February At Feldman’s On Fifth
A Xara Smith Mystery By Bill McGrath
Copyright 2007 Bill McGrath
Smashwords Edition
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Xara Smith Mysteries By Bill McGrath:
January Juggling The Jentons
February At Feldman’s On Fifth
March Of The Mustangs
April At The Antique Alley
May Might Mean Murder
June Jumping the Jaguar
July Jill's Justice
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
CHAPTER-01.
“Find anything you like?” the short but cute waitress asked. The nametag over her left breast told me she was “Jill.” She did not seem to really care what my answer was going to be. I was going to order it. She was going to write it on the order pad. The cooks in the kitchen would prepare the feast. Jill would carry it to my table. I would chow down. Jill would give me a ticket. I would pay for the meal. The restaurant was called Feldman’s on Fifth, and I am sure little Jill would become a lot more excited when her shift was over.
The eatery had been recommended to me once by someone but I couldn’t remember whom. I am usually pretty good at remembering details so it sort of bothered me that I could not conger up the name of the person who had suggested the joint. I do remember though that he had told me it was the best place in the Dallas / Fort Worth area to get Filet Mignon.
Jill and I entered into a forced dialog that neither of us really wanted to have. I told her I wanted the filet; she asked me how I wanted it cooked. I told her I wanted it medium-well; she asked which vegetables I wanted. I asked her which veggies were available; she gave me a list of three. I picked the one I wanted; she asked if I also wanted a baked potato. I said that I did want a spud; she asked how I wanted it topped. I asked what my choices were; she gave me a list this time with a dozen choices. I gave her the mix that sounded good to me; she asked what I wanted to drink with dinner. I picked out a nice white wine from the wine list; she asked if I wanted it by the glass or a full carafe. By this time in the conversation I wanted to tell her to bring me a gallon jug but this was a nice place so I just ordered a carafe. She asked what kind of salad dressing I wanted and finally I had something unique to say when I told her I didn’t want a salad at all. This sort of threw her off her game and she offered a couple of alternatives but I turned each down. I guess our conversation was completed because without another word Jill spun around and I watched her cute little auburn ponytail bob its way across the dining room through the maze of empty tables to the kitchen door.
My name is Xara Smith and I am a tough, six-foot three-inch tall, natural blonde, very athletic, almost thirty-one, female, private investigator who runs her own agency from her office/house in Irving, Texas, which is a nice little suburb right in the middle of the Dallas / Fort Worth megalopolis. Tonight I was celebrating. A week ago I had completed a case that made me look like a real hero. The case I was working had sent me stumbling along until I accidentally found a white slavery ring and with a little help from the police I had rescued nine women from a fate worse than death. But I really wasn’t celebrating the case. The case itself left me quite bitter. For one thing, on that case, I had for the first and only time, with my own hands and with a switchblade knife, killed a bad guy. He was bad, he was mean, he was criminal, and he was, at the time, trying to kill me, so it was definitely self defense, but still he no longer existed because I had been luckier or more skillful in the fight than he had been. I didn’t yet have it right in my head. It’s not like I needed a therapist or anything, but it would take a little getting use to.
Another thing also a result of the case was that I lost my girl friend. O.K. that is not really fair. She and I were doomed even before the case started, but it had all come to fruition on the last day of the case so it was hard for me to separate the two. It had not been a long-term relationship, but I had grown quite comfortable having her around and now she was gone.
My celebration rather was financial. I had just come from a meeting with my last client and her lawyer. She had been married to one of the wealthiest men in Irving, and in our contract she had agreed to pay me eight percent of anything she got because of my efforts. This was in addition to the normal fee and expenses thing one typically finds in a contract with a detective. Her husband had turned out to be one of the bad guys and he was in jail and would be for life if the trial went well. She would be divorcing him and stood to become an instant multi-millionaire. Now she just wanted to get the hell out of town and start her life over somewhere, anywhere but Texas. I am sure I got hosed but when her lawyer had presented me with a check for $250,000.00 that was mine as long as I signed a further quit claim, I signed the form and grabbed the huge check. I felt like a victorious game-show contestant. It was not only the biggest check I had ever received, it represented more money than I had earned in total over the last three years that I had owned my own business. So with nothing else to do I had deposited the check and headed to the best restaurant I could think of.
I had never been to Feldman’s on Fifth before, but as I said, it had come highly recommended. Jill came back and put an empty wine glass on my table and a full chilly carafe filled to the brim with golden liquid. She poured the first glass for me and told me the food would be up in a couple of minutes. She stared at me for a moment too long making me feel quite self-conscious. I was quite sure I didn’t have any salad hanging from my teeth because I hadn’t eaten in several hours. I briefly wondered if my hair was a mess.
“Where do I know you from?” Jill asked.
