A Stranger in My Grave (29 page)

“And the false reason,” Pinata said, “was support for Juanita's child?”

“Yes. It was Mrs. Rosario who inadvertently suggested it by insisting that she wanted no money for herself, only for Juanita. So we decided that was how it would be done. Jim was to claim the child and pay for its support. It seemed, in a way, like a stroke of fate that the lie should fit in so perfectly with the lie I was forced to tell Daisy in the first place. It was all arranged in Adam Burnett's office the next day, by Adam and Jim and Mrs. Rosario. Adam was never told the truth. He even wanted to fight Juanita's ‘claim' in court, but Jim managed to convince him that he must keep quiet. The next step was convincing Daisy. That was easy enough. Jim found out through Mrs. Rosario that Juanita was to go to the Clinic late that afternoon. He picked her up in his car and kept her talking in the parking lot until Daisy came out and saw them together. Then he made his false confession to her.

“Cruel? Yes, it was a cruel thing to do, Daisy. But not as cruel as others, perhaps—and not as cruel as some of the real tricks life plays on us. The next days were terrible ones. Although the coro­ner's inquest ruled Camilla's death was a suicide, the police were still investigating the source of the money found on him and still trying to establish who Camilla was. But time passed and noth­ing happened. Camilla was buried, still unknown.”

Pinata said, “Did you ever visit his grave, Mrs. Fielding?”

“I passed it several times when we went to leave flowers for Jim's parents.”

“Did you leave flowers for Camilla, too?”

“No, I couldn't. Daisy was always with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I—I wanted her along.”

“Was there any display of emotion on these occasions?”

“I cried sometimes.”

“Wasn't Daisy curious about the reason for your tears?”

“I told her that I had a cousin buried there, of whom I'd been very fond.”

“What was this cousin's name?”

“I. . .”

Fielding's sudden fit of coughing sounded like stifled laughter. When he had finished, he wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve. “Ada has a very sentimental nature. She weeps at the drop of a dead cousin. The only difficulty in this instance is that neither of her parents had any siblings. So where did the cousin come from, Ada?”

She looked at him, her mouth moving in a soundless curse.

Pinata said, “There was no cousin, Mrs. Fielding?”

“I—no.”

“The tears were for Camilla?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He died alone and was buried alone. I felt guilty.”

“Guilt as strong as that,” Pinata said, “makes me wonder whether Mrs. Rosario's accusation against you might not have some basis in fact.”

“I had nothing whatever to do with Camilla's death. He killed himself, with his own knife. That was the coroner's verdict.”

“This afternoon I talked to Mr. Fondero, the mortician in charge of Camilla's body. It's his opinion that Camilla's hands were too severely crippled by arthritis to have used that knife with the necessary force.”

“When I left him,” Mrs. Fielding said steadily, “he was still alive.”

“But when Mrs. Rosario arrived—and let's assume that her coming was the noise you heard which frightened you away—he was dead. Suppose Fondero's opinion about Camilla's incapacity to handle the knife is correct. As far as we know, only two people were with Camilla that night, you and Mrs. Rosario. Do you think Mrs. Rosario killed her brother?”

“It's more reasonable than to think I did.”

“What would her motive have been?”

“Perhaps a deliberate scheme to get money for the girl. I don't know. Why don't you ask her, not me?”

“I can't ask her,” Pinata said. “Mrs. Rosario died tonight of a heart attack.”

“Oh God.” She dropped back into the chair, her hands press­ing against her chest. “Death. It's beginning to surround me. All this death, and nothing to take the curse off it, no new life com­ing to take its place. This is my punishment, no new life.” She gazed at Fielding with dull eyes. “Revenge is what you wanted, isn't it, Stan? Well, you have it. You might as well leave now. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

Fielding's smile wobbled at the corners, but it stayed with him. “You won't be living so fancy yourself from now on, will you, Ada? Maybe you'll be glad to find a hole to crawl into. Your pass­port to the land of gracious living expires when Daisy leaves.”

“Daisy won't leave.”

“No? Ask her.”

The two women looked at each other in silence. Then Daisy said, with a brief glance at her husband, “I think Jim already knows I won't be staying. I think he's known for the past few days. Haven't you, Jim?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to ask me to stay?”

“No.”

“Well,
I
am,” Mrs. Fielding said harshly. “You can't walk out now. I've worked so hard to keep this marriage secure—”

Fielding laughed. “People should work on their
own
marriages, my dear. Take yours, for instance. This man Fielding you mar­ried, he wasn't a bad guy. Oh, he was no world-beater. He could never have afforded a split-level deal like this. But he adored you, he thought you were the most wonderful, virtuous, truthful—”

“Stop it. I won't listen.”

“Most truthful—”

“Leave her alone, Fielding,” Jim said quietly. “You've drawn blood. Be satisfied.”

“Maybe I've developed a taste for it and want more.”

“Any more will be Daisy's. Think about it.”

“Think about Daisy's blood? All right, I'll do that.” Fielding put on a mock-serious expression like an actor playing a doctor on a television commercial. “In this blood of hers there are cer­tain genes which will be transmitted to her children and make monsters out of them. Like her father. Right?”

“The word monster doesn't apply, as you well know.”

“Ada thinks it does. In fact, she's not quite sane on the subject. But then perhaps guilt makes us all a little crazy eventually.”

Pinata said, “You know a lot about guilt, Fielding.”

“I'm an expert.”

