The Color of Light Read online

  Beto kissed his father on the forehead, gave me a watcha-gonna-do? look. I smiled. There was no point correcting Mr. Bartolini, again.

  Mr. B turned to me. “You should try Beto’s pastrami today. It’s extra special.”

  “My pastrami is always extra special, Papa.” Beto had been a sweet, round-cheeked little boy. He had become a sweet, round-all-over adult, very much like his dad, except with his mother’s soft brown slanted eyes and none of Mr. B’s curmudgeonly edges. “But you talked Maggie into having the pastrami day before yesterday. Today I have some really nice baked ziti with chicken, artichokes, some asparagus and good Greek olives. I think she’ll like it.”

  “Sounds more like puttanesca than baked ziti,” Mr. Bartolini said, winking at me. “But you’re the boss, son. You’re the boss.”

  “Maggie, I think your number is up,” Beto said, pointing his chin toward the service area; my number was fifty-eight, the number on the call board was fifty-four. “Papa, stay put. Can I get you a coffee?”

  Mr. Bartolini, who seemed fatigued, started to nod, but stopped himself. He turned and looked up at Beto, and as if scolding, he said, “I run this place for forty years. You think I don’t know where to find the coffeepot?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  As I rose to follow Beto, I patted Mr. Bartolini on the shoulder. “Take care.”

  “Try the pastrami,” he said. “Today it’s extra special.”

  Beto leaned his head close to mine as we walked toward the deli cases. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right, Beto,” I said. “He’s getting a little fuzzy around the sides. But he seems to be okay.”

  He nodded. “Some days are better than others, and today’s not so good. If you asked him what happened this morning, he couldn’t tell you. But ask about something ten, twenty, thirty years ago and he’ll tell you every detail as if it happened yesterday.”

  “How old is he?”

  “He’ll be eighty-four in August.” He glanced around, checked on his father, who hadn’t moved from his seat. “For his age, he’s doing all right. You know, I’d understand it if he wanted to go live in a happier time. But he seems to be stuck in a bad place. A very bad place.”

  “He misses your mom.”

  Beto gave my arm a squeeze, seemed to shrug off his mood as he went behind the counter where he had spent so much of his life, selling good food to hungry people. In one continuous flow, he grabbed a take-out container, asked one of his staff to serve his dad some coffee, and unpinned a card from the bulletin board next to a wall phone. He reached over the high counter and handed me the card.

  “This is the number for the gal my wife told you about,” he said. “She did a real good job on the estate sale for her cousin.”

  “Thank Zaida for me,” I said, slipping the card into my pocket.

  “How’s it going over there?” he asked, referring to Mom’s house.

  “Making some progress,” I said. “After my cousin and University Housing take a look around and tell me what they do or don’t want, I’ll be ready to call in someone to cart the rest off.”

  “It’s a big job. Let me know if I can help.” He had already piled enough ziti into the container for several meals before he added a last scoop and snapped on a lid. “But don’t be in too big a hurry to finish over there; I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll be around,” I said.

  “Hey, I heard Kevin knocked on your door.” He looked up, gave me his version of a leer. “Thinking of rekindling the old flame?”

  “Beto!” I feigned shock. “He’s a married man.”

  “Tell him that.” A sardonic laugh. As he filled a second container, unbidden, with grilled peppers and sausage, he said, “So, are you bringing your new guy to the party Saturday?”

  “I should know better, but I’ll ask him. What else can I bring?”

  “Bring? To my house?” He pointed a big spoon toward his chest. “You gotta be kidding. Between my dad, my mother-in-law, Auntie Quynh and me we’re having an Italian-Mexican-Vietnamese feast.”

  “Tums, then?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Bring some of those.”

  There was a local branch of the bank I use down the street from the deli. After I said good-bye to Beto and Bart, I shouldered my shopping bag, its contents much heavier and more expensive than I had anticipated when I dropped in to say hello, and walked over to use the ATM to get cash for the weekend. The bank had stationed a uniformed guard out front, probably to shoo away the street people who sometimes aggressively panhandled bank customers coming out with their pockets full of fresh money.

