Black Current

by Karen Keskinen

  But she didn’t. Vanessa stared a moment longer, then turned on her heel and was gone.

  * * *

  “Jaymie? We found Charlie’s van. It was parked in the lot behind the Fishwife Restaurant, down on Cabrillo.”

  “That was quick.” El Balcon was too steep for the kickstand, so I lowered my bike to the ground. “Mike, is he OK?”

  “Not sure. The van was empty. I went in and talked to the manager at the Fishwife. He said the owner has a soft spot for Charlie, lets him park in the lot at night. Anyway, about three weeks ago, Charlie collapsed in a flower bed. They called an ambulance and he was transported to Cottage Hospital. They heard he made it, but that’s the last they’ve seen of him.”

  “Charlie would have hated that. He can’t stand hospitals.” I spoke in a breezy tone, maybe to dispel my concern. “Three weeks ago—that’s a long time to be hospitalized. Did you check with Cottage?”

  “Thought I’d let you do that, Jaymie. Charlie would rather get a visit from you than me any day of the week.”

  I heard a sharp “yip!” and looked up. The three-legged member of my household was waiting at the brow of the hill, telling me I was late and to hurry along.

  “Thanks, Mike.” I paused, giving him a chance to say something more. But there was only silence. “Well, I gotta go.”

  “Let me know if I can help.”

  I wasn’t over Mike, I admitted to myself as I picked up my bike and wheeled it on up the road. And I needed to be over him, that was for sure.

  Mike Dawson wanted a wife, and I didn’t want to be one. Besides, he had Mandy now. The woman wore cute cotton skirts and styled her auburn hair in a bouncy bob.

  Yep, Mandy Blaine was just Mike’s type. And I wasn’t. It was just that simple, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  The following afternoon I drove up Carrillo and around the corner into Cliff. Three blocks along, I pulled up across the street from the Bonfiglio home.

  Built in the 1920s, the dilapidated two-story Spanish colonial sang of dreamy romance. A gigantic purple-red bougainvillea climbed the wall and poured its molten fire across the second-story balcony grille work. The old clay roof tiles daubed a dark pattern of shade on the creamy stucco walls.

  As I sat in the Camino admiring the house, a slight figure in a pair of bright red basketball shorts and a gleaming white wife beater stepped out onto the balcony and waved. “Hey, Jaymie! Come up!”

  A second figure, a plump boy with dark wavy hair, stepped through the doorway. BJ Bonfiglio wore a mint green long-sleeved shirt and what looked like a pair of skinny-leg jeans. I couldn’t really make him out, but there was something about the way the two of them stood there together … something that made them look like a couple. Could it be?

  “What’s the matter with you, are you deaf?” Claudia screamed. “The door’s right down there!” She leaned over the rail and pointed. Then she turned to her companion and said something. The two of them disappeared back inside.

  Ah, sweet life. Bursting with mysteries, large and small. I got out of the car, crossed Cliff, and walked up the short drive.

  The front door sprang open. “Hey, Jaymie!” The lady of the house was radiant, grinning from ear to ear. “This is BJ. Come in! We’re making margaritas.” Apparently I’d been invited to visit the Bonfiglio home at the cocktail hour.

  I shook BJ’s soft hand. His features were very Italian. In fact, his face looked as if it was lifted from a centuries-old portrait painted by a master. His skin was smooth and olive-colored, his nose classically curved, and his eyes liquid and round.

  “Hi, Ms. Zarlin.”

  “Hi, BJ. Please call me Jaymie. I’m glad to meet you.”

  BJ smiled. “Me too. Claudia talks about you a lot.”

  “I’ll bet she does.” I felt a dash of sarcasm was warranted. But BJ just looked confused.

  “I meant in a good way. She talks about all the people you help.”

  I smiled weakly, feeling mean-spirited. And a tad confused myself. This was definitely a new Claudia. I glanced over at her: I’d never seen her so happy.

  “Come up to the kitchen, Jaymie. BJ’s making some guac to go with the margaritas. His own special recipe.”

  I followed them to a wide staircase decorated with vintage tile risers. “I don’t want to offend you guys. But aren’t you a bit young for tequila? Not that it’s any of my business.”

