36

Ana was in Interrogation Two, the room where I’d viewed the videotape of my dead client, closeted with Marian Rutledge, the classy Harvard lawyer. Mooney stopped at the coffee machine and bought himself a cup before hammering on the door. He knew better than to ask me if I wanted cop-house coffee.

The lawyer opened the door, clad in a tailored gray suit. “Good,” she said curtly upon seeing the two of us. “My client would like to speak to you.”

Mooney raised an eyebrow. We went in and Ana forced a shaky smile.

“We’re not asking for any deal up front,” Marian Rutledge said firmly. “But we are confident that our information will help your investigation, and if it does, a word on Ana’s behalf would be appreciated.” She repeated the same message for Ana’s benefit, her Spanish as elegant as her suit. Ana stared at her in openmouthed admiration. Mooney was so tired, I wasn’t sure he’d realized she was female.

“She ready to make a statement?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’d like a police translator, no offense to your Spanish.”

“Fine,” she said.

Mendez was summoned. Taping equipment was set up on the long rectangular table. Mooney checked to make sure it was in order.

The lawyer nodded to Ana when the machine began to hiss.

“¿Dónde comienzo?” Ana asked. Where do I begin?

Mooney said, “Begin with Manuela Estefan.”

Ana looked at me, glanced at her lawyer, stared longingly at the battered wooden door. There weren’t any windows, just dull beige walls. She took a deep breath. “We meet in the camp, in Texas. Brownsville, I think, is the name of the place. We tell each other stories, how we come, how we walk the long miles, how we leave our families and come here, and we are in the camp, and they say they will send us back, right back to El Salvador, we don’t even get to stay a little while. There is barbed wire and it is crowded, many refugees like us, penned like animals. And a man comes to us, to me and Manuela and three others from my country, and he says he can help us, for money, for jewelry—or maybe for other things.”

She blushed furiously and Marian Rutledge said, “Go on now, Ana.”

“We are good girls,” she declared. “Good girls. From poor families, yes, but we go to church. Good girls.”

I thought I knew why she’d wanted me to stay in Mooney’s office. Not me, in particular, but any woman.

I didn’t think she’d talk any more with Mooney and Mendez in the room, not about that part of her story. She hesitated and swallowed a gulp of coffee. It went down the wrong way and she coughed.

“The man is a coyote, a guide,” she continued. “Some he brings in from over the border, some he takes from the camps. He is a pig of a man, but he can do what he says, and soon we have bus tickets, and we come to this city, to Boston together, and we have jobs at the factory and a place to stay. He promises papers, but they never come. At the factory they don’t ask for papers.”

“Go on, Ana,” the lawyer prompted.

“More girls come to work, but the five of us are together. We work very hard for the promise of papers. Manuela, she complains, and they say if we complain, we go back to the camp, to Texas, back to El Salvador, even—back to die.

“For me it is enough. I have food to eat and I work for it, and nobody comes in the night to take me away. But Manuela, she knows more, she wants more. She talks about the other women she meets, the ones who have papers, and how they can live anyplace and do things, go out with young men and have children, families who grow up here.

“Manuela, she is the most clever of us. She finds out something, something I think about the man who is the coyote, a man we see sometimes at the factory when new girls come in. And soon Manuela has her green card. And she says to us that this secret is very valuable and it will buy green cards for all of us, for all her friends. And we drink wine and celebrate, and then Manuela is gone.”

The recorder hummed. Mendez repeated every word, his voice calm.

“The women at the factory, they say Manuela sleeps with somebody to get her card, and then she goes off because she doesn’t have to stay in such a bad place to work for so little money. But Manuela, she is so smart. She knows something. And the four of us, we think she will send for us, she will get us the green cards because she says she will, and she is not a woman who forgets.

“We wait for her, but we don’t hear. Aurelia is the bravest of us—”

“Aurelia Gaitan,” Mooney murmured.

