Liar

“Briana Maguire called in a burglary in progress?”

“No, but her neighbors did. You didn’t run a history on this address? Mac, Mac, Mac. You’re slipping.”

“Pla

“Well, we have to get going.”

He extended a manila envelope. “Your present.”

“What is it?” she asked, taking it.

“Copies of her bills. Maybe they’ll help you find the kid.”

“All this time, you been down at the PD, ru

He nodded.

She gave him a brilliant smile. “Thanks, Mac. I owe you.”

“No, no, you don’t.”

“Tell you what-wait just a second.” She turned to me. “Come on, get in.” I obeyed. She got in on her side and rolled the window down. “You can have your parking spot back. Talk to those other tenants-it will make you look good.”

If he was disappointed that she was leaving, he hid it well. “Thanks, Rach.”

She pulled out, let him park, then backed up to block him as he had blocked us, only McCain couldn’t even open his door. When he lowered the driver’s side window, she said, “You know what, Jimmy Mac? Those old gals just might make you let up on Irene.”

She put the car in gear, laughing as she pulled away. I picked up the envelope and started looking through it, hearing her hum a catchy oldies tune. She had stopped the car again by the time I realized the song was “Jimmy Mac.”

It hadn’t taken long to find the small tienda, which was about two blocks from Briana’s apartment. We parked on the street, at the corner beneath a shady tree. As I stepped out of the car, I noticed a little white cross was planted in the crook of the tree roots, a small, dusty cluster of artificial roses entwined at its base. I looked away from it and strode resolutely toward the store.

The store owner, Mr. Reyes, smiled and welcomed us in English, but when he learned that we spoke Spanish, he was happier to converse in it. My Spanish is passable, but Rachel speaks it fluently, so I let her do the talking. She explained my relationship to Briana, and at his questioning look, added that Briana was the lady who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Wasn’t the accident at this corner?

His face changed entirely, and once again I received condolences I had not earned. Yes, he told us, this was the corner where the lady was killed. He was obviously upset about it.

His wife, who also worked at the market, was visiting their daughter today-she would feel sorry to have missed us. They were both in the store on the day of the accident. They had not seen the accident itself; they had heard the sounds of the impact and of the car speeding away. When his wife looked outside and saw what had happened-he shook his head sadly. After a moment, he went on, saying that he was the one who had called 911. The ambulance came, but everyone knew it was too late. He glanced at me and quickly said that they were told the lady had not suffered.

Although the police had questioned them, they had not been told of any outcome of the police investigation. They had been worried that the woman was still unidentified.

“Su tia?” he asked me again.

“Si, mi tia,” I answered. “La hermana de mi madre.” Yes, she was my aunt, my mother’s sister.

Again he expressed condolences, and then asked me if I would please say my aunt’s name again. He repeated it softly to himself several times, as if memorizing it, changing it slightly but making it sound no less beautiful with Spanish pronunciation. He patted his pockets and found a pen, wrote Briana Maguire on the back of a receipt, then paused and looked up at me as if to verify the spelling.

“Bueno,” I said.

He talked to us again of his concern over the accident, and was obviously relieved that someone had claimed the body; he was Catholic, and knew my aunt was Catholic-they were concerned that my aunt had not received a Catholic burial.

How did he know she was Catholic? Rachel asked. Did she belong to his parish?

He wasn’t sure if she was of his parish; he attended the Spanish-language Mass at nine o’clock and he didn’t think the lady spoke Spanish. But he knew she was Catholic because she carried the key chain with the St. Christopher medallion on it, and because she had ashes on her forehead when she had shopped on Ash Wednesday.

The lady had been coming to his store only for a few months, but he liked her. She was shy, he said, and he never asked her name. Now he regretted this, too, but at the time he had not wanted to be presumptuous. Once, he said, she told him that she was sorry she had never learned Spanish, and told him that her son spoke it very well. “I think she missed her son,” he said. “She only mentioned him once, but when she did…” He gestured to his face. “She looked sad.”

A man came to the register, and Mr. Reyes introduced us to his customer, and again a round of condolences was offered. Did we need any help? Was there something they could do? Did I know, the customer asked me, that the store owner’s wife had made an altarcito-a marker, a little shrine with a small cross-and put some flowers out on the corner where the accident happened? That she had even arranged for a Mass to be said for my aunt? That she had asked everyone if they knew anything about the lady?

After expressing my gratitude, I listened as Mr. Reyes and the customer told us more about Mrs. Reyes’s activities following my aunt’s death. Soon I saw that I was indebted to this woman I had not yet met-and saw how it was that the LAPD eventually discovered where Briana lived.

Mrs. Reyes had described the lady who had been killed to anyone who would listen, and some of her customers, who lived in this neighborhood, remembered seeing the lady with the cane. One customer had often seen her walk from this street to that, another had once seen her walking back from the store in a certain direction. Mrs. Reyes passed her information along to the police, who thanked her, but had not told her the results of her efforts.

Rachel asked a few more questions, confirming that none of them had ever seen Briana come to the store with anyone else; no one they knew had seen the car that struck her, although they were told there were witnesses who had talked to the police. No, Mr. Reyes told us, she was not carrying a handbag-she always arrived with nothing more than a small coin purse, which she kept in the pocket of her sweater or coat. It was perhaps, he ventured, a little cool for her, living near the water, because she always wore a sweater or coat. On that day, a warm spring day, he recalled, she had worn her blue sweater.

We thanked him and the customer for their time, and I asked him to please convey to his wife that my family deeply appreciated her help, that it was very kind of her to remember my aunt with the shrine and the Mass. If ever I could do anything for them-

“De nada,” Mr. Reyes protested. “It’s nothing.”

We stopped off at Aunt Mary’s house on our way back home. As might be expected, Rachel and Aunt Mary hit it off instantly. While I worked at hanging Briana’s clothes in the closet of one of Mary’s guest rooms, Rachel told Mary about our day’s discoveries.

“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Mary said to me.

“Not as well as Rachel, but I studied it even before the Express started requiring all of its reporters to learn Spanish.”

“Hmm. Paper should have done that years ago. You said you went back to the apartment after you talked to Mr. Reyes. Did the neighbors recognize Travis from any of Briana’s photos?”

I still wondered if James McCain had more to do with Rachel’s decision to make the return trip than Travis did, but McCain had left by the time we got there. To Mary, I said, “Not really. They said Travis might have been the younger of the two men who helped her move in, but they weren’t certain-Briana and that young man hadn’t behaved toward one another as a mother and son would, they said-hardly spoke to one another, and the young man had not been back since.”