“Did he make a will?” Fielding asked.
“I never saw it. She says he did.”
“Don’t you believe her?”
“I don’t know.”
“When did you first hear about it?”
“One day before Paul was born, she suddenly announced that Uncle Carl had died and left a will. If I did this and that, I would get $200 a month.”
“And what was ‘this and that’?”
“Mostly I was to leave town right away and have the baby born in L.A. It seemed kind of crazy him being interested in the baby when he never even sent the other kids anything at Christmastime. When I asked my old lady about it, she said Uncle Carl wanted the baby born in L.A. because that’s where he was born. For sentimental reasons, like.”
He was born in Arizona, Fielding thought. He must have told me a dozen times. Flagstaff, Arizona. And nobody knows better than me that he didn’t die in any automobile accident in New Mexico. He died right here, less than a mile from this very spot, with his own knife between his ribs.
Only on one count was the girl’s story correct: there had been no last rites for Camilla.
“I guess he must have been very sentimental,” Juanita said. “So’s my old lady sometimes. A funny thing, there I was in L.A. with everything going pretty good, and suddenly she gets this idea she wants to see me again, me and the kids. She wrote me a letter how she was getting old and she had a bad heart and she was lonely all by herself and she wanted me to come visit her for a while. Well, Joe had just lost his job, and it seemed like a good time to come. I must’ve been crazy. An hour after I stepped inside that door, she was screaming at me and I was screaming back. That’s the way it is. She wants me around, and she wants me far away. How the hell can I be both? Well, this time I’m going to settle it for good. I’m never coming back once I get out of this town again.”
“Just make sure you get out.”
“Why?”
“Be careful.”
“What’s to be careful about?”
“Oh, things. People.” He would have liked to tell her the truth at this point, or as much of it as he knew. But he didn’t trust her not to talk. And if she talked in front of the wrong people, she would put herself in danger as well as him. Perhaps she was already in danger, but she certainly seemed unaware of it. She was still busy outlining the wallpaper roses with her fingernail, looking as rapt and dedicated as an artist or a child.
Fielding said, “Stop that for a minute, will you?”
“What?”
“Stop fooling around with the wallpaper.”
“I’m making it prettier.”
“Yeah, I know that, but I want you to listen to me. Are you listening?”
“Well, sure.”
“I came to town to see Jim Harker.” He leaned across the table and repeated the name carefully. “Jim Harker.”
“So what?”
“You remember him, don’t you?”
“I never heard of him before.”
“Think.”
Her two eyebrows leaped at each other into the middle of her forehead, like animals about to fight. They didn’t quite meet. “I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking’s easy. It’s not thinking that’s hard. I think all the time, but I can’t think about Jim Harker if I never even heard of Jim Harker. Think, hell.”
The single monosyllable had destroyed her creative impulse as well as her good mood. She turned from the wall and began wiping the grime off her hands with a paper napkin. When she had finished, she crumpled the napkin into a ball and threw it on the floor with a sound of despair, that she had ever tried to make things prettier in the world.
The bartender came around the end of the counter, frowning as if he intended to rebuke her for messing up his place. Instead, he said, “Mrs. Brewster just called, wanted to know if you were here.”
Juanita’s face immediately assumed the peculiarly bland expression that indicated she was interested. “What’d you say to her?”
“That I’d keep an eye out for you, and if you showed up, I’d tell you to call her back. So now I’m telling you.”
“Thanks,” Juanita said without moving.
“You gonna do it?”
“So she can go blabbing to my old lady? What do you think I am, like stupid?”
“You better call her,” the bartender said stubbornly. “She’s at the Velada.”
“So she’s at the Velada. And I’m here, at — what’s the name of this dump?”
“El Paraiso.”
“The Paradise. Hey, Foster, ain’t that a laugh? You and me are strangers in paradise.”
The bartender turned to Fielding. One of his eyelids was twitching in unexpressed irritation. “If you’re a friend of hers, you better persuade her to talk to Mrs. Brewster. There’ve been a couple of men looking for her at the Velada. One of them was a private detective.”
A detective, Fielding thought. So Pinata was in this, too.
He wasn’t exactly surprised. He’d been half expecting it ever since Daisy’s letter was delivered to him at the warehouse. There was no other way for her to have found out where he was working except through Pinata. Obviously, if Pinata was looking for Juanita, that was what Daisy had hired him to do. But how did Camilla come into it? As far as Fielding knew, the name hadn’t been mentioned in Daisy’s presence; she was unaware such a man had ever existed.
He realized suddenly that both Juanita and the bartender were staring at him as if they were waiting for an answer. He hadn’t heard any question.
“Well,” the bartender said.
“Well, what?”
“You know any private detective around town?”
“No.”
“That’s funny, because he was looking for you, too.”
“Why me? I haven’t done anything.”
Juanita protested shrilly that she hadn’t done anything, either, but neither of the men paid any attention.
Fielding was squinting up at the bartender as if he found it difficult to focus his eyes. “You said two men came to the Velada. Who was the other one?”
“Search me.”
“A cop?”
“Mrs. Brewster would have mentioned it if he’d been a cop. All she told me, he was a big man with blond hair and he acted funny. Jumpy, like. You know anybody like that?”
“Sure, lots of them.” One in particular, Fielding thought. He wasn’t jumpy the last time I saw him, in Chicago, but now he has reason to be. “Some of my best friends are jumpy.”
“Yeah, I bet.” The bartender glanced briefly at Juanita. “I gotta get back to work. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
When he had gone, Juanita leaned across the table and said confidentially, “I think Mrs. Brewster was making it all up so I’ll get scared and go home. I don’t believe there’s any detective looking for me, or any big blond man, either. Why would they want to see me for?”
“Maybe they have some questions.”
“What about?”
He hesitated a minute. He wanted to help the girl because in a disturbing way she reminded him of Daisy. It was as if some perverse fate had singled them both out to be victims, Daisy and Juanita, who had never met and perhaps never would, although they had so much in common. He felt sorry for them. But Fielding’s pity, like his love and even his hate, was a variable thing, subject to changes in the weather, melting in the summer, freezing in the winter, blowing away in a high wind. Only by a miracle did it survive at all.