The Crooked Street

by Brian Freeman

  She came back inside and sat next to him again. She looked calm. Brave. That was just one thing he loved about her.

  “So what are you going to do?” Tabby asked him.

  “I have to get him,” he said. “I have to get Lombard.”

  “Frost, maybe you should stop,” she replied. “This is too dangerous.”

  “I wish I could, but I can’t do that.”

  Tabby didn’t look surprised to hear him say that. “How can I help?”

  “You can’t. What you can do is stay a thousand miles away from this. And a thousand miles away from me.”

  “Well, maybe you didn’t hear me. How can I help?”

  “You. Can’t. Help. Do you understand me?”

  Tabby sighed in annoyance and rolled her eyes. She didn’t like being put off, and she didn’t give up easily. “So what are you going to do next?”

  Frost leaned his head back against the sofa. “I need to prove that Martin Filko and the mayor were really on Denny’s boat on Tuesday, and then I need to figure out why they called in Lombard. Obviously, something bad happened that they couldn’t let go public.”

  “But how do you prove they were on the boat if no one saw them?” Tabby asked. “At least, no one who’s still alive.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know yet.”

  Tabby sat next to him with her hands on her knees. She reached over to the coffee table where she’d put her phone. He watched her run a search, and then she glanced over and asked, “What’s the code for blocking your number?”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t want your name or number showing up when you call,” she said.

  “It’s star six seven. Why?”

  Tabby tapped the keys and dialed a number. She put the call on speakerphone and put a finger over her lips to keep him silent. He had no idea what she was doing.

  Then a voice answered. “City hall answering service.”

  “I need the after-hours contact for the mayor’s office, please,” Tabby said brightly.

  Frost began to protest, but Tabby reached over and put her fingers against his mouth.

  Another voice picked up the call. “Mayor’s office, this is Justine.”

  “Oh, hey, Justine,” Tabby announced, as if they’d been friends their whole lives. A strange little Southern accent popped into her voice. “I just knew someone would be there to help me in the evening. You all are so efficient out there. This is Lizzy in Martin Filko’s office. Martin’s got a friend coming into San Fran tomorrow who needs a good limo service. He was pretty impressed with the driver last Tuesday and was wondering if you had a contact number for the limo company. It would be a big help, hon.”

  There was a long, tentative pause on the line.

  And then, “Sure, Lizzy, hang on a minute.”

  The minute turned out to be no more than a few seconds before Justine came back on the line. “Lizzy, are you there? It was DiMatteo Limousine. Oh, and the driver’s name was Jeffrey, if that helps.”

  “It sure does, hon. You’re the best.”

  Tabby hung up.

  Frost stared at her. “I can’t begin to tell you how crazy that was.”

  She winked. “Uh-huh. You can thank me later. Right now, how about I make dinner for the two of us? That was the whole reason I came over here, you know. Duane promised a care package, but he wasn’t sure he could leave the truck, so I volunteered. How does shrimp risotto sound?”

  “It sounds great,” Frost said.

  Tabby picked up Shack from the floor with one hand. “Yes, you get some, too,” she said.

  She wandered unsteadily toward the kitchen, and he pushed himself off the sofa to join her. They were both feeling the effects of the alcohol. He turned on the downstairs lights, and the house looked warmer and brighter. Like the professional chef she was, despite the lack of mobility in one hand, she began to assemble ingredients from the brown grocery bags she’d brought and to manipulate everything into her mise en place. As she was heating a pan, she said, “How about some music? I like to rock when I cook.”

  “Sure. Anything you want.”

  Frost hooked up his speakers. He shuffled the songs on his phone, and the first song that boomed into the room was Parachute’s “Can’t Help.”

  “Oh!” Tabby exclaimed happily as she recognized the beat. “Oh, I love this song!”

  Her head tilted back and forth with the music. Her hips swayed, and her red hair flew. Drinking with him for an hour had erased her inhibitions. She left the stove and strutted from the kitchen into the middle of the living room. He’d never seen her dance before, and he admired the utterly natural flow of her limbs, the ease she had inside her own skin.

