Gods and Pawns (Company) Page 15

  “It’ll be all right,” said Maria automatically, scanning the phone table. No notes from anyone. No blinks on her answering machine. She went first to the stacked plastic boxes; her gun was there in its Tupperware, apparently untouched. She resealed it and set it on the table.

  Five assorted bags and boxes of clothes, toiletries, and music cassettes went down to the trunk of the Buick. There was still room for her blankets and pillows; Maria sent them with Tina and stayed behind long enough to pull one of the photocopies she had made from her purse. She set it on the phone table, fended off Philip’s attempts to grab it, and wrote across Dr. Muller’s smiling face: I CAN TOUCH YOU, TOO, SMART GUY.

  “Come on, sweetie.” She shifted Philip to her other arm, picked up the Tupperware, and left the apartment.

  Back at the house on Fountain, Tina drew the statue of the Virgin from Lupe’s bag and set it on the mantelpiece.

  “She’s home again,” she said, looking wistful. “We need to light a candle in front of her now. Grandma brought her from Durango, didn’t she?”

  “That’s right,” said Maria, methodically unpacking the rest of the bag. Something slipped out of Hector’s crossword book: his plastic magnifying card. She picked it up off the floor and stuck it in her pocket.

  “She looks really old. How long has she been in the family?”

  Maria shrugged. “I think she belonged to Abuela Maria; that was your great grandmother. The one who lived on the big ranch.”

  “So she’s looked after us for generations,” said Tina, smiling.

  “I guess so.” Maria felt a pang, realizing that she was the only one left who knew the family stories about Durango. Isabel might remember, but Isabel didn’t care. Did Tina really care? Would she be able to remember, would Philip inherit any sense of who he was, where he came from?

  Something tugged at her memory. After a moment she placed it, and scowled to herself. “Why don’t you go feed the baby? I’ll unload the car.”

  Sitting among the boxes in her old room, she opened her purse and drew out the envelope again, and shook the old photograph out on the bed. The big ranch in Durango…

  Maria took the magnifying card from her pocket and examined the picture minutely, especially the faces of the men. Not one of them bore any resemblance to Ambrose Muller. The one holding the reins of the horse was almost certainly an Indian. High cheekbones on him, and on the mustached man walking into frame—

  Maria stared at that one a long, long time. He looked familiar, but the blur of motion made it impossible to place him.

  Okay, she thought, these people must be related to us. So, whoever he is, whatever he is, he was trying to show me that he knows all about us. Trying to scare me? Get my attention? Well, the ball is in his court now.

  She put the photograph back in its envelope and set it aside. Opening the Tupperware container, she took out her gun and slid out the clip, and proceeded to clean it.

  Next morning Maria half-expected to find another note tacked on the front door, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there. She dropped off Tina at the mental health clinic and drove on down McCadden, through the same dreamlike sunlight, to the unemployment office.

  Philip stared up from his stroller through the forest of adult legs, and only got cranky after the first hour in line. She placated him with one of the plastic gloves from the Papi kit, inflating it and tying off the end to make a rooster balloon. He thought it was hilarious, and bellowed with laughter as he flailed it through the air.

  Wheeling him back to the Buick, Maria spotted the envelope under her windshield wiper. Moving deliberately, she put Philip in his car seat, fastened him in, folded up the stroller, and put it away before she allowed herself to pick up the envelope.

  On its outside was written: CLEVER GIRL!

  It was heavy, felt as though it contained a lot of folded paper. She weighed it in her hand, looking around to see whether anyone was watching her. Not a soul in sight. At that hour of the morning on a weekday, the mean streets were as wide and sunlit and empty as a desert.

  Maria stuck the envelope into her purse, unopened. She got into the car and drove off.

  Tina was smiling as she waited outside the clinic, clutching a paper bag. Maria’s gaze riveted on it as she pulled up. Were they wine bottles?

  “Sorry I’m late. What have you got in the bag?”

