Liar

6

“Who’s here?” I asked, still thinking of Travis.

I heard a car driving off just as Esther, hurrying down the stairs, hollered, “Damnation, Ruby! You scared him off. Didn’t even get a chance to look at the plates!”

“Who are you talking about?” I asked, stepping out of the apartment to look up and down the street. Rachel joined me, but neither one of us saw any moving vehicles.

“The one who tried to break into the apartment!” Ruby said. “I noticed him first,” she added, glancing back at Esther with a look of reproach. “Maybe if I hadn’t taken the time to call Esther, we would have been able to surprise him.”

“Did you get a better look at the car?” Rachel asked.

She blushed, then shook her head.

“The color?” I asked.

“Green!” she answered quickly.

“Brown!” Esther countered.

I asked them to wait, then went inside the apartment to get my purse, pulled out a couple of business cards and a pen. I wrote my home phone number on the backs of the cards, then handed them to Briana’s neighbors. “If you see him again, call me-doesn’t matter what time of day.”

“You’re a reporter?” Ruby asked. When I said yes, Esther began to give me some ideas for improving the Express-although she admitted that she had stopped taking it about ten years ago-continuing until Ruby said, “For crying out loud, Esther! She works there, she doesn’t own it. They ever ask you how the wing on a plane ought to be built when you were answering phones at Douglas? If the answer is yes, I’m never going to fly anywhere again!”

Rachel started laughing, which made Esther put her chin up in the air. I did my best to smooth her ruffled feathers, thanked them both, and Rachel and I went back into the apartment.

“Think he’ll be back?” Rachel asked as she shut the door.

“No,” I said. “Not unless he thinks we failed to find whatever he’s looking for.”

She looked around the room thoughtfully, eyeing the ceiling, walls and floor as if looking for a secret compartment.

“You said your aunt Mary arranged for movers to pick up the furniture?” she asked.

“Yes, they’re coming Monday. And she’s hired a cleaning crew to come by on Tuesday. So we’re just taking the personal items-clothing, papers, dishes, pictures-things like that.”

“Yeah, all right,” she said absently.

I wasn’t surprised when she started pulling the built-in drawers all the way out, inspecting the bottoms, looking for hiding places. I started doing the same to the furniture in the bedroom as I packed Briana’s things away.

Even with this check for secret compartments, packing up the meager contents of the apartment took little time. I didn’t search through the items we were taking-the actual contents of the drawers and cabinets-figuring I could do that later. Like Rachel, I wanted to have a look at anything we weren’t taking with us.

Only once was I tempted to linger over the contents of a drawer- when I found one that was filled with photographs, including some black-and-white photos of my mother and grandmother. But I heard Rachel working steadily in the other rooms, and rather than reminisce while she worked, I boxed the photos gently but quickly.

The desk had an assortment of loose papers in it, no more organized than the photographs in the drawer. I took a quick look at the papers, but none seemed to have blackmail potential, nor did they immediately identify Travis’s whereabouts.

None of my searching revealed any secret hiding places, but when I was ready to start loading the car, I couldn’t find Rachel. I went from room to room, and didn’t see her. I glanced out at the car, thinking perhaps she had already started loading it, but she wasn’t there. I walked into the apartment again, this time loudly calling her name. Her voice came back muffled, as if through a wall. I found myself wondering if she was in a secret passageway, perhaps having pressed some button on a built-in bookcase. But her voice had seemed to come from the kitchen, not the bookcases.

In the kitchen, though, I still couldn’t see her. I called out again and when I turned toward her voice, she startled me by briefly popping her face up in the window over the sink. “Out here!” she shouted. I looked out. She was standing beneath the window, in the backyard. As I started to unlatch the sash, she shouted, “Don’t! Don’t move it! Come back here-I want to show you something.”

I went outside, down the porch steps and through a side gate to a small backyard shared by the four tenants. It was basically a patch of grass with a couple of rusted metal lawn chairs on it, but Rachel wasn’t touring the gardens. She was staring at the window.

At first I didn’t see what was holding her attention, but as I drew closer, I saw that she was studying some sort of strange symbol, drawn in pencil on the windowsill, near the bars. It was small, not more than a few inches wide, and looked like a rectangle with the bottom side missing; a small, single straight line rose perpendicular from the top side:

“A gang symbol?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not really in that style, and it’s way too small. But maybe it had some meaning to the burglar.”

“Why do you say that?”

She pointed to tool marks left on the bars of the window. “I think it marked this window as the one to break into. Or maybe it marked your aunt’s apartment. Or maybe it was left here as a kind of warning to your aunt.”

“Awfully small warning in an obscure place. She might not have ever come out here, or seen it if she did. And it could have been drawn a long time ago. Some kid could have drawn it.”

“Not too long ago,” she said, pointing at, but not touching, other areas of the sill. “See? Someone wiped at the dust on the sill before they drew it. It’s less dirty than these other places. And rain or more time would have left it looking like the rest of the sill.”

