does that make?” she prompted.
He looked at her then. The silent, soul-deep pain in his dark eyes cut through the cloudy plastic between them and seared into Joanna’s own heart. Slowly both his eyes filled with tears. “So beautiful,” he murmured. “And me? Compared to her, I was nothing but an old man. But sometimes ...”
He stopped yet again. Despite the plastic barrier between them, an unlikely intimacy had sprouted between Joanna Brady and Jorge Grijalva as they sat facing each other in the harsh glare of fluorescent light in those two equally grim rooms.
“Sometimes what?” Joanna whispered urgently.
Jorge Grijalva’s head stayed bowed. “Sometimes she would go with me. If I brought her something extra along with the child support. Sometimes she would...” His voice faded away.
“Would what?” Joanna asked. “Go to bed with you? Is that what you mean?”
Jorge nodded but didn’t speak. His silence now gave Joanna some inkling of the depth of Jorge Grijalva’s shame, and also of his pride. Serena Duffy Grijalva had been a whore, all right. Even with him. Even with her husband.
“So you came to see her,” Joanna said, after a long pause. “Did you bring both the child support and . . . the extra?”
He nodded again.
“But after she found out about the truck—about your new truck—then she refused to go with you and you killed her. Is that what happened?”
“That’s what the
“What witch?” Joanna asked.
“The black-haired one. The detective.”
“The detective from Peoria? Carol Strong?”
“Yes. That’s the one, but it didn’t happen the way she thinks. I didn’t kill Serena. She left the bar first. After a while, so did I.”
Joanna leaned back in her chair and regarded Jorge speculatively. “Your mother is right then, isn’t she, Jorge? You’re going to plead guilty to a crime you didn’t commit”
With effort, Jorge Grijalva pulled himself together. He sat up straighter in his chair. His gaze met and held Joanna’s. “I told you my wife was a whore,” he said quietly, “but I will not go to court to prove it. Serena’s dead. Ceci and Pablo don’t need worse than that.”
“But you’re their father. If you go to prison for murdering the children’s mother, isn’t that worse?”
“Pablo is mine,” he said softly. “But I’m not Ceci’s father. She doesn’t know that. Serena was already pregnant when I met her.”
That soft-spoken, self-effacing revelation came like a bolt out of the blue and stunned Joanna into her own momentary silence. “Still,” she said finally, “you’re the only father she’s ever known. Think what it will be like for her with you in prison.”
“Think what it would be like for her with me dead,” Jorge countered. He shrugged his shoulders. “Manslaughter isn’t murder. You’re an Anglo. Why would you understand?”
