"I have a brother," Estrella answered, checking the face sheet in her case file for the address.
"So?"
"So it's that brown and yellow duplex over there, the one without a screen door. And my brother got involved with Los Brujos when he was only fourteen. He got in trouble with the police. My father was working as a foreman on a big avocado ranch up north, making good money, but he came home to handle 'Berto—Roberto, that's my brother's name. But the gang wouldn't let go of him, made threats, beat him up. Once they threw a brick through our living-room window with one of those glow-in-the-dark plastic skulls you can buy around Halloween taped to it. That meant Roberto was going to die. I was only eight at the time."
"My God, Es, what happened?"
"My father made arrangements for 'Berto to go and live with relatives in Mexico, in Zacatecas. They were very poor and even though my parents sent money, 'Berto had to work. Everybody works there; it's a hard life. He stayed for four years, dropped out of school, married a local girl who was pregnant with his child when he was eighteen. A year later he came back, but the girl and my niece whom I've never seen stayed there. She's seventeen now. She's going to graduate from high school this spring."
Bo watched as a city bus stopped to pick up a white-haired woman who looked like Lady Baden-Powell. Three years in the same office, she thought, and she didn't know Estrella Benedict, her best friend, at all.
"You never told me all this about your brother, Es. Why not? You know all about my sister's suicide, my manic depression, my scurrilous love life before Andy, everything. Why didn't you ... ?"
Estrella steered Bo toward the brown and yellow duplex.
"It's not the same," she sighed. "You're white. You're from a nice family in Boston. Your mother played the violin. Nobody looks at you in restaurants and wonders if you're going to steal the forks or skip out on the bill. I just didn't want you to know."
"Know what?" Bo said, unbuttoning her coat and angrily ripping off a two-foot swath of the loose lining. "That after all this time you don't trust me?"
Estrella took the wool plaid fabric from Bo's hand and stuffed it into her purse.
"Okay, my brother wears cowboy boots and a hairnet and thinks he's muy macho," she said, looking straight ahead. "He divorced the girl in Mexico, never went back to school, works occasionally at car washes and Mexican fast-food joints in Los Angeles, where he lives with a woman he's never married but with whom he's fathered five children he doesn't support. She and the kids live on welfare and money my sister and I send. He drinks too much and when he's feeling really macho he breaks her ribs. She throws him out and a month later he's back. It's been going on for years. He doesn't hit the kids, or I'd call CPS in Los Angeles and turn him in myself, and he knows it. My brother is a worthless, abusive loser and I'm ashamed of him. Now do you feel trusted?"
"I'm sorry, Es," Bo answered, feeling too tall, too pale, too fluent in English, and too privileged to be standing under a small coral tree in front of a shabby duplex with a child's construction-paper wreath taped to the door. "I just didn't want to be... left out."
"Well, now you're not" Estrella sighed and held Bo's arm for balance as they climbed three sagging wooden steps to the small porch of the duplex.
"Bueno?" said a round woman in red nylon stirrup pants and a pink sequined sweatshirt as she opened the door. Behind her Bo could see a little girl wearing a dress and sweater over green corduroy pants that were too big for her, playing on the floor with a grimy blond Barbie doll. Estrella and the woman conversed animatedly in Spanish as Bo settled into a fake fur beanbag chair that had once been purple but was now faded on top to a mottled gray. From her vantage point near the floor Bo had to look up to see the other two women seated on a couch and silhouetted against the window which faced the porch. The perspective, she thought, provided a comfortable distance from a conversation of which she couldn't comprehend a word.
"Si, gracias," Estrella said after a while, and then said something to the little girl which caused her to remove her sweater and lean over her Barbie doll with her head touching the floor. Bo watched as Estrella unbuttoned the back of the girl's dress and then took a Polaroid picture of the child's bare back. The faint marks visible there looked less like burns than scratches to Bo. Scratches that made a sort of design, like the branch of a tree laid vertically against the child's spine.
"Ask her if she and her friends have been playing tag with sticks," Bo said to Estrella.
