A petite Hispanic woman answered the door. She was a well-kept forty-five or six, with poker-straight brown hair down to her shoulders and a hint of makeup, but her eyes were hollow and hovering at half-mast, like she might fall asleep where she stood. She wore a pink polo shirt with the collar turned up, like kids did in the eighties. She spoke to me through the screen, holding on to the inner door for support.
“Yes?” She said it like
Jes
.
“Mrs. Garcia? Libney Garcia?”
“Yes?”
I introduced myself and gave her a brief and heavily sanitized version of what Bloch had asked me to do. The drive over had given me time to think through how I wanted to position myself to the people I’d have to talk to. Almost all of them would be cops, or related to cops, and they weren’t going to be awed or blown away by the words “police investigation” like John Q. Public might be. They’d ask hard questions and want straight answers. I had to give them most of the truth without actually letting the cat out of the bag or having the door shut in my face.
“You are with the police?” she asked.
“Not anymore, Ms. Garcia,” I said. “But Danny’s supervisor asked me to look into his death personally. I’m happy to have him call you, if you’d like confirmation.”
She shook her head, too weary to question it. “What is it you want?”
“Just a couple minutes of your time,” I said. “I know it must be hard to talk about your husband so soon after his death. But any little bit might help catch whoever killed him. You never know what might be useful.”
She waved her hand in a languid sweep, as if to say she didn’t care, but opened the screen door. I went into the house. She shut the door and led me to the living room. The furniture was of the Swedish outlet, put-it-together-yourself variety, but still clean and smart-looking. The floor was hardwood and half of it had been sanded down, giving the room a two-tone cast. Pictures in little easel frames crowded together on top of a TV cabinet. A couch with a plaid throw bunched up at one end held down one corner of the room. I sat in a chair with rounded plywood arms that looked a lot more comfortable than it was.
“You want coffee?” she asked.
I hesitated, then said yes. She left the room and came back five minutes later with two steaming cups.
“I’m sorry. Is instant,” she said, handing me the mug. It said
World’s Greatest Dad
on the side. I cupped my hand around the lettering to cover it. She sat on the couch across from me, absentmindedly straightening the throw as she did so.
“This is fine,” I said, taking a sip. It tasted like burnt cardboard water. I took a deep breath.
“Thank you. You want to know about Danny?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know about his police work. He never want to talk about it.”
“That’s alright. Just tell me about him. As a person.”
She was quiet. I thought I’d said exactly the wrong thing, but she was only getting her thoughts together. “He was a beautiful man, very passionate. He never did nothing part way. When we first met, he wouldn’t stop calling me. Call me every night ’til my mother took the phone away. He would say poetry to my window, throw flowers on the front porch. Like in a song. My father threatened to shoot him, he caught him, but Danny would sneak into the yard anyway and whisper to me through the window. We got married a year after we met, but is like he never stop trying to…to…”
“Court you?”
She smiled. “Yes, to court me. He go after everything the same. No half way.”
“Was he born here?”
“In the States? No. He was born in Oaxaca. Come up across the border when he was fourteen, fifteen. Had cousins near here, in Woodbridge. They raised him. He learn English, graduate, went straight to the Academy.”
“He wanted to be a cop?”
“Always,” she said. “He saw many things in Oaxaca, many things crossing the border that made him angry.”
“He talk about them?”
She shook her head. “He got here, thinking, you know, the worst is over. But crime is everywhere, yes? There were gangs in Woodbridge where he grew up. He hated them, wanted to do something.”
“He wanted to fix the broken things?”
“Yes,” she said, then considered. “And no. He get very, very angry when he see something wrong, something bad. He tell me, Libney, sometimes you can’t fix. Sometimes you have to punish.”
“Like what?”
“We had a neighbor once, beat his dog. We hear it crying at night. Danny let it go three days. Then he talk to the man. Very quiet, on his porch. He never touch him, never make a move to him. But the man move out the next month.”
“What happened to the dog?”
She smiled again. “We took him. Spoil rotten for ten years.”
“Do you have a picture of Danny?”
