Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  I stopped. There was no point in following. The rain seemed to be stopping, too, so I returned to the truck and leaned on it, trying to conjure my next move. Either Jaime himself had dumped Janet’s body and come back to report the job done, or someone else had just left it there, barely missing being seen. A mysterious X. Which I didn’t buy.

  I got back into the truck and continued on to Sanborn Road. There were no cars parked by Mrs. Karsh’s weathered house, and no battered yellow truck.

  I proceeded down the road a bit and parked on the left. Taking binoculars in hand, I got out of the truck and looked out across the floodplain of the Laguna de Santa Rosa, assuming my bird-watcher pose. The Laguna was a narrow, sleepy stream that wandered dreamily through a belt of willows and oaks. The trees that formed the riparian belt were dotted with songbirds, and the nearby grasses sprouted the white heads of cattle egrets.

  I stepped up to the barbed wire fence that paralleled the road, popped the top and middle strands a bit farther apart, bent forward from my right hip, and swung myself through. I’ve climbed through fences that way so many times in my life that I barely broke stride. From the fence I wandered down to the stream, pulling a strand of grass to chew. The grass was greener there, and much richer. Cattle grazed laconically along the stream bank, and some lay peacefully chewing their cuds in the rain-dampened grass. A great blue heron fished in the shallow waters. A flock of blackbirds rose and fell through the air with the careening whims of their leader, then abruptly coalesced along the power lines that followed the road. I raised the binoculars to my eyes and focused on the wires. Yellow eyes; Brewer’s blackbirds. Beautiful, glossy black feathers. I watched the egrets for a while, then a great blue heron that stood motionless in the slowly flowing waters.

  I shook my head, thinking sadly of the article in the Sebastopol Times & News: somewhere along the Laguna, developers hoped to build new housing. Right here in the wetlands, nature’s great filter, which catches the polluted runoff from the land and cleans it through ion-rich clays before releasing the waters to the oceans. But while farmers prefer wetlands for their flat, moist soils, developers lust after them as inexpensive land on which to build town homes and factories, shopping malls and business parks. Before the human race got so good at multiplying its numbers, the damage to the balance of nature wasn’t critical. But now human populations increase geometrically, and with them, their effluent load, full of brand-new man-made toxins. They are increasing faster than we can invent the filters to catch them, at the same time that we are destroying the wetland filters nature built, draining them and paving them, rationalizing that we can do without this one, or that we won’t miss a few or even most.

  I thought of Janet, riding her bicycle out along the Laguna, admiring what Mother Nature had done right. Had she seen a threat to what she held dear?

  West of the Laguna, the ground rose steeply into the wooded hills studded with orchards, vineyards, and the occasional farmhouse. I trained the binoculars on them. The drier ground above was full of sheep and a few goats. A small, square farmhouse stood in the middle of that range, near a large, aging barn. A band of children were chasing the goats, one medium-sized boy joyously wielding a stick.

  I swung the binoculars back to the farmhouse. A short, dark man was climbing into a familiar-looking battered yellow pickup. Yes, it was the man who had fetched Matthew Karsh back from the gatepost the first time I visited the neighborhood. Jaime, the hired hand. Was this where he lived? And these his children?

  I hurried back to my truck, climbed into the seat, and pulled the detailed map I’d copied at the library out of the door of the blue truck and took a good squint. The road Jaime was driving down was called Ferris Road. Why was that name familiar?

  I dug through my notes, found the photocopies I’d made of the Sebastopol Times & News. Sure enough, there it was, on the weekly “County Sheriff’s Log” for the date Janet’s body had been found:

  Miwok Mills: Jaime Potrero Martinez, 43, 10225 Ferris Rd., was arrested for public drunkenness. He was released the next day on a citation to appear in court.

  I had no idea what connection this incident might have to the death of Janet Pinchon, but I didn’t believe in coincidences when murder was involved. Had Jaime Martinez dumped Janet’s body and then spent the day at the bar in Miwok Mills drowning his fear and guilt? Or had he killed Janet himself? No, he was a petite man, his hands too small to have left those marks.

