A Stranger in My Grave (15 page)

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

“Oh yes. Speaking of money...”

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

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

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

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

“Will you do me a favor?”

“I might.”

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

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

“As soon as possible.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

12

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

 

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

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

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

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

“Where's the waitress?” Fielding said.

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

“Nita.”

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

“What's your name, son?”

“Chico.”

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

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

“How old are you, Chico?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Come off it, kid.”

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

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

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

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

“Surprised?”

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

“Ham on rye, bottle of Western beer.”

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

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

“So's the food. Why come here?”

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

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

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

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

“I was a little drunk.”

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

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

“What for?” Juanita asked suspiciously.

“Rest your feet.”

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

“I've been told once or twice.”

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

“No.”

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

“Smart girl.”

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

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

“Nobody. Just them. The town.”

“Where have you been living?”

“L.A.”

“Why'd you come back here?”

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

“I haven't thought about it yet.”

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

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

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

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

“He's a friend of mine.”

“Since when, five minutes ago?”

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

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

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

“It's not bad.”

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

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

“Sure.”

“You look too young to have children.”

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

“Go on, you're pulling my leg.”

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

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

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

“Six. Well, I'll be damned.”

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

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

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

“I bet they're cute.”

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

“Have you any pictures of them?”

“What for?”

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

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

“I would, for one.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It used to be, didn't it?”

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

Fielding nodded. “Of course.”