Flesh Wounds

by Stephen Greenleaf

  The echo of her lifelong torment drifted down the hall, to meld with other sad stories being told at the foot of sickbeds. “But now look at you,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster. “You’re the belle of the ball.”

  “Yes I am.” She laughed like a child, then stuck out a foot and did a slow pirouette on her walking cast. “Look at me. I can stand up straight and look people right in the eye.”

  That’s not always a good idea, I almost said, thinking of the last time I’d ridden the Number 3 bus, but I held my tongue.

  She clutched my hand to her chest. “I’m so glad we met, aren’t you? It would have been creepy in this place without you. The noises; the smells; Nurse Gertie. Yuck.”

  “Double yuck,” I said. We chuckled and resumed our stroll. “Is Carlos coming to get you?”

  “If he can get away. But it’s the height of the season now; he’s busy in the fields. I might have to take the bus to Salinas.”

  “Tell me some more about strawberries,” I said, partly because I was interested and partly because Rita loved to talk about them, almost to the point of obsession. Rita worked as a bookkeeper for her boyfriend, Carlos, who had something to do with growing the berries. In our previous conversations, she had made the business seem both enchanting and sinister and Carlos a mix of clergyman and mobster.

  “You don’t really want to hear any more about strawberries,” Rita said. “I’ve bored you to death already.”

  “No. Really. I love strawberries. I just wish they didn’t have that green thing on top, so you could pop them straight in your mouth.”

  “That’s called the cap.”

  “So is there money in strawberries or what?”

  Rita sobered. “If you really want to know, the only crop more profitable than strawberries is marijuana.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. In a good year you can make up to twenty thousand dollars an acre. Of course there aren’t all that many good years.”

  “Why not?”

  “Weather, mostly.”

  “Even so, it sounds like you and Carlos are going to be rich.”

  I’d expected a smile, but she laughed rather mordantly. “I’m saying just the opposite. The landowners and marketing companies are getting rich. Everyone else is barely surviving, and survival comes at a very high price. Do you know what they call strawberries in Mexico?”

  “What?”

  “The Fruit of the Devil.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it takes so much suffering to grow them. And there’s more suffering now than ever in the fields. The life expectancy of a strawberry worker is less than fifty years.”

  I was surprised and said so. “I thought Cesar Chavez and Jerry Brown took care of the problems with farmworkers.”

  “They tried, and it helped for a while, but most of the protections have been cut back by the politicians who came along later. And even the laws that haven’t been repealed, like the minimum wage, are mostly ignored in the fields. The average income of a campesino is only five thousand dollars for twenty-five weeks’ work with the fruit. That’s half of what they were making when Chavez was leading the union.”

  “That’s it? Five thousand a year?”

  “For many of them. Especially the ones without families.”

  “Then why do they do it?”

  Her voice became grave and her eyes became spectral. “Because in Mexico they earn five dollars a day and they’re starving.”

  “All of the landowners are white, I assume.”

  “Most, but not all. In the Pajaro, many are Japanese. And in north county, many are Mexican.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “They worked hard, saved money, and got financing from some of the big marketing companies. They farm tiny plots, of course; ten acres on average. And they pay the lowest wages in the industry.”

  “Why doesn’t the union make them shape up?”

  “Because the union is Mexican, too.”

  “Most of the strawberry workers are Mexican?”

  “Ninety percent.”

  “Are you talking about illegal immigrants?”

  “At the peak picking season there are lots of illegals—friends and relatives of regular workers or crews hired from labor contractors, who use mostly illegals.”

  “I thought the Border Patrol was cracking down these days.”

  Rita laughed. “Immigration sweeps through after the crop is harvested and sends the illegals back where they came from. Then, the next season, Immigration closes its eyes and lets them come back and pick fruit. But more and more workers are permanent residents now, with homes and families and kids in the schools. There may be two or three families sharing those homes, or living all year in a labor camp, but at least they’re real homes, not cars or caves or holes in the ground.”

  “The working poor.”

  Rita nodded. “An imported peasantry, is what it amounts to. Ever since the Franciscans started growing strawberries in this country in 1770, the problem has been who would pick the crop. The first pickers were mostly Chinese, then the Japanese took most of the jobs until the Second World War, but after the war it’s been almost entirely Mexicans.”

  “Why haven’t conditions gotten better for them?”

  Rita sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Because the union is weak and the workers have no power. UFW membership is less than ten thousand now; it used to be more than fifty. Plus there’s no one around with the strength and charisma of Chavez.”

  “Who runs the union now?”

  “Chavez’s son-in-law, Arturo Rodriguez. He’s a good man and he works hard and has had some success, especially with the public corporations that own the land or market the fruit, but …” She shrugged. “Without a strong union and a magnetic leader, the workers have to take what they can get, which is still next to nothing.”

  I poked her. “Maybe you should be that leader.”

  I expected her to laugh but she didn’t. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. But I’m not Hispanic. And I’m not a man. Farm work is still very much a macho culture.”

