by Mark Wheaton
Ernesto was losing his patience. How was it that the young officer in the driver’s seat of the cruiser had convinced him to come out to Silver Lake an hour before shift to surveil a location? He glanced over at him.
Young officer? More like a kid only a couple of years removed from his first communion.
“I’m sorry, Deputy”—Ernesto stole a glance to the rookie’s name tag—“Poole, but I’ve got to get to roll call.”
The cruiser was parked in a spot that overlooked Sunset Boulevard through a gap between houses. It was sufficiently overgrown to provide a bit of camouflage and was a popular vantage point for cops.
“Give me one more minute,” Poole pleaded. “It’s too weird. I wasn’t even sure there was anything to report, but I don’t think I’m the right person to make that decision.”
Ernesto nodded and sank back in the passenger seat. He’d give him two minutes. Poole would have to understand that what he was asking was . . .
“There!” Poole said.
Poole pointed to a motel down on Sunset as the door to one of its units swung open. As Ernesto watched, local hood Oscar de Icaza stepped out. His hair was wet, as if he’d just showered. He wore clean clothes and didn’t carry a bag. He paused to pop a cigarette into his mouth and light it.
“Okay, you’ve got Oscar de Icaza,” Ernesto said. “You see him do something he shouldn’t?”
The drapes nearest the door rustled. Someone else was in the room.
“Somebody with him?”
“Watch.”
The door opened. Oscar took the cigarette out of his mouth, leaned over, and kissed someone. Ernesto caught a glimpse of a blond Caucasian woman. Oscar smiled and said something else before putting the cigarette back between his lips and moving to his car.
“You want to pick him up for pandering?” Ernesto asked, incredulous. “I appreciate your enthusiasm, but that’ll be a hard case to make.”
“She’s not a prostitute,” Poole scowled. “Wait for her to come out.”
Ernesto was intrigued enough to wait for the woman to emerge. He was pretty sure de Icaza, while making a show of being a prosperous small businessman, was actually a car thief up to his eyeballs in illegality. If Poole had stumbled across something they could charge him with, it’d be worth it for the search warrant on his business alone.
When she came out, Ernesto was surprised. She was too pretty, too pulled together to be a prostitute, even a high-end one. If there was anything he’d learned in the Sheriff’s Department, it was if you thought you were looking at a prostitute, whether a junkie-looking streetwalker or a fashionably dressed escort pumping gas into her VW Bug at eight in the morning, you were probably right.
This wasn’t that. The woman climbing into her eighty-thousand-dollar SUV looked more like an upper-class suburban mom, with big blond hair, jeans, and a fashionable blouse.
“They were here all night?”
“No. According to the guy at the desk, they got a room here on Sunday night and didn’t leave until the next morning. Then Oscar called around five thirty this morning and said he needed a room again, pronto. That’s when she came back, just before dawn.”
“You’re already working some desk clerk as an informer?” Ernesto asked.
“Well, yeah,” Poole affirmed. “The owner’s trying to clean out the drugs so he can sell the place. So the clerk calls me when he sees anything suspicious.”
Good on you, Ernesto thought, meaning it.
“This qualified?”
“Do you recognize her?” Poole asked.
Ernesto shook his head.
“I figured it was pandering, so I ran her plates.”
Poole swiveled the in-car computer screen around to Ernesto.
Fuck. Me.
“Helen Story?”
“Yeah. I found a couple of pictures online to make sure it wasn’t just somebody using her car. That was her. I heard the other day you were asking around about some case her husband’s involved with, so I thought I should tell you.”
A deputy DA’s wife sleeping with a crime figure who just happens to be a former cohort of Luis Chavez? Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I need to know about.
“Who else knows?” Ernesto asked.
“Just you,” Poole said. “I thought you might know him or something.”
“I don’t. But I need you to keep this under your hat until I do.”
Ernesto eyed Poole. The rookie nodded, looking giddy that his instinct to call in the big guns had been right.
Ernesto exited Poole’s cruiser and headed to his own. The day hadn’t even begun and he already had a bad feeling about where it was headed.
XXIII
The drive from the Blocks to the fields was a short one. They’d gone down the gravel road, passed through some unused pasture, and crossed through another checkpoint where the road became paved. This carried them through a last gate onto an isolated road with no cars or street signs. They continued until the fields on both sides went from scrub brush to cultivated rows of strawberry plants.
The convoy then split apart, each truck heading to a different section. The one where Luis and the newcomers were to work was about in the dead center of the vast plot. The driver hopped out and waved the men onto the field. The sun was just beginning its ascent in the eastern sky.
“Probably the first and only time you’ll ever hear this,” the man said in Spanish, “but we’re all about quantity over quality here. Every berry you see is already sold. If it’s fresh and pretty, it’ll end up in the supermarket next week. If it’s just starting to go, it’ll be frozen. If it’s shit, it’ll be pulped, dried, or juiced. Luckily, that ain’t your job to decide. You get them off the plant and into the bins. Call out when you’ve got a full one, and a new one’ll be brought over. We go until an hour before sundown. Keep hydrated, shitter’s over there, and we’ll bring lunch in a few hours. Go to!”
