by Janet Dawson
“Peter Dace was busted on an assault charge a couple of years ago.” Norm’s voice was a familiar South Boston rasp. “The complainant was a woman, Dace’s girlfriend.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I commented, as I picked up my pencil and jotted notes on a lined legal pad. “Is he in jail?”
“Nah. She dropped the charges. Same old song and dance.”
Norm gave me the details. The woman’s name was Cathy Mason. She and Dace had shared an apartment near San Jose State University, where she was a sophomore and Dace was a part-time student. Evidently he’d continued his educational pursuits after leaving Chabot. Mason had called the police one night and told the responding officers that Peter had knocked her around. But she’d subsequently decided she was mistaken, that she’d fallen down the stairs leading to the second-floor unit.
Although she wouldn’t press charges, she did have the good sense to split up with him. She’d moved out. Norm’s contact at the San Jose Police Department said she’d transferred to San Francisco State. But Dace still lived in the same apartment, still taking a few classes. Most of the time, however, he worked at an auto parts store near downtown San Jose. Norm gave me the address.
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Any time, Jeri.”
I hung up the phone and turned back to my computer. Rachel, my breakfast companion, had been arrested three times, first at the Concord Naval Weapons Station out in Contra Costa County, a recurring magnet for demonstrations. She’d been picked up a second time at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, which did nuclear weapons research. Most recently she’d been arrested during the protests that rippled through Berkeley and the rest of the Bay Area when the Persian Gulf War began. Evidently, any arrests at the abortion clinic where she did escort duty had been aimed at the anti-abortion protesters.
In between her activist pursuits, Rachel was doing graduate work in political science. Her choice of study didn’t surprise me, nor did her long tenure at Berkeley. Rachel appeared to be like many other residents who’d come to U.C. as freshmen and simply stayed to become part of the community. My friend Levi Zotowska, who owned an electronics store on Telegraph Avenue, was that way. He’d originally come from the coal mining country of eastern Pennsylvania. Rachel was from upstate New York, she told me over breakfast earlier, but she hadn’t been back since her mother died.
I knew quite a bit about Vicki Vernon, after having been married to her father. She was born in Oakland, but Sid and his first wife Linda divorced when Vicki was five. Linda moved to San Diego, where, several years after the divorce, she married a dentist. So Vicki spent her childhood and adolescence in the pleasant middle-class surroundings of sunny San Diego. She was close to her father, though.
I knew how Sid would react if he found out about the harassment of Vicki and her housemates. Which is why she’d come to me first. Sid wouldn’t like that either. I doubted we could keep any secrets from him long.
I warmed up my coffee, then turned the computer microscope on Emily Austen. And found nothing.
It was as though she didn’t exist.
Twelve
THAT WAS AN OVERSIMPLIFICATION, I SUPPOSE.
Of course Emily existed. I had talked with her, seen her brush the dark brown hair away from her face, looked into her dark blue eyes. I’d watched her move around the kitchen of the Garber Street house.
But I’ve discovered that most people in this life, even those as young as Emily, leave a trail, whether in paper or computer bytes. Emily didn’t have much of a trail. She was a freshman at the University of California. She didn’t own property but she did own a Chevy sub-compact that she’d bought at a Berkeley used car lot just prior to starting classes at Cal. She had a driver’s license to go with the car, a sizable bank account at a Berkeley Wells Fargo branch, and a credit card that she paid off every month. It was as though she had no life before she arrived in Berkeley the past August. Since then she’d led a very careful and circumspect life, which was not unusual for a quiet and studious nineteen-year-old.
Rachel told me that morning over breakfast that Emily’s parents were dead and she was raised by an aunt who lived up north. Northern California? Or farther, in Oregon or Washington? I tried to recall anything else Vicki had told me about this new friend of hers, but came up empty.
Something pricked at me. Emily’s panicky reaction to Martin’s sudden disappearance Saturday morning. Initially I thought she’d gone overboard. The kid had just wandered off, we’d find him. Then all the residue kicked in, left by those news reports about children snatched from their front yards. I’d started feeling it too.
