by Blake Banner
I smiled at Dehan. “Well, I guess we are out of our jurisdiction, so this is not official police business… I’ll have a martini, thank you.”
Dehan blinked at me a few times, then said, “A beer, thank you.”
The small man with the big dignity was still at the door, waiting. Duffy turned on him with overwhelming enthusiasm and said, “Parks, two martinis, dry, and a Waldhaus for the lady.”
Parks left with his orders, and Duffy came and joined us as though he thought that was a really exciting thing to do.
“Now, tell me. I am fascinated. What does the NYPD want with me?”
I crossed my legs and studied his face for a moment.
“I know it’s a while back now, Mr. Duffy, but on May 29, 2015, you threw a party…”
“I’m certain I did. I throw a party on May 29 every year. You see, it’s the anniversary of my fiancée’s death.”
I was surprised. “Oh, I am sorry to hear that.”
“May 29, 2010. People wonder why I never married Sally Brown. She is the reason. I loved her to distraction. She was one of those women who, when they enter a room, the room lights up, as though the sun had emerged from behind clouds over a field of daffodils. She was radiant and had a personality to match. Always laughing, always smiling, never an angry word. Kind, compassionate… Need I go on?”
“No.”
I was about to continue, but Dehan was frowning and asked, “Forgive me for asking, Mr. Duffy, but you celebrate the anniversary of her death?”
He laughed. “It may seem a little macabre, but it’s not, I assure you. It is what she would have wanted. It is a celebration of her life, her vitality. She did not believe in death, you see. She said death was an illusion, an impossibility. So I keep her memory alive by celebrating her life on the day that she… passed on.” He smiled. “A small act of defiance.”
I nodded that I understood. “I wonder if you remember this particular party.”
“What was the year again?”
“2015.”
He thought for a moment, and then his face seemed to light up. “Of course! How could I forget?”
There was a tap at the door, and Parks came in with a trolley. On it was a bottle of beer, which he carefully decanted into a glass, with just the right amount of froth, and placed on the table beside Dehan’s chair, muttering, “Mod’m.” There was also a shaker with two martini glasses. He shook the shaker and poured out two martinis, in each of which he placed an olive. He handed us our drinks and left, leaving the trolley behind.
Dehan sipped her beer and raised an eyebrow. The eyebrow said the beer was good.
“What made that particular party especially memorable, Mr. Duffy?”
He smiled. “That was where I met the only woman who was ever able to make me love again. The only woman who has ever made me believe I might be able to be happy.”
I raised my glass to him. “Here’s to that. Who was this remarkable woman?”
“Tamara Gunthersen. The only woman, after Sally, who was able to touch my heart. My goodness! What a remarkable woman. She had that quality that Sally had, only perhaps more so, of being able to walk into a room and illuminate it simply with her presence. When I first saw her, on that night, it was as though the sun had taken human form and walked into my home.” He gave a small laugh. “Yet it was so innocent. In spite of her enormous, magnetic presence, she was shy and uncertain. When we met, she looked like a lost child, yet with the beauty of a goddess.”
I sipped my drink and frowned. “How did she come to be alone at your party, Mr. Duffy? A woman as remarkable as that…”
“Ah!” He raised an index finger with the air of a master chef about to reveal his pièce de résistance. “Serendipity! I had invited a rather extraordinary man who had visited me a few times because we shared an interest in antique books. Anyway, the man was a crashing bore, but one has to be polite. So I invited him to my annual party and suggested he might like to bring a guest.
“Well, as destiny would have it, the car picked her up, but he was detained. He sent her on with his excuses, saying he would be a little late, but he never showed up!”
I smiled the smile of a man of the world and observed, “Life will do that sometimes.”
He was thrilled by my insight and leaned forward eagerly. “Won’t it just, Detective! Well, naturally, as her host, I could hardly leave her stranded. I myself, naturally, in view of the very nature of the party, had no companion. It struck me that she and I were alone at the ball—her words, not mine—and we sort of sought refuge in each other. It was kismet.”
