Take a Number

by Janet Dawson

  As she talked, I’d watched her face, assessing her veracity. I believed her. Kevin’s story about the two people arguing near the parked cars on Howe Street was ultimately more important. He had described their interchange as acrimonious, their tone and body language carrying across the street even if their words did not. Had the taller one been Sam Raynor? That would have been about the time he’d entered Ruth’s apartment building, about the time Lena Copeland’s friend Maurice had stepped out of the lobby headed for his own car and seen a man matching Sam’s description stepping from the street to the curb. If it had been Sam, who was his companion? Sam and Tiffany had words that evening, but Acey said they’d argued in the parking lot, not on Howe Street. Perhaps Sam met someone after Tiffany left. There were a lot of people who had bones to pick with Sam Raynor, and several had been in the area the night he was murdered.

  I’d just returned to my office when someone pushed open the door with more force than necessary. I looked up and saw a short, stocky Chicano with a crop of coarse black hair over a dark square-jawed face, pugnacious and hostile. He wore khaki pants and a work shirt, with a photo ID clipped to his left breast pocket. The large print at the top told me he worked at one of the oil refineries that dot the hills above Martinez, just this side of the Carquinez Strait. The smaller print below it told me his name was Ruben C. Padilla.

  “You Jeri Howard?” he growled.

  “Yes, I am.” I motioned to the chair in front of my desk. “Have a seat, Mr. Padilla. Let’s talk.”

  He glared at me with angry brown eyes, hands on his hips, thick black eyebrows swooping together like birds of prey. “What I got to say to you, I can say standing up. Where do you get off hassling my wife? You leave Denise alone.”

  “She seemed all right when I left her.” I kept my voice low and neutral, examining his face.

  “The hell she did.” His right hand flew off his hip and he shook his fist at me. “I went by the bank this afternoon and she was upset. When I asked how come, she burst into tears, right there in the lobby. Had to calm her down before she could even talk about it. God damn you, don’t you go bothering my wife again. I don’t care if you are a woman, I’ll teach you one hell of a lesson.”

  “You’re a real hothead, Mr. Padilla. Suppose you cool off and tell me what you were doing outside an apartment building at Forty-first and Howe at one-thirty Sunday morning.”

  The wind left Ruben Padilla’s sails with an almost audible gust. His dark glowering face blanched. He tried, but failed, to regain his bluster. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Bullshit.” I stood up and leaned toward him. He opened his mouth to deny it again but I waved away his protest. “I was there, near the police line. I saw you. You were on the sidewalk by the construction site. You wore blue jeans and a denim jacket. You were glaring at the building where Sam Raynor was shot to death, just like you were glaring at me a minute ago. I noticed you because you looked so angry. Why were you angry, Mr. Padilla? Does Denise know you were there?”

  Padilla’s mouth clamped shut. He narrowed his eyes and I watched as he made a perceptible shift from hot to cold, considering his options. When he finally spoke, his words were as cold as his stare. “I don’t have to tell you jack shit. Except to leave me and Denise alone.”

  He turned and hauled open my office door, unbalancing Joe Franklin, who had just reached for the handle on the other side. “Who was that?” Franklin asked, watching the departing Mr. Padilla.

  “A man with something to hide. Have a seat.”

  He sat down. Fatigue had deepened the lines on his hawk face and drawn dark circles under his gray eyes. His nondescript clothing was similar to what he’d worn earlier in the week. “I’m on my way home. I feel as though I’ve neglected Lenore and the rest of the family these past few days.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and shifted in the chair. “Still no sign of Rosie, but I did talk to a guy named Stubbs. He lives in his truck, parks it various places in North Oakland. He knows Rosie. Says she used to have money and a house in that neighborhood. Then she lost it all—he doesn’t know how—and now she lives on the streets. I don’t know if his story’s true, but...”

  His voice trailed off. In the ensuing silence, I thought about Sister Anne over at the homeless shelter and what she’d said about the little things that rip apart the safety net.

  Joe Franklin roused himself and spoke again. “Every couple of weeks he takes her and some other homeless people over to the recycling center under the freeway so they can sell their cans and bottles.”

