The Unbidden Truth (14 page)

“I don't believe a word of that,” Carrie said through her laughter. “You know what I think? I think you're a two-bit four-flusher.”

He looked deeply hurt. “Carrie, honest, cross my heart, Boy-Scout honor, semper fi, hope to die, I ain't never flushed a four in my life.”

After putting her groceries away Carrie wandered back downstairs and Herbert yelled for her to come on in. “Making quiche,” he said. “You'd think as good as they can cook, the French would take up spelling, but they don't. Anyways, I figure that Darren will come in hungry after a weekend of camp food with his lady friend, and I know Todd will be hungry. Boys that age have an appetite. So we'll have quiche ready and the roast in the oven…”

He was working butter into flour as he rambled on. He
sprinkled water on it and stirred with a fork, and soon had a ball of dough on the counter, rolling it out, talking all the time. She watched his hands and suddenly she was seeing a different kitchen.

 

“What are you making, Gramma?”

“Cherry pie. The first cherries of the season are the best.”

“Can I help?”

“Yes. Bring your stool and wash your hands.”

Gramma gave her a lump of dough and a tiny rolling pin. “Your mother used that when she was your age,” she said.

“It's like Play-Doh,” Carolyn said, making a snowman.

Gramma brought out a tiny pie pan and put it on the table. Carolyn had never seen one like it before. “It's a tart pan,” Gramma said.

“Like the Queen of hearts made some tarts,” Carolyn said. Gramma smiled and they recited together: “All on a summer's day. The knave of hearts he stole the tarts and took them quite away.”

Carolyn knew what a knave was. Daddy told her, but she never knew that a tart was just a little pie. She loved the shiny tart pan.

“You'll spread butter on it, and a little sugar and cinnamon, and a spoon of jam in the middle,” Gramma said. “Then we'll have a tea party, just you and I, out on the terrace.” She had a tiny teapot and cups, blue and pink with yellow flowers.

 

“And in the oven it goes,” Herbert said.

Carrie shook herself, cold all over, and without a word walked from the kitchen, up the stairs to her own apartment.
She went into the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed, hugging her arms around herself.

She whispered, “Raspberry jam.”

O
n Monday morning when Barbara entered her reception room Bailey and Shelley were moving the big easel with the red poppy on one side and topo maps on the other into Barbara's office. She greeted Maria and followed the easel with Frank right behind her.

The four of them were still getting seated when Maria brought in the coffee, glanced around and left again. Barbara turned to Bailey. He never looked happy, but that morning he was more dour than usual.

“I read your reports,” she said. “What else?”

“I thought you'd want a good night's sleep, and left something out,” he said. “Maybe it's the jackpot. Maybe not.” He went to the topo map and studied it a moment, then placed a black stickpin in the desert. Almost tonelessly he went on. “On July 30, 1972, a couple of tourists in a big camper were
heading up State 2.” He pointed to it on the map. “Something came loose on top of the camper, and the guy stopped and climbed up to fasten it down again. From up there he took a look around and saw something funny, and went out on the desert to see if it was what he thought. It was. The body of a man, about a hundred yards from the road. He hightailed it back down to Ocotillo and reported it. The sheriff went up to have a look. Then the state police came in, and they found fifteen more bodies, spread out for about four miles.” He pointed to the black pin. “Around there, middle of nowhere.”

“Dead from what?” Barbara asked when he paused.

“Exposure, dehydration, heat exhaustion. They figured they had been dead for three to four weeks, and they were pretty well picked over. Buzzards, coyotes, you name it. Not a scrap of paper on them, no way to identify any of them, just a bunch of sun-bleached bones, burned skin and rags.”

There was a long silence. Frank stood up and went to the map to study it. Ocotillo had the red stickpins indicating the two Wenzel jobs that had come in late with cost overruns.

“Is there more?” Barbara asked.

“Nothing real,” Bailey said. “The usual investigation. No one in Mexico wanted to talk about the illegals who went north to find work and bring home gringo dollars. Border guards didn't know anything. They could have walked in, or could have been driven in and dumped. It made a few local papers, even a paragraph in the San Diego papers, but attention was on Vietnam, Nixon—who knows what else?—and that kind of thing happened before, and it's happened since. And there it still sits. Just a bunch of illegals who had no business being where they were to begin with. Move on. One guy almost made it to the road, but what good that would have done
him is anybody's guess. Not much traffic out there today and less then. The next nearest one was two miles in.”

