Silver and gold to his heart’s content
If he’d only return the way he went.
A S NINA FELL INTO RESTLESS DREAMS at Paul’s place on Tuesday night, Elizabeth started and stopped the tape recorder with the foot pedal in her house on Robles Ridge, her fingers moving rapidly over the keys as she turned the party tape into written data.
She paused and moved to the word-processing file containing the draft of her article, and the title page came up:
Locals v. Newbies:
INTERACTIONS, AFFILIATIONS, AND CONFLICTS IN A
SIX-HOUSEHOLD ESTABLISHED NEIGHBORHOOD
UNDERGOING GENTRIFICATION
The title was too long and the word gentrification wasn’t technical-sounding. Still, it would do for the draft.
She sat at her desk, wearing her robe, curtains closed tightly against the rain, her notebook bulging with her transcripts and observations of the Siesta Court Bunch over the past two years, her tape of the over-the-top party on Saturday night at the side.
For the next hour, she rapidly processed the tape into word-processing files. Then she began organizing the local v. newbie interactions.
Locals: old-timers. They had grown up in the community and adapted very slowly to new conditions. They experienced jealousy and outrage as the more affluent newbies moved in and initiated rapid, sometimes devastating, change.
Newbies: newcomers. They moved in from San Francisco, L.A., or Silicon Valley. As soon as possible, they built their dream homes or developed their property to the max, and now did not approve of any further change in the neighborhood. They had what they wanted, and shifted over into conservationist mode.
She referred back to her Basic Population Description: eleven adults, eight children. Six households. Of the adult population, not counting Danny Cervantes, who had once been on the list:
Seven Locals:
Darryl and Tory Eubanks; four children
Sam and Debbie Puglia; no children at home
George and Jolene Hill; two grandchildren
Ben Cervantes
Four Newbies:
David and Britta Cowan; two children
Ted and Megan Ballard
She looked the names over, classifying them more closely in her mind: the Eubankses, young traditionalists, low in ambition, family-centered. They wanted to live as their parents had and deeply disliked change. They were perfect examples of young parents making do on working-class salaries. Tory would probably never work outside the home. Darryl would never make any more money than he did now. And they would never move, barring some catastrophe. They got along, went to church, adopted conventional opinions.
A stray thought went through Elizabeth’s mind: But Darryl doesn’t love his wife anymore. She would have to leave this out of the thesis: It didn’t fit at all. It was an aberration caused in part by her own presence, which she had intended to be invisible.
Yes, leave that out.
The Puglias. Also conservative, also low in ambition, also family-centered. Debbie was pivotal in the group because her gregariousness and lack of other outlets were the glue that had brought the neighbors into such close proximity. She wouldn’t allow them to isolate from one another. She had close ongoing relations with each household, greased by her social skills. Sam was an adjunct to his wife, less involved because he had the outlet of his work.
The Hills, examples of the older generation who had started disadvantaged and stayed that way, hooked into history because their Okie parents had come here as part of an important American geographical shift in the thirties. Also conventional and conservative. Financial problems had caused them to attempt change-to subdivide their property-but they hadn’t been sophisticated enough to get around the maze of land regulations.
And Ben Cervantes, saving for his house and his bride, which his parents, who had returned to Mexico, no doubt would pick out for him. A conservative from a minority group, grateful to have any job at all. His nephew, Danny, had fallen into the underclass due to his lack of education.
Ben had such fine eyes. He spoke well. Elizabeth wondered if he already had a fiancée.
Again she had to suppress a thought that didn’t fit into the descriptive paradigm: Ben was ambitious. He might move out and away from his origins.
Elizabeth had observed a subset among the locals: One group wanted no change, period, but the other group looked at the change going on all around them and said, get me some of that. Ben, who worked for anyone that would hire him, and George Hill, with his attempt to subdivide his property, adopting a newbie stratagem, belonged in this interesting subset.
The newbie population on Siesta Court was small but powerful. It hadn’t felt so small because she herself had been a part of the ongoing interactions over the years, but of course she could not insert herself into the thesis.
So: Take the Cowans and the Ballards.
David Cowan, inherited wealth, graduate education, rootless, moved every couple of years, unconventional outlooks. He had no interest in conservation per se but wanted to preserve the status quo now that he had built his palace on Siesta Court. His money made it happen, without consideration for the environmental impact or the impact on the neighborhood.
Britta Cowan, another flouter of the mores, only her area of impact was societal. Her dysfunctional relationship with her husband, her seductive attitudes, her negative attitudes toward her occupation, and her wild acting out made her a kind of relief valve.
The Ballards had to be considered en bloc. Ted and Megan shared the Cowans’ rootlessness and lack of interest in conventional societal mores. They also welcomed change and had disrupted the local environment with their building projects, but wanted no more change to the environment now that they had their own homes. However, Ted and Megan were different from the Cowans in that…
… in that they smile and flex all the time, Elizabeth thought to herself, tired. Quarter past eleven, and she had nowhere to go and nobody and nothing to do but think about these stupid people… She opened the curtains. Down the hill she could see through the mist a thin thread of river. Down there on Siesta Court, the Bunch carried on their pathetic… yes, she was losing it. She ought to knock off for the night.
She took off her headphones and turned the tape on again, loud, letting the noise of the party fill the room. The material wasn’t very useful. The newbies and locals alike had been so disturbed by Britta’s outrageous behavior that…
Elizabeth remembered how Ben had lightly, but with emphasis, pushed that slut Britta away from him. She liked that.
She heard loud talking on the tape. Right here, Britta had gone up to the group of men and now Elizabeth heard her say again:
“What’re you guys talking about, hmm?”
And that was Sam’s voice, boisterous from whiskey, answering:
“Danny. We’re toasting Danny.”
Then she heard some confused, alcohol-fueled laughter from the group of men, and one of them said:
“Good riddance.”
She hadn’t heard that line before. How could he speak so coldly about Danny? Who was that? She pressed rewind and went back and heard again: “Good riddance.”
Then she heard faintly, in the background, “Yeah.” It sounded like a chorus. Perplexed, she shrugged and turned the tape off.
Her mood changed. She sat for a moment staring at the screensaver. Then she opened the file that had her journal in it. She wondered if there would ever be hope for her, and wrote:
Our children are our happiness
But they are gone tomorrow
Like meteors they fly
Brilliant in our sky
She was losing it. The rain no longer pleased her. At the stove, she lit a long brown Sherman’s cigarette on the burner, the heat of the gas fire hot on her lips. Crazy, she could set her hair on fire. Midnight. She should go to the gym in the morning. She could call Debbie in the morning to see if she wanted to have lunch.
Debbie never had any doubts about anything. She was immersed, local to the bone. Once Elizabeth had been a local. Now she was just-outside. Outside all of it. Outside life.
Turning to leave the kitchen, Elizabeth saw the snapshot on the refrigerator freshly, as if it hadn’t been there for a year. One moment May had been with her, a small warm companion who would share her time on the planet, then she had… been removed from the study. Yes. The mother-daughter study had been terminated for unknown reasons. And Jake. No time to work out their problems, just a disappearance, abrupt, irrevocable.
Viciously, she yanked open the door of the cabinet above the refrigerator, searching for the Courvoisier.
M IDNIGHT ON THIS SAME MAGNIFICENT TUESDAY night on Chews Ridge, ambient light low, skies crystalline. David Cowan saw the Trifid Nebula materialize on his screen as the thirty-six-inch reflector followed its computerized instructions. The light in the control room had been set as dimly as possible to see the detail. “Ray, you have to see this,” he said.
Ray, at the next table full of computer equipment, grunted and came over. A small astrophysicist with a beard, he worked at MIRA full-time.
“Beautiful,” he said.
“More than beautiful.” Rose, it was, shading from pale to brilliant pink and deepening to red on its three petals, shedding light below it, a rose. One new star seemed to shine from its center, though David knew that was a trick of the galaxy, the star was actually much closer.
He was peering forty-five hundred light years into space, and the grandness of it, the spectacularness of it, the knowledge of the vast energies roiling and twisting all around this pitiful planet where he existed, were so good for forgetting. He typed in the commands that would photograph the nebula but continued to stare at it.
“Sometimes, looking into it, always bright, always superb, I feel like I’m falling forward, leaving forever. There’s vertigo, movement as I leave my body,” he told Ray.
Ray didn’t answer. Beauty wasn’t visual to him, it was mathematical. His screen, showing window piled upon window of moving graphs, gave him the same kind of pleasure.
“Rain’s coming in from the coast,” David said. “I’d say an hour or so.”
“You ought to get back to work,” Ray said. “We have to get this mapping done by next Thursday or we lose the grant.”
“So what?” David said.
“We can’t keep volunteers who don’t care.”
“I’m thinking about building my own observatory.” But even Ray knew he wouldn’t. That would take an independent, motivated person, unlike David, who didn’t like doing things on his own.
David also knew that Ray didn’t like telling him what to do, because David had given MIRA over a hundred thousand dollars. All David asked for was access to the scopes.
For two years now he had watched the stars, bolstered by his connection to the universe, pretending to participate in the work. David didn’t care about the work. He just liked watching through the scope, falling into that endless blackness. They wouldn’t kick him out. He knew it and so did Ray.
David’s money had bought him salvation here, as it had brought him Britta at home.
The affairs she heaped on him didn’t matter. He understood and accepted her as you should accept a force of nature. Audacious, untamable, reckless, she burst into his life, a hot star-forming nursery at the center of his desolate universe. She threw her colorful clothes on the floor, onto the living-room chairs; she smelled of B.O. and perfume. She kept the air ionized with her angry chatter. She was very angry that he had made her move to Carmel Valley, land of hicks, but she did what he told her. He had the money, it was that simple.
He viewed her behavior with dispassion, because he viewed all natural things that way. That didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings. It didn’t mean he didn’t have passion for her and didn’t get jealous. He just recognized his emotions for what they were, impulses of the organism, and rejected them because he chose to tap into detachment.
After Sam had come Danny; perhaps Sam would come again-so what?
What mattered, the one thing he demanded of her, was that Britta had to sleep with him every night. Sleep, lay her head next to his and breathe next to him and dream. She had to allow him to grasp her hot body in the night, allow him to hold her by her solid hips, let him press his face against her backbone. Because without her, all that would be left would be the void.
His eye caressed the nebula. Pink, pulsing, living light came to him. Closing his eyes, he opened his mouth slightly and relaxed his face, as if the computer screen could allow him to bask in the heat he saw.
“Phone,” Ray said, yanking him back. He handed it to David.
“Britta?”
But it wasn’t Britta on the phone.
Ted came in from putting away the bicycles in the garage as Megan finished spritzing the salad with balsamic vinegar. They both still wore the black spandex shorts and tight shirts from the long bicycle tour they had taken that day-fifty miles along the foggy coast, dodging cars, pouring it on on the uphills, letting it all go on the downhills. They had had a long leg-stiffening trip home and she couldn’t believe the clock-after midnight! Oh, well, tomorrow was Wednesday. They could sleep and sleep. Neither of them was a rat-racer anymore.
“Pont Neuf,” she said, pointing to the glass of wine awaiting him. “For our fashionably late supper.”
“Good choice.” He took off his shoes and socks. Even his veins were carved; his legs looked like they had wires wound around them. Massaging his calf with one hand, Ted went on, “We were so fast at the Point Sur curve I thought we’d fly off the road.”
“Incredibly cool,” Megan agreed. She set cold shrimp on ice and shrimp sauce in front of him and sat down at the table, lit by candlelight. They both dug in and in five minutes the meal was over. Following the habit they had built up over their six years together, they went out in back to the hot tub, stripped, and stretched out in the hot water for a few minutes.
Then they went back inside. Megan lay down on the massage table in the bedroom. Ted dribbled warm oil on her, all down her back and the glutes and the thighs, and began stroking her with his long strokes, his strong arms smoothing her muscles. She relaxed fully, knowing he appreciated the tight muscles along the back of her thighs, where his hands moved now. He moved down to her ankles and feet, rubbing her big toes with his fingers, while she gave out low appreciative noises, started getting drowsy.
“Now you,” she said.
“Such a good day.” He lay down on his stomach on a fresh towel and she leaned over him, slick with oil, and rubbed him into as close as Ted could ever get to relaxation.
“Ted?”
“Mmm-hmm?” he said sleepily.
“Did you set those fires?”
His eyes didn’t open.
“I wouldn’t tell,” Megan said. “Remember a long time ago when we were talking in bed and you told me about-”
“I was a kid. It was hormones. Nobody died.”
“But you said you got off on the fires.”
“So?”
“I’ve been wondering. How come you’re not interested in me lately.” His back went stiff again.
He said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I was enjoying myself. You think I would be part of anything that caused someone to die?”
“Ted, that’s such an interesting way not to answer me. You know, I saw you looking at Danny one time, and I thought maybe… I thought maybe you might be bi. It’s perfectly fine to be bi, you know? I’m an accepting person.”
“So I’m bi and set fires and I killed Danny?” Ted’s muscles had hardened even more under her hand. He sat up and put his hand around her slippery neck. “What is this crap?”
She was suffocating. His hand was a vise.
“S-sorry,” she said.
“Get this, Megan. I am not bi.”
“Okay. I was wrong.” He took his hand away.
“What crap,” he said. “Ruining such a nice day. Hey. Listen. It’s my cell phone in the kitchen.”
He ran for it. When he came back into the bedroom, he got dressed again.
“I have to go out, one of the neighbors thinks she saw a prowler.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that to you.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Megan said from the bed, but he was already gone.
On the corner of Siesta Court nearest Rosie’s Bridge, George and Jolene had been in bed for hours, but George couldn’t get to sleep. His feet didn’t hurt.
That was the problem. His feet didn’t hurt because he couldn’t feel them anymore.
He had knocked his left foot against the bathtub that morning and in spite of Jolene taking him to the doctor, it was going to ulcerate, he knew it. He opened one eye and looked at the clock on the bedstand. Midnight.
Not everybody gets to know what their death will be before it happens. His death was going to blind him and kill him off piece by piece. His dad had died of diabetes at forty-eight. They could keep you alive pretty near to a normal life span now. How old am I, sixty-three or sixty-four, he thought, and didn’t want to remember.
The main thing was how to leave Jolene enough money to raise the little girls properly, like ladies. Jolene never had asked for anything else but she wanted this, did she ever. They had some money in a bank account George had never told Jolene about, but it wasn’t enough. It wouldn’t keep them for a year. It wasn’t nothing the way prices of gas and clothes and food kept going up and up. Might as well just throw that money out the window.
Throw it out the window and let it catch on fire in the night and burn something that needed burning.
Out back, all that useless land covered with live oak, and he couldn’t even sell it because these damn yuppies came in and got theirs and then fought to keep him from getting his. It stung like fury. Here they were developing across the river, wanting to rip down the trees, stealing his views along with his peace of mind.
Had the fire stopped them? Maybe it was too early to tell. He had walked up there, in the meadowy area between the river and the handicapped place, before supper. They didn’t seem to be rebuilding the model home that burnt, not yet, and the land sure looked ugly where it burned.
And after that walk, he couldn’t feel his goddamn feet. He’d have to see the doc again in the morning.
Jolene might go twenty years with the four hundred thousand, which the realtor said he could have gotten on the Back Acre, had he been able to do what he wanted with his own damn property.
Too late now, he’d never get that ordinance changed. He’d done everything he could for the family, right up to things he couldn’t ever tell Jolene about. All he could do now was try to live a little while longer.
He heard the phone ring at the bedstand. Jolene beat him to it. “Oh, hi, Sam,” she said. “Everything all right?”
She handed it to him and he listened. Then he reached down for his slippers. “What is it?” she said.
“Sam thought he saw a prowler. I’m gonna meet him outside.”
She sat straight up in bed, her nightie slipping down her shoulder, pretty as a postcard. “I’ll go too.”
“You stay put. I mean it. It’s probably nothing. I’ll be right back.”
Tory was vomiting in the bathroom again. Darryl heard her wash her mouth out. She crawled back into bed, pulling the covers off him.
One thing after another.
“You’ll forget all about this in a couple of months,” he said. “Remember, you had all that trouble the first trimester with Mikey.”
Tory just rolled over to her side of the bed and gave him her back. She was mad at him for trying to talk to Elizabeth at the party, and he could make no explanation. He didn’t know what had possessed him. He’d only had a couple of Coronas.
Lately, he’d done several things he’d never dreamed he’d do. He’d been lucky, and here he was now, ready to push his luck again.
Tory had no idea that he’d gone to see Elizabeth. Fine, let her sleep, he just wanted to go to sleep too. Darryl rolled over in the opposite direction.
A song was running through his head, a song George sang, a cowboy ballad, and Darryl kept thinking about some of the words:
I’ve got a good life, and a good wife,
Too much to throw away…
They had an appointment with Pastor Sobczek next Thursday, and Darryl was afraid all his fantasizing was going to have to end at that point, because God would be involved, and God would come down, when it came to Tory and his soon-to-be-five kids and his commitment to love and honor forever, on the side of his marriage. That his love for Tory had turned to a mild, fond kind of feeling didn’t matter to God. That he wanted Elizabeth so bad he was breathing harder just thinking about it now didn’t matter.
God’s God. He doesn’t indulge these crazy emotions.
Elizabeth was beautiful and tragic. Debbie had whispered the whole story to Tory and Tory had told him, all about the car crash and the husband and daughter who died.
He couldn’t believe he’d actually gone to Elizabeth’s house. He’d talked with her, had the chance to drink her in. That’s what he had done, drunk her into his soul and made her part of him.
But he hadn’t expressed himself right. Words didn’t come easy to him. She’d thrown him out.
I could make her smile, he thought. I’d go to France with her if she wanted. She’d probably do something like that, go live in Paris. She had money and freedom. Wouldn’t life be fabulous with Elizabeth in Paris, free and rich?
A man had a right to do one thing before God intervened. He had a right to make his feelings fully known to the woman he loved, privately and without humiliating his wife. If he didn’t have that, well, he’d explode. And he’d hate his wife, because he’d blame her for not letting him at least say it once to the woman.
All my life I’ve done the things that were expected of me
And if I wasn’t happy, at least I wasn’t hurtin’ anybody
But I want her, I need her, she stole my soul away
And whatever choice I make, I’ll be sorry…
He slaved for Tory and the kids. Tory must know that. Sometimes he hated what he had to do, meeting the demands of his family and neighbors, working too hard and too much, day in and day out, the parties, the yard work, the troubles, but he did what he had to do, didn’t he? He took care of business just like he was supposed to, so if he wanted more out of life… well, didn’t he deserve it?