  “I wondered how she got down there. Piedmont Avenue to Twenty-seventh is a long way to push a shopping cart.”

  “I don’t know if Stubbs collects a percentage for the use of his truck,” Franklin said. “Maybe he just does it out of the goodness of his heart. He seemed like that kind of guy. All I can say is, based on what I’ve found out about Rosie over the past few days, I don’t think she’d get into his truck if she didn’t trust him.”

  “Good point. Has he seen Rosie since the murder?”

  Franklin shook his head. “Not since the last time he took her to the recycling center. Stubbs hasn’t seen her at all. He says lately there have been some attacks on homeless people in the neighborhood. Rosie and the others may be less visible right now, for that reason. He thought she might be camping out in the bushes near the Piedmont Avenue School, but I took a look at the area. There isn’t that much cover. Besides, school starts soon. I think the cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue might be a possibility, though. I’ll check it out tomorrow.”

  “It’s Labor Day weekend,” I said, thinking how tired he looked. “Why don’t you take a few days off?”

  “Are you going to put your investigation on hold until Tuesday?” he asked as he got to his feet.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Then neither will I.” He favored me with a rare smile and sketched a salute in the air as he went out the door. I picked up the phone and punched in a number in the 408 area code. After a couple of rings the phone was answered in the village of Carmel on the coast about two hours south. “Hi, Minna. It’s Jeri. Is Errol there?”

  I waited while Minna Seville went out into her garden to fetch Errol. He was my mentor, a well-respected Bay Area private investigator with years in the business and lots of contacts. I had worked for him for five years, until a heart attack forced him into retirement. When Errol came on the line, he asked if I were still coming down to the Monterey area this weekend to see my mother and other relatives. “That’s been postponed. I’m involved in a murder investigation. Have you got any juice with the Salinas police?”

  “Of course,” he said, as if there were no other answer. He didn’t ask for details. “What do you need?”

  “I need to know if someone has a record. Ruben C. Padilla. He’s from Salinas.” I gave Errol a description of Padilla, and he said he’d get back to me in a couple of days.

  I looked at my watch. It was nearly four-thirty and I hadn’t heard from my DMV contact, who said he was taking next week off. I had to talk with him before he left. Just as I reached for the phone again, it rang. It was Duffy LeBard.

  “No go on talking to Harlan,” he said. “But he’ll be out of the brig Tuesday morning. Can it wait till then?”

  “I guess it’ll have to.”

  “You can talk to the Marines, though.” He gave me the names of the two Marines Harlan had fought with last Saturday night and an address on San Antonio Avenue in Alameda. I replaced the receiver and the phone rang again.

  “If you’d get off the damn phone,” my DMV contact said, his voice irritated. “I’ve been trying to call you for fifteen minutes. Here’s the information you want. Don’t be calling me for a while unless you plan to buy me dinner.”

  After he’d hung up, I leaned back in my chair, pencil in hand, and examined the name and address of the owner of the red Buick sedan that struck Tiffany Collins’s Subaru the night of Sam Raynor’s mur
der.

  “Well, well,” I said out loud, a smile playing on my lips as I considered this development. “What do you know?”

  Thirty-four

  “WE DON’T HAFTA TALK TO YOU,” TONY LOPEZ INFORMED me as he pulled a box of laundry detergent and a plastic bottle of fabric softener from the canvas tote bag he carried. He and Domingo Herrera then emptied their pockets in search of quarters, which they piled on top of one of the big double-load washers.

  “I know you don’t,” I said patiently, “but it would help me if you did.”

  Tony and Domingo were the two Marines who, along with Harlan Pettibone, had been arrested at the Naval Air Station enlisted club for fighting last Saturday night. In my experience, enlisted Marines seem to come in two varieties. The first are the grizzled gunnery or master sergeants who’ve been in the Corps twenty or thirty years and look as though they eat leather for breakfast.

