Crunch Time

“I don’t think they had much contact, if any. He told me that Faye had an affair with some doctor in Wyoming, a while ago. The doctor wouldn’t leave his wife. But then the doctor’s wife died of cancer, the doctor moved to Denver, and the doctor and Faye got married. Aside from Ernest telling us he insisted on getting the house in the divorce, that’s all he ever, you know, shared.”

I knew the story of Ernest and Faye, the story of the house. But still Tom jotted a few words in his notebook.

“What?” asked Yolanda, her tone accusing. She eyed Tom’s notebook. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Should we not believe you?” Tom shot back.

“Tom!” I interjected. “You know what she’s saying is—” But again I was stopped dead by Tom’s look.

Yolanda muttered to herself in Spanish, something I didn’t catch. I’d only occasionally heard her speak Spanish. Back when Yolanda and I were working at Andre’s, she’d told me that she’d studied it in the Denver public schools, because she was tired of Ferdinanda talking to her fellow Cuban-Americans in a language she didn’t understand. Now, I supposed, it came in handy, when you wanted to curse at someone without them knowing what you were saying. One of the few French words I remembered was merde, and just about everyone knew what that meant.

“Yolanda?” Tom prompted her. “Are you telling us the truth?”

“Of course I am.” Yolanda looked at me for verification, and I risked Tom’s wrath by nodding. “But you know what, Tom?” Yolanda said, turning her gaze to the window over the kitchen sink. “You can believe what you want. Can we go get Ferdinanda now?”

“Just tell me what you know about Humberto Captain.”

Yolanda threw up her hands and narrowed her eyes, first at Tom, then at John. “You guys are always asking me about Humberto! Why?”

“Some months back? You catered a meal for him and his cronies, down in Lakewood,” Tom replied evenly. “And you couldn’t identify even one person who was there.”

Yolanda protested. “That wasn’t ‘some months back.’ It was over a year ago! And I was concentrating on the food, not the faces. Give me a break.”

“Did Humberto give you the cash under your mattress at Ernest’s house?” John Bertram took over the questioning so smoothly, I wondered if Tom had signaled him in some way. “Seventeen thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money for an out-of-work chef to have saved up and hidden.”

“Oh,” said Yolanda drily. “I see. You want to talk about my money again. Did you do my laundry, too? Did you feed the dogs and clean up their poops?”

“You want to go get Ferdinanda,” said Tom. “Tell us if Humberto gave you all that money under your mattress.”

Yolanda clenched her teeth. “Yes.”

“Why?” asked John.

“Why did he give me the money?” Yolanda asked. “Or why did I put it under the mattress?”

There was a long silence. Finally Tom said, “Both.”

Yolanda’s fingers tapped out a drumbeat on the table as she looked out the back windows. “Humberto is a friend. His father brought Ferdinanda and my grandparents over on the boat from Cuba. So Humberto gave us the money because he knew we were having problems. I didn’t have a job. We didn’t have a place to live. He came around when we were packing up what we could salvage from the rental—”

“After it mysteriously burned down,” Tom supplied.

“Yes, Tom. We didn’t have insurance for our stuff. Our landlady, Donna Lamar? She had insurance. So why don’t you ask her if she torched the place?”

I said, “Wait. Since when is Donna Lamar a landlady? You said before that she was an owner/agent. I thought she was just a, you know, rental agent and property manager.” I pictured Donna Lamar, her dark blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, her gray sweatshirt frayed, her jeans unfashionably faded. She was a member of our church, but we went to different services, so I rarely saw her there. Invariably, though, I ran into her at the local hardware store as she absentmindedly pushed a cart loaded with cheap cans of paint.

Yolanda said, “Surprise, surprise, Goldy. Donna owns most of those little houses she rents out. Over the years, whenever somebody had a problem getting rid of a small place? Say the owners were going through a bad divorce, or the house was real remote, or it needed major repairs, and the owners had just been transferred? After the house sat on the market for a year, but before a short sale or foreclosure, Donna would creep in and offer half the asking price. If the owner or the bank refused her offer, she’d move on, buying houses after foreclosure or at auction. She wouldn’t fix and flip, because nobody wanted that house in the first place, right? She’d fix and rent. On the low end of the market, renters aren’t demanding. If Donna does have a difficult tenant, she just doesn’t renew their lease. If you’re renting at the low end? If you’re desperate and you’re just one step removed from sleeping in your car? Donna’s your woman.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

Yolanda shook her head. “I got to know Donna real well when I was renting from her.”

“But she always looks so—”

“Poor and downtrodden? That’s part of her shtick. Or it was. Lately, she’s cleaned up her act. Maybe she’s putting that insurance money to good use.”

“How did Humberto know you were having problems?” Tom asked, giving me a dark, stop interrupting this interrogation glare.

Yolanda cocked her head at Tom. “You ever tried to keep something secret in this town?”

“Goldy didn’t know your house burned down,” said Tom. “Goldy wasn’t aware of Donna Lamar’s circumstances.”

Yolanda gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I haven’t got a clue as to how you didn’t hear the news about our rental, and about Donna.” I stared at my friend. Somehow, her answer seemed . . . calculated. Was I picking up on Tom’s distrust of Yolanda? That afternoon, my friend had told me all kinds of details about her relationship with Kris. And yet she had not told me that her rental house had burned down, or that her landlady was a jackal. Why not?

Before I could ask her some questions, Tom intervened. “So Humberto, your family’s friend, somehow knew you were having problems, and he came around and offered to help you.”

“Yes.”

“He just showed up out of the blue.”

Yolanda shook her head. “He heard it someplace, I don’t know where. Maybe the news. You don’t believe that he heard it through the town grapevine, then ask him how he knew. You want to hear the story or not?”

“I wouldn’t believe a single word that came out of Humberto Captain’s mouth,” Tom replied.

Yolanda placed her hands palm down on our kitchen table. “Yes, Humberto showed up, out of the blue, as you said. He asked if we needed money. I said we did. He gave me that seventeen thousand. He wanted to know if we had a place to stay. I said I could ask someone I was working for if we could stay with him. At Ernest’s, I put the money under the mattress because I couldn’t think where else to put it.”

I stood up and looked for something to do. This whole conversation was making me uncomfortable. First I was on Yolanda’s side, then I was on Tom’s, then back again. I’d be useless on a jury.

“But you didn’t go stay somewhere Humberto supplied,” Tom was saying now. “You asked Ernest McLeod if you could stay with him—”

“Yes.” Yolanda’s eyes flashed. “So what?”

Tom leaned across the kitchen table. “You went to stay with Ernest McLeod, after your rental mysteriously burned down—”

“Would you quit saying the rental mysteriously burned down? I’ve only talked to sheriff’s department investigators sixteen times about that stupid house, which was a firetrap, by the way. And no, I still don’t know how somebody would go about getting a Unifrutco oil can these days, and using it to spread accelerant—”

“—and you had no place to go,” Tom said, continuing as if she hadn’t spoken, “despite the fact that you had a rich boyfriend with a big house who would have loved to have you back, with no conditions. But then Humberto Captain showed up while your rental house was still smoking. He appeared unannounced, wanting to give you money. And, let’s see. I’ll bet he was wearing one of his beige tropical suits. Makes him look like a Miami gangster.”