A Stranger in My Grave (13 page)

“It's a little too gaudy. When you're hitchhiking, it pays to look as conservative as possible, like a gentleman whose Cadillac has just had a flat tire and he can't find a telephone.”

“Like that, eh?”

“Yes.”

“What are you going to use for a Cadillac?”

“My imagination, love. When I'm standing out there on the freeway, I'm going to imagine that Cadillac so hard that other people will see it.”

“Why don't you start right now so's I can see it, too?”

“I
have
started.” He went over to the window and pulled back the grimy pink net curtain. “There. What do you see?”

“Cars. About a million cars.”

“One of them's my Cadillac.” Letting the curtain drop into place, he drew himself up to his full height and adjusted an imagi­nary monocle to his eye. “I beg your pardon, madam, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to direct me to the nearest petrol parlor?”

She began to laugh, a girlish, giggly sound. “Oh Stan, honestly. You're a scream. You ought to be an actor.”

“I hesitate to contradict you, madam, but I
am
an actor. Permit me to introduce myself. My name—ah, but I quite forgot I am traveling incognito. I must not identify myself for fear of the terrifying adulation of my millions of fanatic admirers.”

“Gee, you could fool anybody, Stan. You talk just like a gentle­man.”

He stared down at her, suddenly sober. “Thanks.”

“Why, I could see that Cadillac as plain as could be for a minute there. Red and black, with real leather upholstery and your initials on the door.” She touched his arm. It had gone stiff as a board. “Stan?”

“Yeah.”

“What the heck, we wouldn't know what to do with a Cadillac if we had one. We'd have to pay the license and insurance and gas and oil, and then we'd have to find a place to park it—well, it just wouldn't be worth the trouble, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm not just shooting the breeze either. I mean it.”

“Sure. Sure you do, Muriel.” He was touched by her loyalty, but at the same time it nagged at him; it reminded him that he didn't deserve it and that he would have to try harder to deserve it in the future.
The future,
he thought. When he was younger, the future always seemed to him like a bright and beribboned box full of gifts. Now it loomed in front of him, dark gray and impene­trable, like a leaden wall.

He picked out a tie from the bureau drawer, dark gray to match the wall.

“Stan? Take me with you?”

“No, Muriel. I'm sorry.”

“Will you be back in time to go to your job Monday night?”

“I'll be back.” He'd had the job, as night watchman for an elec­trical appliance warehouse on Figueroa Street, for only a week. The work was dull and lonely, but he made it more interesting for himself by imagining the place was going to be robbed any night now and visualizing how he would foil the robbers, with a flying tackle or a rabbit punch from behind, or a short, powerful left hook, or simply by outwitting them in a very clever way which he hadn't figured out yet. Having outthought, or outfought, the robbers, he would go on to receive his reward from the president of the appliance firm. The rewards varied from money or some shares in the company to a large bronze plaque inscribed with his name and a description of his deed of valor: “To Stanley Elliott Fielding, Who, Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, Did Resist the Onslaught of Seven Masked and Desperate Criminals . . .”

It was all fantasy, and he knew it. But it helped to pass the time and ease the tension he felt whenever he was alone.

Muriel helped him on with his jacket. “There. You look real nice, Stan. Nobody'd ever take you for a night watchman.”

“Thank you.”

“Where will you stay when you get there, Stan?”

“I haven't decided.”

“I should know how to get in touch with you in case something comes up about your job. I suppose I could call Daisy's house if it was real important.”

“No, don't,” he said quickly. “I may not even be going to Daisy's house.”

“But you said before you—”

“Listen. Remember the young man I told you about who paid my fine? Steve Pinata. His office is on East Opal Street. If any­thing urgent should come up, leave a message for me with Pinata.”

She went with him to the door, clinging to his arm. “Remem­ber what you promised, Stan, about laying off the liquor and behaving yourself in general.”

“Of course.”

“I wish I was going along.”

“Next time.”

He kissed her good-bye before he opened the door because of Miss Wittenburg, the old lady who lived across the hall. Miss Wittenburg kept the door of her apartment wide open all day and sat just inside it, with her spectacles on and a newspaper across her knee. Sometimes she read the paper in silence; at other times she became quite voluble, addressing her comments to her younger sister, who'd been gone for a year.

