I sat at a table out front, the deep fried French toast smothered in butter and syrup and sidled next to the seven-buck millionaire’s bacon—thick slabs of sugared pork covered in red pepper flakes.
A young mother with three toddlers sat at a table nearby. The tykes were surprisingly well-behaved, each utterly involved with their pancakes and bacon. The little boy with a mop of flaming red hair wearing a contrasting blue jumpsuit leaned his head down beneath the table, tilted his plate, and let a pool of syrup run down into his mouth, over his chin, and onto his chest. “Robert,” Mom said, although not harshly, but with an amused lilt in her voice. As she gently wiped the jumpsuit with her napkin, Robert blushed, righted his plate and, sighing, resigning himself to the indignity of manners, picked up his fork. Mama Bear was beatific, preternaturally calm, in her element.
I watched a steady stream of traffic on Bridgeway without seeing it, my mind busy sorting through and trying to make sense of the things I’d learned in the past few days.
One thing was certain. Johnnie had been involved with too many men. Men who were married. Maybe that had nothing to do with her disappearance, but somehow I doubted it.
Were Dr. Wainright or Davis Hunter guilty of anything other than adultery? In Wainright’s case, perhaps it was just a mid-life crisis, although if he’d been dealing painkillers through Johnnie, that was going to be another matter entirely. With Hunter, I gathered he and his wife were, at best, polyamorous, but more probably he’d just been cheating for a long time and she was the long-suffering wife. Maybe he had fallen hard for Johnnie, but he was a politician first and foremost, and therefore obsessed with appearances and PR.
Were either of these men capable of murder to protect their status, their positions, their families?
Of course. Anyone is capable, given the right circumstances and pressure, the perfect storm leading to an emotional breakdown.
Poe was capable of anything, but his connection was murky at best. Vince and Scooter were still primary suspects, no matter that I had a feeling that Vince had told me mostly the truth.
Leonard’s connection to Johnnie had proved to be more complex and dicey than it first appeared. He probably was involved with her in questionable or illicit activities, and there was animosity between the two. And maybe more. Most men involved with Johnnie seemed to lose their bearings, to fall hard for her. Was Leonard just another one of those hapless males?
And did Maggie know anything about it?
I needed more.
I had to go see the urologist again. And a visit to Scooter was in the offing to see if he corroborated his partner’s story.
As I picked up my cell phone to call Marsh, it vibrated in my hand.
The number looked familiar, but I didn’t immediately identify it, not until I heard Maggie’s voice sobbing into the phone.
Twenty-Four
Back on that front porch, the smell of pot and flowers in my nose, I knocked on the front door.
After a few moments, I tried the knob, and it gave way.
Opening the door, I said, “Maggie?”
The house was alarmingly quiet.
“Maggie,” I repeated.
My nose picked up the sickly sweet odor of decay.
“Max,” Maggie muttered.
I followed the voice.
In the bedroom, she sat at the edge of the bed, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes staring at the floor.
Leonard lay on top of the covers, his eyes closed, seemingly resting peacefully. The stench told another story.
I knelt at Maggie’s feet and cupped my hands over hers. “When did you find him?”
It was a few minutes before 4 p.m.
Her face was red and puffy, stained with tears. There was a catch in her throat when she answered me. “I...got back from the hairdresser about an hour ago.”
“He was here, in bed?”
She nodded, not looking at me.
I rose and moved to Leonard. I checked his pulse. I felt his forehead. The stink rose, and my stomach churned. I put the back of my hand in front of my face and glanced at the bedside table.
A syringe, a spoon, a Q-tip, a lighter, and a small plastic bag with the remnants of a fine black grainy tar lay on the bedside table beside him.
I guess it wasn’t too surprising, but for some reason, I didn’t peg Leonard for a heroin addict.
“Have you called 911?”
She shook her head.
Why had she called me first? I suddenly felt terrible, realizing how sad it was that I was the first person she thought of calling.
I went to the kitchen and made the call, and when I returned, the drug paraphernalia on the table was gone.
I let it go. I’d tell one of the EMTs about the heroin.
Leonard didn’t seem the type to kill himself: he was too self-involved. So that left an accidental overdose or maybe a heart problem exacerbated by drugs.
Unless somebody had killed him and made it look like the heroin did it.
Death, as life, is full of possibilities.
I decided to leave before the authorities, the cops, and ambulance showed up.
I left Maggie still sitting on the bed looking like a wispy tree in a hurricane, her hands clutching her body as if she was afraid it might fall apart if she let go.
She looked cadaverous.
For now, there was only the devastation of losing the most important person in the world. And I thought, at the time, that she might be too fragile, that her chances of survival seemed slim.
Twenty-Five
That night, things started to go from bad to worse, the complexities and violence ratcheting up as if the probing and prodding I’d initiated had unleashed something hidden and dark and vengeful.
Frankie was spending the night with Dao and Meiying. They were going to make chicken fingers, Chinese style, whatever that might be, and then Dao promised to watch Terminator 2 with her. She had to beg Meiying to watch, too, violent action flicks not being her thing. Meiying finally gave in as long as Frankie agreed to let her know when anything scary or violent happened so she could cover her eyes. Meiying was going to miss most of the movie.
