He was still sitting on the deck when Ehrmann called, and he knew two things as he heard his voice. Ehrmann was at an airport, which probably meant he was being summoned east, and two, Ehrmann had bad news to deliver. He’d heard the tone too many times before, heard Ehrmann sigh and explain, “I wanted to call you before it was public, because I know you were friends and they tell me you came by last night.”
“Aw, don’t tell me that, Ehrmann. Tell me something else.”
“Charles Douglas died this morning at dawn.”
Marquez laid the phone on the railing. He leaned on the railing and bowed his head into his hand.
39
Douglas had once made a cryptic remark to Marquez about religion. As they leaned against the metal railing of a boat and looked out at the clean sky above the water, Douglas had said he believed in God too much to ever sit in a church.
But a memorial service is for the living, not the dead. Douglas’s was held in a chapel adjacent to the East Bay mortuary and graveyard where he was to be buried alongside his mother. A pastor who’d never met Douglas conducted the service. He quoted often from the Bible and gave no sign that he had any feeling at all for Douglas’s life or death.
After the chapel service Marquez followed a line of cars up the long hill to the gravesite, where two men were at work adjusting a dark wooden coffin so it would lower properly into the grave in the steep manicured lawn. A second service began, and those in the audience were asked if they wanted to say anything. An old friend of Douglas’s, a man who said he’d known Charles forever, said, “It was simple with Charles. You could always count on him to do the right thing. It didn’t matter what it was, he would do it.”
Marquez took a long look at Douglas’s sons, square-shouldered and brave as Douglas would want them to be, though tears ran steadily down their cheeks. His wife, Amelia, sobbed as the moment overwhelmed her, and Douglas’s brother pulled her close and held her. When the coffin lowered Amelia broke free and sank to the grass. She grabbed at the chains, tried to stop it from lowering, and a deep sadness came over Marquez. He felt the tears on his own face, couldn’t take this one stoically. He wished he’d found the words to speak earlier and looked away now down the long falling slope and at the dark green of the big oaks and out across San Francisco Bay, at the whitecaps, gray-black clouds at the horizon.
He and Douglas used to talk about what they’d do someday when they had more time. Douglas wanted a house where he could have a big vegetable garden and barbecue on a back deck that looked out on nothing but hills. He’d move north until he could afford a good house, or inland if he had to. He was tired of the fog. He wanted to be where it froze at night in the winter, someplace north where you could toss a football around on New Year’s Day and you were warm in the sun in a T-shirt, but where you knew there was winter.
“Do you think about what comes next?” Douglas had asked, and he’d been serious. “I mean after you get tired of chasing perps and the geeks stealing from our children’s future.”
When the crowd began to break up and move toward the cars, Marquez went to Amelia to tell her how sorry he was. He felt her desperation as she gripped his hands.
“My dreams are gone,” she said. “I had so many dreams of the things we were going to do.”
Marquez walked to his truck. Only as he unlocked it and was getting in did he become aware of someone behind him. A young FBI agent had come up behind him, and he turned to face him, wondering what it was. Another special agent, a woman, backed him up. She stood within earshot but out of the line of confrontation.
“What are you doing here?” the agent asked.
“Charles was a friend of mine.”
“I don’t think you belong here, and I’m not alone thinking that.”
“What’s that about?”
“Don’t show up at the wake.”
The agent waited for a response as though the statement warranted it, but Marquez turned back to his car and got in. He drove away without looking in the rearview mirror, but it had affected him. He did not attend the wake. He’d been unsure whether he would or not, and maybe he deferred to the agent’s words.
An hour later he was on the sidewalk outside the Presto on Union where Maria was working this afternoon. As he came inside her elbows were on the yellow marble of the counter, two customers, two friends of hers he guessed, standing at the bar across from her, cappuccinos in front of them, as she leaned toward them, chatting. A young man with a goatee cleaned an espresso machine to the side of her. He had a feeling that was Shane. He read Maria’s quizzical smile at his black suit and then saw her put it together and the smile vanish.
“Why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and walk with me?”
They walked up Union Street, then climbed up toward Pacific Heights and walked along Broadway where the wind was stronger.
“Your mom told me she came to visit you last night.”
“Only so she could tell me to come home. It wasn’t like she wasn’t waiting the whole time just so she could say that.”
“She told me she didn’t ask for anything.”
“Lies like that,” Maria said almost under her breath, the comment almost lost in the wind, her anger at her mother surfacing again. Marquez stopped walking when he heard it.
“Lies like what?” he asked.
“That’s why she came by,” Maria said. “She hates me.”
“Or you’re so angry you think you hate her. She’s worried because she cares so much, and like any parent she doesn’t want you to take a wrong turn.”
“Like I’m the first person to ever take a break before going to college.”
“She’s afraid you’ll end up without a college degree and working for minimum wage.”
“My friends don’t have college degrees.”
“It’s like a business card here, Maria. A degree is a bare minimum in a lot of places you might go to work.”
“Well, I don’t want to become a suit. I don’t want to live that kind of life.”
“It’s not about what you don’t want to be; it’s about what you do want to be.”
“Mom thinks I’m ungrateful, lazy, and selfish. She was disgusted when I said I want to go shopping instead of look at a college I could never get into anyway.”
“Things get said, and you’d better learn how to forget, if you can’t forgive.”
“How about when your own mother says them?”
“My mother dumped my sister, your aunt, and me at my grandparents when I was nine and my sister twelve. She was going to come back when she ‘got her head clear.’ But we never saw her again. She got killed in a train wreck in India. She was on a spiritual quest going somewhere to find out about herself, and my father was always going to take us back from his parents and raise us, but somehow he was always in the process of getting his life together. The year before they dumped us we lived in a tent up the coast. I was almost two years behind in school when I started, and all I really knew how to do well was fight. Two years behind and big for my age.”
“How come you’ve never told me about living in a tent?”
“It’s not the kind of thing you brag about. The kids at the funeral today just lost their dad. I knew their father well enough to know they just lost the best friend they’ll ever have. You and your mom are going to have to deal with what you’ve said to each other. The only way to do that is to keep talking and put the bad stuff behind you. It’s time you come home.”
She hung tough. “I’ve got to get back to work, Dad.”
He walked down with her, then drove to the Humane Shelter and picked up the cat that Anna had abandoned and August had dumped on the shelter. Marquez wrote a check to the shelter, and the woman there found Bob’s collar.