket to the women’s prison in Shakopee as an accomplice? We’ll see how long she stays pretty. You fucked up your life; you want them to fuck up theirs?” I found Arnaldo’s pic again and showed it to Cesar. “He’s wearing a fucking gang sign on a T-shirt. How long do you think he’s going to last before the cops grab him up?”
Cesar stared at the photograph of his little brother.
“Arnaldo is trying hard to find Navarre—for you. Only he and his crew haven’t got the smarts for it. I do. Give me something to work with. Once I find Navarre your people can do whatever you want with him. I don’t care. He means nothing to me.”
“You give him up?”
“In a heartbeat,” I said, wondering at the same time if it was true.
Cesar stared at the pic of his brother some more and leaned forward. He whispered into the receiver.
“Jax Abana.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Traidor.”
“Traidor? Traitor? Did you say traitor?”
Cesar hung up the phone without answering, left the visiting room, and made his way back to his prison cell.
* * *
I called Bobby Dunston from the prison parking lot.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“It’s nine o’clock,” he told me. “At nine thirty I’m leaving the house. I’m taking Shelby and the girls to TCF Stadium to watch the alma mater play Ohio State.”
“The Gophers are going to get crushed.”
“You are the most negative person I know, McKenzie. How do you even get through the day?”
“I need a favor.”
“So you said. I’m saying if I can’t do it in the next thirty minutes, it’s not going to get done.”
“Can you reach out to someone for me?”
“Who?”
“Anyone involved with the Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia thing that’s still around.”
“Everyone’s still around, McKenzie. You’re the only one who quit.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Like you haven’t heard that before, my inner voice said.
“There’s a detective in West St. Paul that worked the case,” Bobby told me. “He’s the guy I spoke to Thursday morning—the one who gave me the intel I passed on to you.”
“Can you ask him to meet with me?”
“I can ask, but he’ll want to know what the meeting’s about.”
“Tell him the confidential informant that burned the Nine-Thirty-Seven to the ground is back in town.”
* * *
“Jax Abana,” the detective said. “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a good long time.”
“Seven years,” I said.
“Closer to eight.”
I met Ted Ihns for an early lunch at Boca Chica Restaurante on Cesar Chavez Street in an area we call District del Sol on St. Paul’s west side—which was not to be confused with the City of West St. Paul a mile down the road, where Ihns worked as a police detective. West St. Paul, in fact, was actually located due south of downtown St. Paul. It got its name because it happened to be on the west side of the Mississippi River. Don’t ask me why they didn’t call it something else, I only live here.
Boca Chica might have been the oldest Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities. It was also one of the finest. Ihns ordered Mole Poblano con Pollo—chicken served on a bed of Spanish rice with a chile ancho and Mexican chocolate sauce poured over the top—and I had Pescado ala Boca Chica, a broiled walleye fillet smothered with the owner’s renowned poblano sauce. The meals were so good that neither of us spoke until we were nearly finished eating.
“Where did you hear the name?” Ihns asked.
“Cesar Nunez.”
“He does have reason to remember it. How’s he look, Cesar?”
“Like he wishes he were somewhere else.”
“Ain’t gonna get out of the jug for quite a while yet.”
“Because of Jax Abana?”
“Exactly because of Abana.”
“He was a traitor, then.”
“Oh, yes. Indeed he was. He served up the Nine-Thirty-Seven on a platter, gave us everything. We thought, at first, that he was putting us on. He had no reason to turn, no reason to make a deal. We had nothing on Abana. All I knew, all I heard was that he was an up-and-comer in the gang. I could have ID’d most of the Nine-Thirty-Seven by sight back then. Not him.”
“Just came forward like a good little citizen, did he?”
“Yeah, right. Turned out that Abana was the gang’s CFO. Eighteen and right out of high school and he was handling all of the Nine-Thirty-Seven’s finances.”
“So why did he turn?”
“For the money. Why else?”
“Did you pay him?”
“Of course not. What happened, Abana gave us the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes, the gamblers, an annotated list of all the Nine-Thirty-Seven’s customers, and, of course, all the leaders. What he didn’t give us was two hundred and sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash, pretty much the Nine-Thirty-Seven’s entire treasury. He neglected to share that with us. We wouldn’t have even known it existed except Nunez and some others accused us of stealing it. We didn’t steal it, by the way.”
“Never thought you did.”
“Others aren’t so sure. I blame TV. Have you ever seen a cop show where half the force wasn’t dirty?”
“Barney Miller?”
“I mean in the last forty years.”
