Strawberry Sunday Page 12

  The man laughed and waved toward the guard and the fence. “You think all this was done to keep out grungy private eyes from the big city?”

  “I can’t think of any other reason, can you?”

  Randy looked at the guard and then at me, then pointed toward the white Dodge truck. “Hop in. I got a few places to go this morning; we can talk while I take care of business.” He stuck out a hand. “Randy Gelbride.”

  I shook it. “Marsh Tanner.”

  “Climb aboard.”

  As I did as he asked, I noticed a small handgun strapped to the bench seat just beneath his left leg. It was an exact fit with the mood of the place, and it didn’t make me more comfortable.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Randy started the truck and roared off down the highway toward the east. The rising sun was still elbowing its way through the fog, creating an ambiguous aspect, half cheerful, half gloomy. My attentions still split between Rita Lombardi and Jill Coppelia, I felt that way myself.

  In contrast to Carlos Reyna’s rig, this one rode as smooth as a sled, complete with leather seats and air conditioning and cupholders every six inches. After a screech of brakes and a lurch to the left, we abandoned the highway in favor of one dirt road after another, passing slow-moving trucks stacked with everything from boxes of strawberries to crates of broccoli, past row upon row of nursery buildings covered with translucent cloth roofs and designed on the model of Army barracks, furthering the sense that I was in the middle of some kind of absurdist battle in which the munitions were fruits and vegetables, not rifle bullets and mortar rounds.

  I kept a lookout for Carlos Reyna and his workers, but it would be a long shot if I spotted him. Most of the fields were shielded from the road by rows of corn stalks and sunflowers, much the way timber companies leave a stand of trees along the roadside to camouflage the clear-cuts being committed beyond the screen. It was an odd sensation, the benign and even salutary sight of such magnificent fertility coupled with the sense of skulduggery fostered by the elaborate security and secrecy. The implication was that something illegal or at least inappropriate was going on in the fields despite the surface serenity, as if the Mafia or the Colombians or the CIA were using American agriculture as a front for criminal enterprises. Since that was probably not the case, it was puzzling why growers like Gus Gelbride chose to foster such suspicions.

  I didn’t voice my thoughts, but Randy drove as angrily as if I had, wrestling the wheel as though it were an animate adversary, fishtailing down the road as if we were racing off-road in Baja. Although roadside signs repeatedly warned that dust could harm the plants, we were creating a cumulus brown cloud that blotted out most of the world to our rear. Again, the image was of warfare, the aftermath of aerial bombardment, the accompaniment to a mechanized assault.

  After five minutes of strife with the roadway, Randy swung onto a narrow dirt levee that rose three feet above the plane of the fields and separated two large plots of strawberry plants. Some twenty yards from the end of the levee he skidded to a stop and got out of the truck. A dozen other vehicles were parked there already, plus the ubiquitous portable toilets towed on a trailer behind a baby blue school bus that had presumably hauled most of the workers to the job.

  Halfway into the field, a line of pickers worked a double row of strawberry plants. They were tended by a small truck stacked high with cardboard flats stamped with the Gelbride Berry Farm logo and supervised by a row boss who stood at the head of the row being worked, arms crossed, alert for problems. The only sound came from a portable radio hung from the side of the toilets. The tunes were sung in Spanish and were decidedly upbeat, in contrast with the drudgery they accompanied.

  As I followed Randy into the field, I recognized the supervisor who roamed over the area as Carlos Reyna. When he saw Randy he frowned, and when he saw me with him he scowled even deeper, to the point of hostility. He made me feel like a traitor and I didn’t like it.

  “We got a problem out here, Reyna,” Randy was saying as he eyed the row of workers.

  Everybody but Carlos was bent over a plant, but Carlos stood tall and proud and just a little arrogant.

  “What problem would that be?” he asked Randy, meeting his eye, aping his bearing.

