by Mark Coggins
“That’d be spiffy.” I started the car and pointed it down the street. This was going to be a trip of about six blocks. “Who are our hosts?”
“There’s only one. His name is Brad Wilford. He’s just gotten back from an archaeological dig. His house is being refurbished so he’s leased the penthouse suite in an apartment building during the construction. This party is a sort of combination house warming and ‘Hello, I’m back in town’ for him.”
“So he’s an archaeologist? Where was he working?”
Margaret Teller let out another heavy sigh. “Yes, he’s an archaeologist, a mountain climber, an artist, a bicycle racer, a professional student, and a one time fiancé of mine. His family has money, so he’s never actually held a paying job. He just dabbles. I don’t know where the digs were exactly. Somewhere in the Middle East.”
I was stuck behind a pickup truck with lawn equipment and bags of cut grass. As it crept to a stop at the intersection in front of us, I had a sudden desire to jump out of the car and leap on to the back of it. I wasn’t liking the setup for this party at all.
We drove several more blocks in silence until we came to Steiner. Margaret Teller said, “Here we are,” and gestured to the left. On that side of the street was five stories of squat, cream-colored brick building. Two valets in short red jackets stood in front on the walk. Another came up to the car window. “Are you here for the Wilford open house?” he asked.
I nodded, and he told me to pull my car around to the other side of the street. I did so, and the two guys on the sidewalk decanted Margaret Teller out of the Galaxie while I fended for myself. If they thought the car didn’t belong in the neighborhood, they didn’t say anything.
At the front door was another guy in some kind of servant getup. He held open the door for us and gestured to the elevator. Standing there was yet another guy in uniform. He smiled, told us to get off on the top floor. As the doors pulled back at the end of the ride, a sixth person in uniform-this time a middle-aged Latino woman-led us down a short corridor to the only door in the hall. She pulled it open and held it while we walked into the room beyond.
“What,” I said. “No announcement as we enter?”
Whatever response Margaret Teller made to that was lost in the suffocating yammer of thirty or forty people who had already availed themselves of at least two cocktails apiece. We were in a wide open room with a wall of glass at the back-affording an excellent view of the Bay-several pieces of heavy furniture pushed against the sides, and an expensive looking oriental rug that covered all but a thin margin of the hardwood floor. There was nothing special about the people except that they talked a little better, dressed a little better, and rattled a little more jewelry than an equivalent number of the general populace pulled at random off Market Street. I snagged a pair of champagne flutes from a silver tray being circulated by another servant, and returned to Margaret Teller’s side to await developments. They weren’t long in coming.
A gangly, yeasty-looking guy who was balding in back made a show of catching Margaret’s eye from across the room. He arrived next to us with a hang-dog grin and some crumbs from a hors d’oeuvre trailing down the front of his well-pressed cambric shirt. “Margaret,” he said. “I’m so glad that you made it. I’m so sorry about Roland. How are you holding up?” Then, seeming to notice me for the first time, “Oh, pardon me. I’m Brad Wilford.” He put out his hand.
I gave him my name and shook his hand, despite its seeming lack of endoskeleton.
“I’m fine, Brad,” said Margaret Teller. “At least for now. Dr. Hines has taken pity on me and refilled my Valium prescription. I can cope as long as those hold out.”
Wilford reached across to take Margaret’s upper arm and squeezed it. “We’ll have dinner soon and talk.” He gave me a twitchy glance. “Things will work out for the best, believe me. I know they have when I’ve faced hardship. To be honest, I didn’t achieve the success I’d hoped at the site in Syria. But I’ve already found a new lease with my digital photography. You’ll find something too.”
“Yes, Brad,” said Margaret with another sigh.
Wilford glanced at me again. “Well, I must circulate. Please take care of yourself and I will call you soon.” He started to leave. “Oh, and nice to meet you, August.”
After he had gone, I said, “Sorry. I don’t think I’m much help.”
“No, you were a great help,” said Margaret. “Didn’t you see how rattled he was by your presence? He can’t figure out what you’re doing here but is too polite to ask.” She tilted her head back and downed the remainder of her champagne. Tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes. “The idiot. As if taking up something like digital photography could replace a husband.”
“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,” I said, suddenly developing a case of the guilts. “Maybe we should leave. My questions can wait until another time.”
Margaret Teller shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a knuckle. “No, I’ve got to run the gauntlet sooner or later. It’s best to get it over with.”
The “gauntlet,” as she put it, consisted of a string of encounters with eight or nine more people. Three of them were former beaus, including another man to whom she had been engaged. When I questioned her about the high density of ex-boyfriends she explained:
“Wealthy society in San Francisco is very insular. We like to think we’re big town stuff like New York or even LA, but we’re not. We don’t even have the heritage like Boston-we just pretend to. What you end up with is this little group of people throwing parties for each other, writing articles in the Nob Hill Gazette about each other, and sleeping around with each other. We’re more inbred than the Appalachian hillbillies-and a damn sight less honest about it. That was one of the reasons I married Roland. He wasn’t part of this-at least, he wasn’t at the beginning. When I met him he was like a breath of fresh air: a self-made man who worked hard for a living and wanted-I mean really wanted-to raise a family.”