I had known this moment would come but I hadn’t yet prepared a lie to tell to get me out of it. Because of my recently solved case I had been on the local TV news three times in two days. There had been the news crew footage of me being hurried to my car under police protection at the end of the shootout, then Detective Eric Samuels had taken me along with him to his press conference about the case so that I could help him answer questions, and finally some news hack had dug up security camera footage of me going into and out of the local hospital later that day. I had only been going to the hospital to talk with a friend who happens to work there but I guess the media guys were trying to extend the story and sell a few more news papers.
I figured the easiest thing to do was simply hand Jill one of my cards, so I did, but I also introduced myself verbally. I do not know if she did not recognize my name, or was overly polite, or simply saw that I wished to be left alone, but she slid my card into her apron pocket and pretty much left me to await my meal in silence.
While I was waiting for the food I took a look around the place. It was a nice restaurant as things go. The main dining room held sixteen tables and not a single booth. Each table had a nice white table cloth on it. There was a long bar running the entire length of one wall with a dozen stools lined up for patrons. There was a new big plasma screen over the bar where one almost expected a cheese-cake pose of Mae West. There were double swinging doors at one end of the room that obviously led to the kitchen area. There was a sign in the corner that promised there were restrooms and pay-phones in that area. The carpet was short-cropped so that it could be easily vacuumed and it was a very dark green. The place was quiet, at least right now.
I was there at what was a perfect time for me. Two hours earlier and the place would have been jammed with business people grabbing a quick lunch. Two hours in the future every table would be filled with hungry families expecting wonderful food and good service at prices just a bit above average. Right now fifth street would be flowing slowly with SUVs hauling kids home from school and I had Feldman’s to myself. I had seen and talked to my cute little waitress, Jill, and there was a bartender behind the bar but he was quietly going about his business of polishing glasses while he watched some soccer game on the big screen. He did have the volume completely muted so as not to disturb my supper.
The wine was quite good and I poured myself a second glass nearly emptying the carafe. I would definitely need another when the food was delivered to my table. I did not have to worry about drunk driving. My trusty six year old Taurus had sustained minor damage (two bullet holes) a week ago, and it was in the repair shop. The Taurus would get a new passenger-side door, a new rear quarter panel, and then the whole car would get a fresh coat of paint. I had taken a cab to the restaurant because there was no easy way to take the bus system from where I had been, but to get home I planned on catching bus number 302 right outside the restaurant and riding it to the South Irving Transit Station where I would use my transfer to get on the 305 that would deliver me to within two blocks of my front door. The ride home would cost me a dollar and a dime, or for two dollars I could purchase an all-day pass. I started wondering if I would need the bus system later in the evening but decided to postpone that crucial decision until later.
My mind kept flashing thoughts I didn’t want so I forced myself to think of something pleasant. I had just picked up a huge check and was very tempted to trade the Taurus in on a shiny new silver Jag. I had test driven the glamorous toy a year ago when I couldn’t even dream of affording it. It was really fun but at six feet three inches my large frame had felt a bit cramped in it. Still it was good fantasy fodder.
Jill snuck up on me sliding the full plates across the table. Everything looked and smelled delicious. I asked for a second carafe of the wine and dug into the meal.
Twenty minutes later Jill picked up my empty plates and slid a big hunk of cheesecake in front of me adding “On the house” as she did. I was stuffed from the meal and couldn’t even think of biting into the pile of calorie rich heaven. It appeared to be topped with caramel and pecans so after a small sip of my last glass of wine I slid the fork just into the corner of the dessert to make sure. It was scrumptious. Three minutes later there was yet another empty plate in front of me and I asked Jill for the check. I also asked Jill to do something I knew all along I would do and that was to call me a cab. The bus system would some how survive without my business yet another day. I paid the bill and left her a pretty generous tip. It is not that I thought her service exemplary, rather it was that I was feeling quite wealthy with my cool quarter-million recently deposited.
It was the first week of February so the air outside the restaurant was quite cool. North Texas really does not have much of a winter but a jacket was definitely necessary. The cab ride took about ten minutes and the cabbie delivered me to my house without saying much of anything. That was fine with me as I was not really in a conversational mood.
It was late afternoon but still light outside. The house was quiet. I recognized that I was bored. It is just not my style to waste time so I looked for something to do. I felt a good run would do me some good but it was a little cold outside. It was also too cold for fresh air therapy which I treat myself to often by walking the dogs over at the local SPCA. I had been quite happy to go to the meeting with the former client and then out to early dinner this afternoon because my former girlfriend/roommate, Laura, was moving out today and I didn’t want to be there for a lot of emotions that I was sure would surface and so far I was fighting to suppress, but by the time I got home she was gone. She had left the house in good shape so there were no immediate chores to fill my time.
