Authors: Earlene Fowler
“No rest for the wicked, huh?” I flopped down on one of the oak ladder-back chairs she’d purchased for a song when they refurnished the new library. The only way you could tell it was her day off was she wasn’t wearing one of her many Chanel-Armani-Donna Karan power suits. Instead she wore black leggings, Italian leather flats, and a flowing café au lait silk blouse that probably cost more than my truck’s new clutch.
“
Hermana gringa,
you have no idea. What’s up? I thought you and
tu esposo el chota
were out building lung capacity this morning.”
“I’ll have you know I jogged a whole mile and a half.”
“And?” Her liquid voice held a hint of laughter.
“Is it too late for an annulment?” I asked with a dramatic groan.
She pointed a French-manicured nail at me. “I warned you about getting hitched up with a Latino man. They want to run your life like they’re five-star generals and you’re a buck private with no chance of advancement. Not to mention he’s a cop. And a cop in management.”
“Ah, he’s not that bad,” I said, grinning. “Besides, I never could resist being sweet-talked in Spanish.”
“Tramp,” she said, taking a sip of her iced cappuccino. “You just married him for the great sex.”
“Shh,” I said, putting my finger over my lips. “He thinks I married him for his fascinating personality and government pension.”
She rolled her luminous black eyes, and we were both giggling when José, Blind Harry’s cook, brought over my order and told Elvia briefly that they were running low again on almond-flavored Tortani syrup.
“Double the order next time,” she told him, then raised her eyebrows at me. “What’s with the food to go?”
I stopped laughing, suddenly feeling guilty for making jokes after having discovered only hours earlier the body of someone I’d known and liked. But as Gabe once said, people joked automatically to protect themselves. Especially those who saw man’s inhumanity to man on a regular basis.
“If cops didn’t,” he’d told me, “they wouldn’t last a year. That’s why you hear so much grotesque humor at crime scenes. If any of us contemplated emotionally at the moment what really happened and how it could happen to us or to someone we love, we’d end up eating our guts or our guns.” His blue-gray eyes turned dark with sadness. “Some cops lose that ability to disengage, and that’s what they do. Too many.”
Elvia’s face instantly sobered. “Benni, what’s wrong?”
I hugged myself, running my hands up and down my upper arms, trying to smooth out the gooseflesh. “You remember Nora Cooper, don’t you?”
Her brows furrowed in concentration, smoothing out when they placed the name. “Nick Cooper’s older sister. He works at the library, right?”
“Head reference librarian. Nora works there, too.”
“What about her?”
“She’s dead.”
“That’s too bad. Was she sick?”
“No, she drowned. It might be murder.” I grabbed her cappuccino and took a large gulp. She could tell I was upset so she didn’t harp like she normally would about me drinking out of her glass. I set the glass mug down, my hand shaking slightly. “I found her body.”
Elvia pushed her computer printouts aside and leaned closer. “Tell me what happened.” Her shiny black hair caught the overhead light and flashed. It reminded me of Nora’s lifeless strands floating in the water. I closed my eyes for a moment.
“Benni,” Elvia said softly. “Do you want to go up to my office?”
“No,” I said, opening my eyes. “I’m fine.”
Remembering my single quarter’s worth of parking time, I gave her the condensed version. I finished her drink as I talked, and suddenly realized when I was through that I was ravenously hungry and deliriously happy to be alive. Survivor’s guilt pricked at my conscience, that small relieved voice whispering, “Aren’t you glad
you
weren’t the one who died?”
“Would you like another one?” she asked. She held up the glass mug and motioned at the counter clerk to bring us two more.
“I can’t stay long,” I said. “This is Gabe’s lunch. He hates eating the food they order when they’re working on an investigation. It’s always pizza or hamburgers or some junk food. And I’m bringing him a change of clothes.”
“How’s he taking it?”
I rested my chin in my palm and sighed. “Like he does everything, stoically,
professionally
. He really doesn’t need this right now.”
“And exactly when does a person
need
a murder investigation in their life?” she asked ironically.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be facetious.” She and I had discussed my worries about Gabe, the strain he’d been under the last few months with his friend’s death in Kansas and now Aaron’s death and how he never spoke of either of them. She viewed his quiet reticence with more dispassion than me. Not only because he wasn’t her husband, but because she was accustomed to the Latino male’s way of handling emotion.
