by Dianne Emley
“Maybe that’s my secret.”
“So? Give it up.”
Paula shook her head. She got up, walked to the newly replaced sliding glass door that led to the patio, and struggled to pull it open.
“I wouldn’t stand on that terrace. I don’t know how safe it is.”
Paula pulled harder. “I need a cigarette.”
Iris helped her with the door. “The wall’s torqued.” The door finally screeched open.
Paula nonchalantly walked onto the terrace, even though a large crack traversed the length of it. She leaned against the terrace wall with one bare foot on top of the other and pulled a package of cigarettes and a lighter from the bathrobe.
Iris pulled a dining room chair next to the sliding glass door track and sat down.
“What are you going to do with the will, Iris?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why did you buy it?”
“Figured it was safest in my hands. Seems like I’m the only one who wants to use it to put things right for Dolly. Plus, if it’s authentic, it could cost Thomas the election if it got out. I wonder how he’ll react when he finds out there really is a will. And I have it.”
Paula looked at Iris soberly. “Thomas got to you, didn’t he?”
“No one got to me.”
“You’re balling him, aren’t you?”
“Balling him,” Iris sneered. “Ever elegant Paula. What I am or am not doing is none of your business.”
“You might as well be fucking my father.”
“Thank you for that lovely image.”
“You think it was Junior’s idea to burn down my house? The old man pulls both Junior’s and Thomas’s strings.”
“Thomas is his own man.”
“No one who stays with my father can be their own man or woman. He sucks up everyone around him.”
“Maybe Thomas found a way to master the situation. There are ways of dealing with problems other than just running away from them.” Iris agitatedly recrossed her legs.
“Yeah. You can bash their heads in with a pickax.”
“What are you saying?”
Paula dragged on the cigarette, tilted her head back, and blew out smoke. “I’m saying you’d better leave the DeLaceys alone before you find out things you don’t want to know.”
“That includes you.”
“Especially me.”
“I know you burned your house down. Is there something else I should know?”
Paula’s jaw dropped in disbelief. “I didn’t burn my house down. I told you I saw a red truck.”
“I didn’t see any truck.”
“I can’t help it if you’re slow.”
“It sure was lucky that you happened to slip your mother’s jewelry box into the satchel with the money.”
“And the satchel almost got burned up. If I planned the whole thing, why didn’t I take it outside ahead of time? Why didn’t I pack the pictures?” Paula let smoke trail from her mouth as she gazed at a corner of the terrace and shook her head derisively.
Iris got up and started to pace the floor. Her open-backed slippers quietly slapped her heels with each step. She turned mid-route and abruptly left the room. She returned with a handheld tape recorder. She stood next to the terrace door, refusing to step on the terrace, and played and rewound the tape until she got it in the right position.
She held the tape recorder toward Paula. “This is why I won’t leave the DeLaceys alone.” She pressed the play button and Dolly’s message began to emanate scratchily from the machine.
“Iris! It’s Dolly. Dolly DeLacey. I don’t think he knows I know. I don’t know who I can trust. He’s turned my children against me. He knows everyone on the police department and at City Hall. I think he knows the governor and even the president and the president runs the FBI so who can I turn to?”
Paula fussed with the belt of the bathrobe and then busied herself looking for a place to put out her cigarette, as if she had tuned out the tape. She squatted down to press out the butt on the ground. But instead of getting up, she stayed down, wrapping her hands around her knees.
“Iris, he’s trying to kill me. Bill’s trying to kill me. There’s a rope in the garage and some saws and poison, Iris! It says it’s for rats but there’s a skull and crossbones on the box. It’s deadly poison! Then in his desk I found a metal box with my will in it. But I don’t remember it, Iris! How could I leave him everything? What about my children? And my father’s ring is there, too…It’s him! There’s his car! It’s him! Oh my goodness!”
The message ended but Paula didn’t move.
Iris dropped the recorder into her bathrobe pocket, then turned and walked into the kitchen. She was putting bread in the toaster when Paula came in. “Want something to eat?”
Paula opened the refrigerator door and stared inside. She reached in, moved some of the items around, then closed the door. “She finds a rope in the garage and she thinks he’s trying to kill her? What kind of bullshit is that?”
Iris wiped low-cal spread on the toast. “When you were a teenager, you ran away because you were afraid of your father. Why are you discounting your mother’s fears about him?”
“But rat poison? Lots of people have rat poison in their garages.” Paula flung out her arms. “Can’t you see how nuts she is?”
Iris bit into the toast. She poured more coffee into her mug and sat at the dining room table. “Was.”
“What?”
“How nuts she was.”
“Oh. Right.”
“She does sound nuts. But that doesn’t mean that someone wasn’t trying to kill her.”
Paula opened the refrigerator door again and took out a container of nonfat yogurt. She frowned at it. “Don’t you have any food in this place?”
“What you see is what I’ve got.”
Paula flipped the lid off the yogurt and began stirring the fruit up from the bottom.
Iris regarded Paula. “Maybe this is none of my business, but—”
“That hasn’t stopped you yet.”
“But why do you hate your mother?”
“I don’t hate her.”
