Red Man Down(21)

Oscar said he was afraid his presence might cause Angela to stamp off in anger, claiming she had been duped into an encounter that was distasteful to her. Sarah offered to do the interview alone if he thought it was safer, but he said he did not dare to risk lying to Delaney.

‘He can see through my head into my brain, I think,’ he said.

‘Oh, come on. Delaney’s shrewd but he doesn’t have magical powers. How about this – we can both be there, but I’ll do most of the talking. I’ll just tell her we’re partners and I brought you along to run the recorder and fetch the drinks, OK?’

Cifuentes had to do some deep breathing to agree to that; he had a profound need to be the Alpha Dog. But in the end he decided it was the safest way. They went over the checklist, making sure they had the right food waiting for her, plenty of condiments and extra straws for the big icy drink. They checked their questions again, and Oscar trotted back and forth fetching more salt and pepper and extra napkins. He brought salads and water for himself and Sarah, also, and insisted on paying for everything – keeping busy, being in charge of the food, eased his anxieties.

At 12:08 p.m. he nudged Sarah’s elbow and nodded toward the woman coming through the door. Sarah’s first thought was, She must get a price break on the clothes at the store. She wore a garishly printed smock made of some limp synthetic over too-long black pants of the same fabric. Her hair was mousey but neat, held in a ponytail by a purple scrunchy. She probably carried about the same amount of superfluous flesh as Cecelia Lopez, but arranged differently – the eye did not want to linger on Angela’s extras.

She looked surprised when she saw Oscar, but not angry – more like she was trying to remember his name. Sarah said Oscar was her partner today and was going to facilitate the interview by operating the recorder, ‘Because I hate taking notes. Do you mind?’

‘No, of course not,’ Angela said, with a little shrug that somehow ridiculed both the recorder and Sarah’s concern about it.

‘I wish I’d known you were going to be here, though,’ she said, directly to Oscar. He looked at Sarah in alarm, but Angela went on serenely, ‘You left your gloves on my couch the last time I saw you … Nice driving gloves – leather. I called you a couple of times to remind you to come get them. You never called back so in the end I think I threw them in a drawer and forgot about them. I probably still have them somewhere.’

‘How careless of me,’ Oscar said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t offer to come get them, though.

‘No problem.’ Her stoical expression put the whole thing in the rear-view mirror as she tore into the food.

‘Wrestling old clothes all day,’ she said, ‘is like baling hay. Sure gives you an appetite.’ She downed the salty mouthfuls of chicken and greens and sucked up a bucket-sized soft drink while bopping back very short answers to Sarah’s first questions. They started with the easy stuff – last name (it was still Lacey), address, home phone and email.

She was refreshingly direct about her marriage to Ed Lacey. It had lasted seven years and was good as long as Eddie was good, she said. But he started drinking after Frank Martin got arrested. When he drank he got unreliable, and when he added marijuana to the mix he became ‘just impossible.’

‘Impossible how? Did he beat you?’

‘Oh, good heavens no, Ed would never do that. No, I mean he became incompetent, he failed at his job. And at home he was – like an empty suit.’

‘You’re sure it was Martin’s arrest that started his drinking?’

‘Yes. It was part of his whole effort at denial. He could not accept the truth about his uncle; he was determined to make everybody see that Frank could not have been guilty of stealing the money. Like it was somebody else’s fault and his uncle shouldn’t be punished. “Look at all the nice things he’s done for people over the years,” he kept saying. “Where’s the gratitude now when he needs it?”

‘But after all, what else could they do? Depositors kept insisting their money was missing, and it happened on Frank’s watch. His signature was on the deposit slips that they claimed were short. People were demanding answers and the credit union   had to fix blame.’

‘You were right there through the whole thing, weren’t you? Did the two of you try to figure it out together?’

‘Ed was pretty much past the point where he could figure anything out by then. I told him, “Honey, it’s sad and all, but you’re not going to make it better hitting the bottle the way you’re doing.” But then when Frank killed himself, Ed just couldn’t stand it. “It’s not right,” he kept saying. “I should have been able to do something.”’