by Janet Dawson
The phone rang and I reached for it before the machine could pick up the call. It was Sid. “Got some bad news for you, Jeri,” he said. “Eddie Villegas was at a party last night in Daly City. Lots of witnesses who can swear he never got to this side of the Bay, at least not during the time Dolores Cruz was killed.”
“So I guess he’s not much of a suspect for Dolly’s murder. Wasn’t his M.O. anyway. Thanks for checking, Sid. I know you’re busy with this freeway shooting.”
“Yeah, I am.” Weariness showed through the gruffness in his voice. “So try and stay out of trouble, okay? I got enough to worry about already, and I can’t afford to bail you out of jail.”
After we hung up I felt deflated. Somewhere in the back of my mind I’d been sure Eddie the Knife had murdered Dolly, though logically I knew that was too easy. Still, I had discovered that the Villegas family was connected to the Navarros, linked by more than blood. Cousins, I thought, recalling what Alex had told me about compadrazgo, the Filipino kinship system.
I looked at the clock on the wall. Nearly six, and I hadn’t eaten since I’d decimated half a loaf of pumpernickel-raisin at noon. I decided to get some comfort food at Nan Yang, my favorite Burmese restaurant down in Oakland’s Chinatown. I locked up my office and set off on foot, walking down Franklin Street to Eighth, my mind empty of all thoughts except what I was going to have for dinner. I turned left on Eighth, heading toward Webster. Just as I reached the intersection, the light turned red and I waited with a cluster of people who reflected the ethnic diversity of this part of town. To my right was a Hmong woman in her native dress, head wrapped in a colorful turban, and in front of me two middleaged women speaking Chinese. The young people on my left looked Filipino, and so did the man on the opposite side of the street.
It was Alex Tongco, striding briskly across Eighth, wearing jeans and a polo shirt. I called out to him, but there was no way he could hear me over the Webster Street traffic. As the light changed and the walk signal flashed on, I saw Alex push open the door of a restaurant called the Lantern. I sidestepped the people in front of me and hurried across the street. If Alex was having dinner, I’d join him. After all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, I could have used the company.
Inside the Lantern I told the waiter I was looking for a friend. I stood in the doorway of the dining room and looked at the crowded tables, finally spotting Alex at a table near the back. But he had someone with him, an older man. Scratch that idea, I thought, ready to turn and leave the restaurant. Then a waiter stepped up to the table and both men turned so that I could see their faces.
I stood there, startled, as people eddied past me. For the second time that day I had entered a restaurant and found something unexpected. Alex’s companion looked familiar. In fact, he looked like a man I’d met before. But it couldn’t be. That man was dead. My father had found his body, attended his funeral, mourned his passing.
I moved through the dining room, staring at the man’s profile, at the thick black hair threaded with silver. As the waiter stepped away from the table I took his place. “Hello, Alex.”
Alex looked up at me, startled and then alarmed. “Jeri! What are you doing here?”
I looked from Alex to the older man who sat opposite him. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your uncle?”
Nineteen
ALEX’S MOUTH TIGHTENED AS HIS DINNER COMPANION stood. He was in his sixties, gray liberally salting his short black hair. As I approached the table, I thought he looked small and thin. I thought something else, too, but both my initial impressions were wrong. When he moved, I saw the rock-hard muscles on the wiry frame. He tilted his head to one side as he surveyed me with a spark of humor in his dark brown eyes. He knew what thought had passed through my head, as though he had seen it flicker to life and then die, and he was amused by it.
“Yes, Alex,” he said, his voice clipped, his English slightly accented. “By all means, introduce us.”
Alex got to his feet, slow to speak. “Jeri Howard, my uncle, Javier Manibusan.”
“I thought so.”
“But not at first,” Javier said. He smiled as he took my hand in both of his. “The resemblance to my late brother is quite strong.” He pulled out a third chair and signaled the waiter. “Please join us for dinner. We’ve just ordered.”
