John Lescroart - Damage

He woke up with the possibility still fresh in his mind, thought about it through their first six houses in the morning. He did not want to give away what he knew to anyone. He knew Roberto and if he told him about the reward, and if his wife had been Gloria Gonzalvez, Roberto himself would go to Lupe and claim the reward and Hector would be lucky if he even got any small part of it. The same went for his three coworkers. If they had any idea what it was about, in exchange for any information they gave him, they would undoubtedly want to share part of the reward themselves. Jorge Cristobal from the trailer park was going to be bad enough if he was going to be the intermediary between Hector and Lupe. It looked like whoever claimed the reward was going to be stuck with someone like Jorge. But at least if Hector came to Jorge with the truth-if it was the truth-about Roberto’s wife, then he would still have some leverage and might be able to keep Jorge’s cut of the five thousand to a minimum.

Five thousand dollars! It was unfathomable.

They didn’t take much time for lunch, no more than twenty minutes, but Hector arranged it so that he sat near to Roberto, who tended to sit somewhat apart from the crew normally, and halfway through their food, he struck up a conversation with his boss, under the pretext that he had a girlfriend himself and was thinking about marriage.

“How long,” he asked in Spanish, “have you been married?”

Roberto shrugged. “Eight years.”

“And how is it?”

“Good. I got lucky. Gloria works hard and she’s a good mother. Don’t marry a girl who doesn’t like children.”

“That isn’t the problem,” Hector said.

“If you already have a problem, maybe you should think about this decision some more. You shouldn’t have problems before you get married.”

“Well, maybe it isn’t one. I don’t know. It’s why I wanted to ask you.”

“You don’t know if you have a problem?”

“I know what I have. I don’t know if it’s a problem.”

Roberto waited.

“She’s…”

“What’s her name?”

“Maria.”

“All right.”

“Maria has lived here already for seven years.”

“Is she a citizen? Because then, yes, marry her.”

“No. Not yet. She is like me. But she has gotten ideas from some of the women she knows. She says it’s not right that I should force her, if we become married, to change her name.”

This seemed to confuse Roberto for a moment. “What would she change her name to? There is no better name than Maria.”

“Her last name,” Hector said. “To mine. Murillo.”

“Murillo is a fine name. Why would she not want to have it?”

“It’s not about the name. It’s about being a modern American woman.”

“But she’s not American.”

“No. But she speaks good English. She wants to fit in here. It’s the new culture, she says.”

Roberto frowned. “She will never fit in to the culture here. Doesn’t she know that? Her children, maybe, or their children, but maybe not. I don’t want to tell you what to do with this woman, but I’ll be honest. This doesn’t sound good to me.” He took a bite of his burrito, chewing as though he was considering the issue from all angles.

Hector took the opportunity to go on. “So your wife, there was no problem, she changed her name?”

Roberto nodded. “Of course. It was never discussed. I would not have discussed it. She is my wife, she has my name.”

“That is what I’ve been thinking,” Hector said. “Except then I wonder if it is just that she doesn’t like the sound of it, Maria Murillo.”

“Nonsense. The sound of a name. What does that matter? What is her name now?”

“Gonzalvez,” Hector said. “Maria Gonzalvez.”

Roberto said “Ha!” and threw his hands in the air in a gesture of triumph. “You know this was my wife’s name, Gonzalvez? Once she changed, she has never missed it. You tell your woman that. And if she still won’t do it, I don’t advise that you go ahead with this marriage. A woman who doesn’t want to take your name, she sounds like she could be a lot of trouble.”

Eztli bought two piroshki-meat-filled pastries-from one of the little Russian shops in the nearby neighborhood. He started eating one of them while walking back toward Haight Street, and when he’d finished that, he unwrapped the other one and pressed four of the little tablets he’d bought at the hardware store into the bottom of it. He threw the wax-paper wrapper and the package that the tablets had come in into a trash receptacle sitting on the sidewalk two streets down from the piroshki stand.

Coming around the corner a block away from the Rape Crisis Counseling Center, he turned right and strolled casually along, taking in the storefront windows as he aimlessly window-shopped. Stopping two doors down from the Center, checking out the vacation specials in the travel agency’s window, he waited while a couple of elderly women stopped to interact with the cute yellow Lab on the bench, now very much awake and receptive, licking their hands as they petted it.

Farrell stood in a brown study in the mid-afternoon, aimlessly flicking the handles at his foosball table, keeping the ball in play.

Someone knocked on his door. He looked up, stopped defending, and the ball went into the right-hand goal as he said, “Come on in.”

“Where’s Treya?”

“Don’t ask. Get the door, please.”

Amanda Jenkins wasn’t showing off her legs today. She was wearing stone-washed jeans and a simple black T-shirt. She hadn’t combed her hair since she had gotten up and didn’t look like she’d had too much sleep before then, either. For the first split second when he saw her, Farrell almost cracked wise about her appearance here on the job, but one look into her red-rimmed eyes told him that wouldn’t be sensitive or wise, and so instead he said, “I don’t expect you to be in here, Amanda. Maybe you want to take a couple of days off, give things a chance to settle.”

“Are you kidding me?” she asked. “That’s why I’m in here. I don’t want anything to settle. I want to string that bastard up by his balls.”

“You want the grand jury?”

“Absolutely. I want it sooner than you do.”

“I doubt that.” He came around and leaned back against the foosball table. “Could you get the case prepared sooner?”

“If I don’t sleep, and that’s what seems to be happening.”

“Well, don’t sacrifice your prep. You don’t want to go in and not get him.”

“I’ll get him. I swear to Christ I’ll get him.”

“You think-really?-by next Tuesday?”

“Well, I’ve got all the evidence from Sandoval , I’ve got testimony about Matt’s assignment, I’ve got Nuñez and Janice Durbin and revenge, and then I’ll have to see what else I can gather from Abe, but…”

“Speaking of which, did you see Marrenas’s column this morning?”

“Fuck her.”

“Well, sure, but you didn’t read the column?”

“No. Why?”

“She’s turned up the heat on Abe in a big way.”

“On Abe? How can that be?”

“He’s not investigating Michael Durbin. He’s fixated on Ro. It’s a vendetta. Blah, blah, blah. And meanwhile, just in case things are getting too dull around here, guess who called me yesterday about this grand jury thing?”

Jenkins ran her hands through her hair. “What is this bullshit, Wes? This is Alice in Wonderland .”

“Yes, it is. Welcome to San Francisco.”

“So who called you about the grand jury? Marrenas?”

“Well, yes, of course, first. But the real fun part was Cliff the-man-himself Curtlee, who seemed to think that the personal threat is an effective negotiating tool.”