16

“Where’d you go? You see that last point?” Edna asked breathlessly as soon as I walked into the locker room.

Nobody needed to tell me we’d won. A winning locker room feels different from a losing one. Besides, the suburban team would have needed hours to pull back from a 2–1 deficit.

“Who’s the hunk?” This from Joy. I wondered how she’d been able to see through closed doors. Probably noticed both of us disappear from the gym at the same time. The rest was pure guesswork.

I grinned at her, assured them all that I was feeling better, showered, and dressed quickly. The hunk was waiting when I came out. Joy and Edna passed while I was talking to him and gave me the eye.

“You carrying some ID?” I asked him. He yanked a brown folder like Jamieson’s out of his hip pocket. It said I was speaking to Special Agent Harrison Clinton.

“Harry will do,” he said with a smile that warmed up his eyes.

“You have a car, Harry?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Mind driving me home?”

He stared at my nose. The bleeding had stopped, but I was carrying a damp towel, pressing it against my nose and cheek except when conversation required removing it. Might as well keep the swelling down.

“How about to a hospital?” he suggested.

“Home,” I said firmly. I wanted to know if he knew where I lived. I wanted to see if he drove a white Aries. Also, I just plain wanted to get home. I had a headache coming on that was going to be spectacular. I could feel it rumbling behind my eyes like far-off thunder on a summer afternoon.

He drove a boxy sedan, but it wasn’t an Aries. I bet it was a rental or an agency job. He’d parked it in an alley behind the Y, ignoring the no-parking signs.

“You sure you don’t want to make a stop at a doctor’s?” he inquired when I’d belted myself into the passenger seat.

I asked him bluntly if he’d been following me around in a white Aries. It may have been rude, but his solicitousness was starting to get on my nerves.

“Not me,” he said quickly.

“What about your buddy Jamieson?”

He smiled when I said the name, the corners of his eyes crinkling. He was at least my age. His skin had a weathered look you don’t find much in Boston. “I’m not saying he did, but old Walter never could tail worth a damn.”

“Whereas if you’d been following me, I wouldn’t have caught on?” I said, raising an eyebrow skeptically.

“Well, I’m not bragging …” He had an easy grin over a mouthful of nicely spaced, slightly yellowed teeth. Maybe a former smoker, like me. The teeth saved him from looking like a male model. I mean, who wants perfection?

I locked my door and settled back, leaning to my right so I could watch him drive. Good cop, bad cop, was probably the name of this game. Jamieson had been nasty for no particular reason, and now Clinton had been sent to charm the details out of me. The hell with it, let him try. My head pounded faintly. I put the towel to my nose and leaned back against the headrest.

He eased the car out onto Huntington Avenue. The afternoon traffic was light.

“I wanted to tell you we appreciate your cooperation on this case,” he said. “You didn’t have to come forward.”

I didn’t respond. He took a left onto Mass. Ave., intimidating a battered pickup truck. He drove well, big hands easy on the wheel.

“Uh, I was wondering,” he said after working his way through the traffic lights between Symphony Hall and the Mother Church, “do you have any idea why the Estefan woman came to you in the first place?” He’d decided to go straight up Mass. Ave. into Cambridge. I would have gone through the Fenway, taken Park Drive to Memorial Drive. Faster.

“Nope,” I offered from behind my towel mask. “No idea.”

“Have you handled any other cases for immigrants? It doesn’t have to be in the recent past. Go back ten years if you have to.”

He turned and saw my smile and looked embarrassed. “I don’t suppose you could go back ten years as a private investigator, could you?”

“Ten years ago I was a cop,” I said. A rookie, but I didn’t tell him that.

“Hard to believe,” he said with a flirtatious grin. I sat back and waited for the rest of the show.

“Ten years ago,” he said after beating out a green Chevette at a traffic light. “That’s about when I started.”

I raised my eyebrow again. It’s something I work on from time to time.

“Yep,” he said, “I guess I thought I’d be out welcoming Russian defectors. Big-time undercover stuff. Berlin. Intrigue.”

“You into intrigue?” I asked. “That how you knew where to find me today?”

“Wasn’t too hard,” he said smugly. “Just flashed my ID at that little gal lives at your place, the one with the, uh, weird hair.” I knew what he’d been about to say before he substituted the line about the hair. Roz has other attributes that men, in particular, seem to notice.

“So immigration hasn’t lived up to expectations?” I said, leading him on. As long as he talked, I didn’t have to.

He stopped at a traffic light and swiveled to face me. “I’m not into chasing some poor OTM wants to come in here and earn food money doing the kind of shitwork native-born Americans won’t touch. I want you to know that.”

“OTM?” I said. It sounded familiar, but I thought I might be reacting to ATM, automated teller machines.

“Other Than Mexican,” he said. “It’s a category we use.”

“Gotta have labels,” I said dryly.

“It’s for Latins only. Like, you wouldn’t be an OTM.” He flashed the grin at me again. He was good. It may have been the headache, but I almost felt I could trust him, that I could pour out my worries.

“Okay,” I said, catching myself, “why does INS give a damn what I’m doing? Why do you care about any Manuela Estefan? There’s a green card on her, right? She’s legal.”

He zipped past a slow Buick. “You think that’s all we do, right? Round ’em up and head ’em the hell back to the border?”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s what I hear you do.”

“Well,” he said, “that ain’t all there is.”