“This is extremely good beer,” Dehan observed in an apparently irrelevant departure, then added, “What happened?”
He heaved a huge sigh.
“It sounds corny, but it was truly love at first sight. We hit it off instantly. We laughed at the same things, we loved and hated the same things. She was intelligent and, believe it or not, at her age, she was erudite. She knew her Shakespeare, her Shaw… She was remarkable. And, for some bizarre reason known only to herself and the gods, she fell for me. We saw each other every single day for a week, and by the end of that week, we were engaged to be married. We both agreed it was the obvious, simple, natural thing to do. We were in love!”
I watched him a moment, frowning, putting the pieces together in my mind. “But…?”
For some reason he looked at Dehan. “I am both immensely fortunate and deeply unlucky in love, Detective. I am fortunate because I have loved truly, with my whole self, not once, but twice in this life. But on both occasions, the gods have seen fit to take my loved one away.”
He looked down at his drink with an expression of reluctance that masked a deeper pain.
“She disappeared. I had suggested to her that she move in with me. She stayed most nights anyway. And she agreed. The last day I saw her, it must have been the fifth of June, she left the house intending to collect her most basic belongings and bring them home. She never came back. She never phoned, never wrote. She just vanished into thin air.”
I looked at Dehan. She was frowning. She seemed entranced by his story. She said, “Did you try to find her?”
He gave a small laugh. “Of course! I contacted all the hospitals, the police precincts. I even hired a private investigator, but to no avail. She had vanished without a trace.”
We were quiet for a moment, each of us momentarily absorbed by our own thoughts. Then a sad smile of reluctant realization twisted his mouth.
“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? It’s about Tammy.”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
He frowned. “New York? Is she dead?”
I thought about my answer. Eventually, I said, “We have reason to believe she may have been killed, but we haven’t found a body. Mr. Duffy, would you have anything of hers that might contain her DNA? A hairbrush, for example…”
He nodded. “Yes, I still preserve all her possessions. Would you like to take her hairbrush?”
Dehan said, “That would be helpful.”
“That’s fine.” He rang a bell. “Does this mean you have…” His face went gray. “Something that you can make a comparison with?”
“There was a crime scene, Mr. Duffy, two years ago, on June 14. There was blood, but no body. We have reason to believe the blood belonged to Tamara Gunthersen.”
Hope contracted on his face like a spasm. “No body?”
“No.” I looked at my empty glass and sighed. “Mr. Duffy, forgive me for asking this, but you understand we have to. Did anything go missing from your house around the time that Tammy disappeared?”
He smiled and shook his head. “Of course you have to ask. It is the logical question. But the answer is no, and for a very simple reason. Everything I own belonged to her already. You can’t steal what is already yours. I am not a millionaire, Detective. I am not even a multimillionaire. I am a billionaire. What more could she want in material terms?”
He had a point. There was
a tap on the door. Parks stepped in and Duffy told him to go and fetch Miss Tamara’s hairbrush and seal it in a plastic bag for us. Parks bowed, muttered something about “very good,” and left.
Dehan had finished her beer. She placed it on the table next to her and sat forward. “What else can you tell us about the man who should have been Tamara’s date that night?”
He gazed out the library window at the silent garden outside. “Geronimo dos Santos. A Jesuit priest. Very peculiar. A collector of ancient texts.” He gestured around him at the hundreds, probably thousands of tomes he had around him. “I have a noted library, Detective. Over the last couple of hundred years, various generations of Duffys have collected many rare and valuable books. He was interested in my collection. He came to tea a couple of times. I showed him my collection. We talked about this and that…”
He shrugged. I made to stand.
“I don’t think we need keep you any longer, Mr. Duffy. Thanks for the drink. You have been very helpful.”
