Casebook_Four Jeri Howard Stories

by Janet Dawson

  I left a message for Lipensky about the witness, then returned to my office. I already knew Eric drove a silver SUV. Now a database told me Colin Baker, Martha Terrell’s son, owned a blue Honda. I had other information pointing me in Colin’s direction.

  He opened the door of the Oakland apartment he shared with his girlfriend, looking slightly disheveled, feet bare below his faded jeans and stained T-shirt. He ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair, and squinted at the business card I’d handed him while I explained I was working for the insurance company.

  He stuck the card into his pocket. “My mother didn’t kill Claude. Or herself. The court’s going to have to split everything four ways.”

  “May I come in? I have some questions.”

  “Sure.” He waved me into the living room and shut the door. “I don’t know what I can tell you. I was at work that day.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  He took a step back, his expression going from stunned to frightened.

  “I checked, Colin. You called and told the supervisor at the law firm where you were temping that you were sick. She didn’t check with the temp agency because she assumed you’d called them. You didn’t. Edie Walker at the temp agency covered for you. Your girlfriend—the same Edie Walker whose name is on the lease of this apartment. You weren’t at work. You weren’t home either. One of your neighbors saw you leave the apartment that morning. Where were you that day?”

  He looked panicky. “It’s not what you think.”

  “What I think might very well be what the cops think when they find out you lied. Time to come clean.”

  “I couldn’t get out of bed that morning. I just couldn’t face another day at that temp job. I told Edie I wasn’t feeling well. Later, when we found out Mom and Claude were dead, she thought it looked bad and she told that cop I’d been at work.”

  “Where were you?”

  He stared down at his feet. “At the movies.”

  “All day?”

  “Yeah, all day. The theater at Jack London Square starts showing movies in the morning. There was this flick I wanted to see. I sat through it twice. I wound up staying there the whole day, going from theater to theater. You’re not supposed to do that, but I sneaked in and out. I’d go to the john, then I’d buy popcorn and Milk Duds. I dump the Milk Duds in the popcorn and the candy gets all warm and gooey.” I stared at him and he stopped prattling.

  “Have you still got the ticket stubs?”

  “Hell, I don’t think so. Who saves ticket stubs?”

  “They have a way of roosting in pockets and wallets. You’d better start looking. And hope someone at the theater can back up your story.”

  Colin checked his wallet and the jacket he’d been wearing that day but came up with lint and a couple of paper strips from fortune cookies. Not much of an alibi. We went out to his car. The blue Honda’s floorboards were filled with fast food wrappers, empty bottles and cans, and other debris. He dug around in this mess and came up with a receipt from a restaurant at Jack London Square. “I had a pizza afterwards.”

  “After all that popcorn?” I examined the receipt. The date and time printed on the slip were blurred. “This tells me nothing.”

  “It’s the truth.” He sounded scared.

  “All right. I’ll check it out.”

  I went down to the multiplex in Jack London Square. A manager told me hundreds of people cycled through the place on any given day. How could they be expected to remember one guy? And if he’d been found jumping from theater to theater in the course of an afternoon, they’d have escorted him to the exit.

  “I remember him.” It was a young woman behind the refreshment counter.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “A guy in his late twenties, blond, blue eyes. Spent the afternoon watching movies and eating a lot of Milk Duds dumped in his popcorn.”

  “That’s why I remember him,” she said. “I’d never seen anyone do that to buttered popcorn before, and I said so. He told me it made the candy warm and gooey.”

  “Sounds like my guy,” I said. “Was he here most of the day?”

  She nodded. “I noticed him after the first show let out. He went into the john, came out, bought some more popcorn and candy, and went back into the theater. Same thing after the next show. I saw him several times and joked with him about putting candy in his popcorn.”

  “If you knew he was jumping theaters, you should have reported him,” the manager huffed. “The guy was here all afternoon and only bought one movie ticket.”

