“I go down there maybe once a month.”

“Business? Pleasure?”

“Usually some of each. I went to school at UCLA. I have friends there.”

“Did you know Gina or Marissa from LA?”

“No. I told you before: I met them both after they had moved here in—what?—’81, ’82,” Bordain said. “Why are you asking me this? I thought you wanted to show me something.”

“We’ll get to that,” Mendez said.

The closed file folder lay on the table between them. Bordain eyed it like it might open and a rattlesnake would pop out of it and strike him.

“You also told us you never dated Marissa,” Mendez said.

“That’s right. We were just friends. We hung out with the same people.”

“You didn’t find her attractive?”

“Of course I found her attractive. She was a beautiful woman.”

“A beautiful, single, free-spirited woman,” Mendez said. “It’s probably not a stretch to think she wasn’t all that hard to get in bed.”

“That’s insulting.”

“To you?”

“To Marissa. She wasn’t like that.”

“She was a single woman with a child.”

“That doesn’t mean she was easy.”

“And you were never tempted to find out?” Mendez asked.

“No.”

“Even though you admit it would have yanked your mother’s chain if the two of you had gone out.”

Bordain rolled his eyes and shifted positions on his chair for the tenth time. “Just because I can yank my mother’s chain doesn’t mean I always take the opportunity to do it.”

“And last night, when you went home after dinner, did anyone see you?”

“I don’t know. Ask my neighbors,” he said, clearly annoyed. “I thought we went over all of this. I did not run my mother off the road.”

“Hmmm ...”

Mendez pulled the file folder to him, opened it and looked at the document, sighed and closed it again, returning it to its resting place.

“You’re telling me you didn’t know Marissa before Haley was born,” he said.

“That’s right. I’m telling you that, but you don’t seem to be comprehending it.”

“It’s not that, Mr. Bordain. It’s just that I have some documentation here that contradicts what you’re saying in a pretty big way.”

Bordain looked at the file folder but didn’t touch it. Sweat was beginning to bead on his upper lip. He wiped it away, shook a cigarette out of the pack on the table, and lit it.

People always thought they looked cooler and more relaxed when they smoked. The thing they never accounted for before they lit up was that if their hands were trembling even a little bit, with the cigarette perched between their fingers it would then look like they had Parkinson’s disease.

Darren Bordain’s hands were shaking.