I turned on the television. I paid almost a hundred dollars a month for cable which offered me more than three-hundred channels, and I ended up watching about five or six hours of TV each month. Not much of a bargain, and I certainly couldn’t find anything to catch my interest now. I thought of maybe heading to one of the malls in the DFW area and putting a dent in my fat bank account but then remembered my ride was in the car hospital. My house has a nice in-ground pool in the back yard and a long swim filled with many strenuous laps sounded wonderful but it was way too cold for that. I grabbed a diet Coke and a good book and sat in my favorite chair actually feeling quite sorry for myself. What a waste of a Tuesday. I wish it was raining really hard.
CHAPTER-02.
Wednesday morning I felt much better. It is surprising what a good nights sleep followed by a long hot shower will do for you. The place I live in was originally built as a residential house but had previously been amended so that it worked also as a business location. One of the amendments had been basically to remove the wall that separated the original living room from the original dining room making the front of the house one huge room. I use that room as my office and right in the center I have my big old desk facing the door. Whenever I am open for business I have a little sign I hang from the front door that tells the prospective client to walk right in but the building still looks a lot more like a house than an office so virtually everyone rings the bell on their first visit.
By 8:30 A.M. I was fully dressed and sitting at that desk with a big warm mug of fresh java, working on my bills and putting some finishing touches to the copious notes that went along with the last case. I was also considering some changes to my banking arrangements. I am not much of a financial wizard but I was pretty sure that leaving $250,000 in my checking account was not the best I could do for myself.
I heard a car pull off the highway and into my driveway. I watched from my perch behind the desk as two people got out of the car and stepped up onto my porch. I was pretty sure one was the waitress from the previous night and I quickly remembered giving her my card. As I expected the two stopped at the door and rang the bell. Almost always, when I do investigative type business and someone comes to talk to me in the office they come alone so I have a single guest chair on the other side of my desk, but I do occasionally have to deal with two people at the same time. What I usually do, and what I did this time, was usher them into the kitchen area where we then sit around my dining table. It is a little less than professional but it tends to make the clients relax to be in a familiar familial surrounding rather than an office.
Jill, as I remembered from the previous afternoon, was quite tiny but even she was larger than the other young woman she had brought with her. For the moment she introduced the girl simply as Juana. Jill looked quite pert in her blue jeans topped with a sleek black blouse her reddish-blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail. Juana stood barely five feet tall probably weighed a bit short of a full hundred pounds, and was dressed in what I can only believe was professional kitchen attire which resembled hospital scrubs but were starch white when purchased new. Her scrubs were not newly purchased though and sported many washed out stains. Her hair was a dark brown, wavy but not curly, worn short and already captured in one of those net things kitchen workers wear. I am a large and powerful woman but I felt like a giant with these two small women around. I hoped they did not feel intimidated but there was not much I could do about that. I was careful not to accidentally step on their toes.
Juana spoke almost no English at all. I will faithfully report what we spoke about but for editorial purposes let me tell you that most of Juana’s words were in Spanish ably translated by Jill.
Jill first apologized for their early arrival stating that they both had to be at the restaurant by ten. She then told me that Juana wanted to talk to me about possibly hiring me to work on a case for her. I fetched three coffees and the story started coming out. Juana and her husband and their young son had worked their way all the way from Panama to Mexico where they along with thousands of others had gathered in a refugee camp near Juarez, Mexico, which is just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, USA. Their goal, of course, was to cross the border and seek the American dream. Their family fortune which they carried in a sock wrapped with two thick rubber bands and buried deep in their one suitcase was not nearly enough to pay the coyotes to smuggle all three of them across the border. They did what thousands of other families in their situation did and gave all their money to the coyote with the promise to smuggle just one of them in, and the first one to the US would then get a job and send money until they had enough to smuggle the others across. They had picked Juana because it was expected that she could get a job quicker and easier than her husband could.
One night she and fifty-five other illegal immigrants had been locked into the back of an eighteen wheeler and forty hours later they were let out in the desert ten miles east of El Paso. It was dawn. Her group headed east rather than back towards the big city. Ten days later seven of them, all female, all young, all with family awaiting on the Mexican side of the border, still together found the outskirts of the Dallas/Fort Worth area and took a couple of days refuge in the small apartment of another Panamanian immigrant that lived there. Within a week Juana was washing dishes at Feldman’s on Fifth for minimum wage which, at the time, seemed like a fortune to her. Two years later she was still there. She had been faithfully sending money to her husband and communicating via mail. His last letter, which she received a full month ago, told her they now had the money for he and their son to get across the border. She had not heard from them since. She wanted to hire me to find out what happened to them and bring them safely to her. She slid a worn out photograph of herself, her husband, and her son across the table for me. It was the only picture she had of her loved ones so she made me promise to give it back to her but she did allow me to keep it until the next day.
