A Stranger in My Grave (17 page)

“That's right.”

“What about?”

“You may recall Carlos Camilla?”

“Oh yes. Yes, indeed.” Fondero finished watering the maranta and put the empty pitcher on the window ledge. “Camilla was my guest, shall we say, for over a month. As you know, the city has no official morgue, but Camilla's body had to be kept, pend­ing investigation of the source of the money that was found on him. Nothing came of the investigation, so he was buried.”

“Did anyone attend the funeral?”

“A hired priest and my wife.”

“Your wife?”

Fondero sat down in a chair that looked too frail to bear him. “Betty refused to let Camilla be buried without mourners, so she acted as a substitute. It wasn't entirely acting, however. Camilla, perhaps because of the tragic circumstances of his death, perhaps because we had him around so long, had gotten under our skin. We kept hoping that someone would come along to claim him. No one did, but Betty still refused to believe that Camilla didn't have somebody in the world who cared about him. She insisted that the money found on Camilla be used for an imposing mon­ument instead of an expensive coffin. She had the idea that someday a mourner might appear, and she wanted Camilla's grave to be conspicuous. As I recall, it is.”

“It's conspicuous,” Pinata said.
And a mourner did come along and find it, but the mourner was a stranger—Daisy.

“You're a detective, Mr. Pinata?”

“I have a license that says so.”

“Then perhaps you have some theory of how a man like Camilla got hold of $2,000.”

“A holdup seems the most likely source.”

“The police were never able to prove that,” Fondero said, tak­ing a gold cigarette case from his pocket. “Cigarette? No? Good for you. I wish I could give them up. Since this lung cancer business, some of the local wits have started calling cigarettes Fonderos. Well, it's publicity of a kind, I suppose.”

“Where do you think Camilla got the money?”

“I'm inclined to believe he came by it honestly. Perhaps he saved it up, perhaps it was repayment of a loan. The latter theory is more logical. He was a dying man. He must have been aware of his condition, and knowing how little time he had left, he decided to collect money owing to him to pay for his funeral. That would explain his coming to town—the person who owed him money lived here. Or lives here.”

“That sounds plausible,” Pinata said, “except for one thing. According to the newspaper, the police made an appeal to the pub­lic for anyone who knew Camilla to come forward. No one did.”

“No one came forward in person. But I had a peculiar telephone call after Camilla had been here a week or so. I told the police about it, and they thought, as I did at the time, it was the work of some religious crank.”

The expression on Fondero's face as he leaned forward was an odd mixture of amusement and irritation. “If you want to hear from every crackpot and prankster in town, try going into this business. At Halloween it's the kids. At Christmas and Easter it's the religious nuts. In September it's college boys being initiated. Any month at all is good for a lewd suggestion from a sex deviate as to what goes on in my lab. I received the call about Camilla just before Christmas, which made it the right timing for one of the religious crackpots.”

“Was it from a man or a woman?”

“A woman. Such calls usually are.”

“What kind of voice did she have?”

“Medium in all respects, as I recall,” Fondero said. “Medium- pitched, medium-aged, medium-cultured.”

“Any trace of an accent?”

“No.”

“Could it have been a young woman, say about thirty?”

“Maybe, but I don't think so.”

“What did she want?”

“I can't remember her exact words after all this time. The gist of her conversation was that Camilla was a good Catholic and should be buried in consecrated ground. I told her about the difficulties involved in such an arrangement, since there was no evidence that Camilla had died in the Church. She claimed that Camilla had fulfilled all the requirements for burial in consecrated ground. Then she hung up. Except for the degree of self-control she displayed, it was an ordinary run-of-the-mill crank call. At least I thought so then.”

“Camilla is buried in the Protestant cemetery,” Pinata said.

“I talked it over with our parish priest. There was no alternative.”

“Did the woman mention the money?”

“No.”

“Or the manner of his death?”

“I got the impression,” Fondero said cautiously, “from her insis­tence on Camilla being a
good
Catholic, that she didn't believe he had killed himself.”

“Do you?”

“The experts called it suicide.”