  “I walked down to the little Mexican market on the corner,” Tina replied, getting in. A heavy cloud of rose perfume came with her. “I bought candles for the Virgin, see?” She held open the bag to reveal three big pink candles, in glass cups color-lithographed with the Virgin of Guadalupe. “Don’t you love that smell? Hi, baby, Mommy’s so glad to see you! Were you a good boy for Auntie?”

  “He was fine,” said Maria, as she pulled away from the curb. “How was therapy?”

  “Therapy was wonderful. Marvelous. Fabulously fantastic,” said Tina, in a tone of such dreamy ecstasy Maria glanced sidelong at her, suspicious.

  “Really,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” Tina said. She was still smiling.

  “Well, don’t keep me waiting,” said Maria. “What was so good about it? You made a breakthrough?”

  “You could say that,” said Tina. “You know how I’ve told you what an incredibly nice man my therapist is? He’s sensitive and caring and…and it’s as though he’s known me my whole life. He’s like my angel.”

  “Yeah?” Maria tensed, guessing what was coming.

  “Well…today he said he might like to, you know, go out with me. Socially.”

  Maria ground her teeth.

  “Mi hija, doctors don’t date their patients,” she said.

  “What do you know about it?” demanded Tina, coming down off her pink cloud a little.

  “It’s not something ethical doctors do. Especially not psych doctors with emotionally vulnerable patients,” said Maria, trying very hard to keep the anger out of her voice.

  “When two people fall in love, it doesn’t matter who they are,” said Tina. “You’ve never been in love, so you don’t know, do you? He understands me, and I feel completely safe with him. I thought you’d be happy for me! Are you jealous, is that what it is?”

  “No,” said Maria, out of all the things she might have said.

  “This could be the answer to everything,” said Tina in a louder voice, leaning back in her seat. “We could get married. Philip would have a real daddy who’s there all the time. And he’s a doctor, you know? He lives in Bel-Air.”

  “Huh,” said Maria. “And that would solve all your problems.” Silently she screamed, You wouldn’t have to get a job, you wouldn’t have to go back to school. You really think a doctor who lives in Bel-Air is going to ride to your rescue on a white horse.

  “Philip’s happy for me, anyway,” said Tina sullenly. “Aren’t you? Wouldn’t you like a new daddy?”

  Maria waited until she was at home, alone in her old room, to open the envelope. It contained fifteen sheets of paper. She spread them out on her bed and studied them. They were not what she had expected, at all.

  They seemed to be photocopies of scrapbook clippings, culled from newspapers and magazines, over a period of many years. Here and there they had been highlighted with a yellow marker, drawing her attention to certain points.

  Maria read a story about a rare native species of bunch grass, long thought to be extinct, found again growing at a construction site out in Antelope Valley. The story next to it concerned another species once thought extinct, a kind of Asian deer, of which a small herd had just been discovered in a remote park in China.

  Just below that story was an interview with a man in Sweden who had been cleaning out the attic of an old house and found a sixteenth-century quarto copy of a Shakespeare play. Next to it was a brief account of a cabinet in an old country house in England, opened by a new owner who discovered something locked away and forgotten: a concert piece by Handel, known to music scholars from contemporary references but for
merly thought destroyed.

  Wondering, Maria read on. All the articles had a common theme: the miraculous survival of lost things. Extinct species of plants and animals, works of art, manuscripts, early films. Somehow, in each case, they came to light once more, from whatever dusty shelf or hidden valley they had occupied all the while.

  On the last page, someone had written:

  WHAT IF SOMEONE HAD FIGURED OUT A WAY TO MAKE MONEY OUT OF THESE LITTLE SURPRISES?

  HOW CAN YOU EVER BE SURE OF DEATH?

  FOOD FOR THOUGHT, ISN’T IT?

  “Okay,” said Maria quietly. “You really are an obsessive psycho. What’s next? UFOs?”

  The doorbell rang.

  “Can you get it?” Tina called from the kitchen. “I’m washing dishes.”

  Maria went out to the living room, noting that Tina had lit one of her pink candles and placed it before the Virgin of Guadalupe. The air was already warm with perfume. Going to the window, she peered through the blinds; a young man in a suit stood on the porch, looking at something he was holding in his hand.

