The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (5 page)

BOOK: The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five)
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"I'll call my shrink as soon as I get back to the office," she promised the elevator's padded wall. "I see what's happening here."

In the Pathfinder she jammed a tape of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number Three in G Major into the tape deck and matched her breathing to the music.

"The
Kate Harding
, 1892," she recited. "The British schooner
Lily
, 1901."

Something was scaring her. But she wasn't sure whether it was an encroaching mania or something else. Something empty and waiting for one last train in a station where no one ever goes.

 

Chapter
3

 

On the way back to the office Bo considered the calming exercise she'd given Janny Malcolm. What was the capital of Nevada? Las Vegas? Surely not
.
Then what about Wyoming? Idaho? Arizona? Blanks everywhere.

You
couldn't pass an eighth-grade c
ivics class, Bradley. You're pathetic
.

"Es, what's the capital of Arizona?" she asked as she opened her office door. "Also the rest of the western states and Rhode Island."

Estrella Benedict turned her desk chair slowly, even radiantly, Bo thought, toward the door. Always attractive, the younger woman's clear skin had become translucent and glowing in the final months of her pregnancy. And the slower movements demanded by her unaccustomed bulk seemed less awkward than thoughtful.

"We've shared this office for three years and I should be prepared." Estrella grinned, shaking her dark hair recently cut in a sophisticated Sassoon bob. "But I never am. There is simply no way to prepare. You could come through that door and say anything. And it's got to be Phoenix. Why?"

"You'd think I would know that
,
" Bo answered, biting a hangnail as she glanced at the case file on her desk. The cream-colored file folder with its red-orange stripe was new,
she noticed. Brand-new. "Malcolm, Janny" had been penned across the stripe.

"Madge is so worried that I'm going to have the baby in my car on the freeway that she's sending you out on a case with me, can you believe it?"

"No," Bo answered, "I can't."

"At least it's close," Estrella went on. "In fact, we can walk."

"You're kidding."

The nation's sixth largest city, San Diego covered hundreds of miles, and as an agency of the county rather than the city, Child Protective Services spread its jurisdictional net hundreds of miles beyond that. In her work Bo had traveled north to the Orange County line, east over mountains into the ancient Sonoran desert, and south to the Mexican border without leaving San Diego County. But despite the marginal nature of the old central San Diego community in which her office building sat behind high chain-link fences, she'd never heard of anybody getting a case there. Probably, she thought, because the neighborhood's predominantly Southeast Asian immigrants ha
dn't yet acculturated sufficientl
y to view their children as property.

"It's an apartment on Linda Vista Road across from that Asian supermarket, only four blocks or so. The walk will be fun."

"You only get the Latino cases. How can there be a Spanish-speaking case in this neighborhood?" Bo asked, noticing for the twentieth time that the plaid wool lining of her black trench coat sagged indecorously from a rip along the front placket. She'd bought the coat during her college days in Massachusetts, when black ripstop nylon outerwear had somehow been a profound statement about the absence of basic human rights in count
ries with no alphabets. Now peopl
e born in those countries p
urchased octopus and strawberry
flavored rice milk at a supermarket three blocks from her office, their rights intact.

"I don't know, but you look like a vagrant in that coat," Estrella added.

Bo knit her brows at the case file on her desk. The case file for a child with a CPS history, a child in foster care. It should be fat, dog-eared, greasy with fingerprints of the many caseworkers and file clerks who would have crammed paperwork into it. It shouldn't be slim and new. Flipping it open with one hand, she saw that it contained nothing but a face sheet
.
Odd.

"I'm going to get an appropriate, California-type coat during the after-Christmas sales," she reassured her friend. "Don't worry, I'll look smashing at the christening."

The day had already lost its morning chill, but Bo kept her coat buttoned at the chest so that its ripped lining wouldn't show as she and Estrella strolled the neighborhood of prefab military housing built during World War II and later sold to private owners. Each two-apartment wood-frame duplex had been identical to every other when they were built
,
but over the years porches, carports, awnings, and cement-slab patios had been added to the dilapidated buildings, and native sagebrush grew wild in the tiny yards. An original tidiness had surrendered to the demands of time. Beyond a low fence matted with half-dead geraniums, Bo heard a ratchety, aggressive squawk.

"What in hell?" she blurted, lurching against Estrella, who shook her head.

"
El poll
o
," Estrella laugh
ed, pointing to a large chicken
wire cage hidden behind some towels drying on a low clothesline. Atop the cage was an animal with reddish brown feathers and a territorial attitude.

"Rooster," Bo pronounced. "And those things inside the cage are regular chickens."

"Very good, Bo. Next we identify moo-cows and horsies. Now, the way to tell the difference ..."

Bo scowled at the rooster, who hopped to the ground and glared beadily from between two towels that said
holiday
inn.

"Es, we're in the middle of a city," she said. "There aren't supposed to be farm animals."

"A lot of these people were farmers in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. They like their chickens."

