A Stranger in My Grave

10

But there was love, Daisy. You are proof there was love...

Through all of Fielding’s travels only one object had remained with him constantly, a grimy, pockmarked, rawhide suitcase. It was so old now that the clasps no longer fastened, and it was held together by a dog’s chain leash which he’d bought in a dime store in Kansas City. The few mementos of his life that Fielding had chosen to keep were packed inside this suitcase, and when he was feeling nostalgic or guilty or merely lonesome, he liked to bring them out and examine them, like a bankrupt shopkeeper taking stock of whatever he had left.

These mementos, although few in number, had such a strong content of emotion that the memories they evoked seemed to become more vivid with the passing of the years. The plastic cane from the circus at Madison Square Garden took him back to the big top so completely that he could recall every clown and juggler, every bulging-thighed aerialist and tired old elephant.

The suitcase contained, in addition to the cane:

A green derby from a St. Patrick’s Day party in Newark. (Oh, what a beautiful binge that had been!)

Two pieces of petrified wood from Arizona.

A silver locket. (Poor Agnes.)

A ukulele, which Fielding couldn’t play but liked to hold expertly in his hands while he hummed “Harvest Moon” or “Springtime in the Rockies.”

A little box made of sweet grass and porcupine quills by an Indian in northern Ontario.

A beribboned cluster of small gilded pine cones that had been attached to a Christmas present from Daisy: a wristwatch, later hocked in Chicago.

Several newspaper clippings about exotic ports on the other side of the world.

A package of letters, most of them from Daisy; the money orders which had been enclosed were long since cashed.

A pen which didn’t write, made of gold which wasn’t real.

Two train schedules.

A splinter of wood — allegedly from the battleship West Virginia after it was bombed at Pearl Harbor — which he’d got from a sailor in Brooklyn in exchange for a bottle of muscatel.

There were also about a dozen pictures: Daisy holding her high school diploma; Daisy and Jim on their honeymoon; a framed photograph of two identical middle-aged matrons who ran a boardinghouse in Dallas and had inscribed across the picture “To Stan Fielding, hoping he won’t forget ‘the Heavenly Twins’”; an enlarged snapshot of a coal miner from Pennsylvania, who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln and whose chief sorrow in life was that Lincoln was dead and no advantage could be taken of the resemblance. (“Think of it, Stan, all the fun we could have had, me being Abraham Lincoln, and you being my Secretary of State, and everybody bowing and scraping in front of us and buying us drinks. Oh, it just makes me sick thinking of all them free drinks we missed!”)

Another picture, mounted on cardboard, showed Ada and Fielding himself and a ranch hand he’d worked with near Albuquerque, a handsome dark-eyed young man called Curly. On spring days, when dust storms obscured the range and made work impossible, the three of them used to play pinochle together. Ada had been a good sport in those early times, full of fun and life, ready for anything. Having a child had changed her. It was a year of drought. During the months of Ada’s pregnancy more tears had come from her eyes than rain from the skies.

He brought the suitcase out now and began unpacking its contents on the big round table under the green-shaded ceiling light.

Muriel came in from the kitchen, the only other room in the apartment. She was a short, stout middle-aged woman with a hard mouth and eyes soft and round and pale green, like little mint patties with a licorice drop in the middle. She snorted at the sight of the open suitcase. “What do you want to go dragging out that old thing again for?”

“Memories, my dear. Memories.”

“Well, I’ve got a few memories myself, but I don’t go spreading them out in the middle of a table every couple of weeks.” She leaned over his shoulder to get a closer look at the picture taken at the ranch. “You look like you were a real lively bunch.”

“We were, thirty years ago.”

“Oh go on, you haven’t changed so much.”

“Not as much as Curly anyway,” he said grimly. “I looked him up last time I went through Albuquerque, and I hardly recognized him. He was an old man already, and his hands were so crippled by arthritis he couldn’t even play pinochle anymore, let alone work cattle. We talked about old times for a while, and he said he’d drop in on me next time he came to Chicago. But we both knew he’d never make it.”

“Well, don’t dwell on it,” Muriel said brusquely. “That’s the trouble with your poking around in the past like this — you get to dwelling on things. You mark my words, Stan Fielding. That old suitcase of yours is your worst enemy in this world. And if you were smart, you’d take it right down to the pier and chuck it in the briny with a farewell and amen.”

“I don’t claim to be smart. I’m thirsty, though. Bring me out a beer like a good wife, will you? It’s a hot day.”

“You’re not going to make it any cooler by lapping up beer,” she said. But she went out to the kitchen anyway, because she liked his reference to her being a good wife. They’d only been married for a month, and while she wasn’t passionately in love with him, he had many qualities she admired. He was kinder, in or out of his cups, than any man she’d ever known; he had a sense of humor and good manners and a fine head of hair and all his teeth. Above all, though, she appreciated his gift of gab. No matter what anyone said, really educated people with brains, Stan could always top them. Muriel was proud to be the wife of a man who had an answer for everything even though it might be, and often was, wrong. Being wrong, in a classy way, was to Muriel every bit as good as being right.

His easy manner of conversation had encouraged Muriel and emboldened her. From the taciturn and rather timid woman he’d met in Dallas she had developed into quite a loud and lively talker. She knew she had nothing to fear from him no matter what she said. He took all spoken words, including his own, with a grain of salt and a shrug. To written words his attitude was different. He believed absolutely everything he read, even flat contradictions, and when he received a letter, he treated it as if it were a message from a king, delivered via diplomatic pouch and much too special to be opened immediately. He always spent at least five minutes turning it over, examining it, holding it up to the light, before he finally slit the envelope.

When Muriel returned with his beer, she found him hunched over one of the letters, looking tense and anxious, as if this were the first time he’d read it instead of the fiftieth.

Most of the letters from Daisy he had read aloud to her, and she couldn’t understand his excitement over such dull stuff: The weather was warm. Or cold. The roses were out. Or in. Went to the dentist, the park, the beach, the museum, the movies... Probably a nice girl, this Daisy of his, Muriel thought, but not very interesting.

“Stan.”

“Eh?”

“Here’s your beer.”

“Thanks,” he said, but he didn’t reach for it immediately, as he usually did, and she knew this letter must be one of the bad ones he didn’t read aloud or talk about.

“Stan, you won’t get the blues, will you? I hate when you get the blues. It’s lonesome for me. Bottoms up, eh?”

“In a minute.”

“Hey, I know. Why don’t you show me the picture of the guy that looked like Abraham Lincoln? He must have been a real card, that one. Tell me about him, Stan, about how you would have been Secretary of State, wearing a top hat and a cutaway...”

“You’ve heard it before.”

“Tell me again. I’d like a good laugh. It’s so hot in here I’d like a good laugh.”

“So would I.”

“What’s stopping us, then? We’ve got a lot to laugh about.”

“Sure. I know.”

“Don’t get the blues, Stan.”

“Don’t worry.” He put the letter back in the envelope, wishing that he hadn’t reread it. It had been written a long time ago, and there was nothing he could do now to change things. There was nothing he could have done then either. What bothered him was that he hadn’t tried, hadn’t phoned her, written to her, gone to see her.

“Come on, Stan. Bottoms up and mud in your eye, eh?”

“Sure.” He drank the beer. It had a musky odor, as if it had been chilled and warmed too many times. He wondered if he had the same odor for the same reason. “You’re a good woman, Muriel.”

“Oh, can that now,” she said with an embarrassed and pleased little laugh. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

“No? Don’t bet on it.”

“I think you’re swell. I did right from that first night I saw you.”

“Then you’re dead wrong. Stone cold dead wrong.”

“Oh, Stan, don’t.”

“There comes a time when every man must evaluate his own life.”

“Why pick a time like this, a nice sunny Saturday morning when we could hop on a bus and go out to the zoo? Why don’t we do that, eh, go out to the zoo?”

“No,” he said heavily. “Let the monkeys come and look at me if they want a good laugh.”

The fear in her eyes was turning into bitterness, and her mouth looked as though it had been tightened by a pair of pliers. “So you got the blues, you got them after all.”

He didn’t seem to hear. “I let her down. I always let her down. Even last Monday I walked out on her. I shouldn’t have walked out on her like that without an apology or an explanation. I’m a coward, a bum. That’s what Pinata called me, a bum.”

“You told me that before. You told me all about it. Now why don’t you forget it? If you ask me, he had his nerve. He may be a bigger bum than you are for all you know.”

“So now you’re calling me a bum, too.”

“No, honest, I didn’t mean it like the way it sounded. I only...”

“You should have meant it. It’s true.”

She reached down suddenly and pounded her fist on the table. “Why don’t you keep that damned suitcase locked up the way it ought to be?”

He looked at her with a kind of sorrowful affection. “You really shouldn’t scream like that, Muriel.”

“And why not? I’ve got things to scream about, why shouldn’t I scream?”

“Because it doesn’t become a lady. ‘The Devil hath not, in all his quiver’s choice, an arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.’ Remember that.”

“You’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you, even if you got to pinch it from the Bible.”

“Lord Byron, not the Bible.”

“Stan, put the suitcase away, will you?” She picked up the chain leash from the floor and held it out to him. “Let’s lock everything up and put the suitcase under the bed again and pretend you never opened it, how about that? I’ll help you.”

“No. I can do it myself.”

“Do it, then. Do it.”

“All right.” He began replacing everything in the battered suitcase, the photographs and letters and clippings, the petrified wood and circus cane and box made of porcupine quills. “I’m fifty-three,” he said abruptly.

“Well, I know. I must say you don’t look it, though. You’ve got a fine head of hair. I bet there’s many a man not forty yet who envies...”

“Fifty-three. And this is all I have to show for all those years. Not much, is it?”

“As much as most.”

“No, Muriel, don’t try to be kind. I’ve had too much kindness given to me in my life, too many allowances and excuses made for me. I don’t deserve a good girl like Daisy. And then to think I walked out on her, didn’t even stay to say hello or to see how she looked after all these years. She used to be such a pretty little girl with those big innocent blue eyes and a smile so shy and sweet...”

“I know,” Muriel said shortly. “You told me. Now, have you got everything back in here? I’ll close it up for you.”

“Any decent father stays with his children even if he doesn’t get along very well with his wife. Children, they’re our only hope of immortality.”

“Well, I’m fixed then. I’ve got two hopes of immortality chasing cows back in Texas.”

“When my time comes, I won’t completely die, because part of me will keep on living in Daisy.” He wiped a little moisture from his eyes because it was so sad thinking of his own death, far sadder than thinking of anyone else’s.

“If you’re such a bum,” Muriel said, “how come you want part of you to stay alive in Daisy?”

“Ah, you wouldn’t understand, Muriel. You’re not a man.”

“Well, I’m glad you’ve noticed it. How about you notice it a little more often?”

Fielding winced. Muriel was a well-meaning woman, but her earthiness could be embarrassing, even destructive at times. When he was on a delicate train of thought, such as this one, it was a great shock to find himself suddenly derailed by the sound waves of Muriel’s powerful voice.

To cushion the shock, he opened another bottle of beer while Muriel pushed the suitcase back under the bed.

“There,” she said with satisfaction, and made a gesture of wiping her hands, like a doctor who has just stitched up an especially bad wound. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Things are not that simple.”

“They’re not as complicated as you make out, Stan Fielding. If they were, we might as well all go jump in the ocean. Say, how about that? Why don’t we go down to the beach and sit in the sand and watch the people? That always gives you a laugh, Stan, watching people.”

“Not today. I don’t feel like it.”

“You just going to stay here and brood?”

“A little brooding may be exactly what I need. Maybe I haven’t brooded enough in my lifetime. Whenever I became depressed, I simply packed up and moved on. I ran away, just as I ran away from Daisy. I shouldn’t have done that, Muriel. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Stop crying over spilled milk,” she said harshly. “Every drunk I’ve ever known, that’s their trouble. Bawling over things they done and then having to get tanked up to forget they done them and then going ahead and doing them all over again.”

“Well,” he said, blinking, “you’re quite a psychologist, Muriel. That’s an interesting theory.”

“Nobody needs a fancy degree to figure it, just eyes and ears like I’ve got. And like you’ve got, too, if you’d use them.” She came over to him, rather shyly, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Come on, Stan. Let’s go to the beach and watch the people. How about trying to find that place where everybody’s building up their muscles? We could take a bus.”

“No, Muriel. I’m sorry. I have other things to do.”

“Like what?”

“I’m going back to San Félice to see Daisy.”

She didn’t speak for a minute. She just backed away from him and sat down on the bed, looking bewildered. “What do you want to do that for, Stan?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Why don’t you take me along? I could see you didn’t get into any trouble like you did last time over that waitress.”

When he returned to Los Angeles on Monday night, he’d told her all about his encounter with Nita and Nita’s husband in the bar. To diminish the importance of the incident, in his own mind and hers, he’d made quite a funny story of it, and they’d both had a good laugh. But Muriel’s laughter hadn’t been too genuine: suppose the girl’s husband had been bigger and meaner? Suppose, and it often happened this way, that the girl Nita had suddenly decided to take her husband’s side against Stan? Suppose no one had called the police? Suppose... “Stan,” she said, “take me along to look out for you.”

“No.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to introduce me to Daisy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wouldn’t dream of asking such a thing, her being so high class and everything. I could keep out of sight, Stan. I just want to be there to look out for you, see?”

“We haven’t the money for bus fare.”

“I could borrow some. The old lady in the apartment across the hall — I know she’s got some hidden away. And she likes me, Stan; she says I look exactly like her younger sister that got put away last year. I don’t think she’d mind lending me a little money on account of the resemblance, just enough for bus fare. How about it, Stan?”

“No. Stay away from the old lady. She’s poison.”

“All right, then, maybe we could hitchhike?”

He gathered from her hesitance and tone that she had never done any hitchhiking, and the thought of it scared her almost as much as the thought of his going to San Félice without her and getting into trouble. “No, Muriel, hitchhiking isn’t for ladies.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “You just don’t want me along, that’s it. You’re afraid I might interfere if you decided to pick up some cheap waitress in a...”

“I didn’t pick up anyone.” Fielding’s tone was all the sharper and more positive because he was lying. He’d gone deliberately into the café with the idea of finding the girl, but no one suspected this (except Muriel, who suspected everything), least of all the girl herself. Nothing had worked out as he planned, because the husband had walked in before he had a chance to ask her any questions or even to find out for sure if it was the right girl. “I was trying to protect a young woman who was being assaulted.”

“How come you can protect everyone but yourself? The whole damn world you can protect, except Stan Fielding, who needs it worse than...”

“Now, Muriel, don’t go on.” He went over to the bed and sat down beside her. “Put your head on my shoulder, that’s my girl. Now listen. I have a certain matter to take care of in San Félice. I won’t be away long, no later than tomorrow night if things go well.”

“What things? And why shouldn’t they?”

“Daisy and Jim might be away for the weekend or something like that. In that case I won’t be back until Monday night. But don’t worry about me. In spite of your low opinion of my powers of self-protection, I can take care of myself.”

“Sure you can. When you’re sober.”

“I intend to stay sober.” No matter how many hundreds of times he had said this in his life, he still managed to put so much conviction into it that he believed himself. “This time, not one drink. Unless, of course, it would look conspicuous if I refused, and then I would take one — I repeat, one — and nurse it along.”

She pressed her head hard against his shoulder as if she were trying to imprint on him by sheer force an image of herself which would go along with him on the trip, as her substitute, to protect him while he was protecting everyone else.

“Stan.”

“Yes, my love.”

“Don’t get tanked up.”

“I said I wouldn’t, didn’t I? No drinks, except maybe one to avoid looking conspicuous.”

“Like for instance?”

“Suppose Daisy invites me to the house and opens a bottle of champagne to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” With her head against his shoulder she couldn’t see the sudden grimness of his face. “What’s there to celebrate, Stan?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“Then why should she open the bottle of champagne?”

“She won’t.”

“Then why did you say—”

“Please be quiet, Muriel.”

“But—”

“There’ll be no celebration, no champagne. I was just dreaming for a minute, see? People dream, even people like me, who should know better.”

“There’s no harm in a little dreaming now and then,” Muriel said softly, stroking the back of his neck. “Say, you need a haircut, Stan. Could we spare the money for a haircut?”

“No.”

“Well, wait right there while I go get my sewing scissors. Out on the ranch I always cut my kids’ hair, there being nobody else to do it.” She stood up, smoothing her dress down over her hips. “There was never any complaints either, once I got a little practiced.”

“No, Muriel. Please—”

“It’ll only take a minute. You want to look presentable, don’t you, if you’re going to that fancy house of hers? Remember that letter she wrote telling you her change of address? She described the whole house. It sounded just like a palace. You wouldn’t want to go to a place like that needing a haircut, would you?”

“I don’t care.”

“You’re always saying you don’t care when you do.” Muriel went out to the kitchen and returned with the sewing scissors. She said as she began trimming his hair, “You might meet up with your ex, think of that.”

“Why should I?”

“There’s nothing worse than meeting up with your ex when you’re not looking your best. Hold your chin down a little.”

“I don’t intend to see my former wife.”

“You might see her by accident on the street.”

“Then I’d look the other way and cross the street.”

She had been waiting and wanting to hear this. She exhaled suddenly and noisily, as if she’d been holding her breath until she was reassured. “You’d really look the other way?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about her, Stan. Is she pretty?”

“I’d prefer not to discuss it.”

“You never ever talk about her — move your head a bit to the right — the way other men talk about their exes. What harm would it do if you told me a little about her, like is she pretty?”

“What good would it do?”

“Then at least I’d know. Chin down.”

Chin down, he stared at his belt buckle. “And would you like to know she’s pretty?”

“Well, no. I mean, it would be nicer if she wasn’t.”

“She’s not,” Fielding said. “Does that satisfy you?”

“No.”

“All right, she’s ugly as sin. Fat, pimply, cross-eyed, bow-legged, pigeon-toed...”

“Now you’re kidding me, Stan.”

“I’d be kidding you even more,” he said soberly, “if I told you she looked pretty to me.”

“She must have once, or you wouldn’t have married her.”

“I was seventeen. All the girls looked good in those days.” It wasn’t true. He couldn’t even remember any of the other girls, only Ada, delicate and pink and fluffy like a cloud at sunset. He had intended, in his youth and strength, to spend the rest of his life looking after her; instead, she had spent hers doing it for him. He didn’t know, even now, at what point or for what reason their roles had been reversed.

“Some of them still look good to you.” Muriel put down the sewing scissors. “You know what I bet? I bet that waitress of yours is nothing but a chippy.”

“She’s a married woman with six children.”

“A husband and six kids don’t make you an angel.”

“Stop worrying, will you, Muriel? I’m not going up to San Félice to get involved with a waitress or my ex-wife. I’m going up solely to see Daisy.”

“You had a chance to see her last Monday,” Muriel said anxiously. “Why don’t you just phone her long distance or write her a letter? Then you could go and see her some other time, when you’re sure she’s at home.”

“I want to see her now, today.”

“Why so all of a sudden?”

“I have reasons.”

“Does it have something to do with Daisy’s old letters you were reading?”

“Not a thing.” He hadn’t told her about the new letter, the one that had been sent special delivery to the warehouse where he worked and which was now hidden in his wallet, folded and refolded to the size of a postage stamp. This last letter wasn’t like the others he kept in the suitcase. It contained no money, no news, no polite inquiries about his health or statements about her own: Dear Father: I would be very much obliged if you’d let me know at once whether the name Carlos Theodore Camilla means anything to you. Please call collect, Robles 24663. Love, Daisy. Fielding would have liked to pretend that the brief, brusque, almost unfriendly note had never reached him, but he realized he couldn’t. He’d signed for it at the warehouse, and there would be a record of the signature at the post office. How had she got hold of the name and address of the warehouse? From Pinata, obviously, although Fielding couldn’t remember telling Pinata about his job — he’d been feeling bad that day, fuzzy around the edges, not sure where one thing ended and another began. Or maybe Pinata had found out in some other way; he was a detective as well as a bail bondsman. A detective...

God Almighty, he thought suddenly. Maybe she’s hired him. But why? And what did it have to do with Camilla?

“You look awful flushed, Stan, like maybe you’ve got a fever coming on.”

“Stop making a pest of yourself, will you? I have to get ready.”

While he washed and shaved in the bathroom they shared with the old lady across the hall, Muriel laid out fresh underwear for him and a clean shirt and the new blue-striped tie Pinata had lent him earlier in the week. He had told Muriel he bought the tie after seeing it in a store window, and she had believed him because it seemed too slight a thing to lie about. She hadn’t known him long enough yet to realize that this secrecy about very trivial matters was as much a part of his nature as his devastating frankness about some of the important and serious ones. There had been no real need, for instance, for him to have recounted the details of the episode involving Nita and her husband and the jail and Pinata. Yet he had told her all about it, leaving out only the small detail of the tie he’d borrowed from Pinata.

