The Breakers

by Marcia Muller

  “Anything on Ollie Morse’s records with the military?”

  “Nope, nor Majewski’s either, and I’m not too hopeful. You know the military…”

  Yeah, I did—my father had been a career NCO in the navy.

  “Nothing else to report,” Will added, “but you’ll hear from me as soon as I do.”

  9:10 a.m.

  The landline rang as I was planning my day. A sales rep urging me to install some kind of fake tile over my beautiful terra-cotta kitchen floor. I cut him off in the middle of his spiel. Damn nuisance calls! Grumbling, I returned to my list.

  Check with Rae about Ma.

  Call Jamie Strogan and ask if he’d found anything from Missing Persons about Zack’s disappearance.

  The Curleys. I hated to tell them I had nothing positive to report, but they deserved an update.

  Go to Rosie’s Posies, where Zack worked part-time.

  Pamela Redfin. The gregarious woman probably knew quite a bit about what was happening in the Outerlands.

  Anybody else? Maybe a name would arise during my conversations.

  My call to Rae was about to go to voice mail when she picked up. “All’s well so far,” she told me. “Your mother’s still sedated, but they’re gradually decreasing the dosage and will see how she responds. I’ve taken the liberty of moving into her place.”

  “You’re welcome to it.”

  “That’s what Samuel says.”

  “Who’s Samuel?”

  “Her cat.”

  “Ma has a cat?”

  “A three-year-old tortoiseshell with an amiable disposition.”

  Good lord, what else didn’t I know about my adoptive mother’s life? “I hope you didn’t find any stray boyfriends or husbands around the place.”

  “Not yet, but I’m still looking.”

  “Has Ma changed her mind about visitors?”

  “She really isn’t cognizant. In her lucid moments she seems more scattered and uncommunicative than yesterday.”

  “You think it would help if I came down there and talked to her?”

  “I doubt it; it might worsen your relationship. And there’s really nothing you can do.”

  “But I feel so helpless—”

  “Rely on me, my dear.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  Jamie Strogan had nothing to tell me, and I doubted Missing Persons would devote much time to the case. Both Chelle and Zack were of age and free to go when and where they wanted. But at least Strogan’s report would be there to show I’d tried.

  I couldn’t reach the Curleys. My calls to both Jim’s and Trish’s cells weren’t answered—nor did they go to voice mail. The couple hadn’t checked out, Señor Engardo, the desk clerk at their hotel in Costa Rica, informed me, but there was no answer to a call to their room, and none of the staff had seen them since the previous evening. Claiming I was their daughter and asking if someone would check their room to make sure nothing was amiss there, I met with resistance until I offered to allow them to make their return call collect. In ten minutes, the desk clerk reported that all was well.

  “Did you speak with either Mr. or Mrs. Curley?” I asked.

  “They were not there, but all of their possessions are in place.”

  “Possessions. Such as…?”

  “Suitcases, of course.”

  “Packed or unpacked?”

  A muffled exchange. “Apparently they have not had time to unpack yet.”

  “They arrived there when?”

  “Our records say yesterday morning.”

  “I spoke with both of them on Saturday. They had checked into your hotel and were in their room. Surely they would have unpacked then. Mrs. Curley was about to take a bath.”

  “I would know nothing about that, señora, but I can check for you.”

  He put down the phone. Costly minutes ticked by.

  “They are not there, señora. Only their bags.”

  “Do you have a security officer there?”

  “That would be I.”

  “And you have happened to lose two guests who checked in on Saturday, not Monday, and have not yet unpacked their possessions?”

  “Perhaps they are out seeing the sights.”

  I was about to lose it. Instead I ended the conversation with him and buzzed my Spanish-speaking operative Julia Rafael. The call went to voice mail. I left her a message asking her to contact Señor Engardo and see if she could pry any more information out of him. She possessed a great deal of patience and would be better at dealing with him long-distance than I was.

