Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “I guess I prefer to believe Julieanne killed Fortier because it’s easier than believing one of my friends did it.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next day while on break, I pored over the chart that I’d made on the back of the old recipe. According to the matching I’d done, if Fortier had received the honey from a Kris Kringle, the person had to be Patsy, Big Red or Esperanza. I didn’t feel much like visiting the pastry department after my little “invitation” to police headquarters, but I couldn’t let that detour my investigation.

  I cruised from the EDR, walked along the loading deck, and entered the kitchen by the walk-in refrigerators. The pneumatic seal on the meat door sucked open. Victor pushed out the door and nearly dropped the foam chest he was carrying. He stood in a puff of cold air.

  The whole scene struck me as odd. “What were you doing in there?”

  Victor set down the ice chest, turned his back to me and padlocked the door. “Buzz sent me to get a roast. This seemed like the best way to carry it.”

  Buzz wasn’t supposed to give anyone the key. Maybe that’s why Victor seemed stealthy.

  “Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me,” I said.

  I got as far as the garde manger before I lost my resolve to confront Patsy.

  Suzanne saw me hovering there and sang out, “Haven’t seen much of you.”

  “Busy, busy, busy.”

  “Trying to figure out which one of us is a killer,” she retorted with good humor. She clapped a hand over her mouth and grimaced. Peeling carrots, Delores hunched over the sink.

  “I’m amazed we don’t have a machine to do that,” I said.

  Delores smiled weakly at me.

  Suzanne’s slim hand wielded a knife the size of a small machete. She pressed a row of bright, exposed carrots to a cutting board with the heel of her hand, the fingers curled. At the rate Suzanne chopped, her fingers could be added to the salad before she even knew they were missing.

  “Eldon more or less implied I should back off,” I whispered.

  “Oh, God. Eldon,” she moaned. “What am I going to do, Carol?”

  I’d been so preoccupied with my snooping, I’d lost touch with other events in the kitchen. I knew only what any fool could observe. Eldon would let Suzanne’s breaks stretch to twenty-five minutes, and never roust her from the EDR. If he looked at his watch when he was near Suzanne, he did so to avert his eyes. He never approached her. She never had to listen to him. And she most certainly had never been written up. It was easy for her to like him.

  “I don’t like him like that,” she protested.

  “Like what?”

  “God, Carol, you have been out of it. Don’t you know about the stuff he gave me for Christmas?”

  “Let’s go for a beer sometime soon, Suzanne.”

  “Eldon’s only half of it,” Suzanne whispered. “Abundio’s been acting so weird toward me.”

  I gulped. “I’ve gotta hustle. My fifteen minutes are up. Eldon’s already been on my case this week.”

  I felt like a student saved by the bell. Eventually, though, I’d have to tell Suzanne about how I’d used her name. I should probably do that before the mom Hortencia let drop some physical detail about their visitor.

  As I flew up to the pastry department, Patsy gave me a tight, non-smile. I glared at her and suppressed the first-grader instinct to call her a tattletale.

  It struck me as one of life’s mind teases that she and Esperanza were the toughest women I knew, yet they fussed over spongy petit fours and gooey meringue shells.

  “Esperanza,” I called.

  The woman turned from a tiered cake. She had the same flaring cheekbones, full lips and slender nose as Delores, but her eyes were brown. Her face hardened when she saw me. She held a paper sleeve full of icing, and baby blue frosting smudged her smock.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Have you had your second break?”

  She shook her head.

  “Come visit me, okay?”

  ~*~

  Waiting for Esperanza, I wiped down the stainless steel counter for the third time. No second shift replaced me. The last part of my work would be easy, organization tasks. I was the bakery, except for whatever poor fool got stuck in my slot on Friday and Saturday mornings. This week, though, I’d been scheduled for six days in a row. Eldon managed to do that without paying overtime by making sure the sixth day fell into the next pay period. He was sneaky like that.

  Esperanza turned the corner, drying her hands on a small, white terry towel. “Sorry, I had to finish a cake. Dose people,” she said with her thick accent, “dey have a reception here today.”

