Strawberry Sunday Page 20

  Her directions took me west of town, across Highway 101 and into the Santa Lucia mountains that separate the Salinas Valley from the sea. The road I turned onto was narrow and winding, unmarked except for a single sign proclaiming it PRIVATE, suggesting that travel was limited to the Gelbrides and their lackeys. When I got to the crest of the hill, the road dead-ended at a gatehouse and a wide turnaround that would allow an uninvited guest to go back the way he’d come.

  I stopped at the gate, also unmarked, also forbidding, and waited for something to happen. In the meantime, I looked around. There was no mansion in sight, but there were plenty of signs of activity, most of it involving grapes. The hilltop was roped by a series of vines, staked and wired and ready to pick from the look of the plump clusters of fruit. By the time the loudspeaker set into the gatepost asked me what I wanted, I’d concluded that the Gelbrides made their own wine and consumed most of it on the premises. If they’d brewed their own beer, I’d have asked for a job.

  When I told the speaker who I was and that I had an appointment with Gus, the gate swung open without sound and I followed the road around the crown of the hill until I came to the house on the other side. House is an inadequate term; so is mansion, for that matter. The structure—wood siding, slate roof, delicate ornamentation, stained and leaded windows, a dozen gables and as many brick chimneys—rose out of the hilltop like a volcanic eruption that had cooled into an inhabitable geode. Gray with white trim, its roof a darkening smear of stone, the house seemed as much a geological phenomenon as a residence, with an antediluvian aura that such phenomena often generate. I drove beneath the portico and stopped, expecting to be greeted by the modern equivalent of a liveryman. Instead, I was greeted by Gus.

  He still wore his Sunday suit, but his tie was gone and so were his shoes and socks. His white shirt fell open at the collar and its tails had escaped from his waistband. His bare feet flopped at the end of his ankles like freshly boated flounder. His belt was unbuckled and his waist looked twice the size it had been at the church—Sunday dinner must have been super.

  “If I see you, you keep quiet about the girl.” It was more a declaration than a question.

  “I will if I can.”

  “You will. Period.”

  “Not if it has to do with murder.”

  “It has to do with nothing. I was young. She was stacked. I asked for it; she didn’t stop me. I gave her extra credits on the tally book that week. Double what she picked.”

  “How romantic.”

  “In the barn,” he ordered, and headed that way, his bare feet making mini-bursts of dust as he padded down the driveway.

  The barn was the color and trim of the house, an architectural marvel in its own right but nonetheless a real barn, with horses and stalls and tack, and tractors and spreaders and plows, and a hay mow and feed trough and grain bin. The smell was a pungent perfume of manure and straw and leather and grease, the sounds were muffled snorts and heavy sneezes broken occasionally by the chirp of a sparrow or the bark of a dog.

  The view from the barn was the same as the house—a carpet of soil and its produce spread as far as the eye could see, the buildings and roadways and vehicles that served it seeming from the distance like a variety of hand stitching applied by a highly skilled peasantry. I wanted to linger in the glorious perspective, but Gus walked to the far end of the barn and entered a tiny room that was clearly his private retreat. It was finished with a red leather chair, a small refrigerator and wine rack, an expensive sound system that lined an entire wall, and a single photo of his family, almost invisible behind a tobacco humidor.

  Gus sat in the chair and gestured for me to take a folding metal version that was leaning against the wall. As I was still unfolding it he pressed a button on the stereo and the strains of Italian opera surged quickly through the speakers, Turandot, I think. Gus settled into his chair, cranked up the volume even higher, absorbed its lyric passion for a moment, then reluctantly turned it down.

  I started to say something but he held up a hand. He pulled a pipe from the rack at his side, filled it with tobacco from a humidor on the floor by his feet, lit it with a stick match, puffed to get it going, and smiled when the air was full of aromatic blend to the point that I coughed and rubbed my eyes.

  “Kind of dangerous to smoke in a barn, isn’t it?” I said.

  “It’s my barn.” He gestured toward the vista that lapped at the far door. “Hellfire, son. It’s my valley.”

  “You do seem to operate like some sort of potentate.”

  “I got more claim to it than any potentate. When I came out here, there was nothing. Tiny truck farms, some nurseries and orchards, and some sugarbeets down at Spreckles. But no berries, not over here. In the Pajaro, sure, but over here, no berries. I brought seedlings down from Oregon, I figured out the irrigation and the chemical mix, I built the first cooling shed and brought in the refrigerated trucks. I made fruit a big business in this valley.”

  Flattery seemed the best way to go. “That’s quite a legacy Mr. Gelbride.”

  “Not so you’d know from listening to the goddamned union.”

  “Still, you wouldn’t want that history spoiled by foolishness or criminality by you or anyone in the family.”

  Gus didn’t seem persuaded. “This is my world, not theirs. Out here, I say what happens and what doesn’t. There’s a problem, I do what has to be done—not you, not the police, not the union, not the politicians. Just me. Been that way for fifty years.”

  “Some people seem to think the old ways need to be changed. It’s happened in other businesses—steel, timber, fishing. It sounds like it’s going to happen here.”

