Thicker Than Blood (4 page)

But he’s a good-hearted, decent guy. He knows me. Even the worst of me. I’d be taken care of. I’d be rich.

She peered over the rim of her mug and smiled gently. “Let me think about it.”

“Sure. You think on it.”

Bruno drank his tea and changed the subject to his favorite complaint, environmentalists. “We give them land for wetlands. We give them water. What more do they want? My arm? My leg? No, they want to put us out of business.”

He peered at her and stopped. “Rachel, sweetie, you look tired.”

“I am. It hasn’t been a terrific day. I saw Pop. He looks awful. He hit me up for some money.”

“Son of a gun. Marty was a good kid. But your grandpa, he spoiled him. Me, I never had no kids. Maybe I woulda done the same. But it’s a blessing Enrique is not alive to see him now.”

“Pop never got over Mama.”

“Fine woman. You are like her, I think.”

“You wouldn’t believe how wrong you are.” She was surprised to hear herself blurt: “You know Jason Karl was killed?

Bruno nodded. “Hit and run. Dirty coward. Jason and me, we weren’t friends—” He frowned at her. “That’s got nothing to do with the agency’s account with you, does it?”

“I think the car that ran over him is parked right here.” She pointed at the floor.

“Rachel baby, you’re not in any trouble, are you?”

“No, no. I’m fine. It’s just that it seems like the right thing would be to call the police, but Pop made me swear I wouldn’t.”

“At least Marty still has some brains left. You stay out of it. None of your business. You want I should have Aaron call you and explain why you don’t want to get mixed up in something like that? You want to hear about all the do-gooders who got their noses whacked off by cops?” Aaron Reiner had been her attorney.

“No,” she murmured. “I don’t need to talk to Aaron. You’re right.”

“Good. Now I got this proposition for you.”

Rachel squeezed her eyes shut. “I know.”

“Not that one,” Bruno cut in. “This is for while you’re making up your mind on the other. I got some money I want to put into this God-forsaken flophouse for cars. Partners. We could expand. Do some towing. Triple-A maybe.”

Rachel ran her hand through her hair. Her forehead was damp. She needed a shower. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? Piece of cake.”

She rested her head in her hand. “Maybe. I just don’t know.”

“Rachel, the other, take your time, I’m not gonna pressure you. But this is a walk in the park. Good for you, good for me.”

She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth. “Can you give me some time? I’m too tired to think.”

“What’s to think? Just say yes.”

Something surged inside her: “Bruno, you’re a dear, kind, wonderful guy. I owe you my life. And I love you. But I don’t think we should get married, and I like my business as it is.”

“Sorry, kid, I shoulda known better. You had a bad day. What can I say? I’m a dumb Dago. My wife, that’s what she used to say. Take your time. Think about it.”

Chapter Seven

By the time Bruno left, Rachel wanted nothing so much as to put her head down on the counter and sleep. But in bed, sleep did not come. Her arms, legs, head, felt made of lead. She was almost too weary to turn over, her eyes burned with fatigue.

Insomnia was something new. Even when she had plummeted into despair that night she was in jail—before Bruno made her bail—she had slept.

A little after midnight, she got up. With Clancy blinking at her from the arm of the sofa, she fixed some warm milk, moving about in the dark like a burglar in her own home for fear that light would wake her more.

The air in the apartment seemed thin and dead. She opened a window. The night had not cooled much. Maybe it would help to go outside, just for a few minutes. She threw on a tee shirt and jeans, took the elevator down, and slumped her disheveled body onto the small white bench in the narrow patch of green in front of the garage.

Magnolia trees that graced the entrance to the water district headquarters across the street had shed their blooms and the carpet of petals along the sidewalk looked like the aftermath of a ticker-tape parade. Lights in the offices were going out one at a time. The cleaning people finishing up, Rachel decided.

She leaned back and turned her face to the sky. The stars were barely visible in the haze above the city. It had been a night like this, the air swollen with unseasonable humidity, when she had nearly run that family off the road in Oakland.

Someone touched her arm. Rachel flinched away, opened her eyes.

“Honey? What you doin’ here?” A woman wearing glasses, a black woman, was towering over her.

“You’re the gal from the garage, aren’t you. Can’t sleep here. Ain’t safe.”

