Little Dog Laughed (13 page)

“It was dark out there. Somebody was throwing up. When he got through and staggered back inside, this ragged little dude, Porfirio, told me it was gringos who shot the kid—gringos in jungle fatigues and combat boots and berets, all right? They roared up to the irrigation canal in a Cherokee, dragged the kid out, bound and gagged, forced him to his knees in the reeds, and shot him point-blank through the head. Then they yanked the gag out and untied his hands, and dumped his body into the water. They scrambled back into the four-by-four and tore off out of there. People in the shacks heard the shot—it woke them up. But Porfirio was the only one who saw. He was taking a bath in the ditch, under a bridge, where he could hang his clothes and put his soap and towel. The plumbing is kind of primitive down there. He was so close to these killers, he pissed, thinking they’d seen him.”

“Why didn’t he tell the police when they came?”

“I asked him the same thing.” Cecil drank off the beer in the glass, and poured what was left in the bottle into the glass, watching it foam. “Maybe he’s more than an illegal. He could be a fugitive. He just said you don’t talk to law enforcement types if you can’t show them a green card. And he didn’t tell anyone until he learned the kid was from Los Inocentes. That’s unusual in San Feliz. And no one in San Feliz is political. They’re refugees from hunger, that’s all. And Porfirio heard that this kid was political, frightened, hiding out. So he thought he’d better tell somebody. And he chose me.”

“And does he know who the death squad were?”

Cecil gave his head a glum shake. “Here we get into folklore. There’s this mythic character, El Coronel, okay? No one knows who he is, but he’s said to have a secret army hidden in the mountains. The man who started the legend was named Tamayo. His old car broke down back of nowhere, he went for help, got lost, and stumbled on these young Latinos dressed like Vietnam grunts in some dusty canyon. Guns, grenades, the works. Some of them were running hunched over up a creek bed, and the rest were shooting at them from the trees.”

“And Tamayo,” Dave said, “isn’t around anymore—right?”

“Right. Like your flying dude, McGregor,” Cecil said. “His plane crashed. Did you see it on the news?”

“It’s bad news for Underhill.” Dave smoked, frowning into the shadows. “Will Porfirio let you put him on TV?”

“Hell, no. And even if he would, I couldn’t, could I? I mean, who knows if what he says is true? He can’t prove it. He was alone in that canal. But if I need him, I have his address—nineteen twenty-two City View. And he’s got my phone number.”

Dave grunted, drank whiskey, tapped ash off his cigarette. “Why the hell did Hunsinger run?”

“Say what?” Cecil said. He rose and reached for Dave’s glass, in which only ice remained. He went away into the tall darkness. While Dave outlined for him what he had learned about Hunsinger today, Cecil made the Glenlivet bottle gurgle, its cork squeak going back into place. He got himself another Heineken from the little refrigerator, and brought bottle and Scotch glass back into the light. He put the glass into Dave’s hand. Dave said, “Thank you,” and wound up the Hunsinger log, “But now, with this story of Porfirio’s, I wonder if Hunsinger wasn’t telling the truth, after all.”

“About the midnight visitors to Underhill’s?”

“The description jibes.” Dave drank, set the glass under the lamp, stubbed out his cigarette, lit another, and scowled at Cecil through the smoke. “And the dead boy was from Los Inocentes. Among all those Mexican farm workers. Hiding out. Frightened. And Streeter was running. Frightened. By something he’d learned for his story about Los Inocentes—the newsbreak of the decade. You don’t suppose—”

“I don’t suppose it was this dead boy Streeter went to interview on that long drive he took he wouldn’t tell Chrissie about? I don’t suppose the boy knew who had kidnapped Cortez-Ortiz, and told Streeter the name, and got killed for telling? Is that what you’re asking?”

“You understand me so well.” Dave coaxed him with a smile. “Why aren’t we working together anymore?”

“Seems to me we are.” Cecil filled his glass again. “I saw Dr. Scheinwald at County USC Medical Center, like I promised. And there wasn’t any need to drive to Sierra Madre to find the Tom Fraser family. They were right there at the hospital—mother and daughter, anyway. Excuse me.” He rose, and left the lamplight again, this time to cross the wide room. A door closed. After a minute, a toilet flushed. Water ran in the pipes. The door opened. Cecil came back into the light, sat down, took another gulp of beer.

“Your attachment to dramatic pauses is getting out of hand,” Dave said. “What about Glendenning’s alibi?”

“Whose what?” Cecil looked bewildered. “Oh, that. He was there with them, just the way he said—all night.”

