Thicker Than Blood (3 page)

Chapter Five

The parking lot at the poker club was jammed with cars. Rachel parked, wondering why she had agreed to meet her father there. She should have insisted on somewhere else.

Marty rose from a red-vinyl booth when she entered. It was from him Rachel had gotten her almost black hair, her high cheekbones.

She winced a little at his appearance. His thick hair was now white, there were smudges under his eyes, and his clothes looked like ten-year-old Kmart specials. But when his arms closed around her she almost felt like a child again. Unexpected burning pricked at her eyelids. “Hi, Pop. Good to see you.”

Marty lowered his head. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

She dropped her eyes. “Why?”

He jerked a finger at the surroundings. “I mean here, to the club.”

“Well, the food usually stinks,” she said, sitting down. “But I figured that if you got into a game, you’d stand me up anywhere else. At least I knew you’d be here.”

“Haven’t seen my little girl for what? Eight months? And the first thing she says is she thinks I’d stand her up?”

She leveled her eyes at him. “I don’t think it, Pop. I know it.”

“That was years ago.”

“Three years. Almost exactly. I was in trouble. You told me you’d come.”

He ducked his head and peered with great interest at the menu. “I know, okay. I know. But that game was…. I’ve never had another like it. I thought I was going to win enough to get the farm back. For you. It was for you.”

She sighed, but said nothing. The fish they ordered was greasy and overdone. Rachel ate what she could and put her fork down.

Marty glanced at her. “Not like the channel cat we used to catch in the Two Forks, is it? Your mama didn’t approve, of course. We had no business going fishing. You should have been studying. I should have been working.” He grinned like a small boy. “But we all sure ate a lot of that fish.”

The lamp that hung over the table made a rectangle of light between them. She watched him through it. “Nothing will ever be quite that good again.”

He glanced down at the table, then back at her. “There’s still plenty of time for you to hear the tortoise sing.”

The statement tore a laugh from her. Her first-grade teacher had assigned animals for the kids to imitate. Rachel’s was the tortoise. “I made such a fuss about that damn tortoise. I was so insulted. But you said—”

“—the tortoise is a wonderful creature, with a lovely voice,” Marty finished her sentence, a long-missing twinkle beginning to kindle in his eyes. “When the moon is full and the night is warm and the tortoise has reached his goal, he lifts his head, closes his eyes, and sings.”

“I believed you. Back then, I believed every word you said.” The singing tortoise made her think of Jason’s tie tack.

Marty’s face had gone solemn. “You’re doing okay now though, aren’t you?”

“Well enough, I guess. Thanks to Grandpa.”

Marty looked down, then at the wall. “Who would have thought that prissy Marvin Feinberg had built something as common and greasy as a parking garage. In LA, yet. Not in his beloved San Francisco.”

“Well, if he hadn’t, and if Mom hadn’t left me enough to pay the back taxes, I’d still be living in that dreadful little room, flipping burgers for a living.”

“But you’re okay now?” Marty asked again as the waitress cleared the table.

Rachel folded her arms on the orange plastic place mat. Her water glass was fogged with vapor. She drew an X on it, then brusquely wiped it clean. “I’m not using, if that’s what you mean.”

Marty nodded and leaned back in the booth. “Good. I knew you weren’t.”

Her expression stiffened. “No, you didn’t, Pop, or you wouldn’t have asked. So, I’m okay in that way, but I do have a sort of weird problem.”

Marty was watching her intently. “Like what?”

“The head of InterUrban was killed a couple days ago. The cops think it was an ordinary hit and run, some drunk who didn’t stop. Maybe it was. But I think the car that did it is in my garage.” She twisted her napkin into a rope. “It belongs to the water agency’s fleet.”

Marty’s anxious blue eyes examined his daughter’s face while she explained why she was so certain. Then his brows drew into a straight line. “You can’t get mixed up in that. It’s not your problem.”

“I wasn’t planning on getting mixed up in it. I was thinking of phoning in an anonymous tip. Like tonight. Whoever it is will be getting that car out of there real soon.”

“But it would have to be one of the water people, wouldn’t it? Your biggest customer. And the cops would come to the garage. They’d want to talk to you even if the tip was anonymous.”