Nothing came to mind.
“What happened to Abana?” I asked.
Ihns brought his closed fingers to his mouth, blew on them, and let his fingers fly open.
“Poof,” he said.
“Poof?”
“Gone, baby, gone. Disappeared with all that cash. Which explained a lot.”
“Explain it to me.”
“Abana was happy to give us information on the Nine-Thirty-Seven, yet he refused to go on the record. He refused to testify. We told him we could put him in Witsec, give him a new identity, give him protection if he took the stand. He wouldn’t even consider it. The feds pushed hard, too. I didn’t know why he was so adamant until I heard about the money. If he had entered the Witness Security Program, he would have had to give it up.”
“Did you look for him?”
“No, why would I?”
“To get the money back,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it was a small price to pay to take so many assholes off the street at one time, you know?”
“It was a good bust.”
“Best of my career. Now you say he’s back.” I showed Ihns the photograph Riley had sent to my smartphone.
“He cleans up real good, doesn’t he?”
“Abana didn’t have short hair and a polo shirt when he was Mexican Mafia?” I asked.
“Hardly. He was also trying to grow a mustache. Pitiful thing. You say he calls himself Juan Carlos Navarre now?”
“That’s what the passport says.”
“Passport?”
“Spanish. Apparently he’s a lot wealthier than two hundred and sixty-seven Gs, too.”
“Well, good for him. What you need to understand, McKenzie, I have no interest in Abana. There’s no paper on him. He’s not wanted. As far as I know, he’s just another law-abiding citizen.”
“Where did he get his millions? His passport?”
“Maybe he invested in hog futures. Maybe he moved to Spain. All I know, McKenzie, what I knew about him from the moment he opened his mouth—Abana is ungodly smart. We’re talking genius smart.”
“Not so smart,” I said. “He came back home, didn’t he?”
“West St. Paul is home. Compared to this place, Lake Minnetonka is some mythical kingdom beyond the sea.”
“Hardly.”
“I’m just saying it’s pure dumb luck that he bought into the same restaurant where Cesar Nunez’s little sister worked. I mean, what are the odds?”
“They would have been a lot better if he had stayed away.”
“Like I said, Abana’s smart. If he came back, there’s a reason.”
“Does he have family here?”
“A mother. A sister.”
“Think he might have been in contact with them?”
“Now that wouldn’t have been very smart at all, would it?”
* * *
I found Delfina Abana sitting on the top of three concrete steps that had sunk several inches below their original forms, her back to the screen door of her small house. The steps ended at a chipped sidewalk that divided her spotty front lawn in half, a lawn about the size of the paper napkins you find in fast-food joints. Her sidewalk intersected the city’s sidewalk, although the way the concrete slabs rose, fell, and tilted this way and that, I didn’t think West St. Paul took much pride in it. The kids playing up and down the street didn’t seem to notice, though. They just went about their business as if everything was exactly as it should be.
You don’t see that much anymore, I told myself—kids running around a neighborhood on an early Saturday afternoon as if they owned the place. These days you’re considered a poor parent if you allow your children freedom of movement, if you don’t carefully arrange their playdates and chaperone every outdoor excursion. Which was unfortunate. I thought about how I had been raised, how Bobby Dunston and I spent our days roaming hither and yon without a care in the world and without adult supervision. Kids today are missing out on a lot, I told myself.
I found a place to park and locked the SUV, thankful that I hadn’t embarrassed the neighborhood by driving my Audi into it. Delfina watched every movement intently from her stoop, and it occurred to me as I crossed the street that I had been mistaken. The kids were being supervised, not by their parents perhaps, but by people like her who watched out for people like me. They just didn’t know it.
“Who you?” she asked.
I stopped on the boulevard, a three-foot-wide strip of packed dirt between the sidewalk and the broken asphalt street, and introduced myself.
“You police? I got nothing to say to police.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I’m not the police.”
She waved me forward. At the same time she glanced up and down the street as if she were concerned that someone might be watching. I had no doubt that someone was. The houses were set only a few feet apart. Residents standing at their windows could look through their neighbor’s window and read the label on the jar of pasta sauce Mom was pouring over the spaghetti. There were few secrets in a neighborhood like that.
I stopped at the foot of the steps.
“What you want?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Jax.”
“You said you weren’t police.”
“I’m not.”
“Why you asking questions ’bout Jax, then, if you ain’t police? Jax gone a long time now.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“Haven’t spoken to my Jax since he was forced to run away. Why you come here talking about my baby I ain’t seen for so long? You go ’way.”
