Fields Where They Lay, page 17
It wasn’t much, but I’ve found that simple motion can relieve the kind of nervous frustration that I was feeling. At the very least, I was doing something I wouldn’t have to do again.
A ping from my phone announced a text from Louie: ain’t no way he’s working for more than one of them. these guys don’t share secrets or employees. remember the italian city-states, how they killed each other all the way through the renaissance? i’d take italians over russians any day.
Vlad and his partners didn’t trust one another. I’d already known that, but it was useful to be reminded.
The lunch break gave me hope because the nearest fast-food places outside the mall were a few miles away, and the break tended to be shorter during the Christmas season, so I figured that most of those who actually left their shops to eat rather than indulge in some other form of “personal time” would have fed themselves in the big room behind the food court where I’d talked with Shlomo. And that gave me a chance to check my list (“checking it twice” kept popping into my mind) from another perspective.
I took the stairs to the second level and headed down the no access hallway to the employees’ dining area. Once in there, I knocked on the door to Tito’s, and a moment later it opened.
“Oh,” she said. It was the woman from the day before. Her smile bloomed again. “Hi.”
“Hey there. Ummm, what time did you come on today?”
Some of the wattage leaked out of the smile. “Why?”
“I was here—out front, I mean, not back here—about, I don’t know, a little after ten-thirty, and there was a different—”
“Mercy,” she said. “That’s her name, I mean, Mercy. I’m not asking you to, you know, spare me or anything.”
“I made a fool out of myself, giving her a big Hi before realizing she wasn’t you.”
“Well, hi now, then. Although I already said that, didn’t I?”
“We both did.”
We looked at each other for a count of three or four while I searched in vain for a transition. Abandoning the impulse, I said, “I need to talk some business,” just as she said, “I got here about—”
We both stopped talking.
“Eleven-thirty,” she finished. “Business? What kind of—”
“This is between you and me, okay? I’ve been asked to look into what happened today.”
“You mean, with Bonnie?”
“Yes. One of the things I do is, well, figure things like that out.”
“I knew you weren’t really working in a store here,” she said. “It was too much to hope for. What a bunch.”
“And the first thing I need to do is figure out who among the people who work here couldn’t have done it.”
“How exciting,” she said. She raised her right hand as though taking an oath. “I was here. Got here just around eleven-thirty, well, maybe eleven-forty, and didn’t go anywhere. Promise.”
“Don’t feel left out,” I said, “but you weren’t real high on my list of suspects.”
She squinted at me as though catching up to the conversation. “So you’re, like, a cop?”
“Not much like a cop, but I am on a job, and I’m working for the good guys. Did you know her?”
“Everybody knew her. She was that kind of person, just walked up to you and said hello. I’ll bet she knew the name of every single person who works in this dump.” She looked back over her shoulder. “Mercy,” she called, “I’m taking ten minutes. Be right back here.”
“’Kay, hon,” said someone who was presumably Mercy.
“Let’s sit,” she said. “This time of day I feel like I’m all feet. Yipes, I don’t even know your name. I’m Amanda, not Mandy but Amanda.”
“I’m Junior, and yes, that’s my name.”
“Bet there’s a story behind that.”
“Not anything you’d be tempted to write down.” I’d followed her to an empty table near the condiments and plastic utensils station.
She surveyed the room as though looking for a better spot. “Is this okay?”
“It’s scenic,” I said. “All that stuff on the counter gives it a certain panache that the rest of the room lacks.”
“I sit here all the time,” Amanda said, pulling out a chair. “I like to think I shed a little light here, charm the corner up a bit.”
“I have to admit that I sense a kind of, I don’t know, warmth—”
“That’s enough,” she said. “Keep it up and you’ll sweep me off my aching feet. So how am I supposed to help you?”
“Nobody really supervises this room, right?”
“Nope. People order from one of the stands, sometimes from back here, sometimes from out front. If he or she orders from our place, either Mercy or I bring the food back. Otherwise . . .” She shrugged. “We don’t have any way of knowing.”
“What I was afraid of. No cameras, either.”
“Here and the johns, about the only place where old Wally isn’t staring at you.”
“Well,” I said, pulling a tightly folded sheet of wrinkled paper out of my pocket, “what I need you to do is ask everybody who works in the food court to look at the names on this list and tell you which of the people on it were in here at lunch today between roughly noon and one. As soon as one of them says yes, cross that name off the list. If two or more people say yes, put a little check next to the name every time someone confirms it.”
Her eyes were wide as she studied the page. “These are suspects? I know some of—”
“No, these are just people who were out of their stores, for lunch, mostly, around the time—the time it happened. I’m just trying to find someone who saw them while, you know.”
“Got it.” She was running a finger down the list, which had seventeen names on it. “Why nobody from the bazaar?”
“Haven’t gotten to them yet.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “The bazaar alone is, like, a million people.”
“I’ll deal with that tomorrow.”
