by Susan Cox
The garden was used by everyone who lived here. The swings were empty, but the younger kids would come out after school. The vegetable garden was leafy, which meant there would be potatoes soon, or maybe something more exotic. The volunteer gardeners got first dibs, but most of the produce was distributed first-come-first-served on Saturday mornings. There were rules and a computer spreadsheet, so no one got more than their fair share. I usually steered clear and got my veggies at Whole Foods.
I looked over at the two empty buildings, five million dollars on the hoof, as Nat would say, and yet about to be demolished to cause a wound on the neighborhood gestalt. A young woman—I thought it was Angela Lacerda—wearing a tasseled, black-and-white kufiya around her shoulders was slowly walking the narrow paths of the knot garden, her hands occupied with a simple metal bowl. She was caressing the edge of the bowl the way someone might stroke a dampened finger around the rim of a wineglass to make it sing. The tone the bowl made was slightly eerie but not unpleasant, and it somehow overrode other random noises. In addition to the kufiya, her outfit included jeans tucked into the tops of lemon-colored socks. Lucy growled at her as she approached. Angela took it as an invitation to join me on my bench. Lucy growled again.
“The calm before the storm,” she said. “I like to come out here before the kids show up in the afternoon.” She was thin, and not unattractive, but she was colorless, and most girls would have compensated for that lack of sparkle with makeup. She was wearing a sweater in a pale, muddy color, which needed something to brighten it up. I decided the lemon-colored socks must have been a gift. I quickly glanced at her left hand. No engagement ring. Interesting.
She bent down to place her metal bowl, which was half full of water, on the floor near her feet, and picked up a twig. She waved it enticingly at Lucy, who ignored it. “I’m Angela Lacerda. I think you own the perfume store, don’t you?”
“Theo Bogart,” I said. “And I know what you mean about the kids.”
“If I had any of my own, I guess I’d be happy they had a safe place to play.” Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “Sorry,” she sniffed. “Recent breakup.”
“Been there,” I said sympathetically. I thought of Katrina’s dossier and the high school abortion. “Men can be dicks.”
She scowled at me. “My fiancé—ex-fiancé”—she sniffed again—“isn’t a dick. He’s kind and generous and—It was all my fault,” she wailed suddenly. “His family is wealthy, and I wanted to prove my value, I guess. So Jason wouldn’t think he was being burdened with a delicate flower who couldn’t pull her weight, you know?”
“Did—er Jason think you were—”
She faltered. “I could tell his parents were singing that song, and he’d started to say a few things—I’m not a mogul or anything, but I’d bought a few pieces of property for things like back taxes and made a little profit on them. I thought if I showed them, I could play with the big boys—I got involved in a business deal that didn’t turn out well, thanks to our late friend Katrina Dermody.” The twig snapped in her fingers.
“Anyway, that’s all over,” she said, before I could follow her down that intriguing trail. She sniffed once more and straightened her shoulders, and her face assumed what was probably a more typical, capable expression than the tears. She adjusted the kufiya around her narrow shoulders and bent over to secure the hems of her jeans into her lemon-colored socks. “Ticks,” she said.
“Ticks? Here in the Gardens?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Can’t be too careful. You’re on the association board. I recognize your name. And who’s this?” She leaned down to hold out a tentative fist to Lucy, who growled again.
“That’s Lucy. She doesn’t bite. She’s just prickly.”
“I understand. She’s cute.”
I eyed Lucy’s lopsided little face doubtfully. “Not many people think so, but thanks.”
I started to ask her for the story of Katrina’s involvement in the business deal and the broken engagement, but Gavin was strolling across the garden toward us. He raised a hand in greeting.
“Hi, Miss Bogart,” he said as he reached us.
“Call me Theo.”
He looked shyly pleased. “Theo. Hi,” he added to Angela, sticking out his hand, “I’m Gavin.”
She blushed and shook the proffered hand. “Angela. Good to meet you.”
Now they were both flushing, both apparently suffering the agony of being shy and awkward. “This is Lucy,” she said. Gavin stepped back, onto the edge of the metal bowl, and it spun away, splashing water.
“Oh my gosh, I’m sorry. Is that a standing bell? Is it yours? Are you a Buddhist?”
He shook a few drops of water from the bowl and handed it to her. “I’m so clumsy; was the water charged? I’m really sorry.”
“I just use it to meditate,” she said, reassuring him even as she took the bowl and held it tenderly in the crook of her arm. “I’m not religious or anything. Are you Buddhist?”
“Gosh, no. I’m just interested in alternative spirituality, you know?”
“Me too. I love how many different ways people have developed to, well, to hold back the night, I guess.”
I stood up and patted my thigh to get Lucy’s attention, then tucked her under my arm and strolled away. I don’t think they noticed.
