The streets were crowded with Asian youngsters. Scrubbed and groomed within an inch of their lives, they toted book bags, looking more like Valley girls and boys than kids who lived in the San Fernando Valley.
An Anglo man was trudging toward her. His beard was gray and shabby, his shirt filthy, but his eyes were clear. He held out his hand in a silent plea. Charlotte opened her purse and took out a dollar. No, she would make it a twenty, in honor of the day. He was still blinking at it when she glanced back a block later.
The old man and the shiny kids would have better lives because of what she had agreed to.
Eventually. Ultimately.
She reminded herself that for a while, things might get worse. At first she had been uneasy. But the greater good, as her father used to say, demands sacrifices from time to time.
She covered the few blocks briskly. Already she could see the silly drawing on the green enamel sign. Charlotte slowed, brushed a shred of lint from her navy gabardine skirt, lifted her chin, crossed the street, and opened the door.
333
On the fourth floor of Everly Laboratories, Alfred Lieberman pressed the toe of his well-worn loafer against the bottom drawer of his desk and pushed. His swivel chair rolled across the white linoleum to another desk.
Susan Stankowski turned an ankle trying to follow him in her new high-heeled shoes. “Of course I’m sure the figures are right,” she said.
Alfred checked the figures again, absently running his fingers through his thick thatch of dark hair, sprinkling dandruff on his thick glasses. Without taking his eyes off the figures, he removed the glasses, wiped them with a rumpled handkerchief, replaced them on the long nose, and tapped the end of a ballpoint pen on a cheek scarred by acne during an adolescence he could hardly remember. “Interesting,” he muttered.
Susan smoothed her newly styled, highlighted, and moussed hair. After nearly twenty years of preferring research to men, Susan had fallen in love.
Alfred liked her work okay, he just never seemed to see her. After appraising her thin face and angular body in the ladies’ room mirror, Susan had spent a week of her vacation and a month’s pay at a spa being “made over.” She was still struggling to master her new persona. Not that it mattered. Alfred hadn’t noticed.
Now, however, she had his attention. With a perfectly ordinary job of spectrochemical analysis. “Would you…,” she began, then rehearsed the rest of the sentence in her head and started over. “Would you like to come over for dinner Friday?”
Alfred hadn’t caught the interruption in her speech. He was still examining the figures. “This is going to excite a few people,” he said to no one in particular.
“Why?” Susan dropped her hand to the desktop.
“If that’s what’s ailing those ducks, it had to come from the soil. My guess is irrigation water leached it out and washed it into those ponds. Exactly what happened at Kessler. Except this is much, much worse. The environmentalists will be hopping mad. Good thing we’re not farmers.”
He moved his eyes to Susan and stared. “Did you do something to your hair?”
333
Carole Steigholtz was mad. She hardly ever got angry, but this time she was really mad.
It was bad enough that as Assistant Director of Water Quality she had to run the whole shop while Harry schmoozed with reporters and visiting dignitaries. This was too much.
Eyes flashed in the squarish face that had never been contaminated by makeup. Short stubby fingers around the pen showed white at the tips as Carole jotted down numbers from the gas chromatograph printout. For the fourth time, her sensible shoes marched across the tile floor to Harry’s office. A little cowlick of short-cropped brown hair bobbed as she marched.
She’d left him a note. She’d called him at home and left a message on his blankety-blank machine. She was still itching to tell him face-to-face her opinion of his behavior.
Last time, he’d been shacked up with the little bar kitten whose peroxided bangs did nothing to cover the lack of a brain. Carole had covered for Harry then, and the time before. But this was one time too many.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Pig’s Whistle, for all its seediness, was a much-loved watering hole for blue- and white-collar crowds alike. Some of the clientele had something to celebrate, others a rotten day to forget, and there were always those with something at home they couldn’t face without a drink.
