Beyond This Point Are Monsters (6 page)

“How often were they paid, Mr. Estivar?”

“Once a week, same as all the other crews.”

“On what day?”

“Friday. Mr. Osborne wrote the checks on Thursday night and I handed them out in the mess hall while the men were having breakfast.”

“What did they do after work on payday?”

“I don't know for sure.”

“Well, what do crews usually do?”

“They go into Boca de Rio and cash their checks. The bank is closed on Saturday, so on Friday nights it stays open until six. The men settle accounts with each other and some of them buy money orders to send back home. They go to the laundromat, the grocery store, the movies, a bar. There's usually a crap game in somebody's back room or garage. A few get drunk and start fights, but they're generally pretty quiet about it because they don't want to attract the attention of the Border Patrol.”

“What kind of fights?”

“With knives, mostly.”

“Do they all carry knives?”

“Knives are often used in their work. They're tools, not just weapons.”

“All right, Mr. Estivar, did the crew that was working for you on October thirteen, 1967, leave the ranch right after work?”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the truck?”

“Yes.”

“Did they return that night?”

“I was just going to bed when I heard the truck drive in shortly after nine and park outside the bunkhouse.”

“How do you know it was the old G.M.?”

“The brakes had a peculiar squeak. Besides, no other vehicle was likely to park in that particular spot.”

“Nine o'clock is pretty early for a b
ig night on the town to conclude, isn't it?”

“They were scheduled to work the next day, which meant they had to be in the fields before seven. You don't keep bankers' hours on a ranch.”

“And were the men in the fields the next morning before seven, Mr. Estivar?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't get a chance to ask,” Estivar said. “I never saw any of them again.”

CHAPTER FIVE

at eleven o'clock
Judge Gallagher called for the morn­ing recess. His bailiff opened the massive wooden doors and people began moving out into the corridor, the elderly men on cane and crutches, the students hugging their notebooks across their chests like shields, the lady shopper, the trio of ranchers, the German woman with her bag of knitting, the ex-cop, Valenzuela, the teen-aged girl holding her baby now half-awake and fussing quietly.

Estivar, self-conscious and perspiring, rejoined his family in the last row of seats. Ysobel spoke to her husband in staccato Spanish, telling him he was a fool to admit more than he had to and answer questions that hadn't even been asked.

“I think Estivar did real good,” Dulzura said. “Talking up so clear, not even nervous.”

“You keep out of this,” Ysobel said. “Don't interfere.”

“I'm obliged to interfere. I'm his first cousin.”

“Second.
Second
cousin.”

“
My
mother was
his
mother's—”

“Mr. Estivar, kindly tell your second cousin, Dulzura Gonzales, not to express her opinions until they're asked for.”

“I think he did real good,” Dulzura repeated stub­bornly. “Don't you think so, Jaime?”

Jaime looked blank, pretending not to hear, not even to be a part of this loud peculiar foreign family.

On the opposite side of the room Agnes Osborne and Devon sat silent and bewildered, like two strangers who were being tried together for a mysterious crime not de­scribed in an indictment or mentioned by a judge. No jury had been summoned to decide guilt. Guilt was assumed. It hung heavy over both the women, keeping them motion­less in their seats. Devon was thirsty, she wanted to go into the corridor for a drink of water, but she had the feeling that the bailiff would follow her and that the unnamed crime she was accused of committing had canceled even so basic a right as quenching her thirst.

Mrs. Osborne was the first to speak. “I told you Estivar couldn't be trusted when the chips were down. You see what he's trying to do, don't you?”

“Not exactly.”

“He's blackening our name. He's making it appear that Robert deserved whatever fate he met. All the business about prejudice, it wasn't true. Mr. Ford shouldn't have allowed him to speak lies.”

“Let's go outside and take a walk in the fresh air.”

“No. I must stay here and talk to Mr. Ford. He's got to straighten things out.”

“What Estivar said is a matter of record. Mr. Ford or anyone else can't change it now.”

“He can do
something.
”

“All right, I'll stay with you if you want me to.”

“No, go take your walk.”

