The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  “I’m—”

  “You’re kind.”

  “I’m—”

  “You’re generous.”

  “I’m—”

  He paused, and so, at last, did I.

  “I’m gay,” he said.

  _____

  When I could speak again, I murmured, “You’re kidding.”

  “No.” His eyes met mine unflinchingly now, and his voice dropped. “I figured it out a long time ago. I got married anyway. Funny, I didn’t think I wanted a child. But we had one, and she’s wonderful. I really thought I could—you know. Make it work.” Slowly, looking at nothing, I buttoned my blouse.

  “I’m sorry, Rita.”

  My chest felt like it had been kicked by a horse. “Gary, I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s true.” He looked at me steadily.

  “Well,” I said, “you sure can drop the bomb.”

  “Well!” he replied. “I was under some fairly heavy fire, wasn’t I?”

  I laughed weakly.

  “I considered lying, but I—I feel I can talk to you. Actually, I feel quite warmly toward you, I’m sure that’s what you felt. If I were straight, you know—”

  “OH, GOD, that hurts, Gary. Missed by that much.” I gripped my temple. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that.”

  “I’m just being honest, Rita. You feel safe with me, I feel safe with you. I don’t really talk about this.”

  We paused, made coffee, and talked for more than an hour. The coffee aroma filled the air with comfort.

  I was thunderstruck, of course, and more hideously embarrassed than I’d ever been in my life. Naturally I didn’t blame myself. I wanted only to throw all the office furniture through the window, then go home and cry. I forced myself to be low-key and accepting. Somehow I was able to hold my temper and be a listening ear for Gary that afternoon without wanting to commit suicide.

  He told me he was tremendously relieved to be able to talk about it. He said he trusted me completely, which, again, made me feel both great and horrible.

  I said, “Well, I have to ask, what’s the situation with Jacqueline? Is she in denial?”

  “Totally. I’ve hinted at it, but she won’t see it yet, and frankly, I don’t want to be blunt about it. I know that’s dishonest. I’m thinking of Jade. I’m living a double life.”

  “You mean you—”

  “No, no, I’m not seeing anyone. Hell, I have no time these days. But as you saw when she dropped in the other evening, Jacqueline has a subsurface suspicion that something’s wrong, but she can’t bring herself to figure it out.”

  “Seems like you ought to just tell her and let the chips fall.”

  “I will. But … I’m … I’m afraid!” His eyes brimmed and his splendid chest heave with sorrow. “I fought it all my life. I fell in love with boys at school, but ran from them in shame. I dated girls. Japanese families aren’t big on diversity. I feared my own culture. And I was warped by it. My ancestors ought to punish me for saying that so harshly. I was so glad to be in America. Still, I suppressed my feelings for years—quite successfully! When Jacqueline agreed to marry me, I thought I’d beaten it. How can a married man be gay?” He waited for me to comment.

  “That was pretty dumb, Gary.”

  “Can you imagine I thought such a thing?”

  He talked on, telling me that since Jade was born he’d only acted on his feelings with one wonderful guy. They’d met by chance, had a passionate affair, but the man couldn’t take Gary’s closeted lifestyle.

  Because of course Gary’s celebrity was a problem. How many big-time defendants want a known homosexual defending them in the courtroom? How many jurors would have a hidden prejudice against a fag attorney?

  “When this trial is over, Rita, I swear I’ll handle it with Jacqueline. I’ve been a deceitful bastard too long.”

  “Well jeez, Gary, you don’t have to be St. Augustine about it.”

  “When you were telling me how wonderful I am, it made me sick to my stomach.” He dropped his head into his hands. “I hate to break up my family,” he almost sobbed. “I feel that I’d find the courage to do what I have to do if I could just meet up with a good man again.”

  I touched his shoulder, the shoulder I would never think of in the same way again. “You know, there are other options. Maybe Jacqueline wouldn’t mind if you—”

  “She’d mind. Believe me, she’d mind.”

  Well, it had been a mighty fine fantasy while it lasted.