“Soda on ice,” Rachel told the short, swarthy bartender, who was chewing on a toothpick as though his life depended on turning it to pulp. He eyed her stolidly, then stabbed a glass into the ice bin as she sat down at the bar.
“Got a piece of lemon?” she asked as he unceremoniously set the drink before her. He slid a small plate of lemon slices down the bar; it came to a stop directly in front of her.
Five televisions suspended on various shelves were set on mute, the talking heads working their mouths earnestly. Someone was playing an old Beatles tune on an even older jukebox.
Would Hank come? Or would he forget the time, like her father did when his poker game was on a roll?
The bartender nodded at her club soda. “Just quit drinking myself.” He spit out the ruined toothpick and replaced it with another.
“Hey, good for you. The first couple months are tough, but it gets easier.”
“Piece of cake.”
She had downed her drink and was asking for another when the door opened, admitting a short, stocky man in a yellow sweater that did little to mask a barrel-like midsection.
“Bruno!” she waved.
“Hey, kid.” He hoisted himself onto the stool next to hers.
She caught his long look at her drink. “Soda, Bruno, only soda. Smell it.” She held out the glass, feeling like a twelve-year-old, but doing it anyway. “Want a taste?”
“Since when is it any of my business?” He wagged a finger at the bartender. “J and B and water, easy on the water.”
“I didn’t know you were in town.”
“Emergency Farm Bureau meeting. We got trouble, kid. Big time trouble.” He took a gulp of his scotch and sagged over the bar.
She put her hand on his arm. “Like what?”
“Those ponds.”
“What ponds?” Rachel squeezed some lemon into her soda and took a sip.
“Up by Salinas. It was me talked the guys into donating the land. I got newspaper clippings of me shaking hands with Tony Holland. You know Tony? Environmental Defense Fund. The mealy-mouth bastard. Now he’s blaming us like we were doing it on purpose.”
“Blaming you for what?” Rachel knew that to Bruno, farming was the next thing to a religious calling.
His face turned even more dour. “Those damn enviro nuts think we’d kill anything for a buck. They say we’re poisoning wildlife.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We built those ponds to take irrigation water that runs off the farms and evaporate it. Then these enviros said we should plant some weeds, make it some kind of paradise for birds, and give the whole kit and caboodle to them. I think okay, why not make some points, maybe the nuts stop snapping at our backsides for a while. So I talk the guys into it. Now they say the runoff is full of poison, like we planned it that way. Sure. Why not? Don’t everybody like to hurt ducks?”
“What does that mean? Is it a pesticide?”
Bruno ordered himself another Scotch and her another “whatever.” Then he removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “Wish I knew, kid. Wish I knew. They just might be able to ruin us this time. They been trying for a lot of years. They may go after the water folks, too.”
“Why?”
The bar had filled up. Someone played “Only the Good Die Young” on the jukebox. No new music had been added in at least ten years, but the crowds never seemed to mind.
“Farmers get cheap water, you know that,” Bruno said.
“We took ours out of the delta, for free,” she said. “We had to keep an eye
on the levees or we got flooded. That’s about all I know.”
“We get delta water in the valley, too, but it comes in an aqueduct. Thank God that pipe got built before the green nuts were hatched. The water’s pretty cheap. If it wasn’t, we’d have to charge five bucks a melon.”
Rachel tried to look attentive, but her eyes kept darting back to the entrance. Where was Hank?
Bruno didn’t notice. He was staring into his glass. “InterUrban wants more water for the people down here. That’s their job. The enviros have just about managed to cut them off.”
Billy Joel’s voice from the old jukebox came to an end.
Bruno’s had not. Rachel had never seen him so dejected.
“Lots of voters down here,” he said, examining the ice cubes in his glass, as if they were tea leaves. “But none of them knows beans about water, so the city water guys—that’s mostly InterUrban—line up with us because ag has a good lobby and we sure as hell know about water. Between us, we’ve had enough votes in the legislature to keep the duck-lovers from cutting our throats and eating our gizzards.”