  I was just trying to decide whether it would be safe to pay a call on Jaime Potrero Martinez at his home when I heard a vehicle approaching. I glanced up into the rearview mirror. It was a battered yellow truck, pulling up behind me.

  Jaime Potrero Martinez had come to me.

  18

  I stayed in my truck, figuring that if Jaime was going to try something hostile, I was safer sitting at the controls of twenty-five hundred pounds of steel than challenging him on foot. He stayed where he was. He was short enough that all I could see over the dashboard of his truck was the upper half of his dark, ruddy face topped by a green and white cap that advertised pizza. Even with such a limited view of him, I had no trouble identifying him as the man I had seen bullying Matthew Karsh into that same yellow truck; those hard, coal-black eyes and black, angry brows were unmistakable.

  Through those eyes he’d seen me from across the Laguna and had hurried over here to confront me. Why? His eyes burned with the same fierceness I’d seen him use on Matthew Karsh, but now they held something else, too; I could see the whites nearly all the way around the pupils. That looked to me like fear, but not ordinary fear; he seemed less afraid of me than of something about me.

  I waited. He stayed in his truck. What was frightening him? Was he one more person who mistook me for Janet? Did he believe in ghosts?

  Hell, it was broad daylight, or as bright as it was going to get, and this was a public place; how dangerous could it be to get out of my truck and talk to him? If he steered his truck toward me, I reasoned, I could always vault the fence.

  So I climbed out and walked back to his driver’s-side window. Not too quickly. Hands in pockets, kind of casual. Still chewing on that stalk of grass. As I moved closer, his eyes narrowed, and he seemed less frightened and more enraged, so I stopped about ten feet away. “Buenos días,” I said. “I help you?”

  He nodded his head, one quick, sharp motion, driven by force of habit and ingrained manners, but frowned, his eyes still bugging. “Buenos,” he replied. “You trespassing.” He stared defiantly at the ground, nostrils flaring.

  Oh, how I do hate to be told to bugger off. Such gracelessness, such utter lack of hospitality, really truly gets under my skin. I moved closer. “This is a public roadway, verdad?”

  “Before!” he insisted, pointing over the fence at the pasture. “I seen you from my house.”

  “Ah. When I was watching the birds. Lovely, aren’t they?”

  Jaime clenched the steering wheel. “This is private land. You keep off.”

  Just what the hell did I think I was doing taunting him? What was getting into me? I reminded myself I should not take this man lightly, reminded myself also that I was afraid of Matthew Karsh, and that Matthew Karsh was afraid of this man. I used this thought like a nail, jabbing myself with it to make myself pay attention, not be foolish. “You’re Jaime Martinez,” I said, as evenly as I could. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  Jaime’s jaw muscles bunched.

  “I understand you were the man who found Janet Pinchon’s body. She was a friend of mine, and—”

  Jaime rolled up his window fast, his mouth working furiously in a streak of Spanish curses, ground the battered yellow truck into reverse, and punched the gas.

  “Hey!” I slammed the window with the heel of my hand, ripping the flesh on a bit of bent trim as the truck accelerated away from me.

  The yellow truck backed wildly for twenty yards, careened into a gate access, crashed into first, and charged away.

  I stood squ
eezing my hand, trying to stop the bleeding.

  Down along the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the cows still chewed their cuds, the egrets and the heron kept on hunting, and once again, it began to rain.

  19

  Chevron stations don’t sell first aid kits along with the junk food. I returned to the Wagon Trail Motel and prevailed upon the manager to bandage me up. She arched one handsome black eyebrow as she expertly bound my wound with homemade butterfly bandages and gauze. Her doe-eyed daughter watched with amazement and her infant son slept peacefully in his bassinet, oblivious to my foolishness. Now the girl tugged at her mother’s elbow. The woman whispered something to her in Spanish. The child looked at me with alarm and withdrew halfway inside the inner door.

  “Your Elyria Kretzmer phoned while you were out,” the manager announced, as she cranked an extra wrap of adhesive tape around my wrist. She gave it a tug, to let me know what she thought of women who go around cutting their hands, and while she was at it, she gave a good stare at my lacerated knee.

