“Sorry,” she said. “We were tied up.”
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” I said. “My name’s Lee Crowe, and I need to ask a couple of questions.”
I held out my California private investigator’s license. It was basically just a light green card with my name and registration number on it, but the California seal made it look official. I’d laminated it at a copy shop, and kept it in a leather holder with a passport photograph on the left, which made it look even better.
“Look,” the woman said. The baby was squirming against her chest, hiding his face in her neck. “This isn’t my house. I just work here, and so—”
“It’s nothing to do with you. Or him,” I said. I indicated the place next door. “I’m working for the next-door owner. Mrs. Gravesend.”
“You mean Claire?”
“Have you seen her around lately?”
“Yesterday,” the woman said. “But it was weird.”
Weird was an understatement. Yesterday Claire had died, on the other side of the country. I kept my face even.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I was up there.” She was holding the baby with both arms, so she couldn’t point. She glanced upward. I followed her eyes to a three-paneled bay window on the third floor of her employer’s house. “Sitting in the window. And Claire came up the steps, and knocked on her own door. And then she pounded on it. Like, slapping it really hard with her palms. She waited for five minutes, and then she went across the street.”
I followed the woman’s gaze a second time. She was looking at the maple tree I’d chosen earlier.
“And then?”
“I wasn’t really paying attention. I was rocking him. I saw her there for a while, and then she was gone. I thought maybe she was locked out.”
“What time was this?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Yesterday afternoon. Sometime before six o’clock, because I was still here. I take a dinner break at six,” she said. Her face tightened as she thought of something. “Is she okay? Why are you asking about her?”
“You’re sure it was Claire?”
“I mean—yes.”
“How well do you know her?” I asked.
“Not well,” she said. She shifted the baby to her hip, and began to bounce him up and down. “But we talked now and then. And yesterday, when she was knocking on her door, she had her hair up. Like in a bun. So I could see the scars on the back of her neck.”
“Round scars?”
“Yes.”
“Did Claire ever tell you how she got them?”
“Are you— You said you were working for her.”
“I’m working for her mother,” I said. “Did she ever tell you how she got the scars?”
“I didn’t know her well,” she said. She was already retreating into the house. “It’s really not my place to get into her business. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
She began to shut the door, and when I put my hand out, she slammed it quickly. I heard the dead bolts turn.
“Thank you for your time,” I said to the door. “I appreciate it.”
I found my way to a drugstore and bought a phone charger and a box of latex gloves, then walked around Beacon Hill. Soon, the nanny would go on her dinner break. Given the way our conversation had ended, I didn’t want her watching through the bay windows as I entered Claire’s house. If she’d been suspicious enough after our conversation to Google Claire’s name, there was no predicting what she might do next.
For that matter, I had no idea what I should do next, or how I should catalog her statements to me. She hadn’t struck me as a liar, so I’d been ready to write it off as a case of mistaken identity. But then she’d mentioned the scars on the back of Claire’s neck. She must have mixed up the days. What she’d seen could have taken place the day before yesterday, in which case Claire would have had plenty of time to catch the last San Francisco-bound flight. She’d have arrived a little after ten p.m., leaving six hours to roam the Tenderloin until she found her way to the Refugio.
At least that was possible. The only other alternative was entirely improbable—that hours after Claire’s death on the West Coast, someone was walking around Boston impersonating her.
I wandered down a narrow alleyway. The homes here were smaller. Carriage houses, maybe, or servants’ quarters. I tried to picture what Claire’s life in this city would have been like. She’d come when she was just eighteen, and all at once, she’d become the mistress of a five-floor mansion on Beacon Street. Twenty million dollars in the bank, and no one to answer to but herself. It was a miracle she’d held out as long as she did. Put me in the same circumstances at eighteen, and inside of two weeks, I’d have been broke, dead, or in jail.