The door opened, ushering in a breeze from the street. Hank stepped inside and scanned the crowd. Rachel caught his eye and waved.
Hank threaded his way through the throng of drinkers bent on making the most of happy hour.
Bruno looked him over as he approached as if he were an overgrown melon.
Rachel squirmed on her bar stool and introduced them.
Hank’s hand brushed her back, leaving a tiny shiver in its wake.
“Well, I see you got other business.” Bruno buttoned his sweater. “I got to meet some guys for supper.” Slumped shoulders giving him a desolate look, he pushed his way out to the street. A twinge of guilt pricked at Rachel’s innards.
The bartender stopped in front of Hank, who had taken Bruno’s vacated stool. Hank ordered a Mexican beer. Someone was playing the Billy Joel number again. It reminded Rachel of Lonnie.
She frowned into the mirror that covered the wall behind the bar. Lonnie was so young. He should have lived another sixty years. Her fingers around the soda glass whitened.
Hank was examining the label on his beer bottle. “Any more from the sheriff about that plane?” he asked.
“Nope.” She inspected the ring her glass had made on the bar.
Hank shoved the straw-colored hair away from his eyes and exhaled as if he were blowing out candles. “So what’s on your mind?”
“What do you know about Jason Karl’s death?”
Puzzled eyes sought hers before he gave an almost invisible shrug. “What’s there to know? He was apparently taking a pee by the side of the road and some crazy driver, probably going way too fast, lost control of his vehicle, veered off the road, smacked Jason, then got away without being seen. Fairly typical hit and run.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Happened out in the desert. Nobody around.”
Rachel opened her handbag, dug to the bottom of it and extracted the tie tack. “Ever seen this?” She tossed it on the bar. The etched tortoise seemed to turn its head to watch her.
Hank squinted at it. “What’s it supposed to be?”
“Hello there!”
The smooth female voice came from behind Rachel. She covered the tie tack with her hand and turned to meet the almost-black eyes of Alexandra Miller. The three of them danced the prescribed steps of small talk, then Alexandra excused herself and made her way past the bar toward the booths.
Rachel caught sight of a white-haired woman in a bright yellow jacket. “Isn’t that Charlotte?” she asked Hank. “In the booth where Alexandra sat down.”
“Not likely,” he said. “They hate each other.”
Rachel opened her hand. The metal caught the light.
Hank swiveled on the bar stool and peered intently at the tie tack. “Could swear I’ve seen it somewhere, but I can’t think where.”
“It belonged to Jason.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“Wedged under the hood of that car in the garage. The one with the crinkled fender.” She plucked at the limp napkin under her soda glass and plunged on: “Did you know that the guy who worked for me also died unexpectedly?”
Two lines appeared over Hank’s nose. He loosened his red-and-blue striped tie. “When?”
She told him and added, in slow, measured words: “I don’t think either one was an accident. I have some pretty persuasive reasons.”
“And the cops? They think these reasons are persuasive?”
“They haven’t heard them.” She ran her finger back and forth on the grain of the oak bar top.
He glanced over the rim of his beer mug at her. “Why not?”
“I’m not sure they’d believe me.” Rachel mopped up the little puddle around her glass with the frayed napkin.
His eyebrows climbed into the shock of sandy hair. “That’s their problem, isn’t it?”
A truck lumbered by on the street, shaking the entire building. The urge for a drink swept over Rachel, bringing an overwhelming sense of loss. The jukebox was playing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” She banged a fist on the bar. “They need to get some new music here.” She tossed her head, relinquished the bar stool, and moved toward the exit.
“What’s wrong?” Hank stepped down from the stool, left some bills for the bartender, and caught up with her at the door. “How about dinner?”
“No thanks. Don’t you have to get back to work?”
He turned her toward him, looked into her face. “Whatever I said, I apologize.”
