“Who’s Anita?”
“Anita Sewell. The boys were always paying attention to Anita.” She gave up on the callus on my foot and started polishing my nails to a shine that would be gone the first time I went for a run on the sand in Florida. “Actually, you know, now that I think about it? It wasn’t Anita he was with. It was Anita’s sister.”
Regina finished doing her work on my feet and then presented them to me as if she were surprising me with a new car. I looked down, smiled, and nodded appreciably, despite the fact that what I saw was a pair of feet. I figured she couldn’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, or something like that.
I put my own shoes and socks back on, and we wandered over to the front desk, where Regina rang me up. As I looked through my wallet for some cash, I asked her if she knew if Anita’s sister was still in town.
“I know Anita moved into the Bay Area,” she said. “But her sister? I really don’t know what happened to her.”
I nodded and pulled some notes out. A woman who had been getting what I assumed to be the full service and oil change, as she had been there since I arrived and looked nowhere near leaving, called across the expanse of the salon.
“Anita’s sister works at the library,” she called.
I offered the woman a nod for her information and another to Regina for her attempt at the impossible, and for her information as well. I handed her some cash that was about twice as much as the listed price of the pedicure, and I thanked her.
“No, sir. Thank you. And good luck with your book.”
“I’ll be sure to drop by with a copy, once it’s done.”
I pulled the door open and heard the little bell ring, and then I stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked both ways, thinking to myself that if there was ever a statement that was true, it was this.
There are no secrets in the nail salon.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I decided that Danielle needed me more than I needed to solve the mystery behind John Cashman’s determination to cover up Ricky Spence’s past. I called Capt. Smith to arrange a flight back to Phoenix.
“You’re done?” he asked.
“More or less. We can head back anytime you like.”
“There’s not a lot to stay occupied with at the airport, so we’ve headed into town. We just ordered some lunch. But if you’re in a hurry, we can be back there in fifteen.”
I wanted to get back, but I couldn’t say that I was in any particular hurry. “No rush,” I said. “We could meet out there in what, an hour or so?”
“We can certainly do that, if that works for you.”
“That would be great. Enjoy your lunch.”
I put my phone away and looked up and down the streets once more. It was a Sunday, and the downtown was quiet. I tossed around the idea of heading straight out to the airport, but Capt. Smith had mentioned there wasn’t much to the terminal, and I figured it would be easier to kill some time wandering around Modesto.
If I were asked under oath whether I had a destination in mind, I would have been within my rights to say no. It wasn’t a front-of-mind, conscious-decision kind of thing. But it was back there, nibbling away at the part of my brain that seemed to control a lot of the things I did without letting me in on the specifics of why.
The downtown area of Modesto was set out in a convenient grid pattern. On a map it was on a skewed axis, not really north-south or east-west but more like a diamond, if you looked at it with north to the top of your map. The streets running roughly southeast to northwest were numbered, while the cross streets running southwest to northeast were denoted by letters of the alphabet, although as far as I ever figured out, they never dropped below the letter D or above the letter O. Perhaps the town just wasn’t big enough to require the whole alphabet.
I wandered along Ninth Street in the pleasant sunshine, not so much window shopping as looking in wonder at the merchandising decisions that certain shopkeepers chose to make. I turned left onto I Street, walked up past the county clerk’s office, and stood for a moment in the shade of the trees in front of the courthouse. Then I walked across Twelfth Street past the district attorney’s office, which looked as quiet as a building could be.
I watched some people enter the McHenry Museum. I recalled it as one of those local museums you find in small towns across America. The kinds of places that remember and keep alive the history that made the thousands of similar small towns what the United States was today. Lots of people think that the United States was just about the big cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami. And the truth was those big cities dominated the cultural landscape as much as the political one through sheer weight of population. But in my experience, what truly made America America were the small towns. When you play minor-league ball, you get to see plenty of them. The major leagues stick to the big smoke, but the minor leagues are the heart and soul, part of the fabric of small-town America. There was often nothing noteworthy about those towns, other than the fact that they were home to real, solid, hard-working people. The kinds of people that I liked to sit beside at a bar to watch a game and eat a burger.
I moved along from the museum, crossed Fifteenth Street, and then stood for a moment in front of the squat, imposing façade of the Stanislaus County library. As far as buildings go, this one was a doozy. With heavy columns dominating the front entrance, the building was low slung and mean, not in its attitude but its austerity. It looked like the kind of building where you would expect to find Chairman Mao’s interred body laid at rest.
I was ambling up the steps before I even consciously realized where I was headed. The library. Anita’s sister. That was all I had to go on, and with a little time to kill, my primitive brain had recalled the layout of the town and directed me where I needed to be.
I pushed in through the doors and was instantly assaulted by the scent. Libraries have a particular fragrance. They all smell pretty much the same, but not like anything else. It’s a woody, musty kind of tang, almost impossible to put into words but instantly recognizable.
