Sweet Mary Page 5

  Finally, I made out one line: “FOCUS! FOCUS!”

  A strange realization hit me—he was writing affirmations, giving himself a little pep talk on paper. I winced at the discovery: Agent Green was Mr. Motivation’s clone.

  “Can I borrow a pen?” I asked.

  He seemed slightly hopeful that he might get a real confession out of me. He tore some pages out of his notebook and tossed me a pen.

  Concealing my handwriting, I scribbled a couple of words of my own on the page. I stopped to contemplate them, their message, their proven power:

  THE PORCUPINE.

  I looked up from my notes and deep into Agent Green’s eyes.

  “All right. What do you want to know?” I asked.

  “Maria Portilla. It’s January eight, 1999. You are leaving the Red Roof Inn in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You are in a crappy rental car on Route 64. Where do you go?”

  “Where would you like me to go?”

  “You stop at La Casa del Gavilan in Cimarron,” he said, pressing on. “They give you a single room. No one knows you are there, except for American Express. Where is El Flaco?”

  “Where would you like El Flaco to be?”

  Agent Green slammed a fist on the table. I kept my cool, even though he clearly wanted me to lose it.

  “You’re in deep-shit trouble. You are one very faint heartbeat away from going to jail for an extremely long time. Why don’t you let that percolate for a while?”

  Red-faced and livid, he motioned to the mirrored glass. Interrogation over.

  The silhouettes in the mirror seemed to blur into a solitary figure, my own, moving in a damp, cavernous passageway. I was shackled again and tethered to a dozen inmates, led by one female guard and trailed by two other guards.

  “We will check you at eleven, at two, and at five,” the lead guard called out as we, the prisoners, shuffled in the near darkness, her words echoing through the bowels of the federal compound. “You must stand up for each check. We like to make sure you are still with us.”

  The human chain of inmates then disappeared through a large doorway into a processing area.

  FOUR

  PROCESSING AREA—DAY 1

  A row of dressing “rooms” separated by dingy curtains. In one of them, Mary undresses.

  As instructed by a female guard, I took off my nice gray skirt and seafoam top for an inspection. I could hear the grousing of the other women detainees coming from the stalls adjacent to mine.

  “Two steps forward!” the guard commanded.

  I stepped out of my stall into a common area, taking my place in a motley lineup of naked women. I was the only one still wearing a bra and panties, a fact that got me an irate look from the female guard.

  “Get back in there,” she ordered.

  I ducked into the dressing area and returned naked. I tried to cover what I could with my hands. I did my best to avoid eye contact, looking down instead at those Pistol-Packin’ Red toes. What a bad idea that was.

  I sized up the young woman to my left: blond, all-American, probably nice girl gone astray. She had scraped knees and an ugly wound on her right thigh.

  “I hear she’s the touchy-touchy guard,” the girl said.

  Several feet away, the guard patted down an inmate, a leathery woman in her forties who seemed to know the drill: arms out. Feet apart. Bend over.

  “Your clothes and valuables will be stored and given back to you upon your release,” the guard announced by rote.

  Soon enough, I felt the guard clasp my shoulder. My turn. Eyes closed, I followed her orders with the same detached sense of compliance I afforded my doctors. My body felt nothing. My thoughts traveled elsewhere, escaping the federal compound into the streets of Miami. And it was along those streets that Gina Torres raced through a yellow light in her red Benz convertible, on a mission to save me. She was headed to the Star Island home of Elliot Casey, criminal defense lawyer.

  I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I had no news about Max, my parents, Tony, or anyone else, and I was sick with worry. But thanks to Gina and her quick thinking, help was on the way. She had gone to look for me at home when I didn’t show up to work or answer my phone. It was my neighbor, Dale, who told her what he had seen.

  “The feds took huh,” he told her in a Jersey undertone. “Drugs, I hoid.”

  Gina didn’t believe him. She let herself into my house with her key, only to find the wreckage inside. She called the metro police, the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. marshals, the DCF, everyone she could think of, but nobody knew anything—or they weren’t saying. So she telephoned Elliot Casey, the megawatt lawyer she had befriended a year earlier when she sold him a house.

  “Elliot,” she said, “I need a favor.”

  CELL BLOCK BRAVO—DAY 1

  Bare walls. Bunk beds. Mary lies awake on the top bunk.

  I could hear my cellmate, the girl with the nasty thigh wound, stretch out in the bunk below. Throughout the evening she had made several futile stabs at conversation. Her name was Crystal. She grew up in Jacksonville. She was allergic to peanuts. She hated cold weather. She feared the dark. She needed a shot of Jack.

  I wanted no part of it.

  “Hope you don’t mind sleeping up there,” she said in a babyish voice, as if she were addressing someone she was close to. “I have to sleep here ’cause of my injury.”

  I rolled over toward the wall and sobbed for the first time that day.

  “Hey. I’m here if you wanna talk,” the girl said. Her voice had the opaque tone of an alcoholic’s, a low-pitched, almost drab timbre. She dragged out the ends of her sentences like those vapid girls on reality TV.

