Murder in the Melting Pot

by Jane Isenberg

  “The bad news is…” his voice lowered just a little. “There are a few gangs here. They’re mostly run by Mexican drug cartels and distribute for them. So don’t make anybody mad, especially young guys you run into in stores.”

  Miranda had learned online that Yakima County had more gangs per capita than any other county in the entire country. Attracted by business opportunities in the vast under-policed rural areas, these gangs had expanded their operations east from Seattle and Tacoma. Their impact on the culture of the Valley was not to be underestimated. Every September, some middle school principals in the city of Yakima distributed lists of gang colors and other trappings that might warn parents of their child’s growing interest in gang activities along with the usual lists of school supplies. Miranda had brushed off this news, figuring that if the gangs out there were like gangs in Seattle they mostly killed only each other or cops who interfered with their business. The “plainspoken” Rosemarie Arnold had also downplayed the impact of the gangs when she said, “Seriously, Miranda, my brother’s a county sheriff’s deputy, and he says if you don’t mess with the gangs, they won’t mess with you.” So that morning listening to the rabbi, Miranda felt certain they’d never bother a few overdressed New York Jews koshering grapes.

  Rabbi Alinsky’s next words reinforced this assumption. “But, thanks to the Almighty, the gangs have never bothered us. Of course, it helps that we don’t hang out in clubs and bars or eat in restaurants or use drugs. So on your days off, explore this Valley. It’s full of Hashem’s wonders. I have maps and guidebooks at the motel.” He paused. “Okay, so I hope you all watched the video I sent you because now we’re going inside where I’ll demonstrate exactly what you’ll do on each shift.”

  Miranda slipped away and crossed the street. Elated by the improvement in her relationship with Oskar Hindgrout, she strode purposefully through her tiny overgrown yard, the last vestige of the fields that once surrounded the farmer’s home before giving way to Sunnyvale’s slim strip of downtown. She wanted to take another look at the stuff inside her shed before speaking to her handyman about hauling it out. Maybe she could haul it out herself.

  When she looked back across the two-lane road that had begun as a wagon trail she saw that Rabbi Alinsky had led the young men into the processing plant. They were out of earshot when she screamed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Breitner’s in Sunnyvale is the B & B for visitors coming to the Yakima Valley on Business and a Budget! We’re smack in the center of this sunlit farming valley, “The Nation’s Fruit Bowl.” Here in“The Palm Springs of Washington” we enjoy over 300 days of sunshine a year! At Breitner’s you’ll have Wi-Fi and private baths. We’re also smoke-free and accessible, and our ample continental breakfast is locally sourced, homemade, and healthful.” www.breitnersB&B.com

  The low growl coming from the other side of the shed door stopped abruptly. Miranda swallowed her next scream and stood frozen with her hand on the rusty lockless latch. She turned and, leaning hard against the still-shut door, considered going back to the house for a flashlight and a broom so she could see and evict the critter inside. Then she figured she was probably overreacting to the sound of a stray dog scouting the shed for scraps. She told herself that even though there were wolves east of the Cascades, it was very unlikely that one of them was in her shed. Still, she stood there considering the possibility that the animal, whatever it was, was injured, maybe even rabid.

  “Come in. He won’t hurt you.”

  This accented invitation to enter her own shed, extended in a barely audible female voice, was more alarming to Miranda than the growl. Maybe it was the voice of a thief scrounging for scrap metal or something else she could sell. Or maybe it was the voice of a runaway. There could even be two people in there. They could be armed. They could be on drugs. And then there was the dog.

  Emboldened by her recent success with Oskar Hindgrout whose bark had turned out to be much worse than his bite, Miranda pooh-pooed her fears. She turned, threw open the shed door, stuck her head inside, and ordered, “Come out where I can see you. And keep that dog under control.”

  From behind a tower of old wooden fruit crates, a thin, dark-haired girl emerged bug-eyed and pale. Dressed in a grass-stained white T-shirt and jeans, she couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. She appeared to be alone except for the large dog beside her whose collar she gripped in one fist. This dog, better groomed than the bed-headed waif, looked like a slightly skinnier replica of every quasi-descendant of a German shepherd Miranda had ever seen. The girl’s blinking eyes focused on the sturdy woman in the doorway, partially blocking the sun and any hope of easy escape. Miranda stared back and noticed dark smudges beneath those eyes and wondered when the youngster had last slept. She recognized the all-too-familiar signs of a frightened girl in trouble.

