Coyote (21 page)

“Talk,” she repeated bleakly, shaking her head. But she held the door wide.

The apartment was immaculate, sofa bed returned to its sofa disguise, pillows neatly plumped. Floors vacuumed, end tables shined. Marta must have found waiting intolerable, even cleaning preferable. Kept the mind occupied, kept the body moving, kept you from hearing the tick of the clock, the dead silence of the unringing phone.

The living room looked like a stage set.

Marta said, “Lilia has the boys. I thought when she comes home, the two of us should be alone.”

For once the TV screen was blank. Marta waved me into the tiny kitchen. The table was covered with oddly shaped packages wrapped in aluminum foil and waxed paper. The door to the freezer compartment of the ancient GE refrigerator hung open. A kettle steamed on the stove.

“What do you want?” Marta said, selecting a blunt knife from a jumbled drawerful. “Why don't you find her? Why doesn't she come home? What was so bad here for her?”

I couldn't answer all the questions, and I knew better than to try. I stuck to the first one. “I need to know more about the Hunneman plant.”

She stared at me with angry eyes, hefted the knife in her hand. “Please,” she said, “all I think about is my daughter.”

“I know,” I said.

“You don't know anything,” she replied bitterly. She poured boiling water into a shallow tray, set it with a bang on the ice-caked bottom shelf of the freezer.

“I know this has to be done,” I said, “either here or at the police station. Tonight.”

“The police!” She smacked her palm against the refrigerator door. “You tell the police.
Jesús y María
, I tell you before, they close it down. You got no sense.”

“Women who work there die, Marta. Four women are dead. You could be in danger. Lilia could be in danger.”

She gripped the handle of the blunt knife. “I don't know nothing,” she said angrily, turning away and stabbing viciously at the ice-coated walls of the freezer.

“Then let's go over to Lilia's. I'll talk to her.”

“I can't leave here in the middle of this. What if Paolina comes? I won't go.” A hunk of grayish ice fell and clattered across the linoleum.

I picked it up and chucked it in the sink. “Then tell me what you know.”

“You tell the police about me?”

“Just one man. A friend. I'll try to keep you out of it. You know that.”

She kept chipping at the ice. “I know if I go to jail, maybe you think you have my daughter for your own.”

I sat on a hard wooden chair. I felt like Marta had peeled back a layer of my skin, exposed something I hadn't even acknowledged to myself. I haven't thought about kids since Cal and I split up. Was that because I was fooling myself about Paolina? Not about the way I felt for her but about the way she felt for me.

Marta didn't press her advantage. Water was starting to leak down the side of the freezer and puddle on the floor. “At the factory,” she said, “I do my work. I keep my head down. I don't look at things and people that don't concern me.”

“Marta,” I said impatiently, “this is serious. You talk to me or you talk to the police.”

She kept on defrosting the freezer, chipping and hacking at the dirty ice, but she answered my questions. The man she saw the most was the beer-bellied security guard I'd encountered on my brief foray into the plant. There were two shift supervisors, the “boss,” who was spoken of and never seen, and another security guard, who might have been Hispanic.

She swabbed the inside of the freezer with a rag. “I'm only there a few days. I don't know so much. Maybe Lilia knows. But if Lilia helps, she'll be in trouble, with no papers—”

“I'll make sure she has a lawyer—”

“A lawyer. A thief, more like it.” Marta rummaged through the frozen parcels. She dropped one with a thud and I remembered old Mr. Binkleman who lived in the apartment below. “It's Paolina who makes all this trouble for us.”

“Come on, Marta. You can't blame her for everything.”

“For this, yes! It's Paolina who talks to that woman about you, gives her your business card. Showing off, that's what she's doing. It's not me who talks. I know better than to shoot off my mouth.”

It seemed as if the temperature had suddenly dropped ten degrees. As if the freezer had taken charge, ice-coating the room. I could hear the clock tick. “What was Paolina doing there?” I said quietly. It took effort not to scream, not to grab Marta and shake her by her shoulders till her foolish head snapped against the refrigerator door.

