by Jan Burke
She put the car in gear, laughing as she pulled away. I picked up the envelope and started looking through it, hearing her hum a catchy oldies tune. She had stopped the car again by the time I realized the song was “Jimmy Mac.”
It hadn’t taken long to find the small tienda, which was about two blocks from Briana’s apartment. We parked on the street, at the corner beneath a shady tree. As I stepped out of the car, I noticed a little white cross was planted in the crook of the tree roots, a small, dusty cluster of artificial roses entwined at its base. I looked away from it and strode resolutely toward the store.
The store owner, Mr. Reyes, smiled and welcomed us in English, but when he learned that we spoke Spanish, he was happier to converse in it. My Spanish is passable, but Rachel speaks it fluently, so I let her do the talking. She explained my relationship to Briana, and at his questioning look, added that Briana was the lady who was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Wasn’t the accident at this corner?
His face changed entirely, and once again I received condolences I had not earned. Yes, he told us, this was the corner where the lady was killed. He was obviously upset about it.
His wife, who also worked at the market, was visiting their daughter today—she would feel sorry to have missed us. They were both in the store on the day of the accident. They had not seen the accident itself; they had heard the sounds of the impact and of the car speeding away. When his wife looked outside and saw what had happened—he shook his head sadly. After a moment, he went on, saying that he was the one who had called 911. The ambulance came, but everyone knew it was too late. He glanced at me and quickly said that they were told the lady had not suffered.
Although the police had questioned them, they had not been told of any outcome of the police investigation. They had been worried that the woman was still unidentified.
“Su tia?” he asked me again.
“Si, mi tia,” I answered. “La hermana de mi madre.” Yes, she was my aunt, my mother’s sister.
Again he expressed condolences, and then asked me if I would please say my aunt’s name again. He repeated it softly to himself several times, as if memorizing it, changing it slightly but making it sound no less beautiful with Spanish pronunciation. He patted his pockets and found a pen, wrote Briana Maguire on the back of a receipt, then paused and looked up at me as if to verify the spelling.
“Bueno,” I said.
He talked to us again of his concern over the accident, and was obviously relieved that someone had claimed the body; he was Catholic, and knew my aunt was Catholic—they were concerned that my aunt had not received a Catholic burial.
How did he know she was Catholic? Rachel asked. Did she belong to his parish?
He wasn’t sure if she was of his parish; he attended the Spanish-language Mass at nine o’clock and he didn’t think the lady spoke Spanish. But he knew she was Catholic because she carried the key chain with the St. Christopher medallion on it, and because she had ashes on her forehead when she had shopped on Ash Wednesday.
The lady had been coming to his store only for a few months, but he liked her. She was shy, he said, and he never asked her name. Now he regretted this, too, but at the time he had not wanted to be presumptuous. Once, he said, she told him that she was sorry she had never learned Spanish, and told him that her son spoke it very well. “I think she missed her son,” he said. “She only mentioned him once, but when she did…” He gestured to his face. “She looked sad.”
A man came to the register, and Mr. Reyes introduced us to his customer, and again a round of condolences was offered. Did we need any help? Was there something they could do? Did I know, the customer asked me, that the store owner’s wife had made an altarcito—a marker, a little shrine with a small cross—and put some flowers out on the corner where the accident happened? That she had even arranged for a Mass to be said for my aunt? That she had asked everyone if they knew anything about the lady?
After expressing my gratitude, I listened as Mr. Reyes and the customer told us more about Mrs. Reyes’s activities following my aunt’s death. Soon I saw that I was indebted to this woman I had not yet met—and saw how it was that the LAPD eventually discovered where Briana lived.
Mrs. Reyes had described the lady who had been killed to anyone who would listen, and some of her customers, who lived in this neighborhood, remembered seeing the lady with the cane. One customer had often seen her walk from this street to that, another had once seen her walking back from the store in a certain direction. Mrs. Reyes passed her information along to the police, who thanked her, but had not told her the results of her efforts.
Rachel asked a few more questions, confirming that none of them had ever seen Briana come to the store with anyone else; no one they knew had seen the car that struck her, although they were told there were witnesses who had talked to the police. No, Mr. Reyes told us, she was not carrying a handbag—she always arrived with nothing more than a small coin purse, which she kept in the pocket of her sweater or coat. It was perhaps, he ventured, a little cool for her, living near the water, because she always wore a sweater or coat. On that day, a warm spring day, he recalled, she had worn her blue sweater.
We thanked him and the customer for their time, and I asked him to please convey to his wife that my family deeply appreciated her help, that it was very kind of her to remember my aunt with the shrine and the Mass. If ever I could do anything for them—
“De nada,” Mr. Reyes protested. “It’s nothing.”
