“I’m sorry,” I smiled at her. “I found this next to him on the floor and thought maybe he’d dropped it.”
“He wants a dog, and maybe we should get him one, but I don’t want to care for a dog as well as for Ernest. Anyway, his sister is allergic.”
“He’s here for therapy?” I asked.
“I don’t know how much they can do for him, but we come two times every week. After all, if you give up hope, you have nothing left.”
“It’s hard,” I said. “One of my cousins was shot in the head. He can still walk and talk, but he’s lost his impulse control. He behaves so wildly in public we don’t know if he can ever live on his own again.”
Lies. The detective’s stock-in-trade was really making me squirm today.
“With Ernie, it was a motorcycle,” she said. “We kept him out of the gangs. He was a good boy, always, but not a scholar like his sisters, They all are brilliant students. Were brilliant students.” Her face creased in sorrow. “Two of them are dead now.”
“I’m so sorry! Was it in the same accident where he was injured?”
It seemed disrespectful to talk about Ernest as if he wasn’t there, but, in a way, he wasn’t. He was crooning over the picture of the puppy. My guilt mounted.
“The oldest, she died in Iraq. These two were close. Her death hit him in the heart. I think that’s why he was careless with his motorcycle. Six months after Allie’s death, he ran off the expressway. Somehow, the motorcycle climbed over the railing. I don’t understand how, I wasn’t here. And my son couldn’t explain it to me.”
“Allie!” Ernest heard his sister’s name and dropped the picture. “Allie is a dove. She flies around with Jesus! Now Nadia is a dove. Men are shooting my sisters. They’ll get Clara next! Bam, bam! Poor Clara.”
“What, Allie was shot in battle?” I asked the grandmother.
He was getting more and more agitated. I picked up the picture of the puppy.
“The puppy will kiss Clara and make her all better,” I suggested, holding it out to him.
“Yes! Nana, we need to get Clara a puppy. No one can shoot her if she has a puppy.”
In another minute, he was crooning happily over the picture again. I apologized to his grandmother for stirring him up.
“How could you know?” she said. “The death of his sister, he still can’t understand what really happened to her. And his mother, she won’t allow us to mention Alexandra’s name. So he never has a chance to talk. Maybe one day his poor brain will clear, and he will understand what happened to her.”
“The third sister isn’t really in danger, is she?”
The grandmother’s eyes clouded. “I pray night and day for her safety. When you have lost two—three, really”—she nodded toward her grandson—“you are frightened all the time.”
The clerk called her by name. “Daydreaming, Mrs. Guaman? It’s your turn! Ernie, your friends are waiting for you.”
I slipped away as the grandmother began to chat in Spanish with the clerk and drove to my office in a sober mood.
26
A Show in the Dark
Back in my office, I wrote up my conversation with Scalia and the odd reaction of everyone I’d met at Tintrey to Alexandra’s name. I left out the tampon—why include that in a document that might get subpoenaed for a trial?—and threw out the notebook that Scalia had damaged. The last column in my investigator spreadsheet was labeled “Dead Ends.” Jesse Laredo, Chad’s buddy from Iraq, was dead. Jesse’s mother had called while I was out to say she couldn’t find any trace of Chad’s blogs or e-mails among her son’s things. The message wasn’t a surprise—it would surprise me if I learned one reliable thing in this wretched case—but it did depress me further.
I looked up [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com again to see if there were any new postings, but the site was still down “out of respect for the dead.” I took out my notes where I’d copied some of Rodney’s code. There were several L’s but no Q’s. I rubbed my eyes. Kystarnik had to know he was under surveillance. He had to realize he needed multiple avenues to communicate with his thugs. So it seemed reasonable to assume that Rodney’s scribbles were some means of communication. Even so, the feds could