Now I wondered if there was a more personal reason why Emily had been so upset. Had something similar happened to her? Perhaps someone had tried to snatch her in the past. Was she a missing child?
My office door opened, interrupting my speculation. My best friend Cassie Taylor walked in, resplendent in a tailored gray suit with a lilac blouse. The elegant effect of what I called her lawyer clothes was somewhat tempered by the high-topped running shoes and thick white socks. Cassie was a recent convert to comfort, after having sprained her ankle last January while trekking on high-heeled shoes between her office and the courthouse. Cassie was a partner in the law firm of Alwin, Taylor and Chao, which occupied the front suite of offices on the third floor of our Franklin Street building.
A big diamond sparkled on Cassie’s left hand, a reminder of why she was there. She and I had a date to go over to San Francisco. The great wedding dress hunt was on, and so far she hadn’t found anything she liked. But she was early, wasn’t she? A glance at the clock on my wall showed the reverse was true. I was late. The whole morning had whizzed by while I was sleuthing on the information superhighway.
“You are staring at that computer screen,” she declared, “as though you expect it to reveal all the secrets of the world.”
I sighed and cruised off the Net. “At the moment, I’m not finding out anything, let alone the secrets of the world.”
“Tough case?”
“Perplexing,” I said, not going into details. “I hope we’re going to have lunch before we trek through every store in the city.” You wouldn’t think I’d be hungry after that omelet at breakfast, but suddenly I was ravenous.
“Of course. As soon as we get to the city. It’ll have to be a quickie, though. We’ve got several stops to make.”
I locked my office and we headed for the Twelfth Street BART station, where we caught the next train to San Francisco. As the silver cars hurtled into the tunnel, I barely suppressed a shudder. Someone had pushed me in front of a train last December while I was working on a case. Now I couldn’t look at a BART train without thinking about it, though I’d ridden them several times since. Taking public transportation to San Francisco was preferable to driving. Besides, there was something about that old adage of getting back on the horse after I’d been bucked off.
On the way over to the city Cassie and I talked about her wedding plans. She was marrying Eric Lindholm, the accountant she’d met last year when she deposed him during a civil suit. The wedding was planned for July and I was going to be maid of honor, a role that rested uneasily on my shoulders. I hadn’t been in anyone’s wedding since I was in college and stood up by the altar as a bridesmaid at the wedding of one of my Howard cousins.
My own wedding to Sid had been an informal ceremony, performed by a justice of the peace in the living room of my parents’ Victorian house in Alameda. I’d worn a pale green silk dress and I carried a bouquet of roses clipped from Mother’s garden. My mother, the gourmet chef, had taken charge of the small reception that spilled from the dining room into the backyard.
We were a small group that included my grandma Jerusha, who was my father’s mother, my brother Brian and his wife Sheila, themselves not long married. My employer and private investigator mentor Errol Seville and his wife Minna had been there, along with my cousin Donna Doyle, a Fish and Game biologist who made the trip down from Humbo
ldt County with her lover Kay, who made jewelry. And Cassie, who’d been my only attendant. Sid’s sister Doreen was there, along with her husband, and Sid’s partner at the time, Joe Kelso, had been his best man.
There was a lot of water under that bridge, I reflected. Grandma Jerusha had been diagnosed with cancer and she was gone now, leaving a hole in the lives of her family. Not long after my own marriage commenced, my mother decided to end hers. She walked out on my father, after thirty years of marriage, and went back to Monterey, where she’d grown up, to open her own restaurant. My father had rebounded fairly well from this double whammy, the death of his mother and the loss of his wife. Brian and Sheila now had two children, Todd and Amy. Donna had transferred to Monterey County, and she and Kay lived in Pacific Grove. Errol had retired, sidelined by a bad ticker, and I’d set out on my own. Sid had moved from Homicide to Felony Assault after Joe Kelso retired, then back to Homicide. And our marriage ended, almost as soon as it had begun. I’d ended it, figuring it wasn’t a good idea to stay when the spark was no longer there. Sid had been more willing than I to work at what I considered a lost cause. He’d taken it hard when I moved out of his apartment and found my own. We’d been divorced more than two years now, and our relationship was still rather prickly.
