City of Sand

by Robert Kroese

“Your father works at Glazier Semiconductor?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Twenty-four years now.”

  “On the assembly line?” said Benjamin. “I’d be crotchety too.”

  Sofia ran into the kitchen. “All clean, Mamá!” she cried. “Smell!” She held her hands up and Lucia sniffed them. “They smell like flowers!”

  Sofia squealed with joy. “Smell, Mr. Stone!” she exclaimed, holding up her hands to Benjamin.

  Benjamin sniffed dutifully. “They don’t smell like flowers to me,” he said.

  Sofia looked uncertainly at his eyes.

  “They smell like chocolate!” exclaimed Benjamin. “I think I’m going to eat your fingers!”

  Sofia squealed again and then stuck out her tongue, licking her fingers. “Do you still want them?” she asked, grinning.

  Benjamin made an exaggerated grimace. “No, thank you!” he declared.

  “Sofia!” snapped Lucia. “You just washed your hands. Your mouth is full of germs.”

  “I’ll wash them again!” cried Sofia, and ran off.

  “Sorry,” said Benjamin. “I didn’t think—”

  “It’s no problem,” said Lucia. “She likes you. You’re very good with children.”

  “It’s easy when they’re Sofia’s age,” said Benjamin. “When they get a little older, I’m clueless.”

  “Everybody is,” said Lucia. “Don’t beat yourself up, Benjamin. You were a good father. It isn’t your fault what happened to Jessica.”

  “Yeah,” Benjamin said. Maybe not, he thought. But some things were his fault. Anxious to change the subject, Benjamin said, “I used to live not far from here. My father sold his orchard to William Glazier in fifty eight. At one point he must have owned half the real estate in Sunnyview.”

  Lucia nodded. “I guess he used to own all the land around here. My grandparents bought this house from Mr. Glazier in 1950. Mr. Glazier helped a lot of his workers buy houses in this area.”

  “Helped?” asked Benjamin. “How?”

  “When he had a house for sale, he would always tell his employees about it before putting it on the open market. And he would often offer houses for less than market value. Land was a lot cheaper back then, of course, but even so, a lot of employees were able to buy houses that they otherwise weren’t able to afford. Mr. Glazier thought making his employees into homeowners encouraged loyalty.”

  Benjamin nodded appreciatively, but he couldn’t help wonder why Glazier had been so interested in instilling loyalty in low-level factory employees. From what he knew about Glazier, the man had believed strongly in the assembly line model of production, in which workers were largely unskilled, interchangeable and replaceable. He’d also been ruthless in busting unions. Benjamin found it hard to believe that Glazier had helped his employees get houses out of a sense of altruism. And of course it wasn’t lost on him that the old man who had spoken at the party the previous night had also spoken of Glazier Semiconductor helping him buy a house – and he had similar burn marks on his hands. A cynic might think Glazier had been paying off workers who had been the victims of workplace accidents, but that was a bit much for Benjamin to swallow. There were less obvious ways of buying a worker’s silence. There was still something Benjamin was missing.

  The four of them ate dinner together in the dining room. Lucia’s father said very little, and Benjamin didn’t say much either. But that was okay, because Lucia and Sofia—particularly Sofia—had no trouble filling the air with conversation. Benjamin found himself smiling at Sofia’s stories of her various exciting and incredible adventures at school and around her neighborhood. Sofia was at the age where fact and fiction mingled freely; she wasn’t lying so much as making the truth a lot more interesting. Benjamin particularly enjoyed the part where the neighbor’s dog ate Sofia’s fingers because they tasted like chocolate. Sofia was more gregarious than Jessica had been at that age, but Jessica had always had a wild imagination as well.

  After dinner, Lucia’s father went back to the television. “Sofia,” said Lucia, interrupting Sofia in the middle of a story about a magic elevator at school that went all the way to the moon.

  “Yes, Mamá.”

  “Go see if Felipe is awake.”

  “Okay, Mamá.” Sofia ran out of the room and turned down a hallway, disappearing from sight.

