Making Waves

by Catherine Todd

  “Coffee?” I offered, to show that my intentions were benign.

  She shook her head. “No, thank you.”

  I faced her across the kitchen table. “Maria, please tell me the truth. This might be important. Did Manuel’s leaving have anything to do with the death of Mrs. Hampton?”

  She studied her fingers, with their bitten nails and swollen knuckles, as if they were the most important objects in the world. “La Migra.”

  “Pardon me?” I asked her.

  “La Migra, you know.” She waved a hand in a wide circle. “Immigration. Manuel was”—she lowered her voice—“illegal.”

  “Is that what scared him?”

  She looked at me assessingly. “I can’t tell you that, Señora James.”

  “Maria, did Manuel do something wrong?”

  “No!” She seemed outraged at the suggestion.

  “Then if you tell me the truth, he won’t get into any trouble. Does he know something about Mrs. Hampton’s death?”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  She sighed and rested her elbows on the table. “Manuel…he see—saw—somebody,” she said quietly.

  “Saw somebody when? You mean when Mrs. Hampton died?”

  She nodded.

  “Who was it?” I hoped my voice wasn’t trembling.

  “A man. He did not know who. He was far away.”

  “Mr. Hampton?” I prompted.

  “I don’t know,” she insisted. “Manuel did not see.” She studied her wedding ring with little enthusiasm and sighed. “He came back. He went home and then he remember he left a—” Her eyes looked upward, searching for the word. She shrugged and gave up. “I don’t know, some tool. He leave it outside, in the yard, and Mrs. Hampton get very mad if the gardeners leave tools out. So he came back.” A natural storyteller once she got going, she paused for effect. “Then he saw this man, bending over the pool. He saw the señora’s head, above the water. It was far away, but the light was on. The señora—she wasn’t decent, Mrs. James. Sometimes she wear no clothes in front of Manuel. So he look away. He put away this—thing—and he went home. That is all.”

  “And then the next day they discovered she was dead?”

  “Sí.” She put her hands up to her face. “¡Ay, que miedo! Manuel did not want to talk to the police, so he came here. He want to stay with me, but I could not permit this, because of the children.” She looked down. I wondered whether Manuel might have been something more to her than—or other than—her cousin. “I told him he was estupido, because if she was murdered the police would think he did it. He was very afraid. He want to go back to Mexico right away, but he did not have money for the bus. So I said he could stay here until I could give him the money.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I’m sorry, Señora James.”

  I touched her arm. “It’s all right. I’m glad it was Manuel, and not some homeless—well, I’m glad it was Manuel. What happened next?”

  “We wait for news. Manuel, he gets up in the morning very early and takes a bus to the park.”

  “The park?”

  “Sí. The big one in San Diego. Balboa. He meet many people who speak Spanish there. Some of them are living there, too, so some days he sleeps in their camp with them.” She shook her head sternly. “That is not a good way to live, Mrs. James.”

  I nodded agreement. “I know. Go on.”

  “After a day or two, it is obvious that the police are not looking for Manuel. They say the señora’s death was an accident or…”

  “Suicide?” I suggested.

  She crossed herself hastily. “Yes. So I tell Manuel it is safe to look for another job, but he say—said—no.” Her eyes grew big. “He say that if he is the only person who knows about this man, this visitor, it is dangerous to have this knowledge, no matter what the police say. So I gave him the money and he went home.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said firmly.

  “Maria, I have to get in touch with him. I have to know more about this man he saw.”

  Her eyes widened. “No, señora! You promised.”

  “I promised nothing would happen to him. I meant it. But you must see that if he knows something important about what may turn out to be a murder, it is his duty to come forward.”

  She shrugged. “The police are not interested, señora. Did not your friend tell you so?”

  “Well, yes, but they didn’t know about Manuel.”

  “And if they did, how can you promise that they will not accuse him? The very best thing that could happen would be that they would bring him back here, question him, and send him back to Mexico again. The worst, well…why should Manuel go through all that?”

  “Well, couldn’t he at least talk to me?”

  She shook her head. “Impossible.”

  “Maria,” I began.

  “Impossible,” she insisted. “I do not know where he is.”

  “I thought you said he went home to your village in Mexico.”

  “That is so,” she agreed, “but by now he has left again.”

  I sighed. “Where has he gone?”

  She spread her hands wide. “Texas, maybe. Or New York. Chicago. He might have gone to Los Angeles. I do not know. He will contact me when he is ready.”

  Whether she was telling me the truth or not, I had to acknowledge defeat, at least temporarily. I wouldn’t get any more out of her, at least about Manuel. “Okay,” I conceded. “But when you do hear from him, would you at least consider asking him if I could ask him some questions about what he saw?”

  She got up, the victor in this skirmish. “Sí, señora,” she said with a little smile. “I will ask him.”

  “Thank you,” I said, forced to be content with what was probably an empty promise. I got up, too. She started to carry the crystal out to the dining room, but I stopped her. “Maria? Just one more thing.”

  She turned, the tray of glasses in her hand.

  “Did Manuel happen to see what this man was wearing?”