Wow! This one had all kinds of problems. The first of which was communication. By the time the story was out the ladies had to scoot off to their jobs but I did not let them leave without scheduling a follow-up visit for the next morning. I took Jill aside and whispered to her that I realized that Juana wasn’t wealthy but that I was going to have to be paid something if even to just cover expenses or I couldn’t help. She told me she would work on that and have some information for me tomorrow. I also asked if she could finagle their work schedules so that we could talk a lot longer than we had this morning. Jill said she would work on that one as well but didn’t promise anything. That done they hopped into Jill’s little VW and headed towards fifth street.
I didn’t at first think I would even take the case for several reasons, but, I might, so I took out a note pad and furiously scribbled notes about our little meeting. I tried to remember every word Juana, through Jill’s translation, had said but when I was finished I had only one full page of notes. Next I took her photo and scanned it into my computer. It was taken, she had told me, at their home in Panama a month or so before they started their journey to Mexico and America. Juana was wearing a pretty floral print dress. Standing next to her was a young man hardly larger than she was. His skin a little darker than hers already looked weather worn as if he had worked a long life in an outdoor career of hard labor. He was dressed in very worn jeans, a white button shirt topped with a frayed from wear black vest. He had no tie but a red scarf had been craftily tied around his neck. His black straight hair was a little longer than one would expect. Standing in front of them was a skinny little boy of about nine years. In the old photo it was hard to tell for sure but his features somehow seemed to resemble his mother more than his father. He was wearing a red Chicago Bulls basketball jersey with the number 23 on it. It was so long that it covered what one must imagine was a pair of shorts to complete the uniform. Both parents were smiling like it was a family portrait on Easter Sunday but the young boy had that look on his face like his buddies were probably just off camera kicking a soccer ball around and he resented missing the action while he posed.
I looked at the sad little picture a long time. The picture was more than two years old which meant the nine year old boy in the picture was now eleven or even twelve. He would look a good deal different.
I had just been paid a very good chunk of change for doing what I do and my business was finally stable. I should be seeking out other local high-paying opportunities and strike while the iron was hot. If I took this job there is simply no way I could possibly make any money. In fact I would probably not even be able to recover the expenses I would put on my credit card. I expected that Juana had no money at all, and couldn’t imagine her husband or son having any either. Why was I even considering this case? It is not like Jill was my best friend or something. I mean I had just met her yesterday. If I had picked another restaurant I would never have met Jill and therefore never heard Juana’s story. But here I was still looking at the sad little picture and I realized I had not even asked Juana what her husband’s and son’s names are. If I wasn’t careful I would find myself wasting the entire day looking at the photo.
I got myself another cup of coffee and decided to type up my notes so that I could start a proper file on the small chance that I decided to work on Juana’s case until a better one came along. I typed up what I had scribbled and re-read the notes on the computer screen. There was one thing that bothered me. My best class in school had never been Geography, but if I remembered correctly Juarez, Mexico was just across the border from El Paso, Texas. Why then had it been forty hours from the time they were all locked in the truck until it was opened? They probably hadn’t traveled fifty miles.
I thought of several possible reasons for the lengthy trip. First of all they may have traveled around in different directions to confuse the passengers so they could not tell the border guards anything useful if they got caught. Also, they may have been actually running from the border guards for a good part of the trip and Juana may not have known that since she and the other passengers were locked in a windowless box at the time. Another reason is they may not have let the passengers out anywhere near El Paso. They had told them they were near El Paso, but had warned them to walk the other direction. Finally there was the language barrier. Jill told me that Juana said that they were let off ten miles from El Paso based on what the coyote had told Juana and the group she was traveling with. They could have easily been a hundred miles from El Paso and either Juana had misunderstood the distance the coyote had told her or Jill had mistranslated what Juana had told her, or I may have written down ten miles when Jill had translated one-hundred miles. The same could be said for the forty hours. What if Juana had said “four hours” and Jill had translated it as “forty hours?”
All in all I decided that I had nothing at all yet so I must learn a good deal more at our next meeting on the morrow.
I did have something very important to do this day. I dialed a phone number and talked to the person in charge for only a minute to find that my Taurus was ready to go. It took me two busses and almost a full hour to travel the three miles from my house/office to my friend Tony’s place. Tony Tornado was a bit of a local Texas legend. He was only twenty-nine years old. He was quite tall and lanky with long shaggy blonde hair. He had lived in the Irving area his entire life but for some reason had a much more pronounced cowboy accent then any of the rest of the local citizens. Five years earlier his third, but for the time legally current wife, had shot him in the ass as he was hopping naked out of his own bedroom window with the woman who would become his fourth wife in their bed, so from then on Tony had walked with a very pronounced limp. At twenty-nine he was currently on wife number seven. His passel of ex-wives had cost him all kinds of financial problems which eventually forced the IRS to seize and close his successful auto body shop. He had continued to fix autos but now he does it from the back yard of a terrible little house near downtown Irving that he rents from his cousin. That is where the bus dropped me off. His legend status though was not really about his auto mechanic skills or his numerous wives or even his gun shot wound. He was locally famous because on Sunday afternoons, if you don’t happen to like watching the Dallas Cowboys, you can go to the little dirt track outside Fort Worth and watch Tony Tornado (a last name he had appropriated for just such events) and a dozen or so other drivers pilot wrecks around in the demolition derby. Tony was not only a genius at ironing out bent sheet metal, he was also particularly skilled at bending it all up in smashing, crowd cheering, fuel spilling, glory.