  Randy walked to the row of pickers and inspected them one by one, as if they were seasonal crops themselves, coming to the end of their useful life. No one looked up; no one said a word. When he didn’t see what he was looking for, he looked back at Carlos. “Where is he? I know he’s out here, the fucking greaser.”

  When Carlos didn’t respond, Randy walked down the row of pickers once again, an inspection as totalitarian and demeaning as a Marine boot camp. He hesitated before the last picker in line, started to say something but didn’t, and continued walking until he came to the portable toilets.

  With a sudden burst of fury, he banged on a blue plastic door. “Come out of there, you brown bastard, or I’ll dump it over and you can roll around in tamale shit the rest of the morning.” He banged again. “Tuck it and zip it, asshole.”

  A second later, the door to the toilet opened and a young man stepped out onto the dirt with as much dignity as he could muster, which wasn’t a whole lot. He was short and handsome, with quick black eyes and small brown hands and a look on his face that spelled trouble. He wore a red flannel shirt and a hooded gray sweatshirt and a bandanna knotted around his head so that a short black drape fell down the back of his neck.

  As he stood facing Randy, he pulled a hat out of his back pocket and put it on over the bandanna. The hat was red with a black eagle on the front. If I remembered my history, it was the symbol of the UFW.

  Randy looked him over with contempt verging on odium, then turned toward Carlos. “Hey. Reyna. How long has Morales been working your crew?”

  Carlos hesitated, then yelled back. “Just this morning. One of my regulars is in the hospital.”

  “With what?”

  “Appendicitis.”

  “He blaming it on us?”

  Carlos only shrugged.

  “Well, Morales is out. Now. I see another one of these union guys out here and you and I are going to square off. Got it, Carlos?”

  Carlos only looked at him. “He’s a good worker,” he muttered finally.

  “Worker, hell. He’s not here to pick fruit, he’s here to stir things up. You keep telling me you aren’t taking your crew to the union, Carlos, but this don’t look antiunion to me, this looks like you’re a fucking sympathizer.”

  Carlos met his eyes without saying another word. Finally, he looked at the young union man and shook his head. The man tugged his cap lower on his head and walked to the end of the field, watched in awe and trepidation by his fellow workers.

  When he got to the raised road he took off his hat and waved it from side to side. “Viva la Raza!” he yelled, and then, “Viva la Huelga!” With that, he climbed into his truck and drove off, the cloud of dust at his back a symbol of his own brand of disdain.

  When he was gone, Randy Gelbride looked at Carlos. “I see him in my fields again, I’ll kill him. And you, too, if I think you hired him on purpose. Now get these assholes back to work.”

  Randy stomped back toward the truck, but veered off as he reached the end of the line of pickers. He said something I couldn’t hear to the worker at the far end, then cocked his head and waited for an answer.

  The worker was a woman, bent over the berries, not working, just hiding. After Randy spoke to her a second time, she straightened up and turned his way, but as far as I could tell she didn’t say anything in return.

  I hadn’t recognized her because she was swaddled in three layers of clothing, but the worker was Consuelo Vargas, eldest daughter of Homero and Maria, her lovely face covered by a red scarf knotted behind her neck like an outlaw’s mask, her blooming curves buried beneath her baggy sweater and loose slacks.

  Randy was talking, she was listening, but there was nothing between them but tension, sexual on his part, somet
hing close to homicidal on hers. Randy asked a final question that went unanswered, then uttered an epithet that caused Consuelo to place her palms over her breasts, as though she feared assault. I started to move toward them, and Carlos did, too, but Randy swore again for effect, then walked back toward his pickup.

  Halfway there he turned and yelled toward the truck where the picked fruit was being tallied. “Hey. Gonzalez. I seen lots of cat faces in her box. Dump them out. All of them. Everything she picked this morning. Go on. Do it before I do it for you. We don’t ship ugly berries from this farm.”

  Randy watched with satisfaction as the checker on the truck reviewed his notes, then began dumping boxes of berries onto the dirt. I glanced at Consuelo Vargas. Her hands were over her eyes and she was sobbing. Her mother ran to her side and comforted her. Randy Gelbride climbed back in his pickup and slammed the door.