“Well, now that I’ve gone all dramatic, most of the bazaaros eat in their little tiny booths. One-person show, you know?” She bent over the list. “Here, here, and here,” she said, indicating names with her forefinger. She reached into the pocket of her red apron and pulled out a little golf pencil about four inches long. “I waited on these guys myself.”
“See how easy?”
“But you do realize,” she said, checking the names, “that nobody, except maybe Bonnie, knows the name of everybody who works here. Most people think of the ones they don’t know very well as, uhh, Dina from Boots to Suits, the guy who always spills on his shirt, those two pregnant ladies who are always together, the guy who bites his nails and saves them in his shirt pocket, and that chick with the colored rubber bands on her braids who only eats ice cream. The names aren’t going to mean that much. And nobody’s going to remember everybody they took care of.” She looked around the room, which was about a quarter full, people getting an early dinner before the evening rush, if there was going to be an evening rush. “Noon to one? Is that when . . . when it happened?”
“Near as I can figure.” I looked around the room again. “And ask the people who are eating in here now what time they ate lunch. If it was around that time, ask who they ate with, who they saw. Make me another list.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to protest, but she said, “When they ask me why, what do I say?”
“Tell them the cops asked you to do it. They’re just trying to figure out where everybody was.”
“But you’re not—”
“No,” I said. “But I was a friend of Bonnie’s.”
“Everybody was.”
“Not everybody.”
“Well,” she said. “Obviously. But come on, nobody hated her. She wasn’t hateable. Whoever, you know, killed her, he was crazy. Or she knew something about him. Or, oh, I don’t know. Okay, I’ll try to make a list, but I don’t know how it’s going to help.”
“I don’t, either,” I said. “But this is what you do when something like this happens. You start with the dull stuff and hope it leads you to the interesting stuff.”
“Kind of like life,” she said. She thought about it for a moment. “Right?”
20
Tumbling Tumbleweeds
When I rattled off that pap about a life told in Christmases, I skipped over a few of my own. I did it out of sheer cowardice.
My issues with Christmas go way back. In fact, the only seasonal present from my father that I’ve kept with me is an aversion to Christmas.
My father was a problem drinker, by which I mean something quite specific. He wasn’t an alcoholic and he didn’t drink often, but on the occasions when he did drink, he was a problem. At the center of his character, I think, was a radioactive core of resentment. He’d been a dweeb in high school (“Hey, Merle, no lipstick today?”) and he was a dweeb as an adult. He was shorter, less successful, and, he thought, smarter than his two younger brothers, whom he always referred to as “Flash” and “Squeak.” He’d settled in marriage for a woman who wasn’t, by his standards, pretty enough and who had double-crossed him by getting older. He hated his job. My mother said he was a man who felt like life had given him a cheap hat and then trained birds to shit on it. All this festering injustice bubbled to the surface when he drank.
He dealt with being sober by wearing a tight, mean little smile most of the time—like someone who’s got bad gas and can’t bring up a burp—and by saying things he actually meant in a way that forced us to pretend they were jokes. When my mother had to take a job to help with the house payments, he’d survey the living room she hadn’t straightened up before she left at eight a.m. for work and say, “Boy, if cleanliness is next to godliness, the Lord lives far, far away, huh, Junior?” Or, when my high school grades were in free fall because I was slipping out and breaking into houses at night, he’d say, “Guess we don’t have to worry about paying big bills for college, huh, Ruthie?”
He despised his own father, whom he called Walt, as though calling him “Dad” would somehow legitimize the relationship. Walt had abandoned my father and his two younger brothers when my father was in his early teens. “Just packed up one fine day and took off,” my father said maybe three hundred times in my presence, word for word, with the same intonation every time, a kind of involuntary mental tape loop. The moment he said, “Just packed . . .” my mother would close her eyes and sigh. My mother sighed a lot.
I met Walt exactly once, when I was ten, in a big, old Craftsman house in Pasadena where every blind and curtain in the place was drawn to create a permanent dusk. Walt had insisted on the meeting but when we got there he had nothing to say to either me or my dad. I had worn my cowboy hat to piss my father off, and Walt, grasping at straws, wound up sitting at a perfectly polished baby grand with keys yellowed by use, playing old cowboy songs for me: “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” and a few others I never learned the names of while my father sat on the couch, cracking his knuckles.
Every now and then a thin, white-haired woman in a loose, pale gown with draping sleeves—a garment that could have been made any time since King Arthur—would float through the room without a glance at us, as though we were in a different dimension. For all the attention Walt and my father paid her, she might as well have been a draft.
The fourth or fifth time she solidified out of the shadows, my father stood up while Walt was in the middle of yet another song and said, “Okay, you’ve seen him. Come on, Junior.” He’d preceded me to the front door, opened it for me, and stood aside to let me go first, something he didn’t do even for my mother. It wasn’t until I was almost to the car that I realized he’d done it just so he could leave the door standing open. He didn’t say anything on the long ride home. I talked as much as he did.
And that was a day when he hadn’t drunk anything.
