A Stranger in My Grave (14 page)

“I didn't point out anything,” Pinata said, embarrassed. “I was merely defending myself.”

“I insist upon thanking you.”

“All right, all right, you're welcome. At time and a half I don't want to argue with you.”

“Oh yes, time and a half. I must get on with the job. I address the Newcomers Club at two, a good, malleable group usually. I have considerable hopes for our treasury.” He took a ring of keys from his desk drawer. “Please wait here. I can't ask you into the file room. Not that our records are top secret, but many people like to believe they are. Want something to read while I'm gone?”

“No thanks. I'll just think.”

“Got a lot to think about?”

“Enough.”

“Daisy Harker,” Alston said casually, “is a very pretty and, I believe, an unhappy young woman. That's a bad combination.”

“What's it got to do with me?”

“Not a thing, I hope.”

“Save your hopes for the treasury,” Pinata said. “My relation­ship with Mrs. Harker is strictly professional. She hired me to get some information about a certain day in her life.”

“And Juanita was part of this day?”

“Possibly.” Possibly Camilla was, too, though so far there was no indication of it. When Daisy called his office the previous morning, as scheduled, and learned the details of Camilla's death, she was surprised, pained, curious—a perfectly normal reaction, which dispelled his last trace of doubt about her sincerity. She had, she said, asked both Jim and her mother if they'd ever known a man named Camilla, and she was waiting to hear from her father, to whom she's sent a special delivery letter.

Alston was staring at him with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “You're not very communicative today, Steve.”

“I like to think of myself as the strong, silent type.”

“You do, eh? Well, just watch out for that Lancelot syndrome you're carrying around. Rescuing ladies in distress can be dan­gerous, especially if the ladies happen to be married. Harker has the reputation of being a very good guy. And a smart one. Think it over, Steve. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

Pinata thought it over. Lancelot syndrome, hell. I'm not inter­ested in saving Daisies in distress. Daisy, what a silly name for a grown woman. I'll bet that was Fielding's idea. Mrs. Fielding would have picked something a little more high-toned or exotic, Céleste, Stephanie, Gwendolyn.

He got up and began pacing the room. Thinking about names depressed him because his own were only borrowed, from a parish priest and a child's Christmas game. During the past three years especially, since Monica had taken Johnny away, Pinata had wondered a great deal about his parents, trying, not too success­fully, to follow the advice the Mother Superior had given him many times: “There's no room in this world for self-pity, Stevens. You're a strong man because you had no one to lean on, and that's a good thing sometimes, to live without leaning. Think of all the fixations you might have developed, and dear me, there are a lot of them around these days. The essential thing for a boy is to have a good man to pattern himself after. And you had that in Father Stevens…. Your mother? What else could she have been but a young woman who found herself bearing too heavy a cross? You must not blame her for being unable to carry it. Perhaps she was just a schoolgirl....”

Or a Juanita
, Pinata thought grimly.
But why should it matter now after more than thirty years? I could never trace her anyway; there wasn't a single clue. And even if I found her, what about him? It's pos­sible she wouldn't even know which of the men in her life was my father. Or care.

Alston returned, carrying several cards picked out of a file. “Well, you have something, Steve. I'm not sure what. December 2, ‘55, was the last day Mrs. Harker worked here. She was on duty from 1:00 to 5:30, in charge of the children's playroom. That's where the younger children are kept while their parents or rela­tives are being counseled. No actual therapy is done there, but it was part of Mrs. Harker's job to observe any behavior problems, such as excessive destructiveness or shyness, and report them in writing to the professional members of the staff. The way a three- year-old plays with a doll often gives us more of a clue to the cause of family trouble than several hours of talking on the part of the parents. So you can see Mrs. Harker's work was important. She took it seriously, too. I just checked one of her reports. It was full of details that some of our other volunteers would have failed to notice or at least to record.”

“The report you checked, was it one from that particular day?”

“Yes.”

“Did anything unusual or disturbing happen?”

“A lot of unusual and disturbing things happen here every day,” Alston said cheerfully. “You can count on that.”

“I meant, as far as Mrs. Harker was concerned. Did she have some trouble with any of the children, for instance?”

“Nothing on the record indicates it. Mrs. Harker might have had some trouble with a relative of one of the children or even a staff member, but such an incident wouldn't be included in her written report. And I very much doubt that one occurred. Mrs. Harker got along well with everybody. If I had to make a personal criticism of her, that would be it. She was overeager to please people; it led me to think that she didn't set a very high value on herself. These constant smilers usually don't.”

“Constant smiler?” Pinata said. “Overeager to please? Could we possibly be talking about the same woman? Maybe there are two Daisy Harkers.”

“Why? Has she changed?”

“She shows no signs of being eager to please, believe me.”

“Now, that's highly interesting. I always knew she was putting up a front. It's probably a good sign that she's stopped. These lit­tle Daddy's-girl wiles can look pretty nonsensical in a grown woman. Perhaps she's maturing, and that's about all any of us can hope for. Maturity,” he added, “is not a destination like Hong Kong, London, Paris, or heaven. It's a continuing process, rather like a road along which one travels. There's no Maturitytown, U.S.A. Say, I wonder if I could put that across to the Soroptimists at their banquet tonight. . . . No, no, I don't think I'll try. It wouldn't be much of a fund-raiser. I'd better stick with my statis­tics. People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.”

“Especially yours?”

“Mine can be very impressive,” Alston said with a grin. “But to get back to our subject, I'll admit I'm becoming curious about the connection between Juanita and Mrs. Harker.”

“I'm not sure there is one.”

