Clandestine

One of the boys grinned at me. "That was still a pretty swell try, mister," he said.

"Thanks," I returned. "Geeze, it's hot out here. Dusty, too. You guys ever get the chance to go to the beach?"

The boys started jabbering all together: "Naw, but we got the municipal pool." "The beach is too far and it's full of beer cans. My dad took us once." "We play baseball." "I'm gonna pitch like Bob Lemon." "Wanna see my fastball?"

"Whoa, whoa! Hold on there," I said. "What about the Scouts? Don't any of you guys go on field trips with them?"

Quiet greeted my question. There was a general reacting of down-turned faces. I had hit a nerve.

"What's the matter, fellows?"

"Aw, nothin' really," the tall first baseman said, "but my mom got real down on our troop for somethin' that wasn't even our fault."

"Yeah." "Yeah." "What a crummy deal!" the other boys chimed in.

"What happened?" I asked innocently.

"Well," a tall boy said, "it was our troop that found the dead lady."

I tossed the battered softball into the air and caught it. "That's a shame. You mean Mrs. Harris?"

"Yeah," they all said practically at once.

I waded in cautiously, although I knew that the boys wanted to talk. "She lived here on this street, didn't she?"

This brought forth a huge response: "Ooh! Yeah, you shoulda seen her, mister. All naked. Ooh!" "Yeachh, really sickening." "Yeah, ugh."

I tossed the ball to the quietest of the boys. "Did any of you boys know Mrs. Harris?" There was an embarrassed silence.

"My mom told me not to talk to strangers," the quiet boy said.

"My dad told me not to say bad things about people," the first baseman said.

I yawned, and feigned exasperation. "Well, I was just curious," I said. "Maybe I'll get a chance to talk to you guys later. I'm the new baseball coach at Arroyo High. You guys look pretty good to me. In a few years you'll probably be my starting lineup." I pretended to leave.

It was the perfect thing to say, and it was followed by a big volley of excited "oohs" and "aahs."

"What's so bad about Mrs. Harris?" I asked the first baseman.

He stared at his feet, then looked up at me with confused blue eyes. "My dad says he saw her a whole bunch of times down at Medina Court. He said no good woman would have anything to do with a place like that. He said that she was an unfit mother, that that was why Michael acted so strange." The boy backed away from me, as if the specter of his father was right there with us.

"Hold on, partner," I said, "I'm new in this territory. What's so bad about Medina Court? And what's wrong with Michael? He sounded like a pretty good kid from what I read in the papers."

A redheaded boy clutching a catcher's mitt answered me frankly. "Medina Court is Mex Town. Wetbacks—mean ones. My dad says never, ever, ever go there, that they hate white people. It's dangerous there."

"My dad delivers the mail on Medina," the first baseman said. "He said he's seen Mrs. Harris do nasty things there."

A chill went over me. "What about Michael?" I asked.

No one answered. My expression and manner must have changed somehow, alerting some sixth sense in the youthful ballplayers.

"I gotta go," the quiet boy said.

"Me, too," another one piped in.

Before I knew it they were all running off down Maple Avenue, casting furtive glances at me over their shoulders. They all seemed to disappear into dusty front yards just moments later, leaving me standing in the street wondering what the hell had happened.

Medina Court was only one block long.

A tarnished brass plaque inlaid in the cracked sidewalk at the entrance to it said why: the street and the four-story tenements that dominated it had been constructed for the housing of Chinese railroad workers in 1885.

I parked my car on the dirt shoulder of Peck Road—the only access lane to Medina Court—and looked around. The buildings, obviously once painted white, were now as grayish-brown as the plague of smog that stifled the summer air. A half-dozen had burned down, and the charred detritus of the fires had never been removed. Mexican women and children sat on the front steps of their peeling, sunbaked dwellings, seeking respite from what must have been ovenlike interiors.

Garbage covered the dusty street through Medina Court and prewar jalopies lay dead along both sides of it. Mariachi music poured forth from inside some of the tenements, competing with high-pitched Spanish voices. An emaciated dog hobbled by me, giving me a cursory growl and a hungry look. The poverty and meanness of Medina Court was overpowering.

I needed to find the mailman-father of the first baseman, so I started by checking out the entranceways of the tenements to see if the mail had been delivered. The mailbox layout was identical in all of the buildings—banks of metal mail slots, rows and rows of them, bearing poorly printed Spanish surnames and apartment numbers. I checked out three buildings on each side of the street, getting a lot of dirty looks in the process. The mailboxes were empty. I was in luck.