Detective Rios let me look at those photographs for a long time before she spoke again. The man in the nursing home in Shreveport was ninety one. The man in the trailer in Beaumont was eighty four. Both had given Curtis Webb power of attorney, and both had been found in the final week of their lives thin as rails, with nothing in their kitchens but dog food. “It is not a coincidence, Mister Delgado,” she said. “It is a method. He finds a proud old man with a pension and a family that is not paying attention. He takes control of the money. Then he stops feeding him.”
I felt my knees go weak. I sat down in the chair across from her desk. I thought of my father in his undershirt at the kitchen table, tucking a paper towel into his collar like a napkin, spooning chicken and rice out of a can and calling it fine. If I had stayed on the boat another month, if the ice had not come early, I would have been standing at his funeral. She watched me understand it. “You got there in time,” she said quietly. “That matters. Do not forget it.”
Then she told me what we needed to do. She could not arrest Curtis on a bank statement alone. She needed him on the record, in the act, with the money in his hands. A judge had already approved a warrant for the casino accounts in Shreveport, and the state police there were watching the player card. All she asked of me was patience. I was to take my father out of that house at once, say nothing to Curtis, and make no calls to my sister. “Angela has her own story to tell,” the detective said. “Let her tell it first.”
A proud man will starve before he asks for help, so it falls to those who love him to show up at the door.
I drove back to Ocean Drive and found my father asleep in his recliner with the television on. I woke him gently. I told him we were going on a short trip, and he did not ask where. He packed one small bag with two shirts, his rosary, and a photograph of my mother. I drove him to the house of my old shipmate Hector in Portland, Texas, whose wife had cooked for eight people every night for thirty years. When she saw my father in the doorway, she put down her spoon and said, “Sit, Manuel. You are late for dinner.”
My father ate three helpings of her enchiladas. He ate slowly, with his head bowed, as if he were afraid the plate would be taken away. Hector and I stood in the kitchen and did not speak. At the end of the meal he put down his fork and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Mijo,” he said, “I did not want to be a burden.” I knelt by his chair and took his rough welder hands in mine. I told him that I had never once in my life carried anything lighter than him.
Angela came the next morning. She had driven all night from Houston and her eyes were swollen almost shut. She walked into the kitchen of Hector and knelt on the linoleum in front of my father and laid her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. He said nothing, and he did not need to. After a while she lifted her head and told us everything. She had known Curtis was gambling, but she had believed he was winning. She had never once seen the statements. He had controlled the mail, the phone, and the car keys, and she had been too ashamed to see it.
The call from Detective Rios came on a Wednesday afternoon. They had taken Curtis at a blackjack table in the Shreveport casino at two in the afternoon, with the player card of my father in his wallet and seventeen thousand dollars in chips stacked in front of him. He had not even looked up when the officers approached. He simply said, “I was going to put it back.” Rios told me they found a second notebook in his truck, with the names of six more elderly people, all with pensions, all with children who lived far away.
They reached all six before the end of the week. Five were frightened but healthy. One, a retired schoolteacher in Lake Charles named Mrs. Thibodeaux, was in a hospital bed, weak and dehydrated but alive. Rios told me she had asked the nurse for a cup of tea and cried when it came. Curtis was charged with fraud, exploitation of the elderly, and two counts of causing death through neglect. The district attorney said he would not see the outside of a prison for the rest of his life. Angela filed for divorce the next morning.
The money did not all come back. The casino returned thirty one thousand dollars that had been frozen in the account, and the court ordered restitution for the rest. I told my father we did not need it. He looked at me with a stern expression I remembered from childhood and said, “Mijo, a man pays what he owes.” So we put the check in a savings account, in his name only, with me as a signer and no one else. Every month his pension goes in on the first, and every month he spends it on whatever he likes.
I stayed home that winter and did not go back to the boat. I cooked with my father every night, tamales on Saturdays, caldo on Sundays. On a cold day in January, we loaded the twelve cans of dog food into my truck and drove them to the animal shelter on Leopard Street. The director said they would use every can. As we turned to leave, my father stopped at a pen in the corner where a gray muzzled old hound lay with his chin on his paws. “Mijo,” he said, “this one looks hungry.” We took him home. He eats very well.