A Stranger in My Grave Read online

  “What idea?”

  Alston shook his head in a mixture of sorrow and grudging admiration. “She worked out a simple but absolutely stunning device for hog-tying the whole bunch of us: the courts, the Probation Department, our staff. Whenever she got in trouble, she outwitted us all with classic simplicity.”

  “How?”

  “By becoming pregnant. A delinquent girl is one thing; an expectant mother is quite different.” Alston stirred in his chair and sighed again. “To tell you the truth, none of us knows for sure if Juanita actually figured out this device in a conscious way. One of our psychologists believes that she used pregnancy as a means of making herself feel important. I’m not positive about that, though. The girl—woman, rather, she must be twenty-six or twenty-seven by this time—isn’t stupid by any means. She did quite well on several of her tests, especially those that required use of imagination rather than knowledge of facts. She could study an ordinary little drawing and describe it with such vivid imagination that you’d think she was looking at something by Van Gogh. The term psychopathic personality is no longer in vogue, but it certainly would have applied to Juanita.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Fairly pretty in a flashing-eyed, toothy sort of way. About her figure I couldn’t say. I never saw her between pregnancies. The tragic part of it,” Alston added, “is that she didn’t really care about the kids. When they were small babies, she liked to cuddle them and play with them as if they were dolls, but as soon as they grew up a little, she lost interest. Three or four years ago she was arrested on a child-neglect charge, but once again she was in the throes of reproduction and got off on probation. After the birth of that particular child—her sixth, I think it was—she broke pro­bation and left town. Nobody tried very hard to find her, I’m afraid. I wouldn’t be surprised if my own staff chipped in to pay her traveling expenses. Juanita herself was enough of a problem. But multiply her by six—oh Lord, I hate to think about it. So now she’s back in town.”

  “I believe so.”

  “Doing what? Or need I ask?”

  “Working as a waitress in a bar,” Pinata said. “If it’s the same girl.”

  “Is she married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the kids with her?”

  “Some of them are, anyway. She got into a fight with her hus­band a few days ago. He claimed she was neglecting them.”

  “If you don’t even know the girl,” Alston said, “where did you pick up all your information?”

  “A friend of mine happened to be in the bar when the fight started.”

  “And this is how you became interested in the prolific Juanita, through a friend of yours who happened to witness a fight?”

  “You might say that.”

  “I might say it but it wouldn’t be the truth, is that it?” Alston peered over the top of his spectacles. “Is the girl in trouble again?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then why exactly are you here?”

  Pinata hesitated. He didn’t want to tell the whole story, even to Alston, who’d heard some whoppers in his day. “I’d like you to check your files and tell me if Juanita Garcia came here on a cer­tain date.”

  “What date?”

  “Friday, December 2, 1955.”

  “That’s a funny request,” Alston said. “Care to give me a reason for it?”

  “No.”

  “I assume you have a good reason.”

  “I’m not sure how good it is. I have one, though. It concerns a—client of mine. I’d like to keep her name out of it, but I can’t, since I need some information about her, too. Her name’s Mrs. James Harker.”

  “Harker, Harker, let me think a min—Daisy Harker?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s a woman like Daisy Harker doing getting mixed up with a bail bondsman?”

  “It’s a long, implausible story,” Pinata said with a smile. “And since it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m paying you time and a half, I’d rather go into it on some other occasion.”

  “What do you want to know about Mrs. Harker?”

  “The same thing: if she was working at the Clinic on that par­ticular day. Also when, and why, she stopped coming here.”

  “The why part I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. It mysti­fied me at the time and still does. She made some excuse about her mother being ill and needing attention, but I happen to know Mrs. Fielding from my connection with the Women’s Club. The old girl’s as healthy as a horse. Quite an attractive woman, if she could remember to keep her velvet gloves on. . . . No, it wasn’t Mrs. Fielding’s illness, I’m sure of that. As for the work itself, I believe Mrs. Harker enjoyed it.”

  “Was she good at it?” Pinata asked.

  “Excellent. Sweet-natured, understanding, dependable. Oh, she had a tendency to get overexcited at times and lose her head a bit in an emergency, but nothing serious. And the kids all loved her. She had a way, as childless women sometimes have, of making the kids feel very important and special, not just something that hap­pened from an accidental meeting of a sperm and ovum. A fine young woman, Mrs. Harker. We were sorry to lose her. Have you known her long?”

  “No.”

  “Next time you see her, give her my kind regards, will you? And tell her we’d like to have her back whenever she can come.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “In fact, if I could find out the circumstances that made her quit, I might be able to change them.”

  “The circumstances are entirely Daisy’s, not the Clinic’s.”

  “Well, I just thought I’d check,” Alston said. “We have occa­sional disagreements and disgruntlements among the members of our staff just like any other business. It’s surprising we don’t have more when you consider that psychology is not an exact sci­ence and there are consequently differences of opinion on diag­nosis and procedure. Procedure especially,” he added with a frown. “Just what does one do with a girl like Juanita, for instance? Sterilize her? Keep her locked up? Enforce psychiatric treatment? We did our best, but the reason it didn’t work was that Juanita herself wouldn’t admit there was anything the matter with her. Like most incorrigibles, she’d managed to convince herself (and tried, of course, to convince us) that women were all the same and that what made her different was the fact that she was honest and aboveboard about her activities. Honest and above- board, the favorite words of the self-deceiver. Take my advice, Steve. Whenever anyone insists too vigorously on his honesty, you run and check the till. And don’t be too surprised if you find somebody’s fingers in it.”