The little girl sat up and eyed Bo with contempt. "She doesn't have to ask me that. I can understand English. What's tag?"
"It's where you catch somebody by chasing them and touching them. After you touch them, they're caught," Bo explained.
"I don't play that," the child said softly. "I play dolls. Lai has a doll just like this one, only her brother cut its hair off. Her brother is Chu. He's in first grade."
Lai and Chu. Bo shot Estrella a wide-eyed look of sudden comprehension and silently mouthed a single syllable.
"Hmong." Pronounced "Mung," it was the name of an ancient people displaced from the mountains of Vietnam by a war that had nothing to do with them. As refugees many Hmong had come to the United States. A considerable number had wound up in San Diego and settled in this neighborhood near countrymen they would never have seen in their homeland. A Stone Age people, the Hmong had kept to themselves in the mountains of Southeast Asia. And had kept alive certain ancient traditions honoring the mystical connection between humankind and nature. One of these involved pressing a heated branch against the back of a child to mark that child's connection to natural forces and to bring the child luck. Madge had insisted that her entire unit attend a multicultural in-service on Hmong practices less than a month ago. For once, Bo acknowledged, Madge had been right.
"Are Lai and Chu your best friends?" Estrella asked, launching the gentle interrogation which would reveal an interesting dimension of the neighborhood's cultural mix.
"Lai is my friend," the girl answered wearily. "Chu is a boy." The blinding ignorance of adults to an immutable social reality filled her voice with scorn.
"Of course," Estrella grinned. "Sometimes I'm really dumb about things. But I'll bet you and Lai have lots of fun sharing secrets and playing, don't you?"
Bo accepted a glass of warm tea from the child's grandmother and settled back to await the end of the story, which would involve a child of an ancient Asian tribe scratching a secret tree design on the back of a Latina child "for luck." The scratches marked a friendship, not a crime. Bo wished that Janny Malcolm's case could be resolved as easily, whatever Janny Malcolm's case was.
What about the strange teenager had upset Madge Aldenhoven enough to prompt an unprecedented infraction of rules? Bo stifled a yawn as Estrella continued her interview. An electric space heater near the kitchen door switched on every four minutes, blowing warm air against the side of Bo's face. The heat was making her sleepy, and to avoid unprofessionally nodding off in the home of a client, Bo focused on details of Estrella's silhouette against the window. She was relieved when a man appeared on the porch and passed in front of the window. It was something to think about, a way to stay awake. The postman maybe, or a resident of the adjoining duplex. Except there was something familiar about him. His sweater. One of those intricately patterned sweaters invariably worn by men who also wore ostentatious gold jewelry. It was the Brujo they'd seen on the street!
Loud knocking on the adjacent door resulted in its opening, followed by angry words in Spanish and then an Asian dialect. The conversation was audible through the wall dividing the duplexes. Bo watched as alarm spread over the faces of Estrella, the girl, and the grandmother. Then in a practiced series of movements the older woman ran to lock the deadbolt on the front door, pulled the child to her feet, and dragged her through the kitchen into a bedroom, closing the door behind them. As the voices beyond the wall fell to lower, more menacing tones, Bo saw Estrella go pale and start to stand, then notice the window behind her and fling h
erself back onto the couch on her side. Her knees were pulled up, her whole body wrapped protectively around her abdomen. Suddenly it all made sense to Bo.
"The baby!" she yelled, scrambling out of the beanbag chair and flinging herself across Estrella as a deafening blast sent a cloud of wallboard and white dust against the ceiling. A second blast came from the porch, followed by a sickening thump. Then desperate movements from the adjoining duplex, the sound of someone running, silence. It had all happened, Bo calculated, in less than ten seconds. Estrella was sobbing.
"It's okay, Es," Bo said over the pounding of her own heart. "One of them's on the porch, probably shot. He's not moving. The other one ran."
"Don't go out there," Estrella whispered as Bo raised her head to peek out the window. "Just call the police and then stay away from the window until they take him away. There could be more shooting. Stay down and get to a phone."