  “Ouch. Thanks.”

  “She wants you to call her.”

  “Yeah, I’ll get to it.”

  The eyebrow arched again. “She said she was worried about you. Now I am, too.”

  “I just caught it on a fence,” I lied. Embarrassment is the one thing that can make a truly talented liar out of me. “Thanks for your help. I’ll go to my room now and be good.”

  “She left her number.”

  “I have it,” I snapped, as I hurried out the door.

  I did go to my room. I went there and paced for a good ten minutes, cradling my aching hand. Every fifth or sixth time I turned, I would glance at myself in the mirror, trying to figure out what a Mexican campesino had seen in me that would both enrage and spook him. So I looked like a dead woman; was that a sin? I had been thinking of Jaime as a lackey, a hired hand, but what I had just learned of him suggested that his involvement went far beyond that. Had Janet once stood along that stream bank and stared?

  I looked around the room, staring into Janet’s boxes for an answer. “What scared him, Janet?” I whispered. “Did he threaten you, too? What’s so important about a few acres of bottomland that he has to run me off?”

  The boxes didn’t answer.

  My hand began to throb. Finally I sat down to write my thoughts out on paper, so they’d quit fluttering around. I stared at the pad for a while, then gingerly picked up my pencil. I couldn’t put any weight on the heel of my hand, but I managed to write legibly. I made myself a list of questions:

  Did detective question P. Ryan?

  Who and where is Duke?

  What isn’t Suzanne Cousins telling me?

  Who profits by that division of $40,000 in Valentine Reeves’ notebook?

  Why was Janet fired?

  Where was Murbles at the time of the murder?

  Then I took up the telephone and phoned Pat Ryan, finding him at his desk at HRC.

  “Ryan,” he answered, in a dull moan. I could hear his fingers tapping at the keys of the computer. Click-click. Click. He sniffed, clearing congestion from his voice. Had he been up all night?

  “It’s Em. I had another question, if you can stand it.”

  “Sure.” He sounded like he was speaking, if not from the grave, then at least from its lip.

  “Did the Sheriff’s Department ever question you or anyone else at HRC about Janet, like right after she died?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t here.” Click, click, click.

  “You weren’t?”

  “No, I was on a job out of town.”

  “But you were there when she was fired. What day of the week was that?”

  “It was a Monday. An odd day to fire someone, don’t you think?”

  “Odd? Why?”

  “Oh, you know; they usually fire people on a Friday.”

  “Who does? Why?”

  “They always do it that way, every place I’ve worked. That way, the other boys and girls have the weekend to cool off. Limits the gossip and breast-beating.”

  “I see. So you were on a job out of town?”

  “No, well, you see, it wasn’t really a job. That Hollingsworth.”

  “That Hollingsworth, what?”

  “It was a glorified errand. Adam Horowitz could have done it. I tell you, these guys—”

  “Wait, slow down. When did Hollingsworth send you out of town?”

  “Oh, half an hour after Janet left.”

  “And you were gone how long?”

  “Well, it was supposed to be two days, but when I called in, he had another errand, and that one put me near Fresno, so he said why didn’t I just take some comp time and see my wife for a week?”

  “Didn’t that seem odd to you?”

  “Well, frankly, yes, because I knew this Work Plan I’m doing was pending. It’s on a short fuse, tight deadline. Any day we were supposed to get the comments on the first draft, and I was supposed to respond to them. But I didn’t complain; I’ve logged an extra ten to thirty hours a week for these guys since the day I started working here two years ago, and I haven’t been able to take more than a few days off.”

  No wonder Pat Ryan looked like the walking dead. “So you just got back this last week?”

  “Right.”

  “Did they tell you about Janet’s murder when you called in?”

  “No. Or the Turks didn’t, but Jaki did.”

  “Who’s Jaki?”

  “Jaki was the secretary before Cynthia. She phoned me down in Fresno to tell me. Real heads-up kind of babe.”