“I should think by this time you'd be something of an expert yourself along those lines.”

“Experienced. Not expert.”

“What's your private opinion?”

Outside the window Fondero's son had begun to whistle, loudly and off-key, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

“I work very closely with the police and the coroner's office,” Fondero said. “It wouldn't be good business for me to have an opinion contrary to theirs.”

“But you have one anyway?”

“Not for the record.”

“All right, for me. Top secret.”

Fondero went over to the window and then returned to his chair, facing Pinata. “Do you happen to recall the contents of the note he left?”

“Yes. ‘This ought to pay my way into heaven, you stinking rats. .. . Born, too soon, 1907. Died, too late, 1955.'”

“Now everybody seemed to take that as a suicide note. Perhaps that's what it was. But it could also be the message of a man who knew he was going to die, couldn't it?”

“I guess so,” Pinata said. “The idea never occurred to me.”

“Nor to me, until I made my own examination of the body. It was that of an old man—prematurely aged if we accept the date of his birth as given, and I see no reason why he should lie about it under the circumstances. Many degenerative processes had taken place: the liver was cirrhotic, there was considerable hard­ening of the arteries, and he was suffering from emphysema of the lungs and an advanced case of arthritis. It was this last thing that interested me the most. Camilla's hands were badly swollen and out of shape. I seriously doubt whether he could have grasped the knife firmly enough to have inflicted the wound himself. Maybe he could. Maybe he did. All I'm saying is, I doubt it.”

“Did you express your doubts to the authorities?”

“I told Lieutenant Kirby. He wasn't in the least excited. He claimed that the suicide note was more valid evidence than the opinion of a layman. Although I don't hold a pathologist's degree, I hardly consider myself a layman after some twenty-five years in the business. Still, Kirby had a point: opinions don't constitute evidence. The police were satisfied with a suicide verdict, the coro­ner was satisfied, and if Camilla had any friends who weren't, they didn't bother complaining. You're a detective, what do you think?”

“I'd be inclined to agree with Kirby,” Pinata said carefully, “on the basis of the facts. Camilla had good reason to kill himself. He wrote, if not a suicide note, at least a farewell note. He left money for his funeral expenses. The knife used had his own initials on it. In the face of all this, I can't put too much stock in your opin­ion that Camilla's hands were too crippled to have wielded the knife. But of course I've had no experience with arthritis.”

“I have.”

Fondero leaned forward, holding out his left hand as if it were some specimen from his lab. Pinata saw what he hadn't noticed before: that Fondero's knuckles were swollen to twice normal size, and the fingers were bent and stiffened into a claw.

“That,” Fondero said, “used to be my pitching hand. Now I couldn't even field a bunt if the World Series depended on it. I sit in the stands as a spectator, and when Wally Moon belts one over the fence, I can't even applaud. All my lab work these days is done by my assistants. Believe me, if I wanted to kill myself, it would have to be with something other than a knife.”

“Desperation often gives a man additional strength.”

“It may give him strength, yes, but it can't loosen up fused joints or restore atrophied muscles. It's impossible.”

Impossible. Pinata wondered how often the word had already come up in connection with Camilla. Too many times. Perhaps he'd been the kind of man destined for the impossible, born to botch up statistics and defy the laws of physics. The evidence of motive, weapon, suicide note, and funeral money was powerful enough, but fused joints couldn't be loosened overnight, nor atro­phied muscles restored on impulse or by desire.

Fondero was still holding out his hand for exhibit like a freak at a sideshow. “Are you still inclined to believe Kirby, Mr. Pinata?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't actually know, either. All I can say is that if Camilla grasped that knife with those hands of his, I wish he'd have stayed alive long enough to tell me how he did it. I could use some advice on the subject.”

He hid his deformed hand in his pocket. The show was over; it had been an effective one.

“Kirby's a sharp man,” Pinata said.

“That's right, he's a sharp man. He just doesn't happen to have arthritis.”

“Wouldn't Camilla's condition have prevented him from writ­ing the suicide note?”

“No. It was printed, not written. This is common among arthritics. It's a good deal easier to print legibly.”

