A Credible Threat (The Jeri Howard Series Book 6)

by Janet Dawson

  “Ted Macauley drives a red Oldsmobile,” I pointed out.

  “I know,” Nguyen said. “I already checked. And that red Camaro you saw Peter Dace’s girlfriend driving is registered to Dace. But Dace was out with his girlfriend last night, according to the San Jose police. He and the girl had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, plenty of witnesses.”

  “He’s off my A list anyway,” I said. “I just don’t think he’d go to the trouble. Harassment, maybe. A bomb? I doubt it. What about the protester at the clinic? The plate numbers on the van and car?”

  “The van is registered to a William Wellette. He lives in Concord.” Nguyen pulled a photocopy of a photograph from the file. “Is this the man you described to me, the one who seemed to know Ms. Steiner?”

  I took the copy and studied it. “I don’t think he knew her personally. It’s just that he knows her name. He kept saying it over and over. That made me feel uncomfortable about him. Yes, this looks like him. I assume you have his photograph for a reason.”

  “Mr. Wellette is quite familiar to the police in several Bay Area cities, as well as some out-of-state locations.” Nguyen consulted several sheets in his folder. “He’s active in a number of anti-abortion organizations, some of them quite radical. His rap sheet includes arrests for obstructing clinics, making threats, the usual.”

  “Has he ever thrown a bomb through any windows?” I asked.

  “If he has, he’s never been caught. He did, however, pull a jail term last year in Portland, Oregon. For harassing a doctor at a women’s clinic.”

  “Did he, indeed,” I said slowly. “And where was Mr. Wellette last night?”

  “At home, he says. Alone. At least that’s what he told the Concord police when they inquired.”

  “Making signs about baby-killers, no doubt. Did he tell the Concord police how he knows Rachel Steiner’s name?”

  “He denied knowing anything about any of the staff at that clinic. Doctors, nurses, administrative personnel, or escorts.”

  “He’s lying. I heard him.”

  “I plan to have a little talk with him myself,” Nguyen said. “To see if he can clarify that point.”

  “What about Ted Macauley?”

  Nguyen took his time answering. “Ted Macauley seems to be missing,” he said finally.

  “Missing? Since when?”

  Nguyen tented his hands together in front of him. “I went over to Macauley’s apartment this morning. The roommate, Dave Walker, hasn’t seen Macauley since yesterday morning. Nor have any of his friends, classmates, or professors. As far as we can determine, no one has seen Ted Macauley since he walked out of the Oakland Police Department after filing that complaint against Sergeant Vernon.”

  Twenty-two

  BY THE TIME I WENT TO SEE SID ON THURSDAY evening, the media had picked up the story. Some enterprising reporter over at Oakland’s Channel 2 News had connected the dots that led from the complaint filed against a veteran OPD homicide cop to the explosion at the Garber Street house to the missing U.C. Berkeley senior. Neither the Oakland nor the Berkeley Police Department was saying much about the case. But Ted Macauley’s parents, interviewed at their Menlo Park home, indignantly denied that their son could have had anything to do with the bomb. They stopped short of accusing Sid of complicity in their son’s disappearance, but the implication was plain.

  I needed to get Errol Seville’s perspective on the whole situation. I’d tried to call him in Carmel that afternoon, but I got no answer. He and his wife Minna were out. It wasn’t like them not to turn on their answering machine, but maybe they’d forgotten. I planned to try to reach them again that night.

  Sid lived in the Temescal section, a North Oakland neighborhood between Broadway and Telegraph Avenue. After he and I had divorced, I went flying off to Paris. He bought a little house on Manila Avenue, a Craftsman bungalow that was a smaller version of his parents’ home. His current residence wasn’t far, in distance anyway, from that house where he grew up, a few blocks from the campus of Oakland Technical High School, where he’d played football more than twenty-five years ago.

  I stepped onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. I heard footsteps approaching the door. A curtain on the window to my right shifted and I saw a woman’s face. A moment later the door opened.