Bringing the blankets up to his nose, Darryl put his hands together under the covers. Silently, he said, Lord, am I allowed to speak to her one more time? Am I allowed this one thing? Should I?
The Lord may have answered him. But Darryl didn’t really want to hear what He said. Besides, the phone was ringing in the living room. Tory had finally gotten to sleep.
Confused, guilty, and scared all at once, Darryl rolled out of bed to find out who needed him now.
Out behind the Cowan house on this late night, Debbie thought she could see two silhouettes making their way behind the garage.
Sam wouldn’t! What if David came home! Of course not! She looked harder out the kitchen window, across Ben’s grassy yard, but now saw only shadows. Sam was at the office working late just like he had said. Sam would never do it to her again. He really did love her.
He tried so hard to take care of them, always making plans that came to nothing, through no fault of his own. He didn’t have the magic touch with money, which was too bad, but he was a good man. She knew he was hurting, with this awful development going up across the way and his job always at risk.
He was a person who needed to exercise power, and he had few enough opportunities. All the railing and noise he made about Green River, going to meetings, trying to get the neighbors up in arms, and he was like a parking ticket in a shredder. They shredded him and barely knew they had done it. No wonder he got so wild now and then… he had to prove to himself he was a man. She never doubted it, and she was sorry he did, that was for sure.
She would ask him again tomorrow if they could adopt a child from China. He didn’t like babies so much, so maybe a little one a couple of years old. House-trained, he would call it.
Now that the kids were grown the house was so empty. The dogs-they were just dogs, they weren’t like a human child who learns to talk to you and laughs and learns to be like you and who you can do something for…
The house was so quiet she would have enjoyed hearing mice in the walls. Debbie unloaded the dishwasher, then got her fuzzy old robe on, and flipped on the TV to see if Letterman had a funny monologue going, or something. The digital display told her it was past midnight.
When the ads came on, Debbie started worrying the way she did. This time she was worrying about the disabled people about to be evicted at Robles Vista. She could almost hear the noise of the bulldozer engines idling behind the trees, ready to tear up the ground and ruin their lives. We’re at war, she thought, but she couldn’t quite figure out who the enemy was. She only knew what everybody knew-that the fires in the Village were battles in the war.
At least she could bring those people in their wheelchairs some human comfort. She would buy doughnuts in the morning. She’d give a sackful to the cook at Robles Vista so that people could have them for brunch in the common room there.
Finally hearing Sam’s key in the door, she felt greatly relieved. Fires and Ruthie and Danny… all so sad… and frightening… so hard to understand. I love him, she thought with gratitude, getting up, and he loves me. We are so lucky and blessed…
“I WAS CONCERNED THAT THERE MIGHT be some danger leaving the tent unattended,” Paul said. Crockett had told him to meet him at the D.A.’s office at the Salinas courthouse this morning. Apparently his office was a movable feast. He hadn’t been available the morning before and Paul had spent the day looking into other matters.
“Explosives, guns, something kids might find. I wasn’t sure Coyote would come back, once Child Welfare and the D.A. got together and went after him. The remote location, his use of a rifle-these were factors in my decision.”
Crockett’s metal desk shook. About six feet from them, electricians were installing a ceiling fan in the hot office. The phone on the desk rang but Crockett didn’t answer.
He had a honker like a ship’s prow that you only noticed when he turned his head, thin lips, and a brow ridge that hung like a balcony over the etched face. The brown eyes never wavered. The bony casing of his head must house a lively brain.
Ticklish situation, Paul thought again. Crockett needed enough information to get an immediate search warrant, information Paul could provide. But Paul had made an unauthorized entry into the tent. Some unsympathetic joker might call it a burglary. For that reason, they had already discussed what he would say on the tape.
“So you went in. To secure the tent until the police could arrive,” Crockett said for the benefit of the tape. He continued to treat Paul with the wary respect of a former ally, but Paul still had to be careful. Deputy D.A.s, defense lawyers, and at least one judge might decide to review the record of this interrogation.
“Correct.” The recorder clicked, reminding Paul to stay succinct. He had already decided not to mention scraping something off Coyote’s van on an earlier visit. It had turned out to be nothing but mud, anyway.
“And what did you observe?”
“Two rooms. The outer room contained a cot with bedding and a camp-stove setup. Kitchen gear on a folding table. I observed a.22 rifle and a large buck knife in a leather sheath on the table.”
“Did you pick up the rifle?”
“I checked it, yes. Held it with my shirtsleeve. It contained three shells. I ejected them and put them in a baggie and put them in my pocket.”
“You carry baggies?”
“They make good pooper-scoopers.”
“Out in the woods you need that?”
“My friend, Ms. Reilly-it’s her dog. She’s one of those Sierra Club types. Find half-digested blueberries from a bear sitting in a pile on the road and she might even be moved to take a photo of it. Her own dog who never ate anything but dry kibble does it in the road, it’s gotta be picked up.”
“Sierra Club,” Crockett said, shaking his head. “So. This baggie. What condition was it in?”
“Unused,” Paul said. “I might add that the baggie has not been out of my possession since that time, nor have I touched the shells since that time.”
“And you’ve just handed over the three shells.” The baggie with the shells sat on the desk next to Crockett’s coffee cup.
“Yes.”
“What else did you see in that first room?”
“Three gallon cans of kerosene lined up against the far wall. I lifted each of them, again using my shirtsleeve. They were almost empty.”
“Any uses for kerosene you could see there?”
“He did have kerosene lamps, but three gallons constituted overkill for that purpose, in my opinion.”
“Okay. What else?”
“I pushed aside a blanket that separated the two rooms. Looked like the kid lived in front, usually, and Coyote-Robert Johnson-had the back room. Bigger cot, tools and hats and clothes lying around, big trunk at the foot of it.”
“And you felt a compelling need to check the trunk. For explosives or whatever.”
“I felt there was a definite possibility I might find more weapons or hazardous materials.”
“And that was your sole reason in opening the trunk?”
“Yes. I found a suede leather jacket on top. Underneath that I found a brown paper bag containing a quart bottle of whiskey and another smaller paper bag, which I opened. It contained conchos.”
“Conchos?”
“Small silver medallions used in Southwestern jewelry, especially attached to leather belts.”
“Describe them.”
“Tarnished silver, two of them, holes in the center for attaching them to something, chased with fancy filigree designs, about an inch and a half across, round but with an indented pattern around the outside edge.”
“You saw these conchos before?”
“Yes. I recalled that the body found after the most recent arson fire in Carmel Valley wore a belt decorated with conchos. I decided to report this to you as soon as possible as I felt there might be a relationship.”
“Like what? Like he took them off the body?”
“You tell me.”
“What did you do then?”
“I left the tent. There were reinforced holes on the main door flap and holes on the side. A bicycle cable looped through the flap holes and a combination lock was lying on the floor just inside the tent. I attached the cable and lock and pushed the lock shut and spun the dial. I tested the flap. It seemed reasonably secure and there were no openings where a human could get in without cutting through the lock or the tent.”
“And then what did you do?”
“We brought Nate to the sheriff’s field office in Carmel Valley. I took Nina home. Our dog needed veterinary attention. I drove back out to the animal hospital in the Valley.”
Crockett’s eyes closed and a small silence settled around the men. Having said what he needed to say, Paul waited.
“You left those conchos in the tent? You took nothing from the tent but the rifle shells?”
“Correct.”
Crockett repeated the date and time of the interview and turned off the tape. “You are one lucky son of a gun. Because if those conchos match the burned conchos on the belt of the victim, the Cervantes kid-”
Paul smiled.
“If you’d messed with that evidence-”
“Never touched ’em. Used the baggies.”
“They’re gonna match,” Crockett said. “So it was Cervantes and this Coyote fella, this Robert Johnson.”
“I’m with you on the Coyote part,” Paul agreed.
“Come on. Who else is this loner Coyote gonna know on that short street? What’s the name of it?” He shuffled through the reports in front of him. “Siesta Court? We know he was close to Danny Cervantes. We know Cervantes went up the mountain that night with Willis Whitefeather.”
“Yeah, I don’t quite understand the sequence, but I told you before and I’m telling you again, Whitefeather was an innocent bystander.”
Crockett said, “I already told you I’m not gonna talk about those charges with the D.A.’s office. Have your girlfriend talk to Jaime Sandoval about it. I can’t support letting Whitefeather out at all, where we are now.”
“I understand. So go through the tent yourself, pick up Coyote, and see what he says.”
“Come back in a couple of hours after we have your statement typed up. You sure you told me everything the kid brother told you? About kids getting taken?”
“Yes. But don’t forget the other thing,” Paul said, “the other thing that really surprised me, during this phone call that Nate overheard. Coyote was talking to somebody about getting paid for this hit. Now. He couldn’t have been talking to Danny Cervantes, because Danny Cervantes is dead. He couldn’t have been talking to Wish Whitefeather, because I know and you know you monitor those jail calls, and so does Wish. So what that says to me is, there’s another party paying for the party.”
Crockett got up and offered Paul his hand. “Who the hell knows?” he said. “It’s the ramblings of a sick kid, maybe, about something that has nothing to do with the arson fires. Maybe the conchos don’t match.”
“The kerosene cans ought to help. Maybe you’ll find some bank records or something.”
“What with one thing and another, I think we have plenty for the search warrant. Then we’ll see. Maybe lots of charges to file.”
“Davy?”
“What?”
“Are you related to the famous Davy Crockett?”
Crockett said, “Do you have any idea how often I hear that?”
“I’d really like to know.”
“Why?”
“I’m interested in heroes.”
Mollified, Crockett answered, “He was my great-great-great-grandfather. I’m a direct descendant; in fact, my family lived in Tennessee until after World War Two.”
“How about that,” Paul said. “He was an Indian fighter, wasn’t he?”
“He kicked Cherokee ass,” Crockett said. “The Cherokee killed his grandparents. Now, I have to get back to work.”
Paul went out back to the parking lot, musing about Davy Crockett’s ancestry and what cosmic impact it might have on Wish’s case. He would talk it over with Sandy.
The interview had gone well. He had a personal strong conviction that Coyote was the outside arsonist. It just couldn’t go any other way. He liked feeling sure about this one thing at last. They were making progress.
Mexican food, definitely. He got into the hot Mustang and entered the Main Street Salinas traffic, thinking about how many times he and Wish had driven around looking for lunch on one of Nina’s Tahoe cases. Wish got such a charge out of their gigs that Paul would find himself appreciating his life all over again.
Wish’s Ray-Bans… he had found some old Ray-Bans somewhere and he had a way of carefully drawing them on and nodding and saying, “Let’s cruise,” that Paul liked a lot. The kid was so uncool he was cool.
Paul found a taquería on a side street and went in. A swamp cooler blew noisily in the corner and the place was almost empty. While he waited for his chile colorado he looked through the classifieds in the Salinas Californian for a pre-amp for his stereo system. Nada.
What happens next, he thought to himself as he ate his lunch. He wondered again about that phone call Nate talked about. Somebody new comes out of the shadows, he thought, the Moneyman. He tried to put it together, Coyote and Danny and Wish on the mountain, three fires, the Cat Lady murdered right after the Siesta Court party with all the talk about her.
The Cat Lady. Paul looked at his diver’s watch, good to three hundred meters or fathoms, whatever, he never dove more than six feet down in the pool.
Unnecessary refinements, he thought, and mentally saluted her. The waiter brought his bill and he put the credit card on top without bothering to look.
Coyote dropped somebody off on Siesta Court after the second fire. Danny knew him and went up the mountain just in time for the third fire. So-was it Danny after all who was the inside arsonist?
If so, Coyote must have killed his partner, Danny, for unknown reasons on the mountain, a falling out between thieves. Wish just happened to be there, so Coyote had to go after him too-but why would Danny get Wish involved?
Didn’t make sense. Did not make sense.
He muttered a succinct word to himself and decided to go see how Nina was doing.
The condo fan ran quietly. Nina sat under it at the new iBook, brown hair pulled up in a ponytail, wearing cutoffs and a tank top. She looked about sixteen. She turned those square little shoulders and that kestrel profile he loved so much a little to the side, cocking her head.
“All squared away?” she said as he walked up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“We did our duty,” Paul said. “I made another pitch that it couldn’t be Wish, but Crockett couldn’t seem to put two squared and three point one four together. He said you’re welcome to talk to Jaime.”
“You gave him enough for the warrant?” The screen she watched showed endless columns of figures.
“He’s going to have that tent vacuumed out by five is my guess.”
“Good. You didn’t mention the checkbook you looked at?”
“That wasn’t my duty. I didn’t take it and there won’t be any prints on it. Crockett will find it and do the same thing we’re doing.”
“Except he won’t have to hack into the bank records,” Nina said, scrolling down rapidly. “Where did you get this software anyway? It’s scary.”
“A Big Brother company on the Net.”
“It went right into the bank’s computers. This is legal?”
Paul didn’t answer.
“Then I hope it’s as good as it seems and nobody ever finds out we’ve been creeping around in one of the accounts. Ugh. I hate sneaks on the Internet. I hate doing this.”
“Even to save a life?”
“I spend all my time worrying with the subtle refinements of morality, but today I’m going for a crude goal, get Wish Whitefeather out of jail.”
“Your money back if you’re convicted of a felony.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
Paul had started massaging her shoulders. He leaned down now to look at the numbers scrolling down the screen. “Coyote’s checks?”
“For the past year. What I expected. A Social Security disability check for Nate comes in each month. He cashes it and mostly lives on the cash. He writes a check to Susie Johnson for fifty bucks each month. He’s late this month.”
“Susie Johnson. His mother in Markleeville.”
“He also receives money from odd jobs. The total income from the two sources is around fourteen hundred a month.”
“They weren’t starving, then. Did you get some lunch?”
“A tuna sandwich.” She pulled on his sleeve. “Bend down.” She put her arm around his neck and gave him a long, deep, thrilling kiss. “I found something else,” she whispered.
“What?” His hands were under her shirt.
“Six thousand two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, deposited a month ago into Coyote’s checking account. Don’t stop.”
“You are such a sexy woman. I think you need a nap.”
“A half-hour nap would be nice. Oh. Look at you. You want a nap too.”
By three o’clock they had gotten back to business.
“Cash deposit,” Paul said. “Crockett will send somebody to the bank to see if the teller remembers the depositor.”
“Except the depositor is probably Coyote. The Moneyman gave him the cash and he deposited it.”
“Thus ending the money trail,” said Paul.
Nina thought about it. “We could work this from the other end,” she said. “The Moneyman probably took that money out of his bank account a day or two before Coyote made his deposit. Cashed out on some stocks, maybe.”
“Yeah, but we can’t check every transaction like that in the U.S.”
“Think about it, Paul,” Nina said. “I keep coming back to the Cat Lady’s report. Coyote, I assume it was Coyote, dropped someone off on Siesta Court.”
“Right.”
“We seem to be down to a couple of scenarios. First, maybe Danny was the second arsonist and Coyote dropped him off. Danny couldn’t be the Moneyman, he was broke, but he clearly knew the Moneyman. So the question is, who did Danny know? He was new to Monterey County and a loner like Coyote. He knew Wish, and he knew the people in his neighborhood. So we could hack into the bank accounts of the neighbors on Siesta Court.”
“We could.”
Nina said, “I shudder to think what we might find out about these people.”
“Ordinary citizens,” Paul said. “Right?”
“We would be committing multiple felonies and with different banks your hacking program might not work so well.”
“What’s the second scenario?”
“Okay. Danny was not the second arsonist, but the second arsonist met Coyote through Danny. I say that because Coyote lived a long way away and was a loner.”
“Which explains how Danny had inside information, and which makes what Danny told Wish, about trying to take a photo and collect the reward, the plain truth.”
“Right. And again, who did Danny know? Same group of people.”
“It’s the same outcome,” Paul said. “Except then the Moneyman and the second arsonist are one and the same.”
“No matter what, somebody on Siesta Court is involved. Paul, I just realized something.”
“What?”
“If it’s Scenario One and Danny was the second arsonist and the Moneyman is a separate person, then-”
“Then?”
“The Moneyman could be anybody with access to money. A woman.” Nina pushed aside the laptop and opened her notebook. “That means the whole Siesta Court Bunch,” she said. “Eleven adults. And I think we need to include Elizabeth Gold, who is Debbie Puglia’s sister and who knew Danny too. That makes an even dozen.”
“Actually, didn’t we already establish a woman could be the arsonist? Wish was hit on the head with a stone. Anyone could do that. In my mind, Ben Cervantes is still the obvious one, just because he was closest to Danny. But if someone hired the arsonist, that someone could easily be a woman. Or even the disabled guy, George whatshisname.”
“George Hill. The guitar player at the party. So check the bank accounts on all of them,” Nina muttered. “How are we going to find out where they bank?”
“Check their mailboxes for a month?” Paul said. “It’s the time-honored way.”
“We don’t have a month. Not with Wish in custody and the prelim coming up. And that’s a felony too, Paul. And somebody’s going to notice in that neighborhood.”
“How about we ask them?”
“Just ask them? ‘Hi, there, have you or a loved one recently withdrawn six thousand bucks for any purpose? Like, oh, say, murder and arson?’ ”
“It’s another time-honored technique. It has the virtue of simplicity.”
“Just asking might lead to some action,” Nina said, biting her nail. “We’re throwing a rock into a pond, making unexpected ripples.”
“We’d have to come out from under cover.”
“Okay. We become a couple of rocks disturbing the calm.”
“You call that neighborhood calm?”
Nina said, “Okay. We’re throwing matches into an explosives warehouse. Seeing what blows. That doesn’t bother me anymore, Paul. I think there are some children out there in danger and my guess is that the children are the ones on Siesta Court. I know we have talked to Crockett, but if he hasn’t warned the parents-I think we should.”
“Shall we pay the neighbors a friendly visit?” Paul said. “Talk about money, tell them to guard their children? Spread chaos?”
“I don’t know what to do about the threat to the children.”
“I’ll call Crockett and see what he plans to do about warning them. Let’s pretend we’re responsible citizens.”
“Good idea.”
“It’s three-thirty already. We could go out there during the cocktail hour. Gossip Central will be the Puglias’ deck, where they had the party.” She picked up the phone. “I’ll call Debbie and confess all, and see if she and Sam will have us over for a drink.”
“It could be fun,” Paul said. “Not as much fun as I just had with you, but drunken, dangerous fun.”
“Welcome to Siesta Court,” Nina said.