“From your examination of the body, what general information did you get about Camilla's manner of living?”

“I won't go into further medical details,” Fondero said, “but the evidence indicates that he was a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker, and at some time in his life a heavy worker.”

“Was there any clue about what kind of work?”

“One, although some orthopedists might not agree with me. He had a bone malformation known as
genu varum
, less politely called bowlegs. Now bowlegs can be caused by a number of things, but if I had to make a wild guess about Camilla's occupa­tion, I'd say that, beginning early in his youth, he had a lot to do with horses. He may have worked on a ranch.”

“Ranch,” Pinata said, frowning. Someone had recently men­tioned a ranch to him, but it wasn't until he got back to his car that he recalled the circumstances: Alston on the telephone had said that Mrs. Rosario, Juanita's mother, had been housekeeper on a ranch and had inherited enough money, when the owners died, to buy the house on Granada Street.

14

The hotel guests are looking at me queerly while I write this, as if they are wondering what a tramp like me is doing in their lobby where I don't belong, writing to a daughter who has never really belonged to me. . . .

 

Granada was a
street of small frame houses built so closely together that they seemed to be leaning on each other for moral and physical and economic support against the pressures from the white side of town. The pomegranate trees, for which the street was named, were fruitless now, but at Christmas time the gaudy orange balls of fruit hung from the branches looking quite unreasonable, as if they had not grown there at all but had been strung up to decorate the street for the holiday season.

Five-twelve hid its age and infirmities—and proclaimed its independence from its neighbors—with a fresh coat of bright pink paint that seemed to have been applied by a child or a nearsighted amateur. Blotches of paint stained the narrow sidewalk, the rail­ing of the porch, the square yard of lawn; the calla lilies, the leaves of the holly bush and the pittosporum hedge, were pimpled with pink as if they'd broken out with some strange new plant disease. Pink footsteps, belonging to a child or a very small woman, led up the gray porch steps and disappeared in the coarse bristles of the coca mat outside the front door. These footsteps were the only evidence that a child or children might be living in the house. There were no toys or parts of toys on the porch or lawn, no dis­carded shoes or sweaters, no half-eaten oranges or jelly sand­wiches. If Juanita and her six children had taken up residence here, someone was being careful to hide the fact, perhaps Juanita her­self, perhaps Mrs. Rosario.

Pinata pressed the door buzzer and waited, trying to figure out why Juanita had suddenly decided to come back to town after an absence of more than three years. She must have known she'd be in trouble with the authorities for breaking probation when she disappeared in the first place. On the other hand, Juanita didn't behave on the logical level, so the reason for her return could be something quite trivial and capricious, or purely emotional: homesickness, a desire to see her mother again or to show off her latest husband and youngest child to her friends, perhaps a quar­rel with a neighbor, wherever she'd been living, followed by a sudden violent desire to get away. It was difficult to guess her motives. She was like a puppet operated by dozens of strings; some of them had broken, and others had become so inextricably twisted that not one of them functioned as it was intended to. To remove these knots and tangles, and to splice the broken ends together, was the job of Alston and his staff. So far, they had failed. Juanita's soarings and somersaults, her leaps and landings were beyond the control of any puppeteer.

The door opened to reveal a short, thin middle-aged woman with black, expressionless eyes like ripe olives. She held her body so rigidly straight that she appeared to be wearing an iron brace on her back. Everything about her was stretched taut; her skin looked as if it had been starched, her hair was drawn back from her face in a tight and tidy little bun, and her mouth was compressed into a hard line. Pinata was surprised when it opened with such ease.

“What do you want?”

“Mrs. Rosario?”

“That is my name.”

“I'm Steve Pinata. I'd like to talk to you for a minute, if I may.”

“If it's about old Mr. Lopez next door, I have nothing more to say. I told the lady from the Department of Health yesterday, they had no right to take him away like that against his will. He's had that same cough all his life, and it's never done him a bit of harm. It's as natural to him as breathing. As for the rest of the neigh­borhood getting into that ray machine, free or not, I refused and so did the Gonzales and the Escobars. It's against nature, getting your lungs choked up with all those rays.”

