Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) (4 page)

VI

“Our role in this is complicated,” Bishop Duenas said, his voice sounding exasperated as it came out of the speaker phone. “I accept that you feel we have a responsibility to the woman, but we also have one to our parishioners and our clergy. I don’t understand how you can think having a woman under your parish roof, even for a night, would be acceptable to the archdiocese.”

Luis held his tongue. Whillans had told him if he sat in on the call, he had to stay quiet. He watched as his pastor sighed and sank into his chair. When Duenas had been at St. Augustine’s earlier in the day, he’d been more pliable. Luis figured this had changed once the bishop had informed the archdiocese that Whillans believed the young woman should stay at the parish.

“It’s one night, Bishop,” Whillans replied, leaning over the speaker. “Father Chavez has already been in contact with the Sheriff’s Department. His fear, which I share, is that if she’s taken away from here, she might run off. She’s very, very scared.”

“There’s no private home you could put her in?” Duenas pressed. “A member of the laity’s perhaps?”

“I’d be too afraid of endangering someone outside the church. My priests understand and accept there’s a risk.”

There was a long silence. Luis eyed Whillans with concern. Whillans waved this away.

“One night,” Duenas finally agreed. “But I need a report in the morning.”

“You’ll get it.”

Whillans hung up and turned to Luis.

“Let’s hope your sheriff’s deputy works fast,” he said. “How’s our guest?”

“She’s all right,” Luis reported. “Erna got her some clothes from the donation box. She got cleaned up. After that, well . . .”

Luis trailed off. Whillans raised an eyebrow.

“What is it?”

“I thought she’d make a break for it,” Luis said. “But she hasn’t moved from the room all day. Erna said she just sat in a corner for hours. I’ll bet if we offered her a closet, she’d jump at it.”

“When you feel like the whole world’s waiting to strike, a defensible position can be all you want,” Whillans suggested. “Just ask a mouse.”

Luis nodded and headed out. He thought Odilia Garanzuay might be many things, but a mouse wasn’t one of them.

He walked over to the rectory and found Erna sitting with Odilia. Erna knew barely any Spanish, much less Zapotec, but chatted along animatedly as Odilia listened. When Erna spied Luis in the doorway, she hopped up.

“How are you, Father?” she asked.

“Good, Erna.”

“You need to speak to Odilia?” she asked.

“I do, but you’re welcome to stay.”

“No, no,” Erna said, heading for the door. “Have a few things I need to finish up in the office before getting home, if that’s all right.”

“No problem,” he said, realizing Erna was just giving them privacy.

Luis took a seat opposite Odilia. Odilia nodded toward the departing Erna.

“She’s very kind,” she said in Zapotec. “Will you tell her that?”

“I will. I just wanted you to know that I called your mother. She was very worried about you.”

For a moment it looked to Luis like the young woman might burst into tears. Then she straightened, her face hardening as if in acceptance of this.

“Did you tell her I was all right?”

“Yes, but she said something surprising. You said you’d just got here. She said you’d been away for years.”

“I’ve been away from home for some time,” Odilia admitted carefully, “but have been at the Blocks only since last year.”

“The Blocks?”

“There are many people there who are in my situation.”

“Which is what?”

Odilia didn’t respond. Luis switched tack.

“I spoke to a friend in the Sheriff’s Department,” Luis said. “He’s willing to help.”

“I said no police,” Odilia exclaimed.

“He is a friend, and I haven’t even told him your name. I’m trying to use him to find Annie’s contact.”

“The city lawyer?” Odilia asked skeptically.

“Yes. I’m asking you to trust me. Will you?”

When Odilia didn’t respond, Luis leaned in.

“I’m not accustomed to siding with law enforcement either,” he admitted. “But if you want to find out what happened to your friends, this might be the only way to do it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“All right,” Luis said. “I know you’ve been cooped up in here all day. You want to come down to Mass?”

“I haven’t been to Mass since I was a little girl.”

“That’s too long,” Luis said, grinning.

Monday night Mass at St. Augustine’s was strictly an
abuela y ruca
affair, the median age around sixty. While a handful might come to make up for missing Sunday services, others had nowhere better to be. Luis greeted familiar congregants as he led Odilia to a rear pew.

“Do you know most of your parishioners?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Luis admitted. “We service a community of over ten thousand here. These are the ones who are here three or four times a week.”