I pulled my cell from my pocket and called up Abana’s photograph, the one where he was pretending to be Juan Carlos Navarre. I held it up for Delfina to see.
“Is this Jax?” I asked.
She stared at the pic, blinking several times as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She stood slowly and extended her hands. I climbed a step so she could reach the cell easily. She took it in both hands, caressing it the way a fortune-teller might caress a crystal ball. Her head came up. Instead of the joy I had expected to see in her eyes, there was fear.
“You come inside,” Delfina said. “Come inside now.”
She stood and opened the screen door. I stepped into her living room and she followed, closing first the screen and then the interior door. The living room was awash in blue except for a broad water stain on the wall behind the couch that was gray. Forest green drapes that were fading to a color that matched the stain framed the windows. She waved the cell at me.
“Where is my baby? Where is Jax?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I came to see you.”
Delfina shook her head as if she were having trouble comprehending what I was telling her.
“He is here?” she asked. “In the Cities? He’s not in West St. Paul. If he was in West St. Paul people would know. People would tell me.”
“He was,” I said. “In the Cities, I mean. I don’t know where he is now.”
“He is okay? My Jax is okay?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes became moist and her expression tightened. She took a fist and beat it against her breast, and for a moment I thought she might start weeping. She didn’t, though.
“He can’t be here. Jax. Bad people looking for him. Bad men. Do you know about the bad men?”
“Yes.”
“They want to hurt him.”
“The Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia.”
“They say he was one of them. Say he betrayed them. It’s not so. He was never one of them. He was a good boy. A good boy. Good in school. Look. Look.”
Delfina left the room quickly. When she returned she was carrying a box that originally held a pair of boots. She waved me toward the kitchen—the walls were painted a sickly yellow and the dirty white linoleum on the floor had been worn through in spots. She set the box on a table made of metal and covered with a thick white lacquer trimmed with red.
“Here, here,” she said. “Jax is a good boy. An honor student. Look.”
Delfina took a certificate from the box and handed it to me. It stated that the President’s Award for Educational Excellence had been presented to Jax Abana. Another certificate said Abana won an AP Scholar Award. Another boasted that he was an AP Literature and Composition Class MVP. Delfina produced a faded clipping taken from the St. Paul Pioneer Press that cataloged the top students in every high school graduation class in the area. By virtue of his name, Abana was listed first among the honor students at Henry Sibley Senior High School. Under “Favorite Quote” he’d written: Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—Vince Lombardi. Under “College” he’d designated Undecided.
“Here, here,” she said again. She handed me a heavy medal attached to a ribbon. The medal was engraved with images of a book, star, Olympic torch, globe, and what looked like a magic lamp. “The lieutenant governor of the state of Minnesota put this around his neck at the graduation ceremony. The lieutenant governor. It means he graduated, my baby graduated, in the top one percent of his class. Number one.”
After that there was an 8½ × 11 glossy photograph of six students standing together on a stage, each dressed in a black graduation gown and mortarboard, each with a medal draped around their neck, each smiling brightly. Jax was the only male.
I have to admit I was impressed. The closest I came to the top one percent of my high school graduating class was passing them in the hallway.
Delfina reached into the box and retrieved a college-lined notebook. She opened the notebook and showed me what Abana had written on the first page.
Daily Schedule
6:30 AM—Exercise
7:00 AM—Shower and dress
7:30 AM—Breakfast (most important meal of the day)
8:10 AM—School bus
8:30 AM—Period one
9:22 AM—Period two
10:14 AM—Period three
11:06 AM—Period four
11:59 AM—Lunch
12:34 PM—Period five
1:24 PM—Period six
2:16 PM—Period seven
3:30 PM (time approx.)—Home from school/quick snack
4 PM—Work at car wash
6:30 PM—Home for dinner
7 PM—Homework/study
9:30 PM (if time permits)—Read for pleasure
10:30 PM—Sleep
Off to the side of the page Abana had written, Only children play video games, underlining the sentence several times. It was an opinion I shared. Beneath that he’d written another word that he’d drawn a thick circle around. The word was Muffie.
“Jax was not what they said,” Delfina said. “A gangster. He was never that. He was a good boy. I don’t know why they say those things about him. He had to run away because they said those things.”
“He came back,” I said.
Delfina stared at the pic on my smartphone some more.
“You have seen him?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “We’ve never met.”
She turned to me, her large eyes filled with questions. I answered the most obvious.
“I don’t know where he went,” I said. “I only know he disappeared and his girlfriend asked me to help find him.”
