Fielding’s smile wobbled at the corners, but it stayed with him. “You won’t be living so fancy yourself from now on, will you, Ada? Maybe you’ll be glad to find a hole to crawl into. Your passport to the land of gracious living expires when Daisy leaves.”
“Daisy won’t leave.”
“No? Ask her.”
The two women looked at each other in silence. Then Daisy said, with a brief glance at her husband, “I think Jim already knows I won’t be staying. I think he’s known for the past few days. Haven’t you, Jim?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to ask me to stay?”
“No.”
“Well, I am,” Mrs. Fielding said harshly. “You can’t walk out now. I’ve worked so hard to keep this marriage secure—”
Fielding laughed. “People should work on their own marriages, my dear. Take yours, for instance. This man Fielding you married, he wasn’t a bad guy. Oh, he was no world-beater. He could never have afforded a split-level deal like this. But he adored you, he thought you were the most wonderful, virtuous, truthful—”
“Stop it. I won’t listen.”
“Most truthful—”
“Leave her alone, Fielding,” Jim said quietly. “You’ve drawn blood. Be satisfied.”
“Maybe I’ve developed a taste for it and want more.”
“Any more will be Daisy’s. Think about it.”
“Think about Daisy’s blood? All right, I’ll do that.” Fielding put on a mock-serious expression like an actor playing a doctor on a television commercial. “In this blood of hers there are certain genes which will be transmitted to her children and make monsters out of them. Like her father. Right?”
“The word monster doesn’t apply, as you well know.”
“Ada thinks it does. In fact, she’s not quite sane on the subject. But then perhaps guilt makes us all a little crazy eventually.”
Pinata said, “You know a lot about guilt, Fielding.”
“I’m an expert.”
“That makes you a little crazy, too, eh?”
Fielding grinned like an old dog. “You have to be a little crazy to take the risks I took in coming here.”
“Risks? Did you expect Mrs. Fielding or Mr. Harker to attack you?”
“You figure it out.”
“I’m trying.” Pinata crossed the room and stood beside Mrs. Fielding’s chair. “When Camilla telephoned you that night from Mrs. Rosario’s house, you said the call was a complete surprise to you?”
“Yes. I hadn’t seen him or heard from him for many years.”
“Then how did he find out that you were living in San Félice and that you were in a position where you could help him financially? A man in Camilla’s physical state wouldn’t start out across the country in the vague hope of locating a woman he hadn’t seen in years and finding her prosperous enough to assist him. He must have had two facts before he decided to come here—your address and your financial situation. Who told him?”
“I don’t know. Unless . . .” She stopped, turning her head slowly toward Fielding. “It was—it was you, Stan?”
After a moment’s hesitation, Fielding shrugged and said, “Sure. I told him.”
“Why? To make trouble for me?”
“I figured you could afford a little trouble. Things had gone pretty smooth for you. I didn’t actually plan anything, though. Not at first. It happened accidentally. I hit Albuquerque the end of that November. I decided to look Camilla up, thinking there was an off-chance he had struck it rich and wouldn’t mind passing some of it around. It was a bum guess, believe me. When I found him, he was on the last skid. His wife had died, and he was living, or half living, in a mud shack with a couple of Indians.”
His mouth stretched back from his teeth with no more expression or purpose than a piece of elastic. “Oh yes, it was quite a reunion, Ada. I’m sorry you missed it. It might have taught you a simple lesson, the difference between poorness and destitution. Poorness is having no money. Destitution is a real, a positive thing. It lives with you every minute. It eats at your stomach during the night, it drags at your arms and legs when you move, it bites your hands and ears on cold mornings, it pinches your throat when you swallow, it squeezes the moisture out of you, drop by drop by drop. Camilla sat there on his iron cot, dying in front of my eyes. And you think, while I stood and watched him, that I was worried about making trouble for you? What an egotist you are, Ada. Why, you didn’t even exist as a person anymore, for Camilla or for me. You were a possible source of money, and we both needed it desperately—Camilla to die with, and I to live with. So I said to him, why not put the bite on Ada? She’s got Daisy fixed up with a rich man, I told him; they wouldn’t miss a couple of thousand dollars.”
Mrs. Fielding’s face had stiffened with pain and shock. “And he agreed to—to put the bite on me?”
“You or anyone else. It hardly matters to a dying man. He knew he wasn’t going to make it in this life, and he’d gotten obsessed with the idea of the next one, having a fine funeral and going to heaven. I guess the idea of getting money from you appealed to him, particularly because he had a sister living here in San Félice. He thought he’d kill two birds: get the money and see Mrs. Rosario again. He had an idea that Mrs. Rosario had influence with the Church that would do him some good when he kicked off.”
“Then you were aware,” Pinata said, “when you arrived here, that Camilla was Juanita’s uncle?”
“No, no,” said Fielding. “Camilla had never called his sister anything but her first name, Filomena. It was a complete surprise to me seeing his picture when I took Juanita home this afternoon. But that’s when I began to be sure some dirty work was going on. Too many coincidences add up to a plan. Whose plan I didn’t know. But I did know my former wife, and plans are her specialty.”