“Sí. And she goes finally to the coyote after we wait many weeks. I think she maybe knows what Manuela knew, but she doesn’t tell us. Maybe because another girl moves into the apartment and we don’t know her so well, maybe—I don’t know why. But soon the boss at the factory tells us he has a green card for Aurelia, and she has gone also, with Manuela, to work somewhere wonderful, to California where it’s warm always, and we are happy for her, but sad, puzzled she did not say good-bye.

“We wish, the three of us, very much that Manuela had told us the secret that buys the green cards, and at home when the new girls are out, we decide to look everywhere in the apartment because Manuela is tricky and maybe she hides things and that is how Aurelia knows how to get her papers and be North American and free.”

Her coffee cup was empty. Mendez went out and got her a refill. She sipped it gratefully.

“In the mattress of Manuela’s bed, where a new girl is sleeping, we find it. The card you show me, Manuela’s green card, and much money, and suddenly everything is upside down. Because why would Manuela go away to work in California and leave her green card, which she is so happy about and so proud, and she will need wherever she goes in this country? Why would she leave this money, and where does this money come from? I am very afraid she is in jail.

“Delores says she will ask the man, the coyote, about the card. Maybe, she thinks, there are two cards, one—¿cómo se dice?—temporary, one for real.”

“And Delores went away,” I said. And of course the other two couldn’t go to the police, wouldn’t dream of it. Where do you turn when you grow up in a country where uniformed men haul people away in the dead of night? When any cry for help in your new country could boomerang and bring deportation?

Ana nodded bleakly and rubbed her arms, as if she were suddenly chilled. “That leaves only Amalia and myself. We are younger than the others. We decide that we do nothing until we hear from one of the women. They will not leave us without a word. We go to work, we are very quiet, we don’t complain, even when they have us work more hours. We have no secret to tell, so we don’t complain. We have no place to go and our friends are gone. And then two things happen quick together.

“We hear about you.” She nodded in my direction. “Someone who is not the police, a woman like us, and then we hear a woman talk about Manuela and how they find her dead. It’s so long, you understand, months, and in our hearts we see Manuela in California, working somewhere nice, selling dresses, maybe, with a boyfriend, maybe, and we don’t know what is true. And Amalia buys a newspaper and has someone read her the story, and we don’t know how to find out what really happened and we want the green card back, Manuela’s green card, because we think maybe that is what Manuela hid for us, the thing that is so valuable. Maybe we … I don’t know what we thought. Amalia is smarter than me. She says she will go to you. She will take the money we find with the green card—”

I broke in. “Why would Amalia tell me she was Manuela?”

“Because then you will get the card and ask no questions.”

“But the picture—” I said.

“Manuela is her prima, her cousin. She looks a little like Manuela.”

“But didn’t you want to know who the dead woman was?”

“No,” Ana said forcefully. “No. We know our friends are in California. Our friends. My friends …”

She started to cry in earnest now. “And then Amalia is gone and the boss at the factory says to me, don’t worry, the ones who leave get their green cards, and I must move to a new apartment because the officials find the other place and they know the girls who stay there have no papers, but I don’t know anymore, and I move in with somebody else and I do my work and I leave and walk around and I don’t go near the boss and I’m afraid the next time the coyote comes back, he’ll know that we went for help, that Amalia talked to this lady. And I think if I look some more in the old apartment, maybe Manuela left something else there, maybe deeper in the mattress. And I go. I am so stupid, I go. And instead a policeman is there.”

She came to an abrupt halt and buried her face in her hands.

The knock on the door startled all of us. It made Ana cry out. Dave walked in and handed Mooney Clinton’s ID folder. “A few partials,” he said. “Should I have her take a look at it?”

“No!” Mooney said quickly. “Lift the photo out and get five more like it—cop photos, perps, whatever. We let her pick hurt out. We’re doing this by the book. This bastard’s not going to walk.”

Ana picked him out of a group of six with no hesitation.

Son of a dog, she called him, and she spat.