When he returned from the bathroom and saw that this tie was the one she’d picked out for him to wear, he put it back in the bureau drawer.

“I like that one,” Muriel protested. “It goes with your eyes.”

“It’s a little too gaudy. When you’re hitchhiking, it pays to look as conservative as possible, like a gentleman whose Cadillac has just had a flat tire and he can’t find a telephone.”

“Like that, eh?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to use for a Cadillac?”

“My imagination, love. When I’m standing out there on the freeway, I’m going to imagine that Cadillac so hard that other people will see it.”

“Why don’t you start right now so’s I can see it, too?”

“I have started.” He went over to the window and pulled back the grimy pink net curtain. “There. What do you see?”

“Cars. About a million cars.”

“One of them’s my Cadillac.” Letting the curtain drop into place, he drew himself up to his full height and adjusted an imaginary monocle to his eye. “I beg your pardon, madam, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to direct me to the nearest petrol parlor?”

She began to laugh, a girlish, giggly sound. “Oh Stan, honestly. You’re a scream. You ought to be an actor.”

“I hesitate to contradict you, madam, but I am an actor. Permit me to introduce myself. My name — ah, but I quite forgot I am traveling incognito. I must not identify myself for fear of the terrifying adulation of my millions of fanatic admirers.”

“Gee, you could fool anybody, Stan. You talk just like a gentleman.”

He stared down at her, suddenly sober. “Thanks.”

“Why, I could see that Cadillac as plain as could be for a minute there. Red and black, with real leather upholstery and your initials on the door.” She touched his arm. It had gone stiff as a board. “Stan?”

“Yeah.”

“What the heck, we wouldn’t know what to do with a Cadillac if we had one. We’d have to pay the license and insurance and gas and oil, and then we’d have to find a place to park it — well, it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not just shooting the breeze either. I mean it.”

“Sure. Sure you do, Muriel.” He was touched by her loyalty, but at the same time it nagged at him; it reminded him that he didn’t deserve it and that he would have to try harder to deserve it in the future. The future, he thought. When he was younger, the future always seemed to him like a bright and beribboned box full of gifts. Now it loomed in front of him, dark gray and impenetrable, like a leaden wall.

He picked out a tie from the bureau drawer, dark gray to match the wall.

“Stan? Take me with you?”

“No, Muriel. I’m sorry.”

“Will you be back in time to go to your job Monday night?”

“I’ll be back.” He’d had the job, as night watchman for an electrical appliance warehouse on Figueroa Street, for only a week. The work was dull and lonely, but he made it more interesting for himself by imagining the place was going to be robbed any night now and visualizing how he would foil the robbers, with a flying tackle or a rabbit punch from behind, or a short, powerful left hook, or simply by outwitting them in a very clever way which he hadn’t figured out yet. Having outthought, or outfought, the robbers, he would go on to receive his reward from the president of the appliance firm. The rewards varied from money or some shares in the company to a large bronze plaque inscribed with his name and a description of his deed of valor: To Stanley Elliott Fielding, Who, Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, Did Resist the Onslaught of Seven Masked and Desperate Criminals...

It was all fantasy, and he knew it. But it helped to pass the time and ease the tension he felt whenever he was alone.

Muriel helped him on with his jacket. “There. You look real nice, Stan. Nobody’d ever take you for a night watchman.”

“Thank you.”

“Where will you stay when you get there, Stan?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“I should know how to get in touch with you in case something comes up about your job. I suppose I could call Daisy’s house if it was real important.”

“No, don’t,” he said quickly. “I may not even be going to Daisy’s house.”

“But you said before you...”

“Listen. Remember the young man I told you about who paid my fine? Steve Pinata. His office is on East Opal Street. If anything urgent should come up, leave a message for me with Pinata.”

She went with him to the door, clinging to his arm. “Remember what you promised, Stan, about laying off the liquor and behaving yourself in general.”

“Of course.”

“I wish I was going along.”

“Next time.”

He kissed her good-bye before he opened the door because of Miss Wittenburg, the old lady who lived across the hall. Miss Wittenburg kept the door of her apartment wide open all day and sat just inside it, with her spectacles on and a newspaper across her knee. Sometimes she read the paper in silence; at other times she became quite voluble, addressing her comments to her younger sister, who’d been gone for a year.

“There they are now, Rosemary,” Miss Wittenburg said in her strong New England accent. “He appears to be groomed for the street. Good riddance, I say. I’m glad you agree. Did you notice the deplorable condition in which he left the bathroom again? All that wetness. Wet, wet, wet everywhere... I am surprised at you, Rosemary, making such a vulgar remark. Father would turn over in his grave to hear such a thing fall from your lips.”

“Go inside and lock the door,” Fielding said to Muriel. “And keep it locked.”

“All right.”

“And don’t worry about me. I’ll be home tomorrow night, or Monday at the latest.”

“Whispering,” said Miss Wittenburg, “is a mark of poor breeding.”

“Stan, please take care of yourself, won’t you?”

“I will. I promise.”

“Do you love me?”

“You know I do, Muriel.”

“Whispering,” Miss Wittenburg repeated, “is not only a mark of poor breeding, but I have it on very good authority that it is going to be declared illegal in all states west of the Mississippi. The penalties, I understand, will be very severe.”

Fielding raised his voice. “Good-bye, Rosemary. Good-bye, Miss Wittenburg.”

“Pay no attention, Rosemary. What effrontery the man has, addressing you by your first name. Next thing he’ll be trying to — oh, it makes me shudder even to think of it.” She, too, raised her voice. “Good manners compel me to respond to your greeting, Mr. Whisper, but I do so with grave misgivings. Good-bye.”

“Oh Lord,” Fielding said, and began to laugh. Muriel laughed with him, while Miss Wittenburg described to Rosemary certain legislation which was about to go into effect in seventeen states prohibiting laughter, mockery, and fornication.

“Keep your door locked, Muriel.”

“She’s just a harmless old lady.”

“There’s no such thing as a harmless old lady.”

“Wait. Stan, you forgot your toothbrush.”

“I’ll pick one up in San Félice. Good-bye, love.”

“Good-bye, Stan. And good luck.”

After he’d gone, Muriel locked herself in the apartment and, standing by the window, cried quietly and efficiently for five minutes. Then, red-eyed but calm, she dragged out from under the bed Fielding’s battered rawhide suitcase.

11

Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe...

The Neighborhood Clinic was housed in an old adobe building off State Street near the middle of town. A great many of Pinata’s clients had been in and out of its vast oak doors, and over the years Pinata had come to know the director, Charles Alston, quite well. Alston was neither a doctor nor a trained social worker. He was a retired insurance executive, a widower, who devoted most of his time and energy to the solution of other people’s problems. To keep the clinic operating, he persuaded doctors and laymen to donate their services, fought city and county officials for funds, plagued the local newspaper for free publicity, addressed women’s clubs and political rallies and church groups, and bearded the Lions in their den and the Rotarians and Knights of Columbus in theirs.

Whenever and wherever there was any group to be enlightened, Alston could be found doing the enlightening, shooting statistics at his audience with the speed of a machine gun. This rapid delivery was essential: it kept his listeners from examining the facts and figures too closely, an effect that Alston found highly desirable, since he frequently made up his own statistics. He had no qualms about doing this, believing that it was a legitimate part of his war on ignorance. “Did you know,” he would cry out, pointing the finger of doom, “that one in seven of you good, unsuspecting, innocent people out there will spend some time in a mental institution?” If the audience appeared listless and unimpressionable, he changed this figure to one in five or even one in three. “Prevention is the answer. Prevention. We at the Clinic may not be able to solve everyone’s problems. What we hope to do is to keep them small enough to be manageable.”

At noon on Saturday, Alston put the closed sign on the oak doors and locked up for the weekend. It had been a strenuous but successful week. The Democratic League and the Veterans of Foreign Wars had contributed toward the new children’s wing, the Plasterers and Cement Finishers Local 341 had volunteered their services, and the Monitor-Press was planning a series of articles on the Clinic and offering a prize for the best essay entitled “An Ounce of Prevention.”

Alston had just shoved the steel bolt into place when someone began pounding on the door. This frequently happened when the Clinic was closed for the night or the weekend. It was one of Alston’s dreams that someday he might have enough personnel and money to keep it open at all times, like a hospital, or at least on Sundays. Sunday was a bad day for the frightened.

“We’re closed,” Alston shouted through the door. “If you’re desperately in need of help, call Dr. Mercado, 5-3698. Have you got that?”

Pinata didn’t say anything. He just waited, knowing that Alston would open the door because he couldn’t turn anyone away.

“Dr. Mercado, 5-3698, if you need help. Oh, what the hell,” Alston said, and pushed open the door. “If you need — oh, it’s you, Steve.”

“Hello, Charley. Sorry to bother you like this.”

“Looking for one of your clients?”

“I’d like some information.”

“I charge by the hour,” Alston said. “Or shall I say that I accept donations for the new children’s wing? A check will do, providing it’s good. Come in.”

Pinata followed him into his office, a small, high-ceilinged room painted a garish pink. The pink had been Alston’s idea; it was a cheerful color for people who saw too many of the blues and grays and blacks of life.

“Sit down,” Alston said. “How’s business?”

“If I told you it was good, you’d put the bite on me.”

“The bite’s on you. This is after hours. I get time and a half.”

In spite of the lightness of his tone, Pinata knew he was quite serious. “All right, that suits me. Say ten dollars?”

“Fifteen would look prettier on the books.”

“On yours, sure, but not mine.”

“Very well, I won’t argue. I would, however, like to point out that one person in every five will—”

“I heard that last week at the Kiwanis.”

Alston’s face brightened. “That was a rousing good meeting, eh? I hate to scare the lads like that, but if fear is what makes them bring out their wallets, fear is what I have to provide.”

“Today,” Pinata said, “I’m just scared ten dollars’ worth.”

“Maybe I’ll do better next time. Believe me, I’ll try.”

“I believe you.”

“All right, so what’s your problem?”

“Juanita Garcia.”

“Good Lord,” Alston said with a heavy sigh. “Is she back in town?”

“I have reason to think so.”

“You know her, eh?”

“Not personally.”

“Well, consider yourself lucky. We don’t use the word incorrigible around here, but I never got closer to using it than when we were trying to cope with Juanita. Now, there’s a case where an ounce of prevention might have been worth a few pounds of cure. If she’d been brought to us when she first showed signs of disturbance as a child — well, we might have done some good and we might not. With Juanita it’s difficult to say. When we finally saw her, by order of the Juvenile Court, she was sixteen, already divorced from one man and about eight months pregnant by another. Because of her condition, we had to handle her with kid gloves. I think that’s where she got the idea.”

“What idea?”

Alston shook his head in a mixture of sorrow and grudging admiration. “She worked out a simple but absolutely stunning device for hog-tying the whole bunch of us: the courts, the Probation Department, our staff. Whenever she got in trouble, she outwitted us all with classic simplicity.”

“How?”

“By becoming pregnant. A delinquent girl is one thing; an expectant mother is quite different.” Alston stirred in his chair and sighed again. “To tell you the truth, none of us knows for sure if Juanita actually figured out this device in a conscious way. One of our psychologists believes that she used pregnancy as a means of making herself feel important. I’m not positive about that, though. The girl — woman, rather, she must be twenty-six or twenty-seven by this time — isn’t stupid by any means. She did quite well on several of her tests, especially those that required use of imagination rather than knowledge of facts. She could study an ordinary little drawing and describe it with such vivid imagination that you’d think she was looking at something by Van Gogh. The term psychopathic personality is no longer in vogue, but it certainly would have applied to Juanita.”

“What does she look like?”

“Fairly pretty in a flashing-eyed, toothy sort of way. About her figure I couldn’t say. I never saw her between pregnancies. The tragic part of it,” Alston added, “is that she didn’t really care about the kids. When they were small babies, she liked to cuddle them and play with them as if they were dolls, but as soon as they grew up a little, she lost interest. Three or four years ago she was arrested on a child-neglect charge, but once again she was in the throes of reproduction and got off on probation. After the birth of that particular child — her sixth, I think it was — she broke probation and left town. Nobody tried very hard to find her, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if my own staff chipped in to pay her traveling expenses. Juanita herself was enough of a problem. But multiply her by six — oh Lord, I hate to think about it. So now she’s back in town.”

“I believe so.”

“Doing what? Or need I ask?”

“Working as a waitress in a bar,” Pinata said. “If it’s the same girl.”

“Is she married?”

“Yes.”

“Are the kids with her?”

“Some of them are, anyway. She got into a fight with her husband a few days ago. He claimed she was neglecting them.”

“If you don’t even know the girl,” Alston said, “where did you pick up all your information?”

“A friend of mine happened to be in the bar when the fight started.”

“And this is how you became interested in the prolific Juanita, through a friend of yours who happened to witness a fight?”

“You might say that.”

“I might say it but it wouldn’t be the truth, is that it?” Alston peered over the top of his spectacles. “Is the girl in trouble again?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why exactly are you here?”

Pinata hesitated. He didn’t want to tell the whole story, even to Alston, who’d heard some whoppers in his day. “I’d like you to check your files and tell me if Juanita Garcia came here on a certain date.”

“What date?”

“Friday, December 2, 1955.”

“That’s a funny request,” Alston said. “Care to give me a reason for it?”

“No.”

“I assume you have a good reason.”

“I’m not sure how good it is. I have one, though. It concerns a — client of mine. I’d like to keep her name out of it, but I can’t, since I need some information about her, too. Her name’s Mrs. James Harker.”

“Harker, Harker, let me think a min — Daisy Harker?”

“Yes.”

“What’s a woman like Daisy Harker doing getting mixed up with a bail bondsman?”

“It’s a long, implausible story,” Pinata said with a smile. “And since it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m paying you time and a half, I’d rather go into it on some other occasion.”

“What do you want to know about Mrs. Harker?”

“The same thing: if she was working at the Clinic on that particular day. Also when, and why, she stopped coming here.”

“The why part I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. It mystified me at the time and still does. She made some excuse about her mother being ill and needing attention, but I happen to know Mrs. Fielding from my connection with the Women’s Club. The old girl’s as healthy as a horse. Quite an attractive woman, if she could remember to keep her velvet gloves on... No, it wasn’t Mrs. Fielding’s illness, I’m sure of that. As for the work itself, I believe Mrs. Harker enjoyed it.”

“Was she good at it?” Pinata asked.

“Excellent. Sweet-natured, understanding, dependable. Oh, she had a tendency to get overexcited at times and lose her head a bit in an emergency, but nothing serious. And the kids all loved her. She had a way, as childless women sometimes have, of making the kids feel very important and special, not just something that happened from an accidental meeting of a sperm and ovum. A fine young woman, Mrs. Harker. We were sorry to lose her. Have you known her long?”

“No.”

“Next time you see her, give her my kind regards, will you? And tell her we’d like to have her back whenever she can come.”

“I’ll do that.”

“In fact, if I could find out the circumstances that made her quit, I might be able to change them.”

“The circumstances are entirely Daisy’s, not the Clinic’s.”

“Well, I just thought I’d check,” Alston said. “We have occasional disagreements and disgruntlements among the members of our staff just like any other business. It’s surprising we don’t have more when you consider that psychology is not an exact science and there are consequently differences of opinion on diagnosis and procedure. Procedure especially,” he added with a frown. “Just what does one do with a girl like Juanita, for instance? Sterilize her? Keep her locked up? Enforce psychiatric treatment? We did our best, but the reason it didn’t work was that Juanita herself wouldn’t admit there was anything the matter with her. Like most incorrigibles, she’d managed to convince herself (and tried, of course, to convince us) that women were all the same and that what made her different was the fact that she was honest and aboveboard about her activities. Honest and above-board, the favorite words of the self-deceiver. Take my advice, Steve. Whenever anyone insists too vigorously on his honesty, you run and check the till. And don’t be too surprised if you find somebody’s fingers in it.”

“I don’t believe in generalizations,” Pinata said. “Especially that one.”

“Why not?”

“Because it includes me. I make frequent claims to honesty. In fact, I’m making one now.”

“Well, well. This puts me in the embarrassing position of either taking back the generalization or going to check the till. This is a serious decision. Let me meditate a moment.” Alston leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Very well. I take back the generalization. I’m afraid it’s easy to become a bit cynical in this job. So many promises made and broken, so many hopes dashed — it leaves you with a tendency to believe in the psychology of opposites, that is, when a person comes in and tells me he is affable, honest, and simple, I tend to tag him as a complex and irritable cheat. This is an occupational hazard I must avoid. Thanks for pointing it out, Steve.”

“I didn’t point out anything,” Pinata said, embarrassed. “I was merely defending myself.”

“I insist upon thanking you.”

“All right, all right, you’re welcome. At time and a half I don’t want to argue with you.”

“Oh yes, time and a half. I must get on with the job. I address the Newcomers Club at two, a good, malleable group usually. I have considerable hopes for our treasury.” He took a ring of keys from his desk drawer. “Please wait here. I can’t ask you into the file room. Not that our records are top secret, but many people like to believe they are. Want something to read while I’m gone?”

“No thanks. I’ll just think.”

“Got a lot to think about?”

“Enough.”

“Daisy Harker,” Alston said casually, “is a very pretty and, I believe, an unhappy young woman. That’s a bad combination.”

“What’s it got to do with me?”

“Not a thing, I hope.”

“Save your hopes for the treasury,” Pinata said. “My relationship with Mrs. Harker is strictly professional. She hired me to get some information about a certain day in her life.”

“And Juanita was part of this day?”

“Possibly.” Possibly Camilla was, too, though so far there was no indication of it. When Daisy called his office the previous morning, as scheduled, and learned the details of Camilla’s death, she was surprised, pained, curious — a perfectly normal reaction, which dispelled his last trace of doubt about her sincerity. She had, she said, asked both Jim and her mother if they’d ever known a man named Camilla, and she was waiting to hear from her father, to whom she’s sent a special delivery letter.

Alston was staring at him with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “You’re not very communicative today, Steve.”

“I like to think of myself as the strong, silent type.”

“You do, eh? Well, just watch out for that Lancelot syndrome you’re carrying around. Rescuing ladies in distress can be dangerous, especially if the ladies happen to be married. Harker has the reputation of being a very good guy. And a smart one. Think it over, Steve. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Pinata thought it over. Lancelot syndrome, hell. I’m not interested in saving Daisies in distress. Daisy, what a silly name for a grown woman. I’ll bet that was Fielding’s idea. Mrs. Fielding would have picked something a little more high-toned or exotic, Céleste, Stephanie, Gwendolyn.

He got up and began pacing the room. Thinking about names depressed him because his own were only borrowed, from a parish priest and a child’s Christmas game. During the past three years especially, since Monica had taken Johnny away, Pinata had wondered a great deal about his parents, trying, not too successfully, to follow the advice the Mother Superior had given him many times: “There’s no room in this world for self-pity, Stevens. You’re a strong man because you had no one to lean on, and that’s a good thing sometimes, to live without leaning. Think of all the fixations you might have developed, and dear me, there are a lot of them around these days. The essential thing for a boy is to have a good man to pattern himself after. And you had that in Father Stevens... Your mother? What else could she have been but a young woman who found herself bearing too heavy a cross? You must not blame her for being unable to carry it. Perhaps she was just a schoolgirl... ”

Or a Juanita, Pinata thought grimly. But why should it matter now after more than thirty years? I could never trace her anyway; there wasn’t a single clue. And even if I found her, what about him? It’s possible she wouldn’t even know which of the men in her life was my father. Or care.

Alston returned, carrying several cards picked out of a file. “Well, you have something, Steve. I’m not sure what. December 2, ’55, was the last day Mrs. Harker worked here. She was on duty from 1:00 to 5:30, in charge of the children’s playroom. That’s where the younger children are kept while their parents or relatives are being counseled. No actual therapy is done there, but it was part of Mrs. Harker’s job to observe any behavior problems, such as excessive destructiveness or shyness, and report them in writing to the professional members of the staff. The way a three-year-old plays with a doll often gives us more of a clue to the cause of family trouble than several hours of talking on the part of the parents. So you can see Mrs. Harker’s work was important. She took it seriously, too. I just checked one of her reports. It was full of details that some of our other volunteers would have failed to notice or at least to record.”

“The report you checked, was it one from that particular day?”

“Yes.”

“Did anything unusual or disturbing happen?”

