Take a Number

by Janet Dawson

  I shook my head. “I have some questions about your cousin. I need answers before I go back to Oakland.”

  “Why? Mitch said you were a friend of Sam’s.”

  “Mitch assumed.” I took one of my business cards from my purse and handed it to her. “I’m a private investigator.”

  She stared at the card for a moment, then set it down next to the phone. Picking up a pencil, she held it like a drumstick, tapping the eraser end on the surface of the desk, watching me with wary eyes while several emotions marched across her face. When she spoke, her voice was uncertain at first, then more resolute. “You must be working for the wife, or her attorney. Believe me, I don’t blame her for killing him. She probably had ample reason.”

  “Like Denise?”

  Nancy’s mouth curved upward in a sardonic smile. “You’ve been talking to Tom Meriwell.”

  “He had a lot to say.”

  The smile vanished. “You know that old saying—you can’t choose your family. Well, I didn’t choose to be related to Sam Raynor. And I don’t choose to talk about him.” She waved one manicured hand at me, willing me to disappear. Instead I crossed my legs and got more comfortable.

  “Ruth has been charged with murder,” I said. “I don’t think she did it. I think there are plenty of other people who had reason to kill Sam Raynor. Some of them may be here in Gilroy.”

  She stared at me while she considered my words. The phone rang and she shifted her gaze to the blinking light on her extension. She stared at it but made no move to answer. Finally the receptionist picked up the call with a cheery “Good afternoon” and the name of the firm. “Nancy, line two,” she called.

  “Take a message,” Nancy said, her voice sharp.

  “It’s your daughter.”

  “Which one?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  Nancy sighed and tossed the pencil onto the desk, picking up the receiver. “Yes?” She listened for a moment to the voice on the other end, red lips compressed, red fingernails tugging at her hair. “No, you may not... Because I said so... I don’t care what everybody else’s mother says, I say no... Don’t argue, we’ll talk about it when I get home.” She hung up the phone and put her hands on her temples, elbows on her desk, shaking her head slowly. “God, I’ll be glad when school starts. One’s eleven and the other is thirteen. I may not survive puberty. And it was bad enough when I went through it.”

  “It’s rough being a single parent.”

  She put her hands down and leaned back in her chair. “How did you know I was divorced?”

  “Tom Meriwell mentioned it.”

  “Tom Meriwell. Finger on the pulse of Gilroy.” She shook her head again. “I can’t believe he showed up at the church. Then again, maybe I can. It’s just like him. Alma was fit to be tied.”

  “Yes, she made her feelings plain. Of course, running into Tom Meriwell outside the church was fortunate for me. I had lunch with him after I left your aunt’s house.”

  Nancy folded her arms across the front of her blue dress. “I’ll bet he gave you an earful.”

  “He certainly did. Of course, it’s his version. I thought you might have a different one.”

  “I don’t. My cousin Sam was every bit as bad as Tom paints him. He was an obnoxious little bastard from the day he was born. I loathed him. I’m glad he’s dead. But if you tell my mother that, I’ll deny it.”

  “How did he get to be so obnoxious at such an early age?” I asked.

  Nancy crossed her shapely legs and the smile came back, a bit crooked. “If I’d paid more attention in my psychology class at San Jose State, I might have the answer. But I was too busy mooning over the man who is now my ex-husband. And savoring what turned out to be my shortlived freedom.” She sighed and her fingers played with the edge of her silk scarf.

  “Alma’s older than my mother, the oldest of five sisters. She married late in life and not for very long. I barely remember my uncle Lou. He went on a business trip and never came back. Can’t say I blame the man. If I had to live with Alma on a regular basis, I’d leave too. Anyway, Lou took a hike about three months before Sam was born. Alma divorced him. She’s been perfecting her long-suffering deserted wife act ever since.”

  “Alma seems to have lived for her child.”

  “Oh, yes. Darling Sammy was her consolation prize for failing at marriage. He was her perfect little angel. He could do no wrong. She indulged him, she spoiled him rotten. He never had any discipline.” Nancy shook her head, the experience of raising her own children evident in her eyes. “You can’t do that with kids. You have to set limits, or they become tyrants. That’s what Sam was, an absolute devil. He was mean, vicious, and cruel. How do people like that happen? Are they born that way? Or is it the way they’re raised?”

