Strawberry Sunday Read online

  “I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, liquor has a tendency to adversely affect my performance in certain venues.”

  She raised her glass. “To peak performance, by all means.”

  I tried to laugh but couldn’t quite bring it off. “Not that there’s any pressure or anything.”

  “Not yet, there isn’t.”

  She giggled at her impertinence, then sipped her drink, then went to the bed and pulled back the covers and propped the pillows against the headboard. The art above her was a copy of a rural scene by Grant Wood. The barn looked like a battleship and the shocks of winter wheat looked like weapons of ancient combat.

  “I used to love motels,” Jill said as she slipped into the bed. “The anonymity. The freedom from responsibility of cleaning up after yourself. But now all I can think of is what kind of infectious organism the previous occupants might have deposited.”

  “That’s a mood lifter.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry about that.”

  I started to stretch out next to her, but she stiff-armed me away. “No clothes allowed. It’s nude or nothing, buster.”

  “You’re not nude,” I pointed out.

  She crossed her arms, lifted her hips, and was out of her gown with a flair and a flourish that only women can manage with panache. “Any more complaints?”

  I looked her over. “I believe those breasts aren’t precisely symmetrical. Maybe I’d better take measurements.”

  She threw the nightgown at my face. “Finish your drink and get in and warm me up. I thought it was hot in this part of the state. I should have brought my pajamas.”

  I finished my drink in a single gulp and got naked without falling on my face, which is as close to panache as I come.

  My gusto was soon tempered by my recent bout with a bullet. As I groaned involuntarily during a preliminary maneuver, Jill sensed what was happening and slowed things down, though almost to a fault. Her generosity was so comprehensive I worried that she was obtaining no pleasure herself from the exercise, that the thrall was traveling in a single direction. But my nerve endings must have cut a deal with my genitalia, because as we surged toward climax I kept my part of the bargain, or so it seemed to me.

  When we collapsed into a panting clutch, Jill asked if I was all right.

  “Fine,” I said. “You?”

  She kissed me on the nose, her breasts nuzzling like kittens at my neck. “You’re a considerate lover, Mr. Tanner,” she cooed.

  “And you’re an accomplished partner, Ms. Coppelia.”

  “I like making love. It’s nice if it comes packaged with a deep and meaningful relationship, but I discovered that if I waited for that to happen, I only had sex once a decade. So I adjusted my standards.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I suppose you screw anything in a skirt.”

  “Only District Attorneys, as a matter of fact. You’re my seventy-ninth.”

  She hit me with a pillow; I took it from her and hit her back. We kissed and cuddled and ten minutes later she was asleep, snoring softly at my side, as comfortable as if we’d been married for twenty years and she trusted me to put out the cat and lock the back door. Surprisingly, I found myself wishing it were so.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  We had breakfast in the ersatz diner next to the motel. Neither of us said very much, but if Jill was in the vicinity of where I was, her mind was arcing into the future, speculating, estimating, and plotting additional episodes that would be as golden as this one had been. But maybe that wasn’t where she was at all. Maybe she was eager to get back to the city, to the comforts of distance and disentanglement, leaving the complications of me in her rearview mirror. I finished my pancakes, drank a third cup of coffee, and decided how I would finish the day.

  When her mushroom omelet was gone, Jill looked at her watch. “Well …”

  “Well …”

  “I guess I should be on my way.”

  “We could go over to Carmel for a few hours. Wallow in cuteness. Walk on the beach. Spend lots of money.”

  “Been there; done that, I’m afraid.”

  “We could pick strawberries for ten hours at ten cents a pint.”

  “That’s all they get? A dime for those little baskets that sell for a dollar in the market?”

  “That’s it.”

  “And your friend was trying to do something about that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Is that why she was killed, do you think? Because she was agitating on behalf of the farmworkers?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully.

  “She sounds like a wonderful woman. I think I’d better let you get back to work.”

  “It’s Sunday. Even Sam Spade rested on Sunday.”

  “When you’re as famous as Sam Spade, you can rest, too.”

  When we got to her car we looked at each other, then smiled, then embraced. “Thanks for coming down,” I said.

  “It was definitely my pleasure. Thanks for asking.”

  “And thanks for saying things like that.”

  “You’re not a charity case, Mr. Tanner. And I’m not a social worker.”

  With that burst of chastisement, she got in the car and started the engine, then rolled down the window and leaned out. “Thanks for breakfast. And dinner. And the room.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Good luck with the case. And the car.”

  “Thanks. You, too. With bringing down the bad cops.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’d like to call you when I get back to the city.”

  “Please do.”

  “I had a nice time, Jill. A real nice time.”

  “So did I, Marsh. I didn’t know Salinas was so sexy.”

  She puckered up and I bent down and kissed her lightly and somehow it was the most intimate moment of her visit. She put the Altima in gear and drove out of the lot and, after a brief wave in my direction, launched herself toward the stream of traffic heading north on 101.