  After a moment’s debate, I walked to Carlos’s side and asked if he was all right.

  He thrust his jaw. “I’m fine.”

  “How’s Homero?”

  “He’s okay. But he needs rest.”

  “Is he still in the hospital?”

  He nodded. “I take him home tonight.”

  “To the cave?”

  He glanced at Randy’s white truck, then nodded.

  “Randy is why Rita sent them up in the hills, isn’t he?”

  He nodded again.

  “Has it worked?”

  “So far,” he said. “No one’s told him where she is.”

  At my back, I heard Randy start his engine and honk. “I was talking to him about Rita,” I said by way of explanation. “She had an appointment with him just before she died and I wanted to ask about it. I didn’t know what he was going to do when he got here.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Da nada,” Carlos said, then lowered his voice. “He killed her,” he whispered. “I know it. When I can prove what he did, I will kill him as well. Slowly. So he suffers.”

  I started to caution against it, but Carlos turned toward his workers and began to speak to them in Spanish. They straightened to hear his counsel, then bent over the plants once again. I walked back to the white truck and climbed in.

  “You know Reyna, it looks like,” Randy Gelbride said to me as I slammed the door.

  “He was Rita Lombardi’s fiancé.”

  “Yeah. So I heard. I were you, I’d try him out as a suspect.”

  “Why?”

  “I knew Rita from day one. She had a mouth on her but she was smart. Too smart to end up with a beaner, even one as sharp as Reyna. I figure she wised up and dumped him and he couldn’t handle it. These guys don’t like to lose face, you know? The macho thing, plus they treat their women like shit even when they work their asses off for them.”

  I doubted Randy was objective on any subject, particularly one encompassing women or Mexicans. He just seemed to be playing the most popular sport in Haciendas, which was accusing others of murder.

  “What connection was there between Rita and Gelbride Berry Farms?” I asked.

  “What makes you think there was one?”

  “Your mother called Mrs. Lombardi to console her over her loss.”

  Randy shrugged. “Louise used to work for us. From what I heard, she was a shitty employee—fat and lazy. But Mom likes to think the best of people. Lucky for us, she keeps her nose out of the business.”

  “Do you know anything about what happened to Mrs. Lombardi’s husband?”

  “Franco? I was just a kid when it happened, but what I heard was he got run down one night. Drunk. Wandered onto the highway. Probably banged by a beaner rattling around in one of those pickups without brakes. They drive them till they rot, then fix them with baling wire and duct tape and drive them another five years. Amazing thing is, they always keep running.”

  I thought of the snapshot tacked over Rita’s desk. “Were Rita and your sister friends?”

  “Missy? Shit. The last friend Missy had was our dead dog. I think Sparky killed himself to get away from her.” His scorn seemed even more marbled than the version he directed at Morales and the union.

  “Does Missy work for the company?”

  Randy sneered again. “Thinks she does. But we just ignore her.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and the old man.”

  “Is Grayson Noland active in the business?”

  “Noland eats shit,” Randy growled a little too intensely to let me believe his next statement. “Me and the old man run the business. No one else.”

  “Why did Rita meet with you the day before she died?”

  He looked at me for the first time, and almost drove us off the road. “Who said she did?”

  “Her datebook.”

  “Yeah, well, it was just more bullshit.”

  “Union bullshit?”

  “The UFW? Fuck no. Rita was too smart to get mixed up with them. Lesbians and Jews is the only white people who buy into that crap.”

  “So what did Rita want from you?”

  He kept his eyes locked on the road. “None of your fucking business.”

  “The cops don’t know about the meeting yet. I could forget to mention it if you tell me what happened.”

  His laugh was imperious. “You think I give a shit what the cops in this burg know or don’t know?”

  “Usually not, I’m sure. But you might if it gets you mixed up in a murder case. Chief Dixon doesn’t act like he’s been bought and paid for.”