“We had people like that back home. Widows generally.”

“People like the ritual,” Luis offered. “As your days wind on, the church is a reminder that another world awaits. It can lend perspective. If you live in the knowledge that this world is a gateway to the next, it can be a comfort.”

“Do they teach you that in seminary?” Odilia challenged.

“I saw it on a bumper sticker.”

Odilia laughed. The elderly congregants turned to look, more in surprise that a young person was there than in offense. Pastor Whillans entered from the sacristy and made his way to the podium.

“All right, bingo’s in an hour,” Whillans announced. “Shall we get this under way?”

Now it was the congregants’ turn to laugh as the organist, a laywoman named Provence Verdejo, moved to her bench.

“I think ‘Lord of All Hopefulness’ is appropriate for today, no?” Whillans continued, keeping with the informal tone. “It’s a good one for a group of this size to sing. We can turn the nave into the echo chamber it was designed to be.”

“He’s funny,” Odilia said after Luis translated.

“He believes the community part of communion is as important as everything else,” Luis said. “You should see him on a Sunday. Even with hundreds, he makes everyone feel as if this is their church. He’s warm and inclusive.”

“You admire him.”

“I do. He makes it look easy.”

Odilia looked away. When Luis caught her gaze again, she had tears in her eyes.

“Are you all right?”

“Just thinking of Annie,” she said. “I didn’t know her well, but she was a good person. I keep seeing her body crumpled over her car. It’s like I’m remembering a dream, not reality.”

Though he hadn’t been a witness to his brother’s murder, Luis could picture the scene so perfectly in his mind that it felt like a memory.

“Who killed her?” he asked quietly.

Odilia stared straight ahead, saying nothing. The hymn ended and Whillans raised his hands.

“Let us pray.”

When Luis had arrived at St. Augustine’s, Pastor Whillans had indicated the tremendous number of ecclesiastical texts on his bookshelves and told him that everything he needed to know about the Kingdom of Heaven could be found within.

“But everything you need to know about man you can find in this,” he’d said, handing Luis the thickest novel he’d ever seen, a copy of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. “I’ve read it three times myself, and each time it’s a new book.”

Luis had placed the tome on his shelf and forgotten about it. Tonight he picked it up, wanting something irreligious for a change. He flipped through it, finding a fat man waking to shave on the first page. Already bored, he scanned down and found a few Latin phrases, which he translated, happy he still could. When the next few pages were as impenetrable as the first, he looked for other instances of Latin.

Above a particularly difficult passage, however, he found a beautiful song lyric:

I am the boy

That can enjoy

Invisibility.

Luis set the book aside to think about this. Sleep would not come easy. He contemplated the day’s events, looking for evidence of the Hand of God. Nothing filled a priest with greater self-doubt than wondering if he allowed God to operate through him or if, in his pride, he had substituted his own will.

That’s when he remembered the name the valet had passed to him.

Vaitiare Oyervidez.

He got down on his knees, closed his eyes, opened his mind, and prayed.

The rectory door creaked downstairs. Luis glanced to the clock on his nightstand. It was past midnight, the other priests long in bed. He waited to hear the door close, but it stayed open long enough for more than one person to enter.

Then came a crash, metal on wood.

Luis was out the door in a flash. He tore down the hall and down the stairs, not caring who he roused. He exited the stairwell on the first floor, only to run into two men pointing pistols at him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

As if he didn’t know. The door to the communal room was already off its hinges. Odilia was screaming.

“The cops are on their way,” he spat.

The gunmen didn’t flinch. Two more emerged from the communal room, dragging Odilia between them. They glanced at Luis, took his measure, and then kept dragging Odilia toward the door.

Luis charged. The gunmen didn’t react until Luis had already driven a fist into the nose of the closest man, sending him spinning into the wall. The man wore a mask, so Luis couldn’t see his face, but he caught sight of a number of tattoos down the side of his neck. They weren’t quite gangster ink, but they weren’t quite something else, either.

Luis whipped around to continue his attack but was met by a pistol brought down hard against his face, nearly knocking out his upper teeth. Luis swung wildly, but the butt of the pistol slammed into his temple. He dropped like a stone. The last thing he heard were Odilia’s cries fading as she disappeared into the night.