“Jax has a girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes, I think so. Very pretty.”
“She come from a good family, this pretty girl?”
I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I just nodded my head. That made her smile for the first time since we met.
We both heard the front door open, and we turned to face it. A woman, dark like her brother and not much older than Riley Brodin, stepped inside the house. She called absent-mindedly while she wrestled with a white shopping bag adorned with a bunch of red targets.
“Mama, I’m home,” she said.
She saw us standing in the kitchen. Her eyes locked on my face, and her head cocked to one side.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Delfina moved quickly toward her, letting my cell phone lead the way.
“Abril,” she said. “Jax. Jax is home. He’s seen him.”
“What are you talking about?” the young woman asked. She set the bag down and took the cell from Delfina’s hands, examining it closely. After a moment, her head came up and she started walking toward me.
“Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
I explained.
“Get out,” she said.
I tried to argue with her.
“What right do you have coming here, putting us at risk again?” she said. “Do you know how many people around here were hurt by what Jax did? How many went to jail? I could point to houses up and down this street where they lived, where their families still live. Even today some of them spit on the sidewalk when we walk by. Now you say he’s back. He’s back! Damn him.”
“No, no,” Delfina said. “It’s a lie. Jax didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a good boy. Now he’s come home.”
“He can’t come home,” Abril said.
“He has.”
“Mama, he was one of them…”
“No.”
“If he came home…”
“No. It is not true.”
Abril threw her arms around her mother and drew her close.
“Maybe you’re right, Mama,” she said. “Maybe you’re right.”
At the same time she fixed her eyes on my face and jerked with her head toward the door. I stepped outside and waited. A few moments later, she joined me.
Abril returned my cell phone.
“Mama thinks Jax is the one who got away,” she said. “The one who escaped when so many in the neighborhood were jailed. She’ll die thinking that. To her he’ll always be a good boy. She refuses to see him the way he really is.”
“What way is he?” I asked. “Really.”
“A selfish opportunist. He took off and left us holding the bag.”
“Why?”
“The gang life, there’s no future in it, and Jax was always about the future. His future.”
I told Abril that I’d seen all of her brother’s academic awards. She told me that Jax had been accepted at every college he applied to, all nine of them. The University of Minnesota had always been keen on keeping the state’s best students at home and offered him a half-ride academic scholarship. So did Wisconsin and Notre Dame. Northwestern, Boston University, and the others offered only low-interest loan packages.
“Minnesota, Wisconsin—tuition is about twenty-five thousand dollars for residents, counting room and board,” Abril said. “All the others are sixty thousand or more. A year. After everything, Jax couldn’t afford to go to college.”
“Why not apply for financial aid? The government has a program. I have a friend whose daughter is in college. I’m told there’s a lot of scholarship money to be had if you know where to look.”
“What was Jax going to put on the applications? That he was a poor Hispanic with no father and a mother who’s in the country illegally, who has never even paid taxes?”
“There are organizations he could talk to. Programs…”
“Not for Jax. I hated that he became Nine-Thirty-Seven. I understand it, though. He had nowhere else to go.”
I wasn’t so sure, a kid that smart. Maybe smarter than anyone gave him credit for.
“Is it possible that he joined the Mexican Mafia with the sole purpose of eventually stealing its money so he could pay for his education?” I asked.
Abril stared as if she had just seen me saw my assistant in half and wondered how I had managed it.
“I don’t know if he planned it,” she said. “Maybe he did. I only know when he had the opportunity, he took the money and ran, leaving Mama and me to face the neighborhood alone.”
“If he did do it to pay for school, which school would he have gone to?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask his Anglo whore?”
* * *
Mary Gabler née Walker was not a whore, Anglo or otherwise. She was a very pretty twenty-six-year-old community relations manager for Wells Fargo Bank, who lived in Mendota Heights with her husband of fifteen months, and who agreed to meet me at a coffeehouse not far from the Mendakota County Club—but only if I promised to call her “Muffie.”
“That’s what they called me all through grade school,” she said. “High school, too. Probably my mother just started calling me that when I was an infant and it stuck. She still calls me that. So does my family, some old friends, too. Only the people I’ve met since I went to Notre Dame call me Mary.”
“Did Jax Abana call you Muffie?”
“Yes, he did. Jax—I haven’t spoken to him since, what? A week after graduation?”
It was when she said “graduation” that I remembered where I had seen her before. In the photograph that Delfina Abana showed me. She was the blonde third from the left.
“You dated,” I reminded her.
