“Any idea where they’d go, Billy and Josie?”
Julia shook her head. “All I know is, he wouldn’t take her to his house, you know, the rich place he lives with his ma and his daddy, ’cause, you know, they don’t want him dating no Mexican girl.”
I talked to her for a few more minutes, but she’d clearly told me all she knew. I squeezed her hand again, firmly, the dismissal squeeze. “I’ll see you Thursday at three o’clock, Julia. Got that?”
She whispered something that might have been assent. When I got up to leave, I saw a shadow move across the baby clothes lining the middle of the room: Rose had been listening in. Maybe just as well. Maybe it was the only way she’d learn a few things about her own daughters.
26
Annie, Get Your Gun
I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Supposing Billy and Josie are holed up down here, we might find them by finding his little sports car, assuming it’s on the street.” I did some arithmetic in my head. “There are probably only forty or forty-five miles of streets to drive up and down; we could do that in four hours, less if we skipped the alleys.”
Mr. Contreras and I were in the Mustang, where we’d fled from Rose’s overheated emotions. Almost before I’d left the room, she’d begun upbraiding Julia for not telling her own mother what she’d reported to me: “Did I raise you to be a liar?” she’d shouted, before whirling around to demand that I lose no time in finding Josie.
“Where do you suggest I look, Rose?” I’d asked tiredly. “It’s midnight. You say she isn’t at April’s. What other friends would she go to?”
“I don’t know, I can’t think. Sancia, maybe? Only Sancia, she was really Julia’s friend, although she and Josie—”
“I’ll check on Sancia,” I interrupted, “and on the other girls on the team. What about any relatives? Is she in touch with her father?”
“Her father? That gamberro? He hasn’t seen her since she was two. I don’t even know where he’s living right now.”
“But what’s his name? Children sometimes hide meetings with their fathers so that their mothers won’t know.”
When she’d protested that idea—Josie would never do something behind her back—I pointed out that Josie had disappeared behind her back. Rose reluctantly disgorged the man’s name, Benito Dorrado; the last time she’d seen him, eight months ago, he’d been in an Eldorado with some overpainted puta. In the bed behind me, I heard Julia gasp at the word.
“Any other relatives? Do you have any brothers or sisters here in Chicago?”
“My brother is in Joliet. I already called him, but he didn’t hear from her. My sister, she lives in Waco. You don’t think—”
“Rose, you’re distraught, you’re spinning both of us around in circles. Is Josie especially close to your sister? Do you think she would suggest to Billy that they drive a thousand miles to see her?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I just want my girl back.” She started to cry, the loud racking sobs of a person who doesn’t often permit herself to break down.
Mr. Contreras soothed her with much the same language he’d used on the baby. “You give us something that belongs to your girl, some T-shirt or something you haven’t washed. Mitch here will smell it, he’ll track her down, you’ll see.”
The little boys were sitting up on their air mattresses, staring at Rose with large, frightened eyes. It was one thing for their sister to disappear, quite another to see their mother falling apart. To calm everyone down, I said I’d see what I could find out tonight. I gave Rose my cell phone number and told her to call me if she heard anything.
Now my neighbor and I were sitting in my car, trying to figure out what to do next. Mitch was on the narrow backseat, with Josie’s unwashed basketball shirt between his paws. I’ve never thought of him as a star tracker, but you never know.
“You should start with the girls on the team,” Mr. Contreras suggested.
“An address book would help, a phone book, some damn thing.”
I didn’t want to go back up to the apartment to ask for a Chicago directory. Finally, even though it was so late, I called Morrell to see if he would look up the addresses for me. He was still up; in fact, he was watching the football game.