“They’ve had to be,” Mrs. Fielding said. “I’ve had to look ahead if no one else would.”
“This time you looked so far ahead you didn’t see the road in front of you. You were worried about your grandchildren; you should have worried about your child.”
“Let’s get back to Camilla,” Pinata said to Fielding. “Obviously you expected a share of whatever money he could pry out of your former wife?”
“Of course. It was my idea.”
“You were pretty sure she’d pay up?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Oh, auld lang syne, and that sort of thing. As I said, Ada has a very sentimental nature.”
“And as I said, two thousand dollars is a heap of auld lang syne.”
Fielding shrugged. “We were all good friends once. Around the ranch they called us the three musketeers.”
“Oh?” It was difficult for Pinata to believe that Mrs. Fielding, with her strong racial prejudices, should ever have been one of a trio that included a Mexican ranch hand. But if Fielding’s statement was untrue, Ada Fielding would certainly deny it, and she made no attempt to do so.
All right, so she’s changed, Pinata thought. Maybe the years she spent with Fielding embittered her to the point where she’s prejudiced against anything that was a part of their life together. I can’t blame her much.
“The idea, then,” he said, “was for Camilla to come to San Félice, get the money, and return to Albuquerque with your share of it?”
Fielding’s hesitation was slight, but noticeable. “Sure.”
“And you trusted him?”
“I had to.”
“Oh, not necessarily. You could, for example, have accompanied him here. That would have been the logical thing to do under the circumstances, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t care.”
It seemed to Pinata a strangely inept answer for a glib man like Fielding. “As it turned out, you didn’t recei
ve your share of the money because he killed himself?”
“I didn’t get my share,” Fielding said, “because there wasn’t anything to share.”
“What do you mean?”
“Camilla didn’t get the money. She didn’t give it to him.”
Mrs. Fielding looked stunned for a moment. “That’s not true. I handed him two thousand dollars.”
“You’re lying, Ada. You promised him that much but you didn’t come across with it.”
“I swear I gave him the money. He put it in an envelope, then he hid the envelope under his shirt.”
“I don’t believe—”
“You’ll have to believe it, Fielding,” Pinata said. “That’s where it was found, in an envelope inside his shirt.”
“It was on him? It was there on him, all the time?”
“Certainly.”
“Why, that dirty bastard...” He began to curse, and each word that damned Camilla damned himself, too, but he couldn’t stop. It was as if he’d been saving up words for years, like money to be spent all at once, on one vast special project, his old friend, old enemy, Camilla. The violent emotion behind the flow of words surprised Pinata. Although he knew now that Fielding was responsible for Camilla’s death, he still didn’t understand why. Money alone couldn’t be the reason: Fielding had never cared enough about money even to pursue it with much energy, let alone kill for it. Perhaps, then, he had acted out of anger at being cheated by Camilla. But this theory was less likely than the other. In the first place, he hadn’t found out until now that he’d been cheated; in the second, he wasn’t a stand-up-and-fight type of man. If he was angry, he would walk away, as he’d walked away from every other difficult situation in his life.
A spasm of coughing had seized Fielding. Pinata poured half a glass of whiskey from the decanter on the coffee table and took it over to him. Ten seconds after Fielding had gulped the drink, his coughing stopped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, in a symbolic gesture of pushing back into it words that should never have escaped.
“No temperance lecture?” he said hoarsely. “Thanks, preacher man.”
“You were with Camilla that night, Fielding?”
“Hell, you don’t think I’d have trusted him to come all this way alone? Chances were he wouldn’t have made it back to Albuquerque even if he wanted to. He was a dying man.”
“Tell us what happened.”
“I can’t remember it all. I was drinking. I bought a bottle of wine because it was a cold night. Curly didn’t touch any of it; he wanted to see his sister, and she didn’t approve of drinking. When he came back from his sister’s house, he told me he’d called Ada and she was going to bring the money right away. I waited behind the signalman’s shack. I couldn’t see anything; it was too dark. But I heard Ada’s car arrive and leave again a few minutes later. I went over to Camilla. He said Ada had changed her mind and there was no money to share after all. I accused him of lying. He took the knife out of his pocket and switched the blade open. He threatened to kill me if I didn’t go away. I tried to get the knife away from him, and suddenly he fell over and—well, he was dead. It happened so fast. Just like that, he was dead.”
Pinata didn’t believe the entire story, but he was pretty sure a jury could be convinced that Fielding had acted in self-defense. A strong possibility existed that the case wouldn’t even reach a courtroom. Beyond Fielding’s own word there was no evidence against him, and he wasn’t likely to talk so freely in front of the police. Besides, the district attorney might be averse to reopening, without strong evidence, a case closed four years previously.
“I heard someone coming,” Fielding went on. “I got scared and started running down the tracks. Next thing I knew I was on a freight car heading south. I kept going. I just kept going. When I got back to Albuquerque, I told the two Indians Camilla had been living with that he had died in L.A., in case they might get the idea of reporting him missing. They believed me. They didn’t give a damn anyway. Camilla was no loss to them, or to the world. He was just a lousy no-good Mexican.” His eyes shifted back to Mrs. Fielding. He was smiling again, like a man enjoying a joke he couldn’t share, because it was too special or too involved. “Isn’t that right, Ada?”
