Murder in San Francisco

by Dianne Harman

  CHAPTER 21

  Liz walked back to her van, opened the door, and said, “Winston, I think it’s time for a walk, and from what I hear, there’s a little park not too far away. You can get some exercise, and I’ll make Roger happy by taking you with me. Ready?”

  Winston clearly understood the word “ready” and jumped down onto the sidewalk while Liz secured his leash to his collar. It wasn’t that she felt it was necessary, but the last thing she wanted to do was get a citation for having a dog off leash.

  She easily found the park and walked through it, avoiding the mothers jogging with baby strollers in front of them while they were talking on their cell phones, the people who were walking their dogs and felt that the leash laws didn’t apply to them and their dogs, as well as the homeless people, some of whom she saw panhandling. While it would never compete with a park in an upscale neighborhood, she had to admit there was some charm to it. The city or someone had planted flowers and litter had been kept to a minimum. She wondered if there was a neighborhood group that had made keeping the park clean their cause, but in a neighborhood as rundown as this one, that would be rare.

  There were several park benches with people sitting on them. Her attention was drawn to a stoop-shouldered, bespectacled elderly man who wore a moth-eaten grey cardigan sweater, even though the day was warm, and was reading a newspaper. He looked a lot like the man in the photograph Sean had sent her.

  Liz stood nearby, talking to Winston, as she tried to decide what would be the best way to approach the man. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, thinking about how he’d been forced out of a lucrative company he’d helped build, and in his twilight years, getting cancer. Just then she noticed a piece of paper on the ground.

  “Excuse me, sir, is this paper yours?” she asked.

  The man looked up from his newspaper and took the paper she handed him. He looked at it and said, “No, actually it looks like a grocery list, and I sure don’t have the kind of money the food on this list would cost. Someone must have dropped it.” He looked over at Winston. “Nice looking dog you’ve got there.”

  “Thanks, that’s the reason I’m here. He came into town with me today, and I thought he might like a walk in the park after the drive in. It’s quite a nice little park. Do you come here often?” she asked.

  “Sure do. I live in a little apartment not far from here that gives me claustrophobia if I stay in it too long, so I’m here most days. Somebody leaves a paper here every day at about lunchtime, and if I time it right, I can pick up the paper and read what’s going on here in San Francisco and everywhere else in the world.”

  “It probably goes well with that cup of coffee you’ve got.”

  “That it does. Can’t afford to buy a cup anymore, so I make one before I come here. Works out just fine. I’ve learned how to adjust over the years,” he said without a trace of rancor. “Here, have a seat. Plenty of room on the bench for one more.”

  Liz accepted his offer and sat down on the bench beside him. “When you say you’ve learned how to adjust, I take it that your circumstances have changed,” she said softly.

  “You can say that again. You might not know it by looking at me now, but once I was the part-owner of a company that later was sold for millions. Course I wasn’t an owner when it was sold.”

  “That sounds like a sad story,” Liz said.

  “Probably depends on who you’re talking to. From my point of view, it’s a very sad story. I made a mistake and it cost me my job, my wife, my home and put me where I am now. Plus, now I’ve got the big C. I’m not sure how it could get any sadder.” He laughed bitterly. “Maybe I should sell my life story to some big movie studio, and they’d get all the money from it, just like my former partner did, and I’d come out with almost nothing. Maybe that’s just the way my life is.”

  “My name’s Liz Langley, sir, and you’ve aroused my curiosity. What was your mistake, if I might ask?”

  He put his hand out and shook hers. “Name’s Jim Brown. I was a co-founder of a company that made a specialized part for a scientific product, it’s pretty technical and unimportant, but I developed it, and I know it sounds stupid, but I never got around to getting a patent for it. If I had, I can tell you my life would be a lot different than it is now.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “My partner found out we were selling the product with no patent protection. He went ballistic, and decided to get the patent in his own name. When he told me he’d done that, I didn’t have any proof that I was the one who had actually come up with the design for the product. When he offered me money to sign the company over to him, or he’d simply view me as an employee, and pay me accordingly, I really didn’t have a choice. In his eyes, I was no longer his partner, and I sure didn’t have anything that would lead a judge to believe I was entitled to half the company’s assets.”

  “What did you do?” Liz asked, although she already knew the answer.

  “I did the only thing I thought I could do, and in retrospect, I still think it was the right decision. I took the money and ran. Unfortunately, my wife didn’t see it that way. She called me stupid when she walked out of the door for the last time. Maybe she was right.”

  “How so?”

  “I lost the money Bernie Spitzer had paid me for the company in a poker game. I wound up with almost no money, and I couldn’t make my house payments. We’d bought a nice home in Lafayette, but that went, along with everything else. By then the word on the street was that I’d really screwed up, so no one in the industry would hire me. I was a little too old to get a job slinging fast food, so I survived until I got on Social Security, and here I am.”

  “That is sad, Mr. Brown. I imagine you must really resent Bernie Spitzer.”

