Thicker Than Blood

by Penny Rudolph

  “You knew him?” Hank asked, surprised.

  She shrugged. “Not really. Just a client. My most important one. Will this affect your job?”

  Hank paused. “I have no idea.”

  “Was he a friend of yours?”

  Hank’s eyes darkened. “It’s probably safe to say Jason was no one’s friend.”

  She gazed at him a moment. “Well, guess we better get your car open.”

  This time, she took along a flashlight.

  It didn’t occur to her until they were passing the long row of company cars. She stopped so quickly that he was several feet ahead before he noticed and turned around.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, eyes wide, hand over her mouth. The overhead light edged her hair with tiny flashes of red.

  “What is it?”

  She didn’t move or change expression.

  He ambled back and put his hand on her arm. “What’s wrong?”

  “The car,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “The fender.”

  “What car, what fender?”

  If she had stopped to think, she might have kept it to herself. But she reached for his arm and led him to the damaged car. “Is that blood?” she said quietly, pointing at the fender.

  Hank knelt to examine the dent. “Hard to tell. Could be.” He stood again, dusted off his hands, then wiped them on his trousers. “I heard that someone driving one of our cars hit a deer. Maybe this is it.”

  “Oh.” Rachel’s thoughts raced, stumbled over something, bogged down.

  They found Hank’s green Mustang looking lonely and deserted on level B, the jimmy did its work, and he thanked her.

  At the gate, she watched Hank’s car exit, then locked up.

  Back in the apartment, she readied herself for bed, spit out the toothpaste, and stared at herself in the mirror. The brows rose over suspicious eyes. She could almost hear her mother saying, What a nice young man.

  Probably got a wife and six kids, she told the voice in her head. Besides, you were never one for nice young men. You married Pop.

  Her mother, Madeleine, had adored Rachel’s father, whose family had made a small fortune farming, but Madeleine’s austere parents had never quite forgiven their daughter for marrying a Mexican. Marty was only half Mexican, of course—the other half being Irish—but to the Feinbergs that didn’t matter. He was still a gambler, a joker, and a Catholic.

  Rachel climbed into bed only to lie wide-eyed in the dark. Besides, I’m perfectly happy as I am.

  Was she? A sordid mess behind her and, if she were really lucky, she could go on working eighteen hours a day in a parking garage and be too tired to sleep.

  A garage where one of the cars was used to kill someone.

  She sat straight up in bed. The water agency usually sent over paperwork about dents and scratches and she arranged repairs. There had been no recent papers.

  And I can’t even go to the cops.

  The streetlights made a pale glow at her curtainless windows like a movie screen before the film rolls.

  Rachel tore off the covers and went to the kitchen.

  The box of crackers was almost empty and smelled salty. She poured a glass of low-fat milk and sat down at the counter in the dark.

  Soon, very soon, someone would quietly get the damage repaired and there would be no evidence at all that the car on level C had killed anyone.

  But maybe it was just a deer. Maybe the repair order will come tomorrow. Besides, it’s none of my business.

  Rachel rose to go back to bed, thought better of it, pulled on her blue terry robe instead, and picked up the flashlight. First she would have another look at that fender.

  In the yellow beam of light, the dent looked even deeper than she remembered. Crouching next to it, Rachel ran her finger over the naked metal. The blood, if that’s what it was, was like a daub of dull brown paint.

  She shone the light through the passenger window. Nothing odd there. She could search it of course. InterUrban left keys for its vehicles on peg-board hooks in her booth.

  The light flashed across the side mirror. Objects in Mirror Are Close Than They Appear. There was an extra space after Close where the stenciled R had come off.

  She gazed again at the fender. Is it blood?

  The flashlight beam glinted on something in the cleft where the hood met the fender. Something was wedged there, a nail or tack of some sort. Rachel wiggled it back and forth, but it wouldn’t come free. Finally, she took a key from her pocket and pried the object out. It made a dinging sound as it hit the pavement at her feet—a bit of twisted metal about the size of a quarter.