  “BJ doesn’t drink,” Claudia explained. “Not after what happened to him at the piñata party. Right, BJ?”

  “Yeah. I pour my margarita before Claudia adds in the alcohol.” BJ’s voice was earnest. He seemed like a nice kid, and I mentally cringed when I thought of the abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his fellow classmates.

  We climbed the staircase and entered a big old kitchen. It was tidy enough, but you could smell the drains. The counters were tiled, and the grout was missing in places.

  Claudia went over to a blender set up next to the stained porcelain sink. “Course, I drink tequila,” she announced. “Who cares how old you’re s’posed to be?”

  I bit my tongue to keep quiet. At ninety pounds, a thimbleful of alcohol was probably about what this girl could handle.

  “But,” Claudia continued as she sloshed margarita mix into the blender over the ice cubes, “since you two pussies aren’t gonna drink, I guess I won’t either. I like company when I drink, you know?”

  Very much the fifties housewife, Claudia continued to chat away as she finished the margaritas and poured the frothy mix into blue-rimmed glasses. I held open the balcony door as my hosts carried trays loaded with salsa, guacamole, chips, and margaritas out to the deck.

  “Your place is wonderful, BJ. Your parents are out of the country?”

  “New Zealand. They’re both agricultural anthropologists. They have a dig site near Auckland.”

  I took a sip of the drink. It was so sweet it made my teeth ache. “So you get left by yourself a lot?”

  “Yeah. I used to hate it. Really lonely, you know? But now—” He smiled at Claudia, who smiled back. “Now it’s fun to hang here.”

  Their relationship was nice. Whatever it was.

  I looked out over the roofs of the houses on Marine Terrace, to a strip of silver water glimmering under a mother-of-pearl sky. “BJ, I hate to bring up an unpleasant subject. But did Claudia explain why I’m here?”

  “Course I did,” Claudia answered. “BJ’s cool, he can talk about it.”

  BJ nodded. “It’s about that night, right? The piñata party.”

  “Yes. What I want to understand is the roles different people played.”

  BJ looked down at his hands, folded now on the pitted glass tabletop. “All right.”

  “Vanessa, Porter, and Skye. How did each of them figure into what happened?”

  “Vanessa.…” He opened his hands and studied his palms. “I think she was the one who started it all. I think she, you know, decided ahead of time what they were going to do to me. And that’s the only reason she invited me in the first place.”

  “What a sweetheart.”

  “A fuckin’ ho,” Claudia muttered.

  “But after a while, she disappeared. And Porter … took charge.” He bit his lower lip.

  “He took charge of tormenting you, you mean.”

  “Pretty much. They forced me to drink all kinds of stuff. Porter was really drunk. He … he stuck these ice tongs down my throat and made me get sick. People were laughing.” There was a tremor now in BJ’s voice. “Then they held me down on the floor and he poured more vodka down my throat. That’s when I really started to choke.”

  Claudia put a hand on BJ’s arm. “Now tell her about Skye.”

  BJ nodded, twice. “I don’t know where he came from, but all of a sudden, Skye was there. He pulled Porter away, and they started to fight. I think Porter hit his head on the ground. Anyway, I still couldn’t stop choking. And Skye…”

  BJ shut his eyes. “He helped me up and got me out of there,
you know? It was all a blur, I couldn’t really see. I heard some girl yelling at him, screaming, I think it was Vanessa. And then we were outside, heading for Skye’s pickup. After that, I guess I passed out. The next thing I remember is waking up in emergency.”

  “What about your parents? Did the hospital get in touch with them?”

  He gave me a sheepish look. “I lied and said they were away for a week, arriving back the next day. I couldn’t tell them my parents were in New Zealand for six months. I was afraid if the school found out, there’d be trouble, you know? Like maybe they’d call Social Services or something.”

  “I understand. So Skye—he was a lifesaver.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, he was.” BJ met my eyes. “And then—and then look what happened to him!” He tipped his head forward and covered his face with his hands.

  Claudia rested her small hand on his shoulder. “It’s OK, BJ.”

  But it wasn’t OK, and we all knew it.

  “Sorry. I need a tissue.” BJ pushed back his patio chair and went into the house.