  “Liz, if I might call you that, the answer to that question used to be an automatic yes, but lately I’ve kind of changed. You see, in addition to everything else, like I said, I have cancer, and from what the doctors tell me, it’s incurable. That’s definitely shaped my thinking. I wonder if I got it because I spent so much of my life hating someone. Maybe hatred and cancer are the same thing. They eat at you from inside.” Jim’s eyes were almost lifeless, like the lights had already gone out.

  “That’s quite an interesting thought.” Liz looked at the children playing on the grass, thinking how soul-destroying it must be to wake up one day with not much time left, regretting how you’d spent your life.

  “Yeah, I’m getting to be a real philosopher in my old age,” Jim said, rolling his eyes. “I saw in the paper a few months ago where Bernie had died. They said it was because of old age, and it may have been. I used to spend a lot of time and energy thinking how great it would be if he died. Matter of fact, even ran a couple of scenarios through my mind about how I might help make that happen, but after I was diagnosed, those thoughts went away.” He pulled his thin sweater tighter around his frail frame.

  “I need every ounce of strength and positive thinking that I have left, not negative thinking, to see if I can at least bring this monster that’s in me to remission, even if I can’t make it go away. So, compared to what I would have thought about his death years and even months ago, all I felt when I saw the article was a profound sadness at wasting my life with so much hatred eating away at me. Believe me, I wish I could get back all that strength and energy I wasted for so many years.”

  Liz leaned closer to him and patted his arm. He didn’t pull away, and they sat like that for a while. “Thanks for talking to me, Jim. I’m so sorry. Is there anything I, as a stranger, can do?”

  “Yeah, you can let me pet that dog, if he’ll let me. Had one that didn’t look too different from him years ago, but even if the place I live allowed dogs, I couldn’t afford to feed the thing.”

  “Winston, it’s okay,” Liz said as Jim reached his hand down to let Winston sniff him. After a moment Liz and Jim were quiet while he petted Winston who stepped closer and rested his head on Jim’s leg. Liz took a de
ep breath, willing the tears that threatened to gather in her eyes, to stay in place until she could get back to her van.

  CHAPTER 22

  After her meeting with Jim Brown, Liz and Winston walked back to her van, but she couldn’t shake the sad feeling she had about the way Jim’s life had turned out. She kept thinking how different it would have been if he’d just filed the necessary paperwork for the patent. That was certainly the start of his downhill spiral that wound up leaving him with nothing. She had just adjusted her seat belt when her phone rang. It was Roger.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said. “How’s your day coming along, and where are you?”

  “I’m in San Francisco, and I wish I could tell you that my day was just terrific, but I’d be lying. I just met with Jim Brown, and after listening to his sad story, there’s no way he should be on the suspect list if it’s determined that Bernie was murdered.”

  “I wish I could tell you that your day was going to get better, but I don’t think I can. I want to hear all about your meeting with Jim, but I have a little emergency on my hands, and one you should be aware of before you blindly go off and talk to people.”

  “What are you talking about, Roger? What’s happened?”

  “I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat this, so here goes. I just got a call from Walter, and his source at the police department, Mitch Latham, called him and told him that Bernie’s two children were able to get an emergency court order to have Bernie’s body exhumed. There is a provision in the law that if a judge signs an authorization order, an autopsy can be conducted almost immediately, and that’s exactly what happened. Unfortunately, Bernie did not die of natural causes. The autopsy clearly showed that he was poisoned. Naturally, that puts Michelle in a very bad light, and in some ways, puts his children in a good light.”

  “Oh no!”

  “If it goes to trial, and keep in mind I have to think of all the things that could happen, the prosecuting attorney will probably make a big deal about the fact that it was his children who asked for the body to be exhumed and an autopsy conducted. I’m not saying one of them or both of them aren’t involved in Bernie’s murder, but since they were the ones who asked for the autopsy, it would be a hard thing to refute. Plus, I have to think a jury or a judge would automatically think they wouldn’t ask for an autopsy if they were guilty. A lot of jurors would never make the leap that maybe they did that in order to take the spotlight away from themselves, but I’ll deal with that if and when I have to. Anyway, Walter has requested a meeting this afternoon with Michelle and me. Since you’re in town, you might want to be there.”

  “I very much would, and I can tell all of you about Jim Brown then. What time?”

  “Five in Walter’s office. Liz, I know you told me you’d carry your gun and keep Winston with you, but since we’re now dealing with a murder case, I want to make sure you’re doing that.”

  Liz looked over her shoulder to where an alert Winston was panting in her ear. “Winston’s sitting in the back seat of my van as we speak. As a matter of fact, I even took him to the park when I talked to Jim Brown, and I have my gun in my purse. That should make you happy,” Liz said.

  “I’m not sure anyone else would understand why those two things make me happy, but let’s say they do help to relieve my stress levels.”

  “Roger, have you talked to Michelle about this?”

  “No. Walter had already talked to her when he called me, and he said she was quite shaken by the news.”

  “I don’t blame her. Do you think I should call her or just wait until the meeting this afternoon?”

  “Why don’t you wait? She told Walter she was going to call her doctor and see if there was something she could take for her anxiety. She told him she doesn’t want to take anything that might hurt the babies.”

  “That’s something I know nothing about. Poor thing. Being pregnant with twins is enough of a stress without being a possible suspect in a murder case.”

