A dozen Doric columns entwined with giant Burmese honeysuckle made the front of Fondero’s place look like an old southern mansion. The impression was destroyed by the long black hearse parked by the side door. In the driveway behind the hearse stood a small bright red sports car. The incongruity of the two vehicles amused Pinata. The death and the resurrection, he thought. Maybe that’s how modern Americans imagine resurrection, as a bright red sports car whitewalling them along a Styrofoam road to a nylon-Orlon-Dacron nirvana.
Pinata went in the side door and turned right.
Fondero was watering a planter full of maranta. He was a man of massive proportions, as if he’d been built to withstand the weight and pressure of other people’s griefs.
“Sit down, Mr. Pinata. Charley Alston called me to say you want some information.”
“That’s right.”
“What about?”
“You may recall Carlos Camilla?”
“Oh yes. Yes, indeed.” Fondero finished watering the maranta and put the empty pitcher on the window ledge. “Camilla was my guest, shall we say, for over a month. As you know, the city has no official morgue, but Camilla’s body had to be kept, pending investigation of the source of the money that was found on him. Nothing came of the investigation, so he was buried.”
“Did anyone attend the funeral?”
“A hired priest and my wife.”
“Your wife?”
Fondero sat down in a chair that looked too frail to bear him. “Betty refused to let Camilla be buried without mourners, so she acted as a substitute. It wasn’t entirely acting, however. Camilla, perhaps because of the tragic circumstances of his death, perhaps because we had him around so long, had gotten under our skin. We kept hoping that someone would come along to claim him. No one did, but Betty still refused to believe that Camilla didn’t have somebody in the world who cared about him. She insisted that the money found on Camilla be used for an imposing monument instead of an expensive coffin. She had the idea that someday a mourner might appear, and she wanted Camilla’s grave to be conspicuous. As I recall, it is.”
“It’s conspicuous,” Pinata said. And a mourner did come along and find it, but the mourner was a stranger — Daisy.
“You’re a detective, Mr. Pinata?”
“I have a license that says so.”
“Then perhaps you have some theory of how a man like Camilla got hold of $2,000.”
“A holdup seems the most likely source.”
“The police were never able to prove that,” Fondero said, taking a gold cigarette case from his pocket. “Cigarette? No? Good for you. I wish I could give them up. Since this lung cancer business, some of the local wits have started calling cigarettes Fonderos. Well, it’s publicity of a kind, I suppose.”
“Where do you think Camilla got the money?”
“I’m inclined to believe he came by it honestly. Perhaps he saved it up, perhaps it was repayment of a loan. The latter theory is more logical. He was a dying man. He must have been aware of his condition, and knowing how little time he had left, he decided to collect money owing to him to pay for his funeral. That would explain his coming to town — the person who owed him money lived here. Or lives here.”
“That sounds plausible,” Pinata said, “except for one thing. According to the newspaper, the police made an appeal to the public for anyone who knew Camilla to come forward. No one did.”
“No one came forward in person. But I had a peculiar telephone call after Camilla had been here a week or so. I told the police about it, and they thought, as I did at the time, it was the work of some religious crank.”
The expression on Fondero’s face as he leaned forward was an odd mixture of amusement and irritation. “If you want to hear from every crackpot and prankster in town, try going into this business. At Halloween it’s the kids. At Christmas and Easter it’s the religious nuts. In September it’s college boys being initiated. Any month at all is good for a lewd suggestion from a sex deviate as to what goes on in my lab. I received the call about Camilla just before Christmas, which made it the right timing for one of the religious crackpots.”
“Was it from a man or a woman?”
“A woman. Such calls usually are.”
“What kind of voice did she have?”
“Medium in all respects, as I recall,” Fondero said. “Medium-pitched, medium-aged, medium-cultured.”
“Any trace of an accent?”
“No.”
“Could it have been a young woman, say about thirty?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
“What did she want?”
“I can’t remember her exact words after all this time. The gist of her conversation was that Camilla was a good Catholic and should be buried in consecrated ground. I told her about the difficulties involved in such an arrangement, since there was no evidence that Camilla had died in the Church. She claimed that Camilla had fulfilled all the requirements for burial in consecrated ground. Then she hung up. Except for the degree of self-control she displayed, it was an ordinary run-of-the-mill crank call. At least I thought so then.”
“Camilla is buried in the Protestant cemetery,” Pinata said.
“I talked it over with our parish priest. There was no alternative.”
“Did the woman mention the money?”
“No.”
“Or the manner of his death?”
“I got the impression,” Fondero said cautiously, “from her insistence on Camilla being a good Catholic, that she didn’t believe he had killed himself.”
“Do you?”
“The experts called it suicide.”
“I should think by this time you’d be something of an expert yourself along those lines.”
“Experienced. Not expert.”
“What’s your private opinion?”
Outside the window Fondero’s son had begun to whistle, loudly and off-key, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
“I work very closely with the police and the coroner’s office,” Fondero said. “It wouldn’t be good business for me to have an opinion contrary to theirs.”
“But you have one anyway?”
“Not for the record.”
“All right, for me. Top secret.”
Fondero went over to the window and then returned to his chair, facing Pinata. “Do you happen to recall the contents of the note he left?”
“Yes. ‘This ought to pay my way into heaven, you stinking rats... Born, too soon, 1907. Died, too late, 1955.’”
“Now everybody seemed to take that as a suicide note. Perhaps that’s what it was. But it could also be the message of a man who knew he was going to die, couldn’t it?”
“I guess so,” Pinata said. “The idea never occurred to me.”
“Nor to me, until I made my own examination of the body. It was that of an old man — prematurely aged if we accept the date of his birth as given, and I see no reason why he should lie about it under the circumstances. Many degenerative processes had taken place: the liver was cirrhotic, there was considerable hardening of the arteries, and he was suffering from emphysema of the lungs and an advanced case of arthritis. It was this last thing that interested me the most. Camilla’s hands were badly swollen and out of shape. I seriously doubt whether he could have grasped the knife firmly enough to have inflicted the wound himself. Maybe he could. Maybe he did. All I’m saying is, I doubt it.”
“Did you express your doubts to the authorities?”
“I told Lieutenant Kirby. He wasn’t in the least excited. He claimed that the suicide note was more valid evidence than the opinion of a layman. Although I don’t hold a pathologist’s degree, I hardly consider myself a layman after some twenty-five years in the business. Still, Kirby had a point: opinions don’t constitute evidence. The police were satisfied with a suicide verdict, the coroner was satisfied, and if Camilla had any friends who weren’t, they didn’t bother complaining. You’re a detective, what do you think?”