Strawberry Sunday Page 11

  “But maybe not.”

  “No, maybe not.” She tried and failed to stifle a giggle. “Oh, what the hell. I’ll probably hate myself later, but I think I’ll do it.”

  I strained to keep an adolescent flutter out of my voice. “I could come get you, if you’d rather. It’s really not fair to make you drive all the way down—”

  “It’s all right. I haven’t been out of the city in weeks. And you’d have to drive up and back twice if we did it that way. Where should I be at seven?”

  I looked at my room, then went to the window and looked down the street. “Take the Market Street exit off 101, then left and left again at the light and drive to the Best Western a block down on the left. I’ll be waiting in the lobby.”

  “Market Street. Best Western. I’ll be there.”

  “So will I,” I said, but she’d already hung up.

  Five minutes later, I floated out of my motel and walked down the road and made a reservation for two in the Best Western, making sure the room had only a single queen-sized bed. Ten minutes after that I was pulling to a stop in front of Louise Lombardi’s bungalow, doing what I should have done the first time, which was to look more closely into the final days in the life of her dead daughter.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  This time there were no burly vehicles lurking outside Mrs. Lombardi’s bungalow and no friends mourning with her inside the house. There was just a lonely, frightened woman, not wanting me there but not wanting to spend the day alone, either. When she invited me in, it was still a debatable proposition.

  “I’m sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Lombardi,” I said as she retook her seat on the couch and almost caused it to fold in half. “But I was wondering if I could have a look at Rita’s room.”

  She blinked and frowned and coughed, in rolling ripples of excess flesh. “Her room? Why would you want to do that?”

  “To see what might be in there that would tell me what was going on in her life just before she died.”

  “She was going to be married. That was what was going on. That was all she talked about.”

  Not to Carlos and her English teacher, I thought but didn’t say. “I’m sure it was. But maybe there was something else as well.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I need to look.”

  She wasn’t enthusiastic and I wasn’t either, to be truthful—rummaging around in a dead person’s effects is among the least dignified by-products of my profession. On top of that, rummaging in Rita’s effects reminded me that I had been urged to do the same with Charley’s estate once I got back to the city, to pick over his property like a seagull at a landfill, to choose what could be regarded by some as souvenirs but by others as plunder.

  She led me down a narrow corridor to a bedroom in the back of the house. It was tiny, maybe twelve feet square, separated from the only other bedroom by a thin wall of studs and sheetrock, making privacy nonexistent. I could imagine Rita living her home life mostly in whispered yearnings over the phone to her friends as her mother pressed an ear against the wall, living vicariously through the murmurs of her only child. I wondered who she listened to now.

  “Do you mind if I poke around in here a bit?” I asked as Mrs. Lombardi puffed and panted at my side.

  “Do you have to?”

  “I think I do.”

  She sighed like a valve easing pressure off a boiler. “Very well. If you must. But please don’t disturb anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  For some reason, she turned huffy. “The police have already been here, you know. They took several boxes of Rita’s things with them, so I don’t know what you expect to find.”

  “The police make mistakes,” I said, then looked at my watch in order to shove her off the dime. “If I can get started, I’ll be finished in a few minutes.”

  “Don’t you take anything from in there,” she instructed adamantly. “Not one thing.”

  I gave her the promise she was seeking, knowing I wouldn’t necessarily keep it, and stepped into the room. Behind me, the sub-flooring creaked like my knees in the morning as Mrs. Lombardi made her way back to her perch in the front room. There are a lot of extremely obese people around these days, most of them women, most of them doing nothing to change the picture except aggravating it. Some people say it’s glandular or genetic, but I think it’s a symptom of depression, a lack of esteem so fathomless as to foster public self-destruction.