  Stooping to pick it up, she examined the sharp, pointed shaft that had caught in the crack. When she turned it over, a prickling began at the top of her head and moved swiftly down her spine, filling her body with ice water.

  The metal bore the etched image of a tortoise.

  Chapter Four

  At noon the following day, Rachel climbed the stairs to the garage roof.

  She had added the helicopter pad soon after opening the garage. Nearby businesses, from banks to medical complexes, used it. As with parking, the water agency was her biggest helipad client.

  Normally, it was Lonnie’s job to meet the helicopters, but she had sent him to pick up sandwiches for lunch. He’d been gone more than an hour.

  She opened the door and a fierce downdraft of heavy air almost pushed her back down the stairs. Grabbing the narrow metal railing, Rachel squinted and leaned into the wind. The relentless beating of the blades was deafening; it sounded like the beating of a monstrous heart.

  Covering her head, she waited while the chopper touched down, then crouched down and darted to the cockpit. The pilot handed her a parcel. She barely got back to the railing before the helicopter began rising.

  The air finally stilled, leaving the rooftop stiflingly hot. Running a hand through wind-mussed hair, Rachel saw that part of the parcel had torn away. Through the inner plastic lining, granules like sugar were visible. The torn label showed only a return address for Rosen Chemicals.

  She glanced at her watch, wondering where Lonnie was, hoping she didn’t know.

  The stairwell seemed black as pitch after the blinding sunlight and she narrowly avoided colliding with someone in the dimness at the bottom of the steps.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Lonnie gasped, breathless. No taller than she, and thin, he weighed in at about one-ten. Nose and chin jutted from a face the color of milk gone bad. He held up a bag. “Jeez, that Italian sausage reeks of garlic.”

  “Good.”

  “Not for me. Garlic kills my stomach.”

  “I got the package, catch your breath.” She handed the parcel to him, took the sandwich bag and reached inside. “It’s cold, Lon. What took so long?” The sandwich shop was only three blocks away.

  “Sorry,” he said again.

  She waited for an explanation that didn’t come. “Lon, don’t do this.”

  Clean and sober, he was bright, clever, and could outwork three men. And she owed him. She owed him big. The last thing Rachel wanted to do was fire him.

  “I’m clean. I swear it.” He looked at the package she had given him. “What happened ? The address is gone.”

  “The return address is a chemical company. Only place I know that gets shipments of chemicals is the water quality lab.”

  Lonnie peered through the torn cardboard at the contents. “Looks like—”

  “Sugar, crystal, coke, but somehow I sincerely suspect it is none of those.”

  “Right.” He glanced at her, then with a show of haste and efficiency, hurried off.

  Rachel sat down in the stairwell and ate her sandwich, hardly noticing what she was chewing. Finished, she stood, tied the tail of her shirt in a knot about her waist, thinking an icy Fat Tire beer would sure taste good. She settled for some M&M’s and went to sit fidgeting, accomplishing nothing, on the scarred drafting stool in her booth, until almost closing time.

  Firs
t that damn tie tack. No question, it was Jason’s. The design was identical to the cuff link he had dropped in the garage. She should do something, tell someone.

  And now, Lonnie. She couldn’t ignore what was going on with him.

  Her fist pounded the counter, causing the four window envelopes in front of her to dance. She tore them open and was pulling a large book of checks from a drawer when the phone at her elbow rang.

  “Rachel? It’s me.”

  A surge of pleasure gave way to a rush of anger. She shoved it down. “Pop?” She hadn’t seen him in months.

  “How’s my girl?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You free for dinner?”

  She was almost afraid to ask, “You doing okay?”

  “Fine, fine.”

  She waited for him to say more, could almost hear the nervousness in his silence. “Dinner. Okay. How about the Italian Fisherman?”

  There was silence on the line, then, “Pasadena’s a little, uh, far.”

  Rachel sighed. That meant he would be playing poker and didn’t want to have dinner too far from Gardena. “Okay, where?”

  “How about the club? Seven?”

  Oh, Pop, she thought sadly. “Okay.”

