An Equal Opportunity Death (5 page)

“Not more than once,” I said, laughing.

“Time to eat.” Rosa put plates of spaghetti before us, on the kitchen table.

The teenage Fortimiglio sneezed, dug a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and then enthusiastically attacked his spaghetti. Aside from his sneezing, he seemed to be even quieter than his grandfather.

Rosa touched Chris’s arm. “Tell Vejay about the canoe trip,” she said.

Chris laughed again. This time no one looked surprised. “Frank decided, for old times’ sake, we would take a boat trip. We’d paddle a canoe from the inlet up to town. It was a good time of the year for that. The river was calm, the water was low. So I said, fine. I got a canoe from a friend of Pop’s by the inlet.…”

“I didn’t know they had canoes there,” I said.

“They’re not for rental. This guy just loaned it to us, right, Pop?”

Carlo nodded as he twirled the spaghetti against his spoon.

“So, Frank and I paddled up river. This time he
was
sick. I mean, we had to stop for him to throw up. But he insisted on paddling all the way to the far side of town. He said he promised himself he could do it, and he didn’t want to welsh on himself.”

“But he didn’t take the canoe back, did he, Chris?” Rosa laughed.

“No. He offered, sort of. But he was real glad when I said I could do it alone.”

“Why
did
Frank decide to move here?” The spaghetti slipped off my fork. I considered cutting it, but decided against it. I started to wind again.

Chris looked momentarily confused. “Oh, you did ask that, didn’t you? I hadn’t seen him for a couple months. He just called and said he was tired of the city and wanted to get away. So—you know Mama—she told me to invite him up. He stayed for a week and he loved it.”

For Chris there was no need to explain Frank’s reaction. Loving the Russian River was natural.

“I guess Frank had heard me talk about the river so much when we were on ship—I was pretty homesick then—that he felt like he knew it. I must have talked about the town and everybody here twenty hours a day. Later, even now, I talk about it a lot. I’d told Frank so much that when he first came here he recognized people right off. He never had to ask where anything was.”

“How did he afford the Place?”

“He sold all his figurines.”

“They must have been worth quite a bit.”

“That’s what the sheriff said. Frank told me he got taken once selling a netsuke, so when he sold the lot he knew what to ask.”

“The sheriff was here?”

Chris stuffed a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth, looking toward his mother as he chewed. It was apparent he was passing the conversation to her.

Rosa put down her fork slowly. “The sheriff—Sheriff Wescott—came by this morning, asking about Frank. There wasn’t much we could tell him.”

“What did he say?”

Rosa hesitated. She looked embarrassed. I had never seen Rosa have a second thought about discussing a conversation, particularly one so obviously in the public domain.

“Did he tell you something about Frank?” I asked.

“No, no. Nothing we all don’t know. He asked about Frank, and then, Vejay, he asked about you. You and Frank. I told him there was no reason for him to suspect anything there, that he was wasting his time.”

“Is that all he said? About me, I mean.”

“Well, no.” Rosa took an unusually long sip of her wine. She put the glass down slowly. “He asked how well we knew you, and we told him. We told him you were a friend, a good friend, that he’d do better to believe you and not spend his time foolishly asking questions about you when he should be looking for Frank’s killer.” Rosa smiled. “He didn’t like being told that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No need for that,” she said. “I told him if you said you were sick, then you were sick.”

“Thanks,” I repeated without much enthusiasm. I did appreciate Rosa’s faith in me. But the sheriff wouldn’t. He knew I hadn’t been sick. Now he would think Rosa had no discrimination when it came to me. How many people, I wondered, was he questioning about me? Was I the focus of the investigation?

“Drugs,” Carlo said.

“What?” I said, shaking off my speculations.

“Carlo reminded the sheriff about the drugs,” Rosa added quickly, with a clear relief at the change of subject.

“All the drugs that go through here, there’s bound to be violence,” Carlo said. “There’s a lot of money in marijuana.”

Carlo sat in his wool fisherman’s sweater, the wine glass held momentarily before his craggy Italian face. I was always surprised when he spoke—not only because he was usually so quiet, but also because he had no trace of an accent. Though he was in his late fifties, his hair was only partly gray, his face weathered from those years fishing at sea. He was a small man, but his arms and shoulders were well-muscled, perhaps in compensation for his injured leg.