D EBBIE PUGLIA MET THEM AT THE deck gate. “How do you do,” she said to Paul. “Hi, Nina. So. I can’t believe what you told me. Come sit down.”
In Nina’s memory, the party flickered, orange fire and black night, voices howling in the forest, bodies writhing together. Now, in this same landscape, a warm California evening descended, the sun changing from yellow to gold where it flashed low through the trees, substituting a peaceful emptiness. A pair of squirrels ran along the branches of the big oak that overhung the deck.
From where she sat in one of the plastic chairs at a small glass-topped patio table with Debbie and Paul, Nina could see Darryl and Tory Eubankses’ backyard on the left. A dog scratched on their back porch; the screen opened via an unseen hand and the dog went in. Clashing plates and children’s voices drifted out through the window screens. Dinner must be in progress over there.
Crockett had told Paul, ordered Paul, to say nothing about the possible threat to the children. He wanted to confirm it first somehow. But hearing the Eubanks kids’ laughter next door, Nina felt uneasy about that order.
Farther to the left, past the Eubankses’, she could see the corner of Ben’s house almost hidden in the brush and trees, and, past that, deeper in the woods, Britta and David Cowan’s manicured back patio, all traces of nature meticulously removed.
On her right the deck faced a blank stucco wall that abutted a house with a roof higher than the Puglias’. That would be the home of Ted and Megan Ballard. Debbie and Sam enjoyed no views in that direction anymore.
“What shall we drink?” Debbie said. “Paul?”
“What have you got on hand?” Paul said.
“Well, Corona, Dos Equis, Coors. Red or white wine. Vodka gimlet or collins or straight up. Jack Daniel’s. Rum and Coke. We have some good tequila. I make a mean margarita.” She smiled uncertainly at Paul, playing the hostess, worried about what the hell they were up to.
Paul smiled back, and Nina noticed how warm and reassuring his smile was, how easily he sat in the chair. “I haven’t had a margarita in a while. Nina?”
“Sounds terrific,” Nina said.
“I’ll be right out. Don’t go ’way.” Debbie disappeared through the kitchen door, and Paul leaned over and whispered, “Could this woman by any stretch of the imagination be our arsonist-murderer?”
Nina shushed him. She had heard steps coming up the stairs to the deck.
Britta’s flushed face appeared at the gate. In her low-slung jeans and tight top she looked taut and tightly packed. Paul sat up in his chair.
“We-hell,” she said. “So you were the spy, not Elizabeth. Debbie called Tory right away, and Tory told Darryl. I just passed Darryl in the street. I was curious. Thought I’d stop by. And who are you?”
Paul got up and introduced himself. Britta preened and smiled for him, before turning her furious green eyes on Nina. “I knew you couldn’t be with Ben,” she said. “Now, Paul I understand.” She reached up to touch his shoulder. “What the hell happened to your arms? They’re awfully red.”
“Poison oak.”
“Yuck.” Britta moved a chair up close and sat down beside Paul, giving him a long glance from the corner of her eye. A small twinkling red jewel in her navel caught a ray of sun.
Debbie came out with a tray and stopped cold. “What are you doing here?”
“Sammy wanted to make a plane reservation or something,” Britta said, winking at Paul and Nina. “He wants me to wait for him.”
“He’s not due home for half an hour.”
“Ooh, margaritas! So Paul and Nina are trying to prove Danny didn’t set the fires, right?”
“How’d you know that? Oh, never mind.” Debbie seemed to accept that Britta wouldn’t go away and set the tray down with its pitcher and enormous stemmed glasses. She poured them out the pale green slush and they all said no to a salty rim.
“Cheers,” Debbie said glumly, and they all drank. The margaritas were phenomenally good, refreshing and strong.
“Mighty fine drink,” Paul said.
“Deb’s the hostess with the mostest,” Britta said.
Nina hoped Britta was not referring to Sam, but the mean sparkle in her eyes said otherwise. She cleared her throat. “We appreciate your letting us talk with you, Debbie,” Nina said. “I do apologize for coming to your home on Saturday under false pretenses.”
“That’s all right. But I’m awfully confused. What do you want from Sam and me?”
“You and Sam are the heart of the neighborhood, it seems to me.”
“We try to be good neighbors.”
“You might know something that would help our client, Wish Whitefeather.”
“Danny’s friend? I think I saw him with Danny once.”
“If Danny’s innocent, then Wish will be released,” Nina said. “You liked Danny, didn’t you?”
Nina sensed a certain amount of discomfort in Debbie’s hesitation. “Pretty much. He was about the age of my younger son, Jared. Jared is at Chico State. I always felt sorry for Danny. I’d like to think he didn’t do it.”
Britta, for once listening intently, sucked fast on her icy margarita.
“Unfortunately, someone else from Siesta Court might be involved,” Paul said. In the still air, Nina could hear the two women breathing, hanging on his words. “I can’t go into details, but someone from the neighborhood may have paid a friend of Danny’s over six thousand dollars to set the fires.” Debbie set her glass down carefully while Britta drained hers.
“A friend of Danny’s?” Britta said.
“Now, who would that be?” Debbie asked.
“I can’t say right now.”
“What did this friend tell you?” Debbie asked.
“Nothing. He has disappeared.”
“Really,” said Britta. She turned the empty glass in her hand. “So you don’t really know anything.”
“A young man has provided some information,” Nina said. “A boy named Nate. His, uh, caretaker had shackled him to a tree to prevent him escaping and talking about some things he overheard.”
Debbie said, “How awful. How old is this boy?”
“Thirteen. He’s disabled.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m no expert,” Nina said. “He has mental problems.”
“So he can’t tell you anything either,” said Britta. “That must be frustrating.” Nina had the distinct impression Britta was laughing, but her face was dead serious.
“You didn’t leave him tied to a tree, I’m sure. What happened to him?” Debbie asked.
“He’s at Juvenile Hall in Salinas while the county looks for temporary housing for him.”
“That’s terrible.”
“There’s nowhere else to put him.”
“She can’t stay on topic,” Britta said, “but I’m curious. You say somebody on the block took out six thousand some odd dollars and paid it to this guy and he set a bunch of wildfires.”
“Right,” Paul said.
“Who? Any idea?”
“We’d like to narrow it down.”
“You really believe it’s one of us, one of the Siesta Court Bunch that hired an arsonist and got Danny killed?” Debbie said. “Why would one of our neighbors do that?”
“There’s a lot of animosity about the Green River development. It’s possible that’s the real focus of these fires.”
“Well, of course there is. That doesn’t mean we killed people because of it!” Debbie said, her eyes welling. “It’s just too much. Now you’re accusing my friends-my family-of doing these things, when we’re all scared to death ourselves. Just last night Sam thought he saw a prowler and the men went out back and looked for him. I was so frightened.”
“No, now, Debbie, sweetie, let’s stay with this. Look at us! The bunch of us. Who’s got a chunk of money that big to burn?” Britta said, giggling at her joke, as if playing a game. “Count Ben out. I doubt he could put a down payment on a bicycle on what he makes. And it can’t be George and Jolene. The Hills shop at the Wal-Mart and George’s too cheap to spend that much money just to set a couple of fires and off some people.”
“So, in your opinion, we should take them right off the list,” Paul said.
Britta smirked. “I’m not sure you should take anyone off the list. What do I know, after all? Maybe George keeps a stash of big bills under potting soil in a locked barrel, like that gangster on TV. Maybe Ben won the lottery and didn’t tell anyone. He’s a dark horse. He has secrets.”
“He’s not the only one,” Debbie said, glaring at Britta.
“What do you think, Debbie?” Nina said.
“About who might have six grand on this street? Don’t ask me. I wouldn’t know.”
“Aw, come on, Deb,” Britta said. “Every single person on this block has cried on your shoulder. You know. Tell them, go ahead.” What could have been a compliment from someone else had a sharp edge to it coming from Britta.
“Well, you and David come to mind,” Debbie said. Nina thought, So there’s some life in her yet.
Britta wasn’t bothered by this sally. She said, “Absolutely. Except David has the money, not me. I get my allowance and I get my paycheck. But now David, he’s got a trust fund from his parents that would knock your socks off, Paul. Yes, maybe it’s him. Maybe he’s gone political and decided to be the closet savior of the neighborhood. It’s completely out of character, him being heroic or spending that kind of money on anything that doesn’t have the syllables optic in it somewhere, I have to say.”
“You say those things about your own husband?” Debbie broke in.
“Maybe I did it,” Britta said. “Broke into the trust funds.” She was busy pouring herself another margarita.
“Why would you?” Nina asked.
“Same reason as everyone else on this block. Because I don’t want my view wrecked. To save the neighborhood, you could say. I’m a real nature lover.” She had added salt to the rim of the glass this time. She licked it off.
“Who else might have money?” Paul said.
“Ted and Megan have some money socked away, I’d guess,” Debbie said, clearly unhappy with the whole line of speculation. “I don’t really know. I really don’t see how Darryl and Tory could have that much money with four kids on the money Darryl takes home.”
“How about you and Sam?” said Britta. “Sam makes good money, enough so you don’t even have to work.”
“You know, Britta, maybe you better watch yourself,” Debbie said, “making those kinds of accusations while you’re sitting on our deck drinking our booze.” She had become increasingly uneasy. Nina couldn’t understand why she didn’t throw Britta, who had leapt upon her husband with the abandon of a wild animal a few nights before, out. Here she was letting Britta get homey on her deck, acting unreasonably civil. Evidently, Debbie worked to keep the social peace at all costs.
The kitchen door opened with a crash. Sam Puglia looked out at them, thick eyebrows drawing together like dark storm clouds. “You should have waited for me,” he told Debbie.
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
“Hi, Sammy,” Britta said. “I just dropped by.”
“You dropped by, now you go home,” Sam said. “I mean it.”
“Sure you do.” Steadying herself with a hand on the back of the chair, Britta stood up. “See you later, everybody.” She passed close by Sam, brushing him.
After Britta left, Sam said, “What’ve you been telling them, Debbie?”
“That we had nothing to do with it.”
He relaxed slightly. “’Course we didn’t. What’s in the pitcher?”
“You know.”
Debbie poured him a margarita. Victims of a common marital curse, Sam and Debbie no longer looked the same age. After twenty years these partners now represented different generations. Debbie’s hair, almost gray, blew in a frizz cloud around her head. She bore a worried air and tired look around the eyes when she wasn’t acting the hearty hostess. Sam’s hair remained black and plentiful. The cracks time had etched into his face gave him vigor and character. A deceptive look of character, Nina thought, correcting herself. She would never forgive Sam for letting Britta-letting Britta sit on him! All right, as awful as it was, it was funny too. The two participants might not even remember the event, but Nina would swear Debbie had heard all about it.
From the way Sam had just tossed Britta out like rotten meat, Sam must remember plenty too, come to think of it.
“You’re a lawyer?” he said to Nina. “And you’re a P.I.?” To Paul.
They nodded.
“What do you want from us?”
“We’d like to know how well you knew Danny.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Sam, don’t make a big deal out of this,” Debbie told him. “Danny was our neighbor, and he helped Sam with the car, and he hung curtains for me.”
“You would have adopted him if I let you,” Sam said.
“Not really. He was already a man, but he was very lonely and I think it did him a world of good to be part of our little community.”
“He was an outsider here and always would be,” Sam said. “He could try to fit in until the cows came home, he never would.”
“How did he feel about the development across the street?” Paul asked them both.
Sam just sucked on his margarita straw, so Debbie said, “He hated it as much as any of us, I guess.”
“Did he ever talk about the café fire?”
“Not that I recall,” Debbie said.
“He might have had a grudge going there, don’t you think, Sam?” Paul said.
“I got nothing to say,” Sam told him.
“You have a lot to say, I think,” Nina said. “About all this. What’s scaring you so much?”
“Fuck you,” Sam said in response. His face had turned white and he was shaking. Paul set down his glass hard, scraping the glass table.
“Sam!” Debbie said. She put her hand on his arm.
“Come to my house, my neighborhood, accuse us all of whatever evilness. We’re just trying to get along down here in the woods. Ruthie was as crazy as a rabid coon. She didn’t see squat get out of a car on this street.”
“Mr. Puglia, have you made a withdrawal in the last two months out of any account in the amount of sixty-two hundred fifty dollars?” Paul said. His voice had hardened.
Sam said, “No, I fucking haven’t, and neither has my wife. My wife and I love each other. We pay our taxes and our kids’ tuition. We support our president and we love our God. And we’re not criminals. Now, get offa my property.”
Paul stood up, chest sticking out, hands balled into fists. Nina got up too, hastily, to step in front of him. “Thanks for the margaritas,” she said to Debbie.
“You’re welcome.”
“We’ll be going.”
Paul and Sam stood eyeball-to-eyeball.
“Right, Paul? We have to go now.”
Paul moved back a step. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
Releasing his eyes from their deadlock, Sam turned his back on them and sucked on his drink. Nina led Paul to the gate.
“Good-bye,” she said to Debbie.
“Have a nice day,” Debbie said.
Nina and Paul walked across the street to the riprap and looked down at the trickle of river, aware of eyes on them. “Debbie’s on the phone,” Paul said. “Sam’s at the back fence, jabbering at Darryl.”
“You behaved well,” Nina said.
“His turf,” Paul said. “I wasn’t going to start anything.”
“Let’s see what shard of human heart comes flying out of the explosion.”
“Well said. I need food to balance the tequila.”
“There’s an Italian place in the Village not three blocks from here.”
“Let’s go.”
They returned to the Mustang and left Siesta Court. At dinner Paul said, “Are we any closer to finding out who the children are? The children Nate talked about.”
“It has to be one or more of the Siesta Court kids.”
“We don’t know that. Could be some other scam, some other kids.”
“That’s my feeling.”
“You and your feelings.”
Nina thought of Britta’s little towheaded boys, Darryl’s handsome boy Mikey. Callie and April, the apples of Jolene’s eye.
“But if it’s the neighbor kids, why?” she said. “Why?”
M EGAN CAME IN LATE FROM HER martial-arts lesson about seven-thirty. Ted had already done his stretches and was lounging in the hot tub outside. Starving, she hunted around for whatever he had made for dinner, but all she could find was a dry chicken breast.
He hadn’t left her any dinner. He was sulking.
In six years, they had built a home, biked from L.A. to San Francisco, run a marathon together, traveled to Acapulco and Hawaii, invested their money and gotten rich, gone through his father’s death and her brother’s divorce, and generally supported each other to the megamax. Ted was more than a husband, he was her boon companion, that was how she liked to think of him. They were a modern family of two, tight, permanent.
And now this. This choking incident. And Ted’s lack of interest in sex.
They were extremely competent people with resources. These were just maintenance problems, like the sim card in the cell phone dying, or the sink stopping up.
Munching on the chicken, she went downstairs and onto their private deck. In the long last rays of the sun, Ted floated with his eyes closed, his arms hooked onto the tub wall out of the water to keep himself cooler. Next to him on the deck, the laptop showed the Yahoo finance screen.
“Hey,” she said. “I see George is over there grubbing in his garden. I saw Jolene going up the driveway at Debbie’s. She’s usually in for the night by now. Has something else happened?”
“There’s a phone message for you from Debbie. She said she just called to chat.”
“Oh. That’s Siesta Court code for hot neighborhood gossip. I’ll listen later.”
“Maybe you better get to it,” he said. “You never know.”
“Okay. I wonder if it’s about the prowler.”
“Did you see the faxes?” Ted said.
“Yeah.”
“B of A is doing lousy, but it’s still paying out four percent dividends. Brenda thinks we should put fifty thousand in. Buy while it’s down.”
“I already took care of it. Brenda called me at two.”
“The contractor broke a water main up the hill. It’s fixed now.”
“That’s life,” Megan said.
Ted opened his eyes. “Strip down and hop in.”
“I’m going to ride the reclining bike for twenty minutes first.”
“I won’t last that long in here.”
“Meet you at the massage table, then.” Megan went back inside into the bedroom and locked the door. She had changed her mind. She didn’t feel like riding the bike after all. She felt like reading the paper while lying on the bed.
Ted knocked twenty minutes later. She let him in. “What’s wrong with you?” he said, naked and holding his damp towel. “Why’d you lock the door? There’s some kind of crap going on with you.”
“I felt like reading the paper.”
“What about my massage?”
“I thought about it. I don’t see why I should give you massages when you start choking me in the middle of them.”
“Oh. So that’s what this is all about.”
“Yes. That’s what this is about.”
Ted sat down on the edge of the bed. He was so buff that Megan could see each individual ab muscle. He had a dick fit for a porn site. Too bad he never exercised that with her anymore.
“I’m sorry about what I did. But do you remember what you said, Megan? You called me a pervert, accused me of a few major crimes, and topped it off by saying I can’t get it on anymore.”
“Which part didn’t you like?” She threw The Wall Street Journal on the floor.
“Since when did you think you could get away with talking to me like you did?”
“I never said you’re a pervert,” Megan said. “I don’t believe in perversion. People have a right to express their sexuality however they please as long as it doesn’t harm another person. But they have to be open about it with their partners. Trust their partners to understand and accept. Something in our relationship is turning you off, babe. I’m developing some frustrations as a result of your inattention.”
Ted’s mouth twisted, and he said, “You’re right. You’re absolutely right. About everything. As usual.”
“Then just tell me how I turn you off, and we’ll fix it.”
“It’s not that.”
“Is it this other business? Danny dying? The fires?”
“Forget all that. You’ve got a sensational body and you’re a great companion. I love you. I just don’t-”
“Was it the same with Amy?”
“No.”
“So it’s me. Or-”
Ted said, “I am not gay, Megan.”
“You could get a physical workup. Maybe you have an infection or something.”
“I had a physical three months ago, remember? I’m as healthy as a twenty-year-old Argentine soccer player.”
“Then maybe a shrink could help. Why don’t you go to a shrink? You can’t choke me, babe, I don’t play battered woman.” Megan raised her long leg out straight and started rotating it at the ankle joint, admiring it. “You know I’m a brown belt. You’re lucky I didn’t rip your head off.”
“I don’t want to hurt anybody. I was shocked at myself. You could have hauled off and slugged me and I would have taken it.” He paused. “Maybe I was even trying to provoke you into doing that.” He looked surprised at what he had said.
“Do you feel guilty about something?” Megan had studied psych in college and felt comfortable with the role of amateur shrink. She was determined to diagnose Ted and get on with the cure. Whatever it was, they could cope. They did love each other.
“You think I’m gay?” Ted asked, his face anxious.
