Iris returned to her office just in time to answer her telephone, which was ringing in the polite tone she had programmed it to emit. She snatched a yellow pad and pen from her desk, crossed her legs, and swiveled her chair to look out her southern-facing window at the office tower on the other side of the street that blocked her view. If she pressed her cheek against this window, she could glimpse the rolling hills of Northeast L.A., where she grew up. It was only a handful of miles from downtown, but it seemed far away.
The telephone’s display indicated the call was from outside the office, so she answered it formally, using her low-modulated, you’ve-reached-the-person-in-charge telephone voice. “Iris Thorne.” She squeezed the cushion affixed to the telephone receiver between her ear and shoulder and poised her Mont Blanc pen above the yellow pad.
“Your mother said you’d done something with yourself. I wish I could say the same for Paula.”
Iris leaned forward in her chair, her posture stiffening. She clutched the telephone receiver in her hand. The voice had thinned and quivered with age, but she immediately recognized it. It was just like him to assume she’d know who it was even after all these years and the thought made her bristle. “Mr. DeLacey. What a surprise. It’s been a long time. How are you?”
She felt short of breath. She closed her eyes and tried to block the image of a man being beaten to death. It had happened twenty-five years ago, but the memory— in spite of herself— was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday. Through the years, she had tried to forget it and acted as if she had. Hearing Bill DeLacey’s voice brought it all back.
“Yes, it has been a long time,” he said in a way that seemed to sift the years through his fingers. “I could be doing better but I’m all right. I often wondered why you didn’t call.”
Iris angled her eyes toward the telephone receiver like one might eye a vicious dog while stepping around it. She was about to respond when she lost her opportunity.
“I guess you were in college the last time. Then your mother sold the house and all that mess and that was all she wrote. Would have thought your father might have called. After all, I was his employer for eleven years.”
Eleven years under your thumb, Iris thought.
“Have to say he was the best handyman I had. Haven’t heard from any of you Thornes except your mother every once in a while. Gave me your phone number. Said you graduated from college and taught deaf kids. I told her that was real nice. Then you went and got your MBA and I guess you stopped teaching to do this.”
“Now I help people make the most of their money.”
“Don’t get defensive on me. The economy needs people to get their money out from underneath their mattresses. Where would I be without people with the moxie to take a risk? It was probably my example that gave you the idea in the first place. I’ll take some of the credit for getting you down that road, anyway.”
Why not take it all? Iris’s face burned.
“Understand your sister’s married and got a couple of kids. You never married, huh?”
“No.”
“Huh. Well, like I always said, old Lily got the looks and Iris got the brains.”
“That’s what you always said,” Iris responded flatly.
“You know Thomas graduated from that Yale Law School over there back East. He’s still single. Getting married would be good for his political career, but he’s going to do okay in this election without—”
“Election?”
“He’s running for the City Council over here. Didn’t you know that?”
“I live in Santa Mon—”
“Next election he should have a wife and some kids in the picture, plus I want someone to carry on the family name. Guess you know that Junior’s still a bachelor too. Now, Paula, now I tried to get that Paula to go to college. Seemed like she’d do anything to defy me. Even when she was little…”
As Bill DeLacey talked, Iris pictured him sitting behind his desk in his cluttered home office where he ran DeLacey Properties. At one point, the mess on his desk grew so high that he draped it with an old plastic shower curtain and started a second layer on top. DeLacey Properties primarily consisted of low-income housing acquired to take advantage of federal grants and tax breaks. DeLacey turned a profit by not maintaining his buildings. He was a notorious L.A. slumlord.
“Where goes California?” DeLacey rambled on. “A businessman can’t do business here anymore!” His voice was strident. “You got your high Worker’s Comp insurance and your environmental regulations and your taxes and now you can’t hardly hire the illegals, who are the only Mexicans willing to work. The native born think the world owes them a living. Let ‘em go ahead and shoot the hell out of each other, that’s what I say.” He gasped several times with exasperation. “What’s the small businessman to do?”
“It’s a big problem.” Iris plucked at her now damp silk blouse and glanced at a clock on her desk. He’d been talking for twenty minutes and hadn’t yet arrived at the point of his call. She recalled visiting Paula at the ranch house on top of the hill that abutted the Thornes’ property and getting trapped by Mr. DeLacey. She’d inch backward from him toward the door while he followed her, talking continuously, his body angled toward her, his index finger thrashing up and down with each ideological point made. Paula would follow him, making faces behind his back. Upon reaching the door, Iris would blurt, “‘Bye, Mr. DeLacey. I hear my mother calling me!” and dart outside, hearing Paula’s laughter fading behind her as she fled down the hill.