  She thought, then nodded briefly. “Un traje,” she said firmly.

  “Pardon me?”

  She paused again. “A suit, Señora James,” she said at last. “The man was wearing a suit.”

  14

  On Sunday I took Jason, Megan, and Danny to a Chargers game on Steve’s turn at the firm’s newly acquired season tickets. He was extremely unhappy that a last-minute “legal emergency” over the weekend prevented him from using them, but as he had already promised to take the kids, he couldn’t get away with giving the tickets to one of his tennis buddies or a valuable client. It made him particularly mad that I remained oblivious to the game’s finer points, despite his efforts, in better days, to educate me. Hence my unworthiness to benefit from his largesse.

  There were many unelectrifying stretches for the untutored, and after a while I stopped paying attention and started worrying about what I was going to serve David Sanchez for dinner. It was easy to decide what not to fix—anything that might cause heart attacks or gas, which left out an entire repertoire of enticing edibles from Brie to black beans. It was far harder to pick something, despite the 151 (I counted them once, during a particularly dull phone conversation) cookbooks residing imposingly on the built-in shelves in the family room. I sat with my yellow pad, poring over menus.

  You have to take this food business fairly seriously, although not as seriously as you did in the eighties. The most stressful organization of that decade had to be the “food group,” where several couples got together and prepared dishes each designed to outdo all the others in terms of rarity and difficulty of preparation. The more exotic the ingredients, the better; roasted woodcock heads were a stretch but not an impossibility. Food groups kept a lot of peripheral agents in business for a long time: charming little produce stores that sold edible flowers and blue-corn tortillas, butcher shops/restaurants/mail-order outfits that would send Maine lobsters, Virginia hams, Texa
s pecans, or Long Island ducklings winging around the country in time for Saturday night dinner.

  Once, in the grip of a particularly virulent bout of Food Group Mania, I went into a veterinarian’s office on the main street of town and begged them to let me cut down two leaves from the giant banana plant outside in the parking lot. The receptionist nervously nodded assent. I figured it was a strange request, but I didn’t see why she was so jumpy until I looked down and realized I was clutching my paring knife. I looked for a place to put it, but I couldn’t find one. “Sorry,” I told her apologetically.

  I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t my fault, that I had ordered the banana leaves from Jonathan’s across the street, who got them from the produce market in L.A., who got them from the Philippines or someplace like that, and somewhere along the line the order got lost. Still, she didn’t look like a Foodie, although you couldn’t always go by appearances, but I thought that trying to explain why I was in desperate need of a couple of banana leaves might make me look even weirder, and possibly dangerous.

  In case you’re wondering, what I wanted them for was cochinita pibil, a pork loin marinated in citrus juices and achiote and cooked for a very long time in a slow oven. You can wrap it in something else, but in the Yucatan they do it in banana leaves. If I do say so myself, it was delicious.

  Still, you’d want to be careful about fixing something like that for someone who was virtually a stranger. Excessively elaborate food is like overdressing; you look like you’re trying too hard. There was danger in “diner food,” too—meatloaf and mashed potatoes and all the things your mother fixed at least once a week and you hoped you’d never have to eat again after you grew up. That was the problem; you didn’t want to seem like somebody’s mother (or wife). Besides, how many people have a really good recipe for meatloaf?

  After weighing all these factors, I decided that ossobuco, and maybe some pasta beforehand, was trying just hard enough. You’re supposed to serve the veal shanks with risotto, but that requires all this fetishistic ladling of broth onto the rice, and at least half the time it turns out gummy. Besides, without the risotto you can do most of it in advance, so you don’t have to be bumbling around in the kitchen in front of your guests. A salad and some kind of fruit ice for dessert (no cholesterol) would be plenty to complement the meal.

  The Chargers won, and Jason elbowed me in time to watch the winning touchdown. We celebrated with hot dogs and potato chips.

  On Monday I packed up all the relevant documents to launch my legal separation and dropped them off at Rachel Fenton’s office. She promised to have the papers to sign in a couple of days, as soon as I gave her the go-ahead to let Steve know what was going on. I didn’t much want to think about it, so I immersed myself in preparations for a guest of Important Stature—dusting the tops of the cabinets, scrubbing all the toilet bowls and showers, hiding my well-worn copy of Scruples in the back of the bookshelf. I have never actually known anyone who inspected the tops of other people’s cabinetry or the interior of their plumbing fixtures, although I myself often scrutinized their libraries. On the other hand, you never could tell. If David Sanchez was a zealot on the subject of cleanliness and high-minded thinking, no doubt he would be impressed by my thoroughness.

  Or maybe not. I have always wished I were one of those hostesses born with the gift of casualness, the sort of person who throws a newspaper over the grease spots in the carpet and happily invites guests in for a month. I didn’t ask myself why it was so important to impress David Sanchez, period, with as much effort as you might put into a visit from, say, the Queen, and more than you’d exert for Prince Charles.

  Consumed by these labors, I almost let the machine pick up the phone when it rang, but it was the middle of the day, and it might have been the school calling.

  “It’s me,” Steve said curtly. “Can I see you this afternoon?”

