Sold it to Bronson?” repeated Rebecca. Her tone spoke of admiration for Julie’s ability to pull a fast one on Bronson, on her, or perhaps on both of them.
“I take it the business isn’t worth much?” I asked.
“Double whatever number is in your head and that’s how much we owe.” Rebecca caught herself. “I shouldn’t be so dismissive. It was always ‘Julie’s company,’ but I had a certain pride in helping to build it.…”
“Even if you never got any credit for it,” I finished for her.
“I had to give up the day-to-day running once I got sick,” she said, then let out a small laugh. “I knew Julie couldn’t handle it on her own, but I never thought she’d run it into the ground!”
“Lois helped. You know she was a lawyer?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And in contact with ColorNalysis.”
“What else did the phone records say?” She politely waited out my silence and added, “You can tell me.”
In the hours leading up to her murder, I related, Lois had called Julie many times. The calls rose to a frenzied level, with dozens placed no more than a minute apart, until they abruptly stopped, as it turned out, forever. It confirmed that Julie was in contact with Lois almost to the moment of her death. What else it meant was up to the person receiving this information.
Rebecca just nodded but withheld comment.
I pulled my eyes from the road and studied her out of the corner of my eye. We had just come from another treatment and she didn’t look well at all. Her movements were slow and pained. Her breaths were like those of a neglected aquarium fish trying to work a forever-insufficient amount of oxygenated water through its gills.
I began to regret allowing her to come on the trip to Bakersfield. Badger had gotten me the address for James Fitch, the murdered man in the Sierra Madre house. I thought I might learn a little more about him and his connection to Julie. But it was a ways from Los Angeles, one long rise and fall over a four-thousand-foot hump known as the Tehachapi Mountains, and Rebecca didn’t look up for it.
“Stop,” she said, her eyes closed and head resting against the passenger window.
“Stop what?”
“Looking at me. I’ll be fine.”
I was prone, just like everyone else, to revert to the emotional clichés reserved for the sick—equal parts pity for their suffering and admiration for their courage. That usually manifested itself in hollow statements about a “brave fight” or some other pugilistic reference. Rebecca had made it clear early on that that kind of talk was both unwarranted and unwanted: “There’s nothing brave about wanting to stay alive.”
This last statement revived a memory of my father’s end with the disease. He chose to fight it but it wasn’t much of a battle. If anything, he was just some guy waiting for the referee to stop the fight.
I let her sleep on the long drive into the San Joaquin Valley. The I-5 was a major route for semis bringing crap from China north and fresh produce south. The result was a challenging drive with big rigs lugging tons of cargo up a hill at thirty miles an hour while anyone with a V8 blew by them going eighty. My sensible sedan nestled in behind one of the rigs like a pilot fish finding safety among a pod of migrating blue whales. Two attempts to venture into the dark waters of the passing lane sent me scurrying back when pickups appeared in my mirror with flashes of high beams signaling me to get out of the way, quickly.
We crested the summit with the dying sun filtering through ominous rain clouds. Signs warned of dangerous driving conditions and reminded drivers to use headlights and to not venture further unless one’s trunk contained snow chains. I ignored these warnings and left the safety of a pod of semis to glide down the long grade through the Tejon Pass, past the handful of runaway truck ramps and farther into the Grapevine until we finally hit the bed of the San Joaquin Valley and cruised our way toward Bakersfield.
Rosedale Village RV Park sat on the far edge of town and featured a stunning view of nothing. I marveled at the vastness of a landscape so perfectly flat that even a steamroller couldn’t achieve that level of perfection. Scanning the area, I suppressed the urge to ponder just why anyone would want to live here because the second part of that question contained the answer—if you didn’t have to.
I drove through the main entrance, where four shedding pine trees framed up the park’s only landmark, a giant billboard advertising no-questions-asked personal loans at usury rates. An office and bank of resident mail-boxes funneled me into a cemetery-like level of plotting that made Fitch’s trailer surprisingly difficult to find. Every white box could be the right white box but wasn’t. An overall disdain for house numbers and porch lights didn’t help. I eventually found the correct trailer and parked on the quiet lane fronting it.
The silence roused Rebecca from her sleep.
“We’re here,” I told her. “Let me go look around first.”
The side entrance was carpeted with old-school artificial turf that looked like someone had pulled it up from an abandoned mini-golf course. I took a step up and knocked on the flimsy door. Only then did I notice the police tape that partly sealed the gap around the door frame.