I had originally met Tony Tornado shortly after I had opened Xara Smith Discrete Investigations. A man who suspected his wife was cheating had hired me to get evidence on her that he could use in his divorce. I had tailed her right to Tony’s auto shop where her tires were not the only thing being rotated. They weren’t being discrete at all and soon I had a really nice x-rated photo album to present to my client.
Despite the fact that we had started out on opposite sides of that particular case Tony had been so charming that we had become friends. I know it is all just bull-shit, and I am lesbian, but every woman likes to hear compliments every once in a while and Tony lays them on so thick, and does it every time I see him. He has been my auto mechanic of choice ever since and he now considers me a close friend. I am sure he still considers me a target because he sincerely tries to get into my pants every time I see him. I love Tony but like he was my brother or something. I mean I have never had any siblings, but if I had a brother I am sure I would feel the same way about him as I do about Tony. I can not admire Tony for some of the choices he makes, but he sure has more fun making those choices than anyone else I have ever met.
My six-year old Taurus looked show-room perfect. The replacement door and quarter panel had been the right sizes and been installed properly. The celery colored paint matched the original color perfectly. The entire car had been polished like a super-bowl trophy. It even had a brand new set of tires. I was elated. I handed Tony a grand in cash which I joked to myself was only one two-hundred-and-fiftieth of my current estate. I definitely had to do something with that money before I became really stupid. I did mention that I am a blonde, right?
My trusted steed and I jumped onto the nearest highway even though I could have easily taken the surface streets back to my house. It was early afternoon and the evening commuter rush hour had not yet even begun so I put a hundred fast hard miles on my Taurus simply because it felt so good. On the way home I stopped at Kroger and loaded the trunk up with much needed groceries and I also picked out the biggest folding map they had of the great state of Texas.
CHAPTER-03.
Thursday morning eight A.M. found me freshly showered and dressed in jeans and blouse. There were fresh but store bought muffins and a large plate of cut up fruit on the dining table and a full pot of coffee on the kitchen counter. I am no Martha Stewart but for some reason I wanted this next meeting to be comfortable and go well. I guess I had already decided to take the case if I possibly could. I don’t know why, but I was quite nervous.
Juana and Jill arrived sharply at eight-thirty. Jill in her familiar jeans and blouse vaguely resembling my outfit but in a much smaller size, and Juana in what was probably her best dress which was most likely purchased at one of the local thrift stores. Jill explained that Thursday was Juana’s day off, and that she, Jill, would be able to stay as long as we needed her. We three women gathered around the dining table and I passed out plates and coffee mugs. As soon as we started eating Juana slipped a battered manila folder onto the table and urged Jill to show it to me.
I looked through the many documents as we munched quietly on the fruit and muffins. It took several minutes to examine everything. There were several legal documents and a couple of hand written notes mostly in Spanish and I needed Jill to help with these. Basically the file was the recording of a loose business association. The seven women, one of which was Juana, who had made it from Mexico traveling together, across the border, and then into the Dallas area, and become friends along the journey, a good deal of which they had walked in the darkness of night, had formed a group, and all gotten illegal low-paying jobs, and together purchased a house in one of the neighboring suburbs, Grand Prairie. I knew the town and could tell by the address that it was in one of the poorest neighborhoods. I am sure it was not much of a house, and I had no idea whose name it was that had qualified for the mortgage, but together these seven hard-working women were paying the bills and somehow making the monthly mortgage payments. Together they had bought the place almost two years ago and so far had about a dollars worth of equity in it. Still it was all they owned and they were quite proud of their accomplishment. I am sure it started out as a real fixer-upper, but I was also quite confident that it would be one of the best cared-for abodes in the north Texas area. With tears streaming down her cheeks Juana, translated word for word by Jill, pledged their house as security against paying my fees for finding Juana’s husband and son.
