A Stranger in My Grave

17

I have nothing to live for. Yet, as I move through the days, shackled to this dying body, I yearn to step free of it long enough to see you again, you and Ada, my beloved ones still...

They had already visited five taverns, and Fielding was getting tired of moving from place to place. But Juanita was all set to go again. She sat on the very edge of the stool as though she were waiting for some whistle to blow inside her as a signal to take off. Aawouhee...

“For Pete’s sake, can’t you settle down?” Fielding said. He was beginning to feel the drinks, not in his head, which was marvelously clear and sharp and full of wit and information, but in his legs, which were getting older and heavier and harder to drag in and out of doors. His legs wanted to sit down and rest while his head informed and amused Juanita or the bartender or the guy on the next stool. None of them was in his class, of course. He had to talk down to them, way down. But they listened; they could see he was a gentleman of the old school.

“What old school?” the bartender said, and his left eye closed in a quick, expert wink directed at Juanita.

“You miss the point, old chap,” Fielding said. “No particular school is involved. It’s a figure of speech.”

“It is, eh?”

“Precisely. Speaking of old schools, Winston Churchill went to Harrow. You know what people who went to Harrow are called?”

“I guess they’re called the same names as the rest of us.”

“No, no, no. They are Harrovians.”

“You don’t say.”

“It’s God’s truth.”

“Your friend’s getting crocked,” the bartender told Juanita.

Juanita gave him a blank stare. “No, he’s not. He always talks that way. Hey, Foster, are you getting crocked?”

“Absolutely not,” Fielding said. “I’m feeling absolutely shape-ship. How are you feeling, my dear?”

“My feet hurt.”

“Take off your shoes.”

Juanita began tugging at her left shoe, using both hands. “They’re genuine snakeskin. I paid $19 for them.”

“Your tips must be good.”

“No. I got a rich uncle.”

She put the sharp-toed, needle-heeled shoes side by side on the counter in front of her. She had ordinary-sized feet, but out of their proper place the shoes looked enormous and misshapen, as if they belonged to some giant with a taste for pain.

Fielding’s drink seemed extremely small in comparison with the shoes, and he pointed this out to the bartender, who told Juanita to put the shoes on again and quit messing around.

“I’m not messing around.”

“When I come over to your joint for a drink, I don’t undress and leave my clothes on the counter.”

“Well, why don’t you?” Juanita said. “I think it’d be a riot. I can just see Mrs. Brewster swelling up and turning blue.”

“If you want to do a striptease, sit in the back booth so the police patrol can’t see you. Saturday night they go past maybe ten times.”

“I’m not scared of the cops.”

“Yeah? You want to know what happened up in Frisco the other day? I read it in the paper. This girl wasn’t doing nothing except walking around in her bare feet, and by God, the cops arrested her.”

Juanita said she didn’t believe it, but she picked up the shoes and her half-finished drink and headed for the back booth, trailed by Fielding.

“Hurry up and finish your drink,” she said as she sat down. “I’m sick of this place.”

“We just got here.”

“I want to go where we can have some fun. Nobody’s having any fun around here.”

“I am. Can’t you hear me laughing? Ho ho ho. Ha ha ha.”

Juanita was sitting with both hands clenched around her glass as if she were trying to crush it. “I hate this town. I wish I’d never’ve come back. I wish I was a million miles away and never had to see my old lady again or anyone else. I’d like to go where everybody is a stranger and don’t know anything about me.”

“They’d find out soon enough.”

“How?”

“You’d tell them,” Fielding said. “Just the way I did. I’ve hit a hundred towns as a stranger, and inside of ten minutes I was talking to somebody about myself. Maybe I wasn’t speaking the truth, and maybe I was using a false name, but I was talking, see? And talking is telling. So pretty soon you’re no stranger any longer, so you head for the next town. Don’t be a patsy, kid. You stick around here, close to that rich uncle of yours.”

Juanita let out an unexpected little giggle. “I can’t very well stick close to him. He’s dead.”

“He is, eh?”

“You sound like you don’t believe I ever had a rich uncle.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“When I was a kid, he came to visit us. He brought me a silver belt, real silver made by the Indians.”

“Where did he live?”

“New Mexico. He had important cattle interests there. That’s how he made all his money.”

He didn’t have any money, Fielding thought, except a few bucks on Saturday, which were gone by Sunday because he couldn’t help drawing to an inside straight. “And he left this money of his to you?”

“To my mother, on account of she was his sister. Every month she gets a check from the lawyer, regular as clockwork, out of the — I guess you call it the trust fund.”

“Did you ever see any of these checks?”

“I saw the money. My mother sent me some every month to help feed the kids. Two hundred dollars,” she added proudly. “So in case you think I’ve got to work in a crummy dive like the Velada, you got another think coming. I do it for the kicks. It’s more fun than sticking around the house watching a bunch of kids.”

To Fielding, the story was getting crazier by the minute. He signaled the bartender to bring another round of drinks while he did some rapid calculation. An income of $200 a month would mean a trust fund of around $50,000. The last time he’d seen Camilla, the man had been unemployed and trying desperately to raise the money for some food and clothing. Yet Juanita didn’t appear to be lying. Her pride in having a rich uncle with important cattle interests was as obviously genuine as her pride in the $19 snakeskin shoes. The whole thing was beginning to smell like a shakedown, but Fielding felt almost certain that if Juanita was part of it, she had no knowledge of her role. The girl was being used by someone more intelligent and cunning than she was. But that’s crazy, he thought. She’s the one who gets the money; she’s admitted it.

“What was the name of the lawyer?” he said.

“What lawyer?”

“The one who sends the checks?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because we’re friends, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know if we’re friends or not,” Juanita said with a shrug. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“That’s because I’m interested in you.”

“A lot of people have been interested in me. It never got me nowhere. Anyhow, I don’t know his name.”

“Does he live in town?”

“Are you deaf or something? I told you I never saw the checks, and I don’t know the lawyer. My old lady sent me the money every month from my uncle’s trust fund.”

“This uncle of yours, how did he die?”

“He was killed.”

“What do you mean, killed?”

Juanita’s mouth opened in a yawn a little too wide and loud to be genuine. “What do you want to talk about an old dead uncle for?”

“Old dead uncles intrigue me, if they happen to be rich.”

“There’s nothing in it for you.”

“I know that. I’m just curious. How did he die?”

“He got in an automobile accident in New Mexico about four years ago.” In an attempt to appear detached, Juanita stared at a patch of grimy pink roses on the wallpaper. But Fielding had the idea that this was a subject which interested and puzzled her and which she actually wanted to discuss in spite of her apparent reluctance. “He was killed right away, before the priest could give him the last rites. That’s why my old lady’s always praying and burning candles for him, so he’ll get into heaven anyway. You saw the candle, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s funny her making such a fuss over a brother she never saw for years. It’s like she did something wrong to him and is trying to make up for it.”

“If she did something wrong to him, he surely wouldn’t have left her his money.”

“Maybe he didn’t know about whatever she’d done.” She reached out and began tracing the outlines of one of the pink roses on the wallpaper. Her sharp fingernail cut a path through the grease. “It’s like he only got to be important by dying and leaving the money. She didn’t even talk about him when he was alive.”

He didn’t talk about her, either, Fielding thought. Only once, right at the end: “I’d like to see my sister Filomena before I go.” “You can’t do it, Curly.” “I want her to pray for me; she’s a good woman.” “You’re crazy to take a chance seeing anyone now. It’s too dangerous.” “No. I must say good-bye to her.” At the time he’d barely had a voice to say good-bye, let alone a cent to leave anyone.

“Did he make a will?” Fielding asked.

“I never saw it. She says he did.”

“Don’t you believe her?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did you first hear about it?”

“One day before Paul was born, she suddenly announced that Uncle Carl had died and left a will. If I did this and that, I would get $200 a month.”

“And what was ‘this and that’?”

“Mostly I was to leave town right away and have the baby born in L.A. It seemed kind of crazy him being interested in the baby when he never even sent the other kids anything at Christmastime. When I asked my old lady about it, she said Uncle Carl wanted the baby born in L.A. because that’s where he was born. For sentimental reasons, like.”

He was born in Arizona, Fielding thought. He must have told me a dozen times. Flagstaff, Arizona. And nobody knows better than me that he didn’t die in any automobile accident in New Mexico. He died right here, less than a mile from this very spot, with his own knife between his ribs.

Only on one count was the girl’s story correct: there had been no last rites for Camilla.

“I guess he must have been very sentimental,” Juanita said. “So’s my old lady sometimes. A funny thing, there I was in L.A. with everything going pretty good, and suddenly she gets this idea she wants to see me again, me and the kids. She wrote me a letter how she was getting old and she had a bad heart and she was lonely all by herself and she wanted me to come visit her for a while. Well, Joe had just lost his job, and it seemed like a good time to come. I must’ve been crazy. An hour after I stepped inside that door, she was screaming at me and I was screaming back. That’s the way it is. She wants me around, and she wants me far away. How the hell can I be both? Well, this time I’m going to settle it for good. I’m never coming back once I get out of this town again.”

“Just make sure you get out.”

“Why?”

“Be careful.”

“What’s to be careful about?”

“Oh, things. People.” He would have liked to tell her the truth at this point, or as much of it as he knew. But he didn’t trust her not to talk. And if she talked in front of the wrong people, she would put herself in danger as well as him. Perhaps she was already in danger, but she certainly seemed unaware of it. She was still busy outlining the wallpaper roses with her fingernail, looking as rapt and dedicated as an artist or a child.

Fielding said, “Stop that for a minute, will you?”

“What?”

“Stop fooling around with the wallpaper.”

“I’m making it prettier.”

“Yeah, I know that, but I want you to listen to me. Are you listening?”

“Well, sure.”

“I came to town to see Jim Harker.” He leaned across the table and repeated the name carefully. “Jim Harker.”

“So what?”

“You remember him, don’t you?”

“I never heard of him before.”

“Think.”

Her two eyebrows leaped at each other into the middle of her forehead, like animals about to fight. They didn’t quite meet. “I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking’s easy. It’s not thinking that’s hard. I think all the time, but I can’t think about Jim Harker if I never even heard of Jim Harker. Think, hell.”

The single monosyllable had destroyed her creative impulse as well as her good mood. She turned from the wall and began wiping the grime off her hands with a paper napkin. When she had finished, she crumpled the napkin into a ball and threw it on the floor with a sound of despair, that she had ever tried to make things prettier in the world.

The bartender came around the end of the counter, frowning as if he intended to rebuke her for messing up his place. Instead, he said, “Mrs. Brewster just called, wanted to know if you were here.”

Juanita’s face immediately assumed the peculiarly bland expression that indicated she was interested. “What’d you say to her?”

“That I’d keep an eye out for you, and if you showed up, I’d tell you to call her back. So now I’m telling you.”

“Thanks,” Juanita said without moving.

“You gonna do it?”

“So she can go blabbing to my old lady? What do you think I am, like stupid?”

“You better call her,” the bartender said stubbornly. “She’s at the Velada.”

“So she’s at the Velada. And I’m here, at — what’s the name of this dump?”

“El Paraiso.”

“The Paradise. Hey, Foster, ain’t that a laugh? You and me are strangers in paradise.”

The bartender turned to Fielding. One of his eyelids was twitching in unexpressed irritation. “If you’re a friend of hers, you better persuade her to talk to Mrs. Brewster. There’ve been a couple of men looking for her at the Velada. One of them was a private detective.”

A detective, Fielding thought. So Pinata was in this, too.

He wasn’t exactly surprised. He’d been half expecting it ever since Daisy’s letter was delivered to him at the warehouse. There was no other way for her to have found out where he was working except through Pinata. Obviously, if Pinata was looking for Juanita, that was what Daisy had hired him to do. But how did Camilla come into it? As far as Fielding knew, the name hadn’t been mentioned in Daisy’s presence; she was unaware such a man had ever existed.