  “I don’t believe in generalizations,” Pinata said. “Especially that one.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it includes me. I make frequent claims to honesty. In fact, I’m making one now.”

  “Well, well. This puts me in the embarrassing position of either taking back the generalization or going to check the till. This is a serious decision. Let me meditate a moment.” Alston leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Very well. I take back the gen­eralization. I’m afraid it’s easy to become a bit cynical in this job. So many promises made and broken, so many hopes dashed—it leaves you with a tendency to believe in the psychology of opposites, that is, when a person comes in and tells me he is affa­ble, honest, and simple, I tend to tag him as a complex and irri­table cheat. This is an occupational hazard I must avoid. Thanks for pointing it out, Steve.”

  “I didn’t point out anything,” Pinata said, embarrassed. “I was merely defending myself.”

  “I insist upon thanking you.”

  “All right, all right, you’re welcome. At time and a half I don’t want to argue with you.”

  “Oh yes, time and a half. I must get on with the job. I address the Newcomers Club at t
wo, a good, malleable group usually. I have considerable hopes for our treasury.” He took a ring of keys from his desk drawer. “Please wait here. I can’t ask you into the file room. Not that our records are top secret, but many people like to believe they are. Want something to read while I’m gone?”

  “No thanks. I’ll just think.”

  “Got a lot to think about?”

  “Enough.”

  “Daisy Harker,” Alston said casually, “is a very pretty and, I believe, an unhappy young woman. That’s a bad combination.”

  “What’s it got to do with me?”

  “Not a thing, I hope.”

  “Save your hopes for the treasury,” Pinata said. “My relation­ship with Mrs. Harker is strictly professional. She hired me to get some information about a certain day in her life.”

  “And Juanita was part of this day?”

  “Possibly.” Possibly Camilla was, too, though so far there was no indication of it. When Daisy called his office the previous morning, as scheduled, and learned the details of Camilla’s death, she was surprised, pained, curious—a perfectly normal reaction, which dispelled his last trace of doubt about her sincerity. She had, she said, asked both Jim and her mother if they’d ever known a man named Camilla, and she was waiting to hear from her father, to whom she’s sent a special delivery letter.

  Alston was staring at him with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “You’re not very communicative today, Steve.”

  “I like to think of myself as the strong, silent type.”

  “You do, eh? Well, just watch out for that Lancelot syndrome you’re carrying around. Rescuing ladies in distress can be dan­gerous, especially if the ladies happen to be married. Harker has the reputation of being a very good guy. And a smart one. Think it over, Steve. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Pinata thought it over. Lancelot syndrome, hell. I’m not inter­ested in saving Daisies in distress. Daisy, what a silly name for a grown woman. I’ll bet that was Fielding’s idea. Mrs. Fielding would have picked something a little more high-toned or exotic, Céleste, Stephanie, Gwendolyn.

  He got up and began pacing the room. Thinking about names depressed him because his own were only borrowed, from a parish priest and a child’s Christmas game. During the past three years especially, since Monica had taken Johnny away, Pinata had wondered a great deal about his parents, trying, not too success­fully, to follow the advice the Mother Superior had given him many times: “There’s no room in this world for self-pity, Stevens. You’re a strong man because you had no one to lean on, and that’s a good thing sometimes, to live without leaning. Think of all the fixations you might have developed, and dear me, there are a lot of them around these days. The essential thing for a boy is to have a good man to pattern himself after. And you had that in Father Stevens…. Your mother? What else could she have been but a young woman who found herself bearing too heavy a cross? You must not blame her for being unable to carry it. Perhaps she was just a schoolgirl....”

  Or a Juanita, Pinata thought grimly. But why should it matter now after more than thirty years? I could never trace her anyway; there wasn’t a single clue. And even if I found her, what about him? It’s pos­sible she wouldn’t even know which of the men in her life was my father. Or care.

  Alston returned, carrying several cards picked out of a file. “Well, you have something, Steve. I’m not sure what. December 2, ‘55, was the last day Mrs. Harker worked here. She was on duty from 1:00 to 5:30, in charge of the children’s playroom. That’s where the younger children are kept while their parents or rela­tives are being counseled. No actual therapy is done there, but it was part of Mrs. Harker’s job to observe any behavior problems, such as excessive destructiveness or shyness, and report them in writing to the professional members of the staff. The way a three- year-old plays with a doll often gives us more of a clue to the cause of family trouble than several hours of talking on the part of the parents. So you can see Mrs. Harker’s work was important. She took it seriously, too. I just checked one of her reports. It was full of details that some of our other volunteers would have failed to notice or at least to record.”

  “The report you checked, was it one from that particular day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anything unusual or disturbing happen?”