But my father always drank on Christmas Eve. One Christmas, his next-to-last with us, marked in my mind the formal beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage.
My mother’s family had done Christmas the hard way, concentrating all the effort into the night before Christmas: decorating the tree, hanging up the stockings, and laying out the presents after my mother and her sisters were in bed. The one war my mother won during her marriage to my father was the Christmas Eve War. If my father had had his way, the tree would have stood in the living room shedding its needles all year around, just needing to be plugged in on Christmas morning, the presents would have been in their store boxes with the price tags still dangling from them, and my stocking would have hung permanently from the mantle, something for my mother to dust around.
So he would begin to drink as they hauled the tree in from where it had been hidden in the storage shed my father had built behind the garage, a room to which he incorrectly thought he had the only key. Generally by the time they were hanging the lights, he’d be three or four belts in and grumbling about her fancy family and their labor-intensive holidays, and she’d be doing variations on They did it for the children, and you can do it for your son and he’d be off on his eternal complaint about how No son of mine wouldn’t be able to climb a fucking rope in the fucking Cub Scouts and then they’d start yelling at each other and, of course, I would’ve been awake all along.
When I was thirteen I went into the living room, dazzling in a thousand colors from the lights on the tree, and interrupted my father’s seasonal rant with, “This is your idea of a silent night?”
“You’re going to learn sooner or later, smart guy,” he said, “that life isn’t so fucking funny.”
I said, “I’d choose funny over shitty any time.”
And that’s when he slapped me.
My mother responded by going to the Christmas tree, hung with the precious, hand-blown glass ornaments she’d inherited from her grandmother, and pulling the whole thing over. Glass had broken and the lights had flickered and gone out. On his way out of the house, my father stopped long enough to yank the screen door off its hinges. I heard his car door open and then the single word, “Shit,” and there he was again, even angrier at messing up his big exit. He stomped past us into the kitchen, and when he came back he had his keys in his hand. A moment later, we heard him leave parallel lines of rubber all the way down the block.
My mother and I stood there silently, looking at each other, and then I righted the tree and the two of us, like a couple of mimes, used wads of wet paper towels to pick up the shards of the broken ornaments. We never exchanged a word. When we were finished vacuuming up the slivers and the tree was shining again, I said, “Want to open the presents?”
“You know we don’t do that until morning,” my mother said, as though we were sipping high tea in Buckingham Palace rather than standing in a small house in Tarzana in the middle of the night with her husband gone, probably on his way to the woman whose existence she already suspected and whom he would eventually marry. She shook her head and said in all sincerity, “Do you want to spoil Christmas?” I was still laughing when I got into bed. My mother had her good moments, and that was one of my favorites.
So I had a lot to put behind me to get to the point where I could participate in those first miraculous Christmases with Rina, to get to the point at which jingling bells and “Adeste Fidelis” didn’t make me pop anxiety sweat.
I’d just finished checking with Wally and learning that Cranmer was still at the murder scene, so I was adding to my lunch list in one of the second-level shops I’d missed when my phone rang. A little pink Hello Kitty heart announced that it was Ronnie. She’d never seen the sappy little heart, and if she had, she would have directed quantities of muscular scorn at it. I hurried to the stairs just in case Cranmer emerged unannounced through the doors to Gabriel’s, and when I was five steps down and more or less out of sight I said, “Hi. How you doing?”
There was a lot of noise on the line, as though she were on a busy street. “I’ve been better.”
I didn’t like the sound of her voice. It seemed insubstantial and at the same time effortful, as though producing it at all took a lot of work. I cast around for something to say and settled on, “I’m really sorry to hear it. Is there anything I can do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She paused. “It’s not about you.”
“Well, then,” I said, and couldn’t come up with anything that she might not reject as yet another probe into the sensitive areas she wasn’t sharing with me, and took refuge in the neutrality of facts. I said, “Where are you?”
“Beverly Hills.”
“Really. Um, see any movie stars?”
“They’re all in disguise,” she said. “As usual.”
I was wandering back up the stairs, just moving, having forgotten all about Cranmer, I leaned on the handrail, looking up at nothing while my stomach cramped up. On the level above me, people streamed by. Business had picked up. When it was clear she had nothing to add, I said, “Why are you in Beverly Hills?”
“It’s just where I am, Junior. I saw a parking space and pulled over to call you.”
I was hating this conversation. Ronnie was a strong enough person for me to know that whatever was making her sound so hollowed out, it was serious. “Are you on your way somewhere?” There was no response, so I made a desperate snatch at something else to say. “Want to come out here, to the Valley? I can show you the worst mall on earth. Or want me to come to you?”
“I think,” she said, and then she fell silent.
“I could introduce you to Shlomo Stempel, the world’s best and skinniest Santa Claus.” The anxiety in my voice was unmistakable. Even I could hear it.
“I think I’m going to the airport.” Someone honked on the street where she was parked, and someone else shouted, probably at the person who had honked. “I think I need to be somewhere else for a while.”
