They questioned him for the next hour, harangued him about the timeline—Fabian was still saying he was home all night, after returning at eight from his brother-in-law’s ranch—before eventually returning to his knowledge, or lack thereof, about the affair. They told him a neighbor had witnessed him shouting at Andres.
“Fuck yes, I shouted at him!” Fabian swiveled his head from Zamora to Cortez, fists clenched. “Wouldn’t you?”
Cortez said darkly, “Al chile que sí. I’d do a hell of a lot more than that.”
Zamora said, “This güey would get his badge taken, for sure. ?Y sabes qué?” He shifted, lowered his voice. “I wouldn’t blame him.”
“I told him to get the hell off my property,” Fabian said through gritted teeth. “He did. That’s the last time I saw him. Can I go?”
Zamora sighed, closing his notepad. “Fabian. We dusted all over that room for prints. Everywhere you can think of and probably a few places you can’t. So if you were there, se va a ver muy mal if you don’t tell us about it now. If you went to talk, things got out of hand, maybe he came at you—this is when we can help you. Fabian,” he said again, lower. “We want to help you. You didn’t deserve this—what she did.”
I watched Fabian closely. His back was rigid, his chest pulsing with shallow breaths. It wouldn’t take much more to make him explode.
“I had nothing to do with that man’s death.” Fabian spoke evenly, but the effort it took—all the muscles in his face strained—was exhausting to watch. “Neither did Lore. She was with the cuates all evening, and then we were all home together the rest of the night.”
I grabbed the remote, rewound the tape.
“What?” Duke turned to me, startled. He’d been watching as intently as I had, I realized.
“I don’t know. Probably nothing.” I pressed play.
Fabian: “I had nothing to do with that man’s death. Neither did Lore. She was with the cuates all evening, and then we were all home together the rest of the night.”
I hit pause.
Duke looked at me quizzically. “Yeah?”
“Just the way Fabian volunteered, ‘She was with the cuates all evening’ before saying they were home together the rest of the night.” I stared at Fabian on the screen. His fingers curled around the edges of the metal table, shoulders curved forward, as if about to launch himself to his feet. “Everyone says she alibied him, but doesn’t it kind of sound like . . . he’s alibiing her?”
Duke frowned. “It could go either way. Why?”
I set the popcorn bowl aside, wiped my hands, and grabbed my laptop from the coffee table. “Well, I made a timeline of that last day,” I said, opening the document. “See? If I’m right, there’s this weird gap in Lore’s alibi that doesn’t show up on the police report. When it counts, her alibi is solid: Wendy’s with the twins for Frosties, then a movie, then a call with her sister.”
“Okay . . .”
“Andres left a note for her at the bank that afternoon,” I continued, “which was never found. She claimed it said ‘I’m sorry I missed you.’ He’d just found out she was married to someone else, so maybe he wanted to leave her on edge with this cryptic-ass message. But it doesn’t feel right to me. If you were him, wouldn’t you be desperate to talk to her? Hoping it’s all a mistake? And if you didn’t know where to find her, wouldn’t you make damn sure she could find you?”
Duke rubbed the joint burn on the arm of the love seat, left over from a party years ago. “I guess so. I mean, unless he decided to bounce after that, go back home.”
“But he didn’t. He still had a room at the Hotel Botanica. I’m guessing maybe he went back there and looked up the Riveras’ address in the phone book—you know how hotels always used to have phone books—then went to their house to confront her.”
“Okay, so maybe that was his plan.” Duke shrugged, as if this solved everything. “To find her. So that’s why he didn’t leave his contact information.”
“But the thing is, how did Fabian know what room he was in?” The more I talked about it, the stranger it seemed. Pieces that almost fit together, but not quite. I stood up, started to pace. “The neighbor overheard Andres tell Fabian which hotel he was at, not what room. The hotel clerk said Fabian never came to the front desk to ask. No one else at the hotel claimed Fabian knocked on their doors looking for someone. So how did he know?”
Duke looked stumped. “Well, what does Lore say about it?”
“Nothing! She shuts me down hard every time I ask. So, let’s try this—what if Andres told Lore in that note where he was staying, and she went directly to see him after she left the bank? And then later, intentionally, or not, she told Fabian how to find him?”
It was the first time I’d said the words out loud. It felt like opening a treasure chest, the creak before a possible glimmer of gold. My heart thrummed. Duke was looking past me at TV-Fabian, as if he might turn to us and explain everything.
“Even if that happened,” Duke said, slowly, “this Fabian guy confessed, right?”
“Yes, but the confession was a condition of his plea deal. And minus his print, the evidence is more circumstantial than anything.”
“What are you saying, Cass?” Duke yanked a paper towel from the roll I’d brought to the coffee table, wiping his hands almost aggressively. “That he didn’t do it?”
I thought of all the crime books and shows and podcasts that had exposed wrongful convictions over the years, and something animal stirred in me, a sniffing nose and wide-open jaw, a hunger. But then I saw the crime scene photos in my mind: the sheets and coverlet rumpled on only one side of the bed. Two mini bottles of Scotch, only one glass. Fabian’s print the one left behind. Fabian seen at the hotel after ten, precisely within the window for Andres’s time of death. No trace of any other suspect, including Lore, in the room.
I bit the inside of my cheek, dropping down beside Duke. “I don’t know. I just feel like there’s more to what happened than police records and court documents show.”
Duke shifted away, almost imperceptibly, but I noticed. “Okay, but if it doesn’t change the outcome, and Lore doesn’t want to talk about it, why is it any of your business?”
Because it’s a kind of honoring, I wanted to say, uncovering step by step exactly how someone’s life ended. Duke might see it as an unnecessary exhumation, an exploitation of what should be private, entombed. I saw revealing the truth about someone’s death as a way of saying their life mattered.
“This isn’t the blog, you know?” Duke gestured pointedly at the TV, as if to remind me that Fabian, that all of them, were human beings, unlike, I suppose, all those other human beings whose tragic ends I served up as entertainment. “You’re writing a book about this woman’s double life with her permission—and that’s fine. Good for you. But to start shaking things up about the murder when everything points to him and he confessed? It seems like it’d bring a lot of pain to a lot of people, and for what?” He paused, catching me in his steady gaze. “For what, Cass?”
I clutched the VCR remote. There was no mistaking his meaning. He thought I was willing to hurt two families for the sake of my career, a career he’d never understood and had probably secretly hoped would never go beyond writing for some blog. Good for you.
“I have a duty to find out the truth,” I said.
And if duty felt quite a bit like excitement, there was nothing I could do about that.
Lore, 1983
Lore meets her potential customer, David de la Garza, at Hostería de Santo Domingo, a sun-scorched pink building in the Centro Histórico. The cheerful, modest bottom floor is bustling, with paper flags waving from the ceiling, while the second floor salón is all polished wood floors and stained-glass ceilings. This is one of the oldest restaurants in Mexico City, Mr. de la Garza tells her, somewhat unnecessarily, since the year it opened—1860—features prominently on the paper menus.