The Breakers

by Marcia Muller

  “Aaah, that.” He waved his hand in negation. “Nobody’s gonna bother ol’ Billy Clyde about that. The kids love me.”

  “Do the parents love you too?”

  He scowled at me, transforming his face into a badly carved jack-o’-lantern.

  “You might consider getting into another line of work,” I added.

  He bristled, jowls shaking.

  I left, having given him something to think about.

  1:10 p.m.

  Next I took myself off to Nelson Street, where Chelle had exited Billy Clyde’s van.

  The weather, at least in this part of town, had turned gray and misty. Few people were out and about on the sidewalks, and those who were carried furled umbrellas against the possible rain. Rain, I thought irritably as I parked my car in one of the few curbside spaces. Rain in August when we had badly needed it in February and March. But they say there’s no such thing as climate change. No, sir!

  I didn’t have an umbrella, but then I seldom carry one. They distract me, and I’m in entirely too much danger of poking a fellow pedestrian in the eye with one of the spokes. A well-insulated hoodie usually gives me as much protection as I need, and if it doesn’t, well, I’m washable.

  I walked along, surveying the residential part of the neighborhood. Most of the homes were two- or three-story boxes with eyelike windows on the second and third floors and street-level entries and garages. Most of the entries were protected by security grilles. On a day like today, their pastel colors looked washed out, in need of refreshing. A couple of small corner stores anchored the few blocks.

  I decided to start with the stores.

  No one at the N Street Market recognized my photo of Chelle. The proprietor of Gordo’s Groceries thought he’d seen her around the neighborhood, but he couldn’t remember when. After that I started a house-to-house canvass.

  Ofelia Wilson: “Cute kid, looks sorta like my son’s girlfriend. But, no, I ain’t seen her.”

  George Rodriguez: “She doesn’t look like anybody from around here, does she, Lanie?” His wife, Lanie: “Well, no. But these kids, they all look alike—grungy.”

  Ruth Chang: “I don’t recognize her, but you might try up the street at Ginny London’s house—the one with the stone lions on the steps. Ginny’s young—only in her twenties. Inherited the place from her mother, who died last year. She gets a lot of young visitors.”

  Ginny London smiled at me when she opened her door and I handed my card to her. Then she covered her mouth briefly to conceal two missing front teeth.

  “You’re Chelle’s friend. Come in, please.”

  I followed her along a dark hallway that opened into a sitting room; large, brightly colored cushions were scattered over its huge Oriental carpet. “She’s talked a lot about you,” she added, motioning for me to sit. “You’re kind of her hero.”

  I just hoped Chelle wasn’t off playing the kind of games that had made me her hero.

  Ginny offered refreshments, which I refused, then sat down on a purple corduroy cushion across from the crimson velvet one I’d chosen.

  “Have you seen Chelle lately?” I asked.

  “Sure. Just the other day.” She frowned. “She dropped by, in a big hurry. Needed to borrow some money.”

  “How much?”

  “Two hundred. Sounds like not much, but I didn’t have it.” She smiled again, not bothering to conceal the gap in her mouth. “I got a big settlement from the asshole who did this to me, but I already spent it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Fight at Pacific Rollers—that’s a rink a few blocks away from here. This guy didn’t think I was traveling fast enough, so he punched me out.”

  I’d heard roller-skating and derbies were on the way back, but I hadn’t realized the sport could get so violent. I’d never been to a match, and now I definitely never wanted to go to one.

  “Does Chelle skate?” I asked.

  “Hell no. All she does is work. Girl’s gonna be a billionaire before she’s thirty.”

  “Did she tell you why she needed the two hundred?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. Her business.” Ginny frowned, finally catching the drift of my questions. “Hey, what’s the problem? Is Chelle okay?”

  “She’s fine,” I said to forestall a long conversation. “Did she say where she was going when she left here?”

  “Home. She thought she’d be safe there till she could raise some cash.”

  “Safe from who? Or what?”