  The second variety of Marine are the fresh-faced youngsters with no lines and no hair, who look as though they’re not old enough to shave the section of their faces that the Corps leaves to their discretion. Tony and Domingo were definitely of the second variety. As I looked at them, both with smooth brown faces and equally smooth pates, I kept hearing that song called “Soldier Boy,” by one of those sixties girl groups whose names I can never get straight.

  It was just past nine on Saturday morning. We were in a Laundromat called the Washboard, at the intersection of San Jose Avenue and Park Street near downtown Alameda. It was filling up with customers pursuing that hated but necessary chore, washers and dryers whirring and thumping, accompanied by a radio station blasting oldies to the whole room.

  I had followed Tony and Domingo here from the apartment they shared, a couple of blocks away on San Antonio Avenue. Just as I pulled up to the curb, craning my neck to check house numbers, I saw them emerge from the building, both shouldering the big duffels known as seabags, one lugging the additional burden of the canvas tote. They walked to the Laundromat. After trying to find a parking space in the vicinity, I understood why.

  By the time I wedged my Toyota into a tiny space farther down San Jose Avenue and doubled back to the two-room Laundromat, the Marines had established a beachhead in the front section, pulling soiled clothing, sheets, and towels from their seabags and sorting it into piles in three of the low wide carts with wheels which had been provided for the Laundromat’s customers. I approached them, business card in hand, and introduced myself, asking them about last Saturday’s incident. They both looked wary. That’s when Tony advised me that he didn’t have to talk with me. I appealed to them as Domingo fed a five dollar bill into the Laundromat’s change machine and scooped up the quarters that clattered forth. He added the change to the pile they’d already started.

  “What the hell, man,” Domingo said, poking his friend in the side with an elbow. “We got no reason not to tell her.”

  “Okay, but I gotta have some breakfast first.” Tony picked up a quarter and tossed it into the air. “Call it.”

  “Heads,” Domingo said.

  Tony caught the quarter in his right hand and slapped it onto the top of his left. “Tails. I buy, you fly.” He shoved some bills into Domingo’s hand, then turned to me. “You want some coffee or a bagel, ma’am?”

  “Coffee would be fine. I take it black.”

  I reached for my wallet but Tony shook his head. “No, ma’am, I buy, Dom flies. That’s the routine.”

  I nodded and watched Domingo go out the door. He crossed Park Street with the light, then waited to cross San Jose, headed for the bagel shop halfway down the block. Having now decided I was okay, Tony began to talk, telling me that he and his friend were both lance corporals. They’d known each other all their lives—in fact, their families lived next door to one another back in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Right after graduating from high school they’d joined up, going through recruit training in San Diego, then a tour of duty in Okinawa before coming back stateside.

  Tony finished sorting the laundry and positioned the carts in front of several washers, ready for the assault. Just then Domingo returned, bearing two brown paper sacks. He set them on top of one of the washers and examined the carts critically, poking through the contents. He sighed and shook his head.

  “Man, you do it every time,” Domingo said, pulling a bright red shirt from one cart. “You wash this shirt with that stuff, it’ll run all over the place.”

  I watched them work as a fine-tuned team, shoving laundry into several front loaders, Tony measuring out powdered detergent while Domingo brought up the rear with the liquid fabric softener. Then they positioned their quarters into the coin slots, checked temperature controls and started the cycles on each washer. While the washers filled with water, they retired to a bench near the Laundromat’s front window.

  I remained standing, leaning against a waist-high table next to the bench, as they opened the sacks. The first contained three large cups of coffee. Tony handed me one and I removed the lid. The other sack held two fat and fragrant onion bagels wrapped in paper, sliced in the middle and spread so thickly with cream cheese that it oozed from the sides. The bagels looked delicious and I wished I’d ordered one. But it’s a little hard to interview someone with cream cheese smeared on your chin.

  “So what happened Saturday night?” I asked, sipping my coffee.

  They both started talking at once, and I had to wave my free hand at them to bring some order to the proceedings. They were proud of the fact that neither of them had ever been in trouble before last Saturday, and the demise of their perfect records rankled them.

