The Devil May Care (21 page)

“Best of my career. Now you say he's back.” I showed Ihns the photograph Riley had sent to my smartphone.

“He cleans up real good, doesn't he?”

“Abana didn't have short hair and a polo shirt when he was Mexican Mafia?” I asked.

“Hardly. He was also trying to grow a mustache. Pitiful thing. You say he calls himself Juan Carlos Navarre now?”

“That's what the passport says.”

“Passport?”

“Spanish. Apparently he's a lot wealthier than two hundred and sixty-seven Gs, too.”

“Well, good for him. What you need to understand, McKenzie, I have no interest in Abana. There's no paper on him. He's not wanted. As far as I know, he's just another law-abiding citizen.”

“Where did he get his millions? His passport?”

“Maybe he invested in hog futures. Maybe he moved to Spain. All I know, McKenzie, what I knew about him from the moment he opened his mouth—Abana is ungodly smart. We're talking genius smart.”

“Not so smart,” I said. “He came back home, didn't he?”

“West St. Paul is home. Compared to this place, Lake Minnetonka is some mythical kingdom beyond the sea.”

“Hardly.”

“I'm just saying it's pure dumb luck that he bought into the same restaurant where Cesar Nunez's little sister worked. I mean, what are the odds?”

“They would have been a lot better if he had stayed away.”

“Like I said, Abana's smart. If he came back, there's a reason.”

“Does he have family here?”

“A mother. A sister.”

“Think he might have been in contact with them?”

“Now that wouldn't have been very smart at all, would it?”

*   *   *

I found Delfina Abana sitting on the top of three concrete steps that had sunk several inches below their original forms, her back to the screen door of her small house. The steps ended at a chipped sidewalk that divided her spotty front lawn in half, a lawn about the size of the paper napkins you find in fast-food joints. Her sidewalk intersected the city's sidewalk, although the way the concrete slabs rose, fell, and tilted this way and that, I didn't think West St. Paul took much pride in it. The kids playing up and down the street didn't seem to notice, though. They just went about their business as if everything was exactly as it should be.

You don't see that much anymore, I told myself—kids running around a neighborhood on an early Saturday afternoon as if they owned the place. These days you're considered a poor parent if you allow your children freedom of movement, if you don't carefully arrange their playdates and chaperone every outdoor excursion. Which was unfortunate. I thought about how I had been raised, how Bobby Dunston and I spent our days roaming hither and yon without a care in the world and without adult supervision. Kids today are missing out on a lot, I told myself.

I found a place to park and locked the SUV, thankful that I hadn't embarrassed the neighborhood by driving my Audi into it. Delfina watched every movement intently from her stoop, and it occurred to me as I crossed the street that I had been mistaken. The kids were being supervised, not by their parents perhaps, but by people like her who watched out for people like me. They just didn't know it.

“Who you?” she asked.

I stopped on the boulevard, a three-foot-wide strip of packed dirt between the sidewalk and the broken asphalt street, and introduced myself.

“You police? I got nothing to say to police.”

“No, ma'am,” I said. “I'm not the police.”

She waved me forward. At the same time she glanced up and down the street as if she were concerned that someone might be watching. I had no doubt that someone was. The houses were set only a few feet apart. Residents standing at their windows could look through their neighbor's window and read the label on the jar of pasta sauce Mom was pouring over the spaghetti. There were few secrets in a neighborhood like that.

I stopped at the foot of the steps.

“What you want?” she asked.

“I'm looking for Jax.”

“You said you weren't police.”

“I'm not.”

“Why you asking questions 'bout Jax, then, if you ain't police? Jax gone a long time now.”

“Have you heard from him?”

“Haven't spoken to my Jax since he was forced to run away. Why you come here talking about my baby I ain't seen for so long? You go 'way.”

I pulled my cell from my pocket and called up Abana's photograph, the one where he was pretending to be Juan Carlos Navarre. I held it up for Delfina to see.

“Is this Jax?” I asked.

She stared at the pic, blinking several times as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing. She stood slowly and extended her hands. I climbed a step so she could reach the cell easily. She took it in both hands, caressing it the way a fortune-teller might caress a crystal ball. Her head came up. Instead of the joy I had expected to see in her eyes, there was fear.

“You come inside,” Delfina said. “Come inside now.”

She stood and opened the screen door. I stepped into her living room and she followed, closing first the screen and then the interior door. The living room was awash in blue except for a broad water stain on the wall behind the couch that was gray. Forest green drapes that were fading to a color that matched the stain framed the windows. She waved the cell at me.

“Where is my baby? Where is Jax?”

“I don't know. That's why I came to see you.”

Delfina shook her head as if she were having trouble comprehending what I was telling her.

“He is here?” she asked. “In the Cities? He's not in West St. Paul. If he was in West St. Paul people would know. People would tell me.”

“He was,” I said. “In the Cities, I mean. I don't know where he is now.”

“He is okay? My Jax is okay?”

“I don't know.”

Her eyes became moist and her expression tightened. She took a fist and beat it against her breast, and for a moment I thought she might start weeping. She didn't, though.

“He can't be here. Jax. Bad people looking for him. Bad men. Do you know about the bad men?”

“Yes.”

“They want to hurt him.”

“The Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia.”

“They say he was one of them. Say he betrayed them. It's not so. He was never one of them. He was a good boy. A good boy. Good in school. Look. Look.”

Delfina left the room quickly. When she returned she was carrying a box that originally held a pair of boots. She waved me toward the kitchen—the walls were painted a sickly yellow and the dirty white linoleum on the floor had been worn through in spots. She set the box on a table made of metal and covered with a thick white lacquer trimmed with red.