“I don’t know. Are you attracted to men or not?”
“No!”
“Well, are you attracted to women?” Megan said logically.
“Of course I am!”
“Then what’s the problem?”
Ted lay down on the bed in a fetal position, his back to Megan. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said, his voice muffled. “I’ve been stressed out lately. Maybe that’s it.”
“Let me help.”
“Megan, could you just leave me alone right now?”
“You must know what you want, deep down. I am totally accepting, babe. I love you. Every hard inch of you.” She felt an uprush of desire. She ran her hands along his back. “Make love to me,” she murmured. She lay back and waited, stretching luxuriously, letting the electricity move up and down her body.
Ted didn’t move. He had nodded off, or he was pretending.
After a few minutes Megan got up and got going on the reclining bike, mega pissed off and sexually frustrated. She had to pedal forty-five minutes at top speed before she could even think about sleep.
When Jolene got back to the house from Debbie’s, she ran to the back door and peeked out. Yes, George still knelt in the lettuce beds, rooting out weeds, even though the light had dimmed and the moon poked over the trees. As she watched, he sat up on his haunches and rubbed his sore back.
She locked the back door quietly. He’d have to pound and yell and she’d say it was an accident when she finally came and let him in. That way she’d have plenty of warning.
From the girls’ room she could hear the TV and chatter. The dishwasher was still running and the clean clothes lay piled on the couch in the den.
Later for them. She had half an hour, maybe.
She went to George’s old metal desk in the corner. He guarded this desk like a Doberman. On top he had his typewriter and stationery, his ivory-handled letter opener, and their wedding picture. A couple of envelopes were tucked into the blotter. These she took out and examined.
Water bill and cable bill. No.
In all these years, Jolene had never gone snooping in George’s desk. George made the money and took care of the money as head of the household, and though she had been tempted many a time to see if he didn’t have something stashed away for them, she felt that he’d tell her when he thought it right.
The truth was, George was a cheapskate. Scrimp didn’t begin to describe it, the coupons, the penny-pinching, the flea markets and the secondhand shops. He loved to go out at 5:00 A.M. on Saturdays and come back at 10:00 with the back seat full of broken lamps and tools and dollies for the girls. Then he’d spend the rest of the weekend gluing and hammering out back. And play his guitar all night.
He did love his food too, thank goodness, because Jolene loved her cooking. She liked sewing the girls’ clothes, she enjoyed fixing her friends’ hair and taking the girls to Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey on Sundays, but most of all she loved cooking. Not the drudge stuff, the daily dinners, but real cooking, foreign recipes and New Age organic dishes included. She could always bring over her latest dish to the block parties if calling it by a familiar name didn’t fool George and the girls into trying it. Jolene was a natural-born chef, daring and talented, and she knew it.
One time she really wanted to take an Asian cooking class at the Sunset Center in Carmel. Two hundred fifty dollars it cost. This was when Cathy still lived at home and before the girls were born, and they were just as short of money then. George couldn’t stand that kind of cooking. Bamboo shoots in his soup, not gonna happen, he would say.
She showed George the ad and asked him for the money. The idea put him in physical pain, she could see that. She didn’t say another word, just washed the dishes and went to bed and got up the next morning and cooked breakfast.
After breakfast, he handed her the check drawn on Wells Fargo Bank. She’d always remember the wagon-and-the-oxen picture on that check, like a wagonful of treasure being brought to her. “Waste of money,” he said, smiling, as she hugged him.
She learned a lot in that class, but most of all, she never doubted again that George loved her and would always love her, and this sure knowledge had given them a good life together.
So now she didn’t feel too happy about what she was about to do. The two file drawers on the right-hand side of the desk had always been kept locked, and in there George kept the checkbook and bank statements.
She could just ask, but asking wasn’t seeing. George wasn’t feeling good, his mind wasn’t as clear as it used to be, and she was going to have to find out for herself if he’d done anything foolish. And if he had, because he was so mad about not being able to build out back, she wanted to be able to take care of it quietly and soon.
She tried the letter opener, but that didn’t work. She tried a bobby pin and tweezers and a safety pin. No luck.
She went into the bathroom and unzipped George’s shaving kit, his secret hideout place, and wrapped in a baggie she found two silver keys. In a jiffy, she had those desk drawers wide open.
He kept folders for each utility and for the mortgage company, the doctors, taxes, the car insurance, and so on. A big thick folder had the title “Wells Fargo.”
Jolene tiptoed back to the window and peeked out the curtains. George had finished with the weeding and was bagging up his pile. In a hurry now, she went back to the folder and opened it up.
They had two accounts, both in her name too. Why, she’d never known her name was on the accounts along with George’s. One was a savings and one was a checking.
George would never do anything fancy with extra money, like put it in the stock market or something, so she knew any money they had would be in the savings account. She pulled out the latest statement and took a look.
“Well, I’ll be,” she muttered. They had forty-two thousand dollars!
She looked back a few months. No withdrawal of around six thousand. The most was twelve hundred fifty drawn a couple of months before. Thank goodness! She looked back further and further in time, at the same money sitting in the same dusty account gathering its paltry interest. George’s nest egg had probably been sitting there for twenty years while they got along on the nursery money and lately the Social Security.
Her eyes went back to the most recent statement. With forty-two thousand dollars they could be doing so much to make their lives easier, for Cathy, for the girls… George could get a medical consultation at Stanford. They had a secret fortune!
She heard the back door rattle. Then she heard George saying “Now, what’s this?” to himself, and the door rattling again. Meantime she was pulling out a blank withdrawal slip from the savings book, closing the file up, closing the file drawer, and locking it up just like before.
Rattle rattle. “Goddammit!” George roared. “Jo-lene!”
“I’m comin’!” she called. She whisked across the kitchen and opened up, the withdrawal slip crammed into her pants pocket.
“Somebody locked the goddamn door!”
“Those little rascals,” Jolene said, “played a trick on you. Well, come on in.”
At 3:00 A.M. Elizabeth woke up. She went out onto the deck to see the stars, wrapped in a blanket. Looking out into the quiet black, she lay down on the chaise lounge. The Milky Way was an old creviced lane of light. She followed the handle of the Big Dipper to Arcturus and on to the Corona Borealis and Vega. A satellite moved across the sky, a solid point of light, consistent, fast. Soon the night sky would fill with such man-made lights, glittering space stations would wheel around, rockets would leave trails of brilliant debris…
Darryl had called and left one of his urgent, inane messages around noon. It disturbed her deeply. She had a hard enough time keeping herself together without this insistent male interest intruding on her life.
He better leave me alone, she thought. And felt such a pang of loneliness that she had to clench her teeth and wrap herself tight in the blanket to make up for the arms that weren’t there. Darryl, damn him, had reawakened some needs that she had tried hard to forget.
When she could think again, she told herself many things: about how connections are not worth it. About how all is impermanent and transitory, most especially human relationships. It all led to nothing but acute suffering. Loneliness was nothing compared to loss. She had made her decision to remain alone, and it was so unfair for this foolish married man to bring his warmth and wanting to her home, to interfere with her and knock her off-balance.
But then, perversely, she thought, if only I had someone just for a few minutes, I could open my arms and he would fill them and I could press my cheek against his warm living cheek…
She went back inside and flipped up the computer screen, brought up her journal, and wrote:
Please don’t say anything
I know loneliness too
Just cup your hand
Behind my head
Open my mouth gently
With your lips
And with your tongue
Search, search for me
Then, finally, she could sleep.
That first moment, opening her eyes and seeing the red line across the trees that meant the night had finally left her, Elizabeth was content. Morning, hope, the dawn, old and effective symbols, drew her from bed into the weary round once again.
Today is a special day, she told herself, trying to hold on to that evanescent hope.
Downstairs, she made herself breakfast, listening to the sparrows and jays. She ate oatmeal, because that was the current health fad, which should keep her alive to suffer the indignities of an undeservedly long life, and then she dressed carefully. She needed to present an aspect of mental and physical health. She wanted to look important.
Today she would present a progress report to her thesis committee at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She repacked her burgundy briefcase, making sure she had everything, and went out to the Subaru. The mountains lay gentle under the morning sun, and in the quietness she began to feel a strong urge not to go out there to the land of freeways and people.
Get a grip, she told herself, you’re getting phobic. She decided to get it over with efficiently and get out. There were some problems with the study right now that she didn’t want to get into with the committee.
She went over Los Laureles Grade to Highway 68 and picked up Highway 1 in Monterey, entering the coastal fog bank. As she drove north up the coast toward Santa Cruz she thought again, I don’t feel up to this, and admitted to herself that her thesis was in danger. Her little group of subjects faced so many conflicts from so many directions right now-Green River, Danny’s death, the suspicions, Britta’s increasing outrageousness-maybe she should put off the meeting.
Oh, well, I’m halfway there, might as well struggle through it, she thought, and then, just at the turnoff for Manresa Beach, she felt a thunk, then a thud. Flap-flap-flap. Left front tire, damn Michelins too. Even at sixty-five the Subaru steered straight and the brakes didn’t let her down. Pulling over to the side of the road, Elizabeth read the number taped to the back of her mobile phone and punched it in.
The tow truck took some time. She gave up and called her committee chair and postponed her meeting for a week. She felt delivered, light. The sand came right up to the road on the side opposite her and she could smell the ocean. Leaning against the car, her back to the freeway, she let her hair fly in the breeze and watched the gulls.
A long yellow truck finally pulled up behind her. A man got out of the cab.
She squinted behind her sunglasses, recognizing him. Ben Cervantes. And felt huge relief and a little excitement. No new stranger to deal with, just Ben from the neighborhood. Who looked really good smiling at her.
“Buenos días, Elizabeth,” Ben said. “Looks like you could use a change.”
His words, following her thinking so closely, startled her, and she felt herself smiling back. “I have a spare in the trunk,” she said. While he went to work with the spare and the tools, jacking up the Subaru, unscrewing the nuts on the tire, she folded her arms and watched.
She had always felt comfortable with Ben. He had clarity in his eyes that she took to be a high level of awareness, although she didn’t really know. Most of the locals saw through a thick gray film of murk. Maybe he didn’t, or maybe she was just much more sensitive to him for some reason.
For two years at the parties, Ben had come alone or with Danny, never with a woman. Then on Saturday night he had brought the attractive woman along, the pseudo-Hungarian who Elizabeth already knew was a lawyer. Were they close? She wouldn’t have thought Ben would-
Or maybe Ben’s type was different from what Elizabeth had thought.
He knelt at her feet, putting on the spare. His hands in the leather gloves moved the big tire around effortlessly. He leaned over and she watched his back in the T-shirt, strong and V-shaped. The breeze blew across the dunes. The cars roared by on the highway.
“I didn’t know you worked for the emergency road crew.”
“New job,” he said.
“Are you a mechanic?”
“Used to do body work only, but I’m a quick study.”
He didn’t work for long. Minutes later, he slammed the flat into her trunk and pushed down the hood. “You’ll want to get that to a station. Don’t want to drive around without a spare.”
“It does make me nervous.”
“You’ll be okay.”
She stood there looking at him for a long moment. Time stretched out. He stuffed a rag in the pocket of his overalls then looked back at her, patient, with those clear brown eyes.
He added suddenly, “I’ll follow you if you’re worried. You can get it fixed later.”
“You would do that?”
“Of course.” Simple human kindness, she thought, he’s kind, and it felt like rain on her soul. “I’ll pay you for your time,” she said, but he smiled and shook his head.
He jumped back into the yellow truck, pulling the door shut behind him with a thump. She saw him making a radio call.
Observing his face in her rearview mirror, she started up her car. They cut through the fog and back into summer as they turned inland, driving past fields of red snapdragons and orange poppies. All the way down Carmel Valley Road, she studied him. He had lost his job and his nephew, both recently, yet here he was, out on the road helping her and whoever else needed that big helping hand. How must he feel, really?
Back home, she took her purse out and searched for her checkbook.
“Please,” Ben said. “My pleasure.”
“Oh, no. I owe you. This is business.”
“Not for me.”
He wasn’t joking. He meant, he had welcomed the opportunity. “Thank you,” Elizabeth said.
“De nada.”
She hesitated, then said, “Today is my birthday.”
“Really?”
“I’m thirty.”
His smile widened. “Happy birthday, then. I hope thirty is a good year for you.”
“Thanks again.”
“I’ll be going, then. Take care.” Reluctantly, she thought, he turned and walked off. She fitted the key into the lock and opened the door to her empty house and looked back.
He had stopped and was watching her. She saw the desire in his eyes.
She stepped inside and held the door open. He bounded back up the steps and came inside with her, kicking the door shut. Then he had her tight in his arms, supporting her, his hands tangling in her hair, his mouth on her mouth. He was searching for someone, the someone behind the great gray fortress of words and money.
And he found a way in. He found her, exposed her, soothed her fright, caressed her. She began to moan and twist in his arms.
She took his hand in hers and led him into the bedroom. They hardly spoke.
D EBBIE TOLD NINA ON THE PHONE that Thursday afternoon, “You better not be making all this up. People on Siesta Court are getting scared of each other. You really think the Cat Lady was murdered?”
“That’s what the medical examiner found.” Nina scratched her ankle, though the poison oak had faded away at last and the scratch was just a leftover nervous tic, like biting her thumbnail. Paul had gone to town to talk to Crockett again.
“Well, I asked around about the money. Whoever set the fires and killed Danny and Ruthie has to be found. But you have to understand, these are my friends.”
“Hear anything back yet?”
“I’ve heard plenty. But not about the sixty-two hundred fifty dollars.”
“Anything you have heard might help us.”
“Do you really believe your client, that young man-”
“Wish Whitefeather-”
“Didn’t kill Danny?”
“I know he didn’t, Debbie.”
“Of course, you’d have to say that. I don’t know why, but I believe you anyhow. Well, then. Darryl and Tory had a loud discussion this morning before Darryl left for work. I couldn’t help but hear part of it. Darryl told Tory he’s not happy and Tory was crying and carrying on. She’s pregnant.”
“Is it about your sister? Elizabeth?”
“Mm-hmm. So I called Elizabeth and I wanted to know whether she and Darryl-I mean, it’s none of my business in a way, but she is my sister-”
“Sure.”
“And she said, no, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with Darryl, but she has started seeing Ben Cervantes! I was thrilled to hear it, so I thought I better let Tory know she has nothing to worry about, so I gave her a buzz and left a message. And guess what. Talk about bad luck, I never thought something like this might happen-”
“What?”
“Darryl called home from school and picked up the message instead! And he called me and wanted to know everything. I told him that’s all I knew. I was very embarrassed. But also, I’m worried. Because Darryl acted so upset. He sounded jealous. Of Ben.”
“Not good,” Nina said.
Debbie heaved a sigh. “I was just trying to help out. So I called Elizabeth. And she said she was sorry she ever told me about Ben and she must have been out of her mind. I’m afraid I’ve complicated things.”
Nina thought about this, decided she couldn’t link it to Danny, arson, or murder, and said, “Has anything else happened, Debbie?”
“Well, David-you know, the Cowans on the corner-he usually sleeps late, into the afternoon, because he goes to the observatory at night. But this morning I heard the Boxster start up early. One time last year Danny told me that David tried to hire him to spy on Britta. Danny laughed when he told me this and I was curious as to why he was laughing, and the whole sordid story came out that Danny couldn’t spy on himself!”
“Oh. You mean, Danny and Britta.”
“Right. None of us can understand why David stays with her. He actually made a joke about it once. He said he was getting the lay of the land.”
“What else did Danny tell you, Debbie? About anything?”
Debbie needed a moment to change her focus. Then she said, “Lots of stuff. We talked quite a bit.”
“Ever talk about this guy named Coyote?”
“Just that he knew this part-Washoe character who lived out in the woods. A drinker. How is Nate?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’d like to bring him something. I bet he doesn’t have any clothes or anything.”
“That would be nice.” Nina gave Debbie a number to call.
“By the way, I’m sorry Sam was rude to you when you and your friend came over. Sam hasn’t been himself.”
“No problem.” Nina hung up.
What had she learned? Nothing, she thought, but she had enjoyed talking to Debbie, a talented gossip. She ought to have a talk show: She’s another Oprah, she thought.
She called Jaime at the D.A.’s office and had the incredible luck of finding him in. “I’d like to come down and see you,” she said.
“About?”
“Ruth Frost’s murder.”
“I’ve already consulted with my boss on that. She may have been murdered, but I don’t know why or by who, so I can’t link it to the arson case. So I’m not dismissing, you’re wasting your breath.”
“But why else would someone kill this poor woman? She had no money to steal. Come on, Jaime, you think someone did it to lash out at cat lovers?”
“We’ll find out. This is my only free time today, Nina, what else do you have?”
“Is there any progress on finding Robert Johnson?”
“Coyote? I haven’t heard a thing. State highway patrol has his license number, though, so we ought to grab him soon.”
“Before he takes these children as he threatened to do on the phone?”
“You mean the schizophrenic kid’s statement? Let me tell you, Nina, I’m using the word statement loosely. He didn’t feel like talking when my investigator went out to the juvenile facility to interview him.”
“You should warn the parents and grandparents on Siesta Court, Jaime. I don’t like having this information-”
“What evidence do you have that this alleged threat has anything to do with them?”
“The conchos in his tent link him to the fire.”
“They’re similar to the ones on the dead man’s belt, yeah.”
“He had an infusion of cash. That fits Nate’s story.”
“But doesn’t link him to the fires.”
“He worked on Ruth Frost’s car!”
“So we’re back to that. It isn’t a credible threat yet, Nina. I’m not going to throw those people into a panic.”
Five more minutes with Jaime convinced her that Wish was facing a real live preliminary hearing in ten days and she’d better get ready for it. She called a temporary secretarial service and arranged to interview someone the next day at Paul’s office. There would be motions, all kinds of paperwork.
Let the cramming begin. She had always been a crammer in school.
All right, let hell break loose, she could prepare for that with ten days’ lead time!
“Hi, Nate.” The boy looked at her slackly. He had been watching afternoon soap operas on TV. An orderly at the facility hung around close by, curious.
“Hi.” A string of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth and he looked pale and wan. She thought, Maybe he was better off undermedicated.
“How are you doing?”
He watched the TV. Diamonique bracelets were on sale on QVC. “It’s okay. But they never gave me any ice cream.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can help with that. Nate, you remember, when we came and got you”-he was nodding-“you told us why you had been chained to the tree?”
“Chained to the tree. I was.”
“Could you tell me again about the phone call you overheard?”
