What I did know was that I’d have to figure out some other way to get back home. I didn’t dare go to Dante’s mother’s house again. Before, when I thought it was my godfather who wanted me dead, I hadn’t worried about her safety. But with this new information — all bets were off. I couldn’t take the chance of putting anyone else in danger. Not after what happened to Kato.
I curled up on a back pew. The mission bells ringing at eight woke me. The church around me was filled with tourists who had just got off a tour bus and were loudly commenting on the beautiful sacristy. With my coat pulled over my head, they’d probably thought I was a vagrant. I felt like one.
After tidying up a bit in one of the bathrooms at the mission, I snuck onto one of the empty tour buses parked out front. I waited to make my move until I saw a driver pull out a pack of smokes and sneak around the backside of the bus. I didn’t care where it was headed as long as it was far away from here. I sat in a row toward the back and buried my face in a brochure about the Mission when people started boarding the bus. When the bus started up, a couple of elderly ladies kept looking at me and whispering. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. I figured I’d probably taken one of their seats.
It wasn’t until the bus pulled over for a snack break at a coffee shop in Salinas and all of the passengers had filed out except me, that the tour guide noticed me.
“Excuse me. I don’t recall you being on the bus before.” The woman’s neat bun and the frown between her eyes meant no nonsense. “This tour is for the Women’s Club of Gilroy.”
I acted shocked and jumped out of my seat, grabbing my bag. “Oh, my gosh, I had a migraine and must’ve crawled on the wrong bus and fallen asleep. I can’t believe I got on the wrong one. Oh no!”
I acted so distraught, she believed me. I rushed past her. “I need to find a phone. My friends are going to be worried sick.”
I rented a car in Salinas under another fake identity Darling had given me.
Back in San Francisco, I dropped off the rental car and took a cab back to the Tenderloin. As I paid the cabbie, I looked around again for Ethel. I hadn’t seen her since before I left for Europe. I hoped she was okay and not passed out drunk in some alley. Her absence worried me. I’d lost too many people around me not to worry.
When I finally made it to my room and gave Django enough pets for him to settle down, I curled up in my bed with all my clothes on and just stared at the wall. Now that I was safe and could relax, the implications of the day before struck me full force.
My godfather was dead. Although I had just settled under the covers, I leaped out of bed, got a chair so I could reach my mother’s box from its high shelf in my kitchen area.
The answer had to be in there somewhere.
I reached for the box and felt empty air.
My hand ran over the shelf again. There it was, pushed farther back than I had thought.
I opened a can of tuna and shared it with Django as I sorted through a stack of love letters from my dad. I read about six of them and my heart both hurt and filled with happiness at the love my parents had shared.
From what I could piece together, my mother and father had started dating when they were fourteen years old. When my father turned sixteen, he left Sicily and came to Monterey to work for his father on a fishing boat. The two teens pledged their eternal love for one another and made plans to marry once my mother turned eighteen. Then the letters grew sad. My mother’s parents were both killed in a freak boat wreck on their way to Sardinia.
“My love. I am so lost. The pain is almost too much to bear. When I think about mama and papa, the world around me turns black. If I didn’t have you, I would just walk off the cliff by my house. Thoughts of you are the only thing that stop me from doing that.”
I stopped reading for a second. I was living my mother’s life. We were both orphans who had lost everything. Except, unlike her, I had no boyfriend. I had no one to love. My world had been black since their death.
Even though she always loved Christopher more, even though I always felt second best, her absence left a hole in my heart. And I knew no man would ever love me as much as my father had loved me.
My father wrote back begging her to be patient and to wait for him. He even offered to come back to Sicily and get her as soon as he had saved enough money.
The next letter my mother wrote sounded a bit more upbeat. She had been taken in by a friend of the family she called Uncle Tony.
I paused on that name. Uncle Tony was Mateo Antonio Turricci. I’d bet on it. I read on. He had become her guardian. That must be why he gave her that villa and the surrounding land. That explained the connection between Vito and Turricci—they knew each other from the old country. But it still didn’t explain why Turricci was going to pay Vito an insane amount of money for a development worth one-fourth of that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I SNUGGLED WITH DJANGO and slept for two days until my jetlag had worn off and I felt like myself again. My head still hurt occasionally and my body was covered in cuts and bruises from being tossed around like a rag doll, but I’d felt worse.
On the third morning, I made a strong cup of espresso, tugged on some faded jeans and an old sweater and headed for the door with Django practically bouncing at my heels. I wanted to go visit Jessica Stark. The contract I’d seen in Italy still stumped me. Maybe Jessica Stark knew why Turricci was so interested in the land.
Outside the building, I glanced again at the spot where Ethel usually sat during the day. The flattened cardboard boxes she sat on were still there. I made a note to ask Thanh-Thanh about Ethel.
THE CANCER HAD DONE a number on Jessica Stark. Large shadows pooled under her eyes and her cheekbones were sharp slices slanting up to her hairline. The smile she gave me was wan. Death was shadowing her every move.
