Chapter 15 — The Valet Stand

The arrest did not happen quietly, in an office, on a weekday morning.

It happened at the valet stand of the South Beach hotel, in the early evening, as my mother and my sister were sweeping out in their new clothes to go to dinner.

The hotel’s own surveillance footage, which I later obtained, shows it: two plainclothes officers and a fraud investigator stepping out of the flow of well-dressed guests to block their path.

Stephanie begins to shout, immediately, about her rights, in the way of a person who has watched television but has never been in trouble.

And my mother does something I found, when I saw it, more revealing than anything else in the whole affair.