Strawberry Sunday

by Stephen Greenleaf

  He didn’t bother with rebuttal. “You going to try to make trouble about this?”

  “Not unless I need to in order to learn what happened to Rita. And not if you do right by the girl.”

  “What’s that mean? ‘Do right’?”

  I smiled. “I’ll let you know.”

  His countenance was clouded and roiling, his shoulders bulging with barely restrained havoc. “I didn’t force her,” he muttered in a gravelly voice. “Not once. I asked her to come to me and she came.”

  “That doesn’t mean you didn’t force her.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “People like Maria Vargas have no options; you control every aspect of their lives except their religious faith. She couldn’t risk what would happen to her and her family if she refused you.” I paused to let my oration sink in. “When can we meet to talk about Rita?”

  He thought it over. “Come to the house at two. We’ll be done with dinner. Talk to me, nobody else.”

  “Agreed.”

  “People think they know me,” he muttered. “They think I’m a brute and a monster. But I’m just a farmer. I worked hard all my life, side by side with the braceros. I did what I had to do to make a living. Now all of a sudden they say that’s wrong. The old way is not allowed. They don’t understand. The old way is the only way that works. Without it, the farms won’t survive. The only growers will be corporations and the only workers will be machines.”

  His sermon ended, Gus joined his family at the Lincoln, his message as fervent as the one uttered by Father McNally only a few minutes earlier.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Gelbrides piled into their Lincoln and left. I went back to the front of the church, hoping to see Carlos Reyna, but the only people left were Father McNally and a straggling parishioner. When he noticed me lingering, he bid farewell to the elderly woman and drifted my way.

  “Nice service, Father,” I said. “I got a strange feeling in there, as a matter of fact.”

  His grin seemed slightly cynical. “Spiritually uplifting, I trust.”

  “How long have you been at this parish, Father?”

  “Almost thirty years.”

  “Is that normal in your business?”

  “I love Haciendas. The bishop has honored my wishes to stay. Why do you ask?”

  “The feeling I got in church was that if I knew everything you know, I could solve Rita’s murder in an instant.”

  When he didn’t respond, I got cynical myself. “In my business, silence means consent.”

  “Don’t toy with me, Mr. Tanner. The seal of the confessional is sacrosanct. I would be consigned to the bowels of hell if I broke it.”

  “Just tell me this. If Maria Vargas gave a confession sixteen years back, you were the priest she would have given it to.”

  “Not necessarily. There have been many others on staff over the years. But perhaps.”

  “But you won’t tell me whether she did or not.”

  “Not the particulars. No.”

  I shifted a gear. “Louise Lombardi is a good Catholic, I assume.”

  “Indisputably.”

  “If she committed a sin, she would confess it.”

  “I’m certain she would.”

  “I’m talking major here, Father. Not taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

  He ruffled his feathers. “To many of us, that is as grievous a sin as there is.”

  “Come on, Father. You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “I’m asking if twenty-six years ago, Mrs. Lombardi confessed the same sin Maria Vargas did.”

  “I told you, the seal of the confessional—”

  “You can’t tell me if she did. But you can tell me if she didn’t.”

  “This is semantics, Mr. Tanner. The church has no truck with it.”

  I met his piety with some of my own. “Then you must not traffic in annulments in this parish.”

  He came close to taking the Lord’s name in vain himself. “I will not listen to you fault the faith.”

  “We’re talking murder, Father. Two of God’s children are dead. I’m pretty sure the killer was one of your flock.”

  “I pray that is not true. But I have no choice in the matter. Not if it involves the confessional.”

  “If I were you, I’d make sure that’s an absolute rule. Otherwise, your life will be hell.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this. I need to think.”

  “Time is of the essence in murder cases.”

  “Perhaps. But to the church, time is merely a potential pitfall.”

  Stymied, I retired to my corner. “I won’t press you anymore, but I would like you to do me a favor.”

  “What favor would that be?”

  “I’d like you to suggest to Gus Gelbride that he start a scholarship fund, to educate the children of his field workers. And I’d like you to suggest that the first recipient of a grant be Consuelo Vargas.”

  Father McNally cocked his head to inspect me more closely. A series of emotions traveled his face, the last of them an incomplete grin. “A fine idea. And Consuelo is certainly a worthy choice. Does Mr. Gelbride know the girl personally?”

  “I don’t know. But I think we both know he used to know her mother.”

  He looked at me for several long seconds. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you still haven’t learned who killed Rita.”

  “No.”

  “Does the Vargas matter have anything to do with it?”

  “I thought it did, but now I’m not sure.”

  He nodded slowly. “The scholarship idea is a good one. I’ll certainly take it up with Gus. In fact, it will give me an excuse to call on him at home one day soon. That way I can reach out to other members of the family in need of ministry.”

  “Are you speaking of Randy?”

  His expression turned melancholy. “No one is beyond the reach of God’s grace, Mr. Tanner. But some are so far removed it takes an inordinate amount of time to reach out to them. One must then decide whether it is time that might better be spent in other areas.”

