luck it’ll be something todo el mundo was supposed to know about.::::::
But before he could ask that or anything else, this Ghislaine with the snow-white face said, “Am I… under arrest?” Her voice broke when she got to the “under arrest.” Her lips trembled. She looked as if she might start crying.
Ahhh, the warrior felt very chivalrous now… a bit noble, even. “No, not at all,” he said rather grandly. “It all depends on why you’re here. That’s what I need you to tell me. And let me tell you one thing: It’s going to be better for you if you tell me the complete truth.”
She looked up into his eyes with her big eyes and said, “I’m from South Beach Outreach.”
South Beach Outreach… “What’s South Beach Outreach?” he said.
“We’re volunteers,” she said. “We work with Children’s Services. We try to help families in poor neighborhoods, especially children.”
“Families?” said Nestor, in a tone of cop street wisdom. “This is a crack house. I see a lot a crackheads”—even as the words left his lips, he knew it was a gross exaggeration, said solely to impress this snow-white young thing—“and crackheads don’t have families. They have habits, and they don’t even think beyond that. Families?”
“Well, sir, you know more about this than I do, but I think—this isn’t the first time I’ve been here, and I know they have children, some of them, and they do care about them.”
Nestor never got as far as the “than I do.” He didn’t hear a thing after “sir.” Sir? He didn’t want her calling him a sir. Sir meant she thought of him as remote and unapproachable and stuffy, the same way she would if he were a lot older than she was. But he couldn’t very well tell her to call him Nestor, could he… “Officer” would be better than “sir,” but how did you instruct her—or anybody—on that score without sounding like a protocol nut.
So he had to settle for “If that’s a family, where’s the mother?”
Tremulously: “Her mother’s been in a drug-treatment facility at Easter Rock ever since she”—she looked down at the baby—“was born. You know Easter Rock?”
“Oh, yes,” said Nestor. He knew it, and he was surprised. Easter Rock was an upscale rehab facility for upscale people. “How did she rate Easter Rock?”
“We—South Beach Outreach, I mean—intervened. They were getting ready to put her in a correctional facility for addicts.”
“Whattaya mean, ‘intervened’?”
“Mainly it was our president, Isabella de la Cruz. She knows a lot of people, I guess.”
Even Nestor had heard of Isabella de la Cruz. Her husband, Paolo, had a big shipping business. Isabella de la Cruz was always popping up in the newspaper in those group pictures where everybody is lined up in a row grinning for what reason nobody knows.
“So where do you fit into all this?” said Nestor.
“I’m a volunteer,” said Ghislaine Lantier. “We’re assigned to… sort of… watch over children from uhhh… troubled families. I hate the word dysfunctional. A lot of the times the child, as in this case”—she glanced down at her little ward again—“is staying with a relative, usually a grandmother, but it could also be a foster home. She’s with her grandmother, whom you’ve already met.”
“You don’t mean the big woman who kept telling the Sergeant he could shove—kept giving him a hard time…”
Ghislaine’s tremulous lips wavered into half a smile. “I’m afraid so.”
Nestor glanced into the dim dope den. There she was, about ten feet inside the door, the bigmouthed momma. In that gloom Nestor picked her out first by her Big Momma bulk. García was interrogating her… supposedly. You could tell she was doing all the talking. ::::::What’s that thing she has in her hands? A fucking iPhone! This is supposed to be the most impoverished part of Miami—but everybody’s got an iPhone.:::::: He turned back again.
“But Ghislaine, you’re the one holding her, not the grandmomma with the mouth.”
“Oh, I was just giving her a break. She also has two children of one of her daughters to look after. That makes five in all. My job is to check up a couple of times a week to make sure they’re being taken care of, in different ways—supervision, attention, affection, compassion… you know…”
No, he didn’t know. Nestor was intimidated by this Ghislaine’s command of language. She could reel off words like supervision, attention, and whatever the rest of it was as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Magdalena was smart, but she couldn’t talk like