I took the seat he indicated, waving away the menu the waiter offered as I asked him to add kung pao chicken to the food already ordered. When he departed, I glanced at Alex, still tight around the lips, and at Javier, who was enjoying his nephew’s discomfort. Javier picked up the teapot and filled our cups.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Alex may have neglected to mention me. Alex leaves out a lot.”
“My nephew does not care to broadcast his association with me.” Javier’s dark eyes twinkled as a smile curved his lips. “I’m the black sheep of the family.”
Alex kept his voice low so as not to attract the attention of other diners. “Do you realize what would happen to my security clearance if the navy found out about you?” From the look on his face I guessed that Javier’s politics had moved from organizing sugar plantation workers to something more radical. At the fiesta I’d asked Alex if his uncle might be in the hills, toting a gun. I thought he’d been joking when he said he wouldn’t be surprised. Now I wasn’t so sure. Javier certainly looked fit enough to be a guerrilla, but given his age, I suspected his involvement was more of a leadership nature.
“You’ve explained it to me many times,” Javier said, “though the internal workings of the United States Navy hold little interest for me. My only concern is that they remove their sailors from my country and turn the bases over to their rightful owners, the Philippine people. Of which you are one.”
“I’m an American citizen. And I’ve worked damned hard to get where I am.” Anger and pride burned in Alex’s eyes. “In school here in the States, when I was fresh off the boat and the kids called me names and mocked my accent. And in the navy, where Filipinos were always stewards until after the war, because the brass didn’t think we were smart enough to do anything but serve food. But I showed them. I came up through the ranks, from enlisted to officer, in spite of the prejudice and the attitudes and the bastards who called me Flip or slant-eye or gook.”
“Why do you stay in an organization and a country where people denigrate you?” Javier retorted.
“It’s no different in the civilian world. And it’s no different in the Philippines, Uncle, where people from Manila look down at the peasants from the provinces, and the Muslims fight the Catholics. There will always be people calling other people ugly names.”
Javier launched into a diatribe about the legacy of imperialism, and Alex struck the table with the fiat of his hand. The cutlery and glasses rattled. Several heads turned at the sound. “I’m in the navy because I want to be there. I’m proud of my accomplishments. It took me eighteen years to get my gold oak leaves, and I can go higher. Dammit, I can’t risk letting you deep-six my career.”
“Why do you see me, then?” Javier asked with a shrug, his mouth turning up at the comers. I realized he was amused by this verbal skirmish. “So we can have the same argument to spice our dinner? If you are so assimilated, why don’t you disassociate yourself from me entirely? Or turn me in? But you can’t do that. I’ll tell you why. Compadrazgo, kinship. Utang na loob, honor. The ties of family and culture are too strong. You are a Filipino, no matter how Americanized you let yourself become.”
Alex growled deep in his throat. I suspected they had been fighting this war of words for a long time, each without convincing the other. This particular battle was being conducted for my benefit, to delineate where each man stood. I looked from the navy officer, who fought his own internal conflict between duty and kin, to the ex-seminarian, who had found his religion in politics. I didn’t see any chance that they would ever find a middle ground. But they were family, so they met to eat and argue.
Conversation sto
pped as the waiter returned with a plate of pot stickers. He set these in the middle of the table and left again. I picked up my chopsticks and speared one of the dumplings, turning to Javier. “Judging from what I’ve heard, I think you have something to do with the New People’s Army.” Alex winced at the words but didn’t say anything.
“I am part of the revolution that has been evolving in my country for the past hundred years,” Javier said, “loyal to the Philippines, opposed to those in power.”
“Are you in the States illegally? “
“I don’t think I’ll answer that. I’ll let your imagination run riot.” Javier matched my smile with one of his own. He claimed one of the pot stickers and drizzled a spoonful of hot mustard over it before picking it up with his chopsticks. “Alex has mentioned you, Miss Howard. He tells me that several things have happened that may be related to my brother’s murder. Until he told me this, I believed Lito to be the victim of a random street crime, killed for the contents of his wallet. Now I think it is something more.”
