The Complete Mystery Collection

by Michaela Thompson

  Bobo’s distant look, however, had been replaced by a more thoughtful one. “Gonzales? Al Gonzales?” he said.

  “I don’t know the first name. It’s in Fremont.”

  “Sure. Al Gonzales. Took me out to the best Mexican dinner I ever ate. Al does some work for me.”

  He was out of it, but what else was new? “Not any more. Gonzales Manufacturing lost the contract over a year ago. The new supplier is Singapore Metal Works.”

  Bobo rubbed a spot in the middle of his forehead, his eyes closed. “That can’t be right. I would never dump Al. Nobody talked to me about it.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to—”

  Bobo turned abruptly and barked, “Pete!” He looked almost animated. A young man with razor-cut hair, one of the several Fun World employees who were always around, appeared. Bobo said, “What’s this about you boys dumping Al Gonzales?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr.—”

  “Find out. And bring me a report.”

  As Pete disappeared, Bobo said, “Al Gonzales bought me the best margarita I ever drank. The best…” His voice trailed off, and Marina gathered her things. Another exercise in futility. She doubted it was significant, anyway.

  Talking to Bobo was something to do during the Christmas doldrums, at least, while everything else came to a standstill. Tensile tests on Loopy Doop’s steel couldn’t be done, because the machined specimens couldn’t be made, because half the technicians were on vacation. The chemical analysis couldn’t be done because the laboratory’s Christmas party was apparently using up everybody’s energies.

  In the meantime, nobody but Marina seemed to think any of this was urgent. “Hell, the suits haven’t even been filed. All the lawyers are off skiing,” said Sandy, who, naturally, was preoccupied with keeping his tuxedo in good shape and other matters of significance.

  Even Sondergard, when she ran into him in Sandy’s office one day talking with Don, said, “Listen— give it till after New Year’s.”

  “It’s falling on deaf ears, Eric. Marina’s the original Scrooge,” Don said.

  Marina grimaced. It wasn’t that she disliked Christmas, it was that she could never understand why, when there was work to be done, everybody should tacitly agree that things could come to a standstill for three solid weeks. Sure, have parties, give presents if you had anybody to give them to, but— it was useless to complain. She couldn’t change the situation, so she might as well do something silly like drive to Fremont and visit Gonzales Manufacturing.

  With a feeling of playing hooky, she drove out of the parking garage, headed down Nob Hill on California Street, and took Battery toward the Bay Bridge. The city was jammed with shoppers, and trees blinked everywhere. By the time she returned from Fremont it would be too late to go back to the office. As an extra bonus, the Christmas party was this afternoon, and she’d miss it.

  The midafternoon traffic on the Bay Bridge was light, and as she drove she thought about the switch from aluminum to steel gondolas. It probably wasn’t important, but it was curious. When you had a design that in any case depended on thin legs of high strength steel, why give the legs extra weight to carry, even if they could carry it easily? She’d ask Sondergard about it again, in case he’d remembered something.

  She made good time, and in forty minutes was taking the exit closest to the industrial park where, she had learned from the map, she would find the street Gonzales Manufacturing was on. The way led through wide, anonymous streets strung with plastic Santas and lined with taco stands and used-car dealerships. She turned off into the industrial park with its rows of small, anonymous factories of beige- or cream-colored concrete, the newer ones landscaped with spindly young trees.

  Gonzales was in an older section, and the only things growing near it were blackberries forcing their way through cracks in the empty parking lot. Marina left her car beside the weathered redwood sign with “Gonzales Manufacturing” painted on it in yellow and walked to the front door.

  A heavy bar lock and chain hung across it. Peering through the glass, she could glimpse part of an empty office and a bare gray metal desk. Apparently Gonzales wasn’t manufacturing anything these days.

  The factory next door was still in business. Marina walked across the parking lot to it. A dark-haired young woman, sitting behind a receptionist’s desk covered with standing Christmas cards, glanced up as she entered.

