Damage (35 page)

“I don’t know. I don’t think anything anymore. I mean, even Jon’s starting to have the idea that ...”

But Chuck cut him off. “No, he’s not. He’s just devastated by his mom dying, and who can blame him? He doesn’t really believe you had anything to do with it, I promise. Hell, he’s eighteen. He’s trying to find someplace to put all this emotion he’d rather deny he’s feeling, so Marrenas gives him the idea and he takes it out on you.”

“He’s smarter than that.”

“Maybe, but he’s all fucked up right now. Just let him work it out.”

“What other choice do I have, anyway? I don’t know where he’s got to.”

“He’ll be back, don’t worry about that. Meanwhile, you call the
Chronicle
. You know they’ll talk to you. Get Ro out there in front of the story where he belongs.”

“That son of a bitch. But then what if he comes after me, or the kids?”

And at this, Chuck drew a breath, drank off a slug of beer. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

“I haven’t thought of too much else.” He lifted his glass to his mouth and half emptied it. “I know what I should do, I’m not kidding.” Lowering his voice, he said, “I ought to go kill the guy myself.”

Chuck shook his head. “No. That’s a bad idea.”

“I’ve got a fucking shotgun out in my garage. I’ve had it forever, from back when I used to hunt. They can’t trace a shotgun. I go over there to Ro’s house some night, knock on the door, start shooting. Then I throw the gun in the bay. And tell Glitsky I was, say, with you the whole time, drinking away my sorrow.”

“I’ve already said that’s a bad idea. Now I’ll say it again. That’s a really bad idea.”

“I don’t have any other ideas.”

“Well, lose that one. It totally sucks. You’re not a killer, Michael, you couldn’t do that. It would ruin your life.”

Durbin tipped up his glass, finishing the drink. “As opposed to what it is now, you mean?”

Sheila Marrenas was waiting just outside the door of the outer lobby of the chief’s office when Vi Lapeer got back from her lunch meeting. She was talking to one of her chief detectives and didn’t notice the reporter until Marrenas stood up and blocked her way. “Excuse me, Chief. I’ve just got a quick question for you.”

“And I’ll be glad to answer it,” Lapeer said. She looked at her watch. “In forty-five minutes at my press conference. That’s why we have press conferences. So I can talk to the press. Now if you’ll . . .”

She started forward, but Marrenas moved to the side, blocking her.
“This can’t wait!”

“Well, I’m afraid it has to, because ...”

Marrenas stepped directly in front of her. “Isn’t it true that you’ve assigned round-the-clock surveillance to follow Ro Curtlee wherever he goes? And that you’ve authorized budget and even overtime for this surveillance? And in spite of all this time and overkill, no one seems to know where Ro is right now? Isn’t that true? Is that your idea of efficient use of an already overextended police budget? How can you possibly justify such an expensive, useless waste of money and personnel?”

Lapeer’s mouth hung half open in shock, although she quickly recovered. “I have no comment,” she said. “No comment. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

And with that, the similarly astonished assistant chief next to her took her arm and, without touching Marrenas while moving her gently to the side, got her inside the lobby to her office and closed the door behind them.

Hector Murillo was not aware of the concept of six degrees of separation. He was a twenty-seven-year-old day laborer who’d come up from Mexico in 2004 and who remained undocumented. For the past eight months, Hector had been a regular in the four-man landscaping crew of Roberto Serrano. He was still pretty much low man both because he’d worked for Roberto for the shortest time and because he was Mexican and not Guatemalan.

But that was basically okay.

The difference between low man and high man wasn’t so great anyway, not when his boss Roberto himself did whatever had to be done—grunt work like cleaning out gutters or spreading decomposed granite by the cubic yard—as well as the mowing and blowing and trimming. All in all, Hector was grateful to have a regular job, where he got paid in cash every week.

Hector lived in a trailer park just east of the 101 Freeway in Mountain View, and many nights he would hang out drinking beer with other men, mostly from Mexico, who found themselves in situations very much like his own. This was what he’d been doing last night when Jorge Cristobal, one of the guys from the park, had mentioned the five-thousand-dollar reward that Lupe García was offering to find a woman whose name used to be Gloria Gonzalvez. Evidently her mother had died in Guatemala and she had come into some money, and her lawyers had contacted the well-connected Lupe in the hope that, for a portion of the inheritance, he could help locate her so they could all get paid.

That was the story, anyway.

At first, Hector didn’t think much about this, other than to try to fantasize how much five thousand dollars really was. He made sixty-two dollars a day, six days a week, about fifteen hundred dollars a month, and that covered food and rent and clothes and beer, but not much else. He didn’t own even a share of a car; he had no insurance. And even so, he had amassed a savings of exactly zero after two-thirds of a year of steady work.