Marta repacked the freezer compartment as she spoke, angrily chucking packaged waffles next to frozen pizzas. “She won't go to school. How can I leave her here, a place like this? In the daytime the boys downstairs, they have the drugs, wine, whatever. The words you hear are obscene, the noises obscene. I cannot leave her here. I need to work so she comes along. She learns like in a school. She learns to work, a better thing than what she learns in school. Learn to make money, I tell her.”

If it got any colder, my teeth would start to chatter.

“What is it?” Marta asked. “You okay?”

I stood abruptly. “If Paolina comes home, you call me. No matter what time of night it is, no matter if it's two in the morning, you call me. Understand?”

“You got no business talking to me like that, yelling at me, just because my crazy daughter runs away.”

With an effort I calmed my voice. “Marta, if you know why she ran away, tell me. Please.”

She studied a package of frozen piecrust. “You think this is still good?” she muttered. “I can't find no date on it.”

“Is your husband back in town?” I asked. “Is that what's bothering Paolina?”

Marta shoved the questionable piecrust to the back of the freezer, pivoted to face me. “Pedro? He wouldn't come back here. What makes you think Pedro's here?”

“You were comparing him to Paolina when she ran off, remember?” In very unkind terms, but I didn't say that.

Marta sank heavily into a kitchen chair. She opened and closed her right hand, staring at the swollen knuckles. The pain made her wince. “You don't understand,” she said.

“Paolina said the same thing to me.”

Marta made a show of sorting through the remaining frozen foods, inspecting masking-tape labels. She avoided my eyes. “It wasn't Pedro I was yelling about. Pedro is not Paolina's father.”

I ran my tongue over my lips. “He's not—”

“You want to listen to me or you want to talk? Paolina's father, he's a rich man. But does that help us here, living like pigs? Do we get anything? No. Her grandfather dies in Colombia, leaves a fortune, a million dollars, more, and what do we get? A little money for a new television. That's all.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her angry words. “Does Paolina know?”

“She knows nothing. She's too young. This rich Colombian man, I'm working in his house, a little cleaning, a little cooking. He says he's going to marry me, but when I'm pregnant with Paolina, then it's good-bye, he's got too many important things to do, with the M-19, the
guerrillas
, the Communists. A man with ideas, he tells me, can't be chained to a woman like me, a woman with a child; a woman can't live on the run from the government.”

Her hair had come loose from its tight bun. As she spoke, she unpinned it. It fell, heavy and lank, to her shoulders. She rubbed her temples, closed her eyes. For a moment I got a glimpse of the young woman she must have been, with a fresh, unlined face, a face like Paolina's.

“He gives me a little money to ease his conscience, and I come to this country after I have my child, my Paolina. I meet Pedro when she is just a baby. He says he loves us both.” She sighed deeply, shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe he did, for a while.”

“How could you keep this a secret? How could you not tell her?”

“What difference does it make?” she said. “What difference would it make? It's an old story. It happened a long time ago.”

“But how can you be sure Paolina doesn't know? If you went to see her grandfather—”

“I wouldn't go, not to beg for money, not if I'm healthy, not if I can work. Paolina knows nothing. She's just a child,” Marta insisted. “She doesn't understand. I talk to the old man at night. I bring her with me, yes. To show the old man she looks like her father. But she's sleepy. She visits with the housemaid. She falls asleep.”

I thought about Paolina's behavior since she'd returned from Colombia. “She knows,” I said. “Maybe not everything, but something.”

“So what?” Marta said, defiantly sticking her hairpins back where they belonged. “So she accepts what is. What else can she do?”

“I don't know,” I murmured. “I don't know.” And I left her there, stuffing food into her ancient freezer.

When I got outside, I tried a deep breath. The night air was heavy with exhaust fumes. I couldn't get my lungs to expand.

At the phone booth on the corner I stuck in a dime and punched my home number. I got Roz.

“Is she there?”

“No.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, get the hell out and look for her.”

