A Credible Threat (The Jeri Howard Series Book 6)

by Janet Dawson

  They walked away from him, Vicki said, shaking her head at the memory, but he followed them across the street. They finally escaped by dodging into the quiet confines of Cody’s Books. They waited a half hour or more, lurking warily in the aisles, surrounded by tall bookshelves and watching to make sure they hadn’t been followed. Then they left the bookstore and caught the 51 bus home. Since then, every time they’d encountered Macauley, he’d trotted out the lesbian accusation and thrown it at them. Most recently, it was Vicki he’d attacked, Saturday morning at the library.

  Vicki didn’t know where Ted Macauley lived, but I’d found out quickly enough. Like most of us, he was in the phone book, at an address on Regent Street. I consulted my Thomas Guide and located the block, in an area bordered by Ashby and Alcatraz avenues on the north and south, between College and Telegraph avenues on the east and west, on the Oakland side of the red dotted line on the map that separated the two cities.

  It wasn’t that far from the house where Vicki and Emily lived. Close enough to make me wonder if Macauley had made a little plant-destroying excursion on his way home from classes the past Wednesday. Could I pull a few strings and get his phone records, to see if there were any calls to the Garber Street house?

  I parked on Regent Street just after six that evening. By now it was raining. Macauley’s apartment was in an older house that had been turned into flats. According to the mailboxes, he and someone named David Walker lived in unit C, on the left at the top of the stairs.

  I knocked. Music played loudly on the other side of the door. The volume came down a notch and the door opened, revealing a young man who was trying with limited success to cultivate a mustache. Judging from the scraggly growth on his upper lip, he would have been better off marching straight to the bathroom to mow it down to skin. As it was, he rubbed it unconsciously, as though contact with his fingers would make it grow.

  He gazed at me with polite interest. “Hello.”

  “Ted Macauley?” I asked.

  I didn’t think so. Vicki and Emily had both described Macauley as tall with a stocky build, short sandy hair, and blue eyes. This young man was tall and slender, and his eyes and hair were brown. He had to be Macauley’s roommate.

  “I’m Dave. I’ll get Ted.” He opened the door wider, smiled, and waved me into the apartment. “C’mon in.”

  Dave’s friendly, I thought. Or he thought I was someone else.

  I stepped into the living room. I’d been in plenty of similar apartments, enough to guess what the interior of this one looked like. If the occupants were young and didn’t have much money, the flats were furnished with castoffs from home, sofas and chairs that Mom and Dad didn’t need anymore.

  The apartment shared by Macauley and the young man with the nascent mustache was no exception. They never would have chosen the flowered fabric on the sofa themselves. We were past the era of brick-and-board shelves. The bookcases that lined one wall were particle board, inexpensive, easy to assemble, and readily available at stores all over the Bay Area.

  The roommate disappeared into a hallway that led to a bathroom and a couple of bedrooms. I looked around. The living room to my left was long and narrow, with the sofa along one wall. At the end of the room, near the front window, stood a disreputable looking wing-back chair upholstered in some shiny blue fabric. To my right a round table with four chairs denoted the dining area. Beyond this a door led back to the kitchen, crowded with a small refrigerator, a four-burner stove, and a counter not much larger than the sink itself, just long enough to hold the drainer piled with dishes.

  Back in the living room, I noted that the TV and stereo equipment were new and high tech. They always were, I didn’t recognize the music emanating from the CD player on top of a waist-high bookcase. Presumably it was from one of those rock groups I’d never heard of, a fact I confirmed by fingering the CD cases piled haphazardly next to the player. I was more into jazz myself.

  “Ted’ll be right out.” Dave came up behind me. “He was in the shower. He’s getting dressed now.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Ted had a date this evening, and the roommate assumed I was it. “Can I get you something to drink, while you wait?” he inquired, altering course for the kitchen.

  I shook my head. “No, thanks. That won’t be necessary.”

