Thicker Than Blood (13 page)

A man looked up from his paperwork at the jingle of a bell when Rachel opened the door. His white shirt was so full of starch the fold marks stood out. The name Jeff was embroidered in a white oval above the pocket. “Yeah?” He threw his pencil down but didn’t get up. “Tax audit,” he growled. “Three hundred million liars out there and they have to pick me.”

“Sorry for interrupting. I’m not even sure I’m in the right place. I’m looking for a late-model Caddy that had a dented—”

“You a fuzz?”

Rachel almost laughed. “No. It’s my father, you see. He used to be very sharp and everything, but now he’s sort of…forgetful. He took the car to a body shop in this area because of a dented right front fender, and now he can’t remember where he took it.”

Jeff stared at her a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. Happens, don’t it? We’re living longer these days, but we can’t even remember who we are. Piece of crap, you know? Then we arrive at the pearly gates, and they audit your goddam life.”

She examined her thumbnail. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a Caddy like that in here for repair? It’s a late-model. Black.” She hoped that if the car was there, Jeff wouldn’t remember that it bore an E plate and couldn’t have belonged to an absentminded old man.

He thought a moment. “Not that I remember, but already I’m losing it. Have a look for yourself.” He pointed at a door to the right of his desk.

“Just go look?”

“You need an escort? No one here but me. Can’t get a good body man to come in before eight-thirty.”

“Thanks,” she said moving to the door. Engrossed in his paperwork, he didn’t look up.

Nine cars sat in various states of disarray like women in a department store dressing room. The only black car was a Chrysler.

“Thanks anyway,” she told Jeff, who grunted as she exited to the street.

333

An overhead light gleamed on the balding forehead of the round-shouldered, round-faced man behind the counter at Benchmark Analytic as Rachel handed him a Ziploc bag.

Wordless, he tipped his chin up to peer at it through bifocals. Wiping perfectly clean fingers on the front of his short-sleeve white shirt, he plucked at his necktie, then held the bag up to gaze at it again. He put it down as carefully as if it were an egg, picked up the brown envelope, folded back the flap, and examined the contents.

Rachel shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She had given her name as Wanda Feiner. “They look the same, don’t they?”

His round shoulders rose and fell noncommittally. “Many substances look alike.”

“Can you tell me what they are?”

He was peering into the brown envelope again. “Expect we can.”

“How long will it take?”

He fixed her with an owlish gaze that declared that the first mark of civilization was patience. “You have no idea what it is?”

She shook her head. “None. Could be sugar for all I know.”

His watery blue eyes looked at her sadly. “I’m afraid we’re a bit backed up. At least a week, possibly two.”

Rachel rubbed a thumb over her forehead. “What if they turn out to be a…?”

He cleared his throat and then supplied, “Pharmaceutical?” His round face grew a shade pinker.

“All right, yes, a drug. Suppose it’s even an illegal drug?”

“I expect we could not return it to you.”

“You’d just confiscate it?”

“We would have to let the police know. I hope it’s nothing of that sort. The paperwork is terrible.” He held the paper she had filled out between two fingers, then laid it on the counter. “You forgot to fill in your phone number.”

“I’m not in much. I’ll call next week.”

“Cell phone?”

“I’ve never needed one.”

“We do need a number.”

She wrote the garage number down, reversing the last two digits.

Chapter Twenty-two

Charlotte Emerson closed the door of her office and took a zippered packet from her purse. It was embroidered in bright greens and blues and contained her makeup. In the adjoining restroom, she stood before a mirror framed with blue stained glass, feeling as if she were primping for a date. In a way, she told herself, she was. Perhaps the most important date of her life.

This was why she had done it. This was why she had wanted to become chairman. This would set the stage for the renaissance of this wild, throbbing, gasping, choking, astonishing place called the Southland by those who knew and loved it best.

Why, she wondered, does water howl in the Emerson veins like a werewolf?

She ran a tissue over her face. “Not a bad complexion for an old lady,” she said aloud, well aware that her warm ivory skin was the envy of women far younger. She brushed blusher onto her cheeks and darkened her eyebrows with a little mascara.