We started by looking at my map. I pointed out where El Paso and Juarez were. There was a fairly major road called route 80 that ran east along the U.S. side of the border and I thought it likely that they had traveled along this road towards Dallas until it turned into Route 20. It was unlikely that they actually walked down the middle of the pavement but Juana had said that they used a major highway as their guide paralleling it as they went. Of course 80 to 20 is just one path they could have been set along. They might just as easily have been dropped off on route 62. I pointed out each of the little towns along the route hoping to find some that Juana could remember. There were, of course, dozens of small bergs along either path but it was not what you would call a heavily populated area. There would also be vast stretches of ranch land or just plain old desert. It was slow frustrating work. I started by simply telling Juana the name of one of the towns near El Paso and showing her on the map where it was. When she would respond that she did not recognize the name of the town I would work my way east on the map to the next town. This showed no positive results until I got to Abilene. About Abilene Juana had no recollection about going through the town but at least it was one she recognized the name of.
Jill stopped me and suggested that she take over my part because, as she pointed out, Juana and the rest of the people making the journey spoke Spanish, and, in fact, most of the people they would have encountered along the path would have also spoken Spanish. They would not have been using the English names of the towns which were what was printed on the map. Mostly out of frustration I allowed Jill to take over this part of the interrogation. I really wished I had taken some Spanish classes somewhere along the way.
I refilled the coffee cups as Jill started reading off the names of the towns to Juana. It was still really slow work that was not going well. Eventually though Jill was able to get Juana to make a connection to one of the towns, and it was called, in English, “Salty Finger.” It was a very small town along route 62. When Juana first recognized the town’s name she wanted to tell me a good deal about her experience there. I was sure it would become important but I did not want to get things too far out of sequence. We continued the search for cities and Juana was able to identify several other small towns. We marked the ones she recognized until we had a clear picture of their path through the vast Texas wilderness from El Paso all the way to Dallas.
At this point I steered the conversation back to the beginning of the journey. I wanted to nail down the time thing. I needed to figure out the time discrepancy so that I would have a better understanding of how the border crossing had worked. Geographically the river “Rio Grande” is the border between Texas and Mexico. It runs all the way across the common border from the gulf of Mexico until you get to El Paso which is about as far west as you can go and still be in Texas. To the west of El Paso along the Mexican border is the state of New Mexico and if you go any further west you get to the border between Mexico and Arizona. Here you would not find a river demarking the national borders rather you would encounter a simple chain linked fence. That means that to cross the border you would have a choice between a river crossing east of El Paso or a fence crossing west of it. There are many bridges that span the river between the two countries but each and every one of them were heavily guarded border crossings where they check every vehicle and every person in an attempt to stop just such an illegal crossing.
According to Juana’s story, which we went over in more detail, the fifty-five aliens had been locked inside the eighteen wheeler on the Mexican side of the border and had not been let out for forty hours. I drilled her several times on the forty hours and finally out of desperation Juana pulled an old watch out of her purse and showed it to me. It no longer worked, but she assured me it had at the time. It was an old wind-up model that had that little window that showed the day as well as the time. Based on what Juana was telling me I was pretty confident that they had driven west past the end of the Rio Grande and actually crossed somewhere into New Mexico or even Arizona where they had turned north and then east bypassing El Paso where the truck driver had later hooked up with good old route 62 where they had been dumped out.
Juana’s story continued where the driver of the truck had dropped them all off. It was just getting light when the doors to the van were jerked open. The aliens all gladly got off the truck and as soon as they did the driver took off heading the truck back to the road. Juana either did not notice or could not recall which direction the truck had headed. It was early in the morning with the sun just then rising. There was a four wheel drive vehicle there with two armed men. The men were quite friendly with the group and appeared there to help them with the next part of the journey. The men explained that they were sent there to order bus tickets for the group. They picked out two pretty teen-aged girls from the aliens and instructed them in collecting money for the bus tickets. Of course most of the aliens had given all their money to the coyotes before the journey had even started. The two men got quite angry when little money could be gathered and told the group that it would delay things a lot but that they would have to collect jewelry and other valuables to pay for the bus. They then warned the immigrants about the horrendous dangers of being caught by the INS. According to the men the INS would send a few back but that they regularly killed half the people they caught so that those killed could not try to enter illegally again. There was a lot of crying and protesting but shortly the two men and their hand-picked teenagers had all the valuables the group had smuggled in. Juana showed me her left hand and explained that her own wedding ring had been lost to these men. They promised a bus would be along in about two hours to take the tourists, as they called the folks, to their final destinations. With that, the two men and the two teenaged girls they had picked got into the vehicle and they sped away.
Not far from the road were a couple of small trees that would provide a little shade so the group migrated in that direction and sat in small groups talking mostly about how their American dream was just getting started and soon they would all be rich beyond their wildest dreams. Slowly the two hours passed with the people all so expectant and curious about the future, and then another two hours passed with no bus and no word from the men or the two teen-aged girls they had taken with them. People began to grow angry and eventually they all realized they had simply been robbed and now penniless they were on their own. The men started talking about vengeance. The women started praying for the two pretty teen girls that the group had lost.
