“All right,” he said, “who’s gonna start?”
“Where did you go to school?” Maureen asked, not daring to give him the first question.
“Truman High here in town. Then I studied criminal justice at Saint Anselm in New Hampshire.”
Maureen drank half of the tequila in her glass.
“What about you?” he asked. “What was your school?”
“School of hard knocks,” she said.
Manny gave her a sideways look.
“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It was called Saint Dymphna’s. And that’s all you’re gonna get out of me.”
He took the entire shot of tequila in front of him.
Trying to show off for me, huh? “I don’t even think I know how old you are,” Maureen said, taking a sip of her beer to chase down her second slice.
“Twenty-nine. Would it be rude to ask you the same?”
“I don’t care,” Maureen said. “I’m cradle robbing at the ripe old age of thirty-four.”
They clinked glasses and downed their shots again.
“How many times have you been arrested?” Manny asked.
“I thought it was my turn, but whatever. I’d say at least half a dozen times, but it might be a couple more.”
“What was the worst offense?”
“Uh-uh, you don’t get two in a row.” She waited for him as he took a heavy swallow of beer. “Who was your first kiss?”
“Leslie Wynn, eighth grade.”
They continued their back and forth with the bottle of tequila slowly draining down and the beers falling along with it. Craziest place she’d ever had sex (truck stop bathroom). First time he got drunk (third week of college, puked in the bushes of the house where the party was). Maureen avoided the questions about her family but answered the rest. And she learned more about him than she ever thought she would. Some was boring. He played on the junior varsity football team in high school but quit after his junior year when it became obvious he wasn’t going to be good enough for varsity. His mother was the first member of her family born in America, and his father was a naturalized citizen from Mexico. He’d only been out of the country once to visit his mother’s family in Puerto Rico. Some was actually a bit interesting. When he was a kid, he had a pet snake named Chavez who got out once and ate the family guinea pig. He tried out for the cheerleading team in college to meet girls and ended up being the mascot for the basketball team for two years. Eventually, Manny’s speech was starting to slur enough for Maureen to ask her first question over again.
“Why be a detective?” she asked.
Manny paused, blinking, as if trying to decide something. After a moment, he reached for his half full shot glass and slowly began to raise it to his lips. Maureen placed her palm over the top before he could drink it. His mouth brushed the back of her hand. Maureen felt her heart jump, but she kept her face neutral. With a tiny smile and raising of his eyebrows, Manny acknowledged that she wasn’t going to allow him to not answer the question. He sighed and put his glass down.
“It wasn’t easy growing up as a Hispanic kid in a lily-white town,” he said, leaning back and looking up at the ceiling. “I mean, I’m as American as they come—both my parents are legal citizens and Spanish is actually my second language—but all people see is this brown skin, and they listen to all that bullshit on TV about Latinos sneaking into the country and stealing jobs. I guess I let it affect me more than I thought. And it doesn’t help now, when all my coworkers were the king-jock seniors while I was still in grade school.
“Anyway, all I wanted to do was get out of here when I graduated. Saint Anselm had a full-ride scholarship available for a minority student who wanted to study criminology. I was third in my class, and my SATs were thirteen-seventy, so I went for it. I’d always liked detective stories, and I’m good at solving puzzles, so I thought I might be able to make a difference by solving crimes. And wouldn’t you know it, I got it. And I gotta tell you, I really liked it, and I was good at it. But no matter how many friends I made, it was a small private school, and the kids who went there had money—and lots of it. They didn’t let me forget that I was there on charity because of my ethnic background.
“During my senior year, the FBI put out a call for the country’s top criminology students for an early recruitment interview. My student adviser sent in an application on my behalf. I didn’t even know. But I said I would do the interview. I went down to DC, but on the day of the interview, I just couldn’t make myself go. I caught a bus out and rode all the way back up north. I never told anyone that I bailed, I just said I didn’t get accepted.
“I ended up at the New Hampshire Justice Department as an aide, and I was pretty good at that too. Learned more about the inner workings of the law and saw firsthand how the DAs used police evidence to build cases. My bosses recommended me for a couple promotions over the next five years, but I never could pull the trigger. I don’t know, afraid I guess.
“I decided to just come home. It seemed easier to settle into mediocrity down in Missouri than up in New England. I applied here at the police department. They didn’t even have a detective before I came, but Captain Wellner decided to bring me on board. That was a little over eighteen months ago.”
“Something tells me that you haven’t been solving murders this whole time,” Maureen said, leaning on her elbow and