“He’s reacting exactly how any of my brothers or my dad would,” she assured me. “He’ll come around eventually or work it out in his own way.”
“He seemed a little more open when we got back from Kansas, then Aaron died, and he’s . . . well, he’s not exactly depressed. It’s just like it never happened. I don’t think holding things in necessarily works them out. I think people need to talk about their feelings.”
“That’s your Southern background. All you people
do
is talk. But does it really help? You all are just as crazy as the rest of us.”
I gave her a weak smile. “Sometimes crazier.”
She wrinkled her nose delicately, reminding me of a fussy, purebred cat. “Well, I didn’t want to actually say it—”
“You know as well as I do talking about things is healthier, but I guess you’re right. He’ll come around in his own time. I know when Jack died I didn’t want people poking at me to do things.” I sipped the iced coffee drink the clerk set in front of me. “On the other hand, sometimes it was what I needed, you and Dove pushing me back into life before I thought I wanted to go. A person isn’t always their own best judge of what they need.”
“Go feed him,” she said, pushing the white sack toward me. “Mama says if you can’t do anything else for a man, you can always feed him.”
I laughed and stood up. “I love your mama. I need to visit her soon.”
“This week,” she said firmly. “She’s been complaining about not seeing you enough. Are you going to visit Nick?”
“Yeah, I’m going to drop by the bakery and get a pie.”
“Give him my condolences. I’ll send some flowers.” She gathered up her computer printouts and stood up. “I’d better do it now before I forget.”
“I’ll call you later and let you know what happened.”
I took my cappuccino over to the counter and asked the clerk to pour it into a paper cup and added a just-baked apple turnover to Gabe’s lunch. As the clerk added it to my tab I heard my name called out over the buzz of the crowd. Peter Grant stood up and waved at me. I grabbed my sack and maneuvered my way through the noisy room to his table.
Peter and I had known each other most of our lives. His parents once owned one of the largest almond orchards in North County. We met in 4-H and had shared lots of Cokes and baskets of greasy chili fries at the MidState fair while hanging out waiting for our animals to be judged. In college, we took a different route. My major had been American history with a minor in agriculture. His was environmental studies, emphasis on the radical. When his family was forced to sell the orchard after a few bad years and move to San Francisco, Peter remained on the Central Coast. He managed the small mountain sports store he’d worked at since college, taught mountain climbing on the side, and fought passionately for the rights of spotted owls, redwoods, and gray wolves. An avid rock and mountain climber, at thirty-seven he very rarely wore anything but shorts, T-shirts, and hiking boots. He had that yuppie outdoorsy look that, had he been taller, could have made him a lot of money posing for Eddie Bauer catalogs—a trim, muscled body, healthy brown hair, clear brown eyes, skin tanned a glowing ocher. Today he wore a pale tan T-shirt depicting a house with a red circle and slash painted over it and the words SAVE OUR OPEN LANDS. He was at the forefront of the fight for zero development and a permanent greenbelt surrounding San Celina. He’d recently added storytelling to his hobbies, and naturally his stories had a strong environmental emphasis. The troubled look distorting his even features told me he’d heard about Nora.
He wasn’t alone at the table. Next to him sat Ashley Stanhill, another local storyteller and current president of the San Celina Storytellers Guild. Ash and I had worked closely together promoting the storytelling festival. A traditional Southern storyteller, he could tantalize an audience with his smooth-as-Black-Velvet Mississippi accent and sinfully sensual smile. He’d only lived on the Central Coast a little over a year, but according to the co-op’s warp-speed grapevine had already managed to break more than a few female hearts. There was nothing particularly special about him—medium height, russet hair, deep blue eyes. You’d never look twice at him when he walked down the street except for thinking that maybe he bore a passing resemblance to the actor Dennis Quaid. But when he turned his attention on you, it was like you were the most perfect specimen of woman God had ever created. I’d been to one of his storytelling sessions, and though the children were held rapt by his silky-voiced performance, the women were absolutely mesmerized.
Peter gestured to the chair across from him. Ash nodded solemnly and sipped his espresso, his blue eyes observant as a cougar’s.
