Gods and Pawns (16 page)

“Jesus,” Maria repeated. Leaving Tina where she lay, she took the pot and flushed it down the toilet. Then she went through the house with Philip, turning on lights in every room. He watched her in solemn silence.

She gave Philip a bath, fed him, put him into jammies and fixed him a bottle; then retreated with him to Hector’s armchair, and sang quietly to him. It took a while to get him to sleep. He kept sitting up to stare across at his mother, black eyes wide and worried.

“Mommy’s just depressed again, sweetheart,” Maria said quietly. “I wonder what did it this time?”

He nestled back down, took his bottle, and fell asleep at last.

Maria looked across the room and time and saw herself on that couch at twenty-three, with a bottle of gin and a bottle of Seven-Up and a big glass of ice, getting drunk fast, furious with the world, as Hector sat in the other room staring at Lupe’s empty bed. And little Tina had sat next to her and watched, with black eyes wide and worried.

I could tell her I’m this close to calling Child Protective Services; but she’d only try to commit suicide again. I could actually call Child Protective Services; they’d take Philip away to foster care, where somebody would molest him, and then she really would check out. I could call Philip’s daddy and tell him to take custody; I’m sure his wife would love being presented with Philip, especially when she’s just had her own baby. I could call Isabel…and she’d move to New Zealand.

“What am I going to do,
mi hijo
?” she wondered. “Please, God, somebody, tell me.”

She was late for work the next morning. Tina had been weepy, apologetic, resentful, and finally indignant when she discovered that her stash had been disposed of. Maria had countered by telling her about the stalker. While this had been enough of a shock to abruptly change Bad Tina to Good Tina, it had also terrified her, and Maria had to spend a half-hour calming her down.

There was no point in explaining any of this to Yvette, the new departmental supervisor. Yvette lived in a world where such things didn’t happen. Maria simply apologized for oversleeping and offered to work through her lunch hour.

On her afternoon break, however, she called Mrs. Avila’s office.

She got a recorded message informing her that the switchboard was temporarily unavailable due to the high volume of incoming calls, and she could leave a message after the tone. Wondering grumpily how that many people could be calling the Evergreen residents, most of whom never heard from their kids except at holidays, she left a message for Mrs. Avila.

Two hours later, as she was on the phone explaining rate increases to a client, Yvette appeared at the doorway to her cubicle. She bore a message scrawled on a yellow legal pad:
EMERGENCY CALL IN MY OFFICE
.

Maria knocked over a chair in her haste to get to Yvette’s desk, relaxing only momentarily when she heard Mrs. Avila’s voice on the line, rather than the police.

“Ms. Aguilar? I’m afraid I have some bad news.” Mrs. Avila’s voice was trembling. “We’ve had to admit your father to County General.”

It never rains but it pours
, Maria thought. “Has he had a stroke?”

“No,” said Mrs. Avila, and it sounded as though she was drawing a deep breath. “He has—ah—a virus.”

“What? He was fine yesterday!”

“This is—” Mrs. Avila’s voice broke. “This is some new thing. We’ve had several cases. He’s in the ICU, and I don’t know if you’ll be able to get in to see him—”

By the time Maria had explained to Yvette, fought traffic all the way downtown to County General, found a parking space and bullied her way upstairs, Hector was dead.

“What do you mean, I can’t see him?” she asked the floor nurse, but the presence of men in hazmat suits going in and out of the Intensive Care Unit answered her question. She fought her way to the window and stared through. All she could see was a confused tentage of plastic, tubes, pipes, one skinny little mottled arm hanging down. Hector looked like an abandoned construction site.

The doctor, whose name she didn’t catch, explained that Hector had died from a rapidly-progressing pneumonic infection, just as all the others had, but because he had fought it off longer, there was some hope that—

“Longer?” Maria said. “What do you mean,
all the others
? How long were you treating him for this? He had no immune system, you know that?”

“He was brought in this morning,” said the doctor.

“But—he said a doctor came and did some kind of lab work on him yesterday. There was a bandage on his arm,” Maria protested. “He said the doctor made a house call.”

The doctor looked at her in silence a moment.

“Really,” he said. “That’s interesting.”