I took out my car key and cut through the tape. One big tug on the door accomplished nothing save causing me to fall back on my ass as my hand slipped from the knob and I made the humiliating tumble off the step. The Astroturf was about as soft as the windmill hole it came from. I dusted myself off and rose to make another attempt.
“Sitting down on the job?” came a deep voice to my right.
I stared into the darkness at the back of the trailer, where a short figure stood in shadow. Every few seconds a small blip of orange flared brightly as the figure took a deep drag on what smelled like a menthol cigarette. My eyes adjusted to the night and I realized he or she was holding something long and heavy in a free hand. As I studied the shape and recalled the voice, my eyes widened.
“Julie?” I called out into the darkness and took a step toward the figure.
“I’ll be anyone you want me to be, honey,” came the response. “But I’ll ask that you stay where you are.”
The long, dark, heavy object was raised and pointed in my direction.
“There’s no need for that,” I said.
“That’s for the person holding the shotgun to decide. Let’s walk ourselves out to the street where there’s some light.”
I backed my way out to the lane where my car was parked under a skimpy streetlamp.
“What’s the matter?” Rebecca called out, then saw the shotgun. “Oh.”
Once in the light, I got my first look at the woman holding the gun. She had a smoker’s face well past the point that quitting cold turkey could reverse the effects of years of bad decisions. But smoking couldn’t change her eyes. They were very soft.
“Did you hurt yourself trying to pry open that door?” she asked.
“Just my pride.” I smiled.
“What do you want with Fitchie’s place? You know he’s dead, right?”
“Yes, I know,” I told her. “I found his body.”
That thankfully lowered the gun, which now was probably pointed at some unfortunate gopher a few feet underground.
“You a friend?”
I shook my head.
“Thanks for not lying. He didn’t have any friends. No real ones, anyway,” she reflected. “How’d you come about finding him?”
“I was looking for someone else.”
She quickly picked up on the inference in my words.
“They the ones who killed him?”
The gun came up slightly. Rebecca and I shared a look.
“Someone close to me might be involved in his murder,” Rebecca answered. “I’m looking for answers, too.”
That kind of honesty was a curious tack while talking with someone holding a shotgun. But it seemed to work. The woman softened as she recalled her friend.
“Poor Fitchie, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Probably didn’t even know what he was getting into.” She spoke of a man with a good heart, overly trusting of others who always found himself on the wrong side of a deal. “Not a lot upstairs,” she reminded us. The third time she muttered a similar dig, I realized her affection for the dead man was far deeper than I had initially thought. Rebecca had made this realization long before I had.
“We sure know how to pick ’em,” Rebecca mused.
“You got that right, sweetie.”
“You made a comment about Fitch getting into something,” I said. “You know anything about what it was?”
“He came into money, blabbering on about it being just the start. Mr. Big Shot.” She laughed, but it quickly faded. “They got it all,” she said, gesturing to the immensity of the night sky. “I never saw any of it.”
She caught my look.
“I manage the place. Fitchie wasn’t a fan of paying his bills.”
“So he was behind on his rent?”
She spared me the “dim lightbulb” quip. “Pick a unit. Everyone’s behind.”
“Did he ever say how he came into this money?” Rebecca asked.
“He might have but I can’t remember. He always had some scheme going. None out of nothing were legit.” She explained that Fitch really had only two moods. He either had the world figured out (and bragged about how he did) or he whined about how that same world was out to get him. “There was no in between with him.”
Or any of us, I thought.
“Where did he work?” I asked.
“He did his best work on a stool,” she said, smiling. “His office is about a mile down the road. You can’t miss the big red sign.”
“Did he have a family?” Rebecca asked.
“He had a sister, but she’s dead.” After a moment she added, “Murdered.”
Rebecca and I shared a look. There was something odd in the way the old woman said it.
“Why did you say it like that?” Rebecca asked.
“Because it wasn’t true. I learned never to believe anything that came out of Fitchie’s mouth.”
“He’d make up a story about his sister being murdered?”
“You don’t know Fitchie,” she explained.
The woman took a deep inhalation of night air that I took as a signal that she was done reminiscing. As Rebecca and I got into the car to leave, I heard her mutter one final reflection about her friend.
“The big dummy got himself into something serious this time.”