  “Again, I didn’t ask. The way that girl looked, she was plenty scared. In case somebody came around looking for her, I thought it wouldn’t be good for me to have answers to their questions. Besides, she’s probably just on vacation.”

  “On vacation? Wasn’t she just on vacation a while ago, back East someplace?”

  “Yes. I guess she liked it so much she went back. That is one traveling family. Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil—they never stop. The money they spend, but Chelle couldn’t even get her hands on two hundred.”

  “Tell me, if you were going to SFO, what public transit would get you there fastest?”

  Ginny didn’t notice the abrupt change of subject. “The Muni to SamTrans. That’s the way I always go, anyway.”

  “Well, thanks, Ginny. I’ll catch up with Chelle sooner or later.” I left my card with her and headed back to the agency.

  2:41 p.m.

  Later, in my office, I sat doodling on a legal pad. The Muni and San Mateo County Transit routes that Chelle might have caught to SFO weren’t going to be of use to me. Drivers’ schedules switch and, given the number of faces they see on a given day, no one is memorable to them unless it’s Elvis risen from the dead.

  Then there was the problem of the airlines—with thirty-some of them making multiple departures every day, where do you start? If I could narrow it down to a few flights, I had an informant at the FAA who would provide me with passenger lists, but the question was, which ones? I had no proof that Chelle had gone to Costa Rica. Did she have relatives elsewhere in this country? Maybe relatives whom her parents might be visiting? That would explain why they were gone. Did Chelle have a passport? Yes, the family had spent a couple of weeks in Spain last year.

  The phone rang and I picked up without waiting for any of my employees to do so. Julia’s voice said, “Es muy buena en Costa Rica.”

  “Are you at the hotel?”

  “Sí. Es muy elegante. These Curley friends of yours sure know how to travel.” Then her tone became serious. “They aren’t here, though. Señor Engardo, the desk clerk who checked them in, has been fired. The new desk clerk knows nothing. Their suitcases have vanished—someone came to pick them up, the clerk claims. Who? I asked. He didn’t know the man, but he had a release form. Where was that form now? Who knows? I hate these Latino runarounds.”

  “You’d get the same in Paris, Tokyo, or Cape Town. When people have something to hide, or have been paid to, they’ll come up with any number of lame excuses.”

  “I guess so. Anyway”—her tone brightened—“I’m now going out to familiarize myself with the town. Maybe I’ll find out something by accident.”

  Probably not. I could picture her seated at a sidewalk café, drinking a mojito and enjoying the sunshine. She deserved the respite; Julia worked long, hard hours and was a damned good operative.

  The door to my office, where I’d been hiding to think the case through, opened, and a familiar voice called out, “I’m home, matey!”

  Mick, back from Australia.

  I got up from my chair and enveloped him in a big hug. He hugged me back. “Why do I have the feeling that this welcome indicates I’m badly needed here?”

  “You are, matey,” I told him.

  4:55 p.m.

  “So that’s what’s been going on,” I said to Mick. We were at a sidewalk table at Angie’s Deli, drinking wine and eating nachos. I’d first told him about Ma, then everything about Chelle’s disappearance.

  Mick’s face scrunche
d in thought. He looked good—tanned, his blond hair longish and sun streaked; the deep lines around his eyes that I’d noticed before his vacation had softened. Those lines had been caused by a combination of disappointments and outright catastrophes. Early last year his longtime live-in partner Alison had left him—and left the house they’d been restoring on Potrero Hill feeling empty and cold. Next, just before Christmas, the house had been vandalized by a group of white supremacists—an action directed at me, but they were too stupid to get the address right. Finally, in April, he and Derek Frye had lost potential funding for a project that, as they put it, would “set the tech industry on its ear.”

  But now Mick looked as if he’d put all that behind him.

  “Chelle,” he said. “I can’t believe she’s gotten herself into such a mess. Or her parents.”

  “What’s your take on it?”

  “Well, there’s the extortion ploy. The Curleys—do they have money? I mean, they travel a lot.”