“He was my bad boy. A girl has to date at least one bad boy in her lifetime. At least that’s what I told myself afterward.”
“How bad was he?”
“Up until the end, he wasn’t bad at all. At least, he was good to me. People, my friends, they told me I was crazy for getting involved with him, but I never knew if that was because he couldn’t be trusted or because he was Hispanic.”
“Could he be trusted?”
“Turned out no, he couldn’t. It was fun while it lasted, though. Exciting. He took me places where a white Catholic girl from the suburbs is rarely found. Kinda opened my eyes to the world a little bit. Heckuva lot more than Notre Dame did, I can tell you that.”
“They say he was a member of a street gang called the Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia,” I told her.
“I asked him about that. He said it wasn’t true, although he had friends in the gang. I actually met a few of them.”
“You believed him, then?”
“Well, yeah. How many four-point-oh honor students do you know who are in street gangs?”
Just the one, my inner voice answered.
I thought that Muffie must be very good at her job because she spoke easily in a way that made the listener feel comfortable. Plus, she never stopped smiling—until I said, “You stopped seeing him after graduation.”
“It’s an old story, Mr. McKenzie. Boy meets girl. Boy tires of girl. Boy never calls girl again and he refuses to answer when the girl calls him. After a while girl knows that she’s been … discarded. She is upset, the girl. After a while, she gets over it. She vows from that moment forward to share herself only with gentlemen, who, to her great surprise and happiness, are actually quite numerous.”
“Jax didn’t go to Notre Dame, then?” I asked.
“No. We talked about it when the acceptance letters started rolling in, but I didn’t think that was going to happen even before we broke up. I just couldn’t picture Jax in South Bend, Indiana. Could you?”
“Where did he go to school?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask his whore?”
There’s that word again, my inner voice told me.
“What whore would that be?” I asked.
“Right before I left for college my freshman year, my friends and I went shopping up and down Grand Avenue in St. Paul. We ended up at a Dunn Bros coffeehouse. This was early afternoon in late August, maybe the beginning of September. The place was nearly deserted, yet there was Jax Abana at a table with a woman sitting in his lap that was old enough to be his mother, for God’s sake, and they were playing tongue-hockey in front of everyone. I saw Jax and Jax saw me and there was an expression on his face like he was afraid I was going to go over there and start beating on him or something in front of his mom. Seriously, though, life is way too short for that. So I gave him one of these…” Muffie blew me a kiss and smiled. “Afterward, I turned around and walked out.”
“Did you ever find out who the woman was?”
“The whore? A friend, one of the friends that were with me, found out a couple of weeks later and posted it on my Facebook page. You’ll never guess who it was.”
* * *
Patricia Castlerock was not a whore, either. She was an associate professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul who taught undergrads all about the Harlem Renaissance, American Modernism, and Anglophone-Caribbean Literature, as well as race and film study. Macalester did not keep faculty hours on Saturdays, so I was lucky to find her grading papers in her office on the second floor of Old Main, the first building built on campus when the college was established in 1885. She was startled when I rapped on her open door. Her head came up and she whipped off her cheaters, and my first thought was that Muffie Gabler was mistaken. Big sister perhaps, yet there was no chance the woman was old enough to be Jax Abana’s mother.
“I apologize if I startled you,” I said.
“That’s quite all right,” she said. “I’m afraid we don’t keep office hours on the weekends.”
“I apologize for that, too. If I could have just a few minutes of your time—it’s important.”
Castlerock set down her red pen.
“What does this involve?” she asked.
“It concerns one of your former students. A man named Jax Abana.”
She thought it over for a few moments and shook her head. “I don’t believe I know a student by that name. This would have been when?”
“Seven or eight years ago.”
Again she thought about it; again she shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I could check. However, I am pretty good at remembering the names of my students.”
Now it was my turn to do some thinking. Finally I said, “He might have called himself Juan Carlos Navarre.”
“No … no, that doesn’t ring any bells, either. Are you sure he was one of my students? Perhaps you should check with the registrar’s office. It opens at eight Monday morning.”
“Like I said, it’s important. Would you be so kind…” I fished my cell from my pocket and called up Navarre’s pic. “If you could take a look at this…”
Castlerock sighed her impatience and took the smartphone from my hand. She stared at the photo for a good ten seconds. When she finished her face was pale and her upper lip trembled just so.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“McKenzie.”
“Mr. McKenzie, there’s a coffee shop on Grand and Snelling. Do you know it?”
“Dunn Bros,” I said.
“Meet me in twenty minutes.”
