A Credible Threat (The Jeri Howard Series Book 6)

by Janet Dawson

  Garden Grove was in Orange County, I recalled, glancing at the notes I’d made during my conversation with Wayne. And it wasn’t far from Santa Ana. In fact, if memory served, Garden Grove was where he’d grown up.

  I printed out the information on Belston Enterprises. Then I picked up the phone and called Errol Seville’s number in Carmel, guessing he was out of the hospital by now. He had in fact been released the day before. He sounded chipper for a seventyish man who’d been mugged a few days before. I gave him an update of the situation.

  “It seems to me,” Errol said slowly when I’d finished, “that Sam Kacherian is dead.”

  “How in the world would you know that?”

  Errol thought for a moment. “You know, I think I read something in the newspaper. Not here, though. Let’s see... It must have been the San Fernando Valley newspaper. Minna and I were down in Woodland Hills a couple of months ago, visiting friends. Kacherian lived in Encino before he got caught with both hands in the till. I think his wife divorced him. She may still live there. Tell you what. I’ll make a few phone calls.”

  “I’d appreciate whatever you can dig up. One other thing, Errol. What happened to Bradfield’s assistant?”

  He thought for a moment. “Haskell? I don’t know. Nothing in the files?”

  “Not that I could see. Nothing after the stalking trial. I’ll have to dig deeper.”

  I pulled the Bradfield file from the box, hoping to review it again later in the day. But I had several other cases demanding my attention, particularly since I’d been gone for nearly two days. I turned my attention to paperwork, a trip to the courthouse, and an appointment with an attorney on Harrison Street. Shortly after three I detoured to Berkeley and found Sasha at home on Garber Street. The bombed-out living room looked bare and clean, the sofa having been removed and the debris swept out.

  “I’m waiting for my insurance company to come through so I can plaster and paint,” Sasha told me as she conducted me to the kitchen. “They’re not quite sure how to categorize a pipe bomb.”

  Vicki and Emily had just come home from class and were raiding the refrigerator for provisions to tide them over during a planned study session. “I have something I want to show you,” I told Vicki, opening the flap of the manila envelope I carried. “It’s a copy of a photograph.”

  Emily looked at me and the envelope, her mouth tightening as she guessed the subject of the picture. “Don’t show me. I don’t want to see.”

  My hand stopped and I looked into her troubled blue eyes. “You don’t have to.”

  “Come on, Emily.” Sasha put her arm around her tenant. “Let’s go for a walk. Martin should be coming home from school any minute, and I told him I’d meet him at the corner.”

  “She’s pretty freaked out by all of this,” Vicki said after they’d gone. “Guilt tripping, says it’s all her fault. If I were gonna be some big deal psychologist, I’d say she thinks she should have been able to save her mother.”

  “We could speculate about that sort of thing all night.” I pulled the photocopied picture of Richard Bradfield from the envelope and handed it to Vicki. “Take a good look. Have you ever seen this man before?”

  Vicki held the picture between thumb and forefinger, shifting slightly for a better light. She narrowed her eyes and studied the likeness. “He looks familiar,” she said finally. After another pause, she shook her head. “But I couldn’t say where I saw him.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said as I slipped the picture back into the envelope. “Call your stepfather in San Diego. Ask him to find out who does the janitorial work in the building where he has his dental office.”

  “One of the janitors? That could be it. I worked there all summer, sometimes late. I’ll make the call right now.”

  Vicki went upstairs in search of her address book, returning just as Rachel came home from class. “We had another demonstration at the clinic today,” she told me. “But that guy—Wellette—he wasn’t there. Maybe that Berkeley cop scared him off.”

  “Could be. The guy’s got a record.”

  Rachel opened the refrigerator, looking for sustenance, while Vicki punched in a number. Her stepfather was busy with a client, but the dental office manager looked up the information for her. Then Vicki hung up the phone and turned to me.

  “Is San Diego County Cleaners the right answer?”

  I thought it was the right answer, I told myself as I drove back to Oakland. At least to a portion of the mystery.