“Old Doc Grimes over at the Mayo Clinic did a study on manic depressives with paranoid tendencies and found that megadoses of vitamin C mixed with an amino acid found in corn husks given daily over a three-month period reversed the symptoms. Some years ago, I ground up some of this mixture and replaced Dolores’s medication in her capsules…”
Poor Dolly.
Fifteen more minutes passed. Iris interrupted him in midsentence and lied. “Mr. DeLacey, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have an appointment in a few minutes.”
“Say! What do you hear from old Les?”
“My father?”
“He still living over in Azusa?”
“Last I heard.”
“You don’t talk to him either? You’re not much on keeping up with folks, are you?”
“Mr. DeLacey, I really have to go.”
“Oh, okay.” He sounded dejected. “Well, I guess you know I don’t make social calls.” He took a deep breath.
In that moment of silence, Iris found herself imprinting in her mind the setting for the bad news that she sensed was coming. She became aware of her clothing, her tense, washboard-erect posture, the high, feathery, white clouds that streaked the warm January sky, the sliver of ocean that glimmered in the distance, and the telephone receiver that had grown slick with perspiration from her palm.
“Happened day before yesterday. Can’t say I was surprised.” He laughed in that way: rapidly inhaling and exhaling, as if about to hyperventilate. “Course, I thought she’d gone down there to take the Christmas lights off the trees with that extension ladder I bought from that new Home Depot they built over there. Now that’s quite an operation. They’ve got plans—”
“Mr. DeLacey,” Iris said sharply as if she was trying to wake him. “Please. What happened?”
He laughed again in apparent awe of himself. “I guess I tend to go off sometimes. Anyway, before Christmas she’d got it in her head to string lights up in the grapefruit trees there, the ones up close to the street.”
“Who?”
DeLacey laughed again, sucking and expelling air, sounding more exasperated than amused. “Who? My wife! Who the hell else do you think I’m talking about? Are you even listening to what I’m saying here?”
Iris angrily opened her mouth but thought better of it and stuffed the smart-alecky retort she’d almost blurted. Instead, she calmly responded, “I’m all ears.”
“She’d kinda been coming out of the fog she’d been in and was getting into things that she wasn’t supposed to be getting into, so I told her to get the hell outside.”
Iris was unable to remain sitting. She started to pace behind her desk and tried to goad him on. “Did she fall?”
“If you hold your horses, I’ll tell you what happened. So, when she didn’t show up around dinnertime…Thomas was coming over. He moved back into the district, you know. Bought himself a house over in Eagle Rock. Anyway, Junior went looking for her and there she was, hanging from a grapefruit tree. Made herself a noose from a rope I had in the garage. I bought that over at Home Depot too.”
Iris wrenched her torso in response to a chill even though her office was warm. Suddenly exhausted, she flopped into her chair. “I’m stunned.”
“Old Doc Vanderstaad was impressed with the knot she’d done up.”
“Was she depressed again? Did she leave a note?”
“Note?” he shouted as if the suggestion was outrageous. “There was no note. Didn’t expect there would be. She was never much on writing.”
“That’s not my experience. She used to always send me a card at Christmas with a little note in it.”
“There was no note. I already told you.”
“I thought she’d been maintaining okay.”
“This was no surprise to me. If you’d bothered to keep in touch, you’d think the same thing. I always wondered why you turned your back on her.”
“I did not turn my back on her.”
“The hell you didn’t. She practically raised you and your sister. Treated you girls like her own. I don’t know why I should expect anything different from you, considering the way her own daughter acted. Both you girls thought you could go away and leave it all behind, but it don’t work like that. It’s too late to be sorry now.”
Iris bolted from her chair. C’mon, Iris Ann. Don’t let him do this to you. You’re not ten years old anymore. She took a deep breath and regained her composure. “Does Paula know?”
“I don’t know where she is. I don’t want her regretting for the rest of her life that she didn’t go to her own mother’s funeral. It’s tomorrow. You have to make sure she comes.”
“Mr. DeLacey, I don’t know where Paula is either. It must be twenty years since I’ve talked to her.”
He paused.
After his seemingly endless words, the silence was unnerving. Iris worried her string of pearls.
“I thought you two girls were friends.”