  “With Mrs. Gelbride, you mean?”

  “I’m thinking more of Missy.”

  “What’s the problem with Missy?”

  “I can’t go into specifics, of course. Let’s just say she seems in need of spiritual guidance.”

  “Do you know whether or not Missy was a friend of Rita Lombardi’s, Father?”

  “I believe they used to be, as small children.”

  “But no longer?”

  “I believe not.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if Mrs. Gelbride and Mrs. Lombardi are friends?”

  “I believe Mrs. Gelbride has always been gracious to both Mrs. Lombardi and her daughter.”

  “In what way?”

  “I really couldn’t say, I’m afraid.” He glanced at the sun, using it as a giant wristwatch. “I’m afraid I must be going. The CYO is having a picnic at Mount Madonna Park this afternoon. I’m an invited guest. You’re welcome to come along. I’m sure they can scrape up another hot dog.”

  “It’s the ‘scrape up’ part that worries me,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “Peace be with you, Mr. Tanner.”

  “That would be a change of pace.”

  Father McNally walked back toward the church. I got in my squashed-up car and drove the three blocks to the center of town and parked as close to the café as I could. Two kids on the corner laughed when they saw the car, then examined it more closely, as if it might not be a comic accident but the stirrings of a new fad.

  Shortcake’s, the café was called, and the pictures on the wall were of various manifestations of strawberries, from shortcake to frappés to trifle. Much of the parish had the same idea I did—the place was packed with people I had seen earlier at mass.

  The
only one I knew was Sal Delder, who was sitting alone at a table near the front window, sipping a glass of iced tea, wearing a simple white dress that buttoned to the throat and fell to mid-calf. Her hair was drawn back in a twist, her thoughts as far from where she was as her mind could throw them.

  I walked to her table and looked down. “I’ll buy you lunch if you let me pick your brain.”

  She smiled but not seriously. “It’s not the most elegant proposition I’ve ever had, but it’s the best that’s come along lately. Have a seat.”

  “Thanks.”

  I pulled out a chair and sat down. The conversation around us resumed its pulse after pausing to observe the stranger’s approach to the maiden lady. The waitress took my order for coffee, left me a menu, and said she’d be back.

  I looked at Sal. “This looks like a place that could come up with a pretty fair meat loaf sandwich.”

  “If you get the plate you get potatoes and gravy and Bertha’s gravy is to die for. Mondavi is thinking of bottling it with a cork and a fancy label.”

  “Sold,” I said, and passed my choice along to the waitress the next time she drifted by. “I talked to Chief Dixon this morning,” I said as the waitress went off to the kitchen.

  “How’d it go?”

  “Not good.”

  “He’s in a bad mood pretty much every Sunday.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Saturday night.”

  I waited for her to elaborate and for some reason she did, though in a voice that required me to lean across the table to hear her.

  “The chief and I have been having a little affair of late—Saturday nights at my place. He goes home feeling great and wakes up feeling guilty. Then he goes down to the office, his jail is full of kids who’ve done something dumb to save face with the gangs, and Reb gets depressed even more.”

  “Gangs? In Haciendas?”

  “Gangs are everywhere. It’s the only effective support system for kids whose families can’t give them the time and attention they need. Ours are mostly Latino, of course. Los Lobos de la Valle. ‘Wolves of the Valley,’” she translated. “It isn’t entirely inappropriate. Why did you go see Mace Dixon?”

  “To find out how things were going with the Upshaw murder. And Rita’s too, of course.”

  “Nothing more on Rita. Not much more than that on Mona, since the forensics aren’t back from Salinas.”

  “Any leads at all?”

  She frowned and looked at the pie case on the counter by the cash register. “He’ll be mad if he knows I talked to you.”

  “He won’t hear about it from me.”

  She looked around. “There are a dozen more who’ll tell him before sundown.”

  I shrugged. “Your choice.”

  “What the hell. The only thing we have is that there are some drugs missing at the hospital so one theory is Mona might have known what was happening to them. Plus a woman died in childbirth a few months back and the husband has been threatening everyone in the place with mayhem. Other than that, not much.”

  “Do any of those seem likely?”

  “Not to me, but I’m not a cop.”

  “Has Mona Upshaw lived in Haciendas all her life?”

  “I think she has professionally. She came to town when we still had a hospital in Haciendas. Then when that closed down and they converted it to migrant housing she caught on with Mercy in Salinas. I don’t know where she came from originally.”

  “What kind of work does she do?”

  “Obstetrics mostly, I think.”

  “She had some money, apparently.”

  Sal nodded. “She got rich back in the seventies. An uncle died, or something. It didn’t seem to make her happy, though. Which gives me solace when I’m trying to scrape enough together to pay my bills.”

  I asked a question I’d asked a hundred times—it’s what you do when you’re a detective. “Have you heard anything from anyone about what Rita said when they brought her in?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Anything else floating around that might help me out?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Sorry.”

  “Lots of dead ends in this town, Ms. Delder.”

  She nodded. “And I’ve run into all of them at one time or another.”

  “Personally or professionally?”

