Fast Friends (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 3) Page 3

  “If you hold your horses, I’ll tell you what happened. So, when she didn’t show up around dinnertime…Thomas was coming over. He moved back into the district, you know. Bought himself a house over in Eagle Rock. Anyway, Junior went looking for her and there she was, hanging from a grapefruit tree. Made herself a noose from a rope I had in the garage. I bought that over at Home Depot too.”

  Iris wrenched her torso in response to a chill even though her office was warm. Suddenly exhausted, she flopped into her chair. “I’m stunned.”

  “Old Doc Vanderstaad was impressed with the knot she’d done up.”

  “Was she depressed again? Did she leave a note?”

  “Note?” he shouted as if the suggestion was outrageous. “There was no note. Didn’t expect there would be. She was never much on writing.”

  “That’s not my experience. She used to always send me a card at Christmas with a little note in it.”

  “There was no note. I already told you.”

  “I thought she’d been maintaining okay.”

  “This was no surprise to me. If you’d bothered to keep in touch, you’d think the same thing. I always wondered why you turned your back on her.”

  “I did not turn my back on her.”

  “The hell you didn’t. She practically raised you and your sister. Treated you girls like her own. I don’t know why I should expect anything different from you, considering the way her own daughter acted. Both you girls thought you could go away and leave it all behind, but it don’t work like that. It’s too late to be sorry now.”

  Iris bolted from her chair. C’mon, Iris Ann. Don’t let him do this to you. You’re not ten years old anymore. She took a deep breath and regained her composure. “Does Paula know?”

  “I don’t know where she is. I don’t want her regretting for the rest of her life that she didn’t go to her own mother’s funeral. It’s tomorrow. You have to make sure she comes.”

  “Mr. DeLacey, I don’t know where Paula is either. It must be twenty years since I’ve talked to her.”

  He paused.

  After his seemingly endless words, the silence was unnerving. Iris worried her string of pearls.

  “I thought you two girls were friends.”

  “We were friends, Mr. DeLacey. We…drifted. There was a fight and…”

  “That’s Paula for you. Always pushing everyone’s buttons. I don’t know where she gets it from. Her mother wasn’t the smartest female in the world, but she had a good heart. Paula owes it to her mother to come to her funeral. Your mother said that if anyone could get Paula to come, it’d be you.”

  “My mother?”

  “I told you she gave me your number.”

  Iris again started pacing behind her desk. “Like I said, Mr. DeLacey, I don’t know how to contact Paula. Have you tried a private detective?”

  “Is this too much of a sacrifice for you? Think you can do something for someone other than yourself for a change?”

  Iris slapped her hand on her desk. “Mr. DeLacey, I’ll do what I can to find Paula but the funeral’s tomorrow. That’s not much time.”

  “You could find her if you wanted to.”

  “I’ll see you at the funeral.” She hung up before he could say another word.

  Just then, the message light on the telephone began to blink. Her phone mail had apparently been restored.

  Later that afternoon, Iris looked around and realized she didn’t know where she was. The bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Ten had put her in a somnambulistic state and she had lost track of her whereabouts. Her Thomas Brothers’ Guide to Los Angeles and Orange Counties had sat open on the TR’s passenger seat for the past few weeks to aid her in devising routes around the impossible traffic. Her office hours, from six in the morning to two in the afternoon— set to parallel the New York stock exchanges—used to give her a reprieve from the weekday rush-hour traffic. But the earthquake had shaken everything up. Today she was enjoying the traffic’s monotonous predictability. It explained why she couldn’t do anything else.

  She drove with the Triumph’s top down, slouched in the driver’s seat with her head against the headrest, relishing the perfect seventy-five-degree weather that had prevailed since the earthquake. Southern California seemed to be giving her denizens a long, sultry look and a soft caress while knowingly whispering in their ears, “I’ll rock your world and you’ll love me anyway.”

  The weather reminded her of the warm skies that had prevailed after another earthquake—the San Fernando quake of February 1971. The bloody events surrounding that quake had permanently changed the Thornes’ and DeLaceys’ lives.

