Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [45]
The building was cement block, a garish green with orange trim, and its dirty windows were heavily barred. I noted a pay phone a few feet from the entrance and went over there to have a look. The Plexiglas around it had been shattered, the directory was torn apart, and the receiver dangled free. The vandalism didn’t look recent, so I assumed Hy’s purpose in coming here hadn’t been to wait for a call from the kidnappers.
Inside, the store was that peculiar combination of ordinary small supermarket and bodega that you find in southern California towns where mainstream blue-collar workers and military families live in uneasy proximity to recently arrived Hispanics. Tortillas crowded the bread; strands of chorizo were looped above the meat counter. Beans, rice, and a variety of peppers were staples, but the same was true of Hamburger Helper, canned tuna, and Idaho potatoes. Beer, candy bars, chips, and cigarettes seemed to outnumber all other items.
The market was empty except for a young mother with an infant and two toddlers who was getting started early on her day. I went directly to the counter and showed my I.D. to the heavyset Hispanic man at the cash register. He glanced at it, then stared at my face, his expression hard and immobile. When I held up Hy’s picture and asked if he’d seen him on Sunday evening, he shrugged and turned away, muttering, “No tengo inglÉs.”
The hell you don’t, I thought, noting that he had the Union-Tribune open to the sports page. But I went along with it, summoning up what Spanish that working in San Francisco’s Mission district had helped me retain from high school. “En domingo, está aqui?”
He looked at me as if I were speaking an alien tongue.
I repeated the question.
He shrugged, feigning bewilderment.
“Look,” I said, motioning at the newspaper, “I know you speak English. This has nothing to do with you or what’s going on in the parking lot. I just want to know if you saw this man here on Sunday evening.”
“No tengo inglÉs.”
I took a twenty from my bag, placed it on the counter, and pushed it toward him.
He looked at it, shook his head, and pushed it back toward me.
Serious resistance here. Because of the illegal hiring—or something else entirely? Something to do with Hy’s visit?
I added another twenty, looked inquiringly at him.
He shook his head and turned away.
I pocketed both bills and went back outside. Most of the men were gone from the lot now, and those who remained had fixed, desperate expressions, eyes following every truck that moved by on Palm Avenue. For a moment I considered trying to question them, but quickly decided against it. No tengo inglÉs—and besides, none of them would have been here on a Sunday. I passed them by, and all the way back to the Scout, I could feel their anxious, hungry gazes follow me.
* * *
Taking a different route back to San Diego, I drove west on Palm Avenue, past fast-food restaurants and liquor stores and bars that mainly catered to the military, then followed the Silver Strand to Coronado. The Glorietta Bay area was much more built up than I remembered it; one of the more startling changes was that the Casa del Rey Hotel, where one of my most—literally—painful cases had begun at a private investigators’ conference, had been torn down to make way for yet another condo complex. Thank God that the developers so far hadn’t gotten up the nerve to attempt to supplant the venerable Hotel del Coronado, which now stood alone in its Victorian splendor.
As I drove across the soaring expanse of bridge from Coronado to San Diego, I turned serious attention to the dead end at the Holiday Market. The proprietor’s reaction to my question about Hy had been