“They grow marijuana up north. They drive it through here to San Francisco. Bound to be crime. Frank must have got caught in it. Maybe he had connections in San Francisco. I told the sheriff that.” Carlo put down the wine glass, signaling the end of his statement. He had said more in these few minutes than I had heard him say in the entire year I had lived here. Usually he sat comfortably in the background, watching Rosa make everyone at home, listening to Chris and his brothers-in-law talk about the fish, watching his daughters and their children.

Now he pushed himself up, nodded, and headed for the door.

As the door shut after him, Rosa said to me, “He’s going to dig a trench behind the Millers’ house on the High Road. Last year the water caused a lot of damage there. It’s busy for him this time of year. People need a lot done right before the flood comes.” She stacked our plates and carried them to the sink. “It’s good for him to have these jobs,” she added, with her back still toward me. “It was hard, so hard for him, after he got hurt. He couldn’t keep his balance on the boat. He couldn’t fish anymore. He tried.…But this is good.”

I wished I could say something comforting to Rosa, like she did for me yesterday, but what? Still, there was a diversion I could offer. I said, “Yesterday morning, I drove to the freeway to get my newspaper. And, in the restaurant there, guess who I saw together?”

Rosa turned, thinking, probing her collection of facts and possibilities, then giving up. “Who?”

“Madge Oombs and Skip Bollo.”

“What?” Chris laughed.

“Now, Chris,” Rosa said. She and Madge had been friends since grammar school.

“But, Mama, Madge and Skip!”

“I didn’t say it was romantic,” I said.

“I shouldn’t think!” Chris was still laughing.

“Now you know what I know,” I said, as I stood up to leave.

Both Rosa and Chris urged me to stay, but I had my route to finish. I needed to be alone to think through Frank’s possible drug involvement, Frank’s murder, and how suspect I appeared to the sheriff.

Rosa and Chris, I would leave with more pleasant thoughts—wonderfully intriguing speculations—that would last the rest of the afternoon. And I was certain I assured Madge a dinner invitation.

E
VEN THE
F
ORTIMIGLIOS SUSPECTED
Frank’s death had been drug-related. I hadn’t considered the question. But once it had been raised, the likelihood was so great I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it myself. Millions of dollars worth of marijuana passed through here every year, coming from the wild country to the north, heading for the cities down south. And Frank was in an ideal position to be a middleman. It was definitely something to think about.

I pulled the truck into the parking lot behind the Henderson PG&E substation.

The substation was a three-room stucco storefront that accommodated customers in the front, the manager’s office in the middle, and the storeroom that doubled as a meter readers’ area at the rear. There we congregated in wet and cramped fellowship amidst tan metal cases of miscellaneous metal supplies, a scarred wooden table, a coat rack, a pegboard for the route keys, the Lazy Susan holding the route books, and the dufflebag-like, tan San Francisco bag that awaited the completed books. Each night the books in the San Francisco bag were rushed, via Santa Rosa, to the computer in San Francisco.

We readers rarely had reason to be in the customers’ area. We ventured forward to Mr. Bobbs’s office (a tiny windowless cubicle that was one of his few management perks) only to present him pages from the route books on which tampering had been recorded. He never came into our room.

So it was a shock to find him standing between the cable wires and the San Francisco bag when I arrived. His sallow face was orange with outrage; his hand clasped hard over the tan canvas bag.

“We’ve had the sheriff here,” he said before I could put down the route book. “A Sheriff Wescott. He was asking about you.”

“Me?” Why was the sheriff asking about me? Why wasn’t he checking on Frank’s activities?

“He wanted to know about your duties as a meter reader.”

That seemed stranger yet.

“Your duties to your accounts.”

“Yes?”

“He said, Miss Haskell, that you went to Goulet’s bar for the purpose of reporting that his reading was too high. The sheriff asked if that was within the scope of your duties.”

I waited, startled that the sheriff questioned my statements. What I had told him was true.

“I explained to the sheriff that, as you were sick, you had no duties.” Mr. Bobbs stared straight at me, a move as abnormal for him as entering the supply room. His face was still an unnatural orange, his neck muscles so tight he was barely breathing.