  “They travel on cut-rate tickets and deals at hotels.”

  “What about Chelle?”

  “Strictly hand-to-mouth. She urges owners of rundown properties to sell cheap, gets bank loans cosigned by her parents, begs long escrow periods from people.”

  “Does she deliver on her promises?”

  “So far as I know, yes.”

  “What bank does she deal with?”

  “Bank of America, I think.”

  “D’you know if she has a passport?”

  “My guess is she does.”

  “Well, that’s all recoverable information. The Curleys give you permission to search their house?”

  “By the time I thought of that, they’d vanished.”

  He rubbed his chin. “We could go to the cops, try to convince them that they have probable cause—but they might not believe us, and even if they did, they’d be the ones doing the searching, without knowing what they were looking for.”

  “Do we know?”

  “No. But if we found it, we’d recognize it.”

  I caught his drift.

  “How’s the Church Street neighborhood these days?” he asked.

  “Quiet. I sold the lot where my old house was to a guy who wants to build condos on it, but he lost most of his money on a bad investment last spring. The Halls—on the other side—spend most of their time in Lake Havasu City.”

  “That’s where they moved London Bridge to, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a travesty. Okay—the three houses across the street?”

  “I don’t know anybody who lives in them now, and they don’t know me.”

  “Okay, how about having an on-site look? How’re you about that?”

  I frowned. “What d’you mean?”

  “Are you ready and willing to break and enter the Curley house once the sun goes down?”

  I smiled. “It won’t be B&E—I have a key to the house. Have had it for years.”

  6:55 p.m.

  It wasn’t full dark yet, but the tail end of Church Street, beyond where the streetcar tracks turn and stop, was quiet. A couple of dogs barked and a child wailed in the distance and an ambulance screamed from over at St. Luke’s Hospital, but otherwise it felt like the country on a fine August night. We parked in front of the weedy lot where my house once had stood, and memories flooded me.

  An earthquake cottage, hastily and shabbily built to house homeless families after the great quake of 1906. Originally two rooms, designed to give no more than shelter, then enlarged by a later owner to include a rudimentary kitchen. Finally the back porch and an indoor toilet had been added. By my own labor and with the aid of inexpensive—and often inept—contractors, I’d transformed it. Lived there happily until an ex-con former client decided to burn it down. Even now, I could remember the choking smoke, the charring heat.

  I turned my eyes away, focused on the Curley house. It was a bungalow, aluminum sided and painted a grayish blue. Its front steps rose steeply from the sidewalk. I motioned to Mick to follow and mounted them, automatically reached into the mailbox. Nothing. Trish and Jim must have stopped their deliveries when traveling. I fitted the key that they’d given me years ago into the lock; it turned smoothly.

  The foyer inside was totally dark. I fumbled around for the light switch, but Mick found it first. The bulb that came on was faint, and I hesitated, getting my bearings.

  A short hallway bypassed two bedrooms and a bathroom and ended in a kitchen and dining area that stretched the width of the house. Beyond was an equally wide family room and beyond that a deck. I went through the kitchen and family room and flicked on the deck lights—nothing out there but an astonished raccoon.

  Mick met up with me in the family room. It was, as always, well used. This was a very laid-back household. Newspapers and magazines were stacked on the end tables; the big screen of the TV was smudged by fingerprints; shoes had been kicked off on the floor; a pair of used wineglasses sat on the coffee table in front of the couch. I closed my eyes, picturing the room as it always had been over the years. No significant changes.

  Back to the kitchen, Mick following. Yes, a very relaxed household. A couple of dishes floated in the sink, covered in soap-and-grease scum. The garbage can reeked. I didn’t remember Trish and Jim as being such careless people.

  Mick asked, “Is it possible Chelle was eating some of her meals here and skimped on the cleanup? Doesn’t seem like she’d leave such a mess.”

  “No, she’s pretty fastidious.”

  “Doesn’t seem like the Curleys would leave it like this either. Unless they were in a hurry.”

