It was raining pretty heavily, and Marsh, ever prepared, donned a black rain slicker stored in his trunk and shoved another into my hands.
Lightning streaked the sky in the distance, crackling thunder accompanied within milliseconds, and dark pudgy clouds above us rained down their contents, making the slickers slicker.
We crossed a large barren field full of weeds, rocks, tumbling paper, Styrofoam cups, and candy wrappers caught up in the windy gusts.
When we flattened our backs against the back wall of the building, it was 12:42 a.m.
We hadn’t noticed any other cars parked nearby.
Poe had specified that the meeting was going to take place in a room in the southeastern corner of the building and that Davis could enter from unlocked double doors at the north entrance. Lights in the lobby and the stairwell would be on, and he was to climb to the second floor for the rendezvous.
We found the designated entrance, and the double doors, solid slabs of cheap wood, were still open.
But there were no lights on in the lobby, or from all appearances, anywhere in the building.
Marsh switched on the flashlight, and we examined the room.
Which wasn’t a lobby, but a large storage space with a single unadorned lightbulb in the ceiling and boxes stacked high on all four walls.
The boxes had labels indicating that they contained soda pop and plastic cups and napkins and straws and after that, I stopped examining them.
Just plain old storage for the casino’s many restaurants and bars.
A crash of thunder landed seemingly right outside the door, and the whole room shook for a moment. A jolt of sympathetic electricity ran up my legs.
“Wowee,” I whispered.
Marsh frowned at me and said, “Hard to imagine Hunter Davis being comfortable coming to this place alone at this time of night.”
I agreed and wondered if he’d chickened out. The building was as quiet as death, and I sensed there was no one here. Unless the meeting wrapped up incredibly quickly or they were lying in wait for us, we’d wasted our time.
Marsh ran the flashlight beam over the floor and up a wall and stopped it on the frame of an interior door.
“That’s where he was supposed to take the stairs.”
He led the way, and I followed him up the dark cement stairs to the second floor. Marsh was careful with the door there, but it didn’t make any noise when he carefully opened it and stepped out into a corridor, with more cement floors and a false ceiling above us. The floor hadn’t been vacuumed in a long time, and dust motes whirled up under every footstep.
Marsh unclipped his gun holster, and we paused and listened, studying our surroundings closely.
There were more boxes stacked along the hallway, which narrowed the gap so that we had to turn a bit sideways to squeeze through the corridor.
Still absolutely no sign of life.
Our soft-soled shoes barely registered, but we tippy-toed anyway.
At the end of the hallway, the space opened into a coven of spaces, three to be exact, any one of which might be the meeting location.
The open area once again was stacked to the ceiling with more supply boxes.
We stopped and listened for what seemed like an hour, but was probably no more than a minute.
Finally, Marsh pointed his flashlight at the door closest to us. I led the way and pressed my ear against its cold surface.
After another lengthy wait, I shrugged at Marsh, and he nodded.
The door was unlocked, and the room was empty save for more boxes, a small card table, a couple of ripped Naugahyde chairs, a rusty looking refrigerator, and a Coke machine.
The next office was just as empty of life, with its only unique feature being a treadmill.
Behind the door of the third and final office, we again found no life.
But we did find Davis Hunter’s dead body alongside that of a young and attractive woman who I recognized, despite the bullet wound that had ripped open the side of her head.
Thirty-Six
We sat on canvas chairs on the back deck of my boat. The rain had stopped, and the still air was full of a clean ozone smell, tinged with an earthy, oily scent. The half-moon was directly overhead, and there was a smattering of stars, visible through drifting black clouds.
Red was on my lap, purring contentedly as I ran my right hand absently across his back.
My left hand held a small glass of whiskey, a robust old Kentucky bourbon. Marsh was sipping Pierre Ferrand cognac, that he paid for and I kept on hand especially for him. Otherwise, I just flash the fancy bottle to impress my friends.
Something of Lewis Carroll from Alice kept flashing across my mind:
If you drink too much from a bottle marked “poison’”it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later...
Marsh had used one of his untraceable prepaid cell phones to make the call to the SFPD. His report was curt and to the point. He said there were gunshots, gave the address, and then disconnected the call. He hadn’t made the call until after we’d left Treasure Island and were back on Yerba Buena.
As we crossed back over to the 101, we heard, in the distance, police sirens alternating with that weird chirping sound that cop cars make to alert wayward autos.
The dead woman, Katie, the girl I’d seen topless with Hunter in his backyard in Sausalito, had a 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun clutched loosely in her rigid right hand.
The blood from the three visible gun wounds on the bodies was still fresh and oozing. Katie’s bullet had torn through the bone and cartilage at the scalp line on the right side of her forehead. There were two visible shots to Davis Hunter’s body—one in the middle of his throat that peeled back the flesh like a surgeon’s incision, and the other, a small entry hole just above his heart.
We’d probably missed the killers by minutes. They say baseball is a game of luck and timing, but so is life itself. Fate balances on a precarious tightrope.