The crowd quickly grew loud and angry. Juana made herself a silent part of the group. She did not want to be a leader of desperate people. Most of the people wanted to head east towards Austin and Dallas but a few had family out west, mostly in California, so eventually two groups left the shaded area each heading different directions along the road. Juana was with the forty or so people who headed east.
The east bound group did not leave immediately fearing travel along the road during daylight hours so they waited till dusk and headed out. They walked the full night along the highway without seeing anyone but an occasional truck and when one did pass they would get off the road and hide in the weeds along the edge. Juana tried to keep herself in the middle of the pack. She never wanted to be the first on the road and certainly never wanted to be at the back of the pack. She was scared of everything all the time they were walking. People in the crowd were getting madder and madder and many now resented the decision they had made to cross the border. By the second night they were all hungry and thirsty so when they came to what they thought was a ranch they decided to approach the rancher and beg for water.
The rancher, of course, had seen groups like theirs before. He gave them water and a little food and allowed them to take refuge inside one of his barns. The rancher had many armed men working for him so the refugees did pretty much as they were told. Inside the barn they were given not only water but food as well and were allowed to rest and sleep any time they wanted. There were not a lot of creature comforts but at least they were warm and safe. At first the refugees thought they had been rescued but soon found their bad luck was still upon them. They were not permitted outside the barn for a day or two and then the able-bodied men were selected to go out and work some crop field for the rancher. The women would be kept in the barn and occasionally one of them would be selected out for what the guards called a “job interview.”
The selected young lady would be gone an hour or two and was invariably returned well beaten and thoroughly raped. Through Jill’s translation Juana reported that her own job interview had been conducted by ten men who stripped her naked, tied her hands behind her back, and used a whip on her when she was slow to obey their commands. Juana did the sign of the cross on herself several times while telling this part of her story.
The captured men spent the day working hard for no wages, and the captured women spent the day crying. On the fourth or fifth night one of the women confided in Juana that she and a couple of others were going to sneak out and run away. Juana went with them. There were just seven. All women. All with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They had feared it would be difficult to escape but they made it away from the ranch that night without incident.
Not surprisingly the seven vowed to not trust any more ranchers. They walked always east along the road side at night and whenever they crossed a small river or stream they would drink. They were all quite hungry by their second night on the road so they decided that the next time they crossed a connecting road they would follow it one way or the other and try to find a town. They were, of course, very afraid that they might still be picked up by the border patrol and sent back to Mexico or put in prison or executed, but they also knew they could not survive in the desert without food and shelter. So their plan was to sneak into the first small town they could find and under cover of night they would rob a store of food items only.
The first road-crossing led them south about two miles to the town of Salty Finger. Juana stopped her tale here to explain to me that even though they were refugees they were not illiterate. All seven of the women could read and write Spanish, and two of them could speak and read a little in English. It was one of the two bi-lingual women who had read a road sign that had told Juana the name of the town and she remembered it because she thought the name was quite funny.
Dawn was about to break as they neared the town. Approaching carefully looking only for brief refuge and food they were lucky enough to come upon a small church before they found a store to try to rob. They found the church unlocked so they filed quietly into the church where they knelt and prayed for salvation and a crust of bread. They were in the church perhaps an hour before a priest walked in. According to Jill’s translation of Juana’s story the priest was not very surprised to find the women there. Apparently illegal aliens who had recently crossed the border were not a strange occurrence in this area.
Juana did the sign of the cross on herself the first time she told us the name “Father Rico,” and she repeated the sign each time she used his name. This was the second time during the narrative that Juana had started crossing herself. Apparently she was quite religious. She described Father Rico as the kindest angel who had been sent to earth to be in that place at that time just to rescue the women. Father Rico took the women down a rickety staircase into the basement of the church where there was a small room he used as an office. Hidden behind his desk was a secret door that led to a large room that was set up as a sleeping place for about twenty people.
Juana described the place as a large room that had nothing in it but mattresses and blankets on the floor. There was a single light bulb hung from the ceiling that gave the room some light, and there appeared to be a fan built into the ceiling at each end trying to push air through the place. At the far end of the room there was a toilet and a small sink not enclosed like a bathroom but rather masked off by blankets that had been nailed up to form a tiny room. Father Rico left the room as soon as the women were sent into it and returned just a few minutes later with two nuns loaded down with food. There was not a lot to eat. Most was bread but there were also several candy bars. The seven women shared these carefully.
They were in the basement of the church for three days eating what little the nuns could provide, resting, and always praying. Father Rico visited them often and for long periods of time. When he did he would lead them in prayers and then talk to them about where it was that they wanted to go. The two nuns accompanied Father Rico on most of these prayer visits and they provided a little medical attention to the freshly abused women, but the nuns spoke very little to the women. They let Father Rico do their speaking for them.