“A lot of unusual and disturbing things happen here every day,” Alston said cheerfully. “You can count on that.”

“I meant, as far as Mrs. Harker was concerned. Did she have some trouble with any of the children, for instance?”

“Nothing on the record indicates it. Mrs. Harker might have had some trouble with a relative of one of the children or even a staff member, but such an incident wouldn’t be included in her written report. And I very much doubt that one occurred. Mrs. Harker got along well with everybody. If I had to make a personal criticism of her, that would be it. She was overeager to please people; it led me to think that she didn’t set a very high value on herself. These constant smilers usually don’t.”

“Constant smiler?” Pinata said. “Overeager to please? Could we possibly be talking about the same woman? Maybe there are two Daisy Harkers.”

“Why? Has she changed?”

“She shows no signs of being eager to please, believe me.”

“Now, that’s highly interesting. I always knew she was putting up a front. It’s probably a good sign that she’s stopped. These little Daddy’s-girl wiles can look pretty nonsensical in a grown woman. Perhaps she’s maturing, and that’s about all any of us can hope for. Maturity,” he added, “is not a destination like Hong Kong, London, Paris, or heaven. It’s a continuing process, rather like a road along which one travels. There’s no Maturitytown, U.S.A. Say, I wonder if I could put that across to the Soroptimists at their banquet tonight... No, no, I don’t think I’ll try. It wouldn’t be much of a fund-raiser. I’d better stick with my statistics. People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.”

“Especially yours?”

“Mine can be very impressive,” Alston said with a grin. “But to get back to our subject, I’ll admit I’m becoming curious about the connection between Juanita and Mrs. Harker.”

“I’m not sure there is one.”

“Then I guess this is just a coincidence.” Alston tapped the cards he’d picked from the file. “Friday, December 2, was the last time Mrs. Harker appeared here. It was also the last time any of us heard from Juanita.”

“Heard from?”

“She was scheduled to come in Friday morning to talk to Mrs. Huxley, one of our social workers. It wasn’t to be a therapy session, merely a discussion of finances and what could be done with Juanita’s children, who’d been released from Juvenile Hall into the custody of Juanita’s mother, Mrs. Rosario. None of us considered this an ideal arrangement. Mrs. Rosario is a clean-living, respectable woman, but she’s a bit of a nut on religion, and Mrs. Huxley was going to try to talk Juanita into allowing the children to be placed in foster homes for a time.

“At any rate Juanita called Mrs. Huxley early Friday morning and said she couldn’t keep her appointment, because she wasn’t feeling well. This was natural enough, since she was just a couple of jumps ahead of the obstetrician. Mrs. Huxley explained to her that the business about the children was urgent, and another appointment was made for late that afternoon. Juanita was quite docile about it, even amiable. That alone should have warned us. She didn’t show up, of course. Thinking the baby might have arrived on the scene a bit prematurely, I called Mrs. Rosario next day. She was in a furious state. Juanita had left town, taking the children with her, and Mrs. Rosario blamed me.”

“Why you?” Pinata asked.

“Because,” Alston said, grimacing, “I have mal ojo, the evil eye.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“In case you think belief in mal ojo has disappeared, let me hasten to correct you. Like many older members of her race, Mrs. Rosario is still living in the distant past, medically speaking: hospitals are places to die in, psychiatry is against the Church, illness is caused not by germs but by mal ojo. If you accused her of believing these things, she would probably deny it. Nevertheless, Juanita’s first child was born in the kitchen of an elderly midwife, and when Juanita was sent to us for psychiatric help, Mrs. Rosario proved to be as big a stumbling block as the girl herself. Very few medical doctors, and not enough psychiatrists, have attempted to bridge this cultural gap. They tend to dismiss people like Mrs. Rosario as obstinate, backward, perverse, whereas she is simply reacting according to her cultural pattern. That pattern hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think it has. It will take more than time to change it. It will take effort, intent, training. But that’s lecture number twenty-seven and not much of a fund-raiser either... I hope, by the way, that you’re not taking any of my remarks about your race personally.”

“Why should I?” Pinata said with a shrug. “I’m not even sure it is my race.”

“But you think so?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You know, I’ve often wondered about that. You don’t quite fit the...”

“Mrs. Rosario is a more interesting subject than I am.”

“Very well. As I said, she was extremely angry when I called her. She’d gone to a special mass the previous night to pray for various lost souls, including, I hope, Juanita’s. I’ve often wondered — haven’t you? — how the parish priests handle people like Mrs. Rosario who believe with equal fervor in the Virgin Mary and the evil eye. Must be quite a problem. Anyway, on returning home, she discovered that Juanita had left, bag and baggage and five children. I’m not aware of any reason why Mrs. Rosario should have lied about it, but it did strike me at the time that it was a very convenient story. It saved her from having to answer questions from the police and the Probation Department. If she was at church when Juanita left, then obviously she couldn’t be expected to know anything. She’s a complex woman, Mrs. Rosario. She distrusts and disapproves of Juanita; she seems, in fact, to hate her; but she has a fierce maternal instinct.

“Well, there you have it.” Alston leaned back in his chair and studied the pink ceiling. “The end of Juanita. Or what I fondly hoped was the end. After a year or so we closed her file. The last entry on it is in November 1956: Garcia, when he was released from the Army, brought suit for divorce, charging desertion. Which of the children belonged to him, I have no idea. Perhaps none. In any case he didn’t ask for custody. Nor was any alimony or child support demanded of him, since Juanita didn’t show up for the hearing. The chances are she knew about it, though. Most Mexican families here in the Southwest, in spite of dissension among themselves, have a way of retaining their tribal loyalties and ties when confronted with trouble from the whites. And the law is always ‘white’ to them. There’s no doubt in my mind that Juanita remained in touch in some way with relatives who kept her posted on what was going on and when it was safe for her to come back here. I take it you’re sure she is back?”

“Reasonably,” Pinata said.

“Married again?”

“Yes, to an Italian called Donelli. I gather he’s not a bad guy, but Juanita has given him a rough time, and he’s carrying a chip on his shoulder.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I saw him in court after he got into the fight in the bar. My client was involved in the fight. Donelli couldn’t scrape up enough money to pay his fine, so he’s still in jail. It could be that’s exactly where Juanita wants him.”

“What bar is she working at?”

“The Velada, on lower State.”

Alston nodded. “That’s where she’s worked before, off and on. It’s owned by a friend of her mother’s, a Mrs. Brewster. Both Mrs. Brewster and the Velada are known to every health and welfare agency in the county, though the place has never actually been closed. It looks as if you’re on the right track, Steve. If you find out the girl is really Juanita, let me know immediately, will you? I feel a certain responsibility towards her. If she’s in trouble, I want to help her.”

“How will I get in touch with you?”

“I’ll be home about the middle of the afternoon. Call me there. Meanwhile, I’ll keep hoping a mistake has been made and the real Juanita is happily and securely ensconced on an island in the middle of the Pacific.”

Alston got up and closed and locked the window as an indication that as far as he was concerned, the interview was ended.

“Just one more minute,” Pinata said.

“Hurry it up, will you? I don’t want to keep the Newcomers Club waiting.”

“If they knew how much you were going to touch them for, I don’t think they’d mind waiting.”

“Oh yes. Speaking of money...”

“Here.” Pinata gave him a ten-dollar bill. “Have you ever heard of a man called Carlos Camilla?”

“Offhand, I’d say no. That’s an unusual name. I think I’d remember if I’d ever heard it before. What about him?”

“He killed himself four years ago. Roy Fondero was in charge of the funeral.”

“I know Fondero,” Alston said. “He’s an old friend of mine. A good man, level-headed and straight as die, no pun intended.”

“Will you do me a favor?”

“I might.”

“Call him up and tell him I’d like to ask some questions about the Camilla case.”

“That’s easy enough.” Alston reached for the phone and dialed. “Mr. Fondero, please... When will he be back? This is Charles Alston speaking... Thanks. I’ll call him back later this afternoon.” He hung up. “Fondero’s out on business. I’ll try and set up an appointment for you. What time would you prefer?”

“As soon as possible.”

“I’ll see if I can arrange it for today, then.”

“Thanks very much, Charley. Now, just one more question, and I’ll leave. Did Mrs. Harker know Juanita?”

“Everyone at the Clinic did, by sight if not by name. But why ask me? Why not ask Mrs. Harker?” Alston leaned across the desk, his eyes narrowed. “Is there anything the matter with her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I heard on the grapevine she and Harker are planning to adopt a child. Would this mysterious visit of yours have anything to do with that?”

“In a remote way,” Pinata said. “I wish I could tell you more, Charley, but certain things are confidential. All I can do is assure you that the matter is, to everyone else but Mrs. Harker, quite trivial. There are no lives at stake, no money, no great issue.”

He was wrong: all three were at stake. But he hadn’t the imagination or the desire to see it.

12

I wish they were good memories, that like other men I could sit back in the security of my family and review the past kindly. But I cannot...

Fielding’s first hitch got him as far as Ventura, and his second, with a jukebox repairman, landed him in San Félice at the corner of State Street and Highway 101. From there it was only a short walk up to the Velada Café, sandwiched between a pawnshop (we buy and sell anything) and a hotel for transients (rooms without bath, $2.00), modestly called the Ritz. Fielding registered at the hotel and was given a room on the second floor. He had stayed in a hundred rooms like it in his life, but he liked this one better than most, partly because he was feeling excited and partly because he could see through the dirty window the shimmer of sun on the ocean and some fishing boats lying at anchor beyond the wharf. They looked so tranquil and at ease that Fielding had a brief notion of going down and applying for a job as deckhand. Then he remembered that he’d even got seasick on the Staten Island ferry. And there was Muriel now, too. He was a married man with responsibilities; he couldn’t go dashing off on a boat with Muriel expecting him home... I should have gone to sea when I was younger, he thought. I might have been a captain by this time. Captain Fielding, it sounds very right and proper.

“Heave to,” Fielding said aloud, and as a substitute for going to sea, he rinsed his face in the washbasin. Then he combed his hair (the jukebox repairman had been driving a convertible with the top down) and went downstairs to the Velada Café.

There was no cocktail hour at the Velada. Anytime you had the money was the time for drinking, and business was often as brisk in midmorning as it was at night. Brisker, sometimes, since the smell of stale grease that permeated the place increased the agonies of a hangover and encouraged the customers to dull their senses as quickly as possible. The manager of the Ritz Hotel and the operator of the pawnshop frequently complained about this smell to the Department of Health, the police, the State Board of Equalization, but Mrs. Brewster, who owned the Velada, fought back tooth, nail, and tongue. She was a scrawny little miser of a woman who wore an oversize denim apron which she used for everything — wiping counters, swatting flies, mopping her face, handling hot pans, blowing her nose, shooing away newsboys who came in to sell papers, collecting her meager tips, drying her hands. This apron had become the expression of her whole personality. When she took it off at night before going home, she felt lost, as if some vital part of her had been amputated.

Fielding noticed the smell and the dirty apron, but they didn’t bother him. He’d smelled worse and seen dirtier. He sat down at a booth near the front window. The waitress, Nita, wasn’t in sight, and no one seemed interested in taking his order. A Mexican busboy, who looked about fifteen, was sweeping up cigarette butts from the floor. He worked very intently, as if he were new at the job or expected to find something more in the morning’s debris than just cigarette butts.

“Where’s the waitress?” Fielding said.

The boy raised his head. He had huge dark eyes, like prunes swelling in hot water. “Which one?”

“Nita.”

“Fixing her face, I guess. She likes to fix her face.”

“What’s your name, son?”

“Chico.”

“Tell the old lady behind the counter I want a ham on rye and a bottle of beer.”

“I can’t do that, sir. The girls get mad; they think I’m trying to con them out of their tips.”

“How old are you, Chico?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Come off it, kid.”

The boy’s face turned dark red. “I’m twenty-one,” he said, and returned to his sweeping.

Five minutes passed. The other waitress, who was attending to the back booths, glanced casually in Fielding’s direction a couple of times, but she didn’t approach him, and neither did Mrs. Brewster, who was wiping off the grill with her apron.

Juanita finally appeared wearing fresh lipstick and powder. She had outlined her eyes so heavily with black pencil that she looked like a coal miner who’d been working in the pits for years. She acknowledged his presence with a little flick of her rump, like a mare twitching her tail out of recognition or interest.

She said, unsmiling, “So you’re back again.”

“Surprised?”

“Why should I be surprised? Nothing surprises me. What’ll you have?”

“Ham on rye, bottle of Western beer.”

She shouted the order at Mrs. Brewster, who gave no response at all, not even a flutter of her apron. Fielding wondered whether she’d recognized him as the man involved in the fight and was trying to freeze him out to avoid further trouble.

“The service in this place is lousy,” he said.

“So’s the food. Why come here?”

“Oh, I just wanted to see how everybody was doing after the fracas last Monday.”

“I’m doing fine. Joe’s still in the cooler. He got thirty days.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Juanita put one hand on her hip in a half-pensive, half-aggressive manner. “Say, your being always sorry for people is going to get you in some real trouble one of these days. Like your being sorry for me, and pretty soon you’re trading punches with Joe.”

“I was a little drunk.”

“Well, I just thought I’d warn you, you oughta let people feel sorry for themselves. Most of them are pretty damn good at it, me included. Wait a minute, I’ll light a match under the old girl. She’s having one of her spooky days.”

“There’s no hurry. Why don’t you sit down for a while?”

“What for?” Juanita asked suspiciously.

“Rest your feet.”

“So now you’re feeling sorry for my feet? Say, you’re a real spooky guy, you know that?”

“I’ve been told once or twice.”

“Well, it’s no skin off my elbows.” She sat down, with considerably more squirming than was necessary. “Got a cigarette?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll smoke my own, then. I figure there’s no sense smoking my own if I can bum one.”

“Smart girl.”

“Me, smart? Nobody else thinks so. You should hear my old lady on the subject. She throws fits telling me how dumb I am. I don’t have to stand it much longer, though. I’m just living with her for the time being while Joe’s in the cooler, so I’ll have someone to look after the kids. When Joe gets out, maybe we’ll take off again. I’ve always hated this town; it’s treated me rotten. But don’t go feeling sorry for me. What they can dish out, I can take.”

“They?” Fielding said. “Who are they?”

“Nobody. Just them. The town.”

“Where have you been living?”

“L.A.”

“Why’d you come back here?”

“Joe lost his job. It wasn’t his fault or anything. The boss’s nephew just got old enough to work, and Joe was thrown out on his can to make room for him. So I thought, why not come back here for a while? Maybe things are different, maybe the town’s changed, I thought. Hell, this town change? I must of been crazy. The only thing’ll change this place is the Russians, and me personally I couldn’t care less if they started dropping bombs like confetti and everybody fell dead in their tracks.” She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke across the table directly into his face, as if she were challenging him to disagree with her. “What do you think of that, eh?”

“I haven’t thought about it yet.”

“Joe has. Joe says when I talk like that, I oughta have my mouth washed out with soap. And I says, listen, Dago, you try it and you get a hand full of teeth.” She smiled, not out of amusement, but as if she wanted to show she had the teeth to carry out the threat. “Joe’s a real flag-waver. Hell, I bet while they were locking him in his cell, he was waving the flag. Some dagos are like that. Even with the cops sitting on their faces, they open their yaps and sing ‘God Bless America.’”

Fielding started to laugh but immediately checked himself when he realized Juanita wasn’t attempting to be funny; she was merely presenting her own personal picture of the world, a place where people sat on your face and you retaliated in the only logical way, which wasn’t by singing “God Bless America.”

Behind the counter Mrs. Brewster had come to life and was putting the finishing touches on the ham sandwich, a slice of pickle and five potato chips. Juanita went over to pick up the order, and Fielding could hear the two women talking.

“Since when am I paying you to sit with the customers?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

“Since when, five minutes ago?”

“Being nice to customers,” Juanita said smoothly, “is good for business. You’ll make more money. You like money, don’t you?”

Mrs. Brewster let out a sudden little giggle, as if she’d been tickled in some vulnerable place. Then she smothered the giggle with a corner of her apron, slammed the ham sandwich on a tray, and opened a bottle of beer.

Juanita returned with the order and sat down opposite Fielding again. The exchange of words with Mrs. Brewster had improved her spirits. “Didn’t I tell you she was a real spook? But I can handle her. All I do is say ‘money,’ and she giggles like that every time. I always get along with spooks,” she added with a touch of pride. “Maybe I ought to of been a nurse or a doctor. How’s the sandwich?”

“It’s not bad.”

“You must be awful hungry. Me, I’ve got a cast-iron stomach, but you couldn’t pay me to eat in this joint.”

“It’s lucky for you the old girl hasn’t taken up lip-reading.” Fielding finished half the sandwich, pushed the plate away, and reached for the beer. “So your mother looks after the children while you work, eh?”

“Sure.”

“You look too young to have children.”

“That’s a laugh,” she said, but she looked pleased. “I got six of them.”

“Go on, you’re pulling my leg.”

“No, that’s the honest-to-God fact. I got six.”

“Why, you’re hardly more than a child yourself.”

“I started young,” Juanita said with considerable truth. “I never liked school much, so I quit and got married.”

“Six. Well, I’ll be damned.”

She was obviously enjoying his incredulity. She reached down and patted her stomach. “Of course I kept my figure. A lot of girls don’t; they let themselves go. I never did.”

“I’ll say you didn’t. Six. God, I can’t believe it.” He kept shaking his head as if he really couldn’t believe it, although he’d known since Monday, the day of the fight, that she had six children. “How many boys?”

“The oldest and the youngest are boys; the middle ones are girls.”

“I bet they’re cute.”

“They’re O.K.” But a note of boredom was evident in her voice, as if the children themselves were not very interesting, only the fact that she’d had them was important. “I guess there’s worse around.”

“Have you any pictures of them?”

“What for?”

“A lot of people carry pictures of their family.”

“Who would I show them to? Who’d want to look at pictures of my kids?”

“I would, for one.”

“Why?”

The idea that a stranger might be legitimately interested in her children was incredible to her. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, and he thought for a minute that he’d lost her confidence. But he said easily, “Say, what’s got into you anyway? Your kids have two heads or something?”

“No, they haven’t got two heads, Mr. Foster.”

“How did you know my name?” This time his surprise was genuine, and she reacted to it as she’d reacted to his feigned disbelief that she’d had six children, with a look of mischievous pleasure. Apparently this was what Juanita liked best, to surprise people. “Where’d you find out who I was?”

“I can read. It was in the paper, about the fight. Joe never had his name in the paper before, so I clipped it out to save for him. Joe Donelli and Stan Foster, it said, was involved in a fight over a woman in a local café.”

“Well,” Fielding said, smiling. “Now you know my name, and I know yours. Juanita Garcia meet Stan Foster.”

She half rose from the bench, then suddenly dropped back with a noisy expulsion of her breath.

“Garcia? Why did you say Garcia? That’s not my name.”

“It used to be, didn’t it?”

“It used to be a lot of different things. Now it’s Donelli, nothing else, see? And it’s Nita, not Juanita. Nita Donelli, that’s my name, understand?”

Fielding nodded. “Of course.”

“Where’d you get a hold of that Juanita business anyway?”

“I thought the two names were the same. There’s this old song, see, about a girl called Nita, Juanita.”

“There is, eh?”

“Yes, and I naturally assumed...”

“Hey, Chico.” She motioned to the busboy, and he came over to the booth, pushing his broom ahead of him. “You ever hear tell of a song called ‘Nita, Juanita’?”

“Nope.”

Juanita turned back to Fielding, her full mouth pressed tight against her teeth, so that it seemed half its size. “Sing it for me. Let’s hear how it sounds.”

“Here? Now?”

“Sure, here now. Why not?”

“I don’t remember all the words. Anyway, I can’t sing. I have a voice like...”

“Try.”

She was very quiet in her insistence. No one in the café was paying any attention to the scene except Mrs. Brewster, who was watching them with her bright, beady little eyes.

“Maybe there’s no such song, eh?” Juanita said.

“Sure there is. It goes back a long way. You’re too young to remember.”

“So remind me.”

Fielding was sweating from the heat, from the beer, and from something he didn’t want to identify as fear. “Say, what’s the matter with you anyway?”

“I like music, is all. Old songs. I like old songs.”

Mrs. Brewster came out from behind the counter making little sweeps of her apron as if she were brushing away invisible cobwebs. Juanita saw her coming and turned her face stubbornly toward the wall.

“What’s up?” Mrs. Brewster asked Fielding.

“Nothing, I just — that is, she just wanted me to sing a song.”

“What’s wrong with a bit of music?”