  “I was just over at Gonzales,” Marina said. “Where’ve they gone?”

  The girl shrugged. “Closed down.”

  “When?”

  “Couple of months ago, I guess.”

  “Do you know where I could find Mr. Gonzales, who used to run the company?”

  The girl shook her head. “I don’t know anything about it.” She hesitated. Marina didn’t move. After a moment the girl said, “We hired their foreman. He can probably tell you.”

  Marina had learned that standing her ground a little longer than was strictly polite often got results. She said, “I’d like to speak with him for a minute.”

  Gonzales’s former foreman was a graying man in his fifties, dressed in khaki. Marina told him who she was. When she mentioned Fun World, his face hardened. “If it wasn’t for those bastards, Gonzales would still be in business,” he said. “The only good that came out of it was, at least we weren’t involved in that accident. But when Fun World didn’t renew the contract, that was it. A lot of good people out on the street. I was lucky, got another job. Not like some of the rest of them.”

  “Gonzales closed down because of Fun World?”

  “Not exactly.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “We were in trouble already. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, if you know what I mean.”

  “What happened to Mr. Gonzales?”

  “Enrique? I think he’s still trying to pick up the pieces. He’s got an office in the Fremont Plaza building, downtown.”

  “Actually, I meant Al.”

  “Oh. The old man died right after the plant went belly-up. Stroke or something. Shame.”

  10

  Enrique Gonzales tapped a piece of paper with his pencil point, gazing out the window of the tiny office. “I just wish my father hadn’t lived to see the day, that’s all,” he said.

  Marina didn’t reply. The atmosphere in the room was oppressive with Enrique Gonzales’s anger.

  “I swear to God,” Gonzales said. “Sometimes I think that accident is God’s way of punishing Fun World for what they did to us. Let them find out what it’s like to struggle. Let them feel shame.” He turned back to Marina. He was a solidly built man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, with a broad face. A lock of straight black hair fell over his forehead. “There was never any trouble with anything we did for them. We worked with them for years. From Bobo’s very first park. My father and Bobo—” He held up two fingers pressed together. “Then they pull the rug out from under us and take their business to Singapore.”

  “Nobody said why?”

  “Not a word. After all those years. My father, sick as he was, tried to get Bobo on the phone. The secretary said Bobo was unavailable.” Gonzales gave the last word a bitter twist.

  “Why do you think—”

  “Money, lady.” Gonzales’s lip curled. “Don’t you know that’s what everything’s about? What do they live on over in Singapore, rice or something? They don’t have to pay wages like we do here. Unemployment? Workmen’s comp? They never heard of it.”

  He had a point. Still, why not get aluminum gondolas made in Singapore, instead of steel ones? “Thanks,” she said.

  “I pray for the ones who died, for the ones who were hurt,” Gonzales said. “But to see Fun World in trouble— It’s the only thing that keeps me going.”

  Marina stood up, anxious to get away. She left him bent over the desk, writing numbers on a sheet of paper.

  11

  The letter arrived the day of a storm— another in a procession of storms that started at Christmas, continued through New Y
ear’s, and showed no sign of ending. Marina was almost accustomed by now to waking up in the early morning to the sound of spitting rain and in the evening creeping home with her headlights illuminating the downpour, always hoping her car or somebody else’s wouldn’t skid on a hill.

  When, damp and tired, she opened the mailbox in the lobby of her apartment building and her fingers touched the onionskin envelope, she felt the same flash of irritation she used to feel and the accompanying thought: a letter from Catherine. She wasn’t even surprised to see the Indian stamps, the Bombay postmark. An instant later, her mouth filled with bitter fluid and she sat down abruptly on the concrete ledge of the planter next to the mailboxes. She put the letter on her knee. Her name and address, typed with a faint ribbon. No return address. Don’t sit looking at it, open it.