  “Hello, Jeri.” Graciela Portillo’s words were polite, her face composed, as her large brown eyes looked me over. She worked in Missing Persons and I’d met her last December while working on a case. She was divorced, in her thirties, and the mother of a ten-year-old son, according to Vicki, who had reported to me that her father and Detective Portillo had been dating for a couple of months.

  “Hello, Grace,” I said. I looked past her and saw Sid, in faded jeans and an Oakland A’s sweatshirt, slumped tiredly on his Mission-style sofa. “May I speak with Sid?”

  “Sure.” She held the door open and I stepped into the living room, its hardwood floor covered with a Navajo rug Sid had picked up on a trip to Arizona. “I was just leaving. Gotta pick up my kid.” She crossed to the sofa and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll call you later.”

  He touched Grace’s hand, held it tightly for a second, then released it. I was surprised at the sting of jealousy I felt. After all, the man and I were divorced, two years this past October. If I didn’t want him, I had no business playing dog-in-the-manger. Still...

  I put that thought firmly on hold. I had more important things to talk about. Grace’s expression was noncommittal as she walked past me and closed the front door.

  “How’re you doing?” I asked.

  Sid made a noise that was supposed to be a laugh but wasn’t. “Oh, great, just great. Of course, I unplugged the phone because the damn reporters keep calling. I’m a real good candidate for getting my ass thrown off the force.”

  “You’re not going to get thrown off the force.” I said the words as if by rote. I had a feeling he’d been hearing the same thing all day, despite his interview with his lieutenant and the growing media attention. Hearing it from Wayne, from Grace, from Vicki, and now me. I looked through the door leading back to the kitchen and saw several cans, both beer and soda, on the tiled counter, next to a pizza box. “Vicki was here?” I guessed.

  “Yeah. And Uncle Pat.”

  “Uncle Pat. Of course.” I smiled. “I’ll bet he told you not to let the bastards grind you down.”

  “Christ, you should have heard him.” Sid got to his feet, moving slowly in a pair of beat-up running shoes. “He was threatening to call in a few markers. He probably has a few out there too.”

  “After thirty years, I’ll just bet he does.” Pat Haney had been on the Oakland force for more than thirty years. In fact it was Pat who’d steered his nephew into a career as a policeman.

  Sid stood near the doorway, looking at the built-in shelves in the bungalow’s dining room. The top shelf held a lot of family pictures, photographs that had become familiar to me during the years Sid and I had been together. One of them was an eight-by-ten color photograph taken the day Frank Vernon and Eileen Haney exchanged marriage vows at Our Lady of Lourdes on Lakeshore. That was three months after V-J Day in 1945, almost a year after they met one night at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Oakland. Eileen was there with her brother. Pat once told me the movie was To Have and Have Not, with Bogie and Bacall. How romantic, I thought then, and still do.

  Frank was in the Navy, a farmer’s son from Missouri, who had no intention of going back to Joplin. He started dating Eileen, who’d been bora and raised in Oakland. After mustering out, he found work as a longshoreman, unloading cargo ships down at the Port of Oakland. Eileen left the cash register at her father’s bakery on Telegraph Avenue for a cash register at Capwell’s Department Store, downtown at Nineteenth and Broadway.

  Salt of the earth, both of them, according to Sid’s older sister Doreen. Now as I looked at the elder Vernons’ wedding picture, I wished again that I’d had the chance to get to know them. But Frank died of a heart attack
six years before I met Sid. Eileen succumbed to cancer a year later.

  “You want some coffee?” I asked Sid.

  “Yeah, sure.” He sounded distracted, and I knew why. He had bypassed the other family photographs arrayed on the shelf, the ones of his parents at various stages of their lives and the ones of Doreen and her husband and kids. Instead he’d picked up a frame and was staring at a picture of his brother Eddie in his Marine dress blues. Sid was into some serious brooding tonight.

  I flicked on the light in the kitchen and set about making a pot of coffee. I never got the chance to meet Eddie Vernon either. He was killed in Vietnam, a week after Sid graduated from Oakland Tech. Doreen told me about it, the day Sid and I drove to Sacramento so I could meet his family, or what was left of it.

