Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  “Certainly,” Olivia said. She drew her shoulders together and held herself. “If that’s what it took.”

  I glanced around again. To say this house was neatly kept would be an understatement. The air was filtered and scrubbed, and bore the antiseptic smell of eucalyptus. Beyond that, the place was curated. A long hallway held the portraits of Olivia Gravesend’s humorless forbearers, each canvas framed in gold and lit from below with a single spotlight. Bronze plaques gave dates of birth and death. I’d been greeted at the door by a butler. He’d been worse for wear, but uniformed all the same. He’d escorted me through acres of the house before reaching the gun room. I wouldn’t have guessed even one person lived here, let alone two. There were exhibits, like the dueling pistols, but there was nothing personal.

  “Are you married, Mrs. Gravesend?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Now?”

  “No,” she said. “And not for the last five years.”

  “So . . . fair to say Claire wasn’t having trouble with a stepfather?”

  “More than fair,” she said.

  “What about her own father?”

  “She never met him, and she never asked about him.”

  “Were you married to him?”

  “No,” she said. “I wasn’t. And what’s that have to do with anything?”

  “You didn’t know if she was seeing anyone,” I answered. “So I’m asking about the other men around her.”

  Olivia squinted into the fireplace.

  “Because if you want to know who killed a woman,” she said, “then you start with the men in her life. The ones she’s closest to. Those are the odds.”

  I nodded, and we sat for a moment. It was the least uncomfortable silence we’d had so far. But I broke it with another question.

  “Jim said someone from the medical examiner visited you today. Anyone else?”

  “No one.”

  “Does SFPD know she’d been missing for more than six months?”

  “They couldn’t have had a clue,” she said. “Unless she kept a diary in her purse.”

  Of course she’d seen the purse. It was in my photograph.

  “But that’s the kind of thing you can find out—what they really know,” she continued.

  “They don’t hand that stuff out.”

  “But you could break in, and take the file. Or pay a bribe. Or find an inside man with a weak spot, and lean on him until he cracks.”

  Now I was the one wondering how much Jim had said. When I’d worked in his firm, there wasn’t much that set me apart from the hundred other attorneys on my floor. We wore identical suits and the same polished wingtips. Any one of us could recite the California Rules of Professional Conduct from memory. Our only crimes were our billable rates. I hadn’t yet bought my Smith and Wesson. I didn’t know how to bare-hand punch a man in the face without breaking all my fingers on his teeth. It wasn’t until everything crashed down around me that Jim understood how useful I really was. I wasn’t as clean as my brogues. I’d never belonged in a suit. He fired me, but he walked me out of the building himself. I was dirty, he said, to anyone listening. I was an embarrassment to the firm. I wasn’t cut out for a corner office. In fact, I wasn’t any better than my father. No one would ever forget he’d died in jail, after kiting a bad check.

  But then we were in the elevator, alone. He told me if I wanted to work on the street and in the shadows—if I wanted to embrace my nature, be a blunt instrument—I could call him anytime. I don’t know what I felt, but it certainly wasn’t gratitude. By then I’d lost everything but an image of myself, and even that was disintegrating. I’d thought I was a fighter, the kind of guy who’d never run. But Jim was showing me to the exit, and when we got there, my plan was to keep on going.

  Olivia Gravesend was watching me, waiting for me to respond.

  “Maybe I could get the files,” I said. It was actually a foregone conclusion that I would get the files. That would probably be the easiest thing about the case. “The fee will go up, of course. Either a little or a lot, depending on what I have to do.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “What makes you think they’re hiding something?”

  “What makes you think they’re not? You know the place,” she said. She paused long enough to give me the chance to nod. “Most of them aren’t working for the public—they’re on the take. But you’d expect they’d pull it together and work for me. They sent an intern to me, with her pictures. A college kid. I called them, after—”

  “Called who?”

  “The chief of police. The mayor.”

  “They talked to you?”

  Her laugh was a bitter cough.

  “I got a runaround. I was leaving messages with secretaries. They had me talking to pageboys. They’re talking to the press more than they’re talking to me. The phone rang an hour ago, and it was a reporter. She called and asked for a comment. What do I think about my girl committing suicide?”

  “What do you think is going on?”

  “I don’t know, Crowe. But it has to go way up. If that’s how they treat me—Olivia Gravesend, the Iron Bitch who owns a piece of half the elected officials in this state—then whatever Claire got herself into was huge.”

  6

  I spent another ten minutes talking with Mrs. Gravesend in the gun room, and then she rang a bell and the butler came for me. He led me down a marbled hall and up a staircase to the door of Claire’s childhood bedroom. He rocked the handle to show me it was locked.

  “We cleaned it once after Claire left in December,” the old man said. Before he’d answered the bell, he must have been doing something outside. He was wearing a topcoat now, and it was spattered with rain. “And then after the first letter came, Ms. Gravesend shut it up.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Did she think Claire wasn’t coming back?”

  “She didn’t say that.”

