Juan Manuel’s face tightens. I notice the dark rings around his eyes and the redness in them. We look the same, he and I—all of our sorrows on full display.
“What did Rodney do then?” Charlotte asks.
“He said if I don’t keep quiet and do his dirty work, he would kill my family back home. You don’t understand. He has bad friends. He knew my address in Mazatlán. He’s a bad man. Sometimes, when I was working late, I got so tired I’d fall asleep in my chair. I’d wake up, forget where I was. Mr. Rodney’s men, they would hit me, throw water at me to keep me awake. Sometimes they burned me with cigars to punish me.” He holds out his arm.
“Molly,” Juan Manuel says. “I made up lies about the dishwasher burning me; I’m sorry. It’s not the truth.” His voice catches and he dissolves into tears. “It’s wrong,” he says. “I know a grown man should not cry like a baby,” he says. He looks up at me. “Molly, when you came in the hotel room that day and saw me with Rodney and his men, I tried to tell you to run away, to go tell someone. I didn’t want them to get you like they got me. But they did. They found a way to get you too.”
Mr. Preston is shaking his head as Juan Manuel continues to sob. My own tears begin to fall.
Suddenly, I feel very tired, more tired than I’ve ever felt in my life. All I want is to get up from the sofa, pad down the hallway to my bedroom, wrap myself up in Gran’s lone-star quilt, and fall asleep forever. I think back to Gran in her last days. Is this what she felt near the end, drained of the will to carry on?
“Looks like we found our rat,” Mr. Preston says.
“Where there’s one, there are more,” Charlotte adds. She turns to Juan Manuel. “Was Rodney working for Mr. Black? Did you ever hear or see anything—anything at all—that might suggest Mr. Black was actually behind this drug operation?”
Juan Manuel wipes the tears from his face. “Mr. Rodney never said much about Mr. Black, but sometimes he took calls. He thinks I’m so stupid that I don’t understand English. But I heard everything. Mr. Rodney would sometimes come into the room late at night with lots and lots of money. He’d set up meetings to give money to Mr. Black. Like more money than I ever seen in my life. Like this.” He makes a gesture with his hands.
“Stacks of bills,” Charlotte said.
“Yes. New. Fresh.”
“There were bundles like that in Mr. Black’s safe the day I found him dead,” I say. “Perfect, clean stacks.”
Juan Manuel continues. “Once, Rodney was really upset because there wasn’t much money coming in that night. He went to meet Mr. Black and when he came back, he had a scar just like mine. But not on his arms. On his chest. That’s how I knew I wasn’t the only one getting punished.”
The pieces come together. I remember the V of Rodney’s crisp, white shirt and the strange round blemish marring his perfectly smooth chest.
“I’ve seen that scar,” I say.
“There’s another thing,” Juan Manuel says. “Mr. Rodney never talked to me directly about Mr. Black. But I know he knows the wife. The new wife. Mrs. Giselle.”
“That’s not possible,” I say. “Rodney assured me he barely ever spoke to her.” But even as I say it, I realize I’m a fool.
“How do you know Rodney knows Giselle?” Charlotte asks.
Juan Manuel takes out his phone from his pocket and flicks through some photos until he finds the one he’s looking for. “Because I caught him,” he says. “How do you say in English en flagrante delito…”
“In flagrante?” Mr. Preston offers.
“Like this,” he says, and turns his phone around to show us a picture.
It’s Rodney and Giselle. They are kissing so passionately in a shadowy hallway of the hotel that they most certainly would not have noticed Juan Manuel taking the picture. My heart feels sore and heavy as I stare at the photo, registering the details—her hair swept across his shoulder, his hand on the small of her arched back. I fear my heart may stop altogether.
“Wow,” says Charlotte. “Can you send that to me?”
“Yes,” Juan Manuel says. They exchange numbers and he texts the photo to her. It takes only a few seconds for the vile proof to replicate on her phone.
Charlotte stands and paces the living room. “It’s becoming more and more clear that Giselle and Rodney had multiple reasons to want Mr. Black dead. But the only way we can prove Molly is innocent is by finding irrefutable proof that one or both of them killed Mr. Black.”