We all stood. He held out his hand and we shook. “If, by some miracle, you find her alive,” he said, looking us both in the eye by turns, “let me know, will you? Tell her she still has a home here.”
We told him we would, and we left. The hairbrush was waiting for us on a small table in the hallway. Dehan picked it up and put it in her pocket, and we stepped out into the gentle sunshine.
Ten
We walked a couple of blocks through pretty, tree-lined streets to Chouquet’s, where we could sit outside and eat mussels and steaks. I figured we were not going to be in San Francisco much longer, so we should make the most of it. We sat on orange chairs in the sun and gave our orders to a smiling waitress in a long, black apron.
Dehan gazed at me through her impenetrable aviators and said, “Do you know how I would define this case?”
I smiled. “No, Dehan, I don’t.”
“I would define it as a mindfuck.” I laughed and she raised her hand. “No, let me lay it out for you in synthesis.”
“Okay.”
“A Portuguese Jesuit named Geronimo—and we haven’t even got started yet—employs an actress to turn up unaccompanied at Hugh Duffy’s annual remembrance party for his dead fiancée. Geronimo dos Santos has auditioned and selected her with some subtle ingenuity. He has chosen a girl who is going to step, radiant, right into Sally-the-dead-fiancée’s shoes.”
The waitress came out with our beers, and Dehan took a long pull before carrying on.
“So at this point, we assume dos Santos and Tammy are co-conspirators planning to scam Duffy. But instead, Duffy and Tammy have a whirlwind romance, get engaged to be married, and Tammy promptly disappears, as does Geronimo dos Santos. Meanwhile…” She gave a small laugh and shook her head. “Tammy is on the phone begging her estranged husband in Friendly Acres to give her a divorce, either so she can marry the billionaire she is engaged to, or so she can marry her loser ex-boyfriend in the Bronx!”
She stared at me, and I nodded. She continued.
“Next thing, Tammy and Geronimo dos Santos disappear. Her loser boyfriend is found tortured and shot in the heart, there is blood on the floor that is probably hers, but there is no trace of her body, and the case goes cold. Until two years later, when an anonymous client employs a disreputable shamus to investigate the loser’s murder. I call that a mindfuck.”
I had to agree. “And the only person with any credible motive for killing her is Peter, her husband. But if it was him, what the hell is with this whole circus?”
We were quiet for a bit. Then she asked me, “Do you like him for it?”
“Peter?”
She nodded.
“So far, it’s the only thing that makes sense. The only theory that holds water, as of right now, is that dos Santos was planning to use Tammy in a scam. She was only meant to get close to Duffy, but as everybody keeps telling us, she was so radiant and luminous it went too far, too fast, and they were both swept off their feet.” I shrugged, thinking it through, gazing at the sidewalk but seeing the scenes playing themselves out in my mind’s eye. “She still has feelings for Steve, and before committing to Duffy, she decides to pay a flying visit to her old lover to see if he will reconsider.”
The waitress came out with two steaming bowls of mussels and fresh cream. She set them down, and when she’d gone, I continued.
“Thing is, Peter has had a bellyful. He follows her to New York, finds them together, and kills them. Like you said before, in all this miasma of people and weird situations, there is only one motive. The oldest motive on Earth.”
We ate, not so much in silence, as in slurping. When I had finished off my bowl, I sat licking my fingers. “I don’t see we have anything left to do here in San Francisco.”
She sat back and sipped her beer. “We know who she is, we know why she went to New York, at least in general terms, and we have a possible suspect. What are we going to do about him?”
“Hank has to get back to us.”
“On whether Peter has priors and whether he owns a gun.”
I nodded. “Mm-hm. If we get a positive on those two, then we can ask for a court order to see if he used a credit card to buy a ticket to New York in June 2015.”
“Makes sense. At least that’s solid ground.”
I smiled. “Let me complicate things a little, then. Here’s a thought. How do you like Geronimo dos Santos for Baxter’s client?”
