Gods and Pawns (17 page)

The black wave broke.

“Oh, so now I’m a human being and not just a machine part?” Maria said. “Don’t you pretend they care anything about us! I’ve been here seventeen years and I was good at my job, and that counts for nothing? Jesus, there weren’t even computers when I started working here. And now I’m forty-six, and where the hell am I going to find another job?”

“I’m sorry,” said Yvette, and burst into tears. “They don’t care. They have to look at the big picture. I feel just awful, but what can I do? It’s not personal, Maria.”

“You bet it’s not. Clerical workers don’t matter a damn to anybody. But if the new owners think they can find Hispanics who’ll work for nothing in South Carolina, good luck to them,” Maria snapped. She stormed out to the Buick, where her rage abruptly guttered to ashes in her shame at having played the race card. She drove away. The morning sunlight looked strange, unreal.

There were black plastic trash bags lined up on the curb in front of the house, when she drove up; Tina had been cleaning again, scouring away the pointless past. She met Maria at the door with a preoccupied frown.

“Auntie? What are you doing home?”

“I was laid off,” said Maria, and watched the effect.

“But you’ve been there for seventeen years!” Tina shrieked.

“Bummer, huh?” said Maria, and walked past her and sat down on the couch. Philip came rolling up at once, reaching for her. She lifted him out, held him close.

“Those
bastards!
” Tina slammed the door. “Well—well, look, it’s going to be okay. They never appreciated you there anyhow. You’ll get another job right away, I know you will.” She peered closely at Maria. “You’re white as a sheet. You want a drink?”

“No, thank you,” said Maria with great care, feeling the black wave begin to crest again. “Remember all those little talks we’ve had, about how alcohol doesn’t help us in a crisis?”

Tina glared at her. Then she looked down, unclenching her fists.

“Somebody from Evergreen called. It’s okay to go get Grandpa’s things, now.”

The tide went out abruptly, leaving a surreal landscape full of melted clocks. Maria stood up, dazed. “Well, let’s go, then. We can get some lunch at a drive-through, eh? My treat. You can even have a Happy Meal.”

“Thanks a lot,” Tina muttered, but went to the hall closet for Philip’s car seat.

Hector’s boom box, his tapes, his statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe went in a big raffia purse that had belonged to Lupe. His clothes went into a black trash bag. Tina hefted it down to the car while Maria did a last check of the room. She pulled the bed, already stripped of its linen, away from the wall to be certain nothing had dropped down the side; there was only a book of crossword puzzles there, the last one she’d brought Hector, the one he had insisted had been stolen. Sighing, she picked it up. She opened the drawer in the bedside table to see if anything had been left there.

Yes, something white. An envelope. She picked it up. Something was written on the outside, in a familiar hand.

REALLY, MARIA, ISN’T IT BETTER THIS WAY
?

She stared at it a long moment.

“All right, you bastard,” she murmured. “You’re dead, you know that? If I ever get my hands on you, you’re dead as nails.”

She slipped the envelope into her pocket as Tina returned with Philip.

In the car, Maria said: “Let’s go to the library.”

She left Tina and Philip in the Children’s Room and made her way to the reference desk, where she explained what she needed. The slim young man on duty was friendly and helpful, and Maria retired at last to a microfilm viewer with file spools for all the major Los Angeles papers for the year 1937.

What a lost world
, she thought. William Randolph Hearst sounded off on matters of national policy; real estate was painfully cheap, making her wish she had a time machine so she could buy a three-bedroom house for eleven thousand dollars. Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen were hot. The advertisements were charming, quaint. The classified ads were so absorbing that she lingered over them, and so took a while to find her quarry.

But there it was at last in the
Los Angeles Times
on October 14, 1937, the headline story:
DOCTOR INDICTED ON MURDER CHARGES
. Ambrose Muller. Brilliant young physician. Resident at the Avondale Home, a hospital for the elderly. Staff shocked. Relatives demanding answers. “
ANGEL OF DEATH
”
MULLER
? Names of the pitiful deceased, their ages, the suspicious circumstances surrounding their departure into the next world. And here was the picture, Dr. Ambrose Muller in handcuffs between two big cops, the three of them caught by a barrage of flashbulbs exploding.