At half past six, I turned back onto Beacon Street, walked to Claire’s house with the key already in my gloved hand, unlocked the massive oak-plank door, and stepped inside. The street noise disappeared as soon as the door was closed. Light from the transom window illuminated a brick wall twenty feet in front of me. A portrait of Colonel Gravesend glared down at me. He had Olivia’s dark hair and thin, sharp features. I reached back to lock the door, and then looked down. The hardwood floor had been waxed, but its polished surface was covered with a light layer of dust. I knelt to take off my shoes, leaving on my socks. There was a hint of perfume in the air.
I started at the bottom and worked my way up. The whole house had been thoroughly redone since Colonel Gravesend bought it or built it. The basement was a bar and lounge area. White carpet, furniture carved from clear maple. A set of retractable glass doors led to a sunken courtyard in the back, with an ivy-covered fireplace and a table with benches. Everything outside was made of quarried stone slabs as thick as railroad ties. I went back inside, behind the bar. The liquor shelves were ready to handle anything. So was the wine cellar, which I found by lifting a trapdoor behind the wet bar and climbing down an oak ladder until I was standing in a dimly lit grotto of arched brick. Every bottle was covered in dust. I pulled one out, at random, and turned the label to the overhead light. It was a 1922 Vale do Douro port. I set it back carefully. There were probably a thousand bottles in the cellar, and there were no empty spaces on the racks. Claire must have spent her free time developing other tastes.
It wasn’t until the fourth floor that I found any sign that Claire had actually lived in the house. The lower floors were a museum, not unlike her mother’s place in Carmel. A catalog kitchen, a formal dining room, a library and billiards room. Fireplaces in all the guest bedrooms, birch logs stacked artfully on the sootless andirons. The beds were made up, but smelled musty.
On the fourth floor, I found Claire’s bedroom. Her clothes hung in the closet, and her toiletries were scattered in the bathroom. Lipsticks in subtle nude colors, a stick of clear deodorant, a prescription bottle with no label and three capsules of Adderall inside—the only indication I’d seen so far that an honest-to-god college student lived in this house. I found a bottle of perfume and picked it up to smell the spritzer. It was the source of the scent I’d noticed when I first came into the house.
There was a narrower, steeper set of stairs that led from the fourth floor to the fifth. This had evidently been an attic before being reinvented as a sky-lit loft; Claire had turned it into her study. A desk was positioned in the center of the room, where it would get the most sunlight. All four walls were lined with bookshelves, and they weren’t filled with leather-bound volumes printed and purchased to be displayed, like the shelves in the second-floor library. These books were meant to be read, and judging by their spines, they had been.
According to Olivia, Claire was concentrating in English, but from what I could see, that was only her opening bid. I circled the room, head tilted to read the titles. The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Darwin: A Life; The Feynman Lectures on Physics; The Second Creation. There was a clear trend in the titles. In her private reading, Claire was majoring in the physical world, with a minor in genetics.
>
I slid a volume off the shelf. A Crack in Creation. The author was a Berkeley professor, but we’d never crossed paths. She was in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, and I’d wandered through on a boxing scholarship. I thumbed the pages, hoping Claire had left notes, or underlined passages. But if the text had elicited any reaction from her, she’d kept it to herself.
I shelved the book and sat at her desk. There was a pencil drawer in the middle, the usual assortment of ballpoint pens and sticky notes and paperclips in a plastic tray. I lifted the tray and found an envelope taped to the bottom. I pulled it off and opened it over the leather blotter. A new brass house key and a smaller key tumbled out. There was no writing on the envelope. I put it back under the tray and dropped the keys in my pocket.
I opened the largest drawer and found a stack of lined composition books. I pulled them out, set them on the blotter, and counted them. Thirty-five notebooks, a hundred sheets each, and every page covered in the fine script I recognized from the letters Olivia had given me. Apparently, in this age of tablets and laptops, the heiress took her class notes by hand.
