Thicker Than Blood

by Penny Rudolph

  Rising from the booth, Rachel straightened her clothes. “You’re a sorry SOB, Pop, but I love you.” She leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and left.

  By the time she got back to the garage, it was full dark.

  Rachel made her rounds, locked up, and was heading for the elevator when someone began banging on one of the metal doors.

  “The garage is closed,” she shouted.

  “I know, I know.” She knew the voice: Hank. “Late again,” he called. “I don’t suppose you’d let me get my car out.”

  She made a face, but unlocked the door. He loomed before her, taller than she remembered, his shirt and hair purplish in the streetlight.

  “I can’t make a practice of this,” she said. “The insurance, for one thing.”

  Something about his expression stopped her annoyance. “Okay, I guess I owe you something for not filing an assault and battery. I’ll wait while you get your car.”

  He hung his head, and started up the ramp. “Thanks. I sure didn’t want to call a cab.”

  “What are you doing working so late?” she called after him. “Don’t you have another life?”

  A van full of cleaning people had pulled up across the street in front of InterUrban headquarters by the time Hank’s car appeared at the gate. She waited for him to pass, but he stopped, rolled down the window and called, “Got an idea.”

  She tried to see his face in the dim light, but all she could make out was the shock of straight blond hair swinging across his brow. “Oh?”

  “You’re right. I’m working too much. It’s getting to where I’m just not running on all cylinders. And every night for the past four nights I’ve dreamt about going fishing.”

  “Good idea. Get some rest.”

  “Wouldn’t have to go far.” He fiddled with the steering wheel.

  She waited, then bent down to look in the window. “You want to leave your car here overnight sometime? That would be okay.”

  “I thought maybe you might come along. You look like you’re under a little strain yourself.”

  She straightened up slowly. Her hand wandered to her face. “It’s real hard for me to get away. No one to look after things.”

  “Just a thought.” The streetlight made a triangle on Hank’s jaw. He put the car in gear.

  Rachel listened to the tires squeal as the Mustang rounded the corner. A free-floating anxiety washed over her and she wished she hadn’t told him about the blood on the Caddy’s fender.

  Chapter Six

  The steel door had barely clanked into place after Hank’s exit when a voice boomed from the other side, “Rachel! You here?”

  She pushed the control to raise the door.

  Built like a paperweight, close to the ground and formidable, Bruno Calabrese was pacing the sidewalk with his usual pent-up energy. He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the cheek. “Why you living like this when you could be an old man’s trinket?”

  Rachel rolled her eyes at him. “You’re only fifty. What are you doing here? Don’t tell me the water board meeting lasted this late.”

  “I tried to find you earlier, but you were gadding about.”

  “I still don’t understand why you come to InterUrban meetings. They do city water. What do they have to do with farming?”

  “No more than cats have to do with mice. If I don’t watch out, one of these days I’ll go out to irrigate and my pumps will be sucking air. They’d steal every last drop.”

  “Can’t be that bad.”

  “Worse. Gotta keep an eye on the thieves. Little trick I learnt from your grandpa. And he would never forgive me if I didn’t keep an eye on you, too.”

  Once her grandfather’s protégé, Bruno had done everything Enrique Chavez had told him to do, right down to marrying ten square miles of the best farmland in the Central Valley. His wife died young and Bruno was still happily farming the land she left him.

  It was because of Enrique, long dead by then, that Bruno had sent his own attorney to bail Rachel out of jail three years ago.

  Bruno regarded her with a frown. “This really is a crazy way for a nice girl to live.”

  “It’s not so bad. Come up and see what I’ve added.”

  “Holy Mary,” he said when she opened the door to the apartment. “You got new bookshelves.” He whistled. “And a thousand books.”

  “The books are old. But I finally got around to building the shelves. You into books, Bruno?”

  “When have I got time to read? I gotta be up at four with the cantaloupes. Nice for you, though. Better you should be a teacher than a grease jockey.”