They hadn’t wanted to meet in either of their offices, settling instead on neutral territory. And Charlotte would be just a little late. Seven minutes would be about right.

She blotted the rose lipstick, put the cosmetics in her desk, took her navy blue leather purse, and told her secretary Janet she would be late returning from lunch. It was only six blocks. She would walk. Parking was a nightmare and she needed the exercise.

The streets were crowded with Asian youngsters. Scrubbed and groomed within an inch of their lives, they toted book bags, looking more like Valley girls and boys than kids who lived in the San Fernando Valley.

An Anglo man was trudging toward her. His beard was gray and shabby, his shirt filthy, but his eyes were clear. He held out his hand in a silent plea. Charlotte opened her purse and took out a dollar. No, she would make it a twenty, in honor of the day. He was still blinking at it when she glanced back a block later.

The old man and the shiny kids would have better lives because of what she had agreed to.

Eventually. Ultimately.

She reminded herself that for a while, things might get worse. At first she had been uneasy. But the greater good, as her father used to say, demands sacrifices from time to time.

She covered the few blocks briskly. Already she could see the silly drawing on the green enamel sign. Charlotte slowed, brushed a shred of lint from her navy gabardine skirt, lifted her chin, crossed the street, and opened the door.

333

On the fourth floor of Everly Laboratories, Alfred Lieberman pressed the toe of his well-worn loafer against the bottom drawer of his desk and pushed. His swivel chair rolled across the white linoleum to another desk.

Susan Stankowski turned an ankle trying to follow him in her new high-heeled shoes. “Of course I’m sure the figures are right,” she said.

Alfred checked the figures again, absently running his fingers through his thick thatch of dark hair, sprinkling dandruff on his thick glasses. Without taking his eyes off the figures, he removed the glasses, wiped them with a rumpled handkerchief, replaced them on the long nose, and tapped the end of a ballpoint pen on a cheek scarred by acne during an adolescence he could hardly remember. “Interesting,” he muttered.

Susan smoothed her newly styled, highlighted, and moussed hair. After nearly twenty years of preferring research to men, Susan had fallen in love.

Alfred liked her work okay, he just never seemed to see her. After appraising her thin face and angular body in the ladies’ room mirror, Susan had spent a week of her vacation and a month’s pay at a spa being “made over.” She was still struggling to master her new persona. Not that it mattered. Alfred hadn’t noticed.

Now, however, she had his attention. With a perfectly ordinary job of spectrochemical analysis. “Would you…,” she began, then rehearsed the rest of the sentence in her head and started over. “Would you like to come over for dinner Friday?”

Alfred hadn’t caught the interruption in her speech. He was still examining the figures. “This is going to excite a few people,” he said to no one in particular.

“Why?” Susan dropped her hand to the desktop.

“If that’s what’s ailing those ducks, it had to come from the soil. My guess is irrigation water leached it out and washed it into those ponds. Exactly what happened at Kessler. Except this is much, much worse. The environmentalists will be hopping mad. Good thing we’re not farmers.”

He moved his eyes to Susan and stared. “Did you do something to your hair?”

333

Carole Steigholtz was mad. She hardly ever got angry, but this time she was really mad.

It was bad enough that as Assistant Director of Water Quality she had to run the whole shop while Harry schmoozed with reporters and visiting dignitaries. This was too much.

Eyes flashed in the squarish face that had never been contaminated by makeup. Short stubby fingers around the pen showed white at the tips as Carole jotted down numbers from the gas chromatograph printout. For the fourth time, her sensible shoes marched across the tile floor to Harry’s office. A little cowlick of short-cropped brown hair bobbed as she marched.

She’d left him a note. She’d called him at home and left a message on his blankety-blank machine. She was still itching to tell him face-to-face her opinion of his behavior.

Last time, he’d been shacked up with the little bar kitten whose peroxided bangs did nothing to cover the lack of a brain. Carole had covered for Harry then, and the time before. But this was one time too many.

Chapter Twenty-three

The Pig’s Whistle, for all its seediness, was a much-loved watering hole for blue- and white-collar crowds alike. Some of the clientele had something to celebrate, others a rotten day to forget, and there were always those with something at home they couldn’t face without a drink.