  She opened the door. The young man was a stranger to her. As he held up the leather case to display his badge, his coat opened and Maria saw the holster under his left arm.

  “LAPD, ma’am. I’m Lieutenant John Koudelka. How are you today?”

  “Fine,” Maria replied, thinking that he sounded like a salesman.

  “Would you be Maria Aguilar?”

  “Yes.”

  “I take it you’re no longer at the place over on Hobart. Would it be all right if I came in and asked you some questions about your father’s death?”

  “Sure,” said Maria.

  He didn’t get down to business at once. Philip rolled himself in to stare, and the young cop was pleasantly paternal; Tina came in, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and the young cop accepted a glass of soda from her with pleasant grace. Tina giggled, flirted, and talked about the weather. Maria, watching her, thought sourly: Potential Husband Alert!!!! Omigod!!!!

  But Lieutenant Koudelka was all gravity when, social gambits over, he turned to face Maria and said: “You made a statement to the attending physician when your father died.”

  “You bet I did,” said Maria. “The last time I saw my father alive, he had a bandage on the inside of his arm. I asked him what had happened. He said a doctor had made a house call to do some kind of lab work.”

  Lieutenant Koudelka nodded. “That seemed strange to you?”

  “It seemed strange as hell! Evergreen didn’t have any doctors in residence. Any time my father needed a procedure done, they either took him to the clinic or they checked him into the hospital,” said Maria.

  “Did he say what the lab work was for?”

  “He didn’t know,” said Maria wearily. “He probably didn’t ask. If somebody in a doctor’s coat had told my father to stand on his head, he’d have done it. He was polite that way. But he was okay when I saw him at seven o’clock, and a day later he was stone dead. And nobody’s explained to me anything about this super-virus at Evergreen. You can bet I’m thinking of suing somebody.”

  She ran out of words and the cop sat, watching her. She looked him in the eye. Finally he looked away and said, “And…you’d made a complaint earlier, about a man stealing something from your father’s room.”

  Maria considered. How much could she tell him of the truth, without sounding like a middle-aged fat lady who craved attention and made up stories to get it?

  “I saw a guy in a white coat walking around at Evergreen,” she said. “Passing himself off as a doctor, maybe, huh? And stalking me, and leaving nutcase notes for me to find. With stuff he stole from my father, I might add. Which I would think would be a dead giveaway he was in my father’s room, wouldn’t you think?”

  Lieutenant Koudelka’s face registered nothing, but his spine stiffened a little.

  “Notes?” he said. “He’s contacted you again?”

  Maria decided how much to say.

  “I’ll show you the other one,” she said, and went and got the envelope with the old photograph.

  “See?” She tossed it into his lap. “We found that when we went to clean up his room. It was left in a drawer. Maybe the guy’s got some sick idea about euthanasia? The picture’s from an old family album, by the way. I figured he was trying to scare us by telling us how much he knows about us. You want to take it in for fingerprinting?” she added, and felt a bitter glee as Lieutenant Koudelka winced.

  She watched his face as he thought about it. Finally he sighed. “Have you handled it a lot?”

  “Yeah, actually. What you guys ought to be doing is dusting for prints in the rooms of all the other people at Evergreen, you know that?”

  There was only a momentary glint in his eyes saying Lady, don’t tell me my job. “We’re doing that, Ma’am,” he said evenly.

  After he left, Maria went back to her room and looked at the papers spread out on her bed. Too big a piece of the puzzle, too far out in left field. What connection could any of this possibly have with a serial killer of elderly people?

  She bent down, pulled the Tupperware container from its place under her bed and checked. Her gun was still there, still unloaded, lying just as she’d left it. She closed the lid and slid the box back out of sight.

  The next few days were quiet. The Evergreen Virus faded further and further back into the papers, and finally vanished, as no new deaths occurred and no answers were found. Maria found herself wondering how many Evergreens occurred but dropped out of the historical record when they were no longer front-page news. In the provincial little Los Angeles of 1937, the Ambrose Muller case had held public attention for weeks; now such things barely rated a headline.