Barbara got up and walked to her desk, banged her fist on it. “Someone must have seen them crossing the border. You can't hide a truckload of people.”

“Sure they saw them. A few bucks cross hands, turn your head, the truck passes and memory slips a cog. Make sure the gringo border patrol is somewhere else, home free.” He slouched lower in his chair.

“How it worked, and maybe still does, is you need workers to pick cotton or strawberries, work in the chicken processing plant, construction, whatever, and you get in touch with a guy who gets in touch with a guy in Mexico. Set up a date and place for pickup. The Mexican guy collects workers from the countryside and gets them to the pickup place. A lot of them follow the work wherever it takes them and send money home to the family. Some work a few weeks or months and head for home. Some are never heard from again. In most cases the truck never crosses the border. But now and then someone goes down with an empty truck to a village or town near the border, turns the truck over to the local helper for safekeeping and spends the day sightseeing. Next morning, there's a bunch of workers waiting, and the other cargo space has been emptied and repacked with something else overnight. Let the workers off somewhere near the border when you're done with them and drive an empty truck down again. It's a big border, a long stretch of not much.”

“Shelley, are you all right?” Frank asked, still standing by the map.

Shelley looked deathly pale. She moistened her lips. “Nineteen seventy-two, that's the summer Joe Wenzel went to Los Angeles, and H. L. Blount left.”

“That's when Larry and Nora Wenzel went down to pick up their workers and came back with an empty truck,” Barbara said harshly, standing by her desk.

“Is that what Robert Frye was investigating?” Shelley asked.

“Senator Atherton got a letter six years later, in the spring of 1978,” Barbara said. She repeated what she had already told Frank about her conversation with Atherton. “The girl who wrote the letter thought it was about slave labor, but Robert Frye said it was guns and dope. The Wenzels had been in Eugene for three years by then.”

“Leave it alone, Barbara,” Frank said, moving away from the map. He sat down again. “It's thirty years old, and you can't let yourself be distracted by it until after Carrie's trial.”

After a moment she nodded and went back to her own chair. “Then I'll go after them,” she muttered.

“Then we'll go after them,” Frank said.

“Anything else for me?” Bailey asked. “And don't tell me to go looking for the girl who wrote that letter. No name, no address, not even a town. Zilch.”

She shook her head. “What I want is a full account of the accident that killed Joe and Larry's mother, and when their father fell apart, their home life, school records. Everything.”

He groaned.

“And, Shelley, I'd like you to go talk to wife number two again, Alexis O' Reilly. Get a formal statement about when Joe retired, anything she can recall from that time. Get it notarized, the works. And after that?” She spread her hands. “I don't know.”

“It doesn't seem reasonable for Joe to have been blackmailing his brother over the dead men, does it?” Shelley said. “I mean, why wait until six years later to start?”

“A good question,” Barbara said. “I wish to God I knew the answer.”

Shelley and Bailey moved toward the easel a few minutes later. She told them to leave it. When they went out together, Frank didn't stir from his chair.

Barbara went to stand at the map, seeing again that desolate country without a tree, a shrub, an outcropping to offer shade. Ninety at two in the morning and, as soon as the sun rose, the temperature would start to climb and be over 120 at four-thirty or five in the afternoon. She remembered the dust devils swirling in Arizona, abrading whatever they encountered. And the water mirages, just ahead out of reach, always out of reach.

“How long would it take?” she asked in a low voice.

“I don't know. Not long, an hour, less.” He cleared his throat. “You can't use any of this, Bobby. You know that.”

“I know they stranded those workers, abandoned them in hell. I know Joe was frightened, or simply couldn't stomach it. He ran and escaped with girls, drink, school, music, and didn't go back until the company was well out of California. And he got spooked again when the Frye family was wiped out, and that time he didn't go back.” She turned to face Frank. “I know it's all connected.”

“No,” he said. “You intuit it. Three people knew what happened. Two of them aren't going to tell you, and the third one took to his grave whatever he knew. Intuition's a powerful tool. You couldn't do your job without it, but you can't present it as evidence, and even if you had proof, you couldn't use it. Larry and Nora Wenzel aren't on trial, Carrie Frederick is. That's the reality you have to deal with first and foremost. You have to put this aside and walk in the
prosecutor's shoes for now. Build the case they're building and see if you have anything to counter it, and if you don't, you have to think about a plea bargain. You have to keep your focus on Carrie or you'll lose her. What happened that Saturday night last July in that motel room? That's where the prosecution will start and where they'll fight every inch of the way to keep you.”