As Bo dropped to the floor she noticed that the Barbie doll's hair was full of glass from the shattered TV screen, and that her own black coat was filmed in white dust. For a moment she felt ghostly, as if in fact she'd really been shot and was now dead but hadn't yet realized it. It could happen that way, she thought. Like a dream in which you believe you've gotten up and dressed and ready for work, only to waken to the fact that your mind has tricked you, you're still in bed, and you're going to be late. Maybe after you're dead your mind dreams the next moments you would have had, she thought. Maybe your mind stretches the illusion of your life until the last oxygen is exhausted from the last brain cell, and then the illusion fades into darkness.
"Es, am I dead?" she yelled from all fours, panic making her voice crack.
Estrella heard it and slid off the couch to the floor.
"No, but you're probably in mild shock," she said softly. "You must've been psychic or something right before it happened. You couldn't have understood the Spanish when the Brujo said 'If you shoot me you're a dead man,' but you seemed to know what was coming and you tried to protect me and the baby. We appreciate it, Bo, and we love you. So just relax until the shock wears off, okay? Somebody else will have called the police. Just relax."
"Es, if two gunshots can send me over the edge, what does a lifetime of this do to little kids? Little kids who live with it every day?"
"Maybe they think they're dead, too," Estrella replied through tears as a siren wailed and then stopped beyond the locked door.
"Call the medical examiner," a male voice announced noncommittally, "this guy's a goner."
Standing to look out the window, Bo and Estrella saw the Brujo crumpled on the steps, his sweater soaked with blood. The sound of the back door slamming indicated that the girl and her grandmother had left to avoid involvement with the police. It seemed like a good idea to Bo.
"Let's get out of here before it's too late," she suggested. "I'll call Dar from the office and tell him we were here. If the investigating officers need us, we'll talk to them later."
"You're on," Estrella agreed, wincing as she headed for the back door. "I'm really feeling funny, Bo. Maybe I'm just upset, but I'm having these twinges...."
"Oh, my God!"
Grabbing her CPS ID badge from her pocket, Bo opened the front door and held the badge before her. Just a plastic card on a clip, it lacked a certain verve, she thought.
"Bo Bradley, CPS," she growled authoritatively at the uniformed cop. "My partner and I were interviewing a client here when the shooting occurred next door. No one in this duplex was injured, but my partner is almost nine months pregnant and needs to be transported to a hospital now! The shock may have brought on—"
"Oh, jeez," the chunky, bespectacled cop murmured as his rosy cheeks turned pale. "This is a crime scene; witnesses have to remain for interrogation. But she's going to have a baby?”
"Well, she's not going to have a chrysanthemum," Bo replied, noticing that one of the cop's lug-soled boots stood in a pool of darkening blood. "And we walked here, so we'll need a squad car to transport her."
"Lady, I can't just order that. You'll have to call an ambulance. We're not running a taxi service here. We've got a homicide to investigate."
Bo looked at his name tag. wm. beader, it said. No rank. Meaning Bill Beader was a rookie working out of the storefront SDPD Community Relations Office across Linda Vista Road. That's how he'd gotten there so fast.
"Beader," Bo intoned, "you're looking at either a commendation for close cooperation with Child Protective Services or a write-up for failing to come to the aid of another law-enforcement officer in distress. Either one will stay in your record forever, but that second one will chain your career to a desk because no cop in the world will work on the streets with a guy who puts procedure before helping one of his own. You choose."
"Get her in the car," he sighed, gesturing to the black and white at the curb. "I'll drive her myself as soon as the homicide guys get here."
Bo cocked an ear at the sound of sirens howling up Linda Vista Road.
"They're here," she noted. "Es, what hospital?"
"Mercy," Estrella answered, her face pale. "Bo, I think this might be for real!"
"Oh, jeez," Bo and the young cop breathed in unison, then helped Estrella down the steps and through the crowd to the squad car.
"Lights and sirens," Bo insisted from the steel-caged back seat.
"No kidding," Bill Beader replied, and took off as if vampires were at his back.