“Wee-zull. The phone call I overheard. The phone made a song and he answered. His face got funny and he looked around for me, but I was outside listening inside. He said, Don’t try to stiff me. It’s that simple. Or else I’ll take the children.”
“Did he say anything else about the children? Which children, Nate?”
“No.”
“Do you remember calling me at the court?”
“You weren’t there. She wrote it down.”
“Right. And you mentioned fire in your phone call. And you said something about ‘the big one.’ Remember?”
Nina waited, biting her nail. Nate hadn’t turned his head from the TV. He sounded remarkably coherent compared with the last time she had talked to him. Nina had represented mental patients before and believed that antipsychotic medications, with their side effects, were often overused in the interests of the institutions, not the patients. But today Nate sounded almost normal: dulled out, drooling, but almost coherent. The medicine was helping him, she had to admit.
“Take the children. Take the children. Take the children. Take the-” Again, Nina felt the clutch of fear.
“Thanks, Nate. Thanks very much. A friend of mine will be coming to see you soon. Dr. Cervenka. You’ll like him. He looks like Santa Claus.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know where your brother might have gone?”
“He must be dead.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Or he’d come get me out of here.”
“You-you want him to come get you?”
“He always took care of me. I don’t like it here.”
Nina walked swiftly down the concrete-floored hall to the front and was let out. At the counter, she asked the attendant where she could find the nearest ice-cream place. She dropped off a half-gallon of Neapolitan for Nate before she headed for Carmel Valley down 68.
Another hot, perfect summer day. Mount Toro loomed on her left.
The cell phone rang, and Paul came on. “I’m still waiting to talk to Crockett. What are you doing?”
She told him, then said, “I’m going to Britta Cowan’s travel agency and see if I can catch her.”
“What for?”
She heard that tone again, the one that told her he didn’t like her coming up with ideas on her own. She bridled.
“Don’t be overbearing, Paul,” she said.
He seemed surprised. “All I asked was-”
“Debbie said that Britta had an affair with Danny last year. Maybe she met Coyote at some point.”
After a short silence, Paul said, “That’s a good thought.”
“I have them sometimes. I asked Nate if he knew where Coyote might be and he said the strangest thing-that he wished he would come and get him out. After the maltreatment he suffered, I was surprised.”
“I called the condo to pick up voice mail. Sandy wants an update. You or me?”
“I’ll call. I’ll call Joseph too.”
“Great. What time will you be home?”
Home, Nina thought. “Late afternoon.”
“What’s for supper?”
“Whatever’s around.”
“I’ll stop at the store,” Paul said, hurt-sounding.
Carmel Valley Travel was located in a small strip mall on the main road just before the Village. Siesta Court was right down the hill. A school bus stopped just in front of Nina and disgorged its freight of children bowed like porters under their heavy backpacks. She saw George’s granddaughter Callie grab her little sister’s hand as they crossed the street, and it gave her a tight feeling in her chest. She didn’t agree with Jaime. The parents should be warned about a possible threat to the children.
Inside the travel agency, frigid air-conditioning, the usual racks of cruise folders, maps on the walls, Britta Cowan and another woman on the phones. She saw Nina but gave no sign. Nina went back and sat down in the chair next to her.
Britta was saying, “The Bangkok leg has aisle seats but no window except over the wing. You want that? Okay. And vegetarian meal, right? Okay. I’ll see what I can do. What?” Nina looked over the desk. All she saw was travel brochures, tickets, notes, and schedules. No plant, no photos, nothing personal. How odd, she thought. On the wall she saw a poster for Icelandic Airlines.
Britta hung up. “So where are we going today?” she said in her mocking voice.
“I wonder if we could talk for a few minutes.”
“As you can see, I’m trying to make a living.”
“It’s important.”
“To you, maybe.” But curiosity got the better of her, and she said, “Irene, I’ll be out back.”
She led Nina outside to a small, sunny, flowery courtyard. They sat down on some ironwork patio chairs. Britta pulled out a pack of cigarettes, stuck one in her mouth, and lit it with her Zippo. She wore tight white pants and a polo shirt. Her arms were toned and tan and the gold bracelets she wore showed them off.
“Nice poster. By your desk. Are you originally from Iceland?”
“Yes. Home of hot springs and Bjork.”
“You don’t have an accent.”
“I speak four languages without an accent. I was a flight attendant for Icelandic when I met David. He was drunk and I was poor. A perfect match, I thought.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Eight years.” She inhaled the smoke with pleasure. Sun filtered through the trees and made a halo of her hair. “And here I am.”
Nina was having trouble finding an opening. She decided to try to match Britta’s bluntness.
“A happy marriage?” she said.
“Sure.” Britta smiled slightly, enjoying Nina’s discomfiture.
“But you had an affair with Danny Cervantes last year.”
“Yes. And Sam Puglia too. But Sam was only good for a few nights. He ran home to Mama.”
“And Danny?”
“A kid.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“No. In fact, I think he despised me. But we got along in bed. Are we having fun yet?”
“How did your husband take these affairs?”
“David doesn’t care.”
“Then why do you stay married to him?”
“Faithfulness is overrated. We have things in common. Next question.”
“All right. Danny. How did you leave it with him?”
“I told him to get lost. He was borrowing money from me. The thrill was gone.”
“Did Danny talk to you recently about making some big money?”
For the first time Britta’s eyes clouded. She smoked some more, then said, “Maybe. Maybe I don’t want to be a witness in court about any of this, though.”
“I can understand that.” I’ll take that as a yes, Nina thought to herself, and furthermore, I’ll subpoena you if you know anything. She went on, “Did you ever meet Robert Johnson?”
“Coyote? Yes.”
“Where?”
“At a bar.”
“Alma’s?”
“Very good!”
Nina chose her next words carefully. “What did you think of him?”
“A jerk.”
“How so?”
“The type who gets belligerent and shoots his mouth off when he gets drunk. The type who dies in a bar fight.”
“What were he and Danny talking about?”
“The score.”
“The score?”
“That’s what they called it.”
“They were going to make some money?”
“Danny hired Coyote for some job. A big job.”
“What else, Britta?”
“I don’t want to say.”
Nina apologized to Paul, Jaime, and all authority figures in her mind, then said, “You know, Britta, Coyote has disappeared. He may have killed the Cat Lady. And he has made some threats.”
“Against who?”
“Some children. We don’t know yet whose children.”
“I’ll be sure to take mine out of town.” But her mouth trembled. “So he’s the man you were talking about at Debbie’s house.”
“If you know anything about Coyote that might help, you shouldn’t keep it a secret, no matter how much you don’t want to go to court.”
“You think he’d come after me?”
Nina shrugged. “What do you know?” she said.
Britta stubbed out her cigarette under her sandal. “You told me something,” she said, “so I’ll tell you something. Your client’s guilty.”
Nina closed her eyes and took that in. “Why do you say that?”
“Because Danny was in on the fires. With Coyote. They had this Tahoe connection, Washoe Indians or something. And your client, he’s another Washoe, right? He went up the mountain, right?”
“How do you know?”
“Alma’s. We’re sitting at the bar and they’re talking, and Coyote says something about laying in enough kerosene. And Danny says shut your mouth, and shoves him right off the bar stool. Coyote lies there for a while and then he gets up and shoves Danny back. Danny gives him this look and Coyote sits back down like a good boy. That’s it.”
“Was anyone else there who could have heard that statement?”
“I was drinking too. The room was turning into a carousel. But let me think. Yes. A cute guy with a gray beard. Paint all over his clothes. I think he knew both of them.”
The paranoid artist spent a lot of time at Alma’s. What had Cowboy Two said? Something about him doing drugs.
“I met him,” Nina said.
“He didn’t talk much, he just listened. And stared at me. I managed to slip him my phone number. He called and a couple of days later I went to his place.”
“I don’t need to know that-” Nina started, but Britta held up her hand.
“Danny and Coyote were just leaving when I got there, and I didn’t want Danny to see me, so I left and came back later. Donnelly-Donnelly was a dud. Wait. I won’t make your ears burn. But he told me that the two guys had been drinking with him, then he got a little scared of them. They were asking for a loan and he said no.”
“Thank you, Britta.” Stay calm, Nina told herself, and began analyzing this information, deciding how it impacted Wish’s case.
“Maybe it’s my ass on the line now. Or my kids. I think I better go home and deal with this.”
“Just one more question. At any time-did Coyote or Danny ever use my client’s name? Wish or Willis?”
Britta said, “I never heard of your client. He came out of the blue. Maybe Danny hired him later on.”
“Okay,” Nina said.
“But if you subpoena me, I’m gonna hurt you.”
“I see that you might.”
“Good.” She smoked calmly. She was quite beautiful, shiny with her polished nails and lip gloss on her plump mouth.
“Britta? I still don’t understand. About your marriage. About you.”
“And I’m not going to enlighten you. I’ll tell you just one thing. David and I will be together until the end of time.”
“Just a suggestion,” Nina said. “You might want to double-check your husband’s bank accounts to see if he’s the one who paid Coyote. Just to be sure. About that end-of-time thing.” She left Britta on the sunny patio, looking thoughtful.
“Hello, Sandy,” Nina said into the cell phone. “So you have a cell phone too now.”
“I got right in there with the twenty-first century. It does come in handy. Have you got Willis out of jail yet?”
“Not yet.” Nina updated Sandy, then said, “I’m afraid it’s going to go into a prelim.”
“Well, you’re pretty good at those. You’re gonna put up a defense, aren’t you?”
The preliminary hearing in California had only two purposes-to determine if there was probable cause to believe that a crime had been committed, and that the defendant was the person who had committed the crime. If so, the defendant would be bound over for trial.
At this early stage, the defense usually assumed probable cause would be found to exist, and let the D.A. present its minimal evidence for that purpose. Though the defense might cross-examine, in general the defense did not put on its own witnesses.
Nina did not agree with this traditional strategy of defense attorneys. With current discovery rules, the defense often knew as much as the police at the time of the prelim, and with hard and fast work could put on a sort of minitrial. Since a defendant might be incarcerated for months before finally going to trial, it made sense to fight hard every step of the way.
So Nina said, “Yes, I’ll call witnesses. Time is of the essence, though.”
“What are you doing for an office?”
“Using Paul’s. He’s got a spare iBook for pounding out paperwork, and a fax and all that.”
“What about a legal secretary?”
“I called a temp service. I’m interviewing a woman at two tomorrow at Paul’s office.”
“You won’t get anybody who knows law.”
“I’ll choose carefully. Don’t worry, Sandy. I’ll do a good job for Wish. But-but if Wish is bound over for trial-I can’t commit to handling a full-fledged murder trial, you know that.”
Sandy said, “Then win the prelim.”
“Right.”
“I talked to Susie Johnson. Robert Johnson’s mother. She’s not close but I know her. She says Robert hasn’t been in touch. She’s telling the truth.”
“Okay.” So Coyote hadn’t called home. Where would he go? Deeper into the forest?
“Social Services for Monterey County called Susie about Nate. They say he’s almost ready to leave. She’s not sure she can take care of him. Did Dr. Cervenka go see him yet?”
“No. I think he’s making the trip down from San Francisco in a day or two. He’ll help. Tell Susie he has to talk to Nate first.”
“Okay. Robert Johnson and Danny Cervantes, they both had Washoe mothers. I checked around. Those boys went to high school together in Minden.”
“What’s their connection to Wish?”
“He and Danny were friends when they were in elementary school, and they stayed in touch. Danny’s family moved from Markleeville down to Minden for a while. His father worked construction down there. Then when Wish came to Monterey County this summer, he looked Danny up. Danny was the only soul he knew, other than you and Paul, when he came down here.”
“Does Wish know Coyote? Robert Johnson?”
“Ask him. But I don’t think he ever went to school with him. I don’t think he knew him from Tahoe.”
“Okay,” Nina said.
Sandy said, “Willis’s father is a tad worried.”
“I’ll call Joseph.”
“That’s all right. We talk every night.”
“Do you miss Tahoe, Sandy?”
“This Washington trip’ll be over whenever I say it’s over. But good things are happening. The Washoe tribe is going to get twelve acres on Lake Tahoe at Skunk Harbor. That’s one of the tribe’s summer spots.”
“Fantastic, Sandy!” The Washoe tribe had summered at Tahoe for ten thousand years, until the previous century, when logging and silver mining interests took it over. Ever since, the tribe had been trying to get recognized and get some land back. “That’s historic,” Nina went on.
“It’s historic, all right,” Sandy said. “Guess what the conditions are.”
“What?”
“We can only do activities that are traditional. Hunt, fish, grind up pine nuts. Act like Indians in the westerns.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, we get the land, but in a time warp. It’s okay, we didn’t want to build a casino. We’re just glad to get our toes back in the water.”
“A toe at Tahoe,” Nina said.
“Hmph.”
“Excellent work, Sandy.”
“Did you talk to Crockett?”
“Paul did.”
“What did he say?”
“Well, to Paul’s surprise, he is a descendant. And he sounded boastful when he talked about what an Indian fighter his ancestor was.”
“I knew it. I knew it.”
“He’s really not so bad, Sandy.”
“It’s deeper than that. We have to get Willis out of jail.”
“We’re working on it.”
A silence. Then, “Paul treating you right?”
“Great.”
“Good. Hmm.”
“Something else on your mind, Sandy?”
“I just had a thought.”
“Anything you want to tell me?”
“Not yet. You’ll find out.” And with that ominous statement, Sandy signed off.
Nina thought about Sandy in Washington, setting up a Tahoe land trust for the Washoe tribe. She felt quite proud, but not surprised. Sandy was smart and unbelievably sure of herself. Nina had seen that the first day she’d met her, when she showed up for a job interview with Nina with no qualifications to be a legal secretary besides total self-confidence, having been a file clerk at another law firm, and a will to learn.
Sandy was probably regretting that she’d ever met Nina at this point. Wish wouldn’t be in jail if he hadn’t come down here to work for Paul, who’d met Wish through Nina.
Nina closed up her cell phone and pulled the Bronco back out onto Carmel Valley Road. Her mind went back to Britta, to the astonishing thing Britta had told her: Danny was in on the fires.
A ND SO IT CAME TO PASS that on Monday, June 23, Nina went back into law practice, in a half-assed sort of way.
She had a case and half an office, which, because it was shared with a nonlawyer, presented certain ethical problems. She wasn’t supposed to split fees with nonlawyers or partner with them. They might have cooties, the state bar had decided.
She inspected Paul, who leaned back in his yellow leather chair talking on the phone and looking out his window, for those mythical insects. He could use a haircut but looked clean withal. Satisfied, she turned back to putting away the new secretarial supplies purchased that morning from Office Depot into Wish’s old desk. She was a lawyer; she would draft up some paperwork defining her professional relationship with Paul that would leave the state bar puffing uselessly.
Outside, fog blanketed Carmel. Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever spent was one summer in San Francisco. He obviously hadn’t spent June in the microclimate of Carmel-by-the-Sea. A few miles inland, the radio said, the central coast was having a heat wave.
Problem: The new temp would have to sit at that desk. So where was Nina going to work? She looked longingly at Paul’s fine desk with its client overhang, covered with Paul’s computers and files. She surveyed the office. In the corner by the door, Paul had a padded leather client chair and a small table beside it with a lamp and some adventure trekking brochures, where his clients could sit.
So be it. She dragged her new cardboard file boxes over there and stacked them. Now she had a file cabinet. She removed the lamp and brochures and pulled the table around in front of the chair. Luckily, it was high and broad. The corner had one electrical plug into which she plugged a power strip with many outlets. She opened her laptop and it brought up its ocean desktop picture, popping up the icons like long-submerged buoys.
No one must ever come in here and see her like Little Jack Horner. But with Wish in jail, her client wouldn’t be visiting, and her tenure here would be short: a few days of preparation for the prelim, the prelim itself, which probably would last about two to three days, and out.
She began filing the material she had on Wish’s case. Paul stretched and said, “Guess it’s about time for your job interview. I’ll make myself scarce. If you need me, I’ll be at the Hog’s Breath having a late lunch.”
“Thanks, Paul.”
“Nice setup.”
“It’ll do.”
Paul went out and Nina continued organizing. Two o’clock came and went, and nobody came from the agency. Nina had to go down the hall to the ladies’ rest room. She left the door to the office unlocked.
When she came back into Paul’s office, the applicant was there, already seated at Wish’s desk, reading a file, her back to Nina. Nina saw black hair and a purple coat.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” she said, and rushed over to grab the file. The woman turned her head.
“Aughh!” Nina cried.
Sandy said nothing. She lifted an eyebrow and continued reading.
“What are you doing here! You almost gave me a heart attack!”
“What does it look like? I’m your new secretary.”
“Where-where’s the temp?”
“I caught her outside and told her the job was taken. You need envelopes and a Rolodex. What are we going to do for a law library?”
Nina sat down at her new desk. Sandy continued her reading. Finally, Nina nodded.
“I thought you had big business in Washington.”
“My son’s in jail.”
“I should have known,” she said. “When you said, ‘Hmm,’ on the phone yesterday.”
“I’ve only got two weeks,” Sandy said. “We could spend that time looking at each other, or we could get to work.”
Paul came in. He saw Sandy in her purple coat and sneakers and broke into a big smile. “Welcome to Carmel,” he said.
“That’s more like it.”
The phone rang, and Sandy picked it up.
“Law offices of Nina Reilly,” she said.
Strange twist of fate: The phone call actually was official, and for Nina. “There has been a development,” Jaime told her, over a wail of sirens. The D.A. sounded unusually calm, a bad sign.
“What?”
“An assault. On a woman who lives on Siesta Court. Her name is Britta Cowan. She’s at Community Hospital.”
Paul and Sandy had stopped moving around and seemed to be listening, too, though they couldn’t possibly know what Jaime was saying. Nina’s shock must have shown on her face.
“How serious is it?”
“Serious. She was hit in the head with a baseball bat. She’s in surgery. Skull fracture. Her husband is with her.”
“Is she going to make it?”
“Only God knows. I’m just a lawyer. She was found this morning by a janitor at the business where she works in Carmel Valley.” By now, Nina had put on the speakerphone and they were all listening.
Jaime went on, “Her associate says you visited her yesterday, and she went home right after your talk.”
“I warned her, Jaime. About the children. Are her children all right?” She gripped the phone.
“You know, Nina, you and I have known each other for a long time. And I want to tell you something today. I always thought you were bad lawyer material. Because you never listen to anybody.”
“Don’t blame me for this.”