  Okay. Time, as Hy had told me, to get off my ass.

  10:17 a.m.

  The flower shop was on Irving Street, not far from UC Med Center. Painted in attractive pastel tones on the outside, with a light, airy interior. A center table held vases and silk flowers; in the glass cases were various arrangements; the odor of wet earth, blossoms, and other growing things wafted through the door of a greenhouse at the rear.

  “Help you?” a pleasant male voice called out from beyond the door.

  “I hope so.”

  The owner of the voice appeared: handsome, blond, and athletically built.

  “Hi, I’m Rosie. What’ll it be? I’ve got a great price on Grevillea Coastal Gem today.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for information—”

  “I can supply that too. Soil amendment, mulches, organic fertilizers—”

  “Zack Kaplan.”

  His face scrunched up like a displeased child’s. “You know Zack?”

  “I’m looking for him.”

  “So am I. What the hell’s he want, for me to ransom my own truck?”

  “Your truck?”

  “Yeah, mine. He makes deliveries for me. But after he made his rounds last Saturday he never brought it back.”

  “You call the police?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Seems a long time to wait.”

  “I suppose. But I’ve known Zack since we were both students at SF State. You know how it is—a guy does you a favor, you do him a favor, and so on.”

  “What kinds of favors?”

  “A cash loan here, a cash loan there. A place to crash on the sofa. A little lie so you don’t have to hurt the wife or the girlfriend…Why’re you looking at me like that? Don’t you women ever do each other any favors?”

  “Sure we do. I even loaned a friend my toothbrush one time.”

  “Yuck!” He looked seriously offended.

  I took out one of my cards and handed it to him. “If you hear from Zack or he brings back your truck, will you call me?”

  He glanced at it. “Oh, geez, a private eye. What’d Zack do? Rob a bank with my truck as the getaway vehicle?”

  “If he had, you’d be talking with the FBI, not me.”

  “But what’d he do?”

  “Nothing serious. Just call me.” In the door, I paused. “How come you’re called Rosie?”

  “The name was on the shop when I bought it. Besides, it’s better than Theophilus.”

  11:32 a.m.

  Pamela Redfin was opening up at Danny’s Inferno when I arrived. Her father hadn’t come in yet.

  “Anything new about Chelle?” she asked immediately.

  I shook my head. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “Not a word from or about her here.”

  We pulled stools to the end of the bar and sat.

  Pamela said, “It’s not like her to go off like this.”

  “No.”

  “Her folks must be in a real state.”

  “They are.”

  “Are they good friends of yours?”

  “Yes. Former neighbors too.”

  “Losing a child that way…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I know something about that.”

  “You mean you—?”

  “No, I’ve never had a kid. But my mother had another daughter with her first husband. My half sister Sara was only two when she disappeared one day. They we
re in Golden Gate Park, and my mother took her eyes off where she was playing in a sandbox for a minute. When she looked back, no Sara. The cops never found a trace of her, and it sunk the marriage. When my mom married Dad, she told him she didn’t want to have any more children. Lucky for me I was a mistake.” Pamela smiled, but her eyes were melancholy. “Chelle—I bet she was wanted by her parents.”

  “None of the Curleys has ever spoken of that, but I suspect so.”

  “Are they a nice family?”

  “Yes. The parents travel a lot, and it’s to their credit that they don’t interfere with their kids’ lives. Chelle’s one of the most independent women I know—but maybe their lack of parental concern is why she’s had so much trouble with men.”

  Pamela smiled. “I thought she just had bad taste.”

  I considered the men Chelle had recently been with. Adam Smithson, a guy who had only used her to get at valuables he imagined were hidden in a building she was rehabbing. A wannabe musician who went into rages and smashed up his guitars, then told her to pay to replace them because “you made me mad.” The stereotypical married man who swore he was going to leave his wife and two kids—“someday”—and then took the wife on a second honeymoon to Aruba.