  At the moment the words began, she surprised him by spinning around with her arms outstretched and both index fingers pointed at him. She lip-synched the song, which she knew by heart, and the lyrics crushed him. They just crushed him. Like the song said, he couldn’t help himself from falling in love with her. He found himself frozen with a smile that told her everything that he needed to hide. His emotions were like Mr. Jin’s posters of Niagara Falls, a torrent that threatened to drown him.

  He tried to walk away because watching her was torture, but she grabbed his hands and made him dance with her. He couldn’t find any rhythm; he simply circled the room, nodding to the song, while she followed him and teased him. He mouthed the words to her, too, but he wasn’t pretending. He meant it. He couldn’t help it. The only thing he could think about was wrapping her up in his arms right there.

  When the music finally stopped, they were inches apart. Tabby was breathless, and her flushed face beamed. They were out of control. They were drunk, they had no idea what they were doing, and they didn’t care. She slung her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. He was falling, falling, falling, and there was no way she didn’t know it, no way she couldn’t see the truth in his eyes. He wanted to kiss her back hard. On the lips. He wanted to show her what he’d been feeling for months. Something in her face said she wanted it, too.

  “Girl can dance, can’t she?”

  The voice from the foyer stunned them like the blaring wake-up call of an alarm. It was Duane. He’d been watching the whole thing.

  Tabby disentangled herself from Frost as if she were running from a burning building. She put her hands on her pink, blushing cheeks. “Oh,” she said to Duane. “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “I didn’t think you could make it.”

  “I got out of the truck early,” Duane replied.

  Her voice stuttered. “Well, good. Great. That’s great. I was starting risotto. Can you stick around?”

  “Sure I can.” Duane stared at the two of them with a strange coolness in his eyes. “Assuming that’s okay with you guys?”

  “More than okay,” Frost said.

  Tabby turned and disappeared into the kitchen with an embarrassed sideways glance at Frost. Duane didn’t join her. Not right away. He let her get to work. The clatter of pans sounded extra loud and extra fast, as if she were throwing a wound-up ball of nervous energy into the sizzle of shrimp. His brother simply stood in the foyer with his hands on his hips. He watched Frost, and Frost watched him back. Neither one of them said a word.

  “So,” his brother said finally, when the silence had gone on for too long. “I guess I should go help my fiancée.”

  Frost didn’t miss the little emphasis Duane put on that last word.

  “I guess so.”

  “What can I get for you, bro? Is there something you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Really? Because it sure looks to me like you want something. How about another beer?”

  Frost heard the innuendo in Duane’s voice and tried to ignore it. The room spun as he collapsed onto the sofa. His headache was back, like a spike burrowing into his neck. He couldn’t remember another time in his life where he’d felt as if the walls were closing in on him the way they were now.

  “No,” h
e said. “I’ve had too much already.”

  31

  Shack went along for the ride the next morning. Frost wasn’t about to let him out of his sight.

  He called DiMatteo Limousine and found out that their driver Jeffrey was on assignment at the airport. He headed south out of the city and immediately got locked up in the traffic on 101. It was the same slog every morning as tech commuters crawled toward Silicon Valley. Bay Area traffic had always been bad, but since the dot-com boom had taken over the area, it was near-constant gridlock on all the freeways and bridges.

  He was hungover and angry with himself. He felt like a fool for coming so close to making an irreversible mistake with Tabby, and he felt like a traitor because his brother had seen it all happen. The dinner among the three of them had been a long, uncomfortable hour of silence, and then Tabby and Duane had both left with barely a word to him or to each other. Duane’s face was a blank mask, showing nothing. Tabby looked as if she were standing on the edge of a cliff.

  Frost wasn’t sure what would happen next. He felt as if lines had been crossed everywhere, and there was no going back.

