Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [64]
I turned and faced south. Cars moved on the toll road leading away from the border; beyond it sprawled the pastel houses and iron and red-tiled roofs of Tijuana. The famed bullring—like a giant satellite TV dish that could service all of Baja—stood alone at the edge of town. I stared at the black steel-paneled boundary fence that lay across the ridge of rugged hills, and thought of satin funeral ribbons.
For a long time I stood there, thoughts and impressions trickling randomly through my mind. I recalled the words “You keep what you can use, throw the rest away.” And then the sluggish flow began to rush in an unstemmable torrent toward the obvious conclusion. When I finally began to feel, the emotions were not the ones I’d anticipated. I turned and ran back to where AndrÉs still contemplated the sea.
I’d come here this morning on a pilgrimage, thinking that everything was over, finished. Now I realized my search was only beginning.
* * *
Lieutenant Gary Viner of SDPD Homicide had been in the same high-school class with my older brother Joey. I remembered him vaguely as an undistinguished member of a pack of boys who used to hang out in front of our house peering into the engines of various decrepit cars. He was still undistinguished, with thinning sandy hair, gray eyes that were mild to the point of vacuousness, and a wispy mustache that turned down, as if in disappointment at being the best he could grow. But when Viner spoke, I realized that behind his very ordinary facade he had not only a sharp mind but also a rapierlike memory.
“Never figured to see you in my office,” he said, motioning for me to sit. “You haven’t changed all that much. Still eat tons of chocolate?”
“Not like I used to.”
Viner patted the beginnings of a beer belly. “Just as well. You could really suck it up, be fat as a hog if you didn’t cut back some. That’s what we were all waiting for, but you just stayed slim as ever. I take it you didn’t marry that bozo who was captain of the swim team. What was his name?”
“Bobby Ellis.” As I said it, I felt an irrational flash of resentment. Bobby had taken my fragile early love and virginity, then dumped me for someone more socially acceptable to his upwardly mobile parents. I realized now that I was glad I’d tossed his class ring off the Coronado ferry. “He married somebody with a lot of money, who proceeded to make his life hell,” I added with some relish. “They’re divorced now.”
“Isn’t everybody? What’s Joey doing these days?”
“Living up in McMinnville, Oregon.”
“Doing what?”
I shrugged. “Working in a restaurant—at least that’s what he was doing last week.”
Viner shook his head. “Joey’s a good guy, but … You think he’ll ever find himself?”
“Joey doesn’t have the sense to know he’s lost.”
He smiled at that, then sobered. “So what can I do for you?”
I took out my identification and passed it across the desk to him. His eyes widened slightly as he examined it. “What do you know? From cheerleader to private investigator. You have your own office or work for somebody else?”
“Somebody else, a San Francisco law firm.” I said it reflexively, then remembered it was no longer true. “I’m here on a routine missing-person investigation, and I came across some information that might interest you. What do you know about a shooting that occurred in a burned-out adobe on the mesa above Monument Road in San Ysidro Sunday night? Victim was a male Caucasian.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I heard about it from some Hispanics I was interviewing in the South Bay.”
“So you rushed up here to report it, like a good citizen.”
“No, I came up here because I think the victim may be the man I’m trying to locate.”
“His name?” He picked up a pen and drew a scratch pad closer.
“I can’t say. It’s a routine case, no crime involved, and the family doesn’t want publicity.” I felt uncomfortable lying so badly, especially to an old friend of my brother, but