  “Lighten up,” she argued. “He spent five times that on popcorn, candy and sodas.”

  So Colin’s story, strange as it was, checked out. My teeth hurt when I thought about melting Milk Duds in hot, buttered popcorn.

  I went over the alibis in my head. Colin at the movies. Pamela teaching school. Ralph at a job interview. Erin in a meeting. Lisa having lunch with friends. That left Eric, supposedly at work, with no transportation because he’d left his car to be serviced. He’d taken BART and the bus to work. Many car dealerships had shuttles to BART, I recalled. Maybe a driver would remember him. Maybe one of his coworkers had seen him.

  Eric worked at a software firm at the end of Edgewater Drive, across I-880 from the Oakland Coliseum. To get there on public transit, he’d have taken BART to the Coliseum station, then a bus along Hegenberger Road. Once he got off the bus it was a half-mile hike to his office. The business park where he worked consisted of four buildings grouped around a central fountain, with a big parking lot in back. Eric’s employer had all three floors of Building C. It looked as though I’d need a name badge to get past the receptionist. But I didn’t want to get past her. I wanted to talk with her.

  There was a deli on the first floor of Building D, with tables outside, the only eating establishment in the area, from what I could see. I bought a glass of lemonade and waited until I saw the receptionist leaving for lunch. She walked into the deli and went through the salad bar. As she stepped away from the cash register with her container, I approached her, business card in hand, glancing at her name badge.

  “Ms. Linden, may I ask you a few questions?”

  She read my card, then gave me a hard look over her salad. “What is this about?”

  “Eric Terrell.”

  “What about him?” she asked with a frown.

  “I’m trying to verify his whereabouts on a particular day. I understand you told the police that he was at work that day.”

  “If you’re talking about the day his parents died, I already talked with a cop.”

  “I know. But I’d like to hear it from you.”

  She shrugged. “Yes, he was at work. I saw him come in a little after nine, and I saw him leave at a quarter after four.”

  “Did he take a lunch break?”

  She nodded. “He left about eleven-thirty.”

  “What time did he come back?”

  “That I can’t tell you,” she said. “I was at lunch myself from one to two. But he wasn’t back by then.”

  Hour and a half, probably two hours. Would Eric would have had enough time to hike up to Hegenberger, catch a bus to BART, then another bus from a BART station further up the line to Alameda, murder his father and stepmother, then make the return trip?

  “He told the police he had his SUV serviced that day,” I said. “Dropped it off in the morning and picked it up in the evening.”

  “He mentioned it to me when he came in that morning. Something about being late because he had to drop off his car.”

  “So he didn’t have transportation that day. I wonder why he took such a long lunch hour.”

  “He had transportation that day,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Normally I leave at five, but I left early that day. He was parked clear over on the other side of the lot, nowhere near our building. I just happened to see him getting into a car. I assumed it was a loaner from the dealership.”

  That ka-ching sound i
n my head was the coin dropping. If Eric had a car the day of the Terrells’ deaths, it would have taken him twenty minutes to drive from his office to the house in Alameda. He already had the motive. Now he had the opportunity.

  “Can you describe the car?”

  “I’m not sure what kind it was. A sedan, green or blue.”

  I thanked her and headed back downtown. Eric had purchased his SUV from a dealership on Broadway. I talked my way into the service department, where a mechanic remembered Eric. “Yeah, for a couple of reasons. He dropped the car off that morning and picked it up later that day, about a quarter to five.”

  I pointed at the sign that indicated the service department had a shuttle available to their customers. “Did your shuttle take him anywhere?”

  The mechanic shook his head. “No, he insisted on a loaner.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. That’s one of the reasons I remember him. He made such a stink about it. We were short of loaners that day and he insisted he had to have a car. Said something about meeting an important client. So we gave him a car. That one, as a matter of fact.” He pointed at a late model sedan with a paint job the manufacturer called “seafoam” or “teal.” I called it greenish blue.