For a long moment she glared at him, but slowly her scowl wilted. “My fault. I’ve been uptight lately. I know I’m not exactly the playgirl of the month.”
“Let’s grab a hamburger at least.”
She dropped her eyes, wanting to tell him she was an alcoholic, knowing she wouldn’t, but nodding to dinner anyway.
Chapter Twenty-four
The burgers and fries they picked up from Tommy’s filled the car with a rich, salty smell. The evening was dimming toward full dusk when Hank turned the Mustang onto a narrow road that twisted uphill.
“This goes to a park?” Rachel asked.
“Sort of. I live up here.”
She opened her mouth to say this wasn’t a good idea, but he quickly added, “Beyond my house, the road goes into the Angeles.”
Hank parked the car and held the burgers while she climbed over the chain to a trail that led toward national forest land.
She eyed the mountain looming ahead. “Are we trespassing?”
“If we are, I do it all the time.”
Keeping an awkward foot between them, they hiked between California oaks and scrub.
Rachel turned and was stunned by the view of city lights, like drops of water spilling out of the mountains and pooling into a burst of brilliance before paling again in the distance.
“Not bad.” She kicked at a pine cone, sat down and put her arms around her knees. “You bring a lot of women up here?”
“One or two. The last was my cleaning lady—she had trouble making it the last few yards. She’d never seen the lights. Can you imagine living in LA and never seeing the lights?”
“So the only woman in your life is your cleaning lady?”
Hank studied his shoelaces for a moment, then returned her gaze. “You don’t leave people a place to hide, do you?”
She shrugged, still looking at the lights. “I guess I want to save all the hiding places for myself. You don’t have to answer.”
He handed her a burger. The wrapping paper crackled in the stillness. “There have been a few women in my life.”
“None of them important, though, right?”
“Actually, a couple were fairly important, and one was earth-shaking.”
She cocked her head at him, but said nothing.
He leaned back against a rock and looked at the sky. A breeze churned the air. “I flunked out of college in my freshman year, joined the Peace Corps, went
to Brazil to teach the natives how to farm. Without pesticides, of course. But the bugs there were the size of frying chickens. The kids used to hitch beetles to little cardboard carts and have races.”
“You’re kidding.”
Hank scratched his cheek. “No joke. Wound up teaching them to dust their crops with as many pesticides as we could lay our hands on.”
“You taught them? You mean you flew?”
“Had to learn how so I could teach them.” He glanced at Rachel, then unwrapped a hamburger and began to eat. “I married a Brazilian girl, had a daughter.”
Rachel congratulated herself for predicting that something would be wrong. She was losing the struggle to keep her face blank and glad for the darkness. Instead of the question she wanted to ask, she said, “You speak Portuguese?”
“The Peace Corps gave us four weeks of intensive training.”
Rachel was careful not to look at him. “So if you were having such a good time, why did you come back?”
Hank said nothing for a moment, then, “I got tired of the bugs, the humidity, of so many people barely able to feed themselves. The few rich were very rich, the rest were dirt poor. Corruption was so bad that postal employees stole the mail, and you had to pay bribes to get anything from canned goods to an education. People were routinely accused of imaginary crimes and had to bribe their way out of jail.”
An insect buzzed at Hank’s ear. He slapped at it and went on. “At first, you think you can make a difference. But soon you realize you have to play the game. And the name of the game is eat or be eaten.”
Rachel looked down at her hands, which were busy shredding a napkin. She rolled the paper into a ball. “Your wife doesn’t fish?” She stared levelly into Hank’s puzzled frown. “What were your wife and daughter doing that Sunday when we went fishing? What are they doing now?”
Hank made a sound, more a bark than a laugh. “Haven’t the foggiest, they’re in Brazil. I haven’t seen them in over a year.”
“You left them there?”
“My wife couldn’t bring herself to leave papa and all the servants. Eventually, I came home alone.”
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