I was sitting at my dinner table, finishing up the striper, sautéed with olives and capers, that I’d caught off the stern, savoring the tasty mix, which got me thinking about Katie, Hunter’s little wench. Which got me thinking about Alexandra. Fortunately, my lascivious train of thoughts was interrupted by a call from Portia.
“I stumbled across another file on Johnnie’s computer, and I thought it might be important.”
“Hello, Portia.”
“Yeah. So you told me how she had problems with these two guys from the Blue Notes?”
“Yup.”
“She has a note about this guy, Scooter. She was really pissed at him. And she says that she’s going to see CN. She knows that this will really upset Scooter, but she doesn’t care. She says she told Scooter what she was going to do, and he threatened her. She wasn’t worried about it because Scooter is a punk and a coward.”
The lingering taste of the fish in my mouth tasted suddenly fishy. “Was this a file that you hadn’t seen before or—”
“I missed it. It was a subfile, some notes hidden within another file. Kind of a journal. It ran to hundreds of pages over the past three or four years. I’ve skimmed most of it now, stumbled across this a little while ago. It looked like it might be important.” She clucked twice, paused, clucked again.
It was definitely cluck-worthy information.
An hour later, two members of the San Francisco Police Department came knocking on my door. I let them in, and we gathered around my dinner table.
I figured it was a routine informational interview regarding Leonard’s death.
“You like living on a boat, Mr. Plank?” One of the officers, a kid named Kurt, asked. He was young enough to be my son if I’d gotten married in high school, perish the thought.
“Suits me.”
“It’s always been a dream
of mine,” he said wistfully.
I nodded. Lots of people find it a romantic notion, but I find that for most, the reality is not so palatable.
That was all the young man said for a while as his partner, Pete, a cop in his fifties, took over. He was a stolid fellow with streaked brown hair, thick blue glasses, cauliflower ears, and a ruddy complexion.
He confirmed that I’d come to Maggie’s house after she called me and that I’d seen Leonard’s body and made the 911 call. He quizzed me about my involvement with the couple, and I told them as little as possible but indicated they were involved in a case I was working on. Pete asked me what case, and I shrugged my shoulders and told him I wasn’t at liberty to disclose that information.
Pete didn’t like that but didn’t press it at that moment.
Then he shifted the questioning. “So could you tell where you were today, Mr. Plank?”
“I just told you I went to Maggie’s after—”
“No. Before then. Where have you been all day?”
I believe I wrinkled my brow. “Why do you need to know that?”
“Can you just please answer the question?” he said.
“Nope.”
“Nope?” Now his brow was wrinkled.
“Not until you tell me why.”
Pete pursed his lips and nodded. “Did you recently threaten the deceased, Mr. Plank?”
Ah, now I got it. Maggie had fingered me. I was surprised, but shouldn’t have been. In her emotional state, she might say anything.
“You’ll have to speak with my attorney,” I said. I’d had too much experience with cops and lawyers—and yes, even judges—over the years. I wasn’t going to say another word to them.
Pete, I could tell, was getting a little pissed. His ruddy complexion darkened. He looked like a drinker and a smoker, and a taker of blood pressure medication.
His next question let me know that Maggie had completely thrown me under the bus. “Did you recently physically attack the deceased?”
Kurt acted like he wasn’t even paying attention to our exchange. His eyes flitted about the cabin fondly, as if he couldn’t wait to move right in.
“Sorry, officers, but I’m not going to answer any more questions without my attorney.”
“Shame. We could have cleared this up quickly. No muss. No fuss. But now, Mr. Plank, you’ve complicated things.”
“What makes you think the deceased was murdered?” I asked.
“Nothing. We don’t have a cause of death. The coroner’s report is still out. We’re working on the assumption that it was a drug overdose,” Pete said.
“I don’t get it.”
“We have an obligation to the victim and to the spouse, sir. Your questionable, and quite possibly illegal, behavior toward her husband has to be investigated. The cause of death may seem obvious, but it might have been planned to look that way. In any case, you will have to answer these allegations sooner or later.”
I nodded. I grabbed my wallet off a table, fished out a card, and handed it to Pete.
The card had Marsh Chapin’s name on it. He was my attorney, just as he was my best friend, my partner, my financial advisor, and my trainer.
The cop glanced at it, grunted, shoved it in his pocket.
“Let’s go, Kurt,” he said and turned away.
Kurt smiled, took one long last lingering look around my boat, and reluctantly followed.
Twenty-Six
I had a hard time getting to sleep that night.
And it wasn’t because I had any worry about being a suspect in Leonard’s death.
Nor was I worried about why Maggie had so willingly implicated me in the matter. I thought she’d probably volunteered the information about my less than amicable relationship with her lover because the police probably hadn’t questioned her too hard, not at least until they got the coroner’s report back.
Well, that did bug me a little. I thought there was some sympathy between us, but I guessed I was wrong. Perhaps she was just emotionally disheveled and didn’t think through what the possible effect of her words would have. Or maybe she really thought that somehow I’d been responsible for Leonard’s death.