  I set the CD case I’d been examining on the shelf and turned, my knee coming in contact with the edge of an oversize book on a lower shelf. I knocked several books askew. Two of them tumbled to the floor. I knelt and retrieved them. The paperback was a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. Interesting, I thought, riffling the pages. Ted Macauley’s name was scribbled on the inside front cover.

  I put the book back on the shelf. The other volume was quite different, a high school annual. I had a few like it tucked into a box in my hall closet, only the dates on those were far older than this one.

  “Did you go to Menlo Park High School?” I asked.

  “What did you say?” Dave came out of the kitchen carrying a bottle of beer.

  “Menlo Park.” I held up the annual. “Is that where you’re from?”

  “Me?” He smiled politely. “No, I’m from out of state. Illinois. Ted’s from Menlo Park. That’s his.” The CD in the player reached the end of its appointed rounds and the music stopped.

  “Is that a fact?”

  My voice seemed loud in the sudden and welcome silence. I leafed quickly through the pages, to the alphabetical listing of seniors who’d graduated from Menlo Park High School that year. I found Macauley’s photo, then quickly turned the pages until I found another name and photograph. I was looking at it just as Ted Macauley walked into the living room, sandy blond hair still damp from the shower. He looked clean, pressed, and collegiate, a bit older and more sophisticated than his high school picture. His stocky frame was clad in a green and gold shirt, khaki slacks, and loafers. He looked surprised to find me in his living room, especially since he had no idea who I was.

  “I thought you said Lisa was here.” He fired the words at his roommate in an irritated tenor that made me guess he wasn’t the easiest person in the world to live with. His tone was matched by a scowl that brought his eyebrows to a V above his eyes.

  “You’re not Lisa?” Dave looked from Ted to me, genuinely perplexed.

  Macauley fired the next salvo at me. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  Was he this grumpy all the time? I set the annual on the shelf.

  “My name is Jeri Howard, Ted. I’m a private investigator. You and I need to have a talk.”

  Dave looked at me with even greater interest, as though he’d read everything Raymond Chandler ever wrote and he’d love to ask me a million questions. Lisa be damned; a private eye was so much more fascinating.

  Ted Macauley, however, only looked irked. “I don’t have time to talk. I’m expecting someone. Besides, I don’t know you.”

  “Aren’t you even curious why I’m here?”

  He put his hands on his hips and tried to tower over me, which didn’t have the effect he’d hoped. “All right. I’ll bite,” he said with exaggerated patience, as though he were humoring me. “Why are you here?”

  “It has to do with your harassment of Victoria Vernon and Emily Austen.”

  He looked at me, incredulous. “What harassment?”

  “You accosted Vicki Saturday morning in the library. When she left, you followed her.”

  “Oh, this is rich,” Macauley said with a derisive snort. “She doesn’t like me talking to her so she sends a private investigator after me. I’ve never heard anything more ludicrous in my life.”

  A familiar refrain, one I was so tired of hearing. He doesn’t think it’s harassment. But she does. So it turns into a he said/she said situation. Who is believed, and who isn’t? Eye of the beholder. I knew all the neat, legal definitions of harassment. From where I stood it looked clear-cut. If Vicki and Emily felt threatened by Ted Macauley’s actions, he should cease and desist. Pronto
.

  “Why did you follow her?”

  He shrugged and spread his hands wide in exaggerated supplication. “Oh, for God’s sake. It was nothing. I said hello and she ducked into the stacks like I was Count Dracula. So I followed her, for the hell of it. Hey, it was a joke. What’s the matter, can’t she and her girlfriend take ajoke?”

  “You think it’s amusing to follow two women down Telegraph Avenue and call them dykes? I don’t. I think it’s offensive.”

  “What a bunch of politically correct bullshit,” he exploded. “God, you can’t talk about anything anymore. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or even women. Those two girls are joined at the hip. I was just expressing an opinion that they might be more than friends. Free speech. You ever hear of that?”

  “Spare me the P.C. tag line, Macauley. It’s overused and it’s an excuse. It sounds like you think you’re God’s gift to women and you were pissed that neither one of them would go out with you. As far as free speech is concerned, I was always taught that my right to swing my arm ended at the other guy’s nose.”