“I agree. I think it was personal. I need to find out why Dr. Manibusan was in San Francisco that night. I believe that information will lead me to whoever killed him. Why would your brother have an extensive file on Maximiliano Navarro?”
“Pusa the cat? I, too, have a large file on Max Navarro.” Javier moved the pot stickers to one side as the waiter brought the rest of our dinner, making room for additional platters. “I consider him to be a dangerous man.”
“Why?”
“His first loyalty is to himself, a common malady among men in power.” Javier spooned rice onto his plate and passed the bowl to me. “He switched his support from Marcos to Corazon Aquino only when it became clear that Marcos was about to fall. Now that the army has mounted several coup attempts against Cory, Navarro has decided to back another horse — himself. He’s getting money from all the old Marcos connections, in the Philippines and here in the States. He wants to be a member of the oligarchy, and he’d make a bargain with the devil himself to do it.”
I paused, chopsticks poised over my plate. “The oligarchy?”
“The old men,” Alex said as he helped himself to prawns and snow peas.
“Not just old men. The old families.” Javier warmed to the subject while the food cooled on his plate. “For more than a century, all the power and wealth in the Philippines has been concentrated in the landowning families, about sixty of them. Cory’s family, the Cojuangcos, are one such family. So, for that matter, are the Aquinos. And the Navarros aspire to be another. That is why Max chose his new bride, because of her family. Marcos diluted the power of the oligarchs, but now that he’s gone, they’ve reestablished their hold. Nothing has changed. In some parts of the country these landowners act like feudal lords and they treat the people like chattel. The Navarro sugar plantation is an example. Max’s eldest son, Jun, runs it like a private fiefdom. The conditions among the workers are appalling. But Jun and his hired guns have them cowed. He has a private army of vigilantes to terrorize the peasants.”
“Or protect them from your cronies,” Alex challenged his uncle, pointing at him with his chopsticks.
Javier chuckled. “You know, Miss Howard, if you ask a dozen Filipinos for an opinion, you will get more than twelve answers.”
“I know that whatever happens in the Philippines reverberates all the way across the Pacific to the Bay Area. That much has become clear to me, if nothing else.” I took another helping of kung pao chicken. “So Max Navarro wants to be one of the people who runs things, but he didn’t originally come from a wealthy family.”
Javier shook his head. “No. But both his wives have been from the oligarchy. Navarro’s grandfather was mestizo, like mine, a small farmer who lived outside of San Fernando. He and Max’s father, Rufino, bought more land in the twenties and thirties, taking advantage of conditions that widened the gulf between the wealthy and the poor. Rufino Navarro became a very rich man before the war. He got even richer during the war.”
“How?” I asked.
“He collaborated with the Japanese,” Javier said. “Most of the wealthy landowners did. They wanted to preserve their own power. It didn’t matter to them who was in charge, imperial Japan or imperial America. Nothing happened to them afterward. MacArthur was more interested in rooting out suspected Communists than prosecuting collaborators. So the oligarchy remained in power and the people suffered. As they continue to do.”
“There’s some link between Max Navarro and your brother,” I told Javier. “So far I haven’t made that connection. I just have a lot of threads that don’t tie together. One of them is a man named Efren Villegas, evidently Max’s cousin, who fought with Max Navarro in World War Two.”
Javier shook his head. “I have my doubts about Navarro’s war record.”
“You think he made it up out of whole cloth, like Marcos?”
“Perhaps. After all this time, who knows?” The older man shrugged. “Some of the resistance fighters were committed, organized, disciplined, like the Huks. The rest were a jumble of factions fighting each other as well as the Japanese. Who can say? The country was in chaos after liberation. Manila and other cities in ruins, and the rural areas a wasteland, people unable to feed themselves or grow crops. Maybe Max was a partisan, maybe not. World War Two was a long time ago, Miss Howard. Any historian, like Lito, can tell you that the truth is often obscured by time. And embroidered by those who participate in events. Look at how long Marcos was able to convince us, Filipinos and Americans alike, that he was a decorated war hero despite much evidence to the contrary. A lot of the partisans who fought the Japanese were motivated by things other than patriotism. In many cases they were settling old scores under cover of wartime.”