He realized suddenly that both Juanita and the bartender were staring at him as if they were waiting for an answer. He hadn’t heard any question.

“Well,” the bartender said.

“Well, what?”

“You know any private detective around town?”

“No.”

“That’s funny, because he was looking for you, too.”

“Why me? I haven’t done anything.”

Juanita protested shrilly that she hadn’t done anything, either, but neither of the men paid any attention.

Fielding was squinting up at the bartender as if he found it difficult to focus his eyes. “You said two men came to the Velada. Who was the other one?”

“Search me.”

“A cop?”

“Mrs. Brewster would have mentioned it if he’d been a cop. All she told me, he was a big man with blond hair and he acted funny. Jumpy, like. You know anybody like that?”

“Sure, lots of them.” One in particular, Fielding thought. He wasn’t jumpy the last time I saw him, in Chicago, but now he has reason to be. “Some of my best friends are jumpy.”

“Yeah, I bet.” The bartender glanced briefly at Juanita. “I gotta get back to work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

When he had gone, Juanita leaned across the table and said confidentially, “I think Mrs. Brewster was making it all up so I’ll get scared and go home. I don’t believe there’s any detective looking for me, or any big blond man, either. Why would they want to see me for?”

“Maybe they have some questions.”

“What about?”

He hesitated a minute. He wanted to help the girl because in a disturbing way she reminded him of Daisy. It was as if some perverse fate had singled them both out to be victims, Daisy and Juanita, who had never met and perhaps never would, although they had so much in common. He felt sorry for them. But Fielding’s pity, like his love and even his hate, was a variable thing, subject to changes in the weather, melting in the summer, freezing in the winter, blowing away in a high wind. Only by a miracle did it survive at all.

Proof of its survival was in the single monosyllable he spoke now. “Paul.”

“Paul who?”

“Your son.”

“Why would they ask questions about him? He’s too young to be in any trouble. He’s not even four. All he can do is maybe break windows or steal a little.”

“Don’t be naive, girl.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Innocent.”

Juanita’s eyes widened in outrage. “I’m not innocent. I may be dumb, but I’m not innocent.”

“All right, all right, skip it.”

“I’m not going to skip it. I want to know how come two men are so interested in my kids all of a sudden.”

“Not the others, just Paul.”

“Why?”

“I think they’re trying to find out who his father is.”

“Well, of all the goddamn nerve,” Juanita said. “What business is it of theirs?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Not that it’s any of your business, either, but it so happens I was married at the time. I had a husband.”

“What was his name?”

“Pedro Garcia.”

“And that’s who Paul’s father is?”

Juanita picked up one of the snakeskin shoes, and Fielding thought for a moment that she was going to hit him with it. Instead, she began pushing it on her left foot. “By God, I don’t have to sit here and be insulted by no lousy imitation district attorney.”

“I’m sorry, I have to ask these questions. I’m trying to help you, but I’ve got my own hide to save, too. What happened to Garcia?”

“I divorced him.”

Fielding knew that at least this part of her story was a deliberate lie. After he’d left Pinata’s office the previous Monday, he’d gone to City Hall to check the records. It was Garcia who’d brought the divorce suit; Juanita had not contested it or asked for alimony or child support, a curious omission if the child was actually Garcia’s. It occurred to Fielding now, not for the first time, that perhaps Juanita herself didn’t know who the boy’s father was and didn’t care much, either. He might have been someone she picked up in a bar or on the street, or a sailor from a ship visiting the harbor or an airman down from Vandenberg. Juanita’s pregnancies were inclined to be casual. One thing was certain: the little boy Paul bore no resemblance to Jim Harker.

Juanita finished squeezing her feet into the shoes and tucked her purse under her arm. She seemed ready to leave, but she made no move to do so. “What do you mean, you got your own hide to save?”

“The detective’s looking for me, too.”

“That’s funny when you come to think of it. Someone must’ve told him we were together.”

“Mrs. Brewster maybe.”

“No.” Her tone was positive. “She wouldn’t give a detective the time of day.”

“No one else knows except her and your mother.”

“By God, that’s it. That’s who told him, my old lady.”

“But first someone else must have given him your address,” Fielding said. “Maybe the busboy or one of the waitresses.”

“They don’t know my address. I never tell people like that nothing personal about myself.”

“He found out from somewhere.”

“All right, so he found out from somewhere. What do I care? I haven’t committed any crime. Why should I run away?”

“It’s possible,” Fielding said carefully, “that you’re a part of something you’re not fully aware of.”

“Like what?”

“I can’t explain it to you.” He couldn’t explain it to himself, either, because there were gaps in his knowledge that must be filled in. Once they were filled in, his duty would be done and he could be on his away again. The important thing now was to get rid of the girl. She was too conspicuous, and he had to travel light and fast and, if he was unlucky, far.

Luck. Fielding believed in it as some men believed in God, country, or mother. To luck he credited his triumphs; on lack of it he blamed his misfortunes. Several times a day he rubbed the tiny rabbit’s foot that dangled from his watch chain, always expecting miracles from the fragile inert scrap of bone and fur, but not complaining if a miracle failed to occur. It was this quality of fatalism that always baffled his second wife and enraged his first. He knew now, for example, that he was inviting disaster in the same way that he knew he was getting drunk. He accepted both as things over which he personally had no control. Whatever happened, how the dice rolled, the ball bounced, the cookie crumbled, would be a matter of luck or lack of it. His sense of responsibility was no greater than that of the severed paw he wore on his watch chain.

“Why can’t you explain things to me?” Juanita said.

“Because I can’t.”

“All this hinting around like I was going to be killed or something — well, it don’t scare me. Nobody’d want to kill me. Why, nobody even hates me except my old lady and sometimes Joe and maybe a few others.”

“I didn’t say you were going to be killed.”

“It sounded like that.”

“I just warned you to be careful.”

“How the hell can I be careful if I don’t know who of or what of?” She leaned across the table, studying him soberly and carefully. “You know what I think? I think you’re a crackpot.”

“That’s your considered opinion, eh?”

“It sure is.”

Fielding wasn’t offended. He was, in fact, quite pleased because once again luck had taken charge of his affairs. By calling him a crackpot the girl had relieved him of any sense of responsibility toward her. It made what he intended to do to her easier, even inevitable: She called me a crackpot, therefore it’s all right to steal her car.

The immediate problem was to get her away from the table for a few minutes and make sure she left her purse behind with the keys in it.

He said abruptly, “You’d better call Mrs. Brewster.”

“Why?”

“For your own sake — leaving me out of it entirely — you should find out everything you can about the two men who are looking for you.”

“I don’t want to talk to her. She’s always telling me what to do.”

“Well, in case you change your mind...” He took a dime out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of her.

Juanita stared at the coin with a child’s petty avarice. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

“Let her do the talking.”

“Maybe it’s all lies about the two men. She wants me to get scared and go home.”

“I don’t think so. It strikes me she’s a pretty good friend of yours.”

It was the dime that clinched her decision. She slid it off the table with the casual ease of an experienced waitress. “Watch my purse, will you?”

“All right.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Sure.”

She teetered across the floor to the phone booth, which was jammed in a corner between the end of the bar and the door to the kitchen. Fielding waited, stroking his little rabbit’s foot with affection as one might stroke a living pet. Once again it was a matter of luck whether Juanita could remember Mrs. Brewster’s phone number or whether she would have to look it up in the directory. If she had to look it up, he would have thirty seconds or more to open the purse, search through all Juanita’s junk to find the keys, and reach the front door. If she dialed the number directly, he’d be forced to grab the purse and run, taking a chance on getting past the bartender and the half-dozen customers he was serving. The sentimental side of Fielding’s nature, always erratic after a few drinks and apt to disappear entirely after a few more, balked at the idea of stealing a woman’s purse. The car was a different matter. He’d stolen quite a few cars in his lifetime; he had also put the bite on a great many women. But he had never actually stolen a purse from any of them. Besides, there were the risks involved: the thing was too large to put in his pocket or hide under his coat. There seemed only one other alternative — to dump its contents out of sight on the seat beside him, pick out the car keys, and replace the purse on the table. The whole operation would require no more than four or five seconds...

Juanita was dialing.

The purse lay within reach of his hand, a black plastic rectangle with a gold clasp and handle. The plastic was so shiny that Fielding could see in miniature the reflection of his own face. It looked curiously young and unlined and innocent, not the image that stared back at him in the mornings between flyspecks and dabs of toothpaste and other unidentified residues of life. This face in the plastic belonged to his youth, as the picture in Mrs. Rosario’s bedroom belonged to Camilla’s youth. Camilla, he thought, and the knife of pain that stabbed him between the ribs seemed as real as the navaja that had so senselessly killed his friend. We were both young together, Curly and I. It’s too late for him now, but there’s still a chance for me.

He wanted suddenly and desperately to take the purse, not for the money or for the car keys which were in it, but for that reflection of his own face, that innocence intact, that youth preserved in plastic and protected from the sins of time.

He glanced across at the phone booth. Juanita, scowling, was in the act of hanging up. He thought that his opportunity was lost, that she had reached the Velada and been told Mrs. Brewster had gone. Then he saw her pick up the directory chained to the wall, and he knew she must have received a busy signal and decided to recheck the phone number. Luck was giving him another chance.

His eyes returned to the purse, but this time his angle of vision was different and the image that stared back at him was like the images in a fun house. The forehead projected out to the right and the jaw to the left, and in between was a distorted nose and two malevolent slits of eyes. With a little cry of rage he grabbed the purse off the table and dumped its contents on the seat beside him. The car keys were on a small chain separate from Juanita’s other keys. He slid them into his pocket, stood up, and walked toward the front door. He didn’t hurry. The trick was to appear casual. It was the kind of thing he’d done a hundred times before, the friendly, final good-bye-see-you-later to the landlady or grocer or hotel clerk or liquor dealer whom he had no intention of paying or ever seeing again.

He smiled at the bartender as he passed. “Tell Juanita I’ll be back in a few minutes, will you?”

“You didn’t pay for the last round of drinks.”

“Oh, didn’t I? Terribly sorry.” It was a delay he hadn’t anticipated, but he kept the smile on his face as he fished around in his pocket for a dollar. The only sign of his anxiety was a brief, nervous glance in the direction of the phone booth. “Here you are.”

“Thanks,” the bartender said.

“Juanita’s talking to Mrs. Brewster. I thought I’d take a little walk to clear my head.”

“You do that.”

“See you later.”

As soon as Fielding was outside, he dropped the pretense of being casual. He hurried along the sidewalk, the cold brisk air slapping his face with a wintry hand.

At this point he had no clear or extensive plan of action. Impulsively and without thought of the consequences, he had rushed into the middle of something he only half understood. Getting the car and going to Daisy’s house — this was as far ahead as he could see. At Daisy’s house he would almost inevitably run into Ada, and the idea excited him. At this stage he was quite ready to meet her. Sober, he couldn’t have faced her; drunk, he would certainly pick a quarrel, perhaps a very violent one. But right now, somewhere in between, he felt able to deal with her, confront her without malice, expose her without cruelty. Right now he could teach her a few lessons in civilization, in manners: My dear Ada, it grieves me to bring this to your attention but in the interests of justice, I must insist you reveal the truth about your part in this devious little scheme...

It didn’t even seem ironic to him that he should be planning remarks about truth and justice when, in fact, his whole life had been a marathon race, with truth a few jumps ahead of him and justice a few jumps behind. He had never caught up with the one, and the other had never caught up with him.

The car was at the end of the block, parked in front of a long frame building with a dimly lit sign announcing its function: billar. The sign, printed only in Spanish, made it clear that whites were not welcome. Although the place was jammed, the noise coming out of the open door was subdued, punctuated by the click of balls and score racks. A group of young Negroes and Mexicans were hanging around outside, one of them with a cue in his hand. He was using the cue like a drum major, raising it and lowering it in time to some rhythms he heard in his head or felt in his bones.