She shook her head listlessly. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on now, Ada. Tell the people. You knew Camilla better than I did. You used to say he had the feelings of a poet. But you’ve learned better than that since, haven’t you? Tell them what a mean, worthless hunk of—”
“Stop it, Stan. Don’t.”
“Then say it.”
“All right. What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “He was a—a worthless man.”
“A lazy, stupid cholo, in spite of all your efforts to educate him. Isn’t that correct?”
“I—yes.”
“Repeat it, then.”
“Camilla was a—a lazy, stupid cholo.”
“Let’s drink to that.” Fielding stepped down off the hearth and started across the room toward the decanter. “How about it, Pinata? You’re a cholo too, aren’t you? Have a drink to another cholo, one who didn’t play it so smart.”
Pinata felt the blood rising up into his neck and face. Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo. . . . The old familiar word was as stinging an insult now as it had been in his childhood.. .. Take a trip to the northern polo. . . . But the anger Pinata felt was instinctive and general, not directed against Fielding. He realized that the man, for all his blustering arrogance, was suffering, perhaps for the first time, a moral pain as intense as the mortal pain Mrs. Rosario had suffered; and the exact cause of the pain Pinata didn’t understand any more than, as a layman, he understood the technical cause of Mrs. Rosario’s. He said, “You’d better lay off the liquor, Fielding.”
“Oh, preacher man, are you going to go into that routine again? Pour me a drink, Daisy baby, like a good girl.”
There were tears in Daisy’s eyes and in her voice when she spoke. “All right.” “You’ve always been a good Daddy-loving girl, haven’t you, Daisy baby?”
“Yes.”
“Then hurry up about it. I’m thirsty.”
“All right.”
She poured him half a glass of whiskey and turned her head away while he drank it, as if she couldn’t bear to witness his need and his compulsion. She said to Pinata, “What’s going to happen to my father? What will they do to him?”
“My guess is, not a thing.” Pinata sounded more confident than the circumstances warranted.
“First they’ll have to find me, Daisy baby,” Fielding said. “It won’t be easy. I’ve disappeared before. I can do it again. You might even say I’ve developed a real knack for it. This Eagle Scout here”—he pointed a thumb contemptuously at Pinata—”he can blast off to the police till he runs out of steam . It won’t do any good. There’s no case against me, just the one I’m carrying around inside. And that—well, I’m used to it.” He put his hand briefly and gently on Daisy’s hair. “I can take it. Don’t worry about me, Daisy baby. I’ll be here and there and around. Someday I’ll write to you.”
“Don’t go away like this, so quickly, so—”
“Come on now, you’re too big a girl to cry.”
“Don’t. Don’t go,” she said.
But she knew he would and that her search must begin again. She would see his face in crowds of strangers; she would catch a glimpse of him passing in a speeding car or walking into an elevator just before the door closed.
She tried to hold on to his arm. He said quickly, “Good-bye, Daisy,” and started across the room.
“Daddy...”
“Don’t call me Daddy anymore. That’s over. That’s gone.”
“Wait a minute, Fielding,” Pinata said. “Off the record, what did Camilla say or do to you that made you
furious enough to knife him?”
Fielding didn’t reply. He just turned and looked at his former wife with a terrible hatred. Then he walked out of the house. The slam of the door behind him was as final as the closing of a crypt.
“Why?” Daisy said. “Why?” The melancholy little whisper seemed to echo around the room in search of an answer. “Why did it have to happen, Mother?”
Mrs. Fielding sat, mute and rigid, a snow statue awaiting the first ominous rays of the sun.
“You’ve got to answer me, Mother.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Now.”
“All right.”
With a sigh of reluctance Mrs. Fielding stood up. She was holding in her hand something she’d taken unobtrusively from her pocket. It was an envelope, yellowed by age and wrinkled as if it had been dragged in and out of dozens of pockets and drawers and corners and handbags. “This came for you a long time ago, Daisy. I never thought I’d have to give it to you. It’s a letter from—from your father.”
“Why did you keep it from me?”
“Your father makes that quite clear.”
“Then you’ve read it?”
“Read it?” Mrs. Fielding repeated wearily. “A hundred times, two hundred—I lost count.”
Daisy took the envelope. Her name and the old address on Laurel Street were printed in a shaky and unfamiliar hand. The postmark said, “San Félice, December 1, 1955.”
As Pinata watched her unfold the letter, the malevolent chant from his childhood kept running through his head: Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo. He hoped that his own children would never have to hear it and remember. His children and Daisy’s.
21
My beloved Daisy:
It has been so many years since I have seen you. Perhaps, at this hour that is very late for me, I should not step back into your life. But I cannot help it. My blood runs in your veins. When I die, part of me will still be alive, in you, in your children, in your children’s children. It is a thought that takes some of the ugliness out of these cruel years, some of the sting out of the tricks of time.
A Stranger in My Grave Page 28