I was eager to get her talking about Teller, but at that point a couple came through the door that made Margaret wince visibly. “This is where you might want to spit on the rug,” she said.
“Who are they?”
“It’s Milton Carroll the Third and the woman he’s currently seeing, Erica Stevens. I went to school with her. He comes from a family of very successful writers, and he tries hard to wear the mantle, but the truth is he’s nothing but a hack. His last effort was a coffee table book about tequila. He’s a horrid, unctuous man. I was once in group therapy with him and he confessed to the group that he was stalking his former girlfriend because she dumped him. He expected, no, he demanded our sympathy for his actions.”
Carroll and Stevens made straight for Margaret as soon as they spotted her. He was a short man of about forty-five years with a fringe of brown hair surrounding an oddly shaped bald head. His features were heavy and plain, and he was wearing a blue blazer with tan slacks. The woman seemed to be about Margaret’s age, but she was working harder to hide it. She had dark hair and dark skin and was wearing a dress that showed a little too much of her meager breasts. She looked about as hard to get as the time of day.
“Margaret,” said Milton Carroll effusively. “I want you to know how wretched I feel about Roland’s death. You must be absolutely devastated. Still, you’ve managed to make it out in public before the funeral-and with an escort no less. What strength you must have. Bully for you, Margaret.”
“The coroner is holding Roland’s body,” Margaret Teller said almost inaudibly. “We can’t have the funeral until it is released.”
“My God, you’ve really been through a lot, haven’t you?” said Erica Stevens, putting her oar in with a vengeance. “First the news that you can’t have children, then the separation, now this. I guess you are just inured to heartache, dear.”
“I’m sure friends like you have done a lot to help,” I said quickly. Stevens got a funny look on her face as she thought that one over. “Say,” I said to
him. “Aren’t you Milton Carroll the Third?”
Carroll grinned and puffed up about three sizes bigger. “Yes, that’s right,” he said.
“Your father was quite the writer,” I said with enthusiasm. “Must be hard to follow in his footsteps. What was it William Faulkner said? ‘Nobody is going to remember William Faulkner’s son,’ or something like that. Still, I just saw a book of yours.”
“Oh?”
“At a garage sale. I had no idea tequila was made from cactus juice. Fascinating stuff.”
Carroll got an expression like he’d eaten some bad kimchi and maneuvered the conversation to a close. He and Erica Stevens walked off. Margaret Teller watched them go with more tears welling at the corners of her eyes, but she said, “You are like a nuclear retaliation. I should have ordered a preemptive first strike.”
“I don’t know. A punch in the mouth would have been more effective-and satisfying. Now, how about we go somewhere quiet where we can talk?”
We wended our way through the social register until we found a small, unoccupied study at the back of the penthouse. I closed the door on the buzz of the cocktail party, and we sat down on a green leather sofa in front of a fire going great guns in a marble-mantled fireplace.
“This is much better,” said Margaret Teller.
“Maybe you won’t feel that way after I start grilling you,” I said.
“No. Anything would be an improvement over what I went through out there.”
“Yeah. I guess so. You mentioned earlier that you were attracted to Roland Teller because he wasn’t part of San Francisco society. How did you meet then?”
“He came to a party for the opening of the opera. A lot of executives from the Silicon Valley make it up for the opening. I mean, few men really like the opera-certainly Roland couldn’t have cared less for it-but the opening is always a big thing. This party is hosted every year by a group of young business professionals. There are always a lot of single people there and it’s a good opportunity to meet someone.”
“Erica Stevens said that you were separated. May I ask why?”
Margaret Teller looked down and pulled at an upholstery button on the sofa. “It’s not what you think,” she said. “It’s not because he was having an affair with another woman. One reason was the strain my inability to have children put on the marriage. We both wanted so very badly to raise a family and I had gotten to the age where getting pregnant was no mean feat. Roland was several years younger than I, you see. But that wasn’t the underlying cause. The underlying cause was those people out there. Those lovely people out there.” She brought her eyes up to mine. “In fact, it’s not overstating it to say that they are responsible for his death.”
“I can’t even see your dust on that one.”
“They warped him. When I met him he was a relatively unsophisticated man who had made good by hard work and perseverance. I was part of this world, true, but he was not. But the more contact he had with it, the more the Pacific Heights crowd let him know in subtle-and not so subtle-ways that he wasn’t quite their caliber of person. He became very sensitive to slights-both real and imagined-at home, in the workplace, or on social occasions. And to change his standing in their eyes, he started doing everything he could to accumulate and flaunt more wealth and social position. I had money from my family and he amassed quite a respectable fortune from his business, but it wasn’t enough. We over-extended ourselves to buy that mansion-it cost well over five million dollars-and he started running his business ruthlessly and without regard for risk, trying to squeeze as much income as he could from it.”