My face froze as I looked ahead. There was a popup banner informing me that the library was open for a few hours on one Sunday each month for a special writers’ exhibition, and this day’s event was on Walt Whitman. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It felt like the man was stalking me, and he’d been dead for well over a hundred years. If I had anticipated current events, I would have paid more attention in my college class.
I left the specter of Walt Whitman behind and wandered into the main hall of the library. It was an old-fashioned place, shelves packed hard with plastic-wrapped books, low ceilings giving the sensation of an intellectual cave. There was a large children’s collection—lots of picture books—and there was a decent number of kids sitting on the floor reading with massive smiles on their faces. They were showing each other the things they were discovering while their parents sat clumped at nearby tables looking at their phones.
I made my way over to the checkout desk. I knew I was testing my luck. I had almost no information about the person I hoped to find, other than she was a female and she had a sister called Anita. It was also a Sunday, so I suspected the library was running on a skeleton crew.
I didn’t get lucky. Behind the checkout desk sat a young man in a Tiger Woods polo shirt. He gave me a nod of acknowledgment, perhaps in lieu of speaking, which I remembered was taboo in a library, for reasons I never completely got my head around. I personally did most of my reading either sitting on a beach or on my balcony, and under both circumstances there was plenty of noise and distraction around me. I found the silence of the library vacuous, so quiet that it set my ears ringing.
I moved in close to the guy behind the desk so I didn’t have to raise my voice in any way.
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said.
He nodded like this was not a particularly unusual request. I figured in small country towns residents occasionally did research into the local history and the people who put
these places on the map. A request to find information on someone was probably something that a rural librarian heard fairly often. He nodded as if he understood my request and was waiting for further information.
“Is there someone who works here at the library who has a sister called Anita?”
Now the guy frowned a little. I suspected most of the research done in rural libraries did not involve the identities of the actual staff.
The guy shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“Are you the only one in today?”
“No. There’s just me and Monica.”
“And where might I find Monica?”
“I think she’s tidying up in periodicals.”
I gave the guy a nod and a smile, as much for the information as the trust in giving it. In Miami I would have been hassled left, right, and center before anyone divulged anything about a work colleague. There were probably rules and laws and serious discussions had with human resources for fessing up information on those you worked with. Folks in the country tended to be a touch more trusting, and I was thankful for it.
I didn’t ask where the periodicals were, but it didn’t take a lot of finding. It was hardly the New York Public Library. I found a woman tidying up a rack of magazines and newspapers. I hadn’t realized that people still read the news on paper, but there she was straightening up copies of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Modesto Bee.
The woman was probably in her late twenties, with dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and an open face dominated by heavy-framed eyeglasses. She gave me a friendly smile, and I tried on the kind of nod the guy at the checkout desk had given me minutes before.
“Can I help you find something?” she asked, in a voice that was both low in volume and easy to hear. It was a smooth voice, and I couldn’t help but think she had missed her calling as a late-night radio DJ.
“This might sound a little strange,” I said. “But is your name Monica Sewell?”
She glanced down at the name tag on her chest, which had the word Monica written on it. I am nothing if not a master detective.
“Yes,” she said, with a look that suggested this was clearly obvious information.
“Do you have a sister called Anita?”
A slight furrow crept across her eyebrows. “Yes. Why, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
I put my palms out. “Nothing, nothing. I assure you. I was just given some information, and I was hoping to talk to you.”
“Talk to me? What does this have to do with my sister?”
“Nothing. The person I was speaking to earlier couldn’t remember your name. They suggested that I talk to Anita’s sister.”
“Talk to me about what?”
“Talk to you about the night your sister graduated high school.”
Monica squinted through her glasses, her eyes narrowing. “What are you talking about? What could you possibly want to know about the night she graduated?”
“I just wanted to ask you a few questions about Club Mediterrano.”
“Who are you?”
I pulled out my wallet and handed her a card. “I’m a private investigator.”
“From Miami?”
“That’s right. It’s a long story.”
“And your name is Miami as well?”
“That’s a longer story.”
She dropped her eyes from my business card and then held it out to me. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
She seemed like a pleasant enough woman, and I didn’t want to cause her any grief, but an investigator knows that when someone doesn’t want to talk about something, it just became worth talking about.
“It won’t take but a moment,” I said. “I just wondered if you had any memory of a baseball player who was at the club that night.”
Her facial expression turned into a full-blown frown. “Please keep your voice down.”
“Sorry. Is there somewhere we can talk for a minute?”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“How about I talk, then? I can just stand here and ask questions. Answer or don’t answer, it’s up to you.”