  Maria had an overwhelming sense that the present, her present, was sinking out of existence, as the world she had known all her life disappeared. Yet no shining future had risen to replace it; instead, broken and vaguely threatening pieces of the past were bobbing to the surface of time. It seemed the only new thing left on earth was Philip, rolling himself through the old house full of ghosts, babbling at sunbeams. She sat on the couch in silence, watching him, suffocating in love and dull fear.

  Two more envelopes came, left in the mailbox this time; one was marked MORE CLUES and the other HOW LONG DO YOU SUPPOSE THESE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN RUNNING THINGS? Both contained more photocopies of clippings on the same subject matter as the other packets, of extinctions reversed, lost treasures found.

  There was a photograph in the second one, too. It didn’t disturb Maria as much as it had probably been intended to, because by now she had figured out how the stalker had gotten hold of pictures of her family. He must have rummaged through the bags of ruined and rained-on stuff Tina had set out on the curb.

  She felt nothing but gloomy longing, turning over the picture of Hector and Lupe. There they were, young and smiling, dressed up in their best clothes. They were seated at some restaurant table. Where had that been taken?

  A fantastic background of sculpted waterfalls and neon palm trees released her long-buried memory: Clifton’s Pacific Seas. It had looked like an indoor Disneyland, with grottos and statues and a pipe organ. She had had her fourth birthday party there. As her birthday cake had been served, the organist had miraculously played the theme from Tubby the Tuba, which was her very favorite song. She had wondered for years how he had known that was her favorite song.

  And now here, in this photograph, was another thing to wonder about: a red arrow had been drawn pointing to a man in the background. He was leaning from the waist, apparently addressing another man who was seated at…oh, of course, that must be the organist.

  Splash, another memory came bobbing up, one of the stories Lupe had told her. Hector and Lupe had had their wedding dinner at Clifton’s. And the organist had played “La Paloma” for them, their courting song, because Uncle Porfirio had gone over and asked him to…

  Lupe had her left hand slightly raised in the picture, proudly displaying the go
ld wedding band. And the man in the background—what she could see of him—looked a lot like Uncle Porfirio…

  Under the red arrow, the stalker had written: WOULDN’T IT BE USEFUL TO LIVE FOREVER? THINK OF THE THINGS YOU COULD SAVE.

  Nobody had saved Clifton’s Pacific Seas, though; it had been torn down years ago. Maria knitted her brows. She had begun to have an inkling of what the stalker was trying to tell her.

  Before she could piece any more of the puzzle together, she was interrupted by Tina striding in from the kitchen.

  “Listen, Auntie, I had an idea. If we move the last of your stuff out this weekend and really scrub down that apartment, I’ll bet we could get the cleaning deposit back. What do you think?”

  “That never happens,” said Maria listlessly.

  “We could at least try,” said Tina. “You know what your problem is? You’re depressed. Cleaning out the place would probably be good for you. You’d get those, whatchacallem, endo-things, and then you’d feel better.”

  “Endorphins.”

  “Yeah, those. Come on. We need sponges and spray cleaner. Let’s go to Kmart.”

  Miles of aisles, cheap consumer goods stacked heaven-high in plastic packaging occasionally pried open. Maria pushed the shopping cart, soundless over glass-slick linoleum, and marveled at how banal her life was.

  Then again, what exactly did I want from the world? I could have had a husband. I could have had kids. I could have been a congresswoman. I’d still have been stuck behind a shopping cart full of Ty-D-Bowl some of the time. These are the days of our lives…

  “Do you have a mop at your place?” Tina emerged from an aisle with her arms full of bottles of Pine-Sol.

  “I guess so,” Maria replied.

  “What do you mean, you guess so?” Tina dumped the bottles in the cart.

  “I think it’s kind of worn out,” Maria hazarded, unwilling to admit how little time she had ever spent worrying about waxy yellow buildup or other domestic enormities.