The men moved right to the rows. There was no lollygagging, no questions, no easing into the work. Luis found a row with an empty bin at the end. He started picking.
This was not what he expected.
No matter where he looked, there was nothing to indicate any connection to the Marshak corporation. Not a logo on the packaging, nothing on the sides of trucks, no uniforms, no signs.
For the next half hour, the flatbed trucks returned to deposit more and more workers to different sections of the fields. He assumed they were from the other trucks he had seen at the Blocks. The sheer size of the workforce was enough for Luis to get a handle on just how vast the fields must be.
Never was a group dropped near his own, however. It was a way of preventing workers from other apartments from intermingling. They couldn’t really communicate in the Blocks except when coming or going, and the same went for the fields. Isolating the groups likely cut down on the sharing of controversial ideas.
But do they know they are practically slaves? Luis wondered. They were well fed, well housed—or well-enough housed—they were promised women, they’d been given some arbitrary price they had to work off, and there must be word out there that those who worked hard enough would get paid at some point or even get their own land.
So what happened to those who questioned it? Were they threatened with getting shipped back south of the border? Thrown to local law enforcement? Or did the guns in the waistbands of every overseer do the trick? No questions asked. Keep your head down and keep working and no one gets hurt.
It was madness.
Luis worked in silence for much of the morning. No one spoke to him during the first break or when he called for a new bin. Not that the other workers talked that much either, but there was the occasional utterance of frustration or the joke met with laughter.
Until midmorning.
A shout rang out from a couple of sections over. Luis feared someone had gotten
hurt and glanced over. Men stood and pointed.
In the western sky a thick brushstroke of black smoke wisped up into the lower stratosphere. Its connection to the ground below looked severed, the cloud cut free to roam with the wind.
“Small fire,” Luis said.
“No way,” one of the men closest to him said. “That much smoke? Big fire. I bet that’s somebody’s fields, man.”
The speaker watched for a second longer, then went back to work. Luis kept staring, paralyzed. He told himself it was a coincidence, that it couldn’t be the Higuera fields. But he found it a thought near-impossible to banish.
The fire at the Higuera farm had been burning for hours before Henry Marshak arrived. Three different firehouses had responded to the blaze. The fear was always that the fire could spread at will. Henry had heard about it on the radio, the traffic lady saying it was “under control” but that the wind might carry the smoke up to the highway. When she’d read off the location, Henry had turned around his truck, knowing it could only be the Higuera farm.
“We had a helicopter for a while,” the fire chief told Henry after he’d clambered out of his truck. “He directed us to how far it had gone, and we were able to put some corners on it.”
“The workers?” Henry asked.
“We checked the gulley where those workers have that tarp city. Everyone had cleared out.”
But Henry could tell from the hesitation in the chief’s voice he was holding out on him.
“What about the house?” Henry asked.
The chief glanced around, then sighed.
“No confirmation yet, but it’s looking like we’ve got two sets of remains in there. Ventura County sheriffs are taking a look. The fire burned the house down to its foundation. We’re thinking it might’ve started there, took the folks inside by surprise.”
Henry didn’t believe that. One look into the chief’s eyes told him he didn’t buy it, either. Henry thanked the chief for the heads-up and moved to the edge of the field. The flames had darkened everything in their path, snaking through the rows like a thresher. But the dark patches closest to the house had burned differently from the rest. A faster burn. That suggested accelerant.
Shit.
Henry watched as a couple of the firefighters dug trenches, throwing dirt on the smoldering remnants. The remaining harvest was lost, but if this had been an accident, a part of Henry could’ve been happy. Fire was a rejuvenating force after all, injecting soil with a massive amount of nitrogen. When things grew back, the fields’ yield would be ten times what it had been before.
But it was the Higuera farm, and given what had already happened here, all Henry felt was guilt.
That this was his fault wasn’t a question. He was still playing catch-up, but he was sure of this. It was the how that he hadn’t quite sorted, but he was getting close to that, too.
He moved toward the house, where a Ventura County medical examiner’s truck was parked. Two yellow sheets marked the location of the two bodies. A sheriff’s deputy moved to wave him back, then recognized him. Henry didn’t need to go much farther anyway.
He reached the house. He kneeled down and placed his hand flat on the concrete. It still radiated warmth.
“You know who might’ve been in here?” a uniformed fire marshal, another acquaintance, asked, moving to Henry’s side.
“Probably a couple of workers squatting here instead of the arroyo over there.”
The fire marshal glanced over to the culvert. When he turned back, Henry was already walking away.
“Take care, Henry,” the marshal called.
Henry waved over his shoulder but kept walking.
With every snip of the barber’s scissors, Whillans had to banish the belief that this would be his last haircut. He stared at himself in the mirror, eyeing the old man’s face, where he still thought a young man resided, and wondered if he should’ve paid more attention to the changes. He recognized himself, because who else would be staring back at him from the mirror? But in truth it was an aged version of who he saw in his mind’s eye. When had all these changes happened?
