Damage

by John Lescroart

  Sunday was his day off and some gamecocks were fighting at a place he knew down near Pescadero. Maybe Ro would like to go? It was a hell of a show. Girls watching it, getting into it, it made them hot.

  Given his prejudices and predilections, Ro normally wouldn’t have gone out of his way to accommodate or hang out with one of the household help, whom he generally viewed as stratospherically beneath him.

  But Eztli was different.

  First, of course, he was a guy—strong and experienced. He could handle himself, and this was always a plus.

  Second, and much more important, was the fact that while Ro had been in prison, Eztli had suggested to Cliff and Theresa—worried sick about their son’s safety behind bars—that he network amidst the greater Hispanic community and put out the word among the prison population, particularly the violent Mexican gang EME, that Ro wasn’t to be molested; that, in fact, protection for him would be rewarded.

  The two men—butler and convict—had met in the prison’s visitors room several times before Ro’s release to negotiate rewards and payouts and in the course of these meetings had developed an easy bond if not yet a true friendship. But in any event, Ro was inclined to relax his usual standards—for a day at least—and see what kind of fun the butler could provide for him.

  So here they were, sharing a doob, just passing Half Moon Bay, the golf courses, the Ritz-Carlton there on the right.

  “No,” Ro was saying, “I’m not going back in. They’ll have to kill me first.”

  Eztli took a hit and passed the joint across. “Your mom and dad believe it won’t come to that.”

  “That’s what they keep saying, anyway. But I don’t know. They told me starting out they had that prick Farrell on board with them. That didn’t work out so well.”

  “Yeah, but look what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’re out.”

  “No thanks to Farrell.”

  “No?” Eztli shrugged. “Okay.”

  Ro held some smoke in his lungs while he looked over at his driver. Suddenly now he got the strongest sense that he’d intuited several times in the prison’s visiting room that there was more going on inside the man’s brain than might immediately be apparent behind the stony, expressionless exterior. His parents had kept Eztli on for the better part of ten years, and they were very smart and shrewd people who did not much let sentimental attachments get in their ways. If Eztli were just muscle, he would have made some mistake and been long gone by now. But not only was he very much still a presence, he actually lived in the big house with the family. Clearly he had an agile brain and contributed on other levels as well.

  To say nothing of the fact that he’d probably saved Ro’s literal ass in prison, and maybe his life as well.

  The young man blew out the smoke he’d been holding. “You don’t agree with me?” he asked. “About Farrell?”

  Eztli kept his eyes on the road, took a minute before he answered. “I believe what your mother and father believe.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That if Farrell wants you in jail, you’re in jail.”

  “But he ...”

  Eztli was shaking his head. “He’s playing a game.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s a politician. He’s playing both sides. That’s what they do.” Eztli held out his right hand and Ro handed him the joint, which he sucked down to its last half inch. Letting the hit out, he went on, “Look. Don’t kid yourself. Farrell makes the call. He goes to a judge—any judge—and says you don’t get bail, period, then you don’t get bail. But he didn’t do that. Not either time it’s come up. Meanwhile, he gives your lawyer half a year to get up to speed. Which won’t happen in any six months, either. That’ll go a year, maybe two, maybe forever. And this makes Farrell the best friend you got. He’s giving you time, and time’s the main thing.”

  “For what?”

  “Hey, come on, for everything.” Eztli flashed him a look. “For doing what you have to do.”

  Gloria Serrano, née Gonzalvez, loved doing her own family’s laundry. She sometimes felt she could do it forever in perfect happiness, so long as it was in her own house, for her own sons and daughter and husband. She loved the smell of it—the musky tang as she pulled the clothes from the hamper as well as the sweet detergent scent when it came out of the dryer almost too hot to touch. She liked to separate the whites from the colors, to take the shirts out as soon as they’d dried so that she could fold them so they wouldn’t wrinkle.

  She even loved the challenge of finding the lost sock that seemed to go along with nearly every load.

  Now, Sunday afternoon, her one day off, she had her piles of clothes stacked and folded on the wooden workbench next to the washer and dryer in the garage of the two-bedroom house that she and Roberto had finally managed to buy in Sunnyvale.

  Today one of her husband’s red socks had made itself disappear. Gloria went down to one knee and put her head almost inside the dryer, then pulled back and reached in with her hand to turn the drum. No sock.

  She hoped it would not be among the clothes she’d already folded. The only other place it could be was the washer itself, but she was usually very careful about making sure the washer was empty before she started the dryer because this was when she often found the coins and also, very occasionally, the bills, that she hid to use for presents for Roberto and the children.

  Since she’d bought the last present for Ramon’s seventh birthday in November—a Lego battleship that he’d loved and rebuilt so far about twenty times—she’d amassed a new total of nearly twenty dollars, including today’s unusually large haul of two dollar bills and a quarter.

  She never considered that she was stealing from her husband by keeping the money she found. The money always went back to one of them. She looked on it more as though it were a fine that fate imposed on her husband when he didn’t check to empty his pockets before he threw clothes in the hamper.