After fruitlessly searching Hunter’s body for his cell phone and wallet, we looked around to make sure we hadn’t left a hint of our presence and then hightailed it out of there. The gloves made sure there’d be no fingerprints and rubber slipovers did the same for our shoes.
We had driven back to my boat, fetched our drinks, and settled on the deck without exchanging a word. Finally, after more silent contemplation of the night and the bay, Marsh turned to me and said, “Murder-suicide.”
That was obviously the setup, but it was the first time either one of us had mentioned it out loud. It was the only thing that made sense. And yet, at the same time, didn’t.
“He probably killed Johnnie, too, didn’t he?”
I sipped my whiskey and stared off to the west, over the drifting sailboats, cruisers, and catamarans, and out toward Alcatraz Island. “I can’t imagine why, but the evidence certainly points in that direction.” I paused and remembered the recording Marsh had played for me earlier in the evening. “What about the tape—Poe talking to Hunter? That alone might be enough to hang him.”
“I don’t know. Without Hunter’s cell phone, which I’m sure has been destroyed by now, I don’t know what it’s worth.”
I wasn’t enough of a lawyer to know if a recording disembodied from its source hardware was admissible in a court of law.
“I’ll see if there’s any precedent. But even if there is, we have to think long and hard before using it,” Marsh said, tapping his cognac glass against the arm of his chair. “Maybe we can use it as a bargaining chip to get more information out of Poe, although that, too, might be dangerous to health and well-being.”
No doubt.
“But he said it was his building. Why would he kill someone in a property he owned?”
“I have a feeling that it’ll turn out that there’s no connection between that warehouse and Poe,” Marsh said with a tone of resignation.
“But what about all those boxes of supplies?”
“Did you see any labels or indications that they
belonged to his casino? I bet it’s part of some business that has nothing to do with Poe’s various enterprises.”
I nodded. “You have to be right.” Red sat up, arched his back, and dug his nails into my thighs. I winced and carefully lifted him up and dropped him onto the deck. He gave me a dismissive meow and wandered off toward the back of the boat.
“But I still can’t figure out why he’d kill Johnnie and then lead the little girl toward me.” I was thinking out loud. “Johnnie was involved with Hunter. Probably a couple years back when the final approvals for the casino were needed. She was either the price for Hunter’s cooperation or she was blackmailing him in some way, although I see that as unlikely if Hunter was as besotted with her as he confessed. She may have coaxed him into throwing his vote, or maybe she was just Poe’s added insurance.” I paused, drank, thought some more.
“I was at the library doing research. and Hunter’s vote was the deciding, and—to some reporters—surprising one, as he’d been a vocal casino critic. Poe couldn’t bribe him, at least with money, because he was already rich. I’m guessing that Johnnie had pictures or videos of their time together and some of the more kinky activities that floated Hunter’s boat but that she never had to use them because Cupid’s arrow struck him hard and he’d do anything to please her.”
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” Marsh said, quoting Shakespeare and taking another sip of overpriced cognac. Then he added, “Everything you say is possible, perhaps probable, of course, but after squeezing everything we could out of Caballo and the Blue Notes and Dr. Wainright and your friends, Maggie and Leonard, there’s no way to prove any of it, unless we find Johnnie alive or get Poe to talk. Neither seems remotely likely.”
“No matter the legal option of using the recording, we can use it anyway. If he finds out that we have him on tape coaxing Hunter out to his appointment with the grim reaper, it’s got to rattle him.”
“Didn’t your mom ever tell you not to play with fire?”
“Let’s find out more about poor Katie. The online paper tomorrow should have information about her, and we should try and find out how she got out to that warehouse because she sure didn’t get there with Hunter. Poe probably had her kidnapped and hauled over. Maybe one of her neighbors saw something.”
Marsh said, “I’ll get somebody out to wherever she lived and see what we can turn up.”
“Now we need to plan our approach to Poe and decide what we want from him and what we’re willing to do to get it. And, obviously, stage the meeting somewhere that’s safe.”
“Even if the meeting is secure, afterward there may be no place on Earth that’s ever going to be safe again for either of us.”
I knew he was right. I didn’t know what to do about it, how to avoid Poe’s vengeance if we pushed him too far. I thought about Frankie, her grit and determination. She was just a kid who’d already lost too much.
I thought about Dr. Wainright and his poor wife, and the love between them that knew no bounds.
I thought about Hunter and Katie and their awful fate.
I thought about hapless, dead Leonard and poor pitiful Maggie.
We’d come too far. I’d come too far to stop now.
Thirty-Seven
Early the next morning, I was on the back deck of the more stately Sweet and Sour having coffee with Alexandra. She had slept overnight on the yacht, babysitting Frankie. Dao and Meiying were in Los Angeles for the weekend at some kind of a conference on opportunities for investment among emerging Asian nations.
Frankie was circling the boat, practicing skateboard tricks.
As Alexandra watched her whirl by, both woman and girl beaming smiles, I finished explaining the situation to her.
“Maybe it’s time you got the police involved,” she said. “Poe is too dangerous, Max.”
“That won’t work.”
“It might work to save your life,” she said.
Frankie skidded to a stop in front of us, kick flipped her board into her hands, and gave a little open-handed flourish. “Ta-da!” she laughed.