Circles of pink bloomed on her cheeks. “But how can I know and not tell anyone?”

“Listen to your old Dad on this, sweetie. Pretend you never saw it.”

“I guess,” she said slowly. The two words hung in the air.

“Damn right. You’re getting along real well now.”

She gave a small hiccup of laughter. “Compared to three years ago, things are fantastic.”

His eyes skidded away toward the entrance to the poker room. “I was wondering.…”

Abruptly she thought she knew why he had wanted to have dinner. “How much?”

“Just a couple hundred, Rachel. Even one hundred would help.”

She ran her tongue along her bottom lip. “I don’t have a couple hundred to spare. The liability insurance on the garage is due.”

He looked away. “Okay, okay. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

She took her purse from the seat beside her. “I can do a hundred, but that’s about it. She hesitated, annoyed at the tears clouding her vision, then counted out five twenties on the table.

The pathetic look in his eyes blurred her vision more. She handed him another twenty from her billfold. “That’s for this sorry excuse of a meal.”

She watched her father’s forlorn smile flicker and go out. His face seemed more deeply etched, more haggard each time she saw him. He sometimes played cards for forty hours without sleep. How much longer could he go on this way?

Rising from the booth, Rachel straightened her clothes. “You’re a sorry SOB, Pop, but I love you.” She leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and left.

By the time she got back to the garage, it was full dark.

Rachel made her rounds, locked up, and was heading for the elevator when someone began banging on one of the metal doors.

“The garage is closed,” she shouted.

“I know, I know.” She knew the voice: Hank. “Late again,” he called. “I don’t suppose you’d let me get my car out.”

She made a face, but unlocked the door. He loomed before her, taller than she remembered, his shirt and hair purplish in the streetlight.

“I can’t make a practice of this,” she said. “The insurance, for one thing.”

Something about his expression stopped her annoyance. “Okay, I guess I owe you something for not filing an assault and battery. I’ll wait while you get your car.”

He hung his head, and started up the ramp. “Thanks. I sure didn’t want to call a cab.”

“What are you doing working so late?” she called after him. “Don’t you have another life?”

A van full of cleaning people had pulled up across the street in front of InterUrban headquarters by the time Hank’s car appeared at the gate. She waited for him to pass, but he stopped, rolled down the window and called, “Got an idea.”

She tried to see his face in the dim light, but all she could make out was the shock of straight blond hair swinging across his brow. “Oh?”

“You’re right. I’m working too much. It’s getting to where I’m just not running on all cylinders. And every night for the past four nights I’ve dreamt about going fishing.”

“Good idea. Get some rest.”

“Wouldn’t have to go far.” He fiddled with the steering wheel.

She waited, then bent down to look in the window. “You want to leave your car here overnight sometime? That would be okay.”

“I thought maybe you might come along. You look like you’re under a little strain yourself.”

She straightened up slowly. Her hand wandered to her face. “It’s real hard for me to get away. No one to look after things.”

“Just a thought.” The streetlight made a triangle on Hank’s jaw. He put the car in gear.

Rachel listened to the tires squeal as the Mustang rounded the corner. A free-floating anxiety washed over her and she wished she hadn’t told him about the blood on the Caddy’s fender.

Chapter Six

The steel door had barely clanked into place after Hank’s exit when a voice boomed from the other side, “Rachel! You here?”

She pushed the control to raise the door.

Built like a paperweight, close to the ground and formidable, Bruno Calabrese was pacing the sidewalk with his usual pent-up energy. He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “Why you living like this when you could be an old man’s trinket?”

Rachel rolled her eyes at him. “You’re only fifty. What are you doing here? Don’t tell me the water board meeting lasted this late.”

“I tried to find you earlier, but you were gadding about.”

“I still don’t understand why you come to InterUrban meetings. They do city water. What do they have to do with farming?”

“No more than cats have to do with mice. If I don’t watch out, one of these days I’ll go out to irrigate and my pumps will be sucking air. They’d steal every last drop.”

“Can’t be that bad.”

“Worse. Gotta keep an eye on the thieves. Little trick I learnt from your grandpa. And he would never forgive me if I didn’t keep an eye on you, too.”