To reach the main door Devon had to pass near the row of seats where Estivar still sat with his family. They seemed uncertain about what a recess was and how they were expected to act during it. As Devon approached, all of them, even Dulzura, looked up as though they'd forgot­ten about her and were surprised to see her in such a place. Then Estivar rose, and after a nudge from his father, so did Jaime.

Devon stared at the boy, thinking how much he'd grown in just the short time since she'd seen him last. Jaime must be fourteen now. When Robert was fourteen he used to follow Estivar around everywhere, he called him Tío and pestered him with questions and ate at his table. Or did he? Why had it never been mentioned to her by anyone, Robert himself, or Estivar or Agnes Osborne or Dulzura? Perhaps the man, Tío, and the boy, Robbie, and their relationship had never existed except in Estivar's mind.

She said, “Hello, Jaime.”

“Hello, ma'am.”

“You've been growing so fast I hardly knew you.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I haven't seen you since school started. Are you liking it better this year?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

It was a polite lie, just as every answer she'd get from him would be a polite lie. The ten years' difference in their ages could have been a hundred, though it seemed only yesterday that people were telling her how much she'd grown and asking her how she liked school.

In the corridor men and women were standing in small clusters at each window, like prisoners seeking a view of the world outside. Here and there cigarette smoke rose toward the ceiling. The teen-ager in the blond wig came out of the ladies' room. The baby was fully awake now, kicking and squirming and pulling at the girl's wig until it slipped down over her forehead and knocked off her sun­glasses. Before the baby's hand was slapped away and the sunglasses and wig were put back in place, Devon had a glimpse of black hair, clipped very short, and of dark trou­bled eyes squinting even in the subdued light of the corri­dor.

“Hello, Mrs. Osborne.”

“Hello.”

“I guess you don't remember me, huh?”

“No.”

“It's my weight, I lost fifteen pounds. Also the wig and sunglasses. Oh yeah, and the kid.” She glanced down at the baby with a kind of detached interest as though she still wasn't quite sure where he'd come from. “I'm Carla, I helped Mrs. Estivar with the twins summer before last.”

“Carla,” Devon said. “Carla Lopez.”

“Yeah, that's me. I got married for a while but it was a drag—you know? So we split and I took my real name back again. Why should I be stuck for the rest of my life with the name of a guy I hate?”

Carla Lopez, you've grown so much I hardly know you.
Devon remembered a plump smiling schoolgirl hardly older than Jaime, walking down the road to meet the mailman, her thigh-high skirt emphasizing the shortness of her legs.
“Buenos días, Carla.” “Good morning, Mrs. Osborne . . .”

Carla ironing the kinks out of her long black hair in the ranch-house kitchen, with Dulzura helping her—half ad­miring because she'd heard this was the latest style, half reluctant because she knew Devon would eventually come to investigate the smell of scorched hair that was pervad­ing the house. “
What on earth are you doing, you two?”
Dulzura explaining that curls and waves were no longer fashionable, while the girl knelt with her hair spread across the ironing board like a bolt of black silk . . .

Carla sitting at dusk under a tamarisk tree beside the reservoir.

“Why are you out here by yourself, Carla?”

“It's so noisy in the Estivars' house, everyone talking at once and the TV on. Last summer when I worked for the Bishops, everything was real quiet. Mr. Bishop used to read a lot and Mrs. Bishop took long walks for her headaches. She had very bad headaches.”

“You'd better go inside before the mosquitoes start bit­ing. Buenas noches.”

“Good night, Mrs. Osborne.”

Devon said, “Why are you here today, Carla?”

“I think it was Valenzuela's idea, he's got it in for me.”

“You mean you were subpoenaed.”

“Yes, I was.”

“For what reason?”

“I told you, Valenzuela's got it in for me, for my whole family.”

“Valenzuela has no control over subpoenas,” Devon said. “He's not even a policeman any more.”

“Some of the muscle stayed with him. Ask anyone in Boca de Rio—he still swaggers around like he's wearing a cop suit.” She switched the baby from her right arm to her left, patting him between the shoulder blades to soothe him. “The Estivars don't like me either. Well, it's mutual, one hundred percent mutual . . . I hear Rufo got married and Cruz is in the army.”

“Yes.”

“It was the other one I had a crush on—Felipe. I don't suppose anyone ever hears from him.”

