A Stranger in My Grave (30 page)

“You'll have to believe it, Fielding,” Pinata said. “That's where it was found, in an envelope inside his shirt.”

“It was
on
him? It was there
on
him, all the time?”

“Certainly.”

“Why, that dirty bastard...” He began to curse, and each word that damned Camilla damned himself, too, but he couldn't stop. It was as if he'd been saving up words for years, like money to be spent all at once, on one vast special project, his old friend, old enemy, Camilla. The violent emotion behind the flow of words surprised Pinata. Although he knew now that Fielding was responsible for Camilla's death, he still didn't understand why. Money alone couldn't be the reason: Fielding had never cared enough about money even to pursue it with much energy, let alone kill for it. Perhaps, then, he had acted out of anger at being cheated by Camilla. But this theory was less likely than the other. In the first place, he hadn't found out until now that he'd been cheated; in the second, he wasn't a stand-up-and-fight type of man. If he was angry, he would walk away, as he'd walked away from every other difficult situation in his life.

A spasm of coughing had seized Fielding. Pinata poured half a glass of whiskey from the decanter on the coffee table and took it over to him. Ten seconds after Fielding had gulped the drink, his coughing stopped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, in a symbolic gesture of pushing back into it words that should never have escaped.

“No temperance lecture?” he said hoarsely. “Thanks, preacher man.”

“You were with Camilla that night, Fielding?”

“Hell, you don't think I'd have trusted him to come all this way alone? Chances were he wouldn't have made it back to Albuquerque even if he wanted to. He was a dying man.”

“Tell us what happened.”

“I can't remember it all. I was drinking. I bought a bottle of wine because it was a cold night. Curly didn't touch any of it; he wanted to see his sister, and she didn't approve of drinking. When he came back from his sister's house, he told me he'd called Ada and she was going to bring the money right away. I waited behind the signalman's shack. I couldn't see anything; it was too dark. But I heard Ada's car arrive and leave again a few minutes later. I went over to Camilla. He said Ada had changed her mind and there was no money to share after all. I accused him of lying. He took the knife out of his pocket and switched the blade open. He threatened to kill me if I didn't go away. I tried to get the knife away from him, and suddenly he fell over and—well, he was dead. It happened so fast. Just like that, he was dead.”

Pinata didn't believe the entire story, but he was pretty sure a jury could be convinced that Fielding had acted in self-defense. A strong possibility existed that the case wouldn't even reach a court­room. Beyond Fielding's own word there was no evidence against him, and he wasn't likely to talk so freely in front of the police. Besides, the district attorney might be averse to reopening, with­out strong evidence, a case closed four years previously.

“I heard someone coming,” Fielding went on. “I got scared and started running down the tracks. Next thing I knew I was on a freight car heading south. I kept going. I just kept going. When I got back to Albuquerque, I told the two Indians Camilla had been living with that he had died in L.A., in case they might get the idea of reporting him missing. They believed me. They didn't give a damn anyway. Camilla was no loss to them, or to the world. He was just a lousy no-good Mexican.” His eyes shifted back to Mrs. Fielding. He was smiling again, like a man enjoying a joke he couldn't share, because it was too special or too involved. “Isn't that right, Ada?”

She shook her head listlessly. “I don't know.”

“Oh, come on now, Ada. Tell the people. You knew Camilla better than I did. You used to say he had the feelings of a poet. But you've learned better than that since, haven't you? Tell them what a mean, worthless hunk of—”

“Stop it, Stan. Don't.”

“Then say it.”

“All right. What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “He was a—a worthless man.”

“A lazy, stupid
cholo,
in spite of all your efforts to educate him. Isn't that correct?”

“I—yes.”

“Repeat it, then.”

“Camilla was a—a lazy, stupid
cholo.”

“Let's drink to that.” Fielding stepped down off the hearth and started across the room toward the decanter. “How about it, Pinata? You're a
cholo
too, aren't you? Have a drink to another
cholo
, one who didn't play it so smart.”

Pinata felt the blood rising up into his neck and face.
Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo. . . .
The old familiar word was as stinging an insult now as it had been in his childhood.. ..
Take a trip to the northern polo. . . .
But the anger Pinata felt was instinctive and general, not directed against Fielding. He realized that the man, for all his blustering arrogance, was suffering, perhaps for the first time, a moral pain as intense as the mortal pain Mrs. Rosario had suffered; and the exact cause of the pain Pinata didn't understand any more than, as a layman, he understood the technical cause of Mrs. Rosario's. He said, “You'd better lay off the liquor, Fielding.”

“Oh, preacher man, are you going to go into that routine again? Pour me a drink, Daisy baby, like a good girl.”

There were tears in Daisy's eyes and in her voice when she spoke. “All right.” “You've always been a good Daddy-loving girl, haven't you, Daisy baby?”

“Yes.”

“Then hurry up about it. I'm thirsty.”

“All right.”

She poured him half a glass of whiskey and turned her head away while he drank it, as if she couldn't bear to witness his need and his compulsion. She said to Pinata, “What's going to happen to my father? What will they do to him?”

“My guess is, not a thing.” Pinata sounded more confident than the circumstances warranted.