  “Felipe?” asked Benjamin. He had noticed that Lucia wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and he wondered if Felipe was a boyfriend.

  “My uncle,” said Lucia.

  “Oh,” said Benjamin. “Does he work nights?”

  Lucia shook her head. “He doesn’t work.”

  Sofia came running back into the room. “He’s awake, Mamá!” she exclaimed.

  “Okay, come help me make him a plate,” said Lucia. “Excuse me a moment, Benjamin.”

  Benjamin nodded. “Could I use your bathroom?”

  “Sure. Down the hall. First door on the left.”

  Lucia and Sofia went into the kitchen, and Benjamin got up and walked down the hall to use the bathroom. When he was done, he stepped out into the hall and noticed a door open a few inches on his right. Benjamin listened for a moment for footsteps, and then stepped quietly down the hall toward the door. He peeked through the crack in the door and saw a man sitting hunched over a large table, muttering quietly to himself. The man wore wrinkled pajamas and he had a thick head of bushy black hair flecked with gray. The table was covered by what appeared to be a model train set, although Benjamin didn’t see any trains. Houses, other buildings and the occasional tree dotted a dusty brown landscape.

  He heard Sofia saying something to her mother across the house. It sounded like she was leaving the kitchen and coming his way. Feeling a little guilty about his snooping, Benjamin tore himself away from the scene. But as he did, the man looked up from the model and stared directly at Benjamin. Benjamin stopped mid-step, looking back at the man. There was something in the man’s eyes, an intensity that Benjamin couldn’t quite interpret. But that wasn’t what made Benjamin’s hair stand on end.

  He had seen this man before, outside the Blue Agave restaurant. Felipe was the crazy man who had accosted Benjamin after his meeting with Cameron Payne—the one who had yammered about being “blinded by the glare.”

  Benjamin looked away, hurrying down the hall.

  Chapter Ten

  Benjamin was more careful this time, leaping the creek at a narrower point. He still tumbled awkwardly to the ground on the other side, but without twisting his ankle. He got to his feet and kept running. This time he would catch the boy before he vanished into the castle. His chest burned and his calves ached, but he was narrowing the gap between him and the boy. Once again, the castle loomed darkly ahead, the orange disc of the sun partially obscured by the building.

  “Stop!” cried Benjamin after the boy. The boy stopped for a moment and turned to look at Benjamin. Benjamin halted as well, leaning against a tree and gasping for breath. At his feet he noticed something partially obscured by weeds: a smooth metallic object that glinted in the orange light.

  When he looked up, he saw that the boy had resumed running toward the dark castle. “Stop!” Benjamin cried again, but it came out as a hoarse whisper. Benjamin squinted in the blinding sun, blinking away tears. The boy’s frame had been swallowed by the black silhouette of stones.

  Benjamin spent the morning at the city’s hall of records, investigating the purchases of land in Sunnyview from the 1950s to the 1970s. What he found confirmed his suspicions: Glazier had bought thousands of acres, mostly farmland, in the 1950s, and gradually turned it into housing developments. Benjamin would have liked to cross-reference the list of buyers of these houses with Glazier Semiconductor’s payroll, but he had no way of getting the company’s personnel records. Even if he were still a cop, it would be doubtful whether he could get a warrant for the records under the circumstances. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly, or how it connected to Jessica’s murder. He had put Lucia’s uncle, Felipe
, out of his mind. When he had mentioned that he thought he had seen Felipe downtown, Lucia just laughed. Felipe hadn’t left the house in more than twenty years.

  Felipe was an imbecile, permanently ensconced in a back room of Lucia’s house, unable to care for himself, unable to do much of anything but play all day with a model of Sunnyview as it was many years ago. If he had built that model himself, he was a sort of idiot savant, but one with a very limited and impractical predilection. Whatever Felipe’s story was, it had nothing to do with Jessica’s murder. Benjamin had simply seen someone who looked a lot like him. That was the only explanation. Anyway, obsessing on the matter wasn’t going to help him find Jessica’s killer.