PART II

VII

Monks first brought wine to California. They came to establish missions in the then Spanish-held territory but were quickly without wine for communion. Vines were planted, grapes were grown, and it was discovered that the Central Coast was a perfect place to produce wine.

Young Walter Marshak came to the West Coast from Indiana to try his luck at farming in the twenties. He’d tried his hand at cotton, but after three bad harvests in a row, he switched to wine grapes. For this, growing a fruit that required careful and dedicated cultivation, he had a knack.

Then came Prohibition.

Though bootleggers slipping liquor across the Canadian border got all the headlines, California vintners were also busy keeping the country stocked with illegal wine. While the making of wine used in communion services was exempted by the Volstead Act, the rate at which California wineries kept producing would have been enough to stock churches well into the twenty-first century.

Government agents got wise and tried to shutter the renegade vineyards, but sympathetic Sheriff’s Departments made it their civic duty to tip off the local farmers. Men like Walter thrived. And when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the cozy relationship between vineyards and law enforcement continued.

Though he became something of a decent wine grape grower, Marshak was no visionary. He had a solid work ethic and enough discipline to break even almost every year, but expansion never entered his mind. For Walter’s sons, Henry and Glenn, this was all they’d thought about since childhood.

The younger brother, Glenn, had the head for business. Twelve when he took over his father’s books, he dove into the numbers with near-religious zeal. He saw only flaws in the way his father did things. He attacked these imperfections, working late into the night to prove his ways were more efficient and profitable. At best he’d receive a shrug or amused nod for his efforts, at worst an admonishment to stick to the task at hand.

The experience made Glenn first hate and then pity his father, but it didn’t affect his relationship with Henry. Though firstborn and favored, Henry never lorded it over his younger sibling. Henry’s gifts manifested themselves in the vineyards. He shared his brother’s zeal to innovate and constantly experimented with new farming techniques. When his father frowned on this, Henry shrank his sample size but continued to work.

After Walter died, the brothers implemented their changes the very next season. They increased their profits and market share so quickly, even the press noticed, dubbing them an overnight success. Where their father had been content to partner with vintners, the brothers cut out the middlemen and established their own winery. They bought up land, vanquished the old notion that a winemaker’s focus should be on creating the finest quality product, and entered the marketplace with a line of affordable table wines aimed at the American mass market.

While aficionados regarded them as apostates, by the midsixties the Marshaks were a household name, and wine was no longer something just for special occasions. Soon, Americans drank more wine from Marshak vineyards than all European imports combined. As the brothers reached their fifties, their annual income was in the tens of millions.

They continued to expand, turning their attention to other big California produce, like strawberries and lettuce. Almost superstitiously avoiding cotton due to their father’s early failed harvests, they moved into citrus, buying orchards up and down the state. They moved into nuts. They bought dairy farms. They established their own warehouses and systems of distribution.

Now in his eighties, Glenn ran the business from downtown Los Angeles, as well as the main administrative campus closer to the fields in Ventura County, a warren of offices nestled in the foothills of the Santa Ynez range.

Henry, however, had checked out almost three decades prior. He was still listed as his brother’s partner but was semi-retired. After his wife, Robin, died, he took back control of a few select fields, on which he could experiment with new methods of irrigation, organic fertilization, or soil compositing—a farmer’s version of tinkering in the garage. He partnered with the viticulture and enology program at the University of California at Santa Barbara and brought students to these fields as well. His earthy humor and unaffected humility soon made him a favorite of faculty and students alike.

Henry had one son, Jason, but the boy was born with his uncle’s head for business, not his father’s love of the fields. The heir apparent to the Marshak empire was often mistaken for Glenn’s son rather than Henry’s.

Henry didn’t mind.

As he drove through the fields that had borne his family’s name for almost a century, he inhaled every scent coming through his open window. It was the height of the strawberry harvest. The rows were peppered with workers, moving from plant to plant, carefully plucking the fruit. He smelled the berries, sure, but also the sweat of the workers, the scents released from the soil as they broke it up with their feet, and the occasional hint of green, likely from a broken stem the workers would then try to hide. It was backbreaking labor, as there was no easy or machine-driven way to bring in strawberries. He didn’t begrudge them a couple of damaged plants.