“Soda on ice,” Rachel told the short, swarthy bartender, who was chewing on a toothpick as though his life depended on turning it to pulp. He eyed her stolidly, then stabbed a glass into the ice bin as she sat down at the bar.

“Got a piece of lemon?” she asked as he unceremoniously set the drink before her. He slid a small plate of lemon slices down the bar; it came to a stop directly in front of her.

Five televisions suspended on various shelves were set on mute, the talking heads working their mouths earnestly. Someone was playing an old Beatles tune on an even older jukebox.

Would Hank come? Or would he forget the time, like her father did when his poker game was on a roll?

The bartender nodded at her club soda. “Just quit drinking myself.” He spit out the ruined toothpick and replaced it with another.

“Hey, good for you. The first couple months are tough, but it gets easier.”

“Piece of cake.”

She had downed her drink and was asking for another when the door opened, admitting a short, stocky man in a yellow sweater that did little to mask a barrel-like midsection.

“Bruno!” she waved.

“Hey, kid.” He hoisted himself onto the stool next to hers.

She caught his long look at her drink. “Soda, Bruno, only soda. Smell it.” She held out the glass, feeling like a twelve-year-old, but doing it anyway. “Want a taste?”

“Since when is it any of my business?” He wagged a finger at the bartender. “J and B and water, easy on the water.”

“I didn’t know you were in town.”

“Emergency Farm Bureau meeting. We got trouble, kid. Big time trouble.” He took a gulp of his scotch and sagged over the bar.

She put her hand on his arm. “Like what?”

“Those ponds.”

“What ponds?” Rachel squeezed some lemon into her soda and took a sip.

“Up by Salinas. It was me talked the guys into donating the land. I got newspaper clippings of me shaking hands with Tony Holland. You know Tony? Environmental Defense Fund. The mealy-mouth bastard. Now he’s blaming us like we were doing it on purpose.”

“Blaming you for what?” Rachel knew that to Bruno, farming was the next thing to a religious calling.

His face turned even more dour. “Those damn enviro nuts think we’d kill anything for a buck. They say we’re poisoning wildlife.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We built those ponds to take irrigation water that runs off the farms and evaporate it. Then these enviros said we should plant some weeds, make it some kind of paradise for birds, and give the whole kit and caboodle to them. I think okay, why not make some points, maybe the nuts stop snapping at our backsides for a while. So I talk the guys into it. Now they say the runoff is full of poison, like we planned it that way. Sure. Why not? Don’t everybody like to hurt ducks?”

“What does that mean? Is it a pesticide?”

Bruno ordered himself another Scotch and her another “whatever.” Then he removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Wish I knew, kid. Wish I knew. They just might be able to ruin us this time. They been trying for a lot of years. They may go after the water folks, too.”

“Why?”

The bar had filled up. Someone played “Only the Good Die Young” on the jukebox. No new music had been added in at least ten years, but the crowds never seemed to mind.

“Farmers get cheap water, you know that,” Bruno said.

“We took ours out of the delta, for free,” she said. “We had to keep an eye on the levees or we got flooded. That’s about all I know.”

“We get delta water in the valley, too, but it comes in an aqueduct. Thank God that pipe got built before the green nuts were hatched. The water’s pretty cheap. If it wasn’t, we’d have to charge five bucks a melon.”

Rachel tried to look attentive, but her eyes kept darting back to the entrance. Where was Hank?

Bruno didn’t notice. He was staring into his glass. “InterUrban wants more water for the people down here. That’s their job. The enviros have just about managed to cut them off.”

Billy Joel’s voice from the old jukebox came to an end.

Bruno’s had not. Rachel had never seen him so dejected.

“Lots of voters down here,” he said, examining the ice cubes in his glass, as if they were tea leaves. “But none of them knows beans about water, so the city water guys—that’s mostly InterUrban—line up with us because ag has a good lobby and we sure as hell know about water. Between us, we’ve had enough votes in the legislature to keep the duck-lovers from cutting our throats and eating our gizzards.”

The door opened, ushering in a breeze from the street. Hank stepped inside and scanned the crowd. Rachel caught his eye and waved.