“Yes.”
Disco leaned across the counter. “Say, you look kind of familiar to me. Did we meet somewhere, maybe a long time ago?”
“I don’t think so. My name is Estivar.”
“Some boys called Estivar used to come in here a lot, they worked on the Osborne ranch. Any relation to you?”
“My sons.”
“Oh.” Disco thought about it awhile and then added, “They were okay.”
“Yes.”
“One of them was pretty scrappy — Felipe — he liked to fight with the Lopez boys. They’d go out the back door and zap each other around. It was all more or less in fun, kid stuff, until Luis Lopez started carrying a knife. Then it got serious.”
“What kind of knife?”
“A fancy little hinged job, made in the Philippines, called a butterfly knife. I told Valenzuela about it, but he said forget it. So I forgot it. In a business like this you learn to forget and remember at the right times.”
Estivar took a bite of the doughnut. It felt gritty between his teeth as if the grains of sugar were turning into sand.
“Now this,” Disco said, “this is a pretty good time to remember — the Osborne case is over and Valenzuela’s left town. And suddenly my head’s clearing, know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“Not that I ever had any important information about the Osborne case, just little things. The night Osborne was killed, for instance, Luis Lopez was in here and he had a butterfly knife with him. That doesn’t mean it was the knife, of course. Or even if it was the knife — well, somebody could have taken it from him. It was Friday — Friday’s a big night in Boca de Rio and there were lots of people in the place, including your son, Felipe.”
“You made a mistake. Not Felipe.”
“I’m sure.”
“Felipe was nowhere near here at that time. He’d left the ranch three weeks earlier.”
“He came back.”
“No. He went to Seattle, he was in Seattle working at an aircraft factory. He wrote letters. Ask my family about the letters.”
“He was in here, Mr. Estivar, just as sure as you’re in here yourself right now. He told me he’d run out of money and he was going out to the ranch to get some from you as soon as he could hitch a ride. I don’t know what occurred after he left.”
“Nothing,” Estivar said. “Nothing.”
“All I know is, Luis Lopez happened to walk past the place and looked in the window and saw Felipe sitting here at the counter. He came in and started an argument about his sister, Carla. Pretty soon it turned into a real fight. Luis had a bloody nose by the time I kicked both of them out on the street.”
Estivar stared into the empty cup. He couldn’t recall drinking the coffee or eating the doughnut, but they were both gone and a leaden lump was forming in the middle of his chest. Luis had a bloody nose. He knew now the source of the blood on Felipe’s shirt sleeve, the type O which Ford thought indicated the presence of a third man. There weren’t three men in the mess hall that night. There were only two — Robert Osborne and Felipe.
“Not that it matters,” Disco said, “the Osborne case being over and Valenzuela not around, not even a cop any more. But I figure it could have happened then, if it happened at all. I mean, it’s just a theory.”
“What?”
“Luis drew the knife and Felipe took it away from him.”
“No,” Estivar said. “No.”
But he was sure now that it was true and that Valenzuela kept quiet about the knife because he thought he was protecting Carla’s brother. Instead, he had protected Felipe. When Valenzuela came back and found out the truth he’d be wild with rage. He’d go looking for Felipe and he’d find him. Valenzuela had been a cop, he knew all the angles, the corners, the hiding places — the bars and back alleys of L.A., the ramerías of Tijuana and garitos of Mexicali, the flyblown fondas of El Paso.
There was no place that Felipe would be safe.
Chapter Eighteen
She awoke before there were any sounds from the kitchen below. In the half-light she dressed quickly in her ranch clothes, jeans and sneakers and a cotton shirt. When she opened the drapes to crank the window shut against the coming heat, she could see Tijuana in the distance, the cathedral gradually turning from dawn-pink to day-yellow, the wooden shacks clinging grimly to the sides of the hill like starving children to a teat. She could see, too, part of Leo’s ranch. Something was burning in one of the fields. The column of smoke rose thin and gray, a signal of despair.
She left the house by the front door to avoid waking Dulzura. The tomato fields teemed with the hungry birds of morning, but on the other side of the road the mess hall and bunkhouse were empty and silent, as though no one had ever lived there and nothing had ever happened. North of the mess hall were the acres of canteloupe where the migrants were at work, bodies bent, heads lowered and hidden under identical straw hats. None of them looked up or sideways; the direction of survival was down.
Jaime was late this year in harvesting the pumpkins for Halloween and the field was strewn with big orange heads. Although no faces had yet been carved on any of them, Devon felt that they were watching her, a hundred toothed grins and sets of geometric eyes. In the sky above her a vulture circled looking for carrion. Alternately flapping and floating, he kept coming closer and closer to her as if he thought she might lead him to something dead — a small dog by the side of the road, a woman wet from the river, a young man bleeding. She turned with a little cry, half rage, half grief, and began walking rapidly back to the house.
Dulzura, barefooted, was at the work counter measuring out coffee. “Mr. Ford called,” she said. “I went upstairs to get you and you were gone.”
“Yes. What did he want?”
“He left two messages. I wrote them down.”
The messages, printed in large careful letters, were on a sheet of paper beside the telephone: Meet Ford in court 1:30 for judge’s decision. See morning paper page 4A and 7B.
Above the story on page 4 there was a picture of a car smashed beyond recognition, and another of Valenzuela in uniform, looking young and confident and amused. The account of the accident was brief:
A former deputy in the sheriff’s department, Ernest Valenzuela, 41, and his estranged wife, Carla, 18, were killed in a one-car accident late yesterday afternoon a few miles north of Santa Maria. The car was traveling well in excess of a hundred miles an hour according to Highway Patrolman Jason Elgers, who was in pursuit. Elgers had been alerted by an attendant at a gas station in Santa Maria where Valenzuela had stopped for refueling. The attendant said he heard the couple quarreling loudly and saw a half-empty bottle of bourbon on the front seat.
The ex-deputy was killed instantly when his car smashed through a guard rail and struck a concrete abutment. Mrs. Valenzuela died en route to the hospital. They leave a six-month-old son.
The other newspaper item was a box ad on page 7. It offered $10,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of Robert K. Osborne, last seen near San Diego, October 13, 1967. All replies would be kept confidential and no charges of any kind would be pressed. The numbers of a P.O. box and of Mrs. Osborne’s telephone were given.
She put the paper down and said to Dulzura, “Valenzuela is dead.”
“I heard it on the radio,” Dulzura said, and that was Valenzuela’s epitaph as far as she was concerned.