She didn’t seem surprised to see me. She held up a rocks glass to toast me and shrugged.
“I figure there’s no reason to wait until noon anymore.”
I pressed my lips together. When she poured me a drink, I clinked my glass to hers and downed it in one gulp.
“I came to tell you that you don’t have to worry anymore. My godfather’s dead.”
Her shrill laughter startled me.
“It’s too late. I went to the oncologist yesterday. It’s spread to my brain. It’s a matter of days. Maybe hours.”
I looked down. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged.
I felt bad grilling a dying woman for information, but I needed to know.
“Jessica, can you think of any reason why an investor would pay two hundred and fifty million for this development? I mean, is there a gold vein buried underground or what?”
She frowned and her eyebrows knit together. “That’s how much your lying greedy godfather was getting for these digs?”
“Can you think of any reason someone would pay that much?”
She hiccupped. “Not a clue.”
I sighed. “Me, either.”
Grabbing my bag, I headed toward to door.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you. Again.”
“How about keeping a dying woman company?” She held up a bottle of gin.
“When you put it that way, it’s an offer I can’t refuse.”
She laughed. “Come on, stay a while. Want to watch a movie?”
“Sure, why the hell not.”
We sat, slumped on the couch drinking gin and howling with laughter at The Big Lebowski. When I heard her snoring softly beside me, I covered her with a throw blanket, lowered the volume of the TV, and crept out.
It was the last time I saw Jessica Stark.
ON MY WAY HOME, I SAW a stand with flowers for sale. Dozens of red roses. I thought about Ethel. That fuck of a husband had beat her nearly to death and then thought he could buy her roses and that would make everything okay.
Well, it didn’t. I was glad he was dead. For a second, I thought about buying Ethel roses. Just for the hell of it. To show
that someone could be kind to her for no reason, not as a way to make up for nearly beating her to death. But I didn’t know how she would take it. I would never forgive myself if it brought up bad memories. I’d ask her. I’d ask if it’d be okay if I bought her some roses one day because she deserved something pretty.
When I got home, I knocked on Thanh-Thanh’s door. Through a series of hand gestures and broken English, I asked about Ethel. From the older woman’s responses, she hadn’t seen Ethel around for days. Downstairs, I knocked on Trang’s door.
He opened it up and yawned.
“I ain’t seen the old biddy for a while.”
Oh, my God. My heart pounded in my throat.
I waited until eight thirty at night and headed for Saint Boniface. I’d heard that doors to the church closed for the night at nine. The pews were already filled. I began at the altar and slowly walked down the aisle softly calling Ethel’s name. A couple of people swore at me, but nobody answered my call. I looked for a head wrapped in a paisley scarf. About half way down the aisle, a man with a bald head and long beard sat up. “Ethel ain’t been around for long time.”
“You know where she’s staying?”
He shook his head and laid back down, pulling a dingy brown blanket up to his nose.
THE NEXT MORNING, I did a short Budo workout in my place to get back in the swing of things. Then, dressed as demurely as I could manage— flat shoes, my hair back in a sleek ponytail, and big black sunglasses—I headed to the police station.
At the front desk, I said my elderly aunt was homeless and missing and I was concerned.
After I filled out a missing report, I asked the clerk how soon I might know something. He shrugged. He gestured toward a bulletin board on the way out. “We’ll put a missing person poster up there. You can check back tomorrow.”
I glared at him. He was useless.
“I need answers now. She’s never just disappeared like this.” It wasn’t really true since I barely knew her, but I wanted him to take me seriously. I had a really bad feeling about Ethel’s disappearance.
I’d turned to walk out when the clerk called after me, “You checked the morgue?”
I didn’t respond. On my way out, my heart stopped for a minute as I passed a bulletin board plastered with wanted and missing person’s posters. My face and name were on one poster. I didn’t stop to read why. Blood pounded in my ears but I managed not to break stride as I casually walked out the double doors.
Outside, I leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. What the fuck? Had my godfather lied and reported me for committing some nonexistent crime? He must have been really desperate to find me. It wasn’t a “Missing Person” poster—it was a “Wanted” poster.
Just in case, I kept my sunglasses on when I walked into the morgue about twenty minutes later.
“I don’t have an Ethel Swanson, but we’ve got some unidentified,” the clerk there told me. “Can you be more specific?”
“Older black lady maybe in her sixties with short gray hair. She usually wears a scarf around her head. Homeless?” I knew it wasn’t much.
“Your aunt, huh?”
“Yep.” I looked her dead in the eye.
The clerk looked away and scrolled through her computer screen. “I got one that fits that description,” she said.
My heart stopped.
“Does she have any identifying marks? Tattoos, special dental work, anything like that?” The clerk asked.
I shook my head sadly. I didn’t know.
“What about something she might have had on her person, like a handbag or something?”
The flask.
“A silver flask with the initials GVS.”
“Hold.” She got up and went out a door.
She came back with a plastic bag. “This one?”
Good God. Inside was my flask.