As Fielding approached, the boy pointed the cue at him and said, “Rat ta ta ta ta. Man, you’re dead.”

Sober, Fielding might have been a little intimidated by the group; drunk, he would certainly have made trouble. But in between, right now — “That’s pretty funny, kid. You ought to be on TV” — and he brushed past the boy with a grin and made his way to the car.

There were two keys on the ring he’d taken from Juanita’s purse — one for the luggage compartment, the other for the doors and ignition. He tried the wrong key on the door first. It was a bad start, made worse by the fact that the boys were watching him with sober interest, as if they knew perfectly well what he intended to do and were waiting to see how he did it and if he would get caught. Later — if there was a later — they would be able to give a good description of both him and the car. Or perhaps Juanita had already called the police, and they had a description on the radio right now. He had counted on her distrust of officials to prevent such a move, but Juanita was unpredictable.

Once inside her car, he had a moment of panic when he looked at the dashboard. He hadn’t driven a car for a long time, and never one like this, with so many buttons and switches that he couldn’t tell which was supposed to turn on the lights. Even without lights, though, he knew where to find the most important object in the car — the half-pint of whiskey he’d bought at one of the bars and later hidden on the floorboard under the seat. The bottle had hardly touched his lips before he began feeling the effects of its contents. First there was a fleeting moment of guilt, followed by the transition of guilt to blame, blame to revenge, revenge to power: By God, I’m going to teach all of them a lesson.

In an ordinary person these changes of emotion would take time to evolve. But Fielding was like a man who’s been hypnotized so often that a snap of the fingers will put him under. A smell of the cork, a tilt of the bottle, and By God, I’ll teach those smug, hypocritical, patronizing bastards.

One of the young Negro men had approached the car and was kicking the right rear tire absently, as if he had no motive other than that the tire was there to kick and he didn’t have anything more important to do.

Fielding shouted through the closed window, “Get your black feet off that tire, coon boy!” He knew these were fighting words, but he knew, too, in that corner of his mind which still had access to the real world, that the insult had been muffled by the window glass and scrambled by the wind.

He pressed the starter button. The car gave a couple of forward lurches, then the engine died, and he saw that he hadn’t released the emergency brake. He released it, started the engine again, and looked in the rearview mirror to make sure the road was clear of traffic behind him. There were no nearby cars, and he was on the point of pulling away from the curb when he saw two Juanitas running down the middle of the road, barefooted, their arms flailing like windmills in a gale, their skirts ballooning around their thighs.

The sight of these two furies coming at him made him panic. He pressed the accelerator right down to the floorboard. The engine flooded and died again, and he knew that he had no choice but to wait.

He turned down the window and looked back at the road, narrowing his eyes until the two Juanitas merged into one. He could hear her screaming twenty yards away. A scream in this part of town was interpreted not as a cry for help, but as a sign of impending trouble: the group of young Negroes and Mexicans had disappeared without a trace, and the doors below the sign billar had closed as if in response to an electronic ear alert to the decibels of danger. When and if the police arrived, nobody would know anything about a car thief and a screaming woman.

Fielding glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was 6:30. There was still plenty of time. All he had to do was keep his head, and the girl would be handled easily enough. The fact that she was running toward the car indicated that she hadn’t called the police. The important thing was to stay calm, play it cool...

But as he watched her approach, rage beat against his temples and exploded behind his eyes with flashes of colored lights. Between flashes Juanita’s face appeared, streaked with black tears, red from cold and exertion.

“You — sonna bitch — stole my car.”

“I was coming to pick you up. I told the bartender I’d be right back.”

“Dirty — liar.”

He reached across the seat and unlocked and opened the right front door. “Get in.”

“I’m gonna — calla cops.”

“Get in.”

The repetition of the direct order and the opening of the door had the same effect on her as his putting the dime on the table in the café. The dime was there to be picked up; the door was there to be entered. She went around the front of the car, keeping her eyes fixed steadily on Fielding as if she suspected he might try to run her down.

She got in, still breathing hard from her sprint down the road. “You sonofabitch, what’ve you got to say?”

“Nothing you’d believe.”

“I wouldn’t believe nothing you said, you—”

“Take it easy.” Fielding lit a cigarette. The flare of the match blended with the lights flashing behind his eyes, so that he wasn’t quite sure which was real. “I’m going to make a bargain with you.”

“You make a bargain with me? That’s a laugh. You’ve got more guts than a sausage factory.”

“I want to borrow your car for a couple of hours.”

“Oh, you do, eh? And what do I get out of it?”

“Some information.”

“Who says I want information from an old crackpot like you?”

“Watch your language, girl.”

Although he didn’t raise his voice, she seemed to sense the force of his anger, and when she spoke again, she sounded almost conciliatory. “What kind of information?”

“About your rich uncle.”

“Why should I want to hear about him for? He’s been dead and buried for four years. Besides, how would you know anything about him that my old lady didn’t tell me already?”

“There’s no similarity between what your old mother told you and what I’m going to tell you. If you cooperate. All you have to do is lend me your car for a couple of hours. I’ll drive you home now and bring the car back to your house when I’ve finished my errand.”

Juanita rubbed her cheeks with the back of her hand, looking surprised to find tears there, as if she’d already forgotten that she had wept and why. “I don’t want to go home.”

“You will.”

“Why will I?”

“You’re going to be curious to find out why your mother has been lying in her teeth all these years.”

He started the car and pulled away from the curb. Juanita seemed too astonished to object. “Lying? My old lady? You must be crazy. Why, she’s so pure she...” Juanita used an ancient and earthy figure of speech without embarrassment. “I don’t believe you, Foster. I think you’re making all this up so you can get the car.”

“You don’t have to believe me. Just ask her.”

“Ask her what?”

“Where your rich uncle got his money.”

“He had cattle interests.”

“He was a cowhand.”

“He owned—”

“He owned nothing but the shirt on his back,” Fielding said, “and ten chances to one he’d stolen that.” This was not true, but Fielding couldn’t admit it, even to himself. He had to keep himself convinced that Camilla had been a liar, a thief, and a scoundrel.

Juanita said, “Then where did the money come from that he left to me in the trust fund?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you — there is no trust fund.”

“But I get $200 regular every month. Where does it come from?”

“You’d better ask your mother.”

“You talk like she’s a crook or something.”

“Or something.”

He turned left at the next corner. He wasn’t familiar with the city, but in his years of wandering, he had taught himself to observe landmarks carefully so he could always find his way back to his hotel or rooming house. He did it now automatically, like a blind man counting the number of steps between places.

Juanita was sitting on the edge of the seat, tense and rigid, one hand clutching her plastic purse and the other the snakeskin shoes. “She’s no crook.”

“Ask her.”

“I don’t have to. Her and me, maybe we don’t get along so buddy-buddy, but I swear she’s no crook. Unless she was doing something for somebody else.”

“Unless that, yes,” Fielding said blandly.

“How come you pretend to know so much about my uncle and my old lady?”

“Camilla was a friend of mine once.”

“But you never even saw my old lady till this afternoon.” She paused to give this some thought. “Why, you never even saw me till that day you got in the fight with Joe.”

“I’d heard about you.”

“Where? How?”

He was tempted, momentarily, to tell her where and how, to show her the letter from Daisy he’d taken out of the old suitcase that morning. It was this letter, dated almost four years previously, that had sent him to the Velada in the first place, in the hope of finding, or getting some information about, a young woman called Juanita Garcia. That she happened to be there at the time was luck, but he still wasn’t sure whether it was good luck or bad luck. That her husband happened to drop in and started the quarrel was pure bad luck: it had put Fielding’s timing off, it had temporarily dislodged his whole purpose in coming to town, and, what might turn out to be the worst misfortune yet, it had brought Pinata into the affair. Pinata, and then Camilla. One of the most terrible shocks in Fielding’s life occurred at the moment he looked across Mrs. Rosario’s bedroom and saw the picture of Camilla.

That’s when I should have stopped, he thought. I should have walked away right then.

Even now he didn’t know why he hadn’t stopped; he was just aware that the gnawing restlessness inside him disappeared when he was playing a game of danger, whether it was a simple matter of cheating at cards or defrauding a landlady, or whether it involved, as it did now, his own life or death.

“I don’t believe you ever heard of me before,” Juanita said, and it was obvious from her tone that she wanted to believe it, that she was flattered by the notion of being recognized by strangers, like a movie star. “I mean, I’m not famous or anything, so how could you?”

“Well, I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Some other time.”

The idea of showing her the letter and watching her reactions appealed to his sense of dramatic irony. But the references to herself were decidedly unflattering, and he was afraid to take a chance on making her angry again. Besides, the letter was, in its way, a very special one. Of all the times that Daisy had written to him, this was the only time she had ever expressed genuine and deep emotions.

He hadn’t answered it. At the time there were a dozen reasons why not, but as the years passed, he’d forgotten the reasons and only the fact remained: he hadn’t answered this simplest of requests. Every time he opened the old suitcase, that word please flew up out of it and struck him in the face...

Well, he was answering it now, and at a much greater risk than if he’d done it in the first place. It was a stroke of incredibly bad luck that the sister Camilla had referred to before he died had turned out to be Mrs. Rosario. And yet Fielding realized now that if he’d been thinking logically, he should have made some connection between Camilla, on the one hand, and Juanita, on the other. Daisy’s letter was dated December 9. In it she stated she’d first heard about Juanita’s child a week before, which would make it December 2. This was also the day Camilla had died and Juanita had left town. A connection between the two events was inescapable. And the link must be Mrs. Rosario, who, behind her crucifixes, madonnas, and shrines, seemed as devious an operator as Fielding himself.

“Ask your mother,” he said, “how she wangled that money.”

Juanita was stubborn. “Maybe someone gave it to her.”

“Why?”

“There’s some people that like to give away money.”

“They do, eh? Well, I hope I meet one before I die.”

They had reached Granada Street. It was lined on both sides with cars parked for the night; garages were a luxury in this part of town.

Fielding remembered the house not by number, but by its bright pink paint. As he braked the car, he noticed a new blue and white Cadillac pulling away from the curb with an anxious shriek of rubber.

“I’ll be back in two hours,” he told Juanita.

“You better be.”

“I give you my word.”

“I don’t want your word. I want my car.”

“You’ll have it. In two hours.”

He had no idea whether he’d be back in two hours, two days, or ever. It would all be a matter of luck.

18

I came here to see you, but I lack the courage. That is why I am writing, to feel in touch with you for a little, to remind myself that my death will be only partial; you will be left, you will be the proof that I ever lived at all. I leave nothing else...

The blue and white Cadillac was just as conspicuous on Opal Street as it had been on Granada, but there was no one around to notice. At the first drop of rain the sidewalks had emptied. Jim turned off the windshield wipers and the lights and waited in the cold darkness. Although he didn’t look either at his watch or the clock on the dashboard, he knew it was five minutes to seven. During this week of crisis he seemed to carry around inside him his own clock, and he could hear the seconds ticking off with ominous accuracy. Time had become a living, breathing thing, attached to him as inexorably as a remora to a shark’s belly, never sleeping or relaxing its grip, so that even when he awoke in the middle of the night, it would communicate to him the exact hour and minute.

Across the street the lights were on in Pinata’s office, and a man’s shadow was moving back and forth past the window. An overpowering hatred surged up Jim’s body like a bore tide up a river, roiling his reason, muddying his perceptions. The hatred was divided equally between Pinata and Fielding — Pinata because he had dredged up the business about Carlos Camilla, Fielding because he had, in his impulsive, irresponsible manner, caused the events of the past week. It was his seemingly innocent phone call on Sunday night that had triggered Daisy’s dream. If it hadn’t been for the dream, Camilla would still be dead, Juanita forgotten, Mrs. Rosario unknown.