  She stuffed her paperwork in a box and went up to the apartment to wait for freeway traffic to thin out.

  Sprawled on the worn sofa with Clancy on her lap, she wondered what to do about her father. He’d been in a downward spiral since her mother had died.

  Madeleine had been thrown from a horse.

  Marty had phoned Stanford and got Rachel out of class. In some dark corner of Rachel’s mind, fear had begun to collect like the first drops of storm water. She raced home.

  “Of course, she’ll get better,” Marty said as they shared a dinner of lukewarm takeout chicken in the dining room of the huge old farmhouse. His eyes seemed to have sunk into his head, leaving a pair of dark craters.

  When her mother’s condition didn’t improve, Rachel dropped out of school. “Next semester she’ll be better. I’ll go back then,” she told Marty.

  She and Madeleine spent hours in the sun on the patio where the view was mostly row upon row of crops and the levees that ringed their island, like a range of little mountains, protecting the land from being swamped by the water in the river channel.

  Marty had never bothered to disguise his lack of interest in farming. His own father had amassed a good deal of land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and made a lot of money from it, but Marty had little taste for rising at four, preferring to turn in, rather than out, at that hour. Ever since Rachel could remember, he had alternated weeks in Vegas with weeks at home.

  The days in the farmhouse dragged on. Madeleine got no better.

  Bored, and drained by it all, Rachel left her mom with Marty and went shopping in San Francisco. A few days later, she woke up aching and hot with fever. “Just a virus, or something,” she told Marty.

  Three weeks later her mother, having caught Rachel’s virus, followed by that stealthy assassin, pneumonia, was dead.

  Why did I have to go shopping? What did I think I needed?

  Brittle and ashen as a cutout parchment doll, Rachel began taking Madeleine’s codeine to help her sleep.

  Marty, always a heavy drinker, but never a drunk, seemed to forget how to stop. In the dim, joyless evenings, he would sleep wherever he fell. Grateful that he hadn’t gone back to the casinos, Rachel didn’t scold him.

  One hot August morning over breakfast, she announced she was packing for school. “We have to go on with.…” She stuttered to a stop.

  Marty was still as stone.

  “Are you ill?” she asked.

  The silence rattled like a dried gourd. He stared at the plate of eggs he had barely touched. His eyes were lumps of coal in the ruined ashes of his face. His mouth opened, but he couldn’t seem to speak.

  Her head filled with cold air.

  Finally, “You can’t go back to school.” The words had been torn from him like a dry bandage from a terrible wound. “There’s no money. It’s gone…. The whole wretched farm. Everything.”

  Chapter Five

  The parking lot at the poker club was jammed with cars. Rachel parked, wondering why she had agreed to meet her father there. She should have insisted on somewhere else.

  Marty rose from a red-vinyl booth when she entered. It was from him Rachel had gotten her almost black hair, her high cheekbones.

  She winced a little at his appearance. His thick hair was now white, there were smudges under his eyes, and his clothes looked like ten-year-old Kmart specials. But when his arms closed around her she almost felt like a child again. Unexpected burning pricked at her eyelids. “Hi, Pop. Good to see you.”

  Marty lowered his head. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  She dropped her eyes. “Why?”

  He jerked a finger at the surroundings. “I mean here, to the club.”

  “Well, the food usually stinks,” she said, sitting down. “But I figured that if you got into a game, you’d stand me up anywhere else. At least I knew you’d be here.”

  “Haven’t seen my little girl for what? Eight months? And the first thing she says is she thinks I’d stand her up?”

  She leveled her eyes at him. “I don’t think it, Pop. I know it.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Three years. Almost exactly. I was in trouble. You told me you’d come.”

  He ducked his head and peered with great interest at the menu. “I know, okay. I know. But that game was…. I’ve never had another like it. I thought I was going to win enough to get the farm back. For you. It was for you.”

  She sighed, but said nothing. The fish they ordered was greasy and overdone. Rachel ate what she could and put her fork down.