“It wouldn’t be music. I can’t sing.”

“She’s a little crazy,” Mrs. Brewster said. “But I can handle her.” She put a scrawny hand firmly on Juanita’s right shoulder. “Snap out of it. You hear, girl?”

“Leave me alone,” Juanita said.

“You don’t snap out of it, I call your mother and tell her you’re having trouble with your cabeza again. Also, I write to Joe. I tell him, Dear Joe, that wife of yours, you better come and get her locked up. O.K., you snap out of it now?”

“All I wanted was to hear a song.”

“What song?”

“‘Nita, Juanita.’ He says it’s a song. I never heard of it, I think he’s lying. I think he’s a spy from the police or the Probation Department.”

“He’s not lying.”

“I think he is.”

“I can spot a cop a mile away.” Mrs. Brewster said. “Also, I know that song. I used to sing it when I was a girl. I had a pretty voice once, before I breathed in all this foul air. Now you believe me?”

“No.”

“O.K., we sing it together for you, him and me. How about that, mister? We make a little music to cheer Nita up?”

Fielding cleared his throat. “I can’t...”

“I begin. You follow.”

“But...”

“Now. One, two, three, here we go:

Juanita’s face was still turned to the wall. Mrs. Brewster said, “You’re not listening.”

“I am so.”

“Isn’t it pretty, all that sadness? Now comes the chorus with your very own name in it.”

Fielding joined, softly and a little off key, in the chorus:

During the chorus Juanita slowly turned her head to watch the two songsters, and her mouth began to move slightly, as if she were silently singing along with them. She looked like a child again in that moment, a little girl wanting desperately to be part of a song she never knew, a harmony she never heard.

When the chorus was over, Mrs. Brewster blew her nose on her apron, thinking of her pretty voice that had vanished in the foul air.

“I like the part with my name in it the best,” Juanita said.

Mrs. Brewster patted her shoulder. “Naturally. That’s the best part.”

“‘Lean thou on my heart.’ Imagine anyone saying that to me. I’d drop dead.”

“Things like that don’t get said in real life. You feeling better now, girl?”

“I’m all right. I was all right before, too. I just wanted to hear the song to make sure he wasn’t lying.”

“She’s a little crazy,” Mrs. Brewster said to Fielding. “But she handles easy if you know how.”

“I didn’t really think you were lying,” Juanita said when Mrs. Brewster had gone. “I have to check things, that’s all. I always check things. It’s funny the way spooks like her think everybody else is crazy.”

Fielding nodded. “It is funny. I’ve noticed it myself.”

“You didn’t believe her for a minute, did you?”

“Not for a minute.”

“I could tell you didn’t. You have a very kind expression. I bet you like dogs.”

“Dogs are fine.”

His fear had gone now, leaving in his throat a little knot of pity which he couldn’t swallow or cough up. It wasn’t often that Fielding experienced pity for anyone but himself, and he didn’t like the feeling. It seemed to immobilize him. He wanted to get up and run away and forget about this strange, sad girl, forget about the whole bunch of them — Daisy, Jim, Ada, Camilla. Camilla was dead. Jim and Daisy had their own lives, and Ada had hers... What the hell am I doing here? It’s dangerous. I may stir up a storm and get caught in the middle of it. I’d better go while the going’s good.

The girl was staring at him gravely. “What kind of dogs do you like best?”

“Sleeping ones.”

“I had a fox terrier once, but it chewed up one of my old lady’s crucifixes, and she made me take it to the pound.”

“That’s too bad.”

“I get off work in fifteen minutes. Maybe we could take in a movie this afternoon.”

It was the last thing in the world he wanted to do, but he didn’t hesitate. “That would be very nice.”

“I have to go home first and change clothes. I only live about three blocks away. You could wait here for me.”

“Why don’t I come along? It’s a good day for a walk.”

She looked suddenly tense again. “Who said I was going to walk?”

“I assumed — well, since you only live three blocks away...”

“I thought maybe you meant I wasn’t the kind of girl that’d have a car.”

“I didn’t mean that at all.”

“That’s good, because it’s not true. I’ve got a car. I just don’t bring it to work. I don’t like leaving it parked in the hot sun for all those niggers to lean against and scratch up the finish.”

He wondered whether the car, and “all those niggers” who leaned against it, existed outside Juanita’s mind. He hoped they were real and not symbols of the dark and ugly things that had happened to her, in or out of the hot sun.

“I take real good care of the finish.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Here’s your check. Eighty-five cents.”

He gave her a dollar, and she went behind the counter to get his change.

“How you feeling now, girl?” Mrs. Brewster said softly.

“Fine.”

“When you get off work, you go home to your mother, lie down, take a little rest. You do that, eh?”

“I’m going to the movies.”

“With him?”

Both the women turned and looked at Fielding. He wasn’t sure what was expected of him, so he smiled in a tentative way. Neither of them smiled back.

“He’s all right,” Juanita said. “He’s old enough to be my father.”

“Sure, we know that, but does he?”

“We’re only going to the movies.”

“He looks like a lush,” Mrs. Brewster said, “all those broken veins on his nose and cheekbones, and see the way he shakes.”

“He only had one beer.”

“And suppose one of Joe’s friends sees you with this man?”

“Joe doesn’t know anybody in town.”

Mrs. Brewster began fanning herself with her apron. “It’s too hot to argue. Just you be careful, girl. Your mother and me, we’re old friends; we don’t want you to start running wild again. You’re a respectable married woman with a husband and kids, remember that.”

Juanita had heard it all a hundred times; she could have recited it forward and backward and in Spanish. She listened without interest, watching the clock on the wall, leaning her weight first on one foot, then another.

“You hear me, girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Pay it some mind, then.”

“Oh sure,” Juanita said, and gave Fielding an amused little glance: Listen to this spook, will you? “Can I go now?”

“It’s not two yet.”

“Can’t I go early just this once?”

“All right, just this once. But it’s no way to conduct a business, I ought to have my head examined for soft spots.”

Juanita went over to the booth where Fielding was sitting. “Here’s your change.”

“Keep it.”

“Thanks. I can go now; the spook says it’s O.K. Shall I say ‘money’ and make her giggle again, just for fun?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to hear it?”

“No.”

For some reason she couldn’t figure out, Juanita didn’t want to hear it again either. She walked very quickly to the door without glancing back to see whether Mrs. Brewster was watching or Fielding was following.

Outside. This was what Juanita liked best, to be out and free, to be moving fast, going from one place to another, not being anywhere in particular or with anyone in particular, which was the same thing, because people were like places, like houses, they tied you down and made you live in them. She wanted to be a train, a huge, beautiful, shiny train, which never had to stop for fuel or to let people off or on. It just kept on going, blowing its big whistle, frightening everyone off the tracks.

These were the high points of her life, the times between places.

She was a train. Awhoooeeeee...

13

I am alone, surrounded by strangers in a strange place...

It was 2:30 when Pinata reached the neighborhood of the Velada Café. Before he got out of the car, he took off his tie and sports coat, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, and unbuttoned it at the neck. He planned on using the direct approach, asking for the girl and letting it be assumed he was one of her admirers.

But he hadn’t figured on Mrs. Brewster’s sharp, suspicious eyes. He was barely inside the door when she spotted him and said to Chico the busboy out of the corner of her mouth, “Cop. You in trouble?”

“No, Mrs. Brewster.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying. I’m...”

“If he asks your age, you’re twenty-one, see?”

“He won’t believe it. I know him. I mean, he knows me from the Y; he taught me handball.”

“O.K., hide in the back room till he leaves.”

Chico made a dash for the back room, riding his broom like a witch frightened by a bigger witch.

Pinata sat down at the counter. Mrs. Brewster approached him, holding her apron in front of her like a shield, and said very politely, “Can I get you something, sir?”

“What’s your lunch special?”

“We’re not serving lunch. It’s after hours.”

“How about a bowl of soup?”

“We’re fresh out of soup.”

“Coffee?”

“It’s stale.”

“I see.”

“I could make you some fresh, but it’d take a long time. I move slow.”

“Chico moves pretty fast,” Pinata said. “Of course, he’s young.”

Mrs. Brewster’s eyes glittered. “Not so young. Twenty-one.”

“My guess would be sixteen.”

“Twenty-one. He’s got a birth certificate says twenty-one, all printed up proper.”

“He must have his own printer.”

“Chico looks young,” Mrs. Brewster said stubbornly, “because his whiskers are slow to come through the skin.”

Pinata was well aware by this time that his plans for a direct approach were useless, that it would be impossible to get information from a woman who’d refused to serve him lunch or coffee. He said, “Look, I’m not a policeman. It’s not my concern if you’re employing underage help. Chico just happens to be a friend of mine. I’d like to talk to him for a minute.”

“What for?”

“To see how he’s getting along.”

“He’s getting along good. He minds his own business, which is how everybody should do.”

Pinata looked toward the rear of the café and saw Chico’s eyes peering out at him through the little square of glass in one of the swinging doors. Pinata smiled, and the boy grinned back in a friendly way.

Seeing the grin, Mrs. Brewster hesitated, wiping her hands uneasily on her apron. “Chico’s not in trouble?”

“No.”

“And you met him at the Y, eh?”

“That’s right.”

Mrs. Brewster’s snort indicated her low opinion of the Y, but she motioned to Chico with her apron, and he came sidling out of the door dragging his broom behind him. He was still wearing his grin, but it seemed in close-up to be less friendly than anxious.

“Hello, Chico.”

“Hello, Mr. Pinata.”

“I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

“No, well, I been busy, one thing and another like.”

Three men in coveralls came in and sat at the far end of the counter. Mrs. Brewster went over to take their orders, giving Chico a little frown of warning as she passed.

“How’s your schoolwork coming along?” Pinata said.

Chico stared up at an interesting spot on the ceiling. “Not so good.”

“You’re getting passing grades, I hope.”

“That grade bit’s all in the past. I quit school at Christmastime.”

“Why?”

“I had to get a steady job to keep my car running. That after-school errand stuff wasn’t enough. You can’t take the chicks out in a machine that don’t run good.”

“That’s a foolish reason for quitting school.”

The boy shrugged. “You asked. I answered. Maybe in your day the chicks was different, maybe they liked to do things like walk in the park, see? Now when you ask a chick out, she wants to go to a drive-in movie like, and you can’t go to a drive-in without you got a car.”

“Unless you have a car.”

“That’s what I mean. Without you got a car, you don’t rate, you’re the most nothing.”

In the past few years Pinata had heard this same story fifty times, often from brighter and more educable boys than Chico. Each time it depressed him a little further. He said, “You’re pretty young to be working in a place like this, aren’t you, Chico?”

“There ain’t no harm in it,” the boy said nervously. “Honest to God, Mr. Pinata. It’s not like I go around lapping up what’s left in the glasses. Croaky does that — he’s the dishwasher. It’s part of his salary like.”

“What about the other people who work here? The waitresses, for example. How do they treat you?”

“O.K.”

“The blonde standing beside the back booth, who’s she?”

“Millie. The other one’s called Sunny, short for sunshine on account of she never smiles. She says, what’s to smile at.” Chico was relieved to have the conversation switched from himself, and he intended to keep it that way if he could. “Millie’s real cool. She used to teach dancing at one of them schools, you know, like cha cha cha, but it was too hard on her feet. They were flat to begin with and got flatter.”

“I thought there was a new girl around, Nita somebody-or-other.”

“Oh, her. She’s a funny one. One minute you’re her best friend — good morning, Chico, ain’t it a beautiful morning, Chico — and the next minute she looks at me like I’m the thing from outer space. She’s a snappy waitress, though. Real jet. Her and the old bird” — he indicated Mrs. Brewster with a slight movement of his head — “are pretty palsy because the old bird knows her mother. I hear them talking about it a lot.”

“Isn’t Nita working today?”

“She was. She took off an hour ago with a guy. There was some trouble about a song, ended up with Mrs. Brewster and the guy singing this real square song with her name in it, Juanita. Nobody was drunk; it wasn’t that kind of singing.”

“Could the man have been her husband?”

“Naw. He’s in hock. This other guy, he’s the one put him here.” God, Fielding’s back in town. I wonder if Daisy knows.

“I spotted him soon as he came in,” Chico added with pride. “I got a good memory for faces. Maybe I don’t dig that math bit so good, but faces I never forget.”

“How old a man was he?”

“Old enough to be my father. Maybe even old enough to be your father.”

“That’s pretty old,” Pinata said wryly.

“Sure. I know. I was kinda surprised Nita’d want to go out with him.”

“Out where?”

“To the movies. Nita and the old bird had an argument about it, not a real fight like, just quiet. You go home to your mother, the old bird says, but Nita wasn’t having any of that stuff, so she and the guy take off. Nita don’t like to be told a thing. Like the other day it’s raining, see, and I says to her, look, it’s raining. That’s all, nothing personal. But she gets sore as hell, like I’d told her her lipstick was on crooked or something. Me, I think she’s zafada, she needs a headshrinker.”

Mrs. Brewster turned suddenly and called out in a sharp, penetrating voice, “Chico, sweep!”

“Sure. Yes, ma’am,” Chico said. “I got to get back to work now, Mr. Pinata. See you at the Y, huh?”

“I hope so. I’d hate to think you’ve given up everything merely to support a car.”

“That’s the way it is these days, if you dig me.”

“Yes, I guess I dig you, Chico.”

“You can’t change it, I can’t change it, that’s the way it is.”

“Chico!” Mrs. Brewster screamed. “Sweep!”

Chico swept.

The public phone booth on the corner smelled as if it were used during the dark hours for more personal communication and needs than the telephone company had planned on. The walls were covered with telephone numbers, initials, names, messages: winston tastes good. winston, 93446. sally m is cool. don’t be haf safe. greetings from jersey city. life is rotten. you guys are all nutz. 24t, u4 me. hello crule world goodby.

Pinata dialed Daisy’s number and received a busy signal. Then he called Charles Alston at his house.

Alston himself answered. “Hello?”

“This is Steve Pinata, Charley.”

“Any luck?”

“That depends on what you mean by luck. I went to the Velada. Juanita wasn’t on duty, but there’s no doubt she’s the girl.”

Alston’s heavy sigh could be heard even above the street noises coming through the open door of the telephone booth. “I was afraid of this. Well, I have no alternative. I’ll have to let the Probation Department know about her. I hate the idea, but the girl’s got to be protected and so do the children. Do you think — that is, you agree, don’t you, that I should notify the Probation Department?”

“That’s up to you. You know the circumstances better than I do.”

“They’re closed for the weekend, of course, but I’ll call them first thing Monday morning.”

“And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile we wait.”

“Meanwhile you wait,” Pinata said. “I don’t. I’m going to try and find her.”

“Why?”

“She happens to be out with an ex-client of mine. I’d like to see him again for various reasons.”

“When you find her, go easy on her. For her sake,” Alston added, “not yours. I assume you can take care of yourself. Where’s she staying?”

“With her mother, I think. At least she’s in contact with her, so I’ll try there first. Where does Mrs. Rosario live?”

“When I knew her, she was living in a little house on Granada Street. It’s very likely she’s still there, since the house belongs to her. She bought it a long time ago. She used to be the housekeeper on the old Higginson ranch. When Mrs. Higginson died, she left Mrs. Rosario a few thousand dollars, as she did all her other employees. By the way, if Juanita is out with this ex-client of yours, why do you expect to find her at the house on Granada Street? Believe me, she isn’t the type to bring the boys home to mother.”

“I have a hunch she might have dropped in to change her clothes. She was working, in uniform, until two o’clock. She wouldn’t be likely to keep a date while wearing a uniform.”

“Definitely not. So?”

“I thought I’d try to get some information from Mrs. Rosario.”

Alston’s laugh was loud and brief. “You may or may not get it. It depends on whether you have a mal ojo. By the way, I set up your appointment with Roy Fondero for three o’clock.”

“It’s almost that now.”

“Then you’d better get over there. He’s driving down to L.A. for the game tonight. Oh yes, one more word of advice, Steve: in dealing with Mrs. Rosario, play up the clean-living, high-thinking angle. You never swear, drink, smoke, blaspheme, or fornicate. You go to Mass and confession and observe saints’ days. You don’t happen to have a brother or uncle who’s a priest?”

“I might have.”

“That would help,” Alston said. “Incidentally, do you speak Spanish?”

“Some.”

“Well, don’t. Many Spanish Americans who’ve been here a long time, like Mrs. Rosario, resent people addressing them in Spanish, although they may use the language themselves with their friends and families.”

A dozen Doric columns entwined with giant Burmese honeysuckle made the front of Fondero’s place look like an old southern mansion. The impression was destroyed by the long black hearse parked by the side door. In the driveway behind the hearse stood a small bright red sports car. The incongruity of the two vehicles amused Pinata. The death and the resurrection, he thought. Maybe that’s how modern Americans imagine resurrection, as a bright red sports car whitewalling them along a Styrofoam road to a nylon-Orlon-Dacron nirvana.

Pinata went in the side door and turned right.

Fondero was watering a planter full of maranta. He was a man of massive proportions, as if he’d been built to withstand the weight and pressure of other people’s griefs.

“Sit down, Mr. Pinata. Charley Alston called me to say you want some information.”

“That’s right.”

“What about?”

“You may recall Carlos Camilla?”

“Oh yes. Yes, indeed.” Fondero finished watering the maranta and put the empty pitcher on the window ledge. “Camilla was my guest, shall we say, for over a month. As you know, the city has no official morgue, but Camilla’s body had to be kept, pending investigation of the source of the money that was found on him. Nothing came of the investigation, so he was buried.”

“Did anyone attend the funeral?”

“A hired priest and my wife.”

“Your wife?”

Fondero sat down in a chair that looked too frail to bear him. “Betty refused to let Camilla be buried without mourners, so she acted as a substitute. It wasn’t entirely acting, however. Camilla, perhaps because of the tragic circumstances of his death, perhaps because we had him around so long, had gotten under our skin. We kept hoping that someone would come along to claim him. No one did, but Betty still refused to believe that Camilla didn’t have somebody in the world who cared about him. She insisted that the money found on Camilla be used for an imposing monument instead of an expensive coffin. She had the idea that someday a mourner might appear, and she wanted Camilla’s grave to be conspicuous. As I recall, it is.”

“It’s conspicuous,” Pinata said. And a mourner did come along and find it, but the mourner was a stranger — Daisy.

“You’re a detective, Mr. Pinata?”

“I have a license that says so.”

“Then perhaps you have some theory of how a man like Camilla got hold of $2,000.”

“A holdup seems the most likely source.”

“The police were never able to prove that,” Fondero said, taking a gold cigarette case from his pocket. “Cigarette? No? Good for you. I wish I could give them up. Since this lung cancer business, some of the local wits have started calling cigarettes Fonderos. Well, it’s publicity of a kind, I suppose.”

“Where do you think Camilla got the money?”

“I’m inclined to believe he came by it honestly. Perhaps he saved it up, perhaps it was repayment of a loan. The latter theory is more logical. He was a dying man. He must have been aware of his condition, and knowing how little time he had left, he decided to collect money owing to him to pay for his funeral. That would explain his coming to town — the person who owed him money lived here. Or lives here.”

“That sounds plausible,” Pinata said, “except for one thing. According to the newspaper, the police made an appeal to the public for anyone who knew Camilla to come forward. No one did.”

“No one came forward in person. But I had a peculiar telephone call after Camilla had been here a week or so. I told the police about it, and they thought, as I did at the time, it was the work of some religious crank.”

The expression on Fondero’s face as he leaned forward was an odd mixture of amusement and irritation. “If you want to hear from every crackpot and prankster in town, try going into this business. At Halloween it’s the kids. At Christmas and Easter it’s the religious nuts. In September it’s college boys being initiated. Any month at all is good for a lewd suggestion from a sex deviate as to what goes on in my lab. I received the call about Camilla just before Christmas, which made it the right timing for one of the religious crackpots.”

“Was it from a man or a woman?”

“A woman. Such calls usually are.”

“What kind of voice did she have?”

“Medium in all respects, as I recall,” Fondero said. “Medium-pitched, medium-aged, medium-cultured.”

“Any trace of an accent?”

“No.”

“Could it have been a young woman, say about thirty?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”

“What did she want?”

“I can’t remember her exact words after all this time. The gist of her conversation was that Camilla was a good Catholic and should be buried in consecrated ground. I told her about the difficulties involved in such an arrangement, since there was no evidence that Camilla had died in the Church. She claimed that Camilla had fulfilled all the requirements for burial in consecrated ground. Then she hung up. Except for the degree of self-control she displayed, it was an ordinary run-of-the-mill crank call. At least I thought so then.”