He had questioned Ada Fielding thoroughly about the phone call from Fielding, trying to make her remember exactly what she’d said that evening that might have disturbed Daisy and started the train of thought that led to the dream. “What did you say to her, Ada?” “I told her it was a wrong number.” “What else?” “I said it was some drunk. God knows that part of it was true enough.” “There must be something more.” “Well, I wanted to make it sound realistic, so I told her the drunk had called me baby...”

Baby. The mere word might have caused the dream and led to Daisy’s recollection of the day she’d forced herself to forget, the day Jim had told her about Juanita’s baby. So it was Fielding who had started it, that unpredictable man whose friendship could be more disastrous than his enmity. Questions without answers dangled in Jim’s mind like kites without strings. What had brought Fielding to San Félice in the first place? What were his intentions? Where was he now? Was the girl still with him? Mrs. Rosario hadn’t been able to answer any of these questions, but she’d answered another before it was asked: Fielding had seen the boy, Paul.

Jim watched the raindrops zigzagging across the windshield, and he thought of Daisy walking in the rain on Laurel Street trying to find her lost day as if it were something that was still there in the old house. Tears came into his eyes, of love, of pity, of helplessness. He could no longer keep her safe and protect her from knowledge about her father that would cause her pain for the rest of her life. Yet he knew he must keep on trying, right to the end. “We can’t let her find out now, Jim,” Ada Fielding had said, and he had replied, “It’s inevitable.” “No, Jim, don’t talk like that.” “You shouldn’t have lied to her in the first place.” “I did it for her own good, Jim. If she’d had children, they might have been like him. It would have killed her.” “People don’t die so easily.”

He realized now how true this was. He’d died a little more each day, each hour, of the past week, and there was still a long way to go.

He blinked away his tears and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles as if he were punishing them for having seen too much, or too little, or too late. When he looked up again, Daisy was coming down the street, half running, her dark hair uncovered and her raincoat blowing open. She appeared excited and happy, like a child walking along the edge of a steep precipice, confident that there would be no landslide, no loose stones under her feet.

Carrying the landslide and the loose stones in his pockets, he got out of the car and crossed the road, head bowed against the wind.

“Daisy?”

She gave a little jump of fright, as if she were being accosted by a strange man. When she recognized him, she didn’t say anything, but he could see the happiness and excitement drain out of her face. It was like watching someone bleed.

“Have you been following me, Jim?”

“No.”

“You’re here.”

“Ada told me you had an appointment at — at his office.” He didn’t want to say the name Pinata. It would have made the shadow moving behind the window too real. “Please come home with me, Daisy.”

“No.”

“If I have to plead with you, I will.”

“It won’t do the slightest good.”

“I must make the attempt anyway, for your sake.”

She turned away with a skeptical little smile that was hardly more than a twist of the mouth. “How quick people are to do things for my sake, never their own.”

“Married people have a mutual welfare that can’t be divided like a pair of towels marked His and Hers.”

“Then stop talking about my sake. If you mean for the sake of our marriage, say so. Though of course it doesn’t sound quite so noble, does it?”

“Please don’t be ironic,” he said heavily. “The issue is too important.”

“What is the issue?”

“You don’t realize the kind of catastrophe you’re bringing down on yourself.”

“But you realize?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me.”

He was silent.

“Tell me, Jim.”

“I can’t.”

“You see your own wife headed for a catastrophe, as you put it, and you can’t even tell her what it is?”

“No.”

“Does it have anything to do with the man in my grave?”

“Don’t talk like that,” he said harshly. “You have no grave. You’re alive, healthy...”

“You aren’t answering my question about Camilla.”

“I can’t. Too many people are involved.”

She raised her eyebrows, half in surprise, half in irony. “It sounds as if there’s been some giant plot going on behind my back.”

“It’s been my duty to protect you. It still is.” He put his hand on her arm. “Come with me now, Daisy. We’ll forget this past week, pretend it never happened.”

She stood silent in the noisy rain. It would have been easy, at that moment, to yield to the pressure of his hand, follow him across the street, letting him guide her back to safety. They would take up where they left off; it would be Monday morning again, with Jim reading aloud to her from the Chronicle. The days would pass quietly, and if they promised no excitement, they promised no catastrophe, either. It was the nights she feared, the return of the dream. She would climb back up the cliff from the sea and find the stranger under the stone cross, under the seamark tree.

“Come home with me now, Daisy, before it’s too late.”

“It’s already too late.”

He watched her disappear through the front door of the building. Then he crossed the road and got into his car, without looking up at the shadow behind the lighted window.

The noise of the rain beating on the tile roof was so loud that Pinata didn’t hear her step in the corridor or her knocking at the door of his office. It was after seven o’clock. He’d been chasing around after Juanita and Fielding for three hours until he’d reached the point where all the bars, and the people in them, looked alike. He was feeling tired and irritable, and when he looked up and saw Daisy standing in the doorway, he said brusquely, “You’re late.”

He expected, in fact wanted, her to snap back at him and give him an excuse to express his anger.

She merely looked at him coolly. “Yes. I met Jim outside.”

“Jim?”

“My husband.” She sat down, brushing her wet hair back from her forehead with the back of her hand. “He wanted me to go home with him.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I found out some things this afternoon that indicate we’ve been on the right track.”

“What are they?”

“It won’t be easy or pleasant for me to tell you, especially about the girl. But of course you have to know, so you can plan what to do next.” She blinked several times, but Pinata couldn’t tell whether it was because the overhead lights were bothering her eyes or whether she was on the point of weeping. “There’s some connection between the girl and Camilla. I’m pretty sure Jim knows what it is, although he wouldn’t admit it.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Yes.”

“Did he indicate that he was acquainted with Camilla?”

“No, but I think he was.”

She told him then, in a detached voice, about the events of the afternoon: her discovery of the check stubs in Jim’s desk, the call from Muriel about Fielding, her talk with Adam Burnett at the dock, and finally her meeting Jim. He listened carefully, his only comments being the tapping of his heels as he paced the floor.

He said, when she’d finished, “What was in the letter in the pink envelope that Muriel mentioned to you?”

“From the date I know it could have been only one thing — the news about Juanita and the child.”

“And that’s what motivated his trip up here?”

“Yes.”

“Why four years after the fact?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t possible for him to do anything about it at the time,” she said defensively. “I know he wanted to.”

“Do anything such as what?”

“Give me moral support, or sympathy, or let me talk it out with him. I think the fact that he didn’t come when I needed him has been bothering him all these years. Then when he finally settled nearby, in Los Angeles, he decided to satisfy his conscience. Or his curiosity. I don’t know which. It’s hard to explain my father’s actions, especially when he’s been drinking.”

It’s even harder to explain your husband’s, Pinata thought. He stopped pacing and leaned against the front of the desk, his hands in his pockets. “What do you make of your husband’s insistence that he is ‘protecting’ you, Mrs. Harker?”

“He appears to be sincere.”

“I don’t doubt it. But why does he think you need protection?”

“To avoid a catastrophe, he said.”

“That’s a pretty strong word. I wonder if he meant it literally.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“Did he indicate who, or what, would be the cause of this catastrophe?”

“Me,” Daisy said. “I’m bringing it down on my own head.”

“How?”

“By persisting in this investigation.”

“Suppose you don’t persist?”

“If I go home like a good little girl and don’t ask too many questions or overhear too much, presumably I will avoid catastrophe and live happily ever after. Well, I’m not a good little girl anymore, and I no longer trust my husband or my mother to decide what’s best for me.”

She had spoken very rapidly, as if she were afraid she might change her mind before the words were all out. He realized the pressure she was under to go home and resume her ordinary life, and while he admired her courage, he doubted the validity of the reasons behind it. Go back, Daisy baby, to Rainbow’s End and the pot of gold and the handsome prince. The real world is a rough place for thirty-year-old little girls in search of catastrophe.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said with a frown. “It’s written all over your face.”

He could feel the blood rising up his neck into his ears and cheeks. “So you read faces, Mrs. Harker?”

“When they’re as obvious as yours.”

“Don’t be too sure. I might be a man of many masks.”

“Well, they’re made of cellophane.”

“We’re wasting time,” he said brusquely. “We’d better go over to Mrs. Rosario’s house and clear up a few—”

“Why do you get so terribly embarrassed when I bring up anything in the least personal?”

He stared at her in silence for a moment. Then he said, with cold deliberation, “Lay off, Daisy baby.”

He had meant to shock her, but she seemed merely curious. “Why did you call me that?”

“It was just another way of saying, don’t go looking for two catastrophes.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“No? Well” — he picked up his raincoat from the back of the swivel chair — “are you coming along?”

“Not until you explain to me what you meant.”

“Try reading my face again.”

“I can’t. You just look mad.”

“Why, you’re a regular face-reading genius, Mrs. Harker. I am mad.”

“What about?”

“Let’s just say I’m a sorehead.”

“That’s not an adequate answer.”

“O.K., put it this way: I have dreams, too. But I don’t dream about dead people, just live ones. And sometimes they do some pretty lively things, and sometimes you’re one of them. To be any more explicit I would have to go beyond the bounds of propriety, and neither of us wants that, do we?”

She turned away, her jaws clenched.

“Do we?” he repeated.

“No.”

“Well, that’s that. To hell with dreams.” He went to the door and opened it, looking back at her impatiently when she made no move to get up. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you.”

“I’m — not frightened.” But she hunched in her raincoat as if she had shrunk during the storm, the real one on the other side of the window or the more turbulent one inside herself. “I’m not frightened,” she said again. “I just don’t know what’s ahead for me.”

“Nobody does.”

“I used to. Now I can’t see where I’m going.”

“Then you’d better turn back.” There was finality in his voice. It was as if they had met, had come together, and had parted, all in the space of a minute, and he knew the minute was gone and would not return. “I’ll take you home now, Daisy.”

“No.”

“Yes. The role of good little girl is better suited to you than this. Just don’t listen too hard and don’t see too much. You’ll be all right.”

She was crying, holding the sleeve of his raincoat against her face. He looked away and focused his eyes on an unidentifiable stain on the south wall. The stain had been there when he moved in; it would be there when he moved out. Three coats of paint had failed to obscure it, and it had become for Pinata a symbol of persistence.

“You’ll be all right,” he repeated. “Going home again might be easier than you think. This past week has been like — well, like a little trip from reality, for both of us. Now the trip’s over. It’s time to get off the boat, or the plane, or whatever we were on.”

“No.”

He turned his eyes from the wall to look at her, but her face was still hidden behind his coat sleeve. “Daisy, for God’s sake, don’t you realize it’s impossible? You don’t belong in this part of town, on this street, in this office.”

“Neither do you.”

“The difference is, I’m here. And I’m stuck here. Do you understand what that means?”

“No.”

“I have nothing to offer you but a name that isn’t my own, an income that ranges from meager to mediocre, and a house with a leaky roof. That’s not much.”

“If it happens to be what I want, then it’s enough, isn’t it?”

She spoke with a stubborn dignity that he found both touching and exasperating.

“Daisy, for God’s sake, listen to me. Do you realize that I don’t even know who my parents were or what race I belong to?”

“I don’t care.”

“Your mother will.”

“My mother has always cared about a lot of the wrong things.”

“Maybe they’re not wrong.”

“Why are you trying so hard to get rid of me, Steve?”

She had never before called him Steve, and the sound of it coming from her made him feel for the first time that the name was finally and truly his own, not something borrowed from a parish priest and tacked on by a Mother Superior. Even if he never saw Daisy again, he would always be grateful to her for this moment of strong, sure identity.

Daisy was wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. The lids were faintly pink, but unswollen, and he wondered whether a really powerful emotion could have caused such dainty and restrained weeping. Perhaps it had been no more than the weeping of a child denied a toy or an ice cream cone.

