Strawberry Sunday

by Stephen Greenleaf

The tack room had been crowded with two, but with four it was positively intimate. Three of us shouldered our way to comfort as Gus dropped into his overstuffed chair and lit his noisome pipe. Beyond the door, the horses seemed to be expressing annoyance even more effectively than Gus had done.

  When the pipe was going, Gus barked a single word. “Talk.”

  I talked.

  “Twenty-six years ago your wife was pregnant. Louise Lombardi was pregnant as well. They both went to the Haciendas hospital and they both delivered baby girls twenty-six years ago tomorrow. Okay so far?”

  “Get to it,” Gus grumbled.

  “Mrs. Lombardi delivered a healthy child, but Mrs. Gelbride delivered a child that had several birth defects—two misshapen legs and a birthmark on her face. Mrs. Gelbride was inconsolable. She regarded herself as a failure; she feared how her husband would react to bringing such a child into the family and she worried how the child would be treated by people in the valley who had reason to fear or resent her husband. So she had her husband make a deal with the doctor and nurse who attended the deliveries. In exchange for money on one hand and clemency on the other, the family bought a switch. The Gelbrides got the healthy baby; the Lombardis got the one with bum legs. No one was the wiser, except a few years later Franco Lombardi found out what had happened, probably from Mona Upshaw. He made some demands for compensation, and was killed to keep him from talking.”

  As Gus swore a denial, the chief asked, “Can you prove any of this?”

  “Not all,” I said. “But some. Mona Upshaw made lots of money on the deal, and it grew over the years until she became a rich woman. But her guilt compounded also, especially since she saw Rita often and was close to Louise as well. Her remorse became such that she paid to have Rita’s birth defects remedied and she also persuaded her friend Dr. Haldeman to tell Rita what had happened at birth while Rita was in the hospital recovering from surgery.”

  “Why tell her at all?” the chief asked.

  “I’m not sure, but I think it was because Mona felt she owed Rita more than money and what Rita needed besides some new legs was leverage. To get anywhere with her crusade for the farmworkers and to help her fiancé Carlos to make his way in the world, she needed a way to force the Gelbrides to mend their ways in general and to let Carlos out from under his debt in particular. Mona Upshaw decided she knew a way to help, which was for Rita to claim her heritage as blood of the Gelbrides. And it’s clear that when she learned who she was, Rita decided to take it all the way—she had a union lawyer on call, to help her decide how to proceed, and she was thinking of being baptized again.”

  “The murder,” the chief reminded.

  “Somehow Missy Gelbride found out what had happened. She was terrified at the prospect of being ruled illegitimate and having to share her inheritance with Rita, if she got any share at all. Basically she killed Rita to keep from being displaced in the family and she killed Mona Upshaw because she’d been a party to what happened at the hospital and had caused the whole mess to come to light.”

  “Proof?” the chief said again.

  “It should be in the forensics. Hair samples and fiber matches shouldn’t be hard to come up with. This was a crime of passion. There wasn’t time for precautions.”

  “How do you suggest we get a warrant?”

  “If nothing else, the administrator of Rita’s estate can file a claim against Gus for paternity. Then you can test Gus’s DNA and Estelle’s, too. Match it with Rita’s. Then you’ve got enough to go after Missy.”

  “Thin,” the chief said.

  I looked to my left. “Maybe Gus will persuade Missy to confess. She’s had mental problems, I understand. A good lawyer might get her off.”

  “Are you through?” Gus demanded.

  “One more thing. If Missy pleads insanity and gets help, I don’t see why the switch needs to be public. Rita didn’t want to displace Missy, she just wanted her status to force changes in the ethics of the strawberry business. I think I can persuade Louise Lombardi and Carlos Reyna to keep quiet if certain steps are taken to provide Rita her birthright.”

  “What kinds of steps?”

