Bohemian Heart

by Dalessandro, James

  "Calvin is a very smart attorney," I assured her, wishing I could tell her just how smart. "Do what he says." Then she dropped the really big one.

  "They're starting closing arguments on Monday."

  I told her everything would be okay, to trust me, and suggested we try to work. She was obviously anxious but agreed.

  We spent hours going through the lists of women we'd already interviewed who claimed they knew nothing of the burglaries or Ghiberti's plates. I kept quizzing Colleen to see if any of the names jogged her memory. Nothing.

  Throughout, I tried to keep her occupied, to keep her spirits up. Even though I'd told her earlier I could buy her some time, she had no comprehension of what that meant yet. It killed me to keep silent about Calvin and the potential mistrial when I knew what she was going through, but I was afraid that in her emotional state, any more hints or clues would change her demeanor enough that Calvin might suspect we were on to him. I decided she had lived with it for almost two years, she would have to bear it another few days.

  I had difficulty concentrating. My mind kept drifting to Martha listening to the hotel tapes, thinking about Colleen with Tommy. I kept wondering if she'd told the truth, if she hadn't offered to pay Tommy to kill her husband. It seemed more improbable than ever now that I knew there'd been burglars in her home the night of the shooting, but I suffer from a perpetual case of mistrust.

  I kept flashing back to Calvin's penthouse, re-examining my every move, wondering if I had made any discernible mistakes. I hoped that Calvin would not look in his safe before Monday and find the tape and the note missing.

  At 11:22, with Colleen asleep in her chair, I looked at the five names I had culled from Tommy's welfare cases. Four women whose first and last names began with C and one with the initials C.A.C. All of them were still living and had already been interviewed by Frankie, Martha, or myself. I made a note to pay them another visit the following day.

  Martha called me down to the office.

  I went downstairs, my heart pounding. One more case like this and I wouldn't make it to forty-one.

  "She never offered Tommy anything," Martha said when the door was closed. "He mentioned her husband several times, and there's not the slightest indication she harbored any kind of animosity toward him at all. Tommy lied."

  I breathed a big, big sigh of relief sinking into a chair. Then I looked at Martha, grateful for everything she'd done for me over the years. I was dead tired and sentimental.

  "Colleen's not going to testify," I told her. "Closing arguments start on Monday."

  There wasn't much to say after that.

  Chapter 26

  The next day, Saturday, with Henry staying with Colleen on the top floor of the house and Arnie's cousin Phillip at the bank of monitors in the garage, I hopped on the Norton and rode to Lloyd Dinkman's house in Foster City. I'd called him a few hours earlier and gotten him to make a special trip to records. I was too paranoid to meet him anywhere in public or have him come to my office.

  En route, I went over the few things we knew about the Farragut burglars. One of the burglars had the initials C.A.C., and barring some miracle cure, she had died shortly after January 13. The amateurish nature of the burglary spelled JUNKIE in flashing lights. The fact that they'd scaled the wall behind the Farragut home indicated that she and her partner were fairly young and semi-healthy.

  After a relaxing ninety-mile-per-hour ride down the Bayshore Freeway, I arrived at Lloyd Dinkman's at nine, the approach of Monday's closing arguments weighing heavily on every part of me. My greatest fear was that C.A.C. might have been born and raised outside the city and gone home to die, and Phillips had managed to trace her to somewhere like Moose Dick, Montana.

  But I got lucky. Lloyd Dinkman had found the death certificate I was looking for.

  Candira Anne Chandler, Caucasian female, forty-four years old, born Parkersburg, West Virginia, died January 17 at San Francisco General Hospital. Cause of death was listed as "acute liver failure resulting from long-term heroin and alcohol abuse."

  Her rap sheet listed six felony arrests, three convictions; one conviction each for burglary, possession of stolen property, and possession of a Class One substance, heroin. Probation reports also showed four trips to county detox.

  Her name was not in the Rivera case files, but her death in S.F. General and the fact she'd gone to county detox instead of private facilities gave me a good place to start digging into her past.