  He glared at me and I couldn’t help feeling I’d hit the nail squarely on its head. Pompous, arrogant, and opinionated—that was my take on Macauley. He was physically attractive, no doubt used to having all the girls swoon over him. Maybe he just couldn’t deal with the fact that Vicki and Emily didn’t. Even if Vicki had exaggerated Macauley’s behavior, his following her, first on Telegraph and that weekend at the library, was stepping over the line.

  “Fine, fine.” Macauley shrugged again. His roommate was at the far end of the living room standing next to the ugly wing-back chair. “They don’t want me to talk to them, they could just say so.”

  “I believe they already have. On more than one occasion.”

  “So they went out and hired some private eye to lean on me,” Macauley was saying, warming to his persecution routine. “Ludicrous, just ludicrous.”

  “It’s not ludicrous when someone makes threatening phone calls,” I said, nailing him with a look. “And trashes all the plants on the front porch.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold the phone.” He scowled at me, alarm in his blue eyes. “They told you I did that? That’s bullshit.”

  “You knew the phone number. You called the house several times before one of the housemates told you to stop.”

  “So I stopped calling,” he sputtered, stumbling over the words in his haste to disassociate himself from the anonymous calls. “I haven’t called for months.”

  “You didn’t vandalize their porch Friday afternoon?”

  “No.” His voice was outraged. “I never went to the house. Hell, I don’t even know where they live.”

  So he claimed. But if he was in such a following mode earlier this year, he could have followed Vicki or Emily home.

  “No obscene phone calls, such as the one they got last night?”

  “No,” he bellowed. “And if they say so, they’re lying.”

  I looked at him steadily, trying to decide whether he was telling the truth. Then my eyes were drawn over Macauley’s shoulder, to his roommate Dave. He stared at Macauley’s back, frowning, as though Ted were a strange new life-form and Dave wasn’t sure he wanted to live with it. There was something there, in his expression, that made me want to talk with Dave later. Had he overheard or observed some behavior in his roommate that had some bearing on why I was there?

  Someone knocked on the door, so hard it rattled. “That must be Lisa,” Macauley said, moving quickly to answer it.

  But it wasn’t Ted Macauley’s date. It was Vicki Vernon’s father.

  Sixteen

  SID WAS TALLER THAN MACAULEY BY A COUPLE of inches. He loomed in the open doorway of the apartment, looking mad as an alley cat who’d had his tail tweaked.

  “Are you Ted Macauley?” he asked. The growl in his voice didn’t bode well for whoever answered that question in the affirmative.

  Macauley growled right back and took a step forward, out into the hall. “What if I am? Who the hell are you?”

  “My name’s Sid Vernon.” Only someone who knew him as well as I did would recognize the edge that meant danger. “I understand you’ve been harassing my daughter.”

  Macauley got belligerent. Bad choice. I could have told him that, but he wasn’t interested in listening to my version of reason. Neither was Sid.

  “Jesus, I don’t believe this. All I did was ask her for a date.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it,” Sid said. “You’ve followed her twice, verbally abused her, and there’s evidence that you’ve made some obscene phone calls. That sounds like harassment to me.”

  That last bit about the phone calls was stretching it, I thought. Sid sounded as though he were reading a formal complaint. Macauley picked up on his language.

  “Evidence, harassment. What are you, some kind of cop?” Macauley’s face reddened, as though he were just warming up. His eyes blazed and his mouth twitched into a sneer, trying to goad Sid. By this time several of his neighbors had opened their doors and were poking their heads out into the hallway.

  “What a crock. First a private dick with no dick, then the daddy police.” Macauley laughed, the sound at odds with his jeer. “Where the hell does she get off, sending her storm troopers to hassle me. The little bitch—”

  The pejorative was barely out of Macauley’s mouth when Sid moved forward, six feet two inches of deadly fury. One of Sid’s hands shot out. I caught it before it grazed Macauley’s shoulder, interjecting myself between the two men.