  But that sock was missing, and she didn’t really want to unfold all of her already folded clothes and check again. Maybe in the excitement of finding so much money earlier, she hadn’t been as careful as she usually was. So she opened the washer and reached around where a sock might have stuck in the spinning process. And today—a good luck sign—she found it clinging to the top of the drum.

  She wasn’t about to run a whole load of drying for one sock, so she took the wet sock and its dry partner and threw them both into the dryer, where they would wait until the next load went in. Then she gathered the other clothes in her arms, opened the garage door to the kitchen, and went to distribute them through the house.

  She was making enchiladas for Sunday dinner and their wonderful smell stopped her in her tracks in the kitchen. Caught in a rogue wave of emotion, she put the clothes down on the table and pulled out a chair to sit on. Roberto had taken the children—all the children, bless him—to Costco for their biweekly run there, and this had left Gloria free to clean and do the laundry in an empty house, get it ready for the next week.

  After a minute, she got up to pour herself some of her delicious Guatemalan coffee. Sitting back at the table, she wrapped her hands around her mug and stared out at the overcast sky through her kitchen window.

  The color of the sky didn’t matter. Sitting with her clean washing in her own house on a Sunday afternoon, drinking the wonderful coffee, smelling the good food that they’d have for dinner, she felt kissed by God, in complete contentment.

  And who could ever have imagined she would have gotten to here? Especially after those first few months when she’d just arrived to work with the Curtlees. And after their horrible son, who’d started in on her within the first few days, finally got his way again and again over the months she’d stayed.

  What else was she going to do? Whom could she turn to? The family chose to turn at best a blind eye to Ro’s advances. And, at worst, they were complicit. That she’d eventually gotte
n out and placed with another family had been miracle number two.

  And that would never have happened if the new girl, Dolores—the one Ro had finally killed—hadn’t been on her way in the pipeline from Guatemala. The poor thing.

  Gloria had no doubt that, but for the grace of God, that might have been her.

  And then the scary months before and after she’d actually gone in and testified and Ro had gone to jail, when Cliff and Theresa Curtlee had first tried to buy her silence, and then had threatened her, through their lawyers, with extradition. But even with all of their connections, they had not been able to call on as many as Gloria herself had among her extended family. So they could not track her as she disappeared first to live with friends of some cousins in Gilroy, nor after she met and married Roberto and reestablished herself as a housekeeper in Sunnyvale.

  Now she had a good business cleaning twenty-five homes in Palo Alto and Menlo Park every week—steady, legal work, and two employees besides herself. She had a dependable babysitter, her own home, a family, and a documented, hardworking husband who loved her.

  And—she thanked God every day—no Ro or any other Curtlee in her life.

  Not now.

  Not ever again.

  The Novios had a semi-enclosed redwood gazebo in their backyard, hexagonal in shape, about ten feet in diameter. When Chuck came out to get firewood as dusk closed in on this cold and cloudy Sunday evening, he noticed his brother-in-law sitting on the bench that encircled the inside of the gazebo. He was faced away from the house, canted forward, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him.

  Chuck walked over and knocked on one of the posts and Michael’s shoulders rose and fell as he looked over. “Hey.”

  “You all right?”

  “Just taking a break.”

  Kathy had insisted that the whole Durbin family stay with them at least until the memorial next Thursday. Individual pockets of grief were piled up inside the house like snowdrifts. Kathy. Chuck’s twins. And Michael and Janice’s own Allie and their boys—angry Jon and devastated Peter. All of them were flopped, wasted on the furniture in front of the television, tuned to sports round the clock.

  “Not really so all right, though,” Durbin added.

  “No. Of course not. I hear you.” Novio sat down across from him.

  Durbin raised his head. “I keep wondering what I’m supposed to do now. Next. You know?”

  “I can imagine. If Kathy died . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t think about it.”

  “No,” Durbin said. “No reason to.” A beat. “I’m just trying to get my arms around what happened. I can’t put together any kind of a plausible scenario. I mean, why was she home? What was she doing there that time of morning? She was supposedly going out the door right behind me, and next thing we know, somebody else is in the house and she’s dead up in the bedroom. How does that happen, Chuck? What’s that about?”

  “What do the cops say? They got any theories?”

  Durbin’s face went dark. “Fucking cops. Don’t get me started. They got nothing. No lab reports. The autopsy won’t be done until maybe next month. They’re not even ready to say somebody killed her yet, not on purpose, anyway. She might have just happened to be home when whoever it was started the fire. Maybe she ran upstairs and tried to put it out and died of smoke inhalation.”

  “So at least they’re saying it was arson?”

  “Apparently. But that’s the other thing. I told you not to get me started.”

  “Too late now. What’s the other thing?”

  “This guy Glitsky, the inspector? When he was here, it was like I was part of his investigation. Like I could have had something to do with it.”

  Chuck nodded in understanding. “Yeah. He had some questions for me, too, while we were waiting for you to come downstairs.”

  This information straightened Durbin right up. “He talked to you? He questioned you? What about?”