  “Never been up in front of the C.O. before,” Domingo growled, swallowing a mouthful of bagel, “not since recruit depot. Till Monday morning.”

  “Yeah, but he believed us when he said it wasn’t our fault.” Tony punctuated his words with his index finger. “That’s why we’re walking around and that little rat bastard’s in the brig.”

  “Do you know Harlan Pettibone?”

  They shook their heads and Domingo muttered something in Spanish. I knew enough of the language to translate, and the appellation was worse than rat bastard.

  “Never saw him before,” Domingo said, reaching for his coffee. “He came steaming into the club while me and Tony were sitting at a table having a beer. He started a fight.”

  “Right out of the blue? With no provocation?” I asked. Both Marines nodded vigorously. “Tell me everything you remember. What time did you get to the club? What time did you first see Harlan?”

  Tony took another bite of his bagel and chewed, his eyes fixed on the washers, as clothes and suds whirled round and round. He set down the bagel and used both hands to illustrate. “We got there about eleven, had one round, talked with some buddies, played the jukebox. I think we got the second round about eleven-forty. We’d just gone back to me table when all of a sudden I look up and this Harlan guy is standing there, grinning at us. He had on black jeans and an orange T-shirt, looked like a Halloween spook. And he had this look in his eye. He said he was a Texas tiger, then he starts calling us names.”

  “Like what?”

  Domingo’s dark eyes smoldered and his lips twisted as he repeated the slurs. “Beaner, spic, wetback.” This last one particularly incensed him. “Wetback! Shit, my family’s been in New Mexico three hundred goddamn years. My grandma’s a Mescalero Apache.”

  “So he just walked up to your table and started calling you names. Was he drunk?”

  Tony shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was something in the way he said it, that look in his eye, the way he was standing. It was like he was trying to pick a fight. When we got to fist city, I could smell beer on his clothes, real strong, like he’d spilled it on himself. But his eyes, they didn’t look drunk.”

  “You keep mentioning his eyes. How did they look?”

  “They had this sparkle,” Tony said, hesitating as he searched for words. “A glint. I remember thinking, this guy’s not drunk. Drunk is red nose and
watery eyes. I wondered if he was wired on something, like speed or coke. My guess is that he was fighting for the hell of it. I don’t know why. There were two of us. We’d have taken him apart if the club manager hadn’t called in reinforcements.”

  Domingo chimed in. “Besides, if he’d been drinking or doing drugs, he did it someplace else. I think I saw him come in, when Tony and I were walking away from the bar. He came in alone, stood at the entrance and looked around the room, like he was looking for some friends. It wasn’t but a few minutes before he came over to our table and started calling us names.”

  “What time did the fight start? Do you have any idea?”

  “Eleven forty-five,” Tony declared.

  “You sound sure.”

  “We are sure,” Domingo said, wiping some cream cheese from his mouth with a crumpled paper napkin. Just then I heard an electronic beep and Domingo raised his right arm, bagel in hand, and pointed with his left index finger at the elaborate watch he wore. The digital readout informed me that it was nine-thirty. “This sucker beeps every fifteen minutes. And it beeped when the fight started.”

  I set my coffee on the table and recalled what Duffy LeBard had told me yesterday. The club manager called the base police at eleven-fifty, five minutes after the brawl began. More importantly, Claudia Yancy told me Thursday that she’d seen Harlan and his friends come into Fenton’s Ice Cream Parlor around ten-thirty Saturday night. They’d headed for a table just as Claudia and Dana left. So Harlan could have been out of Fenton’s by eleven or a little after.

  Somehow I didn’t think overindulging in ice cream would provide the wired look Tony had just described. What about drugs? Had Harlan had a snort or a toke before he picked a fight with the Marines? In his first mention of the fight, however, Duffy LeBard described Harlan as “likkered up.” Booze was evidently the little Texan’s recurring problem, enough for everyone to assume Harlan had been drinking that night. Yet it would have been easy for him to spill beer on himself and feign intoxication. I wondered if the Navy had done a blood alcohol test on Harlan. I’d have to call Duffy for an answer, if he had one.