Strawberry Sunday Page 6

Carlos shook his head. “I’m an independent grower. I have a contract to grow for the Gelbrides, but I work for myself. Hire and fire my own people. Plant what and how I want. Apply the pesticides and fertilizers; pick when I choose.”

  I wiped my brow and sighed. “Is there a cooler place I can wait till Mrs. Lombardi gets off the phone?”

  Carlos looked back at the house, as though inspecting it for the first time and finding it wanting. “Not really,” he said. “She won’t be much longer—Mrs. Gelbride is a busy woman. But they deserve some privacy.”

  “Maybe I’ll wait in the shade by the car. After I see Mrs. Lombardi, I’d like to talk to you.”

  Carlos looked at his watch. “I got to be in the fields pretty soon. I could meet you at the Cantina at five. It’s cool in there,” he added as a major inducement.

  “Five it is. I don’t suppose there’s a motel in town?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing for Anglos—the only one we have is mostly for migrants. Salinas is closest. Or you want something fancy, you could drive over to Monterey.”

  “I don’t do fancy,” I told him.

  I started to walk toward the car. Ten steps later I tripped over a rock, aggravating my wounds, sending another slice of pain through my innards. Sweat salted my eyes and trickled down my flanks—I felt as if I’d taken a shower in sulfuric acid. My head throbbed and my back ached—I felt old and decrepit and foolish.

  Halfway across the street, Carlos called my name. “She’s finished,” he said, and waited for me to join him.

  “How’s she been holding up?” I asked as I climbed the steps to the door, gingerly, still waiting for the pain to subside.

  “She is strong,” Carlos said as he held the door for me. “And she has lost loved ones before. But one day she will fall. If you see it start to happen, you need to tell me right away.”

  With that, Carlos ushered me into the house. It was tidy but cluttered, everything in its place but lots of things in lots of places. Mrs. Lombardi was a collector. She collected sugar bowls and decorated plates and commemorative medallions and ice blue perfume bottles, and that was only the living room. The paraphernalia seemed to give her comfort, though, because despite the tragedy she had suffered, she appeared to be calm and on an even emotional keel, wanting to please, hoping to help. I was feeling guilty for interrupting the evolution of her grief even before I sat down.

  “Welcome to my house, Mr. Tanner.”

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. Lombardi. I’m sorry for intruding.”

  “Not at all. Father McNally will be here at noon, but until then I’m happy to speak with you.” She looked at Carlos with fondness. “Go, Carlos. The workers need you more than I do now. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Lombardi. Do you want something before I go?”

  “No, thank you. Unless Mr. Tanner would like some tea.”

  “No, thanks. But a glass of water would be nice.”

  She nodded. “People from the city always need water.”

  Carlos fetched me a glass. I downed it before he was out the door. When I looked up, Mrs. Lombardi was watching me.

  “You were right,” she said. “I cannot be at peace while the man who killed Rita goes free.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  With Carlos Reyna departed, the energy level in the house dropped by 80 percent. I was impressed with the young man, with the depth of his grief over Rita and his obvious devotion to her mother. I was sorry Rita hadn’t lived to make a life with him.

  Mrs. Lombardi and I sagged into our upholstered seats and regarded each other with equal shares of melancholy. She was a vast vat of a woman, younger than I’d assumed at first glance, perhaps because she dressed the part. Her gray-black hair was gathered into a large bun; her tiny black eyes were wedged deep behind slits of pink flesh. Two doughy cheeks cascaded into a swollen neck that deprived her of chin. Her upper arms trembled as she moved and her bulbous chest rose and fell like industrial bellows. A blue print dress, as tailored as a beach towel, fell over her like a giant tablecloth above black leather shoes with heels the size of tuna cans. She breathed with difficulty—wheezing asthmatically after the slightest expense of effort. Although it was cool in the house, a small fan oscillated like an obedient pet on the floor right in front of her. I worried that for different reasons Mrs. Lombardi wasn’t far from joining her daughter in the grave.

  “You have a nice house,” I began.

  “Thank you.”

  I gestured toward the shelves on the walls. “You like to collect things, I see.”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “Are they souvenirs of your travels?”

  Her smile was sufficiently lachrymose to be mystical. “I have never been north of San Jose or east of Modesto. I find my treasures in the flea markets. Times are hard; people have to sell precious things to feed their families. I enjoy myself by enjoying the mementos of other people’s journeys. It seems heartless, perhaps, but I tell myself I honor their memories by preserving them.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said, though I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  She nodded ponderously, in a silence that became hermeneutic. I couldn’t help but think of Rita, as engaged with the messy swirl of the world as her mother was removed from it.

  “Have you lived in Haciendas all your life?” I asked when the hush became unbearable.

  She shook her head. “Thirty years, almost. I came out from Chicago with my husband Franco after he returned from Vietnam and got out of the service. We came to Chicago from Napoli after we were married and we came West to make our fortune and to have a large family.” She forced a smile. “It was God’s will that we didn’t have either. Now my only family is my treasures.” Her eyes floated over the row upon row of painted plates, displayed in an ornate wall rack, each portraying a different national monument from a different state of the Union. The display was a shrine of some kind, though I wasn’t sure to what.