History is written by the winners. My father the history professor often quoted that statement, but I didn’t recall who said it first. Dad was usually referring to the American Indians and the Old West, but the words would fit the situation in the Philippines as well as any other.
“As for this Villegas cousin,” Javier was saying, “I’ve never heard of him. But with our tradition of compadrazgo, we have many cousins.”
“Efren’s grandson Eddie is the one who was trying to get Alex to give him the professor’s papers. Just like Dolores Cruz, pretending to be Dr. Manibusan’s widow, trying to get that envelope.”
“Can Miss Cruz be persuaded to explain herself?” Javier asked.
“Not anymore,” I said, pouring another round of tea. “She was murdered last night.”
“Good God.” Alex looked stunned. He’d been spooning rice onto his plate and now his hand stopped in midair. “Do the police have any suspects?”
“Not so far. They’re still making up their minds about me.” I rescued the rice bowl, which he was in danger of dropping, as I gave Alex and Javier an overview of the previous night’s events. “I think Dolores Cruz knew who killed Dr. Manibusan. That envelope must contain something that proves it.”
“You don’t even know if she’s the one who took it,” Alex broke in, his voice grim. “What about Eddie Villegas, posing as a reporter? How do you know he didn’t take the damned envelope?”
“He came to my office and threatened me. He was still looking for the envelope then. I think Dolly got it when she attacked my father earlier in the week.”
“So Villegas killed her for it.”
“I’d like to think so,” I said. “But the police say he was somewhere else last night, with lots of witnesses. And I was standing over Dolly’s body with the murder weapon in my hand.”
“What’s in this mysterious envelope?” Javier asked.
“I’ve never actually seen it, but Dad says it contains a microcassette and some folded sheets of paper. It’s postmarked San Francisco, the day after Dr. Manibusan died.” I ladled more kung pao chicken on my rice. “I found out something else. Until last fell, Dolores Cruz was Max Navarro’s mistress.”
“Dolores Rios,” Javier said. “Of course. She was a si
nger.”
“You knew her?”
“Knew of her. She was married to a man named Jimmy Rios, a popular singer. He was killed in a car accident. Then a few years later she took up with Navarro. He kept her in an apartment in Manila, very discreet while his first wife was still alive. After Mrs. Navarro’s suicide he appeared in public with Mrs. Rios, as he called her. She disappeared from view several months before Navarro married his second wife. I think the last time Dolores Rios was seen with Max Navarro was in January, when Navarro was over here for that fund-raiser.”
“What fund-raiser?”
“Hector Guzman’s fund-raiser,” Javier said. “A thousand dollars a plate, or so I hear.”
“Guzman, the real estate tycoon in Daly City? I know he’s one of Max’s financial backers. He’s also in business with Sal Agoncillo and Rick Navarro.”
Javier nodded. “Guzman’s one of the old pro-Marcos crowd. He threw his support behind Navarro a year ago and he hosted a big fund-raising dinner for Navarro at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.”
“I remember.” Alex frowned as though he was trying to recall something. “Lito told me about it.”
My interest quickened. “When in January was this dinner?”
“I’m not sure of the date,” Alex said. “But I think it was a couple of weeks into the new year.” He looked across the table at Javier, who shook his head.
“We can find out. There was a big article in the Philippine News. Navarro comes to the States several times a year and he always attracts press coverage, especially since he’s made known his political ambitions.”
“Let me know the date as soon as you can.” What if the fund-raising dinner had been the same night the professor was murdered? After Dad encountered Lito Manibusan in the Sutter-Stockton garage, they had walked together to the corner of Post and Powell. The St. Francis covered that block of San Francisco real estate bordered by Post, Powell, Geary, and Mason. Dr. Manibusan could very well have been going to the hotel. I considered the possibilities, but they still didn’t give me any reasons. That link I sought between the history professor and the businessman-turned-candidate so far existed only as Jeri’s hunch. Hunches don’t prove anything.