  When I got closer, I recognized the guard, Chuck Riley, a retired Berkeley detective who lived down on the corner of my parents’ street, across from the Bartolinis’. I knew him to be a blowhard, with a quiet, put-upon wife and two notoriously wild daughters, one of whom, Lacy, was married to my friend, Detective Kevin Halloran. Dad always said that Chuck must have been a pretty good money manager to afford a house in that neighborhood on a cop’s salary, unless he or his wife, Marva, had inherited a fair amount, though that didn’t seem likely. Marva canvassed the neighborhood regularly, selling everything from Amway to Tupperware; Mom avoided her. The Rileys still lived in the same house; maybe Chuck needed this post-retirement job to maintain it.

  Like many old acquaintances I had run into that week, I noticed how much he had aged since I last saw him; they all probably said the same about me. Probably in his late sixties or early seventies, he was still thin enough to be described as lanky, but now a bit stooped. Age aside, he looked sufficiently intimidating in his crisply pressed uniform with a gun holstered on his Sam Browne belt to do his job. He gave me a fish-eyed going-over as I used my card to gain access to the ATM lobby.

  “Hello, Mr. Riley,” I said.

  “It’s been a while,” he said, smiling when he recognized me. He touched the shiny bill of his cap in a sort of military salute. When the lobby door lock clicked, he pulled it open and held it for me.

  While I waited for a man who had finished his business inside to fumble his cash into his wallet before leaving, I asked, “How are you?”

  “Good enough,” Chuck said, still holding the door. “How’s your mother?”

  “Mom’s doing well. You know she moved?”

  “George Loper mentioned that. You’re in town closing up the house, I understand.”

  “I am.” I shifted my shopping bag higher on my shoulder. “How’s your family?”

  “Hanging in.” His smile became closer to a sneer when he said, “But I suppose Kevin already filled you in on the details, eh?”

  There were ugly undertones in that question. What sort of nasty spin was Karen Loper putting on Kevin’s visit to my house that morning as she made her rounds?

  The answer to Chuck’s question was, no. Kevin had said nothing about his wife’s family at all, and never mentioned his wife, Lacy, by name.

  Wallet satisfactorily stowed away, the man inside the ATM lobby finally came out. Without addressing Chuck’s last remark, I said, “Nice to see you, Mr. Riley,” and stepped past him. When I came back out a few minutes later, he had his back toward me, giving directions to a tourist holding a map.

  I hiked the bag up on my shoulder again as I turned and walked away.

  An afternoon breeze blew in off San Francisco Bay, full of salt and fish and a hint of petroleum fumes wafting up from the freeway. It was early for rush hour but traffic streaming out of the City was already so heavy that the line of cars seeping over the Bay Bridge and up the freeway looked like one continuous snake undulating along the shore as far as I could see in any direction. Grim going for those trapped in it.

  Instead of cutting across the campus, as I normally would, I detoured for a look at my elementary school. On the way, I passed the pharmacy where Dad had spotted Isabelle watching for me. Bay Laundry and Dry Cleaners was two doors down. It would be pointless, I knew, to go in and ask whoever was there who might hav
e been driving their delivery truck on a particular Monday morning over thirty years ago. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained, I thought, and not for the first time. Even though the chance of solving a thirty-year-old murder was remote, especially when there was scant surviving evidence, maybe the right question to the right person might dislodge an essential bit of information out of hibernation. Who knew?

  I ask questions for a living, so I went in.

  “Good afternoon.” The young woman at the counter looked up from a chemistry textbook. “Picking up?”

  “No,” I said. After an awkward-feeling moment—what was my excuse for being there?—I pulled out one of my business cards with the network logo in the middle and asked if the owner was on the premises. The woman raised her eyebrows and looked from the card to me, and back again.

  “Joe’s out in the shop, but he’s busy,” she said. “Can I tell him what you need?”

  I lied: “I have a few questions about running a family-owned business. If he could give me just a minute or two.”

  “I’ll ask,” she said in a way that gave me little hope. Probably for the best, I thought. Why waste his time?