  “I was very sorry to hear about Rita,” I said. “It must be hard for you to come to terms with it.”

  “The good die young,” she said softly. “It is my only solace. Rita was so good, despite her handicaps, she seemed truly heaven-sent. But as with His only Son, God’s plan did not allow my child to live a full lifetime.”

  “You seem like a religious person, Mrs. Lombardi.”

  “I am Roman Catholic,” she said. In her world it was clearly answer enough.

  “Was Rita active in the church as well?”

  She nodded. “She was active in everything. If there was a group in Haciendas devoted to helping the less fortunate, Rita was an active part of it.”

  “Is that how she met Carlos?”

  “At church? No. Rita was helping with what they called the second language program at the school. Carlos often brought his workers there in the evenings, so they could learn to speak better English.”

  “Was there any problem between Rita and anyone else in the program? A dispute of some sort?”

  Mrs. Lombardi shook her head. “They loved her there. Everyone loved Rita.” The precept seemed as sacred to her as those contained in the missal that lay beside her on the couch.

  “Was Rita active politically at all? In the union movement, perhaps? Or in civil rights?”

  She nodded. “She was like her father in that.”

  “How so?”

  “Rita’s father was a field foreman for Mr. Gelbride. Franco was like Carlos—the workers liked him because he treated them with dignity and respect and because he would take their complaints to the owner and be their advocate for better conditions. The same was not true of the men who came after him.”

  “Who came after him?”

  “Several people, over the years. But Randy Gelbride is the one there now. Carlos says he is the worst of them all.”

  “He’s the son of the owner?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened to your husband, Mrs. Lombardi?”

  She closed her eyes. “He was killed
.”

  “How?”

  “He was hit by a truck as he was waiting to cross the big highway. They said he was drunk but he could not have been—he stopped drinking when he came home from the war. Rita told me he must have had a seizure.” Her entire body swelled as she talked of the death, until she seemed twice her normal size and capable of levitation.

  “When did that happen, Mrs. Lombardi?”

  “Three years after Rita was born.”

  “So you raised her by yourself.”

  She nodded. “But I had help when I needed it. The church, the school, the neighbors, my friends. Rita never lacked for anything. Not anything important. Except a father.”

  “Tell me more about her,” I said.

  “She was a saint,” Louise Lombardi said simply. “Even Father McNally said so in his eulogy.”

  “Did she go to college?”

  “Two years at Hartnell College in Salinas.”

  “What did she study?”

  “Accounting and social work.” The phrase caused her to smile for the first time since I’d entered the room. “She didn’t need to study social work. It came as naturally to her as breathing.”

  “Did Rita have any particular friends at college? Either students or professors?”

  “There was a girl named Powell. Thelma Powell. She had a disability, too; a withered arm. But she could still drive, so she and Rita rode down to school together.”

  “Where’s Thelma now?”

  “I believe she is still in Salinas, working for one of the banks. Rita was lucky. Her disfigurements could be corrected. There was nothing they could do for Thelma’s arm. Her mother took the wrong kind of medicine when she was still in the womb. Her mother suffers for it more than Thelma does. Every time she speaks of her child, she weeps.”

  I tried to narrow her focus to a single tragedy. “How about Rita’s professors? Was there anyone she had a special relationship with?”

  “Not in college, I don’t think. But the English teacher at the high school was a good friend. Mr. Thorndike. Rita wrote many stories for his class. He wanted her to send them away to New York magazines, but she never would.”

  “Why not?”

  “She felt no one would be interested in her thoughts.”

  “Everyone would be interested in her thoughts,” I said, remembering my own reaction to them.

  Mrs. Lombardi’s smile became ethereal. “Everyone could see that but Rita. She was always surprised when people paid attention to her, and came to her for advice and asked what she thought they ought to do in their lives. It’s what happens when you are disabled, I think. You believe the deformity applies to all of you, not just the crooked limbs.”

  Silence filled the room once more as we devoted even more thoughts to Rita. I was depressed by the absurd illogic of her death. It was time to get what I needed and leave.

  “Based on the way Rita was killed, I’d have to say it looks personal, not random,” I said, “that whoever did it was outraged at Rita for some reason. Do you know anyone who might have had reason to feel that way about her, Mrs. Lombardi?”

  As she stiffened with anger, her upper arms trembled like vanilla pudding. “Of course not. There is no one like that in Haciendas.”

  “I was thinking of an ex-boyfriend. Maybe a guy she left for Carlos.”

  “Carlos was the first man in her life in that way.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She thrust a lip. “A mother knows such things.”

  Not always, I knew, although maybe in this case. But I didn’t accept it as gospel. “Did she have any trouble at her job? Or with any of the people she helped in the community? Sometimes good deeds are most resented by the people who benefit from them.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “If there was anything like that, I didn’t know what it was. Everyone liked Rita. It is what I always heard, from the day she started school. Rita is such a wonderful girl. It’s a privilege to work with her in class. That was what they all said. I must have heard it a thousand times. I can show you her report cards if you want. Rita was always perfect.”