  I held up fingers one by one. “Mrs. Lombardi’s health needs are taken care of, without restriction. Carlos Reyna’s debt is canceled. And Carlos gets thirty acres of strawberries, free and clear, to work on his own with no interference from anyone named Gelbride. And Gus gives up Franco Lombardi’s killer.”

  “You think you got it all figured out, don’t you, Tanner?” Gus growled.

  “Pretty much,” I agreed.

  “Well you don’t know shit. Tell him,” Gus instructed, his eyes fixed on the stranger.

  “Tell me what?”

  The stranger cleared his throat. “My name is Carstairs. I’m a board-certified psychiatrist and I am chief of staff at a private mental health facility named Shady Oaks. It’s five miles up the Carmel Valley. We offer both inpatient and outpatient services to a few select clients.”

  “By select you mean rich,” I said.

  “By no means do we limit—”

  “Tell him,” Gus repeated.

  The stranger blanched and cleared his throat. “I can personally testify that on the day Rita Lombardi was murdered, and for two days either side of that date, Missy Gelbride was an inpatient at our facility. She was under a variety of medications for an episode of bipolar dissociation and was confined to her room for a week. I’m prepared to testify in court that Missy Gelbride could not and did not commit that crime.”

  The chief turned to me in time to see me lick my arid lips. “Rita and Upshaw killed by the same person?”

  “I think so.”

  “So we got nothing,” he grumbled.

  “Not quite,” I demurred, trying to be blasé, trying to bluff my way off the hilltop so I could see where I’d gone wrong. “The paternity aspect still stands, but if Gus does right by Louise and Carlos, I’m sure none of it needs to come out.” I looked at him. “If I were you, I’d let the lawyers work out a deal.”

  “Get off my farm,” Gus said.

  “If you don’t do a deal, I’ll see to it that Louise Lombardi and Carlos Reyna consult legal counsel to be fully apprised of her options. And I’ll raise a stink if the chief here doesn’t reopen Franco Lombardi’s murder case.”

  “Go,” Gus said again, then heaved himself out of his chair and stomped off, the stranger and the chief in his wake.

  When we got to the car, Mace Dixon looked at me with a wrinkled smile. “One good thing came of this,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I finally figured out the difference between guys like you and guys like me. You got a problem, you get to flip a coin.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I was as embarrassed as I’d ever been outside the contours of a blind date. My eagerness to do right by Rita and my effort to show off for Chief Dixon, coupled with my lack of anything resembling tangible proof of my theory, had led me to point the finger at an innocent party for the second time in two days. It’s the worst thing you can do in my profession, akin to a surgeon cutting off the wrong leg. There was only one remedy for my gaffe, and that was to point my errant finger in what Chief Dixon could prove was the right direction.

  On the way down the mountain I thought over what I knew about the case, everything I’d heard from Rita, everything I’d learned since I got to Haciendas, everything I’d assumed and surmised. I opened myself to every deductive leap my neurotransmitters could execute as I labored to produce what’s known as an educated guess. By the time we were approaching the police station, I thought I had the answer.

  “Drop me at my car,” I said as we cruised down the main drag. “It’s in the next block.”

  “I should drop you in a cell,” the chief groused, which were his first words since we’d left the barn. “You going home where you belong?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got a hunch I can wrap this up in an hour.”

  “Another crap shoot, you
mean.”

  “Pretty much,” I admitted.

  “Not Randy, I hope.”

  “He has the same motive Missy did, but I don’t think he’s the guy.”

  “Why not?”

  “One, he’s not that bright. Two, he claims you checked out his alibi and cleared him. And three, I think Rita could have talked him out of it.”

  The chief chuckled. “Process of elimination will produce something eventually, I suppose. Last man standing sort of thing.”

  “We didn’t come up entirely empty up there, you know,” I bristled. “Gus and Estelle are Rita’s biological parents. They owe her big time and they can pay big bucks. You should see to it that they do.”

  “I’m a cop, not a social worker.”

  “Put Sal on it, then. If you need me, I’ll be at the Motel 6 in Salinas.”