“I wouldn't know.” Devon remembered the three old­est Estivar boys only as a trio. When she used to meet them individually she was never certain whether she was seeing Cruz or Rufo or Felipe. They were uniformly quiet and polite, as though their father had spelled out to them ex­actly how to behave in her presence. There were rumors, passed along to her mainly by Dulzura, that away from the ranch the Estivar brothers were a great deal livelier.

Beneath the girl's platinum wig a narrow strip of brown forehead glistened with sweat. “My old lady was supposed to meet me here, she promised to look after the kid when I go on the stand. Maybe she got lost. That's the story of my life—people I count on get lost.”

“I'd be glad to help if I can.”

“She'll
turn up sooner or later. She probably wandered into some church and started praying. She's a great prayer but it never does much good, least of all for me.”

“Why not for you?”

“I got a jinx.”

“Nobody believes in jinxes any more.”

“No. But I got one just the same.” Carla glanced down at the baby, frowning. “I hope the kid don't catch it from me. He's gonna have enough trouble without people dying all around him, disappearing, drowning, being stabbed like Mr. Osborne.”

“Mr. Osborne didn't die because of your jinx.”

“Well, I feel like if it wasn't for me he'd still be alive. And her, too.”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Bishop. She drowned.”

Mrs. Bishop had had headaches and took long walks and drowned.

the table reserved
for the press when court was in session had been vacated for recess. Across its polished mahogany surface Ford and Mrs. Osborne faced each other. Mrs. Osborne still wore her public face and her jaunty blue hat, but Ford was beginning to look irritable and his soft voice had developed a rasp.

“I repeat, Mrs. Osborne, Estivar talked more freely than I anticipated. No harm was done, however.”

“Not to you, nothing touches you. But what about me? All that talk about prejudice and ill-feeling, it was embar­rassing.”

“Murder is an embarrassing business. There's no law stating the mother of the victim will be spared.”

“I refuse to believe that a murder occurred.”

“Okay, okay, you have a right to your opinion. But as far as this hearing today is concerned, your son is dead.”

“All the more reason why you shouldn't have allowed Estivar to blacken his name.”

“I let him talk,” Ford said, “just as I intend to let the rest of the witnesses talk. This Judge Gallagher is no dope. He'd be highly suspicious if I tried to present Robert as a perfect young man without an enemy in the world. Perfect young men don't get murdered, they don't even get born. In presenting the background of a murder, the victim's faults are more pertinent than his virtues, his enemies are more important than his friends. If Robert wasn't getting along well with Estivar, if he had trouble with the migrant workers or with his neighbors—”

“The only neighbors he ever had the slightest trouble with were the Bishops. You surely wouldn't dredge that up again—Ruth's been dead for nearly two years.”

“And Robert had no part in her death?”

“Of course not.” She shook her head, and the hat jumped forward as though it meant to peck at a tormentor. “Robert tried to help her. She was a very unhappy woman.”

“Why?”

“Because he was kind.”

“No. I meant, why was she unhappy?”

“Perhaps because Leo—Mr. Bishop—was more inter­ested in his crops than he was in his wife. She was lonely. She used to come over and talk to Robert. That's all there was between them, talk. She was old enough to be his mother. He felt sorry for her, she was such a pathetic little thing.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“He didn't have to tell me. It was obvious. Day after day she dragged her trouble over to our house like a sick animal she couldn't cure, couldn't kill.”

“How did she get to your house?”

“Walked. She liked to pretend that she did it for the exercise, but of course no one was fooled, not even Leo.” She paused, running a gloved hand across the surface of the table as though testing it for dirt. “I suppose you know how she died.”

“Yes. I looked it up in the newspaper files. She was attempting to cross the river during a winter rain, got caught by a flash flood and drowned. A coroner's jury returned a verdict of accidental death. There were indica­tions that she suffered from despondency, but suicide was ruled out by the finding of her suitcase a mile or so down­stream, waterlogged but still intact. It was packed for a journey. She was going some place.”

“Perhaps.”

“Why just ‘perhaps,' Mrs. Osborne?”

“There was no evidence to prove Ruth and the suitcase entered the water at the same time. It's easy enough to pack a woman's suitcase and toss it in a river, especially for someone with access to her belongings.”

“Like a husband?”

“Like a husband.”