“The timing is right. You talk to her, you set the alarm in motion, and this woman gets hurt. Yes, her children are all right.”
Paul looked like he was going to seize the phone. She motioned him away, then said, “Who did it?”
“You might have some ideas on that.”
“So you don’t know?”
“Forensics is working the site right now. I’m standing here looking at travel brochures and blood, and I didn’t call you for nothing. Now you better speak up. You know who did this?”
“No.”
“You have a guess?”
“I think it was Robert Johnson. Danny Cervantes’s buddy. The man called Coyote.”
“Based on?”
“I did see Mrs. Cowan last Thursday. She told me something about Robert Johnson.”
“What?”
Nina didn’t have much time to decide what to tell Jaime. She ran the legal questions through her head: Was the information privileged? No, Britta wasn’t her client, she was a victim, and this was a criminal investigation. But would it hurt Wish’s case in any way to tell Jaime what Britta had said?
It might. If Danny and Coyote were coconspirators, Wish’s story about being on the mountain made little sense. Wish had gone up there with Danny. The judge would assume they were all together.
But she wanted Coyote found, she was hot with anger at what he might have done, and she knew he was the key to the story. Jaime needed to work harder to find him. She could make that happen.
The truth could only help Wish.
Or was she being naive? A D.A. should never be told anything. Too dangerous, and you never could tell how the information could rebound.
“Well, Nina?” Jaime said. “I called you, remember? Instead of bringing you in.”
“She was seeing Danny last year.”
“I knew that.”
“She went to a bar with him. Coyote was there. He and Danny talked about laying in supplies of kerosene. Danny had hired Coyote. They were talking about making a score.”
Jaime digested this. Danny was in on it. I shouldn’t have said it, Nina thought. But Britta was lying on a gurney with a skull fracture. She had to say it.
“What else?”
“Only her speculations about what she overheard.”
“Her speculations may have led her to the hospital.” Jaime’s cell phone was whistling. Wind, whistling through a parking lot.
“I hope not.”
“Well?”
“That’s all I can tell you.”
“I can send a sheriff’s car over and pick you up and hold you as a material witness.”
“I won’t have anything to add. I told you what she said. She heard Johnson practically confess to the arsons. Maybe you should use your police car to get some police work done, like finding him.”
“You think a hard-ass attitude is gonna win you any points when you come cryin’ to me for a deal? Her speculations are important. Her state of mind, her motivations, are important.”
He was right. “I’ll search my memory. I’ll call you tomorrow,” Nina said.
Jaime took some more time. She heard him whispering to someone, probably an evidence tech.
“You do that. I have to go, Nina, but before I do, there’s one more thing. The victim wrote your name on an envelope.”
Hearing that, Sandy moved her head on her neck, toward Nina, slowly. With portent. She blinked. Meaningfully. It was an oh-shit moment. They had had so many together. It was really great to have her back.
“What was in this envelope?” Nina said with extreme care.
“Nothing. But there was a sentence written under your name. On the envelope. I’m going to read you this sentence and I expect you to tell me what it means, fully and truthfully. Right now.”
Sandy picked up a yellow pad and a pen. Nina said, “Let’s hear it.”
“The sentence reads as follows. ‘Nina, just in case, I heard about a cute artist’s studio for rent.’ ”
“That’s it?” Nina said.
“Don’t jive me,” Jaime said. “Don’t evade. Don’t act like a lawyer. Somebody is out of control and running around cracking skulls. And maybe a whole lot more. Now. What does it mean?”
“We were talking. About vacation places. To rent.”
“I don’t believe you. Shit.” There was another whispered exchange. “I have to go now. But I am going to catch up with you later. So think about it some more. Hard.”
“I sure will. Jaime?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks. For letting me know about all this.”
“I thought I might get some help from you in return. Not that I should expect it. In fact, I have noticed that you turned into a maverick. I thought you said your ambition was to be a big shot in the legal profession way back when we were drinking vending-machine coffee between classes.”
“Well, at least one of us turned out respectable,” Nina said.
Jaime laughed. “You may still hit it big. You may be right about jamming us on prelims. I just hope it doesn’t become a fashion among the defense lawyers.” He paused for a moment and when he began talking again he was serious. “But I think you’re lying about the note, Nina. That’s obstruction of justice.”
“I told you. Britta knew Robert Johnson was an arsonist. He lived out in Arroyo Seco. You know about the Child Welfare warrant. Go get him.”
Jaime said, “Maybe it was her husband.” The thought hadn’t even crossed Nina’s mind. She had experienced that feeling of absolute certainty about Coyote that drove all other thoughts away.
“That’s not my bet,” she said. She laid the phone in its cradle.
Sandy took off her coat. “It’s always a barrel of laughs,” she said.
“I’m hoping I didn’t cause this,” Nina said. “I told Britta that she and maybe her children might be under threat from this guy.”
“Then she would run the other way, if she’s sane. And she is sane,” Paul said.
“She wouldn’t contact him. She’s not stupid. He was after her. Paul, listen. She did know something more.”
“What do you mean? How do you know that Britta knew where Coyote went?”
Nina ran her hand through her hair. “The note,” she said.
“I was going to ask you about that. About taking a vacation,” Sandy said.
“Obviously I don’t need a vacation rental.”
“True. The vacation is obviously over,” Paul said. “It’s obvious to the D.A. too. What does it mean? About the cute artist’s studio?”
“It means we go back to Alma’s and find out where the artist lives. The one who accused you of being a repo man. Britta told me he was listening that night at Alma’s.”
Paul got it instantly. “Ohh, that cute artist. It wasn’t the studio that was cute, it was the artist.”
“‘Just in case,’ she said, Paul. She must mean that she thought Coyote went to the artist’s place when he ran off from the camp after we rescued Nate.”
“Why would she think that?”
Nina thought back to her conversation with Britta. “He asked the artist for money one time. The cowboy at Alma’s called him Donnellen or something.”
“What I want to know is why you didn’t explain all this about the artist to the D.A.,” Paul said. “The deputies could be over there by now.”
“I needed to think.”
“You needed to think. Okay. That’s a good idea. Let’s all do some thinking.” Paul went over to his fabulous leather office chair and looked out his window, hands behind his head. Nina scratched her arm. Sandy raised her eyebrows and they stuck up there.
The clock ticked over a minute, then two. Finally, Paul broke the silence. “We can’t, honey,” he said. “The man’s too dangerous.”
“I agree that he’s dangerous. But-”
“We should tell the police about the vacation rental. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know if he will implicate Wish, Paul. I don’t know what he would say. I don’t know if he did anything, or if Britta’s husband finally lost his patience and attacked her. Maybe he won’t be there at all, and we can talk to the artist. If Jaime gets there first, he’ll arrest Coyote and then we won’t get any information out of him.”
“Whew. Sandy, she’s talking rings around me again.”
“She’s very persuasive,” Sandy said. “You have to watch out for her.”
“Paul, you have a gun.”
“This is cowboy stuff.”
“We could be really careful. It’s for Wish.”
“You just can’t resist. Because you know something the D.A. doesn’t.”
“You know you’re going with her,” Sandy said. “So let’s get on with it. I’ll stay here and get organized.”
“I suppose we could visit Alma’s and see what we see,” Paul said. “You know, between the Cat Lady and Nate and the jabbering artist, I feel like we’re having a nuttiness epidemic.”
“Most people are nuts,” Sandy said. “You just have to clue in to their points of nuttiness.”
“Well, Britta Cowan was nuts if she drove back to Cachagua to find the artist.”
“He’s probably sitting at Alma’s right now, coming down from whatever he takes,” Nina said.
“It’s a country-music song,” Paul said. “I know that one.” He launched into an off-key, twanging tune:
I’m drownin’ my sorrows at Alma’s
I’m drownin’ my kittens at home
I’m drownin’ my paycheck in cash for cocaine
But you’re a good girl-you’ll forgive me again
He gave them a crazy grin and reached his hand under his sport coat and felt around, and Nina realized he’d been wearing the Glock in a shoulder holster the whole time.
J OLENE, DEBBIE, AND TORY SAT ON Debbie’s back deck on Monday afternoon. Tory’s kids had just jumped up from the picnic table, leaving a mess of ketchupy hot-dog buns and potato chips strewn from here to kingdom come. They ran down in the woods and Tory screamed a couple of warnings to them, which Jolene sincerely hoped they would pay attention to.
Callie and April, now, they were safe in summer school, learning how to be good citizens in a drug-free America, how to get up when the alarm sounds, how to do their homework every night no matter how tired or distracted they felt. But Tory and Darryl had decided to home-school, which meant Tory was their teacher, which was not working out because Tory’s pregnancy had knocked her for a loop.
The whole neighborhood was knocked for a loop. Jolene sipped her iced tea and considered how many years had gone by without much change. Maybe twenty-five years, before new people started adopting Carmel Valley. The new people weren’t supposed to supplant the old. They were supposed to blend in. Instead they brought in their strange slanted ways of looking at things until you didn’t know which way your head was screwed on anymore.
Today, another hot one, Tory wore a beige T-shirt with sea otters on it. Nobody sewed anymore except Jolene, clothes were so cheap to buy at the Ross Store in Seaside. The huge T-shirt hung like a nightgown on Tory, almost covering the loose shorts that brushed her kneecaps. The girl was a fashion disaster.
And look at Debbie, puffing on a cigarette right close to Tory, who they all knew was pregnant. Debbie in her gardening jeans, busting out of that tight tank top and wearing those hip-hop sunglasses. My.
“I’m not sure I want to go,” Debbie said. “Tell you the truth, I’m scared to death to go see her. What’m I supposed to say? She made a spectacle of herself with my husband a week ago. I don’t want to be a hypocrite.” She got up to bring the plates in and Jolene and Tory got up to help.
“No, you sit and rest,” Debbie told Tory. “Watch the kiddies.”
When the deck was all clean and swept, Jolene and Debbie sat down again.
“So? What about you?” Jolene asked Tory. “Our neighbor just about got killed, somebody has to go see her.”
“I don’t have anybody to watch the kids.”
“I’ll watch ’em,” Debbie volunteered, because she felt guilty, even though Britta was definitely not her favorite person, Jolene could understand that.
“One o’clock, then,” Jolene said to Tory, who nodded reluctantly.
“She must know who did it, but she’s been unconscious,” Tory said. “They’ve had to keep her knocked out so she wouldn’t get brain swelling. Darryl knows one of the deputy sheriffs, that’s how I know. She won’t even know we’re there. But I know we have to go.”
“Maybe she’ll clear all this up when she comes to,” Debbie said, and they all pondered this, sipping her heavy-honeyed mint tea.
“I’m not even sure I want to get it all cleared up. You know how Danny was sort of the handyman around here? How he did all the odd jobs?” Jolene said, choosing her words.
“So?” Tory said.
“It looks like one of us neighbors sure as hell did hire him to set a couple fires. He was used to doing the dirty work. Now, don’t give me that surprised look, Deb, you know it too.”
“I knew as soon as I smelled the smoke from the development across the river,” Debbie said. “Truth to tell.”
“Me too,” Tory said. “So like the lawyer says, all we need to know is who paid out over six thousand dollars a month ago. I’ll go first. I checked our bank account. Darryl paid out some money for his sick dad in Arizona about then, but it was nothing like six thousand. I didn’t want to do it, but it was pay for a nurse or have him come live with us.”
“What about that account of his in the Bahamas?” Jolene said, pointing her finger at Tory.
“Yeah, I should check on that one, shouldn’t I?” Tory said, and they all had a good laugh. “Okay, Debbie. Speak up, that’s what you do best.”
“I didn’t hire Danny. And neither did Sam.”
“And you know this-how?” inquired Jolene.
“Sam has the business account, and he keeps all that at the office. I waltzed in there and looked at his bank statement. As usual, too much money going out, but nothing like six thousand.”
“Maybe he’s been squirreling cash on the side,” Jolene said.
“He’s not a crook. Real people don’t keep two sets of books. Sam is too lazy to do that, even if he wanted to. He’s made some payments out too, but same as Darryl, just small amounts, a couple thousand at most.”
Jolene nodded thoughtfully.
“Not that he wasn’t royally pissed about the subdivision,” Debbie added. “Elizabeth reads about all this stuff and she told me the company has now put the project on hold.”
“Until they catch the arsonist,” said Tory.
“Arsonists,” Jolene reminded. “The one who hurt Britta, who I suppose is this man named Coyote. Danny, who’s dead. And whoever paid them.”
“What a mean man,” Debbie said. “Coyote. To chain up his own brother. It’s so sick. He’s the sick one. You know, the boy is really sweet. I brought him some snacks and spent some time with him at the juvenile facility. His eyes are so sad.” She hitched up the tank top. “So, Jolene. You and George do all this?”
Jolene couldn’t resist. She told them about the forty-two-thousand-dollar stash. “Hadn’t been touched for years, except a little over a thousand a few months ago,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known about it till George died.”
“That’s sweet,” Debbie said. “He was going to leave you an inheritance.” Seeing Jolene’s expression, she said, “It wasn’t sweet?”
“We need the money right now,” Jolene said. “So I stole it. Every bit. Withdrew it out of that account and opened a new one at Security Pacific. I had to.”
“Jolene!” Debbie breathed.
Tory said, “You go!”
“What are you going to do with it?” Debbie asked.
“I don’t know yet. But it’ll come to me. It sure will,” said Jolene. “We better get going, Tory. The girls get home from school at two-thirty. Debbie, I’ll leave a note for them to come over to your house if I’m late.”
“I’ll take care of them. But I thought we were going to figure this out. What about Ted and Megan? What about Britta’s husband? And what about Ben?”
Tory said, “At least we narrowed it down.”
“Did we?” said Jolene. “It’s like an octopus, I swear, all wavy tentacles getting into everything.”
Nina and Paul shot through the fog wall at Mid-Valley, where the organic stand sold expensive flowers and tomatoes to the tourists. Golden sun, benevolent, fertile land, bumpy road snaking through the narrow valley along the Carmel River. At Carmel Valley Village Nina got a good look down Esquiline Road toward Siesta Court, past the old buildings at Robles Vista and past the ashy land and black seared trees of the fire.
She was thinking about Coyote’s right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment, which stood in Wish’s way right now. All the amendment said was that a person couldn’t be compelled to bear witness against himself.
The reasoning of the Founding Fathers went something like this-confessions become “confessions,” which become coerced confessions, a euphemistic phrase for confessions obtained by torture. So they decided to make it official-a defendant can’t be made to testify against himself.
Defense lawyers ran all the way for a touchdown with that one. Not only did the defendant have the right not to be tortured into a confession, court decisions gradually extended that right to a right to say nothing at all, to refuse any questioning. And this refusal to speak, even to save a victim’s life, could not be held against the accused in or out of court.
In her work as a criminal-defense attorney, Nina almost never let her clients take the stand or make any statement to the police. She used this powerful impediment to conviction whenever it would benefit her client. So it was ironic that she and Paul should be driving out to a hole in the woods, intent on catching Coyote before he could exercise the same right she exploited to the fullest extent in her work. Wish might sit in jail for months, or be convicted, because no one could make Coyote say anything, if he exercised that right. All anyone would know was that Danny was in on it.
And if Danny was in on it, and Wish was at the fire with him… what jury would believe that Wish wasn’t in on it too?
Her only chance was to find Coyote first, and make him tell his story.
They rode on for an hour along the olive-green ridges with their open views, through the heat, until the road flattened and rolled into the peaceful, sun-baked village of Cachagua. Nina jumped out and slammed the door, kicking up dust as she walked over to the screen door that led into the dark, air-conditioned cool of Alma’s. Paul followed.
Nobody at the bar this time, just the lady bartender behind the counter, her eyes watchful, her cough straight out of a Marlboro carton.
“Two Dos Equis,” Paul said, sliding onto the stool beside Nina. The beers appeared within seconds. “Four dollars,” the woman said.
“Excuse me,” Nina said. She put the cash on the counter. She looked, really looked, at the woman, trying to figure out how to approach her.
She was careworn, but chubby rather than haggard, her face soft, her eyes not stupid but not expecting trouble, her hair freshly styled and her jeans new. Nina liked her in the way that she liked the other mothers at Bob’s school, and she said, “We need to find someone pretty fast. He hangs out here a lot.”
“Oh, yeah? Who?”
“Coyote, Robert Johnson.”
“Sorry. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
“Then his friend. A guy with paint all over his clothes and a gray beard.”
“Donnelly’s not Coyote’s friend. Who are you?”
“Good guys,” Paul said. “We’re the good guys.”
She smiled. “Glad to hear it. And now, who are you? Because if you want information, you have to give it.”
“We could ask someone else.”
“In this neighborhood, we watch out for each other. Nobody’s going to talk to you unless you explain your business.” Nina waited for Paul to make something up, as they had when they talked to the cowboys, but Paul had sized this lady up as too smart to bullshit.
He explained their business. He passed over his P.I. license. She examined it. Then she said, “He may not welcome you. Donnelly’s got some IRS problems.”
“Oh?”
“He’s famous. He’s a famous sculptor. He’d rather be a painter and that’s all he’s doing this year. Anyhoo, he needs privacy, but I’m afraid it gets out of hand.”
“Pit bulls?” Nina asked.
“No. Walls. The biggest walls and gate in the valley. But I could call him.”
“You have his number?”
“I’m his sister. My name’s Prem.”
“Ah. Hi, Prem.”
“Because from what you just told me, I don’t want Coyote to be there. If I didn’t have to mind the bar I’d go out with you. Yes, I’ll call him.” She picked up the phone and punched in some numbers, which Nina tried unsuccessfully to catch. Holding the receiver to her ear, she grimaced and shook her head.
“He’s gone,” she said.
“I hope that’s it,” Paul said.
“Listen, I’m coming with you. I know the code and I know him. Mr. van Wagoner?”
“Yeah?”
“You better be scaring me for nothing.” She took a handwritten sign that said BACK SOON, taped it to the door, and waited for them to follow her dusty Explorer out of the parking lot.
They drove off the main road onto a gravel road that became narrower and narrower, until they came to a metal electric gate ten feet high, with spikes at the top. The adobe wall on both sides displayed the same wicked-looking metal spikes. Oak branches inside had been carefully trimmed back.
At the entry stood a call box. Prem punched a button and leaned her head out the window, ready to shout into the box, but the box stayed mute. She punched in a number sequence next, and the gates creaked heavily open.