  Her grin was tired and halfhearted. “Both.”

  “You seemed to have eyes for the English teacher this morning.”

  She raised a brow. “You were at mass?”

  “Back row. I’m guessing you and Mr. Thorndike used to be an item.”

  Her lips wrinkled with distaste. “A sale item was all. I’m discontinued merchandise.”

  “He’s with Missy Gelbride now?”

  “When she lets him. When she’s sane.”

  “She has mental problems?”

  “Scott says she’s manic-depressive.”

  “Is that official or just a guess?”

  She shrugged. “She’s gone away a few times. Trips to Europe that were really stays in psych wards, supposedly. But all I know is what I get from Scott.”

  “You still see him?”

  “On occasion.” She sniffed. “The occasion being when he’s gone more than a month without sex.”

  “If I wanted to talk to Missy, how would I go about it?”

  “She lives in the big house with the family. She drinks wherever they have a license to sell it. And she meets Scott at the Pine Cone Inn bar in Carmel Monday nights. Then they repair to a motel for a few hours. When she gets it together enough to make the trip, that is.”

  “How about Scott and Rita?”

  “What about them?”

  “Were they ever lovers?”

  A tear bloomed in her left eye. “I really, really hope not,” she said.

  “There’s been a suggestion that Rita was pregnant when she died.”

  Sal shook her head. “Rumors. This town is rumor central.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I saw the ME’s report. If she had been pregnant, it would have said so and it didn’t.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I spent another half hour chatting with Sal Delder. We talked about Rita for a while, exploring Sal’s suggestion that Rita was a true revolutionary and my burgeoning sense that Rita’s newly discovered empowerment had to do with the Gelbride family, but reached no firm conclusion about either assessment. Then we talked about Mona Upshaw, whom Sal had disliked for reasons unclear even to her, and about Chief Dixon, whom she admired and slept with but didn’t truly love, and about life in Haciendas, which Sal found surprisingly uplifting.

  By the time we finished, my regard for her had increased exponentially. She had never had a break, never earned a dime above expenses, had dated and been ditched by most of the eligible men in town, and had never traveled out of the state. Yet she was a cheerful woman on the whole, positive, optimistic, and kind. It was a triumph of the will, really, a lesson to us all. What Sal understood that most of the rest of us don’t was that it didn’t matter how the world regarded you, what mattered was how you regarded the world.

  I’d spent time grilling her about Mona Upshaw, particularly about her money. Apparently it hadn’t been common knowledge that Ms. Upshaw was a very wealthy woman. She had lived simply and unspectacularly, had never sported the slightest trapping of wealth outside the walls of her charming home, which she explained by vague references to an inheritance. What Sal didn’t know and the chief didn’t either was whether Mona had brought the money to town or whether she’d acquired it from a deceased relative after she’d come to live in Haciendas, as she’d implied. Sal said that on Monday the chief was going to look at bank records to try to nail it down.

  I told Sal that when I first met her, Mona Upshaw had implied there were secrets about Rita, secrets best kept unpublished by me or anyone else. When I asked Sal if she knew what Nurse Upshaw was talking about, she shook her head.

  “We all have secrets,”
she said softly. “But most of them don’t get us killed, they just get us embarrassed.”

  “That can be a fate worse than death, sometimes.”

  “No, it can’t,” she said, as if she knew it for a fact.

  I asked about the other item of interest, Gus Gelbride’s wife, Estelle, and on this subject Sal was voluble. Apparently Estelle Gelbride had become a virtual recluse over the past two decades, a participant in no cultural or charitable activities, a leader of no political or social organizations, a contributor to none of the civic improvement efforts that had swept through Haciendas periodically. According to Sal, there were people who had lived in Haciendas all their lives who had never laid eyes on Mrs. Gelbride except at church on Sunday.

  The object of her solitary obsession was an increasingly comprehensive consideration of the path to personal enlightenment. She had neglected friends and family in an effort to learn, with the aid of everything from Eastern philosophers to small-town psychics to self-help hustlers like Chopra and Bradshaw, why life proceeded the way it did. Her primary interest was in cause and effect—did bad and good things happen for reasons, and if they did, as they surely must, how do we divine what that reason is? The man who knew her best, claimed Sal, was the UPS driver who delivered her dozens of books on the subject every month, from seers as far away as Tibet and Brazil and as close as Bolinas and Carmel. In fact, rumor had it that Estelle had moved her bed into the library of the family mansion so she could spend twenty-four hours a day communing with the wisdom contained in the tomes that surrounded her.

  When she finished telling me about Estelle, Sal said she had to go do her laundry. I thanked her for the chat, paid for her meal, and walked with her out into the town. The fog was gone, the heat was up, the streets were inhabited by other than surly kids steering low-slung vehicles.

  “If you find yourself at loose ends some night, give me call,” Sal said, touching me lightly on the arm.

  “I don’t have your number.”

  “Look in the book. Or on the nearest bathroom wall.”

  With a wave and a smile she was gone, but only after answering one more of my questions, which was how to get to the Gelbride mansion.