I laughed. “If I think of anything, Chief, I’ll call you.”
His smile faded. “I don’t want to undercut Thornbury and Weber, Mags, but if you do run into anything, I would appreciate it if you ran it by me first.”
“Didn’t I just say that?” I got up from his big desk chair.
“We should get back to the others,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be starting a barbecue?”
As we walked from his home office through the house out toward the patio, he asked, “How did it go with Sly’s mother yesterday?”
“She’s a mess, Roger. I believed her when she said she had no memory of the son she named Ronald Miller. She thought Ronald Miller was some tweaker who died.”
“Waste of time?”
“The visit? Definitely not. Meeting her makes me appreciate Sly even more. He is something of a miracle.”
“Speaking of miracles,” he said, giving me a little wink. “You really like this new guy of yours.”
“He’s growing on me.”
“Like a wart,” Roger said, nudging me with his shoulder. “He seems to stick pretty close to you.”
“We’re new, Roger. We’ve both been on the shelf for a while, and we’re enjoying being with another nice, warm body again. And as someones go, you have to admit, he’s interesting.”
“I don’t like him,” Roger said with that wicked gleam in his eye that I knew was good-natured, brotherly teasing. “He speaks in complete sentences.”
“English isn’t his first language. Give him time and his usage will be as crappy and profane as yours.”
“We can only hope.”
My daughter, Casey, and her roommate, Zia, had arrived while I was with Roger. On our way through, we found the two of them huddled with Kate at a kitchen counter, three heads bent over a typed paper. Ever since she was in high school, from time to time, Casey had called upon Kate, her godmother, for help with written assignments. This time, it seemed, it was Zia who had asked for counsel.
When I walked in I got little waves from the girls, who, with Kate, seemed intent on a knotty problem. Kate looked up from the paper and called to her mother-in-law, Linda, who was stirring something magic-smelling in a big pot on the stove.
“Mom,” Kate said to Linda, “can we borrow you for a minute?”
“Sí, m’ija.” Linda, a retired high-school English teacher, put the lid on her pot, wiped her hands on the tea towel tied around her middle, came over and bent her head next to Casey’s and began to read the paper on the counter.
Linda looked up when Roger went to the refrigerator for a beer.
“Rigo, I don’t smell any smoke coming from outside.”
“I’m on it, Mom,” Roger said, popping his beer open and heading for the patio door.
“Maggie, honey,” she said to me, “Ricardo took your mom, your uncle, and that handsome man of yours out to his studio. You might go rescue your boyfriend-you know how Ricardo can be.”
As the door closed behind us, Roger said, “My dad is probably grilling the poor boy about his intentions.”
“Actually, your dad said he wanted to show everyone the didgeridoo he brought back from Australia.”
“That’s as flimsy a pretext as an invitation to look at etchings.”
Laughing, I left him to fire up the big barbecue and walked across the patio to the second house of the three houses on the property.
Roger’s father, Ricardo, had been a high-school band teacher before he retired. When Kate and Roger built the casita-the little house-for his parents, in self-defense they added a sound-proofed music studio on the back side. Forty years of standing in front of tubas and drums had left Ricardo a bit hard of hearing, though Linda insisted that his hearing was fine when he wanted it to be; he just liked things loud.
Ricardo was indeed showing Mom, Max and Jean-Paul his didgeridoo, a flute-like instrument played by Aboriginal Australians. There was a lot of laughter going on, so I could only guess at what else they were talking about because when I walked in they paused the conversation to see who was interrupting.
Jean-Paul rose and came over to me.
“I promised you a home tour,” I said. “Still interested?”
“Of course.”
We said good-bye to the others and I led him outside.
“Ricardo was explaining his retirement plan,” he said, still smiling.
“What? Move in with the kids?”
“Exactly. He was trying to persuade your mother to follow suit.”
“She wasn’t buying it, though, was she?”
“She said maybe she should move in with Ricardo’s kids. You haven’t offered to build her a house of her own, and you don’t have a pool.”
“I keep hoping they’ll invite me to move in,” I said.
He nodded, looking around.
“In the three years I have been in Los Angeles,” he said, “I have seen many grand homes: mansions in the foothills, mansions on the shore, penthouse mansions. But this is the first home I have visited that I would want to live in.”
He smiled at me. “I wouldn’t turn down an invitation to move in, either.”
I took him out through the big wooden gate at the side of the adobe wall that surrounded the Tejedas’ three-house compound to show him the front of the original Mexican-era adobe structure.
The buildings were just above the flood plain of a year-round creek-a trickle in the summer, a torrent during the winter rainy season-and seemed to be as much a part of the natural landscape as the ancient live oak trees that gave the ranch its name, El Rancho de las Encinas Viejas-Old Oaks Ranch-almost two hundred years ago.
When Kate and Roger happened upon the place during a Sunday drive, no one had lived there for decades. The roof of the main house was long gone and its five-foot-thick adobe walls had been eroded by many years of rain and neglect. But they could see in the ruins the outlines of what had once been a gracious hacienda. And they fell in love with it.
They were at one of those transitional junctures in life. Roger was ready to retire from his first police career. Marisol, their daughter, would enter kindergarten that fall. And Kate, ready to resume her career after a five-year hiatus to stay home with Mari, had managed to land a scarce college teaching position at Anacapa, sixty freeway miles from their home. So, the day they first saw the crumbling rancho, they searched out the owner and made an offer, even though the property had not been listed for sale. And then they began planning their new home, using the original architecture as their guide.
On his first visit to the site, Ricardo announced that they had better build him and Linda a house there, too, because there was no way he could be expected to battle the 405 every time he wanted to see his youngest grandbaby. So they had. And then a third one for visits by Roger’s two grown children from his first marriage and their young families.
Jean-Paul thought that it was completely natural for several generations of a family to live in such close proximity. When I thought about it, it wasn’t all that unusual in the U.S., either.
Though the Tejeda home wasn’t opulent by any measure except comfort and setting, clearly the costs involved in its acquisition and building had been significant.
“Policemen must be better paid in America than they are in France,” Jean-Paul said, with a tilt of the head that posed the statement as a question.
“Kate is an heiress,” I said.
“Quiet money?”
“Very quiet.”
That night, dinner conversation naturally turned to the murder.
Kate sighed, “Hiram Chin is pressing for a memorial service for Holloway ASAP. Roger told me the coroner won’t even get to the autopsy until tomorrow, but Hiram thinks we can schedule the service for Wednesday. I find the hurry to be unseemly.”
“Why the rush?” Linda asked.
“Hiram says the memorial will start the healing process for the campus, whatever that means. But I think that what he wants is to put the tenure of Park Holloway in his rearview mirror just as soon as he can.”