  A Jeep cut in front of Iris. Its vanity license plates taunted: R U FREE.

  She flipped open her cellular phone, called her sister, and told her about Bill DeLacey and Dolly and Paula.

  “Why is he so desperate for Paula to come to the funeral?” Lily asked. “He never gave a damn about her.”

  “And then there’s Dolly’s phone message.”

  “Sounds like she fell off her rocker for good.”

  “Maybe it would be convenient for Bill DeLacey if everyone thought that,” Iris said dryly.

  “Are you saying she didn’t kill herself?”

  “In her message, she said she’d found her will, in which she’d left Bill everything, by the way, and didn’t remember writing it.”

  “If that’s true,” Lily said, “she could have blown his chances of ever building DeLacey Gardens.”

  “Bill said she’d been coming out of her fog. Maybe he was afraid she’d start to put together the missing pieces about everything that happened in seventy-one. If Dolly wanted to blow the whistle, building DeLacey Gardens would be the least of Bill’s problems.” Iris remembered the traffic and the Triumph. She glanced at its temperature gauge. The needle had moved close to the halfway mark but was still within the safe range.

  “Why do you want to get involved with the DeLaceys after all these years?”

  “Lily, it’s the last thing I want after everything I saw back then. I still have nightmares.”

  “I know you do.”

  “It bugs me that I never said anything.”

  “You were just a kid. Mom told you not to say anything because she was afraid something would happen to you.”

  “I don’t think she knows I told you.”

  “She does. I told her. You still haven’t answered my question. Why get involved with the DeLaceys again?”

  “Dolly said she didn’t have anyone else to turn to.”

  “What about her children?”

  “She felt they’re against her, too.”

  “Sounds paranoid.”

  “I know.” Iris eased into the next lane to avoid following a mammoth truck. “I guess I can hire a private detective to find Paula.”

  “How much will that cost?”

  “I don’t know. Couldn’t cost that much, could it?”

  “But the funeral’s tomorrow. The whole thing seems weird.”

  “Consider the source.”

  “Leave it alone, Iris.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Bill’s right. Paula should go to her mother’s funeral. Dolly would have wanted it that way. It’s the least I can do for her. When I was a kid, Dolly was kind to me when kindness was a rare commodity.”

  Lily said nothing.

  “Besides, the great William Cyril DeLacey himself told me I might think I can run away from the past, but I can’t. Lord knows I’ve tried.”

  “So you’ve decided what you’re going to do.”

  “Yeah. Find Paula.” At least she would try.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The night air on February 8, 1971, was clear with a cool snap that sharpened the sweet, thick scent of the citrus blossoms—like ice enhances lemonade. The old trees had grown thick and gnarled and occasionally a dead one stood barren and ghostly among them. The fruit, rarely picked, stayed on the branches year-roun
d, the rinds growing thicker and lumpier over time. Eventually the fruit blackened and hardened into small brittle balls that split when they hit the ground, revealing the bright pulp inside. The pulp eventually withered and the fruit was reduced to hard, black, hollow spheres that bore no resemblance to their earlier incarnations.

  In the citrus grove stood a small house that was originally built for the ranch’s workers. Now Gabriel Gaytan lived there alone, having given his daughter Dolores and her husband use of the large adobe house on top of the hill, which overlooked the grove, on their wedding day eighteen years ago. As another wedding gift, he’d given his daughter title to a small parcel of the ranch.

  The workers’ house had stood empty for years. Rancho Las Mariposas hadn’t employed any live-in help since it had been divided between Gabe and his two brothers after Gabe’s father died. His brothers caved into the land developers’ promises of riches and sold their parcels before their father’s corpse was cold. Gabe vowed that his five hundred acres would never leave the Gaytan family. Part of his strategy for keeping it in the family was to make sure his grandchildren were raised there, thereby bonding with the land. As for himself, he was content to spend the rest of his days at Las Mariposas. His funeral ashes were to be scattered over it. The land was the source of the Gaytan family’s strength. Without the land, they would be nothing.