  Gus shook his head. “That union business, it’s all lies. I do right by my workers. Why would I cheat them? Without the workers, the fruit rots in the field.”

  “Some of your workers evidently see it differently.”

  “Troublemakers. Always had them; always will.”

  “It sounds to me like things may have changed for the worse since your son took over management of the business.”

  “Randy.” He pronounced it the way he would pronounce a foot fungus. “He has much to learn, but I will teach him. I will teach him like I teach my horses.” He looked at a rawhide quirt hanging on the wall, to indicate the type of training he had in mind.

  “There’s a chance Randy killed Rita Lombardi,” I said, just to get it on the table and see which way it rolled.

  Gus seemed less shocked than saddened by the suggestion. “Why would he do something that dumb?”

  “Because she was keeping him away from the Vargas girl.”

  “Why did Rita care about that?”

  “Because that’s what Rita did. She cared. And because there’s a name for what it would be if Randy had sex with Consuelo Vargas.”

  “What name?”

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  He puffed for a long time. I wiped my eyes and endured it. “Rita knew about me and Maria?” he asked finally.

  “She must have. That legacy you talked about wouldn’t look so good if it got branded with that kind of allegation.”

  “How did she know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gus shook his head again. “Maria wouldn’t tell her. She saw Randy sniffing around Consuelo, she’d come to me to stop it.”

  It was touching that he thought there had been something tender between the two of them instead of just terrorism. “She might to save her daughter from a life of shame,” I said. “Or from giving birth to an addled child.”

  Gus muttered a curse and puffed on his pipe until it went out.

  “Rita told Carlos Reyna that she was going to make you forgive his debt,” I said. “How was she going to make that happen?”

  “There’s no way on earth she could make that happen. Business is business.”

  “I think there was a way. I think Rita learned that some aspect of your strawberry operation was illegal. Something no one outside
your family knew anything about. Something she was going to hold over your head to make you change the way you operate.”

  “Hah. What could she know?”

  “You tell me.”

  “We do right. We obey the law.”

  “That barbed wire around your compound doesn’t look very law-abiding.”

  “That was Randy’s idea.”

  “Maybe Randy is doing things you don’t know about. Maybe he killed Rita to shut her up.”

  Gus opened the humidor and refilled his pipe. “Randy’s not a killer,” he said. It sounded more like a guess than a testimonial.

  “He threatened to kill a union man he caught working in his fields,” I said. “I heard him do it.”

  “That was bluff. That’s what he does.”

  “I’m not sure you know your son as well as you think you do, Mr. Gelbride.”

  Gus listened to the music, pressed the contents of his pipe into a firm pack, relit it, then closed his eyes. “He thinks I should retire. Move to the desert with his mother. Leave the business to him.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “Not yet. And not till he makes room for Missy in his plans.”

  “Missy seems more interested in men than in strawberries.”

  “She’s young. Business will be important later on.”

  “How do Missy and Randy get along?”

  “They don’t,” he said simply. “They’re too much like me.” His laugh was harsh and dismissive, as much of himself as his children.

  “If you decided Randy had killed Rita, what would you do?”

  “Take care of it.”

  “How?”

  “He would be punished.”

  “But not by the police and the courts.”

  “He would be punished by me.”

  “I’d like to ask him about it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’d like to ask Randy if he killed Rita. With you there as a witness.”

  “I already did. He says no.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t know.” Gus puffed at his pipe but it was dead again. He started to relight it, then abandoned the effort. “It’s a terrible thing, not to know if your son is a killer.” He cranked up the volume on the music till the speakers did a shimmy on the shelf. “Nessun Dorma”; the tenor sounded like Pavarotti.

  Although he expected me to retreat in the face of the cascading sound, I stayed put. When the aria ended, he turned the music off and walked out into the barn. “See that mare?”

  He pointed at a beautiful bay standing in the corner of the nearest stall, staring at us as if we were sculpted out of oats.

  “Nice animal.”

  “It’s Missy’s birthday present. Day after tomorrow. Bought her down in San Luis Obispo. Her father won the California Derby.”

  “Nice gift.”

  “Missy won’t even notice. By the time dinner is served, she’ll be drunk. By the time the cake is served, she’ll be gone. One of these days, she’ll drive off the road and roll all the way to the valley. By the time she stops rolling, she’ll be dead. Which must be what she wants.”

  When I left, he was still looking at the mare, as if he hoped it had something reassuring to say.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Halfway down the mountain, I ran into Missy Gelbride, almost literally. She was trudging up the middle of the road, head down and heedless of oncoming traffic, her thoughts somewhere between the stratosphere and the gutter. She wore torn and tattered cut-offs and a red tube top and her stride was wayward and maladroit—her red and white cowboy boots were no match for the ruts and potholes she encountered on the climb.

  I pulled to the shoulder and stopped the car and got out. Missy didn’t notice until she almost bumped into my Buick.

  She looked at it and at me, then back to it. “Who sat on your car?” she asked, her voice slurred and dull, her effort at humor halfhearted and inept.

