“It was Mrs. Osborne’s idea,” Devon said. “She thought people would talk if they saw us together.”
“I’d like to think they had something to talk about... Do they?”
“No.”
“No period, or no not yet?”
Her only response was a slight shake of her head that could have meant anything.
She had taken off the white wrist-length gloves which she’d worn almost continuously since early morning. They lay now in her lap, the false passive immaculate hands she’d exhibited to the spectators in court and strangers in the hall and on the street. Her real hands, sunburned and rough, with calloused palms and bitten nails, she showed only to friends like Leo who wouldn’t care, or to people she saw every day like the Estivars and Dulzura who wouldn’t notice.
“I worry about you,” Leo said.
“Well, stop. I don’t want you to worry about me.”
“I don’t want to, either, but that’s the way it is. Did you have a decent lunch?”
“A hamburger.”
“That’s not enough. You’re too thin.”
“You shouldn’t fuss over me, Leo.”
“Why not?”
“It makes me nervous, self-conscious. I like to feel at ease with you.”
“All right, no fussing. That’s a promise.” The humming of the air conditioner muffled the rasp in his voice.
He turned north on the freeway. Traffic had been slowed down to boulevard speed by its own volume. People passing were without names or faces or any identification except their cars: a red Mustang with Florida plates, a blue Chevelle, a VW camper decorated with daisies, a silver Continental with matching silver smoke coming from its exhaust, a yellow Dart with a black vinyl roof, a white Monaco station wagon trailing a boat. It was as if human beings existed merely to keep the vehicles in motion, and the real significance had shifted from the Smiths and the Joneses to Cougars and Corvairs, Toronados and Toyotas.
“Turn west on University,” Devon said. “She lives at 3117 Ocotillo; that’s three or four blocks north.”
“I know where it is.”
“Did Mr. Ford tell you?”
“She told me. She called me one day and asked me to come and see her.”
“I thought you were barely on speaking terms.”
“We barely were,” Leo said. “In fact, we barely are. But I went.”
“When was that?”
“About three weeks ago, as soon as she found out the hearing was scheduled for today. Well, after a lot of chitchat she finally got to the point — she wanted to make sure my wife’s death wasn’t brought up during the hearing. She said it was irrelevant. I agreed. She offered me a drink, which I refused, and I drove back to the ranch. That’s all. At least as far as I was concerned it was all. I can’t be sure what was in her mind, perhaps something quite different from what was actually said.”
“Why do you suggest that?”
“If what she really wanted was to keep Ruth’s name out of the proceedings, she would have called Mr. Ford, not me. I’m only a witness, he’s running the show.”
“Maybe she called him, too.”
“Maybe.” He ran his left hand around the scalloped rim of the steering wheel as though it were a bumpy road he’d never explored before. “I think she was trying to make sure I didn’t say anything against her son. She had to believe — and to make other people believe — that Robert was perfect.”
“What could you have said against him, Leo?”
“He wasn’t perfect.”
“You were referring to something specific.”
“Nothing that should make any difference to you now. It was over before you even knew the Osbornes existed.” He added, after a time, “It wasn’t even Robert’s fault. He just happened to be the boy next door. And Ruth — well, she happened to be the girl next door, only she was pushing forty and afraid of growing old.”
“So the gossip about them was true.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I started to, many times, only I never went through with it. It seemed cruel. Now — well, now I know it’s necessary, cruel or not. I can’t afford to let you believe Mrs. Osborne’s version of Robert. He wasn’t perfect. He had faults, he made mistakes. Ruth turned out to be one of the bigger mistakes but he couldn’t have foreseen that. She was pretty appealing in her role of defenseless little woman, and Robert was a setup for her. He didn’t even have a girl friend to stand in the way, thanks to Mrs. Osborne. She’d managed to get rid of all the girls who weren’t good enough for him, and that meant all the girls. So he ended up with a married woman nearly twice his age.”
Devon sat in silence, trying to imagine the two of them together, Ruth seeing in Robert another chance at youth, Robert seeing in her a chance at manhood. How often did they meet, and where? Beside the reservoir or in the grove of date palms? In the mess hall or bunkhouse when there were no migrants working on the ranch? In the ranch house itself when Mrs. Osborne went to the city? No matter where they met, people must have seen them and been shocked or amused or sympathetic — the Estivars, Dulzura, the ranch hands, perhaps even Mrs. Osborne before she shut her eyes tight and finally. Mrs. Osborne’s references to Ruth had all been similar and in the same tone: “Robert was kind to the poor woman...” “He went out of his way to be neighborly...” “It was pitiful the spectacle she made of herself, but Robert was always patient and understanding.”
Robert — kind, patient, understanding and neighborly. Very, very neighborly.
Devon said, “How long had it been going on?”
“I’m not sure, but I think a long time.”
“Years?”
“Yes. Probably ever since he came back from school in Arizona.”
“But he was just seventeen then, a boy.”
“Seventeen-year-olds aren’t boys. Don’t waste sympathy on him. It’s possible that Ruth did him a favor by distracting him from his mother.”
“How can you say such a terrible thing so calmly?”
“Maybe it’s not so terrible. Maybe I’m not so calm.” But he sounded calm, even remote. “When Estivar was on the witness stand this morning he blamed the school for teaching Robert prejudice and keeping him away from the Estivar family. I don’t believe it was prejudice. Robert simply had something new in his life, something he couldn’t afford to share with the Estivars.”
“If you knew about the affair, why didn’t you try to stop it?”
“I did. At first Ruth denied everything. Later we had periodic fights, long and loud and no holds barred. After the last one she packed a suitcase and set out on foot for the Osbornes’. She never got there.”
“Then nothing was planned about her running away with Robert?”
“No. I think it would have been a real shock to him to look out and see her heading for his house with a suitcase. But he didn’t see her. It had started to rain heavily and he was in the study catching up on his accounts. Mrs. Osborne was in her bedroom upstairs. Both rooms faced west, away from the river, so nobody was watching it, nobody knew the exact time of the flash flood, nobody saw Ruth try to get across. She was small and delicate like you, it wouldn’t have taken much to knock her off her feet.”
Small and delicate... “You remind me of someone back home,” Robert had told her at their first meeting. “Someone nice — or she used to be. She’s dead now. A lot of people think I killed her.”
“Leo.”
“Yes.”
“Her death was an accident?”
“According to the coroner.”
“And according to you?”
“To me,” Leo said slowly, “it seemed a crazy way to die, drowning in the middle of a desert.”
The house at 3117 Ocotillo street was built in the California mission style, with tiled roof and thick adobe walls and an archway leading into a courtyard. The archway was decorated with ceramic tiles and from the top of it hung a miniature merry-go-round of brass horses that twitched and pranced and chimed against each other when the wind blew.