“I'm not connected with the Department of Health,” Pinata said. “I'm looking for a man who may be calling himself Foster.”

“Calling himself? What is this business, calling himself?”

“Your daughter knows him as Foster, let's put it that way.”

Mrs. Rosario took a tuck in her mouth, like a sailor reefing a mainsail at the approach of a storm. “My daughter, Juanita, lives down south.”

“But she's here now for a visit, isn't she?”

“Whose concern is it if she comes here for a visit? She has done no harm. I keep a sharp eye on her, she stays out of trouble. Who are you anyway to come asking questions about my Juanita?”

“My name is Stevens Pinata.”

“So? What does that tell me? Nothing. It tells me nothing. I don't care about names, only people.”

“I'm a private investigator, Mrs. Rosario. My job right now is to keep track of Foster.”

The woman clapped one hand to her left breast as if something had suddenly broken under her dress, a heart or perhaps merely the strap of a slip. “He's a bad man, is that what you're saying? He's going to cause trouble for my Juanita?”

“I don't think he's a bad man. I can't guarantee there won't be trouble, though. He can be a little impulsive at times. Did he come here with your daughter, Mrs. Rosario?”

“Yes.”

“And they went off together?”

“Yes. Half an hour ago.”

A thin, red-cheeked girl about ten came out on the porch of the house next door and started rotating a hula hoop around her hips and chewing a wad of gum in matching rhythm. She appeared to be completely oblivious to what was taking place on the adjoining porch, but Mrs. Rosario said in a hurried whisper, “We can't talk out here. That Querida Lopez, she hears everything and tells more.”

Still not looking in their direction, Querida announced to the world in a loud, bright voice, “I am going to the hospital. None of you can come and see me either, because I've got spots on my lungs. I don't care. I don't like any of you anyway. I'm going to the hospital like Grandpa and have lots of toys to play with and ice cream to eat, and I don't have to do any more dishes forever and ever. And don't any of you come and see me, because you can't, ha ha.”

“Querida Lopez,” Mrs. Rosario said sharply, “is this true?”

The only sign that the girl had heard was the increased speed of the hula hoop.

Mrs. Rosario's dark skin had taken on a yellowish tinge, and when she stepped back into her front room, it was as if Querida had pushed her in the stomach. “The girl lies sometimes. Perhaps it isn't true. If she is so sick as to go to a hospital, how could she be out playing like this? She coughs, yes, but all children cough. And you see for yourself what a fine, healthy color she has in her cheeks.”

Pinata thought that the color might be caused by fever rather than health, but he didn't say so. He followed Mrs. Rosario into the house. Even after he closed the door behind him, he could hear Querida's rhythmic chanting: “Going to the hospital—I don't care. Can't come and see me—I don't care. Going in an ambulance ...”

The rays of sun coming in through the lace curtains scarcely lightened the gloom of the small square parlor. All four walls were covered with religious ornaments and pictures, crucifixes and rosaries, Madonna's with and without child, heads of Christ, a lit­tle shrine presided over by the Holy Mother, haloed angels and blessed virgins. Many of these objects, which were intended to give hope and comfort to the living, had the effect of glorifying death while at the same time making it seem repulsive.

In this room, or another one just like it, Juanita had grown up, and this first glimpse of it did more to explain her to Pinata than all the words Alston had used. Here she had spent her childhood, surrounded by constant reminders that life was cruel and short, and the gates to heaven bristled with thorns, nails, and barbed wire. She must have looked a thousand times at the haloed moth­ers with their plump little babies, and unconsciously or deliber­ately, she had chosen this role for herself because it represented aliveness and creativity as well as sanctity.

Mrs. Rosario crossed herself in front of the little shrine and asked the Holy Mother for assurance that Querida Lopez, with her fine, healthy color, was lying. Then she tucked her thin body neatly into a chair, taking up as little space as possible because in this house there was hardly any room left for the living.

