“Come on, you older people don’t get it. We hooked up. She knows that. When we get back to Los Angeles, she’ll go her way and I’ll go mine. That’s how it is.” He took another huge bite of apple.
“As long as she knows that upfront. We ‘older people’ and most younger ones, too, like to know the rules before we begin the game.” I wasn’t insulted by his rudeness. In terms of maturity, the fourteen years between us was a huge distance. He was handsome, privileged, and felt entitled. “I didn’t come to talk about Dallas. I want to ask you some questions about your sister.”
“Estelle, the psycho queen?” He took the last large bite of the fruit and tossed the core into a garbage can. “What’s she done now?”
“Do you know where she is?”
“Ah, hiding in the attic?” He grinned big, proud of what he viewed as his cleverness.
It was peculiar, but I’d talked to Ricardo before, and he hadn’t been such a jackass. “Do you know where Estelle is?” I asked patiently. “Federico is worried about her and so am I.”
The mask of superiority dropped for a moment. “Why? What’s she done now?”
“Nothing, for sure. She’s not answering her cell phone.” I wasn’t certain how to proceed. I’d expected Ricardo to be more cooperative. Our prior conversations had been pleasant; now there was antagonism.
“Sometimes she gets down and doesn’t want to talk to people,” he said. “Maybe she wants to be left alone.”
“That’s a reason for concern. This anger she carries toward your father could be…” I let the sentence fade. He’d supply his own ending.
“She’ll be fine. She’s just pissed about the house. He could have asked her, you know.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know any of the details. What I’d like to know is how stable is your sister?”
He dropped all pretense of being the smartass he’d been earlier. Motioning to a comfortable chair for me, he sat down on the floor. “Look, Estelle has her ups and downs, but she’s not going to harm herself.”
“Could she harm someone else?”
That really got his attention. “She likes to pretend to be crazier than she is.”
“Someone tried to drown me last night. It wasn’t kidding around. Joey was seriously hurt in that fall. Another woman associated with your father in Los Angeles is dead.”
“And you think Estelle is doing all of that?” The idea shocked him.
“I didn’t come to tell you what I thought. I want to know what you think.”
“What does Dad say?”
“What do you think, Ricardo? Tell me that and then we’ll talk about Federico.”
He considered for a long moment, one hand aimlessly brushing up and down his shin. “She hated Suzy Dutton. She thought…” He looked at me, suddenly much younger than his twenty years. “Estelle wasn’t rational about sex. She has it in her head that Mom died because of Dad and his liaisons with other women.”
“And why did your mother die?”
“She hated herself.”
It was a pretty succinct summation of the terrible disease that had killed Carlita. “Does Estelle know this?”
“In her heart she does, but she won’t admit it. If she accepted that Mom was mentally ill, that Mom starved herself to death, then she’d have to forgive Dad.” He sighed, suddenly tired. “This is all so boring.”
“If Estelle is trying to sabotage Federico’s film, we’re going to have to stop her before she really hurts someone.”
“Good luck. She knows this house inside and out. Grandfather showed her all of the secret passages, the places he had built into it just for her.”
I’d been curious about this. “Why would he construct a house like that?”
“He liked puzzles. He liked playing games with us when we were children. He could hide and we would never find him. He enjoyed that.” He was smiling as he talked. “Estelle adored him. He gave her his undivided attention and I think the only time she really felt loved was when she was with him.”
“I’ve never heard Federico talk of him.”
“For good reason. Dad and Granddad hated each other. Pappy Estoban didn’t believe Dad was good enough for his daughter. He did everything he could to break them up before they married. He told me once that if Mom hadn’t married Dad, she would be alive and happily married.”
“And I suppose he told Estelle the same thing?”
Federico lifted a shoulder and let it drop. “When Dad moved us to California, Pappy was furious. He tried to get the police to stop Dad from taking Mom and us. He had Dad arrested. It was awful.”
I could only imagine the horror of that scene to a child-caught between the grandfather she loved and the family she felt didn’t love her.
As sorry as I felt for Estelle, I still had to know if she was capable of harming another person. “Estelle went to a private boarding school, as you did. Was she ever in trouble?”
His gaze dropped and I knew he was thinking about lying. For all of his sexual suavity, he wasn’t as sophisticated as he thought.
“Tell me the truth, Ricardo. I’m not out to harm Estelle, but if she is behind some of these things, she has to be stopped.”
“Why don’t you ask Dad about this?”
I considered my answer, but I told him the truth. “Whatever Estelle thinks of her father, he’s doing everything he can to divert suspicion from her. I’m afraid he’d color the truth to protect her.”
“And you figured I’d be a stool pigeon?” He was quick to insult.
“No, I figured you’d want to help your sister and could see that the truth was the best way to get there.”
He rose to his feet in one fluid movement. “How about a banana? They’re fresh from a plantation not far from here.”
“Sure.” The bananas available in Petaluma were totally different creatures from the ones in supermarkets.
He brought back two and began to peel his. I thought perhaps he was going to ignore my request, but he began talking. “Estelle was expelled from one school for a stunt she pulled that resulted in injury to another girl. It was harmless, but it looked bad then and it could also look bad now.”
“What happened?”
“No one knows the exact details, because Estelle would never talk about it. Not even to defend herself. But Lisa, a girl in her dormitory, fell from a second-floor window. The headmaster said Estelle put Lisa up to edging out on the brickwork and pretending that she was going to jump. This was a diversion so Estelle could sneak out of the dormitory.”
“She was trying to get home?”
“Yeah.” He ate the banana. “She was miserable at boarding school. She hated being away from Mom, and she hated the other girls.”
“You went away to school also. Was it like that for you?”
“It was okay for me.” He took my peel and tossed it in the trash. “I hated being at home and I made friends easily. For Estelle, it was torture. She was shy and self-conscious, and she had this need to be at home to protect Mom.” His laugh was bitter. “She didn’t understand that no one could protect Mom from Mom.”
“How seriously was her classmate injured?”
“Two broken legs. Nothing fatal.”
“I’m guessing she slipped?”
“Yeah. There was never any doubt about that. Estelle was already headed out the gate of the school where she’d finagled a ride to the train station. She was held accountable, though, for thinking up the plan.”
Estelle had a cunning mind and an interesting ability to get others to go along with her plans. Had she convinced Suzy Dutton to meet her in the canyon so she could push her over the cliff?
That reminded me that I needed to check in with Sheriff King to see what the final determination in Suzy’s death was.
“If you hear from your sister, will you let me know?”
“Sure. But I’m going to tell her you’re looking for her. I’m not going to betray her.”
That wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it wasn’t worth an argument. “Fine. Tell her to please call me or your father. On a related topic, do you know who damaged the cameras on the first day of shooting?”
