I threw myself into working on the book. I had hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, and my proposal was nearly finished. Recently, I’d started writing some sample chapters—Lore arriving in Mexico City, meeting Andres, their midnight walk at Chapultepec. I’d begun this project wanting to understand Lore, to dissect her, to lay bare her choices. Now, in writing, I was inhabiting her. It unnerved me, how easy it was.
Over FaceTime a week after the Andrew call, as I’d come to think of it, Lore gave a small laugh. “They all thought we were crazy, getting married five days after the temblor, but it made sense in a way: the city was rebuilding; we were rebuilding. The ‘foundation of our union’—I loved that, something the minister said—the ‘foundation of our union’ would be our starting point.”
“And what was the foundation of your union?” I was crabby today. Not in the mood for her romanticizing. “What could it be, considering you were already married?”
Lore straightened up on her living room couch, adjusted the angle of the phone. “They were independent of each other. They were like neighboring houses.”
“Yes, but—” I clicked between articles, found what I was looking for. “Take the earthquake, for instance. Take Roma.”
“La Roma.”
“La Roma. Some of the old mansions were destroyed because of cracks in their foundation caused by the construction of those newer office complexes.” Lore made a murmur of possible acquiescence, and I built on her silence. “I don’t think they could have been as independent as you thought. You say you brought a wholeness into each relationship, but there were things you couldn’t give to them both. Andres never knew you as a mother, for example. You must have felt that. It must have been hard.”
“He saw me with Penelope and Carlitos.”
“That’s not the same.”
Lore was quiet, then said, “You know, when we stopped to help that toddler in the temblor, the mother thanked me—‘Mother to mother,’ she said. She could tell.”
“Are you suggesting that you think Andres could tell, on some level? And that was enough?”
“I think there are things we carry in our bodies and in our souls that don’t need to be explained to be known by others.”
“I think,” I said to her, to both of us, “that might just be a justification you told yourself.”
“Okay, what do you think I didn’t give to Fabian?” Lore asked, a challenge.
“Fidelity. Honesty. Time,” I said. “To start.”
“Yes, but I was more there, more present, in our time together than I had been before. That matters, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you think Fabian would agree? Do you think if he’d had the choice, this is the one he would have made?”
“Fabian,” Lore said, “made his own choices.”
“You mean killing Andres?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
I took a risk. “Oscar Martinez told me you said Andres was bothering you. What did you mean? Did you see Andres that day?”
“Oh, yes,” Lore said. “I was wondering when you’d tell me you talked to Oscar. That was very sneaky, Cassie.”
“Not sneaky,” I said. “My job. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen, Lore. If you refuse to talk about it, I need to get my information elsewhere.”
Lore looked away, toward her back doors, but not before I caught the flash of hurt in her eyes. “Is that all this is to you?” she asked quietly. “A job?”
I heard a different question: Is this all I am to you? I didn’t know how to answer.
Lore turned back to the screen. After a moment, her lips curved into a self-satisfied smirk that suggested she was about to strike where she thought my flesh was soft. “Tell me,” she said, “what’s really holding you back from marrying your fiancé?”
I glared, cheeks flushing hot. Duke wasn’t home, but she didn’t know that. “Money,” I hissed. “That’s it.”
Lore chuckled. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, mija.”
When it came to Andres’s last day, I was getting nowhere. Oscar now refused to take my calls. Fabian continued to decline my prison interview requests. Carlos Russo hadn’t responded to my Facebook messages or calls, and Lore’s brother-in-law, Sergio Mu?oz—who had been Fabian’s alibi until 8 P.M.—had never returned my call as promised. Finally, on a Thursday in mid-October, I tried him again and he answered.
Sergio was garrulous, the kind of man who could extend a simple anecdote to twenty minutes. Retired from banking, he was now a competitive skeet shooter. He was eager to talk about everything except Lore and Fabian—especially the ranch, 175 acres south of Encinal, which he and Lore’s sister, Marta, had bought in the 1970s, when they were just “little chavalitos.” They’d thought they’d be able to sell some or all of the acreage to pay for their kids’ college education, only “we were never blessed in that way.” It took forty minutes to build up to the day of the murder. Then Sergio’s voice became heavy, like wood swollen with water, warped.
“We usually went on weekends,” he said, when I asked if the ranch trip was planned. “Unless it was hunting season. I think he probably wanted to go by himself, but he didn’t have the key to the padlock at the gate.”
“Why go at all?” I asked. “You didn’t think the call was strange? Random?”
Sergio laughed. “Fabian and I were in school together since we were chiquitos. We used to sneak into other people’s ranches when we were teenagers. Could’ve gotten our brains blown out, two little idiots hiding in the monte, but that’s how much we loved being out there.” He chuckled again, melancholy now. “No. It wasn’t strange.”
“How did he sound over the phone?”
“Not good.”
Interesting. In his witness statement, taken several days before the arrest, Sergio had told the police Fabian sounded normal. I also hadn’t realized he and Fabian went so far back. Sergio must have wanted to protect his friend.
“Not good, how?”
“Just—stressed out. Like he needed to get out of the house.”
“What happened next?”
“It’s been a long time,” Sergio said. “But I had just gotten home from work. I basically changed, got my guns, and went to pick him up. He was standing in the middle of the empty driveway, looking almost like he didn’t know where he was. That always stuck in my memory.”
I pictured Fabian as he’d been in his police tapes—disheveled, frustrated, a man who didn’t know how to act in a place he’d never expected to be. The image of him dazed in the middle of the driveway was striking and sad. “Did he tell you about meeting Andres?”
“No.” Sergio sighed. “I wish he had. I wish I’d asked what was going on.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh, you know, all the usual pendejadas of the times. Reagan and NAFTA and the whole multibillion-dollar package of loans and credits the U.S. had pulled together, supposedly to bail out Mexico but really to save the U.S. banks from themselves. Credit unions were shutting down right and left. I lost my job a year later. Gracias a Dios, Lore was able to talk her boss into hiring me.”
“How did you feel about her at that point?”
“Fabian was in prison because of her,” Sergio snapped. “But I couldn’t turn down work, could I? And she was still family.”
Instinctively, I wanted to correct him: Fabian was in prison because of an action he’d taken—at least, allegedly. Detective Cortez may have wanted to lock Lore up for what she’d done, what she represented, but that wasn’t how the law worked.
“On the day of the ranch,” I said, “Fabian’s store had already closed, right?”
“Yeah, but Fabian—he was a hustler. Didn’t let his pride get in the way. There he was at Dr. Ike’s looking for construction work with all the mojados.”
Mojados. I knew what that meant: wetbacks. The slur surprised me, considering Sergio’s own ethnicity. I didn’t pause on it, though.
“So Fabian’s mood that day, it was nothing out of the ordinary for the times?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said we didn’t talk about it. No, it was out of the ordinary. But I figured it was related to the crash, like Lore was losing her job or something. I even thought maybe . . .”