  I’ve often wondered that myself. There seem to be a lot of people like that running around loose, creating havoc for the rest of us. They go through life leaving trails of pain. Some do it with impunity, while others populate our prisons.

  “Both, I think,” I said. I recalled my conversations with Tom Meriwell and Sergeant Bruckner. “I hear Sam had a few brushes with the law before he joined the Navy, mostly as a juvenile.”

  Nancy nodded her head vigorously. “Oh, yes. From the time he started school. If there was trouble, Sam was usually behind it. Alma always called those incidents childish pranks. But there was a nasty edge to everything he did.”

  “Such as?”

  “He set fire to his elementary school when he was eight years old,” Nancy said, lowering her voice as she leaned toward me. Now that she’d started talking about Sam, she was on a roll, and I was prepared to let her talk until she had no more words left. “He torched some books in his classroom. The fire got out of hand. The room was badly damaged. It’s a wonder the whole school didn’t go up. Sam was playing with matches, or so he said. Everyone treated it as an accident, so he got off with a scolding from the principal. Even that made Alma mad. She hated it when anyone punished Sam, though God knows she never did it herself. But that fire was no accident. Sam and Mitch were in the same class. Mitch told me the teacher disciplined Sam for hitting another student, and Sam threatened to get back at her. And that very afternoon—flames and smoke and fire engines.”

  Nancy grimaced, brows drawn together, hands worrying the end of the brightly colored scarf. “You see what I mean? And that’s just a sample of the stunts he pulled. Sam liked to get even. In grade school kids who crossed him got tripped in the lunchroom, or shoved into walls, or pushed out of trees. Later on they got beat up. Everyone left him alone. They were afraid of him.”

  I knew the type. When I was growing up there was one in every school, the bully, the petty tyrant who preyed on children younger, weaker, less sure of themselves. My classmates and I soon learned to stay out of the way, as a matter of self-preservation, and hope that sometime in the future retribution would catch up with the tormenter. Sometimes the comeuppance never came, but in Sam Raynor’s case it had. Raynor was a murder waiting to happen, waiting for the person with the motive and the opportunity. As far as people with motives were concerned, it looked as though the line formed on the right.

  “What about later, when Sam was in high school?” I asked. “After you left Alma’s house this afternoon, your mother mentioned Sam ‘borrowing’ a car from an Aunt Ida. Did this happen a lot?”

  “I remember that. Sam and my cousin Ty from Bakersfield. Two peas in a pod, Mother used to say. Every time Ty would visit, he and Sam would raise hell and get into trouble. Car crazy, both of them. Sam started ‘borrowing’ people’s cars when he was about fourteen. Anyone who complained usually got their trash cans overturned on their front lawns, or rocks tossed through their windows. Or their pets would turn up dead.”

  At that, Nancy Tate took a deep ragged breath. “Sam killed my cat, when I was in junior high school. He told Alma it was an accident, but I knew he did it on purpose.” I didn’t ask her why. The fact that he’d done it was en
ough. Her brown eyes turned cold with hatred at the memory, cold enough to make me wonder where Nancy was last Saturday night.

  “Tell me about Denise Meriwell,” I said quietly, breaking her mood.

  She looked at me, startled, then she smiled. “Oh, Denise. She was pretty and sweet A really nice girl.”

  “Alma called her a slut.”

  “Alma would. Denise was popular. She dated a lot. As far as Alma was concerned, that meant Denise was sleeping around.”

  “Denise dated your brother for a while.”

  Nancy nodded. “Yes, for about a year. They started going out together when Mitch was a senior and Denise was a junior, and the relationship continued through the summer and into the fall. Denise was at our house quite a bit during that time. Mitch was really fond of her. I thought it was getting serious, and so did my mother. Mom was concerned because Mitch had started college in San Jose and we wanted him to finish school. Sam didn’t go to college. He was working at an auto parts store here in town. Sometime after Christmas he moved in on Denise. I always thought he did it just to take her away from Mitch. Deep down inside I don’t think Sam liked women.”

