It was the one thing his careful mind couldn’t account for — that the people he isolated might find each other.
Chapter 24 — The Recording Plays
The trial came three months later.
Damian walked in wearing a sharp gray suit with an expensive defense lawyer beside him, and the lawyer’s first move was to try to throw out the kitchen recording — an illegal wiretap, he called it, inadmissible, fruit of a poisoned tree.
The judge was a sharp-eyed woman named Lorena Valdes, and she did not entertain it for long.
“If Mr.
Rios did not wish to be recorded,” she said, “attempting to defraud and chemically incapacitate a senior citizen at that man’s own kitchen table, then Mr.
Rios should not have done those things at that man’s own kitchen table.
Overruled.
The recording comes in.”
And then the courtroom went silent, and they played it.
It filled the room — Damian’s own voice, warm and then cold, pure bureaucracy, the debts, Efrain, the house as collateral, the dull, plain woman who was never part of the plan.
Then my father’s steady voice, the tap on the radio, you just gave us every word we needed. I watched the jury’s faces as they listened to a man convict himself in his own confident voice, and I watched Damian drop his head into his hands, and I did not look away from him.
I had spent twelve years not seeing him clearly.