“It started on Friday when he went to the bank, visited his safe-deposit box and left with a thousand dollars. That was the beginning of the end.”

 

After Frank left, Barbara sat at her desk for a long time, unable to erase the images of the brutal desert from her mind. She stirred finally and began to look through the folders until she found the snapshot of the Wenzel brothers and their wives with their truck. The original was too small to see their features well, and they were shadowed by the vehicle. She put that one down and picked up the enlargement. Tweedledee and Tweedledum, she thought, comparing the two young men. But now she could see that their faces were not just shadowed, they also were darkened with emerging beards as if both of them needed frequent shaves. They were smiling.

She remembered what the motel manager had told her, how scandalized he had been with Joe's appearance when he returned in the late afternoons—dirty and unshaved. He cleaned himself up before dinner, and before he lingered in the bar to listen to Carrie play. But by afternoon he probably had looked like a bum.

After a few minutes she realized that she had been gazing at the topo map again. She got up, crossed her office and turned it to face the wall with the O'Keeffe poppy showing,
then sat down once more to read the newest reports from Sylvia, which she had skipped the night before.

Sylvia reported that Nora and Larry both had had affairs. She was crazy about her sons, and her two-year-old grandson. Larry would be gone for a week in November after the first good rain. He went down to the Rogue River with pals every year for steelhead fishing, Nora had confided. She had said wistfully that maybe he would fall into the river and not come out again, then she had laughed and said just joking. But she had not been joking, Sylvia had added. Sylvia planned to have a professional photographer for her Halloween party, and she would tell him to get a lot of shots of Nora and Larry.

And what does that have to do with Joe's murder? Barbara asked herself. She had no answer. Instead, she looked at the chair where Frank had been sitting when he lectured her, and she realized that she thought of it as a lecture. “See, Dad,” she said softly, “I also
know
that Larry and Nora somehow managed to kill him even if I don't know yet how they pulled it off.”

After a few minutes she went to Shelley's door and said, “Bailey's coming by at around four. Sit in if you'd like. I have a long shopping list for him. And something for you. When you see Alexis on Friday, find out where Joe kept his safe-deposit box key, and if he had a safe at home. It doesn't have to be in her signed statement, I just want to know.”

Bailey arrived promptly at four and helped himself to a drink. He scowled at the O'Keeffe poppy and shook his head. “That's indecent.”

“So much for art,” Barbara said. “What do you have?”

“Wenzel family. Long or short?”

“You know better. Keep it short.” His detailed report would be in the folder he put on the round table. It could wait for later.

“Right. Good people, upright and poor. The old man worked for a department store, delivery job, minimum. The mom cleaned a couple of neighborhood stores three nights a week. Larry got out of high school, moved out and went right to work as a carpenter's helper for a company building new docks or warehouses. Joe was still in school when Mom and Pop went on a church picnic. It was on a lake up in the mountains. There was a boating accident and she couldn't swim. Bingo. Two years later Joe got out of school and Larry and Nora got married. The construction company moved its operations out in the boonies somewhere and Larry and Nora followed, and before long Joe moved in with them. The old man took to drink about then. A couple of D.U.I.'s and he lost his job, then lost the rental house, and got in a couple of fights. Four years after his wife died, he was found more dead than alive and he kicked in the hospital a couple of days later. His head busted in, beaten up, like that.”

There was a little more, but that was the gist of it. The boys had never been in trouble, they both had been pretty good students and had after-school jobs as soon as they were old enough.

Bailey shrugged. “The all-American-family success story.”

“Okay,” Barbara said. “Is Herbert still hanging out at the restaurant with Carrie?”

“Nope. After he got the place wired, there was no good excuse for hanging around. I've got another guy keeping an eye out while she's in there. You know, this is starting to add up to big bucks.”

“Right. A few more things for you. When and how did Joe hurt his wrist?” She paused as Bailey got out a notebook and began to write. She had a long list of questions and went
down her notes, checking off items, then said, “This might be a little harder. I want a fairly recent photograph of Joe, not as a corpse. I have that one. Wife number three, Tiffany Olstead, might have one that's ten years old and if that's all to be found, it will have to do. I don't know how to suggest you get it if it exists.”

“Easy. I break into her place at three in the morning and search.”

“If that's what it takes,” she said. “Also, what's it like when guys go to a fishing camp for a week at a time? What do they do besides fish?”