  I used Lloyd's phone to call Angela Estrella and convinced her to have her brother, Guillermo, go back into Welfare Department records. Giving Lloyd Dinkman an envelope containing five hundred-dollar bills, I wished him a speedy recovery from the anxiety attack he was having over the volume of information he'd provided for me so far and traveled back up the freeway at a sedate eighty miles an hour. When I arrived at Telegraph Hill, I went straight to my office and wore the carpet out waiting for Angela or Guillermo to call.

  It was Angela who called. Guillermo had brought the records to her house this time, telling her he was afraid to be seen at the agency. I couldn't blame him. When I arrived at Angela's house, I parked, hit the buzzer and once admitted, ran up the steps. She was waiting at the top to hand over the photocopied file.

  Reading the file back in my office, I learned that Candira Anne Chandler had been on the welfare rolls with two children six years before Tommy Rivera started as a case worker. But Candira's case had never been administered by Tommy Rivera, though her accomplice's case might have been.

  I went straight to the evidence cart and found the burglary reports Lloyd had given me earlier, looking for the information on the cheese-eating burglar at the Schmidbaum house. The crime lab had made a plaster cast of the cheese, and there was a photo of it in the police reports.

  I was giddy from fatigue, my expectations rising. Going back to Candira's welfare records, I found she had received emergency dental work on three occasions, all paid for by Medi-Cal.

  Shortly after noon, I chained the Norton to a street sign in the Outer Mission District, across from Milton Goldblume, Quality Dentistry, credit plans, English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, Medi-Cal accepted. From the looks of the hallway and waiting room, quality dentistry probably meant Milton washed his hands every morning whether they needed it or not.

  I flashed my ID and told him I needed the dental records of Candira Anne Chandler. A bored, puffy-eyed, gray-haired, stoopshouldered Milton told me he was too busy to help me, but two hundred-dollar bills helped him find the time. When I told him Candira was dead, he threw the file at me and walked away.

  I drove back to the office and compared the police file with Candira's dental records. The imprint of the burglar's teeth from the piece of cheese at the Schmidbaum house did not match Candira's dental X-rays.

  Candira had had a female accomplice in the Schmidbaum break-in; it was most likely she had the same partner in the Farragut burglary a few weeks later.

  I was now one name, one face away from the person I was looking for.

  Chapter 27

  When I returned home a printout of two DMV photographs of Candira was waiting for me, compliments of a friend in Sacramento. The first, taken when she was twenty, showed a very attractive blonde. The second showed her at age thirty-two, bloated, with pasty white skin and baggy, swollen eyes. She looked closer to fifty than thirty. She must have been haunting houses just before she died.

  There was also a message that Henry had taken from Lloyd Dinkman, who'd called with information on Candira's two children. The oldest, a son named Elvis, had been killed eight years earlier over a drug deal in the Western Addition. According to the records, he'd been born to Candira at a county hospital in Parkersburg, West Virginia, when she was fourteen years old.

  Candira's daughter, Patsy, was born at San Francisco General when Candira was seventeen. Patsy, now in her early twenties, had given birth to a daughter at the same hospital 18 years later and had named the baby Candira.

  After hou
rs of futile searching by my contacts at the telephone and utility companies in San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara and Marin counties, I got lucky with an old girlfriend who worked for the Forestville Water District in Sonoma County. Patsy Chandler was living in an apartment in Forestville, sixty minutes north for a normal driver. I made it in forty.

  The apartment had to be the oldest and shabbiest in Forestville: overgrown lawn, overflowing dumpsters, dangling gutters, cracked trim, and enough holes in the faded stucco to pass for the Alamo's stunt double.

  I knocked on the door of apartment 213 and got no answer. Newspapers from that day and the day before, Friday, were on the doorstep. I waited to see if any neighbors passed by. When they didn't, I went to the manager's office.

  An overweight woman of about thirty-five, dressed in a quilted polyester robe, nursing a canned mai-tai, and smoking a menthol cigarette answered the bell. She'd probably been a knockout forty pounds ago. A loud announcer's voice babbled from the TV inside. She looked me over. I was still quite popular with the walking wounded.