  “Well, that opens another question. Why and when did Jaki leave?”

  “She said she didn’t like working here anymore. She left the week Janet was, ah … was killed. Cynthia is a temp. They probably ought to be interviewing for someone else, but I don’t suppose they have to pay a lot for Cynthia, so they’ll probably string her along awhile. Or until she makes a big enough mistake they decide to execute her,” he said bitterly.

  “Can you give me a home phone number for this Jaki?”

  Pat told me to hold on for a moment. Then gave me a number in Rohnert Park, a town he said was south of Santa Rosa. I wrote it down on the pad of paper, adding Jaki to my list of questions. “Jaki’s a nice kid,” he said. “Be gentle.”

  “I will. One more question: who’s Valentine Reeves, and what’s he got to hide?”

  “Got me.”

  “You don’t know him?”

  “No, sorry. Should I?”

  “He’s an HRC client. He runs a construction company.”

  “That would have been Janet’s territory.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s construction people who get environmental assessments done. They need a clean assessment, remember, in order to buy land to build on, or to get a construction loan.”

  I pondered that for a moment. Then inspiration struck. “Can you dig a site address out of the computer where a job was done for Reeves?”

  “Spell the name.” I did. I heard Pat clicking away at his computer. “Here it is. Or wait, we’ve done several for him. Yes, he’s a big customer, it looks like. Let me read them to you.”

  I scribbled as fast as I could, given the pain in my hand, but I might as well have saved myself writing down the first three. Number four was getting to be a familiar address: 10225 Ferris Road. The home of Jaime Potrero Martinez.

  * * *

  JAKI WAS IN and willing to talk to me. When I pulled up in front of her cracker-box little town home, she was sitting out front on a concrete step, pulling a weed from the minuscule flower bed next to it. She was petite and had short, dark hair cut in a butchy ruff that was longer down the back of the neck than on top of her head. She had on purple lipstick and wore big purple trousers and a black vest encrusted with antique buttons. Her eyes were dark and limpid, yet lively, like a cocker spaniel on uppers. Politely not commenting on my bandaged hand as she sized me up, she shook my left hand with hers and motioned for me to step
inside her abode, which featured a tall, spindly fir tree decked out with popcorn strands, lights in the shapes of hot chiles, and slick photographs of male bodybuilders that had been cut out from a calendar and hung up with ribbons through holes punched in the middle of their self-admiring heads. Jaki stretched her purple lips with pride as I admired her efforts at Christmas decor and said, “Pat Ryan just called, said you were okay to talk to, but to watch my back. What’s up? And what happened to your hand?”

  Candor seemed the best policy with anyone who wore purple lipstick. “I caught it on a truck door. And I’m trying to learn what I can about Janet Pinchon’s murder. I’ve gone undercover, taking her job at HRC. I’m crosswise with Rauch, Adam Horowitz, at least one client, and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department. But I was hoping you could help.”

  Jaki grinned. “My kind of woman. I liked Janet. Who gets along with Rauch anyway? And Adam Horowitz—well, pissing him off just means you’re breathing. Yeah, if you can leave me out of your fight with the Sheriff, I’ll help. If I can.” She showed me to a futon couch and curled up at one end of it, pulling a box of fat-free cookies out from under a cushion and leaving it communally open on the coffee table.

  I sat down and greedily snatched a cookie. A long-haired cat with fish breath briskly claimed my lap. I munched. The cat purred.

  “That’s Brutess. She has good taste in humanoids,” Jaki informed me. “So speak: how can I help you bust Janet’s murderer?”

  “First, why did you leave HRC? Did that have anything to do with Janet?”

  “No, the Janet thing just tore it. I got a better job. That’s code for ‘I couldn’t stand the sons of bitches a minute longer.’”

  “Can you expand on that?”

  “For hours.”

  “Okay, can you think of anything that would pertain to Janet’s relationship with the company?”

  “Well, she was a pretty honest babe. Into doing good and all that. I’m sure it rubbed her the wrong way to work for those slimeballs. But beyond that, she was kind of quiet, you know?”