“We were friends, Mr. DeLacey. We…drifted. There was a fight and…”
“That’s Paula for you. Always pushing everyone’s buttons. I don’t know where she gets it from. Her mother wasn’t the smartest female in the world, but she had a good heart. Paula owes it to her mother to come to her funeral. Your mother said that if anyone could get Paula to come, it’d be you.”
“My mother?”
“I told you she gave me your number.”
Iris again started pacing behind her desk. “Like I said, Mr. DeLacey, I don’t know how to contact Paula. Have you tried a private detective?”
“Is this too much of a sacrifice for you? Think you can do something for someone other than yourself for a change?”
Iris slapped her hand on her desk. “Mr. DeLacey, I’ll do what I can to find Paula but the funeral’s tomorrow. That’s not much time.”
“You could find her if you wanted to.”
“I’ll see you at the funeral.” She hung up before he could say another word.
Just then, the message light on the telephone began to blink. Her phone mail had apparently been restored.
Later that afternoon, Iris looked around and realized she didn’t know where she was. The bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Ten had put her in a somnambulistic state and she had lost track of her whereabouts. Her Thomas Brothers’ Guide to Los Angeles and Orange Counties had sat open on the TR’s passenger seat for the past few weeks to aid her in devising routes around the impossible traffic. Her office hours, from six in the morning to two in the afternoon— set to parallel the New York stock exchanges—used to give her a reprieve from the weekday rush-hour traffic. But the earthquake had shaken everything up. Today she was enjoying the traffic’s monotonous predictability. It explained why she couldn’t do anything else.
She drove with the Triumph’s top down, slouched in the driver’s seat with her head against the headrest, relishing the perfect seventy-five-degree weather that had prevailed since the earthquake. Southern California seemed to be giving her denizens a long, sultry look and a soft caress while knowingly whispering in their ears, “I’ll rock your world and you’ll love me anyway.”
The weather reminded her of the warm skies that had prevailed after another earthquake—the San Fernando quake of February 1971. The bloody events surrounding that quake had permanently changed the Thornes’ and DeLaceys’ lives.
A Jeep cut in front of Iris. Its vanity license plates taunted: R U FREE.
She flipped open her cellular phone, called her sister, and told her about Bill DeLacey and Dolly and Paula.
“Why is he so desperate for Paula to come to the funeral?” Lily asked. “He never gave a damn about her.”
“And then there’s Dolly’s phone message.”
“Sounds like she fell off her rocker for good.”
“Maybe it would be convenient for Bill DeLacey if everyone thought that,” Iris said dryly.
“Are you saying she didn’t kill herself?”
“In her message, she said she’d found her will, in which she’d left Bill everything, by the way, and didn’t remember writing it.”
“If that’s true,” Lily said, “she could have blown his chances of ever building DeLacey Gardens.”
“Bill said she’d been coming out of her fog. Maybe he was afraid she’d start to put together the missing pieces about everything that happened in seventy-one. If Dolly wanted to blow the whistle, building DeLacey Gardens would be the least of Bill’s problems.” Iris remembered the traffic and the Triumph. She glanced at its temperature gauge. The needle had moved close to the halfway mark but was still within the safe range.
“Why do you want to get involved with the DeLaceys after all these years?”
“Lily, it’s the last thing I want after everything I saw back then. I still have nightmares.”
“I know you do.”
“It bugs me that I never said anything.”
“You were just a kid. Mom told you not to say anything because she was afraid something would happen to you.”
“I don’t think she knows I told you.”
“She does. I told her. You still haven’t answered my question. Why get involved with the DeLaceys again?”
“Dolly said she didn’t have anyone else to turn to.”
“What about her children?”
“She felt they’re against her, too.”
“Sounds paranoid.”
“I know.” Iris eased into the next lane to avoid following a mammoth truck. “I guess I can hire a private detective to find Paula.”
“How much will that cost?”
“I don’t know. Couldn’t cost that much, could it?”
“But the funeral’s tomorrow. The whole thing seems weird.”
“Consider the source.”
“Leave it alone, Iris.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because Bill’s right. Paula should go to her mother’s funeral. Dolly would have wanted it that way. It’s the least I can do for her. When I was a kid, Dolly was kind to me when kindness was a rare commodity.”
Lily said nothing.
“Besides, the great William Cyril DeLacey himself told me I might think I can run away from the past, but I can’t. Lord knows I’ve tried.”
“So you’ve decided what you’re going to do.”
“Yeah. Find Paula.” At least she would try.