'You ever visit the restaurants on Newbury Street?'
'Newbury? You mean, like in Boston?'
'Yes.'
I seemed to put him off track. 'Once in a while. Couple of small accounts there. That where you are?'
'A few blocks away.'
Cuervo came back on track. 'So, what do you think of our operation?'
'Impressive.'
'Damned right. State-of-the-art equipment and sanitary standards. You saw the schochet down there?'
'The what?'
'The rabbi, like.'
'Oh, yes, I did.'
'You don't run a clean plant, you don't have to worry about the government inspectors. The rabbis, they'll close you down first. Only use the front quarter of the animal, but you got to have them.'
'Even so, it didn't look like you waste anything.'
'Right again, John. The heads we send to Mexico-they go for the brains and the cheek meat down there. The hearts, the Italians, they stuff them. Kidneys to the fancy French bistros. The rest of the dropped meat we send off to Europe. The hides to Japan for tanning, then to Italy for gloves and shoes.'
'You get a lot of heat from the animal protection people?'
'Pickets once in a while. They'd have us all living on bean sprouts and Velveeta, they had their way. But, hey, there wouldn't be any veal calves if it weren't for the dairy herds, right?'
'Right.'
'I mean, what's a dairy farmer supposed to do? He needs the bull to knock up the cows so they'll give milk. But when he gets a boy calf instead of a girl that can grow up to give more milk, he doesn't have too many choices. One, he can let the calf roam with the mother and suckle, which cuts down on her milk production. Two, the farmer can let the calf loose in the fields to feed on grass and become a beefer. Three, he can sell the calf to a Bob-packer who whacks the animal at all of one or two weeks of life and maybe eighty pounds of weight. Four is us. The dairy farmer, if he's smart, can auction the calf to a fancy veal grower like the ones who own this plant. The grower's going to raise that calf for sixteen weeks and come in here at four hundred pounds, giving us maybe two hundred sixty pounds of meat. Now, those are the choices, right?
You want milk, you're going to have male calves and you got to do something with them.' He picked up the cup again. 'And it seems to me that our way is the best way.'
I didn't say anything as he sipped.
Cuervo blinked a few times and then said, 'What outfit are you with, anyway?'
'I'm not in the veal business.'
He rotated the cup in his hands. 'I started to get that idea. What are you doing here?'
'I'm a private investigator from Boston.'
Cuervo frowned. 'What do you want from me?'
I had decided on the drive up that there was no way around telling him the truth. But maybe not all the truth. 'Your stepmother, Maisy Andrus. She's been getting threats.'
He laughed, shaking his head. 'What's the matter, she flunk the wrong student?'
'How's that?'
'She's a teacher, right? Who's going to get mad at her except the students?'
'I don't think it's like that, Mr. Cuervo.'
'Hey, call me Ray, okay?'
'Not Ramon?'
Cuervo took a big slug of coffee. 'Look, I know it's not too cool to turn your back on your heritage and all, but it would be kind of tough to go through life over here as Ramon Cuervo Gallego, you know?'
'Your last name isn't Cuervo either?'
'In Spain they do names differently. My middle name comes from my father's family, the very last name, Gallego, from my mother's. So, my father was Enrique Cuervo Duran and my mother was Noeli Gallego de la Cruz, and I'm Ramon Cuervo Gallego. Understand?'
'I think so.'
'Besides, I'm not exactly Spanish.'
'Now I don't follow you.'
'My father, the late great el Senor Doctor, had this thing about American stuff, okay? Everything from America was better: cinema, appliances, sporting arms, cars. When we went hunting, it was Remingtons all the way, and we were the only family in Candas, maybe in all of Asturias, that had a Cadillac. Yeah, he had a hell of a time getting that boat through the streets.'
Cuervo made a hitchhiking gesture behind him at the photo of the house. 'Even had to widen the driveway, keep from scratching the paint off. If we ever got snow – which thank Christ we never did, it's more like London weather there – he'd have wrecked it first time out, the way he drove. And when it broke? Good luck getting it fixed. But that didn't matter, right? My father wanted the best of everything, and the best was American, so I got sent off to school over here, and after my mother died he married the showiest American woman he could find.'
'How old were you when your father married Maisy Andrus?'
'I don't know. I didn't even go to the wedding. What the hell does it matter?'
'Why didn't you attend the wedding?'
A smirk. 'I think I had a track meet that weekend. Yeah, yeah, that was it. The team couldn't spare me.'
'You get along all right with Andrus?'
'Get along? I barely ever saw her. You got to remember, I was in school over here. And Maisy went to live in Spain with my father only part of the year. I sure as hell wasn't interested in seeing Maisy over here, and I'll bet Maisy spent more time in old Esparia during those years than I did.'
'You have a falling out with your father over Maisy?'
'Falling… you got a hell of a nerve, interrogating me like this.'
I just waited.
'What right do you have, coming into my place of business and asking me all these questions?'
I hadn't checked in with the Sarrey police. 'Only trying to do my job.'
'Which is?'
'To eliminate as many people as possible from the list, and then focus on the ones who could be threatening her.'
Cuervo started rotating the cup again. 'Look, I don't have any bone to pick with Maisy anymore.'
'Anymore?'
'My father… when he died, she got some things, I got some things.'
I inclined my head toward the house photo. 'She got the homestead.'
'Yeah, which if she was able to use it would be a nice place. It sits on this bluff, kind of overlooking the bullring in Candas, near Gijon. When I was a kid, the family'd sit on the lawn, swilling sidra – new cider, sweet, a little alcoholic – and we'd watch the corridas – the bullfights. The bullring is built right along the beach, so when the tide goes out, they can have the corridas right there. Of course, sometimes the bulls, they notice the hole in the wall and they swim for it, but… look, what I'm trying to say here is, by the time it came to dividing things up between her and me, I did fine. I got everything I needed to come back here, go to college, buy a place on the water in Marblehead. My father was right about one thing. American is the best, and I got all I needed from him to have it.'
'How did you feel about your father dying the way he did?'
'My father got sick. He was a doctor. I never thought much about him getting sick. When I was young, still living in Spain before he sent me… before I came over here for school, I thought he was like Superman, you know?'
'Invulnerable?'
'Right, right. Like God didn't let the doctors catch any diseases. That they always had to stay healthy to keep other people alive.'