He said carefully, “We’d better not discuss this anymore tonight, Daisy. I’ll take you back to your car.”

“I want to come with you.”

“You’re making this tough for me. I can’t force you to go home, and I can’t leave you alone in this part of town even with the door locked.”

“Why do you keep referring to this part of town as if it were a corner of hell?”

“It is.”

“I’m coming with you,” she said again.

“To Mrs. Rosario’s house?”

“If that’s where you’re going, yes.”

“Juanita might be there. And the child.”

A spasm of pain twisted her mouth, but she said, “It may be a necessary part of my growing up, to meet them both.”

19

Memories — how she cried before you were born, day in, day out, until I wished there were a way of using all those tears to irrigate the dry, dusty rangeland...

She had taken the children to the Brewsters’ house and left them without explanation, and Mr. Brewster, who was crippled and liked to have company while he watched television, had demanded none. On her return trip she avoided the lighted streets, using shortcuts across backyards and driveways, hunched under her umbrella like a gnome on night business. She was not afraid, either of the dark or its contents. She knew most of the people in the neighborhood stood in awe of her because of the candles she burned and the number of times she went to church.

The thin walls of poverty hold few secrets. Even before she reached the porch, she could hear Juanita slamming around inside the house as if she were looking for something. Mrs. Rosario shook the water off her umbrella and removed her dripping coat, thinking, Maybe she’s got it in her head that I am spying on her again, and she is looking for me all over the house, even in places I couldn’t possibly be if I were a midget. I must hurry...

But she couldn’t hurry. Weariness dragged at her legs and arms, and ever since the scene with Juanita in the afternoon, there’d been a sickness in her stomach that didn’t get worse but wouldn’t go away. When she’d fed the children their supper, she had eaten nothing, just sipped a little lemon and anise tea.

She let herself quietly into the house and went to the bedroom to hang up her coat. With Pedro’s help she had taken the broken door off its hinges and carried it out to the backyard, where it would lie, with other damaged pieces of her life, to warp in the rain and bleach in the sun. Next week she and Pedro would go to the junkyard and hunt for another door until they found one almost the right size. They would fix it up with sandpaper and a little paint...

“Next week,” she said aloud, as if making a promise of improvement to someone who’d accused her of being slovenly. But the thought of the long trip to the junkyard, the grating of sandpaper, the smell of paint, increased her nausea. “Or the week after, when I am feeling stronger.”

Even without the door, the bedroom was her sanctuary, the only place where she could be alone with her grief and guilt. The candle in front of Camilla’s picture had burned low. She put a fresh one in its place and lit it, addressing the dead man in the language they had used as children.

“I am sorry, Carlos, little brother. I yearned to see justice done, out in the open, but I had my Juanita to think of. Just that very week you came here, she had been arrested again, and I knew wherever she went in this town from then on, she’d be watched; they’d never let her alone — the police, the Probation Department, and the Clinic. I had to get her away where she could start over and live in peace. I am a woman, a mother. No one else would look after my Juanita, who was cursed at birth by the evil eye of the curandera masquerading as a nurse at the hospital. Not a penny did I touch for myself, Carlos.”

Every night she explained to Carlos what had happened, and every night his static smile seemed to indicate disbelief, and she was forced to go on, to convince him she had meant no wrong.

“I know you did not kill yourself, little brother. When you came to see me that night, I heard you telephoning the woman, telling her to meet you. I heard you ask for money, and I knew this was a bad thing, asking money from rich people; better to beg from the poor. I was afraid for you, Carlos. You acted so queer, and you would tell me nothing, only to be quiet and to pray for your soul.

“When the time came that you were to meet her, I went down to the jungle by the railroad tracks. I lost my way. I couldn’t find you at first. But then I saw a car, a big new car, and I knew it must be hers. A moment later she came out from the bushes and began running towards the car, very fast, as if she was trying to escape. When I reached the bushes, you were lying there dead with a knife in you, and I knew she had put it there. I knelt over you and begged you to be alive again, Carlos, but you would not hear me. I went home and lit a candle for you. It is still burning, God rest your soul.”

She remembered kneeling in the dark in front of the little shrine, praying for guidance. She couldn’t confide in Juanita or Mrs. Brewster, because neither of them could be trusted with a secret, and she couldn’t call in the police, who were Juanita’s enemies and hence her own. They might even suspect she was lying about the woman in the green car in order to protect Juanita.

She’d prayed, and as she prayed, one thought grew in her mind and expanded until it pushed aside all others: Juanita and her unborn child must be taken care of, and there was no one else to do it but herself. She’d called the woman on the telephone, knowing only her name and the shape of her shadow and the color of her car...

“It is a bad and dangerous thing, Carlos, asking money from the rich, and I was afraid for my life knowing what she’d done to you. But she was more afraid because she had more to lose than I. I did not tell her my name or where I lived, only what I had come across in the bushes and her running away to the car. I said I wanted no trouble, I was a poor woman, but I would never seek money for myself, only for my daughter, Juanita, with her unborn child that had no father. She asked me whether I’d told anyone else about you, Carlos, and I said no, with truth. Then she said if I gave her my telephone number, she would call me back; there was someone she had to consult. When she called back a little later, she told me she wanted to take care of my daughter and her child. She didn’t even mention you, Carlos, or argue about the money, or accuse me of blackmail. Just ‘I would like to take care of your daughter and her child.’ She gave me the address of an office I was to go to the next day at 12:30. When I went in, I thought at first it was a trap for me — she wasn’t there, only a tall blond man, and then later the lawyer. No one talked about you, no one spoke your name, Carlos. It was as if you had never lived...”

She turned away from the picture with a groan as another spasm of nausea seized her stomach. The lemon and anise tea had failed to ease her, although it was made from a recipe handed down by her grandmother and had never failed in the past. Clutching her stomach with both hands, she hurried out to the kitchen, with the idea of trying some of the medicine the school doctor had sent home to cure Rita’s boils. The medicine had not been opened; Mrs. Rosario was treating the boils herself with a poultice of ivy leaves and salt pork.

She was so intent on her errand, and her pain, that she didn’t notice Juanita standing at the stove until she spoke. “Well, are you all through talking to yourself?”

“I was not...”

“I got ears. I heard you mumbling and moaning in there like a crazy woman.”

Mrs. Rosario sat down, hunched over the kitchen table. In spite of the pain crawling around inside her like a live thing with cruel legs, merciless arms, she knew she must talk to Juanita now. Mr. Harker had warned her; he’d been very angry that she had permitted Juanita to come back to town.

The room felt hot and airless. Juanita had turned the oven up high to cook herself some supper, and she hadn’t opened the window as she was supposed to. Mrs. Rosario dragged herself over to the window and opened it, gasping in the cold fresh air.

“Where are my kids?” Juanita said. “What have you done with them?”

“They’re at the Brewsters’.”

“Why aren’t they home in bed?”

“Because I didn’t want them to overhear what I am going to say to you.” Mrs. Rosario returned to her place at the table, forcing herself to sit erect because she knew the disastrous effects which a show of weakness on her part sometimes had on her daughter. “The man who was with you — where is he?”

“He had some business to look after, but he’ll be back.”

“Here?”

“Why not here?”

“You mustn’t let him in. He’s a bad man. He lies. Even about his name, which is not Foster but Fielding.”

Juanita masked her annoyance with a shrug. “I don’t care. What difference does it...”

“Did you tell him anything?”

“Sure. I told him my feet hurt, and he said take off your shoes. So I took...”

“There is no time for insolence.” The strain of holding herself erect had weakened Mrs. Rosario’s voice to a whisper, but even her whisper had a sting in it.

Juanita felt the sting and resented it. She was afraid of this old woman who could invoke saints and devils against her, and her fear was compounded by her knowledge that she had talked too much and too loosely to Fielding. “I never told him a thing, so help me God.”

“Did he ask you any questions about your Uncle Carlos?”

“No.”

“Or about Paul?”

“No.”

“Juanita, listen to me — I must have the truth this time.”

“I swear by Mary.”

“What do you swear?”

Juanita’s face was expressionless. “Whatever you want me to.”

“Juanita, are you frightened of me? Are you afraid to tell the truth? I smell drink on your breath. Maybe the drink has made you forget what you said, eh?”

“I never said a word.”

“Nothing about Paul or Carlos?”

“I swear by Mary.”

Mrs. Rosario’s lips moved silently as she bowed her head and crossed herself. The familiar gesture loosened angry memories in Juanita’s mind, and they came crashing down like an avalanche of gravel, covering her fear with dust and noise.

“Do you call me a liar, you old witch?” she shouted.

“Shhhh. You must keep your voice down. Someone might...”

“I don’t care. I got nothing to hide. That’s more than you can say.”

“Please. We must have a quiet talk, we...”

“For all your moaning and groaning to God Almighty, you’re no better than the rest of us, are you?”

“No. I am no better than the rest of you.”

Juanita’s loud, harsh laughter filled the little room. “Well, that’s the first thing you ever admitted in your whole damn life.”

“You must be quiet a minute and listen to me,” Mrs. Rosario said. “Sit down here beside me.”

“I can listen standing up.”

“Mr. Harker was here half an hour ago.”

Juanita had a vague memory of Fielding mentioning the name to her. It had meant nothing to her then and meant nothing now. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“Mr. Harker is Paul’s father.”

“Are you crazy? I never even heard of a guy called Harker.”

“You are hearing now. He is Paul’s father.”

“By God, what are you trying to do? Prove I’m so spooky I can’t even remember my own kid’s father? You want me to get locked up so’s you can keep the money from the trust fund for yourself?”

“There never was a trust fund,” Mrs. Rosario said quietly. “Carlos was a poor man.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“It was necessary. If you told anyone about Mr. Harker, the money would stop.”

“How could I tell anyone about Harker when I don’t even know him?” Juanita pounded the table with her fist, and the salt-shaker gave a little jump, fell over on its side, and began spilling, as if it had been shot.

Hurriedly Mrs. Rosario picked up a pinch of the salt and put it under her tongue to ward off the bad luck that plagued a house where there was waste. “Please, there must be no violence.”

“Then answer me.”

“Mr. Harker has been supporting Paul because he is Paul’s father.”

“He’s not.”

“You are to say so, whether you remember or not.”

“I won’t. It’s not true.”

Mrs. Rosario’s voice was rising in pitch as if it were competing with Juanita’s. “You are to do as I tell you, without arguing.”

“You think I can’t even remember Paul’s father? He was in the Air Force, he went to Korea. I wrote to him. We were going to get married when he got out.”

“No, no! You must listen to me. Mr. Harker...”

“I never even heard of a guy called Harker. Never in my life, do you hear me?”

“Shhhh!” Mrs. Rosario’s face had turned gray, and her eyes, darkened by fear, were fixed on the back door. “There’s someone out on the porch,” she said in an urgent whisper. “Quick, lock the door, close the window.”

“I got nothing to hide. Why should I?”

“Oh God, will you never listen to your mother? Will you never know how much I’ve endured for you, how much I’ve loved you?”

She reached out to touch Juanita’s hand with her own, but Juanita stepped back with a sound of contempt and disbelief, and went to the door.

She opened it. A man was standing on the threshold, and behind him, at the bottom of the porch steps, a woman, faceless in the shadows.

The man, a stranger to Juanita, was politely apologetic. “I knocked on the front door, and when I didn’t get any answer, I came around to the back.”

“Well?”

“My name is Steve Pinata. If you don’t mind, I’d like to...”

“I don’t know you.”

“Your mother does.”

“He’s a detective,” Mrs. Rosario said dully. “Tell him nothing.”

“I’ve brought Mrs. Harker with me, Mrs. Rosario. She wants to talk to you about something that’s of great importance to her. May we come inside?”

