Mariela’s cheeks flame brighter, but after that, dinner continues seamlessly: over buttery filet mignon, they discuss the architecture in DF and whether President Reagan will go on to a second term. Their wineglasses refill as if by magic, until Lore has no idea how many glasses she’s consumed. Then come the after-dinner drinks: port, more sipping tequila, playful mango shots with sugar-spice rims. The mariachi band has been replaced with a popular Mexican band everyone knows—a surprise, judging by the bride’s strangled shriek of joy. The table empties of everyone except Lore and Andres.
Lore knows she should drink water, but she and Andres are laughing, talking with exuberant ease, and it feels so good to not be worrying, for once. They talk about how, for him, this is the first month of the new year—he lives by the academic calendar, he says, and August has that fresh-start sparkle that others feel in January. So you’re either five months early or seven months late, Lore jokes, and he says late. Argentineans, like Mexicans, are always late.
“So that’s where you’re from,” Lore says. “Argentina. I’ve been trying to figure it out.”
“Buenos Aires.” A shadow crosses Andres’s face.
It’s Lore’s job to be informed of international affairs, so she knows he’s referring to the military junta and the Dirty War, the last seven years of state terrorism in which tens of thousands of political dissidents—many of them students, activists, journalists—have been killed or “disappeared.”
“The election is coming up, isn’t it?” she asks.
Andres nods. In his eyes, guarded, cynical hope. “October. Let’s hope for the return of democracy.”
“What was it like to grow up there?” Lore asks, and he tells her about his childhood, how he misses the graffiti and street art that make even the wealthiest neighborhoods feel like raw silk, on the edge of unraveling. Lore tells him about City Drug, the 1930s apothecary-turned-soda-fountain where she used to take the bus after school, ten cents for a bag of pistachios white with salt, making her mouth water to think about even now.
“So tell me, Ms. Crusoe,” Andres says sometime later, with a lazy smile. “Couldn’t your boyfriend make it tonight?”
“Boyfriend?” Lore laughs, glancing automatically at her ring finger—but of course, it’s bare. Though, has she really not mentioned Fabian or the boys all night?
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Lore says, and before she can finish, Andres is out of his seat, hand outstretched.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he says. “Dance with me?”
Lore will look back on this moment again and again over the years, naming every detail back to life: how Andres has loosened his bow tie, giving Lore the startling impulse to undo it completely; the long, elegant fingers on his waiting hand, which she will later discover smell like oranges from his morning café de olla; the irresistible chaos of the dance floor, pulsing now within her chest. A simple misunderstanding, an incomplete sentence, leading to a moment when everything that will happen has not yet happened, and so every possibility still exists: Lore could decline the dance. She could tell him she doesn’t have a boyfriend—she has a husband. She could realize she hasn’t had so much to drink in months and remember her beautiful king-size bed upstairs, a haven of uninterrupted rest. In this moment, Lore’s life forks.
But she doesn’t know that yet, and who ever does? Lore looks up into those shattered-bottle eyes that are suddenly electric, and though his stare flusters Lore, it electrifies her, too, because how long has it been since she’s been looked at this way, with such fierceness of curiosity, as though she might be anybody? And it’s only a dance, after all.
Cassie, 2017
On Tuesday, the day after we returned from the farm, Duke and I had our usual coffee and toast together before he left to start the brisket. For the perfect caramelized bark, he’d season the meat with only salt and pepper, dusted from an old shaker two feet above the glistening prime beef. Then he’d begin the eight-hour smoking process, a whole workday before the food truck’s window even slid open. Duke was as obsessive as I was about work, only his nourished people, while mine—well.
I spent the next three hours combing through my murder alerts and writing the day’s blog posts. Man sets wife on fire after believing she’d been poisoning his pot roast. Kid fresh out of high school plots his octogenarian godmother’s murder in hopes of inheriting her house. Man dismembers young girlfriend who wants no part of his group sex lifestyle. Below each post, a fuchsia link like a lipstick stain, tempting readers with You May Also Like. What a strange word to use in this context—like. I imagined readers flitting from post to post as if gorging on a box of chocolates, liking them right up until they felt sick.
I wanted out. Or no: I just wanted different. I might be a dirty little cog in the true crime industrial complex, but I still loved the genre. When it’s done right, true crime tells us who we are, who we should fear, who we are always in danger of becoming. Under a careful investigative eye, someone opaque briefly becomes transparent. Even if what’s revealed is ugly, it’s true. And nothing is more beautiful than the truth.
After a sad bagged-salad lunch, I reread the Dolores Rivera story. Though the article was ostensibly written for the thirty-year anniversary of Fabian’s sentencing (a lazy claim on relevance), there was so much about the murder the reporter didn’t even address. How had Fabian found out about Dolores’s double life, and how long had he known before killing Andres? How had he known where Andres was staying? Why take his rage out on the other man, instead of the woman who’d duped them both? I wondered why Andres’s body wasn’t found until the next morning—at a hotel, somebody should have heard the gunshot. And why had Fabian accepted such a harsh plea deal instead of taking his chances in court? This was the definition of a crime of passion. Any half-decent attorney should have been able to plead down the charges.
And finally, Dolores. Had she seen Andres that day? Had she known Fabian killed him before he was arrested? Was she haunted by her role in both men’s downfall, or—a cynical thought—was any part of her relieved to be free of them?
I made a spreadsheet with every name referenced in the piece, along with any contact information I could find. The Laredo Police Department didn’t have an online FOIA request form, so I left a voicemail with the records division. Then I started a rudimentary timeline: the year Dolores and Fabian married, the approximate year their sons were born, the date and place Dolores met Andres, the date they’d been married, and finally the murder and Fabian’s arrest. There were only ten days between the last two.
I worked in a state of heightened focus, like the few times I’d taken Adderall in college to write four papers back-to-back. If I was right about the potential for a story from Dolores’s perspective, I had to be fast.
Relationship fraud is typically a man’s crime, with the FBI identifying most common targets as women over forty who are divorced, widowed, and/or disabled. Money is usually the end game. In 2016, more than fifteen thousand relationship scams were reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, with losses over two hundred million dollars. The real numbers were probably much higher.
The stories were easy to find. Whirlwind romances, women who couldn’t believe their luck: He was a doctor, a soldier, an entrepreneur. He was handsome, charming. He took her out on his motorcycle, on his speedboat, in his convertible. He proposed after only a couple of months. Arms snaked around each other’s waists at courthouses and chapels, eyes shining. But the travel. The money he needed to borrow until the real estate deal came through. The errant piece of mail with a different name. The disappearing act. Heartbroken and humiliated, the women were forced to move in with aging parents or continue working the jobs from which they’d been set to retire. What was taken from them would never be recovered.