  Eddie was in the last month of his tour of duty, Doreen said, and he had his whole life planned out. He was engaged to marry his high school sweetheart, and when he left the Corps he was going to use his GI Bill to go to college. He’d also talked about becoming a cop, just like his uncle Pat.

  But all those plans got cut short by a Viet Cong barrage in the last days of the war. It hit the family hard. I could see it in Doreen’s eyes when she told me her folks were never the same after Eddie died.

  I leaned against the kitchen counter and watched Sid put Eddie’s picture back on the shelf. Then he shambled into the kitchen and picked up the pizza box. “There’s one piece left. You want it?”

  “Sure. I haven’t had any dinner.” I tore off a couple of paper towels and stuck the wedge into the microwave. While it was heating, Sid folded the cardboard box with his big hands and shoved it into the kitchen garbage can. Then he swept the cans into a City of Oakland recycling bin at the end of the counter.

  “Coffee will be ready in a minute,” I said, just making conversation.

  “Thanks.” He looked at me with his yellow cat’s eyes and mustered a ghost of a smile as he leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Be right back.”

  He headed down the hallway, his destination the bathroom. As he closed the door the microwave beeped and I took out my pizza slice. I went looking through the kitchen cupboards for a couple of mugs. I couldn’t find any, so I checked the dishwasher. Pay dirt. Everything was clean, but it hadn’t been unloaded. I took out a couple of mugs and poured coffee into them, then ate my pizza. When I was finished I washed my hands and set to work unloading the dishwasher.

  I pulled out another mug, thick white crockery with a faded gold insignia on one side, a globe with the words “United States Marine Corps” beneath it. I wondered how long Sid had had this. It had been more than twenty years since he got out of the Marines.

  Sid hadn’t really thought about what he was going to do after high school. In fact, he’d thought about going to work at the port, just like his father. But Eddie’s death sent him in a different direction, to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego, with his mother saying the rosary and hoping like hell her second son wouldn’t wind up in Vietnam.

  Instead Sid went to Japan. That’s where he met Linda, his first wife. He was in his early twenties when they married, three years into his four-year enlistment. Her father was a gunnery sergeant, a career Marine who encouraged his new son-in-law to stay in the Corps. But when it came time to reenlist, Sid decided he wanted to come back to Oakland. While he was thinking about college and several other options, Uncle Pat put in his pitch for the police force. Then Linda told him she was pregnant and Sid knew he needed to settle into something. He took the exam and made it into the hiring pool. Vicki was born two months after he graduated from the Academy.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Sid said when he came back into the kitchen. I’d put the Marine Corps mug into the cupboard and poured coffee into two others. Now I sorted flatware from the dishwasher basket into a drawer.

  “If you’re like me, you’ll let it sit for a couple of days before you get around to it.” I pointed at one of the mugs. “Take your coffee and go sit down.”

  He stayed where he was and took a swallow of coffee. “Hand me those plates,” he said. We unloaded the dishwasher in companionable silence, then he turned to me. “Thanks for coming over.”

  “I had some questions I wanted to ask you.” I looked at his tired face. “But I think they can wait until tomorrow. How about a couple of hands of gin instead? As I recall, I used to beat you with great regularity.”

  His mouth curved up in a smile and I saw a glimmer of the old Sid who had charmed me into his arms and his bed a few years back.

  “The day hasn’t come when you could beat me at gin rummy, Jeri Howard.”

  He went to get the cards while I sifted through the CDs in the rack next to his stereo system. I put on some Dave Brubeck and kicked off my shoes. We faced off over the coffee table for a couple of hours. It was about ten when I kissed him good night and headed home.

  It had turned out to be a mild, clear evening, with stars twinkling in the dark blue sky above Oakland. As I climbed the steps onto my own front porch I saw Abigail standing on the back of my sofa, which was visible because her tabby bulk and her head had parted the vertical blinds covering the front window. I turned the key in the lock, my nose catching the sweet fragrance of the blossoms on the lemon tree in the flower bed in front of my window.

  When I opened my front door the next morning to get my newspaper, the lemon tree had lost its head.