Now Cassie was getting married. That meant our relationship would change. It already had, ever since she’d met Eric. Those spontaneous single woman outings had taken a backseat to her growing relationship with this man who would soon become her husband. Intellectually I understood it, of course, having been through it myself. Still, it made me feel a little sad.
We came up out of the BART station at Powell Street and headed into the lower level of San Francisco Centre, where our first stop was Nordstrom, on the upper five levels.
“No, you may not wear jeans and a T-shirt.” Cassie rolled her eyes upward at my suggestion for maid of honor attire.
“Nobody’s gonna look at me. You’re supposed to be the star, right? I think a nice clean pair of Levi’s and maybe a green and yellow Oakland A’s shirt—”
“This is a church wedding, Jeri. I’ll get you into a dress yet.” We sidestepped a couple of shoppers and made our way toward the curving escalator.
“No high heels,” I warned. “I don’t do high heels.”
“How about hats?”
I glared at her, aghast, as we stepped onto the moving silver stairs that would carry us upward. “Hats? Cassie, are you on drugs?”
“It’s my wedding,” Cassie declared. “I get to do what I want.”
“Yes, but that’s not a license to get carried away. You have my blessing to deck yourself with all sorts of frills. But be merciful to your maid of honor, please.”
Cassie’s response was a wicked laugh, followed by a thoughtful expression. She looked as though she were a partisan getting ready to storm the barricades. “Don’t worry. I have something in mind. I just haven’t found it yet. But I’ll know it when I see it.”
I sighed. “Battle stations, then. On to Nordie’s.”
Thirteen
WHATEVER CASSIE HAD IN MIND FOR A WEDDING dress was not to be found at any of the downtown San Francisco department stores, at least not that afternoon and evening. After we stormed the barricades at Nordstrom, Macy’s, and several downtown bridal shops, we had dinner at the City of Paris on Geary Street. Thus refreshed, we tramped the city sidewalks to Neiman-Marcus and Saks before running out of steam around eight-thirty. Empty-handed, we took BART back to the quieter side of the bay, with Cassie plotting our next outing and me thinking fondly of my own bed.
But I went to my office first, to check messages. There was one from Rachel Steiner. She’d checked with her escort partner and it was okay by him if I showed up Tuesday morning. According to their information, the clinic was expecting an organized protest. This would be a good opportunity for me to observe the anti-abortion protesters.
Early Tuesday morning I stopped at Peet’s on Piedmont Avenue for a large container of strong black coffee. Then I headed for the address Rachel had given me. It was a one-story building on a side street that intersected a major North Oakland thoroughfare. The clinic performed abortions on Tuesdays and Saturdays, and the escorts were supposed to show up early, hoping to get a jump on the protesters who had been targeting the clinic for the past year.
I drove slowly past the clinic and didn’t see anyone outside. Rachel had told me to be there by nine. It was just now eight-thirty.
Don’t park near the clinic, Rachel had cautioned. Sometimes the protesters follow people to their cars. They’ll take down your license number and follow you home. Sometimes they put sugar in the gas tank, she added. That’s why I have a locking cap on mine.
Mindful of Rachel’s warning, I left my locked Toyota in a residential neighborhood some four blocks away and took a circuitous route back to the clinic. On the steps in front of the clinic I saw three people, two women and a young man, all three casually dressed. Rachel wasn’t among them. I turned and scanned the street, both directions, to see if I could spot her. No sign of her yet. I raised the container to my mouth, sipping coffee through a hole in the lid.
“Do I know you?” a voice said behind me.