  “Please, don’t call the police, Miss. I’ll go. I was just trying to get my dog. He got off his leash, chased a rabbit in here. That’s all. I’m sorry.” She took a step toward the shed door.

  Miranda often felt insecure in her new setting and her new guise, as if she were living a lie, had stolen someone’s identity instead of reinventing her own. And her own daily deceit sometimes gave her insight into others who were also lying. Like this girl. Miranda could tell by the way her trace of a Spanish accent became more pronounced and her grip on the dog’s collar tightened when she said police, by how she hesitated and wiped her nose with her hand before she said rabbit, and by how her narrow shoulders shrugged when she offered to leave. That shrug told Miranda that this kid had no place to go, no well-heeled parents to bail her out, and that she was scared.

  Even though Miranda suspected she was being lied to and even though she was hardly an observant Jew, she knew that feeding the hungry was a mitzvah, a commandment. Or maybe that was just an excuse, a rationale for befriending a total stranger and so, for a time, keeping her own loneliness at bay. She had let reason prevent her from reaching out to the young kosherers. But just a few minutes later it didn’t occur to her that in these times and this place her response to this girl might be ill-considered, as in really dumb. “Come in the house. Tell me who you are and why you’re hiding in my shed while I fix us something to eat.”

  The girl didn’t move. Her whisper was more prayer than condition. “No police. I didn’t take nothing.”

  “No police.” For Miranda, no police was a no-brainer. When the girl still didn’t budge, Miranda cocked her head in the direction of the dog. “Yeah. Him too.”

  Once inside, the visitor took the dog into the bathroom with her. When she emerged with clean hands and face, Miranda pulled a stool up to the counter, and her guest perched there like a sparrow prepared to take flight except that sparrows aren’t often tethered to large dogs. Miranda had never been a big talker, but compared to this girl she was a chatterbox.

  “My name is Miranda Breitner. You are?”

  “Vanessa Vargas.”

  “And your friend?” Miranda pushed a bowl of water across the counter. “Put this down in the corner for him, okay, Vanessa? What’s his name?”

  “Rusty.” Vanessa did as she was asked and returned to her perch. “Thanks.”

  “I hope Rusty likes scrambled eggs because I don’t have any dog food, so he’s going to eat what we eat.” Miranda cracked eggs into a bowl and slid slices of bread into the toaster. She put a quart of skim milk, some cheddar cheese, butter, and blueberry jam on the counter. It struck her as odd but somehow okay that her first B & B guests were a skinny vagabond girl and a dog with neither reservations nor the wherewithal to pay. And they were having a late lunch, not breakfast. She served Rusty first, giving him a bowl of scrambled eggs, cheese, and crumbled toast.

  Miranda plated eggs, put them on the counter, pulled over a short stepladder, and took a seat opposite her guest. “Vanessa, somebody must be worried about you. Do you want to use my phone to call anybody?” She held out her cell.

  Tears welle
d in the teenager’s brown eyes. She shook her head several times. “No, no.”

  “Okay then, who do you live with? Where do you go to school?”

  Vanessa ignored the first question. “Green Hollow.”

  Miranda remembered only too well that Green Hollow was Washington’s only state-run residential school for youthful offenders that included girls. It was in a suburb of Seattle. Twenty years ago she’d feared she might be sent there. She wanted to hear how Vanessa described it. “Is that a school?”

  “It’s a boarding school.” Thus proving her gift for euphemism, Vanessa scraped the last bits of egg from her plate, spread her next slice of toast with butter and jam, tore it in half, and handed his share down to Rusty who’d finished his own meal and stretched out beneath his mistress’s perch.