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t.” I was looking around for other inconsistencies, and found them: butter congealing in a dish on the cutting board; a jar of jam with its lid off; a loaf of bread covered in mold. “This is not right,” I added.

  I went to the utility closet between the kitchen and family rooms. Found mildewed towels in the washer.

  “Somebody’s been staying here,” I said.

  Mick didn’t reply. He was standing at a side window off the dining room.

  “Shar, come here.”

  I went over and looked around him. The glass was shattered, and a space large enough for a medium-size person to crawl through had been cleared of the shards of glass. “Whoever broke in,” I said, “it wasn’t Chelle.”

  “But she could have been staying here when somebody broke in.”

  “Just what I was thinking.”

  “I’ll call the cops.”

  “No, not yet.”

  I backtracked along the hall to the front door and began examining the individual rooms, looking for anything that was misplaced or gone.

  Everything—knickknacks, books, sofa pillows, vases, sound equipment, and TVs—was in its proper place. Of course, a lot might have changed here since I’d really taken a close look at my friends’ home, but the sameness told me the broken window didn’t signify robbery or vandalism.

  I sank down onto a chair at the built-in desk in the kitchen. A drawer had been left slightly open, a small corner of paper poking out. Before I opened it I pulled on a pair of the thin rubber gloves I keep in my bag. Inside was a jumble of papers, writing implements, and old check registers.

  “Shar—?” Mick said.

  I stood up. “I’ve got one more place to check out. In the meantime, please find a big plastic bag and dump the contents of this drawer into it.”

  Off the kitchen there was a door that led to a narrow stairway to the space under the house. Not a basement exactly, but a place that harbored a furnace and water heater. Behind the furnace was a coal chute that had seldom been used, since most San Francisco houses had been converted to gas long ago. A plywood sheet blocked the entrance to it; I pulled it aside and shone my flash into the chute.

  Yes, that was what I’d expected. A few blankets and a rumpled pillow lay in the small space, an empty plastic bottle of spring water beside them. The faint scent of Chelle’s sandalwood perfume cl
ung to them. She’d been hiding here, for how long I couldn’t tell.

  “Shar?” Mick called from upstairs.

  “Come down here!”

  He appeared as I came out from behind the furnace. “This is where Chelle was holed up?”

  “She must’ve been scared to death of somebody, poor kid. The same person who broke in, probably.”

  “D’you suppose whoever it was grabbed her?”

  “Or scared her off, and she ran. The question is, where is she now?”

  “That’s not the only question.”

  No, it wasn’t. The most important one was: Was she still alive?

  10:55 p.m.

  The last place I’d expected to spend my late evening was the city morgue.

  The phone call I’d received on my way home from the Curley house had made me turn around and head straight to Zuckerberg SF General Hospital. The morgue, which had been relocated to the second story of the hospital in July of 2016, is brightly lit and pleasant; you experience none of the gloomy, cold clamminess of the old location. Furnishings are comfortable, private viewing rooms are discreet. A totally different experience for those of us who’d had reason to visit the old morgue.

  The call had been from Jamie Strogan. The ME’s office had received a male body found in an overgrown lot in the Outer Richmond; they’d cross-referenced his identification to my report and needed me to confirm it. “We’ve been unable to locate his next of kin,” Jamie had added.

  When I arrived at the morgue, Jamie and another homicide inspector, Robert Cooksen, met me in the reception room. Cooksen fit right in there: with his narrow face, thin lips, and trim black suit, he could have been a visiting mortician. He acknowledged Jamie’s introduction with a grunt and turned away to confer with an attendant. Then we went into a small room with a viewing screen.

  The body shown on the screen was indeed Zack Kaplan, and I said so. I’d prepared myself for this, but the sight of him still made me wince. His skin was very pale, verging on blue, his features waxen. In many ways he’d been like a big kid, with his curiosity about and passion for the detecting business. I’d sensed he didn’t have a mean bone in his body—and this was what it had gotten him.