  Since Gabe was a widower, the workers’ house was plenty large for him. There his exotic birds could sing and screech to their hearts’ content without bothering anyone. After moving into the workers’ house, Gabe added a patio for his birds, pouring the cement and raising the slatted wood canopy himself. The cages for the black myna, the small green Amazon parrot, and a brilliant blue-and-yellow macaw were now shrouded with the sheets that Gabe carefully wrapped around them each night.

  Normally the birds’ tittering and clucking as they soothed themselves to sleep emanated from the sheets, but a groaning, sputtering mechanical sound now drowned out the more subtle noises of the ranch at night.

  Fifty yards away, in the middle of the citrus grove, Gabe was building a wall. Les Thorne and Gabe’s cousin, Humberto De la Garza, were helping him, although Humberto seemed to be doing more drinking than helping.

  A makeshift scaffold straddled a six-foot-high, ten-foot-long wood frame. Steel supporting rods were set down the middle. It was a ramshackle thing with slushy wet cement oozing out here and there from between the loosely fitted planks. Gabe wasn’t much on details. He was more of a big-picture guy.

  Standing on a platform placed across the top of the frame, Gabe dug a shovel into an open sack of cement and flung the powder into a churning cement mixer. The platform bowed beneath the accumulated weight. A white powdery halo settled on his already caked skin, clothes, and black hair. He picked up a bottle of beer near his feet and sipped thoughtfully as he watched Les pour water from a bucket into the mixer. They worked by the light of a butane lantern wired to the scaffold.

  When the bucket was empty, Les tossed it to the ground, splashing water onto Humberto, who sat on the ground, leaning his back against a lemon tree.

  “Pince cabrón!” Humberto cursed as he abruptly rolled out of the way, still grasping his beer bottle. He slowly stood, first checking to make sure his head cleared the branches above him. He was six feet five inches tall. His head was big and square and topped with an unkempt mop of thick black hair. Dense hair, too uncultivated to be called a beard, covered the lower half of his face and the top of his neck. His thick lips, shiny with beer, protruded through the facial hair like two moist slugs. He staggered, almost stepping on a black, shaggy dog.

  “Watch it, Gigante!” Gabe said with annoyance. “Don’t step on Perro.”

  Humberto raised his hand which dwarfed the beer bottle he still held, and pointed at the dog. His voice was deep and resonant and clumsy with alcohol. “Damn thing’s always under my feet.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve drunk enough of my liquor?” Gabe asked.

  “What? You don’t want to show your cousin a little hospitality?”

  “Why don’t you do some work? Help me with this.”

  “I wouldn’t waste my time. That’s not going to mean nothing to DeLacey.”

  “It will. Every day it’ll remind him that beyond this, Bill DeLacey will not go.”

  “Looks like it’s already going to fall over,” Humberto said. “Probably won’t even be standing by tomorrow morning.”

  “This wall’s stronger than you think,” Gabe boasted. “It’s gonna be here a long time.”

  Les adopted a spread-legged stance on top of the scaffold and crossed his arms over his chest. His khaki work clothes, smeared with cement, and disheveled appearance did not obscure his blond good looks. His hair was clipped in a crew-cut style. His chest and arms had been built up by years of manual labor. His skin was tanned, the creases in the corners of his eyes whiter than the rest from squinting in the sun. Standing six feet tall, he cut an imposing figure. He was smiling with closed lips, not because he found something amusing but because he felt uncomfortable.

  Humberto raised his beer bottle in Les’s direction. “What are you smiling at, Smiley?”

  Les appeared embarrassed to be singled out. He drew his hand across his bristly hair and began opening another bag of cement.

  “Let him be,” Gabe ordered. “Bill DeLacey’s going to give him enough problems when he finds out his handyman is helping me.” He chuckled. “A handyman. Like DeLacey even bothers maintaining those rat traps of his. Well, he’s not building one here. I don’t care what promises he already made to investors. He can’t build on land that isn’t his. Fighting off developers is nothing new to me.”