  “What was the other reason?”

  “One of the mechanics claims this guy Terrell took a pair of coveralls off a hook in the garage. We asked Terrell about it when he brought back the car. He got all riled and said what the hell would he want with some coveralls.”

  I looked at the blue coveralls the mechanic was wearing and thought of a very good reason Eric Terrell wanted those coveralls. He’d worn them to protect his clothing from the blood spatters the day he murdered his father and stepmother.

  “So Claude died first,” Wilcoxin said.

  I nodded. “Eric was angry because Claude wouldn’t give him the money to start another business. He decided to collect his inheritance early.”

  Eric had been calm when Sergeant Lipensky confronted him with the evidence, his voice emotionless as he described how he’d planned and executed the murders.

  “He’d seen the house on the other side of the lagoon with the dock and rowboat, easy to get to because there was no fenced yard. So he concocted his no-car alibi and lifted the coveralls from the dealership. Once he got to Alameda, he parked in the cul-de-sac, put on the coveralls and rowed across the lagoon. He went in the side door and surprised Claude and Martha. He hit them both over the head, then shot them. That’s why the ME found a bruise on Martha’s head.”

  “How did Eric know about the Slayer Statute?”

  “His sister had mentioned it in conjunction with a case at the law firm where she works. That got him thinking about how he could arrange to inherit everything. He’d written a note, purportedly from Martha, claiming that she’d killed Claude because she discovered he was going to divorce her. But the housecleaner arrived early that day. Eric heard her come in the front door, so he bailed out the patio door. He dropped the gun at the foot of the plant and didn’t have time to take the note out of his pocket. Once he rowed back across the lagoon, he stripped off the bloody coveralls and disposed of them in a trash can. Then he’d walked out to the cul-de-sac where the witness saw him get into the loaner from the dealership.”

  “Good work.” Wilcoxin closed the Terrell file, picked up the envelope containing my check, and handed it across his desk. “You’ve earned this.”

  Candles on the Corner

  Twelve candles, one for each year of Emily Gebhardt’s life, stood in a row on the grassy strip between sidewalk and curb. Each evening, Emily’s parents lit fresh candles. The flames flickered like beacons in the darkness, burning out long before morning.

  At each end of the row were plastic vases filled with fresh flowers—roses, tulips, iris, daffodils—in Emily’s favorite colors, pink and yellow. A pink umbrella, its handle lengthened by a broomstick stuck into the ground, sheltered a small easel from the spring rain. The easel held a color photograph of Emily and a newspaper clipping.

  The shrine—that’s what it was, really—had been on the corner where I stood for the past month. I stepped up to the easel and examined Emily’s picture. I saw wide blue eyes, a cheerful smile on a round face, and brown curls tied back with pink and yellow ribbons. Emily had been a pretty girl poised on the verge of adolescence, just twelve years old. She’d never see thirteen.

  I turned from the shrine and looked out at Grand Street. Emily’s parents had spray-painted slogans on the pavement in the middle of the intersection. They’d done so without the blessing of the Alameda authorities, who’d nevertheless let the words stay there, to be gradually worn away by rain and the tires of passing vehicles. I read the messages, painted in eye-catching Day-Glo pink and yellow: “Slow Down,” “Drive 25,” “Children Crossing,” and “Emily Died Here.”

  Emily’s parents said most people in the neighborhood seemed protective of their makeshift memorial. But not everyone respected the shrine. Several times the Gebhardts had arrived with fresh flowers and candles to discover all the items missing. Not vandalized, just gone. Each time, they simply rebuilt the memorial to their daughter.

  I’d read the police report and talked with the investigating officer. On a Wednesday afternoon in April, Emily and two friends had just been released from the confines of the nearby middle school. They were crossing Grand Street at this corner when Emily dropped something. She went back to retrieve it.

