The woman working on a computer at one of two desks jumped a little at my entrance, as if startled at the appearance of a visitor. She blinked, saw that I was no one she knew, and blinked some more. The professional smile that finally beamed on had a little twitch at one corner.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said as I shut the door. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. May I help you?”
“I’d like a few words with Mr. Erskine.”
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “He’s not here. He left half an hour ago. Did you have an appointment?”
“No appointment. Do you expect him back this afternoon?”
“No, I’m sorry”—for the third time—“not until tomorrow.”
“Would you happen to know where he went?”
“I really couldn’t say. What was it you wanted to see him about?”
I didn’t answer immediately. The anteroom was large and on the posh side, as befitted the type of business Erskine was in: thick carpeting, neatly arranged chrome-and-leather furniture, blandly tasteful prints on the walls. But it had an unused look about it, as if the office were newly opened instead of well established. The young woman’s desk contained a blotter, a telephone, and the computer she’d been using; the unoccupied desk had nothing at all on it except a covered computer terminal. One of two closed doors at the rear bore Erskine’s name; the second was unmarked.
Except for the twitchy smile, the woman fit well into the posh surroundings. No older than twenty-five, and decoratively attractive in the characterless fashion of so many young people these days: small of stature, shoulder-length hair a thick glossy black, green eyes large, luminous, and canny in an unsophisticated way. Judging from as much as I could see of her body behind the desk, she was eye candy in that respect, too.
“Sir? What was it you wanted to see Mr. Erskine about?”
“Private business matter.”
“I see. Well, if you’d like to leave a message or a number where he can reach you…”
“No, thanks, I’ll try him at his home. You’re Melanie Vinson, is that right?”
“How did you—” The corner of her mouth twitched again. “Did Mr. Erskine tell you my name?”
“Is there a reason he shouldn’t have?”
“No.” Twitch. “No, of course not.”
“Must be an interesting job, working with a stockbroker.”
“Yes, it is. Very. And very demanding.” Twitch. “Well. If you’re sure you don’t want to leave a message for Mr. Erskine, I have quite a bit of work to do before I leave for the day.”
“I won’t keep you from it, then.”
I turned for the door, but before I reached it she said, “Um, in case you don’t connect with Mr. Erskine at his home, whom should I say stopped in to see him?”
I gave her my name. It was not the first time she’d heard it in this office; the smile twitched all the way off and sharp little teeth nibbled at her lower lip before she dropped her gaze to the computer keyboard and began typing. Not good at hiding her emotions, the nervous Ms. Vinson.
Why would a man with Peter Erskine’s bizarre problem confide to his secretary/assistant that he’d hired a private investigator? One more question that needed answering, and honed even more the sense of manipulation and deceit I felt.
* * *
The tall wrought-iron gates were closed across the foot of the Erskines’ entrance drive. Locked, too; I got out of the car and tried them. There was an intercom device on one of the pillars. I pushed the pearl button below the speaker, waited, got no response, and tried twice more with the same lack of results. Nobody home. Or nobody home who wanted to be disturbed by a caller no matter who he happened to be.
Before driving away I hauled out the iPhone and called the agency and asked Tamara to do a deeper background check on Peter Erskine. Emphasis on his business practices and personal finances.
“How come?” she asked.
“He lied to me, that’s how come, and I haven’t been able to find him to ask why.” I told her what I’d learned from Ellen Bowers. “No reason for the lie that I can see unless he’s got some sort of hidden agenda.”
“Such as?”
“I’m not sure yet. That’s why I need more data on him, his marriage, his personal life, his business activities. Anything you can dig up that’ll give me a better handle on the man.”
“Right.”
“And while you’re at it, run a check on his assistant, Melanie Vinson.”
“Ah hah,” she said. “So you do think she might be more to him than just office help.”
“Could be. She was a lot less professional today than a woman in her position ought to be. She’s got something on her mind that doesn’t involve stocks and bonds.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
“One more search you can run for me when you have the time. Floyd and Harvey Leno, L-e-n-o, owners of Leno Brothers Painting in Campbell.”
“Who’re they?”
“Devil cultists … maybe. One of them helped clear out the Voks’ apartment the day after he died. I had a little talk with Floyd Leno this afternoon. Nonproductive, but provocative.”
“So you want the full package on them, too?”
“Right. Whatever seems relevant.”
“Okay. You coming back to the city now?”
“On my way. Not the office, though—home.”
“I’ll get back to you ASAP.”
“It can all wait until tomorrow. Why don’t you give yourself a break, go home early for a change?”
“I am home,” she said, “right here at my desk. That place on Potrero Hill I pay too much rent for is just where I go to sleep.”
12
Rush-hour traffic heading into the city and on the way up to Diamond Heights added twenty-some minutes to my travel time from Atherton. It was nearly six when I walked into the condo. I’d been there all of five minutes, just enough time to say hello to Emily—Kerry was still at Bates and Carpenter—and open a beer from the fridge when Tamara called.