I remembered what Marian Rutledge, the Cambridge Legal Collective lawyer, had told me. “I hear you guys run detention camps on the Texas border. I hear a lot that makes me wonder why somebody who doesn’t like chasing Third World poor people out of the country wouldn’t maybe find other work,” I said.

That shut down conversation for a while. We made it over the Harvard Bridge without causing its collapse.

“What we’ve got,” he said in a sorrowful tone, “is one hell of a public-relations problem. And somehow I don’t think Congress is gonna fund us an ad campaign.”

I smiled in spite of myself. He played hurt so well. It could have been the twang. I wondered if my outburst was due to the fact that I felt attracted to the guy. Automatic self-preservation. I have a history of liking the wrong guys. When I feel the old chemistry churn, I know I’ve met either a much-married man or a guy who’ll mess up my head. So I get argumentative right off.

He wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

There was road construction in Central Square. Every bump jarred my head.

“Sure you’re okay?” he said.

Behind us, somebody blared his horn.

“Fine,” I said through gritted teeth.

I had the towel up to my face. He reached over and pulled a few strands of my hair free of the cloth. His hand brushed my cheek and the cynical part of me wondered if this was part of the good-cop routine. The rest of me felt the tingle.

He didn’t ask for directions to the house. He didn’t need them. When he pulled up in the driveway, I had my hand on the door handle, my goodbye in my mouth, but he leaned over and put a restraining hand on my arm.

“I’ll level with you,” he said. “What we think is going on is this: We think this Manuela Estefan was involved in some very heavy-duty stuff. Fingering folks.”

“Fingering?”

“She moves around a lot. And where she moves, folks die.”

“You’re gonna have to tell me more than that.”

“She was from El Salvador.”

“Yeah.” I wished he’d hurry. My head was pounding harder.

“A lot of political folks coming from El Salvador, seeking asylum and all that good stuff.”

“Not that you guys let them in.”

“A lot of the claims are frivolous,” he said.

“Frivolous. I like that word. Frivolous, as in I’m starving to death where I live?”

“You can’t get political asylum for starvation. And I don’t want to argue with you. I shouldn’t even be telling you this—”

“Wait up. Are you saying that Manuela, whoever she is, was pointing out people for Salvadoran death-squad hits?”

“You know what a coyote is?”

“I assume you’re not talking about the animal,” I said.

“A sort of animal,” he continued with distaste. “A coyote is a guide, somebody who takes illegals’ money and lies to them about how easy it is to get into the country, and takes a group up here, sometimes with false papers, sometimes with nothing, and strands them someplace. A few fall between the cracks, get into the country and manage to stay, but most get caught and deported.”

“So?” I said.

“We’ve heard rumors about a female coyote named Manuela Estefan. She knows where a lot of political people wound up, what cities they’re in, what contacts they’ve made. And, word is, she’s selling that information to the highest bidder. And believe me, the INS is never the highest bidder.”

I remembered Mooney’s warning about death squads. I considered my Manuela, my client with the cheap shoes, the work-worn hands, and the hundred-dollar bills. I tried to imagine her as this coyote, this predator. It turned the whole picture upside down. True, my client may have lied about her name, but lying about a name doesn’t rate as a mortal sin. It’s not in the same league as pointing out victims to assassins.

Maybe my client was one of “Manuela’s” victims, a political refugee fingered by her former guide.

“Is the Manuela with the card, this coyote Manuela, still alive?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” the INS man said, “but I’m concerned—we’re concerned about this ad you put in the paper.”

I’d forgotten about the ad. I kept that carefully off my face.

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I placed that while she—while my client—was alive.”

“I know you didn’t realize what you were letting yourself in for,” he said, “but you’ve gotta back off. These guys the Estefan woman’s playing with are not nice people. We’ve been trying to round ’em up for years now. They kill folks. Don’t think twice about it.”

“Is that why you’re following me?”

“Don’t you see, dammit, if somebody’s following you, we need to know about it, because somebody might think this damn woman told you something that’s going to help us.”

“Then by sitting here with me, out in the open, you’re setting me up, right?”

“Shit,” he said. “Is everything an argument with you? Setting you up? You’re doing a hell of a job by yourself, taking out an ad in the paper.”

I gave up on my nose and pressed the towel to my head. “What do you want?”

“If you hear from anybody who says they want to chat with you about Manuela, you call me, okay? Not after you meet them, because there may not be any afterward, but before you meet. And I’ll go with you.” He handed over a card. “This number ought to get me anytime.”

“Why don’t you just follow me around?”

“It’s not my style,” he said angrily. “Look, you want to target yourself, you go ahead.” His voice softened abruptly. “But I’d hate for anything to happen to a lady with hair the color of yours, you know. I hardly ever see hair that color.”

“They let Jamieson work the men and you work the women?”

“Usually.” He smiled with just the right amount of self-deprecation. “They slipped up with Jamieson earlier. Didn’t know you were gonna be you.”

“And now you know.”

The Southern accent got heavier. “Ma’am, it’ll be a pleasure keeping an eye on you.”

“Don’t count on it,” I said.

He reached over and put his hand on my arm, just below the elbow. “Get some ice on that nose, take two aspirin, and lie down,” he said. “Call me in the morning?”

Somehow I fumbled the locks and got in the house. As I slammed the door the headache throbbed into full flower, and pain washed over me, leaving me momentarily weak, clinging to the banister. Where he’d touched it, my arm felt hot.