  I was more regretful at her departure than I expected to be, a spasm of tristesse that was far from usual in my experience. Beset by foreign feelings, I went back to the room and watched new-stalk TV until my psyche had reassembled itself enough to get me back to business.

  It was time to visit the union, so I took 101 north for almost ten miles, then took a left at the Watsonville/Aromas turnoff. Rita had been right—because of their surging profitability, every tillable pocket of land in the Pajaro Valley was given over to strawberries. In each of the fields I passed, the crop looked ready to pick, though there were few workers in sight, presumably because it was Sunday.

  The highway eventually deposited me on San Juan Road, took me past the distribution and research facilities of Driscoll Strawberry Associates, the cooperative Carlos had mentioned as one of the pioneers in the strawberry business, then through the sleepy town of Pajaro and into the heart of Watsonville, a city of some thirty thousand people that was the core of the strawberry industry in the state. As I reached the center of town, I attracted a host of catcalls and giggles because of the risible state of my car. I felt like sort of a celebrity.

  The UFW office was a block off the main drag in a narrow storefront that was part of a rustic mini-mall, which seemed less prosperous than its developers must have projected. The windows of the union office were plastered with flyers in both Spanish and English, urging support for the campesinos. The most arresting displayed bold white lettering on a red and blue background that read: “WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAID … THIS IS WRONG.”

  Inside the door there was a small waiting room with a picture of Cesar Chavez on the wall and a display case full of caps and buttons and T-shirts on sale to union supporters, as though the UFW was a sports franchise out to milk its market for every last nickel it could generate. A young woman behind the reception desk asked how she could help me, then was immediately interrupted by a phone call. By the time she got back to me she’d answered two other calls,
sold buttons to three kids of high school age who were poking and teasing each other during the entire transaction, and directed yet another visitor to an office in the back.

  When she turned my way again, I smiled. “Busy day.”

  “Always.”

  “Even on Sunday.”

  “Especially on Sunday. It’s the only day the workers have the time and energy to meet with us.”

  “Are you in the union yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I’m a volunteer.”

  “Have you ever worked the fields?”

  “In summers since I was five. When I went to college my father refused to let me pick fruit anymore—he said I was better than that now. So I work days for the union and nights at Long’s Drugs. There is more honor working the fields,” she added, “even if my father cannot see it.” She looked me over. “Are you a reporter?”

  “No.”

  “La migra? Immigration?” she explained when she saw I didn’t understand.

  I shook my head. “I’m looking for information about a friend of mine who was sympathetic to the cause and might have done some work for the union in recent months. I’ve been told a woman named Liz Connors knew the woman I’m talking about.”

  “What’s the name of your friend?”

  “Rita Lombardi.”

  “Not Latino.”

  “Italian, from Haciendas.”

  “Why do you need this information?”

  “It might tell me who killed her.”

  That one knocked her off balance. “I see. Uno momento, por favor.”

  She left her desk and trotted down the hall. After a minute she returned and told me someone would be with me shortly. Then she helped the four people who made up the line that had formed in her absence, in a language I couldn’t interpret.

  I took a seat on the battered couch and stared up into the chocolate eyes of Mr. Chavez. He was a saint, some people say, which doesn’t mean he was perfect, it just means he was courageous and right—a soft and selfless man, intensely spiritual, who had given his life to aid an oppressed people whose simple aspirations were opposed by some of the most powerful political and financial interests in the state.

  Chavez may have been less effective than leaders like Gandhi and King, perhaps, but the effort, not the result, is the measure of a man, and his effort had been superhuman at times, such as when he starved himself to the point of collapse in protest of the outrages committed in the table grape industry. In his latter years he had reportedly withdrawn into an almost mystical reliance on a higher power to deliver the workers from their oppressors and the union effort had suffered from his detachment.

  But who could blame him? By then the crusading spirit of the sixties had given way to the self-absorption of the eighties. To the extent that the union relied on popular support for success, it was doomed to failure—the populace from which Chavez had formerly received both money and time was worshiping Madonna and reading Danielle Steele and clamoring to work on Wall Street. I remembered the only time I’d seen Chavez in person. He had seemed truly holy to me, a man of God and the people, a revolutionary in the footsteps of Christ himself. I doubted that I or anyone retained the capacity to see any leader in such a light again.

  A woman came through the front door and stood before me as if she were auditioning for a remake of Shane. “You the man who was asking about Rita Lombardi?” she said.

  She was in her early thirties, her skin browned like Thanksgiving turkey, her hair shaggy and short and dull brown, and her eyes dark and squinting, as though genetically forearmed against the sun. Her attire included cowboy boots, Levi’s as snug as blue body lotion, and a denim shirt with sleeves rolled above her elbows.

  I stood up. “I’m him,” I said. “Marsh Tanner.”

  She extended a hand. “Liz Connors.”

  We shook. “You knew Rita Lombardi, am I right?”

  “Yes, I did. It’s horrible what happened to her.”

  “I’m trying to find out exactly what that was.”

  “Who killed her, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m happy to help if I can. But I have to tell you I don’t know anything significant. If I did, I’d have gone to the police.”