I looked at my watch, then checked the skylight above me. Nine p.m., and it was finally dark. I went down four flights of stairs. I’d seen a bag of coffee in the kitchen, and there’d been a grinder and French press in one of the cabinets. I could wash everything, send the grinds down the sink disposal, and there’d be no trace. That was important, because one way or another, this house would be searched eventually. When Inspector Chang found out about it, he’d want to come himself. Unless there was a budget setback, SFPD would get him here in a couple of days.
Whatever I did here I needed to do quickly.
I woke up sometime after three a.m. At first I wasn’t sure what had pulled me out of sleep, and then my phone made its little chirp again. I’d fallen asleep in Claire’s chair, and I was still in it. Sitting up, I pushed the open notebooks away and reached for my phone. The chirp had been a text message, sent by my home alarm system.
Motion trigger—12:21 a.m.
It took me a moment to realize the system was texting Pacific Standard Time. Which meant it was warning me about something that was happening right now. A second text arrived: a photograph, from the webcam in my kitchen, which was made to look like a smoke alarm. I opened the photo and saw a man standing in the living room, next to my bedroom door. His face was invisible. Either the photograph was blurred or he was wearing pantyhose over his head. He was holding a cordless drill, and he’d set a black satchel on the edge of my couch.
Agent White. The sonofabitch.
I had no doubt I was witnessing a black-bag job, federal style. If those were pantyhose, White didn’t have a warrant—but that wasn’t stopping him from planting bugs in my apartment walls. I was thinking about calling SFPD and reporting a break-in, and then I heard a noise downstairs, the front door opening and closing. It was fast and quiet, one click and then another. I wouldn’t have heard it at all if I’d been asleep.
I remembered my shoes. They were in the entrance hall, two feet from the front door. The house smelled like coffee because I had brewed three pots. Whoever had come inside either knew I was here or was an idiot. I scanned the room for a weapon. Claire had nothing but books up here. There were ballpoint pens in the desk, a pair of cobblestones she’d repurposed as bookends. But downstairs, in her fourth-floor bedroom, there’d been something better. I got up and moved as silently as I could, taking the stairs two at a time and hoping none of them would creak.
I entered Claire’s bedroom, crossed to the fireplace, and took the iron poker from its stand. There was enough light from the street to see my watch. Twenty seconds had elapsed. I went back to the door, stood against the wall, and listened.
I heard him coming up the stairs. Soft steps, but he hadn’t taken his shoes off. He reached the fourth-floor landing and paused. If he’d been watching the house from across the street, he’d have seen the reading lamp glowing through the skylights. And now, at the foot of the stairs to the fifth floor, he’d see the light spilling down from above. If he went up, then I could slip down.
I held my breath until I heard him heading up to the attic. Then I crept out of the bedroom and waited by the stairs, the poker in my right hand. I could see a shadow, but not the man himself. I relaxed. I had him cornered in the attic, with the entire house—and the exit—at my back. And I was perfectly within my rights to be here. My client owned the house and had given me the keys. Whoever he was, he couldn’t say the same.
While I was debating whether to call up to him, twenty-seven hundred miles away, in San Francisco, Agent White decided for me. He must have entered my bedroom just then, to plant a second bug. I had another smoke alarm camera above the dresser, set to alert me when it detected motion.
In my pocket, my phone chirped.
10
I hesitated, but the man upstairs didn’t.
He turned and charged me, raising something in his right hand. He didn’t see the poker until it was too late. He barreled directly into my swing. The poker’s hooked claw caught his wrist. I saw a flash of metal as a short-bladed knife flew out of his grip and tumbled down the stairs. The man didn’t slow down. He just changed his tactics. He hit my chest with the top of his head, wrapping his arms around my waist and pushing with his legs. I went over backwards and he came with me. He’d have broken my spine on the stairs, but I was able to twist as I fell, and we landed together on our sides. He let go of me and punched me in the face, even as we were sliding down the steps.
