Beyond Suspicion

just doesn’t add up for me.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Simple. If the viatical investors were the killers, they wouldn’t have made her death look anything like suicide.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I’m the PR of her estate. I’ve seen her life insurance policy. She bought it twenty-two months ago. It’s void if she took her own life less than two years after the effective date. It’s a standard suicide exclusion.”

His response came slowly, as if weighted by the implications. “So, if her death is ruled a suicide, the investors lose their three-million-dollar death benefit.”

“Bingo. I don’t care how bad you say those guys are, they can’t be idiots. If they were behind it, Jessie would have been found dead in her car at the bottom of some canal. Her death would have looked like an accident, not suicide.”

Jack stared into his empty coffee cup. It suddenly seemed like a gaping black hole, one big enough to swallow him and his whole theory about the investors as killers.

“You okay?” asked Clara.

“Sure. That suicide exclusion is news to me, that’s all. I guess that’s why the cops are looking at me and not the investors.”

“You got that right.”

Jack sipped his coffee, then caught Clara’s eye. “You seem to know more than you say.”

“Could be.”

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Don’t piss me off. Because if I wanted to hurt you, believe me: I could really hurt you.”

Her tone wasn’t threatening, but he still felt threatened. She rose, no subtle signal that it was time for him to leave. Jack placed his coffee mug on the counter and said, “Thanks for the caffeine.”

“You’re welcome.”

She walked him to the foyer and opened the front door. He started out, then stopped and said, “I didn’t kill Jessie.”

“You said that already.”

“I didn’t have her killed, either.”

“Now there’s something I hadn’t heard yet.”

“Now you have.”

“Yes. Now I have. Finally.”

They said good night, and Jack headed down the steps, the door closing behind him.

21

•

By nine o’clock Jack was on a second plate of ropa vieja, a shredded-beef dish with a name that translates to “old clothes.” According to his grandmother, the name only described the meat’s tattered appearance and had nothing to do with the actual ingredients. Then again, she’d fed him tasajo without disclosing that it was horse meat, and she would argue until her dying breath that Cubans do so eat green vegetables, as fried plantains were the tropical equivalent thereof.

Jack had a lot to learn about Cuban cuisine.

The stop at Abuela’s was yet another diversion. He’d tried to call Cindy but had gotten nowhere, which was perhaps just as well. Perhaps he needed to take a little time to refine an explanation that, as yet, sounded only slightly better than “Good news, honey, it’s been at least a decade since my last sex tape.”

“Mas, mi nino?” Predictably, Abuela was asking if he wanted more to eat.

“No, gracias.”

She stroked his head and ladled on more rice. He didn’t protest. Jack could only imagine what it must have been like to enjoy cooking, more than anything else in the world, and yet have practically nothing in the cupboard for thirty-eight years. Abuela had a great kitchen now. The townhouse Jack had rented for her was practically new, and she shared it with a lady friend from church. She’d lived with him and Cindy for a short time. They’d sit around the dinner table every night, Jack speaking bad Spanish and Abuela answering in broken English, each of them trying to learn the other’s language in record time so that they could communicate freely. But having a place of her own made it easier to get out and enjoy herself.

Hard to believe, but almost three years had passed since Jack’s father called to tell him that Abuela was flying into Miami International Airport. Jack had nearly dropped the phone. Never had he expected her to come to Miami at her age, even on a humanitarian visa to visit her dying brother. He’d tried many times to visit her in Cuba, and while many Americans did visit relatives there, Jack was never approved for travel. His father’s staunch anti-Castro speeches as a state legislator and later as governor had surely played a role in the Cuban government’s obstinacy. She’d come over on a temporary visa, but she was on her way to U.S. citizenship and would never go back. Their initial face-to-face meeting evoked a whole range of emotions. For the first time in his life, Jack had a profound sense that his mother had actually existed. She was no longer just an image in a photo album or a string of anecdotes as told by his father. Ana Maria had lived. She’d had a mother who’d loved her and who now loved Jack, gave him big hugs, fed him till he could have exploded-and then served dessert.

“I made flan,” she said with a grin.

“Ah, your other invention.”

“I only perfected flan. I didn’t invent it.”

They laughed, and he enjoyed her warm gaze. All his life he’d been told that he resembled his father, a well- intended compliment from people who had never met his mother. Abuela saw him differently, as if she were catching a precious glimpse of someone else each time she looked into his eyes. Those were the rare moments in his life when he actually felt Cuban.

She served an enormous portion of the custardlike dessert, spooning on extra caramel sauce. Then she took a seat across from him at the table.

“I was on the radio again today,” she said.

Jack let the flan melt in his mouth, then said, “I thought we agreed, no more radio. No more stories about inventing tres leches.”

She switched completely to Spanish, the only way to recount with proper feeling the entire fabricated story. With a totally straight face, she told him yet again how she’d invented tres leches a few years before the Cuban revolution and shared the recipe with no one but her exbest friend, Maritza, who defected to Miami in the mid-sixties and sold out to a Hialeah restaurant for a mere twenty-five dollars and a month’s supply of pork chunks.

Abuela was the only bilingual person on the planet who was patient enough to endure his stilted Spanish, so he answered in kind. “Abuela, I love you. But you do realize that people are laughing when you tell that story on the radio, don’t you?”

“I didn’t tell that story today. I talked about you.”

“On Spanish radio?”

“The news people all say terrible things. Someone has to tell the truth.”

“You shouldn’t do this.”

“It’s okay. They like having me on their show now. What does it matter if they tease the crazy old lady who says she invented tres leches? So long as I get to slip in a few words about my grandson.”