She’d already run all the backgrounders I’d asked for and compiled fairly substantial dossiers on Peter Erskine, Melanie Vinson, and the Leno brothers. It never takes her long to gather even the most obscure data available on any individual within radar range.
“First off,” she said, “the Erskines’ marriage isn’t so solid after all. Turns out she filed for divorce two and a half years ago, but they reconciled before it ever got to court.”
“What prompted the divorce action?”
“Not specified, but I picked up some hints he was having himself a fling and she found out about it.”
“You get the woman’s name?”
“No. Hush-hush on that. But it probably wasn’t Melanie Vinson. She didn’t start working for Erskine until sixteen months ago.”
“So he strayed at least once.”
“At least.”
“And his wife won’t stand for it happening again. Likely the reconciliation was based on his promise to walk the line and a threat to go through with the divorce if she caught him a second time.”
“Right. If she caught him. Doesn’t mean he’s been Mr.Faithful since, just extracareful.”
I said musingly, “Marian Erskine’s no dummy, and with all her money she figures to have sound legal representation. Two failed marriages and the third a trophy husband spells prenup to me.”
“Did to me, too. There was one, I found out that much, but of course I couldn’t get the details.”
“Usual kind of arrangement, probably. Settlement for X amount of dollars in the event of divorce, with no claim on anything she owned prior to the marriage. I assume that includes the Atherton property?”
“Does. She inherited that along with her pop’s millions.”
“What about Erskine’s personal finances?”
“Well, he’s a lousy stockbroker,” Tamara said. “Lost bundles in the market on dubious investments, his own money as well as his clients’. One of the clients threat
ened him with a lawsuit for fraud. Most of the others quit him quick. He’s only got a couple left, just barely hanging on.”
“And I take it his wife won’t bail him out.”
“Did at first, then apparently got tired of the money drain and shut it off. Letting him sink or swim on his own, and he’s going down fast.”
“I figured as much,” I said. “Didn’t look as though much if anything was going on in that office of his. The Vinson woman seemed surprised to have somebody walk in unexpectedly.”
“Keeps it open and her on salary for appearance sake. Either that, or because he’s banging her.”
“Uh-huh. Anything more on him I should know?”
“Nothing relevant. Unless the fact that he doesn’t drink means something. Won’t touch any kind of alcohol, makes a big deal out of it, evidently. My body’s my temple kind of thing.”
“Either that,” I said, “or it’s a matter of self-discipline. He’s the type who doesn’t like to lose control.”
“Must not like being under his wife’s thumb, then. Seems she calls all the shots in the marriage.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Okay. Melanie Vinson. Erskine didn’t hire her because of her stock market savvy or secretarial skills. She didn’t have either. Before she went to work for him, she was a saleswoman in a Palo Alto boutique. And before that, a student at San Jose State.”
“Any idea whether she met Erskine by applying for the job, or he offered it to her after they met some other way?”
“Nope. Want to bet it was after they met? Party, club, someplace like that.”
“No bet.”
“Here’s the rest of what I pulled up on her,” Tamara said. “Born in San Diego, family moved to Milpitas when she was twelve. Father deceased, mother still living. No siblings. Never married. Drama major at S.J.S., wanted to be an actress like about twenty million other kids her age. Small parts in two school plays. Dropped out after a year and a half—lack of funds. Family set up a college fund for her when she was little, but it wasn’t substantial enough to carry her through. She wasn’t doing well anyway. Not enough talent or ambition and likely poor study habits.”
“Any sort of police record?”
“Arrested once for shoplifting a bottle of perfume when she was eighteen. That’s all.”
“Where does she live?”
“Palo Alto. Expensive apartment building. And her ride is a BMW Z4 sports car. Even secondhand, those babies don’t come cheap, and she’s had it less than a year.” Tamara chuckled and said sardonically, “Erskine must be paying her a pretty hefty salary for sitting around that half-dead office of his. I wonder why.”
What she’d turned up on the Leno brothers was not particularly illuminating. Harvey Leno had a minor record—arrested twice, once for public drunkenness, once for aggravated assault, both more than a dozen years past. Married briefly and divorced in the late nineties, no children, no living relatives other than his brother. Floyd Leno was a bachelor with no brushes with the law of any kind. More or less model citizens, on the surface. Paid their bills and taxes on time, made a modest but steady living out of their painting company. Not a whisper of any trafficking with Satanists or other illegal or dubious activities.
Definite dead end there. If I continued my investigation, I would need to scrounge up another lead. If I continued it. The way things were shaping up now, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t.
After Tamara and I rang off, I went out onto the balcony—it was a warmish night, clear, myriad lights twinkling in the city panorama spread out below—to do some hard thinking.
So Peter Erskine was a business failure with financial troubles and a sick wife who held tight to the purse strings and kept him on a short leash. What I’d have liked to know were the terms of her will, whether or not he stood to inherit all or some of her fortune if she predeceased him. But as with the conditions of their prenup, there was no legal way to find out. Except from her, in answer to a direct question—an unlikely prospect.