  “Your brother.”

  She frowned dubiously. “Randy’s big but he’s not that big.”

  “I was speaking more figuratively than literally.”

  “I’m not sure what that means, but that’s the first sign of wit I’ve seen out of Randy since he tossed his cat in the grape crusher.”

  “I got a good chuckle out of it myself. So will my insurance man.”

  She leaned against the Buick and looked at me with the slippery focus of all alcoholics. “You aren’t going to do anything boring like call the cops, are you?”

  “Not if I get what I came for.”

  “Money?”

  “Information.”

  She shrugged. “All I know is what happens when you fucking run out of fucking gas at the bottom of the fucking hill.” She shoved herself off my fender and started marching up the road once again. “And when your cell phone conks out while you’re calling for help,” she called over her shoulder after she’d taken a few stumbling steps.

  “We had a chat in the Cantina the other night,” I called after her.

  She kept walking. “You and Randy?”

  “You and me. You bought me a drink. I wasn’t properly appreciative.”

  She stopped and turned and almost tipped over. “Men don’t have an appreciative bone in their bodies. Hell, they don’t even thank you for good sex. What are you doing out here, anyway?”

  “I was talking to your father a while ago.”

  She blinked and squinted. “What about?”

  “Lots of things. Including your brother.”

  “There’s lots of people in town who know more about Randy than Daddy does. Including me. What do you want to know about him?”

  “I’m wondering what was going on between Randy and Rita Lombardi before she died.”

  “Going on in the sense of sex?—nothing. She was a crip and over eighteen; Randy likes them pure and prime. But going on in the sense of animosity?—a lot.”

  “Why did Randy dislike her?”

  “Rita has made him feel stupid as a stump for the last twenty years. Plus guilty. Plus irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant to what?”

  “To just about anything. Women don’t need men anymore, haven’t you heard? Women need men like fish need bicycles. It’s on all the best T-shirts.” She looked up at the sun and then at the distance she still needed to travel. “Are you going to drive me home?” She made her hands caress her chest and her thighs. “Or do you require payment in advance?”

  I opened the passenger door. “Hop in.”

  She wedged her big body into the crumpled cocoon that was the passenger side of the car. “Reminds me of the first place I had sex,” she said.

  “In a Buick?”

  “In a Volkswagen.”

  It took me a while to find a place wide enough to turn around, and a while longer for the Buick to clamber back from whence it came. Along the way I asked Missy if she had an active role in the family business.

  “I’m an essential part of the machine,” she bragged sardonically. “Ask anyone. Anyone who isn’t named Gelbride.”

  “What’s your job?”

  “I’m the assistant vice president of marketing. It says so on my letterhead.”

  “Which means?”

  “I answer the phones and place orders with shippers. When I feel like it, that is.”

  “Which is how often?”

  “Which in the last five years is never. You’re not a broker, are you? Daddy hasn’t put the place up for sale, has he? He hates Randy enough to do it.”

  “I’m not a broker,” I said. “But I’ve heard the business is in some kind of trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But I heard it was something so serious it might shut you down.”

  “There’s nothing like that going on. Is there?” Her question was a bald confession of her irrelevance.

  “Rita Lombardi knew something that was going to make your father and Randy shape up. I’d like to
know what it was.”

  “If Rita really knew something like that, Randy would …” She seemed afraid to supply the predicate.

  “What? Kill her?”

  Missy shook her head as if to dislodge the word. “God. He’s dumb but not that dumb. Is he?”

  “He’s at the top of my suspect list.”

  “The cops think so, too?”

  “After they talk to me, they will.”

  “Then if I were you, I’d watch my back.” She stayed quiet until we reached the top of the hill and I pulled into the barnyard and stopped the car. “But you know what?” she said as she opened the door and swung a bare booted leg out.

  “What?”

  “If they really do shut down the farms, it will be the best thing that ever happened to this family. Randy would stop being a thug; Mama would come out of hiding; and Daddy would remember my name.”

  “How about you? How would it change you?”

  “I wouldn’t start drinking till noon.”

  She thanked me for the ride, then got out of the car and wandered toward her home.

  I was turning around to head back down the hill when movement in the trees and shrubs at the far side of the house caught my eye. A woman—small, delicate, and stooped, wearing a raincoat and rubber boots even though the sun was shining brightly and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky—wandered through the garden, head down, eyes transfixed, as though she had lost something tiny and irreplaceable.

  I got out of the car and walked toward her. When I realized who it was, I was surprised. “Mrs. Gelbride?”

  She turned my way, startled but not fearful. “Yes?”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No, thank you. I’m looking for my shears. I left them out yesterday. I seem to have trouble keeping track of things these days.”

  “You have some beautiful flowers out here. Especially the roses.”

  “Thank you.” She frowned into the sun. “Do I know you?”

  “No, but I’m a friend of Louise Lombardi’s. She asked me to stop by and thank you for your support during these difficult times.”

  “I … you dropped by? You just drove up the hill and dropped by?”

  “Yep.”