  Marty glanced at her. “Not like the channel cat we used to catch in the Two Forks, is it? Your mama didn’t approve, of course. We had no business going fishing. You should have been studying. I should have been working.” He grinned like a small boy. “But we all sure ate a lot of that fish.”

  The lamp that hung over the table made a rectangle of light between them. She watched him through it. “Nothing will ever be quite that good again.”

  He glanced down at the table, then back at her. “There’s still plenty of time for you to hear the tortoise sing.”

  The statement tore a laugh from her. Her first-grade teacher had assigned animals for the kids to imitate. Rachel’s was the tortoise. “I made such a fuss about that damn tortoise. I was so insulted. But you said—”

  “—the tortoise is a wonderful creature, with a lovely voice,” Marty finished her sentence, a long-missing twinkle beginning to kindle in his eyes. “When the moon is full and the night is warm and the tortoise has reached his goal, he lifts his head, closes his eyes, and sings.”

  “I believed you. Back then, I believed every word you said.” The singing tortoise made her think of Jason’s tie tack.

  Marty’s face had gone solemn. “You’re doing okay now though, aren’t you?”

  “Well enough, I guess. Thanks to Grandpa.”

  Marty looked down, then at the wall. “Who would have thought that prissy Marvin Feinberg had built something as common and greasy as a parking garage. In LA, yet. Not in his beloved San Francisco.”

  “Well, if he hadn’t, and if Mom hadn’t left me enough to pay the back taxes, I’d still be living in that dreadful little room, flipping burgers for a living.”

  “But you’re okay now?” Marty asked again as the waitress cleared the table.

  Rachel folded her arms on the orange plastic place mat. Her water glass was fogged with vapor. She drew an X on it, then brusquely wiped it clean. “I’m not using, if that’s what you mean.”

  Marty nodded and leaned back in the booth. “Good. I knew you weren’t.”

  Her expression stiffened. “No, you didn’t, Pop, or you wouldn’t have asked. So, I’m okay in that way, but I do have a sort of weird problem.”

 
; Marty was watching her intently. “Like what?”

  “The head of InterUrban was killed a couple days ago. The cops think it was an ordinary hit and run, some drunk who didn’t stop. Maybe it was. But I think the car that did it is in my garage.” She twisted her napkin into a rope. “It belongs to the water agency’s fleet.”

  Marty’s anxious blue eyes examined his daughter’s face while she explained why she was so certain. Then his brows drew into a straight line. “You can’t get mixed up in that. It’s not your problem.”

  “I wasn’t planning on getting mixed up in it. I was thinking of phoning in an anonymous tip. Like tonight. Whoever it is will be getting that car out of there real soon.”

  “But it would have to be one of the water people, wouldn’t it? Your biggest customer. And the cops would come to the garage. They’d want to talk to you even if the tip was anonymous.”

  Circles of pink bloomed on her cheeks. “But how can I know and not tell anyone?”

  “Listen to your old Dad on this, sweetie. Pretend you never saw it.”

  “I guess,” she said slowly. The two words hung in the air.

  “Damn right. You’re getting along real well now.”

  She gave a small hiccup of laughter. “Compared to three years ago, things are fantastic.”

  His eyes skidded away toward the entrance to the poker room. “I was wondering.…”

  Abruptly she thought she knew why he had wanted to have dinner. “How much?”

  “Just a couple hundred, Rachel. Even one hundred would help.”

  She ran her tongue along her bottom lip. “I don’t have a couple hundred to spare. The liability insurance on the garage is due.”

  He looked away. “Okay, okay. I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  She took her purse from the seat beside her. “I can do a hundred, but that’s about it. She hesitated, annoyed at the tears clouding her vision, then counted out five twenties on the table.

  The pathetic look in his eyes blurred her vision more. She handed him another twenty from her billfold. “That’s for this sorry excuse of a meal.”

  She watched her father’s forlorn smile flicker and go out. His face seemed more deeply etched, more haggard each time she saw him. He sometimes played cards for forty hours without sleep. How much longer could he go on this way?