T. Boyle - The Tortilla Curtain

“Whose place is this?” he asked Jack as they came up the walk.

“Dominick Flood's.”

Delaney shot him a glance. “Don't think I know him.”

“You should,” Jack said over his shoulder, and that was all.

A maid showed them in. She was small, neat, with an untraceable accent and a tight black uniform with white trim and a little white apron Delaney found excessive: who would dress a servant up like somebody's idea of a servant, like something out of a movie? What was the point? They followed her down a corridor of genuine hand-troweled plaster, spare and bright, past a pair of rooms furnished in a Southwestern motif, Navajo blankets on the walls, heavy bleached-pine furniture, big clay pots of cactus and succulents, floors of unglazed tile. At the rear of the house, in the room Delaney used for his study, was a den with a wet bar, and eight men were gathered round it, drinks in hand. They were noisy and grew noisier when Jack stepped into the room, turning to him as one with shouts of greeting. Delaney recognized Jack Cherrystone and the bearded fat man from the meeting-Jim Shirley-and two or three others, though he couldn't place their names.

“Jack!” a voice cried out behind them and Delaney turned to see the man he presumed to be their host coming up the hallway. Flood looked to be about sixty, tanned and hard as a walnut, with.

“Dom,” Jack sang, shaking the older man's hand, and then he turned to introduce Delaney.

“The naturalist,” Flood said without irony, and fixed him with a narrow look. “Jack's told me all about you. And of course I follow your column in _Wide Open Spaces,__ terrific stuff, terrific.”

Delaney made a noise of demurral. “I didn't think anybody really paid that much attention-”

“I subscribe to them all,” Flood said, “-_Nature, High Sierra, The Tule Times,__ even some of the more radical newsletters. To me, there's nothing more important than the environment-hey, where would we be without it, floating in space?”

Delaney laughed.

“Besides, I have a lot of time on my hands”-at this, they both glanced down at the box on his ankle and Delaney had his first intimation of just what its function might be-“and reading sustains me, on all issues. But come on in and have a drink,” he was saying, already in motion, and a moment later they were standing at the bar with the others while a man in a blue satin jacket and bow tie fixed their drinks-Scotch, no ice, for Jack, and a glass of sauvignon blanc for Delaney.

It was a convivial evening, a social gathering and nothing more-at least for the first hour-and Delaney had begun to enjoy himself, set at ease immediately by his host's praise and the easy familiarity of the others-they were his neighbors, after all-when the smaller conversations began to be subsumed in a larger one, and the theme of the evening gradually began to reveal itself. Jim Shirley, sweating and huge in a Disneyland T-shirt, was leaning forward on the sofa with a drink in his hand, addressing Bill Vogel and Charlie Tillerman, the two men Delaney had recognized on entering, and the room fell silent to pick up his words. “Go unlisted, that's what I say. And I'm going to raise the issue at the next community meeting, just to warn everybody-”

“I don't think I'm following you, Jim,” Jack Cherrystone rumbled from the bar, the seismic blast of his everyday voice setting the glass ashtrays in motion on the coffee table. “What do you mean, go unlisted? What difference would that make?”

Jim Shirley was a querulous fat man, bringer of bad tidings, a paranoiac, and Delaney didn't like him. But the moment belonged to Jim Shirley, and he seized it. “I'm talking the latest rash of burglaries? The three houses on Esperanza that got hit two weeks back? Well, the gate helps, no doubt about it, but these characters came in in a pickup truck, ratty old clothes, a couple rakes and a mower in back, and said they were doing the Levines' place, 37 Via Esperanza. The guard waves them through. But the thing is, they got the address out of the phone book, called the Levines to make sure they were out, and hit the place. And while they were at it, they got the Farrells and the Cochrans too. So my advice is, go unlisted. And I mean everybody in the development.”

It had gotten dark, and Delaney looked through his reflection to the shadowy lawn out back, half-expecting to see criminals disguised as gardeners tiptoeing past with rolled-up Karastan rugs and CD players. Was nobody safe-anywhere, ever?

“I like the advice, Jim,” Jack Jardine said. He was sitting at the bar still, nursing h sañl, nursinis second Scotch. A single thick strand of hair had fallen across his forehead, giving him the look of an earnest high-school debater. “And I think you should bring it up at the next meeting, but what we should really be looking at is the larger issue of how these people are getting into our community to begin with and the fact that the gate is just a stopgap-hell, anybody can just park out on the canyon road and walk in from the south or take any one of half a dozen off-the-road tracks and be out back of the development in five minutes. We're all vulnerable to that. And what Jim didn't tell you-or hasn't told you yet-is what happened to Sunny DiMandia.”

There was a portentousness to Jack's tone that put Delaney off-he was manipulating the room the way he manipulated a courtroom, and Delaney resented him for it. Was this what Jack had brought him for-to get him on his team? Jim Shirley, who seemed to be the official trader in horror stories, was about to lay bare the Sunny DiMandia episode in all its lurid detail, when Delaney heard his own voice plunging into the gap: “So what do you mean, Jack? Isn't the gate enough? Next thing you'll want to wall the whole place in like a medieval city or something-”

Delaney had expected laughter, a murmur or two of assent, anything to confirm the absurdity of the proposition, but he was met by silence. Everyone was watching him. He felt uneasy suddenly, all the spirit of camaraderie dissolved in that instant. Wall the place in. That was exactly what they intended to do. That was what they were here for. That was the purpose of the gathering.

“We're all praying for Sunny,” Jim Shirley said then, “and the latest prognosis is for a full and speedy recovery, but the man-or men, the police aren't sure yet-who got in there last week did a lot of damage, and I don't mean just physical damage, because I don't know if a woman ever really recovers from something like this…” He paused to heave a deep alveolar sigh. A hand went to his face, moist and doughy, and he pressed his drink to his brow like a wet cloth. “You all know Sunny, don't you?” he said finally, lifting his head to survey the room. “Fabulous woman, one of the best. Sixty-two years old and as active in this community as anybody.” Another sigh, a rigid compression of the jowls. “She left the back door open, that was her mistake. Thinking it was safe up here-what an irony, huh?”

“It was our first violent crime,” Jack put in. “The first, and let's make damn sure it's the last.”

“Amen,” Jim Shirley said, and then he went into the grisly details, step by step, moment by moment, sparing them nothing.

Delaney filtered him out. He was watching his host, who was curled up now in the corner of a pastel couch, his bare legs propped on the coffee table, idly scratching his calf. As they'd sat together earlier at the bar, Jack had given him an abbreviated explanation of the device on Flood's ankle. He was a client of Jack's, a good guy, ambitious, and his bank-there'd been three local branches and he personally oversaw them all-had got entangled in some unwise investments, as Jack put it. The device was on loan from the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service house-arrest program, and he would be wearing it, night and day, for the next three years. Delaney had been stunned. “Three years?” he'd whispered, glancing in awe at the black plastic manacle on Flood's ankle. “You mean he can't leave this house for three years?” Jack had nodded curtly. “Better than prison, wouldn't you say?”