  The single sheet of onionskin rustled as she tried to unfold it. The typed message was brief:

  Rain Sister,

  You told me trees write stories on the sky and only you can read them. What do the trees tell you now? Can you read the sky?

  Cloud Sister

  She stared at the spongy green moss in the planter. She must have been about seven then, and Catherine four. They were kneeling on the bed, looking out the window at bare winter limbs. “The ends of the branches are pencils,” Marina had said, her breath condensing on the cold glass, and she “read” to Catherine the story written on the sky, repeating something from a book the teacher had read at school. Catherine listened, rapt, her eyes huge and blue. After that she had often asked Marina to read what the trees had written.

  Rain Sister and Cloud Sister. What had that game been about? They had played it over and over. To become Rain Sister she had wrapped herself in their mother’s fringed gray silk shawl with its border of pink roses. Catherine, Cloud Sister, had worn a white angora sweater.

  She’d been sitting here a long time. She got up stiffly and took the elevator to her apartment.

  Catherine was dead. She had died ten years ago, when the Palika Road ashram burned— was burned by an angry mob after the sacrificial killing of a young neighborhood boy named Agit More. Marina put the letter on the kitchen table and walked, hugging her elbows, through her low-ceilinged anonymous apartment, with its bare white walls, its expanses of glass overlooking rain-slick streets and in the distance beyond the lights the black stretch of the bay. She went back to the table and picked up the letter.

  It couldn’t be from Catherine, because Catherine was dead. She tried to avoid the thought that she hadn’t actually seen Catherine’s body. There had been no body to see. Neither Catherine’s nor those of the two other members of the faithful who refused to desert Nagarajan no matter what atrocities he’d committed. She had seen Catherine’s ring, which the police had found, along with the bones and teeth of three people, after the ashes cooled. The ring, a bauble picked up for a few rupees in some bazaar, was twisted, but by some fluke not entirely melted, and it had a pink stone. She could see it, lying in the light from the desk lamp, and she could smell the bureaucratic police-station smell of paper crumbling, year after year, in the damp heat. They had asked, tentatively, if she wanted to keep the ring. When she said no, they put it carefully in a small brown envelope that had probably long since disintegrated in its turn.

  By that time Nagarajan had hanged himself in his jail cell and there was little to do but come home, despite the threats of the parents of the other victims and some posturing by the government. Even then, Marina had seen irony in the king cobra strangling himself. Unless he actually had been beaten to death by the police, a distinct possibility. Nobody had been left but Marina, who hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place, who had come to India only because that was where Catherine was, and she was responsible for Catherine. She had flown to Bombay full of determination to regain her sister. She had left with nothing, not even Catherine’s ring.

  Catherine was dead, so this letter couldn’t be from Catherine. It was like Catherine, though, to be so cryptic. To jerk Marina around, just to prove she still could.

  When Marina had gotten back from India, she had thrown out or given away everything that belonged to Catherine— her Western clothes, which she’d long since given up wearing; her school notebooks; the pictures she’d drawn when she was a child. Because if Catherine had done what Marina wanted and gone back to school instead of getting mixed up with Nagarajan and going to India, she would be alive. It was Catherine’s fault. But it was Marina’s fault, because Marina was responsible for Catherine. How many times had Marina gone around on that wheel?

  Their parents’ death, in an airplane crash on the way to a football game in Los Angeles, had been Marina’s introduction to disaster. She was eighteen when it happened, and was getting ready to start her freshman year at Stanford. Catherine was fifteen. Two orphans with few relatives, and those far away. It seemed best to everyone that she and Catherine do what they preferred— continue living in the little house in the Avenues near Golden Gate Park where they had grown up. Marina forgot Stanford and enrolled in San Francisco State.

  For several years, it worked. It was fine. They shared household tasks, got decent grades, worked at part-time jobs to supplement the insurance money. Once the initial shock of bereavement wore off, they were— Marina was, anyway— reasonably happy.