  He strode across the room, his stocky body rolling on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter, and examined the shelves. “Good job. But why would a woman want to use a hammer and saw?”

  “Because she couldn’t afford to hire it done.” Rachel took a ceramic pot from a cabinet. “Coffee keeps me awake. You want some tea?”

  “Sure.”

  As she ran water into the pot he said solemnly, “Why I am here, I got a proposition for you. Actually, I got two, but if you take the first, you don’t need the second.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think, you and me, we oughta get married.”

  Rachel barely saved the pot from crashing to the floor and didn’t turn her head to Bruno until she was sure the worst of the shock had faded from her face. Then she laughed lightly. “You been fooling around with a controlled substance?”

  “Nope. I’m dead serious.”

  “But….” She pulled on the hem of her bright green tee shirt. “Why?” She finished weakly.

  “Is that the only teapot you got?”

  “It makes perfectly good tea.”

  “We oughta get married because your family’s mostly gone, except for your Pa, bless his heart, but I bet dollars to doughnuts he’s usually asking for help instead of givin’ it.”

  Rachel lifted one shoulder and let it drop.

  Bruno went on, “I got no wife, and you got no china.”

  “China? What does china have to do with anything?”

  “You think china don’t have to do with anything? It has everything to do with it. What are you doing standing there? Make the tea. I tell you a story.” Bruno paced, waving his hands as he talked.

  “I was eleven years old when my Mama shook me awake and told me to get dressed. That was in the old country, Italy. We got packs strapped to our backs, and we walk, all the way up the mountains, then down. Now me, I was always short, and I didn’t have much muscle yet, and my pack, I didn’t know what was in it, but it was damn heavy. Mama had food in hers and Papa had clothes and tools, so I figured mine had to be real valuable. Lira maybe. Silver, gold. Even when that pack rubbed blisters, I was proud they trusted me to carry it.”

  Rachel set water to boiling, listening intently, partly because she’d never heard this story, partly it kept her face busy lest the shock still show.

  “We go clear over the mountains to Genoa and get on a ship. I was still carrying that pack around every day because we didn’t have anything grand, like a cabin. We were on that ship a lot of days, and then more days on a train. Finally, Papa said we were in California and this was home. That was okay by me. I was plenty tired of carrying that pack. That night I found out what was in it.”

  Rachel handed Bruno a mug of tea and he looked into it as if reading the leaves.

  “That was just about the biggest little bombshell of my life,” he mused.

  “What was in it?”

  “My grandmama’s china. Not lira, not silver, not gold, not even food. China.”

  “You’re joking! They made you carry dishes halfway around the world?”

  “That’s what I thought. But I was a kid. I was wrong. That china was just as important as food and clothes, maybe more important than lira.”

  Rachel stared at him. “Excuse me! I don’t think so. I’ve never known anyone who couldn’t eat off a paper plate.”

  “That china was all we
had of our old home, our past. What I carried in that pack was tradition. It’s why I’m a farmer. Old Enrique, he understood that. His own father, his grandfather—farmers, like mine. He must be spinning in his grave to think you been thrown off his land. Come back. If you can’t go to his farm, come to mine.”

  Looking at the cup, not at her, he ran his finger around the edge, then held it up. “This cup, it’s heavy, made of mud. You got no china.”

  Rachel blinked. For a moment, no words came. She owed him too much to be flippant. She couldn’t tell him she felt no loss of tradition, that for that matter, her mother had come from a Jewish family in San Francisco.

  But he’s a good-hearted, decent guy. He knows me. Even the worst of me. I’d be taken care of. I’d be rich.

  She peered over the rim of her mug and smiled gently. “Let me think about it.”

  “Sure. You think on it.”

  Bruno drank his tea and changed the subject to his favorite complaint, environmentalists. “We give them land for wetlands. We give them water. What more do they want? My arm? My leg? No, they want to put us out of business.”

  He peered at her and stopped. “Rachel, sweetie, you look tired.”