* * *
Yes, it was that Dunn Bros, kitty-corner to the Macalester campus. I found a table more or less in the center of the room, and while I waited, I wondered if I was in the same chair where Muffie Gabler’s ex-boyfriend sat while making out with Professor Patricia Castlerock. I might have asked, except the way the lady blew in through the door and marched on my position, I didn’t think she would have appreciated the question.
“May I get you something?” I asked.
“No,” Castlerock said. “I don’t want to be here that long.”
I motioned toward the chair opposite where I sat. She took it.
“He was not a student when I knew him,” Castlerock said. She spoke almost breathlessly, as if she had prepared her remarks in advance and was desperate to get them out. “It’s important that you understand that I did nothing unethical. Our relationship was not in violation of any college rule or regulation. If you wish to question my judgment, feel free. My moral principles remain intact.”
A lot of questions came to mind at that moment. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to ask any of them before a young woman wearing a white bib apron that seemed too big for her approached.
“What’ll ya have, Prof?” she asked. “The usual?”
Castlerock’s demeanor changed abruptly. Her voice softened and she smiled demurely.
“Good afternoon, Casey,” she said. “Yes, perhaps I will stay a bit longer. How about—I think a small café mocha today with plenty of whipped cream.”
“For you, sir?”
“Coffee,” I said. “Black.”
“Ahh, old school.”
I liked that she said that, although I had a sneaking suspicion she was making fun of me.
“How’s your paper coming?” Castlerock asked. There was genuine concern in her voice.
“It’s really hard,” Casey said.
“It’s meant to be, dear.”
I don’t know why, but the girl seemed cheered by the remark. Both she and Castlerock were smiling, yet as soon as Casey turned her back to the table, the professor’s expression became troubled again and her voice hardened.
“Who are you exactly?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“You’re getting a little ahead of me, Professor,” I said. “I’m not here to put you into the jackpot.” Her expression changed to one of curiosity. “It’s police slang. It means trouble, get you in trouble.”
“Oh.” She spoke as if she had just learned something and was happy about it. I liked her for that.
“As I said earlier, my name is McKenzie, and I’m looking for the man in the photograph I showed you.”
“David Maurell?”
“Is that what he called himself?”
“Are you saying that isn’t his real name?”
“No, it’s not.”
“What is his name?”
“That, Professor, is a long story. I’ll be happy to tell it, if you tell me yours.”
She agreed, so I explained about Jax Abana—but not Juan Carlos Navarre—right up to the point where Muffie Gabler saw her and Abana at Dunn Bros. I even used the term Muffie had employed, tongue-hockey.
When I finished, Professor Castlerock glanced around the coffeehouse as if it suddenly contained bad memories. By then Casey had delivered our beverages. Castlerock took a sip from the mug and came away with a dollop of whipped cream on her nose. She brushed it away with the back of her hand.
“David seemed so much older than the boy you describe,” she said. “Certainly he pretended to be older. Twenty-four, twenty-five. I spend a great deal of time with postadolescents, McKenzie. The way David behaved around me, I believed he was that mature. I met him here. It might have been at this very table. He approached me; used the book I was reading as his hook. The book was about the Harlem Renaissance, and David said he had opinions on the subject that he would be happy to share if only I allowed him to buy a dessert to go with my coffee. I was flattered, to be honest. A lot of very pretty coeds spend time here, yet he was interested in me. So, in exchange for a double chocolate brownie, I offered him a seat at my table.”
“Did he know anything about the Renaissance?” I asked.
“He knew enough to quote Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, even Duke Ellington.”
“Hell, I can do that.”
“Mr. McKenzie, he knew me. He knew the papers I wrote on the subject. He knew my book.”
The man does his homework, doesn’t he? my inner voice said.
“What did he want?” I asked aloud.
“Eventually he told me he wanted to go to college. He said he was employed in the construction industry, yet it was becoming increasingly difficult to find work because of the housing crisis. He claimed he wasn’t bitter about it. He said it only encouraged him to finally pursue his dream to become a writer.”
“The man you knew as David Maurell said he wanted to attend Macalester College to become a writer?”
“It’s been done before, McKenzie. Probably I was naive. Or unduly smitten, if you prefer. This is an international school. We draw the best students from all around the world. I said I would help him get in. He said tuition wouldn’t be a problem. His parents left him enough in their wills to pay it. It was his high school transcripts that concerned him. There are ways to get around that, however. In the meantime, I allowed him to audit a couple of my classes. He fit in well. He and one of my students became very close friends. Collin Baird.”
