that."
"You think Ines knows why you really came back to San Antonio? She wasn't the only piece of your past you needed closure on."
His eyes were getting sleepier and angrier by the second. "Go home, Professor."
"Your mother worked for Jeremiah Brandon until just after you were born. Jeremiah kept track of you as you grew up. Have you ever known for sure who your father was?"
Zeta didn't answer.
I strove to see some resemblance between Zeta Sanchez and the old photos of Jeremiah Brandon. I didn't see any.
"For what it's worth," I said, "you're more like him than Aaron or Del. You're the one who inherited his character."
I could tell that my words were no consolation. They simply sank in, probably joining the army of similar thoughts that Zeta had been amassing most of his life and still hesitated to put into the battlefield.
"You did something good today," I said. "Thank you."
Zeta stood. "I didn't do nothing, Professor. I'll be out of here sooner than you think. You wait until then before you decide to thank me."
Then he walked to the exit and disappeared back into the county jail.
I tried to convince myself that he'd needed to say those parting words to save face, that we'd come to a resolution despite that. I sat there listening to the crying babies and the fat woman grouse about her electric bill. But I kept watching the door Zeta had gone through, just to make sure it stayed closed.
Chapter 52
Woodlawn Lake cuts a green, quarter-mile U through the near West Side. The area had been affluent once. When my father was a kid back in the 1940s, the water had been pristine, the circular Casting Pond stocked with fish for children to catch. Dad once told me he'd beaten his friends in a rowing race around the lake's miniature red and white lighthouse, an idea I found incredulous, given Dad's massive beer gut in his later years. Neighborhood families had held their debutante parties and upscale Christmas posadas at the now boarded-up community center. My father and mother had gone to their first dance there.
Now the palm trees dotting the shore were dying. The Casting Pond was choked with watercress and cattails and old shoes. Most of the Spanish villas and Southern plantation homes fronting the water had long ago been divided into apartment blocks, their lawns gone to crabgrass and wild pyracantha.
Still, in the fresh light on a late spring morning, the place glowed with a kind of faded dignity.
Along the shore, joggers did their routes. Preschool-aged children toddled after the flocks of grebes and geese. The smell of roasted buttered corn filled the air from vendors' wagons.
We parked across from the old docks, in front of Ines and Michael's new apartment.
It didn't look like much - a two-story brownstone cube with white-framed windows and a briar patch of TV aerials on the roof. The first time I'd seen it, I'd been reminded of those buildings in atomic bomb test films, a few seconds before annihilation. I hadn't shared that observation with Ines.
On the doorstep, we found a wicker basket full of food, heavily cocooned in Saran Wrap. Ines' name was on the tag. Erainya's handwriting.
"Greek leftovers," I pronounced.
Ines hefted the new addition to her larder. "But she brought us a basket this big yesterday. We haven't even started - "
"Erainya is relentless," I warned her. "Now that you're on her list, she won't stop until your breath permanently smells like gyros."
I followed Ines and Michael upstairs to number five. Across the hallway, their neighbor's door was cracked open just enough to let out the sound of Spanish soap opera and the smell of cooking beans.
Ines unlocked the door to number five and Michael pushed through immediately, tugging at his tie as he disappeared around the corner. Ines leaned against the doorway. She hugged the basket of food to her stomach and closed her eyes. Pain tightened in her face. I got the uncomfortable impression that she was passing through a labor contraction. Congratulations, sir. It's a dolma platter.
Finally she murmured, "I don't know what to do."
"Buy some fresh yogurt. A couple of bottles of ouzo."
She smiled wanly. "You know what I mean. I don't trust myself to stop moving. I'm afraid I'll fall apart."
"The worst is over."
She opened her eyes and looked straight through me, as if calculating the distance to the horizon. "Is it?"
She didn't sound like she expected an answer. That was just as well.
"You want me to