  “I’m still looking for motive at this point, so I’m wondering if Rita did much work for the union in the past few months.”

  Connors looked at me and then at the people still lined up at the front desk for purposes as much social as political or economic. “Why don’t we discuss this outside?”

  “Fine with me.”

  She led me into a small courtyard in the center of the mini-mall. It was too early for the shops to be open, so the bench was relatively private. When we sat side by side we were secluded by a variety of flora, most of which were prickly. “I could probably find you some coffee,” Liz Connors began.

  “I’m topped up. But thanks.” I looked back at the flyers decorating the window. “How’d you get in the union business?”

  “My parents were sixties radicals. Berkeley, mostly; Madison for a while. I was conceived in People’s Park, so they claim, though for some reason I always had doubts about that and some of their other supposed exploits. Anyway, they went on and on about civil rights and social justice and economic tyranny, and for a long time I tuned them out, but lo and behold, I ended up buying into it, big time.” She grinned. “Mom and Dad are appalled, of course. They still dress like hippies but they live in Mill Valley on my mother’s inheritance. Trustafarians is what people call them behind their backs.”

  I laughed at the image and the nomenclature. “Have you always worked for the farmworkers?”

  “I spent some time with the Native American Rights in Arizona when I got out of college at Reed. But it’s too hot down there for Irish stock like me, plus the Native Americans don’t like palefaces telling them what to do anymore. Even palefaces who agree that they’ve been screwed for two hundred years.”

  “How about Rita?” I asked again. “Did she work for the union at some point?”

  Liz Connors shook her head. “Not in any official capacity.”

  “Then how did you meet her?”

  “She came by the office not long after she started to work in the strawberry business. We traded information from time to time, about the latest atrocity in the fields, about more effective forms of advocacy, about workers who looked as if they had some organizing skills. When I was in Haciendas or she was in Watsonville we’d commiserate over a beer or a cup of coffee.” She smiled sadly. “And dream of a brighter day for workers everywhere.”

  “But Rita wasn’t doing anything specific? Organizing or recruiting or whatever?”

  “Not for us, she wasn’t. From what I could see, she was pretty busy keeping Carlos Reyna’s operation afloat.”

  “You know Carlos?”

  “A little.”

  “He a good guy?”

  “His heart’s in the right place, but his methods are mistaken.”

  “How so?”

  She gazed across the mall, as if an explanation hung somewhere near the ice cream parlor. “Carlos believes he can go it alone, rise high enough in the system to offer a better way to the workers all by himself. But the owners won’t cave in to Carlos Reyna, they’ll only respond to collective pressure applied across the entire Salinas and Pajaro valleys.”

  “You think you can organize enough workers to bring that kind of pressure to bear?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  When her eyes dared me to deny it, I shrugged. “Good luck.”

  “We’ve got some things going for us, you know,” she said defensively.

  “Like what?”

  “One, Chicanos are the only people who will do this kind of work full time. Two, when the fruit is ripe, it must be picked. A strawberry plant is not a warehouse—it’s harvested or it dies. Three, some time early in the next century, Latinos will be the largest political force in the state of California. At that point, the legisl
ature will support us, not our oppressors. And four, our cause is just and our hearts are pure and God is on our side.” Her smile was part beatific and part insolent.

  “You’re an optimistic woman, Ms. Connors. I seem to be running into a lot of them lately.”

  She shrugged. “What’s the point of being anything else?”

  “That’s fine, except I think you’re leaving something out.”

  “Like what?”

  “The degree of desperation of the workers. Seems to me most of them will be happy to keep taking crumbs because even a crumb is more than they had back home.”

  “That’s true to a point. But fewer workers are illegal now, because of pressure on the Border Patrol to keep them out, because of the hardships of life up here, because of better conditions in Mexico. More and more of the strawberry workers are citizens, but to hold your head high in America you need to make more than five thousand dollars a year. Sooner or later they will see that the union is the only way they can become economic citizens as well as legal citizens.”

  “Apparently Rita was highly energized before she died. She seemed to think she was going to bring about some big changes in the system.” I gestured toward the union office. “I figured she was thinking that the agent of those changes would come from here.”

  “In time it will, but Rita believed she would see major improvement in conditions right away, it had nothing to do with us. Like all revolutions, our struggle will take many years. A lifetime, probably.”

  “Do you know what the meeting with you was going to be about? The one set for the day after she died?”

  She shook her head. “All I know is, she wanted one of our lawyers to be there, too.”

  This was new, so I perked up. “What lawyer?”

  “She didn’t mention anyone in particular, she let me choose.”

  “So the lawyer didn’t know what she wanted?”

  “No. After Rita was killed, I asked Jake—Bill Jacobs—if she’d talked to him privately, but he said she hadn’t.”

  Liz Connors stood up. “Sorry I can’t be more help, but I have to get back. We’re taking a busload of foreign journalists out to a labor camp on San Andreas Road to see the abominable conditions for themselves. You’re welcome to join us. We’ll leave here about two.”