Bo imagined the rooster on
a Styrofoam tray under shrink-
wrap, and sighed as they rounded the corner onto Linda Vista Road, the
main thoroughfare. Near a Jack in the
Box restaurant a smaller store announced itself with a sign saying
heo quay dat tat dai naan cho toi nha
. For all she knew it could be saying "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." The proprietor, a tiny man in tiny Wrangler jeans and flip-flops, was scrubbing the security bars over the store's front window with soapy water and a hairbrush.

"You know, I've never actually walked around here," Bo observed. "I just drive through, in and out of the office. It's interesting."

"Litt
l
e Saigon," Estella said. "It's been a neighborhood of immigrants since the military left. First it was Latinos, then people from Southeast Asia. But a few of the Mexican families just stayed. This case we're investigating is one of them. It's nothing serious, just a four-year-old girl who showed up at a daycare center with an odd burn on her back that she refuses to explain. The grandmother's at home with her now."

On the sidewalk ahead of them a Latino man in pressed black chinos and an elaborately patterned sweater talked on a
cell
phone as he walked. The hand holding the phone displayed a huge gold ring set in flashing diamonds.

"Dealer or pimp?" Bo asked conversationally.

"Dealer."

"How can you tell?"

Estrella smiled at a young Chinese woman pushing twin baby boys in a double stroller. The man with the telephone, his conversation concluded, stopped and dropped to one knee to make cooing noises at the twins in Spanish.

"Pimps don't flash cell
phones on the street," Estrella answered, her gaze lingering on the plump baby boys in their quilted Chinese jackets. "But the pants are the giveaway."

"Pants?"

"Yeah. The black chinos with the knife-edge crease. Years ago those were part of the uniform of a Latino gang called
Los Brujos
, 'The Magicians.' As teenagers
Los Brujos
worked as drug runners for some small-time Mafia clones. Then they grew up, ousted the clones, and took over the business of supplying drugs to the children of their own people. Some of them still wear the black chinos."

"Like a school tie," Bo observed. "An old boys' network."

Estrella had wrapped both arms over her bulging abdomen. "More like a warning," she replied. "Those pants let other drug dealers know that a
Brujo
is working the territory. It isn't wise to mess with them. They kill their competition."

Bo admired the clearing sky through the bare limbs of a sycamore tree in the grassy median between Linda Vista Road and the fronting residential street called Morley.

"How do you know all these things, Es? You're a walking encyclopedia."

"I have a brother," Estrella answered, checking the face sheet in her case file for the address.

"So?"

"So it's that brown and yellow duplex over there, the one without a screen door. And my brother got involved with
Los Brujos
when he was only fourteen. He got in trouble with the police. My father was working as a foreman on a big avocado ranch up north, making good money, but he came home to handle 'Berto—Roberto, that's my brother's name. But the gang wouldn't let go of him, made threats, beat him up. Once they threw a brick through our living-room window with one of those glow-in-the-dark plastic skulls you can buy around Halloween taped to it. That meant Roberto was going to die. I was only eight at the time."

"My God, Es, what happened?"

"My father made arrangements for 'Berto to go and live with relatives in Mexico, in Zacatecas. They were very poor and even though my parents sent money, 'Berto had to work. Everybody works there; it's a hard life. He stayed for four years, dropped out of school, married a local girl who was pregnant with his child when he was eighteen. A year later he came back, but the girl and my niece whom I've never seen stayed there. She's seventeen now. She's going to graduate from high school this spring."

Bo watched as a city bus stopped to pick up a white-haired woman who looked like Lady Baden-Powell. Three years in the same office, she thought, and she didn't know Estrella Benedict, her best friend, at all.

"You never told me all this about your brother, Es. Why not? You know all about my sister's suicide, my manic depression, my scurrilous love life before Andy, everything. Why didn't you ... ?"

Estrella steered Bo toward the brown and yellow duplex.

"It's not the same," she sighed. "You're white. You're from
a nice family in Boston. Your mother played the violin. Nobody looks at you in restaurants and wonders if you're going
to steal the
forks
or skip out on the bill. I just didn't want you to know."

"Know what?" Bo said, unbuttoning her coat and angrily ripping off a two-foot swath of the loose lining. "That after all this time you don't trust me?"

Estrella took the wool plaid fabric from Bo's hand and stuffed it into her purse.

"Okay, my brother wears cowboy boots and a hairnet and thinks he's
muy macho
," she said, looking straight ahead. "He divorced the girl in Mexico, never went back to school, works occasionally at car washes and Mexican fast-food joints in Los Angeles, where he lives with a woman he's never married but with whom he's fathered five children he doesn't support
.
She and the kids live on welfare and money my sister and I send. He drinks too much and when he's feeling really
macho
he breaks her ribs. She throws him out and a month later he's back. It's been going on for years. He doesn't hit the kids, or I'd call CPS in Los Angeles and turn him in myself, and he knows it. My brother is a worthless, abusive loser and I'm ashamed of him. Now do you feel trusted?"

BOOK: The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five)
3.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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