“Go away. I can’t talk to anyone. I’m sick.”

Pinata knew from her color and her labored breathing that she was telling the truth. “You’d better let me call a doctor, Mrs. Rosario.”

“No. Just leave me alone. My daughter and I were having... a little argument. It is no business of yours.”

“From what I overheard, it’s Mrs. Harker’s business.”

“Let her talk to her husband about it. Not me. I can say nothing.”

“Then I’m afraid I’ll have to ask Juanita.”

“No, no! Juanita is innocent. She knows nothing.”

Using the table as support, Mrs. Rosario tried to push herself to her feet, but she fell back into the chair with a sigh of exhaustion. Pinata crossed the room and took her by the arm. “Let me help you.”

“No.”

“You’d better lie down quietly while I call a doctor.”

“No. A priest — Father Salvadore...”

“All right, a priest. Mrs. Harker and I will help you to your bedroom, and I’ll send for Father Salvadore.” He motioned to Daisy to come into the house, and she started up the porch steps.

Up to this point Juanita had been standing, blank-faced, beside the open door, as if what was happening was of no concern or interest to her. It was only when Daisy reached the periphery of light that Juanita let out a gasp of recognition.

She began screaming at her mother in Spanish. “It’s the woman I used to see at the Clinic. She’s come to take me away. Don’t let her. I promise to be good. I promise to buy you a new crucifix, and go to Mass and confession, and never break things anymore. Don’t let her take me away!”

“Be quiet,” Pinata said. “Mrs. Harker’s had no connection with the Clinic for years. Now listen to me. Your mother’s very ill. She belongs in a hospital. I want you to help Mrs. Harker look after her while I call an ambulance.”

At the word ambulance Mrs. Rosario tried once more to get to her feet. This time she fell across the table. The tabled tilted, and she slid slowly and gracefully to the floor. Almost immediately her face began to darken. Bending over her, Pinata felt for a pulse that wasn’t there.

Juanita was staring down at her mother, her fists clasped against her cheeks in an infantile gesture of fright. “She looks so funny.”

Daisy put her hand on Juanita’s shoulder. “We’d better go into the other room.”

“But why does she look so black, like a nigger?”

“Mr. Pinata has called an ambulance. There’s nothing else we can do.”

“She isn’t dead? She can’t be dead?”

“I don’t know. We...”

“Oh, God, if she’d dead, they’ll blame me.”

“No, they won’t,” Daisy said. “People die. There’s no use blaming anyone.”

“They’ll say it’s my fault because I was bad to her. I broke her crucifix and the door.”

“No one will blame you,” Daisy said. “Come with me.”

It was only by concentrating on helping Juanita that Daisy was able to keep herself under control. She led Juanita into the front room and closed the door. Here, among the shrines and madonnas and thorn-crowned Christs, death seemed more real than it had in the presence of the dead woman herself. It was as if the room had been waiting for someone to die in it.

The two women sat side by side on the couch in awkward silence, like guests waiting for a tardy hostess to introduce them to each other.

“I don’t know what it was all about,” Juanita said finally in a high, desperate voice. “I just don’t know. She asked me to lie, and I wouldn’t. I never met any Mr. Harker.”

“He’s my husband.”

“All right, then. Ask him. He’ll tell you himself.”

“He’s already told me.”

“When?”

“Four years ago,” Daisy said. “Before your son was born.”

“What did he say?”

“That he was the boy’s father.”

“Why, he’s crazy.” Juanita’s fists were clenched so tight that the broad, flat thumbs almost covered the knuckles. “Why, the whole bunch of you are crazy. I don’t even know any Mr. Harker!”

“I saw you getting out of his car at the parking lot outside the Clinic just before your baby was born.”

“Maybe he just gave me a ride. A lot of people give me rides when I’m pregnant. I can’t remember them all. Maybe he was one of them. Or maybe it wasn’t even me you saw.”

“It was you.”

“All right, maybe I’m the one that’s crazy. Is that what you’re getting at? They oughta maybe come and take me away and lock me up someplace.”

“That isn’t going to happen,” Daisy said.

“Maybe it’d be better if it did. I can’t make sense of things like they are now. Like the business about my Uncle Carlos and the money — he said my mother had been lying about Uncle Carlos.”

“Who said?”

“Foster. Or Fielding. He said Uncle Carlos was an old friend of his and he knew a lot about him and what my mother told me was all lies.”

“Your uncle’s name is — was Camilla?”

“Yes.”

“And you think my fa — Mr. Fielding was telling you the truth?”

“I guess so. Why shouldn’t he?”

“Where is he now, this Mr. Fielding?”

“He had an important errand, he said. He asked to borrow my car for a couple hours. We made like a bargain. I gave him the car; he gave me the dope on my uncle.”

Daisy had no reason to doubt the statement: it sounded exactly like the kind of bargain her father would make. As for the important errand, there was only one logical place it could have taken him — to her own home. Fielding, Juanita, Mrs. Rosario, Jim, her mother, Camilla, they were all beginning to merge and adhere into a multiple-headed monster that was crawling inexorably toward her.

Outside the house the ambulance had come to a stop with one last suffocated wail of its siren.

Juanita began to moan, bent double, so that her forehead pressed against her knees. “They’re going to take her away.”

“They have to.”

“She’s scared of hospitals; hospitals are where you die.”

“She won’t be scared of this one, Juanita.”

After a time the noises from the kitchen ceased. A door opened and banged shut again, and a minute later the ambulance pulled away from the curb. Its siren was mute. The time for hurrying had passed.

Pinata came in from the kitchen and looked across the room at the moaning girl. “I called Mrs. Brewster, Juanita. She’s coming over to get you right away.”

“I’m not going with her.”

“Mrs. Harker and I can’t leave you here alone.”

“I got to stay here and wait, in case they send my mother home. There won’t be anybody to look after her if I...”

“She’s not coming home.”

The strange blankness had come over Juanita’s face again, as concealing as the sheet that was used to cover her mother’s. Without a sound, she rose to her feet and walked into the bedroom. The candle in front of Camilla’s picture was still burning. She leaned down and blew it out. Then she flung herself across the bed, rolled over on her back, and stared up at the ceiling. “It’s just wax. It’s just ordinary beeswax.”

Daisy stood at the foot of the bed. “We’ll stay with you until Mrs. Brewster gets here.”

“I don’t care.”

“Juanita, if there’s anything I can do, if there’s any way I can help you...”

“I don’t want no help.”

“I’m putting my card with my telephone number on it here on the bureau.”

“Leave me alone. Go away.”

“All right. We’re leaving.”

Their departure was marked by the same words as their arrival had been: Go away. Between the two, a woman had died and a monster had come to life.

20

Dust and tears, these are what I remember most about the day of your birth, your mother’s weeping, and the dust sifting in through locked windows and bolted doors and the closed draft of the chimney...

The drapes were drawn across all the windows as if there was no one at home, or the people who were at home didn’t want to advertise the fact. A car, unfamiliar to Daisy, was parked beside the garage. Pinata opened the door and examined the registration card while Daisy stood waiting under a eucalyptus tree that towered a hundred feet above the house. The pungent odor of the tree’s wet bark, half bitter, half sweet, stung her nostrils.

“It’s Juanita’s car,” he said. “Your father must be here.”

“Yes. I thought he would be.”

“You look pale. Are you feeling all right?”

“I guess so.”

“I love you, Daisy.”

“Love.” The sound of the word was like the scent of eucalyptus, half bitter, half sweet. “Why are you telling me that now?”

“I wanted you to know, so that no matter what happens tonight in connection with your father or mother or Jim...”

“An hour ago you were trying to get rid of me,” she said painfully. “Have you changed your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I saw a woman die.” He couldn’t explain to her the shock he’d had of complete realization that this was the only life he was given to live. There would be no second chance, no certificate of merit to be awarded for waiting, no diploma for patience.

She seemed to understand what he meant, without explanation. “I love you, too, Steve.”

“Then everything will work out all right. Won’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“We don’t have time for guessing, Daisy.”

“Everything will work out,” she said, and when he kissed her, she almost believed herself.

She clung to his arm as they walked toward the house where the dream had begun and where it was now to end. The front door was unlocked. When she opened it and went into the foyer, there was no sound from the adjoining living room, but the silence was curiously alive; the walls seemed to be still echoing with noises of anger.

Her mother’s sharp voice sliced the silence. “Daisy? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone with you?”

“Yes.”

“We are having a private family discussion in here. You must ask our guest to excuse you. Immediately.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Your... your father is here.”

“Yes,” Daisy said. “Yes, I know.”

She went into the living room, and Pinata followed her.

A small woman who looked like Daisy was huddled in a chair by the picture window, a handkerchief pressed tightly against her mouth as if to stem a bloody flow of words. Harker sat by himself on the chesterfield, an unlit pipe clenched between his teeth. His glance at Daisy was brief and reproachful.

Standing on the raised hearth, surveying the room like a man who’d just bought the place, was Fielding. Pinata realized immediately that Fielding was drunk on more than liquor, as if he’d been waiting for years for this moment of seeing his former wife cringing in fear before him. Perhaps this was his real motive for coming to San Félice, not any desire to help Daisy, but a thirst for revenge against Ada. Revenge was heady stuff; Fielding looked delirious, half mad.

Daisy was crossing the room toward him, slowly, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether this strange man was her father or not. “Daddy?”

“Yes, Daisy baby.” He seemed pleased, but he didn’t step off the raised hearth to go and meet her. “You’re as pretty as ever.”

“Are you all right, Daddy?”

“Certainly. Certainly I am. Never better.” He bent to touch her forehead lightly with his lips, then straightened up again quickly, as though he was afraid a usurper might steal his position of power. “So you’ve brought Mr. Pinata with you. That’s unfortunate, Daisy baby. This is entirely a private family affair, Pinata wouldn’t be interested.”

“I was hired,” Pinata said, “to make an investigation. Until it’s concluded, or until I’m dismissed, I’m under Mrs. Harker’s orders.” He glanced at Daisy. “Do you want me to leave?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You might regret it, Daisy baby,” Fielding said. “But then regrets are a part of life, aren’t they, Ada? Maybe the main part, eh? Some regrets, of course, are slower in coming than others, and harder to take. Isn’t that right, Ada?”

Mrs. Fielding spoke through the handkerchief she held to her mouth. “You’re drunk.”

“In wine is truth, old girl.”

“Coming from you, truth is a dirty word.”

“I know dirtier ones. Love, that’s the dirtiest of all, isn’t it, Ada? Tell us about it. Give us the lowdown.”

“You’re a... an evil man.”

“Don’t antagonize him, Ada,” Jim said quietly. “There’s nothing to be gained.”

“Jim’s right. Don’t antagonize me, Ada, and maybe I’ll go away like a good lad without telling any tales. Would you like that? Sure you would. Only it’s too late. Some of your little tricks are catching up with you. My going away can’t stop them.”

“If there were any tricks, they were necessary.” Her head had begun to shake, as if the neck muscles that held it up had suddenly gone flabby. “I was forced to lie to Daisy. I couldn’t permit her to have children who would inherit certain — certain characteristics of her father.”

“Tell Daisy about these characteristics. Name them.”

“I... please, Stan. Don’t.”

“She’s got a right to know about her old man, hasn’t she? You made a decision that affected her life. Now justify it.” Fielding’s mouth cracked open in a mirthless smile. “Tell her about all the little monsters she might have brought into the world if it hadn’t been for her wise, benevolent mother.”

Daisy was standing with her back against the door, her eyes fixed, not on her father or mother, but on Jim. “Jim? What are they talking about, Jim?”

“You’ll have to ask your mother.”

“She was lying to me that day in the doctor’s office? It’s not true I can’t have children?”

“No, it’s not true.”

“Why did she do it? Why did you let her?”

“I had to.”