  Esperanza was only a few years older than I was but seemed of another generation. Perhaps parenthood caused the shift. Maybe one day I’d be seventy-six and still relate to teenagers better than to grandmothers. Perhaps the difference was cultural. She had the dignity of an indigenous person mixed with the toughness of a field worker and the style‑consciousness of a women’s magazine reader, her eyelids painted mauve to plum, her cheeks brushed with matching blusher.

  “I just have one question,” I lied—I had about a hundred. “Whose name did you draw for the Kris Kringle?”

  She frowned. Although her hands surely had to be dry, she kept wiping them. “I drew Todd for the Kris Kringle.” She waited. I didn’t want her to leave, but I couldn’t formulate a relevant question about Todd. He was a young, curly-haired, back-line cook with no apparent motive to kill Fortier, even if he, like every young guy in the restaurant, had a crush on Delores.

  “Thank you for the nice presents, Carol,” she said.

  “I saw you put one of those glow-in-the-dark Band-Aids on Delores.”

  She nodded. “I am worried for Delores. She’s so heart-broken.”

  “You’re a good mother.”

  Tears sprang to the corners of her eyes. This woman did not crumble easily. Eldon was right. Esperanza was distraught.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of this place.” I laid my hand on her stiff shoulder.

  As we walked by Victor and Abundio, she pitched the towel into a blue, plastic milk crate. Victor spoke tersely to her in rapid Spanish. As they no doubt intended, I didn’t understand much—only inmigración and the tone. It warned.

  ~*~

  I didn’t get a clue about the murder, at least not any that jumped up and bit me, but I did learn about Esperanza. She and Juan Rocha had grown up in Gomez-Farias, a small town near Zamora, Mexico. Many of the villagers, migrant workers who picked crops, traveled between Mexico and the Pajaro and Salinas valleys.

  After her quinciñera, her fifteenth birthday, Esperanza married Juan. The families had known each other and Juan and Esperanza had grown up together. Their families wanted them to marry and fortunately they were fond of one another.

  In the first two years of marriage, Esperanza gave birth to Guadalupe and Juan. When Esperanza was seventeen, they packed two plastic bags full of supplies, left the children with Juan’s mother, and used their savings to ride a bus to Tijuana. In the evening, they walked the brown, barren hills along the border to La Colonia Libertad.

  “Dere were a hundred people, jus’ waiting for night, so dey could run down the hill. All we had to do was climb a fence and dere was MacDonald’s and all the tings of America.”

  We sat in the EDR. Esperanza munched apple coffee cake, several days old. “How do you stay so skinny when you bake so delicious food?”

  I smiled. “I could ask you the same question.” She’d borne three children, but a person would never know it. Her body was sinewy, her stomach flat, her breasts large and firm.

  “Wedding cakes are not delicious.” The smooth face relaxed as the brown eyes turned inward, thoughtful, as though considering the metaphoric implications of the statement. “We had tortillas, and water, but I was so scared I could not eat a tortilla. Helicopters flew over, so low dey make dust turn ‘round. I was sure we would get caught.

  �
�Someone tol’ us to drow away the plastic bags because dey were white. Juan wrapped our tings in a spare shirt. Someone said to forget dem. We need to run.

  “When it got dark, people moved. We did, too. When the spotlight came over, we would drow our bodies on the floor or in the bushes. Then some horses came right toward us. Juan went in the bushes but a man on a horse shined a flashlight in my eyes. Dey handcuffed me and took me in a full bus to a deportation camp, like a prison, with wire fence all ‘round. I had a hearing and dey sent me back to Tijuana. A lot of people walked back to the hills to try again. I didn’t know what to do. Juan had our money. I had no way to go back to Gomez-Farias, so I walked up to the hills.

  “Dat night I got across okay. I begged money and lucky I got an operator who could speak e-Spanish. I called Victor. He told me where to go and what to do until he could get me. I never saw Juan again.”

  ~*~

  Esperanza’s story plagued me for the rest of my shift. At first, the search for Juan had detained her in Watsonville.

  After a couple of months, Victor had suggested, “Maybe the cabron took a hike.”