It wasn’t until he’d been lying in bed, trying to sleep with that huge number floating around in his brain, that he realized that Roberto’s wife’s name was Gloria. She was also Guatemalan—or at least he assumed she was, since that was Roberto’s nationality. It would certainly be odd if she wasn’t.

He woke up with the possibility still fresh in his mind, thought about it through their first six houses in the morning. He did not want to give away what he knew to anyone. He knew Roberto and if he told him about the reward, and if his wife had been Gloria Gonzalvez, Roberto himself would go to Lupe and claim the reward and Hector would be lucky if he even got any small part of it. The same went for his three coworkers. If they had any idea what it was about, in exchange for any information they gave him, they would undoubtedly want to share part of the reward themselves. Jorge Cristobal from the trailer park was going to be bad enough if he was going to be the intermediary between Hector and Lupe. It looked like whoever claimed the reward was going to be stuck with someone like Jorge. But at least if Hector came to Jorge with the truth—if it was the truth—about Roberto’s wife, then he would still have some leverage and might be able to keep Jorge’s cut of the five thousand to a minimum.

Five thousand dollars! It was unfathomable.

They didn’t take much time for lunch, no more than twenty minutes, but Hector arranged it so that he sat near to Roberto, who tended to sit somewhat apart from the crew normally, and halfway through their food, he struck up a conversation with his boss, under the pretext that he had a girlfriend himself and was thinking about marriage.

“How long,” he asked in Spanish, “have you been married?”

Roberto shrugged. “Eight years.”

“And how is it?”

“Good. I got lucky. Gloria works hard and she’s a good mother. Don’t marry a girl who doesn’t like children.”

“That isn’t the problem,” Hector said.

“If you already have a problem, maybe you should think about this decision some more. You shouldn’t have problems before you get married.”

“Well, maybe it isn’t one. I don’t know. It’s why I wanted to ask you.”

“You don’t know if you have a problem?”

“I know what I have. I don’t know if it’s a problem.”

Roberto waited.

“She’s . . .”

“What’s her name?”

“Maria.”

“All right.”

“Maria has lived here already for seven years.”

“Is she a citizen? Because then, yes, marry her.”

“No. Not yet. She is like me. But she has gotten ideas from some of the women she knows. She says it’s not right that I should force her, if we become married, to change her name.”

This seemed to confuse Roberto for a moment. “What would she change her name to? There is no better name than Maria.”

“Her last name,” Hector said. “To mine. Murillo.”

“Murillo is a fine name. Why would she not want to have it?”

“It’s not about the name. It’s about being a modern American woman.”

“But she’s not American.”

“No. But she speaks good English. She wants to fit in here. It’s the new culture, she says.”

Roberto frowned. “She will never fit in to the culture here. Doesn’t she know that? Her children, maybe, or their children, but maybe not. I don’t want to tell you what to do with this woman, but I’ll be honest. This doesn’t sound good to me.” He took a bite of his burrito, chewing as though he was considering the issue from all angles.

Hector took the opportunity to go on. “So your wife, there was no problem, she changed her name?”

Roberto nodded. “Of course. It was never discussed. I would not have discussed it. She is my wife, she has my name.”

“That is what I’ve been thinking,” Hector said. “Except then I wonder if it is just that she doesn’t like the sound of it, Maria Murillo.”

“Nonsense. The sound of a name. What does that matter? What is her name now?”

“Gonzalvez,” Hector said. “Maria Gonzalvez.”

Roberto said “Ha!” and threw his hands in the air in a gesture of triumph. “You know this was my wife’s name, Gonzalvez? Once she changed, she has never missed it. You tell your woman that. And if she still won’t do it, I don’t advise that you go ahead with this marriage. A woman who doesn’t want to take your name, she sounds like she could be a lot of trouble.”

Eztli bought two piroshki—meat-filled pastries—from one of the little Russian shops in the nearby neighborhood. He started eating one of them while walking back toward Haight Street, and when he’d finished that, he unwrapped the other one and pressed four of the little tablets he’d bought at the hardware store into the bottom of it. He threw the wax-paper wrapper and the package that the tablets had come in into a trash receptacle sitting on the sidewalk two streets down from the piroshki stand.

Coming around the corner a block away from the Rape Crisis Counseling Center, he turned right and strolled casually along, taking in the storefront windows as he aimlessly window-shopped. Stopping two doors down from the Center, checking out the vacation specials in the travel agency’s window, he waited while a couple of elderly women stopped to interact with the cute yellow Lab on the bench, now very much awake and receptive, licking their hands as they petted it.

Farrell stood in a brown study in the mid-afternoon, aimlessly flicking the handles at his foosball table, keeping the ball in play.

Someone knocked on his door. He looked up, stopped defending, and the ball went into the right-hand goal as he said, “Come on in.”

“Where’s Treya?”