“And you trusted him?”
“I had to.”
“Oh, not necessarily. You could, for example, have accompanied him here. That would have been the logical thing to do under the circumstances, wouldn’t it?”
“I don’t care.”
It seemed to Pinata a strangely inept answer for a glib man like Fielding. “As it turned out, you didn’t receive your share of the money because he killed himself?”
“I didn’t get my share,” Fielding said, “because there wasn’t anything to share.”
“What do you mean?”
“Camilla didn’t get the money. She didn’t give it to him.”
Mrs. Fielding looked stunned for a moment. “That’s not true. I handed him two thousand dollars.”
“You’re lying, Ada. You promised him that much but you didn’t come across with it.”
“I swear I gave him the money. He put it in an envelope, then he hid the envelope under his shirt.”
“I don’t believe...”
“You’ll have to believe it, Fielding,” Pinata said. “That’s where it was found, in an envelope inside his shirt.”
“It was on him? It was there on him, all the time?”
“Certainly.”
“Why, that dirty bastard...” He began to curse, and each word that damned Camilla damned himself, too, but he couldn’t stop. It was as if he’d been saving up words for years, like money to be spent all at once, on one vast special project, his old friend, old enemy, Camilla. The violent emotion behind the flow of words surprised Pinata. Although he knew now that Fielding was responsible for Camilla’s death, he still didn’t understand why. Money alone couldn’t be the reason: Fielding had never cared enough about money even to pursue it with much energy, let alone kill for it. Perhaps, then, he had acted out of anger at being cheated by Camilla. But this theory was less likely than the other. In the first place, he hadn’t found out until now that he’d been cheated; in the second, he wasn’t a stand-up-and-fight type of man. If he was angry, he would walk away, as he’d walked away from every other difficult situation in his life.
A spasm of coughing had seized Fielding. Pinata poured half a glass of whiskey from the decanter on the coffee table and took it over to him. Ten seconds after Fielding had gulped the drink, his coughing stopped. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, in a symbolic gesture of pushing back into it words that should never have escaped.
“No temperance lecture?” he said hoarsely. “Thanks, preacher man.”
“You were with Camilla that night, Fielding?”
“Hell, you don’t think I’d have trusted him to come all this way alone? Chances were he wouldn’t have made it back to Albuquerque even if he wanted to. He was a dying man.”
“Tell us what happened.”
“I can’t remember it all. I was drinking. I bought a bottle of wine because it was a cold night. Curly didn’t touch any of it; he wanted to see his sister, and she didn’t approve of drinking. When he came back from his sister’s house, he told me he’d called Ada and she was going to bring the money right away. I waited behind the signalman’s shack. I couldn’t see anything; it was too dark. But I heard Ada’s car arrive and leave again a few minutes later. I went over to Camilla. He said Ada had changed her mind and there was no money to share after all. I accused him of lying. He took the knife out of his pocket and switched the blade open. He threatened to kill me if I didn’t go away. I tried to get the knife away from him, and suddenly he fell over and — well, he was dead. It happened so fast. Just like that, he was dead.”
Pinata didn’t believe the entire story, but he was pretty sure a jury could be convinced that Fielding had acted in self-defense. A strong possibility existed that the case wouldn’t even reach a courtroom. Beyond Fielding’s own word there was no evidence against him, and he wasn’t likely to talk so freely in front of the police. Besides, the district attorney might be averse to reopening, without strong evidence, a case closed four years previously.
“I heard someone coming,” Fielding went on. “I got scared and started running down the tracks. Next thing I knew I was on a freight car heading south. I kept going. I just kept going. When I got back to Albuquerque, I told the two Indians Camilla had been living with that he had died in L.A., in case they might get the idea of reporting him missing. They believed me. They didn’t give a damn anyway. Camilla was no loss to them, or to the world. He was just a lousy no-good Mexican.” His eyes shifted back to Mrs. Fielding. He was smiling again, like a man enjoying a joke he couldn’t share, because it was too special or too involved. “Isn’t that right, Ada?”
She shook her head listlessly. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on now, Ada. Tell the people. You knew Camilla better than I did. You used to say he had the feelings of a poet. But you’ve learned better than that since, haven’t you? Tell them what a mean, worthless hunk of...”
“Stop it, Stan. Don’t.”
“Then say it.”
“All right. What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “He was a... a worthless man.”
“A lazy, stupid cholo, in spite of all your efforts to educate him. Isn’t that correct?”
“I... yes.”
“Repeat it, then.”
“Camilla was a — a lazy, stupid cholo.”
“Let’s drink to that.” Fielding stepped down off the hearth and started across the room toward the decanter. “How about it, Pinata? You’re a cholo too, aren’t you? Have a drink to another cholo, one who didn’t play it so smart.”
Pinata felt the blood rising up into his neck and face. Cholo, cholo, grease your bolo... The old familiar word was as stinging an insult now as it had been in his childhood... Take a trip to the northern polo... But the anger Pinata felt was instinctive and general, not directed against Fielding. He realized that the man, for all his blustering arrogance, was suffering, perhaps for the first time, a moral pain as intense as the mortal pain Mrs. Rosario had suffered; and the exact cause of the pain Pinata didn’t understand any more than, as a layman, he understood the technical cause of Mrs. Rosario’s. He said, “You’d better lay off the liquor, Fielding.”
“Oh, preacher man, are you going to go into that routine again? Pour me a drink, Daisy baby, like a good girl.”
There were tears in Daisy’s eyes and in her voice when she spoke. “All right.”
“You’ve always been a good Daddy-loving girl, haven’t you, Daisy baby?”
“Yes.”
“Then hurry up about it. I’m thirsty.”
“All right.”
She poured him half a glass of whiskey and turned her head away while he drank it, as if she couldn’t bear to witness his need and his compulsion. She said to Pinata, “What’s going to happen to my father? What will they do to him?”
“My guess is, not a thing.” Pinata sounded more confident than the circumstances warranted.
“First they’ll have to find me, Daisy baby,” Fielding said. “It won’t be easy. I’ve disappeared before. I can do it again. You might even say I’ve developed a real knack for it. This Eagle Scout here” — he pointed a thumb contemptuously at Pinata — “he can blast off to the police till he runs out of steam. It won’t do any good. There’s no case against me, just the one I’m carrying around inside. And that — well, I’m used to it.” He put his hand briefly and gently on Daisy’s hair. “I can take it. Don’t worry about me, Daisy baby. I’ll be here and there and around. Someday I’ll write to you.”
“Don’t go away like this, so quickly, so...”