  “No. No es posible.”

  “If we find him able to come, but not here, I’ll cut off his cajones.”

  Across the cafeteria table, the tough little woman had smiled at me. “You understan’?”

  I nodded. “If Juan deserted you, Victor would have killed him.”

  “Yes,” she said, without hesitation. “Yes, he would.”

  Victor had planted doubt in Esperanza’s head. In Mexico, her life with Juan had existed in a carefully crafted vessel, hard as adobe, earthy as patted tortillas, slow as a paseo. But once they had scrambled over the fence and Juan’s boots thudded on American soil, the vessel and its dreams shattered. Everything was different in America.

  As months passed, Esperanza thought maybe Victor could be right. She stopped looking. Run down and weak, she collapsed in an artichoke field. Victor took her to a clinic that diagnosed hepatitis B. After the long illness, poverty chained her to the fields of the Central Coast.

  When she had finally returned to Gomez-Farias, with money for a coyote to smuggle her children, they did not recognize her. Like Chad, little Guadalupe and Juan had come to know their grandma as Mama. They had cried and clung to her at the mere idea that the stranger might take them, and, in the end, Esperanza had returned to the United States alone and broken-hearted.

  “You see, Carol, I am not a good mother.”

  It was the same conclusion I’d reached about Chad’s mom, but given Esperanza’s circumstances, her self-judgment seemed harsh. Maybe if I knew more about Mary, my judgment of her would seem harsh, too. I gritted my teeth and resolved to be more understanding with the woman.

  Her “hija natural,” Delores, had been born four years after Juan disappeared.

  Esperanza’s story made me think Victor, to honor his sister and to protect his niece, might have killed Fortier. The honey, after all, connected him to the crime even if the jar did have a red ribbon on it. I yawned. It was a theory, no better or worse than my theory about Julieanne.

  TWENTY-SIX

  By the time I finished work, I felt emotionally drained. I’d barely shut the door of my Ghia, when a black Harley roared up beside my parked car.

  Patsy was decked out in black leather and a law-abiding helmet. She motioned for me to roll down the window.

  I didn’t mouth, “Fuck off,” through the glass, although I was tempted. But rather I complied, locking her eyes in my steeliest stare. I noted with satisfaction that the motorcycle, now stopped, presented a challenge for her straddled legs.

  “I just want you to know that I didn’t go to the police to tell on you.”

  “Oh?” I asked.

  “There was some other stuff I thought Sasha should know.”

  “Sasha?” I asked, with an obnoxious, insinuating flutter of lashes.

  “Detective Peters,” she clarified, struggling with her black beast. “And just for your information, Carol, she’s not gay.”

  I hated knowing that I’d jumped to a wrong conclusion.

  The Harley turned a little this way, and then a little that way. “I didn’t want Sasha to find out through the investigation about Fortier and me.”

  “You and Fortier!” I exclaimed in a most impolitic way.

  She pulled back her shoulders, offended. “Why not? I have great tits.” She sounded sarcastic and angry.

  I half expected her to rip open the black leather jacket to prove the merit of her breasts. Perhaps she would have if the motorcycle had been less demanding. Something was going on here that I didn’t understand.

  “You and Fortier had an affair?” I asked.

  She rolled her eyes. “Hardly.”

  I felt dense for at least the tenth time since I’d gotten involved in this mess. I didn’t even know what question to ask.

  “Fortier saw me as the ultimate challenge,” she said. “He was one of those guys who believes a woman could only be a lesbian because she hasn’t met the right man. Namely him.”

  “He raped you?” I guessed.

  She considered the question. “No one but me would think of it that way.”

  “Jesus, Patsy.” I remembered her bitterness last summer in the sports bar. Yet, I’d never heard a peep about this in the kitchen. Below its surface of dirty jokes and juicy gossip, I glimpsed a black reservoir of secrets. “How was Detective Peters going to find out about this if no one knew?”

  “Did I say no one knew?” She fired up the machine and roared off, leaving me to wonder whether she’d simply finished all she had to say, or I’d pissed her off, or she’d gotten tired of fighting the weight of the Harley.

