“What was her reason?”
He shrugged. “They didn’t get along too well, always fighting. Just one of those things, I guess. But Danny’s crazy about the kid. That’s what tore him up, her taking the kid.”
“Couldn’t he do anything about getting the boy back?”
“He didn’t have any money for a lawyer. Besides, Eva was … well …”
“An illegal alien?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“My investigation has nothing to do with immigration matters, Mr. Fuller. I’m not interested in the resident status of Danny or his woman. And I have no intention of repeating anything you tell me.”
He nodded slowly, but he said, “I still don’t want to say. I’ll tell you this, though: Danny was born in the Salinas Valley. I know that for a fact.”
“How long did he work for you?”
“Three years, about.”
“You said he was a good worker. Honest, too?”
“Oh, yeah. Never any problem with that.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me where he lives,” I said. “It would save me some time.”
“I’ll tell you,” Fuller said, “but you won’t find him there.”
“Why not?”
“He’s gone. Lit out somewhere—Mexico, I figure.”
Damn! I said, “When?”
“I dunno. Sometime after I fired him. I got to worrying about him, the way he’d been drinking, I wanted to see how he was, if he had another job or maybe he needed a few bucks …” Fuller let his gaze slide away from mine; like a lot of compassionate men in the macho eighties, he was embarrassed to let his compassion show because he was afraid it would be mistaken for weakness. “Anyhow, I drove out to his place last Sunday. Most of his stuff is gone. Packed everything into his beat-up old Chevy truck and took it with him. Nothing much left but the furniture, cheap stuff from the Salvation Army.”
“And you think he went to Mexico?”
“To look for his son,” Fuller said, nodding. “Better that than moping around here, getting drunk and feeling sorry for himself.”
“Whereabouts in Mexico?”
“Search me. He never said where Eva was from.”
“Did he live here in Moss Beach?”
“Yep. Back in the hills a couple of miles.”
“Private house?”
“An old farm. Lived there ever since he came here.”
“Rented?”
Fuller nodded again. “Danny had a lease. Some fellow down in L.A. owns the property.”
“How do I get there?”
He gave me directions. Then he said, “This investigation of yours … Danny’s not in any trouble, is he?”
“I hope not, Mr. Fuller.”
“Me too. He’s a good man, believe me. It’s just he’s had a run of lousy luck, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
I thanked him for talking to me—and then, because there didn’t seem to be any hurry now, and because disappointment and frustration sometimes make me hungry, I gave him an order for a poor-boy sandwich to go. I was eating too many sandwiches these days, which was one of the reasons my weight had crept up another few pounds. But how were you supposed to eat balanced, non-fattening meals when you were out on a job like this? And I was damned if I was going to eat any more yogurt and cottage cheese and carrot sticks; Kerry had had me on that kind of starvation diet once and it had been pure torture. Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders, she’d said, lived to be a hundred eating yogurt and soft cheese and vegetables. Well, so what? What was the use of living to the century mark if you weren’t enjoying life? I was willing to bet that when those ancient Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders finally did croak, not one of them had a smile on his face.
I bought a Bud Light to go with my sandwich and had my lunch sitting in the car. I did some ruminating while I ate. Despite what Fuller had told me about Danny Martinez’s honesty, it seemed pretty clear—at least to me—that Martinez was the man Tom Washburn had talked to on the phone. He was of Mexican descent and he spoke with a slight accent. He had been at the Purcell house the night of the party, at the approximate time of Kenneth’s death; he could easily enough have seen or heard something incriminating. And he had had a run of bad luck that might have made him bitter enough to throw up a life of honesty in favor of one big grab at a tarnished brass ring. The run of bad luck also explained the six-month hiatus between Kenneth’s death and the phone call to Leonard’s home: Martinez hadn’t needed money back then, had had a job and a family. As for why he hadn’t gone to the police with what he’d seen or heard—maybe it wasn’t all that incriminating or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to get involved.