California Schemin': The 2020 Bouchercon Anthology

By Scott Turow, Anne Perry, Walter Mosley and 2 more

California Schemin' is a new anthology of thrilling tales by nineteen of the world's best mystery authors. The official anthology of Bouchercon 2020, it is edited by the award-winning Art Taylor and features brand new works by acclaimed and award-winning writers like Scott Turow, Walter Mosley, Anne Perry, Anthony Horowitz, Cara Black, Janet A. Rudolph, and Catriona McPherson.

As the name implies, most tales in California Schemin' features a Californian theme, exploring both the heights of ambition and the depths of depravity in the Golden State's shadowy streets. Filled with twists and turns, intrigue, betrayals, wit, and whimsy, California Schemin' is the perfect book for any mystery lover.

Included are:

• Jennifer Berg, "Schemes in the Dark"
• Cara Black, "Cabaret aux Assassins"
• David Boop, "Call Before You Die!"
• Chris Dreith, "Old Soles"
• Dixon Hill, "No Postman, No Doorbell"
• Anthony Horowitz, "Camberwell Crackers"
• Kim Keeline, "California Fold'em"
• R.J. Koreto, "The Hollywood Gangster"
• Joyce Kreig, "Last Call at the Zanzibar"
• Ellen Clair Lamb, "The Assistant"
• Catriona McPherson, "The Finishing Touch"
• Walter Mosley, "Fearless"
• Anne Perry, "An Affaire of Inconvenience"
• Eileen Rendahl, "A Spoonful of Poison"
• Christopher Ryan, "Hellhounds: Hollywood Demons"
• Linda Townsdin, "Re-entry"
• Scott Turow, "Tell Him No"
• Gabriel Valjan, "Elysian Fields"
• Carrie Voorhis, "The Fandancer's First Murder"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781479451951

Book preview

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

INTRODUCTION, by Art Taylor

TELL HIM NO, by Scott Turow

ELYSIAN FIELDS, by Gabriel Valjan

SCHEMES IN THE DARK, by Jennifer Berg

FEARLESS, by Walter Mosley

A SPOONFUL OF POISON, by Eileen Rendahl

CABARET AUX ASSASSINS, by Cara Black

THE HOLLYWOOD GANGSTER, by R.J. Koreto

NO POSTMAN, NO DOORBELL, by Dixon Hill

THE ASSISTANT, by Ellen Clair Lamb

THE FANDANCER’S FIRST MURDER, by Carrie Voorhis

LAST CALL AT THE ZANZIBAR, by Joyce Krieg

OLD SOLES, by Chris Dreith

AN AFFAIRE OF INCONVENIENCE, by Anne Perry

CALIFORNIA FOLD’EM, by Kim Keeline

CALL BEFORE YOU DIE! by David Boop

CAMBERWELL CRACKERS, by Anthony Horowitz

HELLHOUNDS: HOLLYWOOD DEMONS, by Christopher Ryan

RE-ENTRY, by Linda Townsdin

THE FINISHING TOUCH, by Catriona McPherson

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2020 by Bouchercon, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

INTRODUCTION, by Art Taylor

California Schemin’ marks the second time I’ve edited an anthology for Bouchercon, the World Mystery Convention. The first was Murder Under the Oaks for the 2015 Bouchercon in Raleigh, North Carolina—not only my home state but also a city I lived in for about a decade. Heading up that anthology, being part of that Bouchercon—all of it felt like coming home.

California? My first impulse here was to write, I’ve been a tourist—at best.

But that’s not quite true—for me or for any of us who count ourselves as serious readers of crime fiction. We mystery fans have read our Hammett and Chandler and Cain. We’ve read our Ross Macdonald and our Dorothy B. Hughes. We’ve read Sue Grafton and James Ellroy and Walter Mosley and Michael Connolly and Laurie R. King. And these days we’re seeing new views of California, hearing from new voices, including Steph Cha and Rachel Howzell Hall and Joe Ide, just to begin to name a few.

(And then there’s Hollywood’s long history of crime films as well—many set right in the state itself: Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, Chinatown, Dirty Harry, Boyz in the Hood, Pulp Fiction, Heat, Zodiac, Drive…fill in your own favorite.)

It’s a testament to those writers—and many more, both past and present—that readers of crime fiction and viewers of crime films feel as if we know California, even if the California we’ve read about and seen—author to author and book to book, director after director and film to film—might in each case occupy some very specific imaginative terrain, inevitably molded by personal worldviews or by the eras in which the works were written.