  As I watched her vroom down the hill and into the trees, I realized if Fortier had participated in the Kris Kringle, his name had fallen either to Big Red—or to Patsy.

  ~*~

  At home, I fixed myself a stout cup of coffee and parked myself on our brick landing. I needed to figure out what to do next. Lola circled in the Peruvian lilies, preparing to lie down. She squashed a section of the flowers into a nest. “Get in there and lay some eggs,” I told her.

  She curled in the long, slender leaves and squeezed her round eyes shut with either annoyance or pleasure.

  I sipped my black coffee and processed the new information from Patsy. If Fortier had raped her, Patsy had the perfect motivation to murder him. She would have considered the deed environmental cleanup.

  I reached out and absently petted Lola’s tail. She gave me one sharp meow and a scathing look.

  Patsy hadn’t wanted Detectives Peters and Carman to stumble onto her secret. Better to tell them, especially when she had a sympathetic audience like Detective Peters. She might not be gay, but Patsy had called her Sasha. They must know each other.

  Patsy had suggested someone else knew about whatever had happened with Fortier, someone who had kept his or her mouth shut, but who might now talk.

  The flower is pure Patsy. The niggly detail that I couldn’t remember at the police station popped into my head. The petit four that Eldon had said was specifically for Alexis had been decorated by Patsy, but I’d eaten the damned thing instead. I doubted Patsy had shared that tidbit of information with Sasha.

  The memory of spewing over the balcony made me gag. I looked at the contented, brindled ball of fluff in the crushed flowers. “Come on, Lola,” I urged. “If the Easter bunny can lay eggs, so can you.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mist dampened my face. Like fingers reading Braille, my feet followed the bumps of the path from the employees’ parking lot to the kitchen. The night was moonless and the stars shrouded in fog. Sometimes the night cleaning staff were around—distant vacuums smothered in fog pillows. This morning I heard nothing—no noisy cart rattling along the sidewalk. In the still, dead air, the eucalyptus leaves didn’t rustle. Even my footsteps were muffled.

  No light spread itself into the wet air—no late revelers, no early risers, n
o pacing insomniacs. Three-thirty may have been an obscene time to go to work, but it was a lovely to walk in the deep quiet through a seamless velvet. I savored the solitude, the sense of floating as though through outer space.

  I walked to the far side of the building and ascended the steps onto the loading dock, screened from the bricked horseshoe of the main entrance by an island of artful landscaping. The door was locked, but I had my keys in hand, as I always did in the dark. For all my love of the stillness, I was a realist. I didn’t carry a purse and I practiced a wary look.

  I entered the building, turned to the poorly lit time clock, and punched in. The brightness of the locker room blinded me. The lights should not have been on. I felt myself tense, even though occasionally someone did arrive before me, or someone forgot to turn the lights off.

  I zipped through a rack of clean uniforms, arranged by size, smocks on one side, pants on the other. I ignored the divisions, and looked for the smock with the prohibited “Carol” on the inside of the collar in indelible black. After I found my top, I began pulling out the pockets of pants to find the one with my name on it. I’d marked one of the hound’s-tooth checked pants when I’d finally found a uniform that fit. I had a fastidious dislike, anyway, of wearing other people’s clothes, laundered or not.

  I couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that someone was around. My ears felt as though they were rotating back, like an alert cat’s, listening for unfamiliar sounds.

  I sat on the bench in front of the lockers, and stripped off my sweats. The one time I’d seen Fortier in his birthday suit, he had been sitting right here, doing what I was doing, except he apparently didn’t bother with underwear.

  I’d debated a sexual harassment report. I hardly needed to tell anyone, though. Fortier had crowed about the situation with special exaggeration of my expression.

  Young guys like Todd and Ray were amused. Buzz looked like he’d rip Fortier’s head off. Eldon ignored him. Patsy snarled, under her breath, “Fuck with my fluff, and I’ll bite your balls off,” to which Fortier responded, “Try it, you’ll like it.” Typical kitchen banter. But maybe the police would see her remark differently, the way they chose to view my remarks.