Right to Die

Cuervo.”
    “Ray, please. I thought we had a talk already?”
    “Something else came up.”
    “I’m, uh, entertaining.” He sent his eyebrows toward the interior staircase behind him. “Can’t it wait?”
    “I’m afraid not. Somebody took a shot at your stepmother yesterday.”
    “Somebody... you mean with a gun?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Dios mío! Come in, come in.”
    Cuervo’s living room had a view of the harbor through a glass wall, French doors leading to a wooden deck. He waved at the sectional furniture around an elaborate home entertainment center that dominated one of the other walls. “Sit down. I’ll be right back.”
    Cuervo took the stairs two at a time. I heard just vague voices, then a door opening and closing. Cuervo came back down, pulling a rugby shirt over his head, the collar of the shirt uneven.
    I said, “I’m sorry to be interrupting anything.”
    “That’s okay. Her night was just about up anyway.”
    A shoe hit the floor upstairs, and Cuervo got serious. “So what’s this about Maisy?”
    I went through it for him.
    Cuervo raked his hair with his left hand. “Unbelievable. I can’t believe none of you got hurt.”
    “The shooter wasn’t trying to hit us.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I know. The question is, do you have any idea who it could have been?”
    “Me? How would I know anything about it?”
    “You told me you and your father used to go hunting.”
    “Sure, we... Oh, come on, man. You’re thinking I had something to do with this?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Hey, lots of kids go hunting with their fathers. Doesn’t mean I’d—look, I don’t have any reason to shoot Maisy.”
    “Any reason to scare her?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “You said last time that you didn’t care about the split on your father’s estate.”
    “That’s right. She got the house in Candás, I got the liquid stuff.”
    “Any nonfinancial reason for getting back at her?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like sexual?”
    Cuervo hurled himself from the sectional piece. I rolled to the left, felt him land, then rolled back, clamping my arms around his. I pushed his face into the cushion for about ten seconds, then let up enough to hear him say, “Okay, okay. Let me go.”
    I stood up and over Cuervo as he turned back to me. He kneaded his left bicep with his right hand, then switched off to the other arm.
    I said, “Just what exactly happened between you and Maisy Andrus?”
    Cuervo cocked an ear toward upstairs before speaking in a low voice. “I was maybe fourteen, fifteen. After my mother died, I was pretty used to having the run of the house in Candás, you know? I mean, it was just my father, Manolo, and me when I was home from school. Well, one day I was coming back after going to the beach, and I was dripping wet on the tile floor near the staircase. So I stripped down as I was climbing the steps, hurrying so the water wouldn’t get all over the rugs upstairs.
    “I kind of burst into the bathroom, naked, and there’s... there’s Maisy. Naked, too, just stepping out of a bath. I was stunned, I guess. Then Maisy looked down at me”— Cuervo dropped his eyes to the crotch of his tennis shorts— “and she said, ‘Ramón, you’re your father’s son,’ and smiled. Looking back on it, I guess she meant it to cut the embarrassment, but at the time I took it... I took it for my father’s marrying a whore, okay? A Whore who’d make a play for her new husband’s son.”
    “You ever talk it out with her?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    Cuervo blushed for the first time. “We don’t do things that way.”
    “ ‘We’?”
    “In Spain . We don’t do that kind of thing. It’s just... different over there. You wouldn’t understand.”
    “This scene with Andrus in the bathroom. Is that why you were so long coming home to see your father?”
    “Probably. It was all a long time ago, all right? Not a real happy time to remember either.”
    “Where were you yesterday?”
    “Yesterday?”
    “Right.”
    “At the plant.”
    “In New Hampshire .”
    “Yeah. Where you saw me before.”
    “When did you leave?”
    “I don’t know. I headed back here around four, four-thirty. What difference—oh. Look, I told you, I don’t know anything about the shooting. I don’t even own a gun anymore, okay?”
    “You said Maisy Andrus got the house. What about the hunting rifles you and your father used?”
    “I don’t know what happened to