  He sipped from the bottle and thoughtfully rolled the beer around his mouth. “Bill DeLacey. Comes to California without a pot to pee in. I give him a job. And what thanks do I get? He takes my daughter. A girl of sixteen and a man of thirty-eight. Old enough to be her father.” Gabe pleadingly held his hands out. “Was it so terrible, living with me? She never wanted for nothing.”

  “There’s no figuring women, amigo,” Humberto commiserated. “At least he made an honest woman of her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was pregnant, hombre.”

  Gabe waved dismissively. “I didn’t care about that. I would have liked raising the boy. I missed not having a son.” He frowned. “Maybe I should have married again after her mother died. Dolly was only nine. A girl needs a mother.” He shook his head as if there were no words adequate to express his thoughts.

  “It’s time to get over it, Gabe,” Humberto said. “It’s been eighteen years. She’s had three kids with him.”

  Les tipped the cement mixer bucket and poured wet cement into the frame. “Gabe, it’s gonna take you ten years to build this wall. We should build the whole frame and hire some cement trucks.”

  “This wall will make a statement to Bill DeLacey,” Gabe continued as if he hadn’t heard Les. “It’ll say, you might have my daughter and you might think you have your hands on the land I gave her, but you’ll never get your hands on the rest.” He began to laugh, rounding the flat planes of his face. “Even if Dolly’s stupid enough to give him her land, he can’t do nothing with it! He don’t have access to the street.” As he laughed, tears sprang into his eyes. His face was red and flushed from emotion and drink.

  Les climbed down from the scaffold and began gathering the buckets that were scattered on the ground. “I’m getting more water.”

  “Bring back some beer,” Humberto ordered.

  Humberto waited until Les’s footsteps on the dry leaves had faded before speaking. “Why don’t you do something about that DeLacey?”

  Gabe frowned. “Like what?”

  “C’mon. We could work it out, you know?”

  Gabe rubbed his chin.

  “Place like this, lots of things could happen to somebody.”

  The clattering of crickets became audible and the cement mixer’s noise subsided to
a hum as Les walked through the citrus grove to Gabe’s house. The dog trotted beside him, stopping now and then to investigate a noise or mark a tree, the tags that dangled from his collar tinkling together. In the patio, Les dropped the end of the garden hose into one of the buckets, then twisted on the water spigot. As the ten-gallon bucket filled, he walked to a kitchen window at the side of the house, from which a light glowed. The screened window was open.

  Dolly was in the kitchen, on her hands and knees next to a bucket of soapy water, feverishly scrubbing the floor with a steel wool pad held in her bare hand. The floor was covered with thick circles of soap, dirt, and wax intersected by two broad trails that Dolly had traced with her knees.

  She was barely five feet tall and reed thin, never sitting still long enough to gain an ounce. In spite of her slender figure, there was a voluptuousness about her. Her lips were full, her teeth pearly, and her smile almost too broad. Her cheekbones were pronounced on her round face. Her nose was flat with large flared nostrils. Her thick black hair grew low on her forehead and was rolled into a dense coil at the base of her neck, where it was secured with a carved wood, mother-of-pearl inlaid, two-pronged pin. She was thirty-five years old.

  She had pulled the wide skirt of her dress between her legs from behind and had tucked it into the front of her belt, turning it into loose pantaloons. The dress’s scoop neckline hung away from her body, revealing the tops of her breasts, which jiggled as she scrubbed.

  She frowned at the linoleum as she scrubbed and scrubbed. Her frown deepened as she worked at a particularly difficult, practically invisible speck. She bore down on the spot, grunting and whimpering, rubbing and rubbing. The room was quiet except for Dolly’s mutterings and the wet metallic noise of the steel wool on the linoleum. A patch of dirty soap grew pink as she continued to scrub even though the steel wool had cut her hand.

  Les watched her. He looked at her dangling breasts and her perspiration-dappled brow. As she leaned closer to the floor, he leaned closer to the window screen.