  A man I guessed to be in his fifties, wearing starched green work pants and matching shirt with the laundry’s logo stitched over the pocket, came forward through the forest of plastic garment bags hanging from the overhead conveyor. He flicked my card as he studied me.

  “I heard you were a local,” he said. “My wife watches your stuff on TV.”

  I had to chuckle. “But you don’t?”

  He shook his head. “Too bleeding-hearts for me. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  “Madison here said you have some questions.”

  “A few, yes,” I said. “I know you’re a busy man.”

  “That I am.” He flipped up a section of the counter and gestured for me to come through. “But if I said no to you, the wife would shoot me. Come on back. We can talk while I work. This time of day I need to keep an eye on things.”

  I followed him into a huge room. It was a hive. At the far end, a bank of industrial-size washers and dryers sloshed and whirred while maybe a dozen people operated a variety of pressing and folding machines. Sorters wrapped and tagged the finished work and either hung it on the conveyor or placed it on shelves in what seemed like one seamless, efficient chain. A truck backed into a loading bay and three workers converged to unload bundles of soiled clothing, and then they loaded in clean.

  Fascinated, I said, “This is a much bigger operation than I thought it was. Very impressive.”

  “You gotta keep growing or you get plowed under. We’ve taken over five storefronts since my dad retired.” Joe weighed a stack of starched, maroon-colored dinner napkins on his hand, flipped the edges and took two off the top before he sealed the stack in plastic and stuck a routing label on it. “You wouldn’t know how big the plant is unless you went down the alley.”

  “How many employees?”

  “Here at the laundry, we have eighteen. Another four at the dry cleaning plant up in Richmond.” He leaned in close to offer a confidence, though he still had to shout over the noise of the machines. “Up there, they aren’t as anal about the cleaning chemicals as they are here in town. But in case that’s what you’re nosing around about, this ain’t no sweatshop. We run a green business, we pay better than minimum, make our Social Security contributions on time and offer health coverage to full-time workers. And we don’t discriminate against nobody. Hell, take a look around and you can see I got a goddamn mini-U.N. working for me.

  “Everything is run strictly by the letter of the labor codes. Here in the People’s Republic of Berserkeley, if I break some law of political correctness, whatever it is at the moment, a squadron of hatchet-faced do-gooders will land on me like a bomb and organize a boycott. Which I can’t afford. Is that what you want to know?”

  “Interesting,” I said, laughing. “But I’m more interested in your delivery schedule.”

  He scowled. “There a problem? My drivers are bonded.”

  “No problem,” I said, watching the truck driver scan his load before signing off on a computer-generated manifest.

  “My drivers are good guys. They draw a good wage and they stay with me for a long time.”

  Feeling hopeful, I asked, “How long?”

  He wrapped another stack of napkins. “Fred’s been with me about a dozen years, Satch eight or nine. Jaime, my dispatcher back there, drives backup if someone calls in sick. He was the first man I hired when Dad retired twenty years ago. I don’t mean to knock my dad, may he rest in peace, but he had a big turnover of drivers. I say it makes better sense to take good care of your key people so they stick around.”

  I was disappointed; none of them had been on the job long enough to help me out. I asked, “Do you change their delivery routes regularly?”

  “Nope. The schedule is the same as it’s been since forever.” He tapped a city map on the wall behind him that was divided into a dozen numbered zones. “Mondays and Fridays are commercial pick-up and delivery, restaurants, mostly. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are home delivery. If someone needs something off-schedule, they have to come in for it.”

  I pointed to my neighborhood, Zone Nine on his map. “Would there be any reason for one of your trucks to be here on a Monday morning?”

  “On a Monday?” He scowled, shook his head, counted and wrapped another stack of napkins. “Never. On Mondays, besides half the restaurants in town, we pick up from the party rentals and caterers—after the weekend events, you know—so we have to scramble. If one of my trucks took a detour into Nine on a Monday, I’d be getting calls about late deliveries.”

  “Did you change the schedule after your dad retired?”