“Camilla is buried in the Protestant cemetery,” Pinata said.

“I talked it over with our parish priest. There was no alternative.”

“Did the woman mention the money?”

“No.”

“Or the manner of his death?”

“I got the impression,” Fondero said cautiously, “from her insistence on Camilla being a good Catholic, that she didn’t believe he had killed himself.”

“Do you?”

“The experts called it suicide.”

“I should think by this time you’d be something of an expert yourself along those lines.”

“Experienced. Not expert.”

“What’s your private opinion?”

Outside the window Fondero’s son had begun to whistle, loudly and off-key, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“I work very closely with the police and the coroner’s office,” Fondero said. “It wouldn’t be good business for me to have an opinion contrary to theirs.”

“But you have one anyway?”

“Not for the record.”

“All right, for me. Top secret.”

Fondero went over to the window and then returned to his chair, facing Pinata. “Do you happen to recall the contents of the note he left?”

“Yes. ‘This ought to pay my way into heaven, you stinking rats... Born, too soon, 1907. Died, too late, 1955.’”

“Now everybody seemed to take that as a suicide note. Perhaps that’s what it was. But it could also be the message of a man who knew he was going to die, couldn’t it?”

“I guess so,” Pinata said. “The idea never occurred to me.”

“Nor to me, until I made my own examination of the body. It was that of an old man — prematurely aged if we accept the date of his birth as given, and I see no reason why he should lie about it under the circumstances. Many degenerative processes had taken place: the liver was cirrhotic, there was considerable hardening of the arteries, and he was suffering from emphysema of the lungs and an advanced case of arthritis. It was this last thing that interested me the most. Camilla’s hands were badly swollen and out of shape. I seriously doubt whether he could have grasped the knife firmly enough to have inflicted the wound himself. Maybe he could. Maybe he did. All I’m saying is, I doubt it.”

“Did you express your doubts to the authorities?”

“I told Lieutenant Kirby. He wasn’t in the least excited. He claimed that the suicide note was more valid evidence than the opinion of a layman. Although I don’t hold a pathologist’s degree, I hardly consider myself a layman after some twenty-five years in the business. Still, Kirby had a point: opinions don’t constitute evidence. The police were satisfied with a suicide verdict, the coroner was satisfied, and if Camilla had any friends who weren’t, they didn’t bother complaining. You’re a detective, what do you think?”

“I’d be inclined to agree with Kirby,” Pinata said carefully, “on the basis of the facts. Camilla had good reason to kill himself. He wrote, if not a suicide note, at least a farewell note. He left money for his funeral expenses. The knife used had his own initials on it. In the face of all this, I can’t put too much stock in your opinion that Camilla’s hands were too crippled to have wielded the knife. But of course I’ve had no experience with arthritis.”

“I have.”

Fondero leaned forward, holding out his left hand as if it were some specimen from his lab. Pinata saw what he hadn’t noticed before: that Fondero’s knuckles were swollen to twice normal size, and the fingers were bent and stiffened into a claw.

“That,” Fondero said, “used to be my pitching hand. Now I couldn’t even field a bunt if the World Series depended on it. I sit in the stands as a spectator, and when Wally Moon belts one over the fence, I can’t even applaud. All my lab work these days is done by my assistants. Believe me, if I wanted to kill myself, it would have to be with something other than a knife.”

“Desperation often gives a man additional strength.”

“It may give him strength, yes, but it can’t loosen up fused joints or restore atrophied muscles. It’s impossible.”

Impossible. Pinata wondered how often the word had already come up in connection with Camilla. Too many times. Perhaps he’d been the kind of man destined for the impossible, born to botch up statistics and defy the laws of physics. The evidence of motive, weapon, suicide note, and funeral money was powerful enough, but fused joints couldn’t be loosened overnight, nor atrophied muscles restored on impulse or by desire.

Fondero was still holding out his hand for exhibit like a freak at a sideshow. “Are you still inclined to believe Kirby, Mr. Pinata?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t actually know, either. All I can say is that if Camilla grasped that knife with those hands of his, I wish he’d have stayed alive long enough to tell me how he did it. I could use some advice on the subject.”

He hid his deformed hand in his pocket. The show was over; it had been an effective one.

“Kirby’s a sharp man,” Pinata said.

“That’s right, he’s a sharp man. He just doesn’t happen to have arthritis.”

“Wouldn’t Camilla’s condition have prevented him from writing the suicide note?”

“No. It was printed, not written. This is common among arthritics. It’s a good deal easier to print legibly.”

“From your examination of the body, what general information did you get about Camilla’s manner of living?”

“I won’t go into further medical details,” Fondero said, “but the evidence indicates that he was a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker, and at some time in his life a heavy worker.”

“Was there any clue about what kind of work?”

“One, although some orthopedists might not agree with me. He had a bone malformation known as genu varum, less politely called bowlegs. Now bowlegs can be caused by a number of things, but if I had to make a wild guess about Camilla’s occupation, I’d say that, beginning early in his youth, he had a lot to do with horses. He may have worked on a ranch.”

“Ranch,” Pinata said, frowning. Someone had recently mentioned a ranch to him, but it wasn’t until he got back to his car that he recalled the circumstances: Alston on the telephone had said that Mrs. Rosario, Juanita’s mother, had been housekeeper on a ranch and had inherited enough money, when the owners died, to buy the house on Granada Street.

14

The hotel guests are looking at me queerly while I write this, as if they are wondering what a tramp like me is doing in their lobby where I don’t belong, writing to a daughter who has never really belonged to me...

Granada was a street of small frame houses built so closely together that they seemed to be leaning on each other for moral and physical and economic support against the pressures from the white side of town. The pomegranate trees, for which the street was named, were fruitless now, but at Christmas time the gaudy orange balls of fruit hung from the branches looking quite unreasonable, as if they had not grown there at all but had been strung up to decorate the street for the holiday season.

Five-twelve hid its age and infirmities — and proclaimed its independence from its neighbors — with a fresh coat of bright pink paint that seemed to have been applied by a child or a nearsighted amateur. Blotches of paint stained the narrow sidewalk, the railing of the porch, the square yard of lawn; the calla lilies, the leaves of the holly bush and the pittosporum hedge, were pimpled with pink as if they’d broken out with some strange new plant disease. Pink footsteps, belonging to a child or a very small woman, led up the gray porch steps and disappeared in the coarse bristles of the coca mat outside the front door. These footsteps were the only evidence that a child or children might be living in the house. There were no toys or parts of toys on the porch or lawn, no discarded shoes or sweaters, no half-eaten oranges or jelly sandwiches. If Juanita and her six children had taken up residence here, someone was being careful to hide the fact, perhaps Juanita herself, perhaps Mrs. Rosario.

Pinata pressed the door buzzer and waited, trying to figure out why Juanita had suddenly decided to come back to town after an absence of more than three years. She must have known she’d be in trouble with the authorities for breaking probation when she disappeared in the first place. On the other hand, Juanita didn’t behave on the logical level, so the reason for her return could be something quite trivial and capricious, or purely emotional: homesickness, a desire to see her mother again or to show off her latest husband and youngest child to her friends, perhaps a quarrel with a neighbor, wherever she’d been living, followed by a sudden violent desire to get away. It was difficult to guess her motives. She was like a puppet operated by dozens of strings; some of them had broken, and others had become so inextricably twisted that not one of them functioned as it was intended to. To remove these knots and tangles, and to splice the broken ends together, was the job of Alston and his staff. So far, they had failed. Juanita’s soarings and somersaults, her leaps and landings were beyond the control of any puppeteer.

The door opened to reveal a short, thin middle-aged woman with black, expressionless eyes like ripe olives. She held her body so rigidly straight that she appeared to be wearing an iron brace on her back. Everything about her was stretched taut; her skin looked as if it had been starched, her hair was drawn back from her face in a tight and tidy little bun, and her mouth was compressed into a hard line. Pinata was surprised when it opened with such ease.

“What do you want?”

“Mrs. Rosario?”

“That is my name.”

“I’m Steve Pinata. I’d like to talk to you for a minute, if I may.”

“If it’s about old Mr. Lopez next door, I have nothing more to say. I told the lady from the Department of Health yesterday, they had no right to take him away like that against his will. He’s had that same cough all his life, and it’s never done him a bit of harm. It’s as natural to him as breathing. As for the rest of the neighborhood getting into that ray machine, free or not, I refused and so did the Gonzales and the Escobars. It’s against nature, getting your lungs choked up with all those rays.”

“I’m not connected with the Department of Health,” Pinata said. “I’m looking for a man who may be calling himself Foster.”

“Calling himself? What is this business, calling himself?”

“Your daughter knows him as Foster, let’s put it that way.”

Mrs. Rosario took a tuck in her mouth, like a sailor reefing a mainsail at the approach of a storm. “My daughter, Juanita, lives down south.”

“But she’s here now for a visit, isn’t she?”

“Whose concern is it if she comes here for a visit? She has done no harm. I keep a sharp eye on her, she stays out of trouble. Who are you anyway to come asking questions about my Juanita?”

“My name is Stevens Pinata.”

“So? What does that tell me? Nothing. It tells me nothing. I don’t care about names, only people.”

“I’m a private investigator, Mrs. Rosario. My job right now is to keep track of Foster.”

The woman clapped one hand to her left breast as if something had suddenly broken under her dress, a heart or perhaps merely the strap of a slip. “He’s a bad man, is that what you’re saying? He’s going to cause trouble for my Juanita?”

“I don’t think he’s a bad man. I can’t guarantee there won’t be trouble, though. He can be a little impulsive at times. Did he come here with your daughter, Mrs. Rosario?”

“Yes.”

“And they went off together?”

“Yes. Half an hour ago.”

A thin, red-cheeked girl about ten came out on the porch of the house next door and started rotating a hula hoop around her hips and chewing a wad of gum in matching rhythm. She appeared to be completely oblivious to what was taking place on the adjoining porch, but Mrs. Rosario said in a hurried whisper, “We can’t talk out here. That Querida Lopez, she hears everything and tells more.”

Still not looking in their direction, Querida announced to the world in a loud, bright voice, “I am going to the hospital. None of you can come and see me either, because I’ve got spots on my lungs. I don’t care. I don’t like any of you anyway. I’m going to the hospital like Grandpa and have lots of toys to play with and ice cream to eat, and I don’t have to do any more dishes forever and ever. And don’t any of you come and see me, because you can’t, ha ha.”

“Querida Lopez,” Mrs. Rosario said sharply, “is this true?”

The only sign that the girl had heard was the increased speed of the hula hoop.

Mrs. Rosario’s dark skin had taken on a yellowish tinge, and when she stepped back into her front room, it was as if Querida had pushed her in the stomach. “The girl lies sometimes. Perhaps it isn’t true. If she is so sick as to go to a hospital, how could she be out playing like this? She coughs, yes, but all children cough. And you see for yourself what a fine, healthy color she has in her cheeks.”

Pinata thought that the color might be caused by fever rather than health, but he didn’t say so. He followed Mrs. Rosario into the house. Even after he closed the door behind him, he could hear Querida’s rhythmic chanting: “Going to the hospital — I don’t care. Can’t come and see me — I don’t care. Going in an ambulance...”

The rays of sun coming in through the lace curtains scarcely lightened the gloom of the small square parlor. All four walls were covered with religious ornaments and pictures, crucifixes and rosaries, Madonna’s with and without child, heads of Christ, a little shrine presided over by the Holy Mother, haloed angels and blessed virgins. Many of these objects, which were intended to give hope and comfort to the living, had the effect of glorifying death while at the same time making it seem repulsive.

In this room, or another one just like it, Juanita had grown up, and this first glimpse of it did more to explain her to Pinata than all the words Alston had used. Here she had spent her childhood, surrounded by constant reminders that life was cruel and short, and the gates to heaven bristled with thorns, nails, and barbed wire. She must have looked a thousand times at the haloed mothers with their plump little babies, and unconsciously or deliberately, she had chosen this role for herself because it represented aliveness and creativity as well as sanctity.

Mrs. Rosario crossed herself in front of the little shrine and asked the Holy Mother for assurance that Querida Lopez, with her fine, healthy color, was lying. Then she tucked her thin body neatly into a chair, taking up as little space as possible because in this house there was hardly any room left for the living.

“Sit down,” she said with a stiff nod. “I don’t expect strangers to come into my house asking personal questions, but now you are here, it is only polite to ask you to sit down.”

“Thanks.”

The chairs all looked uncomfortable, as if they had been selected to discourage people from sitting. Pinata chose a small, wooden-backed, petit-point couch, which gave off a faint odor of cleaning fluid. From the couch he could look directly into what appeared to be Mrs. Rosario’s bedroom. Here, too, the walls were crowded with religious paintings and ornaments, and on the night-stand beside the big carved double bed a candle was burning in front of the photograph of a smiling young man. Obviously, the young man had died, and the candle was burning for his soul. He wondered whether the young man had been Juanita’s father and how many candles ago he had died.

Mrs. Rosario saw him staring at the photograph and immediately got up and crossed the room. “You must excuse me. It is not polite to display the sleeping quarters to strangers.”

She pulled the bedroom door shut, and Pinata could see at once why she had left it open in the first place. The door looked as if it had been attacked by someone with a hammer. The wood was gouged and splintered, and one whole panel was missing. Through the jagged aperture, the young man continued to smile at Pinata. The flickering light of the candle made his face appear very lively; the eyes twinkled, the cheek muscles moved, the lips expanded and contracted, the black curls stirred in the wind behind the broken door.

“One of the children did it,” Mrs. Rosario explained in a quiet voice. “I don’t know which one. I was at the grocery store when it happened. I suspect Pedro, being the oldest. He’s eleven, a boy, but the devil gets into him sometimes, and he plays rough.”

Very rough, indeed, Pinata thought. And playing isn’t quite the word.

“Pedro’s down at the lumber mill now, seeing about a new door. For punishment, I made him take the other children with him. Then he’s got to paint and hang the new door by himself. I’m a poor woman. I can’t afford painters and carpenters with such prices they charge.”

It was obvious to Pinata that she wasn’t rich. But he could see no signs in the house of extreme poverty, and the religious items alone had cost quite a bit of money. Mrs. Rosario’s former employer on the ranch must have been generous in his will, or else she earned extra money doing odd jobs.

He glanced at the door again. Some of the hammer marks were at the very top; if an eleven-year-old boy did the damage, he must be a giant for his age. And what would be his motive for such an act? Revenge? Destruction for its own sake? Or maybe, Pinata thought, the boy had been trying to break down a door locked against him.

It didn’t occur to him that Mrs. Rosario was lying...

She’d seen them coming up Granada Street, Juanita in her green uniform and an older man. Mrs. Rosario didn’t recognize the man, but the two of them were laughing and talking, and that was enough: they were up to no good.

She called the children in from the backyard. They were old enough now to notice things, to wonder, yes, and to talk, too. Pedro had the eyes and ears of a fox and a mouth like a hippopotamus. Even in church he talked out loud sometimes and had to be punished afterward with adhesive tape.

She gave them each an apple and took them all into the bedroom. If they were very good, she promised, if they sat quietly on the bed and said their beads to themselves, later they would all go over to Mrs. Brewster’s to watch the television.

She had just locked the bedroom door when she heard Juanita’s quick, light step on the porch and the sound of laughter. She took the key out of the lock and put her eye to the keyhole. Juanita was coming in the front door with the stranger, looking flushed and restless.

“Well, sit down,” she said. “Take a look around. Some dump, eh?”

“It’s different.”

“I’ll say it’s different. Don’t touch anything. She’ll throw a fit.”

“Where is your mother?”

Juanita raised her eyebrows, the corners of her mouth, and her shoulders in an elaborate combination of shrug and grimace. “How should I know? Maybe she dragged the kids over to church again.”

“That’s too bad.”

“So what’s too bad about it?”

“I was hoping to meet them.” Fielding made his tone casual, as if he were expressing a polite desire instead of a deadly serious purpose. “I like children. I only had one of my own, a girl. She’s about your age now.”

“Yeah? How old do you think I am?”

“If you hadn’t told me about the six children, I’d say about twenty.”

“Sure,” Juanita said. “I bet.”

“I mean it. That goo you put on your eyes makes you look older, though. You should stop using it.”

“It enhances them.”

“They don’t need enhancing.”

“You can sure throw the bull around.” But she began rubbing her eyelids with her two forefingers, as if she had more respect for his opinion than she cared to admit. “Is she pretty? Your kid, I mean.”

“She was. I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

“How come you haven’t seen her for a long time if you like children so much?”

It was a question with a hundred answers. He picked a couple at random. “I’ve been moving around. I’ve got itchy feet.”

“So’ve I. Only I can’t do much about it, saddled with six kids and an old lady that watches me like I got two heads.” She flung herself almost violently on the couch, rolled over, and stared up at the ceiling. “Sometimes I wish a big wind would come along and blow this house away and me in it. I wouldn’t care where I blew to. Even a foreign country would be O.K.”

From the bedroom came the sudden, sharp cry of a child, followed immediately by a noisy babble of voices, as if that first single cry had been the signal for a whole chorus to begin.

Juanita glanced toward the door, looking angry but not surprised. “So she’s in there spying on me again. I should’ve guessed.”

The noise from the bedroom had increased to a roar. Fielding could scarcely hear his own voice above it. “We’d better leave. I don’t want to get mixed up in another brawl.”

“I haven’t changed my clothes.”

“You look fine. Come on, let’s go. I need a drink.”

“You can wait.”

“For Pete’s sake, someone might call the police like last time. Two hundred bucks that cost me.”

“I don’t like being spied on.”

She jumped off the couch and moved swiftly toward the bedroom, yanking a large crucifix off the wall as she passed.

“What are you doing in there?” She banged on the door with the crucifix. “Open this up, you hear me? Open it up!”

There was a sudden silence. Then one of the children began to wail, and another answered in a scared voice, “Grandma won’t let us.”

Finally Mrs. Rosario herself spoke. “The door will be opened when the gentleman leaves.”

“It’ll be opened now.”

“When the gentleman leaves, not before. I will not allow the children to see their mother consorting with a strange man while her husband is away.”

“Listen to me, you old spook!” Juanita screamed. “You know what I got here in my hand? I got Jesus Christ himself. And you know what I’m going to do with him? I’m going to pound him against this door—”

“You will not blaspheme in my house.”

“—and pound him and pound him, until there’s nothing left of him or it. Hear that, you witch? For once, Jesus is going to do me a good turn. He’s going to break down this door.”

“If there is any violence, I will take steps.”

“He’s on my side for a change, see? It’s him and me, not you.” She let out a brief, excited laugh. “Come on, Jesus baby, you’re on my side.”

She began striking the door with the crucifix, as rhythmically as a skilled carpenter driving nails. Fielding sat, his face frozen in a grimace of pain, listening to the sound of splintering wood and sobbing children. Suddenly the crucifix broke at the top, and the metal head flew through the air, narrowly missing Fielding’s, and ricocheted off a table onto the floor.

The same blow that broke the crucifix had shattered one of the panels in the door, so that Mrs. Rosario could see what had happened. The door opened then, and the children scrambled out like cattle from a boxcar, confused and terrified.

With a cry of rage Mrs. Rosario darted across the room and picked up the head of Jesus.

“That’ll teach you to spy on me,” Juanita said triumphantly. “Next time it’ll be more than Jesus; it’ll be every lousy piece of junk in the house.”

“Wicked girl. Blasphemer.”

“I don’t like being spied on. I don’t like doors locked against me.”

Three of the children had run directly out the front door. To the others, one hidden behind the couch and two clinging to Juanita’s skirt, Mrs. Rosario said in a trembling voice, “Come. We must kneel together and ask forgiveness for your mother’s sin.”

“Pray for yourself, you old spook. You need it as bad as anybody.”

“Come, children. To keep your mother’s soul from the torments of eternal hell...”

“Leave my kids alone. If they don’t want to pray, they don’t have to.”

“Marybeth, Paul, Rita...”

None of the children moved or uttered a sound. They seemed suspended in midair like aerialists aware of an imminent fall and not sure which side would be safer to fall on — God and Grandma’s, or Juanita’s. It was the youngest, Paul, who decided first. He pressed his dark, moist face against Juanita’s thigh and began to wail again.

“Stop slobbering,” Juanita said, and gave him a casual push in Fielding’s direction.

Fielding found himself in the position of a spectator at a ball game who sees the ball suddenly coming off the field in his direction and has no choice but to catch it. He picked the child up and carried him into the bedroom to get him away from the screaming women.

“You’ll go to hell, you wicked girl.”

“That’s O.K. by me. I got relatives there.”