All of my internal alarm bells and sirens flared at once. It was so loud in my head I could barely hear my own thoughts—CBE were the initials on the bag I found inside Navarre’s closet.
Collin Baird, Esquire? my inner voice said.
“What happened?” I asked.
“David stopped coming to class. Stopped coming here. He never called and never returned my calls. I thought it was me, that he had grown weary of our relationship and wished nothing more to do with me. I guess I still do. There was a young woman in the class. I never saw David speak to her, but the way he watched her—I saw the breakup coming, McKenzie. That doesn’t mean it hurt any less.”
“The young woman—do you remember her name?”
She looked up as if she expected to see the name written on the ceiling. I didn’t wait.
“Riley Brodin?” I asked.
“Yes. How did you know?”
It was all starting to make sense to me.
“What about Baird?” I asked.
“Collin dropped out, too. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Students drop classes, don’t they? They quit school. You’d be surprised at how many go home during Christmas and spring breaks and never return. In Collin’s case, he wasn’t much of a student to begin with; certainly he was struggling in my class. I suspected his high school transcripts did not match his true intellectual abilities. We get a lot of that these days—grade inflation.
“Eventually the police came around,” Castlerock added. “They told me David and Collin had driven to Collin’s home in Illinois, but apparently disappeared on their way back here. It was very worrisome to me even though I was told there were no indications of foul play and the police were treating it as a simple missing persons case. Since then I’ve discovered that twenty-five thousand men go missing every year in this country, and one out of five is Latino, like David. However, only a tiny fraction is the result of kidnapping or murder. The vast majority go missing because they want to go missing.”
“Do you believe that Maurell and his very good friend Collin Baird went away together?” I asked.
“It was easier to believe that than the alternative. It turns out I was right, too.” Castlerock gestured more or less at the pocket where I kept my cell. “The photograph that you showed me. It was taken recently, wasn’t it?”
“Sometime in July.”
“David is back.”
“So it would seem.”
“What about Collin?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did David come back after all this time?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Professor.”
* * *
Professor Castlerock left the coffeehouse first; I stayed to settle the bill. Before she left, she asked if I should find David, to have him call her. I said I would. I was lying. I liked her. I liked Muffie Gabler, Abril and Delfina Nunez, Anne Rehmann, and Riley Brodin, too. The more I learned about Jax Abana–David Maurell–Juan Carlos Navarre, the less I wanted him around the people I liked.
I stepped outside and immediately began searching for the red Sentra. I had picked it up outside the Nunez residence in West St. Paul and let it follow me first to the coffeehouse in Mendota Heights and then to Macalester College. It was now parked in the customer lot of the Stoltz Dry Cleaners and Shirt Launderers across Grand Avenue from Dunn Bros. I waited for the traffic to clear and crossed the thoroughfare. I walked up to the driver’s-side window and peered inside. The window had been rolled down. The driver gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared straight ahead. Arnaldo Nunez was sitting in the passenger seat and looking uncomfortable in his heavy cast. He leaned forward to look at me.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Hello to you, too,” I said.
“How long you know we be here?”
“Since I took a right off the street where Mrs. Nunez lives.”
Arnaldo stared at the driver, who continued to stare straight ahead.
“Don’t feel too bad,” I said. “A one-car tail is damn near impossible to pull off if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you want, I could give you lessons.”
“Fuck,” Arnaldo said.
“Why exactly are you following me, anyway?”
“Cesar says you’re after Jax. He says you’re gonna give him up once you find him. We’re supposed to watch you, make sure you keep your promise.”
“Fair enough. So, Arnaldo, have you learned anything interesting so far?”
“Only that you really like your coffee, man. And you meet lots of good-looking women.”
“You’re going to love the next place we go. Can’t promise any babes, though. Try to keep up.”
* * *
I hung a right onto Snelling Avenue and went north until I caught the I-94 entrance ramp. From there I headed east until I found I-35E and went north again. I signaled my turn well in advance so that the red Sentra was on my bumper when I exited onto Pennsylvania Avenue, hung a right onto Phalen Boulevard, hung another on Mississippi Street, and went east again on Grove Street. I turned left into the large parking lot. The Sentra kept going straight. I don’t know if it was all the cop cars that spooked them or the sign on the red brick wall—ST. PAUL POLICE DEPARTMENT. The idea that Arnaldo and his driver would keep heading east until they reached the Wisconsin border made me chuckle.