“I suppose you both heard,” I said, sitting down, then added quickly, “I can’t stay long. I’m taking lunch over to Gabe at the station.”
“Did you really find her body?” Peter asked, his normally calm face mobile with agitation. A faint sheen of perspiration coated his cheeks.
“Unfortunately, yes,” I said with a sigh.
“We’ve called an emergency meeting of the festival committee. We’re going to meet at the museum.” He glanced at his black diver’s watch. “I told them two o’clock. I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to reach you. I tried calling, but no one answered.”
“You must have just missed me. I have an answering machine.”
He waved his hand irritably. “I refuse to give in to the control the industrial complex is gaining over our lives through the addiction to useless environmentally destructive machinery.”
I shrugged. I understood what he meant, but with that attitude he was going to miss a lot of messages.
“Old Pete here wishes we’d go back to sendin’ smoke signals with a bonfire and a blanket,” Ash said, giving me a conspiratorial wink. “More environmentally responsible. At least until the EPA shut it down.”
“Shut up, Ash,” Peter snapped. “This is a disaster. Our guild’s first storytelling festival, and it has to be overshadowed by Nora Cooper.”
I leaned back in my chair, shocked. I thought he was upset because of Nora’s murder when apparently it was only the festival he was worried about.
“Let’s talk about it at the meeting,” I said sharply. “We can also discuss how we all might give some support to her brother, Nick.”
His face flushed slightly, and he looked down at his blunt rope-callused hands, avoiding my gaze. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“Good, because it sounded pretty heartless,” I said. “See you at two.”
There was a space free in front of the police station, a tan stucco building with a gurgling beige-and-blue tile fountain that local college students occasionally filled with detergent. If you exchanged the plain San Celina Police lettering for the word PODIATRY, no one would even bat an eyelash. Since it was Sunday, I knew the lobby door would be locked, so I walked around back to the maintenance yard and pressed the red buzzer. A young officer with greenish-blond hair and a bad cold opened the gate and informed me that Gabe was in his office.
The oak door to Gabe’s office was closed. I stood for a moment and studied the brass plaque that had replaced Aaron’s only a few months ago: GABRIEL ORTIZ—CHIEF OF POLICE. Its permanent look wrapped around my heart like a flannel quilt. Removing Aaron’s name from the door had been a big step for Gabe. I was glad he did it before his best friend died. It would have been a lot harder now.
Gabe was leaning back in his black leather executive chair talking on the phone. He rested the bottoms of his running shoes on the edge of the glossy oak desk in a less-than-professional position, especially in his cotton running shorts. I set the white paper sack and his clothes on the desk in front of him and waved hello before settling down in one of his padded office chairs. He gave me a welcoming smile and continued to talk on the phone. Or rather listen. Whoever it was on the line was chattering like a hysterical parakeet, and Gabe answered with an occasional “Yes, I understand. No, sir. Yes, sir, I certainly will.” He swung around and stared at the picture on the wall behind him, another gift from me. It was a black-and-white framed poster of Albert Einstein sitting in a wing chair, his fingers threaded loosely in his lap, giving the photographer a slightly bemused look. Printed above his feathery white hair was a quote that made Gabe throw back his head and laugh when he read it—GRAVITATION CANNOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR PEOPLE FALLING IN LOVE.
He swung back around and hung up the phone, giving it a dark scowl.
“Who was that?” I asked, pushing the lunch bag toward him. “Here, eat. What do you want to drink?” I went across the room to his small oak-paneled refrigerator. The choices were limited. “Looks like it’s water, grape soda, or water.” I made a face. Welch’s grape soda. There were some things about this man I’d
never
understand.
He stood up and stretched. “Give me a Welch’s. I know I need to restock. The Neighborhood Watch commanders cleaned me out yesterday.”
I handed him a frosty purple can. “Who was flapping their gums at you over the phone?”
“The mayor, who else?” He popped the lid and sat back down. “He’s upset about this murder, of course. He’s up for reelection next year and he wants to run on a get-tough-on-crime platform.” He unwrapped his sandwich, a weary expression on his face. “That means my life is going to be miserable for the next year. And right before he called, the city manager called and gave me his nickel’s worth. They both want this murder solved as quickly as possible.”