“What I am asking you, Miss Haskell, is how do you explain that?”

I didn’t know exactly what he was asking. Did he want an explanation of Frank’s overread, my reporting it, or the sheriff’s visit? I suspected it was the last. Mr. Bobbs took his position as manager very seriously. As he was quick to say, he had been in power (electricity) for twenty years. It was a standing joke among the readers that he dressed in a tan suit to match the San Francisco bag. One day, in a flurry, he would be mistaken for it, rushed to the city, and fed into the computer.

But even if he were asking why I had decided to go to Frank’s Place, I couldn’t fully explain, not to myself, and certainly not to him. Predominantly, it was in response to a feeling that I got from Frank for the past few weeks. Frank had seemed uneasy with me, distant. I couldn’t think of a reason. I was uncomfortable, then annoyed, and confused. The issue had to be discussed; I’d avoided it as long as … I guess now I’d avoided it forever.

To Mr. Bobbs I said, “Since I was there I decided to mention the overread. It was considerable. His usage had been regular up to the last month or so.”

“Regular for twenty years.”

It was like Mr. Bobbs to be able to recall the figures of an individual account.

“There’s been a bar at that account since the twenties,” he said. “Never problems, our problems. Disputes with the law during Prohibition, they say, but no usage problems.”

I waited, but he said nothing more. He stood looking somewhere beyond my left shoulder, but he made no move to return to his office.

Anxious to keep the topic impersonal, I said, “Speaking of problems, there was another tampering at the Kellys’ on the High Road.”

“Have you warned the account?” Mr. Bobbs always referred to customers as accounts, as if people were created merely to be instruments for the consumption of electricity.

“I stuck a warning on the meter last month. And yesterday the meter was running backwards again.” I put the route book on the table and flipped to the Kelly page. Mr. Bobbs glanced down at the “R” in the Changes column.

“Umm. Tampering last month
and
this month. I’ll get the investigator from Santa Rosa. Tomorrow, first thing.”

“There’s a slide on that road from last year. It’ll be worse by tomorrow.” I unzipped my slicker.

Mr. Bobbs continued to stare at the offending page. “Two months straight, with a warning … He removed the page, closed the book with a snap, and placed it carefully in the San Francisco bag.

I was just reaching in my pocket for the keys that accompanied the route when he said, “Two days off.”

“What?”

“You will be suspended for two days.”

“But why?”

“Abuse of sick leave.”

“I don’t need an excuse for one sick day.”

His hand tightened on the San Francisco bag. “You weren’t sick, Miss Haskell. The sheriff told me you were at Goulet’s bar, drinking. At noon. Two drinks.” His voice was squeaky, his breath caught in those viselike neck muscles. “You were, Miss Haskell, tampering with the sick leave policy.”

He held up a page from the personnel manual. “Sick leave may be requested by an employee in cases of personal illness. Up to three days leave
may
be granted without medical verification.”

“I turned in a sick card this—”

He continued. “If there is question as to the appropriateness of the request, medical verification is necessary. There
is
question. Clearly, you do not have medical verification of your ‘illness.’” He put down the page. “Two days off.”

I stared, infuriated, then turned and stalked out, not bothering to avoid slamming the door. It wasn’t until I had crossed the parking lot and climbed into my own pickup that I realized I still had the route keys in my pocket. I wasn’t about to return them.

I drove out of the lot, barely aware of the road. Three days off! The more I thought of it the angrier I became. Technically, Mr. Bobbs was within his rights. I hadn’t been really sick. I might have been, for all he knew. I might have had a sore throat, or a touch of the flu, but I didn’t. Still, that day I couldn’t have faced another eight hours tramping up those staircases in the rain. By March “illness” was rampant among meter readers, and the unspoken rule was that if you had accrued sick time, it was yours to use, as long as you kept a low profile. And two days suspension was certainly extreme punishment.

But furious as I was, it was unsatisfying to focus it on Mr. Bobbs. I still pictured him clutching the San Francisco bag. The scene clearly had upset him as much as it had me; he had been tense to the point of breathlessness. It was another standing joke among the readers that at 5
P.M.
Mr. Bobbs dropped headfirst into the San Francisco bag and pulled the tie closed over his feet. The Henderson substation was his life. And my “sick day” had made a mockery of it.