I thought about it for a while but came to no conclusion. I wanted to pay her another visit and try to sort things out, but, all things considered, realized that probably wasn’t a good idea.
There was an almost full moon visible through the porthole above my bed, and I reflected upon it, wondering what in the heavens was wrong with people, particularly the people I’d met in this case.
Once again, I tried to make sense of all the various threads spinning out from one little girl’s dilemma. Once again, I got no closer to clarity.
I’d called Marsh after the cops’ visit, but he hadn’t answered his phone. I remembered something about a special evening that Tom had planned. Was that tonight?
I needed Marsh’s aid, not only to deal with the authorities, but also to help me with the home invasion I was planning.
Twenty-Seven
In the morning, sipping coffee on my deck beneath a brooding gray sky, still unable to rouse Marsh (maybe Tom had kidnapped him and was holding him in captivity until he agreed to get married?), I decided to hold off on the home invasion for one more day.
Instead, I was going to simply invade someone’s privacy and, hopefully, force them into telling me the truth.
I called Meiying to ask after Frankie, and she said that the little girl was using the boat as a skateboard park, which made Dao a little nervous, but other than that, they loved the kid.
I asked if they could keep her for a couple more days, and she seemed delighted. She wanted to take Frankie to the Exploratorium in the Embarcadero, then to Chinatown for lunch, and on to one of the big fish aquarium vendors in the neighborhood. Dao and Meiying had a 150-gallon saltwater tank embedded in a wall in the main galley of their boat.
After I hung up, I worried for a moment that Meiying was going to be heartsick when the little girl went away.
A moment was all I had, though, and soon I was back on the Ducati with the wind in my hair, crossing the Bay Bridge towards Oakland.
It was Saturday, so I assumed I might more likely find Dr. Wainright at his home in the Montclair hills, rather than his posh office in Piedmont.
He lived in the heavily wooded area below Highway 13, comfortably sheltered from the traffic noise.
I drove up a long, winding, tree-lined driveway about a hundred yards before I encountered the house, a sprawling California redwood contemporary home. Nothing compared to Davis Hunter’s Sausalito digs, but impressive nevertheless.
I rang the bell once and waited, looking around. There were lots of trees and bushes, rocks and larger boulders, and plantings made to look like nature, wild and haphazard. But the human hand was evident in the meticulous presentation.
The front door swung open, and a woman in her thirties faced me with a questioning look.
“Hello,” she said.
She was beautiful and she was sick.
The skin on her face was tight against the high cheekbones. Her pallor extreme, her eyes sunken into her skull. Her blonde hair was tied back in a tight bun. Her arms were thin twigs, the thickness of an adolescent.
She smiled at me, and it was a lovely smile, despite what was eating her alive.
I tried to smile back, but don’t know if I managed it, as I suddenly felt sick, too. I didn’t want to be there anymore.
“Can I help you?” she said. Her voice was thin and hoarse.
“Is Dr. Wainright home?” My voice was gentle.
“Who are you?” she asked, without a hint of fear or anxiety. She seemed calm, placid, despite it all.
“An old friend....from school. High school. I’m sorry, I was in the area and realized...remembered that he lived here and...I know it’s a bit rude to show up like this, but I haven’t seen him for a very long time and was hoping...” I let my words trail off.
“You attended St. Ignatius?�
�� she asked.
I nodded, embarrassed. The Jesuit-run college prep is well known in the area.
She gave me a steady look, sizing me up.
“All right, Mr...?”
“Plank. Max Plank.”
“Paul is out in the backyard gardening. C’mon in.”
She led me through a front hall that had walls covered with family photos. The two of them on bicycles and beaches and mountains and trails, often with big wide smiles, often holding hands, or hugging each other.
We passed through a kitchen replete with the usual stainless steel appliances and black granite countertops. She opened French doors, and we stepped out onto a brick patio. The yard was a beautifully maintained amalgam of green lawn, brick planters, and bright flowerbeds.
Wainright had a shovel in his hand and was digging around in an enclosed vegetable garden.
“Steve,” she called out, and her voice broke. She cleared her throat.
He looked up, resting his hands on the top of the shovel. When his eyes fell on me, his face darkened.
“This is Max Plank, your friend from Saint Ignatius?” she said with a question in her tone.
He stared at me for a moment and then his eyes closed with a look of resignation.
“You do know him, don’t you, sweetheart?” A note of alarm rose in her voice for the first time.
He opened his eyes and managed a smile. “Yes, of course. Good to see you again, Max.”
I nodded.
She relaxed.
“Well, I’m afraid I’m a bit tired. I’ll leave you two to catch up.” She turned, then turned back. “Is there anything I can get you, Max? Coffee, tea?”
I shook my head. “No. Thanks very much.”
She smiled again, although it was tinged with pain now, and left us alone.
We sat in the middle of the garden on a black steel bench with a wooden seat covered with vinyl cushions, as Wainright spilled his guts.
“...I was desperate. I didn’t care what trouble I got in afterward. I only cared about saving Katherine.”
Stray Cat Blues Page 15