Inside, the forest continued, thick branches of olive-leafed oaks, and on the ground, in clumps along the drive, twining along the stumps and trunks, the glistening poison oak. Here and there Nina glimpsed strange bronze figures, much too tall and skinny to be human, performing private rites, leaning over, fallen, jumping, sitting on a branch. One of these sculptures peeked out from behind a tree near the car. The body was elongated and bronze, but the head was the bleached skull of some horned animal, teeth intact. It wore a porkpie hat.
Nina thought, not for the first time, what has modern art come to?
The artist’s home consisted of a series of adobe cubes piled haphazardly alongside each other, anchored by tall double Indonesian doors painted in garish gold leaf, reds, yellows, and greens. Brown shutters on all the windows, closed. Satellite dish, chimneys, tiled roof. Primitive stencils on the wall here and there. A million-dollar home, so altered that it would perhaps be unsellable.
“The garage door’s open,” Prem said. “The Jeep’s gone. Shit!”
She ran to the door and fumbled a key out of her bag, though Nina called “Wait!” She pushed open the door and disappeared inside.
“You ready?” Paul said to Nina, taking her hand. “You could stay outside.” She could see it in his face, the anxiety, the grim anticipation.
“I’m with you.” So they went in together.
Polished echoing floors, an almost-empty foyer. A sideboard, all the drawers pulled out. Place mats and tablecloths lying on the floor where they had been tossed.
From somewhere to the right they heard a full-throated, anguished shriek. Nina’s eyes met Paul’s. He shook his head slightly. He held his gun in his right hand. Nina fell behind as they moved right, into a painting studio.
Canvases propped against the wall. A long scarred Gothic table down the center, covered with a tarp and tubes of oil paint, brushes, bottles, plates, cups, animal skulls, mirrors, dead flowers. And what were those vines in the watery glasses? Nina shrank back.
She looked at the pictures. He was painting poison oak, skulls, dead things, hyperrealistically. While her eyes raked the otherwise-empty room, a vision came to her of the interior of his mind, and she shrank from this too.
And yet. And yet, the brilliant light filtered through the shutters to stripe the concrete floor; the dead things lay passively, giving up their essence, at ease at last; the painting technique, so old-fashioned, brushless, jewel-colored, was so accomplished that the overall feeling she experienced was a sense of quiet and formality, the sense that only great painting can give. She thought of Hieronymus Bosch, Henri Rousseau, Vermeer.
No sound anywhere, now. Paul’s hand around hers tightened and he pulled her toward an arched doorway. Nina felt no fear, because of Paul, but also because in this world of deathly harmony she already knew what they would see and she already knew it would be quiet, unmoving. The jittery energy of danger had left.
Prem knelt in the kitchen, behind a prosaic butcher-block kitchen island, copper pots reflecting the shining stripes of light, knelt over a large bloodied creature on the floor. Nina saw hanks of hair, a pool of blood of the most saturated, purest red, with its tributary stream meandering down a slight declivity in the floor. A face covered in this scarlet paint, arms and legs akimbo; he must have been beaten to death. Paul stretched out an arm and stopped her.
“No farther,” he ordered. Then he moved gingerly in toward Prem, sobbing next to that bleeding head, and gently lifted her up and brought her back to Nina. Nina put her left arm around her and, with her right hand on the cell phone, punched 911.
T HE NIGHT BEFORE IN CACHAGUA HAD gone on too long. The police needed statements. Paul, evasive but tired, wasn’t his usual suave self and practically got himself arrested. She had played the tight-ass attorney to get him out of trouble. What they learned at the scene was that the artist was wealthy, had many fans, many detractors, and many possible killers.
She started off Tuesday morning sitting in her visitor’s chair in Paul’s office, laptop on her knees, listing the things she felt might be important to remember in her preparations for Wish’s preliminary hearing. On the wall she had pasted her hand-drawn map of Carmel Valley Village, showing the location of the fires and Siesta Court. Faint laughter filtered up from the Hog’s Breath.
Sandy, at Wish’s old desk, was reading the Monterey newspaper out loud, in between working on court papers they needed to file.
“Donnelly really was famous.”
“He’ll be more famous now,” Nina said shortly.
“The motive seems to be robbery. His sister said he often kept cash in the house. He was a lumpy-mattress type. Plus Coyote stole his Jeep. You’d think the highway patrol could pick out every Jeep in five hundred miles with helicopters.”
“I agree, fleeing in a Jeep is as desperate as dodging a taxi by running into a bus.”
“Says here, he was a bit of a recluse. Kinda like Stephen King. People knocking at his door toting bombs, wanting money.”
“He despised fame,” Nina said. “Unusually private type, but if you ask me, some of that was drug-induced paranoia.”
“So it might not be Coyote?”
“It’s Coyote. Has to be. We talk about Coyote, and Britta leaves me a note telling me to head for Donnelly’s if anything happens to her, and something happens to her. Then something happens to Donnelly. That’s what I explained to the homicide detective last night. Not that he appeared to be fully convinced, but he was interested.”
“How’s she doing? Britta Cowan?”
“When I called David Cowan this morning, he said they’ll bring her out of the coma in a couple more days. She’s going to make it. What did she do when she left me that day? How did she know he might try to rob Donnelly? I really need to talk to her.”
Unable to come to any useful conclusions, Nina and Sandy returned to their work. The clock on Paul’s desk ticked. He was out at the handicapped facility in Carmel Valley Village, interviewing the people there, and the phones were blessedly silent.
Nina began doodling names. Britta. Elizabeth Gold. Coyote. Danny. George Hill.
How to prove that Coyote set the fires without implicating Danny, and by further implication, Wish? She got out the autopsy report on Danny and studied it again, reread Wish’s story, thought again about the more than six thousand dollars in Coyote’s account, wondered again how Danny got his “tip.” Tip in quotes, because she wasn’t at all sure there had been any tip.
Now she started drawing little sketches of the objects surrounding this case-little sketches for little objects. A piece of paper with Twelve Points. A margarita glass. A cat, a concho belt, fire, cowboys, a little kid with his diapers hanging down, a Jeep, Danny’s flute…
She shook her head and tried again. Sandy had come over to get something and was looking at her paper.
“Why do you do that? I’ve seen you do that for every case. What does it do for you?”
“It’s how I think.”
“What about logic?”
“It’s never about logic, Sandy. It’s always about emotion.”
They tapped on their keyboards for a while. The phones rang a few times. Sandy dispensed with calls with her usual mixture of tact and ironhandedness. At lunch, they called an order down to the restaurant. Nina went down to pick up the food and breathe some of the cleansing fog into her lungs. They ate at their desks, communicating, as they often did, in a shorthand that pricked the silence like static.
“Those papers,” Nina would say.
“Done.”
“Did you call…?”
“Called at ten. Weren’t you listening? They say they’ll have the discovery papers couriered over this afternoon.”
“Wish wanted us to bring…”
“I took that stuff over last night.”
Nina asked a question that had been bothering her. “Sandy,” she said, biting into a pepper, “do you need a place to stay, or are you staying with that friend of yours who lives near here?”
“Staying at your place.”
“You are?” Nina struggled for neutrality. Had Paul invited her without saying? How in the world could they have any kind of a life with Sandy on the couch or in his precious den?
“Gotta say, those boys need me.”
Boys? Dustin and Tustin sprang into her mind’s eye. “You’re staying at the house Aunt Helen left me? In Wish’s room?”
“Like I said,” said Sandy. “Rent paid. Furnished. Except for a whole lot of dirty laundry, it’s empty, thanks to you.”
Was she teasing, or criticizing? With Sandy, Nina never knew. “Not for long, if we get our plans in order.”
“I’ve looked over your plans,” Sandy said, “and they remind me of the living room at your house in P.G.”
“It looked pretty neat the day I visited.”
“It would that day, yeah.”
Nina tried to imagine the Boyz confronted by Sandy and her luggage, trotting into their domain and taking over Wish’s private lair, but here was a situation where her imagination faltered. She was sorry to have missed the moment.
Back at the office, amid the group of phone messages was one from Elizabeth Gold. Nina called back immediately.
“I’d like to meet with you,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe I can help. You weren’t the only one at the party under false pretenses. I’m a trained sociologist. That’s why I was taping the party. I’ve been studying the Siesta Court Bunch for two years.”
“What can you tell me?” Nina said.
“I want to play the tape for you. I can come to your office.”
“Not a good idea. I’m tied up.”
“Then… how about tonight at my house? About eight? I’ll make tea.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You better take this one too,” Sandy said, her finger on the hold button on the phone.
Nina picked up the extension she had rigged on her table. “Hello?”
“Hi. It’s me.”
Across an ocean, flying over a continent, only slightly distorted by the thousands of miles between Stockholm, Sweden, and Carmel, California, the voice was almost instantly recognizable. “Hello, Kurt.”
“Nina.”
“It’s good to hear your voice.” Was it? She couldn’t tell how she felt. Kurt, so much part of her past, father of her only child, lived too far from her to do more than dance along the edges of her consciousness now and then.
“Same,” he said. “Listen, Nina. I’m sorry to spring this on you, but Bob… he’s impulsive. Like his mother.”
“Like his father,” she said, kidding, as Kurt had been, but wondering what he meant. “He’s okay?”
“Fine. I mean, he was fine last night when I saw him last.”
“What’s going on?”
“I told him to call you, but he said he just gets a recording. He wouldn’t leave a message. He’s on a kick.”
“Kurt, I’m trying to follow here.”
“Well, there’s news,” he said, an understatement, as it turned out.
When she hung up, Nina turned to Sandy and said, “Bob’s getting into the Monterey airport at three. I’m going to pick him up.”
“You want me to go?” She didn’t seem surprised.
“No. You have to get our motions over to the court by five.”
“How do you sign them, if you’re not here?”
Nina grabbed several sheets of pleading paper and signed them about halfway down. “You’re so good I’m going to assume you can transcribe the motions perfectly, proof them, and make them end right above the signatures on the papers.” She was signing proof-of-service forms as she spoke. “If Paul calls… don’t tell him about Bob, Sandy.”
“You sure?”
“I’m… kind of behind with this,” Nina said.
“Ooookay.”
Sandy did not say, this is what you get for not dealing with what is really happening in your life, and, for that, Nina was grateful. Nina lingered at the door for a while, issuing instructions that Sandy took in good spirit, then finally went out to the street to locate the Bronco, which had a ticket, as usual. She stuffed it into the glove box with all the others. Another thing she could not tell Paul was that she couldn’t stay in Carmel forever. The boot would get her for sure.
She drove through light afternoon traffic to Highway 68. She took the airport exit. A million questions rose in her throat. She tamped them down.
The sight of Bob waiting on the curb, as battered as his duffels, looking insecure and uncertain of his welcome, tore through all questions and doubts. Jumping from the Bronco, she grabbed him and hugged him tight. “Oh, honey!” she said.
He said nothing, just clung to her.
With no other option, she took him directly to Paul’s condo. In the car, they didn’t talk much. Bob was exhausted and incoherent. At his age, fourteen, incoherence was the norm. She had forgotten how difficult it was to pierce the haze of adolescence, but the trip reminded her immediately. Mom did not ask probing questions. Mom awaited moments of revelation. Since a fourteen-year-old boy did not understand himself, he had few such moments. Plus, he did not wish to subject himself to Mom’s judgment.
She reached over and ran her hand through his spiky hair instead.
At the condo, she helped him unload his duffel and the case with his bass in it. He couldn’t sleep on the couch in the living room; the television had its corner in that room, and the area opened up to the dining and kitchen areas. They would all go crazy with a teenager installed on the couch there.
Bob would have to set up shop in Paul’s high-tech study.
While she pushed books around on shelves to make room for a few of Bob’s things, and pulled out the sofa bed, he showered.
She found extra bedding in the hall closet, and put it on the sofa in the study along with a few throws Paul had accumulated over the years, one saying 49ers, another saying R U Experienced?
Bob came in, rubbing his hair with a towel, trailed by Hitchcock. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor near the couch. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too,” he said. He tossed the wet towel onto a desk full of papers. Nina got up to remove it. Paul would not want his papers runny and moist. Seeing the sofa with its fresh sheets, Bob crawled inside, pulling the sheet up to his neck. “I’m so tired,” he said.
“It’s a long trip from Sweden to the West Coast,” Nina said. “How long have you been traveling?”
“Forever. Honest, Mom, I lost track. I don’t even know what day it is.”
“Bob, we need to talk.”
“Sure, Mom. Go ahead.” His voice already sounded muffled.
“Because…” Because Paul doesn’t know anything about this, she thought in despair. Because I’m afraid what his reaction will be, finding this kid ensconced in his private space without warning. Because he always said he didn’t want kids at all.
“Because,” she started again, more firmly, “we have to find a better situation.”
“It isn’t the most comfortable bed in the world,” Bob said, “but it’s fine for now.”
“I didn’t know you were coming! I would have gotten a room ready.”
“I tried to call! You were never around!”
“What about my cell?”
“I always got your message center. I hate that. It’s too complicated for a message.”
“So what’s going on.”
“I wanted to come home.”
“So you did.” Home meaning… Mom?
“Right. They only charged me a hundred bucks to change my ticket, and I paid for it out of gifts I got from Uncle Matt, so that’s okay, right?”
“But, Bob…”
“It’s okay, Mom. I don’t care that this bed is hard. I could sleep out on the deck until the weekend, and never wake up.” His voice was drowsy. “There’s more. Tell you later.”
She couldn’t get another word out of him. His eyes rolled up and closed and that was that.
The duffel was full of dirty, stinking, in some cases damp, clothes. She took them into the laundry area off the hallway and started to sort, whites, darks, permanent press, unable to think about Paul coming home, what he would say. After she sorted his things, she decided to add the growing pile in the laundry basket in the main bathroom.
In the corner she saw the rolled-up pile of clothes Wish had left the night he appeared at their door.
“Ugh,” she said, pulling them out. They should have tossed these the day Wish got back. Holding the reeking ball at arm’s length, she marched to the kitchen, to the main trash can. Before she dumped the contents, she forced herself to pick through the pockets, changing her mind in the process. Let Wish decide what to do with his motley assortment.
Wish was a pack rat, like Bob. Bottle caps, crumpled paper, an old lollipop melted into its paper wrapping… he had an accumulation of goodies, some of which she couldn’t even recognize. Forcing herself to be diligent, she took it all, right down to the denim-colored lint, and stuffed it into a plastic bag. She set the contents on the kitchen counter to give to Wish later and, feeling productive, gathered up all the kitchen trash and carried a big load out to the Dumpster at the end of the buildings. She yawned. She was beat.
It was five o’clock, the adults’ witching hour, when the work stops and, if you’re lucky, the fun begins. Right on cue, she heard Paul’s Mustang muscling into the driveway.
He swept in, kicked his shoes off, and gathered her up into his cold arms. “Ah,” he said. “Alone at last.” His grin, so soon to be brutally erased, was one she knew well, and signified that he was feeling playful.
“Paul,” she said.
He put his finger over her lips. “Let’s have ourselves a TGIF nap. We are not going to discuss work. We are going to take our clothes off and frolic. I need a quick shower. Dinner after. I’ll take you out for barbecue.”
“No, Paul, wait…”
He covered her mouth with kisses, nudging her toward the bedroom. “I want you in bed, naked and ready in two minutes. Can you do that? I think you can.”
“Really, I need to tell you!”
He shut the door on her. “Shh. Save it.”
She heard him slam the door to the bathroom, and the shower going on. Might as well do what I can to mitigate the shock, he’ll find out soon enough, she thought. Hint to investigator: no hot water.
Meanwhile, she combed through her brown hair, sitting at the mirror. The woman in there was turning back into a mother right before her eyes.
He took a long time in the shower, cold water or no cold water. She crawled between the sheets to warm her cold feet. She pulled a fuzzy blue blanket up from the foot of the bed. She would just get warm… she could explain everything…
Paul wrapped the towel loosely around his waist and peeked into the bedroom. In the light of early evening through the deck doors, Nina lay on her side, pillow spread with her long soft hair, hands in prayer position under her head, knees bent. She was asleep, and he took a long moment, admiring her. What a beauty she was, and she was his now.
Humming, he decided to take a second to check his E-mail. He opened the door to his den. He stopped.
A form covered with blankets too heavy for summer lay on the sofabed. At its foot, Hitchcock lolled, eyes closed, lost in canine cogitation.
Who?
He moved in closer. Gingerly, he lifted the blanket from the face.
Bob.
Bob Reilly. Nina’s son. Home to roost.
Stepping back into the living area, gently closing the door behind him, he thought about it. He considered Nina’s preoccupation on several previous occasions. He thought he now understood the source of her anxiety.
He was feeling some anxiety himself.
He decided to pour himself a stiff one. In the kitchen, in the cabinet near the refrigerator, he located the half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. However, a glass did not come as quickly to hand. No matter. He drank from the bottle.
Better, he thought, and drank some more. After a while, a pleasant, welcoming attitude warmed his heart. Good old Bob! He liked the boy, after all!
But Bob could not live here, no, no, no.
He looked again for a shot glass. This drinking from the bottle seemed suddenly rude. Finding a souvenir from Caesars Palace at Tahoe, he filled it and downed it.
But he was hungry. It was dinnertime. All is flux, people sleep at five in the afternoon, plans go aft agley…
He checked the microwave, in case some plate was in there, still warm. Empty. He checked the refrigerator. Also nothing. The uncooked fish filet in there looked disgusting.
On the counter, nothing but an ancient wrapped turkey sandwich and a sandwich bag full of pennies and acorns and loose, discolored peppermint Lifesavers and blackened scraps of paper. He discarded the sandwich, fiddling with the bag.
Various things fell from the baggie onto the counter. They appeared to be the property of Wish Whitefeather, student, or so it seemed according to the filthy student ID he found. Finding nothing of redeeming value in the stuff, he tossed most of Wish’s bits in the garbage below the sink.
But what was this?
He examined a plastic card of electronic material, no more than a few inches long, narrow. Familiar, he thought, squinting. Oh, yes, but why here?
He knew that he had drunk too much when he stumbled slightly leaving the kitchen. He would have some coffee, he promised himself, just as soon as he checked this out.
Opening a cupboard by the television, he pulled out his camera, opened a small compartment, and pushed the thing into place.
A memory card, perfect fit.
He clicked through twelve pictures, all orange-and-yellow, flames, underexposed because Wish must have been using the automatic functions of the camera, which would not be able properly to process the brightness of the nighttime scene. Three showed people, men. Two men.
He woke Nina up.
I N THE HARSH LIGHT OF THE fire, the whole forest around Wish was revealed, bit by bit, as he had spun around, twelve pictures in all. In nine of the pictures they saw nothing but creepy-looking bushes and trees, and whiteouts of smoke.