  “BJ’s afraid Skye got killed because of him,” Claudia said in a husky whisper.

  I nodded but said nothing. Now that I knew Porter and Vanessa had alibis, I doubted they’d had a hand in Skye Rasmussen’s death, or Cheryl’s, for that matter. But nothing was ever exactly as it seemed.

  “Sorry about that.” BJ stepped back through the door. “Skye was a really good person, you know?”

  “That’s what I hear.” I waited until he’d seated himself again at the patio table. “Should we continue?”

  “Yes, go ahead.” BJ managed a weak smile. “I want to help.”

  “Good. Now, I understand you already knew Skye. Claudia said you worked on a school project with him?”

  “Uh-huh. We wouldn’t have ended up being study partners if it wasn’t for Mrs. Sang. She drew names out of a box. A lot of kids didn’t like that, but it worked out fine for me.”

  “Tell me about your project, what you guys did together.”

  “The assignment was to do a presentation on the sixties. Me and Skye, we decided to do the protest movement. It was real interesting, about Mario Savio up at Berkeley and stuff. But mainly we researched what happened here in Santa Barbara.”

  Santa Barbara in the sixties. I thought of Neil Thompson and the Steinbachs. “What did you find out?”

  “Oh, there was a big protest here. The Bank of America got burned down in 1970, did you know that?”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about that.”

  “Cool!” Claudia’s eyes sparkled. “Nothin’ like that ever happens here now.”

  “A lot of students got arrested,” BJ continued. “Like Skye’s grandfather.”

  The world slowed, and just for an instant, held still. I rested my hand on the glass tabletop. “BJ? Say that again.”

  “Skye’s grandfather, Dr. Steinbach? He got arrested, a bunch of times. Skye and me, we went over to his house to interview him. He was like, a leader in the protest movement out at UC.”

  “Well, how about that.” I got up and crossed the deck to the far railing, where a tall coral-flowered eucalyptus filtered the view of the ocean. “BJ, tell me what Rod Steinbach had to say. Tell me everything you can remember about your visit with him.”

  “Um, well—we didn’t talk all that long, I remember that. They’d just moved back into town, and their furniture and stuff had just arrived, maybe the day before. There were lots of boxes in the rooms. First Skye and me helped him carry some stuff, because the movers put things in the wrong places.” BJ looked at me to see how he was doing.

  “All right. So the three of you chatted?”

  “Uh-huh. We sat down in the living room. Skye asked Dr. Steinbach some questions, and he started telling us all about how it was in the sixties, the music and the drugs and the—the—” BJ glanced at Claudia and blushed. “And the girls.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “Let’s see … he said the hippies and the protesters, by 1968, they weren’t the same people. I didn’t know that. The protesters were real serious. Dr. Steinbach was a leader. He was important in—he called it the movement.”

  Music, drugs, sex—and violence. “BJ, tell me something. Do you have any notes from your meeting? Or maybe you still have the report you handed in.”

  “It was a presentation, actually. PowerPoint. I put it together, but in the end, I think Skye kept the disc. But…”

  “But?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got some of the stuff we used. Like copies of the pictures.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “People, mostly. Dr. Steinbach dug into some boxes that were stacked in his office. He found some old photos from back then. I remember he didn’t want us to take anything away, so we set up his printer and made copies.”

  “Can we find those copies, BJ? I’d like to see them.”

  “Sure. I’ll look for them.” He relaxed in his seat.

  “BJ,” I said, “do you mind if we find those copies now?”

  Both BJ and Claudia looked at me in surprise. “What are you looking for, Jaymie?” Claudia asked.

  “I’m not sure exactly. I’ll know it when I find it.”

  “OK,” BJ said. “Let’s go to my room. But I warn you, it’s chaos up there.”

  * * *

  BJ’s room was only a moderate mess. The curtains were drawn, and the space was lighted by the glow from a big fish tank. Clothes were piled on the single bed.

  BJ went to the window and pulled back the drape. Then he lifted the clothes and tossed them into a corner.

  Claudia smoothed the bedspread and sat down, motioning for me to join her. But I walked over to the sparkling tank.

  “Salt water. Beautiful. I’ve heard it’s tricky to maintain.” I watched a bevy of rainbow-colored fish undulate to and fro.