Collectively, however, it’s a tribute to the Golden State that perhaps more than any other (New York? Florida?), California crime fiction has formed and shaped and dominated the landscape of the entire genre.

In this collection, Gabriel Valjan’s Elysian Fields places itself squarely in a long tradition of hard-boiled crime novels and stories—Chandleresque was the term that immediately leaped to my mind, though perhaps Ellroyesque fits as well? Even in its title, Dixon Hill’s No Postman, No Doorbell gestures toward Cain’s most famous novel and toward a distinguished history of noir tales—and maybe it’s just me, but in the references to property and water rights, I couldn’t help but get some dim echoes of Chinatown too. Jennifer Berg’s Schemes in the Dark makes explicit reference to the paperback adventure novels and Saturday matinees which her narrator reads and watches—and those storylines influence so much of the narrator’s perspectives on everything unfolding around her.

R.J. Koreto’s The Hollywood Gangster and Christopher Ryan’s Hellhounds: Hollywood Demons each depict very different versions of that city—the era of the silver screen in the first, and a more contemporary Hollywood (more madcap, more comic-book-frenzied, more everything) in the second. Another tale set in Hollywood, Ellen Clair Lamb’s The Assistant focuses very specifically on a leading director and his ever-dependable assistant and the power dynamic between them. In each of these tales, little is quite what it seems.

Further north, Joyce Krieg’s Last Call at the Zanzibar relies on actual historical events to depict a different set of power dynamics: the city’s racial tensions and the role of journalists—and newspaper owners—in mid-20th-century Sacramento. And in Chris Dreith’s Old Soles, we find a more contemporary Sacramento—shoe stores, farmers markets, tea rooms—but with characters making their own feisty social critiques, in several directions.

All of the stories mentioned above—and five more by David Boop, Kim Keeline, Eileen Rendahl, Linda Townsdin, and Carrie Voorhis—were chosen from one hundred and fifty blind submissions. These tales are the cream of a rich crop.

The other stories were contributed by this year’s Bouchercon Guests of Honor, the authors named on the cover.

Despite this anthology’s overall California theme, those latter authors weren’t required to stick to the setting. Two of our international headliners, for example—Anthony Horowitz and Anne Perry—set their stories abroad, as did Local Guest of Honor Cara Black, best known for her Aimée Leduc novels, set in Paris; like her series, Black’s story, Cabaret aux Assassins, also unfolds in France, but she focuses instead on a pair of iconic characters from classic mystery fiction.

Among these Guests of Honor, Walter Mosley deserves special mention—both as this year’s Lifetime Achievement recipient but also because his story, Fearless, does speak directly to the anthology’s title. Set in Los Angeles after World War II, it not only presents a keen portrait of a place and an era—trademarks of his fiction generally, with particular attention to troubled race relations—but also delivers a twisty tale of scheming by several characters, working at cross purposes to one another.

Our final two Guests of Honor also offer something special for readers. Scott Turow’s Tell Him No is a valuable outtake: the first chapter of the initial draft for his novel Identical, unpublished until now. And not only is Catriona McPherson’s The Finishing Touch wry and witty (as always with her work), but that parenthetical subtitle—(inspired by true events)—would surely have provided the starting point for any number of conversations at the bar or in the hallways if this year’s Bouchercon had not moved to a virtual conference in the midst of the still-unfolding coronavirus crisis.

Save those conversations for another Bouchercon, for an easier year.

In the meantime, I want to thank Michele Drier, this year’s Bouchercon co-chair, for inviting me to serve as editor for this anthology, for recruiting stories from these Guests of Honor, and for helping to coordinate the blind submissions to ensure anonymity during the judging and selecting of the final stories.

I also want to thank the first-round judges who narrowed down the full range of submissions to the forty-four I read to make the final selections. Those first readers are former newspaper editor Dale Bryant, author and bookstore manager Janis Herbert, and novelists Richard Meredith, T.T. Thomas, and Pam Van Allen.

Their hard work helped bring this book to you, and your purchase of this book gives back in other ways—with sales benefitting 916 Ink, a creative writing nonprofit in Sacramento that provides workshops for students grades 3-12 to help transform them into confident writers and published authors.

With any luck, all this might come full circle, and we could well see some 916 Ink alumni published in a future Bouchercon anthology.

While I wish many of us were together in person this year, I’m pleased to help celebrate Bouchercon between these pages, and I appreciate you joining in that celebration.

I hope you enjoy these stories, and I look forward to better days ahead for all of us.