  His one comfort was that Shack seemed no worse for his brush with Lombard. The cat slept through the traffic jam at first, then got up and went from window to window to examine the other drivers stuck around them. His tail swished. He put a paw on the glass, as if handing out high fives. Young women cooed and waved back. Everywhere they went, Shack was the star.

  His SUV inched past the calm bay waters. The Pacifica hills loomed to the west, still tipped with morning fog off the ocean. The sun was low. It took him nearly an hour to reach the airport, but he finally left the freeway at San Bruno Avenue near the huge United maintenance facility and found the private parking lot where taxis and limos waited for their fares. His badge got him past the gate, and he drove to the lineup of town cars parked near the barbed wire fence. Several of the drivers were hanging out together, laughing and smoking cigarettes.

  Frost pulled into an open spot near them. He saw no signage to identify the cars for DiMatteo Limousine, but that didn’t surprise him. Their clientele preferred anonymity. When he asked the drivers about Jeffrey, they pointed him toward a young Filipino man in a black suit hanging out by himself on the other side of the lot.

  He walked through the rows of cars, and the eyes of the other drivers followed him. Jeffrey sat in a fold-up canvas chair next to a sleek navy-blue Lincoln. The tall, skinny driver was eating slices of mango from a plastic bag and reading a well-thumbed paperback copy of David McCullough’s biography of the Wright brothers. Frost had already read the book himself. Before he could say anything, he had to wait for the thunder of a departing 767 to clear overhead.

  When it was quiet again, Frost said, “Long way from then to now.”

  Jeffrey looked up at him. Unlike his wary colleagues, the young man’s face was curious and open. He was probably no more than twenty years old. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Frost nodded at the jumbo jet vanishing north toward the city. “We’ve come a long way since the Wright brothers.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “‘No bird soars in a calm,’” Frost quoted. “Isn’t that what Wilbur’s wrote?”

  “Yes! You’ve read the book?”

  “I have.”

  “I don’t meet many people with an interest in history,” Jeffrey said. “Me, I can’t get enough of it.”

  “Same here.” Frost extended a hand, and the man took it. “Are you Jeffrey? Do you work for DiMatteo Limousine?”

  Jeffrey finished his last slice of mango and shoved the empty bag in his pocket. “Yeah, that’s right. It pays the bills. I go to SF State in the evenings.”

  “My alma mater,” Frost said. “Are you studying history?”

  A smile creased the young man’s face. “Oh no. My parents wouldn’t like that. College has to be practical. I’m studying business.”

  “My parents told me the same thing,” Frost said. “Not that I listened.”

  Jeffrey grinned. “So what do you do?”

  Frost took out his badge. “Mostly, I ask people questions. Mind if I ask you some?”

  “About what?”

  “A limo charter you drove last Tuesday night,” Frost said.

  Jeffrey looked nervous. “The boss doesn’t like it when I talk about the rides. We’re pretty high end. We get a lot of people who are really concerned about privacy. Celebrities and such.”

  “I understand. The thing is, I’m investigating a murder that might be connected to the people who were in your limo. It would help a lot to know what happened on Tuesday night. I won’t tell your boss.”

  The young man glanced at the cluster of drivers on the other side of the lot. They were still watching the two of them. “There are other DiMatteo guys over there. They’re going to tell my boss that they saw me talking to you. I’ll get in trouble, and I can’t afford that. This job pays my tuition.”

  Frost reached into his pocket and let one of his cards drop to the greasy pavement at his feet. “Tell you what. I’m going to walk away, and I’m going to make sure those other guys see that I look unhappy. Like you didn’t tell me anything. Then I’m going to drive away, but I’d appreciate it if you’d call me after I’m gone. Five minutes. That’s all I need.”

  Jeffrey glanced at the card on the ground near the car door. “Yeah, okay. What the hell. ‘No bird soars in a calm,’ right?”

  “Right.”

  Frost walked away. He made a show of looking frustrated and angry, which prompted an undercurrent of conversation in another language as he passed the drivers near his Suburban. He climbed inside and drove out of the parking lot, and he wondered whether Jeffrey would follow through on his promise. He didn’t have to wait long to find out. He wasn’t even back to the on-ramp at 101 when his phone rang.