With the calendar in mind, I took a few minutes to assess the gnarled and ancient purple clematis growing on the garden shed. The weathered shed had some old and rusty garden tools nailed to one of the outside walls as a sort of declaration of ownership by the volunteer gardeners, in case anyone got it into their head to think they could store their model boats there or something. The Garden Gnomes were both vocal and territorial. (That was Nat’s name for them, not mine, but it was hard to think of them any other way once the idea took hold.) A varied assortment gathered every Saturday morning carrying water bottles or mugs of coffee, rubbing their eyes like sleepy kindergarteners on a field trip, some of them wearing red knitted hats in an ironic homage to their nickname. In my experience, this makes them nearly unique, since Americans often don’t recognize irony unless it sits up and begs. The English, of course, use it all the time, whether it’s appropriate or not.
Professor D’Allessio, the current über-gardener, handed out grumpy orders to anyone who wandered by, so I was always careful to avoid catching his eye. He’d been retired from UC Berkeley for a decade or more, and the garden was his passion. We all knew him as Professor, and no one ever called him anything else, even his wife, Ruth.
If Lucy ever finished her perambulations, I thought I might stop in to see them and find out how they were taking Katrina’s death. And I supposed I could have a word with Angela Lacerda if I could pry her away from Gavin. I looked at them, heads close together, as they strolled down the garden.
In the meantime, I had the photos to take for the calendar. I was planning to pair O’Keeffe-style close-ups of the flowers with a wider view of their location, while taking Nat’s advice to avoid the sexual subtext in O’Keeffe’s art. If I took everything from unexpected angles maybe they’d focus on that. I’d include the shed’s rusty tools in tight close-up, with a flower from the clematis vine growing up over its roof; I could crawl under the bench down the way and shoot upward from ground level, with one of the nasturtiums growing through the slats; the datura, with its protective ring of picket fencing, would look interesting from the viewpoint of one of its large trumpet-shaped flowers, and the kids’ swings, with that vine growing on the crossbar. Or maybe that was a weed.
The rosemary in the knot garden/labyrinth was in flower. I could pair a close-up with an overhead shot to show off the rigid geometric precision of the hedges. I looked up and worked out the angle. My friend Sabina’s top-floor flat looked like a good vantage point.
While I was thinking about it, Professor D’Allessio sneaked in under my radar. He marched in my direction, with his hoe at parade rest as usual. “Ah,” he shouted, raising his hoe to get my attention.
“Soap girl! You!” He had nicknames for all of us, and mine was actually a slight improvement over the original. Nat was “the furry one”—no clear idea why. For some reason the professor liked Ben, and so he was “Ben, the lawyer.” He referred to Sabina, his granddaughter, as “my little Sabina,” although she towered over him by several inches and was about to become a mother for the second time. Her husband, Kurt, was “il biondo,” which I think means “the blonde,” which, fair enough, as Kurt was about the palest blonde I’d ever seen. I’d never heard if the professor had a nickname for Katrina, but I was about to find out.
“So,” he said, reaching me and holding his hoe upright like a staff of office. He kept the thing honed to a razor’s edge, and I worried he’d lop off an ear one day. His face, topped with a cap of wiry white hair, looked carved from redwood. I waited, resigned, to hear his latest complaint. His English wasn’t perfect, but he never had any trouble making his opinions known.
“Calendar for this year,” he said unexpectedly. “You do photographs, yes?”
I nodded.
He waved a hand, encompassing the entire garden with a grand, Italian gesture. “Do photographs of garden.” He frowned at me ferociously. “No animals. Pah!”
“That’s a good idea, Professor,” I said, because it was always best to agree with him whenever possible.
“Yes. Not so many fights.” He nodded firmly, once, and started to move away.
“Speaking of fights—” I said hastily, and he turned back. “About Katrina—”
“Ah. You mean did I, Guillermo D’Allessio, kill the bitch?” He spat on the ground near his feet.
I must have looked as shocked as I felt; I’d never heard him utter even the mildest of crude language.
He narrowed his eyes, thumped his hoe on the ground, and doubled down. “She was a bitch. She try to destroy the Gardens.” Then he shrugged. “But I don’t kill her. Plenty of others, maybe,” he cackled and waved his hoe at Gavin and Angela, now halfway down the garden, engrossed in conversation. He grimaced. “My little Sabina knows I am distrowt—distrowt! And she says don’t worry. Maybe someone will kill her. She try to make me feel better.” He shrugged. “That is all I know.”
He stomped off, swishing his hoe rhythmically and decapitating weeds daring to show their heads in his path.
I picked up Lucy, who’d finally achieved her objective, and dropped the resulting plastic bag into one of a pair of dedicated waste bins we’d recently installed over the objections of our pet-haters and to the satisfaction of our pet-owners. The bins had an airlock entrance to cut down on escaping smells, and we’d had them painted in a sort of botanical camouflage, all of which made them difficult to find unless you were practically on top of them. Like even the simplest changes to the gardens, the bins represented dozens of hours of my life and the lives of the other neighborhood association officers.