  “A lot of unusual and disturbing things happen here every day,” Alston said cheerfully. “You can count on that.”

  “I meant, as far as Mrs. Harker was concerned. Did she have some trouble with any of the children, for instance?”

  “Nothing on the record indicates it. Mrs. Harker might have had some trouble with a relative of one of the children or even a staff member, but such an incident wouldn’t be included in her written report. And I very much doubt that one occurred. Mrs. Harker got along well with everybody. If I had to make a personal criticism of her, that would be it. She was overeager to please people; it led me to think that she didn’t set a very high value on herself. These constant smilers usually don’t.”

  “Constant smiler?” Pinata said. “Overeager to please? Could we possibly be talking about the same woman? Maybe there are two Daisy Harkers.”

  “Why? Has she changed?”

  “She shows no signs of being eager to please, believe me.”

  “Now, that’s highly interesting. I always knew she was putting up a front. It’s probably a good sign that she’s stopped. These lit­tle Daddy’s-girl wiles can look pretty nonsensical in a grown woman. Perhaps she’s maturing, and that’s about all any of us can hope for. Maturity,” he added, “is not a destination like Hong Kong, London, Paris, or heaven. It’s a continuing process, rather like a road along which one travels. There’s no Maturitytown, U.S.A. Say, I wonder if I could put that across to the Soroptimists at their banquet tonight. . . . No, no, I don’t think I’ll try. It wouldn’t be much of a fund-raiser. I’d better stick with my statis­tics. People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.”

  “Especially yours?”

  “Mine can be very impressive,” Alston said with a grin. “But to get back to our subject, I’ll admit I’m becoming curious about the connection between Juanita and Mrs. Harker.”

  “I’m not sure there is one.”

  “Then I guess this is just a coincidence.” Alston tapped the cards he’d picked from the file. “Friday, December 2, was the last time Mrs. Harker appeared here. It was also the last time any of us heard from Juanita.”

  “Heard from?”

  “She was scheduled to come in Friday morning to talk to Mrs. Huxley, one of our social workers. It wasn’t to be a therapy ses­sion, merely a discussion of finances and what could be done with Juanita’s children, who’d been released from Juvenile Hall into the custody of Juanita’s mother, Mrs. Rosario. None of us con­sidered this an ideal arrangement. Mrs. Rosario is a clean-living, respectable woman, but she’s a bit of a nut on religion, and Mrs. Huxley was going to try to talk Juanita into allowing the children to be placed in foster homes for a time.

  “At any rate Juanita called Mrs. Huxley early Friday morning and said she couldn’t keep her appointment, because she wasn’t feeling well. This was natural enough, since she was just a couple of jumps ahead of the obstetrician. Mrs. Huxley explained to her that the business about the children was urgent, and another appointment was made for late that afternoon. Juanita was quite docile about it, even amiable. That alone should have warned us. She didn’t show up, of course. Thinking the baby might have arrived on the scene a bit prematurely, I called Mrs. Rosario next day. She was in a furious state. Juanita had left town, taking the children with her, and Mrs. Rosario blamed me.”

  “Why you?” Pinata asked.

  “Because,” Alston said, grimacing, “I have mal ojo, the evil eye.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “In c
ase you think belief in mal ojo has disappeared, let me has­ten to correct you. Like many older members of her race, Mrs. Rosario is still living in the distant past, medically speaking: hospitals are places to die in, psychiatry is against the Church, ill­ness is caused not by germs but by mal ojo. If you accused her of believing these things, she would probably deny it. Nevertheless, Juanita’s first child was born in the kitchen of an elderly midwife, and when Juanita was sent to us for psychiatric help, Mrs. Rosario proved to be as big a stumbling block as the girl herself. Very few medical doctors, and not enough psychiatrists, have attempted to bridge this cultural gap. They tend to dismiss people like Mrs. Rosario as obstinate, backward, perverse, whereas she is simply reacting according to her cultural pattern. That pattern hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think it has. It will take more than time to change it. It will take effort, intent, training. But that’s lecture number twenty-seven and not much of a fund-raiser either. ... I hope, by the way, that you’re not taking any of my remarks about your race personally.”

  “Why should I?” Pinata said with a shrug. “I’m not even sure it is my race.”

  “But you think so?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You know, I’ve often wondered about that. You don’t quite fit the—”

  “Mrs. Rosario is a more interesting subject than I am.”

  “Very well. As I said, she was extremely angry when I called her. She’d gone to a special mass the previous night to pray for various lost souls, including, I hope, Juanita’s. I’ve often won­dered—haven’t you?—how the parish priests handle people like Mrs. Rosario who believe with equal fervor in the Virgin Mary and the evil eye. Must be quite a problem. Anyway, on returning home, she discovered that Juanita had left, bag and baggage and five children. I’m not aware of any reason why Mrs. Rosario should have lied about it, but it did strike me at the time that it was a very convenient story. It saved her from having to answer questions from the police and the Probation Department. If she was at church when Juanita left, then obviously she couldn’t be expected to know anything. She’s a complex woman, Mrs. Rosario. She distrusts and disapproves of Juanita; she seems, in fact, to hate her; but she has a fierce maternal instinct.