Once her grandfather’s protégé, Bruno had done everything Enrique Chavez had told him to do, right down to marrying ten square miles of the best farmland in the Central Valley. His wife died young and Bruno was still happily farming the land she left him.

It was because of Enrique, long dead by then, that Bruno had sent his own attorney to bail Rachel out of jail three years ago.

Bruno regarded her with a frown. “This really is a crazy way for a nice girl to live.”

“It’s not so bad. Come up and see what I’ve added.”

“Holy Mary,” he said when she opened the door to the apartment. “You got new bookshelves.” He whistled. “And a thousand books.”

“The books are old. But I finally got around to building the shelves. You into books, Bruno?”

“When have I got time to read? I gotta be up at four with the cantaloupes. Nice for you, though. Better you should be a teacher than a grease jockey.”

He strode across the room, his stocky body rolling on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter, and examined the shelves. “Good job. But why would a woman want to use a hammer and saw?”

“Because she couldn’t afford to hire it done.” Rachel took a ceramic pot from a cabinet. “Coffee keeps me awake. You want some tea?”

“Sure.”

As she ran water into the pot he said solemnly, “Why I am here, I got a proposition for you. Actually, I got two, but if you take the first, you don’t need the second.”

“Okay.”

“I think, you and me, we oughta get married.”

Rachel barely saved the pot from crashing to the floor and didn’t turn her head to Bruno until she was sure the worst of the shock had faded from her face. Then she laughed lightly. “You been fooling around with a controlled substance?”

“Nope. I’m dead serious.”

“But….” She pulled on the hem of her bright green tee shirt. “Why?” She finished weakly.

“Is that the only teapot you got?”

“It makes perfectly good tea.”

“We oughta get married because your family’s mostly gone, except for your Pa, bless his heart, but I bet dollars to doughnuts he’s usually asking for help instead of givin’ it.”

Rachel lifted one shoulder and let it drop.

Bruno went on, “I got no wife, and you got no china.”

“China? What does china have to do with anything?”

“You think china don’t have to do with anything? It has everything to do with it. What are you doing standing there? Make the tea. I tell you a story.” Bruno paced, waving his hands as he talked.

“I was eleven years old when my Mama shook me awake and told me to get dressed. That was in the old country, Italy. We got packs strapped to our backs, and we walk, all the way up the mountains, then down. Now me, I was always short, and I didn’t have much muscle yet, and my pack, I didn’t know what was in it, but it was damn heavy. Mama had food in hers and Papa had clothes and tools, so I figured mine had to be real valuable. Lira maybe. Silver, gold. Even when that pack rubbed blisters, I was proud they trusted me to carry it.”

Rachel set water to boiling, listening intently, partly because she’d never heard this story, partly it kept her face busy lest the shock still show.

“We go clear over the mountains to Genoa and get on a ship. I was still carrying that pack around every day because we didn’t have anything grand, like a cabin. We were on that ship a lot of days, and then more days on a train. Finally, Papa said we were in California and this was home. That was okay by me. I was plenty tired of carrying that pack. That night I found out what was in it.”

Rachel handed Bruno a mug of tea and he looked into it as if reading the leaves.

“That was just about the biggest little bombshell of my life,” he mused.

“What was in it?”

“My grandmama’s china. Not lira, not silver, not gold, not even food. China.”

“You’re joking! They made you carry dishes halfway around the world?”

“That’s what I thought. But I was a kid. I was wrong. That china was just as important as food and clothes, maybe more important than lira.”

Rachel stared at him. “Excuse me! I don’t think so. I’ve never known anyone who couldn’t eat off a paper plate.”

“That china was all we had of our old home, our past. What I carried in that pack was tradition. It’s why I’m a farmer. Old Enrique, he understood that. His own father, his grandfather—farmers, like mine. He must be spinning in his grave to think you been thrown off his land. Come back. If you can’t go to his farm, come to mine.”

Looking at the cup, not at her, he ran his finger around the edge, then held it up. “This cup, it’s heavy, made of mud. You got no china.”

Rachel blinked. For a moment, no words came. She owed him too much to be flippant. She couldn’t tell him she felt no loss of tradition, that for that matter, her mother had come from a Jewish family in San Francisco.