“I’d be inclined to agree with Kirby,” Pinata said carefully, “on the basis of the facts. Camilla had good reason to kill himself. He wrote, if not a suicide note, at least a farewell note. He left money for his funeral expenses. The knife used had his own initials on it. In the face of all this, I can’t put too much stock in your opinion that Camilla’s hands were too crippled to have wielded the knife. But of course I’ve had no experience with arthritis.”
“I have.”
Fondero leaned forward, holding out his left hand as if it were some specimen from his lab. Pinata saw what he hadn’t noticed before: that Fondero’s knuckles were swollen to twice normal size, and the fingers were bent and stiffened into a claw.
“That,” Fondero said, “used to be my pitching hand. Now I couldn’t even field a bunt if the World Series depended on it. I sit in the stands as a spectator, and when Wally Moon belts one over the fence, I can’t even applaud. All my lab work these days is done by my assistants. Believe me, if I wanted to kill myself, it would have to be with something other than a knife.”
“Desperation often gives a man additional strength.”
“It may give him strength, yes, but it can’t loosen up fused joints or restore atrophied muscles. It’s impossible.”
Impossible. Pinata wondered how often the word had already come up in connection with Camilla. Too many times. Perhaps he’d been the kind of man destined for the impossible, born to botch up statistics and defy the laws of physics. The evidence of motive, weapon, suicide note, and funeral money was powerful enough, but fused joints couldn’t be loosened overnight, nor atrophied muscles restored on impulse or by desire.
Fondero was still holding out his hand for exhibit like a freak at a sideshow. “Are you still inclined to believe Kirby, Mr. Pinata?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t actually know, either. All I can say is that if Camilla grasped that knife with those hands of his, I wish he’d have stayed alive long enough to tell me how he did it. I could use some advice on the subject.”
He hid his deformed hand in his pocket. The show was over; it had been an effective one.
“Kirby’s a sharp man,” Pinata said.
“That’s right, he’s a sharp man. He just doesn’t happen to have arthritis.”
“Wouldn’t Camilla’s condition have prevented him from writing the suicide note?”
“No. It was printed, not written. This is common among arthritics. It’s a good deal easier to print legibly.”
“From your examination of the body, what general information did you get about Camilla’s manner of living?”
“I won’t go into further medical details,” Fondero said, “but the evidence indicates that he was a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker, and at some time in his life a heavy worker.”
“Was there any clue about what kind of work?”
“One, although some orthopedists might not agree with me. He had a bone malformation known as genu varum, less politely called bowlegs. Now bowlegs can be caused by a number of things, but if I had to make a wild guess about Camilla’s occupation, I’d say that, beginning early in his youth, he had a lot to do with horses. He may have worked on a ranch.”
“Ranch,” Pinata said, frowning. Someone had recently mentioned a ranch to him, but it wasn’t until he got back to his car that he recalled the circumstances: Alston on the telephone had said that Mrs. Rosario, Juanita’s mother, had been housekeeper on a ranch and had inherited enough money, when the owners died, to buy the house on Granada Street.
14
The hotel guests are looking at me queerly while I write this, as if they are wondering what a tramp like me is doing in their lobby where I don’t belong, writing to a daughter who has never really belonged to me...
Granada was a street of small frame houses built so closely together that they seemed to be leaning on each other for moral and physical and economic support against the pressures from the white side of town. The pomegranate trees, for which the street was named, were fruitless now, but at Christmas time the gaudy orange balls of fruit hung from the branches looking quite unreasonable, as if they had not grown there at all but had been strung up to decorate the street for the holiday season.
Five-twelve hid its age and infirmities — and proclaimed its independence from its neighbors — with a fresh coat of bright pink paint that seemed to have been applied by a child or a nearsighted amateur. Blotches of paint stained the narrow sidewalk, the railing of the porch, the square yard of lawn; the calla lilies, the leaves of the holly bush and the pittosporum hedge, were pimpled with pink as if they’d broken out with some strange new plant disease. Pink footsteps, belonging to a child or a very small woman, led up the gray porch steps and disappeared in the coarse bristles of the coca mat outside the front door. These footsteps were the only evidence that a child or children might be living in the house. There were no toys or parts of toys on the porch or lawn, no discarded shoes or sweaters, no half-eaten oranges or jelly sandwiches. If Juanita and her six children had taken up residence here, someone was being careful to hide the fact, perhaps Juanita herself, perhaps Mrs. Rosario.
Pinata pressed the door buzzer and waited, trying to figure out why Juanita had suddenly decided to come back to town after an absence of more than three years. She must have known she’d be in trouble with the authorities for breaking probation when she disappeared in the first place. On the other hand, Juanita didn’t behave on the logical level, so the reason for her return could be something quite trivial and capricious, or purely emotionaclass="underline" homesickness, a desire to see her mother again or to show off her latest husband and youngest child to her friends, perhaps a quarrel with a neighbor, wherever she’d been living, followed by a sudden violent desire to get away. It was difficult to guess her motives. She was like a puppet operated by dozens of strings; some of them had broken, and others had become so inextricably twisted that not one of them functioned as it was intended to. To remove these knots and tangles, and to splice the broken ends together, was the job of Alston and his staff. So far, they had failed. Juanita’s soarings and somersaults, her leaps and landings were beyond the control of any puppeteer.
The door opened to reveal a short, thin middle-aged woman with black, expressionless eyes like ripe olives. She held her body so rigidly straight that she appeared to be wearing an iron brace on her back. Everything about her was stretched taut; her skin looked as if it had been starched, her hair was drawn back from her face in a tight and tidy little bun, and her mouth was compressed into a hard line. Pinata was surprised when it opened with such ease.
“What do you want?”
“Mrs. Rosario?”
“That is my name.”
“I’m Steve Pinata. I’d like to talk to you for a minute, if I may.”
“If it’s about old Mr. Lopez next door, I have nothing more to say. I told the lady from the Department of Health yesterday, they had no right to take him away like that against his will. He’s had that same cough all his life, and it’s never done him a bit of harm. It’s as natural to him as breathing. As for the rest of the neighborhood getting into that ray machine, free or not, I refused and so did the Gonzales and the Escobars. It’s against nature, getting your lungs choked up with all those rays.”