Rachel shrugged off the hand. “I’m okay.” Then, realizing where she was, she bolted upright on the bench and looked about. “Really, I’m fine. Sorry. You a cop?”

A deep laugh bubbled up from somewhere in the woman’s mid-section. “Don’t I wish! I just run the cleaning crew, honey.” She cocked her chin at the van parked across the street. Merry Maids was written in script across the side. “We’re not real merry, and we sure ain’t maids, but we do a bang-up job of cleaning offices.” She examined Rachel’s face. “You don’t look real good, honey.”

“Just tired, really.”

“Tell you what. I could use me a sit-down, and the rest of them aren’t quite through over here. Why don’t you just scoot yourself over a little?”

Rachel slid to the side. “I don’t usually sleep on the street.”

“Don’t guess you do.” The woman relaxed onto the bench, stretching her legs out and crossing her ankles. “How come you doing that tonight?”

“I was too tired to sleep.”

The woman nodded. “I know how that is. ’Specially when we got something big on our mind.”

“I don’t—” Rachel shook her head sharply. Then, in the way that even the most private people sometimes confide in strangers, she said, “I guess you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” the woman said lazily. She leaned her head back and the eyes behind the glasses closed.

Rachel examined her thumbnail. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

The woman chuckled dryly. “There’s damn little I ain’t seen or at least heard.”

Rachel drew in a breath, paused, let it out. “A guy I sort of know was killed, maybe on purpose.” A car passed, its lights making the black street look watery.

When Rachel described the tie tack, the tortoise and why she was certain it was Jason’s, a low whistle came from the sprawled-out form next to her.

“You telling me that water company over there—that place where I scrub toilets and empty trash—has got itself a murderer in its midst?” The woman turned her head, purplish streetlight glinting from her glasses, but she didn’t sit up.

“I guess that has to be one possibility.”

“Damn rhinoceros-size possibility, if you ask me. Horn and all.” The woman turned and looked Rachel in the eye. “Well, honey, it seems like you got to do something. You got to go to the cops.”

Rachel rubbed her fingertips across her forehead. “If I do that, I could be buying myself a major stack of trouble.”

“How so?”

Rachel knotted her hands and dropped them to her lap. “I’d rather not say.”

“Mmmm,” the woman nodded, sagely, then asked calmly, “You a criminal or something, yourself?”

“Of course not,” Rachel sputtered.

“Then maybe your reasons are a little bit small.”

Rachel studied the steel arm of the bench. “Look, I do have reasons, honest-to-God big reasons why I can’t go to the cops.”

“Like what?”

“Like for one thing, I don’t trust them, and they wouldn’t trust me.”

“Why not?”

Rachel gazed at the pinkish-purple haze that passed for sky in the streetlight and smog. “I’m an alcoholic and an addict,” she began. “I’ve been sober and clean for three years and two days and,” she looked at her watch, “about twenty hours. My mother died and my father bet the farm—literally—in Vegas, and lost it. I started taking some of my mom’s codeine. When that was gone, I had to drink. A lot.” She drew a ragged breath.

“But being hung over and strung out all the time wasn’t exactly great, so one night, I got me a noseful of some really terrific stuff. I wondered where it had been all my life. Here was the ultimate answer: Drink till you fall down, then snort a little coke or crystal and, wow, you’re ready to go again. And you make the nicest friends.”

A knowing chuckle came from the woman next to her. “Oh, yeah. Got some of those nice folks in my neighborhood.”

Rachel plunged on. “I guess I was lucky. I got arrested by some mean-minded cops. I had run a father and his two little kids into a ditch on the freeway. Thank God it only shook them up and made some bruises.” Rachel was staring at a point in mid-air. “But the father had a cell phone and my license number.

“I only had a blood alcohol content of point-one-six when the cops pulled me over. I was barely beginning to feel good. But I had five ounces of crystal on the floor of the back seat. After all, if you drink as much as I did, you need a lot of speed to wake you up. They thought I was a dealer. That was enough to get me free room and board at County.”

The silence drew out like a spider’s silk thread.

Rachel cleared her throat and went on. “An old family friend hired a wheeler-dealer attorney who got me off on a technicality. It seems that I was so drunk I had not understood my Miranda rights.” The drizzle of tears she’d been holding back escaped, leaving a wet path down her cheek.