  “What about Carlos? Or is he a landowner, too?”

  She straightened with pride. “Carlos is an independent grower.”

  “How many acres does he own?”

  “None, yet. That will come later.”

  “So how is he involved?”

  “The landowners hire men like Carlos to tend the plants and harvest the crop. Carlos farms thirty acres for Gelbride Berry Farms. Then he and the Gelbrides split the profits.”

  “Sounds like sharecropping.”

  “It is sharecropping. Only worse.”

  “How?”

  When she answered, her words were rasping and urgent, the invocation become a testimonial. “Carlos is a good farmer. He’s smart, energetic, a hard worker. Plus he knows the pomology and he’s liked by his workers.”

  “So he must be doing well.”

  Rita paused for effect. “Carlos owes Gelbride Berry Farms more than sixty thousand dollars.”

  “Wow. How did that happen?”

  “Because last year it rained at the wrong time because of El Niño. And because he signed an evil contract.”

  “Why did he sign the contract?”

  Rita muttered a curse. “Because he had no choice. If he wanted to work in the business, he had to make the deal.”

  “Why?”

  “Sharefarming is the way the owners avoid the farm labor regulations by passing the responsibility on to men like Carlos, who can’t afford to obey them. Workman’s comp, unemployment insurance, health care—Carlos can’t afford that. Not even the owners can afford that, or so they claim.”

  Rita’s voice rose to a pitch that caused two patients and one nurse to look our way in wonder. “What I don’t understand is why they never get enough,” she said in what amounted to an invocation.

  “Who?”

  “The owners. They make more and more money, and live b
etter and better lives, but they never say, ‘That’s all I need, I’m happy, let the workers have more of the profits, let them live decently as well.’ I don’t see how they can live the way they do and call themselves Christian, when the people who work their fields live with such hardship and disease.”

  Tears came then, tears of frustration and confusion, of anger and accusation. I waited for her to wipe them away on the sleeve of her jammies, then tried to buck her up. “I’m sure things will get better in time. People like you—”

  “They’re going to get better right away,” she said stiffly. “The minute I get back to Haciendas and get in touch with the Gelbrides.”

  I started to ask Rita how she was going to manage that, but we were interrupted by her nurse, who wanted her back on the ward for her final exam before heading home.

  “Well, this is it, I guess,” she said, her eyes still misting over, her voice quaking just a tad.

  I tried to keep my own voice on a level pitch but I’m not sure I succeeded. “I guess it is.”

  “Would you mind very much if I kissed you, Mr. Tanner?”

  “It would be my distinct pleasure, Ms. Lombardi.”

  She leaned over and pecked my cheek, gave me a brisk hug and a wave, then shuffled off toward her room with her nurse, her newly repaired legs not quite up to full speed, but almost. Both my cheek and my heart stayed moist and tingly until I was visited by an assistant D.A.

  Her name was Jill Coppelia. She was in her early forties or so, with big blue eyes, light brown hair, a gently expressive face, and long legs and long arms and a long look that made me uncomfortable.

  “We meet at last,” she began.

  “Sorry I was tied up.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “I never did.”

  Her smile was warm and soothing; she would have been good at getting confessions and earning promotions. “If you’re not ready for this, I can come back.”

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  She smiled wider this time, companionably and attractively, putting me more at ease than I wanted to be. She was the friendliest D.A. I’d ever met, which wasn’t saying much. She was also the first woman in more than a year who had made my libido perk up, which was saying even less.

  “I’m in charge of the Sleet investigation,” she began.

  “I didn’t know there was a Sleet investigation.”

  “There always is when an officer goes down.”

  “That may be, but this case is open and shut.”

  She raised a brow and crossed her arms. “Is that so?”

  “If you’re good at your job, you already know it.”

  She colored and shifted position and looked for a place to sit down. There was a chair in the corner and she spotted it, but when I didn’t invite her to sit, she stayed standing.

  “We’ve gotten statements from the other officers who were out there that night,” she went on, “and we’d like to get one from you.”

  I shook my head and gave the answer I’d already decided to give her. “Sorry. No can do.”

  She blinked and frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that whatever Charley did or didn’t do that night, you’re not going to get it from me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t rat on my friends.”

  “Your friend is dead.”

  I smiled. “All the more reason.”

  “But all we want is the truth.”

  “In my experience, what goes in one end of your office in the form of truth often looks ugly and warped when it comes out the other end in the form of an indictment. Some sort of legal indigestion, I guess.”

  “I’m not that kind of lawyer,” Ms. Coppelia said primly.

  “I’m glad to hear it, but the answer’s still no. Why don’t you have a seat?”

  She went to the chair and sat down. When she crossed her legs, I paid attention. Apparently the source of the sex drive isn’t close to the spleen.

  “The survivors say Sleet killed Gary Hilton and Milt Mandarich—”

  I interrupted her. “He’s the big guy?”

  “Right. The survivors say Sleet killed Hilton and Mandarich because they were going to file a complaint against Sleet with Internal Affairs.”