“You had to. Is that the only explanation you can offer me?” She crossed the room toward him, the rain dripping soundlessly from her coat onto the soft rug. “What about the girl, Juanita?”

“I only met her once in my life,” he said. “I picked her up on the street and drove her three or four blocks to the Clinic. Deliberately. I knew who she was. I kept her talking in the car until you came out because I wanted you to see us together.”

“Why?”

“I intended to claim her child.”

“You must have had a reason.”

“No man would take a drastic step like that without having reasons.”

“I can think of one,” she said in a brittle voice. “You wanted to make sure I kept on believing that our lack of children was my fault and not yours. You’re admitting now that it has been your fault, right from the beginning.”

“Yes.”

“And the reason you and my mother lied to me and that you claimed Juanita’s child was to make sure I’d never suspect you were the sterile one in our marriage.”

He didn’t try to deny it, although he knew it was only a small portion of the truth. “That was a factor, yes. I didn’t originate the lie; your mother did. I went along with it when I found out — when it became necessary.”

“Why did it become necessary?”

“I had to protect your mother.”

Mrs. Fielding sprang out of her chair like a runner at the sound of the starter’s gun. But there was nowhere to run; the course had no beginning and no ending. “Stop it, Jim. Let me tell her, please.”

“You?” Daisy turned to face her mother. “I wouldn’t believe you if you told me it was Saturday night and raining outside.”

“It is Saturday night and it is raining outside. You’d be a fool not to believe the facts just because they came from me.”

“Tell me some facts, then.”

“There’s a stranger present.” Mrs. Fielding glanced at Pinata, then at Fielding. “Two strangers. Must I talk in front of them? Can’t we wait until...”

“I’ve done enough waiting. Mr. Pinata can be trusted to be discreet, and my father wouldn’t do anything to harm me.”

Fielding nodded and smiled at her — “You bet I wouldn’t, Daisy baby” — but there was a derisive, cynical quality about the smile that worried Pinata because he couldn’t understand it. He wished the alcohol, and whatever other intoxicant was at work in Fielding’s system, would wear off and leave him less sure of himself. One sign of its wearing off was already apparent, the fine tremor of Fielding’s hands, which he attempted to cover up by hiding them in his pockets.

Mrs. Fielding had begun to talk again, her eyes on Daisy. “No matter what you think now, Daisy, Jim has done everything possible for your happiness. Remember that. The first lie was mine. I’ve already told you why it was necessary — your children would be marked by a stigma that must not be passed on. I can’t talk about it in front of a stranger. Later, you and I will discuss it alone.” She took a long breath, wincing as if it hurt her lungs, or heart, to probe so deep. “Four years ago, without warning, I received a telephone call from a man I hadn’t seen for a very long time and never expected to see again. His name was Carlos Camilla, and Stan and I had known him as Curly when we were first married in New Mexico. He was a close friend to us both. You’ve always accused me of race prejudice, Daisy. But in those days Camilla was our friend; we went through bad times together and helped each other.

“He didn’t mince words when he called. He said he had only a short time to live and needed money for his funeral. He reminded me of — of old times, and I... well, I agreed to meet him and give him some money.”

“Two thousand dollars?” Pinata said.

“Yes.”

“That’s a lot to pay for memories of old times, Mrs. Fielding.”

“I felt an obligation to help him,” she said. “He sounded so terribly ill and broken, I knew he must be telling the truth about his approaching death. I asked him if I could send him the money instead of meeting him, but he said there wasn’t time, and he had no address for me to send it to.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“From Jim. I knew he had a lot of cash in the safe at his office. I explained the situation to him, and he thought it would be advisable to pay what Camilla asked.”

“Advisable?” It seemed, to Pinata, a curious word to use under the circumstances.

“Jim is a very generous man.”

“Obviously there were reasons for his generosity?”

“Yes.”

“What were they?”

“I must refuse to answer.”

“All right,” Pinata said. “You went to meet Camilla. Where?”

“At the end of Greenwald Street, near the signalman’s shack. It was very late and dark. I couldn’t see anyone, and I thought I had misunderstood his instructions. I was about to leave when I heard him call my name, and a shadow stepped out from behind a bush. ‘Come here and look at me,’ he said. He lit a match and held it in front of his face. I’d known him when he was young and lively and handsome; the man in the matchlight was a living corpse, emaciated, misshapen. I couldn’t speak. There were so many things to say, but I couldn’t speak. I gave him the money, and he said, ‘God bless you, Ada, and God bless me, Carlos.’”

The funereal words seemed, to Pinata, to contain a curious echo of another ceremony: I, Ada, take thee, Carlos...

“I thought I heard someone coming,” Mrs. Fielding went on. “I panicked and ran back to my car and drove off. When I returned to the house, the phone was ringing. It was a woman.”

“Mrs. Rosario?”

“Yes, although she didn’t tell me her name then. She said she had found Carlos dead and that I had killed him. She wouldn’t listen to my denials, my protests. She just kept talking about her daughter, Juanita, who needed taking care of because she was going to give birth to a fatherless child. She seemed obsessed with this single idea of money for her daughter and the baby. I said I would call her back, that I had to consult someone. She gave me her phone number. Then I went to Jim’s room and woke him up.”

She paused, looking at Daisy half in sorrow, half in reproach. “You’ll never know how many times Jim has taken a burden off my shoulders, Daisy. I told him the situation. We both agreed that it was impossible for me to be dragged through a police investigation. Too many suspicious things would come out: that I knew Camilla, that I’d given him two thousand dollars. I couldn’t face it. I realized I had to keep Mrs. Rosario quiet. The problem was how to pay her so that even if someone found out about the payments, the real reason for them would remain secret. The only possible way was to concoct a false reason and make it known to someone in a key position, like Adam Burnett.”

“And the false reason,” Pinata said, “was support for Juanita’s child?”

“Yes. It was Mrs. Rosario who inadvertently suggested it by insisting that she wanted no money for herself, only for Juanita. So we decided that was how it would be done. Jim was to claim the child and pay for its support. It seemed, in a way, like a stroke of fate that the lie should fit in so perfectly with the lie I was forced to tell Daisy in the first place. It was all arranged in Adam Burnett’s office the next day, by Adam and Jim and Mrs. Rosario. Adam was never told the truth. He even wanted to fight Juanita’s ‘claim’ in court, but Jim managed to convince him that he must keep quiet. The next step was convincing Daisy. That was easy enough. Jim found out through Mrs. Rosario that Juanita was to go to the Clinic late that afternoon. He picked her up in his car and kept her talking in the parking lot until Daisy came out and saw them together. Then he made his false confession to her.

“Cruel? Yes, it was a cruel thing to do, Daisy. But not as cruel as others, perhaps — and not as cruel as some of the real tricks life plays on us. The next days were terrible ones. Although the coroner’s inquest ruled Camilla’s death was a suicide, the police were still investigating the source of the money found on him and still trying to establish who Camilla was. But time passed and nothing happened. Camilla was buried, still unknown.”

Pinata said, “Did you ever visit his grave, Mrs. Fielding?”

“I passed it several times when we went to leave flowers for Jim’s parents.”

“Did you leave flowers for Camilla, too?”

“No, I couldn’t. Daisy was always with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I... I wanted her along.”

“Was there any display of emotion on these occasions?”

“I cried sometimes.”

“Wasn’t Daisy curious about the reason for your tears?”

“I told her that I had a cousin buried there, of whom I’d been very fond.”

“What was this cousin’s name?”

“I...”

Fielding’s sudden fit of coughing sounded like stifled laughter. When he had finished, he wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve. “Ada has a very sentimental nature. She weeps at the drop of a dead cousin. The only difficulty in this instance is that neither of her parents had any siblings. So where did the cousin come from, Ada?”

She looked at him, her mouth moving in a soundless curse.

Pinata said, “There was no cousin, Mrs. Fielding?”

“I... no.”

“The tears were for Camilla?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He died alone and was buried alone. I felt guilty.”

“Guilt as strong as that,” Pinata said, “makes me wonder whether Mrs. Rosario’s accusation against you might not have some basis in fact.”

“I had nothing whatever to do with Camilla’s death. He killed himself, with his own knife. That was the coroner’s verdict.”

“This afternoon I talked to Mr. Fondero, the mortician in charge of Camilla’s body. It’s his opinion that Camilla’s hands were too severely crippled by arthritis to have used that knife with the necessary force.”

“When I left him,” Mrs. Fielding said steadily, “he was still alive.”

“But when Mrs. Rosario arrived — and let’s assume that her coming was the noise you heard which frightened you away — he was dead. Suppose Fondero’s opinion about Camilla’s incapacity to handle the knife is correct. As far as we know, only two people were with Camilla that night, you and Mrs. Rosario. Do you think Mrs. Rosario killed her brother?”

“It’s more reasonable than to think I did.”

“What would her motive have been?”

“Perhaps a deliberate scheme to get money for the girl. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her, not me?”

“I can’t ask her,” Pinata said. “Mrs. Rosario died tonight of a heart attack.”

“Oh God.” She dropped back into the chair, her hands pressing against her chest. “Death. It’s beginning to surround me. All this death, and nothing to take the curse off it, no new life coming to take its place. This is my punishment, no new life.” She gazed at Fielding with dull eyes. “Revenge is what you wanted, isn’t it, Stan? Well, you have it. You might as well leave now. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

Fielding’s smile wobbled at the corners, but it stayed with him. “You won’t be living so fancy yourself from now on, will you, Ada? Maybe you’ll be glad to find a hole to crawl into. Your passport to the land of gracious living expires when Daisy leaves.”

“Daisy won’t leave.”

“No? Ask her.”

The two women looked at each other in silence. Then Daisy said, with a brief glance at her husband, “I think Jim already knows I won’t be staying. I think he’s known for the past few days. Haven’t you, Jim?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to ask me to stay?”

“No.”

“Well, I am,” Mrs. Fielding said harshly. “You can’t walk out now. I’ve worked so hard to keep this marriage secure...”

Fielding laughed. “People should work on their own marriages, my dear. Take yours, for instance. This man Fielding you married, he wasn’t a bad guy. Oh, he was no world-beater. He could never have afforded a split-level deal like this. But he adored you, he thought you were the most wonderful, virtuous, truthful...”

“Stop it. I won’t listen.”

“Most truthful...”

“Leave her alone, Fielding,” Jim said quietly. “You’ve drawn blood. Be satisfied.”

“Maybe I’ve developed a taste for it and want more.”

“Any more will be Daisy’s. Think about it.”

“Think about Daisy’s blood? All right, I’ll do that.” Fielding put on a mock-serious expression like an actor playing a doctor on a television commercial. “In this blood of hers there are certain genes which will be transmitted to her children and make monsters out of them. Like her father. Right?”

“The word monster doesn’t apply, as you well know.”

“Ada thinks it does. In fact, she’s not quite sane on the subject. But then perhaps guilt makes us all a little crazy eventually.”

Pinata said, “You know a lot about guilt, Fielding.”

“I’m an expert.”

“That makes you a little crazy, too, eh?”

Fielding grinned like an old dog. “You have to be a little crazy to take the risks I took in coming here.”

“Risks? Did you expect Mrs. Fielding or Mr. Harker to attack you?”

“You figure it out.”

“I’m trying.” Pinata crossed the room and stood beside Mrs. Fielding’s chair. “When Camilla telephoned you that night from Mrs. Rosario’s house, you said the call was a complete surprise to you?”

“Yes. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him for many years.”

“Then how did he find out that you were living in San Félice and that you were in a position where you could help him financially? A man in Camilla’s physical state wouldn’t start out across the country in the vague hope of locating a woman he hadn’t seen in years and finding her prosperous enough to assist him. He must have had two facts before he decided to come here — your address and your financial situation. Who told him?”

“I don’t know. Unless...” She stopped, turning her head slowly toward Fielding. “It was — it was you, Stan?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Fielding shrugged and said, “Sure. I told him.”