  As Mrs. Lombardi’s footsteps retreated down the hall, I stepped into her daughter’s room and inspected it. It was a child’s domain in many ways, with frilly pink pillows and wallpaper with Pooh characters frolicking over it, and a throw rug bearing the image of Snow White. The books were girlish classics—Alcott and Austen and Browning, with Kingsolver and McMillan and Watters thrown in as contemporary spice. The music was lots of Celine Dion and Boyz II Men, the art on the wall was magazine photos of Princess Di and posters from movies like Roman Holiday and Sabrina—Rita obviously had an affinity for Audrey Hepburn.

  Taken together, the accoutrements of Rita’s home life seemed aggressively sunny and intensely romantic, as if her physical handicaps had provided more than enough dark clouds so the optional additions should foster the opposite climate. I’d have done the same in her shoes, I imagine, though with David Lodge and Richard Russo and Dan Hicks and Mose Allison and posters of Marilyn Monroe.

  I eliminated the periphery first. Nothing in the closet, or the dresser, or the bathroom yielded anything but the trappings of an ascetic existence, with the exception of Rita’s wedding dress, white and lacy and beaded and heartbreaking, hung on a padded hanger on the back of the closet door like a vestment of hand-carved ivory. I touched it for a moment, long enough to envision Rita walking down the aisle and Carlos in his tux eager to receive her at the altar. It took an effort to jerk myself back to the reality of the tiny bedroom and its hidden treasures, which at this point meant the desk.

  It was piled high with paper and not a sheet of it was anything but adult. There were government reports on pesticide dangers, a bulletin on accounting methods for depreciation in small businesses, communiqués from the farmworkers union about violations of the wages and hours act, and clippings about union protest marches at stockholder meetings of corporations that had agricultural subsidiaries that employed farm labor. One of the drawers contained several snapshots of Rita and Carlos and of Rita and a woman I didn’t recognize but guessed was her friend Thelma Powell, stacked and ready to be pasted in a small blue photo album that was in the drawer as well. Other than that, the contents of the desk were mundane.

  Various notes to herself were pinned to the corkboard on the wall above the desk—reminders to get the dry cleaning or call the dentist or meet with the priest, presumably about the wedding arrangements, plus a snapshot of Carlos looking as handsome as Valentino in his Sunday suit. The only oddity was a snapshot of Missy Gelbride, current and candid, climbing into a Mercedes convertible parked in downtown Haciendas, right in front of the laundromat, which meant right in front of Scott Thorndike’s apartment. Jealousy? Blackmail? Curiosity? Or worship of the princess of the valley in the sense that she worshiped Princess Di and Audrey Hepburn?

  Having found nothing helpful in my first pass through the room, I cast about for secret sources—loose floorboards, hollow walls, the bottoms of drawers and the backs of pictures, shoe boxes stuffed in the back of the closet, canisters afloat in the toilet tank. But nothing suggested a lead until I glanced at the closet a third time.

  Hanging on a ceramic hook on the front of the door was a backpack. Although it didn’t bulge with content, it seemed to fall from the hook in an odd shape, stiff on one side, slack on the other. I took it down and looked inside. The main compartment was empty, but when I felt around the edges there was a hard surface toward the bottom that seemed not part of the original design. When I looked closer, I found a zipper. So I unzipped it.

  Some sort of electronic datebook was sec
reted in the bottom pocket of the pack. Made by Rolodex, it was the size of a trade paperback only thinner, with a hinged top and a battery pack and instructions printed on the inside cover. I turned it on, read the instructions, pressed some tiny buttons, and eventually found what amounted to Rita’s appointment calendar, reduced to a digital readout.

  I scrolled to the month of August and saw an impressive variety of names listed beside the dates and times of their meetings with Rita. Most of the dates were with Carlos, of course, and most of the rest seemed clearly about business, with people like the departments of Agriculture and Immigration and a trucking line that, like everything else in Haciendas, was owned by the Gelbrides. But in the last week of her life, she had met with at least four people who might have had other agendas.