  Catherine apparently wasn’t. How else to explain her rejection of their life together, in her first year at State, in favor of placing herself in the hands of Nagarajan, a two-bit guru whom even the gurus had never heard of? At that time, there were dozens of Indian saints, Tibetan saints, Chinese and Japanese living gods, yogis, boddhisattvas, Sufis, dervishes, you name it running around San Francisco and Berkeley establishing ashrams, temples, meditation halls, giving lectures, classes, intensives. Everybody was seeking the Way and the Path. So Marina simply laughed and kidded Catherine when Catherine hung the photograph of Nagarajan in her room and put fresh flowers in front of it every day.

  It took a long time for Marina to realize it was serious. She had worried from time to time that Catherine might get pregnant or become a drug addict, but something like this had never occurred to her. One afternoon when Catherine wasn’t home, Marina went in to look at the picture. Catherine’s room smelled of incense. A brightly printed Indian cotton spread covered her bed.

  The picture of Nagarajan hung over the incense burner. It was in color, heavily and too brightly retouched. It showed, from the waist up, a slim young Indian man with prominent facial bones and large dark eyes. Curly luxuriant black hair hung to his shoulders. His bare brown chest was smooth and muscular, and his lips, half-smiling, were full and well-molded and looked, to Marina, almost feminine. Behind his head was a chair or a piece of sculpture shaped like an umbrella of golden cobras with their hoods flared open.

  When Marina looked at the picture she felt, for the first time, dread at what might happen to Catherine. Despite its tackiness, she couldn’t scoff at it.

  “The nagas were ancient Indian gods,” Catherine said when Marina questioned her later. “They can take the form of humans or snakes. A nagarajan is a naga king.”

  “How did this guy get to be a nagarajan?”

  “He had a wise teacher, who recognized that he was one.”

  “Are you telling me you believe that? You believe this guy is a snake-god in human form? Do you know what Freud would say about all this snake business?”

  “I believe in Nagarajan, yes. Yes.”

  “But Catherine—” Catherine was so beautiful, Marina thought, with her long, shining yellow hair disarranged by the vehemence of her affirmative nod, looking flushed and embattled and resolute. “You’ve never even seen Nagarajan himself. How can you say you believe in him?”

  “I’ve felt his spirit.”

  “What does he teach, or preach, or whatever?”

  “That we are one, and the universe is one, and we must be what we are.”

  “That’s fine, that’s fine, that’s all very well, but—”

 
Catherine touched Marina’s cheek. “If your mind is closed, how can you possibly understand? Why don’t you come to a meditation service with me?”

  Marina went, following the theory that she had to know her enemy. She felt ill at ease beforehand, despite Catherine’s touching eagerness for her to approve of everything. Some gurus, Marina knew, had wealthy devotees who remodeled mansions for their headquarters. That was evidently not the case with Nagarajan. The next evening Catherine took her to a storefront in the Tenderloin, wedged between a rehabilitation center and a pornographic bookstore. Banner-sized posters of Nagarajan, the same photograph that hung in Catherine’s room, were plastered on the dusty, smeared windows. Young Americans in robes and saris greeted them. Incense was burned, the small company swayed and chanted. The ritual carried out in the bare, seedy-looking little room seemed harmless enough— or would have seemed so, if it hadn’t been for Nagarajan’s image on the wall.

  Watching Catherine’s ecstatic response as she chanted and swayed, her eyes closed, smiling, Marina felt closed off and bereft. Afterward, Catherine pressed her for a reaction: “Did you feel the vibrations? Wasn’t it terrific?”

  “Well, sure. It was really interesting.”

  “You didn’t feel it. You didn’t feel anything.”

  “I don’t think I felt exactly what you feel, but—” After that, Catherine had not invited her again.

  What do the trees tell you now? Can you read the sky? It was suffocating in here. Marina blotted her upper lip with the back of her hand and realized she was still wearing her raincoat. She took it off and turned down the thermostat. Can you read the sky? No. She closed the curtains.