  "Excuse me, ma'am, have you seen Patsy? Up in two thirteen. I told her I was gonna stop by." I gave it my best smile, like I was delivering Patsy her winning lottery ticket and the orgasm of her life.

  "You that guy she's been telling me about? What the hell name did she tell me, Slim? Or was it Slick?"

  "Yeah, that's me."

  "Well which is it, Slim or Slick?"

  "Slim," I said.

  "You sure? You ain't slim, you're kinda studly. I swear she said Slick. Yeah, that's right, Slick."

  "Did she tell you where we met?" I asked, trying to cover my screw-up.

  "At the Sweetwater in Mill Valley," she said.

  "That's right. You ladies must be purty good friends. I took one look at her and you know what I seen? Lust at first sight. Infinite lewd and lascivious possibilities. You seen Patsy today? I told her I might stop by, but when I knocked, I noticed there was two day's newspapers by the door." My hillbilly was getting stronger by the second.

  "Oh, hell, I better get them before the burglars notice. She didn't tell you she was going camping?"

  "No. I didn't know she liked camping. Wait a minute, as a matter of fact, she did say something about Tahoe . . . or was it Yosemite?" I actually scratched my head. "I can't remember. I think I drank enough tequila that night to shave about fifty points off my IQ."

  We had a good laugh.

  "I don't think she even told me where she was going, to tell you the truth," the manager said.

  "Damn, I'd love to surprise her. It wasn't over to Napa or Mount Tamalpais or anything?"

  "Got no idea, sorry. You wanna come in for a while? ESPN's got Big Bob Bowser gettin' ready to drive over twenty-one cars in the Monster Mash. Biggest fuckin' truck I ever seen. I love that shit."

  "Me too," I lied. "But I gotta find Patsy."

  "Too bad," she said. "Sorry I can't help you."

  "Did she say when she'd be back?"

  "Yeah, as a matter of fact, she's gotta work tomorrow night. She's a waitress at some little dive down in town, the Silver Slipper."

  "Thanks."

  I went back to apartment 213 and got my lock picks out, happy that there was no dead bolt on the door. In less than a minute I had tripped the cheap lock.

  Patsy Chandler was a card carrying slob. Beer cans, pizza boxes, coffee cups transformed to fungi experiments, cheap posters of country-and-western stars half falling from the wall, a bathroom not quite as clean as the one at the county jail.

  But she had a five-thousand-dollar giant-screen TV and a gaudy bedroom set that must have cost as much. Receipts in a shoe box on top of the television showed the stuff was only a few months old, and yet everything already had cigarette burns on it.

  I found pay stubs from her job at the Silver Slipper Lounge, minimum wage for twenty-five hours work. I also found a receipt for a three-year-old Camaro for which she'd paid $8,500 cash three days after her mother died.

  That's what Candira had done with the money Hayden Phillips gave her on her deathbed. She'd sold the truth, or part of it, to leave her daughter and grandchild some money. Given the choice between hiring a maid or saving for her daughter's education, Patsy had wisely bought a big-screen TV and a bedroom set from the Liberace collection.

  I found a birth certificate for a second child, Tammy. The baby had been born three weeks after Farragut's murder. I figured it highly unlikely a woman eight months pregnant could scale the wall behind the Farragut place. Patsy Chandler was not her mother's accomplice.

  Before I left, I took a picture of Patsy from a collection of vacation photos I found in a chest of drawers.

  By the time I got back to the city, the sun was sinking behind the bridge. I was spent, queasy, with a headache that could have killed Superman.

  I made a few phone calls to see if I could get back into any of the records at welfare, Pacific Bell, or the gas or electric companies. But it was Saturday night and everything was closed until Monday, inaccessible to any of my connections. The last part of my search would have to wait at least thirty-six hours.

  I'd been brought to a screeching halt, not by the cops or Calvin, but by the weekend.

  Chapter 28

  That night, as Martha, Arnie, Henry, Colleen, and I sat at my kitchen table eating Chinese food from Sam Wo's, I brought them up to date, plotting for the stretch drive.