  But she must have thought it was a possibility. Maybe she’d had other motivations, but either way, she’d taken steps to preserve evidence. That wasn’t a guilty act, but it was an odd one. There must have been something about Claire’s letters that set off alarm bells beyond what their text seemed to warrant.

  “You knew Claire?”

  “Since she was a little one.”

  “Were you surprised, what happened?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “Things like this, they shouldn’t happen to people like the Gravesends, should they?”

  “Who should they happen to?”

  “No one, sir. But you wouldn’t expect them here.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  He took out a key ring, sorted it in his palm, and then unlocked the door. He pushed it open but didn’t step inside.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “Was Claire in trouble?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it in December,” the old man said. “But knowing what I know now—that she ran away, that she jumped off a roof—I should imagine so. She must have been in trouble.”

  “But you don’t have any idea what?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you read the letters?”

  “No, sir.”

  I went into the bedroom and switched on the light. The butler closed the door behind me.

  I stood in front of an eleven-foot armoire, turned a little brass key that had been left sitting in the lock, and pulled the doors open. The thing was nearly empty; Claire must have taken all her favorite clothes to Boston. She probably took everything that meant anything to her. Diaries and letters. Gifts from the people who loved her, the people she didn’t want to forget. I scanned the room again. Above the bed, a signed Klimt hung in a glittery frame. I doubted it was a reproduction. On the shelf above her writing desk, there were novels she might have read for a high school literature class. Tolstoy, Austen, García Márquez. There was also a sizable collection of books with misty cover art and gold-leaf jacket lettering. This was a teenager’s
bedroom. But in the time since Claire had moved out of this house, she’d grown into a young woman. A different person, perhaps. Boston would be the more interesting place to search.

  Still, I turned back to the open armoire. There were a few school uniforms—white blouses, plaid skirts, navy blazers. I rifled through the clothes folded in the lower drawers but didn’t find anything. Running socks that had been paired and rolled into balls; cotton panties; a few T-shirts.

  At the matching vanity, I found half a dozen tubes of lipstick, the colors spanning a narrow band of the spectrum from coral pink to blood red. There was a mostly empty bottle of Dead Sexy perfume, a skull and crossbones emblazoned on its front. Two drawers held a collection of eyebrow pencils and assorted gold-plated grooming instruments. Nail clippers, tweezers, and scissors. There was a hairbrush, and when I held it up to the light, I saw a blond hair caught in the bristles. It had come out root and all. That could be useful. I took a receipt from my wallet and folded it around the blond strand, then tucked it behind a maxed-out credit card. I’d have it if I needed it.

  The rest of the room yielded nothing, and the less I found, the more I searched. I lifted the mattress and checked under the box spring; I pulled the drawers out and checked underneath them. I opened the curtains and looked out the window, but there was nowhere to go there—a sheer drop to the ocean.

  If Claire had wanted to jump out a window to her death, she didn’t need to be in the Refugio Apartments in the heart of the Tenderloin. She could have just come home.

  “Sir?”

  I turned from the window. The butler was in the doorway, eyeing the tipped-up mattress and the drawers stacked on the floor.

  “If you’re finished in here, Mr. Garland’s driver will take you back to the city.”

  I’d forgotten all about the driver. I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly midnight.

  “Mrs. Gravesend said there were letters from Claire.”

  “They’re in Mr. Garland’s vehicle.”

  “Copies, or the originals?”

  “The originals, sir.”

  “When can I see the Boston place?”

  “You’d have to ask Mrs. Gravesend, sir.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. I stepped past him and into the hall. “She’s still in the gun room?”

  “No, sir,” the butler said. “I’m afraid she’s left the house.”

  “Funeral arrangements?”

  The butler studied his shoes as he answered.

  “I believe she went to the Carmel Mission.”

  “I see,” I said. I started for the stairs. When the man began to follow me, I waved him off. “Don’t—I can find my own way out.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. And then he tailed me to the door.

  Back in the Range Rover, I turned on an overhead light and opened the packet Olivia had left for me. There was an envelope with the keys to the Boston house. The Beacon Street address was written on the back flap. I took that to mean I could go anytime I wanted. Then there were the six brief letters from Claire. She’d used plain white paper, and what looked like the same pen. For all I knew, she might have written all the notes in one sitting, and then mailed them over a span of six months. Olivia could attest to the handwriting, but that didn’t prove the letters were written voluntarily. Claire could have been taking dictation, with a gun muzzle between her shoulder blades.

  In any case, the first letter was exactly as Olivia Gravesend had described it.

  Mother,

  I’m leaving school for a little while. I can always come back; what I need to do now won’t wait. Don’t worry about me. Don’t call the police. I can take care of myself. You taught me how.

  —Claire

  The next five letters were variations on the original theme. Don’t worry, Mother, I’ve got this under control. I need to do this, and then I’ll pick up where I left off. And in the last note, one week ago, she’d hinted that she was almost done. Whatever she’d been searching for was within her reach. Two days, she wrote. Maybe three.

