I didn’t need to stand too close to recognize the chavo whom I’d seen at Fly the Flag two weeks ago. The same thick dark hair, the slim hips, the army camouflage jacket. Freddy. He’d been talking to Pastor Andrés, then to Bron, and now to Grobian. They kept talking while they waited for the guard. I could hear enough to tell that they were speaking Spanish, Grobian as fast and fluently as Freddy. Just what were they discussing?

36

Shown the Door—Again

Any hopes I had of intercepting Freddy were thwarted by the security staff. By the time I slipped back to the sunlamps to retrieve my parka and my own hard hat and got out the front door, the guards had put Freddy into a Dodge pickup and sent him on his way. I was just in time to see his taillights disappear as I jogged outside. I’d had to waste a minute talking to the woman standing guard at the entrance.

“You the detective? Can I see your ID? We lost track of you there for a few minutes—I’m going to have to search you.”

“To see if I’m carrying out any soap dishes?” I said, but I let her pat me down and look inside my shoulder bag. Fortunately, I’d decided to abandon the By-Smart hard hat, although I’d been tempted to keep it—who knew when I might want to come back here.

I only got a glimpse of the Dodge’s license plate—the starting letters “VBC”—but I thought it was the same truck that had been outside the Dorrado apartment the first time I visited Josie’s family. Had it only been two weeks ago? It seemed more like two years, sometime in the remote past, anyway. The speakers in the flatbed whose bass had been rocking the neighborhood—Josie had hollered something at the guys in the truck, something important, it seemed to me now, but I couldn’t think of it.

I trudged slowly down the drive to 103rd Street, dodging the trucks and cars that jolted through the deep ruts. Back in my own car, I took off my parka and turned the heater on. With David Schrader playing the Goldberg Variations on my CD player, I leaned back in my seat and tried to think through everything I’d been hearing this afternoon. The document April swore her father had, proving Grobian had promised to come through with money for her medical care. The Bysens wanted to find Billy because he had absconded with a document. Was it the same one? What was it? Had the fight over it between Bron Czernin and Patrick Grobian led to his death?