I opened the door myself, with the rosary beads still wound around my fingers, and found a small woman in a gray overcoat on the porch, with two men in dark jackets standing behind her. “Mr. Castillo, I am Judge Patricia Alvarado of the federal court,” she said. “I am sorry to come at this hour.” It was eleven fifty two on the last night of the year. She held out a single page. It carried the raised gold seal of the United States District Court, and across the top, in capital letters, the words Order to Preserve Assets. I read it under the porch light. My hands were steady. My heart was not.
She told me the rest in my own front hall, with the cold coming in behind her. Walter Hollis, the county judge who had been removed from the bench in August, had spent six years selling outcomes. Monica had three drunk driving cases dismissed. Anthony owed a bookmaker in El Paso a sum that was somehow forgiven. The bookmaker paid Hollis in cash, and the cash was repaid, she said, in small checks drawn on my own company, through an account that only my son could sign. “Mr. Castillo, your children did not know the full scheme,” she said gently. “But they knew enough.”
Monica came down the stairs in her robe, holding the banister with both hands. Anthony came out of the den with a glass in his hand, and he set it down very carefully when he saw the two men in the dark jackets. One of them held up a badge and said the letters I had only ever heard on the television. FBI. The bells of the church down the street began to ring for midnight, and no one in my house moved. Judge Alvarado looked at my children, one and then the other, and then she looked at me. “Sir, it is your house,” she said. “Tell me how you want this to go.”
A string of rosary beads left on a hallway table gave one father the weekend to bring his children back to the family home in Las Cruces.
I gave my terms in the front hall, with the beads in my fist. The company had sold for nineteen point five million dollars, and the money was in a trust that no creditor and no bookmaker could touch. I would testify before the grand jury in Albuquerque, against Hollis and the man in El Paso. Monica would enter a treatment program in the morning. Anthony would attend a gambling recovery program and hand over every account he held. Ernesto, my foreman for thirty years, would manage the company transition. And no child of mine would receive a dollar until a full year of recovery had passed.
Monica sank to the bottom stair and cried the way she cried at six years old, with her whole face. “Papa, I was so ashamed,” she said. “I woke up in places I did not know. Judge Hollis said he would make it go away, and I let him, because I could not bear to see it.” I sat down on the stair beside her, with my old knees complaining, and I put my arm around her shoulders. She smelled of lavender soap and, faintly, of whiskey. “Monica Elena, I would have driven you to the clinic myself,” I told her. “You only had to ask.”
Anthony did not cry. He stood rigid in the doorway of the den, and then, quick as a man who has run before, he turned and bolted through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard. I heard the screen slam and the gate bang. He had not gone twenty feet. Ernesto, who had come to wish me a happy new year and had been waiting quietly on the back patio with a plate of tamales, caught him at the gate by the collar with his big, scarred hands. “Mijo, enough,” he said, in the voice he used on the job site. “Your father is waiting.”
They brought him back through the kitchen, panting, with dust on his good shirt and tamale sauce on his sleeve. The agents did not put cuffs on him. They let him stand by the table where he had eaten his first communion cake, with his head down and his shoulders shaking. “Papa, I lost eleven hundred thousand dollars,” he said. “I took the loans in the name of the company. I thought I could win it back by spring.” I put my hand on the back of his neck, the way I did when he was small and afraid of the dark. “Anthony, you will win nothing back,” I said. “But you will walk out of this clean.”
The money consequences took a year to unwind. Hollis pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud and received a long sentence in a federal prison. The bookmaker in El Paso lost his business and his freedom. Anthony cooperated, completed the recovery program, and repaid the company out of wages from a job on one of the crews of Ernesto. Monica spent ninety days at a treatment center and returned to Las Cruces thinner and clearer. The three dismissed cases were reopened, and she faced them in open court, with her head up, and accepted the sentence without a word.
In the name of my father, Tomas, who passed in 1987 and who poured the first foundation of our company with a wheelbarrow and a borrowed level, I started the Tomas Foundation Stone Fund. It pays for treatment, legal help and honest counsel for families in Dona Ana and Luna counties whose grown children are caught in the courts, in the bottle or in debt. In the first year, we helped twenty three families. A man of eighty, with cement dust in the lines of his hands, sat in the office and said, “I thought I had to carry it by myself.”
On the next New Year Eve, I stood at the window of my front hall with the rosary beads in my hand and watched the street. At eleven fifty two, a car pulled to the curb. Out stepped Monica, in a green dress, and Anthony, in a pressed shirt, each carrying a covered dish. They climbed the walk together, slowly, and one of them knocked. I opened the door. They stood on the porch under the light with the cold coming in around them. “Papa, we are early,” Monica said. “Eight minutes,” Anthony added, and I laughed until I had to hold the doorframe.
