“Friday is the day you drive to Phoenix,” Benny said, reading the tape twice. I had forgotten. Two weeks earlier I had told Crystal at dinner that I would take the Buick up the long grade on Interstate 10 to meet a banker about a reverse mortgage on my adobe house, because I wanted to help them buy a home of their own. The line was cut just far enough that it would hold in town and fail on the hills. I sat very still on that stool. Then I said, “Benny, do not fix it yet. Please. I need to hear what they say when they think I am not listening.”
Benny called his old friend Detective Ortega at the Tucson police, and by noon the three of us were in his back office with the door shut. Ortega was a tired, careful man in a gray jacket. “Mrs. Lattimore, the tracker is evidence,” he said. “Put it right back where you found it. Let them keep watching.” I told him that for thirty two years I had typed testimony, and I knew how to get a man to say exactly what he meant. “In Arizona you may record a conversation you take part in,” I said. He smiled for the first time. “So I have heard.”
Benny fixed the brakes that afternoon, quietly, and he left the cut piece in a paper bag with a label. The tracker went back under the car with its magnet. On Wednesday I called Lance in my sweetest voice. “I have decided to do the Phoenix trip after all,” I said. “Friday morning, early. Come for supper Thursday, and bring Crystal, and we will sign the house papers together.” I could hear him smiling through the phone. “That is great, Mom,” he said. “You are doing the smart thing.” My steno recorder sat in my purse, red light on, ready.
A strip of tape, an honest mechanic and a court reporter with a steno recorder let a Tucson widow catch a scheming son in law before the Phoenix road.
Thursday night I made green chile enchiladas and put the good tablecloth on. Lance talked about his solar business, and the investors who wanted their money back, and the pressure he was under. Crystal barely looked at me. When the plates were cleared, I said innocently, “I worry about the drive. The grade past Picacho scares me.” Lance reached across the table and patted my hand. “You will be fine, Mom,” he said. “Take it slow on the downhill. Honestly, it is a good thing you are going Friday. Everything gets so much simpler after that.”
“Simpler how?” I asked. He laughed, a little too long. “I mean the papers, Mom. The house. Crystal and I could finally breathe.” “And if the car fails on that hill?” I said. The table went silent. A clock ticked. Crystal stared at her husband with her mouth open. “Lance,” she said. “You told me the tracker was just to keep her safe.” He put down his fork. “Crystal, not now.” “What did you do to the car of my mother?” she cried. I reached into my purse, set the little recorder on the tablecloth, and said, “Everything he said is already typed, honey.”
The doorbell rang. Detective Ortega stepped in with two uniformed officers and a folder, and what he said next was calm and official and quite complete. Lance began to explain it was a joke, a misunderstanding, a favor. Ortega held up a photograph of the tape on the frame and then the cut piece in its paper bag. “Mr. Lance Dorsey,” he said, “you have the right to remain silent.” Lance looked at me with a face I had never seen. “Mom,” he said. I answered the way I had answered a hundred defendants. “I am not your mother. Please stand up.”
Crystal came to my kitchen at midnight, shaking and gray. She told me she had known about the loan from the investors and that Lance was in deep, but she had believed him when he said he only wanted to look after me. “I did not ask enough questions,” she said. “I did not want the answers.” I let her cry, and then I made her a cup of tea. The next morning she gave the police every message and every bank record she could find, and she moved into a small apartment, alone and ashamed and honest.
The trial was in spring, in the same courthouse where I had worked, and a young reporter typed my testimony. Lance was sentenced to a long term, and the investors came after what he owed. I gave Crystal her spare key back and then, after a long time, a new one. She sees a counselor and works at the library on Fourth Avenue, and every Tuesday she comes for lunch. We do not say much. We have all the time in the world to learn how.
In the weeks before the trial I found out how many small things Lance had arranged. He had copied the spare key, learned the pattern of my errands, and told two neighbors I was getting forgetful. Mrs. Alvarez next door brought over a plate of tamales and cried at my kitchen table. “I thought I was helping,” she said. I told her she had been kind to answer, and that the mistake belonged to the one who asked. Then I changed every lock on the property myself, with Benny holding the screwdriver, and we agreed it was the best afternoon of our month.
Benny put new brake lines on the Buick, and I drove it that Friday, to Phoenix, with the windows down and no one watching but the sky. I met the banker, and I signed nothing I had not read twice. When I got home the evening light was gold on the palo verde. At six the next morning I filled the hummingbird feeder, as I have every day since 1990. A tiny ruby throated visitor hovered at the glass, and in the driveway the silver Buick of Wade shone, quiet, perfect and mine.