“Paper towels. Rug cleaner. Some blueberries for my breakfast and some steak for my dinner, since you will be partying and I have to eat alone.”
“Go for it,” Nina said. “I’ll stay in the car with Hitchcock.” While she waited, she read over the Twelve Points again. “What do you think, Hitchcock?”
But Hitchcock, uninterested in these all-too-human epiphanies, was asleep.
10
“B EN?” NINA KNOCKED AGAIN ON THE door of the old bungalow on Siesta Court.
It was quarter to six on this long summery Saturday afternoon. She could hear the stream flowing behind the riprap wall and smell the inimitable pungency of charcoal lighter fluid mixed with animal fat. The party must already be starting two doors down at the Puglias’.
She felt like a narc. Paul did it all the time, but she wasn’t sure she could carry this off. Again, she mentally counted the houses on the street: David and Britta Cowan in the big house on her left on the corner, Ben’s door right in front of her, Darryl and Tory Eubanks’s roof past a fine fir tree on the right, and past that, the Puglias, then Ted and Megan Ballard, and finally the Hills. She could hear kids screaming somewhere and the thought came, maybe one of them was a kid, arsonists are often young.
Ben opened the screen. “You’re early.”
“I love a good party.” She went into the dim low-ceilinged living room with its tweed couch and shook hands with Ben, who wore a black T-shirt and jeans. Condolence cards lay on the coffee table where they had been tossed. Someone had brought a huge flower arrangement, which still sat by the door.
He didn’t smile, and his eyes still had the puzzled, hurt look that comes with the shock of sudden death. Though he couldn’t be older than his early thirties, Ben’s face was lined and the tops of his ears were red as if from a permanent sunburn. She imagined he worked outside at least some of his day at Valley European Motors. None of this made him any less attractive. “Thanks for letting me tag along,” she said.
Ben sat down and said, “Anything, if it helps you find the killer of my nephew. I can’t sleep at night. He died so young, and while he was in my care. He played the flute. See it there, on the table?” The black flute case lay half-buried by the flowers like a miniature casket. “Danny’s flute,” he repeated, shaking his head.
“We have the same goal in mind,” Nina said, sitting down beside him. “I know my friend Wish didn’t set any fires, so I don’t see how Danny could be involved.”
“What is Wish to you?” Ben asked. She apologized mentally to Paul, because she couldn’t help enjoying sitting next to him. He had warm brown eyes in a smooth face in which she glimpsed the sun-drenched walls of a Yucatan pyramid.
“He worked for me. He helped with my law-office work at Tahoe. His mother is-was-my legal secretary.”
“Why are you here instead of at Tahoe? Is that why Wish was down here, too?”
“That’s a long, irrelevant story, Ben.”
He accepted this. In his soft voice he said, “We buried Danny this morning at the Catholic cemetery in Monterey. He was sort of Catholic. I said some things.”
“Who came to the cemetery?”
“My brother and his wife-Danny’s parents-came down from Tahoe, but they had to get back to work and they left right after. A couple of his cousins came too, and my sister and her husband. We decided to keep it small, even though some of the neighbor ladies wanted to come and have a meal after.”
“I’m sure Wish would have come if he could.”
“I guess. I don’t know what went on between them, but Danny-he gets so irritable, maybe Wish just had enough. Danny had a hard time making friends. He used to go out to Cachagua and spend the evening at Alma’s with his buddy Coyote. I didn’t even know how to call his buddy to tell him Danny’s dead.”
“Cachagua? I haven’t been there in a long time. I don’t remember a place called Alma’s.”
“There’s only one bar in the place. It used to be the Dew Drop Inn.”
“Oh, sure.”
“You know it? You don’t look like the kind of person who would go there.”
“Well, I haven’t always been thirty-five,” Nina said. “Ben?” Ben had immersed himself in a sad reverie. “Do you have a picture of Danny? I’m trying to get to know him, understand him.”
“Sure.” Ben went into the bedroom and came out with some snapshots.
A long, lanky, long-haired Native American boy, she thought. She could not see his face, hidden by a baseball cap. In one photo, Danny stood by a fence post, some scrubland behind him; in another, Danny sat at Ben’s kitchen table, a beer in hand, his head down, still wearing the cap.
“That’s the concho belt?” Nina said, showing him the outdoor shot.
“That’s it. Other than that belt, he didn’t care about clothes.”
“He doesn’t look happy in this picture in your kitchen.”
“That was the day after he was laid off,” Ben said. “He was low. I told him he could get another job, but he said he didn’t want to look yet. I’d come home from work and he’d be laying on the couch watching sports, anything that was on in the afternoon.”
“Do you think he was depressed?”