We clapped and she bowed.
“Sweetie, you haven’t eaten breakfast yet. There are blueberry muffins and bananas on the counter downstairs. Give Red his breakfast and a bowl of milk. Max and I need to talk for a few more minutes, and then I’ll come down so we can plan the day.”
“Okay,” she said, turning away with the skateboard tucked under her arm. She spun back and said, “Can we go to Balls to the Wall this morning? Nick’s going to be there.”
She was referring to a nearby warehouse converted into a combo laser tag, paintball, and skateboard rink. Nick was her best, and probably only, friend.
“I have lots of errands to run and there might not be—”
“Please. Please. Please!” she cried. “Pretty please. I’ll do anything. I haven’t seen Nick in years. Please?”
Alexandra laughed, shook her head. “In years? I thought you saw him last Thursday.”
“Yeah, but only for a little while. I have so much to tell him. Please?” Her little face wrinkled up into a bursting ball.
“All right. But only for an hour.”
“Two hours.”
“One hour,” Alexandra said firmly.
“And a half,” Frankie tried.
“And fifteen minutes,” Alexandra conceded, extending her hand.
Frankie smiled, shook it, turned away again. At the cabin door, she stopped, turned around and said, “Mr. Plank...have you...do you...did you find anything out about Johnnie yet?”
I’d been avoiding that topic with her, and now I felt like a heel and a failure. “No. Not yet. But I’m still trying. With a little luck, we’ll find out where Johnnie is pretty soon.” The words felt weightless, empty.
“Okay. I hope so. Thank you, Mr. Plank.” She disappeared down the stairs.
“Goddammit.”
“You’re doing all you can.” Alexandra reached out and touched my knee.
“A fat lot of good that’s done her.”
“She’s something, isn’t she?”
I nodded.
“Almost makes you want to...” Alexandra paused, looked out over the line of boats stretching out across Pier 39.
Even though I knew what she was trying to say, I responded, “What?”
“Never mind.” She shook it off and said, “So why would getting help from the police not work?”
“What would I tell them? Unless I want to accuse him of being involved in the murders. We have his voice on a third-hand recording. I’m sure his high-priced attorneys will make mincemeat out of that. Plus, he has friends in high places in the city. Friends who owe him favors or allegiance. Or are just plain afraid of him.”
“So Superman is going to do this all alone. Confront and threaten the city’s most dangerous gangster, to say nothing of his countless minions. I understand you want to help Frankie. So do I. But this is crazy. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You forget, I’ll have Batman with me,” I lied.
Alexandra gave me the evil eye. “Marsh is only a man, Max. He’ll bleed just like you.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that.”
With a look of pained resignation, she rose to join Frankie downstairs and said, “I am glad Marsh will be with you. And you two better have a good plan, which includes an exit strategy.”
I stood up and took her in my arms and whispered, “Don’t worry. We do.”
What else could I say?
Thirty-Eight
No one knew where Poe really lived.
No one but Marsh.
They were so similar in some ways, particularly their unpredictability and mysterious habits and history.
It turned out that Poe moved among numerous habitats. He had an apartment on the top floor of the casino and a pied á terre in Pacific Heights. He owned a Victorian near Golden Gate Park and a loft in Sausalito. He also kept a whole penthouse floor of the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.
&
nbsp; And that only counted known residences in the Bay Area.
He also had a fortress-like mansion in Big Sur and a sprawling villa in Beverly Hills.
According to Marsh, he seemed to move among these various residences in no discernible pattern. He might stay at one for a few days, or a week, or even longer sometimes. Or he might move almost every day.
He was either paranoid, or careful, or a little of both.
Or, considering his notoriety and potential list of enemies, just plain damn smart.
Marsh told me he’d employed a small drone with a powerful mini-camera trained on the casino and, whenever possible, Poe himself, for the past few days. Three nights ago, Poe stayed in the casino all night. Two nights ago, he slept on Nob Hill. The same for last night.
Tonight he’d been tracked to the back of the Fairmont Hotel. He’d arrived by helicopter, landing on the roof of the hotel, and then descended a stairwell to the library in the penthouse suite through a secret built-in door that had been designed into the room many years ago. Marsh told me the suite was 6000 square feet and could host up to 130 people for dinner parties. It rented for $15,000 a night. But he probably got a cut rate deal for his long term rental.
Marsh’s eye-in-the-sky seemed preposterous, although I knew it was quite possible.
The only thing I really trusted was that if Marsh said Poe was at the Fairmont, then Poe was at the Fairmont.
Marsh asked me if I wanted to make our move tonight.
I told him to check out the place as much as he could and figure out an approach, a plan. If Poe stayed there tomorrow, we’d strike.
If he moved again, we’d reassess.
I didn’t like lying to Marsh, any more than I liked telling Alexandra that Batman was going to be my sidekick on this mission.
But neither of them would have let me have my way.
I didn’t want to expose Marsh to Poe’s forces and revenge. He was a big boy, and he could more than defend himself, but this was different. If Poe wanted someone dead, sooner or later, they stopped breathing.
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