“Don’t you dare speak his name. He is not in hell. The priest says by this time he is with the angels.”

“Well, if he can get to be with the angels, so can I.”

“‘Hi diddle diddle,’” Fielding whispered in the boy’s ear. “‘The cat and the fiddle. The cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.’ Did you ever see a cow jump over the moon?”

The boy’s black eyes looked grave, as if this were a very important question that deserved something better than a snap answer. “I saw a cow once.”

“Jumping over the moon?”

“No, he was giving milk. Grandma took us to see a big ranch, and there was cows giving milk. Grandma says cows work hard to give milk, so I mustn’t spill mine on the table.”

“I had a job on a ranch once. And believe me, I worked harder than any old cows.”

“Grandma’s ranch?”

“No. This one was far away.”

The noise from the next room stopped abruptly. Juanita had disappeared into another part of the house, and Mrs. Rosario was kneeling alone in front of the little shrine, the head of Jesus cradled in her left hand. She prayed silently, but from the vindictive look on her face Fielding thought she must be invoking punishment, not forgiveness.

“I want my daddy,” the boy said.

“He’ll be back one of these days. Now how about Miss Muffett, would you like to hear about her troubles? ‘Little Miss Muffett sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey. Along came a spider and sat down beside her, and frightened Miss Muffett away.’ Are you afraid of spiders?”

“No.”

“Good boy. Spiders can be very useful.”

Fielding’s collar was damp with sweat, and every few seconds his heart gave a quick extra beat, as if it were being chased around inside his chest cavity. He often worried about having a heart attack, but when he was at home, he simply took a couple of drinks and forgot about it. Here he couldn’t forget. It seemed, in fact, inevitable, a bang-up climax to the crazy afternoon of the broken crucifix and the shattered door, the grim praying woman and the terrified children, Juanita and Miss Muffett. And now, ladies and gentlemen, for our grand finale of the day we give you Stanley Fielding and his death-defying coronary.

“Miss Muffett,” he said, listening to his heartbeat, “was a real little girl, did you know that?”

“As real as me?”

“That’s right, just as real as you. She lived, oh, about two or three hundred years ago. Well, one day her father wrote a verse about her, and now children all over the world like to hear about little Miss Muffett.”

“I don’t.” The boy shook his head, and his thick black curly hair tickled Fielding’s throat.

“You don’t, eh? What do you like to hear about? And not so loud; we mustn’t disturb Grandma.”

“Talk about the ranch.”

“What ranch?”

“Where you worked.”

“That was a long time ago.” Ladies and gentlemen, before our star performer does his death-defying act, he will entertain you with a few highlights from his life story. “Well, I had a mare called Winnie. She was a cutting horse. A cutting horse has got to be fast and smart, and that’s what she was. All I had to do was stay in the saddle, and Winnie could pick a cow from a herd as easy as you can pick an orange from a bowl of fruit.”

“Grandma gave us an apple before you came. I hid mine. Want to know where?”

“I don’t think you’d better confide in me. I’m not so good at keeping secrets.”

“Do you tell?”

“Yeah. Sometimes I tell.”

“I tell all the time. The apple is hid under the—”

“Shhh.” Fielding patted his head. The boy, without speaking, had already told him what he’d come to find out. His black eyes and hair, his dark skin had spoken for him. One thing was clear now: a mistake had been made. But who had made it, and why? My God, I need a drink. If I had a drink, I could think. I could think with a drink. Think...

“What’s your name?”

“Foster,” Fielding said. He had used the name so often that it no longer seemed like lying. “Stan Foster.”

“Do you know my daddy?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Where is he?”

It was a good question, but an even better one was going around in Fielding’s mind. Not where, but who. Who’s your daddy, kid?

The boy was clinging to his neck so tightly that Fielding couldn’t move his head even to look around the room. But he was suddenly aware of a peculiar odor which he’d been too excited to notice before. It took him a minute or two to identify it as burning wax.

Rising from the bed, he eased the child gently onto the floor. Then he turned and saw the picture of the curly-haired young man behind the flickering candle. His heart began to pound against his rib cage, and the noise of it seemed as loud as the noise Juanita had made banging on the door. Flashes of red struck his eyes, and his hands and legs felt numb and swollen to double size. This is it, he thought. Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. Here I go...

It was a trap.

He saw it now very clearly. The whole thing was a trap; it had been written, rehearsed, staged. Every line, even the little boy’s, had been memorized. Every piece of business, including the shattering of the door, had been practiced over and over until it seemed real. And all of it had been leading up to this moment when he saw the picture.

He raised his swollen hand and wiped away the sweat that was dripping into his eyes, obscuring his vision.

They were in there now, in the other room, waiting to see what he would do, Mrs. Rosario pretending to pray, Juanita pretending to be getting ready to go out, the children pretending to be scared. They were in there listening, watching, waiting for him to give himself away, to make the wrong move. Even the little boy was a spy. Those innocent eyes looking up at him were not innocent at all, and the angelic mouth belonged to a demon.

“He is with the angels by this time,” Mrs. Rosario had said. Fielding knew now whom she’d been talking about, and crazy laughter rose in his throat and stuck there until he began to choke. He loosened his tie to get more air but immediately tightened it again. He must not let the watchers see that the picture meant anything to him or that he was trying to find out about the little boy’s father.

He was aware, in a vague way, that he wasn’t thinking straight, but he couldn’t clear his mind of the haze of suspicion that clouded it. In this haze, fact and fiction merged into paradox: a troubled girl became a master criminal, her mother a scheming witch, and the children were not children at all but adults whose bodies hadn’t grown up.

“Hey, I’m ready,” Juanita said.

Fielding whirled around so fast he lost his balance and had to steady himself by grabbing one of the bedposts.

“It’s a brand-new dress. How do I look?”

He couldn’t speak yet, but he managed to nod. The haze was beginning to lift, and he could see her quite clearly: a young woman, slim and pretty in a blue and white full-skirted dress, with a red sweater flung over her shoulders and red snakeskin shoes with heels like needles.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of this spookery.”

He walked out of the bedroom, rubber-kneed, trembling with relief. There had been no plot, no trap. His mind had invented the whole business, molded it out of fear and guilt. Juanita, Mrs. Rosario, the children, they were all innocent. They didn’t even know his real name or why he had come here. The picture beside the bed was one of those ugly coincidences that happen sometimes.

And yet...

I need a drink. My God, get me to a drink.

Mrs. Rosario crossed herself and turned from the little shrine. She still had made no acknowledgment of Fielding’s presence, not even a casual glance in his direction. She looked over his shoulder, addressing Juanita. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“You will buy me a new crucifix.”

Juanita moistened a forefinger on her tongue and smoothed her eyebrows. “I will, eh? Fancy me being so bighearted.”

“You are not bighearted,” Mrs. Rosario said steadily. “But you’re sensible enough to realize this is my house. If I lock the door against you, you’ll be out on the street.”

“You just tried the lock bit. See where it got you.”

“If there’s any more of that, I’ll call the police. You’ll be arrested, and the children will be taken to Juvenile Hall.”

Juanita had turned quite pale, but she grinned and shrugged her shoulders so expressively that her sweater fell off onto the floor. When Fielding bent over to pick it up, she snatched it out of his hand. “So? The kids will be just as good off there as they are in this nuthouse with you crawling around on your knees half the time.”

Mrs. Rosario for the first time looked directly at Fielding. “Where are you taking my daughter?”

“He’s not taking me anyplace,” Juanita said. “I’m taking him. I’m the one with the car.”

“You leave that car in the garage. Joe says you’re too wild to drive. You’ll be killed. You can’t afford to be killed with so many sins on your soul you haven’t confessed.”

“We had planned on going to a movie,” Fielding said to Mrs. Rosario. “But if you don’t approve — that is, I wouldn’t want to be the cause of any family friction.”

“Then you’d better leave. My daughter is a married woman. Married women don’t go to movies with strangers, and gentlemen don’t ask them to. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Stan Foster, ma’am.”

“What does that tell me? Nothing.”

“Leave him alone,” Juanita said. “And keep your nose out of my business.”

“This is my house; what goes on here is my business.”

“O.K., take your damn house. Keep it. It’s only a lousy little shack anyway.”

“It’s sheltered you and your children in times of trouble. You’d be out on the street if it wasn’t for...”

“I like the street.”

“Yes, sure, now that it’s warm and sunny you like it. Wait till the night comes, wait till it’s cold and maybe it starts to rain. You’ll come crying.”

“You’d love that, wouldn’t you, me coming crying. All right, start praying for rain, see if I come crying.” Juanita opened the front door and motioned to Fielding to go out ahead of her. “Just see if I come crying.”

“Gypsy,” Mrs. Rosario said in a soft, furious whisper. “You’re no child of mine, gypsy. I found you in an open field. I took pity. There’s none of my blood in you, gypsy.”

Juanita slammed the door. The Madonnas on the wall shivered but continued to smile.

“I was born right here in St. Joseph’s hospital,” Juanita said. “It’s on the records. You didn’t believe that open field stuff, did you?”

“Let’s go someplace and have a drink.”

“Sure, but did you or didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Believe that gypsy stuff.”

“No.” Fielding wanted to break into a run, to put as much distance as possible between himself and the weird house with the decapitated crucifix.

Juanita was tottering along beside him, crippled by her needle heels. “Hey, not so fast.”

“I need a drink. My nerves are shot.”

“She bugged you, eh?”

“Yeah.”

“She didn’t use to be so spooky when I lived at home before. Sure, she was religious, but it wasn’t so bad until she started trying to get people into heaven. You saw the candle, didn’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“The car’s just down here. I keep it in a separate garage so’s the kids don’t play around it and scratch the finish.”

“We don’t need a car,” Fielding said. “I can’t afford to be killed with all the sins on my soul, either.”

“She’s a crackpot.”

“Yes. Only...”

“You heard that open field stuff, didn’t you? That was all lies. It’s on the records, how I was born in St. Joseph’s hospital...”

Mrs. Rosario stood in front of the broken door as if she were trying to hide from Pinata the mortal wound of her house.

“Forgive me my curiosity,” Pinata said. “But the young man in the picture, was he Juanita’s father?”

“The name of Juanita’s father has not been spoken in this house for twenty years. I would not waste good beeswax on his soul.” She crossed her arms on her chest. “I must remind you that you were invited into my house to discuss Mr. Foster. No one else. Just Mr. Foster.”

“All right. Where did he go when he left here with your daughter?”

“I don’t know. They spoke of going to the movies. But Juanita hardly ever goes to the movies. She’s afraid of being shut up in dark places.”

“Well, what does she usually do when she gets off on a Saturday afternoon?”

“She shops or takes the children to the beach or maybe down to the wharf to fish. She likes being outdoors and talking and laughing with the fishermen that hang around the wharf. She can be a very happy girl sometimes.” She studied her hands as if she were reading the past in their lines and finding it as inscrutable as the future. “Sometimes you never saw a happier girl.”

“What does she do when she’s miserable?”

“I don’t follow her. I have the children to watch over.”

“But you hear things?”

“Friends maybe tell me when they see her acting — acting, well, not so good.”

“Does she do much drinking? I’m asking the question because Foster has a decided weakness in that direction. If Juanita shares it, it will give me some idea of where to start looking for them.”

“She drinks sometimes.”

“At the Velada?”

“No, never,” Mrs. Rosario said sharply. “Never at the Velada. Mrs. Brewster wouldn’t allow it, not even a glass of beer.”

Strike the Velada, Pinata thought. That left some twenty-five or thirty places which could strictly be called taverns, and perhaps eighty or ninety restaurants in and around town which served liquor. A great many of these restaurants would be closed to Juanita because of her race, either obviously, with a quick brush-off at the door, or subtly, with small printed signs stating the proprietor’s right to refuse service to anyone. The taverns, however, were mainly located in areas where discrimination would have meant bankruptcy. For this reason a tavern seemed the most logical place to look for Juanita. In spite of everything he’d been told about her aggressiveness, Pinata had a hunch that she was too timid to wander very far from the places where she felt welcome and at home.

“Mrs. Rosario,” Pinata said, “Juanita left town nearly four years ago to live in Los Angeles. Why?”

“She got sick of being hounded by the police and the Probation Department and the people at the Clinic. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all they did, tell her what was wrong with her, what to do, what to wear, how to manage the children.”

“They were all trying to help her, weren’t they?”

“It’s a funny kind of help that hinders,” she said scornfully. “The last time she was arrested, she wasn’t doing any harm. It’s hard, when you’re young, always being followed by five children, never going anyplace alone. When she locked them in the apartment, it was for their own good, so they wouldn’t run away or get in an accident. But the neighbors complained when they cried, and the police said what if there was a fire or an earthquake. So they arrested her and put the children in Juvenile Hall. Do you call this helping? I don’t. If that’s the only kind of help I can get, I’d rather fend for myself. Which is what she chose to do when she got out. She left right away, that same night. The children were in bed asleep, and I asked Mrs. Lopez to keep an eye on them while I went to church. When I came back, she was gone.” She moved her head back and forth in remembered pain. “I didn’t think she would leave so sudden, her with no husband, no friends, and another baby due in less than a month.”

“Did she leave a message for you?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know where she was going?”

“No. I never heard from her or saw her again until two weeks ago. The Probation Department and someone from the Clinic came snooping around a few times. I told them just what I’m telling you now.”

“I hear what you’re telling me,” Pinata said. “But is it the truth?”

Mrs. Rosario blinked, and the ripe-olive eyes disappeared for a fraction of a second under lids that looked withered from lack of tears. “Four years with no news of her, and suddenly comes a knock on the front door, and there she is, with six children and a husband and a car. She talked a blue streak telling me how happy she was, and didn’t I think the baby was cute and the car beautiful and the husband handsome. But there was a look in her eye I didn’t like, that restless look of hers. When she’s like that, she hardly eats or sleeps, she just keeps on the go, day and night, one place to another, never getting tired.”

One place to another, Pinata thought. Twenty-five taverns, eighty restaurants, sixty thousand people. I’d better start moving.

“This man she’s with,” Mrs. Rosario said, “this Mr. Foster, he is a drunk?”

“Yes.”

“You find them and send Juanita home.”

“I’ll try.”

“Tell her I’m sorry I called her a gypsy. I lost control of my tongue. She’s no gypsy, my Juanita. I lost control — it’s so easy sometimes. Afterwards I’m filled with such shame and sadness. You find her for me, will you? Tell her I’m sorry?”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Hurry up before this man gets her into trouble.”

Pinata wasn’t sure who was going to get whom into trouble, but he knew they made a bad combination, Juanita and Fielding. He wrote his name and the phone numbers of his office and residence on a slip of paper and gave it to Mrs. Rosario.

She held it at arm’s length to read it. “Pinata,” she said, nodding. “That’s a good Catholic name.”

“Yes.”

“If my daughter went to church more often, she wouldn’t suffer from this sickness.”

“Perhaps not,” Pinata said, knowing how useless it would be to argue the point. “I’d appreciate your letting me know right away if either Juanita or Fielding shows up here again.”

“Fielding?”

“That’s his real name.”

“Fielding,” she repeated quietly. Then she folded the piece of paper and tucked it into the pocket of her black dress. “I guess it doesn’t matter what people call themselves. Fielding may not be his real name, either, maybe?”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Well, it’s no business of mine.” She crossed the room and opened the front door. “You won’t find Juanita, or Fielding, either. With a car, they could be anywhere by this time.”

“I can try.”

“Don’t try for my sake.”

“You asked me to find her and send her home.”

“I’m tired,” she said bitterly. “I’m tired. Let her stay lost.”

“I have a job to do.”

“Then do it. Good day to you, Mr. Pinata. If that is your name.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

“I don’t care anyway.”

When he stepped across the threshold, she closed the door behind him so quickly that he felt he’d been forcibly ejected.

The porch of the Lopez house next door was empty, and Querida’s purple hula hoop lay broken on the steps.

Mrs. Rosario waited until his car had turned the corner. Peering through the lace curtain, she felt faint and very cold, as if an iron hand had squeezed her heart and stopped its flow of blood. She touched the silver cross she wore at her throat, hoping it would warm and comfort her. But the metal was as cold as her skin. Pinata. It sounded false. He hadn’t even claimed that it was real, just that it was the only one he had.

She went out into the kitchen and picked up the telephone directory. The name was listed. Stevens Pinata, and the phone numbers were the same ones he’d written on the slip of paper.

She stood leaning against the sink, paralyzed by indecision. She had orders not to call Mr. Burnett, the lawyer, at his office unless it was absolutely necessary, and never to call him at his home under any circumstances. But what right had he to give the orders? Maybe he’d even been the one who sent Pinata and Fielding to spy on her. Well, they had learned nothing, either of them. The picture had been taken thirty years ago and bore no resemblance to the way he’d looked when he died.

The minutes passed, ticking away like heartbeats. It had been a long, cruel day. So many of the days were long and cruel. Carlos was well out of it. He was with the angels by this time. No more candles would be necessary, the priest said. “He will certainly be in heaven by this time,” the priest said. “You mustn’t become a fanatic; it looks bad for the church. This has been going on long enough.”

He was right, of course. Things had been going on long enough...

She picked up the phone.

15

Your mother kept her vow, Daisy. We are still apart, you and I. She has hidden her shame because she cannot bear it the way we weaker and humbler ones can and must and do...

On Saturday afternoon Ada Fielding had lunch at a downtown restaurant with a group of friends. After lunch she found herself being followed into the powder room by Mrs. Weldon, a member of the group whom she didn’t know very well and didn’t like at all. Mrs. Weldon’s large, inquisitive eyes were always hidden by a veil, like windows by a net curtain, and her thin, sharp mouth moved constantly, even when she wasn’t talking, as if she were chewing on some little regurgitated seeds from the past.

Adjusting her veil in front of the mirror above the washbasin, Mrs. Weldon said, “How’s Daisy?”

“Daisy? Oh, fine, she couldn’t be better, thanks.”

“And Jim?”

She wasn’t even aware that Mrs. Weldon knew the names of her daughter and son-in-law, but she concealed her surprise, as she had concealed a great many other things in her lifetime, under a slow, placid smile. “Jim is very well, too. He’d planned on going north this weekend to look at some land he’s thinking of buying, but he decided to wait until it was cooler. Hasn’t it been a fantastic year? All this heat and no rain to speak of.”

But Mrs. Weldon did not intend to put up with weather-talk when she’d planned on people-talk. “A friend of mine saw Daisy the other day — Corinne, you’ve heard me mention Corinne, the lovely girl that lives next door to us — well, not a girl, really, she’s almost forty, but she’s kept her figure like a girl. Of course she was born skinny; that helps. Corinne saw Daisy just the other day and said she was looking quite peaked.”

“Indeed? I certainly haven’t noticed.”

“Thursday, it was. Thursday afternoon, walking along Piedra Street with a young man. I knew it couldn’t be Jim. Jim’s so blond and fair-skinned, and this man was quite — well, dark.”

“Daisy is acquainted with a great many men,” Mrs. Fielding said casually. “Dark and fair.”

“I meant dark in you-know-what sense.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Of course you’re not a native Californian...” Mrs. Weldon stopped and shook her head helplessly; these nonnative Californians could be very dense. “I meant, this man wasn’t one of us.”

Ada Fielding was well aware of her meaning, but it seemed advisable to feign innocence, to appear imperturbable; there was nothing a gossip enjoyed more than the signs of anxiety, a quickening of the breath, a sudden flush, a clenching of the hands. Mrs. Fielding’s hands and breathing remained steady, and her flush was hidden by a layer of powder. Only she knew it was there, she could feel it in her cheeks and neck, and it annoyed her because there was nothing to get excited about. Daisy had been seen walking along a street with a dark young man. Very well, what of it? Daisy had all kinds of friends. Still, in a town like this, one had to be careful. There was a difference between being tolerant and being foolish, and Daisy, even with the best of intentions, could be quite foolish at times.

“No, I’m not a native Californian,” she said blandly. “I was born in Colorado. Have you ever visited Colorado? The mountain scenery is perfectly magnificent.”

But Mrs. Weldon was not interested in Colorado. “By a strange coincidence Corinne happened to recognize the man. She met him last year when she was in that little scrape with the police. All she had at the bridge party was one teensy cocktail, but when she ran through the red light — Corinne swears it was yellow — the police insisted she was drunk. She had a perfectly dreadful time. It was Saturday, the banks were closed, and her lawyer was out playing golf, and her parents were in Palm Springs for the weekend. And the poor girl is so delicate because she never eats anything. Anyway, along came this young man and bailed her out. Corinne can’t recall his name, but she remembered his face because he was so good-looking — except of course he was — well, dark.”