  The destination made him laugh. “You must fuck up on a regular basis.”

  The chief dropped me at my car and I drove out of town doing what I hate to see other people do, which was to talk on the phone while they’re driving. Twenty minutes later I was entering the Cherry Bean coffee shop in the heart of Salinas. My appointment wasn’t there yet, so I got a cup of the coffee of the day and repaired to a booth in the back.

  When she came in the door she was carefree and smiling, her hair still the color of corn silk, her lips the color of red licorice. I bought her a latte and a scone and we went to my booth and got comfortable. She was dressed in a navy blue suit with white piping, one of its long sleeves covering the entirety of her bad arm and sewn shut at the hem with prim precision.

  Thelma Powell sipped her coffee and nibbled her scone and licked a smear of foam off her lip. “I don’t have much time, I’m afraid,” she said. “There’s an Incentives Team meeting at eleven.”

  I long ago quit inquiring into the etymology of corporate jargon. “This won’t take long. I enjoyed meeting your mother on Sunday, by the way. Do you live with her?”

  “She has her own place. It’s not far from my sister’s.”

  “So you’re not an only child.”

  She shook her head. “There are three of us. My brother works for Bridgestone, the tire people. My sister is a receptionist for a lawyer.”

  “What kind of lawyer?”

  “All kinds, I think. Criminal mostly. Clarissa has some lurid tales to tell, let me tell you.”

  “You’re going to need to talk to her boss.”

  Her eyes bulged and her hand trembled. “Why?”

  “So he can refer you to the best defense attorney in this part of the state.”

  Thelma worried her cup, spilling steamed milk over its edge and onto the table between us. Fastidious in other aspects of her life, this time she ignored the mess.

  “Why am I going to need an attorney, Mr. Tanner?” she asked again after a long moment, seemingly as guileless as when she and Rita were inseparable.

  “You know why and I do, too. You told me yourself, in fact. Right after church.”

  She seemed genuinely puzzled. “Told you what?”

  “Why you did it. It was pretty amazing. There we were, standing on the sidewalk on the main street in town, you, me, your mother, and Father McNally, and you and your mother told me why you killed Rita Lombardi. Except your mother didn’t know it, did she?”

  Her lips stretched tight. “My mother knows nothing about any of this.”

  “The funny part is, I wasn’t the audience you were addressing, was I? You were explaining your actions to Father McNally.”

  Her expression remained seamless. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You confessed to him before, I’m sure; you’re too good a Catholic not to do that and your crime was too reprehensible not to want absolution. So you confessed the way you were brought up to, but something happened, didn’t it?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “What happened was that after your confession, Father McNally changed. He liked you before, joked around, maybe even flirted with you once in a while. But given his feelings for Rita, and knowing what he knew about you, he must have pulled back. He seemed pretty formal with you on Sunday; he didn’t greet you or chat with you much there on the sidewalk and he even made his homily some sort of message especially for you. He wasn’t all that friendly with me, either. The only person he addressed directly was your mother. That must have hurt, seeing him so distant. That must have made you wish you hadn’t done it.”

  “Never.”

  I barely heard her. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  I waited for more, but it didn’t come.

  “Rita told me, too, you know. In a story she wrote after she got back from the hospital and showed to Scott Thorndike just before she died. I thought it was about Carlos, but really it was about you.”

  “This means nothing to me, I assure you.”

  “I can understand, Thelma,” I went on. “Really I can. You and Rita were friends your whole lives. Best friends, linked by a common bond, which was the lousy hand that fate had dealt you: Rita’s bum legs and your bad arm. Together you made a whole person—you could drive and run errands and Rita could cook and wash dishes. But separately, well, let’s just say that when Rita got her legs fixed, it reminded you again of who you were and who you always would be, only this time without Rita by your side.”

  I gave her a chance to respond, but she sat frozen like a snowman, eyeing the spilled milk as if it were seepage from her soul.