Every writer has heard their agent or editor talk them into cutting part of a manuscript the author loves with the appealing lie, You’ll just publish it somewhere else. Tell Him No was written for my novel Identical as the first chapter of the initial draft. But as it turned out, the business deal discussed had no further part in the novel. And even though I loved this portrait of an octogenarian private eye, there was no place for it as the novel moved toward completion. I’m glad to see it finally in print.

—S.T.

TELL HIM NO, by Scott Turow

Tell him no, said the man two seats over in the airport waiting area. I know our bottom line. But there’s more there. I want every loose drachma rattling around in Hal’s pocket. The man was angry, it seemed, and proud of it. He was a big fellow in a camel topcoat, and he had an old briefcase between his feet that he kicked without thinking whenever he turned ornery. The satchel had the beaten look of a playground football.

The man was named Corus Dykstra, and Tim Brodie had been following him for three days now. Like every human, you could say some good things about Corus. He knew how to tell a joke, especially if you liked an off-color story, and he never got off the phone with an employee without asking after their family. But generally speaking, he was a jerk. He’d eaten a $100 steak last night in Manhattan, then not ten minutes ago he’d stormed off from an airport bar without paying for a burrito he’d nearly finished, claiming he’d just realized it was beef, a dish he never would have ordered as a vegetarian. At 81, Tim had long since stopped being surprised by the way some people lived to believe they were getting the drop on everyone else.

Right now, Tim was two seats over in the nickel-framed bank of sling chairs. Dykstra had been an easy mark. You could learn three-quarters of his plans just by staying in earshot of his phone calls, which generally meant anything nearer than a city block. He was the kind who thought they’d invented the cellphone so everyone in the vicinity would know he was important.

Yesterday night, after watching from the bar while Dykstra ate dinner with a couple of business contacts, Tim followed him to The Mark over in Manhattan, where Dykstra checked in. Tim had put on a hat and a different raincoat, but Dykstra was too self-involved to take much notice of what was around him, and a lame old man passed for nothing in the eyes of most folks anyway. This morning, Tim read a couple of papers in the lobby until Dykstra had barreled through with his luggage on his way to a breakfast meeting.

Upstairs, Tim retrieved his own bags then descended to the fourth floor where he knew Dykstra was staying, having lined up behind him at the check-in counter. He waited nearly half an hour before the maid appeared. I just checked out, Tim told her, and darn if there aren’t some papers in there I need for work.

He’d used this trick several times before when he was on someone. Often the maid called Security, and Security would come up and ask for Tim’s I.D., but they wouldn’t have records on guests who’d already checked out. The active database was only for people currently in the hotel. And even if Security figured out this wasn’t Tim’s room, which had happened once, the same records showed that he had been registered last night. Tim would have said he was a co-worker of Dykstra’s, who Corus had sent back to retrieve the papers he forgot.

The part Tim wasn’t especially keen on was the lying. There wasn’t a job on earth where you didn’t tell a fib now and then. You think the priest really believed three Hail Marys was gonna get you back in God’s good graces? Salesmen? Don’t even ask. Even the 25 Tim had spent on the job, nobody was out to earn a Good Conduct Medal. How many kids had he told it would go easier if they just coughed up the whole story, knowing all the time that the best chance this kid had was if he shut his yap? But if you took a job, you did the job. You had to do the job.

Ordinarily, when Tim was pulling a stunt like this one with the maid, he tried to keep a little fingernail’s hold on the truth. And what he told the woman, if you considered it word for word, was fact: He had just checked out. And there were papers in that room he needed for work.

Today, the maid slipped the ten Tim passed her into the pocket under her apron and slid her pass key in the lock before she disappeared. Dykstra hadn’t flushed the toilet after peeing and had left his trash scattered around the room, including a copy of his itinerary and several notes on the deal he was negotiating with ZP, the outfit paying Tim. The TV still displayed Corus’s bill after his video check-out. Dykstra had watched a movie last night, after dinner, probably porn. And there was a charge for a long-distance call from the hotel phone to a number on the screen, which Tim had already tracked to a woman named Shirley Nagel, who worked in Material Procurement at Dykstra’s construction firm. Nobody used the hotel line these days instead of his cell, except a guy like Corus who didn’t want to leave tracks. Corus called Shirley Nagel Baby when he phoned her at work, which he did two or three times a day. Mrs. Dykstra was back in Cleveland.