She got up from the couch, shuffled to the TV, and picked up one of the large pictures. She traced the face of it with a finger, then walked back and handed it to me. It was one of those canned studio portraits you get at a department store, with the weird gray clouds in the background. There were three people in the picture: Libney and a man I assumed was Danny were seated, holding hands. Danny was dark and whip-thin, with medium-length hair and cocoa-brown eyes. He had that sparse mustache that some Latino men can never seem to grow in completely but insist on wearing anyway. He was smiling, but his strong white teeth had a predatory gleam. The hint of a tattoo peeked out from under the cuff of one sleeve. Behind them stood a stocky younger man with a buzz cut so close the skin of his scalp gleamed through. He was smiling, with an arm around each of them. He wore a dress shirt that, despite the generous cut, couldn’t hide a wide set of shoulders.
“Danny looks…fierce,” I said, handing the photo back.
She smiled again. “Yes. I tol’ you, no half way with Danny.”
“Is that your son in the picture, as well?”
“Yes,” she said, putting the frame back on the TV. She adjusted it carefully before sitting down. “Paul.”
“Is he home?”
She shook her head. “No. He run all my errands since…” She trailed off. She seemed not so much occupied by grief as sinking into it. Sadness rolled off her in waves.
I gave her a moment, though it wasn’t easy. Time was running away from me, or at least that was how it felt. This interview was necessary, critical even, but it already seemed like I’d spent too long here. I took a deep breath. A car that needed muffler work burbled on the road outside, faded away. I waited until her eyes rose to meet mine.
I asked, “Is Paul in the military?”
“Was. Iraq. Afghanistan.”
“He came back recently?”
“Las’ year. He was going to go into the Academy like his father, this fall. He dropped out when Danny was…” She turned her head.
I nodded. “I know this is hard, but did Danny say anything about his work? Anything recent?”
“Never. He want them to be very separate.” She made a chopping motion with her hand. “We don’t even go to picnics, parties. All our friends are here. He get very mad when I ask him anything.”
“Do you know what kind of work he did?”
“No. He was gone for days sometimes. He’d let me know when, how long. He come back very tired. Smelled like cigarettes an’ beer. But happy.”
“Did he have any friends on the force? In law enforcement?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What were you supposed to do if something happened to him? To you?”
“I have his office number. He tell me to call that if I don’t hear from him in a week or if I have a problem.”
I asked a dozen more questions while my coffee grew cold, but the answers were generally the same and all unhelpful. Whatever else he had done, Danny Garcia had shielded his wife from his work. He could’ve been an astronaut for all she knew. I don’t know if it was part of the Latin culture, or just an iron-clad policy Danny had made for his own family, but there seemed to have been no questioning the issue. No friends on the force, no favorite cop bars, no other cops’ wives to share the burden and the anxiety with. No diaries, no shaky midnight pillow talk, no marital blowups about the life of the law enforcement family, like the one that had ended my own marriage. There was Danny Garcia, undercover narc, and Danny Garcia, devoted husband and father, and never the twain did meet.
I thanked her and put my mug down on an end table. “Would you mind if I came back and talked to Paul?”
She shrugged and seemed more likely than ever to go to sleep on me. I had the impression she would probably crawl back onto the couch after I left. Some of the memories had been kind to her—she had smiled once or twice—but overall, the grief had robbed her of essence. I hated to call it the will to live, but that’s what it felt like. I jotted my number on the back of an old MPDC card, handed it to her, then stood. She walked me to the door, where I shook her hand.
I said, “I know this is very hard. There might not be anything harder in the world. I’ve been through this before. If you need anything, please call.”
She nodded, but said nothing, and quietly closed the door.
Chapter Five
I was at Restaurant Nora on Florida Avenue, trapped in a tipsy debate between Amanda on one side and Jay on the other with their friend Zenny chiming in whenever she felt like it. The topic, not unexpectedly, was the state of career options for post-graduates in Gender Studies. I had less to contribute to the discussion than if I’d been asked to describe the inner workings of the digestive organs of a Maryland Blue Crab. Then again, that’s what was on my plate with a side of wild mushroom risotto, so I could probably have gotten somewhere on that question by poking around with my fork. I felt a small twinge of guilt that I wasn’t out there, chasing down more leads for Bloch, but I’d done what I could to this point and I told myself I had to eat sometime.