The seven refugee women all knew that they could not live the rest of their lives in the squalid but safe little room so they were not surprised when on their fourth day there Father Rico told them that he had arranged for them to move on as far as the city of Austin.
That evening they held one last prayer session together and as dusk fell the seven women were loaded into the back of a cargo van but not before Father Rico had given each a blessing and a ten dollar bill. The driver of the van drove all night stopping just once for gasoline. For their safety he would not let them out of the van at the gas station but he did stop for a restroom break at one of those little highway rest stops. Along the way the driver was friendly with the women and often helped them read the road signs along the way so they could start learning about their new country. Therefore, Juana was able to name several of the towns between Salty Finger and Austin but the group had not stopped at any of these towns, just whizzed by in their van.
With the sun not yet risen they were delivered to a private house on the outskirts of a big city which Juana thought was probably Austin. The owners of the small house were legal refugees from Panama themselves and treated the women with a good deal of respect and kindness for the daylight hours they were there, but that night the seven women were once again crowded into a different cargo van with a different driver and this time delivered to a Panamanian household in Grand Prairie which is a suburb of Dallas that borders Irving where Feldman’s of Fifth is and where my office is.
The Grand Prairie home was a tiny apartment so they were very crowded, but the couple who lived there helped the women blend into the town and pointed them at businesses they were familiar with that could help the women find jobs. Juana reported that she slept on the living room floor each night but that she and one of the other refugees loved walking around the nice little neighborhood during the daylight hours. Most of the illegal alien women were quite scared of being seen in the open but Juana was already starting to feel at home. It had been through the Grand Prairie family that Juana had been introduced to a Mr. Stepho who was the current owner of Feldman’s. Of the seven women, Juana and one other had been selected to work for Mr. Stepho at the restaurant. That is where Juana met Jill who was a bit more than just a waitress there, she was Jill Stepho, the owner’s daughter.
Juana had gone to work as a dish washer more than a year ago, and had been washing dishes and doing clean-ups at the restaurant ever since. The seven women all got low paying jobs in the area and together rented a two bedroom house. It was still quite crowded but far less crowded than they had been with the other couple in the apartment. Less than three months later they had saved up enough money from their jobs to make an offer on the house and the current owner had been trying to unload the place for quite some time so they bought the place and all seven were still there.
As soon as Juana had an address she wrote a letter to her husband in Mexico telling him all about the journey. They had been corresponding ever since and almost every single letter Juana sent she would include some money. She showed me his last letter. Jill translated it word for word and it was mainly filled with lovey-dovey stuff that one would expect in a letter from a husband who had not seen his wife in two years, but it also clearly had instructions for her to not write any follow-up letters because he and their son would be crossing the border and they expected to arrive at the house in Grand Prairie by the middle of January. As this was now the middle of the first week of February, they were clearly late and Juana had no idea how to contact them which is why she needed my help to find them.
A long but sad story. We went over it several times but it did not change much. What Juana wanted me to do was go out there and find her husband and son and bring them safely to her. I didn’t know where to start. I thought perhaps I could start with the coyote who had smuggled them across the border and retrace the journey from there, but, Juana told me that there had been dozens of coyotes working the refugee camp and they had picked the one they had simply because he had been ready to go the day they had been. It was possible but not likely that her husband would have used the same human smuggler even though he had successfully gotten Juana into the USA. It would be more likely that he would pick the smuggler who was ready to work the very day he had decided they had enough money to cross.
I took another tract and suggested that I might start where the truck had crossed the border with them and trace her journey from there looking for her family along the route. Juana pointed out that from the talk of the coyotes the most often used method was to have the truck meet the refuges on the US side of the border east of El Paso after they had taken a short boat ride in the middle of the night across the Rio Grande.
I was about out of ideas. I really wanted to help this woman but I would need some direction to go. I was explaining this all to Jill and hoping she would temper it with kindness when she translated it for Juana when Juana herself spoke directly to me in very broken English “You find my family, please.”
Against my better judgment I took out one of my standard contracts and collected Juana’s signature a few times. I took the time explaining to Jill who would translate for Juana exactly what the contract said but Juana really didn’t want to hear much of it. She would have signed any piece of paper I put in front of her if I would only promise to help her locate her family members. Of course the contract was pretty much worthless because I did not expect Juana or her husband to be able to pay any real money. For a few minutes I wondered if my tax picture for this year would be more promising if I did the case pro-bono. There was though another reason I executed the contract. Clients always seem to feel a good deal more secure once the legal document binds us together. I had no hope of collecting either my fees or a percentage of anything, but if I were lucky I might be able to recover a portion of the expenses I would go through helping the poor woman try to recover her loved ones. More importantly though Juana now could have the peace of mind that comes with doing everything in ones power to solve a problem.