The itinerary showed that Dykstra was on his way to Pittsburgh, but after overhearing the last conversation about Hal’s drachmas, Tim had no need to follow Corus any further. Here in the airport, Tim stood up and circled behind Dykstra. As Tim peered at his cellphone, he took a photo of the screen of Corus’s device, where a text was displayed. Tim’s eyes hadn’t been good enough to read the message from this distance for years. Still, it might be something once he blew it up.

Tim walked down to the airline counter to change his ticket and called the office of Evon Miller, the VP of Security at ZP. Hal and his dad, the owners, had been giving Tim work for decades, but he reported to Evon. She was a good egg, a former FBI agent, a bandy-legged little gal who’d played Field Hockey in the Olympics, and who still had the hard, compact look of a jock. She was an excellent boss, who valued the kind of work she had Tim doing. She’d done some herself. That was how she’d gotten to these parts, working undercover in a big FBI sting that had brought down several state court judges, all of them crooked as a stick and brazen about it.

Tell her, I’m done, he told Sharize, Evon’s assistant. Unless I hear otherwise, I’ll come straight to the office. Should be there by 1, if the traffic is good from the airport.

* * * *

When Evon opened the door to her office to greet Tim Brodie, he was seated in her little reception area in a red leather chair, more or less lost in thought. He had the uneven, marked face of an old potato, and in the last few years he had become one of those old men with a permanently wary expression. While he was abstracted, his hands circled over each other repeatedly. She wondered, as she always did, how much longer she could use him as a PI. He was a favorite of her boss, Hal Kronon, ZP’s CEO. Tim knew where the lines were and never got himself or the company in trouble—no black bag jobs or illegal wiretaps. If you had a high-tech problem, something requiring computer forensics, Timmy would be the first to tell you he was useless. But for a job like this, anything that called on what he’d learned before retiring more than a quarter of a century ago as maybe Kindle County’s most-respected homicide dick, he was still the best private investigator she knew of, perhaps even better these days when age had given him virtual invisibility.

As usual, Tim didn’t waste many words in reporting what he’d discovered. She had to hear it from him face to face. Stuff like this you never put in writing. She tried to keep even her own notes to a single word here and there.

Tim had picked up three things that were going to delight Hal, who was close to buying Fortune Builders, Dykstra’s company, for $220 million, every penny of it to be borrowed in a web of cross-collateralized obligations whose complexity defied Evon’s comprehension and, she sometimes suspected, even Hal’s. But the acquisition fit Hal’s strategic plan. With the recent downturn in housing, he was driving a hard bargain on price, and he’d long wanted to diversify beyond commercial real estate, as well as to own a captive construction company—he was perpetually infuriated by the change orders and shenanigans with even the biggest contractors. Dykstra had four developments in the works around the country, in which they’d reserved enough land with flexible zoning where ZP could place shopping centers. Hal expected the deal, when announced, to bump the ZP’s value at least ten percent.

Number one, Tim said, Corus’ll take the current offer.

How do we know?

He told Zeleski a couple of hours ago on the phone. Said the offer was at their bottom line, but he was still trying to get the last drachma in Hal’s pocket. That was how he put it.

Hal will love that part. What else?

Second, when you get around to looking inside their books and stuff, after you sign the letter of intent—what do you call that part?

‘Due diligence?’

Right. You’ll be able to knock off some more, because there’s a brownfield near his big development in Indianapolis. Corus was bragging yesterday how Hal hadn’t figured it out yet. Make sure the lawyers know.

Evon swung around in her chair and typed a one-word note on her computer.

Third, Tim said, you told me Corus has been negotiating this employment contract to stay on, after the deal?

Right. Dykstra wants two mil a year for five years. Hal would rather choke.

Go ahead and give it to him, that’d be my advice. Just be sure you can fire him for cause. He told Evon about Shirley Nagel. Diddling a direct report? That’s cause these days, right?

In Hal’s company, you bet.

So make sure Corus and his lawyer see the Employees Manual before he signs his deal. He won’t be making a stink when he gets his pink slip. Don’t think he wants to be talking about Shirley with Mrs. D and the kids.

Great stuff, Tim, Evon said and put the cap on her pen. Get me your invoice. I’ll recommend a 100% premium.

Appreciate that kindly, said Tim and nodded like the courtly old gent he was.

She knew he didn’t really like these assignments all that much. This was third time she’d had him tailing somebody Hal was negotiating a deal with. When she’d first asked him to do this a few years ago, he’d reared back and made a sour face. Spying? he’d asked. But even in his 70s, back then, the number of people bidding for his services was already declining. After a minute of talking to himself, he’d said yes. Suppose they’re doing the same on the other side, all’s fair, I guess.