“Blair Witch stuff,” Paul said. After sneaking into the den to retrieve it, he had moved the pictures from his camera to his portable computer screen. The bigger pictures made the faces of the men easier to see. He double-clicked on his photo program, and began doing some easy enhancements to see if there were any details he had missed on first persual. He brightened the pictures of the men, compensating for the poor exposure.
They now sat together on the couch in the living room, two cups of coffee steaming on the table, the warm body in the den behind the closed door nearby lurking between them like a monster under the bed. Nina had changed into jeans and a T-shirt. Paul now wore shorts.
They were not touching.
Wish had taken one photo of Danny in his spinning, the very first shot on the memory card, and now they saw the man who had brought Wish up the mountain, Wish’s dead friend, at last. Danny’s hand was up, shielding his face from the light, and he was grimacing. He wore a dark T-shirt over black pants. He must have flung off the Army jacket. His face was handsome, planed, stark in the light, with a thick neck and shoulders.
He looked directly at the camera and his parted lips were arrested midword. He looked familiar to Nina, as though she had met him before, and she had indeed met his type before, strong young men who ought to be building families or serving in the military but instead drifted into purposelessness.
“Good-looking dude,” Paul said, keeping his voice low. He clicked to the third and fourth shots and manipulated them so that they were side by side on the screen, and Nina saw that Wish had done it, managing in spite of his terror to take two shots that linked Coyote forever to the fire.
In the third shot, they saw mostly Coyote’s lower body as he hid or stepped out from behind a bush. He wore a long white T-shirt and jeans, and his long dark face was somewhat shadowed.
“Nothing in his hands,” Paul said, disappointed. “A can of kerosene would have been good.”
“It’s incredible just to have the shot.”
In the fourth shot he had stepped fully out and was advancing toward Wish, holding his hands up and looking scared and angry. He was built like Danny, muscled, tall, dark, and young.
“Wish was lucky,” Nina said.
“To get these pictures?” Paul’s hand moved to her thigh. They had both leaned back to study the three shots, now side by side on the computer screen, their necks stiff with the effort, as if the shots were Picassos. Which they were, lawyers’ Picassos, strong, timeless, and irrefutable.
And as mysterious as a Picasso. The two shots still did not reveal why this young man had killed three people and almost killed another.
Nina accepted his touch. “Yes, Wish was lucky to take the shots, but also to still be alive.”
“So, after tucking the memory card into his pocket, Wish drops the camera and runs at this point, and Danny gets lost for a while but catches up to him on the trail. But Coyote has followed Danny. He kills Danny and grabs Wish, who manages to escape.”
“That’s how Wish says it happened.”
“Why didn’t Wish mention this memory card? How the hell could he forget it?”
“He must have popped another one in before he ran. When the sheriff’s office found the camera on Robles Ridge it had a memory card with no photos taken.”
“That’s it, then. Why are you grinning?”
Nina said, “I’ve got something Jaime doesn’t have, and it helps Wish. Of course I’m grinning.”
“Danny couldn’t have been in on it either. If he was, Coyote wouldn’t have had any reason to kill him.”
“I know. That’s how it must be, and Wish won’t have it any other way. But Britta said Danny was in on it. She heard him plotting with Coyote, for Pete’s sake.”
“She’s lying?”
“Anyway, look at how a jury will see this. Wish up on the mountain, taking photos. Coyote caught in two of the shots. I don’t understand what part Danny may have played, but I do know this, it’s going to look like Wish was trying to catch an arsonist, and the rest is a tap dance. I don’t have to explain everything.”
Paul got up and stretched. “You going to give the photos to Jaime?”
“I have to in order to use them at the prelim. I’m going to have Wish take the stand, Paul.”
Paul shook his head. “You are the only lawyer in the whole world who would do that. Then the D.A. has months to go over what he says and twist it into anything he wants. It’s a murder case. Are you sure?”
Nina ticked the points off on her fingers. “First, he’s led a clean life, Paul. No ugly character evidence or prior felony convictions to come in and slime him if he takes the stand. They can’t mention any juvenile offenses. Second, he’s got a simple story and I think he can handle the cross-exam. Third, he’s innocent, and I think it’ll come across. Fourth, I need him to authenticate these shots and explain what he was doing up there. If he doesn’t take the stand, his story doesn’t come out, the prelim becomes a pro forma exercise, and Wish stays in jail for maybe a year.”
Paul thought about this. “But-”
“Mom?” Bob stood in the doorway in his rumpled skivvies, rubbing his eyes. Nina took in again his height, his long narrow feet, a slight shadowy hint of whiskers above his upper lip. The light fell on his face in a way that made her think of Kurt. “What time is it?”
“Seven. At night. You had a good nap.”
“Hi, Paul.”
“Hi, kid.”
“I am so hungry. Is there any food?”
Nina jumped up. “Sure, honey. What would you like? Cereal? I could fix you some scrambled eggs. Or do you want a sandwich?”
“Oh-whatever. Anything edible.”
“Come on in the kitchen.” Nina went over to Bob and gave him a quick hug.
They went into the kitchen and Nina got out the frying pan. It was seven in the evening and she and Paul had just found an important piece of evidence and Bob was sitting at the table drinking orange juice.
She broke the eggs in the pan and put toast in the toaster. In the other room Paul had passed through the duffel area and sat down at his computer. Bob looked out the doors to the deck and said, “Check that foggy night. In Stockholm it’s summer. It stays light until midnight.”
“It’s summer here too, silly.”
“What’m I gonna do now?”
“Eat. Bob-”
“Yeah?”
“I have to work tonight.”
“On Wish’s case?” She had told him on the phone about Wish.
“That’s right. We have a prelim in his case starting next week.”
“I’ll help you. Sign me up.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, honey, but-the best thing you could do is give Hitchcock lots of love right now and help him get better. Could you take on that responsibility? I would really appreciate your help.”
“Sure.” He petted the dog, who lay at his feet. Poor Hitchcock’s bandages were soiled already. The vet had given him painkillers, which made him drag around and sleep a lot. Nina patted the dog too, and tried without much success to restick the gauze on his neck. “What happened, anyway? Did Hitchcock get hit by a car?”
“A dogfight.”
“Hitchcock fought with a dog? Who won?”
“Hitchcock,” Nina said. “How are you feeling?”
“Like sh-not so good.”
“Don’t worry, everything will be fine,” Nina said, too brightly. She served him the eggs and toast and watched him eat. “Do you want to talk?” she asked.
“No, you’re busy.”
Nina dropped into the chair beside him. “Not that busy. You’ve just come from a far country. I’m sure you’ve had a million adventures, and I want to hear-”
“You have to work tonight, and we’ve got plenty of time to talk later. I have stuff to do. I have to call Taylor and Troy at Tahoe. Call Dad and tell him I made it.”
“Call your grandpa too,” Nina said. “He’ll be happy you’re here in town.”
“Yeah, I want to see Isaiah.”
Nina left him eating and went into the bedroom to get her jacket. From the kitchen to the bedroom she had to go through the living room, where Paul was now sitting on the couch talking on the phone and leaning over at an uncomfortable angle to look at the photos again. Bob’s open duffel lay in the corner, and his carry-on knapsack lay in the middle of the floor.
She picked it up and set it inside the den, saw the sofa sleeper with its roil of blankets taking up most of the room, and got busy.
Kitchen, bedroom, living room, and study. The place already felt like a tiny box, now that Bob was in it.
Isaiah, Angie, Harlan. Family who had been comfortably distant, moving in fast on her radarscope, now that Bob had come. Her father, big, filling up emotional space she couldn’t spare right now.
She sat down on the bed. Between Paul and Wish, she had thought the motel was full up. But now Bob was here. For a moment, she panicked. But following this, she thought of Bob in the kitchen, eating eggs, and inside her, something that had been tense and anxious and incomplete soothed and smoothed itself.
The Boy was back. She was complete again. And happy.
Paul, one finger looped in the top of his shorts, observed. “You’ll be going, then,” he said.
“Not necessarily,” Nina said, punching in Elizabeth’s number.
“Yes, you will. And you will avoid the inevitable confrontation.”
She held the phone to her ear, desperate for an answer.
“Can’t put it off forever, Ms. Reilly,” he said. He drank some cold coffee, making a face. “Things have changed. Must reevaluate options. I’m going if you go. Protect and serve.”
“You can’t, Paul. You’ve been drinking.”
Elizabeth answered. “Nina? You’re coming, aren’t you?”
“I was wondering if we could make this tomorrow?” Nina asked.
“I’m leaving for the weekend. I have to get away. You really ought to make it if you can.”
She let her brown eyes rest on Paul’s bloodshot hazel eyes. “On my way,” she said. He looked away.
Nina drove out Carmel Valley Road listening to the Cal State station blasting hip-hop. She didn’t want to think. Sometimes, and this was the human condition, wasn’t it, sometimes she relied solely upon emotions to inspire her next move.
The human condition, irrational, unpredictable, people just trying to scrabble through life-the truth is, we don’t think very well.
Eminem’s song about cleaning out his closet came on, and she remembered the Boyz cleaning house to that very tune. She turned it up to make it so loud, the people in the car passing her illegally on the right could hear the earth-shattering bass. She sang “I never meant to hurt you-u-u” along with the chorus. Son home, lover drunk.
Fine. Go to work. She felt quite alert after the nap.
At Southbank Road, she turned and climbed up the hill toward Elizabeth Gold’s. The house, larger than she would ever have dreamed, had that expensive up-lighting that turned greenery and home into a movie set.
Elizabeth, luminous in a clingy bamboo-spangled robe, answered the door promptly. Not exactly trained sociologist attire, which caused Nina to think again, she’s in danger of turning into Virginia Woolf.
She took Nina into a living room that resembled the inside of a cathedral. Gigantic, sparkling windows curved along one whole wall, pines and oaks fluttered beyond.
“Wow,” she said, starting off with some especially articulate lawyer talk.
“Thanks,” said Elizabeth. “Want to try some lapsang souchong?”
“Whatever.”
Elizabeth left Nina to admire the scenery, returning after some time with a tray loaded with teapot, honey, noncaloric sweetener, and a colorful tin tea canister.
“I’ll bet you see deer out there,” Nina said, stirring honey into the tea.
“They eat everything.” Elizabeth hadn’t sat down, but had gone to the window, looking dreamily out. “If they don’t, the gophers do. One year I planted three Japanese maple trees. The gophers ate the root balls. They just toppled over one fine day.”
“But it’s beautiful,” Nina said.
“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed. “I wanted a fortress. A nunnery of one. I found an architect who specialized in women like me.” She smiled. “He enjoyed building to the absolute limit allowed by law. The size is obscene, I know. One time the Cat Lady came up to me as I was getting into my car in the driveway and she whispered, ‘Obscenely wealthy people should have their wealth taken.’ ”
“The Twelve Points,” Nina said. “That was only one of her pillars of wisdom.”
“She was right. If you don’t use your surplus money to help others, you ought to have it taken for that purpose. I’ve given so much away, I may have to actually start working for a living.” She laughed. “But the house… it’s my security. I’m trying to decide if it’s my prison too.”
Elizabeth stirred honey into her tea, her movements as exquisite as a geisha’s. It irritated Nina, how much time she seemed to have to pay attention to small things, to be sensitive, to think about herself. She realized she felt envious of the young woman sitting in her luxurious home. She knew from the Siesta Court party that Elizabeth inspired that reaction in others too.
“So what’s on those tapes?” she said abruptly.
Elizabeth sipped. “I don’t know if you’ve studied sociology.”
Nina shook her head.
“I’m working on my Ph.D. thesis. In my branch of study, we look at group dynamics and power struggles.”
Nina said, “You taped those people as a research project?”
“Well,” Elizabeth said, “for years my sister, Debbie, talked about these get-togethers she hosted. I listened, feeling like I was listening to a weekday-afternoon soap. The characters seemed like cardboard. The conflicts between the locals and the newcomers were so aptly illustrated they almost seemed contrived, you know? When I moved here, I really thought it would be interesting to take an objective look-see. I decided to write my thesis about gentrification on Siesta Court.”
Nina said, “How does your sister feel about that?”
“Debbie doesn’t know. None of them know. It would affect their behavior and ruin the study.”
“But-you’re part of it. You affect the parties and their behavior.”
“Not really. I keep a very low profile. You’re smiling. You don’t think I’m sufficiently objective. I can compensate for these problems.” She sighed. “Actually, you’re right. I have just developed a rather significant objectivity problem.”
“And his name is Ben,” Nina said. “We ladies do have a grapevine.”
Elizabeth tensed, then smiled back. “I can find something else to write about,” she said. “I won’t find another Ben. If you know about Ben, I suppose you also know how Darryl Eubanks has been harassing me.”
“That too.”
“I’ve taken care of it.”
Nina said, “You know, Elizabeth, I’m interested in sociology and psychology, and I can’t wait to hear what you’ve discovered in connection with your thesis. But what I’d really, really like to know right now is how you’ve taken care of Darryl.”
Now they were both smiling. “I called Tory, his wife, and had a chat with her,” Elizabeth said. “I took the bull by the horns.”
“Wow,” Nina said again, impressed.
“I explained that Darryl was having a problem, and I suggested counseling.”
“How did she react?”
“She slammed the phone down in my ear. I believe she’ll calm down quickly and have a rational discussion with him and that he will stop bothering me.”
“No doubt.”
“You’re making fun of me?”
“Not at all. I just have less faith in the rule of reason than you when it comes to human beings.”
“Maybe when this is all over we could have lunch together,” Elizabeth said. “I’d like to make some friends. What do you think?”
“Sure.” They nodded at each other. Nina felt as though she had been handed an unexpected gift. She liked Elizabeth, and she also needed a friend.
“I promise not to tape you,” Elizabeth went on, and laughed.
“Speaking of tapes…”
Nina received a ten-minute lecture about the classifications Elizabeth had assigned to each of the neighbors, and her hypothesis that the newbies, though fewer in number, were winning the power struggle, not only because they had a monetary advantage, but also because they possessed what Elizabeth called a “timely” advantage.
“Different groups of people develop at different rates,” she explained. “The newbies live in the twenty-first century. The locals live in about 1960. I have surveyed both groups informally. The mores of the locals haven’t stopped developing, but the rate of development has been slower because they stayed in their enclave and didn’t experience as many upheavals as the newbies. The newbies move all the time. It speeds them up.”
“I never heard this idea before,” Nina said.
“I made it up. It explains so many things. Of course I will have numerous references to other authorities who have said something similar. But no one has put it exactly this way.”
“So never the twain shall meet? The newbies and the locals are fated to slug it out, and the locals will fade away?”
“And then the newbies will become entrenched, and slow down. And they will become locals. If they’re lucky, they will have some time before the next wave of newbies arrives.”
“What happens to this ongoing power struggle if an outside threat comes along that threatens both groups?”
“That’s exactly what happened.”
“That’s exactly what happened? You mean on Siesta Court? When the Green River development started?”
“Obviously.”
“And all this has to do with your tapes?”
“Yes. For all this time I have been quite sure that the core group issue was gentrification. The subjects aligned according to their newbie/local status as predicted.
“But then about two months ago, I noticed a change in the dynamic of the block parties. I would listen to the tapes afterward, and in the middle of the usual hanky-panky and drinking and skinned knees on the kids, I realized that a surprising new set of alliances had formed and most of the group energy had transferred there.”
Nina waited.
“Very sudden and very powerful, this shift. Different people became leaders, and some people became irrelevant. The dynamic changed utterly.”
“Go on.”
“The alliances solidified and secrets developed.”
“You’re too general,” Nina said. “This is interesting, but I know you asked me here to tell me something important about my client’s case. It’s late, Elizabeth.”
Elizabeth said, leaning forward, “I’ll make it simple. The men allied. And the women allied. Across the newbie/local lines.”
Nina considered this. “They broke into gender-based groups over the conflict with the subdivision?”
“Precisely.”
“Secrets developed?”
“The men began holding private conversations. I should mention that Ben was the exception throughout. He was kept outside.”
“Why?”
“I think-I think they knew Ben wouldn’t want to get involved.”
“Involved in what?”
“I’m not sure. Now. Remember, at this time Danny was still alive. He had always been an outsider too. Suddenly he was talking a lot and being listened to. He was an integral part of this new alliance.
“I could only catch bits and pieces of their conversations during the parties. They always came back to the Green River development. I’m quite sure that they began holding other conversations outside the parties. Away from the women, whom they didn’t trust.”
“And you say the women began doing the same thing? Meeting secretly?”
“Not exactly. They had always used that extremely fast and efficient telegraph called gossip, but they talked as a group more than they used to. I was curious as to why they tolerated Britta at all. But then I realized that Britta had an important role as the transgressive woman in the group. They all had the same issue-the men were shutting them out, and they all felt resentful. Actually, the men had always shut them out in various ways-George keeping Jolene from their money, Darryl shutting Tory out emotionally-but this was a conspicuous exacerbation.”
“You mean they tolerated Britta because she caused so much trouble?” Nina asked, amazed.
“Oh, yes, Britta helped all the women vent their frustrations. Did you notice how muted Debbie’s response was to Britta’s transgression with her husband, Sam?”
“You mean the lap dance?”
“Yes. It reminds me of the custom in a certain African tribe. It’s called ‘sitting on a man.’ The women go to the hut of a man who has violated some social custom and compel him to submit to the very same obscenity. It’s a sexual attack. Humiliating. Degrading.”
“You’re kidding,” Nina said. “The women despise Britta.”
“Consciously, they do. Unconsciously, they admire her.”
“You know, I think you’re right. It was like a-a rape,” Nina said. Elizabeth nodded.
“Then Danny died. The last tape I made-at the party you went to-contains a few bits of conversation from one of those male groupings. I want to play it for you.” She got up and led Nina into a book-lined study, green-walled and octagonal, like the tower of a princess in a fairy tale. She had already inserted the cassette into the player, and she switched it on and off at each phrase, watching Nina’s reactions.
“This is Britta,” she said.
“What’re you guys talking about, hmm?”
“Sam answers her”:
“Danny. We’re toasting Danny.”
“They all laugh here, you can hear it, and I don’t know who says this”:
“Good riddance.”
“Now another group response”:
“Yeah.”
“And that’s what I thought you should hear,” Elizabeth concluded. They were both standing, and both very excited.
Nina said, “They were glad Danny was dead.”
“They were toasting his death,” Elizabeth said. “Fascinating, no?”