  Twenty-three

  THE TOP OF THE LEMON TREE RESTED NEATLY on my front porch, just beyond Friday’s edition of the Oakland Tribune. The tree’s lower half still protruded from the flower bed to my left, below my front window. I could make out a partial footprint in the soil at the base of the tree.

  I took a deep breath, then another one, feeling cold. I felt as though someone had just walked over my grave. No, it was more immediate than that. I wasn’t dead yet. But it felt as though someone’s eyes were watching me. And the sensation wasn’t benign.

  It was a threat.

  I took another breath. Then I backed away from the calling card on my front porch, shut the door, locked it, and walked back to the kitchen to use the phone to call 911, then Wayne Hobart and Brad Nguyen. Wayne arrived about fifteen minutes after two Oakland detectives and a couple of evidence techs. Nguyen showed up half an hour later.

  By that time my neighbors were clustered on their front porches in the courtyard of the U-shaped building on Adams Street, talking among themselves, wondering how the vandal had gotten past the security fence and gate that surrounded our building. And why were the cops making such a fuss over a decapitated lemon tree?

  “Same as the one on Garber Street?” Nguyen asked.

  “Same position,” I told him. “With the chopped end pointing toward the front door. That one was in a pot, though, and it had been pulled out, with the lower half and the roots tossed onto the sidewalk.”

  Nguyen rubbed his chin. “Interesting.”

  “Way past interesting.”

  Finally the police finished asking their questions and collecting evidence, packed up their gear, and left, taking the lemon tree with them. I asked Wayne to wait in the living room, explaining what I wanted to do and why. Then I went to the hall closet and hauled out the cat carriers. The sound of rattling latches normally caused a cat exodus, but in this case the cats were already hiding, spooked by the unusual activity. It took me a while to corral them, but finally I had both Abigail and Black Bart locked inside the carriers.

  “What have you been feeding this cat?” Wayne asked as he hoisted Abigail’s carrier, using both hands.

  “She likes her chow, that’s for sure.” I picked up Black Bart, who was much lighter, and we went out the front door, past the forgotten newspaper. Out the front security gate and into Wayne’s car. He drove us on a circuitous route all over downtown Oakland, accompanied by periodic protestations from Abigail, who hated to ride in cars. Black Bart just huddled in the back of his carrier, shivering. When we were both satisfied that we weren’t being
tailed, Wayne followed the directions I’d given him, to Dr. Prentice’s office. One of the calls I’d made earlier was to my vet, who boarded animals and had an alarm system as well as someone on duty during the night.

  “I don’t know how long,” I told her. “But I’d feel safer if you kept them here until this is all sorted out.”

  “I understand.” She ruffled Abigail’s fur. “I hope it’s not long. Abigail really hates to stay here. And you, you’re going to miss these guys.”

  “I know. But it’s safer to have them out of the apartment.”

  Wayne took me back to my home, which already seemed empty without my cats. I hadn’t eaten breakfast and it was nearly time for lunch, so I poured cereal into a bowl and sloshed milk over it. After this repast, I picked up the phone and punched in the Sevilles’ number. It rang and rang. Finally, just as I was about to hang up, Minna Seville answered.

  “Minna, it’s Jeri. I called yesterday but you were out. May I speak with Errol?”

  “Jeri.” Something was wrong; I knew it immediately. Her voice was subdued as it traveled over the phone line from Carmel, more than a hundred miles south. “Errol’s not here. He’s in the hospital.”

  “The hospital. Oh, no.” Shock and dismay washed over me. Errol was in his seventies. A heart attack had finally forced him to retire. “Is it his heart?”

  “He was mugged,” Minna said, amazed that anything like that could happen in their pleasant little retirement retreat. “In Carmel. Right here on San Antonio Avenue, as he was walking home.”

  I clicked into detective mode, prompted by a disturbing thought. “When did this happen, Minna?”

  “Yesterday afternoon. I’m not sure of the time. One of our neighbors found him lying in the street about a block from the house, around two o’clock. He’d been hit over the head. He was conscious but disoriented, and his head was bleeding. He’s over at Community in Monterey, with stitches and a concussion.”