  Chapter 21 – What Maria Helena Knows

  OURO PRÊTO, BRAZIL

  George Rowe carried toys wherever he went because everyone likes them. The sudden appearance of a toy makes people relax and smile. With a toy, a child can be bribed to stop crying and go away, or climb through a window and unlatch a door, or come back tomorrow with something from Daddy’s workshop. Also, tossing a kite into the air and flying it can be a distraction, if you need one.

  The yo-yos and chess set had, by the skin of their teeth, helped with the tough boys in the grotto. However, the schoolgirl forger, Maria Helena, was not a child anymore, especially given her line of work, and it was work.

  “Her father, he taught her the business of false documents,” explained Raimundo as he and Rowe hiked through the dark colonial town as night fell. “She is sixteen years old.” Rowe had been away in America for more than a month, and now he was back. Raimundo had found out some things in the meantime.

  Ouro Prêto was especially beautiful in the evening, when the wind turned soft and the houses and cantinas threw their sparks of light over the hills. It was as beautiful as San Francisco, Rowe thought, his favorite city. He liked to drive the six hours from Los Angeles to San Francisco just for overnight. He would hike the headlands, glorying in the cool breezes, then eat spaghetti in North Beach with a couple of bail bondsmen and their wives, old friends.

  Raimundo, in his questioning Portuguese accent, said, “Her father, he is in the prison now because he hoped he would do better to counterfeit American money. But—he found too much competition. Too much big fishs.” Raimundo said “hoped” in two soft syllables, hope-et.

  “I see,” said Rowe.

  This evening Raimundo wore his canvas hat and carried a stout walking staff, swinging it along with only a tiny tap as it hit the road. “He has two sons, worthless bastards who suck the money Maria Helena makes.”

  “Two sons. They live there?”

  “Yes, but they are drunks. Her mother, she sits in the wheelchair from polio.”

  “I see,” said Rowe. “Dog?”

  “No dog. Dogs are not a problem in any case.” Raimundo lifted his wiry brown arm. “There is the house.”

  “At the foot of the hill?”

  “Soon the brothers will be drunk for the night. They have television. The mother, she can not go down steps. There is a room below the ground. If I made photography I would build the darkroom there.”

  “A cellar?”

  “Yes. I have seen light come through a hole in the wall.”

  “How big is the hole?”

  Raimundo held his thumb and forefinger a few inches apart and shook his head. “Small. Only for air.”

  “A vent?”

  “A vent.”

  Rowe said, “You tried to get her to talk to you again?”

  “Once. No good. She is very like wolf.”

  “You mean a fox?”

  “No, I mean wolf.”

  They walked on.

  Raimundo said, “I told my granddaughter where Maria Helena goes with her friends. I gave her one bottle of rum to take to there tonight, also DVD of American movie called Shred the Finger.”

  “Raimundo!” exclaimed Rowe, pleased at the ingenuity yet disconcerted, remembering the meek girl he’d met that first night at dinner. He didn’t expect she’d fit in to the delinquent crowd.

  “My granddaughter, she thinks she can keep Maria Helena away until eleven o’clock.” He glanced sideways at Rowe. “
She has my blood. More brave than you think.”

  Rowe didn’t like to involve more people than absolutely necessary, but he didn’t have much choice at this point.

  “We will tunnel in,” announced Raimundo.

  “What?”

  “Best way,” said his companion confidently. “You will see.”

  “I thought we’d just knock on the door and do the police detective thing.”

  “The family, they are on guard. The mother will not open the door. Even if so, why let strangers in to look in her house? Too risky. The brothers? They will rise up if we make trouble. Who knows?”

  Rowe had already told Raimundo he did not want to use force or terror on Maria Helena or her family. “They’ll hear us,” he said. “And we don’t even have any tools.”

  “You will see.”

  Flanking Maria Helena’s house on one side was a neighboring home, on the other a steep bank down to another street. The front windows glowed golden, spilling lamplight in a soft pool toward the road. Rowe saw a flickering TV screen behind the thin curtains. The windows were open.

