A Town Called Malice by Adam Abramowitz

Author:Adam Abramowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

TWENTY-TWO

The food is on the table when I return, Klaussen and Solarte already digging in.

“Did I miss grace?” I say.

“By a mile.” Solarte winks at me as I slide into a chair beside her. I could have sat next to Klaussen but his guitar case occupies the seat beside him and anyhow, Solarte’s much smaller, giving me plenty of elbow room. I can tell she’s not happy with the seating arrangement, her back to the door, which would force her to crane her neck every time someone came into the restaurant. Only nobody comes into the restaurant. Maybe it’s the off hour. Possibly it’s Nestor and his violent pompadour.

“So what’s the word?” I say.

“What do you know about Mexican culture, Zesty?”

“Really? First it’s MLK and now this? Okay, it’ll be short: I know Cinco de Mayo, Quinceañera, that the Aztecs used to put gold flakes into their coffee because they believed it ensured sexual potency.” Something I’d be willing to try but can’t afford. “And Día de los Muertos is a holiday that honors the dead and loved ones pray to speed the dead’s journey into the afterlife. How’d I do?”

“Sadly, better than most. But you’re spot on about Día, which is really why we’re here. Día starts on October thirty-first, which leaves us less than a month.”

“To do what?”

Solarte reaches into her jacket and lays down three photographs, two black-and-white, one color, of a pretty woman, maybe late teens, early twenties; it’s hard to tell with the heavy black and purplish makeup on her face, the eyelashes painted long, maybe fake, possibly not. Cherry lips in the color photograph. Dark eyes with charcoal stripes underlining them in that one, like what a ball player wears to fight the glare or just look tough. It doesn’t make Camilla Islas look tough, though, just sexy. If you could ignore her junkie thinness and the faraway look in her eyes.

“Cool jacket.” I point out the leather coat that could have been stolen from Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. Spikes on the shoulder to dissuade pigeons from roosting. Red stripes on the sleeves.

I look long and hard at the photographs and then up to see Klaussen’s eyes, deep and dark and brimming with tears that flow quietly down his angular cheekbones like water over stone, a level of pain in them that surprises me, probably similar to the fresh grief Rambir Roshan’s loved ones are experiencing right about now. Only this girl in the pictures has been dead for over thirty years. And Klaussen killed her and then disappeared her body with my father. What right does he have to cry?

The second photo is crowded with people, Klaussen and Islas together in a graffiti-covered equivalent of what was once the green room of a Boston club, both of them looking thoroughly wasted but happy, a snapshot of the high-octane Boston rock and roll scene of the time.

“That one,” he points out, “was backstage at the Channel, long gone now, right?” He uses the back of his hand to swipe the tears from his face.

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