Free Rag and Bone by Michael Nava Page B

she might have gone to or who would know where she is?”
    “She seems to be close to her mother-in-law,” Elena ventured.
    “Pete’s mom? Wouldn’t she be on his side?”
    “The way Vicky talked about her, she could have been her mother, too,” Elena said. I could hear that the admission pained her.
    “What’s her name?”
    “Jesusita. She lives down there in a town called Garden Grove. You know where that is?”
    “Just south of L.A.,” I said. “Jesusita. I assume her last name is Trujillo.”
    “As far as I know.”
    “I’ll have my investigator try to track her down. If she’s in touch with Vicky, maybe she’ll get a message to her from you.”
    “Thank you, Henry.”
    “Elena, I know this is hard for you.”
    “I’ll be all right,” she replied. “You really sound like you’re having a good day today.”
    “I feel good.”
    “Well, whatever you’re doing, keep it up.”
    I called my investigator, Freeman Vidor, and gave him the assignment of finding Jesusita Trujillo. Freeman was suffering from a form of arthritis that was slowly crippling his spine and might have forced him to retire had his career not been saved by the internet. The dingy office he occupied on Broadway now looked like the headquarters of some dot-com startup.
    “Of course,” I told him, “Trujillo is a guess. She might have divorced and remarried.”
    “You don’t have anything else? DOB? Social Security?”
    “Just a name and a town,” I said. “I thought you could get anything on the internet these days.”
    Freeman snorted. “You think the web’s like a Ouija board. I’ll get back to you.”
    The sky was clear and bright above the tiers of half-filled seats in Dodger Stadium. The typical Dodger fan, John had explained to me, arrived around the middle of the third inning and skipped out at the seventh inning stretch to avoid traffic. Out on the field, the visiting Giants were taking batting practice. The sight of the Giants’ black and orange took me back to childhood and going with my father to Candlestick, when the Giants had more Latin players than other teams in the majors: Orlando Cepeda, the Alou brothers, José Pagan and Juan Marichal, the first living Latino player inducted into the Hall of Fame. Almost more than the game itself, I think what my father loved was the sight of those dark-skinned, Spanish-speaking men outplaying the americanos at their own game. Their heroics on the field, and a couple of beers, must have made him feel bigger in his own life—for a few hours, anyway. On the long drive home, we regaled each other by reliving the big plays of the game, a sweet catch by Pagan or a strike-out by Marichal or another Cepeda homer. Those were the happiest moments I ever had with my dad. By the time I was ten, our expeditions to el béisbol were over, and after that there were no happy memories.
    “Hey, Henry,” John said, nudging me. He’d gone off to buy a couple of Dodger dogs and had returned to his seat while I was lost in the past. “You with me?”
    “I was thinking about my dad.”
    “Must have been a good memory,” he said. “You were smiling. Here’s your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion—you sure it’s okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?”
    “If it’s not,” I said, biting into the hot dog, “I’ll die a happy man.”
    He looked momentarily alarmed, then relaxed and grinned. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a short-sleeved yellow silk shirt, half-unbuttoned to take in the sun. His Dodgers cap covered his graying hair and I could almost see the teenage prospect he had been when he played for the Dodgers farm teams. He must have been a beautiful boy, I thought, and then wondered who I was protecting by putting it in the past tense.
    “You don’t wish sometimes you were down there on the field?”
    “Ancient history,” he said, then relented. “Yeah, sometimes. I can remember going out to the mound at the beginning of the season