“Sit down,” she said with a stiff nod. “I don't expect strangers to come into my house asking personal questions, but now you are here, it is only polite to ask you to sit down.”

“Thanks.”

The chairs all looked uncomfortable, as if they had been selected to discourage people from sitting. Pinata chose a small, wooden-backed, petit-point couch, which gave off a faint odor of cleaning fluid. From the couch he could look directly into what appeared to be Mrs. Rosario's bedroom. Here, too, the walls were crowded with religious paintings and ornaments, and on the night-stand beside the big carved double bed a candle was burning in front of the photograph of a smiling young man. Obviously, the young man had died, and the candle was burning for his soul. He wondered whether the young man had been Juanita's father and how many candles ago he had died.

Mrs. Rosario saw him staring at the photograph and immedi­ately got up and crossed the room. “You must excuse me. It is not polite to display the sleeping quarters to strangers.”

She pulled the bedroom door shut, and Pinata could see at once why she had left it open in the first place. The door looked as if it had been attacked by someone with a hammer. The wood was gouged and splintered, and one whole panel was missing. Through the jagged aperture, the young man continued to smile at Pinata. The flickering light of the candle made his face appear very lively; the eyes twinkled, the cheek muscles moved, the lips expanded and contracted, the black curls stirred in the wind behind the broken door.

“One of the children did it,” Mrs. Rosario explained in a quiet voice. “I don't know which one. I was at the grocery store when it happened. I suspect Pedro, being the oldest. He's eleven, a boy, but the devil gets into him sometimes, and he plays rough.”

Very rough, indeed
, Pinata thought.
And playing isn't quite the word.

“Pedro's down at the lumber mill now, seeing about a new door. For punishment, I made him take the other children with him. Then he's got to paint and hang the new door by himself. I'm a poor woman. I can't afford painters and carpenters with such prices they charge.”

It was obvious to Pinata that she wasn't rich. But he could see no signs in the house of extreme poverty, and the religious items alone had cost quite a bit of money. Mrs. Rosario's former employer on the ranch must have been generous in his will, or else she earned extra money doing odd jobs.

He glanced at the door again.
Some of the hammer marks were at the very top; if an eleven-year-old boy did the damage, he must be a giant for his age. And what would be his motive for such an act? Revenge? Destruction for its own sake? Or maybe
, Pinata thought,
the boy had been trying to break down a door locked against him.

It didn't occur to him that Mrs. Rosario was lying....

She'd
seen them coming up Granada Street, Juanita in her green uniform and an older man. Mrs. Rosario didn't recognize the man, but the two of them were laughing and talking, and that was enough: they were up to no good.

She called the children in from the backyard. They were old enough now to notice things, to wonder, yes, and to talk, too. Pedro had the eyes and ears of a fox and a mouth like a hippopotamus. Even in church he talked out loud sometimes and had to be punished afterward with adhesive tape.

She gave them each an apple and took them all into the bed­room. If they were very good, she promised, if they sat quietly on the bed and said their beads to themselves, later they would all go over to Mrs. Brewster's to watch the television.

She had just locked the bedroom door when she heard Juanita's quick, light step on the porch and the sound of laughter. She took the key out of the lock and put her eye to the keyhole. Juanita was coming in the front door with the stranger, looking flushed and restless.

“Well, sit down,” she said. “Take a look around. Some dump, eh?”

“It's different.”

“I'll say it's different. Don't touch anything. She'll throw a fit.”

“Where is your mother?”

Juanita raised her eyebrows, the corners of her mouth, and her shoulders in an elaborate combination of shrug and grimace. “How should I know? Maybe she dragged the kids over to church again.”

“That's too bad.”

“So what's too bad about it?”

“I was hoping to meet them.” Fielding made his tone casual, as if he were expressing a polite desire instead of a deadly serious purpose. “I like children. I only had one of my own, a girl. She's about your age now.”

“Yeah? How old do you think I am?”

“If you hadn't told me about the six children, I'd say about twenty.”

“Sure,” Juanita said. “I bet.”

“I mean it. That goo you put on your eyes makes you look older, though. You should stop using it.”