  “I am. It hasn’t been a terrific day. I saw Pop. He looks awful. He hit me up for some money.”

  “Son of a gun. Marty was a good kid. But your grandpa, he spoiled him. Me, I never had no kids. Maybe I woulda done the same. But it’s a blessing Enrique is not alive to see him now.”

  “Pop never got over Mama.”

  “Fine woman. You are like her, I think.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how wrong you are.” She was surprised to hear herself blurt: “You know Jason Karl was killed?

  Bruno nodded. “Hit and run. Dirty coward. Jason and me, we weren’t friends—” He frowned at her. “That’s got nothing to do with the agency’s account with you, does it?”

  “I think the car that ran over him is parked right here.” She pointed at the floor.

  “Rachel baby, you’re not in any trouble, are you?”

  “No, no. I’m fine. It’s just that it seems like the right thing would be to call the police, but Pop made me swear I wouldn’t.”

  “At least Marty still has some brains left. You stay out of it. None of your business. You want I should have Aaron call you and explain why you don’t want to get mixed up in something like that? You want to hear about all the do-gooders who got their noses whacked off by cops?” Aaron Reiner had been her attorney.

  “No,” she murmured. “I don’t need to talk to Aaron. You’re right.”

  “Good. Now I got this proposition for you.”

  Rachel squeezed her eyes shut. “I know.”

  “Not that one,” Bruno cut in. “This is for while you’re making up your mind on the other. I got some money I want to put into this God-forsaken flophouse for cars. Partners. We could expand. Do some towing. Triple-A maybe.”

  Rachel ran her hand through her hair. Her forehead was damp. She needed a shower. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? Piece of cake.”

  She rested her head in her hand. “Maybe. I just don’t know.”

  “Rachel, the other, take your time, I’m not gonna pressure you. But this is a walk in the park. Good for you, good for me.”

  She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. “Can you give me some time? I’m too tired to think.”

  “What’s to think? Just say yes.”

  Something surged inside her: “Bruno, you’re a dear, kind, wonderful guy. I owe you my life. And I love you. But I don’t think we should get married, and I like my business as it is.”

  “Sorry, kid, I shoulda known better. You had a bad day. What can I say? I’m a dumb Dago. My wife, that’s what she used to say. Take your time. Think about it.”

  Chapter Seven

  By the time Bruno left, Rachel wanted nothing so much as to put her head down on the counter and sleep. But in bed, sleep did not come. Her arms, legs, head, felt made of lead. She was almost too weary to turn over, her eyes burned with fatigue.

  Insomnia was something new. Even when she had plummeted into despair that night she was in jail—before Bruno made her bail—she had slept.

  A little after midnight, she got up. With Clancy blinking at her from the arm of the sofa, she fixed some warm milk, moving about in the dark like a burglar in her own home for fear that light would wake her more.

  The air in the apartment seemed thin and dead. She opened a window. The night had not cooled much. Maybe it would help to go outside, just for a few minutes. She threw on a tee shirt and jeans, took the elevator down, and slumped her disheveled body onto the small white bench in the narrow patch of green in front of the garage.

  Magnolia trees that graced the entrance to the water district headquarters across the street had shed their blooms and the carpet of petals along the sidewalk looked like the aftermath of a ticker-tape parade. Lights in the offices were going out one at a time. The cleaning people finishing up, Rachel decided.

  She leaned back and turned her face to the sky. The stars were barely visible in the haze above the city. It had been a night like this, the air swollen with unseasonable humidity, when she had nearly run that family off the road in Oakland.

  Someone touched her arm. Rachel flinched away, opened her eyes.

  “Honey? What you doin’ here?” A woman wearing glasses, a black woman, was towering over her.

  “You’re the gal from the garage, aren’t you. Can’t sleep here. Ain’t safe.”

  Rachel shrugged off the hand. “I’m okay.” Then, realizing where she was, she bolted upright on the bench and looked about. “Really, I’m fine. Sorry. You a cop?”