  “My cell phone. Or rather, Janice’s cell phone, which didn’t burn up because it was hanging from a peg behind the kitchen door. Evidently, he said, I got twelve calls to or from her in the past two weeks. I told him that evidently I did. So what? We were planning a surprise party for Kathy’s fortieth next month. Was there something sinister about that?”

  “What’d he say?”

  A shrug. “He just let it go, as he should have. But Jesus, talk about shaking every tree. I know it’s his job, but can you say ridiculous?”

  “Yeah, well, I hear you. And the funny thing is, before yesterday, I would have told you Glitsky and I got along all right.”

  “Before yesterday? You knew Glitsky personally?”

  “Not saying we were friends exactly, but after Ro’s trial we went out together a couple of times, just comparing notes on how the Curtlees were fucking around with both of us. So I figure he knows who I am, basically. But yesterday, I get the strong impression that he doesn’t really think it’s out of the question that I killed her, either.”

  “He’s just turning over rocks.”

  Durbin shook his head. “Maybe, but stupid and a waste of his time. I told him Janice and me, we were having a few problems, same as every other married couple with teenagers on the planet, but nothing we couldn’t work out . . .”

  “You guys were having problems?”

  A shrug. “Nothing we couldn’t fix, Chuck. Nothing to kill her over, trust me.”

  “No, I didn’t mean ...”

  Durbin waved him off. “It doesn’t matter. The point is Glitsky’s ears go up and he’s all ‘How long have you been having these difficulties? ’ and ‘Were you seeing anybody, a marriage counselor, like that?’ I tell him maybe he hasn’t heard, but Janice was a psychiatrist. We weren’t anywhere near therapy. Anyway, bottom line, I shouldn’t have mentioned anything. Next thing I know, he tells me he’s talked to some of my people down at the shop. He wants to know where was I that I got in late Friday morning? I told him I didn’t even realize I had been late. And he goes, ‘Yeah, like a half hour.’ And then waits, like I’ve got something to tell him. Then he starts asking about Liza.”

  “Who’s Liza?”

  “My assistant manager at work. Smart and cute. She’s sticking up for me when Glitsky’s down at the store asking questions about how late I was, how was I acting . . .”

  “He actually went to your store?”

  “First thing. Before he came to see us here. I told you. I’m on his list.”

  “But that’s just so ludicrous.”

  “It’s beyond that, but then he’s going on about my relationship with Liza. Like maybe it’s because of her I decided to kill Janice? I want to strangle the guy.” His temper flared again suddenly. “Thinking it could be me, for Christ’s sake!”

  Chuck came forward on his bench. “He couldn’t really think that. He’s just getting started. Let the evidence come in, get the autopsy done. It’ll all work itself out.”

  Durbin leaned back against the wall of the gazebo. “You’re right. You’re right.” He brought a hand up to his forehead, his eyes dull, shot with red. “I’m just so done in.” Suddenly Durbin cocked his head, life coming into his eyes.

  “What?” Chuck asked. “It’s not too often you actually see the lightbulb go on.”

  Durbin stared out over Novio’s shoulder.

  “Mike? What is it?”

  Durbin let out the breath he’d been holding. “You know the troubles I told you we’d been having, Janice and me? I think she was having an affair.”

  Novio went still before he finally shook his head. “No way, Mike. I don’t think so. Not Janice.” Then, “Really? You know this? With who?”

  “One of her patients, if I had to guess.” The idea growing on him, he straightened up. “I was just wondering who could have had a reason to have done this. No way it was just random, someone picking our house and deciding to burn it down. But if she was involved with somebody and wanted to break it off, and he came over and went into a rage . . . I me
an, that’s somebody who would have a motive, some kind of personal connection to tell Glitsky about, get him looking at somebody besides me.”

  Nodding, going along with it, Chuck said, “At least it’s someplace he can start. Or he can go with my other theory.”

  “What’s that?”

  Chuck hesitated. “That this might not have been about Janice at all. That she was just a way to get at you.”

  “Me? Who’d want to get at me? What for?” But then the obvious occurred to him. “Ro Curtlee.”

  Novio shrugged. “The first witness who got killed after he got let out, didn’t he burn her place down around her? And you said you thought he recognized you in court last week. So I start thinking maybe . . .”

  Durbin held out a hand, stopping him. “God in heaven,” he said.

  15

  “I really think we ought to move to New York,” Theresa Curtlee said on Monday morning. She was at breakfast downstairs with her husband. She would alternately sip from a porcelain coffee cup, a leaded-crystal Riedel wineglass filled with Pellegrino water garnished with a slice of lime, and a small glass of grapefruit juice. On her plate she’d sliced off two small bites of pineapple. The table between her and Cliff groaned with food, most of it destined for the disposal: several bowls and platters of French toast, scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, smoked salmon, bagels, English muffins, bran and blueberry muffins, a composed fruit salad. “There really is no reason we have to live with the constant aggravation here.”

  Cliff moved his copy of the Courier off to the side. “It would be difficult to run the businesses from New York,” he said. “And we don’t want to uproot now at our ages. Although it is tempting, I must admit. All this madness with Ro. I just pray now that they let it drop.”