Maria stared at his face. The picture was dreadful, grainy, must have been poor even by the standards of 1937. She studied it a long moment. Finally she got up and went back to the reference desk. She asked for, and got,
LIFE
magazine for the year 1937 on microfilm. It was a local scandal, not a national one, but even so she found an article in the issue for the first week of November. There was the same picture of young Dr. Muller and the cops, beautifully sharp and clear now. He was smiling into the bright lights, smiling as though at his own cleverness.

She had seen him before, of course.

Great
, she thought,
ghosts and vampires. My life has just become an episode of
Kolchak.

There was a quote from a noted psychologist on the subject of megalomania and delusions of grandeur. There was a photograph of one of the pieces of evidence that would have been produced at the trial, had Dr. Muller not committed suicide: a prescription for a diabetic patient, ordering a drug no sane physician would have given to anyone with that condition. With a feeling of resignation, Maria took out the envelope she had found in her father’s room and studied it.

“Yep,” she said. Same handwriting.
But families look alike
, she told herself.
Ambrose Muller died in 1937, right? So maybe this is his grandson, or something. Maybe he inherited his grandfather’s M.O. as well as his face. And handwriting? Riiight. Stranger things have happened…but not people rising from the dead.

There was something in the envelope, something she hadn’t noticed in her anger. She opened it cautiously. It was a photograph, so old it had gone to sepia. Taken outdoors, it showed three young men, possibly
vaqueros
from their dress, standing together by an adobe building. One held the reins of a horse, quite a fine horse, obviously showing him off. In the background a fourth man had just walked into frame, blurred, frozen as he turned a startled face to the camera.

What was this supposed to prove?
Maria wondered, turning it over in her hands. She didn’t recognize the landscape. The men might have been Mexicans, or Indians; no other clue.

She stuck the picture back in the envelope. She rummaged in her purse for dimes, fed the microfilm machine’s copier, and made three copies of the picture of Dr. Muller. Having returned the microfilm spools to the young man at the desk, she hurried out to the Children’s section.

Tina was sitting at one of the little tables with Philip on her lap, reading to him in a whisper from
Madeline.
Her high breathless voice sounded like a child’s voice. Maria vividly remembered holding Tina on her lap, pointing out Madeline at the end of the line of little orphaned girls…

But that had been in the old library, the one with its quaint tiled mural of Our Lady Queen of the Angels that little Tina had insisted was a dolly. It was gone now, torched by an arsonist in the late seventies.

Half my world is dead
, Maria realized.
Why shouldn’t there be ghosts and vampires?

“Come on,
mi hija
,” she said, jerking her thumb at the door.

In the car, Tina remarked: “You haven’t called me
‘mi hija’
in a long time.”

“I’m getting old,” Maria replied.

“So…are you going to move out of your apartment now?”

“I guess so,” said Maria, feeling the last of her short-lived independence slip away.

“It makes sense,” said Tina. “You’ll save money if you live with Philip and me. You don’t want to stay there alone anyway, right? Not with the stalker, or whoever he was, bothering you. This way, we can be there for each other.”

You mean I can be there for you
, Maria thought, downshifting. It made sense; for what else was she going to do with her life, now? Take up crafts? Run away to Tahiti and get a gorgeous young husband? Wait: maybe she’d become a fearless vampire hunter.

Tina patted her on the shoulder.

“Let’s stop by your apartment,” she said. “You can’t go on living out of your overnight bag. We’ll pick up some of your things.”

They entered Maria’s apartment cautiously, but no one was lying in wait for them.

“Philip says, ‘You better watch yourself, creepy man!’” Tina said, mock-fierce as she brandished him. “‘You mess with my Auntie and I’ll punch you in the nose,’ he says. Don’t worry, Auntie. You’ve got a little angel looking out for you!”

“It’ll be all right,” said Maria automatically, scanning the phone table. No notes from anyone. No blinks on her answering machine. She went first to the stacked plastic boxes; her gun was there in its Tupperware, apparently untouched. She resealed it and set it on the table.