“Here, here,” she said. “Jax is a good boy. An honor student. Look.”

Delfina took a certificate from the box and handed it to me. It stated that the President's Award for Educational Excellence had been presented to Jax Abana. Another certificate said Abana won an AP Scholar Award. Another boasted that he was an AP Literature and Composition Class MVP. Delfina produced a faded clipping taken from the
St. Paul Pioneer Press
that cataloged the top students in every high school graduation class in the area. By virtue of his name, Abana was listed first among the honor students at Henry Sibley Senior High School. Under “Favorite Quote” he'd written:
Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing—Vince Lombardi.
Under “College” he'd designated
Undecided.

“Here, here,” she said again. She handed me a heavy medal attached to a ribbon. The medal was engraved with images of a book, star, Olympic torch, globe, and what looked like a magic lamp. “The lieutenant governor of the state of Minnesota put this around his neck at the graduation ceremony. The lieutenant governor. It means he graduated, my baby graduated, in the top one percent of his class. Number one.”

After that there was an 8
½
×
11 glossy photograph of six students standing together on a stage, each dressed in a black graduation gown and mortarboard, each with a medal draped around their neck, each smiling brightly. Jax was the only male.

I have to admit I was impressed. The closest I came to the top one percent of my high school graduating class was passing them in the hallway.

Delfina reached into the box and retrieved a college-lined notebook. She opened the notebook and showed me what Abana had written on the first page.

Daily Schedule

6:30 AM—Exercise

7:00 AM—Shower and dress

7:30 AM—Breakfast (most important meal of the day)

8:10 AM—School bus

8:30 AM—Period one

9:22 AM—Period two

10:14 AM—Period three

11:06 AM—Period four

11:59 AM—Lunch

12:34 PM—Period five

1:24 PM—Period six

2:16 PM—Period seven

3:30 PM (time approx.)—Home from school/quick snack

4 PM—Work at car wash

6:30 PM—Home for dinner

7 PM—Homework/study

9:30 PM (if time permits)—Read for pleasure

10:30 PM—Sleep

Off to the side of the page Abana had written,
Only children play video games,
underlining the sentence several times. It was an opinion I shared. Beneath that he'd written another word that he'd drawn a thick circle around. The word was
Muffie.

“Jax was not what they said,” Delfina said. “A gangster. He was never that. He was a good boy. I don't know why they say those things about him. He had to run away because they said those things.”

“He came back,” I said.

Delfina stared at the pic on my smartphone some more.

“You have seen him?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “We've never met.”

She turned to me, her large eyes filled with questions. I answered the most obvious.

“I don't know where he went,” I said. “I only know he disappeared and his girlfriend asked me to help find him.”

“Jax has a girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes, I think so. Very pretty.”

“She come from a good family, this pretty girl?”

I didn't know how to answer that question, so I just nodded my head. That made her smile for the first time since we met.

We both heard the front door open, and we turned to face it. A woman, dark like her brother and not much older than Riley Brodin, stepped inside the house. She called absent-mindedly while she wrestled with a white shopping bag adorned with a bunch of red targets.

“Mama, I'm home,” she said.

She saw us standing in the kitchen. Her eyes locked on my face, and her head cocked to one side.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Delfina moved quickly toward her, letting my cell phone lead the way.

“Abril,” she said. “Jax. Jax is home. He's seen him.”

“What are you talking about?” the young woman asked. She set the bag down and took the cell from Delfina's hands, examining it closely. After a moment, her head came up and she started walking toward me.

“Who are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

I explained.

“Get out,” she said.

I tried to argue with her.

“What right do you have coming here, putting us at risk again?” she said. “Do you know how many people around here were hurt by what Jax did? How many went to jail? I could point to houses up and down this street where they lived, where their families still live. Even today some of them spit on the sidewalk when we walk by. Now you say he's back. He's back! Damn him.”

“No, no,” Delfina said. “It's a lie. Jax didn't do anything wrong. He's a good boy. Now he's come home.”

“He can't come home,” Abril said.

“He has.”

“Mama, he was one of them…”

“No.”

“If he came home…”

“No. It is not true.”

Abril threw her arms around her mother and drew her close.

“Maybe you're right, Mama,” she said. “Maybe you're right.”

At the same time she fixed her eyes on my face and jerked with her head toward the door. I stepped outside and waited. A few moments later, she joined me.

Abril returned my cell phone.

“Mama thinks Jax is the one who got away,” she said. “The one who escaped when so many in the neighborhood were jailed. She'll die thinking that. To her he'll always be
a good boy.
She refuses to see him the way he really is.”

“What way is he?” I asked. “Really.”

“A selfish opportunist. He took off and left us holding the bag.”

“Why?”

“The gang life, there's no future in it, and Jax was always about the future. His future.”

I told Abril that I'd seen all of her brother's academic awards. She told me that Jax had been accepted at every college he applied to, all nine of them. The University of Minnesota had always been keen on keeping the state's best students at home and offered him a half-ride academic scholarship. So did Wisconsin and Notre Dame. Northwestern, Boston University, and the others offered only low-interest loan packages.

“Minnesota, Wisconsin—tuition is about twenty-five thousand dollars for residents, counting room and board,” Abril said. “All the others are sixty thousand or more. A year. After everything, Jax couldn't afford to go to college.”

“Why not apply for financial aid? The government has a program. I have a friend whose daughter is in college. I'm told there's a lot of scholarship money to be had if you know where to look.”

“What was Jax going to put on the applications? That he was a poor Hispanic with no father and a mother who's in the country illegally, who has never even paid taxes?”

“There are organizations he could talk to. Programs…”