We hit the third-floor landing. I tried to get up, but he swept my arms out from beneath me. My chin hit the hardwood. The tip of my tongue kept my teeth from smashing together. The man rolled me over and straddled my chest, and then he had his hands around my throat. My right arm was free. I could hear my hand slapping the floor, searching for the poker.
“Who else knows?”
His face was close enough to mine that our noses almost touched. Except that I couldn’t see his nose. He was wearing a black ski mask. He spoke in a hoarse whisper.
“Who’d you tell?”
Even if I’d understood his question, it would have been impossible to answer. He’d tightened his grip, and was working his thumbs into my Adam’s apple. Time turned into a series of broken thoughts and shutter clicks. I saw the bulge of his shoulders as he flexed and bore down on me. I wondered if I would still be conscious to hear my hyoid bone pop. On the floor, my fingers brushed something cold. Reflexively, they tugged the object closer and picked it up. The knife. My field of vision had shrunk to a pinpoint. Just before everything went black, my body made one final, adrenaline-driven leap.
I stabbed him in the lower back, hoping for his left kidney. The knife must have been honed to a razor’s edge. My arm had no strength left at all, but I felt the blade sink into him. He grunted but didn’t let up on me. I twisted the handle; instantly he reached both hands for the wound. I yanked the knife out, drew a gasping breath, and swung again. Harder and higher this time. The blade slammed into the side of his neck and didn’t stop until it hit a bone.
The man fell sideways, sliding off the blade. He caught himself, and then slowly stood. His breath made a whistling noise out the side of his neck. I scrabbled backwards on the floor until I came to a wall, then pushed myself up.
We faced each other on the dark stair landing.
He was looking at my hand. I still had the knife. Its blade was short, but wide. Smooth on the cutting edge and roughly serrated along the back. My arm was slick with blood up almost to the elbow. None of it was mine.
“Get on the floor,” I said.
Now I was the one whispering. He’d choked my windpipe down to the diameter of a coffee straw. I took a step toward him and raised the knife. One of us was going to pass out pretty soon. I didn’t want it to be me.
“The floor.”
The man lurched to the stairs and pounded down them, one hand covering his neck and the other arm wrapped aro
und his side. I leaned against the wall and listened to him go. At the first-floor landing, he must have collapsed. There was a crash, and then nothing. The house was entirely silent. Then he was on his feet again. He’d been built like a rock wall, and was using his strength to get out. But force would only get him so far. He was losing blood with every heartbeat. The harder he worked, the less time he had.
The front door opened, but I didn’t hear it close.
I went into the guest bedroom on the third floor and reached the window in time to see the man limp across the sidewalk on the opposite side of Beacon Street. He leaned against the maple tree, nearly invisible in its shadows. A car passed, and the man waited until it was gone. Then he moved off, deeper into the park. I saw him fall and get up again. Twenty paces later, he was in the grass a second time.
When I turned away from the window, he was crawling.
I went downstairs, turning on lights as I went. There were no signs of the fight until I came to the main entry landing, where he’d fallen. He’d been down long enough for blood to pool there. He’d stepped in it, and left footprints on his way to the front door, which he’d left open. There was a dark red handprint on the top step, as though he’d slipped and caught himself. But after that, nothing. I shut the front door and went to the kitchen. I pulled off my shirt and put it in the stainless-steel sink, and then I washed my hands, arms, and face. My undershirt and pants were clean. I took hand towels from a drawer, and bleach spray from under the sink, and went after the blood on the floor.
I worked quickly, but thoroughly. Calling the police was not an option. I had every right to be in the house. The man attacked me, and I had stabbed him with his own knife. It was self-defense, pure and simple. But I didn’t know who he was, or why he’d come. I could think of three possibilities. The worst was that Agent White had put a tail on me, which meant that the man could be a federal agent. Second to that, but almost as bad, was the chance that DeCanza had friends on the outside who didn’t like what Jim and I had done to their man.
Blood Relations Page 7