  “Nope. Give him credit for that. He only had the one truck, and now we have three because we have more customers. But the schedule worked then, and it works now.”

  I took out my laptop, loaded Dad’s movie, fast-forwarded to the shot of Bay Laundry’s truck backing out of a driveway, and froze the frame. I turned the screen so he could see. He paused in his work to take a look.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked, chuckling. “That’s Dad’s old van. If it’s still around, it belongs in a museum.”

  “This is an old film,” I said. “What does it tell you?”

  “That’s upper Zone Nine,” he said with a little shrug. “So that was taken on a Thursday between eight and ten.”

  “It was shot on a Monday around eight A.M.”

  He shook his head. “Not possible.”

  “Can you think of any reason why the truck would be there on a Monday?”

  Again he shook his head. “Like I said, we keep a tight schedule.”

  The second of his delivery trucks backed into the loading bay and the off-loading, reloading scramble began anew. I saw the driver slip into the men’s room.

  “What happens if one of your trucks breaks down?” I asked.

  “We take good care of the rolling stock so that doesn’t happen very often. But when one does go down or goes in for regular servicing, we bring in the truck from the dry cleaning shop. They do a pick-up here in the morning and a delivery in the afternoon, so in the case of a breakdown, we just hang on to it for the day.”

  “Is that truck the same as the other two?”

  “It’s an Econoline, yeah. But it’s unmarked. The Richmond plant is in a crappy area, so we try to keep a low profile up there.”

  I took another look around before I offered Joe my hand. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Sure thing.” He pulled my card out of his breast pocket. “Mind putting your John Hancock on here? For the wife, you know.”

  “A pleasure.” I don’t at all understand the appeal of autographs, especially the signature of someone like me, who has, at most, minor celebrity. But I scrawled my name on the face of the card and handed it back. “Say hello to her for me.”

  As he walked me back toward the
front, I asked Joe where he was on the date Mrs. Bartolini died. The question seemed to puzzle him, but after a moment to think back, he said, “I was in the navy, stationed in Japan.”

  I thanked Joe again, said good-bye, and started off again toward home. On the street where we had faced down Larry Nordquist and his gang all those years ago, I stopped and looked around.

  Funny how two disparate events, the “rumble” and Mrs. B, became inextricably entwined in my memory. For me, the link was more than a coincidence of time. It was also the words that Larry yelled at me that day as we stood toe-to-toe in the middle of the street; his words still seemed to hang in the air at that place. “Gook kid and his gook whore mother. Saigon slut.”

  I remembered the way Larry’s spittle felt on my cheek when he spat out those words. Ugly, frightening words, so foreign within the protective bubble of my existence then. Ugly still.

  With a shudder, I continued toward home. When I reached my own street, I turned and took a last look at that place; no one was there.

  Beto, his wife, their children, his father and his mother-in-law all lived together in the corner house where Beto grew up. It appeared to be a happy arrangement for all, one that was perfectly natural to Beto’s Mexican-born wife, Zaida. As the domestic jefe, Zaida had overseen an extensive home remodel that added a second story, so that now the house looked very different from the original, right down to the front yard where a lawn and rose garden had been replaced with a native-plant xeriscape.

  Just about the only parts of the house that had been left untouched were the bedroom Mr. B had shared with his wife and a niche in the front entry that held a small golden Buddha. Every morning, fresh flowers, food and burning incense were carefully placed in the niche to honor the lost wife and mother, and the ancestors she left behind in Vietnam.

  A car horn startled me as I stood looking at the Bartolinis’ yard. I turned and saw Beto’s Aunt Quynh behind the wheel of a huge SUV. She waved as she pulled in off the street. I walked up the drive and waited for her to park.

  Quynh was Mrs. B’s older sister, a smaller, less pretty version of Tina. After the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, because Quynh had family in the U.S., the Hanoi-based government sent her to a re-education center, where she was sentenced to work in the rice paddies somewhere outside Saigon until, by some mysterious means, she managed to escape. From a Red Cross camp in Hong Kong, she was able to contact Bart. It was only then, maybe a year after the fact, that she learned that her sister was dead.