“First they'll have to find me, Daisy baby,” Fielding said. “It won't be easy. I've disappeared before. I can do it again. You might even say I've developed a real knack for it. This Eagle Scout here”—he pointed a thumb contemptuously at Pinata—”he can blast off to the police till he runs out of steam . It won't do any good. There's no case against me, just the one I'm carrying around inside. And that—well, I'm used to it.” He put his hand briefly and gently on Daisy's hair. “I can take it. Don't worry about me, Daisy baby. I'll be here and there and around. Some­day I'll write to you.”

“Don't go away like this, so quickly, so—”

“Come on now, you're too big a girl to cry.”

“Don't. Don't go,” she said.

But she knew he would and that her search must begin again. She would see his face in crowds of strangers; she would catch a glimpse of him passing in a speeding car or walking into an ele­vator just before the door closed.

She tried to hold on to his arm. He said quickly, “Good-bye, Daisy,” and started across the room.

“Daddy...”

“Don't call me Daddy anymore. That's over. That's gone.”

“Wait a minute, Fielding,” Pinata said. “Off the record, what did Camilla say or do to you that made you furious enough to knife him?”

Fielding didn't reply. He just turned and looked at his former wife with a terrible hatred. Then he walked out of the house. The slam of the door behind him was as final as the closing of a crypt.

“Why?” Daisy said. “
Why
?” The melancholy little whisper seemed to echo around the room in search of an answer. “Why did it have to happen, Mother?”

Mrs. Fielding sat, mute and rigid, a snow statue awaiting the first ominous rays of the sun.

“You've got to answer me, Mother.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Now.”

“All right.”

With a sigh of reluctance Mrs. Fielding stood up. She was holding in her hand something she'd taken unobtrusively from her pocket. It was an envelope, yellowed by age and wrinkled as if it had been dragged in and out of dozens of pockets and drawers and corners and handbags. “This came for you a long time ago, Daisy. I never thought I'd have to give it to you. It's a letter from—from your father.”

“Why did you keep it from me?”

“Your father makes that quite clear.”

“Then you've read it?”

“Read it?” Mrs. Fielding repeated wearily. “A hundred times, two hundred—I lost count.”

Daisy took the envelope. Her name and the old address on Laurel Street were printed in a shaky and unfamiliar hand. The postmark said, “San Félice, December 1, 1955.”

As Pinata watched her unfold the letter, the malevolent chant from his childhood kept running through his head:
Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo.
He hoped that his own children would never have to hear it and remember. His children and Daisy's.

21

My beloved Daisy:

It has been so many years since I have seen you. Perhaps, at this hour that is very late for me, I should not step back into your life. But I can­not help it. My blood runs in your veins. When I die, part of me will still be alive, in you, in your children, in your children's children. It is a thought that takes some of the ugliness out of these cruel years, some of the sting out of the tricks of time.

This letter may never reach you, Daisy. If it doesn't, I will know why. Your mother has vowed to keep us apart at any cost because she is ashamed of me. Right from the beginning she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself too. Even when she talked of love, her voice had a bitterness in it, as if the relationship between us was the result of a physical defect she couldn't help, a weakness of the body which her mind despised. But there was love, Daisy. You are proof there was love.

Memories are crowding in on me so hard and fast that I can barely breathe. I wish they were good memories, that like other men I could sit back in the security of my family and review the past kindly. But I can­not. I am alone, surrounded by strangers in a strange place. 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. Your mother kept her vow, Daisy. We are still apart, you and I. She has hid­den her shame because she cannot bear it the way we weaker and hum­bler ones can and must and do.

Shame—it is my daily bread. No wonder the flesh is falling off my bones. I have nothing to live for. Yet, as I move through the days, shack­led to this dying body, I yearn to step free of it long enough to see you again, you and Ada, my beloved ones still. I came here to see you, but I lack the courage. That is why I am writing, to feel in touch with you for a little, to remind myself that my death will be only partial; you will be left, you will be the proof that I ever lived at all. I leave nothing else.

Memories—how she cried before you were born, day in, day out, until I wished there were a way of using all those tears to irrigate the dry, dusty rangeland. Dust and tears, these are what I remember most about the day of your birth, your mother's weeping, and the dust sifting in through locked windows and bolted doors and the closed draft of the chimney. And at the very last moment before you were born, she said to me when we were alone, “What if the baby is like you. Oh God, help us, my baby and me.” Her baby, not mine.

Right from the first she kept you away from me. To protect you. I had germs, she said; I was dirty from working with cattle. I washed and washed, my shoulders ached pumping water from the drying wells, but I was always dirty. She had to safeguard her baby, she said. Her baby, never mine.

I couldn't protest, I couldn't even speak of it out loud to anyone, but I must tell you now before I die. I must claim you, though I swore to her I never would, as my daughter. I die in the hope and trust that your mother will bring you to visit my grave. May God bless you, Daisy, and your children, and your children's children.

 

Your loving father, Carlos Camilla

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mar
garet Millar
(1915-1994) was the author of 27 books and a masterful pioneer of psychological mysteries and thrillers. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she spent most of her life in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband Ken Millar, who is better known by the 
nom de plume
 of Ross MacDonald. Her 1956 novel 
Beast in View
 won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In 1965 Millar was the recipient of the 
Los Angeles Times
 Woman of the Year Award and in 1983 the Mystery Writers of America awarded her the Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement. Millar's cutting wit and superb plotting have left her an enduring legacy as one of the most important crime writers of both her own and subsequent generations.