“You start depressed,” Ben said. “You feel hopeless, like you just can’t make it. You don’t have money to take a girl out, get parts for your car, nothing. Finally one day, if you’re lucky, you put your head down like a bull and you get out there and try to find work, whatever it takes.”
Nina nodded. “I’ve been there,” she said, and it was true.
“I didn’t know if Danny was going to make it that far until a couple months ago he told me he was doing some yard work for George Hill. Then Mr. Cowan hired him for some odd jobs. You know, he always wanted to be part of the neighborhood. Be one of the guys. But we were the outsiders on the street.”
“Outsiders?” Nina said.
“He wanted to belong, you said before.”
“Maybe because he never had any roots. He didn’t even have a brother or sister to fight with. Anyway, everybody in the neighborhood suddenly figured out how good Danny was with his hands. He was working thirty or forty hours a week, gardening, repairing stuff, building a shed for George, doing errands for Debbie-it was like he had a family here. He had some money in his pocket and he started living again, making plans.”
“What kind of plans?”
“Same old thing. The other thing Danny needed besides a family was to make it big. When he was feeling good, it was always about getting the money fast. One night I said, ‘For what?’ And he told me, ‘Maybe start a business you and me can run ourselves.’ ”
Nina nodded.
“I didn’t blame him. Our parents came into this world poor and they’re gonna leave poor. Danny didn’t want to do the same, but look what happened. He was murdered. He died at twenty-one. And now people think he was a bad person.”
Ben shook his head. “Is it bad to want the same thing we all want, a better life for us and our families? Enough money to live”-he looked around the cottage-“better than this? The system… it relies on workers’ misery.”
He got up. “Well, let’s do it. The party goes on no matter what. People come and go, but the party stays right here on this street, once a month, Saturday night.”
He stretched out a hand and Nina let him help her up. She watched him tuck in his shirt in back. He didn’t really notice her; the life had been kicked out of him for now. “Ben, I understand you’re not in a party mood.”
“I have other reasons for going. Reasons you don’t need to worry about. So, let’s get our story straight, okay? You’re my old high-school girlfriend, around for the summer. Right?”
“Right. What high school did we go to?”
“Douglas High, up at Tahoe.”
They walked down his gravel driveway to the street, turned left, and, passing the Eubanks house with its brightly lit windows, turned into Sam and Debbie Puglia’s concrete drive. Balmy evening air carried the charcoal and wood smoke drifting through the forest. The laughter of children and the clinking of glasses emanated from the backyard.
“This house has been around awhile,” Nina said.
“They keep it up. Debbie is the street housemother. She’s always around, doing her projects. She and Sam like having the block parties. They like to know their neighbors, get close. Let’s go around back.”
They climbed the stairs to a wooden gate festooned with miniature white lights, which seemed to wrap all around the big deck the Puglias had built for entertaining. Nina felt panicky, and Ben wasn’t going to help much. She reminded herself that this wasn’t her social debut. Nobody should care about her if she kept a low profile. She was there to observe and keep quiet.
She didn’t expect much. Nobody would inadvertently let fall that he was an arsonist. She couldn’t ask many questions.
But if the Cat Lady was right, tonight she might meet an arsonist.
Would she know him when she met him? Keep an open mind, she reminded herself.
“Oh, my poor Ben. Poor, poor Danny. We are so sorry.” A middle-aged woman in a Hawaiian sundress rushed over to greet them, her arms held out. Nina, with Paul, had seen her that afternoon on the deck. The woman pulled Ben to her and held him as tight as a lug nut on a tire, patting his back. When she released him her eyes were wet with tears. “Such a loss,” she said. “I can’t imagine.”
“Thank you,” Ben replied.
He had some dignity, some presence. Nina had already realized that she liked him. Hope it’s not him, she thought to herself, but he was young and strong. He could commit arson. His kindness could be a pose, and his cooperation with her could be a way of defusing the opposition.
“And you brought a date! Introduce us, Ben.”
“Uh, here’s a good friend of mine from high school. Visiting in Monterey this summer. Nina.”
“Hi there, Nina. I’m Debbie Puglia.” Debbie took a small step forward and Nina took a small step back, not wanting to suffer Ben’s fate. Debbie wore a lot of makeup and had one of those faces that exaggerate emotion. Nina thought guiltily of Tammy Faye Bakker. Debbie went on, “You know, Nina, in all these years, Ben has never brought a guest before.”
“Thanks for letting me join you.”
“I’m glad you have company tonight, Ben. Oh, it’s so awful. We stopped by but you weren’t home. Is there anything we can do? We don’t know what to think. Danny-”
“Let ’em in, Debbie. Yo, Ben. Cerveza for you. Let me guess. White wine for your friend.” A short beer-bellied man came up and slipped his arm around Debbie’s waist.