  Mrs. Lombardi’s belated eulogy echoed through the house like a roll of distant thunder. I hoped it was true, what she said, that Rita truly had no enemies in life, that she was a blessing to all concerned the way she had been for me. It depressed me to realize that before I left Haciendas I was probably going to find out that the truth was more complicated than that.

  I was about to ask if I could take a look at Rita’s bedroom when someone knocked on the door. As Mrs. Lombardi struggled toward her feet, I motioned for her to stay put and hurried to answer it in her stead.

  The woman standing on the stoop was taken aback. “Oh. I didn’t expect … who are you, a policeman of some sort? I just stopped by to see Louise, but I can come another time if it’s not convenient.”

  I told her I wasn’t a policeman. “I’m a friend of Rita’s,” I added, because it was something I needed to keep saying.

  The woman was short and stout and businesslike, with a high forehead and chubby cheeks and a determined look that indicated she dealt with adversity often enough and overcame it more often than not.

  She wore a khaki pants suit that seemed far too coarse for the weather but it didn’t slow her down. She strode past me at the pace of a troop on the parade ground at nearby Fort Ord and walked straight to the couch. She sat without invitation and took Mrs. Lombardi’s hands in her own. “How are you, Louise?” she asked with a puff of gruff concern.

  “I’m fine, Mona.”

  “Do you need anything? Anything at all?”

  Mrs. Lombardi shook her head. “People have been very kind.”

  “A hot dish?”

  “I have three casseroles in the fridge already. You work hard enough as it is. Let the ones with time to spare spend some of it on me.”

  Mrs. Lombardi turned my way. “Mr. Tanner, this is Mona Upshaw, one of my oldest friends. A saint, like my Rita.”

  “How do you do?” I said.

  “Mona is a nurse. She was at the hospital when they brought Rita in.”

  Mona bowed her head. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in all my years of practice, to watch the monitors go flat as that dear girl left us.”

  “She was still alive when she got to the hospital?” I asked.

  “Only technically, I believe. She hadn’t quite bled out.”

  I stemmed a shudder at a fate I’d almost succumbed to myself. “Did she say anything about what happened to her?”

  She shook her head. “I heard nothing myself and I asked the EMS team that same question, but she said nothing to them, either. I don’t believe she ever regained consciousness.”

  “Where was she found, do you know?”

  “Near the high school, is what the papers said. Apparently there was so much blood they assumed she was dead until they located a faint pulse.”

  “What does it matter?” Mrs. Lombardi interrupted heavily. “She’s gone. That’s all that matters now. She’s gone and Franco is gone and I have no one left to care for.”

  Ms. Upshaw swiveled to embrace Mrs. Lombardi and began to comfort her with slow caresses and soothing words. Although I wanted to look at Rita’s room and ask more questions about the last days of her life, now wasn’t the time to do it. After saying what I could think of to say, which wasn’t nearly enough, I bid the two women good-bye and let myself out the front door.

  “One minute, Mr. Tanner.”

  Mona Upshaw was standing on the threshold, pulling the door closed behind her.

  “You’re the detective, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Will you listen to some advice from an old friend of Rita’s?”

  “Sure.”

  She pulled the door closed and spoke in a rasping whisper. “Leave us alone, Mr. Tanner. There are things in Haciendas that should stay hidden, things no one needs to hear, things that will go to the grave with the only
people who know of them if you leave them be. Let it happen, Mr. Tanner. Let time bury our secrets.”

  Before I could ask her if one of those secrets had gotten Rita Lombardi killed, she was already back in the house. When I turned toward the car, the heat hit me like a hammer.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was time to talk to the cops. By the time I regained equilibrium and drove to the station, the sign on the bank said it was eighty-eight degrees and it was twice that in the car. The air conditioner in my Buick wasn’t up to the task; neither was my deodorant. Since I was going to be even more offensive than usual, I walked through the door with a smile on my face, under the theory that you should never let them see you sweat.

  The Haciendas police department occupied a fake adobe building that it shared with the fire department and the mayor’s office: The town was so small, it seemed possible the same individual performed all three functions. As I walked toward the door, I could feel the heat invading my body through the soles of my shoes and the top of my head. If the currents ever met in the middle, my stitching might not withstand the collision.

  I stopped in front of the first desk I came to, which belonged to a woman in mufti. She was sharp-faced and tanned to the color of khaki, with hyper-blond hair and hyper-red lips and a silver ring on each ear and each thumb. The wrinkles around her eyes and mouth were lighter than the rest of her skin, giving her a clownish aspect. It was a good bet that no one had ever told her that. It was also a good bet that I wasn’t going to get anything helpful from her, given what seemed to be a congenital dispassion—she wore her boredom like a badge.

  She looked up from whatever her computer was telling her about the state of the world or at least Haciendas. “How can we help you, stranger?”

  “How do you know I’m a stranger?”

  She looked me over. “You ain’t got enough color to be local, for one. For another, I seen every Anglo in Haciendas at one time or another—funeral, wedding, or right where you’re standing—and I ain’t seen you before or I’d have remembered.”

  I smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  She shrugged with aggressive uninterest. “Suit yourself. So what’ll it be?”