  They crept up to the side of the house next to the embankment. The walls were masonry, like all the other houses in town, painted white, with the same cheerful red tile roof. Raimundo chose a spot behind a bush and between the two windows—thankfully dark—that overlooked the bank. He began scraping the rocky soil away with his staff. Only now did Rowe notice how sharp the staff’s point was. After Raimundo had loosened half a bushel’s worth of dirt, he set down the staff and drew two pairs of leather work gloves from his pocket. He put on a pair and handed the other to Rowe.

  “Help me,” he directed in a whisper, and the two men got down on their knees and scraped the dirt away by hand. A half moon, which had begun to glow at sunset, helped them to see.

  So it went: Raimundo would disrupt the dirt with his stick, and they would paw it away from the house’s foundation. The work went fast. Raimundo manipulated the stick in the soil expertly, prying up rocks, lancing the sharp end down again into the dry hole, loosening dirt by the bucket’s worth every few seconds.

  Rowe marveled at the low-tech efficiency of it. Without metal tools striking rock, and with the night breeze riffling the trees, their work was almost noiseless. Raimundo whispered with a smile, “This is how a garimpeiro pays back another who has wronged him.”

  Rowe didn’t know exactly what that meant, but Raimundo had the look of a hound on the scent of a rabbit. Rowe felt the same way, his breath coming deep, his nerves taut. More conversation would be foolish.

  The predominant trees, whatever they were, gave off a resinous smell after the day’s heat.

  Rowe supposed the cellar would have a dirt floor, and he was right. Raimundo dug down about seven feet, came to the end of the stone block foundation, then started going horizontally. He filled his hat with dirt and rocks, which he tossed up to the surface. Rowe kept the opening clear. He wondered whether any of the stones they were digging up were topazes or emeralds.

  At last Raimundo slithered feet-first into the tunnel. Just before his head disappeared, he whispered, “Wait.”

  Rowe strained his eyes trying to see the dark bottom of the hole. A rat or a night bird rustled leaf litter nearby. He paid no attention. His whole nervous system was attuned to that hole. The night breeze chilled the sweat on his face.

  He wondered what he would find in Maria Helena’s workroom. Practically anything would do, he thought. He would carry away some incriminating things, perhaps ID blanks or stolen passports, or perhaps spoiled pieces thrown into a bin, or computer disks. Then he would approach Maria Helena in some neutral public place for a quiet discussion. If he were to find copies of the documents she might have made for Tenaway, so much the better, but he judged she was probably too careful for that.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder.

  Biting back a grunt of panic he whirled, already calming himself, prepared to find Raimundo laughing at him silently, having magically found his way out some other way.

  Instead he was confronted by the angry countenance of Maria Helena herself. She hissed at him in Portuguese, but did not scream. Though her eyes were in shadow, he could just make them out. He detected absolutely no fear in them. She seemed to want to be as quiet about this extraordinary intrusion as he did. He could tell she recognized him from the grotto.

  He collected himself almost instantly. He kicked a spurt of dirt quickly into the hole to attract Raimundo’s attention. He pointed to his chest, then to the hole, then further with the same finger, then held up one finger, to indicate an accomplice. He did not want her to be surprised by Raimundo.

  The girl was fierce and amused in equal parts. Rowe saw something in her eyes, as if she were seeing the dawning of some special opportunity.

  Raimundo appeared, said, “Euh!” then spoke to her in Portuguese. She stood in the deepening darkness with her hands on her hips, then spoke to Raimundo and walked into the house.

  “Follow me,” said Raimundo, sliding down the hole again.

  Rowe’s first instinct was not to go into a situation he could not quickly escape from. But he had perceived that amusement in Maria Helena’s face, as well as in the way she tilted her hips, so he took the risk.

  Inside the cellar they brushed themselves off. Raimundo found a light switch, and Maria Helena descended the steps, closing the upstairs door carefully behind her. They spoke in low voices.