She clenched her jaw and shot me a wide-eyed look that suggested even my whisper was too loud for the library. She turned and charged away about ten paces, then turned back to me and waved her hand as if to tell me to follow. I did. She walked to the back of the library and opened the door to a small room, flicked the light on, and then gestured me inside. It looked like a study room, with a couple of uncomfortable-looking chairs and a wooden table. She closed the door, and I heard humanity come to an end. There was absolutely no sound whatsoever. For a moment we stood looking at each other, and the longer I stood there, the louder the sound of my heartbeat became in my inner ears. I looked around the room.
“It’s like a black hole in here.”
“It’s soundproofed. It used to be a listening room for vinyl records. Now it’s used for meetings and study sessions and things like that.”
I didn’t want Monica to stay on her feet. People on their feet often get ideas about walking away rather than answering my questions, so I pulled the chair out with my foot and sat. She took a moment but she followed suit, staying on the opposite side of the round table.
“So what’s the story about your sister’s graduation night?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know? What is it that you’re after?”
“I know that something happened, and I know it involved a baseball player. A guy called Ricky Spence.”
“And what do you think you’re going to learn?”
“I really haven’t the faintest idea.”
“What do you have against Ricky Spence? Does he owe you money?”
“Actually, his agent hired me for a job.”
“What job? Dredging up old history?”
“Something else,” I said. “But the pieces don’t fit right. And I don’t like it when the puzzle doesn’t come together properly.”
“We all have to learn to live with disappointment, Mr. Jones.”
“Call me Miami.”
Monica said nothing but shook her head slowly from side to side.
“You don’t seem surprised by the name Ricky Spence,” I said.
“So?”
“So either you’re a big baseball fan, and I’m not getting that vibe, or you’ve heard some stories from your sister’s graduation.”
“I don’t know any stories,” she said. Her eyes glazed over as she stared at the middle of the table between us. Then it hit me.
“You were there. The night of your sister’s graduation.”
“Of course I went to her graduation. My whole family did.”
“No, I mean later. At the club. You went to the club.”
“Yes, okay. I went. But it wasn’t my graduation. It was my sister’s, hers and her friends’.”
“Do you know Lily Barkin?”
“I think she was a classmate of my sister’s.”
“That’s right. She was at the club that night. Her, you, Regina Foster, and your sister Anita. Anyone else?”
“There may have been one or two,” she said. “I didn’t know all of my sister’s friends.”
“There was some information, and implication, that Lily Barkin and Ricky had, how shall I put it, relations that night at the club.”
Monica frowned. “Lily? When was this, exactly?”
“The information I have is conflicting, but something may or may not have gone down in the bathrooms at the club.”
I was going to give her a moment before I followed up with my next question, but my line of questioning went out the window when I saw the color wash from Monica’s face. Her eyeglasses magnified the moisture welling in her eyes, and I noticed that she clasped her hands to prevent them shaking.
“It was you,” I said.
Monica shook her head, but not with any conviction.
“You had relations with Ricky Spence in the bathroom?”
“Had
relations,” she repeated, her eyes still on the table. Then she glanced up at me. “You mean sex?”
“Okay.”
“Yes, Mr. Jones. We had sex.”
For a moment I let the information sink in. Monica let out a sigh that was quiet but long and deep.
“No one seems to know about it,” I said.
“I’d like it to stay that way,” said Monica.
“Why?”
“You really have to ask?”
“I don’t think anyone would care, let alone hold it against you.”
“Isn’t it enough that I care? That I’d rather not rehash the whole thing?”
“Okay. I understand. You don’t want to make it public knowledge, and there’s no reason why you should. But just between you and me, these things happen. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You’ve never had drunken sex?” she asked.
“I can’t say no.”
“And who do you think came out of it with any sense of shame? You or the girl?”
I didn’t need to think about her question. I’d done that before. When it came to casual hookups, men considered them conquests, which by definition made the other side the conquered. I’d been to college, I’d played ball. I’d been a young man. I hadn’t always handled myself in a way that filled me with pride. But I was reasonably confident that I had also never handled myself in a way that should fill me with shame. Never done anything that someone else didn’t want me to do. I looked at Monica, and she turned her eyes back to the vastness of the table.
“Was it assault?” I asked.
“Let’s just call it a bad experience, but no, not assault.” Her emotions were raging, and now her face swelled bright pink. “Why are you dragging this up?”
I suddenly had no idea. I had a hunch, which brought me to Modesto, and then on the back of a piece of intel that was no more than a rumor, I found myself sitting in front of a young woman who was being asked to remember something that she had quite clearly put behind her. She seemed to be hiding in plain sight, the ponytail pulled taut, the glasses with frames that dominated her face. She was pretty in a country-plain kind of way. An advertising executive might have said wholesome. But the story she was sharing unwillingly was anything but. It had been a long time since her sister’s high school graduation night, but Monica still wore the softer features of a young woman, not yet gaunt like Amber Spence. It was then that the puzzle pieces started to slip into place.
The Ninth Inning Page 17