  "There were two burglars," I said, passing out copies of all the pertinent information—Candira's death certificate, dental records, and probation reports, the photo of the dental imprint from the Schmidbaum burglary, and my notes about Patsy Chandler's apartment. "Candira Anne Chandler was one of them. As you can see, she was a junkie who was on welfare the entire time she was in San Francisco, almost seventeen years."

  "How did you find her?" Colleen asked, a look of relief and excitement on her face. "The cops couldn't find her, and they've been looking for almost two years."

  "That I can't say. I can tell you what I know, but I can't betray my sources. Let's just be happy we're almost home." She accepted it. I sure wasn't about to say my information came from Calvin Sherenian's safe.

  "I'm convinced that as of January seventeenth of this year, the date of Candira's death, her accomplice was still alive. This dental impression was made by Candira's partner when she bit into a piece of cheese during the Schmidbaum burglary. It's logical that she would have the same partner the night she broke into Colleen's house a few weeks later. I think the partner is still out there and she knows what happened to Ghiberti's silver plates.

  As tired as we were, I could feel the excitement in the room. It added to the tension.

  "Candira was not one of Tommy Rivera's welfare cases, but her partner may have been. Tommy could have recruited her partner, who told him about Candira. Candira's sheet verifies that she'd committed burglaries before the Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights break-ins. I want to stick close to the original theory, that Tommy recruited these women through his position at welfare."

  "Where do we look for the other woman?" asked Arnie.

  "I went to Forestville today, up in Sonoma County, to talk to Candira's daughter, Patsy. She was away on a camping trip, but I had a look around her apartment." "There's . . . " I caught myself before I gave away the fact that Patsy had received the money Hayden Phillips had paid her mother. Everyone looked at me. I feigned fatigue.

  "There are things in Patsy's apartment that made me believe she knew her mother was a burglar, or that perhaps Patsy herself was involved."

  "You think she was the accomplice," Colleen jumped in.

  "She was eight months pregnant with her second child the night your husband was shot. Since I'm convinced the burglars came over the back wall, it's highly unlikely that Patsy was the other burglar."

  "But she might know who the other burglar is," Martha suggested.

  "Right. Patsy might have received or sold some of the stolen property. Or she might be able to tell us who her mother's a
ccomplice was. The welfare records don't give an address for Candira once she got off Aid to Dependent Children, when Patsy turned eighteen. If she doesn't know who her mother's accomplice was, maybe Patsy can tell us who her mother's friends were, where she hung out, where she lived at the time of the burglaries. People who commit crimes together usually hang together. And I'll wager her partner is also a junkie."

  "We only have a few days," Colleen said. "I don't think they'll take more than a day or two for closing arguments. What happens if you don't find the woman you're looking for?"

  "I don't want to waste time talking about what might happen," I said. "I told you l could buy some time if necessary. Right now, all I want to do is find the accomplice. I want to put an end to this nightmare. We've come a long way in a short time. We can find what we're looking for if we just don't make any mistakes. Tomorrow afternoon, Henry and I will be waiting for Patsy Chandler when she gets back from her camping trip.

  "If Patsy doesn't know who the accomplice was, then Monday morning, we'll be re-checking any women from Rivera's case load who lived in the same buildings as Candira, or nearby. We may have already interviewed her and she was just too scared to admit she was involved, even with the fifty-thousand-dollar reward. Or maybe someone we interviewed knew who it was and was afraid of reprisals. I just know we're close. Very, very close."

  "You never told me anything about a reward," Colleen said when she and I were sitting up in my bed that night, with Henry at the monitors and Martha asleep in the bedroom down the hall. "Were you going to pay it out of your bonus?"

  I'd misspoken, and it bothered me. "Eileen Farragut gave it to me."

  "William's mother?" she asked, sounding shocked.

  "Yes. Does that surprise you?"

  "Only that you talked to her about it. It doesn't surprise me that she did it. She's about the only one who's believed me through this whole mess."

  "She hates the things her son did," I offered.