“Why? To make trouble for me?”

“I figured you could afford a little trouble. Things had gone pretty smooth for you. I didn’t actually plan anything, though. Not at first. It happened accidentally. I hit Albuquerque the end of that November. I decided to look Camilla up, thinking there was an off-chance he had struck it rich and wouldn’t mind passing some of it around. It was a bum guess, believe me. When I found him, he was on the last skid. His wife had died, and he was living, or half living, in a mud shack with a couple of Indians.”

His mouth stretched back from his teeth with no more expression or purpose than a piece of elastic. “Oh yes, it was quite a reunion, Ada. I’m sorry you missed it. It might have taught you a simple lesson, the difference between poorness and destitution. Poorness is having no money. Destitution is a real, a positive thing. It lives with you every minute. It eats at your stomach during the night, it drags at your arms and legs when you move, it bites your hands and ears on cold mornings, it pinches your throat when you swallow, it squeezes the moisture out of you, drop by drop by drop. Camilla sat there on his iron cot, dying in front of my eyes. And you think, while I stood and watched him, that I was worried about making trouble for you? What an egotist you are, Ada. Why, you didn’t even exist as a person anymore, for Camilla or for me. You were a possible source of money, and we both needed it desperately — Camilla to die with, and I to live with. So I said to him, why not put the bite on Ada? She’s got Daisy fixed up with a rich man, I told him; they wouldn’t miss a couple of thousand dollars.”

Mrs. Fielding’s face had stiffened with pain and shock. “And he agreed to... to put the bite on me?”

“You or anyone else. It hardly matters to a dying man. He knew he wasn’t going to make it in this life, and he’d gotten obsessed with the idea of the next one, having a fine funeral and going to heaven. I guess the idea of getting money from you appealed to him, particularly because he had a sister living here in San Félice. He thought he’d kill two birds: get the money and see Mrs. Rosario again. He had an idea that Mrs. Rosario had influence with the Church that would do him some good when he kicked off.”

“Then you were aware,” Pinata said, “when you arrived here, that Camilla was Juanita’s uncle?”

“No, no,” said Fielding. “Camilla had never called his sister anything but her first name, Filomena. It was a complete surprise to me seeing his picture when I took Juanita home this afternoon. But that’s when I began to be sure some dirty work was going on. Too many coincidences add up to a plan. Whose plan I didn’t know. But I did know my former wife, and plans are her specialty.”

“They’ve had to be,” Mrs. Fielding said. “I’ve had to look ahead if no one else would.”

“This time you looked so far ahead you didn’t see the road in front of you. You were worried about your grandchildren; you should have worried about your child.”

“Let’s get back to Camilla,” Pinata said to Fielding. “Obviously you expected a share of whatever money he could pry out of your former wife?”

“Of course. It was my idea.”

“You were pretty sure she’d pay up?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, auld lang syne, and that sort of thing. As I said, Ada has a very sentimental nature.”

“And as I said, two thousand dollars is a heap of auld lang syne.”

Fielding shrugged. “We were all good friends once. Around the ranch they called us the three musketeers.”

“Oh?” It was difficult for Pinata to believe that Mrs. Fielding, with her strong racial prejudices, should ever have been one of a trio that included a Mexican ranch hand. But if Fielding’s statement was untrue, Ada Fielding would certainly deny it, and she made no attempt to do so.

All right, so she’s changed, Pinata thought. Maybe the years she spent with Fielding embittered her to the point where she’s prejudiced against anything that was a part of their life together. I can’t blame her much.

“The idea, then,” he said, “was for Camilla to come to San Félice, get the money, and return to Albuquerque with your share of it?”

Fielding’s hesitation was slight, but noticeable. “Sure.”

“And you trusted him?”

“I had to.”

“Oh, not necessarily. You could, for example, have accompanied him here. That would have been the logical thing to do under the circumstances, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t care.”

It seemed to Pinata a strangely inept answer for a glib man like Fielding. “As it turned out, you didn’t receive your share of the money because he killed himself?”

“I didn’t get my share,” Fielding said, “because there wasn’t anything to share.”

“What do you mean?”

“Camilla didn’t get the money. She didn’t give it to him.”

Mrs. Fielding looked stunned for a moment. “That’s not true. I handed him two thousand dollars.”

“You’re lying, Ada. You promised him that much but you didn’t come across with it.”

“I swear I gave him the money. He put it in an envelope, then he hid the envelope under his shirt.”

“I don’t believe...”

“You’ll have to believe it, Fielding,” Pinata said. “That’s where it was found, in an envelope inside his shirt.”

“It was on him? It was there on him, all the time?”

“Certainly.”

“Why, that dirty bastard...” He began to curse, and each word that damned Camilla damned himself, too, but he couldn’t stop. It was as if he’d been saving up words for years, like money to be spent all at once, on one vast special project, his old friend, old enemy, Camilla. The violent emotion behind the flow of words surprised Pinata. Although he knew now that Fielding was responsible for Camilla’s death, he still didn’t understand why. Money alone couldn’t be the reason: Fielding had never cared enough about money even to pursue it with much energy, let alone kill for it. Perhaps, then, he had acted out of anger at being cheated by Camilla. But this theory was less likely than the other. In the first place, he hadn’t found out until now that he’d been cheated; in the second, he wasn’t a stand-up-and-fight type of man. If he was angry, he would walk away, as he’d walked away from every other difficult situation in his life.

A spasm of coughing had seized Fielding. Pinata poured half a glass of whiskey from the decanter on the coffee table and took it over to him. Ten seconds after Fielding had gulped the drink, his coughing stopped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, in a symbolic gesture of pushing back into it words that should never have escaped.

“No temperance lecture?” he said hoarsely. “Thanks, preacher man.”

“You were with Camilla that night, Fielding?”

“Hell, you don’t think I’d have trusted him to come all this way alone? Chances were he wouldn’t have made it back to Albuquerque even if he wanted to. He was a dying man.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“I can’t remember it all. I was drinking. I bought a bottle of wine because it was a cold night. Curly didn’t touch any of it; he wanted to see his sister, and she didn’t approve of drinking. When he came back from his sister’s house, he told me he’d called Ada and she was going to bring the money right away. I waited behind the signalman’s shack. I couldn’t see anything; it was too dark. But I heard Ada’s car arrive and leave again a few minutes later. I went over to Camilla. He said Ada had changed her mind and there was no money to share after all. I accused him of lying. He took the knife out of his pocket and switched the blade open. He threatened to kill me if I didn’t go away. I tried to get the knife away from him, and suddenly he fell over and — well, he was dead. It happened so fast. Just like that, he was dead.”

Pinata didn’t believe the entire story, but he was pretty sure a jury could be convinced that Fielding had acted in self-defense. A strong possibility existed that the case wouldn’t even reach a courtroom. Beyond Fielding’s own word there was no evidence against him, and he wasn’t likely to talk so freely in front of the police. Besides, the district attorney might be averse to reopening, without strong evidence, a case closed four years previously.

“I heard someone coming,” Fielding went on. “I got scared and started running down the tracks. Next thing I knew I was on a freight car heading south. I kept going. I just kept going. When I got back to Albuquerque, I told the two Indians Camilla had been living with that he had died in L.A., in case they might get the idea of reporting him missing. They believed me. They didn’t give a damn anyway. Camilla was no loss to them, or to the world. He was just a lousy no-good Mexican.” His eyes shifted back to Mrs. Fielding. He was smiling again, like a man enjoying a joke he couldn’t share, because it was too special or too involved. “Isn’t that right, Ada?”

She shook her head listlessly. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on now, Ada. Tell the people. You knew Camilla better than I did. You used to say he had the feelings of a poet. But you’ve learned better than that since, haven’t you? Tell them what a mean, worthless hunk of...”

“Stop it, Stan. Don’t.”

“Then say it.”

“All right. What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “He was a... a worthless man.”

“A lazy, stupid cholo, in spite of all your efforts to educate him. Isn’t that correct?”

“I... yes.”

“Repeat it, then.”

“Camilla was a — a lazy, stupid cholo.”

“Let’s drink to that.” Fielding stepped down off the hearth and started across the room toward the decanter. “How about it, Pinata? You’re a cholo too, aren’t you? Have a drink to another cholo, one who didn’t play it so smart.”

Pinata felt the blood rising up into his neck and face. Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo... The old familiar word was as stinging an insult now as it had been in his childhood... Take a trip to the northern polo... But the anger Pinata felt was instinctive and general, not directed against Fielding. He realized that the man, for all his blustering arrogance, was suffering, perhaps for the first time, a moral pain as intense as the mortal pain Mrs. Rosario had suffered; and the exact cause of the pain Pinata didn’t understand any more than, as a layman, he understood the technical cause of Mrs. Rosario’s. He said, “You’d better lay off the liquor, Fielding.”

“Oh, preacher man, are you going to go into that routine again? Pour me a drink, Daisy baby, like a good girl.”

There were tears in Daisy’s eyes and in her voice when she spoke. “All right.”

“You’ve always been a good Daddy-loving girl, haven’t you, Daisy baby?”

“Yes.”

“Then hurry up about it. I’m thirsty.”

“All right.”

She poured him half a glass of whiskey and turned her head away while he drank it, as if she couldn’t bear to witness his need and his compulsion. She said to Pinata, “What’s going to happen to my father? What will they do to him?”

“My guess is, not a thing.” Pinata sounded more confident than the circumstances warranted.

“First they’ll have to find me, Daisy baby,” Fielding said. “It won’t be easy. I’ve disappeared before. I can do it again. You might even say I’ve developed a real knack for it. This Eagle Scout here” — he pointed a thumb contemptuously at Pinata — “he can blast off to the police till he runs out of steam. It won’t do any good. There’s no case against me, just the one I’m carrying around inside. And that — well, I’m used to it.” He put his hand briefly and gently on Daisy’s hair. “I can take it. Don’t worry about me, Daisy baby. I’ll be here and there and around. Someday I’ll write to you.”

“Don’t go away like this, so quickly, so...”

“Come on now, you’re too big a girl to cry.”

“Don’t. Don’t go,” she said.

But she knew he would and that her search must begin again. She would see his face 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.

She tried to hold on to his arm. He said quickly, “Good-bye, Daisy,” and started across the room.

“Daddy...”

“Don’t call me Daddy anymore. That’s over. That’s gone.”

“Wait a minute, Fielding,” Pinata said. “Off the record, what did Camilla say or do to you that made you furious enough to knife him?”

Fielding didn’t reply. He just turned and looked at his former wife with a terrible hatred. Then he walked out of the house. The slam of the door behind him was as final as the closing of a crypt.

“Why?” Daisy said. “Why?” The melancholy little whisper seemed to echo around the room in search of an answer. “Why did it have to happen, Mother?”

Mrs. Fielding sat, mute and rigid, a snow statue awaiting the first ominous rays of the sun.

“You’ve got to answer me, Mother.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Now.”

“All right.”

With a sigh of reluctance Mrs. Fielding stood up. She was holding in her hand something she’d taken unobtrusively from her pocket. It was an envelope, yellowed by age and wrinkled as if it had been dragged in and out of dozens of pockets and drawers and corners and handbags. “This came for you a long time ago, Daisy. I never thought I’d have to give it to you. It’s a letter from — from your father.”

“Why did you keep it from me?”

“Your father makes that quite clear.”

“Then you’ve read it?”

“Read it?” Mrs. Fielding repeated wearily. “A hundred times, two hundred — I lost count.”

Daisy took the envelope. Her name and the old address on Laurel Street were printed in a shaky and unfamiliar hand. The postmark said, “San Félice, December 1, 1955.”

As Pinata watched her unfold the letter, the malevolent chant from his childhood kept running through his head: Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo. He hoped that his own children would never have to hear it and remember. His children and Daisy’s.

21