“There they are now, Rosemary,” Miss Wittenburg said in her strong New England accent. “He appears to be groomed for the street. Good riddance, I say. I'm glad you agree. Did you notice the deplorable condition in which he left the bathroom again? All that wetness. Wet, wet, wet everywhere ... I am surprised at you, Rosemary, making such a vulgar remark. Father would turn over in his grave to hear such a thing fall from your lips.”

“Go inside and lock the door,” Fielding said to Muriel. “And keep it locked.”

“All right.”

“And don't worry about me. I'll be home tomorrow night, or Monday at the latest.”

“Whispering,” said Miss Wittenburg, “is a mark of poor breeding.”

“Stan, please take care of yourself, won't you?”

“I will. I promise.”

“Do you love me?”

“You know I do, Muriel.”

“Whispering,” Miss Wittenburg repeated, “is not only a mark of poor breeding, but I have it on very good authority that it is going to be declared illegal in all states west of the Mississippi. The penalties, I understand, will be very severe.”

Fielding raised his voice. “Good-bye, Rosemary. Good-bye, Miss Wittenburg.”

“Pay no attention, Rosemary. What effrontery the man has, addressing you by your first name. Next thing he'll be trying to—oh, it makes me shudder even to think of it.” She, too, raised her voice. “Good manners compel me to respond to your greeting, Mr. Whisper, but I do so with grave misgivings. Good-bye.”

“Oh Lord,” Fielding said, and began to laugh. Muriel laughed with him, while Miss Wittenburg described to Rosemary certain legislation which was about to go into effect in seventeen states prohibiting laughter, mockery, and fornication.

“Keep your door locked, Muriel.”

“She's just a harmless old lady.”

“There's no such thing as a harmless old lady.”

“Wait. Stan, you forgot your toothbrush.”

“I'll pick one up in San Félice. Good-bye, love.”

“Good-bye, Stan. And good luck.”

After he'd gone, Muriel locked herself in the apartment and, standing by the window, cried quietly and efficiently for five minutes. Then, red-eyed but calm, she dragged out from under the bed Fielding's battered rawhide suitcase.

11

Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe. . . .

 

The Neighborhood Clinic
was housed in an old adobe building off State Street near the middle of town. A great many of Pinata's clients had been in and out of its vast oak doors, and over the years Pinata had come to know the director, Charles Alston, quite well. Alston was neither a doctor nor a trained social worker. He was a retired insurance executive, a widower, who devoted most of his time and energy to the solution of other people's problems. To keep the clinic operating, he persuaded doctors and laymen to donate their services, fought city and county officials for funds, plagued the local newspaper for free publicity, addressed women's clubs and political rallies and church groups, and bearded the Lions in their den and the Rotarians and Knights of Columbus in theirs.

Whenever and wherever there was any group to be enlight­ened, Alston could be found doing the enlightening, shooting statistics at his audience with the speed of a machine gun. This rapid delivery was essential: it kept his listeners from examining the facts and figures too closely, an effect that Alston found highly desirable, since he frequently made up his own statistics. He had no qualms about doing this, believing that it was a legit­imate part of his war on ignorance. “Did you know,” he would cry out, pointing the finger of doom, “that one in seven of you good, unsuspecting, innocent people out there will spend some time in a mental institution?” If the audience appeared listless and unimpressionable, he changed this figure to one in five or even one in three. “Prevention is the answer. Prevention. We at the Clinic may not be able to solve everyone's problems. What we hope to do is to keep them small enough to be manageable.”

At noon on Saturday, Alston put the
closed
sign on the oak doors and locked up for the weekend. It had been a strenuous but successful week. The Democratic League and the Veterans of Foreign Wars had contributed toward the new children's wing, the Plasterers and Cement Finishers Local 341 had volunteered their services, and the
Monitor-Press
was planning a series of arti­cles on the Clinic and offering a prize for the best essay entitled “An Ounce of Prevention.”

Alston had just shoved the steel bolt into place when someone began pounding on the door. This frequently happened when the Clinic was closed for the night or the weekend. It was one of Alston's dreams that someday he might have enough person­nel and money to keep it open at all times, like a hospital, or at least on Sundays. Sunday was a bad day for the frightened.

“We're closed,” Alston shouted through the door. “If you're desperately in need of help, call Dr. Mercado, 5-3698. Have you got that?”