Maria was numb, going back down in the elevator, wandering past the gurneys full of moaning people parked in the hallways, threading her way between the cars in the parking lot. It wasn’t until she got to the Buick and opened her purse for her keys that she saw the Papi kit, and the reality sank in:
My father is dead.

And for about thirty seconds she felt the sense of release, of relief, that she had expected to feel. Then the mental image of the old man, the shrunken, childish, infinitely vulnerable thing he had become, vanished away forever. All she could remember was her father the way he had been in her childhood, young Hector who had put on dance records and waltzed in the living room with his two little girls, one on either arm, as Lupe sang from the kitchen where she fixed breakfast…

The memory went through Maria like a knife. She leaned against the car and wept.

The next day it was in all the papers and even on the local news: how the Evergreen Care Home was being evacuated following the deaths of more than half of its residents and three members of its staff, of what was thought to be a new super-virus. Maria had to go to Kmart to buy clothes for Hector to be buried in, once his body was abruptly released, because she was unable to enter the Evergreen’s building; it was full of more men in hazmat suits, carrying equipment in and out. Too surreal.

The funeral was surreal, too. Hector had been a member of the Knights of Columbus and they turned out for him in full regalia, a file of grandfathers in Captain Crunch hats. They were most of them too frail to be pallbearers—six sturdy ushers wheeled Hector’s coffin down the aisle—but they drew their sabers and formed an arch for him. Philip stared, absolutely fascinated, turning now and then to his mother and great aunt to point at the feathered hats.

There were more old men at the cemetery, ancient rifle-bearing veterans, one of whom carried a cassette player identical to the one Hector had owned. He slipped in a cassette and set it down to salute as “Taps” played, tinny and faint. The veterans fired off a twenty-one-gun salute; Philip started in his mother’s arms and lay his head on her shoulder, trembling until the noise had stopped. At the end they folded the coffin flag into a triangle, just as Maria remembered the Marines doing at JFK’s funeral long ago. As a final touch, they zipped it into a tidy plastic case, presenting it to her solemnly. Before leaving they asked for a donation, and Maria fished in her purse for a five-dollar bill to give them.

The old veterans left in a Chevy van painted with the Veterans of Foreign Wars insignia. The Knights of Columbus departed in two minivans and a Mercury Grand Marquis. Were Hector and Lupe going, too, away in a pink Cadillac to live happily ever after in the Land of the Dead?

Maria and Tina were left staring at Hector’s coffin, poised on its gantry between the mounds of earth neatly covered by green carpet. Lupe’s grave was hidden by them, and so was Uncle Porfirio’s, but when the earth had been shoveled back in its hole the cemetery custodian would hose away the mud. They would lie there all three together, tidy, filed away, their stories finished. End of an era.

As Tina was buckling Philip into his car seat, Maria noticed a man standing alone by a near grave, head bowed, hands folded. He wore sunglasses. Their black regard was turned on her, just for a moment. She stared hard at him; no, he wasn’t the man with the Cat in the Hat smile. He lowered his head again, apparently deep in a prayer for his dead.

Maria shrugged and got into the Buick, wincing at the hot vinyl seat. She drove out carefully through the acres of manicured lawn, flat and bright in the sticky heat of the morning. Questing for the nearest freeway on-ramp, she passed Mission San Fernando. It sat like a postcard for Old California, orange groves, graceful adobe arches, painted wooden angels, pepper trees. The past stood guard on the past.

They drove home in a weary silence that was not broken until they walked into the living room, when Maria played the messages on the answering machine. There were two.

“Hi Maria, hi Tina, this is Rob O’Hara. I just thought I’d call and let you know again how sorry Isabel is that she can’t make the funeral—”

Tina stormed out of the room with Philip, muttering, “Fucking selfish bitch!”

“—know how much her father would have wanted her to do well, and the New York exhibit is turning out to be a terrific success. I’m sure he’s looking down from Heaven, very proud of all of you…”

Rob’s message ended abruptly, cut off in mid-sentence, and Maria smiled involuntarily. She expected him to resume in the second recording. Instead, there was a moment of silence but for background noise, and a hesitant throat-clearing. Maria tensed.