  “It is till you get the hang of it.” BJ was poking around in a closet. He emerged with a cardboard file box in his arms. “My parents don’t like dogs very much. So the fish keep me company.”

  “Fish? How about me?”

  I was so surprised at Claudia’s coquettish tone that I laughed aloud.

  “Sure, you too.” BJ sounded embarrassed, but he grinned.

  He set the cardboard box on a chair and lifted the lid. It was stuffed with papers and folders. “I’m pretty sure they’re here.” He rummaged around in the box and pulled out a dark blue file folder. “Yeah, I knew I kept this. I’m a pack rat, I never throw anything away.”

  I accepted the folder and opened it. There were maybe a dozen sheets of typing paper within, and each sheet was printed with a copy of a photograph. I studied them one by one.

  A young Rod Steinbach featured in most of them: Rod on a speaking platform, commanding with his strong handsome features and long dark hair; Rod with a megaphone in hand, scowling like a pirate, clearly having the time of his life. And there were several photos of crowds, the young men shaggy, the women fresh-faced and girlish without makeup.

  Two-thirds of the way in, I came on a photo of Rod sharing a bottle of vino with some friends. I caught my breath.

  I set the folder down and took the photocopy over to the window.

  “Jaymie? What did you find?”

  I didn’t answer Claudia right away. I was too intent on understanding the photo.

  It was a snapshot of four people holding jam jars of what looked like red wine. They were surrounded by more people, a larger group. Yet you could see how these four formed their own knot, not apart from the others, but closer, tighter. Like seeds within an apple: Rod Steinbach, Alice Steinbach, a woman I didn’t recognize, and a fourth—Neil Thompson.

  Rod’s left arm was draped around Neil’s narrow shoulders. So Neil Thompson hadn’t just “known” Rod and Alice from college days. They’d been close friends.

  “Let me ask you guys a question. Come here for a minute.” I held up the glossy black and white photo. “Look at these four. That’s Dr. Steinbach, of course
. Now tell me, do you think the four are just friends, or are they two couples?”

  “Couples,” Claudia said quickly. “See how that Asian woman’s all over that guy with the blond hair? She’s fucking him. And Dr. Steinbach? He’s with this other woman here. Look, see where his hand is. He’s probably grabbing her butt.”

  I wasn’t so sure about the location of the hand. But I agreed with Claudia: Alice and Neil were close. “It’s light red hair, actually, not blond. You can’t tell because the picture’s black and white. BJ, what do you think?”

  “The same as Claudia. Two couples. And the four of them are friends.”

  Did this explain why Neil had tried to make Skye’s death look like an accident? Maybe he still had feelings for Alice, and wanted to spare her the anguish of knowing her grandson was murdered. Actually, this explanation wasn’t so far from what he’d claimed.

  I shuffled the papers and slipped them back in the folder. “Can I take this? I’ll get it back to you when I’m done.”

  “Sure. You can keep it if you want.”

  “Thanks, BJ. Now, I gotta run.”

  Well, I’ll be damned: Neil Thompson and Alice. I thought about what I’d just learned as I headed back to the office.

  Somewhere along the line, there’d been a swap.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I stayed late at the office, attempting to deal with paperwork. But in fact, I couldn’t quit gnawing away at unanswered questions. I was still thinking about Neil and the Steinbachs as I pulled the Camino into the dark car shed and climbed out.

  I stepped out to the yard and turned my face to the sky. The air was clear, and a scatter of stars quivered under the sleepy eye of a three-quarter moon.

  Dexter scuttled out of the bushes. Low to the ground, he raced over to me as fast as three legs could take him.

  “Dex? What are you doing out here?”

  The cow dog wasn’t so brave anymore. Not since last year, when he was lashed to the porch railing and partially butchered.

  I looked over at the house. All seemed as usual: the porch light was on, the front door shut. Then, I glanced over at the studio.

  “No,” I breathed. “No.”

  I never locked the studio door. Deep down, I suppose, I was still leaving it open for Brodie. Now the door yawned wide. I walked closer and saw their belongings strewn in the dirt. Their belongings: Brodie’s, and Danny Armenta’s.