Pinata didn't say anything. He just waited, knowing that Alston would open the door because he couldn't turn anyone away.

“Dr. Mercado, 5-3698, if you need help. Oh, what the hell,” Alston said, and pushed open the door. “If you need—oh, it's you, Steve.”

“Hello, Charley. Sorry to bother you like this.”

“Looking for one of your clients?”

“I'd like some information.”

“I charge by the hour,” Alston said. “Or shall I say that I accept donations for the new children's wing? A check will do, provid­ing it's good. Come in.”

Pinata followed him into his office, a small, high-ceilinged room painted a garish pink. The pink had been Alston's idea; it was a cheerful color for people who saw too many of the blues and grays and blacks of life.

“Sit down,” Alston said. “How's business?”

“If I told you it was good, you'd put the bite on me.”

“The bite's on you. This is after hours. I get time and a half.”

In spite of the lightness of his tone, Pinata knew he was quite serious. “All right, that suits me. Say ten dollars?”

“Fifteen would look prettier on the books.”

“On yours, sure, but not mine.”

“Very well, I won't argue. I would, however, like to point out that one person in every five will—”

“I heard that last week at the Kiwanis.”

Alston's face brightened. “That was a rousing good meeting, eh? I hate to scare the lads like that, but if fear is what makes them bring out their wallets, fear is what I have to provide.”

“Today,” Pinata said, “I'm just scared ten dollars' worth.”

“Maybe I'll do better next time. Believe me, I'll try.”

“I believe you.”

“All right, so what's your problem?”

“Juanita Garcia.”

“Good Lord,” Alston said with a heavy sigh. “Is she back in town?”

“I have reason to think so.”

“You know her, eh?”

“Not personally.”

“Well, consider yourself lucky. We don't use the word
incorrigible
around here, but I never got closer to using it than when we were trying to cope with Juanita. Now, there's a case where an ounce of prevention might have been worth a few pounds of cure. If she'd been brought to us when she first showed signs of disturbance as a child—well, we might have done some good and we might not. With Juanita it's difficult to say. When we finally saw her, by order of the Juvenile Court, she was sixteen, already divorced from one man and about eight months pregnant by another. Because of her condition, we had to handle her with kid gloves. I think that's where she got the idea.”

“What idea?”

Alston shook his head in a mixture of sorrow and grudging admiration. “She worked out a simple but absolutely stunning device for hog-tying the whole bunch of us: the courts, the Probation Department, our staff. Whenever she got in trouble, she outwitted us all with classic simplicity.”

“How?”

“By becoming pregnant. A delinquent girl is one thing; an expectant mother is quite different.” Alston stirred in his chair and sighed again. “To tell you the truth, none of us knows for sure if Juanita actually figured out this device in a conscious way. One of our psychologists believes that she used pregnancy as a means of making herself feel important. I'm not positive about that, though. The girl—woman, rather, she must be twenty-six or twenty-seven by this time—isn't stupid by any means. She did quite well on several of her tests, especially those that required use of imagination rather than knowledge of facts. She could study an ordinary little drawing and describe it with such vivid imagination that you'd think she was looking at something by Van Gogh. The term
psychopathic personality
is no longer in vogue, but it certainly would have applied to Juanita.”

“What does she look like?”

“Fairly pretty in a flashing-eyed, toothy sort of way. About her figure I couldn't say. I never saw her between pregnancies. The tragic part of it,” Alston added, “is that she didn't really care about the kids. When they were small babies, she liked to cuddle them and play with them as if they were dolls, but as soon as they grew up a little, she lost interest. Three or four years ago she was arrested on a child-neglect charge, but once again she was in the throes of reproduction and got off on probation. After the birth of that particular child—her sixth, I think it was—she broke pro­bation and left town. Nobody tried very hard to find her, I'm afraid. I wouldn't be surprised if my own staff chipped in to pay her traveling expenses. Juanita herself was enough of a problem. But multiply her by six—oh Lord, I hate to think about it. So now she's back in town.”

“I believe so.”

“Doing what? Or need I ask?”

“Working as a waitress in a bar,” Pinata said. “If it's the same girl.”

“Is she married?”

“Yes.”

“Are the kids with her?”