“That makes you a little crazy, too, eh?”

Fielding grinned like an old dog. “You have to be a little crazy to take the risks I took in coming here.”

“Risks? Did you expect Mrs. Fielding or Mr. Harker to attack you?”

“You figure it out.”

“I'm trying.” Pinata crossed the room and stood beside Mrs. Fielding's chair. “When Camilla telephoned you that night from Mrs. Rosario's house, you said the call was a complete surprise to you?”

“Yes. I hadn't seen him or heard from him for many years.”

“Then how did he find out that you were living in San Félice and that you were in a position where you could help him finan­cially? A man in Camilla's physical state wouldn't start out across the country in the vague hope of locating a woman he hadn't seen in years and finding her prosperous enough to assist him. He must have had two facts before he decided to come here—your address and your financial situation. Who told him?”

“I don't know. Unless . . .” She stopped, turning her head slowly toward Fielding. “It was—it was you, Stan?”

After a moment's hesitation, Fielding shrugged and said, “Sure. I told him.”

“Why? To make trouble for me?”

“I figured you could afford a little trouble. Things had gone pretty smooth for you. I didn't actually plan anything, though. Not at first. It happened accidentally. I hit Albuquerque the end of that November. I decided to look Camilla up, thinking there was an off-chance he had struck it rich and wouldn't mind passing some of it around. It was a bum guess, believe me. When I found him, he was on the last skid. His wife had died, and he was liv­ing, or half living, in a mud shack with a couple of Indians.”

His mouth stretched back from his teeth with no more expres­sion or purpose than a piece of elastic. “Oh yes, it was quite a reunion, Ada. I'm sorry you missed it. It might have taught you a simple lesson, the difference between poorness and destitution. Poorness is having no money. Destitution is a real, a positive thing. It lives with you every minute. It eats at your stomach dur­ing the night, it drags at your arms and legs when you move, it bites your hands and ears on cold mornings, it pinches your throat when you swallow, it squeezes the moisture out of you, drop by drop by drop. Camilla sat there on his iron cot, dying in front of my eyes. And you think, while I stood and watched him, that I was worried about making trouble for
you?
What an ego­tist you are, Ada. Why, you didn't even exist as a person any­more, for Camilla or for me. You were a possible source of money, and we both needed it desperately—Camilla to die with, and I to live with. So I said to him, why not put the bite on Ada? She's got Daisy fixed up with a rich man, I told him; they wouldn't miss a couple of thousand dollars.”

Mrs. Fielding's face had stiffened with pain and shock. “And he agreed to—to put the bite on me?”

“You or anyone else. It hardly matters to a dying man. He knew he wasn't going to make it in this life, and he'd gotten obsessed with the idea of the next one, having a fine funeral and going to heaven. I guess the idea of getting money from you appealed to him, particularly because he had a sister living here in San Félice. He thought he'd kill two birds: get the money and see Mrs. Rosario again. He had an idea that Mrs. Rosario had influence with the Church that would do him some good when he kicked off.”

“Then you were aware,” Pinata said, “when you arrived here, that Camilla was Juanita's uncle?”

“No, no,” said Fielding. “Camilla had never called his sister anything but her first name, Filomena. It was a complete surprise to me seeing his picture when I took Juanita home this afternoon. But that's when I began to be sure some dirty work was going on. Too many coincidences add up to a plan. Whose plan I didn't know. But I did know my former wife, and plans are her specialty.”

“They've had to be,” Mrs. Fielding said. “I've had to look ahead if no one else would.”

“This time you looked so far ahead you didn't see the road in front of you. You were worried about your grandchildren; you should have worried about your child.”

“Let's get back to Camilla,” Pinata said to Fielding. “Obviously you expected a share of whatever money he could pry out of your former wife?”

“Of course. It was my idea.”

“You were pretty sure she'd pay up?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, auld lang syne, and that sort of thing. As I said, Ada has a very sentimental nature.”

“And as I said, two thousand dollars is a heap of auld lang syne.”

Fielding shrugged. “We were all good friends once. Around the ranch they called us the three musketeers.”

“Oh?” It was difficult for Pinata to believe that Mrs. Fielding, with her strong racial prejudices, should ever have been one of a trio that included a Mexican ranch hand. But if Fielding's state­ment was untrue, Ada Fielding would certainly deny it, and she made no attempt to do so.

All right, so she's changed
, Pinata thought.
Maybe the years she spent with Fielding embittered her to the point where she's prejudiced against anything that was a part of their life together. I can't blame her much
.

“The idea, then,” he said, “was for Camilla to come to San Félice, get the money, and return to Albuquerque with your share of it?”

Fielding's hesitation was slight, but noticeable. “Sure.”

“And you trusted him?”

“I had to.”

“Oh, not necessarily. You could, for example, have accompa­nied him here. That would have been the logical thing to do under the circumstances, wouldn't it?”

“I don't care.”

It seemed to Pinata a strangely inept answer for a glib man like Fielding. “As it turned out, you didn't receive your share of the money because he killed himself?”

“I didn't get my share,” Fielding said, “because there wasn't anything to share.”

“What do you mean?”

“Camilla didn't get the money. She didn't give it to him.”

Mrs. Fielding looked stunned for a moment. “That's not true. I handed him two thousand dollars.”

“You're lying, Ada. You promised him that much but you didn't come across with it.”

“I swear I gave him the money. He put it in an envelope, then he hid the envelope under his shirt.”

“I don't believe—”