  “They busted me at Tampa International,” the girl went on. “It would’ve never happened if I was nonstop Bogotá to Miami. But my boyfriend booked me through Panama. Genius that he is. I’m the only mule he’s got and he detours me through Panama. Panama! Such a loser. Glad I don’t ever have to go back. If you wanna know the truth, I’d rather take a five-year plea than go back.”

  The girl’s monotone lulled me into a calmer state.

  “How old are you?” I asked her after a while.

  “Twenty-one.”

  Moments later the guard came for me. I could make a phone call, the one I was dreading for so many reasons. She led me to a bank of phones in a hallway smudged with hand-scrawled messages and, after giving it considerable thought, I dialed my parents’ number. I couldn’t hear who answered the phone but the ear-piercing blast of Miami-style rap gave me a clue.

  “Fatty, turn the music down,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

  I could imagine the scene on the other end, inside Fatty’s psychedelic room. Worn satin sheets. Gold chains dangling from the bedpost along with the black beret that transformed an obese convenience store clerk named Rosendo into Fatty Guevara, flagship voice of Sin Verguenza Records. Fatty was probably sprawled on the bed, the parolee-monitoring device tight around his massive ankle, listening to his latest joint, which surely sounded like every other one of his not-very-creative rantings. My little brother, Fatty, was Miami’s answer to Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the late rapper who went to live at his momma’s house after racking up one parole violation too many. That’s Fatty, sponging off the folks so he can go lead some fictional revolution. That’s his thing, the “revolutionary” fetish. That’s why he wears the single-star beret and strikes a Che pose on his YouTube video, wielding the family name as if we were related to any such simpleton. But, then again, I guess it takes one poseur to inspire another.

  “Listen to me. This is important,” I said.

  But it was too late. Fatty had dropped the phone and belted out his greatest hit: “Ma!”

  That cry. That cry bolted down the hallway across a wall of papal memorabilia and flamenco-themed art, and it found only empty chairs and empty rooms in a virtually empty house.

  Fatty picked up the phone again.

  “Oh. I forgot,” he said. “They’re on some cruise.”
/>   “What about Max?”

  “Haven’t seen him.”

  “Listen to me. There’s been a horrible mistake. I don’t know what’s happened, but—”

  “You’re in jail,” he said, unfazed.

  “How do you know? Never mind,” I said. “I need you to get ahold of Gina.”

  “Gina called a little while ago,” he said.

  “What?” I said. I could barely hear him over the noise in his room.

  “She’s the one who told me you’re in jail,” said Fatty.

  For the first time in hours, I felt the tiniest bit connected to my world.

  “Good. I need you to track down Tony. His number’s on the fridge. Tell him where I am. Tell him I need to see him right away,” I said. “Max is with child services. Tony needs to go pick him up.”

  “Got it.”

  “This is urgent, Fatty.”

  “Duh.”

  A long, irritating blast of simulated gunfire rattled across the telephone line.

  “Turn the damn music off,” I said. A half second later there was silence.

  “I’ll call Tony. Don’t worry. I got you, sis.”

  “What do I do about Mom and Dad?” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Call ’em. They got phones on the ship. They got everything on those ships,” he said.

  “No, I’ll wait for them to get back.”

  “They’ll call when they get to Jamaica, or wherever they’re going,” said Fatty. The thought hadn’t occurred to me.

  “If they call, don’t say anything. It’s better that they don’t know.”

  “They’ll be pissed.”

  “They’ll have a heart attack,” I said. “Don’t say a word.”

  “All right. But let me ask you something,” Fatty said. He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I was stunned that he would even ask. “I did nothing.”

  “Okay, let me help you out here. When you say that, try to sound a little more convincing.”

  “You think I’m guilty?”

  “Nah, I’m just saying…”

  “You think I’m a drug dealer?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, how many people can write a check for five grand on the spot?”

  “People who work.”

  “Yeah. So stick with that, only don’t try so hard. It makes you sound more guilty.”

  “Good night, Fatty,” I said, hanging up the phone.

  As I lay in my bunk that night, Max’s voice rang in my head. In the sleepless night, it was the one thing that reminded me who I was. I tried to imagine myself in my own bed, safe in the knowledge that my son was sleeping just a few feet down the hall. I closed my eyes and pictured his bedroom. I tried to remember the titles on his bookshelf and the faces on the basketball posters hanging on his bedroom wall, and I strained to hear the soft patterns of his breathing as he slept. This is how I finally lulled myself to sleep.

  But the next morning, I heard that jarring name again when the guard came around for me.

  “Portilla! Visitor.”

  I ran a brush through my hair, smoothed the creases of my green prison jumpsuit, and went to meet my visitor. He was a dis tinguished man in his early sixties, salt-and-pepper hair, strong jaw, warm eyes. Elliot Casey clasped my hand in a sturdy handshake. He was the rock star defense lawyer I had seen on cable news programs, the silver fox among the overamped pundits, certainly out of my price range. If not for Gina, he might not have been there that morning. She sold him the mansion of his dreams on Star Island, and he was forever grateful. Now I was grateful to see him.

  He listened intently as I recounted the details of the raid and the interrogation. He asked no questions.

  “I’ll do my best to get you out on bond,” he said after I was done.

