The Citgo sign is on, doing its thing across Kenmore Square, as I walk into Solarte’s office, and it’s a good thing I’m not high because if I were, I’d just stare out the window, pencil lame jokes on scrap paper, and scarf down an entire pizza. Instead I lay a file on Solarte’s desk before taking a seat.
“Is that what I think it is?” Solarte looks impressed.
“Probably not,” I say. “It’s from the FBI.”
“Say what?”
“Zesty Meyers, PI,” I say. “Put me on salary, boss.”
“I just might. But before I look at this and you tell me how you were able to get ahold of it, I’ll see your file and raise you…” Solarte opens the top desk drawer and gently lays Charlie’s gun on the table, the barrel facing away from us toward the window.
It’s my turn to be impressed, but I don’t touch the gun.
“You don’t want it,” she says.
“No. And I found out it doesn’t belong to Charlie.” I explain how he came to hold it in the first place.
“So.” Solarte slides the gun off the desk and back into her drawer. “You’ve been busy, I’ve been busy, too. I got the grand tour with Klaussen today after I dropped you off. Up and around Allston, Cambridge, Somerville, all the places he and Camilla Islas used to hang out or scored. Of course, most everything’s changed; I just wanted to see if anything shook loose out of him. I offered to have him sit with someone I know who could hypnotize him, but he wasn’t having any part of it.”
“I don’t blame him,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
“Control, mostly. I wouldn’t want somebody to have that kind of access to the things I know.”
“You mean the secrets you keep?”
“I thought we were talking about Klaussen,” I say.
“We were. Now we’re talking about you. I know this can’t be easy for you, Zesty, to learn these things about your father so late in the game when he can’t explain himself.” Solarte’s voice goes dry. “It’s not what I intended when I brought you in on this.”
“No?”
“You give me too much credit. I rarely see that far ahead. I just go where the leads take me. Anyhow, we weren’t about to go shoveling in Tenean or Wollaston since they’d bulldozed and cadaver-sniffed those spots years ago. You know the story.”
I did, of course. Just about everyone in Boston knows the story now. I only wonder how much Solarte knows that I know. It’s hard to tell. Everywhere I’ve careened this last week I’ve stumbled into women who are kicking ass, taking names, and playing their game tight. Conversely, the men are all running around like chickens with their heads cut off, making up shit as they go along and cutting corners at every opportunity. Something I’m sure Jhochelle would characterize thusly: business as usual.
“Klaussen thought it could have been around the Revere shoreline, any one of those places, really, but he doesn’t remember shit. The only rise I got out of him was in Islas’s old hood near Davis Square. He couldn’t believe how nice the neighborhood is now. It was never a shithole, but it was always working class, pretty mixed by Boston standards. You know, I never realized Somerville back-ended into Charlestown, but now it makes sense McKenna’s crew were all Irish with Charlestown roots, Southie. Everybody knows Charlestown used to be the bank robbery capital of the world, but did you know—”
“Somerville was the car theft capital during the same time period?”
“I guess you do. Makes perfect sense, right? They’re not driving their own cahs to hit the banks,” Solarte purposely butchering the word. “Anyhow, Klaussen says he’s pretty good with names so we went mailbox reading, rang a few doorbells. Most everybody in the neighborhood, at least the people we met, hadn’t been there more than ten, fifteen years tops.”
“Did Klaussen recognize Camilla’s place?”
“You mean her parents’? Barely. It had been fixed up, pretty much like every other house on the block. I’d live there in a heartbeat if I could afford it. We checked the mailboxes. The Islases, as you know, are deceased. Nobody answered when we rang. We asked whoever answered the door in the houses closest to Camilla’s if they knew the family back in the day.”
“Did anybody?”
“One old lady, who must have been confused, said the daughter had moved back a long time ago. Poor thing. It looked like she lived alone and I could smell the cats from the porch. Hers might have been the only house on the block that hadn’t been renovated. Honestly, I’m surprised she answered.”
“Why’s that?”
“There must have been a half dozen fliers in her mailbox, those cash-for-your-house deals, reverse mortgage, all that bullshit. I’m sure there are vultures who go by that house every day just waiting for her to kick.”
“How long ago did Polishuk say Camilla’s parents died?”
“Eighty-six? The dad died in a car crash. The missus a few years later? Cancer, I think it was.”
“You ran the deed? Record of sale?”
“Sure.” Solarte had picked up a pencil off her desk and begins to tap it on the side of her head like it might jar a thought loose.
“What?” I open my hands at my sides.
“I didn’t really think anything of it when I looked, but now that you mention it, that might be the only thing that was strange.…”
“What’s that?”
“There wasn’t a record of sale, per se. It was a transfer. Like in a will.”
“To who?”
“Nobody named Islas, I remember that. I just assumed it must have been somebody else in the family. Didn’t think it was important.”
“Do you now?”
“Not particularly. But I’ll follow up anyway. At this point it’s all I have unless that file tells us something new.”
We open it. It doesn’t. Except for what’s not there: my father’s name missing or redacted from any of the paperwork that makes up the FBI file and any connection to Camilla Islas’s murder. Confirming what Polishuk said about being warned off by the FBI and his superiors: one of his two leading suspects was declared off-limits and Karl Klaussen vanished, whereabouts unknown to everybody except my father, safely across the Mexican border with a new name and identity. Only to resurface thirty-some-odd years later, hoping loss would be his guide to exhume Camilla’s bones and usher her soul to heaven in time for Día de los Muertos.
Is Klaussen a religious man? He doesn’t strike me as one. But death has a way of forcing that conversation. At least it has with me. Maybe not religion in the organized sense, but the start of a relationship with what lies beyond, the living’s responsibility to the dead. And it also dawns on me at that moment that I know next to nothing about my responsibilities to my father when his time comes to pass. Nothing about his wishes for his burial or what to do with his remains, or the ceremony he’d like to mark his passing, the words he’d prefer were spoken over his mortal coil.
His end is nearing. Why can’t I face that? Even Zero seems to have come to some form of acceptance of this inevitability. No. It’s more than acceptance. He’s preparing himself. Without me. Because I haven’t been strong enough to face the truth.
I close my eyes and think of my father and the choices he’s made over the years, not a single meaningful decision that hadn’t drawn blood or pain. It would be comforting to think that Lee was right, that I’m more like my mother than I know, at least trying to do the right thing, to swerve hard to the choices that don’t burn anyone else, or make matters worse than they are. But Lee only knew my mother like I did, through newspaper clippings and files and stories. Meaning, through other people’s eyes.
“What’s wrong, Zesty?”
“What?” Solarte startles me out of my thoughts.
“You’re crying.”
“I am?” I reach to my eyes, touch the wetness that I hadn’t felt streaming over my cheeks, and look down to see the accumulation forming almost an arrow of a stain on my sweatshirt. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out, so we sit there together in silence, until the motion-sensor lights in Solarte’s office click the room into darkness and I come to realize that the bitterest thing I’ve ever tasted are my own tears, which just won’t seem to stop falling.