  “Then the survivors are lying assholes.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  I ignored her question. “Complaint about what?”

  “That Sleet was shaking down several business establishments in the Tenderloin and North Beach. Offering protection for money.”

  “Extortion.”

  She nodded. “That’s where they were headed.”

  I shook my head to show my disgust. “Did you know Charley?”

  “A little.”

  “Does that sound like something he’d do?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Then maybe you should find out the real reason he took Hilton and Mandarich out.”

  She recrossed her legs. I wondered if the show of thigh was deliberate. If it was, I wondered what she hoped it would get her. Then I wondered whether I’d give it to her.

  “I’m betting you could help me do that,” she was saying. Jill Coppelia was at ease and self-controlled, attempting to manipulate me according to a preconceived plan, going with the flow but channeling it in a direction she felt was productive. I began to admire her a little and lust for her a little more.

  “Charley’s dead,” I said. “That terminated any and all of my obligations to the SFPD.”

  “You’re still a citizen, Mr. Tanner.”

  “I was a citizen when Milt Mandarich broke my finger to get me to tell him how to get to Charley.”

  That one tilted her off center by at least a degree. “I didn’t know-about that.”

  “You don’t know a lot of things, it sounds like.”

  She pouted. “So why don’t you help us find out?”

  I shook my head.

  The pout became close to a sneer. “We could impanel a Grand Jury and subpoena you.”

  “And I could hire Jake Hattie to head you off.”

  “Jake couldn’t keep us from offering you immunity and putting you in jail for contempt if you don’t talk.”

  “Why would I need immunity?”

  “You shot a cop, for one thing.”

  “And for another thing, I saved two more cops from dying the way Hilton and Mandarich died.”

  “The proof of that is only anecdotal.”

  “The word of the survivors, you mean.”

  She shrugged.

  A twitch in my gut curled me up. When I finally straightened out, Jill Coppelia was by the bed. “Do you need the nurse?”

  “No.”

  “Water? Medication? Anything?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She patted my hand. I waited till she sat back down. “Look,” I said stiffly. “Charley Sleet was my best friend. Plus he had a brain tumor. So why would I murder him, even if I wanted to? Why wouldn’t I wait till the cancer took its toll?”

  She shrugged. “Motive isn’t an essential element of a criminal conviction.”

  “Then how do you expect to prove malice and intent, which the last time I looked were essential elements?”

  She shrugged. “Why do you think we haven’t put you in the prison ward in this place? Even though there are lots of guys on the force who think that’s where you ought to be.”

  I thought it over while I looked her over. What I saw was enough to soften me up. “Okay. You gave me a break, so I’ll give you one. Does the name Triad mean anything to you?”

  “You mean the Chinese family organizations?”

  I shook my head. “This is something else, and you need to find out what it means. But put your own guys on it, not the SFPD.”

  “You’re saying this Triad has something to do with the department?”

  I kept my mouth shut and smiled.

&
nbsp; “That’s it? That’s all you’re giving up?”

  “That’s it.”

  “It doesn’t seem nearly enough.” She stood up and smoothed her skirt and came to the bed and looked down. “We could go at this another way,” she said, with something more ardent in her voice than a threat.

  “How?”

  “We could hire you to help us as a special investigator.”

  “Not for a while, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “As soon as they let me out of here, I’m going out of town.”

  “Not far, I hope.”

  “Not in terms of geography.”

  She handed me her card after scribbling a number on the back. “Call me when you get back. By then I’ll have come up with new reasons why you should cooperate with us.”

  “Those reasons became irrelevant when the Honor Guard didn’t show up for Charley’s funeral,” I said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Without Rita’s charm to speed it along, the week crawled by like a slug, obese and repellent and interminable. But the healing progressed, the pain diminished, the strength returned, and suddenly it was Friday morning. I was dressed and packed and waiting when he got there.

  “Well, Mr. Tanner.”

  “Well, Dr. Stratton.”

  “How are we feeling today?”

  “We’re feeling tip-top, shipshape, A-okay, and then some.”

  He smiled. “I’ll be the judge of that. Let me give a listen.”

  He slid his stethoscope off his neck and pressed it to my body in several places, most of them ticklish. I don’t know what they hear in there, maybe a little voice that gives them medical updates on the hour, sort of like a miniature NPR. Or maybe it’s just for show.

  “Pulse is steady; lungs are clear; the gut is gurgling away, doing its work. I think we’ve done all we can do for you here.”

  “That must mean my insurance is running out.”

  His laugh was slightly forced. “It’s more that we need the space. Gunshots are as fashionable as tattoos this season—we’re starting to take reservations. Although I must say yours was one of the sexiest we’ve seen in a while. And it wasn’t the first bullet to pass through the vicinity, was it?”

  I thought of a night in an alley near Broadway almost twenty years back, in the first weeks of my career as a detective, when I’d been gut-shot by an assailant who was unknown to me then and now. “I’ll try not to develop a taste for it.”