  Miranda understood that she over-identified with Vanessa because the unlucky girl reminded her of herself at thirteen. She was scared too then and needed help. Vanessa must have been found guilty of a crime. While deciding how to frame the question about what crime it was, Miranda pointed to a bright yellow bowl of apples on the counter. “Have one. They’re good for you.” She hated interrogating this kid. While her sympathy battled with her suspicion, Miranda managed to keep her voice even. “Vanessa, Green Hollow is a school for juvenile offenders. Why were you convicted? What did you do?”

  Vanessa shrugged and studied the apple in her hand while she spoke. “I brought two guns to school.”

  Miranda swallowed a gasp.

  When Vanessa continued, her words suddenly flowed, and Miranda heard in her voice the familiar expressionless drone of a suspect who has repeated the same sad, unsatisfying story many times. “They wasn’t mine though. One was my mom’s and the other was my dad’s. He don’t live in the same house with us. My mom wasn’t no chola when I was little and she didn’t do drugs back then, but this Sureño started coming round, staying with us, and then selling to her and then she was using and she was like his girlfriend and the other Sureños started courting her, you know, to get her to join. For her initiation they wanted her to pop my dad. Basically, you know, blood in, blood out.” Vanessa’s barely perceptible shudder prompted Rusty to stand and nuzzle her leg. “My dad’s always run with the Norteños. He was a block rep in jail, and when he got out he started dealing for them in South Seattle.” Her voice lowered as if this were the end of her story.

  Miranda was incredulous. “Are you telling me your mom shot your father?”

  Vanessa inhaled and straightened her shoulders before going on. “Almost. Last year when my mom saw him driving around in a new Escalade she asked him for money for me to go to Catholic school.” Vanessa’s mouth twisted and she stopped talking.

  “So did he pay your tuition?” As soon as the question left her lips, Miranda regretted it. “I mean…”

  Vanessa soldiered on with lowered eyes, talking a little faster. “No. And right after that he got busted for carrying and while he was doing time the Sureños gave her a gun. When he got out, she was gonna meet him and blast him, but that day the girl who was gonna drive her had to go to court, and my mom, she couldn’t get another ride. But I knew she’d keep trying, so that night I took that gun outta the bag of rice by the stove where she kept it.” A tear slid down Vanessa’s cheek. If this girl was lying, she was putting on quite a performance. Miranda handed her a napkin and kept quiet, willing Vanessa to continue.

  “Right after that I went to see my dad, and I heard him bragging to his boys about how he was gonna give his latest bitch his gun and get her to blast my mom first. And, basically, that little puta is so young and so dumb, she’d do it too. She’s gonna have another baby.” Vanessa rolled her eyes either at the idiocy of her father’s current lover or at the prospect of another half-sibling or both. For a nanosecond Miranda considered sharing the story of her own father’s second family. But she wanted to hear Vanessa’s tale, not reveal her own. To her relief, the girl kept talking, as if sharing her story with someone who wasn’t judging her, was in and of itself rewarding. “So while they was partying, I took his piece right off his dresser. I went and stayed by Liliana, a girl from my school they don’t know.”

  “Were you going to sell the guns?” Miranda regretted interrupting when Vanessa paused and shrugged. Again Miranda read defeat in the rise and fall of those narrow shoulders. When the girl spoke next, her voice was so low Miranda had to lean over to catch her words. “No. I wouldn’t do that. I was gonna give both guns to the cops at one of those gun exchanges they have, you know? But until the exchange, I basically had to hide them.” Vanessa took a deep breath as if inhaling strength to continue.

  Miranda sat back and waited.

  “I was gonna stash them in one of them broken-down trailers at my school. They don’t use it now cause it leaks real bad. But this old custodian, he came in to sneak a smoke while I was trying to hide them and he saw them and ratted me out.”

  Miranda was quiet for a moment trying to absorb this twisted tale. She asked herself if it could possibly be true, any of it. Her new ability to recognize a lie when she heard one offered no help, but it would take her only a few minutes on the information highway to corroborate or disprove Vanessa’s account. Miranda didn’t want to reveal her distrust by working her smart phone in front of the kid though. And she did want to hear the rest of her story. “How did you like Green Hollow?”