  “A jury can understand all that, Thelma. If your lawyer does the job, the jury will suffer along with you, feel the hurt, feel the sense of terror and betrayal, feel the need to lash out and make Rita regret what she’d done. Rita understood your distress as well, didn’t she? It’s why she gave you her most prized possession.”

  Thelma sniffed and rubbed her nose. “If she understood,” she murmured, “she wouldn’t have done it.”

  “That’s why you broke her legs. To put her back the way she was when she was like you. To put her back on your side of the ledger. What did you use, a club of some kind? Or did you just jump on them till they snapped? What did it sound like, Thelma? When you broke Rita’s brand-new legs?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her bad arm with her good hand. A tremor moved through her, perhaps out of guilt and regret, perhaps out of rage and revulsion, perhaps out of relief that her misdeeds were known and her life would come to some sort of judgment.

  When she opened her eyes, she looked at me and then at the door. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to tell me I’m right.”

  “What else?”

  “I want you to turn yourself in to Chief Dixon.”

  “What else?”

  “I want you to defend yourself in court on the ground of legal insanity.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not a killer.”

  “But I did kill. Twice.”

  “Because you thought you’d been wronged.”

  “I had been wronged. Rita didn’t even tell me what she was going to do, which she never could have done anyway if Mona hadn’t put her up to it. She just told me she was going out of town for a while and then three weeks later she waltzed in the bank with her new legs and new face and skipped across the room and planted a kiss on my cheek like I was supposed to be oh so happy for her. I should have killed her right then, killed her and chopped her up and fed her to my cats. They’re quite the carnivores. They would have gobbled her up in a week.”

  Thelma began to cry, placing her only palm over her face as if to shield herself from onlookers, of which there were blessedly none. I left her in the booth and got in the car and put a call into the chief and told him what I’d learned.

  “One out of three,” he said when I’d finished. “I suppose that’s good odds in your business.”

  “There are no good odds in my business,” I told him. “I’m going home. If you need me, I’m in the book.”

  �
�I won’t need you,” he said. “I never did.”

  I pointed the Buick north, toward the place I called home, toward a place where I had done some good as well as bad, a place where the view is clear and awe-inspiring, not stymied and truncated the way it was from behind the wheel of my mashed-in car in the flat fertile world of the Salinas Valley.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was a long ride back. I spent most of it thinking about Rita, about the fickleness of a fate that would yank away her life just as it was about to soar beyond its former bounds, about the cruelty of circumstance that would badger a woman like Thelma Powell into killing her best friend to preserve what little solace she enjoyed in her life, about my own inept engagement in the drama, stirring up the secrets that Mona Upshaw had begged me to let lie, leaving everything as tenuous and indeterminate as when I’d first set foot in Haciendas.

  I was pretty sure Chief Dixon would make a case against Thelma Powell sooner or later, propelled by the forensic evidence and perhaps by the confession I’d urged Thelma to make. But if he did, it seemed less a thing to be proud of than to regret. Thelma Powell was less a criminal than a victim. Sooner or later, in an act of cosmic algebra, victims become victimizers, balancing life’s equation when no one will balance it for them. As far as I was concerned, from the moment of birth, Thelma was excused from whatever dungeons and dragons her demons might lead her to, even the death of someone I loved—Rita and Thelma had collided on a course charted by forces neither had sought and neither deserved. All I could do was wish it hadn’t happened. As for Gus, I was pretty sure he’d go free for having Franco killed, for reasons of time and rank. The good news was, by the time I unlocked the door and entered my chilly apartment, Haciendas was becoming more historical than haunting.

  I slept uneasily, alternately sweating and freezing, alternately wide awake and fuzzy with sleep. I got up at six, ate some Shredded Wheat and drank a pot full of coffee as I got current with the Giants’ drive for the pennant courtesy of the Green Sheet. When I was shaved and showered I called Ruthie Spring.

  “Hey, Marsh. You back?”

  “I’m back.”