“Some of them are, anyway. She got into a fight with her hus­band a few days ago. He claimed she was neglecting them.”

“If you don't even know the girl,” Alston said, “where did you pick up all your information?”

“A friend of mine happened to be in the bar when the fight started.”

“And this is how you became interested in the prolific Juanita, through a friend of yours who happened to witness a fight?”

“You might say that.”

“I might say it but it wouldn't be the truth, is that it?” Alston peered over the top of his spectacles. “Is the girl in trouble again?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why exactly are you here?”

Pinata hesitated. He didn't want to tell the whole story, even to Alston, who'd heard some whoppers in his day. “I'd like you to check your files and tell me if Juanita Garcia came here on a cer­tain date.”

“What date?”

“Friday, December 2, 1955.”

“That's a funny request,” Alston said. “Care to give me a reason for it?”

“No.”

“I assume you have a good reason.”

“I'm not sure how good it is. I have one, though. It concerns a—client of mine. I'd like to keep her name out of it, but I can't, since I need some information about her, too. Her name's Mrs. James Harker.”

“Harker, Harker, let me think a min—Daisy Harker?”

“Yes.”

“What's a woman like Daisy Harker doing getting mixed up with a bail bondsman?”

“It's a long, implausible story,” Pinata said with a smile. “And since it's Saturday afternoon and I'm paying you time and a half, I'd rather go into it on some other occasion.”

“What do you want to know about Mrs. Harker?”

“The same thing: if she was working at the Clinic on that par­ticular day. Also when, and why, she stopped coming here.”

“The why part I can't tell you, because I don't know. It mysti­fied me at the time and still does. She made some excuse about her mother being ill and needing attention, but I happen to know Mrs. Fielding from my connection with the Women's Club. The old girl's as healthy as a horse. Quite an attractive woman, if she could remember to keep her velvet gloves on. . . . No, it wasn't Mrs. Fielding's illness, I'm sure of that. As for the work itself, I believe Mrs. Harker enjoyed it.”

“Was she good at it?” Pinata asked.

“Excellent. Sweet-natured, understanding, dependable. Oh, she had a tendency to get overexcited at times and lose her head a bit in an emergency, but nothing serious. And the kids all loved her. She had a way, as childless women sometimes have, of making the kids feel very important and special, not just something that hap­pened from an accidental meeting of a sperm and ovum. A fine young woman, Mrs. Harker. We were sorry to lose her. Have you known her long?”

“No.”

“Next time you see her, give her my kind regards, will you? And tell her we'd like to have her back whenever she can come.”

“I'll do that.”

“In fact, if I could find out the circumstances that made her quit, I might be able to change them.”

“The circumstances are entirely Daisy's, not the Clinic's.”

“Well, I just thought I'd check,” Alston said. “We have occa­sional disagreements and disgruntlements among the members of our staff just like any other business. It's surprising we don't have more when you consider that psychology is not an exact sci­ence and there are consequently differences of opinion on diag­nosis and procedure. Procedure especially,” he added with a frown. “Just what does one
do
with a girl like Juanita, for instance? Sterilize her? Keep her locked up? Enforce psychiatric treatment? We did our best, but the reason it didn't work was that Juanita herself wouldn't admit there was anything the matter with her. Like most incorrigibles, she'd managed to convince herself (and tried, of course, to convince us) that women were all the same and that what made her different was the fact that she was honest and aboveboard about her activities. Honest and above- board, the favorite words of the self-deceiver. Take my advice, Steve. Whenever anyone insists too vigorously on his honesty, you run and check the till. And don't be too surprised if you find somebody's fingers in it.”

“I don't believe in generalizations,” Pinata said. “Especially that one.”

“Why not?”

“Because it includes me. I make frequent claims to honesty. In fact, I'm making one now.”

“Well, well. This puts me in the embarrassing position of either taking back the generalization or going to check the till. This is a serious decision. Let me meditate a moment.” Alston leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Very well. I take back the gen­eralization. I'm afraid it's easy to become a bit cynical in this job. So many promises made and broken, so many hopes dashed—it leaves you with a tendency to believe in the psychology of opposites, that is, when a person comes in and tells me he is affa­ble, honest, and simple, I tend to tag him as a complex and irri­table cheat. This is an occupational hazard I must avoid. Thanks for pointing it out, Steve.”