Chapter 4
On the tarmac at San Diego's Lindbergh Field, an American Airlines commuter flight from Los Angeles International Airport concluded its thirty-minute low-altitude cruise just off the California shoreline. The passengers, mostly tourists and businesspeople, exited the plane through the jetway. Within three minutes none could have described the color of the plane's upholstery or remembered the row in which they'd sat. None noticed how closely the flight crew watched them deboard. And none knew that the ground crew unloading baggage below was waiting for one of two coded messages: "Move before unloading cadaver" or "Wait fifteen minutes, unload cadaver at this gate." If procedures went smoothly, as they did at hundreds of airports every day, the passengers would never know that they had flown in the company of a dead body.
Optimally, the plane would be moved to another gate for the unloading of the unobtrusive but carefully secured cardboard box. That way if a passenger from the flight remained in the gate area and happened to glimpse the unloading through a window, he or she would assume the body had been on a different plane. Nothing the airlines industry tried had succeeded in persuading baggage handlers to treat these necessary shipments as they would treat any other parcel. Something in the strong, young people employed at this vigorous work seemed to insist on respectful ritual. They would shoulder the box as if it were actually a coffin, go to extraordinary lengths to pad and brace it on the transport trailer, remove their caps, make religious gestures, even pray over it. And if these behaviors were witnessed by a passenger who'd just flown on that plane, there could be trouble. Because even the most rational people, the industry had learned, are made uncomfortable by confinement in an enclosed space with the dead. And this discomfort may find expression retroactively in diminished ticket sales. It was a long-standing industry rule that passengers must never know the nature of certain cargo with which they might be traveling.
Today the plane was not moved. The box from a Los Angeles mortician was unloaded and transported without notice to the unmarked van of a San Diego mortician, parked at an assigned space inside the baggage area. The baggage crew, having waited uneasily the fifteen minutes presumed necessary to clear the gate area of deboarding passengers, were as usual relieved when the mortician's van joined the stream of outgoing airport traffic. A sad and vaguely scary responsibility was out of their hands.
Twenty minutes later the van's driver, also an embalmer and cosmetologist, pushed a remote control and backed into the garage of a mid-city mortuary. Then he quickly closed the garage door behind him. He'd worked for a number of these
establishments in his sixty years. It was always important to keep the doors closed.
After sliding the box from the van onto a gurney, he wheeled it into the cold room without turning on the light, set the brake on the gurney, and went out back for a smoke. The body had been embalmed in Los Angeles, so there was nothing much to do except the clothes and makeup. And that had to wait until the family or whoever was responsible came over with clothes and a picture or description he could use. He enjoyed the work and knew he was good at it, even though it wasn't something people liked to hear about.
Reentering the garage through a side door, he checked the orders pinned to a cork bulletin board by the mortuary's owner/director, who only came in for the big funerals. Most of the time the owner played golf with a cell phone on his belt for business calls.
“Private service to be held tomorrow noon. Economy casket. No public announcements, no press of any kind. All inquiries must be referred to me. Do not confirm identity of deceased to press or any outside inquiry. Expenses to be covered by private individuals Aldenhoven and Mandeer. Burial immediately after service in Mt. Hope Cemetery. Aldenhoven will be by after five with clothes.”
The driver grinned happily. Plenty of time to catch a matinee of that new sci-fi movie, the one about mutant insects from the future coming through computers. He'd be back well before five.
Twenty miles from the mortuary Daniel Man Deer stood in a narrow canyon on the south face of Fortuna Mountain, staring at the dried excrement of a large animal. The scat contained the usual mouse fur as well as the longer and more substantial fur of a mule deer. He knew that the deer carcass was probably somewhere north of Highway 52 on the vast expanse of land still owned by the military, off limits to human animals. But not, he judged from the segmented shape of the scat, to the feline variety. The scat had been left in the middle of a "corridor" he'd suspected was the path of a bobcat, and now he knew. The next task would be planning a method for keeping the cat alive.
The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) Page 4