“Hmm. And now that I think about it, I guess no little kid drew it. Not up this high.”

“No. Older kid, maybe, but you’d expect more than one little mark if some teenager wanted to doodle.” She studied it for another minute and said, “I’ve got a camera in the car. Mind if I take a photo of this?”

I shrugged. “Be my guest.”

After she had photographed the drawing (at one point making me hold a ruler near it), we began loading boxes into the car.

When we had finished, Rachel peered into her trunk. “Been a long time since I could fit all my worldly possessions into the trunk and backseat of a Plymouth.”

“Look, if you’re hinting that I ought to feel ashamed of myself-”

“Hey, relax! I’m sorry about what I said earlier. Nobody’s trying to blame you for anything. All right?”

“Sorry. Guess I’m on edge. Maybe it’s because your friend McCain is trying to blame me.”

She closed the lid of the trunk a little more forcefully than necessary. “Let’s see if we can find this little grocery store,” she said, opening the driver’s side door.

“It’s probably within walking distance.”

“I don’t want to leave the car sitting here-not with all her belongings in it.

No sooner had she said this than a now-familiar car pulled up. McCain. He double-parked, blocking us. Even though Rachel was the one standing between the two cars, I took a couple of steps back on the sidewalk, a brief, wild urge to run passing through me. Run? From what? Maybe it was just that McCain was starting to make me feel hemmed in.

There was a humming sound as he lowered the passenger window.

“You live in this neighborhood, Mac?” Rachel asked.

“Just wondered how you were doing,” he said. “And I brought you a little present.”

“We’re fine,” she said coolly. “We just finished up, in fact. You caught us just as we were leaving.”

“Find anything?”

“Nothing we could walk off with,” she answered. “But you ought to turn on the famous Mac charm with the old ladies in the neighboring apartments. Ask them about break-ins.” She laughed. “Or ask the knuckleheads who took the breaking-and-entering complaint calls before Briana Maguire was killed.”

“Briana Maguire called in a burglary in progress?”

“No, but her neighbors did. You didn’t run a history on this address? Mac, Mac, Mac. You’re slipping.”

“Planning to do it Monday,” he said, turning red.

“Well, we have to get going.”

He extended a manila envelope. “Your present.”

“What is it?” she asked, taking it.

“Copies of her bills. Maybe they’ll help you find the kid.”

“All this time, you been down at the PD, running copies of all this for me?”

He nodded.

She gave him a brilliant smile. “Thanks, Mac. I owe you.”

“No, no, you don’t.”

“Tell you what-wait just a second.” She turned to me. “Come on, get in.” I obeyed. She got in on her side and rolled the window down. “You can have your parking spot back. Talk to those other tenants-it will make you look good.”

If he was disappointed that she was leaving, he hid it well. “Thanks, Rach.”

She pulled out, let him park, then backed up to block him as he had blocked us, only McCain couldn’t even open his door. When he lowered the driver’s side window, she said, “You know what, Jimmy Mac? Those old gals just might make you let up on Irene.”

She put the car in gear, laughing as she pulled away. I picked up the envelope and started looking through it, hearing her hum a catchy oldies tune. She had stopped the car again by the time I realized the song was “Jimmy Mac.”

It hadn’t taken long to find the small tienda, which was about two blocks from Briana’s apartment. We parked on the street, at the corner beneath a shady tree. As I stepped out of the car, I noticed a little white cross was planted in the crook of the tree roots, a small, dusty cluster of artificial roses entwined at its base. I looked away from it and strode resolutely toward the store.

The store owner, Mr. Reyes, smiled and welcomed us in English, but when he learned that we spoke Spanish, he was happier to converse in it. My Spanish is passable, but Rachel speaks it fluently, so I let her do the talking. She explained my relationship to Briana, and at his questioning look, added that Briana was the lady who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Wasn’t the accident at this corner?

His face changed entirely, and once again I received condolences I had not earned. Yes, he told us, this was the corner where the lady was killed. He was obviously upset about it.

His wife, who also worked at the market, was visiting their daughter today-she would feel sorry to have missed us. They were both in the store on the day of the accident. They had not seen the accident itself; they had heard the sounds of the impact and of the car speeding away. When his wife looked outside and saw what had happened-he shook his head sadly. After a moment, he went on, saying that he was the one who had called 911. The ambulance came, but everyone knew it was too late. He glanced at me and quickly said that they were told the lady had not suffered.

Although the police had questioned them, they had not been told of any outcome of the police investigation. They had been worried that the woman was still unidentified.

“Su tia?” he asked me again.

“Si, mi tia,” I answered. “La hermana de mi madre.” Yes, she was my aunt, my mother’s sister.

Again he expressed condolences, and then asked me if I would please say my aunt’s name again. He repeated it softly to himself several times, as if memorizing it, changing it slightly but making it sound no less beautiful with Spanish pronunciation. He patted his pockets and found a pen, wrote Briana Maguire on the back of a receipt, then paused and looked up at me as if to verify the spelling.