  That jibed with Betty Korsakov’s comment, and with my impression of the man I had met, the day before someone shot him. “You know, when Mom told me Sam was back in the area, I was worried. About my daughters. The oldest one is starting to develop, and she’s really pretty. I didn’t want him anywhere near my girls.” She sighed, the breath coming out tinged with relief. “I needn’t have worried. He hardly ever visited Alma, unless he wanted something. But just the same, I’m glad he’s dead.”

  So were a lot of other people I had talked with over the last few days. “I understand Denise was pregnant when she and Sam got married.”

  “She’d have been a lot better off if she’d gotten an abortion,” Nancy said, “or tried to go it alone. Poor kid. But no, they got married, two weeks after Denise graduated from high school. Alma was furious. She didn’t think Denise was good enough for her darling Sam. They lived with Alma until the baby was bom. I can’t imagine a worse way to start a marriage, with my aunt Alma glowering over the dinner table.”

  “When was the baby born?”

  “Right before Christmas.” So the boy was eight years old, nearly nine. “After Scott was born,” Nancy said, “Sam and Denise had a tiny little apartment near the store where Sam worked. I don’t know when he started beating her. Probably early on, knowing Sam. I’d. heard rumors over the years about how he treated his girlfriends, a punch or a slap here and there, nothing that ever left any evidence. The fat hit the fire the night Sam broke Denise’s nose. It was right before Halloween, so Scott wasn’t quite a year old. Denise should have had him arrested. I don’t know why she didn’t. You’ll have to ask her for her reasons.”

  “I intend to.” That is, if I could find her—with or without Tom’s help.

  “Sam’s current wife, the one they think killed him, did he beat her too?”

  “Same pattern,” I told her, “over a longer period of time. Did Sam have a girlfriend while he was married to Denise?”

  “Several. I guess some women would consider him attractive. He certainly must have had a good line. He always had some girl swooning over him. But it was all surface. He was a rotten human being underneath. I’m not even sure he qualified as a human being.”

  “Sam joined the Navy eight years ago. That must have been right after Denise left him.”

  Nancy nodded. “I don’t have any details, but I had a feeling Sam was anxious to get out of Gilroy. You never know what Tom Meriwell might do when he’s angry, and he was mad enough to chew every nail in that hardware store. Denise had filed for divorce, and Sam didn’t fight it. He went up to San Jose and next thing I knew, he was headed for boot camp.”

  Tom Meriwell was still angry, I thought, reflecting on my lunch with the hardware store owner. Sam Raynor’s desire to get out of Gilroy would certainly explain his sudden rush to serve his country. After all, the Navy’s ads promised adventure and exotic ports of call, something that might appeal to someone who had spent his whole life in Gilroy, California. Raynor’s juvenile record was legally under wraps, and what Sergeant Bruckner told me earlier that afternoon indicated Sam had been careful enough not to acquire a record as an adult—at least not in Gilroy. Would the Navy have taken him with an adult rap sheet? I didn’t know the answer to that question either. I made a mental note to ask Alex or Lieutenant Bruinsma.

  “Please call me if you think of anything else I should know,” I said, thanking Nancy Tate. Despite her earlier resistance, she looked relieved for having let it all out.

  I headed north, arriving at the edge of San Jose’s urban sprawl just in time for the evening rush hour. Trapped in my Toyota, I crawled along for a few miles, one car amid many, caught in the smog and haze, the afternoon sun glaring through my windshield, sweat dampening my now thoroughly wrinkled gray linen.

  Finally I got off the freeway and detoured downtown to the Santa Clara County Courthouse, where I looked through divorce decrees from eight years ago, searching for the name Raynor. I verified the date on which Denise Meriwell obtained her dissolution of marriage from Sam Raynor and wrote down the name of her attorney.

  It had been a long day and I was tired and hot, not wanting to face the freeway again. I left the courthouse and walked to a building not far from the San Jose Police Department. Upstairs, in an office that looked a lot like mine, a fellow private investigator named Norman Gerrity looked bored on this hot afternoon. His face brightened when he saw me.

  “Norm,” I said, “I’m buying. Let’s go get a cold one.”

  Twenty-nine

  “HE SOUNDS LIKE A REAL GRADE-A SON OF A BITCH,” Norm Gerrity said when I told him about Sam Raynor. “I’m surprised someone waited this long to take him out.”

