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“I did, didn’t I.” It’s not a question. “I made a mistake.”
He writes something down. “What mistake would that be, Mrs. Sanchez?”
“I saw Isabelle the night she died.” I say this quickly, on the out breath.
“I see. That’s quite a mistake. Did you forget about that?” He sits back in his seat and chews on the top of his pen.That is a bad habit,I want to say.I’ve been trying to get Carla to stop doing that and it’s really hard. Do you know how many trillions of bacteria you’re ingesting right now? Where has that pen been? In your unwashed pocket? Have you dropped it on this filthy floor lately? Of course you have.
“Mrs. Sanchez?”
I blurt it out. “I told you before, I went out with someone from work, June. I said we were together until I went home, but we weren’t together all night. We went our separate ways around eight p.m. I think. After that I went to Isabelle’s house, to talk to her, that’s all, just to talk. And before you ask what it was about…it was nothing. It was about my husband, actually. She was home, she let me in. I…my memory of that night is a bit fuzzy, so please bear with me.”
“Sure. Take your time.”
I pick at the skin around my thumbnail.
“I asked her to leave him alone. I suppose you know that she and Luis…”
I look at him, for help almost, for confirmation. But he just waits for me to continue.
“Well, I suppose you know that they had some kind of fling. Very brief, and he had ended it by then. Except I didn’t know that. Anyway, she wasn’t going to leave him alone, that’s what she said. Because they were in love. I may as well tell you, since you probably already know, that she was pregnant, and that it was Luis’s… but I don’t know if that’s true. I called her names, told her to stay away from my family, then I left.”
“What time was that?”
“Um… ten? Eleven maybe? Then I went out to a bar, I don’t remember where exactly.”
“Okay. So why didn’t you tell us this the first time?”
“I was embarrassed. I didn’t want you know about Luis and Isabelle. The fewer people who knew…”
Detective Dalloway, who is sitting on a flimsy plastic chair in a corner taking notes, turns to Jones. “I understand that,” she says. Then to me she adds, “If my husband was cheating on me, I wouldn’t want anybody to know about it.”
“Right?” I say, relieved. “Exactly.”
Jones makes a face. “We’ve all been there, Mrs. Sanchez. Having a partner cheat on you is a nasty feeling. Especially when there are children involved. I don’t blame you for wanting to have it out with her.”
I flinch. “I wouldn’t say ‘have it out’. More like a frank and honest discussion.”
“Right,” he says. “So that frank and honest discussion took place over… three hours?”
“No! God, no, I don’t remember what time I left but it couldn’t have been that long.”
“That’s all right, we have CCTV that places you in the neighborhood, walking away from Ms. Wilcox’s home at… eight minutes past ten. So let’s call it two hours, then. And just so I understand clearly here, you went to Ms. Wilcox’s house, you told her to stay away from your husband, you called her names… Then what did you do for the other hour and fifty minutes?”
“We argued! She told me she was pregnant, I cried, we shouted at each other!”
“Did you assault her?”
“No!” I rub my hand across my forehead. “I knocked over a vase. That’s all.” I think of the pool of water on the carpet, her crouching and putting the flowers back in the vase. How incongruous it all seems now. “She was perfectly fine when I left her.”
“Did she agree to”—he licks a fingertip and flicks over a page—“leave him alone?”
I take a moment to reply. “No. But it didn’t matter. Luis had already broken it off.”
“Had he?” Jones says, eyes wide, as if this is the first he’s heard of it. I tilt my head at him.
“He must have told you.”
He turns to Dalloway. “Did Mr. Sanchez say he’d broken it off?”