“Bueno,” I said.

He talked to us again of his concern over the accident, and was obviously relieved that someone had claimed the body; he was Catholic, and knew my aunt was Catholic-they were concerned that my aunt had not received a Catholic burial.

How did he know she was Catholic? Rachel asked. Did she belong to his parish?

He wasn’t sure if she was of his parish; he attended the Spanish-language Mass at nine o’clock and he didn’t think the lady spoke Spanish. But he knew she was Catholic because she carried the key chain with the St. Christopher medallion on it, and because she had ashes on her forehead when she had shopped on Ash Wednesday.

The lady had been coming to his store only for a few months, but he liked her. She was shy, he said, and he never asked her name. Now he regretted this, too, but at the time he had not wanted to be presumptuous. Once, he said, she told him that she was sorry she had never learned Spanish, and told him that her son spoke it very well. “I think she missed her son,” he said. “She only mentioned him once, but when she did…” He gestured to his face. “She looked sad.”

A man came to the register, and Mr. Reyes introduced us to his customer, and again a round of condolences was offered. Did we need any help? Was there something they could do? Did I know, the customer asked me, that the store owner’s wife had made an altarcito-a marker, a little shrine with a small cross-and put some flowers out on the corner where the accident happened? That she had even arranged for a Mass to be said for my aunt? That she had asked everyone if they knew anything about the lady?

After expressing my gratitude, I listened as Mr. Reyes and the customer told us more about Mrs. Reyes’s activities following my aunt’s death. Soon I saw that I was indebted to this woman I had not yet met-and saw how it was that the LAPD eventually discovered where Briana lived.

Mrs. Reyes had described the lady who had been killed to anyone who would listen, and some of her customers, who lived in this neighborhood, remembered seeing the lady with the cane. One customer had often seen her walk from this street to that, another had once seen her walking back from the store in a certain direction. Mrs. Reyes passed her information along to the police, who thanked her, but had not told her the results of her efforts.

Rachel asked a few more questions, confirming that none of them had ever seen Briana come to the store with anyone else; no one they knew had seen the car that struck her, although they were told there were witnesses who had talked to the police. No, Mr. Reyes told us, she was not carrying a handbag-she always arrived with nothing more than a small coin purse, which she kept in the pocket of her sweater or coat. It was perhaps, he ventured, a little cool for her, living near the water, because she always wore a sweater or coat. On that day, a warm spring day, he recalled, she had worn her blue sweater.

We thanked him and the customer for their time, and I asked him to please convey to his wife that my family deeply appreciated her help, that it was very kind of her to remember my aunt with the shrine and the Mass. If ever I could do anything for them-

“De nada,” Mr. Reyes protested. “It’s nothing.”

We stopped off at Aunt Mary’s house on our way back home. As might be expected, Rachel and Aunt Mary hit it off instantly. While I worked at hanging Briana’s clothes in the closet of one of Mary’s guest rooms, Rachel told Mary about our day’s discoveries.

“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Mary said to me.

“Not as well as Rachel, but I studied it even before the Express started requiring all of its reporters to learn Spanish.”

“Hmm. Paper should have done that years ago. You said you went back to the apartment after you talked to Mr. Reyes. Did the neighbors recognize Travis from any of Briana’s photos?”

I still wondered if James McCain had more to do with Rachel’s decision to make the return trip than Travis did, but McCain had left by the time we got there. To Mary, I said, “Not really. They said Travis might have been the younger of the two men who helped her move in, but they weren’t certain-Briana and that young man hadn’t behaved toward one another as a mother and son would, they said-hardly spoke to one another, and the young man had not been back since.”

“Who was the other man?”

“A priest. When he came to visit other times, he was wearing a collar, they said.”

“What priest?”

“We asked that, too. They didn’t know.”

Mary looked troubled, then straightened her shoulders and began to ask Rachel a lot of questions about her work as a cop in Phoenix and as a private eye here in Las Piernas. When I hinted that grilling the volunteer help might show a lack of manners, she told me to mind my own damned business.

I was hanging up Briana’s moth-eaten wool coat, half-listening to them, when I impulsively reached into one of the pockets, thinking the trait of forgetting to empty one’s coat pockets might run in the family. My fingertips met a stiff piece of paper, and my imagination ran ahead of me-this would be a three-by-five card with Travis’s address on it. Instead, to my dismay, I withdrew a holy card.

I might have sworn, but Saint Somebody-or-another was looking right at me, and there are limits to my sacrilegiousness. It was a familiar image, a monk in long brown Franciscan robes, holding a stalk of lilies and the child Jesus. I turned the card over to see who it was and received a shock that made me reach clumsily for the edge of the bed, where I sat down hard next to Rachel.

“What’s gotten into you?” Mary said sharply.

“Arthur-”

“What?”

“Arthur Spanning. He’s dead. This is a holy card from his funeral Mass.”