“So what you want to know from this piece of garbage, missus?”
“The soap dish Julia gave you for Christmas last year, Freddy.”
“I don’t know what you talking about.” He was looking at the ground, which made it hard to understand his whining.
“Don’t lie, Freddy. I sent the dish to a forensics lab. You know what DNA is, don’t you? They can find DNA even on a soap dish that’s been through a fire. Isn’t that wonderful?”
He balked some more, but after more prodding and a few threats, both from me and the men, admitted that he’d given it to Diego, who’d given it to Sancia Valdéz. “What Julia think I want with a girly present like that?”
“And Sancia was mad when she learned that Diego hadn’t bought it for her. Secondhand goods, Sancia called it, and she didn’t want it, so she gave it back to Julia. Isn’t that right, Diego?”
Diego backed away from me in alarm, but another of the men caught his arm and dragged him back to the group, with a guttural command.
“So, Freddy,” I picked up my narrative in a bright, schoolteacher voice, “recently you changed your mind. And you went to the Dorrado place and took it back from Julia. Why did you do that?”
There wasn’t much light on the street, just what little was spilling out of the bar, and the one streetlamp across the road in front of the church, but I think Freddy was giving me a calculating look, as if to decide how big a story he could get me to swallow.
“I was sorry I treated her mean, man, she tried to do something nice for me, I shouldn’t have been so mean to her.”
“Yeah, Freddy, I believe in the Easter bunny and all those other warm cuddly stories, too. If you wanted it so bad, how did it end up at Fly the Flag?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone stole it from me.”
“Yes, a three-dollar soap dish, that’s worth breaking and entering for, isn’t it? Here’s the problem.” I turned to the men from the bar, who were listening to me as closely as if I were telling their fortunes. “That soap dish was used to start the fire at Fly the Flag. Frank Zamar died in that fire, so the person who set it is guilty of murder. And it looks like that person was Freddy, here, maybe with Bron Czernin’s help, maybe with Diego’s.”
Shocked comments in Spanish rippled through the group. Had this gamberro and his cousin killed Frank Zamar? Destroyed the plant?
“Why, Freddy? Why you do this?” Celine’s uncle slapped him.
“I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know what she talking about!”
“How that soap dish start the fire?” one of the men asked.
I pulled the crude drawing of the frog from my pocket again. They crowded around to study it in the dim light.
“I don’t know who made this drawing—maybe Bron Czernin, maybe Freddy. But here’s how it worked.”
Pointing at the drawing, I explained my theory, about the nitric acid and the wires, and there was another buzz of talk. I caught Andrés’s name, and Diego, and “carro,” which at first I heard as the Italian “caro,” darling: Diego was some-body’s darling? No, the pastor had done something to Diego’s darling, no, to his—not his wagon, his truck, that’s what it was.
The first time I visited Rose Dorrado, Diego was outside her apartment, playing his stereo at top volume, and Josie said if Pastor Andrés came around he’d totally fix Diego’s truck like he had before.
“What did the pastor do to Diego’s truck?” I asked.
“Not his truck, missus, his stereo.”
“Diego, he starts parking his truck right here, in front of Mount Ararat, during the services,” Celine’s uncle explained. “He crank his stereo up real loud. No one even knows why, was he playing to Sancia, trying to get her to come join him, or bugging his ma, she’s real religious, her and Freddy’s ma, they’re sisters, they both pray at Mount Ararat, but Pastor, he warn Diego two, three times, you turn that off during the sermon, and Diego, he just as much a chavo as Freddy, here, he jus’ laugh. So Pastor, he fix up a metal dish with a rubber plug, put in some nitric, put it on the stereo, acid go through the plug, go through the wires, shut Diego down ’bout halfway through the worship.”
In the poor light, I couldn’t make out anyone’s expressions, but I could tell the men were laughing.
Freddy was furious. “Yeah, everybody think, whatever the pastor do, thas cool, he cost Diego here three hundred dollars to fix his amp, his speakers, and you guys think it’s all a joke because the pastor did it, but the pastor, he put glue in the locks at Fly the Flag, I saw him.”