“Let me rephrase that. You seem ambivalent about her. You went out of your way to go to her funeral. You leap into a fire to save her photos and jewelry but you always seem angry when you talk about her. After listening to the tape, you seem more upset about how crazy she sounded than about her accusing your father of trying to kill her.”
Paula ate a spoonful of the yogurt and frowned at it. “That’s what pisses me off. Whenever there was a problem, instead of dealing with it, she went off the deep end.”
“She couldn’t help it.”
“That’s bullshit. She took the easy way out.”
“She didn’t lose her mind for fun, Paula.”
“You preach to me about how it’s better to stand and fight when things get tough than to split. What did the old lady do? She mentally got the hell out.”
Iris shook her head. “I don’t get you. I don’t know why you can’t accept that your mother did the best she could with what she had.”
Paula looked at Iris out of the corners of her eyes. “I told you before, you’re not me.”
“Fine. You don’t give a damn about your mother or how your father might have murdered her to steal her assets or maybe to keep her quiet. Fine. No problem.” She took a big bite of toast.
Paula still frowned at the yogurt.
Iris angrily chewed. “Wonder if she really lost her memory for that long. I guess it’s possible. I read that that’s one of the reasons shock therapy fell out of favor in the seventies. It’s popular again, but they’ve learned a lot in twenty-five years. Who knows what they did to her head back then. I wonder if she forgot who killed Gabriel or if she managed to keep up the lie.”
She crunched a corner of the toast between her teeth. “That’s really blind devotion, isn’t it? Lying to protect her husband even though he murdered her father.” She fingered the cheap bracelet sh
e was still wearing. “I don’t understand why she did it. She would have done fine without Bill DeLacey. She had the land.” Iris looked at Paula, who had sat down and was facing her across the table. “Unless she did it to protect someone else.”
Paula got up and threw the half-empty yogurt container in the trash. “Who else could have killed him? There isn’t anyone else.”
“Sure there is. If it wasn’t some stranger, it had to be one of us. Let’s see…There was your father, Humberto, Dolly, Junior, Thomas, my father, my mother, Lily, you, me…”
“Don’t forget Skippy and Perro.”
“The problem is motive. Your father was the only one who had a motive.”
“What if you start digging around and you end up finding out things you don’t want to know?”
“Like what?”
“Like what if Thomas did it?”
“What would his motive have been?”
“To help the old man. You know what a kiss-ass Thomas was.”
Iris bit into the second piece of toast. She shook her head. “Nah. That’s not enough of a motive.”
“Or Junior. The old man was always putting him down. What if Junior did it to show the old man that he was really a man? Or what about your own father? Maybe the old man paid him to get Gabe out of the way. You said he acted weird after that night.”
“It was a coincidence. The two things are unrelated.” Iris walked to the kitchen and put her plate and mug in the dishwasher.
“What if it wasn’t a coincidence? Are you prepared to find that out? Why are you into this, Iris? It doesn’t even have anything to do with you.”
“Because a woman who was kind to me when I needed kindness asked me for help. Because a cop who participated in killing an unarmed man is sitting on the City Council. Because a greedy, controlling man is laying claim to land that belongs to his children. Your land, Paula. You said yourself that if you had a base, you could make a home for your kids.”
“That still doesn’t explain what’s in it for you.”
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I just stood by and did nothing.”
“You’ve got the will. Why don’t you just go to the police and say that the old man did it?”
“It wouldn’t be fair to Thomas.”
“Fair to Thomas,” Paula snorted. She slapped her thighs and stood up. It marked the end of the conversation. She walked to the living room, dropped to her knees, and starting stacking her money.
“Off again? You’ll have quite a ride on that stash until it runs out.”
Paula sat back on her heels. “I think I know that metal box she was talking about. The old man used to keep one in his desk. I found it once when I was looking for money. He never throws anything away. I’ll bet it’s still there.”
“I’d love to get my hands on it.”
“Hell, I used to break into that house all the time. You know how the old man was about his ten o’clock curfew. If I was home one minute past ten, he’d lock me out.”
“What are you saying?”
“Let’s go home.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Look at my poor old house,” Iris said. “I knew the neighborhood had gone downhill…” She stopped the Triumph in the middle of the street. “My mother’s roses and flowers are gone. My father’s yard’s all dirt and they’ve got cars parked on it.”
“Looks like my house in Pearblossom.” Paula looked up at the top of the hill. “Doesn’t look like Las Mariposas has changed.”
Iris parked the Triumph out of view on a side street across from the ranch’s chain-link front gate. “Let’s call and see if he’s home.”
“He won’t be. He and Junior always went to the apartments on Sunday afternoons because the tenants are usually home. It’s a good time to shake them down for the rent.”
Iris took the cellular phone from her purse and called the ranch house. “No answer.”
“Let’s go. Looks like we’re going to have to cut the fence with your wire cutters.”
They got out of the car. From the trunk Iris grabbed a canvas bag that she’d packed with a few tools. They had started down the hill when Iris said, “I’d better cover up the car. Someone might recognize it.”
She had started to walk back when she saw Paula jump behind a hedge bordering the front yard of one of the homes on the street.