  The witnesses all agreed on one thing—the vehicle that raced down Grand Street and smashed into Emily was going much too fast for a residential area, much faster than the 25 miles per hour limit posted all over Alameda. The impact tossed the girl into the air. She died a short time later.

  Now there were candles on the corner.

  The vehicle didn’t stop after hitting Emily. The driver sped down Grand Street and hung a left on Otis Drive, narrowly missing other pedestrians and cars, weaving in and out of traffic as it raced past the nearby shopping center. At Park Street the vehicle ran a red light and left squealing brakes in its wake. A few moments later a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed crossed the drawbridge at the southern end of the island that is Alameda. Once it reached Doolittle Drive, the vehicle vanished. Perhaps the driver had turned right on Island Drive, or continued south, toward Oakland International Airport, or detoured onto Hegenberger Road or 98th Avenue to cut over to the freeway.

  When it came to a description, the witnesses diverged widely, as witnesses do. People saw a flash of silver, gold, blue, green, brown, red. No one was sure whether the vehicle was big or small, a car or an SUV, what make or model. No one offered a description of the driver’s gender or appearance. No one could recall license plate numbers or letters, or whether they were California plates. No one knew where to find the vehicle or the driver who’d been at the wheel.

  Emily Gebhardt’s parents grieved, full of sadness, anger and frustration, dissatisfied with the slow progress of the police investigation. They wanted answers. They wanted someone to blame, someone to pay. So they came to me, Jeri Howard, private investigator working out of Oakland. I wasn’t sure I could give the Gebhardts what they wanted. But in the face of that much raw pain, I had to try.

  I took a small digital camera from my purse and shot photographs of the intersection, from different angles, then pictures of the shrine. As I lowered the camera, a woman came out the front door of the big two-story Victorian house on the corner. She stalked across the lawn toward me, a decidedly belligerent look on her face.

  “Are you one of those people who’s been leaving this stuff here?” she demanded. I guessed she meant the easel, the flowers, the candles on the corner.

  “Why? Are you one of those people who’s been removing this stuff?”

  She looked nonplussed. I looked her over. She was in her mid-forties, blond hair coiffed into a head-hugging style, lots of makeup and flinty hazel eyes. She rethought her opening and dredged up a smile that curved her lips only slightly.
“Look, I own this house. I’m tired of those people leaving this stuff in my yard.”

  I glanced at Emily’s shrine. “It’s here for a reason.”

  “I know why it’s here.” She sounded exasperated and glanced dismissively at the shrine. “But it’s been a month.”

  “A month is a short time when you’ve lost a child.” That’s the loss many people never get over.

  The woman’s mouth tightened. “There’s such a thing as excessive grief.”

  Okay, I was ready to declare her winner of the insensitivity sweepstakes. I guess she figured now that their only child’s funeral was over, the Gebhardts should just get a grip and go on with their lives.

  “Did you remove the items?”

  “I just put my house on the market,” she snapped. “The real estate agent’s showing the place to prospective buyers. This stuff looks tacky and garish. Do you see my problem?”

  “You certainly have one. You didn’t answer my question. Did you remove the items?”

  She glared at me. “Who are you? Why do you want to know?”

  I handed her one of my business cards. She held it gingerly between thumb and forefinger as though she was afraid she might catch something.

  “A private detective? Surely those people didn’t hire you to find out who took the stuff. For God’s sake, those people need to get a life.”

  I bit back the words that sizzled on my tongue, instead asking the question again. “Did you remove the items?”

  She backed away from me, sputtering angrily. “It’s my property. You tell those people I want that stuff gone, permanently. I’ve complained to the police and they won’t do anything. Next I’ll be talking to my lawyer.” She turned and stalked back to her house, slamming the front door for good measure.

  Talk about excessive. Her reaction to the shrine was just that. Why was she so discomfited by the memorial? Who was she? I could find out easily enough from the Alameda county property-tax records. I glanced at the For Sale sign near the woman’s front walk, noting the name of the real-estate agent and firm.