Lucy grumbled at me, although her heart didn’t seem to be in it, as I hitched her under one arm. I had to carry her or she’d stay to argue with our resident raccoon, and anyway, pets weren’t permitted in the garden unaccompanied. She was usually impressively obedient, and she walked to heel around the neighborhood, but apparently being out here made her brains dissolve. She’d arrived already trained, by the way, so it was surprising when no one claimed her. After I turned her in, I kept checking in with the kindly people at the city animal shelter, hoping she’d be reunited with the poor soul who owned her. She’d been surly, argumentative, and miserable there, and after a month she was due for the chop. They waived the adoption fee, with fixed smiles on their faces, and by the time I remembered “The Ransom of Red Chief,” she and I were already on our way home.
We headed over to Sabina’s flat; maybe she’d tell me why she told the professor someone might kill Katrina. It was Kurt Talbot’s flat, too, but I preferred not to think too much about former lovers, especially ones I no longer liked very much. Kurt played golf on Wednesday afternoons and then came home to change before going back to the office for evening appointments. I thought I might be able to catch him for a few minutes and ask them both … whatever I could think of to ask them about Katrina.
Sabina had exchanged her skin-tight motorcycle leathers (and the motorcycle that went with them) for figure-hugging stretch dresses, which made her small baby bump obvious. Today’s was dark green with a subtle glitter in the fabric and, as always, she was stunning. She was also carrying a vicious-looking knife with a set of wings and the number 666 on the handle. It probably says something about both of us that I didn’t even blink.
“Hey, Theo! Hi, Lucy.”
Even though I’m tall, she had to bend slightly from her six-foot altitude to kiss my cheek, and her long, fiery red corkscrew curls tickled my face. She exchanged the knife for a chopstick she grabbed from the kitchen counter, bunched up a handful of her hair, pulled it into a casual knot, and impaled it with the chopstick. When I’ve tried that trick, the chopstick usually ended up on the floor. Then she filled a mixing bowl with water and put it on the floor for Lucy, who ignored it in favor of sitting upright by the back door, ready to leave.
“I’m putting my knives up in the hallway; come look.” She guided me along to their central hallway where, sure enough, she had her collection of knives in shadow boxes arranged with subtle lighting from somewhere. “Decided before Sebastian gets old enough to walk I needed to put them somewhere he can’t get his hands on them, but I didn’t want to lock them away. What d’you think?”
“It looks great,” I said, because it did, although I will never understand Americans’ love affair with their weapons. She grinned at me. Sabina understood me. Or at any rate, she understood the person she thought I was.
I told her about my calendar project, and she cheerfully led me into their bedroom, which overlooked the gardens. One of the bed pillows was on the floor, and the mattress was askew. She blushed when I looked at it and said, “Nice,” in an admiring tone, and then she giggled and we bumped fists. I looked out of the window down at the potting shed and the knot garden below. “This is the perfect angle,” I said. “I’ll come back with a camera if that’s okay.”
She turned around from rummaging in her closet. “Sure. Hey! Would you like to buy my leather jacket?” She held it out in my direction and looked it over. “I’m never going to wear it now, and it’s about your size.”
It was black, a little scraped and dinged, with heavy zippers in unlikely places. It was left over from her former career as a motorcycle messenger, and I loved it. I’d been a clotheshorse, once. Now I had fashion apathy. I didn’t even have any jewelry here, except a pair of earrings and a bracelet I was wearing on the day I left London. My Louboutin heels ended up at the Salvation Army store in the Mission, and I now owned half a dozen pairs of ballet-style flats to go with my wardrobe of jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts. But I could use a warm jacket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
She tossed me the jacket. “Try it on. I’ll pour you some wine and get some snacks; come out when you’re ready and we can catch up while Mariana gives the kiddo his bath. Are you hungry?”
“Not really. But wine sounds great.”
On my way past the hall bathroom, I glanced in. “Hola, Mariana.”
She looked up “Hola, Miss Teo.” She had her arms full of Sebastian, so I said, “Hola, Sebastian,” and wiggled my fingers at him. He gummed his fist and kicked his legs happily like a frog.
Kurt looked a little startled when I smiled at him as he came up the stairs. I didn’t usually.
“Hi,” I said. “Sabina’s offered me a glass of wine.”
“Sounds good,” he said cautiously. He leaned into the archway leading to their sitting room. “Pour me a glass, would you, Sabina? I’ll be right there.”
I settled myself into a comfortable chair, leaving the sofa for them because they were sort of tactile, with a tendency to gaze into each other’s eyes a little too much. Sabina came out of the dining room with a third glass, and a plate of Brie,
grapes, and crackers. She poured wine into a second glass and poured herself a glass of sparkling water. I heard Kurt cooing at Sebastian in the next room, which, frankly, I would never have believed if I hadn’t heard it myself. I turned to Sabina and opened my mouth to say as much, but she preempted me. “Sebastian will be asleep when he comes home this evening; he wants to get his baby fix.”
“Everything is good?” I asked.
A smile lit up her face. “Better than good.”
“So. How is parenthood?” I asked when Kurt joined us. I thought that was a safe topic, since they were both good for twenty minutes on the subject of Sebastian’s latest acts of brilliance, which, since he wasn’t yet three months old, you’d think would be fairly limited.