“Iris, it’s him!”
Iris ducked behind the Triumph.
Through the windows she saw Bill DeLacey get out of a cream-colored Cadillac that he’d stopped just inside the gate. He fiddled with a chain that held the gate closed, pushed it open, then got back inside the car. After he’d driven the car beyond the gate, he rolled down the driver’s window and yelled, “Junior! Close the gate.” Then he pointed the Cadillac’s long nose down the hill and drove away with one hand on the steering wheel.
Paula and Iris looked at each other.
“Junior didn’t go with him,” Iris said. “Maybe we should do this some other time.”
“I can handle Junior. Let’s go before he comes out.”
They ran across the street.
“What if they’ve got dogs?” Iris fretted.
“We’ll deal with it.” She looked at Iris and shook her head. “You’re still a big sissy.”
“I know.”
They ducked into the citrus grove.
Paula pulled at the crotch of her jeans. “These are killing me. Thought you said they were big.”
“Those are my fat jeans, darling. They’re big on me.”
“Bitch.”
“Wonder if I can still find Skippy’s grave. I buried him under an orange tree and put some stones on top to mark it. He lived to be sixteen. Great dog.”
Iris lifted a string of Christmas lights dangling from a big grapefruit tree. She looked up at the sturdy branches and thought of Dolly’s grisly end. “That’s hardcore, to hang yourself.”
Paula rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if cold. “Let’s get out of here before Mr. Personality finally locks the gate. Junior, the original slacker.”
They walked through the old citrus trees, which still held unpicked fruit from prior growing seasons. The ground was littered with fallen fruit in various stages of decay.
“Uhhh!” Iris inhaled sharply. “The Wall of Gaytan. It’s still there!”
They walked into the clearing where the six-foot expanse of wall stood. It had several deep cracks and listed forward. The top remained unfinished with steel rods jutting from it.
“Looks like it’d come right down with one good shaker,” Paula said.
“Wonder why your father never took it down,” Iris mused.
“No deep dark secret there. The old man loves to save things.” Paula squatted slightly and raised her index finger, imitating her father. “Don’t throw that away! Might need it someday.”
Iris looked at the wall and the lemon tree that still spread its branches above it and shook her head. “I never told you the real reason I was out here that night your mother drove into the wall. I was going to hang myself from that branch with the belt from my bathrobe.”
Paula was stunned. “Really?”
“It was the night my dad left. Made sense at the time. But I couldn’t do it.” She looked at the limb again. “I never forgot being in that state of mind. Feeling such hopelessness and despair and not seeing any end.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Paula, you were gone with Mike all the time. When you took up with him, it was like I didn’t exist.”
Paula looked at the ground.
Iris gazed silently at the tree.
“I’ll be over here.” Paula turned and left.
After a while Iris walked in the direction Paula had gone and soon reached the toolshed. It was still run down and ramshackle looking and had been patched. It was smaller than Iris remembered. Paula was not around.
The toolshed door burst open.
Iris jumped backward and clasped her h
and to her chest.
“Sorry,” Paula said.
“You scared the life out of me!”
“Sorry.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“Nothing.” She avoided Iris’s eyes and started walking quickly. “Let’s do this deal and get the hell out of here. This memory lane business is giving me a headache.”
Iris followed.
They walked through the grove until they reached Gabriel Gaytan’s old house. The red pickup truck was parked next to it. They heard the clatter of metal against metal and a whistling whine.
They stepped quietly past the house. The noise grew louder. When they reached the wooden lattice that formed the walls of the backyard patio, Paula threw her hand out, stopping Iris. She motioned for Iris to look through the lattice.
In a corner of the patio, Junior DeLacey was sitting on a chair, cleaning a handgun. Pieces of the gun were spread on cloths on the ground around him.
The green Amazon parrot and blue macaw were still alive. They were out of their cages and sitting on tall, T-shaped perches crammed against one wall of the crowded patio. Junior’s model train set—arrayed on a platform that extended the length of the patio and halfway across it—was running full speed. It was quadruple the size it had been when Iris had last seen it in Junior’s room. More villages had been added, with farms and forests in between. Throughout, there were tiny people going about their business, carrying bags of groceries, filling their cars with gas, waving at acquaintances, filing out of a steepled church, filing into a brick schoolhouse, and plowing their fields. A group of boys played baseball in a park. A cluster of children waved at the passing train, their arms permanently raised.
Junior wasn’t looking at the train but was focused on his work, methodically rubbing a metal part with a stained cloth. The train provided background noise, like a radio.
When Junior bent over to set down the part he held and pick up another, the parrot strained forward on his perch and grabbed a hunk of flesh on Junior’s neck just below the hairline. He cried out and swatted at the bird, who squawked and danced away from him on his perch.
“Stupid bird,” Junior grumbled.
Iris and Paula clamped their hands over their mouths to stifle their laughter. They made the mistake of looking at each other, which made them laugh harder. They started to make their way around the patio, when Iris paused to get a closer look at something that had caught her eye. Paula kept going while Iris stayed frozen. The macaw spotted her and squawked, startling her and causing her to sprint behind the hill, leaving Paula in the dust.