The woman beside her barely stirred as she spun out the rest of the story. When she finished, Rachel wondered if her companion was asleep.

But after a moment, “That’s a reason, all right,” the black woman said laconically. “But it ain’t good enough. Unless the cops are still wanting you for something.”

“No, it’s over now, but they don’t forget. You ever take a look at some of the gorillas they call cops at Rampart? Would you trust them?”

The woman raised her chin. “I guess I would.”

“Why?”

“I’m just putting in time evenings with the Maids, waiting till my number comes up for the Academy.”

“The Police Academy?”

The black woman nodded solemnly. “When I was a kid, I never owned a doll. Not one diaper-wetter, not one Barbie. Nope. My brother Marcus and I played cops and robbers. He was older and bigger, so most of the time he made me be the robber. He never let me have the hat or the holster or the badge. He went to the Academy soon as he turned twenty-one. Now I plan to get me a badge of my very own. I know some cops are thugs, but most are decent like Marcus. And you got to ask yourself, what if someone killed you and the one person who knew it wouldn’t say anything?”

Rachel had been twisting the hem of her tee shirt. She gazed at the wrinkled fabric in her fingers, then dropped it. “Maybe it was just a genuine hit and run. What if the person who was driving didn’t mean to kill him and is just too scared to say anything?”

“I guess that’s possible. But you got no call to protect such a one.” The woman glanced across the street. Six or eight people were milling about the sidewalk. A boy was crossing the street toward them. “They’re done. They’re waiting on me. Got to go.” She heaved herself off the bench.

The boy, when he arrived, announced happily, “All done! Done. Done.”

Rachel peered at a face as round as a doughnut, the eye sockets narrow, the brows close above them. Chinese, she thought. Chinatown was only a few blocks away.

“This here is Peter,” the woman said.

“Nice to meet you, Peter. I’m Rachel.”

Peter’s head bobbed up and down energetically. A smile all but split his jaw from his face. “Pleased. Pleased.”

“You go on back. I’ll be right there,” the black woman told him. “Look both ways,” she called after him. “There’s cars all night long in this city.”

She turned back to Rachel. “They’re re-tards. Sweetest people in the world. Today they call them ‘special people’ or ‘de-velopmentally disadvantaged,’ or some such high-sounding words. But they don’t mind the word retard. They don’t understand the other words. It’s just so much noise in their ears. They know they’re different. They’re simple in a good sort of way. They don’t keep trying to pretend they’re something they’re not, like the rest of us do.”

“They clean offices?”

“Sure do. The ones the Community Foundation decides are ready. Good workers, every single one. They love earning their own money.”

Rachel gave her a weak smile. “Well, thanks for listening—I don’t think I caught your name.”

“Don’t think I threw it.” The woman chuckled. “Friends call me Goldie, it’s okay by me.”

For the first time in many hours, Rachel’s mouth made a real smile.

Chapter Eight

Rachel snapped wide awake and cranky with the first rays of the next morning’s sun. “Three hours sleep is worse than nothing,” she grumbled to herself.

She kicked off the covers and padded to the kitchen in bare feet only to find the can of Folgers empty. Exasperated, she flung it into the trash and opened another. The jagged lid caught her right thumb, and her elbow hit the newly opened can, spilling the coffee to the floor. She banged her fist on the countertop, which made the blood bubble up in the cut on her thumb.

Gritting her teeth, she went through the motions again. The wait for the aging Mr. Coffee to brew seemed interminable.

She took a sip, then set the mug on the counter and studied it. “China,” she muttered. “I like pottery.” Unsure whether she meant “China” literally or figuratively, as Bruno had described it, she took another sip of coffee, leaned back, propped her bare feet up on the counter, and stared blankly at the place where the wall met the ceiling. You’re losing it. Lucky someone decent found you on that bench.

Suddenly, her weary body shot past the merely awake state and revved up with tension. She sat for a while drumming her fingers on the arms of the barstool, then decided that running might help.

Five minutes later, in shorts, tee shirt, and a bright purple sweat band, she shoved a bagel into the toaster, fidgeted until it popped up, then jammed it between her teeth and headed for the door. She was still licking the crumbs away when she reached the ground level.