Even so, her sense of Tim was that he was glad when it turned out like this. The main thing he’d discovered was that Dykstra was just a great big turd.

Evon stood. Hal’s on pins waiting to hear what you came up with. You know how impatient he is.

Oh yeah, said Tim.

She grabbed Tim’s hand before she jumped in the elevator. She always felt like she should hug the old guy, but she knew better. It would insult Tim, if he thought this wasn’t all business.

ELYSIAN FIELDS, by Gabriel Valjan

Steps away from the newsstand, the Times under my arm, I was heading into The Pantry for breakfast when I noticed a red piece of paper under my windshield wiper. No writing. I pocketed it.

Like every other place in the country, winter visited Los Angeles in December. If the temperature dipped to sixty degrees, people shivered in the sunlight and if it dropped to fifty or lower and drizzled, people forgot how to drive in the rain. On this dark winter morning, the streets were wet, and everybody was cold and moody about something, whether it was not enough green in the bank, enough love at home, or enough of everything else because the country was at war.

The piece of paper between the blade and glass was red, a homicide, and a victim nobody cared about. It was a signal to make the phone call. I went inside the joint, my back to 9th and Figueroa.

I closed the accordion door, put my copy of the Times down on the small shelf below the phone. I read the motto in the upper left corner, while I fished for coins. ALL THE NEWS ALL THE TIME described the city and its people. Nobody had time for a comma. I gave the operator the exchange and she named the price.

Like this luncheonette, crooked was always cooking. I spotted the brooding cop at the counter. I’d need more than Bromo-Seltzer to cure the headache he wanted to give me. I’d seen him before, as muscle for Kynette, who was a real speck of dirt. Judge Fletcher Bowron was appointed to look into corruption between the Mayor’s Office and the Police Department. His investigation led to Mayor Frank Shaw being recalled and replaced, Shaw’s brother and bagman being charged with graft, and Captain Earl Kynette of the Intelligence Squad being convicted of the attempted murder of investigator Harry Raymond. Instrumental in the investigation of the bombing of Raymond’s car was a Captain Parker who everyone swore would make chief one day.

His was the voice in my ear.

Sixteen-year old male. Mexican. Body was found in Elysian Park. Parents reside in Boyle Heights and reported him missing three days ago. Pending official confirmation at the morgue, the brother identified the body from a photo. Get over to Elysian before the stretchers do, and watch yourself on this one. The brother tried to unionize Signal Hill.

He gave me a name and two addresses. You were on the right side of the street when the assignment came from a top cop inside the station house, and you saw beat blues steaming your way.

As I opened the door, the brooding cop charged in for double-occupancy. I pivoted and shoved him inside the booth, slammed the door shut, and borrowed the broom from the kid sweeping the floor. I slid the stick through the looped handle to trap him inside. I left him to pound wood and yell obscenities from behind the glass. The morning crowd ignored us, disappointed that bacon, butter, and sugar had been rationed. I walked out, leaving them to enjoy their coffee and cigarettes.

Breakfast was supposed to be the most important meal of the day, and this crooked cop and some murdered kid made me forget it and my copy of the Times.

* * * *

I hopped into my boiler and pressed my foot on the starter. Elysian Valley is where frogs sing along the soft edges of the LA River, with the Hollywood sign and the San Gabriel mountains within sight. Elysian Park played a cameo in the ’32 Olympics and now some lowlife killed a kid and left the body near contaminated water.

My car eased into an imaginary parking spot. I lifted my lid after I exited the vehicle. The detective in the distance raised his fedora. We knew each other but we never used names because it meant less paperwork for him on the case.

I crouched down, remembering Elysian Fields was the afterlife in Greek mythology for heroes. I looked at the body. Another Angeleno was found gazing up at the sky; this time he was as dead as all the promises and stardust in this town. The detective aired out the facts for me.

Cause of death is likely blunt force trauma to the head. Footprints in close proximity to the corpse suggest two men. I’m confident impressions from all the foot traffic will match the bruises on the body. Hell of a way to go, don’t ya think? Beaten and stomped to death, left for night crawlers, and then the indignity.

The insult the detective referred to was that the deceased had been stripped down to his skivvies. Save the boxers he was wearing, he was battered and bruised, eyes swollen shut, the face distorted and gnawed at by blowflies, critters, and maggots. A real nightmare for any parent to have to see on the tray. No mortuary arts and sciences could undo all that violence, and that’s exactly what the killers intended. They could’ve tossed him into the drink, but didn’t.