A wave of sadness rolled across my body. Thoughts of her dying cold and alone in some alley maybe from alcohol poisoning. A thought horrified me — what if that night we had drank that booze and smoked that weed, what if that had done her in? What if that had been too much and she had died from it?
“How did she die?” My voice, barely above a whisper, cracked.
“You’ll have to talk to the police department.”
I scrunched up my face in confusion. “I was just there. They didn’t say shit.”
The woman seemed to take pity on me. “If you were there filing a missing person report earlier, they might not have made the connection yet. Go back and talk to them. But don’t expect much because it’s an open case and they won’t be able to tell you much.”
“I don’t understand.”
She looked over her glasses at me. “I’m sorry to tell you this about your aunt. Her death was ruled a homicide.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMED like every person I had a conversation with ended up dead, it didn’t dawn on me that Ethel’s murder was connected to me until I was nearly home. I smelled something odd in the air and then, still six blocks away, saw the plumes of smoke billowing into the sky.
Two block away I began running.
My entire block was lined with fire trucks and emergency vehicles.
In front of my building, three giant fire engines were parked and firemen stood on tall ladders shooting water out of hoses. Two ambulances were parked nearby.
A crowd was gathered across the street from my building. Smoke poured from the top floor and flames licked out of the windows. Django and Thanh-Thanh.
I raced toward the police tape and was stopped by strong arms.
It was just like in the movies — a screaming hysterical woman being held back by a firefighter as she tried to fight her way into the burning building.
“Please! You have to help me. I live here. Is there anybody still in the building?” I was wild-eyed and my voice was shrill, but the man looked me in the eyes so calmly, I felt tension ease from my body for just a second. But then I began fighting again.
“We’re trying to determine that right now,” he said. “Wait over there. Our public information officer is gathering some details and will share them as soon as she can.”
I walked closer in a daze, staying away from the small crowd of spectators. I slumped onto the curb and stared at a small pile of cigarette butts swirling in a bit of wind.
There was no hiding from it. People were dying because of me. If Ethel had been murdered like the woman said, it had to be because of me. It was my fault. I knew it in my bones.
There was no avoiding it. Thanh-Thanh. Trang. And that poor damn dog. I was trying to save him from an asshole master and instead sent him to a painful death.
I watched as firefighters rushed out of the building. I heard a familiar bark and raised my head. Django. And Thanh-Thanh on the other end of the leash. She was frowning as she watched the building. Relief shot through me.
I whistled and Thanh-Thanh’s face lit up in a smile. How could she smile? She was homeless. Probably everything she owned was destroyed. But she raced over with short, waddling steps and embraced me, talking rapidly in Vietnamese. By her gestures, I figured out that Thanh-Thanh had taken Django for a walk so they’d been gone when the fire started. Thank God.
Django wasn’t interested in me scratching his belly. His ears were up and his eyes on the building. Small whining sounds came rumbling from his throat.
After a few minutes, a small crowd began to gather a fireman with a clipboard. Thanh-Thanh and I walked over. The fire man gave us the details.
Nobody died in the fire.
Trang had kept the building up to code and had smoke alarms installed in every apartment and in the hallway on every floor. Thank God. Then the fire captain said that it was arson. Somebody had set fire to the top floor apartment — mine.
They were investigating, but it was clear the fire was not accidental.
I was relieved nobody was injured or killed, but sickened that all these people had lost their homes.
It was my fault. It was catastrophic for them. Unlike me, they’d lost all their material goods in the world. I’d always had something to fall back on. In a bank account.
I watched small groups huddling and crying. Red Cross workers showed up to pass out cards and tell all my neighbors — about a dozen lived in the six apartments — where they could sleep. These people had lost everything they owned. The fire captain said later, once the building was secured, firefighters would either let residents in to recover belongings or bring out any remaining possessions themselves for residents to sift through.
One thing was clear: Whoever was trying to kill me knew I was still in San Francisco.
I could easily buy more clothes and belongings. I had my gun. I could replace everything. Except one thing: The box that had belonged to my mother.
Those love letters my parents had exchanged seemed like my last link to them on this earth. And now they were gone. I had no home. No money. No nothing.
It seemed like it could get no worse.
A police car came to a screech with a dark sedan on its tail. Good. I hoped they had a lead on the arsonist. Because obviously, that was who was trying to kill me. Took them long enough to get here, though. Like the arsonist would be standing around.
“Little bit late to be in a hurry,” I said, looking up at the smoldering remains of my building. It was still standing, but probably everything inside had been destroyed. I’m sure the building would have to be gutted.
I didn’t notice the commotion that started in the crowd until some shiny black shoes were on the pavement in front of me and Django.
“Gia Santella?”
I looked up, warily.
“Monterey P.D. You’re going to have to come with us. You’re under arrest for the murder of Vittorio Guidi.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I ACTUALLY LAUGHED. Until they jerked my arms behind my back and patted me down.
My gun.
“Weapon!”
Gia in the City of the Dead Page 13