  “Inspector?”

  “Thanks, Jeffrey. I’m glad you called.”

  “Well, there isn’t a lot I can tell you about Tuesday, because I don’t know much. Yeah, I had a limo pickup, and the boss told me it was a big deal and everything had to be perfect. No mistakes. I made sure the car was washed, bottled water, champagne, special hors d’oeuvres from some bakery, all the perks.”

  “Who got in the car?” Frost asked.

  “I don’t know, because I never saw them. My instructions were not to get out to open the doors. That’s pretty weird.”

  “Where did you do the pickup?” Frost asked.

  “That was weird, too. It was in a parking garage on Larkin. I went in and waited, and I saw the headlights of another car pulling up. A few people got out and climbed in the back, and after they did, I got a thump on the screen to tell me to go. I don’t know who they were. I’m paid not to be curious. When my boss says to be deaf, dumb, and blind, that’s what I am.”

  “Where did you take them?”

  “The marina. I let them out near one of the expensive yachts down there. Someone was at the dock to escort them onto the boat, but I didn’t look at any of the faces. Plus, it was dark, so I wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway.”

  “Do you have any idea how many people were there?” Frost asked.

  “Maybe three or four. It was a small group. I heard a couple different male voices and at least one woman. But I don’t know how many it was. I was trying not to listen, you know?”

  Frost shook his head in frustration because Jeffrey had told him everything and nothing. If the people in the limo included the mayor and Martin Filko, they’d been careful. No pickup at city hall. No interaction with the driver. Their tracks were covered. He had no way of proving they’d been on the Roughing It at all.

  “Did you see the person who met the limo?” he asked. “The one who took them on board the boat?”

  “It was a woman. That’s all I can say for sure.”

  “Then what?” Frost asked.

  “Then I left. The job was done.”

  “What about the pickup on the other end? Did another driver
meet them when they came back from the cruise?”

  Jeffrey sounded uncomfortable. “Look, Inspector, I really don’t want to get into trouble.”

  “I know that, but this is important. If you know something, I need you to be honest with me.”

  “Except if I tell you, then everybody knows it was me.”

  Frost was on the freeway again, and the traffic went nowhere heading back into the city. “Whatever you say is just between us. I’ll leave your name out of my notes. But I need to know what happened.”

  “Well,” Jeffrey said, drawing out the word. “Here’s the thing. I was supposed to get them on Wednesday morning. The pickup time was eight o’clock. I got there early because I live over in San Ramon, and I didn’t want to take any chances with the traffic. Believe me, if you’re late for a ride, you’re done. It was still dark when I arrived, like six thirty in the morning. I had a long time to wait, but I didn’t care. I figured, coffee, doughnuts, Wright brothers, know what I mean?”

  “Okay.”

  “Except when I arrived at the marina,” Jeffrey continued, “the boat was already there.”

  “What?”

  “The boat was in its slip in the harbor again. They weren’t supposed to get in for another hour and a half, but there they were. For a minute, I panicked. I thought I’d gotten the time wrong, you know? But I hadn’t. They were early.”

  “Did you see anybody getting on or off?” Frost asked.

  “I did, but not passengers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were two black SUVs parked at the dock, and maybe half a dozen guys were on the boat. I could just barely make them out. They looked like a cleaning crew. They were scrubbing everything down. And I saw two guys bring out a couple boxes from the boat and put them in the back of one of the SUVs. Looked like electronic equipment. The whole thing was strange. I mean, these guys looked like serious dudes.”

  “Did you see anything else?” Frost asked.

  “That was all.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I didn’t know what to do. I thought about leaving and coming back at eight o’clock because that’s what the itinerary said. But it looked pretty obvious to me that I wasn’t going to be picking anybody up. They were already gone. So I called my boss, and he said, what the hell was I doing there so early? He told me to stay put and wait for instructions.”