“Thank you. That’s nice to know.” Dave frowned at the telephone on the dark desk. “I wonder why Ray Lollard hasn’t got back to me with a location on that phone number I found at Underhill’s. And an up-to-date list of Streeter’s call-outs. Ray never kept me waiting before.”

“You’re never home,” Cecil said, “and you always forget to activate the answering machine.”

“I don’t forget. It’s deliberate.” Dave drank the last of his whiskey. “Irrational, but deliberate.” He moved the glass in a circle, listening to the ice rattle. “I’ll phone him in the morning.”

“You want to know,” Cecil said, “whether Streeter rang somebody in San Feliz?”

“Somebody named Rafael,” Dave said. “Ray told me the number was down among the big produce ranches.”

“Dave, I can’t drive all the way to San Feliz to ask if anybody saw Streeter there the night the boy was killed. It would take the best part of a day. Donaldson won’t give me the time. Everybody’s on vacation. I’m already working double shifts. You know that.”

Dave put out his cigarette. “You ready for bed?”

Cecil sighed. “I thought you’d never ask.”

F
LAT LAND STRETCHED AWAY
in every direction to mountains three inches high on the horizon. The earth was yellow-brown, striped with green rows of lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower. Sealed in the air-conditioned Jaguar, Dave smelled the crops, especially the onions when he passed onion fields. The wheels of the Jaguar rattled the rough planks of bridges across irrigation canals. The sluggish water in these ditches mirrored a hard hot sky the blue of steel. Now and then a trail of dust far off across a field showed where a truck carried crates of harvested produce, or piles of empty crates, or a crowd of brown-skinned field hands in ragged straw hats, dusty coveralls, cracked shoes, men, women, children. He saw other workers, stooped, laboring in the fields. Or gathered around an old tanker truck for water to drink.

San Feliz was a loose scatter of buildings, stucco over frame mostly, some stucco over cement block, some sun-bleached yellow brick. Clumps of pepper trees and ragged-barked eucalyptus trees shadowed them. There were big old date palms sometimes. The shops sold hardware, groceries, clothes. A single bank occupied a corner. The lone motel called itself the Rest E-Z. A middle-aged woman, scrawny in walking shorts and a halter, was turning a garden hose on plantings in front of the straw-color motel units, but the petunias there were wilting anyway. Ed’s Oasis was a tavern in a gaunt frame building whose jigsaw decorations where spooled supports met porch roofs had cracked in the dry heat of decades and sections fallen away. Pickup trucks stood in front of the place, a lumbering Cadillac, rickety RVs, a sports car. Dust coated them all. Dave was thirsty, but he drove past.

The settlement of Mexican field hands was a mile beyond San Feliz itself. He crossed a canal bridge to a cluster of twenty scaly stucco shacks long ago painted bright pink, yellow, purple. The paint had flaked away in patches. Iron pipes with faucets stuck up out of the ground beside the doors of the shacks. The faucets dripped. Little brown kids played in the puddles, squatting, muddying their diapers—those that wore diapers. Chickens pecked in the dust. Flies buzzed. From the open windows of one shack drifted thin radio music—marimba, accordion, guitars. Somewhere, a goat bleated.

A fat grandmother sat on a doorstep watching the children, her eyes milky with cataracts. A thin grandmother without teeth leaned in a doorway, bony arms crossed, staring out at the fields. One who might have been her sister sat on a broken kitchen chair under a dusty oleander heavy with pink flowers, and fanned herself with a tattered magazine. In the shade at the side of one shack, a skin-and-bones old man lay on a rusty tube-and-webbing lawn chaise beside a stack of gray, threadbare automobile tires. A cheap cotton blanket covered him to the chest. A Gatorade jar filled with water stood in dry weeds beside the cot. Back of the same house, a very pregnant young woman bent over a green plastic laundry basket, lifted wet clothes from it, pinned them to a sagging wire. Dave stopped the Jaguar, waited for the dust it had raised to settle, then got out of the car. The heat was stunning. He shed his jacket, laid it over the seatback, picked up the book Dan’l had given him the other morning, closed the car door, and went to talk to the girl.

“My name is Brandstetter,” he said in Spanish, and held the book out. It was a collection of Adam Streeter’s newspaper and magazine pieces, including the one that had got him a Pulitzer Prize three years ago. Streeter’s picture was on the back. “I am an insurance investigator. This man”—he tapped the picture—“was insured by my company. He was killed, no one knows by whom. Shot with a gun. I am trying to trace his actions on that day. Did you ever see him here?”

She tilted her head at Dave, a child’s red romper suit dripping in her hands. Her brown eyes looked wryly amused. “A famous man who wrote books? What would he be doing in a place like this?” She turned and pinned the romper suit to the clothes wire. “Who would come here who does not have to?”