  The letters were anodyne. There was no fear in them. They hardly contained any information at all. If she’d written them in the 1950s, I would have assumed she’d gotten pregnant, that she was disappearing to a home for unwed mothers and would be back in nine or ten months. It was still at least a possibility. Claire had pressures most young women didn’t have to consider these days. Her mother could cut her out of a hundred and eighty million dollars for any reason at all.

  But I’d seen Claire. I might not have been the last person to see her alive, but I was probably the last to touch her while she was still warm. She hadn’t been six months pregnant. And for that matter, she wouldn’t have needed to miss an entire semester to get an abortion.

  Whatever she was taking care of, it probably wasn’t an unplanned pregnancy. It could still be something in that neighborhood. A problematic boyfriend. A quickie marriage and wild honeymoon. But I was having trouble imagining how either of those scenarios would culminate in an heiress jumping from the roof of a Tenderloin tenement. The only thing that fit Claire’s lifestyle was the Rolls, and as far as I could tell, that was just a freak coincidence.

  I fell asleep somewhere north of Salinas and didn’t wake again until the driver rolled to a gentle stop and tapped the horn. I looked out the window and saw the stairs leading up to my office. I thought about knocking on the privacy screen and asking him to take me to my apartment in Chinatown. But the guy’s night had been long enough already. He’d have to be up early to get Jim to trial. So I got out, and stepped over a bum sleeping on my bottom step. He had bands of white medical tape on both his forearms, as though the only thing he had left to sell was his own blood. The sight of it made me think of Claire again, and how far she had fallen. At least the guy on my steps was still above the ground.

  7

  Upstairs, I put Claire’s letters in my safe and her house keys in my pocket. The last unsold seat to Boston was in first class, but Olivia Gravesend was good for it. The plane left at eight, which gave me four and a half hours.

  I figured I could sleep in the air, and could buy whatever I needed once I got there. So with time to kill, I did what I’d become accustomed to that spring. I went out and walked down Turk Street, into the Tenderloin. But instead of the Westchester, this time I went to the Refugio.

  The sidewalk out front was clear. Nothing left from the morning but a few pieces of windshield glass. Snowsuit Man was gone. At the corner, a car was idling beneath a darkened streetlamp. A man leaned through the open window, transacting business of one kind or another. Otherwise the street was dead.

  The Refugio’s front door was locked. I’d anticipated that. Every apartment building in the Tenderloin was locked, accessible only by an electronic keypad. I didn’t know the code, but I had something just as good. The police were in and out of here on a nightly basis. They couldn’t be expected to know the codes to all the tenements on Turk Street, so most doors in the Tenderloin had a code box that they could open with a squawk from their handheld radios. I didn’t have a police radio, but I had a phone. I took it out and played my pre-recorded SFPD squawk, and watched the light on the box turn from red to green. I went in.

  The lobby was dark enough that I had to turn on my phone’s flashlight. I saw a desk, but I doubted there was a receptionist even in the daytime. The floor behind it was littered with needles and short lengths of surgical tubing. Glassine bags and dried vomit.

  I found the mail room. There were no names on any of the steel boxes, so I didn’t linger there. Both elevators were out of service, but I wouldn’t have gotten into an elevator in a building like this anyway. I found a stairwell and began to climb, using my light to pick a path around the needles and liquor bottles and unidentifiable lumps. It was impossible to imagine someone like Claire Gravesend climbing these steps and not immediately turning around.

  But she must have, and so I considered how I could narrow my search.

  She’d hit the car ha
rd enough to flatten it, and the Wraith was built like a tank. Either she weighed a lot more than appearance would suggest, or she’d had the vertical space to accelerate until her small frame packed more of a punch. So I skipped floors two through seven and started on the eighth. I came out of the stairwell into a wide hallway, which made an angular lap around the inside of the building. If Claire had come out of an apartment window, it had been a corner unit on the right side of the building. There was a wide crack under the door to Apartment 801, but it was dark. I’d broken in, and didn’t particularly want to explain myself to the police. So I went up, floor by floor, until I found a light under the door of Apartment 1201.

  I knocked, one knuckle against the wood. Tap, tap. I waited ten seconds, and tried it again. I wasn’t really expecting anything, but then I heard a soft voice from behind the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Ma’am,” I said. The gentlest voice I could manage after the day I’d just had. “I’d like to talk to you about yesterday morning.”

  The door opened until it jerked to a halt on the chain. I was looking at an eighty- or ninety-year-old woman in a wheelchair. Which meant she likely hadn’t left the apartment since the elevators had gone out of service. That could’ve been years ago.

  “Do you know about the young woman who fell outside this morning?”

  “I saw her from my window.”

  “You saw it happen?”

  “No—I saw after.”

  “What did you see?”

  “She was on top of a car. A man came along and touched her neck. Then he took pictures of her.”

  It shouldn’t have worried me that there was a witness to what I’d done. The photographs themselves were evidence that I’d come across her before anyone else, and that I’d done nothing.

  “You heard her hit the car?”

  “A loud bang—it woke me up,” she said. Then she gestured at the wheelchair. “But it took me a while to get out of bed and to the window.”

  “Did you hear anything before the bang?” I asked. “An argument, or voices, or anything at all?”