  He threw me a glance the way he would give me a tip. “The whole town’s been bought and paid for, Mr. Detective. If you’re smart, you’ll keep it in mind.”

  I smiled. “Where were you the night she was killed, Randy?”

  He shrugged. “With a woman, I imagine.”

  “What woman?”

  “Who knows? They got different names, but their snatches look all the same.”

  “I imagine you keep some sort of list, don’t you? And some sort of scoring system? You seem like that type of guy.”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  I shifted gears. “How much does Carlos Reyna owe your company?”

  Randy shrugged at its insignificance. “Seventy grand, last I looked.”

  “How much is he likely to clear this year?”

  “Above expenses? Maybe twenty.”

  “So he’ll still owe you.”

  Randy grinned. “One way or another, he’ll owe me till the day he dies.”

  “You plan to file suit to collect the debt?”

  “Not if he keeps in line.”

  “By that you mean he keeps union workers out of the fields.”

  “That. Other things,” he added cryptically.

  “And if he gets out of line?”

  “We take everything he has and run him out of the state. Any more stunts like bringing guys like Morales to the farm, that’s just what we’ll do.”

  The smile on his face was adolescent and infuriating. It would please me no end to pin Rita’s killing on him but at this point I couldn’t see how to make it happen.

  As we got out of the truck, I grabbed his arm. “If anything happens to the Vargas girl, I’m going to come after you first, Randy.”

  “Yeah?” he sneered. “You and what army?”

  I looked at the fields surrounding the Gelbride compound. “The one out there,” I said, gesturing toward the verdant workplace. “Where all the armies come from.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When I got back to town I looked at my watch—six hours till my tryst with Jill Coppelia. I was hot and bothered for the next five minutes, until it occurred to me that the reason Jill was coming to Salinas might not have to do with romance, it might be to serve a subpoena.

  I stopped at the first phone I came to, called the hospital and asked for Mona Upshaw, learned she hadn’t come in that day, and followed the directions Louise Lombardi had given me to her house. Nurse Upshaw ha
d implied there were secrets in Haciendas that no one need know, information that would be more harmful to unearth than to let Rita’s killer go free. Since I hadn’t learned the secrets on my own, it was time to go to the source.

  Del Rio Road was on the south end of Haciendas. Once, it had served as the southern boundary of the town, but now it was too near a mini-mall and a car wash and a park that had been given over to kids and their attendant gang graffiti and skateboard ramps.

  Mona Upshaw’s house was the only bright spot on the block, a long low ranch home with stone accents and a redwood fence that protected a small Japanese garden from the ravages of drive-bys and random vandalism. I walked through the gate and up to the door and knocked, then noticed the bell and pushed it. The chimes that echoed back at me sounded monastic and melancholy. I knocked as loud as I could, then followed the narrow flagstone pathway that took me to the back of the house.

  The patio was small but attractive, a core of stone and flowers amid a circle of well-trimmed shrubbery. The decor included a brick fireplace and portable gas grill and tasteful lawn furniture lounging comfortably in the shade of a large yellow umbrella. Everything was as neat as a pin as befit a registered nurse, except the back door was standing wide open. I stuck my head inside and called her name. What answered wasn’t the voice of Mona Upshaw, what answered was the unmistakable vapor of death.

  I went inside, wishing my spare gun was in my pocket instead of my car, alert for sounds, alert for the macabre manifestation of murder. As I moved through the kitchen and dining room, I was dimly aware of a tidy, efficient abode, the lair of a woman who knew what she liked and needed and could afford to accommodate both elements of a placid existence. The only thing I found that was ugly and inappropriate was her body.

  She was on the floor in the tiny foyer near the front door, face down, dressed in a nurse’s uniform that had once been pristine but was now soaked in the blood that still seeped out of the many stab wounds that someone had put in her back. There was no sign of a weapon, no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, and no sign that Mona Upshaw had any idea she was about to draw her last breath until that was what she had done.