  After Benjamin had perused the records for a few hours, a correlation began to emerge: a high percentage of the buyers of Glazier’s houses had Hispanic surnames. The records were full of names like Garcia, Martinez and Lopez, and this was particularly true for houses purchased near Sand Hill Creek. It occurred to Benjamin–and the thought incurred an almost immediate pang of guilt—that maybe this predominance of low income, uneducated immigrants was the reason the Sand Hill Creek area had gone downhill while the Hidden Oaks area had prospered. This trend tended to be self-reinforcing as well: as poor, darker-skinned people moved into an area, the rich, white folks tended to leave, and the quantity of sales tended to cause property values to drop. Other poor Mexican immigrants would look for inexpensive housing near their friends and relatives, and the cycle would continue. The same thing had happened with many other immigrant groups in many other cities in the past – the Irish in New York, the Poles in Chicago, the Cubans in Miami. And often, unless one knew the details of how the first few immigrant families ended up living in a particular area, the ghettoization seemed rather arbitrary. Sometimes it only took a little push, and in this case the push seemed to have been provided by Glazier selling cheap houses to his employees.

  And yet, Benjamin still felt like he was missing something. He still had no explanation for why Glazier had begun selling cut-rate houses to his employees—or, for that matter, why he had gotten into the real estate business in the first place. It clearly wasn’t to make money, at least not in any direct way, and that was certainly out of character for Glazier. Had Glazier been buying his employees’ silence about industrial accidents? Benjamin had come into two long-time employees at the plant, and both of them had chemical burns. Obviously Glazier Semiconductor used some nasty chemicals, and probably hadn’t always had very good safety protocols. But there was more to it than that.

  As he ruminated on this over lunch at a sandwich shop downtown, his phone rang. He answered.

  “Mr. Stone, it’s Detective Lentz.”

  “Yeah,” said Benjamin. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  “I wanted to tell you we’ve made an arrest.”

  “What?” asked Benjamin, snapping out of his reverie. “Who?”

  “The boyfriend. Chris Sandford.”

  “I thought you’d eliminated him as a suspect.”

  “I never eliminated him. Anyway, things have changed. We’ve got evidence linking him to the crime scene.”

  “Really,” said Benjamin. “What?”

  “I can’t get into that,” said Lentz.

  “Alright,” said Benjamin. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t have much choice.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s asking for you. He won’t tell us anything. Keeps saying he’ll only talk to you. Do you know why that might be?”

  “No,” said Benjamin. “I talked to him briefly on Monday, but I have no idea why he’d want to talk to me now.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “The Giants game,” said Benjamin. After a pause: “I asked him about Jessica.”

  “Covering all your bases, huh?”

  “Just trying to be thorough,” said Benjamin.

  “Yeah? Catch anything I missed?”

  “Apparently not,” said Benjamin.

  “Alright, well, if you want to talk to Chris Sandford, now’s your chance. We’ve got him at the station if you want to come by.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Chris Sandford sat alone in a small conference room, his cuffed hands resting on the table in front of him, tapping his fingers anxiously on the fake wood veneer. Detective Lentz led Benjamin past the uniformed officer guarding the hall into the room.

  “Your lucky day, Chris,” said Lentz. “Look who I found.”

  Sandford looked up at them, momentarily confused. After a moment, he nodded in recognition.

  “I understand you wanted to talk to me,” said Benjamin.

  “Yeah,” said Sandford, glancing nervously at Lentz.

  “Do you mind, Detective?” asked Benjamin.

  “Knock yourself out,” said Lentz, who seemed resigned to the fact that Benjamin would have more luck getting information out of Sandford than he would. On his way out the door, he shot Benjamin a knowing glance. “Professional courtesy,” he said, and closed the door behind him. The implication was not lost on Benjamin.

  “He thinks I killed Jessica,” said Sandford, his eyes downcast.

  “Why would he think that?” asked Benjamin, taking a seat across from Sandford.

  “They found her glasses in my car. Underneath the driver’s seat, like I’d hidden them there. The frames were broken, and they had sand on them.”