  “Back off, Sid.” He didn’t want to, but he did. I turned to Macauley. He looked cocky and red in the face. He opened his mouth. I spoke before he did. “Don’t even think about it. Get back to your apartment.”

  He was ready to argue with me. But Dave, the roommate with the scraggly mustache, was right behind him. He grabbed Macauley’s arm, hauling him backward as he shut the door.

  I turned and stared at the neighbors in the hall, and they too retreated.

  “Let’s go outside,” I told Sid.

  He withered me with a glare and stomped down the stairs. I caught up with him in the front yard. It was still raining, the drops hanging like bits of crystal on his curly gold head. There seemed to be a lot more silver there than there was before, but maybe that was just the light from the streetlamp.

  “That was a real bone-head move, Sid Vernon,” I said, keeping my voice level.

  His jaw worked. I watched the muscle pulse. “I know.”

  I took a deep breath, feeling the chill rain. “If you knew it, why did you do it?”

  “When I talked with Vicki last night,” he said slowly, “and she told me about the calls... Then she said this creep had followed her, called her names.”

  “We don’t know for sure Macauley’s the one that made the calls.”

  “He’s the one that followed her out of the library last Saturday. Not the first time, she says. Besides, Vicki phoned me an hour ago, at my office. They got another threatening call this afternoon. And someone in a red car has been cruising up and down Garber Street. The landlady noticed it, and so did one of the neighbors. So I ran a check on this clown Ted Macauley. You’ll never guess what he drives.”

  “Something tells me it’s red.”

  “Good guess, Jeri. A red Oldsmobile. When I got that DMV report... I lost it. I wanted to bounce the son of a bitch off a wall. I wanted to warn him off, tell him to stay away from Vicki.”

  We both looked up as a car drove by on Regent Street. It slowed and pulled into a parking spot farther down.

  “Why did Vicki call you?” Sid asked. “And not me? I’m her father.”

  “She was afraid you’d overreact.”

  Sid sighed. “I did, didn’t I?” I nodded. “It’s just that... she’s my little girl, Jeri. I don’t care if she is almost nineteen and in college. The thought of anyone doing anything to hurt Vicki...”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and gave him an affectionate squeeze. “I und
erstand.”

  A familiar figure had climbed out of the driver’s seat of the car that had just parked. Now Wayne Hobart, Sid’s partner, walked toward us, giving us both the eye. “Does this mean I’m a day late and a dollar short, Jeri? Has he hurt anybody yet?”

  “Some words were exchanged.”

  “How did you know I was here?” Sid asked. “You were over in CID when I got the report on Macauley’s car registration.”

  “Yeah, but I was in Homicide when Vicki called. So I had a sense of your frame of mind. Then one of the guys came and got me, said you were on the phone with DMV before you went steaming out of the office in what they used to call high dudgeon. So I put two and two together. Figured I’d come over here and stop you from doing something foolish.”

  I shivered as the rain fell in a steady curtain. “Wayne, would you take him home and keep an eye on him?”

  “I’ll do better than that. I think you need to come home and have dinner with me and Laurie. It’s about that time and I’m hungry.” Sid shook his head, but before he could say anything, Wayne jumped in. “No, Sid. We’ve been partners for three years now. I usually let you lead because I’m comfortable with that. But tonight I’m calling the shots. You’re coming home with me.”

  I watched them drive away, Sid following Wayne in his car. I walked back to where I’d parked my Toyota. Another car pulled up to the curb in front of the house where Ted Macauley lived. A young woman, blond and willowy, got out, wearing a tan raincoat. She walked briskly up the sidewalk. Was this Lisa, the long overdue date? I sat in my car and waited. A few minutes later Macauley and the woman came out. I watched them get into her car and head down Regent Street, toward Ashby.

  Then I started my engine. I had a date myself, to cook dinner for Kaz, who was leaving tomorrow for his trip to the AIDS conference in London. I stopped at Piedmont Grocery, fighting the usual after-work crowds, and headed for my Adams Point apartment. I was running late, but Kaz usually was too. Sometimes it was difficult to drag the man away from his work.