  The cellar, capable of being blacked out as a darkroom, was crammed with all sorts of equipment—scanners, a computer, a small hand-driven press, paper supplies, plastic film, a stereo microscope, bottles of dye, and a strongbox that looked like it fell off a pirate ship three hundred years ago. The place smelled of the sharp chemicals of photographic processing.

  A few photographs had been clipped to a wire strung across a corner. They were pictures of people at a festival, middle-aged Brazilian moms and dads from the working class, you could tell from their clothing, who had gotten caught up in the spirit of celebration. They looked violent, almost feral, dancing or throwing back a drink, inadvertently baring their teeth and gums in uninhibited joy. Maria Helena, evidently, had an eye for the decisive moment.

  The girl perched herself on a worktable, Raimundo threw a leg over the one straight chair in the place, and Rowe squatted in the center of the room beneath the bare bulb.

  Maria Helena’s face was classically oval, like the waitress Raimundo had pinched in the café, with a longish nose and peaked upper lip. The nose gave her face an arrogance beyond what showed in her eyes. Her body, Rowe perceived, was unspoiled by neurosis; no anorexia, no tight posture. She was one of those rare humans with unconditional self-confidence.

  She spoke, and Raimundo said in English, “She understands what you want. She will tell you what she wants. We will find no thing here. She says if you threaten her you will not get what you want.”

  Rowe asked Raimundo, “Where is your granddaughter?”

  “Maria Helena says she made her go home.” He looked crestfallen.

  “Ask her what she wants.”

  He did, and as she spoke, Raimundo burst out laughing. “She wants to go to the film school in United States!”

  Rowe did not smile.

  “She wants to make film. Films,” he corrected himself. “About the way people really are, deep in the heart!”

  The girl spoke at angry length, swinging one sandal-clad foot in a short arc.

  Raimundo, chastened, told Rowe, “She wants to get away from the black market. She is more smart, I see, than her father. She does not want to live like this, work in secret. Good pay, but dangerous. She has some money in the bank she wants to give to her mother. Then she wants to go to America with ten thousand new dollars. From you! Ha! Ten thousand dollars. My friend, you must not—”

  The girl spoke again. “I am learning English. Not good yet.”

  “Oh,” said Rowe.

  “I have travel papers,” said Maria Helena.

  “
I bet you do,” said Rowe, glancing around her factory. “How come you use old photography—not digital?”

  Slowly, she said, “Old...? Ah! Because I can use thick paper. More thicker than for digital. Better for making emboss in passport.” Lifting her head proudly, she added, “I do by hand, under microscope.”

  “I have to tell you, film school’s going to cost more than ten thousand dollars.”

  She said, “I get to America, I get work. No problem.” She gestured to one of her photographs of the revelers. “The world is in that eye. That mouth. That foot. I want to find it. All of time is in one thing.”

  “Your English is better than you think,” Rowe told her.

  _____

  The next morning the three met in town at the bank Maria Helena had named. She watched as Rowe wrote out directions for a wire transfer from his Fenco account. She would not agree to half now, half later. “All now,” she said coolly, as if certain her luck had finally changed.

  Rowe found himself helplessly charmed by this child racketeer. The money, though a huge chunk out of his budget for this job, was all right. If he didn’t spend it here and now, he might lose Tenaway entirely. Raimundo struggled to manage his shock that Rowe would hand over so much money to a little girl.

  When the bank manager showed her the new balance in her account, they went to a café. The manager looked after them as they went out. Rowe had slipped him two hundred to keep his thoughts to himself. Rowe and Raimundo wore clean clothes and Raimundo had on a newer, city-type straw hat. At the café they ordered the sweet, boiling-hot coffee Brazilians love, bread, and soft white cheese that Raimundo said was a local specialty. It tasted good, but Rowe only took two bites; he was too keyed up.

  Maria Helena spoke at length about Richard Tenaway, in Portuguese. The words poured out; she did not want to hesitate to find English ones, she explained through Raimundo.

  Her story was as simple and heartbreaking as the landscape of Minas Gerais on a foggy morning.