  A deep laugh bubbled up from somewhere in the woman’s mid-section. “Don’t I wish! I just run the cleaning crew, honey.” She cocked her chin at the van parked across the street. Merry Maids was written in script across the side. “We’re not real merry, and we sure ain’t maids, but we do a bang-up job of cleaning offices.” She examined Rachel’s face. “You don’t look real good, honey.”

  “Just tired, really.”

  “Tell you what. I could use me a sit-down, and the rest of them aren’t quite through over here. Why don’t you just scoot yourself over a little?”

  Rachel slid to the side. “I don’t usually sleep on the street.”

  “Don’t guess you do.” The woman relaxed onto the bench, stretching her legs out and crossing her ankles. “How come you doing that tonight?”

  “I was too tired to sleep.”

  The woman nodded. “I know how that is. ’Specially when we got something big on our mind.”

  “I don’t—” Rachel shook her head sharply. Then, in the way that even the most private people sometimes confide in strangers, she said, “I guess you’re right.”

  “Of course I’m right,” the woman said lazily. She leaned her head back and the eyes behind the glasses closed.

  Rachel examined her thumbnail. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  The woman chuckled dryly. “There’s damn little I ain’t seen or at least heard.”

  Rachel drew in a breath, paused, let it out. “A guy I sort of know was killed, maybe on purpose.” A car passed, its lights making the black street look watery.

  When Rachel described the tie tack, the tortoise and why she was certain it was Jason’s, a low whistle came from the sprawled-out form next to her.

  “You telling me that water company over there—that place where I scrub toilets and empty trash—has got itself a murderer in its midst?” The woman turned her head, purplish streetlight glinting from her glasses, but she didn’t sit up.

  “I guess that has to be one possibility.”

  “Damn rhinoceros-size possibility, if you ask me. Horn and all.” The woman turned and looked Rachel in the eye. “Well, honey, it seems like you got to do something. You got to go to the cops.”

  Rachel rubbed her fingertips across her forehead. “If I do that, I cou
ld be buying myself a major stack of trouble.”

  “How so?”

  Rachel knotted her hands and dropped them to her lap. “I’d rather not say.”

  “Mmmm,” the woman nodded, sagely, then asked calmly, “You a criminal or something, yourself?”

  “Of course not,” Rachel sputtered.

  “Then maybe your reasons are a little bit small.”

  Rachel studied the steel arm of the bench. “Look, I do have reasons, honest-to-God big reasons why I can’t go to the cops.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like for one thing, I don’t trust them, and they wouldn’t trust me.”

  “Why not?”

  Rachel gazed at the pinkish-purple haze that passed for sky in the streetlight and smog. “I’m an alcoholic and an addict,” she began. “I’ve been sober and clean for three years and two days and,” she looked at her watch, “about twenty hours. My mother died and my father bet the farm—literally—in Vegas, and lost it. I started taking some of my mom’s codeine. When that was gone, I had to drink. A lot.” She drew a ragged breath.

  “But being hung over and strung out all the time wasn’t exactly great, so one night, I got me a noseful of some really terrific stuff. I wondered where it had been all my life. Here was the ultimate answer: Drink till you fall down, then snort a little coke or crystal and, wow, you’re ready to go again. And you make the nicest friends.”

  A knowing chuckle came from the woman next to her. “Oh, yeah. Got some of those nice folks in my neighborhood.”

  Rachel plunged on. “I guess I was lucky. I got arrested by some mean-minded cops. I had run a father and his two little kids into a ditch on the freeway. Thank God it only shook them up and made some bruises.” Rachel was staring at a point in mid-air. “But the father had a cell phone and my license number.

  “I only had a blood alcohol content of point-one-six when the cops pulled me over. I was barely beginning to feel good. But I had five ounces of crystal on the floor of the back seat. After all, if you drink as much as I did, you need a lot of speed to wake you up. They thought I was a dealer. That was enough to get me free room and board at County.”