  “That’s what everyone says. I’m even saying it myself.” Norm and I were tucked into a red leather booth at a dark watering hole just down the street from his office, a place frequented by a lot of off-duty San Jose police officers. No doubt Norm feels comfortable in these surroundings. He’s a retired Boston cop, a thickset man with a bulldog face, a broken nose, and a full head of curly gray hair. His gravelly voice sounds like he never left Southie. He and his wife came to California several years ago to be near their daughter and her family. But Norm got bored with retirement, so, much to his wife’s dismay, he acquired an investigator’s license and set up shop downtown. We met earlier in the year, when we discovered we’d both been working, at different times, on the Willis missing persons case. Since then I’ve learned that Norm Gerrity is a good investigator who delivers. Plus he has connections with law enforcement all over the South Bay. That was one reason I was here. The other was his perspective, which is usually right on the money.

  “The only person I’m reasonably certain didn’t kill him is his wife,” I said, hands locked around a mug of cold Anchor Steam. “Or his mother. Believe me, she’s a piece of work. She loved her son, though, even if he wasn’t lovable. But it looks as though there are plenty of people with motives to go around.”

  “How can I help?”

  “Norman, you read my mind.”

  He grinned over his beer as he took a swallow and wiped a thin line of foam from his upper lip. “Yeah, I’m getting good at that. Besides, you’re buying. I figure you want something.”

  “Norm,” I protested, “it’s the pleasure of your company.”

  “Jeri, my love, it’s my contacts. You want to know if the murder victim ever, shall we say, came to the attention of the law in this neighborhood.”

  “That’s a good way to put it.” I raised my mug. “Sergeant Bruckner at the Gilroy Police Department was very informative. Raynor had a record as a juvenile—vandalism, shoplifting, helping himself to other people’s cars. He was more careful as an adult, at least in Gilroy. He worked in an auto parts store after he got out of high school, until he joined the Navy two years later. Until then he seem
ed to have cleaned up his act, except for the occasional speeding ticket. However, Bruckner heard rumors that Raynor was involved in something up here in San Jose. Rumors only, nothing concrete. Raynor’s former boss got busted a few months later, for running a chop shop out of his store. It seems he wasn’t too picky about where he got those auto parts. That was after Raynor left Gilroy, but it makes me wonder.”

  “I’ll check it out. Give me some details.” Norm pulled out a notebook and pen, wrote down the particulars on Sam Raynor and told me he’d put out some feelers. “Now it’s payback time,” he said with a grin.

  “You mean the beer’s not enough?” We both laughed. “Name it.”

  “I need some information on a real estate transaction in Alameda County. If you could look it up on your next trip to the courthouse, it would save me a drive to Oakland.”

  “Consider it done,” I said, reaching for my own notebook.

  * * *

  It was past eight Wednesday evening when I finally returned to my apartment, anxious to get out of the gray linen dress I’d worn all day. Abigail met me at the door, tail up and belly wobbling, loudly announcing that she’d cleaned up every last morsel in her cat food bowl. I fed her, then headed for the bathroom, where I stripped off my clothes and took a shower to wash off the day’s grime. I fell into bed and a deep dreamless sleep. After what felt like a forty-eight-hour day in Gilroy, I slept in until Abigail parked her bulk on my stomach and meowed in my face. Now, as the hot water dripped through the freshly ground coffee, I grabbed a pencil and pad and played back the messages on my home answering machine. Mother had called, I noted with a disquieting twinge. Now what?

  I pushed Mother’s call from my mind and breakfasted on cereal and strawberries, then made sure Abigail had plenty of crunchies before I left. I drove to my office, thinking about today’s agenda. I still hadn’t answered all my questions about Steve Yancy, Raynor’s supervisor, who had finally tumbled to the fact that Raynor was sleeping with his wife Claudia. Yancy said he’d followed Claudia and her friend Dana to the Piedmont Cinema, then spent the rest of Saturday night drinking at the Royal Flush, until the lights and sirens lured him to the scene of Raynor’s murder. Plausible, but I needed to corroborate Yancy’s presence at the bar.