* * *
Sergeant Billy Turner was one of the few friends I still had in the St. Paul Police Department; one of the few cops who didn’t think I sold my badge when I resigned to collect the reward on the embezzler. He was an African American living in Minnesota who played hockey, which made him a true minority in my book. I met him in his office on the first floor of the Griffin Building. The Missing Persons Unit shared space with the Juvenile Unit because—Professor Castlerock’s math notwithstanding—approximately seven hundred thousand persons go missing each year and all but fifty thousand are kids. Well over half are runaways who eventually return home, and another two hundred thousand are family abductions related to domestic and custody disputes, leaving approximately sixty thousand boys and girls seventeen years or younger that the police consider “endangered.” Billy was a busy man.
“I can give you ten minutes, McKenzie,” he said. “You’re lucky to get that, because it’s Saturday and I want to go home. Me and the missus are going to my sister-in-law’s for dinner.”
“Your sister-in-law a good cook, is she?”
The question slowed him down.
“Okay, make it fifteen minutes,” he said. “What do you need?”
“What do you remember about a missing persons involving two young adult males named David Maurell and Collin Baird?”
“Help me out.”
“Macalester College about eight years ago?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. College kids coming back from some bumfuck town in Indiana. They never made it. Hang on a sec.”
Billy sat in a swivel chair, spun until he faced his computer, and typed in a few commands.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. “Baird is from Galena, Illinois, not Indiana. My mistake. This wasn’t our case, McKenzie. Jo Daviess County in Illinois had jurisdiction since the kids were last seen in Galena. What I have, kid never called his family and his family couldn’t get a hold of him. Family became worried and checked with the school. Macalester had no record of the kid returning to campus after spring break. Jo Daviess asked for an assist. We made inquiries. All we discovered was that this Maurell kid didn’t seem to exist. He wasn’t enrolled at the school. Didn’t have a permanent address. No driver’s license. No Social Security number. Spoke to a woman who knew him, what’s her name, ahhhh … Professor Patricia Castlerock. All she had was a cell phone number. Forwarded what little intel we generated to Jo Daviess. They sent out bulletins—you know the drill. If anything came of it, they didn’t bother to tell us.” Billy spun in his chair to face me. “This is getting to be a long time ago, McKenzie. What’s your interest?”
“Maurell has apparently resurfaced using a different name.”
“Should I care?”
“I don’t think so. Hennepin County might, though.”
“Now the important question—is this going to get me in trouble with Bobby D upstairs? You know the bosses don’t like us doing favors for civvies like you.”
I was pleased to hear how he referred to Bobby. If Billy had called him by the proper title, Commander Robert Dunston of the Major Crimes Division, it would have been a sign of disrespect or at least disagreement.
“Bobby should be cool with this one,” I said. “Although, if you’d rather keep it to yourself…”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you have the name of someone I could reach out to in Galena?”
“Hang on.”
Billy swiveled back in front of the computer screen, found a name and phone number, scribbled them down on a sheet of paper, and gave it to me.
“Time’s up, my man,” he said.
* * *
I called the Galena Police Department from the parking lot and asked for Officer Lori Hasselback. Chief Hasselback took the call and said she remembered the Baird case vividly. She was intrigued by what I had to tell her and agreed to meet me. She said she would review her notes before I arrived. I asked if Baird’s family would also consent to an interview.
“You can ask,” she said.
* * *
My next call was to Nina Truhler.
“Hey,” she said.
“Road trip,” I said.
“When?”
“Right now. I’ll pick you up at your place.”
“Fun. Where are we going this time?”
“Galena, Illinois.”
“Never heard of it.”
“River town. Lots of antique stores. General Grant used to live there. You’ll like it.”
“I will?”
“We’ll spend the night in Winona and arrive early tomorrow afternoon.”
“No, no, no, wait a sec, McKenzie. I’ve gone on these impromptu road trips with you before, and they’ve always been a great time. In the past, though, it was let’s go catch the Cash Box Kings at Buddy Guy’s place in Chicago and since we’re there, we might as well take the Red Line to Cellular Field to see the White Sox. Or the time you said we just had to fly down to Kansas City and decide once and for all who served the best barbecue in town…”
“It’s Oklahoma Joe’s.”
“No, it’s Arthur Bryant’s. Anyway, we ended up at Kauffman Stadium watching the Royals play Detroit. San Francisco…”
“San Francisco was your idea.”
“Yes, but it was your idea to get tickets to watch the Giants at AT&T Park. My point being, there is no professional baseball in Galena, Illinois. Is there?”
“No.”
“Then why are we going?”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“Involving Riley Brodin?”
“Yes.”
“You can tell me on the way.”