I turned and saw the young man, in his twenties, I guessed. He’d left the group at the door and walked over to check me out, assessing me with narrowed blue eyes. Hair and mustache were an ashy brown. His T-shirt featured a coat hanger graphic and a message that left no doubt which side of the abortion battle he chose.
“Jeri Howard,” I said. “Rachel Steiner asked me to meet her here.”
“Oh, yeah. I’m Tate.”
Rachel hadn’t mentioned anything about Tate, other man he was her escort partner. I could only surmise that he was a friend who shared some of her activist interests. We shook hands. “Sorry to be so suspicious,” Tate said. “But these days we never know whether someone’s going to toss a bomb or pull out a gun.”
“I know.” I smiled grimly. “I read the newspapers.”
Rachel and I had touched on that subject during breakfast on Monday. The tally nationwide in recent years included two doctors, one escort, and two clinic workers murdered, numerous clinics firebombed or shut down, many doctors and clinic workers harassed by protesters.
Which brought me to the reason I was here. If some anti-abortion zealot with a gun thought a clinic receptionist in Boston was fair game, it was just as likely that some protester could focus on an escort like Rachel, to the point of finding out where she lived. Especially since she thought one of the protesters knew her name. But as she had pointed out Monday, until Saturday the anonymous caller had been silent. And in the spewing of venom I’d listened to during that call, I hadn’t heard the usual epithets the anti-abortion crowd was so fond of flinging at everyone who disagreed with their narrow view of the issue.
“They usually show up by ten,” Tate said as we walked toward the door of the clinic. “Though the past couple of weeks they’ve been early.”
It looked like someone else had made a Peet’s run before coming over. I saw a row of four large steaming coffee containers lined up on the clinic’s cement porch.
Tate introduced me to the two women. The younger of the two, Sarah, was in her twenties, curly black hair pushed back from her face by a headband. She told me she was a part-time student at Laney College here in Oakland, and also temped as a legal secretary. Since I’d done that sort of work before becoming a paralegal and later a private investigator, I felt some kinship with her.
Edna, the other escort, was older, past sixty, with a stocky build in tailored blue slacks and a flowered shirt. Her carefully coiffed gray hair and a layer of makeup made her look like any prosperous middle-class East Bay matron, but her words were gruff and to the point.
“I had an abortion, back when I was in college and it was illegal,” she told me. “It was a horrible experience. I almost died. Believe me, abortion’s got to stay legal. We can’t let these zealots change the law.”
“I can tell them what it’s like.” Edna shook her head, mouth grim. “If they’ll listen.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.” Tate’s thin lips moved into a tight humorless smile. His eyes were moving restlessly as he scanned the street for Rachel. “The protesters you’ll see here this morning aren’t interested in listening, Jeri. Their ears and their minds are blocked.”
Edna snorted. “It’s worse than that. These people are fixated on fetuses. They don’t give a damn what happens to mothers and babies after the kids are born. Not when it comes to funding day care, education, or WIC programs. Forget it. They live in some dreamworld that never existed, where some unreal mother stays home and raises flocks of perfect children and never has to worry about paying the rent or putting food on the table. Well, I was a single mom. I’m here to tell you that world doesn’t exist.”
“I’m inclined to agree with our former Surgeon General, the one who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind,” Tate said. “She said the anti-abortion movement is just a ploy for right-wingers. They’re not interested in people, but in political power.”
Sarah nodded. “The first thing I noticed when I started doing escort duty is how many men are in charge of the anti-abortion groups. They run the show. The women do the dirty work. I think it has less to do with fetuses than some sort of need to control women.”
“You mean hatred of women,” Edna said bluntly.
“Surely some of the protesters are sincere,” I said. “Religious people who view abortion as a sin.”
“I used to think that too,” Edna said. “But things have gotten really ugly over the past few years. The protests have escalated from peaceful to confrontational, and the nutcases started bombing clinics. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone got killed, and I was right. It’s got more to do with politics than spiritual beliefs.”