  Rather than go into all of that, I said to Pamela, “Chelle’s highly spoken of here in the Outerlands.”

  “Everybody loves her. Since she bought that grotesque building, she’s taken such an interest in the history and residents of the area.”

  “I know she’s tight with Cap’n Bobby, but who else?”

  “Me, my dad, Zack. Al, Ollie. She was especially close to Ollie; they talked a lot, most every day.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. I think she was trying to help him work through this PTSD thing.”

  “She ever talk to you about what happened to him in Afghanistan?”

  “Not to me or my dad. Chelle respects other people’s privacy.”

  It was an admirable trait, but it sure wouldn’t help my investigation.

  2:11 p.m.

  Julia was in her office when I came in to M&R. She’d gotten my message and spoken to Señor Engardo in Costa Rica as I’d requested. And had better luck than I had. “I threatened him,” she said, looking mighty pleased with herself.

  “With what?”

  “El jefe, the head cop in the town there. I looked his name up on the Net. He must be one tough hombre, because the guy at the hotel started backtracking like crazy.”

  “Good job.” I smiled at her.

  She smiled back. “Well, you gotta work the angles. You taught me that.”

  Julia is strong and tall, with long black hair that she wears piled atop her head. She is also very smart and a damned good operative. Her childhood on the streets of the Mission district, where her parents abandoned her at ten, had been a sordid one, and her prospects for the future had looked even worse until she located a sister who took her in when she was pregnant with her son, Tonio. The sister, and Julia’s hopes for Tonio’s future, had turned her life around, and by the time she answered an ad I’d placed for a Spanish-speaking operative, she had the confidence to own up to her past and describe her transformation.

  “So what did you find out?”

  The smile turned into a frown. “It was all a ‘big misunderstanding.’ The Curleys arrived, as you said, late Saturday afternoon. They had dinner in the hotel’s cantina, then went out on the town. While they were out, there were two calls for them from a San Francisco number, no message.” She held out a piece of notepaper.

  The number wasn’t a familiar one.

  When I looked questioningly at her, she said, “It’s new, maybe unlisted. I’ve got a friend at the phone company working on whose it is. You said you spoke to both of the Curleys on Saturday?”

  “In the late evening, yes.”

  “You sure it was both of them?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Uh-huh. The desk clerk tried to convince me that only one of them returned from their Friday night on the town. I asked him, why was my employer able to speak with both of them on Saturday? Why are there now still two unpacked suitcases in the room?”

  “And he said?”

  “Well, he kind of ran out of his Español. His Ingles too. He babbled, he cursed—in both languages—and then he hung up on me. The phone at the hotel has been out of commission ever since.”

  “My God, we’ve got to do something!”

  “It’s under way.” She grinned widely. “By now el jefe, Jaime Estenzione, who seems to be a very cooperative individual, is questioning Señor Engardo and will let us know as soon as he gets the answers we need.”

  4:39 p.m.

  Tense time waiting. I attended to some paperwork, grew bored with it, and gave up. I collected Julia and we climbed up to the roof garden, where we shared some wine.

  The ever-present August fog was creeping over the towers of the Golden Gate on a trajectory that I knew would eventually envelop AT&T Park. Was there a baseball game scheduled for tonight? Didn’t matter; the team had tanked, with too little time left in the schedule to get back on its feet. Most fans would take the weather as a welcome invitation to stay home.

  “You know,” Julia said, “Chelle, she seems to be a pretty good kid. Would she have run off to be in Costa Rica with her parents and not called them first?”

  “No. And I doubt she’s in Costa Rica. Helene in the research department says there’s no record of her entering the country.”

  “You said she took her cell and laptop with her.”

  “She—or somebody else—did. According to Helene, she hasn’t used them since.”

  “A kidnapping, you think?”

  “Possibly. Chelle’s tough, but somewhat naïve.”