The more I thought the more convinced I was that Erskine had a hidden agenda of the nastiest sort. The facts Tamara and I had come up with, the inferences to be drawn from them and from the lies he’d told me, all pointed to it. Some of the details were hazy yet, but the overall design was clear enough. Vengeance vows, Satanic covenants, black masses and black hosts, evil spirits in human form … none of that mattered anymore if I was right.
But it was all just speculation at this point, without a foundation of proof to support it. If I went to the police with uncorroborated suspicions about a bizarre plot with supernatural overtones, I’d come across as a head case in spite of my long-standing reputation as a reliable investigator.
The only other way to proceed was problematic. I’m always leery of stepping into a volatile situation without hard evidence, but in this case, where it might well mean saving a woman’s life, it was my moral duty to run the risk. And do it quick. But I had to be careful. Very careful. Sticking my oar in could backfire on me and on the agency—leave us wide open to legal action for harassment and defamation of character. We’d been on the receiving end of a similar kind of lawsuit once before, unjustly and maliciously, and if it hadn’t been for the plaintiff’s sudden demise before the case went to court the judgment could have gone against us and put us out of business.
All right, then. Tomorrow I would find a way to have a private face-to-face with Marian Erskine, then another with her husband.
* * *
I did not have those face-to-face meetings. By then it was too late—too damn late.
Marian Erskine was already dead, of a massive heart attack suffered at her home that same night.
13
It was Tamara who gave me the news when I came into the agency in the morning. She’d decided to see if she could pull up anything more on the Erskines, and there it was. Nothing happens of any newsworthy interest in this world today that isn’t reported and disseminated almost immediately on the Internet, and Marian Erskine had been a prominent figure in the Atherton community as well as a major contributor to charitable causes. One more example of the two-edged sword of modern technology: good for business purposes, disastrous for privacy.
People with weak hearts die suddenly all the time. The fatal attacks don’t have to be induced by external means, and even when they are there is no way to prove it without witnesses and/or some sort of physical evidence. Marian Erskine had reportedly been alone when she suffered her coronary, her “bereaved” husband away at a business dinner in Palo Alto. She hadn’t died at the Atherton home; she’d been found on the rear terrace alive and unconscious—by none other than Melanie Vinson, who’d made the 911 call—and taken to Peninsula General Hospital, where she succumbed at 10:06 P.M. Tragic death by natural causes.
I didn’t believe it.
Marian Erskine had been murdered. Cleverly and cold-bloodedly, with malice aforethought.
I said as much to Tamara. And to Jake Runyon, who had arrived a few minutes before I did and been briefed on the situation.
Tamara said, “So you figure the whole thing was a setup by Erskine to scare his wife into a fatal attack.”
“Everything except Vok’s shenanigans in the hospital; the revenge vow was genuine enough. Erskine built his plan on that, hatched it after she had her first coronary and barely survived. She might’ve had another attack as suddenly as the first, but she might also have lived for years. Seems pretty obvious he married her for her money and that he didn’t want to wait any longer to gain control of it.”
“Assuming she made him beneficiary in her will and didn’t write him out after she caught him cheating.”
“Sole or major beneficiary, right,” I said. “Has to be that way. As far as the plan goes, her credulous belief in the supernatural made it easy for him. A little research was all he needed to manufacture an imitation black host, create the rest of the revenant illusion. I’d be willing to bet he encouraged her cognac drinking, too, whenever the two
of them were alone—to weaken her heart even more. Then it was just a matter of escalating the threat. Whatever he arranged to happen last night terrified her enough to do the job.”
“Adds up that way for me, too. Jake?”
Runyon nodded his agreement. He’s a good man and a good detective, formerly with the Seattle PD and one of the Pacific Northwest’s larger private security firms before he went to work for us. He’d moved to San Francisco after his second wife’s cancer death, to try to reconcile with his estranged son by his first wife, but the reconciliation hadn’t worked out. His way of dealing with lingering grief and loneliness was to throw himself into his work; he put in more hours on the job than even Tamara did.
“But there’s one thing I don’t get,” she said. “Why did Erskine want to hire a detective?”
I said, “I don’t think he did.”
“You mean it was his wife’s idea?”
“That’s right. Dominant decision maker, holder of the purse strings—she’d have insisted on it to try to disprove the supernatural explanation. He couldn’t talk her out of it without arousing her suspicions, so he pretended it was his idea. And tried his lying best to misdirect me, keep me focused on Vok’s alleged connection to a devil cult.”
“Who’d he have helping him, impersonating Vok? Vinson’s the one who made the nine-one-one call.”
“What did the report say she was doing at the Erskine house at that time of night?”
“Delivering some business papers.”
“Pretty thin excuse, given that his business is in the dumper.”
“Yeah, but she still tried to save Mrs. Erskine’s life with the nine-one-one call.”
“Maybe not,” Runyon said. “Maybe she was supposed to make sure the woman was dead before making the call and misdiagnosed. Even doctors get fooled sometimes.”
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