“Then I guess this is just a coincidence.” Alston tapped the cards he'd picked from the file. “Friday, December 2, was the last time Mrs. Harker appeared here. It was also the last time any of us heard from Juanita.”

“Heard from?”

“She was scheduled to come in Friday morning to talk to Mrs. Huxley, one of our social workers. It wasn't to be a therapy ses­sion, merely a discussion of finances and what could be done with Juanita's children, who'd been released from Juvenile Hall into the custody of Juanita's mother, Mrs. Rosario. None of us con­sidered this an ideal arrangement. Mrs. Rosario is a clean-living, respectable woman, but she's a bit of a nut on religion, and Mrs. Huxley was going to try to talk Juanita into allowing the children to be placed in foster homes for a time.

“At any rate Juanita called Mrs. Huxley early Friday morning and said she couldn't keep her appointment, because she wasn't feeling well. This was natural enough, since she was just a couple of jumps ahead of the obstetrician. Mrs. Huxley explained to her that the business about the children was urgent, and another appointment was made for late that afternoon. Juanita was quite docile about it, even amiable. That alone should have warned us. She didn't show up, of course. Thinking the baby might have arrived on the scene a bit prematurely, I called Mrs. Rosario next day. She was in a furious state. Juanita had left town, taking the children with her, and Mrs. Rosario blamed me.”

“Why you?” Pinata asked.

“Because,” Alston said, grimacing, “I have
mal ojo,
the evil eye.”

“I hadn't noticed.”

“In case you think belief in
mal ojo
has disappeared, let me has­ten to correct you. Like many older members of her race, Mrs. Rosario is still living in the distant past, medically speaking: hospitals are places to die in, psychiatry is against the Church, ill­ness is caused not by germs but by
mal ojo.
If you accused her of believing these things, she would probably deny it. Nevertheless, Juanita's first child was born in the kitchen of an elderly midwife, and when Juanita was sent to us for psychiatric help, Mrs. Rosario proved to be as big a stumbling block as the girl herself. Very few medical doctors, and not enough psychiatrists, have attempted to bridge this cultural gap. They tend to dismiss people like Mrs. Rosario as obstinate, backward, perverse, whereas she is simply reacting according to her cultural pattern. That pattern hasn't changed as much as we'd like to think it has. It will take more than time to change it. It will take effort, intent, training. But that's lecture number twenty-seven and not much of a fund-raiser either. ... I hope, by the way, that you're not taking any of my remarks about your race personally.”

“Why should I?” Pinata said with a shrug. “I'm not even sure it is my race.”

“But you think so?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You know, I've often wondered about that. You don't quite fit the—”

“Mrs. Rosario is a more interesting subject than I am.”

“Very well. As I said, she was extremely angry when I called her. She'd gone to a special mass the previous night to pray for various lost souls, including, I hope, Juanita's. I've often won­dered—haven't you?—how the parish priests handle people like Mrs. Rosario who believe with equal fervor in the Virgin Mary and the evil eye. Must be quite a problem. Anyway, on returning home, she discovered that Juanita had left, bag and baggage and five children. I'm not aware of any reason why Mrs. Rosario should have lied about it, but it did strike me at the time that it was a very convenient story. It saved her from having to answer questions from the police and the Probation Department. If she was at church when Juanita left, then obviously she couldn't be expected to know anything. She's a complex woman, Mrs. Rosario. She distrusts and disapproves of Juanita; she seems, in fact, to hate her; but she has a fierce maternal instinct.

“Well, there you have it.” Alston leaned back in his chair and studied the pink ceiling. “The end of Juanita. Or what I fondly hoped was the end. After a year or so we closed her file. The last entry on it is in November 1956: Garcia, when he was released from the Army, brought suit for divorce, charging desertion. Which of the children belonged to him, I have no idea. Perhaps none. In any case he didn't ask for custody. Nor was any alimony or child support demanded of him, since Juanita didn't show up for the hearing. The chances are she knew about it, though. Most Mexican families here in the Southwest, in spite of dissension among themselves, have a way of retaining their tribal loyalties and ties when confronted with trouble from the whites. And the law is always ‘white' to them. There's no doubt in my mind that Juanita remained in touch in some way with relatives who kept her posted on what was going on and when it was safe for her to come back here. I take it you're sure she
is
back?”

“Reasonably,” Pinata said.

“Married again?”

“Yes, to an Italian called Donelli. I gather he's not a bad guy, but Juanita has given him a rough time, and he's carrying a chip on his shoulder.”

“How do you know all that?”

“I saw him in court after he got into the fight in the bar. My client was involved in the fight. Donelli couldn't scrape up enough money to pay his fine, so he's still in jail. It could be that's exactly where Juanita wants him.”

“What bar is she working at?”

“The Velada, on lower State.”

Alston nodded. “That's where she's worked before, off and on. It's owned by a friend of her mother's, a Mrs. Brewster. Both Mrs. Brewster and the Velada are known to every health and welfare agency in the county, though the place has never actually been closed. It looks as if you're on the right track, Steve. If you find out the girl is really Juanita, let me know immediately, will you? I feel a certain responsibility towards her. If she's in trouble, I want to help her.”

“How will I get in touch with you?”

“I'll be home about the middle of the afternoon. Call me there. Meanwhile, I'll keep hoping a mistake has been made and the real Juanita is happily and securely ensconced on an island in the mid­dle of the Pacific.”

Alston got up and closed and locked the window as an indica­tion that as far as he was concerned, the interview was ended.

“Just one more minute,” Pinata said.

“Hurry it up, will you? I don't want to keep the Newcomers Club waiting.”