  One of the appointments was with Scott Thorndike, the teacher who wanted Rita to publish her fiction in prestigious magazines, no doubt the meeting Thorndike had already told me about. One was with Grayson Noland, a name I finally remembered as the lawyer who’d drawn the contract for Carlos to grow berries for Gus Gelbride. One was with someone with the initials J.R. And the last was with Mona Upshaw, the nurse who had been on duty at the hospital the night they’d brought Rita in, who had asked me to let Rita’s secrets slip quietly into the grave with her.

  After a second’s consideration of the criminal consequences of disturbing evidence, I put the device in my pocket and headed back to the living room. But it occurred to me as I was leaving that meetings scheduled in the days immediately after her death might be as important as the ones before, so I returned to the bedroom, activated the device again, scrolled forward in time, and looked at the result.

  Opposite the date blocks for the remainder of the month were two entries: One was with a woman named Liz Connors, a name I didn’t recognize; the other said simply Gelbride—Mother. There was no notation to indicate the subject matter of the first meeting or whether the latter session was with Mrs. Gelbride or with a Gelbride to talk about Mrs. Lombardi.

  I slipped the device in my pocket and found Mrs. Lombardi in her usual place, a cup of tea steaming beside her on the occasional table, her eyes roaming as intimate as a caress over the collectibles lining the walls. “I found some names in Rita’s calendar I’m not familiar with,” I said. “I wonder if you can help me.”

  She shrugged infinitesimally. “If I can.”

  “Liz Connors.”

  She frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “How about someone named J.R.?”

  She smiled. “That’s Randy Gelbride. When he was in grade school, they all called him that.”

  “Why?”

  “It had to do with that character in Dallas. You know, the TV show? Because that’s they way he acted, I guess. A big man impatient to take over for his father.”

  “Do you know why Rita would be meeting with him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why Rita would be meeting with Ms. Upshaw the day before she died?”

  “Mona?”

  I nodded.

  “No.”

  “No idea at all?”

  She shook her head. “Unless it was to do with me. Mona is worried about my health. I keep telling her I’m fine, but she worries. She wants me to go up to Stanford for a physical examination.”

  Mrs. Lombardi looked down at her bulbous torso as if onto a separate being, one in which she took a maternal concern. Causing people to worry seemed to be her proudest accomplishment. My guess was that Rita’s meeting with a Gelbride was on the same subject—her mother’s well-being.

  She was eager to have me on my way. “Where does Ms. Upshaw live?” I asked before she could invite me to leave.

  “On Del Rio Road.” She told me how to get there. “I’m afraid I need to rest now,” she said. “If I don’t get my sleep, my blood pressure acts up.”

  “One last thing and I’ll be off.”

  “Yes?”

  “I was wondering about Rita’s surgery.”

  “What about it?”

  “I was wondering who paid for it.”

  Her eyes disappeared like raisins pressed into a mound of white flour. “That’s none of your business.”

  “So it wasn’t health insurance.”

  She struggled to her feet. “Please leave this house. Now. I’m afraid I must insist.”

  I stayed seated. “There’s some indication that Rita was going to meet with one of the Gelbrides a few days after she died, and that the reason for the meeting was you.”

  “That’s crazy. Why would they talk about me?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “I know nothing about it,” she pouted, both repelled and attracted by the possibility it was true.

  “Maybe Rita wanted Gus to pay for some medical work for you. Just like he had done for Rita.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she grumbled.

  “I’ll find out sooner or later. You might as well tell me now.”

  “I’ll tell you nothing,” she said, her voice climbing toward hysteria. “You are no longer welcome in this house. I wish you had never come.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mrs. Lombardi.”

  “And I am sorry for you, Mr. Tanner. That you make it your business to pry into private matters, that you intrude where you’re not wanted, that you open old wounds and make mothers who have lost their husband and their only child even more unhappy than they are already.”

  If she had one of her painted plates in her hand, she would have thrown it at me. There was nothing for me to do but apologize once again and leave, taking with me a private plea of guilty to most of the charges she had made about me.

  Ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot at the headquarters of Gelbride Berry Farms, about a mile east of Haciendas, and parked next to a white Dodge Ram pickup just like the one I’d seen near Mrs. Lombardi’s house the morning before. Before I got out, a security guard came out of a gatehouse and approached the car. Behind him, a fence of shiny new razor wire encircled the entire compound, which included the low brick headquarters building, a dusty lot filled with flatbed trucks, Caterpillar tractors with steel tracks instead of rubber tires, stacks of cardboard strawberry flats and lengths of irrigation pipe, and a square stucco building, huge and gray and windowless, that loomed over the rest of the compound like a brewing storm.

  The guard tapped on the window. “What can we do for you, mister?”

  I rolled it down. The air was still cool from the morning fog, a misty veil that made everything indistinct and out of focus. “My name’s Tanner. I’m here to see Mr. Gelbride.”

  “Would that be Gus or Randy?”

  “Gus,” I said, then amended it. “Either one.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He raised a clipboard and consulted it. “Don’t have you on the sheet.”

  “Someone must have made a mistake.”

  He licked his lips and grinned. “If they did, it would be the first time. What’s your business?”

  I smiled. “Confidential, I’m afraid.”

  He smiled back. “You from the government, by any chance? Labor? EPA? Immigration? Agriculture? OSHA? Any of them?”

  I shook my head.

  “You a cop?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Then it’s hard for me to see a reason why I need to let you in here.”

  I looked at his uniform and then at the fence that stretched toward the horizon beyond him, the fence that suggested prison breaks and border crossings. “What are you guys hiding out here, anyway?”

  He fidgeted. “How do you mean?”

  “All this security. It’s like you’re running a nuclear installation or a meth lab or something. What’s so secret about strawberries? My grandma used to raise them in the backyard.”

  “We get people coming around to cause trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble? Labor trouble?”
<
br />   “That’s part of it, but there’s lots of it I don’t know.” He wrinkled his nose and shrugged. “Anyways, I don’t make the decisions, I just carry them out. And right now my job is to tell you to move along.”

  “How can I see Mr. Gelbride?”

  “Call for an appointment.”

  “How likely am I to get one?”

  “Not very, unless you got something he wants.”

  “What does he want?”

  The guard smiled. “Peace and quiet, mostly.”

  I returned his smile. “He’s not going to get it till he talks to me about Rita Lombardi.”

  “That may be, mister, but it’s not going to happen today. Now move along.”

  I turned the key and started the car and began to back out of my space. As I looked in the mirror to make sure I was clear, a man stepped in my path and blocked it. He was tall and powerfully built, with broad shoulders and a thick waist and skin tanned like butterscotch and stretched like cowhide. His smile was more sneer than grin, as if he were wearing a rubber mask that had crinkled and curled in the heat. His straw hat hid everything above his cruel brown eyes.

  “What we got here, Mr. Gilstrap?” he asked the security guard.

  “Man wants to see you or your daddy.”

  “What about?”

  “Didn’t say. Got no appointment, so I told him to move along.”

  I got out of the car and leaned against the rear fender and smiled at Randy Gelbride. “Actually it was Mr. Gelbride the younger I wanted to see most. J.R., as they used to call him in school.”

  Gilstrap started to say something else but Randy waved him off. “Is that so?”

  “Yep.”

  “What would you want to see him about?”

  “To tell him I’m a private detective from San Francisco looking into the death of Rita Lombardi, and that I’d like to ask him some questions about it.”

  He nodded his head in mock seriousness and referred to himself in the third person, the way Richard Nixon used to. “What makes you think Gelbride the younger knows anything about that subject whatsoever?”

  “Nothing, except he had an appointment to see Rita a few days before she died. Plus, I’ll bet he knows something about everything that goes on around here. Plus, he seems to be trying to avoid me.”