  Vicki’s stepfather had his dental practice in a building in San Diego’s Hillcrest district, not far from the janitorial firm’s downtown address, or from the location of the apartment where Bradfield lived during his parole. If Bradfield was part of the crew cleaning that building, that could explain how he might have encountered Vicki. As for how he keyed in on the fact that she was Sid Vernon’s daughter, perhaps he’d overheard someone say her name.

  The phone was ringing as I unlocked my office door. I snatched up the receiver before the answering machine picked up the call. On the other end of the line was Brad Nguyen at the Berkeley Police Department.

  “Ted Macauley’s car turned up,” he said, “with bomb paraphernalia in the trunk.”

  Nguyen told me Macauley’s red Oldsmobile Cutlass had been abandoned in a cul-de-sac off Centennial Drive, up by the University Botanical Gardens. No one knew how long the car had been there, but since Macauley’s disappearance, a description and plate number had been out on the computer. Finally someone noticed the car and reported it earlier that day. The site, in the hills above U.C. Berkeley, was close enough to campus that whoever had abandoned the car could have hiked down.

  “When we popped the trunk we found a length of pipe, some fuse, and some caps. Some black powder residue as well.”

  “Fingerprints?” I asked.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I get the report. I hope when the press gets hold of this we can turn up a witness who saw the car being ditched.”

  Nguyen’s news added another variable to the debate. Having discovered the possible hand of Richard Bradfield in what was going on, I was reluctant to return to Ted Macauley as instigator. He’d receded from his former position of best suspect, in my personal lineup anyway.

  It was true the college student had the knowledge necessary to build the bomb. He drove a red car, like the one that had been seen on Garber Street right before the explosion. And he’d been acting oddly before the explosion and his disappearance. Witness his bailing out on his date with Lisa Spaulding the night Sid and I had shown up at his apartment.

  Suddenly I recalled what Macauley’s roommate Dave told me, about the older man who’d shown up at the apartment a week earlier, looking for Ted. Sandy hair going gray, Dave had said. And he’d thought the man looked like Ted.

  I dug out the Oakland Tribune story I’d clipped for my file, about Ted Macauley’s disappearance and the complaint against Sid. A photograph of Macauley had accompanied the article, small and a couple of years old. I compared it with the photocopied picture of Bradfield that Wayne had faxed to me. The only similarity I could see was the shape of the face, but neither likeness was good.

  Was I reading too much into this, seeing the black hand of Richard Bradfield everywhere I looked?

  The phone rang again. This time it was Errol.

  “Sam Kacherian is indeed dead,” he said. “He committed suicide. At least that’s the way it looks. I called an old friend of mine, down in L.A. I was right about seeing Kacherian’s name in the newspaper when Minna and I were in Woodland Hills. It was just after the New Year, the first week in January.”

  Errol gave me what information he had obtained from his friend. Kacherian had been paroled to Orange County last year, about the same time Bradfield was paroled to San Diego County. Kacherian had worked at a number of jobs during that time and had been laid off from the last one, a few days before he was found in his Tustin apartment, dead of a single gunshot to the head. The gun, an unregistered .38
caliber, was in Kacherian’s right hand. Tests showed residue on that hand, indicating the dead man had fired the weapon.

  An apparent suicide, despite the lack of a note. At least, that’s how the local police were treating it.

  Kacherian had reason enough to kill himself, I supposed. He was out of work, alone, since, as Errol had said when we’d talked earlier in the day, Kacherian’s wife had divorced him after his arrest. He’d come a long way down the ladder from the days when he was the president of Kacherian Manufacturing, with a factory and offices near the Los Angeles airport and a big house in Encino.

  “What sort of jobs was he working at?” I asked. Errol didn’t know, but his L.A. contact was supposed to dig up some more information. I thought of Bradfield’s car turning up in that lot in Garden Grove, which wasn’t far from Tustin either. I couldn’t help wondering if Richard Bradfield had been anywhere near Tustin when Sam Kacherian died.