  “Bond? I’m innocent.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “When do we go to court?”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “Ten minutes.”

  Casey must have read my exhaustion.

  “Look on the bright side,” he said. “At least they moved the case to your home turf, where you have a community and a standing.”

  “They think I’m a drug dealer from New Mexico.”

  Casey leafed through some of his documents.

  “From Colombia, via New Mexico, via the Florida Keys. If that makes sense.”

  “Where do you see that?”

  “Don’t get too excited—it’s only seven pages. Six of them are devoted to your illustrious co-conspirators.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but there was no time to ask. Casey signaled for a guard and gave my shoulder a reassuring tap.

  “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

  There’s only so much you can say in a letter to a seven-year-old boy. How do you explain that life has turned upside down, that people are accusing you of things you didn’t do, that not even a judge believes you—he denied you bail and sent you back to cell block Bravo, back to the cell with a girl whose tweaker boyfriend blew a hole in her leg with a .357 Magnum? What do you say?

  “Dear Max,” you say, “Today I learned about codes. A code is like a hidden message that not everybody understands. It takes good eyes and a smart mind to read a code.

  “Here is one for you: I love you more than anything on this earth, more than all the starfish in the sea.

  “Love, Mommy.”

  In the blur of days that followed, I raced for my life. I hit the law library and scoured drug cases, determined to find cases similar to my own. I pestered Casey for updates. I left repeated—and unanswered—messages for Agent Green. I brainstormed with Gina in twice-daily phone sessions. But I was simply treading water. Five days had passed since my arrest and nothing seemed to change my situation. Tony was still AWOL. According to his secretary, he was on a yacht, sailing around the Greek Isles, and was last known to be docked off the beaches of Corfu, where he would spend the last few days of his vacation blissfully disconnected. My parents were still away, as their one-week cruise was drawing to a close.

  But it was I who felt as if I were adrift on a boat in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the world and, most flagrantly, from Max. Casey had been able to verify that my son had been placed in a temporary foster home until his father or grandparents returned. Casey had been permitted to deliver two of my letters to Max via the young social worker, Tiffany. But Max had not been allowed to write me back. Although I heard only assurances that my boy was holding up okay—“like a little champ,” the social worker told Casey—I didn’t buy it. I knew my son too well. I knew he wasn’t “holding up” in any way that would be considered cooperative. He was giving them hell. He was making noise. He was making demands, just like his mother would be doing in his place.

  One week after my arrest, my parents returned from their cruise. Gina had waited for them at the dock when they disembarked from the Illusion of the Seas, and she had broken the news. Incensed, Daddy jumped into high gear.

  “I need to get home. Rapidamente,” he commanded, tossing the luggage in Gina’s car. Once back home, he darted toward his bedroom closet and retrieved from the top shelf a faded pink box bearing a half-peeled beige label inscribed in a spidery hand.

  DULCE MARIA, it read.

  Box in hand, Daddy asked Gina to drive him to the detention center. In a rare show of machismo, he ordered my mother to stay home.

  “Don’t worry, I’m bringing her back home with me. In this box is all the proof they need,” he told her.

  Gina didn’t have the heart to tell him he wouldn’t be allowed to bring anything inside the visiting area, that he would be searched on his way in to see me. So when they arrived at the jail and Daddy held up the box, demanding to see the person in charge, he triggered a security alert that brought a stampede of armed guards to the reception area.

  “Put the box down, si
r,” ordered the chief guard.

  “No!” said Daddy. “This box doesn’t leave my hands. It belongs to my daughter.”

  Gina tried to intervene, explaining to the guard that Daddy was harmless and that there was nothing illegal or explosive in the box—even though she had no idea what was actually in it—but it was too late for rational explanations. Two guards wrestled Daddy to the floor, sending the pink box flying and causing its contents to scatter all over the floor. There, atop the filthy, government-issue linoleum, lay precious relics of my childhood, all the mementos Daddy had saved since my birth. As Daddy wept, crumpled in a chair, the guards inspected each item as if they were examining a cache of stolen goods: my birth certificate, my baptismal certificate, my first baby tooth, my first pair of white knit booties, a wallet-sized photo of my first Holy Communion, all my report cards from the first through sixth grades, and a curled lock of hair tied with a yellow satin bow.

  When the guards placed the final item in the box and returned the box to Daddy, he took it with a sense of vindication.

  “You see, my daughter is innocent,” he said.

  But neither the mementos nor Daddy’s good intentions would make a difference that day. By the time the security alert was canceled, visiting hours were over. Gina took Daddy back home, but she promised to deliver the box to my lawyer as evidence. Satisfied with that, he set his focus on the next mission: bringing Max home.

  “I’ll have him home first thing tomorrow morning,” Daddy said when I spoke to him that night. My heart leaped at the thought. But I wondered why neither Casey nor Gina had mentioned it when I spoke to them earlier.

  “Is there news? Did you talk to the social worker?” I asked.

  “No, I left her a message. I’m going to call her again in the morning,” he said with a flat confidence, a level tone that had made me feel safe as a child.

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  “Sweet dreams, my girl.”

  I went back to my cot that night feeling hopeful.