Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [87]
I continued down the road a short distance, U-turned at a wide place, and went back to a beach access I’d noticed earlier. Several vehicles were drawn up there—not the sleek luxury cars belonging to El Sueño’s affluent residents but rusted old sedans, one of which had been abandoned and cannibalized for parts. I parked the Tercel there, took my photographic equipment from the trunk, and spent about fifteen minutes assembling it and familiarizing myself with how it worked. Then I put on my jacket, shed my shoes, stuffed them into my oversized purse next to my father’s .45, and carried it and the camera down to the beach. The sand was powdery soft and very clean; a few people were walking there, and others surf-fished. A young mother watched her two children as they splashed in the water, impervious to the chill on the air. I walked along looking at the houses until I spotted Fontes’s.
It perched lower than its neighbors, with a walled terrace outfitted with clear glass baffles to protect it from the wind. The windows on this side were small and barred, too, but large doors opened to the terrace. No one was out there, but I saw a portable bar and moments later a man in a white waiter’s jacket appeared, carrying some glasses. Preparing to entertain the guests from California?
The beach ended a hundred or more yards down from there at the mouth of the dry riverbed. The vegetation was thick: scrub cactus, yuccas, sycamores, and—farther back, straggling up the incline—greasewood. I kept walking that way, past a couple of old rotted wooden pongas—fishing boats—that Fontes and his neighbors probably allowed to remain there because they considered them picturesque. A few newer Fiberglas pongas were beached closer to the riverbed. As I neared it, I saw the outlines of buildings in among the vegetation— rough board shacks painted turquoise and lavender and pink, with rusted metal roofs and sheets for doors. Here and there a clothesline hung with bright garments stretched between the sycamore trunks, and in a clearing next to a trash dump strewn with shells and old car parts, children played. Women moved back and forth bearing baskets and buckets. I’d found the slums of El Sueño, carefully concealed so as not to mar the content of the hill dwellers.
After a while I turned and walked back toward the rotting pongas. Looked them over, then perched on one facing the sea, setting my bag beside me. I began to experiment with the camera, focusing on the swooping gulls and pelicans. As I homed in on them, I remembered the claim of the clerk at Gooden’s: “You’ll be able to count the pinfeathers on a baby bird’s head at two hundred yards.” How right he’d been! I swiveled, focused on the settlement in the riverbed. A woman’s face confronted me unseeing, dark eyes cast down. I moved the lens to see what she was looking at; a knife slashed expertly into a plump tomato.
If I could make out that much detail at this distance, think what I might observe at Fontes’s villa. The situation here was so perfect for my purposes that I crossed my fingers superstitiously against anything going wrong.
Spying on Fontes was one thing, but covertly watching this woman prepare her supper made me feel like a voyeur. I set the camera down and continued to contemplate the sea. If the people at the villa had noticed me, let them watch. Let them get used to a solitary tourist looking out at the Pacific and occasionally trying to photograph the curious muted sunset. After a while I’d become part of the landscape to them, merely another expensively equipped traveler displaying an unwarranted fascination with a phenomenon that happens every evening.
My back was turned to the villa, but my thoughts were very much on what might be happening there. First there was the Volvo, the one I’d followed last night when Ann Navarro drove Diane Mourning to the border. Ann Navarro,