She thought about it while the waitress took our plates away and delivered two peppered steaks. I asked for two more beers. Dehan leaned forward and picked up her knife. She pointed it at me like a fencing foil.
“It’s got to be somebody, right?” I made a “that’s logical” face and cut into my steak. “Somebody who is looking for Tammy. I’m stating the obvious, but in this case, you kind of have to.”
“I agree.”
“So we know it’s not Duffy, because he didn’t know she was in New York. And we know it wasn’t Peter because… why?”
I spoke with my mouth full. “Because if he killed her, why would he start an investigation? And if he didn’t—he’s moved on, he wants to get married—why would he look for her?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “So who does that leave?”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Geronimo dos Santos. So where does that lead us?”
She stuck a forkful of steak into her mouth and spoke around it. “If he is looking for her, he either wants her, or he wants something she has.”
“What’s the bet that Duffy lied? What’s the bet she took something from him?”
“Something Geronimo sent her to get in the first place.”
“Mm-hm. That’s my thinking.”
She screwed up her face. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. We are back to what Duffy himself said. Why steal something you already own?”
I gave a small shrug. “Because what she really wanted was Stephen Springfellow. And she thought if she could take him some prize, something really valuable, he might take her back.”
“That’s pathetic.”
“I don’t know if Stanford has done a study on it yet—it might be considered politically incorrect—but you and I both know that there is a sad tendency among women to throw their lives away on losers. Nothing, it seems, is more attractive to a woman than a deadbeat, parasitical layabout. And if he beats her up occasionally, so much the better.”
She stared at me for a bit. “That’s pretty harsh.”
“Am I wrong?”
She shook her head. “No. You’re probably right.”
“So we should do some background research on dos Santos too, when we get back, and run the DNA on the brush to match it with Tamara’s.”
We ordered coffee and I called the captain to let him know we would be catching the next flight back. He told me if he was in my shoes, he’d invent reasons for staying. They had topped 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air-conditioning was still not fixed.
We walked back to where I had left the car, at Alta P
laza Park, and drove back sedately toward the Hillsdale Inn. Neither of us seemed in an awful hurry to book the tickets back.
In the end, Dehan made the reservations when we got back to the hotel. The flight was at six p.m, which meant we’d be getting in just before midnight. While she was down at reception printing the boarding passes, I phoned Hank to thank him for his help.
“I was just about to call you, actually, Stone. I got an answer to your queries. Peter Gunthersen has owned a Colt .38 revolver for the last five years. He’s a member of the gun club. As to priors, there were a couple of domestic incidents, and he’s been in a couple of brawls, but nothing serious.”
I thanked him and hung up.
Nothing serious, I thought, except maybe a double homicide.
Eleven
The next couple of days were hot, humid, and slow. The air-con was still not fixed. We dropped the hairbrush off at the lab and asked Frank nicely if he would prioritize it. He said he would, along with the fifteen other priorities he had going. We talked to the captain and laid out the case so far for him. He had a mildly incredulous squint on his face throughout most of it. In the end, he agreed to seek a court order to view Peter Gunthersen’s credit card and bank account details for the months of May and June 2015. He would also talk to the San Mateo PD about getting a warrant to run a ballistics test on Peter’s .38.
Then all we could do was wait. Wait, perspire, and look for Geronimo dos Santos. But he was not easy to find.
A couple of days rolled by. I tried the Jesuits, but they were politely vague and gently unhelpful, suggesting I try various different departments and archives, usually in writing, and managing to convey a feeling that my pursuit was not a very hopeful one.
Dehan searched on Google and found a Brazilian mixed martial arts fighter who didn’t look much like a Jesuit collector of rare tomes.
I called Bernie at the bureau.
“Hey, Stone, long time. You only call me when you need something. You’re not the only man in my life, you know?”
“Honey, don’t talk like that. You know it makes me sad.”