We stopped off at Aunt Mary’s house on our way back home. As might be expected, Rachel and Aunt Mary hit it off instantly. While I worked at hanging Briana’s clothes in the closet of one of Mary’s guest rooms, Rachel told Mary about our day’s discoveries.
“I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” Mary said to me.
“Not as well as Rachel, but I studied it even before the Express started requiring all of its reporters to learn Spanish.”
“Hmm. Paper should have done that years ago. You said you went back to the apartment after you talked to Mr. Reyes. Did the neighbors recognize Travis from any of Briana’s photos?”
I still wondered if James McCain had more to do with Rachel’s decision to make the return trip than Travis did, but McCain had left by the time we got there. To Mary, I said, “Not really. They said Travis might have been the younger of the two men who helped her move in, but they weren’t certain—Briana and that young man hadn’t behaved toward one another as a mother and son would, they said—hardly spoke to one another, and the young man had not been back since.”
“Who was the other man?”
“A priest. When he came to visit other times, he was wearing a collar, they said.”
“What priest?”
“We asked that, too. They didn’t know.”
Mary looked troubled, then straightened her shoulders and began to ask Rachel a lot of questions about her work as a cop in Phoenix and as a private eye here in Las Piernas. When I hinted that grilling the volunteer help might show a lack of manners, she told me to mind my own damned business.
I was hanging up Briana’s moth-eaten wool coat, half-listening to them, when I impulsively reached into one of the pockets, thinking the trait of forgetting to empty one’s coat pockets might run in the family. My fingertips met a stiff piece of paper, and my imagination ran ahead of me—this would be a three-by-five card with Travis’s address on it. Instead, to my dismay, I withdrew a holy card.
I might have sworn, but Saint Somebody-or-another was looking right at me, and there are limits to my sacrilegiousness. It was a familiar image, a monk in long brown Franciscan robes, holding a stalk of lilies and the child Jesus. I turned the card over to see who it was and received a shock that made me reach clumsily for the edge of the bed, where I sat down hard next to Rachel.
“What’s gotten into you?” Mary said sharply.
“Arthur—”
“What?”
“Arthur Spanning. He’s dead. This is a holy
card from his funeral Mass.”
7
On the back of the holy card—a likeness of St. Anthony of Padua, as it turned out—was a prayer for the dead. A few added lines of print indicated that Arthur Anthony Spanning had died three weeks ago at the age of forty-eight.
We each took turns looking at the back of the card, not speaking for several moments.
“Poor Travis!” Aunt Mary said softly. “Both parents in such a short period of time!”
“They followed one another to the grave a little closely, didn’t they?” I said. “A week apart.”
Rachel nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking.”
“This funeral home,” I said, studying the card, “is in Las Piernas. Do you think he died here?”
“Kind of strange to think of him living here in town all this time, isn’t it?” Rachel said.
“Yes. And Briana must have been in contact with him, or kept track of him, anyway. Otherwise, how would she know about his funeral? I wonder why she went to it?”
“Maybe to make sure he was really dead,” Rachel said. “You know, if he faked the wedding…”
Aunt Mary was pacing, ignoring these remarks. “This is going to be very hard on Travis,” she said.
“Was he close to Arthur?” I asked.
“I have no idea. I used to see them once in a great while when Travis was little. After Briana moved from Las Piernas, she and I never exchanged more news than would fit on a few lines at the bottom of a greeting card. She never mentioned Arthur, and only wrote ‘Travis is doing well in school,” or ’Travis is growing so tall,“ things like that. She did tell me that he wasn’t going to be living with her at the new apartment, but I suppose I just thought it was high time he was on his own. I asked for his new address, but she never sent it.”
“Maybe he already knows about his father’s death,” I said. “He may be the one who told Briana about it.”
“But to lose his remaining parent so quickly!” Mary said, pacing again.
“You have her old address? The place where she lived before she moved to this apartment?” I asked.
“Yes, I think I have it somewhere around here.”
“That might help us find Travis,” I said. “Maybe one of her former neighbors will know where he’s living these days.”
She searched for it and found it. I made a note of it and asked, “So she was at this place from the time of the murder until recently?”
“No, she didn’t leave Las Piernas immediately after the murder. But she was at this place for a number of years.”
“Do you remember anything about the murder of Arthur’s first wife?” Rachel asked.
“Certainly. Arthur’s wife was Gwendolyn DeMont, the sugar beet heiress.”
Rachel raised a brow. “Sugar beet heiress?”
“Yes, this area used to have lots of sugar beet fields. That’s how her grandfather started out, but that was just the seed money for their wealth. He made money in real estate and by investing in aerospace and oil companies—with a sense of timing that made the rest of us wish we had his crystal ball.”
“You said this was her grandfather?” I asked.
“Right. He raised her. Her parents died when she was just a baby, not long after World War I, I believe.”