  “And the parents? Could they have been kidnapped too?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t see any reason they would have been. They’re not wealthy.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “That I don’t understand at all.”

  Julia’s cell rang. After a moment she mouthed at me, “Local call. My phone company friend.”

  I waited.

  “Yeah? You’re kidding. Really. Thanks, I owe you.” She clicked off, then turned to me. “Well, surprise!”

  “What?”

  “The SF number that someone called the Curleys from is a brand-new one, belonging to your buddy Hank Zahn.”

  Hank. My best male friend, going all the way back to college. Partner, along with his wife Anne-Marie Altman, in the best family law practice in the city. Trish and Jim must’ve decided they needed an attorney. Well, they were in good hands.

  Julia’s phone rang again. Costa Rica, finally. “Si, Señor Estenzione…No…? Y Señor Engardo…? Sí, comprendo…Bueno.”

  She sighed as she replaced the phone in her jacket pocket. “The desk clerk told Chief Estenzione that the Curleys had requested a room change—the reason their bags were in the new room unpacked. The desk clerk is now being ‘rigorously interrogated’ by the authorities—poor bastard.”

  I couldn’t feel for the lying desk clerk, but I feared for the Curleys. I’d never been to Costa Rica, but I remembered the terror of the last time I’d worked a case in Mexico and had been lied to, scammed, and ultimately flown over the jungle by a pilot intent on pushing me out over the deep-green canopy below.

  “Shar?”

  “I’ve got to call Hank. Maybe he knows…something.”

  5:27 p.m.

  The phone rang at least seven times at the new number Hank had left with the desk clerk at the Curleys’ hotel in Costa Rica. Then it was picked up and I heard, “Hell! Shit! Why doesn’t this machine work?”

  In spite of my tension, I had to smile. Hank is the world’s most inept person at dealing with technology—even simple tech.

  I said, “I think you have to turn it on first.”

  “That might be the problem. Damn answering machine.” Clicking noises, a dropped receiver, a couple
more curses, and then a sigh. “All right—here I am.”

  “What’s with the new number?”

  “I’ll go into that later. What can I do for you?”

  Very abrupt, very unlike Hank.

  “I understand you’ve been leaving messages for Trish and Jim Curley in Costa Rica.”

  “Uh, yeah. But I can’t reach them.”

  “Neither can I. Have they retained you? For what? And don’t give me any of your client confidentiality crap.”

  Pause. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my request or still fiddling with the recalcitrant machine.

  After a moment he said, “No money’s changed hands, but I consider myself retained.”

  “To do what?”

  “You know I can’t—”

  “Okay, let me tell you: the Curleys’ daughter Chelle has vanished; they’ve asked me to look for her. I think they’ve retained you to protect her legal status.”

  “Why would they?”

  “That I don’t know. But look at it this way: She’s disappeared and the SFPD is being extremely casual about investigating it. Wouldn’t you seek counsel if it were your daughter who’d disappeared?”

  Silence.

  I asked, “Have I compromised your legal ethics in any way?”

  “Of course not, but I sure hate it when you’ve gotten way ahead of my thinking.”

  “Anything they told you that could help me deal with the situation?”

  “They’re a closemouthed couple. There’s a reserve about them that I can’t get past even when we’re talking about their own daughter.”

  “Then we’ll have to wait out their silence. Now, what’s with you?”

  “Oh, Shar, please don’t ask me now.”

  But I already knew: a new phone number; a new answering machine; the hollowness in his voice. He and Anne-Marie had split up.

  I’ve seen it again and again, as we approach this middle stage of our lives: Something’s missing. This isn’t the deal I signed up for. I’m tired of the same old life.

  I said, “I’m not going to ask you anything you don’t want to talk about. Except where are you?”

  “New apartment, a couple of floors down from your brother John and three floors up from Mick. New home. I mean I guess it’s home.” Pause, then heavily, “She…just walked out. I couldn’t stay there in the house we shared.”