  “I’m good in school so I liked it there except for visiting days. Miranda saw tears well again and was surprised when Vanessa chose to go on. “I rather be at Green Hollow than with them two. I don’t use drugs. I don’t deal. I don’t gang bang. So, basically, we got, you know, nothing in common them and me. This is the only ink on me. See.” She lifted her hair to reveal a small scroll, a diploma, tied with a ribbon and tattooed on the side of her neck. She dabbed at her eyes with the napkin Miranda had provided. “Green Hollow’s cool.”

  Her tone lightened when she added, “I found Rusty there. They got this program training us to work with dogs, ‘service dogs’ they call ‘em. We train ‘em to go live with people in wheelchairs or old people who get around with walkers.” Vanessa got down from the stool and sat on the floor beside Rusty and, as she continued, stroked his flank. “Him and me, we were tight from the beginning, weren’t we?” She grabbed his snout and leaned over to brush it quickly with her own nose. Both she and Miranda smiled. “He didn’t have a good childhood either, but he’s good in school too, picked up everything real easy, and I learned how to take care of him and train him, right, Rusty?” She ran her hand down the dog’s back and planted a kiss on his head. The picture of canine contentment, Rusty yawned and blinked.

  “So why did you leave Green Hollow?”

  “I had to. Rusty got adopted by this dude who told them at his interview he was gonna give him a good home with his dad who was in a wheelchair, but when I was telling Rusty goodbye, I overheard that same dude say on his phone that his dog would be staying alone in his country place with someone just coming by to feed him and let him out once or twice a day. That creep lied and faked his application. He really wanted a watchdog for this fancy vacation house he has out in the desert near here.

  “But, basically, Rusty’s a Belgian Malinois, a work dog.” Vanessa’s shoulders straightened with pride. “He’s bred to have responsibilities, right, Rusty?” She spoke into one of Rusty’s pointed ears. “Cops and soldiers use dogs like you to find bombs and drugs and stuff, don’t they? I bet you once worked for a soldier.” Miranda noted that Vanessa was no longer using gang slang and her accent was barely noticeable. She was glancing around the room, too, no doubt taking in the fresh paint on the bare walls, the unfinished floors, and the almost total lack of furniture. “And this type of dog’s very social. Basically, he needs to always be with somebody, right Rusty?” Miranda waited to hear more. There had to be more.

  “So I got a look at this guy’s address and a few days after he picked up Rusty I snuck out of Green Hollow in a plu
mber’s van. I got out when the driver stopped at a gas station and walked until I snagged a ride over the mountains with some old couple. The lady talked about Jesus the whole way.” Another smile animated Vanessa’s thin face. “She made me feel good because I know, basically, rescuing Rusty was exactly what Jesus would do if he was me. They let me out right by the library in Yakima. I told them my mom was meeting me there.

  “I asked somebody going into the library where that address was and she looked it up on her phone. I got another ride out that way in the back of a pick-up truck. In front was two women going fishing. They let me off, and I hiked up to where Rusty was staying and waited out of sight all day for someone to come feed him and take him out. Finally a guy drove up with a girl and brought Rusty out and chained him up outside and left him like that while the two of them went back inside. Didn’t even put his water dish out there.” Vanessa frowned at the horny dog sitter’s priorities. “But at least I didn’t have to fight him. And I didn’t see no rattlesnakes. I signaled Rusty not to bark when I came up, so he just licked my face off he was so glad to see me! I unchained him and we ran all the way back down to the road and hitched another ride with a couple of ladies who like dogs. They live in this town, and they let us out last night, and we found your shed.”

  Miranda noted that Vanessa had taken rides only from women and wondered if that was intentional. She also was very curious about what Vanessa’s next move might be, if the kid had a plan, would ask her for a job. At the prospect of having the girl stay, Miranda felt her heartbeat accelerate. She could use a kid around to quiet the incessant ticking of her biological clock. She’d always loved kids. Now most likely she’d never have a child of her own and she’d never be allowed to adopt. And right here was a youngster in need of a family. Also once the B & B opened, if it stayed booked, Vanessa could help with laundry, shopping, baking, and cleaning. But this fugitive girl had serious baggage, and Miranda didn’t want to literally invite trouble, couldn’t afford to really. On the other hand, who’d know? She could alter Vanessa’s appearance and give her a new name and backstory. Then she could home-school her and prepare her for college.