  “Any luck with Haskell, Bradfield’s assistant?” Errol asked.

  I looked at the Errol Seville Agency file, which I’d hauled out of the box a few hours earlier. “That’s next on my to-do list.”

  Thirty-three

  IT HAD BEEN SIX YEARS SINCE HASKELL’S DAYS in court, forced on the point of a subpoena.

  Tuesday evening, after talking with Errol, I refreshed my memory of Richard Bradfield’s assistant by going back through the old files. Of course, I remembered Haskell quite well. One of my jobs on the investigative team had been to take a look at Bradfield’s alibi for the night of his wife’s murder.

  The alibi had blond hair, brown eyes, and a little birthmark just to the left of her full lips. Her tall slender figure and long legs looked terrific in the successful career woman suits she always wore. I’d always thought her looks were what got her hired. Her employment record certainly wasn’t that remarkable.

  Andi Haskell was about twenty-five when, after a succession of office jobs, she went to work for Bradfield Investments as the boss’s administrative assistant. Sometime after that their relationship expanded to include the bedroom as well as the office. She was twenty-eight the night her lover’s wife bled to death in the Colton Avenue house.

  The day Stephanie Bradfield was murdered, her husband and his assistant drove down to Pebble Beach, a journey of approximately two and a half hours. Ostensibly they were there to meet with a new client, a retired general who lived in a big house on Seventeen Mile Drive. As it turned out, the meeting with the client appeared to be a smoke screen to disguise Bradfield’s meeting with Sam Kacherian, who just happened to be in Pebble Beach that day.

  If Bradfield and his stock scam accomplice ran into each other on the putting green, who would give it a second thought? Of course, we figured Kacherian’s presence provided another layer of smoke between Bradfield and his wife’s murder.

  Bradfield and Haskell checked into the lodge just after noon and had a late lunch with their new client. Then Bradfield played golf with Kacherian, had a few drinks in the bar, and retired to Haskell’s room for an intimate room service dinner for two, followed by a romantic night together. The next morning they had breakfast in the hotel dining room, where they conducted some business at the table, enough so that the server remembered the file folders and the calculator. Then they checked out of the lodge and drove back up to Bradfield’s Oakland office, where Sid Vernon and Joe Kelso were waiting for them with the news of Stephanie Bradfield’s death.

  It certainly appeared that Bradfield did not have enough time to get from Pebble Beach to Oakland, stab his wife, and return to Pebble Beach to spend the night with Andi Haskell. Particularly since Haskell and the room service waiter backed up Bradfield’s story about the intimate dinner in her room. Of course, the waiter only remembered delivering the meals to a beautiful blonde in a blue silk robe that showed a tantalizing glimpse of her bosom, a woman who smiled and gave him a hefty tip.

  So where was Andi Haskell now? She was thirty years old when her boss went to jail. But she helped put him there. She was a hostile witness, unsmiling, subdued, and monosyllabic, unwilling to say anything damaging about the man who was both her employer and her lover. Despite all that, it was Andi Haskell who, when asked about a particular set of files in Bradfield’s office, inadvertently revealed too much about Bradfield’s relationship with Kacherian. I remembered the look on Bradfield’s face that day in court, when he realized the damage her testimony had caused. And it had. Confronted with Haskell’s words, Kacherian rolled over on his former accomplice.

  Haskell had been facing the prospect of jail time, but our investigation, and that of the D.A., didn’t provide any evidence that she’d been involved in the stock scam. So she was free to disappear. I agreed with Errol that I needed to find her, if only to warn her that she might be in danger from Bradfield. How difficult would that be, six years after the fact?

  Haskell’s address at the time of the Bradfield affair was a condominium on Moraga Avenue in Oakland, in Montclair just this side of the Warren Freeway, and not far from her lover’s Colton Avenue address. She had purchased it about a year after she went to work for Bradfield.