“Maria, Isabel, this is Frank Colton. Will you give me a call? I’m still at the same number in Seal Beach. I have some information for you.”

Frowning, Maria sorted through the junk on the phone table for the family address book. She flipped through it. Who on earth was Frank Colton? She found a listing for him, seeing with a pang that it was in her mother’s handwriting. As she dialed, she began to place the name: a long-ago Saturday drive to the beach. She had been twelve. Hector and…yes, his name had been Frank, had sat together on the sand and talked about Uncle Porfirio. They had both gotten drunk, and Lupe had had to drive home.

She remembered him as a young man, with freckles and a crew cut: Uncle Porfirio’s partner. He must be a retiree now. His voice had sounded old, tired. Maria dialed the number, hoping he wouldn’t be home. But: “Colton,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“Mr. Colton? I’m Maria Aguilar. I’m sorry I didn’t call you in time—”

“Oh! Hector’s daughter. Right.”

“You were the lieutenant who worked with my uncle, weren’t you?”

“That’s right.” There was a long pause. “Look…I’m retired now, but I still get news. Your uncle’s case was never solved, you know, and when anything related turns up, they…I get told. I heard you had some trouble, you thought, with a stalker?”

“Somebody
was
stalking me,” Maria said. “My dad had some, uh, property stolen from his room. It tuned up in my apartment, with a threatening note. The cops took it away to test for fingerprints.”

“Yeah, honey, I know. That’s what I was calling about.” The voice on the other end of the line sounded embarrassed. “Hector’s teeth, of all things. I guess we all get older, huh? Anyway…they’re not going to tell you this, but they didn’t find anything. No usable prints.”

“Usable?”

“Well, there was a partial. Hector’d mended his teeth with Superglue, apparently, and that was where the print was. They ran it through, but—”

“No records on file?”

“None that made sense. Some kind of file error. The nearest match they could get was a guy who died in 1937. No prints on the note at all. So, ah, it doesn’t look as though the investigation is going to go anywhere. I thought you should know, though.”

“Thanks,” said Maria dully.

“Tell your dad I’m still working on the murder, will you?”

“What?” Maria cried.

“Tell Hector, I’d like to maybe come up there sometime, talk over the old days—”

“Mr. Colton—Mr. Colton, I’m sorry, I thought you’d heard. My father passed away last week. He was at the Evergreen Care Home. It’s been in the news—”

“Oh, my God.” For a moment the voice on the other end of the line sounded young again, in its shock. “He was
there?
Oh…oh, son of a bitch!”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Colton—”

“Son of a
bitch
! Ambrose Muller!”

“Mr. Colton?”

“But that makes no…” Suddenly the life drained out of the voice, and it was an old man’s once more. “Miss, I’m sorry, please excuse my language. I just—”

“Who’s Ambrose Muller?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Maria could even hear distant surf, the cry of a seagull.

“He was the guy who committed suicide in 1937,” said the voice. Frank Colton’s breathing was labored now. It sounded as though he took a sip of water. “The one whose partial they thought they found on your dad’s teeth. He, uh, was a doctor who worked in an old folks’ home. Arrested on suspicion of poisoning his patients. Never stood trial; he committed suicide in his cell, like Hermann Goering. It just startled me, you know, the coincidence. This Evergreen Care Home thing.”

“Right,” said Maria, feeling slightly stunned.

“Listen, I’m so sorry about Hector. So sorry. I…will you call me if anybody bothers you again? Promise?”

“Okay,” said Maria, wondering if he was about to cry.

“God and His angels protect you, sweetheart,” said Frank Colton, and he did begin to cry, and hung up abruptly.

She went back to work the next day, having used up her Compassionate Leave time. Just after morning break all the employees were called into a meeting, where the sword fell: the new owners were relocating the company to South Carolina. Severance pay and unemployment benefits, or relocation incentives to work for one third her present salary a continent’s width away from her family…

Maria walked back to her desk, almost tranquil, observing the black tidal wave of anger rising but not feeling it yet. Her supervisor stepped in front of her, and she blinked at Yvette in mild surprise.

“Maria, I’m so sorry this had to come at this particular time, for you,” she said. “If you need to take the rest of the day off, ah…”