But she still felt abandoned. Jilted. Fool, Brenda thought. You dumped him. In all the months since Kettle Falls, he had been her anchor. All these months. His voice on the other end of a call, or in his presence, she felt sane. Clear-headed. Better than herself.
Hilda Frieslander’s address drew her back to the laptop. In her photo, the woman looked reserved, the way Tina’s voice had sounded. In a few years, Tina Bostwick would lose her sight. She would eventually become bedridden, eventually incontinent. Maybe that was what Hilda Frieslander had faced.
He’s a cockroach, Ray said in Spanish. Some kind of pig. Why are you letting someone like that work for us?
It was after ten. Ray was at Wyndemere Golf Club doing a plumbing job. Rivera was stopped at Golden Gate Parkway and Airport Pulling Road. He watched the light and listened to his cousin. Squinted in the glare. He hadn’t slept well and didn’t want to talk about Dennis Stuckey. Feeling his bowels about to move, and fearing loss of the watch, Stuckey had defecated in the back of his van. Ray had arrived that morning at the All Hands office just as Stuckey was cleaning up the mess.
“Tell me you never had the shits,” Rivera said. “Give him a break, he had an accident.”
Fuck accident. When you have to go and there’s no toilet, you do it in the bushes. You don’t shit in your own van. I’m telling you, Quinto, it was not a turd, it was fucking Mount Everest.
“I’ll talk to him.”
Yeah, you talk to him. What it is, is all the vegetables. He’s shitting in a truck from too much fiber. I knock on his door, he calls just a minute. What do you think he is always doing?
“All right, Ray, I get the picture. Where is he now?”
I have a good idea. Where are you going?
“Naples Bath and Tennis. Aaron has a problem opening a ceiling access door.”
He can’t open a little door?
“In English.”
“You losing it, Quinto,” his cousin said. “This is not funny. This is a great business, and you going to shit on it, like Stuckey.”
“Trust me, Ray.”
“I trust you,” his cousin said. “I come to Naples with you, don’t I?”
“Everything with us is fifty-fifty, you know that.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But some of what I’m doing I need Stuckey for. You remember Bellinger?”
Ray groaned. “What an asshole.”
“Yes, Bellinger was an asshole. But do you remember that time fishing? What happened when you drove over the manatee?”
“AIDS,” Ray said. “Cancer. Terrorists. These people got all kind of thing to worry on. What they care about a dead sea cow?”
“Without Bellinger, what do you think would happen?” Ray didn’t answer. “I’ll tell you what,” Rivera said. “Without a native-born legal to take the ticket, no more All Hands on Deck. You think 9/11 doesn’t affect us? Without Bellinger, they’d know about me. I’d be back in Mexico, and you’d be picking tomatoes in Immokalee.”
Rivera pushed the button and dropped the phone on the passenger seat. Still the light didn’t change. Already he felt tired. It made him angry to need shiftless, no-class people like Stuckey. It’s Burlson, he thought. Stabbing you in the back. People said one thing and did another. Do what they wanted, they called you a guardian angel. A blessing. But when the chips were down, when push came to shove, that was a different story. Only now did Rivera fully understand what Kleinman had meant: never trust anyone but Ray.
Not even someone like Hilda Frieslander. Maybe her cold feet had nothing to do with the Kentucky Derby. Maybe she had talked to a priest or a doctor. Maybe she talked about you, Rivera thought.
At last the light changed. Turning onto Golden Gate, he shook his head. No more off-the-books. Not for a while. But he had not yet taken down the Haileys’ Christmas tree, and now Rivera knew why. The tree was part of the whole plan, the big picture. That’s why it was still up, why he hadn’t gone last night to take it down.
The tree would be his smooth-sailing guarantee. His alibi.
She glanced at the clock—12:50—and back to the car ahead. She had just crossed the bridge and was now on Marco Island, waiting for the light at Bald Eagle Drive. Hilda Frieslander lived in The Palazzo Bellissima. The GPS showed the high rise would be dead ahead, south of something called Tigertail Beach.
Brenda checked herself in the rearview. Lipstick OK, eye makeup OK. Hair never OK, but more or less under control. She had not known what to wear, how to present herself in a fancy retirement high rise. Shorts-and-polo casual, or something more like the woman in Wynn’s Market? What would Charlie say?
The light changed, and she moved forward in light Sunday traffic.
Before leaving, Brenda had Googled Hilda Frieslander. She had grown up in Amherst, Massachusetts, and graduated in ’46 from Amherst College. Her father had taught English at Amherst, specializing in the town’s most famous citizen, Emily Dickinson. Hilda’s mother had stayed home to raise the couple’s one child. After graduation, Hilda had gone to New York. She had made a successful career as an editor, working for several New York publishing houses. She had never married, but her mother’s sister had born a daughter, Hilda’s first cousin. She, too, had born one child, another girl. That meant her niece Holly Meininger was Hilda’s only surviving relative. Holly had gone to Europe in 2000. Any record of her came to an end there.
◆◆◆◆◆
A gold-leaf marble sign marked the Palazzo Bellissima’s entrance. No gatehouse or security guard—good.
Brenda passed under ornate grillwork and parked in the visitors section. She checked herself again before getting out. She had decided on the one fancy outfit packed for her trip, a dress of raw silk with big coconut buttons. The dress had traveled with her five years before, all the way to Micronesia, and she