“That’s a very interesting story about Corinne’s scrape with the police,” Mrs. Fielding said with a small, steely smile. “I must remember to pass it along.”

For nearly a week Daisy had been trying to arrange to have the house to herself, and she had finally accomplished it. Her mother was downtown shopping, Stella had taken the weekend off after Daisy convinced her she wasn’t feeling well, and Jim had gone out for a sail in Adam Burnett’s new racing sloop. Both the invitation and its acceptance had been engineered by Daisy: Jim suffered from seasickness, and Adam, who wasn’t accustomed to the new boat, would have preferred a more experienced crew, but neither man put up much of an argument.

From the kitchen window Daisy watched Jim’s car until it disappeared around the first sharp turn of the road that wound down the canyon. Then she went down immediately to the lower part of the house. Here there was an extra bedroom and bath for guests; a lanai decorated in pale green and turquoise which, seen in a half-light, looked under water; Jim’s hobby room; and, at the far end of the house off the lanai, Jim’s den. The den was filled with various pieces of furniture Jim had made himself, some of it experimental and impractical, all of it modernistic in line. The largest object in the room looked incongruous beside the modern pieces: a huge, old-fashioned rolltop desk which Jim had bought at an auction so that he could study its design and work out an improved version. But the old desk had proved so useful and satisfactory that he’d never bothered trying to improve it.

The rolltop and the drawers were locked, though the key was in plain sight on the windowsill. Daisy thought how typical this was of Jim, to lock everything, as if he felt surrounded by thieves, then to leave the key available, as if he’d decided he had nothing worth stealing after all.

She unlocked the desk while the dog, Prince, stood in the doorway, his tail between his legs, his amber eyes indicating disapproval of this change in routine. He knew Daisy didn’t belong down here in this room, and he sensed her nervousness.

The top part of the desk was very neat, with separate little drawers for stamps and for paper clips, compartments for pencils, current bills, unanswered letters, bankbooks, clippings from out-of-town newspapers advertising land for sale. In contrast to the top of the desk, the larger drawers were crammed with stuff — old letters and postcards, bank statements, half-empty packets of matches and cigarettes.

She began going through the drawers, taking everything out and laying each item on a half-finished free-form table which Jim was making for her mother’s cottage. She had no real hope of finding anything, but she kept on searching, her hands moving clumsily as if they were weighted down by feelings of guilt and shame at what she was doing. Jim had always trusted her, and she had trusted him. Now, she thought, after eight years of marriage, she was going through his private papers like a common thief. And, as any common thief deserved, she was finding nothing. The postcards were impersonal, the letters innocent. Already, in her mind, apologies were forming: Jim dear, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t mean any harm...

At the back of the left bottom drawer she came across a pile of used checkbooks. They were not arranged in order of date. The one on the top was from a year ago and covered a period of four months.

Without expecting to find anything important, she began to turn the tiny pages listlessly, as if she were reading a dull book with lots of characters but no plot. She knew most of the characters: the pharmacist, Stella, the owners of the bookstore and dress shop and building supply company, the dentist, the veterinarian, the gardener, the paperboy. The largest amount, $250, had gone to Stella for wages. The stub with the next largest amount bore the name Ab and the amount $200. It was dated September 1.

She checked the next month’s stubs, and here again she discovered an identical notation for October 1. When she came to the end of the book, she’d found four of them altogether, each for $200, paid to Ab at the beginning of the month.

Ab. She knew no one by that name, no Abner, Abbott, Abernathy, Abigail. The closest was Adam. Adam Burnett. A.B.

She was not actually surprised at first: it was natural enough for Adam to be receiving money from Jim. He was Jim’s lawyer and did all his tax work. But the amount — $200 a month, $2,400 a year for a tax consultant — seemed excessive, and she was puzzled by the fact that Jim had not paid it through his office as a business expense. Was it possible that Jim was paying off a debt, that he had borrowed money from Adam and wanted to keep it secret from his business associates? That he was not as well off as he pretended to be in front of her and her mother?

How foolish of him not to tell me, she thought. I could easily economize. Mother and I got along on a shoestring when we had to. And we usually had to.

The dog, Prince, suddenly let out a bark and bounded noisily through the lanai and up the stairs. Although Daisy could hear nothing from the upper floor, she knew someone must have come into the house, and she began frantically cramming everything back into the drawers. She might have had a chance to finish if Prince hadn’t decided that it was his duty to guide Mrs. Fielding down to the den and Daisy.

The two women stared at each other for a moment in the silence of mutual confusion. Then Daisy said awkwardly, “I thought you were going to spend the afternoon shopping.”

“I changed my mind. It was too hot downtown.”

“Oh.”

“It’s nice and cool down here, though.”

“Yes.”

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”

It was, for Daisy, like a scene from her childhood, with her mother standing over her, strong and angry and, above all, right, and herself cringing and scared and, beneath all, wrong. But she was older now; she knew better than to sound scared or admit she was wrong. “I was looking for something I thought Jim might have put in his desk.”

“Something so important that you couldn’t wait until he comes home to ask him about it?”

“On the contrary, it’s so trivial I wouldn’t bother him about it. Jim has a lot on his mind.”

“You should know. You put it there.”

“Oh, Mother, for heaven’s sake, don’t. Don’t start anything.”

“Something has already been started,” Ada Fielding said harshly. “You started it last Monday morning when you allowed yourself to get hysterical over some absurd little dream. That’s how it all began, with a dream, and since then everything’s been going to pieces. There have been times when I actually thought you were losing your mind — crying and carrying on, wandering around a cemetery alone looking for a tombstone you saw in a dream, cross-examining us all, even Stella, about a dead Mexican none of us ever heard of — it’s sheer madness.”

“If it’s madness, it’s mine, not yours. Don’t worry about it.”

“And now this, this sneaking around going through Jim’s private papers, what does it mean? What are you looking for?”

“You know what I’m looking for. Jim must have told you. He tells you everything else.”

“Only because you won’t talk to him anymore.”

Daisy stared at a section of the wall, wondering how many times during the past week Jim and her mother had discussed the situation. Perhaps they had a conference about her whenever she was absent, like two doctors in consultation over a very sick patient whose symptoms they didn’t understand. “She’s looking for a lost day, Dr. Fielding.” “That sounds pretty serious, Dr. Harker.” “Oh, it is. First case I’ve ever had quite like it.” “We may have to operate.” “Good idea. Splendid. If the lost day is anywhere, it’s inside her. We’ll dig it out and dispose of it. Can’t leave it in there festering.”

“You seem,” Mrs. Fielding said, “to resent the fact that Jim confides in me.”

“Not at all.”

“Most young women are grateful for a decent relationship between in-laws. Jim and I have many differences of opinion, but we try to overlook them for your sake, because we both love you.” Mrs. Fielding’s eyes were moist, and the corners of her mouth turned down as if she was going to cry. She pressed her fingertips against her mouth to steady it. “You know that, don’t you? That we both love you?”

“Yes.” She knew they both loved her, each in a different way, neither of them completely. Jim loved her insofar as she fitted his conception of the ideal wife. Her mother loved her as a projection of herself, but the projected part must be without the flaws of the original. Oh yes, certainly, she was loved. Being loved was not the problem. The problem, when you were the focus of two such powerful people as Jim and her mother, was the loss of spontaneity, of being able to love.

She thought, suddenly and disturbingly, of Pinata, of the drive back to the city from the cemetery, how old and tormented his face had looked in the dashlights as if he thought no one was watching him and it was safe to show his sorrow.

She turned her head and saw her mother looking at her, and she knew she’d better stop thinking about Pinata. It was frightening the way her mother could read her mind sometimes. But then I am her projection machine. She just sits back and watches the pictures, censoring, editing. She can’t see Pinata, though. She doesn’t even know about him. No one does. Pinata was hers, locked up in a secret drawer inside herself.

She finished replacing the papers. Then she locked the desk and put the key back on the windowsill. Everything looked exactly the same as when she had come in. Jim need never know she’d searched the desk and found out about the monthly payments to Adam. Unless her mother told him.

“I suppose,” Daisy said, “you’ll tell him?”

“I consider it my duty.”

“Do you have any duty to me?”

“If I thought you were acting in a logical and rational matter, I wouldn’t dream of mentioning this episode to Jim. Yes, I have a duty to you, and that is to protect you from the consequences of your own irresponsibility.”

“I’m irresponsible,” Daisy repeated. “I’m illogical and irrational and irresponsible. Just like my father. Go on, say it. I’m just like my father.”

“I don’t have to say it. You did.”

“In exactly what ways have I been irresponsible?”

“Several that I know of. One that I’d like to find out about.”

“You could ask me.”

“I’m going to.”

Mrs. Fielding sat down, holding her back straight and her hands crossed on her lap. It was a posture Daisy had come to know well through the years. It indicated seriousness of purpose, great patience, maternal affection (this hurts me more than it does you), and anger with its bile so finely distilled that it was almost palatable. Wry whiskey.

“I had lunch with Mrs. Weldon today,” Mrs. Fielding said. “Do you remember her?”

“Vaguely.”

“She’s an impossible woman, but she has a way of finding out odd bits of information. This time the information was about you. Perhaps you’ll consider it trivial. I don’t. It’s an indication that you’re not being as careful as you should be. You can’t afford to get yourself talked about. Jim is becoming a prominent man in this town. And he’s a devoted husband as well. There isn’t a woman who knows him who doesn’t envy you.”

Daisy had heard it all before. The tone varied, the clichés varied, but the message was always the same: that she, Daisy, was a very lucky girl, who ought to be grateful every day of her life that Jim remained married to her even though she was sterile. Mrs. Fielding was too subtle to say any of this outright, but the implication was clearly made: Daisy had to be a super wife because she couldn’t be a mother. The marriage was the important thing, not the individuals who contracted it. And the marriage was important, not for any religious or moral reasons, but because it meant, for Mrs. Fielding, the only real security she’d ever had. Daisy understood this and felt both sympathetic, because her mother had worked very hard to keep the family going, and resentful, because it seemed to Daisy that it wasn’t her own life or marriage or husband; half, or more than half, belonged to her mother.

“Are you listening to me, Daisy?”

“Yes.”

“On Piedra Street?”

“I may have been on Piedra Street. Why? What difference does it make?”

“Someone saw you,” Mrs. Fielding said. “A next-door neighbor of Mrs. Weldon’s, called Corinne. She claims you were walking with a good-looking dark young man who has some connection with jails or the Police Department. Were you, Daisy?”

She was tempted to lie about it, to keep Pinata safely and secretly locked inside her private drawer, but she was afraid that a lie would be more damaging than the truth. “Yes, I was there.”

“Who was the man?”

“He’s an investigator.”

“Do you mean a detective?”

“Yes.”

“Why on earth would you be walking around town with a detective?”

“Why not? It was a nice day, and I like walking.”

There was a silence, then Mrs. Fielding’s voice, as smooth and chilling as liquid air. “I warn you not to be flippant with me. How did you meet this man?”

“Through my — through a friend. I didn’t know he was an investigator at the time. When I found out, I hired him.”

“You hired him? What for?”

“To do a job. Now that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

She started toward the door, but her mother called her back with an urgent “Wait.”

“I prefer not to discuss...”

“You prefer, do you? Well, I prefer to get this settled between the two of us before Jim finds out about it.”

“There’s nothing to settle,” Daisy said, keeping her voice calm because she knew her mother was waiting for her to lose her temper. Her mother was always at her best when other people lost their tempers. “I hired Mr. Pinata to do some work for me, and he’s doing it. Whether Jim finds out about it doesn’t matter. He hires people at the office all the time. I don’t make an issue of it, because it’s none of my business.”

“And you think it’s none of Jim’s business that you should go traipsing all over town with a Mexican?”

“Whether Mr. Pinata is a Mexican or not is beside the point. I hired him for his qualifications, not his racial background. I know nothing about him personally. He doesn’t volunteer any information, and I don’t ask for any.”

“Tolerance is one thing. Foolishness is another.” There was a curious rasp in Mrs. Fielding’s voice, as if her fury, which had been denied admittance into words, had broken in through the back door of her larynx. “You know nothing about such people. They’re cunning, treacherous. You’re a babe in the woods. If you let him, he’ll use you, cheat you...”

“Where did you learn so much about a man you’ve never even seen?”

“I don’t have to see him. They’re all alike. You must put a stop to this relationship before you find yourself in serious trouble.”

“Relationship? For heaven’s sake, you’re talking as if he were my lover, not someone I happened to hire.” She took a deep breath, fighting for control. “As for traipsing all over town, I didn’t. Mr. Pinata escorted me to my car at the conclusion of our business appointment. Now does that satisfy you, and Mrs. Weldon, and Corinne?”

“No.”

“I’m afraid it will have to. I have nothing farther to say on the subject.”

“Sit down,” Mrs. Fielding said sharply. “Listen to me.”

“I’ve already listened.”

“Forget I’m your mother for a minute.”

“All right.” It was easy, she thought. The green watery light coming in through the doorway from the lanai made Mrs. Fielding’s face look strange and opalescent, like something that lived in the depths of the sea.

“For your own sake,” Mrs. Fielding said, “I want you to tell me what you hired this Pinata to do.”

“I’m trying to reconstruct a certain day in my life. I needed someone — someone objective — to help me.”

“And that’s all? It has nothing to do with Jim?”

“No.”

“What about this other man, the one whose name is on the tombstone?”

“I’ve found out nothing further about him,” Daisy said.

“Are you trying to?”

“Of course.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Fielding repeated shrilly. “What do you mean, of course? Are you still being foolish enough to believe that his tombstone is the same one you saw in your dream?”

“I know it’s the same one. Mr. Pinata was with me at the cemetery. He recognized the tombstone before I did, from the description I’d given him from my dream.”

There was a long silence, broken finally by Mrs. Fielding’s painful whisper. “Oh, my God. What will I do? What’s happening to you, Daisy?”

“Whatever is happening, it’s to me, not to you.”

“You’re my only child. Your welfare and happiness are more important to me than my own. Your life is my life.”

“Not anymore.”

“Why have you changed like this?” Her eyes filled with tears of disappointment and anger and self-pity, all mixed up together and inseparable. “What’s happened to us?”

“Please don’t cry,” Daisy said wearily. “Nothing’s happened to us except that we’re both getting a little older, and you want a little more of my life than I’m willing to give.”

“God knows I only try to make things easier for you, to protect you. What’s the use of my having gone through everything I did if I can’t pass on to you the benefit of my experience? My own marriage was broken. Can you blame me for trying to keep yours from turning out the same way? Perhaps if I’d had someone to guide me, as I’ve guided you, I’d never have married Stan Fielding in the first place. I’d have waited for someone reliable and trustworthy, like Jim, instead of tying myself to a man who never told a straight story or did a straight thing from the day he was born.”

She went on talking, pacing up and down the room as though it were the prison of the past. Daisy listened without hearing, while she tried to remember some of the lies her father had told her. But they hadn’t been lies, really, only bits of dreams that hadn’t come true. Someday, Daisy baby, I’m going to take you and your mother to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower. Or to Kenya on a safari, or London for the coronation, or Athens to see the Parthenon.

If they were lies, they belonged as much to life as to Fielding. No one believed them anyway.

“Daisy, are you paying attention to me?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must stop all this nonsense, do you understand? We’re not the kind of people who hire detectives. There’s something squalid about the very word.”

“I’m not sure what kind of people we are,” Daisy said. “I know what we pretend to be.”

“Pretense? Is that what you call putting up a good front to the world, pretense? Well, I don’t. I call it simple common sense and self-respect.” Mrs. Fielding pressed one hand to her throat as if she were choking on the torrent of words gushing up inside her. “What’s your idea of how to get along in life — hiring a hall and shouting your secrets to the whole city?”

“I have no secrets.”

“Haven’t you? Haven’t you? You fool. I despair of you.” She fell into a chair like a stone falling into a pond. “Oh God. I despair.” The words rose from the very bottom of the pond. “I’m so — tired.”

Daisy looked at her with bitterness. “You have reason to be tired. It takes a lot of energy to lead two lives, yours and mine.”

The only noise in the room was the nervous panting of the collie and the tea tree pawing at the windowpane as if it wanted to get in.

“You must leave me alone,” Daisy said softly. “Do you hear me, Mother? It’s very important, you must leave me alone.”

“I would if I thought you were strong enough to do without me.”

“Give me a chance to try.”

“You’ve picked a bad time to declare your independence, Daisy. Worse than you realize.”

“Any time would be a bad time as far as you’re concerned, wouldn’t it?”

“Listen to me, you little fool,” Mrs. Fielding said. “Jim’s been a wonderful husband to you. Your marriage is a good one. Now, for the sake of some silly whim, you’re putting it in jeopardy.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Jim would actually divorce me simply because I’ve hired a detective?”

“All I meant—”

“Or could it be that you’re afraid the detective might find out something Jim doesn’t want found out?”

“If you were younger,” Mrs. Fielding said steadily, “I’d wash your mouth out with soap for that remark. Your husband is the most decent, the most moral man I’ve ever met. Someday, when you’re mature enough to understand, I’ll be able to tell you some things about Jim that will surprise you.”

“One thing about him surprises me right now. And I discovered it without the help of any detective.” Daisy glanced briefly at the rolltop desk. “He’s been paying Adam Burnett $200 a month. I found the check stubs.”

“So?”

“It seems peculiar, doesn’t it?”

“Obviously it does to you.”

“You sound as if you know something about it.”

“I know everything about it,” Mrs. Fielding said dryly. “Jim bought some acreage Adam owned up near Santa Inez Pass. He intended to build a mountain hideaway on it as a surprise anniversary present for you. I’m sorry I’ve been forced to tell. But it seemed wiser to spoil the surprise than to let your suspicions keep on growing. You must have a guilty conscience, Daisy, or you wouldn’t be so quick to accuse others.”

“I didn’t accuse him. I was simply curious.”

“Oh? Just what did you think Adam was being paid for?” Mrs. Fielding got up out of the chair as though her joints had stiffened during the hour. “This man Pinata is obviously a bad influence on you to have affected your thinking like this.”

“He has nothing to do with—”

“I want you to call him immediately and tell him he is no longer in your employ. Now I’m going over to my cottage and get some rest. The doctor says I must avoid scenes like this. The next time I see you, I hope the cause of them will have been removed.”

“You think firing Pinata will solve everything?”

“It will be a start. Someone has to start somewhere.”

She walked to the door with brisk, determined steps, but there was a weary stoop to her shoulders that Daisy had never seen before. “I despair,” her mother had said.

Why, it’s true, Daisy thought. She despairs. How extraordinary to despair on a bright, sunny afternoon with Pinata somewhere in the city.

She looked across the room at the telephone. Its shiny black cord seemed like a lifeline to her. All she had to do was pick up the receiver and dial, and even if she couldn’t reach him personally, he would get her message through his answering service: Call me, meet me, I want to see you.

The phone began to ring while the sound of her mother’s step was still on the stairs. She crossed the room, forcing herself to walk slowly because she wanted to run.

“Hello?”

“Long distance for Mrs. Daisy Harker.”

“This is Mrs. Harker.”

“Go ahead, ma’am. Your party’s on the line.”

Daisy waited, still hoping, though she had no reason to hope, that it was Pinata, that this was his way of reaching her in the event Jim or her mother might be around when he called.

But the voice was a woman’s, high-pitched and nervous. “I know I shouldn’t be phoning you like this, Mrs. Harker, or maybe I should say Daisy, though it don’t seem socially proper to call you Daisy when we never even been introduced yet—”

“Who is this calling, please?”

“Muriel. Your new... new stepmother.” Muriel let out an anxious little giggle. “I guess this is kind of a shock to you, picking up the phone and hearing a perfect stranger say she’s your stepmother.”

“No. I knew my father had married again.”

“Did he write and tell you?”

“No. I heard it the way I hear everything else about my father — not from him but from somebody else.”

“I’m sorry,” Muriel said in her quick, nervous voice. “I told him to write. I kept reminding him.”

“It’s certainly not your fault. You have my best wishes, by the way. I hope you’ll both be very happy.”

“Thank you.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“I’m in Miss Wittenburg’s apartment across the hall. Miss Wittenburg promised not to listen; she has her fingers in her ears.”

To Daisy it was beginning to sound like an April Fools’ joke: I am your new stepmother — Miss Wittenburg has her fingers in her ears... “Is my father there with you?”

“No. That’s why I decided to phone you. I’m worried about him. I shouldn’t have let him go off by himself the way he did. Hitchhiking can be dangerous even when you’re young and strong and have no outstanding weaknesses. I guess,” Muriel added cautiously, “being as you’re his daughter, you know he drinks?”