“But what I’m saying is, there are real needs right now in community centers and shelters and counseling practices,” Amanda said. “It’s fine to talk about higher academics and pushing the borders of the field, but there are practical applications to what we’ve studied. You can’t say that about all liberal arts.”
“None of them, actually,” Zenny quipped. She was a tall, slim brunette model masquerading as a graduate student. She slung back half her glass of Riesling.
“Sure, but that’s stuff that can be handled by people with a certificate from a community college,” Jay said. “You just walked out with a master’s degree from one of the most prestigious non-Ivies in the country. You could do more with it, is all.”
“Don’t qualify GW like that just because you went to Princeton for undergrad,” Amanda said, picking up her fork and jabbing it at Jay with each word. He flinched as though she might stab him. “And don’t belittle my degree just because you’re in for the whole ball of wax and are scared you won’t get tenure somewhere.”
“I’m
not
belittling your degree,” he said, a little desperately. “I’m lauding it.” His turned to me for support.
“Speaking of lauding, how’s everyone’s moderately expensive dinner?” I asked.
Since I was talking to three graduate students who had subsisted primarily on boxed macaroni-and-cheese for several years and since we were at one of the best restaurants in DC and—most importantly—because I was paying, my question deftly steered the discussion to less dangerous ground. The three tucked in like they hadn’t eaten since freshman year.
The relative quiet allowed me to take a gander around the place. I hadn’t gotten out much in the last year. Hell, in the past ten. Before cancer, I’d rarely raised my head from my plate. Now, I valued the times that I could visit a swank place like Nora’s and I noticed small things I wouldn’t have before. The high walls were painted sage green. The woodwork was well-done, ornate without being gaudy. Instead of paintings, spaced evenly around the walls were colorful and non-linear quilts that were less like your grandmother’s bedspread and more like something Chagall would’ve done if he’d been handy with a needle and thread. The lighting was just right and the tables far enough apart that diners felt privacy, but not isolation.
The grads mopped their plates and sat back, content. They waxed poetic and effusive in their thanks, which I encouraged with an “aw shucks” look on my face. I basked in it for a while, then ordered a third bottle of the Alsatian Riesling we’d been drinking, which was probably the real reason they piled on the compliments.
We enjoyed that for a while, then Jay and Zenny started comparing notes on the dessert menu. I turned to Amanda. “Without opening the can of worms again, what
are
the job realities for you? I’m not trying to be an ass. I really don’t know.”
She played with her silverware and sighed. “I want to do counseling, but I’m not qualified. I don’t have the education, believe it or not. That’s the hands-on work I want to do, but it takes a psych degree and certification.”
“And a willingness to live like a refugee,” Jay said, still looking at the dessert menu. He glanced up to receive glares from the two girls. “Sorry.”
“So, there are definitely shelters that would be ecstatic to get an educated helping hand on staff,” Amanda continued, turning her gaze from Jay to me. “But they can only afford to pay one or two of them. Seventeen of us just graduated from the program. I could volunteer somewhere with an eye towards becoming full-time staff, but how long can I afford to do that?”
“So what’s the answer?” I asked, but I’d already guessed. I tried to ignore the tightening in my stomach.
“Follow the money,” Zenny said.
Amanda nodded. “Wherever there’s a position. San Francisco, Austin, Chicago. Whoever got the last big grant will be looking to staff, so I’ve got to be in line when they start looking.”
I didn’t say anything to that and the discussion took a sharp right turn into DC politics, veered off into Capitol Hill scandals, and crashed headlong into a critique of the latest reality TV shows.
I smiled and nodded at all the right places, but I wasn’t hearing much. The news that Amanda might be leaving shouldn’t have been unexpected, but we hide the most obvious truths from ourselves. Over the past half year, Amanda had become like a daughter to me. Besides my ex-partner Dods and his wife, I’d managed to acquire a lot of acquaintances but not a lot of friends in my fifty-three years, and had no family to speak of. I’d only had one near relationship in the past year and that had ended badly, though it was probably as much my own fault as hers. I’d have to deal with the way I’d handled Julie Atwater and what I’d seen at the time as her betrayal…but lately as simply her only way out of a no-win situation.