I looked at the holy card again. “World War I? She must have been at least thirty years older than Arthur!”
“Yes, she was much older than he. I know you think of him as being much younger than Briana, but after Gwendolyn, Briana must have looked like a regular spring chicken to Arthur.”
“Did you know Gwendolyn?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, no. But the family was wealthy and Los Alamitos isn’t so far away, after all. Irene’s grandfather used to like to go to the Los Alamitos Race Course, which is in Cypress, not Los Alamitos—but that’s another story.”
“What else do you know about Gwendolyn?” I asked, knowing where racetrack discussions could lead, and not especially inclined to have Rachel learn all about my grandfather’s various pastimes and diversions.
“Not too much. She was a very shy woman. A recluse, really.”
“Arthur was apparently attracted to shy women,” I said.
“Perhaps he was—what of it?” she snapped. I didn’t answer, and she scowled at me. “Maybe there are two pairs of Prissy Pants in the family.”
Rachel didn’t even try to hide her amusement.
I was saved further humiliation only because the doorbell rang. Mary answered it, and soon we heard our husbands’ voices and the sound of their laughter. Rachel’s face reflected nothing but pleasure when she heard it, and I hurried after her into the living room, where Frank and Pete were chatting with Mary.
“Caw,” Rachel said, running a hand over Pete’s sunburned bald head. “You didn’t put the sunscreen on like I told you to!”
“See what happens when you don’t go with us?” Pete said.
I found myself wondering what on earth had ever made me think she was flirting with McCain.
Frank put an arm around my shoulders. “Thought you’d like a ride home.”
“That would be great,” I said, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. “I need to get a few things out of Rachel’s car.”
We divided up the rest of Briana’s belongings as planned, and Frank helped me to move the photos and desk papers from Rachel’s car to his.
Once, while Frank was out of earshot, Pete asked, “You want us to try to look up this cousin of yours in DMV records?”
I shook my head. “McCain has undoubtedly already tried that. And things have been bad enough for you two at work lately. You might get in trouble.”
He laughed at that and told me not to worry.
I thanked Rachel again, and we said good night to Mary and the Bairds. As we drove home, I made Frank tell me about his day first. He told me where they had sailed, about the dolphins they had seen, of a predictably futile but hilarious attempt by Pete to win an argument with Cassidy, of Jack’s surprising ability to actually get the better of Cassidy once or twice—which had made Pete look at Jack with new admiration. “I kept trying to figure out if Cassidy was orchestrating the whole thing—you know how Pete is sometimes a little jealous of Jack? Maybe not jealous—”
“Yeah, jealous.”
“Right, well, you know how Pete is—anyway, by the end of the day, Pete is treating Jack like he’s his best pal. Inviting him over for dinner, asking Jack to tell Cassidy about his days in the motorcycle gang—and through all this, Cassidy—” He glanced over at me, stopped his spirited narrative and said, “Missed you, though.”
“That was an afterthought if I’ve ever heard one.”
He laughed. “No, really. Jack’s talking about taking everyone to Catalina in a couple of weeks. You should come with us. I have the feeling your day wasn’t so relaxing.”
I shrugged.
“Tell me what happened.”
I did, but didn’t want to trouble him or bring down his mood, so I put the best face on it I could. He caught me at it. As we pulled into the driveway he said angrily, “You don’t have to treat me like I’m going to break into pieces, you know. It’s goddamned insulting. I’m tired of it. Bad enough to get it from the guys at work. Tiptoeing around me like I’m—like I’m a basket case or something.”
“Sorry,” I said. I tried to think of something else to say and only managed another lousy, “Sorry.”
He kept going on about it for another ten minutes or so, long enough for me to stop feeling apologetic. Maybe I would have kept my cool if I hadn’t spent the last two or three days looking at the ends of fingers pointed in my direction. I did manage to stay silent. At some point it must have dawned on him that I wasn’t participating in the conversation, though, because he broke off and asked, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“You’re treated like a leper at work and coddled at home. You want it to stop. I can’t do anything about what happens to you at work, but it will be a damned pleasur
e to stop coddling you. Will a bell ring at the end of this lecture period, or will you dismiss class in some other way?”
He didn’t answer, just swore under his breath and got out of the car. I sat there staring at the glove compartment as he opened the trunk, got the boxes out, and took them into the house, greeting the dogs as they ran outside. He came back out, walked over to my side of the car and lifted his hand, as if he were going to tap on the window. He hesitated, put his hand in his pocket and stood there. I went back to staring straight ahead, even when the dogs jumped up against the passenger door. I heard Frank tell them to get down, and they ran off to wrestle with one another in the front yard.
After a minute, Frank tapped his knuckles against the glass. I rolled the window down. He leaned over, so that his face was level with mine.