“Yes. I know he drinks.”

“He’s been pretty good lately, with me to keep an eye on him.

But today he wouldn’t take me along. He said we didn’t have the money for bus fare for both of us, so he was going to hitchhike up alone.”

“Do you mean up here, to San Félice?”

“Yes. He wanted to see you. His conscience was bothering him on account of he walked out on you last time when he lost his nerve. Stan has a very strong conscience; it drives him to drink. It’s like he always has a bad pain that has to be numbed.”

“I haven’t seen him or heard from him,” Daisy said. “Are you sure he intended to come right here to the house?”

“Why, yes. Why, he even mentioned how maybe you’d all have some champagne to celebrate being together again.”

Daisy thought how typical it was of her father: to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower, to London for the coronation, to San Félice for a champagne celebration. Her sorrow and anger met and merged in a relationship that weakened them both and conceived a monster child. This child, half formed, tongueless, without a name, lay heavy inside her, refusing to be born, refusing to die.

“Stan wouldn’t like me phoning you like this,” Muriel said, “but I just couldn’t help it. Last time he was up there, he got involved with that waitress, Nita.”

“Nita?”

“Nita Garcia. That’s what he called her.”

“The report in the paper said her name was Donelli.”

“It said Stan’s name was Foster. That don’t make it true.” Muriel’s dry little laugh was like a cough of disapproval. “Sure, I’m suspicious — women are — but I can’t help thinking he’s going to see her again, maybe get in some more trouble. I was hoping... well, that maybe he’d be in touch with you by this time and you could set him straight about associating with the wrong people.”

“He hasn’t been in touch,” Daisy said. “And I’m afraid I couldn’t set him straight if he were.”

“No. Well. Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you.” She seemed ready to hang up.

Daisy said hurriedly, “Just a minute, Muriel. I wrote my father a special delivery letter on Thursday night asking him an important question. Was this the reason he suddenly decided to come and see me?”

“I don’t know about any special delivery letter.”

“I sent it to the warehouse.”

“He didn’t mention it to me. Maybe he never got it. He was reading some other letters from you, though, just before he decided to leave. He kept them in his old suitcase. You know that old suitcase of his that he lugs around full of junk?”

Daisy remembered the suitcase. It was the only thing he’d taken with him when he’d left the apartment in Denver on a winter afternoon: “Daisy baby, I’m going to take a little trip. Don’t you stop loving your daddy.” The trip had lasted fifteen years, and she hadn’t stopped.

“He was reading a letter of yours,” Muriel said, “when he suddenly got the blues.”

“How do you know it was from me?”

“Right away he started talking about how he’d failed as a father. Besides,” she added bluntly, “nobody else writes to him.”

“Did he mention what was in the letter?”

“No.”

“Did he put it back in the suitcase?”

“No. I looked right after he left, and it wasn’t there, so I guess he took it with him.” Muriel sounded both apologetic and defensive. “He doesn’t keep the suitcase locked, just chained.”

“How did you know what particular letter to look for?”

“It was in a pink envelope.”

Daisy was on the point of saying she didn’t use colored stationery when she remembered that a friend of hers had given her some for her birthday several years ago. “What was the address on the envelope?”

“Some hotel in Albuquerque.”

“I see.” The Albuquerque address and the pink stationery dated the letter positively as being written in December of 1955. Her father had moved from Illinois to New Mexico at the end of that year, but he had stayed barely a month. She recalled sending his Christmas presents and check to a hotel in Albuquerque and receiving a postcard from Topeka, Kansas, a couple of weeks later thanking her for the gifts and saying he didn’t like New Mexico, it was too dusty. There’d been a doleful quality about the postcard, and the handwriting was shaky, as if he’d been ill or on a drinking spree or, more likely, both.

“Stan will be awful mad about me phoning you like this,” Muriel said nervously. “Maybe you just sort of keep it a secret when you see him?”

“I may not see him. He may not be anywhere near San Félice.”

“But he said—”

“Yes. He said.” He’d said, too, that he was taking a little trip, and the trip had lasted fifteen years. Perhaps he’d started on another little trip, and Muriel, as naive as Daisy had been in her early teens, would walk up and down the city streets searching for him in crowds of strangers; she would catch a glimpse of him passing in a speeding car or walking into an elevator just before the door closed. Daisy had seen him a hundred times, but the car was too fast, the face in the crowd too far away, the elevator door too final.

“Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you,” Muriel repeated.

“It was no bother. In fact, I’m very grateful for the information.”

“Stan gave me another number to call in case of emergency, a Mr. Pinata. But I didn’t want to call a stranger about — well, about Stan’s certain weakness.”

Daisy wondered how many strangers, the length and breadth of the country, knew about Stan’s certain weakness and how many more were finding out right now. “Muriel?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry about anything. I’m going to get in touch with Mr. Pinata. If my father’s in town, we’ll find him and look after him.”

“Thank you.” There were tears in Muriel’s voice. “Thank you ever so much. You’re a good girl. Stan’s always said you were a real good girl.”

“Don’t take everything my father says too seriously.”

“He really meant it. And I do, too. I’m ever so grateful for all the things you’ve done for him. I don’t mean just the money. Having somebody who really cares about him, that’s what’s important.”

Oh yes, I care, Daisy thought bitterly when she’d hung up. I still love Daddy after his little trip of fifteen years. And if he’s in town, I’ll find him. I’ll get to the elevator door before it closes; the speeding car will be stopped by a red light, a policeman, a flat tire; the face in the crowd will be his.

The wind had increased, and the air was filled with the rush of birds and flying leaves, and the scratching of the tea tree against the window sounded like the paws of a dozen animals.

Daisy sat with the phone in her hands, shivering, as if there were no glass between her and the cold wind. She could barely dial Pinata’s number, and when she was told he wasn’t in, she wanted to scream at the girl on the other end of the line and accuse her of bungling or fraud.

She took a deep breath to steady herself. “When do you expect him?”

“This is his answering service. He left word that he’d be in his office at seven. He’ll check in for his calls before that, though. Is there any message?”

“Tell him to call...” She stopped, dubious about leaving her name, even more dubious about Pinata phoning the house when her mother or Jim might be present. “I’ll meet him at his office at seven.”

“What name shall I put on that?”

“Just say it’s about a tombstone.”

16

Shame — it is my daily bread. No wonder the flesh is falling off my bones...

Jim had been waiting at the dock for nearly an hour when Adam Burnett finally showed up. He came running along the seawall, moving heavily but quietly in his sailing sneakers.

“Sorry I’m late. I was delayed.”

“Obviously.”

“Don’t get sore. I couldn’t help it.” The lawyer sat down beside Jim on the seawall. “The sail’s off, anyway. They’ve raised a smallcraft warning at the end of the wharf.”

“Well, I suppose I might as well go home, then.”

“No, you’d better wait a minute.”

“What for?”

Although there was no one within hearing distance, Adam kept his voice low. “I had a phone call half an hour ago from Mrs. Rosario. Juanita’s back in town. What’s worse, so is Fielding.”

“Fielding? Daisy’s father?”

“What’s worse still, the two of them are together.”

“But they don’t even know each other.”

“Well, they’re getting acquainted in a hurry, if Mrs. Rosario can be believed.”

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Jim said in a bewildered voice. “Fielding had nothing to do with the — the arrangements.”

“Mrs. Rosario somehow got the impression that you... or I... sent him to spy on her.”

“I haven’t seen Fielding for years.”

“And I never have. I pointed these facts out to her, but she was pretty excited, almost incoherent toward the end. She insisted I swear on the soul of her dead brother that I had nothing to do with Fielding’s going to her house.” Adam squinted out at the whitecaps, multiplying under the wind. “Know anything about a dead brother?”

“No.”

“His name was Carlos, apparently.”

“I said I knew nothing about a dead brother, didn’t I?”

“Well, don’t get waspish. I was just asking.”

“You asked twice,” Jim said curtly. “That’s once too often. My relationship with Mrs. Rosario has been brief and impersonal. You should be aware of that better than anyone.”

“Impersonal isn’t quite the word, surely?”

“As far as I’m concerned, it is. I wouldn’t recognize her if I met her on the street.”

A fishing boat was coming into port, her catch measurable by the squat of her stern and the number of gulls quarreling in her wake, trying to snatch pieces of fish from each other’s beaks.

“What does she want?” Jim said. “More money?”

“Money wasn’t mentioned. Apparently there’d been some violence when Fielding was at the house, though he didn’t have anything to do with it as far as I was able to make out. Mrs. Rosario was upset and needed reassurance.”

“You gave it to her, I hope?”

“Oh, certainly. I swore on the soul of her dead brother. Whom you don’t know.”

“Whom I don’t know. As I have now stated three times. Why the persistence, Adam?”

“She kept raving about him, and I’m curious, that’s all. How does a dead brother fit into the arrangements we made about Juanita?”

“The woman’s obviously unstable.”

“I agree. But I wonder how unstable.”

Jim got up and stretched his arms. “Well, I’ll leave you to your wonderings. I must get home. Daisy will think we’ve both drowned.”

“I don’t believe,” Adam said carefully, “that Daisy is thinking about us at all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just before I left the house, I had a phone call from Ada Fielding. She asked me to tell you that Daisy had hired a detective a few days ago, a man named Pinata.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Mrs. Fielding thinks you ought to do something about it.”

“She does, eh?” Jim’s face was grim and weary. “Such as what?”

“I gather she meant unhire him. After all, it’s your money he’s getting.” Adam paused, watching the fishing boat as it tied up to the dock, wishing he were on it. “There’s more if you want to hear it.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“You’d better listen anyway. Daisy’s meeting this man at his office tonight at seven o’clock. She promised Fielding’s new wife that she and Pinata would go looking for Fielding.”

“Fielding’s new wife? How the hell did she come into it?”

“She was worried about Fielding getting into trouble and phoned Daisy from Los Angeles.”

“What’s it all about anyway?”

“I was hoping that you’d tell me.”

Jim shook his head. “I can’t. I have no idea how Fielding got involved in this thing, if he is involved. As for his wife, I didn’t know of her existence until Daisy informed me this week. I’m at a complete loss, I tell you.”

“You tell me, yes.”

“Your tone suggests disbelief.”

“Let’s put it this way. It’s better to lie to your wife than to your lawyer.”

“I play it safe,” Jim said, “by not lying to either.”

“What about the girl?”

“I told Daisy all about that when it happened — names and everything — and she took it very calmly. She seems to have forgotten now, and that’s not my fault. I told her.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because it was the reasonable, the honorable, thing to do.”

“It may have been honorable as all get-out,” Adam said with a cryptic little smile. “But reasonable, no.”

“She’d have found out sooner or later anyway.”

“Your logic reminds me of the first time I took my brother-in-law sailing. It was a brisk day, we were going along at a nice clip with just the right angle of heel, but Tom was so afraid we’d tip that he jumped overboard and swam to shore. I know you don’t enjoy sailing much, so you probably think Tom did the sensible thing. It wasn’t, though. It was both silly and dangerous. He almost didn’t make it to shore, and of course, the boat didn’t tip.”

“She’d have found out eventually,” Jim repeated.

“How? The girl left town and remarried. She’d have nothing to gain by talking. As for the mother, all arrangements were made by me. You were never brought into it except as a name. I don’t want to pry” — he leaned over to remove a pebble caught in the tread of his sneakers — “but I’ve often wondered why you didn’t let me take the case into court, especially since you never intended to keep it secret from Daisy.”

“I couldn’t afford the scandal.”

“But I’m sure we could have won it.”

“The scandal would still be there. Besides, the child was — and is — mine. Would you ask me to perjure myself?”

“Of course not. But the girl’s reputation alone would certainly have cast doubt on the legitimacy of her claim.”

“In other words, I should have stayed on the boat until it tipped?”

“It didn’t tip,” Adam said.

“Well, this one would have.”

“You didn’t wait around to find out. You jumped overboard.”

“Oh, stop it, Adam. It happened. It happened a long time ago. Why go into it all over again now?”

“Do you remember exactly how long ago it happened?”

“No. I try not to think about it.”

“It was four years ago. To be precise, it was on December 2, 1955, that I made the first payment to Mrs. Rosario in my office. I looked it up before I left.” He pulled the hood of his sea jacket over his head. “You’d better go home and have a talk with Daisy.”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Well, I’ll see you later. I want to stay down and make sure everything’s tight and tidy on the sloop. I don’t like the size of those swells. Sorry we missed our sail, by the way.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want to go anyway.”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t want to ask you, either.”

“So Daisy arranged it.”

“Yes.”

“Daisy’s getting to be quite an arranger.” Jim turned abruptly and walked toward the parking lot.

But he was not thinking of Daisy as he climbed into his car. He was thinking of the boat that hadn’t tipped, and of the man who’d jumped overboard and almost hadn’t made it to shore. A silly and dangerous thing, Adam had called it. Sometimes, though, silly and dangerous things were necessary. Sometimes people didn’t jump; they were pushed.

She pretended, in case any of the fishermen or the dockhands were observing her, that she was standing against the wall of the harbormaster’s office for shelter from the wind. She made a show of being cold — shivering, pulling up her coat collar, rubbing her hands together — until, as time passed, the show became real and the coldness penetrated every tissue of her body.

She watched the two of them talking on the seawall fifty yards away. They looked as though they might have been discussing the weather, but Daisy knew it couldn’t have been the weather when Jim suddenly turned and walked away in a peculiarly abrupt manner, as if he and Adam had been quarreling. She waited until Jim got into his car. Then she started running toward Adam, who was going down the floating ramp to the mooring slips.

“Adam.”

He turned and came back up the ramp to the guardrail, swaying with the movement of the waves. “Hello, Daisy. You missed Jim by a couple of minutes. He just left.”

“That’s too bad.” There was nothing in her voice to indicate how long she had waited for Jim to leave.

“I may be able to catch him for you.”

“Oh no, don’t bother.”

“He told me he was going home.”

“I’ll see him there, then,” Daisy said. “You didn’t stay out very long, did you?”

“We didn’t get out at all. The storm warnings are up.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Jim didn’t seem to mind,” Adam said dryly. “By the way, next time you arrange a sailing partner for me, make it someone who likes water, will you?”

“I’ll try.” Daisy leaned against the guardrail and looked down at the crabs scuttling around the rocks as if they were trying to find the biggest and safest one to weather out the storm. “Since you couldn’t sail, what did you and Jim do?”

“We talked.”

“About me?”

“Certainly. We always talk about you. I ask Jim how you are, and he tells me.”

“Well, how am I? I’d like Jim’s version of the state of my health, mental and otherwise.”

Adam’s smile was imperturbable. “Obviously, you’re a little cranky today. That’s my version, not Jim’s.”

“Did he tell you his plans for our anniversary?”

“We discussed a great many—”

“He’s made some lovely plans, only I’m not supposed to know about them.”

“Only you do.”

“Oh yes. Word gets around. I must say you’ve kept the secret from me very well, considering the fact that you must have been the first to know.”

“Keeping secrets,” Adam said coolly, “is part of my job.”

“How large is it going to be, my surprise, I mean?”

“Large enough but not too large.”

“And the style?”

“The style will be stylish. Naturally.”

“And you haven’t the faintest notion what I am talking about, have you?”

He took her arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee at the Yacht Club.”

“No.”

“You don’t have to snap at me. What’s the matter with you today?”

“I’m glad you asked. I intended to tell you anyway. I found some check stubs this afternoon in Jim’s desk. They indicate that he’s been paying you $200 a month for some time.”

“Well?”

“I asked my mother about it, and she claimed the money was for some acreage Jim was buying from you to build a mountain cabin on. I gather she was lying?”

“She may have been lying,” Adam said with a shrug. “Or she may actually believe it’s the truth.”

“It isn’t, of course.”

“No.”

“What was that money for, Adam?”

“To pay for the support of Jim’s child by another woman.” He deliberately looked away from her as he spoke because he didn’t want to see the pain and shock in her face. “You were told about it at the time, Daisy. Don’t you remember?”

“Jim’s — child. How funny that sounds. So f-funny.” She was clutching the guardrail as if she were afraid she was going to fling herself into the sea against her own will. “Was it — is it a boy or a girl?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Haven’t you even asked him?”

“That wouldn’t do much good. Jim doesn’t know, either.”

She turned to Adam, and her eyes looked blind, as if a film of ice had formed over the pupils. “You mean he hasn’t even seen the child?”

“No. The woman left town before her delivery. Jim hasn’t heard from her since.”

“Surely she must have written him a letter when the baby was born.”

“There was a mutual agreement between the two parties involved that no contact be made, and no correspondence entered into.”

“But what a terrible thing, not to see your own child. It’s inhuman. I can’t believe that Jim would evade his responsibilities like—”

“Now wait a minute,” Adam said crisply. “Jim evaded nothing. In fact, if he’d taken my advice, he wouldn’t have admitted paternity at all. The woman had a flock of other children whose paternity was in question. She also had a husband, although he was allegedly out of the country at the time. If she had brought charges against him — and I doubt that she’d have had the nerve — she would have had a tough time proving anything. As things turned out, Jim quietly admitted paternity, and financial arrangements were made with Mrs. Rosario, the girl’s mother, through me. That’s all there was to it.”

“All there was to it,” she repeated. “You talk like a lawyer, Adam, in terms of cases and bringing charges, of proving or not proving. You don’t talk about justice.”

“In this case, I think justice was done.”

“Do you call it justice that Jim, who so desperately wanted to father a child, should cut himself off from his own flesh and blood?”

“The arrangements were his.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Ask him.”

“I can’t believe that any man, let alone Jim, wouldn’t want to see his own child at least once.”

“Jim did the only sensible thing under the circumstances,” Adam said. “And the circumstances weren’t in the least what you seem to imagine in your sentimental way. No sentiment was involved. The girl thought nothing of Jim personally, nor he of her. The child was not the product of love. If it’s still alive — and neither Juanita nor Mrs. Rosario would be in a hurry to inform us otherwise — it’s half Mexican, its mother is mentally unstable—”

“Stop it. I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“I must present the facts bluntly to prevent you from sentimentalizing and perhaps doing something foolish which you might regret.”

“Foolish?”

Adam pushed back the hood of his sea jacket, as if the day had suddenly turned warm. “I think you hired the detective to find that child.”

“So you know about Pinata?”

“Yes.”

“Does Jim know, too?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t care,” she said listlessly. “I don’t really care. I guess it’s time we laid our cards on the table. You’re wrong, though, about my reason for hiring Pinata. Why should I hire someone to find a child I didn’t even know existed?”

“You knew. You were told.”

“I can’t remember.”

“You were told.”

“Stop repeating it like that, as if forgetting were a cardinal sin. All right, I was told. I forgot. It’s not the kind of thing a woman likes to remember about her husband.”

“Some part of you remembered,” Adam said. “Your dream shows that. The date on your tombstone was the day the first payment was made to Mrs. Rosario. It was also the day that Juanita left town, and, possibly, the day Jim confessed the affair to you. Was it?”

“I don’t — I don’t know.”

“Try to think about it. Where were you that day?”

“Working. At the Clinic.”

“What happened when you had finished working?”

“I went home, I guess.”

“How?”

“I drove the car — no. No, I didn’t.” She was looking down at the water as if it were the deep dark well of memory. “Jim called for me. He was waiting in the car when I went out the back door. I started to cross the parking lot. Then I saw this young woman getting out of Jim’s car. I’d seen her around the Clinic before. She was one of the regular patients, but I’d never paid much attention to her. I wouldn’t have then either, if she hadn’t been talking to Jim and if she hadn’t been so terribly pregnant. Jim opened the door for me... ”

“Who was the girl?” Daisy said.

“Her name’s Juanita Garcia.”

“I hope she has her hospital reservations all set.”

“Yes, so do I.”

“You look pale, Jim. Are you feeling sick?”

He reached out and took her hand and held it so tightly that it began to feel numb. “Listen to me, Daisy. I love you. You won’t ever forget that, will you? I love you. Promise never to forget it. There’s nothing in the world I wouldn’t do to make you happy.”

“You don’t very often talk like this, as if you were going to die or something.”

“The girl — the child — I’ve got to tell you—”

“I don’t want to hear.” She turned and looked out of the car window, smiling the little smile she put on in the morning and washed off at night. “It gets dark so early, it’s a pity we don’t have daylight saving time all year.”

“Daisy, listen, nothing’s going to happen. She won’t cause any trouble. She’s going away.”

“The paper says there’ll be snow on the mountains again tomorrow.”

“Daisy, give me a chance to explain.”

“The mountains always look so much prettier with a little snow on them... ”