I listened to the rest of the man’s report.

This young man was dragged out here for the beatdown and left for dead.

This young man bestowed a modicum of respect. I looked again. The kid’s body advertised no tattoos, no collapsed veins to suggest drug use. He exhibited all the signs of good living, a righteous life in accordance with the crucifix on a gold chain around his neck. I listened to the detective.

No tire marks found yet, but that’s not to say they didn’t park nearby and force him to leg it down here. Lord knows where his clothes are. Probably disposed of there or over there.

The detective pointed to the river and then a brewery in the distance where smoke whispered out of a chimney. I remained crouched, curious about the fingertips. Stained red—and it wasn’t from blood, his or another’s. An unnatural shade of red.

I stood up and surveyed the territory. Frogtown was a transient community for wildlife, human or otherwise. A lot of living and dying happened here among the willows and tall grass, next to the river.

The detective gave me the greenlight to visit Boyle Heights. The parents, he said, already knew someone from the department was coming and he’d let them know I would be in plainclothes. Nobody liked this part of an investigation, not even hardened cops. A day didn’t go by without seeing the Western Union man or a pair of servicemen on a doorstep with dreadful news about a loved one from the war in Europe or the Pacific.

While driving I was reminded again how LA was obsessed with the hereafter. I passed a billboard for a clairvoyant. An oversized marquee hawked consultations on life and love. Another faker boasted of having doctorates in spirituality and psychology; the word ‘Reverend’ preceded his name, alphabet soup for degrees after it. Everybody had a scheme or a scam to lighten the hearts and wallets of the lonely and desperate.

Boyle Heights was, and is, the Ellis Island of the West Coast. Jews lined Brooklyn and Soto Avenues with delis, small businesses, and a synagogue within walking distance of their homes. The police and watch-groups kept vigil on these sons and daughters of Abraham—and kept an even tighter grip on bats, believing that Boyle Heights was infested with communists and socialists. Dirty, unpatriotic subversives. Enthusiasm died down among Reds and other intellectuals after Stalin and Hitler formed their pact.

Germans, Italians, and Russians had a presence in the neighborhood, the Japanese had as well before Roosevelt shoved them into relocation centers. Banks showed up faster than the day’s mail and seized their properties. The same finance men reappraised the Heights and red-lined it as too risky for the federal home-loan program. The dream of owning a house disappeared overnight. Jews fled to Fairfax, Mexicans filled the void in the labor force as the Japanese went bye-bye into shantytowns behind barbed wire, and Boyle Heights was divided into the moderately affluent Heights and a struggling but dignified Flats.

As my car wobbled down the unpaved driveway, a hand in the front window of the house swept the curtain and let it swing back into place. I tramped though grass slick from last night’s rain. I rapped the wood and the screen door rattled with each knock. A small tired man opened the door and beckoned me inside.

I wiped my feet on the mat and took off my hat. Mr. Hernández, I presume.

"Bienvenido. Welcome."

Husband and wife, father and mother, stood in front of me in a small parlor. Their other son lingered behind them. I pinned the kid’s age around nineteen. I offered my condolences, first in Spanish and then in English.

My wife and I plan to identify Miguel later today. We were told you were coming and the man on the phone told us to wait for you.

"Gracias. I’ll do my best to keep this brief. I have some questions."

Mr. Hernández directed me to a chair. His chair. I understood this as the equivalent to sitting at the head of the family table.

Every family handled grief differently. She was tall, regal in a black mourning dress, a handsome woman despite the swollen eyes from crying. Her husband walked as slowly as an altar boy behind the priest during high mass. Their son, who had introduced himself as José, looked as if he hadn’t slept the three days since his brother Miguel disappeared.

As I sat, Mrs. Hernandez insisted on stepping to the kitchen to make me a plate of food. I read her hospitality as deference to the men of the household, or that she simply didn’t want to hear this conversation. Nobody said it, but the youngest in most families is the favorite child.

Miguel had attended Roosevelt High. His class, his father told me, had been decimated and reduced to less than half because of the Japanese internment. Mr. Hernández shook his head. Good hard-working people and Americans, like you and me. I don’t understand this president.

Miguel was the good-looking kid in the framed picture he showed me. I stood up when Mrs. Hernández returned with a plate of memelas and a tall glass of cold water. She explained that her masa dough was a family recipe in Oaxaca. I thanked her and she disappeared again.

Had your son experienced any troubles, sir?

Both father and son shook their heads. They knew I was referring to prejudices against Mexicans.

"Any interest in him, say from the 38th