I hung up and got through to Mooney after letting the damn thing ring about fifty times.

“Got anything?” I asked him.

“The lawyer's here. And I've got Canfield, but he won't say squat till he talks to his attorney. We're gonna host a goddamn meeting of the American Fucking Bar Association.”

I told him Marta knew zip, and I asked him to put out an all-points for Paolina.

33

I knew I ought to go home, the way a child lost in the woods knows he ought to stay put and wait for the search party. But what if the familiar path is right over the hill? What if the dark starts closing in and the rustling branches threaten?

What if Paolina was close at hand, somewhere I might find her?

Staying put is too damn hard.

I told myself she was okay. She'd taken care of herself last night, and she was smart enough to take care of herself tonight. I was less than convincing.

With the all-points, every cop in the metro area would be looking out for her. So what the hell did I think I could add? One more pair of searching eyes. A knowledge of her habits.

As I drove, my eyes peered into the shadows. Just because Paolina had been at Hunneman, I lectured myself, just because she had spoken to the woman who'd called herself Manuela, given her my business card, was no reason to believe she was mixed up in this mess any further. Her disappearance was her own idea, triggered by Marta's angry words.

I drove through Harvard Square, where one more young runaway would hardly be noticed, staring in the doorways where the musicians played on summer weekends, searching the sheltered depths of Holyoke Center, stopping to get a good look at the clutches of leather-clad youngsters.

Bands of young kids roamed the Cambridge Common. I abandoned the car and trailed a pack of them on foot, showed them a photo of Paolina, managed not to hit any of them when they sneered. I drew a ragged girl aside. She couldn't have been more than fourteen. She wore a thin suede jacket, fashionably fringed and frayed, scant protection against the coming winter. For five dollars she really looked at Paolina's picture. I believed her when she said she'd never seen her in the Square.

Hours later I found myself visiting the last-gasp places and realized I ought to quit. Paolina surely knew enough not to run to the Combat Zone, Boston's adult-entertainment district, Boston's sewer. But then, as Marta had said, what did I know?

I cruised Park Square near the bus terminal, looking for the ladies of the night, the sidewalk hostesses who might have noticed a young girl waiting for a bus. I flashed my photo of Paolina. Some of the women would have told me anything for a few dollars, but others said they'd never seen her, and I was relieved.

Where do you run when you're too young to have anywhere to run to?

Would she try to get back to Colombia? To learn more about this new father? The image of my own dad came back to me so strongly, I thought I could smell the cigar smoke. A cop, he'd smoked every day of his life, a three-pack-a-day man, plus those evening cigars. I quit right after he died of emphysema, his last days a hospital nightmare of tubes, shots, and pills. Oxygen masks. The painful struggle for breath.

How would I feel if I suddenly learned that he wasn't my father? Me, the daughter who'd become a cop in his image? It would be like an earthquake, I thought. Something I'd always counted on would have moved, altered irrevocably. The very earth would seem treacherous.

Paolina's brothers would have become her half brothers in a moment's revelation.

I debated a trip to the airport, gave it up, drove home with my heart tight in my chest. I imagined her at my front door, sleepily greeting me when I arrived. She wasn't there.

I fell asleep as the sun was starting to rise, a quarter to six. Two hours later I woke, filled with an urgency that seemed almost an extension of a dream.

I called Mooney and argued with him until he agreed to meet me in half an hour at a doughnut shop near the apartment on Westland Avenue.

34

I got there first and perched on a stool at the dingy counter. A lone waitress who looked like she'd been working three nights straight reluctantly plodded by. I ordered a large coffee with cream and two sugars in case she fell asleep before getting back to me. She swabbed the grimy countertop in front of me with a piece of rag even dirtier than the Formica. She kept staring at the door, waiting for her relief to come in, sighing and yawning for the benefit of the guy behind the cash register. Husband, maybe. She slopped some of my coffee into the saucer when she plunked it in front of me. I ordered two glazed doughnuts, my favorites. They tasted like sweetened, gluey paper.