  “Why were her glasses under your car seat?”

  “I don’t know!” cried Sandford, seemingly on the verge of tears. “Somebody must have put them there.”

  “Somebody? Who?”

  “How should I know? The people who killed Jessica, probably.”

  “People? Who do you think killed her?”

  “Glazier,” said Sandford. “Or somebody who works for him.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Jessica found something, when she was working on that historical project for Glazier. Something they don’t want public.”

  “What did she find? How do you know this?”

  “I found something,” said Sandford.

  “What?” asked Benjamin, growing impatient. “What did you find?”

  “You can’t tell the cops. You can’t tell anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “Glazier owns this town. He owns the cops.”

  “I don’t believe that,” said Benjamin. “Glazier is a powerful guy, but if you have some evidence about Jessica’s murder, you need to tell Detective Lentz. I can’t—”

  “I’m not going to tell fucking Lentz!” Sandford cried. There was some motion in the hall, and Sandford went on, in a whisper, “He owns Lentz. He owns them all.”

  “Alright,” said Benjamin. “Tell me what you know. But if you really do have evidence regarding Jessica’s murder, eventually I’m going to have to turn it over to the police.”

  “Fine,” said Sandford. “But make copies first. And tell somebody you trust. Somebody outside of Glazier’s control. Do you know anybody in the FBI?”

  “Slow down, Chris,” said Benjamin. “Copies of what?”

  “She gave me a combination on a piece of paper. For a storage unit on Coburn and Ninth. I forgot all about it until I found it in my pocket last night. I went over there to see what was in the unit, but I didn’t know what to do with all that stuff. Figured I’d call somebody this morning, but then they arrested me…”

  “What stuff? What was in the storage unit?”

  “Documents,” said Sandford quietly. “You’ll see. Unit 429. The combination is Jessica’s birthday. Get them to somebody outside of Sunnyview, the FBI or somebody. I didn’t kill her. You’ll see.”

  “Alright,” said Benjamin.

  “Don’t tell Lentz,” Sandford said again. “Don’t trust anyone in Sunnview.”

  Benjamin nodded and got up from the table. He opened the door to room and saw Lentz standing outside. He wondered how much Lentz had heard. Benj
amin closed the door behind him.

  “Learn anything?”

  “Yeah,” said Benjamin. “Chris Sandford is paranoid. He thinks everybody in this town is secretly working for William Glazier.”

  “Including me.”

  “Yeah,” said Benjamin. “Nothing personal. He doesn’t trust the cops. Do you really think he killed Jessica?”

  “We found her glasses in his car. Broken, and caked with sand. The sand matches the sand from near the creek.”

  “Is that it?”

  “It’s pretty damning.”

  “Unless someone is setting him up.”

  Lentz snorted. “Now who’s paranoid? You think one of my guys put those glasses in his car?”

  “How’d you know where to look?”

  “Anonymous tip.”

  “Convenient.”

  “The tipster didn’t tell us about the glasses. He said he saw a tall blond man near the creek on the morning Jessica disappeared.”

  “Just enough information to get you to search Sandford’s house and car.”

  Lentz shrugged.

  “How do you know the glasses are Jessica’s?”

  “We found a receipt in her apartment. Sunnyview Optical. The prescription and the model match a pair that she bought six months earlier. She was very near-sighted, as I’m sure you know. Never left home without her glasses. But we didn’t find them anywhere near the body.”

  “Why did he take them? Why not leave them with the body?”

  “Souvenir? Or maybe he panicked, wasn’t thinking clearly. Picked them up and put them in his pocket. Found them there later and stuffed them under the car seat until he could dispose of them.”

  “Yeah,” said Benjamin, unconvinced.

  “So did you get anything else from him, other than contracting his paranoia?”

  Benjamin shook his head. “Just kept repeating that he didn’t do it, thinks he’s being framed by Glazier.”

  “Why was he so insistent on talking to you?”

  Benjamin shrugged. “He thinks I’m safe because I’m not part of this town. At least, not any more.”