“He didn’t mince words when he called. He said he had only a short time to live and needed money for his funeral. He reminded me of — of old times, and I... well, I agreed to meet him and give him some money.”
“Two thousand dollars?” Pinata said.
“Yes.”
“That’s a lot to pay for memories of old times, Mrs. Fielding.”
“I felt an obligation to help him,” she said. “He sounded so terribly ill and broken, I knew he must be telling the truth about his approaching death. I asked him if I could send him the money instead of meeting him, but he said there wasn’t time, and he had no address for me to send it to.”
“Where did you get the money?”
“From Jim. I knew he had a lot of cash in the safe at his office. I explained the situation to him, and he thought it would be advisable to pay what Camilla asked.”
“Advisable?” It seemed, to Pinata, a curious word to use under the circumstances.
“Jim is a very generous man.”
“Obviously there were reasons for his generosity?”
“Yes.”
“What were they?”
“I must refuse to answer.”
“All right,” Pinata said. “You went to meet Camilla. Where?”
“At the end of Greenwald Street, near the signalman’s shack. It was very late and dark. I couldn’t see anyone, and I thought I had misunderstood his instructions. I was about to leave when I heard him call my name, and a shadow stepped out from behind a bush. ‘Come here and look at me,’ he said. He lit a match and held it in front of his face. I’d known him when he was young and lively and handsome; the man in the matchlight was a living corpse, emaciated, misshapen. I couldn’t speak. There were so many things to say, but I couldn’t speak. I gave him the money, and he said, ‘God bless you, Ada, and God bless me, Carlos.’”
The funereal words seemed, to Pinata, to contain a curious echo of another ceremony: I, Ada, take thee, Carlos...
“I thought I heard someone coming,” Mrs. Fielding went on. “I panicked and ran back to my car and drove off. When I returned to the house, the phone was ringing. It was a woman.”
“Mrs. Rosario?”
“Yes, although she didn’t tell me her name then. She said she had found Carlos dead and that I had killed him. She wouldn’t listen to my denials, my protests. She just kept talking about her daughter, Juanita, who needed taking care of because she was going to give birth to a fatherless child. She seemed obsessed with this single idea of money for her daughter and the baby. I said I would call her back, that I had to consult someone. She gave me her phone number. Then I went to Jim’s room and woke him up.”
She paused, looking at Daisy half in sorrow, half in reproach. “You’ll never know how many times Jim has taken a burden off my shoulders, Daisy. I told him the situation. We both agreed that it was impossible for me to be dragged through a police investigation. Too many suspicious things would come out: that I knew Camilla, that I’d given him two thousand dollars. I couldn’t face it. I realized I had to keep Mrs. Rosario quiet. The problem was how to pay her so that even if someone found out about the payments, the real reason for them would remain secret. The only possible way was to concoct a false reason and make it known to someone in a key position, like Adam Burnett.”
“And the false reason,” Pinata said, “was support for Juanita’s child?”
“Yes. It was Mrs. Rosario who inadvertently suggested it by insisting that she wanted no money for herself, only for Juanita. So we decided that was how it would be done. Jim was to claim the child and pay for its support. It seemed, in a way, like a stroke of fate that the lie should fit in so perfectly with the lie I was forced to tell Daisy in the first place. It was all arranged in Adam Burnett’s office the next day, by Adam and Jim and Mrs. Rosario. Adam was never told the truth. He even wanted to fight Juanita’s ‘claim’ in court, but Jim managed to convince him that he must keep quiet. The next step was convincing Daisy. That was easy enough. Jim found out through Mrs. Rosario that Juanita was to go to the Clinic late that afternoon. He picked her up in his car and kept her talking in the parking lot until Daisy came out and saw them together. Then he made his false confession to her.
“Cruel? Yes, it was a cruel thing to do, Daisy. But not as cruel as others, perhaps — and not as cruel as some of the real tricks life plays on us. The next days were terrible ones. Although the coroner’s inquest ruled Camilla’s death was a suicide, the police were still investigating the source of the money found on him and still trying to establish who Camilla was. But time passed and nothing happened. Camilla was buried, still unknown.”
Pinata said, “Did you ever visit his grave, Mrs. Fielding?”
“I passed it several times when we went to leave flowers for Jim’s parents.”
“Did you leave flowers for Camilla, too?”
“No, I couldn’t. Daisy was always with me.”
“Why?”
“Because I... I wanted her along.”
“Was there any display of emotion on these occasions?”
“I cried sometimes.”
“Wasn’t Daisy curious about the reason for your tears?”
“I told her that I had a cousin buried there, of whom I’d been very fond.”
“What was this cousin’s name?”
“I...”
Fielding’s sudden fit of coughing sounded like stifled laughter. When he had finished, he wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve. “Ada has a very sentimental nature. She weeps at the drop of a dead cousin. The only difficulty in this instance is that neither of her parents had any siblings. So where did the cousin come from, Ada?”
She looked at him, her mouth moving in a soundless curse.
Pinata said, “There was no cousin, Mrs. Fielding?”
“I... no.”
“The tears were for Camilla?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He died alone and was buried alone. I felt guilty.”
“Guilt as strong as that,” Pinata said, “makes me wonder whether Mrs. Rosario’s accusation against you might not have some basis in fact.”
“I had nothing whatever to do with Camilla’s death. He killed himself, with his own knife. That was the coroner’s verdict.”
“This afternoon I talked to Mr. Fondero, the mortician in charge of Camilla’s body. It’s his opinion that Camilla’s hands were too severely crippled by arthritis to have used that knife with the necessary force.”
“When I left him,” Mrs. Fielding said steadily, “he was still alive.”
“But when Mrs. Rosario arrived — and let’s assume that her coming was the noise you heard which frightened you away — he was dead. Suppose Fondero’s opinion about Camilla’s incapacity to handle the knife is correct. As far as we know, only two people were with Camilla that night, you and Mrs. Rosario. Do you think Mrs. Rosario killed her brother?”
“It’s more reasonable than to think I did.”
“What would her motive have been?”
“Perhaps a deliberate scheme to get money for the girl. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her, not me?”
“I can’t ask her,” Pinata said. “Mrs. Rosario died tonight of a heart attack.”
“Oh God.” She dropped back into the chair, her hands pressing against her chest. “Death. It’s beginning to surround me. All this death, and nothing to take the curse off it, no new life coming to take its place. This is my punishment, no new life.” She gazed at Fielding with dull eyes. “Revenge is what you wanted, isn’t it, Stan? Well, you have it. You might as well leave now. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.”