  “I know. Liz, I’m sorry, but I need to spend the rest of the afternoon preparing a defense, or at least get my ducks in a row in case I have to. I’ll see you at the meeting this afternoon. Loves.”

  Liz spent several minutes trying to decide what to do next. Now that Bernie’s death was definitely confirmed as a murder, she knew that Michelle would probably be a prime suspect. In order to try and remove Michelle from the list of suspects, she decided to see what she could find out from Bernie’s children. She checked the email she’d printed out from Sean, and realized she wasn’t too far from where Bernie’s son, Larry lived. She started her van and drove the short distance to where his apartment building was located.

  When she arrived at the address Sean had sent, she felt like she was having a déjà vu experience. The apartment building where Larry lived looked like a clone of the one where Jim Brown lived. About the only difference between the two was that Larry’s was a little larger. Like Jim’s, weeds had grown up in the cracks in the cement walk and paint was flaking off of the front doors of the building.

  She’d just pulled into a parking place a few doors down from the building when she saw the front door to the building open and a man stepped out. Liz quickly picked up the picture Sean had sent her. There was no doubt in her mind that the man walking down the steps was none other than Bernie’s son, Larry Spitzer.

  She debated whether to try and gain access to his apartment while he was gone in the hopes that she might find something useful or follow him. She decided it would be a lot safer for her if she observed him from a distance while other people were around rather than possibly getting caught in his apartment. She didn’t know how she would be able to find a way into his apartment anyway, so following and watching him was her only viable option.

  As she looked around, she decided she’d made the right decision. Several of the people walking down the sidewalk did not look like the type of people who would visit her spa or ones she’d meet at one of Roger’s law office parties. They mostly looked like down-and-out individuals with a rough hardscrabble look about them.

  Glad that she’d chosen to wear nondescript jeans and an old denim blouse, she took her watch and wedding ring off and put them in the glove compartment. When she and Winston stepped out of her van, she manually pushed the door lock rather than using the lock on her fob, not wanting the sound to draw attention to her.

  She spotted Larry farther down the sidewalk and followed him for about two blocks. She watched as he walked into a neighborhood bar with a sign that said “Captain Kidd’s” along with a large picture of a pirate displayed on it. As she walked by, she saw that the bar had an outdoor side patio. A moment later she noticed that Larry had taken a seat at a table on the patio. It was the type of bar that catered to the neighborhood locals, and she overheard several people call him Larry, which confirmed she was right in thinking the man in question was Larry Spitzer.

  Liz turned around, walked in the front door, and over to the bar. “Excuse me,” she said to the bartender, “I’m wondering if it would be all right if I take my dog to the patio area. I was walking by and thought a cold beer would taste good. Is that allowed?”

  “For you, little lady, sure,” he said winking, as the bar area became quiet with the arrival of a new attractive woman. “Matter of fact, a lot of folks bring their dogs here when they have an itch for a beer. It’s right through that door. Course, from the looks of your dog, don’t think anyone else will be taking their dog back there when they see that big brute.”

  She and Winston walked through the door and out to the small patio which had several tables with umbrellas over them, each bearing the name of a different brand of beer. She took a seat at an unoccupied table next to where Larry was sitting and noticed he was drinking a beer the barmaid had already brought him.

  Hmmm, Liz thought, he must be a regular if he already has his beer. The barmaid must have gotten it as soon as he walked in.

  The barmaid walked over to Liz and said, “What can I get
ya’, honey?”

  Liz looked up at the woman who was about her age and the immediate saying of “rode hard and put away wet” came to mind. The skintight top, short black mini, and black band around her bleached blond hair with a feather sticking out of it, couldn’t hide the fact that the years had not been kind to her. Her face was a roadmap of lines and even the black fishnet tights couldn’t disguise the varicose veins which Liz thought must be causing her pain with all the standing and walking she must have to do in her job.

  She looked over at where Larry was sitting and said, “Excuse me, sir. I haven’t been here before. Can you recommend a good beer?”

  “Sure, try the Anchor Steam Beer. That’s what I always get. It’s made in San Francisco, so I feel like I’m helping to support the local economy, right, Stella?” he said to the barmaid as they both laughed.

  “I’ll have one of those,” Liz said. The barmaid left and a moment later Liz said, “There are so many beers on the market today, I get really confused. Thanks for helping me out.”

  “Not a problem. It’s a lot easier when you just stick with one brand, leastways, that’s what I do. Thing is, I only have a couple more months that I’ll be drinking beer, because after that I’ll be drinking the best champagne money can buy.”

  “Well, aren’t you lucky? Have a big payday coming up?”

  “You could say that. Got a lot of money coming my way. You ever hear of a man named Bernie Spitzer?” he asked.

  Liz was quiet for a few minutes as if she was deep in thought. Just then the barmaid said, “Here ya’ go. That’ll be $4.50. It’s happy hour time, so ya’ got off light.”

  Larry interrupted. “Stella, put it on my tab. I’ll take care of it.” He moved over to the table where Liz was and sat down. She sensed that Winston wasn’t thrilled with the idea and reached down to pet him and reassure him that it was all right.