After another mile or so, the Marshak campus appeared up ahead. It looked like any large-scale office park, albeit one dropped in the middle of endless farm fields. He had his own barely used parking space a few steps from the front door and slid his rumpled ’85 Ford pickup into the spot.

Henry’s one real contribution to the building of the campus was the landscaping. He’d asked that all plants inside and out be California natives—huckleberry shrubs, flannelbush, California poppies, cactus, and so on. He paused on his way up the sidewalk to admire a spectacular desert agave, its budding stalk rising from a porcupine of succulent leaves at its base. He inhaled and could smell the beginnings of the buds’ acrid fragrance.

“Morning, Mr. Marshak,” the front desk security guard said, as if Henry’s appearance was a regular occurrence. “How are you today?”

“Can’t complain,” Henry said with a smile. “How are you?”

The guard extracted a key card from his pocket as he flanked Henry on his way to the elevator bank.

“Going all the way up?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

As the elevator ascended the four floors, Henry had his first moment of hesitation.

What am I doing here?
It isn’t too late to let this be. Going home would be the easiest thing in the world.

But since when do I do things the easy way?

“Good to see you, Henry,” Marge Babbitt, the senior receptionist, said as Henry emerged from the elevator.

“Morning, Marge. Glenn in yet?”

Henry knew the answer. When he’d called the house, Glenn’s wife, Charlene, told him where he was.

“He is. Does he know you’re coming?”

“No, no,” Henry said. “Just wanted to see if I might catch him.”

Before Marge could reply, the door leading to Glenn’s office swung open and its occupant appeared, arms outstretched.

“Henry! What a pleasant surprise.”

Though the brothers had long been a study in contrast, the last couple of decades had made this more pronounced. At some point Henry’s aging seemed to accelerate even as Glenn’s appeared to slow. Henry’s skin was tanned and weathered from years in the sun, his thinning hair an unkempt bristle brush atop his head to match the fuzzy gray mustache above his top lip. He wore thick wire-rimmed bifocals, and his clothes were pulled from the store-brand bins at Walmart.

Glenn, on the other hand, was rarely without a suit coat, or at least a sports jacket with a tailor-made dress shirt underneath. At one time he favored Barneys or Brooks Brothers, but these days he preferred a personal tailor. Now, almost every outer garment he owned had been made to his exact measurements. He was the best-dressed man on any occasion.

“Hope I’m not interrupting,” Henry said, raising his palms.

“Not at all!” replied Glenn. “Come on back.”

Henry caught a tone on the second sentence. Though he felt he’d conditioned Glenn to expect his irregular appearances at the office to concern eccentric nonsense that was easily handled, there was always a small part of his brother that braced for the worst.

“So, what can I do for you?” Glenn asked once they were out on the balcony off his office.

Henry stared out past the fields to the mountains beyond for a second before eyeing his brother.

“Santiago Higuera?”

The name hung in the air a few seconds before Glenn realized it was a question. “Friend of yours?”

“Of ours. Worked for us in the fields a few years back. Then we sold him a piece of land out off South Lewis Road. Grew strawberries.”

“‘Grew’?”

Henry handed the morning’s paper to his brother, the front page folded around so that a story about the discovery of Santiago Higuera’s body in Mexico was on top.

“That’s unfortunate,” Glenn said cautiously. “How does this relate to us? Are we mentioned in the story?”

He had expected a self-interested response. “Not at all,” Henry replied.

“If you’re worried the press might try and make hay from the connection, I should tell you it’ll probably come to nothing. Not great given the Crown Foods contract, but a blip.”

“I’m not worried about Crown Foods.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t be, would you?” Glenn sighed. “It’s a big deal, though. It’s the future of this company. Which makes it your son’s future.”

Henry said nothing. Glenn handed the paper back.

“Was this all you wanted to talk about?”

“I thought you might be concerned,” Henry said. “A good man is dead, and no one knows who did it.”

“Did it happen on our land?” Glenn asked.

“It doesn’t look like it. But a friend of mine in the Sheriff’s Office gave me the heads-up. They might send someone by the office to ask a few questions.”

“Well, if they do, I’ll tell them the same thing I just told you. Won’t even be worth the gas.”

Henry nodded. “Okay. Just putting it on your radar.”

Henry felt Glenn’s gaze all the way back to the elevator. He’d come expecting a denial. Why, once he’d received it, did it feel like a confession?