He chuckled at this thought. Then another snip and . . .
Will this truly be my last?
Though he’d promised Bridgette he wouldn’t, he’d gone on the Internet to look up what he could expect from this kind of cancer. Everything suggested that it would happen fast. One day he’d be all right, suffering through chemo but on his feet. Then the failing liver would invite the kidneys to fail along with it, and that’d be it. The body couldn’t process urine anymore, so jaundice was next. Death arrived in days.
Whillans’s doctors could only assure him he’d be pain-free throughout. This meant doping him into oblivion to the point he probably wouldn’t even know when he’d entered his final hours. He’d probably pass in his sleep anyway.
Thank you, God, for Bridgette, he prayed for the umpteenth time that day.
He could only imagine what it’d be like if the archdiocese found out. They’d whip into action, throw him in some sort of assisted-living facility, hire round-the-clock care, and get their parishioners to pray. He’d be fed, cleaned, drugged, and have his diapers professionally changed. He’d die surrounded by dutiful strangers.
Besides knowing who he’d want to see and not see, what books he might like read aloud to him, or what his moods might suggest about his condition, Bridgette would be with him through this. She’d feel his pain and shoulder some of it herself to ease it. She loved him, and this meant everything.
The barbershop was only three blocks from St. Augustine’s, so he walked back after. He had a lot to think about, particularly when it came to the parish. He wanted it to be a smooth, painless transition. It could happen, but he couldn’t do it on his own. He’d need help.
He’d just reached St. Augustine’s and was thinking he might keep walking when he spotted the large white Cadillac in the parking lot. Though its appearance—or, more importantly, whose appearance it heralded—made him want to not walk but run away, never to return, he sighed and made his way to the nave.
Nice to know your sense of humor remains intact, O Lord, Whillans sighed.
He entered through a side door, moved up past the pews and the altar to the administrative wing beyond. Seated in the hall was a fastidious little priest named Uli something, who stood as Whillans approached.
“I’m not the Holy Father, Uli, so you need not stand,” Whillans said. “But nice to see you, too.”
The priest didn’t know what to say to this, so he quickly sat back down, folding his hands in his lap.
He’ll be the next archbishop, Whillans chuckled.
The man waiting in Whillans’s office was decked out in a full ceremonial cassock, complete with rochet and scarlet chimere. To the pastor, it felt like he’d stumbled onto a Mardi Gras float.
“Ah, Father Whillans,” Bishop Osorio said, shoving an iPhone back into his pocket. “You were at the barber?”
“I was.”
Osorio made a scolding sound with his teeth.
“I remember when I was in Rome the barbers came to us,” Osorio said grandly. “It wasn’t vanity.”
Of course not.
“The business of the church was all-consuming. There was no time for anything. We worked around the clock at a breakneck pace. That’s what killed our beloved Pope John Paul thirty days after his election, not poison or a Mafia hit. The tailors came to us, the cobblers, the laundresses, the florists, the perfumers . . .”
Thank you again, Lord, for sparing me a post in the Eternal City, Whillans thought.
“Sounds spiritually invigorating,” he offered. “Now what can I do for you, Bishop Emeritus?”
Osorio wrinkled his brow at “Emeritus” but then eyed Whillans closely.
“It has come to the attention of the diocese that one of your priests has
gone, well, rogue.”
Osorio’s eyes fluttered, as if he couldn’t believe it himself.
“Gone rogue?” Whillans asked. “Can we really do that?”
“You don’t even want to know who I mean?”
“I assumed that was forthcoming,” Whillans replied, refusing to be baited.
“It is Father Chavez,” Osorio said. “Which is why the situation is so near to my heart.”
“What has he done?”
“You mean other than the incident with the woman the other night?” Osorio asked.
“You mean when he was attacked, trying to prevent her from being kidnapped?”
Osorio waved this away as if they were the same thing.
“If you’ll recall, the woman was here against the better judgment of many in the archdiocese. But now he’s taken things a step farther.”
Whillans could see the bishop was enjoying this, but he knew playing along was the only way he’d get the bishop to finish his story.
“How so?”
“Do you know where he is right now?”
“I relaxed his duties to allow him time to mend.”
“Would you believe, up in the Santa Ynez Valley?” Osorio announced. “Harvesting strawberries?”
Whillans froze, limiting his reaction. He didn’t want to give Osorio the satisfaction of surprising him.
“Is that a sin?” Whillans asked.
“It is when he’s playing detective,” Osorio snapped. “He’s up there looking for that . . . woman. Do you understand? A woman!”
“I hear what you’re saying, but I have no reason to believe his interest in Odilia Garanzuay is prurient. No matter what you seem determined to imply.”
Osorio raised his hands in horror that anyone might think him capable of such a thought.
“What Father Chavez chooses to do with his time off is up to him,” Whillans said. “I have no reason to believe he won’t be exemplary in his conduct. He’s done nothing to make me question his commitment to God.”
This did nothing to mollify Osorio.