  After leaving my apartment Wednesday morning, I drove to the Alameda County Courthouse to find out whether Andi Haskell was still paying taxes on the condo. Not this year. Not for five years, in fact. She must have put the place on the market about the same time Bradfield was being tried in Marin County on charges of harassing Cordelia Ramsey. The real estate records didn’t provide me with a forwarding address, but they did give me the name of the real estate company that handled the transaction.

  It was a large firm with branches all over the Bay Area. I headed for my office to make some phone calls. When I finally connected with the real estate agent who handled the sale of Andi Haskell’s condo, she told me that all she knew was that her client had gone back to Colorado.

  “Back to Colorado,” I repeated. It made sense. Our investigation had unearthed the information that Haskell had attended the University of Colorado, but we hadn’t pursued that part of her life before she came to the Bay Area. We had focused on Bradfield’s background rather than hers. “You’re sure that’s what she said?”

  “I think so.” The woman paused. “It’s been a while, you know. But I seem to remember her using that phrase. Back to Colorado. Anyway, the only address I have for her is a post office box in Denver.”

  Denver’s a big city, I told myself as I replaced the phone in its cradle. Good place to lose oneself. Should I contact an investigator there? Or could I narrow the parameters of the search?

  There had been another employee in Bradfield’s office, a woman who worked there as a secretary and receptionist. I sifted through the files until I found the woman’s name, an address, and phone number. Stella Contreras. I’d interviewed her a couple of times when the Bradfield case had come to a full boil.

  Five years ago she’d lived on Damuth Street, not far from Dimond Park, right here in Oakland. When I punched in that phone number, however, I got an answering machine that told me the number now belonged to someone named Truong. So she’d moved, or she’d gotten another phone number. I considered driving down to Damuth Street to scout around. Instead I reached for the phone directory that covered Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, and San Leandro. There was more than one Contreras listed, of course. No Stellas, but several with Oakland exchanges and the initial S. She could have moved farther away during the intervening five years, but this was a place to start.

  I tried to picture Stella Contreras, coming up with a vague image of a middle-aged Hispanic woman with a round face and streaks of gray in her short, upswept black hair. According to the file, she’d been registered with a temporary agency in Oakland before Bradfield hired her. Maybe she’d gone back to that agency when her employer had been arrested.

  I picked up the phone again and struck out with my first try. “No, she’s not registered with us anymore. Hasn’t been for several years.”

  I thanked the woman who’d answered the phone and
disconnected the call. Back to the phone directory, this time the Oakland yellow pages. I flipped through the thick book until I found the listings under “Employment-Temporary.” There were a lot of them, including a firm on the third floor of my building.

  I walked down the hall to ask Ruby, head of that firm, if she’d ever had Stella Contreras on her rolls. No luck there. It looked as though I had a date with my phone. I went back to my office and made myself another pot of coffee. When I had a mugful of fresh dark brew, I settled back into my office chair and started dialing.

  It took me the better part of an hour to work my way through the listings. Finally, toward the end of the alphabet, I hit a fresh trail. “Yes, we did have a Stella Contreras registered with us last year,” said the crisp voice on the other end of the wire. “She found a permanent situation. A law firm here in Oakland.”

  “Could you tell me which law firm?” I asked.

  It was on the sixth floor of the Ordway Building. Ironic, considering that Bradfield’s office had been on the twelfth floor of that same downtown high-rise overlooking Lake Merritt. I got off the elevator, looked around, and spotted a sign indicating that the law office was on the city side of the building. Bradfield’s suite had been on the lake side, with a view past the body of water to the hills beyond.

  I recognized Stella Contreras immediately. She looked a bit older, with more wrinkles in the round face and a lot more gray mixed into the black. But her hair was still done in that upswept helmet, decorated with the thin wire headset that ran from her left ear to her mouth.

  “Mrs. Contreras?”

  She looked up from her station at the reception desk and frowned, as though she thought she knew me but couldn’t quite place me. The phone rang, although in this case it was more like a low insistent trill. Her focus shifted from me to the headset as she said good afternoon and repeated the name of the law firm. When she’d directed that call she fielded another, then in a lull turned her attention to me again. By that time I had my identification in my hand.