Five assorted bags and boxes of clothes, toiletries, and music cassettes went down to the trunk of the Buick. There was still room for her blankets and pillows; Maria sent them with Tina and stayed behind long enough to pull one of the photocopies she had made from her purse. She set it on the phone table, fended off Philip’s attempts to grab it, and wrote across Dr. Muller’s smiling face:
I CAN TOUCH YOU
,
TOO
,
SMART GUY
.

“Come on, sweetie.” She shifted Philip to her other arm, picked up the Tupperware, and left the apartment.

Back at the house on Fountain, Tina drew the statue of the Virgin from Lupe’s bag and set it on the mantelpiece.

“She’s home again,” she said, looking wistful. “We need to light a candle in front of her now. Grandma brought her from Durango, didn’t she?”

“That’s right,” said Maria, methodically unpacking the rest of the bag. Something slipped out of Hector’s crossword book: his plastic magnifying card. She picked it up off the floor and stuck it in her pocket.

“She looks really old. How long has she been in the family?”

Maria shrugged. “I think she belonged to Abuela Maria; that was your great grandmother. The one who lived on the big ranch.”

“So she’s looked after us for generations,” said Tina, smiling.

“I guess so.” Maria felt a pang, realizing that she was the only one left who knew the family stories about Durango. Isabel might remember, but Isabel didn’t care. Did Tina really care? Would she be able to remember, would Philip inherit any sense of who he was, where he came from?

Something tugged at her memory. After a moment she placed it, and scowled to herself. “Why don’t you go feed the baby? I’ll unload the car.”

Sitting among the boxes in her old room, she opened her purse and drew out the envelope again, and shook the old photograph out on the bed.
The big ranch in Durango…

Maria took the magnifying card from her pocket and examined the picture minutely, especially the faces of the men. Not one of them bore any resemblance to Ambrose Muller. The one holding the reins of the horse was almost certainly an Indian. High cheekbones on him, and on the mustached man walking into frame—

Maria stared at that one a long, long time. He looked familiar, but the blur of motion made it impossible to place him.

Okay
, she thought,
these people must be related to us. So, whoever he is, whatever he is, he was trying to show me that he knows all about us. Trying to scare me? Get my attention? Well, the ball is in his court now.

She put the photograph back in its envelope and set it aside. Opening the Tupperware container, she took out her gun and slid out the clip, and proceeded to clean it.

Next morning Maria half-expected to find another note tacked on the front door, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there. She dropped off Tina at the mental health clinic and drove on down McCadden, through the same dreamlike sunlight, to the unemployment office.

Philip stared up from his stroller through the forest of adult legs, and only got cranky after the first hour in line. She placated him with one of the plastic gloves from the Papi kit, inflating it and tying off the end to make a rooster balloon. He thought it was hilarious, and bellowed with laughter as he flailed it through the air.

Wheeling him back to the Buick, Maria spotted the envelope under her windshield wiper. Moving deliberately, she put Philip in his car seat, fastened him in, folded up the stroller, and put it away before she allowed herself to pick up the envelope.

On its outside was written:
CLEVER GIRL
!

It was heavy, felt as though it contained a lot of folded paper. She weighed it in her hand, looking around to see whether anyone was watching her. Not a soul in sight. At that hour of the morning on a weekday, the mean streets were as wide and sunlit and empty as a desert.

Maria stuck the envelope into her purse, unopened. She got into the car and drove off.

Tina was smiling as she waited outside the clinic, clutching a paper bag. Maria’s gaze riveted on it as she pulled up. Were they wine bottles?

“Sorry I’m late. What have you got in the bag?”

“I walked down to the little Mexican market on the corner,” Tina replied, getting in. A heavy cloud of rose perfume came with her. “I bought candles for the Virgin, see?” She held open the bag to reveal three big pink candles, in glass cups color-lithographed with the Virgin of Guadalupe. “Don’t you love that smell? Hi, baby, Mommy’s so glad to see you! Were you a good boy for Auntie?”