  He did not sound as if he had a passionate reconciliation on the chaise longue in mind. “I’m busy,” I told him.

  “Is someone there?”

  “No,” I admitted reluctantly.

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said and hung up.

  In the almost-two decades we’d been married, Steve had been really angry at me a number of times and vice versa. We’d yelled at each other, slammed doors, and once, on the road to Whitney Portal in Northern California, I had punched his arm really hard with my fist. He had responded by elbowing me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. When I recovered my breath, we’d both been appalled at this physical brawling, and it had never happened again. Still, there had been some life to the relationship, some flame that could flicker into hot anger.

  Over the years, even before things got bad between us, I sometimes imagined myself at his funeral, trying to think of how it would feel. Now, instead of the man, it was the relationship that was dead. The spark was out, and there was a glacier in its place.

  “Come in,” I told Steve as he pushed past me into the living room. He looked tired and strained, and the skin around his mouth was taut and white.

  “The kids?” he inquired brusquely, jerking his head in the direction of the upstairs.

  I still understood his marital shorthand. I shook my head and pointed to my watch. “Of course not. They’re still in school.”

  He looked confused, as if it had been ten years since he’d had to consider such a thing. “Oh, right. They okay?”

  “They’re fine. Jason’s getting an A in history, and Megan’s reading Daddy-Long-Legs.”

  Despite his apparent determination to get right down to his agenda, he couldn’t help asking “What’s that?”

  I shrugged. “A classic. What did you want to see me about?”

  He settled himself into the cushions of the couch, crossing one leg over his knee so that I caught the shine of his gleaming Church’s loafer. His hands were clenched. “I think you know, Caroline.”

  I imagined there was a laundry list, but I wasn’t going to help him. “Why, how could I?” I asked innocently.

  His look was hard, unblinking, and ungenerous. “Look,” he said with exaggerated patience, “what you do with your personal life is no longer any of my business. I would have thought—well, never mind.”

  “You’re right,” I told him. “It’s not.”

  He looked momentarily taken aback. “What?”

  “My personal life,” I said helpfully. “It’s not any of your business.”

  “Fine, have it your way,” he said angrily. “If you don’t have any more sense than to get involved with one of my partners, for God’s sake—”

  “I am not involved with one of your partners,” I said in a calm voice that I knew would irritate him more than an angry rebuttal.

  He stared at me while a number of more grownup variations of “Oh, yeah?” apparently crossed his mind. “That’s not what I heard,” he said at last.

  I shrugged. “It’s true, but I don’t really care whether you believe me or not.” I shifted position and tucked my feet up under me on the couch, leaving a moat between us. “Come on, Steve, you didn’t take time off from work to come over here in the middle of the day and ask me about having drinks with Jeff Grayson. What’s going on?”

  “Drinks?” He was still unwilling to let it go.

  I said nothing.

  “All right, Caroline,” he said, marshaling his forces for a frontal attack, “then suppose you tell me what the fuck is going on between you and Barclay Hampton.”

  “My, you do give me a lot of credit,” I said lightly. “Do you think I’m chasing all the male lawyers in the firm?”

  I thought for a moment I had gone too far. His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. He looked at them for a moment and then spread his fingers wide. “Cut the shit, Caroline. I want to know why you’ve been asking Tricia a lot of questions about Barclay’s state of mind since Eleanor’s death, and what he was doing on the day before they found her body. You scared the poor girl to death.”

&n
bsp; “I didn’t think she was quite such a delicate flower as all that,” I said snidely but with some qualms.

  “You’re lucky Barclay didn’t come here himself. He’s beside himself, Caroline. He thinks you’re implying that he had something to do with Eleanor’s death. I told him he had to be mistaken, that I’d talk to you about it.”

  “All right, you’ve talked to me about it.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. What do you want me to say? I did not imply to Tricia Hampton that I thought Barclay had killed Eleanor. I merely made what I thought was a solicitous inquiry into his state of mind, since his own wife professes to be worried about him. I wonder why. Barclay is acting a little paranoid, don’t you think? Do you suppose he has a guilty conscience about something?”

  Steve ignored the question. “I certainly hope you didn’t. There are libel and slander laws for things like that.”

  “Okay, Counselor, you’ve done your job. You can rest assured that I know better than to throw accusations around without proof.” I decided to hit him a hard ball. “By the way, did you ever find that file you wanted?”

  “What file?” he asked before he thought.

  “The one you tore up my office looking for.” I watched his expression. “You didn’t by chance extend your search to the garage in my absence, did you?”

  He blinked. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not.

  His eyes narrowed. If I could read him, he could read me as well. “Caroline, what the fuck are you up to?”

  “Relax. I’m just doing a little investigating, that’s all. It’s no big deal.”

  “Investigating what?”

  I effected an approximation of a Gallic shrug, as if the matter were a minor distraction from a life full of electrifying adventures. “Eleanor’s life, I suppose. What she was thinking. Why she died.”

  “Have you lost your fucking mind?” he shouted. Melmoth darted out from underneath one of the chairs and streaked for the kitchen.

  “You scared the cat,” I told him.