“He was a journalist, a reporter,” Dave said, and smiled slightly. “So he must have been looking for a story to write, don’t you think? Are there no stories to write in San Feliz?”

Her laugh was dry and brief, the look in those large, luminous eyes a little scornful. “There are many stories—but not that would interest people like him, people like you We grow hungry and we eat.” With a soft grunt because of the child large in her belly, she bent to lift another bright garment from the basket. She was barefoot, and her feet were grimy. “We get up in the morning before it is light, and climb into trucks, and go to the field and work until it is dark, and come home tired. And we go to bed. Children are born, and old people die.” She turned from pinning the thin orange blouse to the line, and glanced along the side of the house to where the old man lay, eyes shut, but not asleep. In pain. “And when there are no more crops to gather, we move on. It is”—she sighed and wiped her chubby brown hands on her faded blue wrap-around skirt—“always the same, perhaps uninteresting, even to us. But it is life.” She laid a hand on her swollen belly and smiled down at it—not sentimentally, but thoughtfully. “It is our gift from God.”

“How soon will your child be born?” Dave asked.

“Soon.” She scrabbled clothespins out of a rumpled pink plastic sack in a corner of the basket, and dropped them into a pocket of the skirt. “That is the reason I am here, and not out in the fields today. But no—I do not know this writer of books. I never saw him.” Bending again over the green basket, she waved a hand. “You would do better to ask the old women. They have nothing to do but see who comes and goes.”

“The old see only what is past,” Dave said. “What about the young man who was shot and his body put into the irrigation ditch? That was no ordinary happening. Did you know that boy? Did you know his name?”

Fear showed in her eyes. She opened them wide for an instant and quickly shook her head. “No, no. I know nothing about that. No one here knew him. He was a stranger.”

“Somebody fed him,” Dave said, “he slept somewhere.”

“
Sí
. But not I.” Her hands moved nervously. “Not my family. We did not know him.”

“Rafael,” Dave said. “Was that his name? I have it on a slip of paper written by Adam Streeter. I am told by the telephone company that Streeter talked to him down here.”

She glanced around her, pale, searching the empty, sleepy settlement for a sign of anyone listening. Crows cawed in the distance. The goat bleated again. A child cried. The grandmother with the magazine had dropped it. She slept, chin on bony chest. “
Sí
, Rafael,” the young woman whispered. “Why did they kill him? Why did he try to hide here?”

“From the death squad of El Coronel?”

“From the immigration,” she said. “They do not want refugees from Los Inocentes in this country.”

“But did you hear that it was El Coronel’s commandos who shot him?”

She shrugged impatiently. “It is talk, nothing more.”

“Were the people he stayed with”—Dave pushed his hair back, and his hand came away damp—“from Los Inocentes also?” The glare was harsh. He narrowed his eyes and looked around at the lonely buildings. “Where can I find them?”

“They are no longer here.” Her motions, pinning up the clothes, had become quick, jerky. “They departed that night. Immigration thinks they are all communists. Please,
señor
, I must finish with these clothes. I must lie down, for the sake of my baby.” She glanced at the motionless old man again. “I must take my father his medication.”

“Why is he not in a hospital?” Dave said.

“They can do nothing. He is dying. He asked to die at home.” Her laugh was joyless. “This is the only home he has.”

“Will you name the baby for him?” Dave said.

“
Sí
,” she said, and smiled. “Victorio.”

“That is a fine name,” Dave said, and went back to the car. He tossed the book inside, but before he got in after it, he looked at the frayed wires that hung limply from thin poles in a crooked row behind the shacks. Power lines. No one had a telephone out here. He tossed the jacket into the rear seat, sat behind the Jaguar’s leather-wrapped wheel, slammed the door, started the engine. The air from the dashboard jets blew on his sweat-soaked shirt. He swung the heavy car around and, careful to avoid children and chickens, headed back toward the bridge of rusty-bolted beams and planks across the irrigation ditch. There, on a pole beside the bridge, a helmet-shaped blue transparent plastic covering housed a telephone. He stopped the car, reached into the back for his jacket and the reading glasses tucked into it, got out of the car, and stepped to read the number on the pay phone above its rows of steely pushbuttons. This was the pay phone Ray had told him about this morning. Adam Streeter had rung this number not once but three times in the two days before his death. Dave put the glasses into his shirt pocket and stood on the bank looking down at the tall reeds growing in the murky water. Shadows lurked under the bridge, where Porfirio had brought his soap and towel that ugly night to have a bath.