“I think I know where you’re going with this. You’re saying he wouldn’t have made the deal for Bishop’s software if he wasn’t so concerned about the bottom line.”
“Not that he wouldn’t have made the deal. It would have been an eminently reasonable thing to do. But he never would have negotiated with this Terri McCulloch person. He knew there was something wrong about her from the start. In fact, he told me he had broken off negotiations with her at one point.”
“So you spoke about it?” I said.
Margaret Teller nodded and looked into the fire. “Yes, we still spoke regularly even during the separation. He said that he’d had a meeting with her and he came away very skeptical that she had the authority to negotiate for Bishop, even though the software she demonstrated was impressive. Later, he told her that he wasn’t interested.”
“When did he change his mind?”
“I’m not entirely sure. The only hint I had was several weeks later when he told me that he had a big money maker at work, and he hoped that it would redeem him in my eyes.” She stifled a sob and looked up at the ceiling. Now the tears were really flowing. “He still hadn’t gotten it. He still thought I was judging him the way everyone else in Pacific Heights did.”
Watching this was no fun. Everything I’d seen of Teller said he was a horse’s ass, but there must have been something decent in him to evoke this sort of response. Or maybe she was crying for herself. There was a pile of cocktail napkins on the coffee table in front of us. I took one off the stack and handed it to her, and then patted her shoulder awkwardly.
So what if our goofy host, Brad Wilford, chose that exact moment to stick his head in through the study door? There wouldn’t have been a good time. “What kind of shenanigans are going on in here?” he said affably. “Oh-Oh, it’s you, Margaret, please excuse me.”
Margaret Teller stood up quickly, dabbing at her eyes. “No need to apologize Brad. I was just crying on August’s shoulder.” She looked over at me. “But I think perhaps we should go. I’m no good to anyone at this point.”
We said our good-byes to Wilford and went back through the penthouse and down to the street. The party crowd had thinned out, but those who were left had compensated by cranking up the volume of their cocktail chitchat in direct correlation to the number of drinks they’d imbibed. Outside, it was growing dark and a stiff breeze had come up from the Bay. The valet on duty said, “Oh, you had the old Ford, didn’t you?” before I even approached him.
When he brought the car around, I tipped him two bucks and told him that I preferred the term “classic” to “old.” I drove Margaret Teller back to her house, and then got out to walk her to her door. We hadn’t spoken since we left the study, but as we came under the arch at the front entrance, I said:
“Sorry to keep hammering on this. But in terms of actually pulling the trigger, you don’t have any reason to doubt that Terri McCulloch is responsible. I mean, Roland didn’t say anything to you about anyone else who was involved in the deal?”
Her face seemed very pale in the darkness. “No,” she said. “I’m satisfied she killed him. I think Roland decided to buy the software from her, even though he knew it was stolen. I doubt he even pretended to believe her. My guess is he told her right out that he thought he was buying stolen property in order to get the best deal from her. He was just that driven to make money.”
“But how could he expect that Bishop would hold still for it? And if he had bought it from McCulloch with the understanding that it was stolen, why would she later kill him?”
Margaret Teller let out another sigh. A sigh that had the weight of all her suffering behind it. “I’m just guessing, Mr. Riordan-I mean-August. But what could Mr. Bishop do but take Roland to court? It would take years to settle, and by then, Roland would have reaped most of the benefits from being first to market with a unique product-even if he lost the suit in the end and had to compensate Mr. Bishop. As a matter of fact, Roland and Bishop once had a dispute over a similar matter. Bishop claimed that Roland’s company had copied the user interface for one of his games. Roland told me it all came to naught because Bishop’s counsel advised him against bringing any action. The cost and the risk of a judgment in Roland’s favor were just too high.
“As to why Terri McCulloch would kill Roland, many reasons occur to me. She wanted more money. She was angry that Roland had implicate
d her. Perhaps Roland even refused to pay her the sum they had agreed on. I just know one thing for certain. They did not have a lover’s quarrel. Roland had changed, but he would never have had an affair behind my back.”
I took a card from my wallet and handed it to her. I said, “If there’s ever anything you need...” On impulse, I leaned over and kissed her cheek. Her skin beneath my lips felt soft-and very cold.
I turned quickly and walked out of the courtyard. On the drive home I felt oppressed by a vague sadness that even The Happy Horns of Clark Terry could not stave off.
HOME ON THE RANGE
I HIT THE BOURBON HARD WHEN I GOT home, and the next morning I didn’t exactly spring out of bed to do aerobics with the pretty girls wearing spandex on the TV fitness show. However, I did pay careful attention to their routines-particularly the stretches-while sitting on the couch in my boxer shorts eating raw Pop-Tarts. Who knew when I might get religion and take up strenuous exercise? I wanted to be prepared.
I was tearing open a second foil package of Pop-Tarts when the bell from downstairs went off. I got up from the couch and buzzed open the door without thinking too much about it. Then I remembered the consequences of a similar decision just three nights ago, and I went back to the bedroom and got the 9mm out of its shoulder holster where it hung on the bedpost. As I pulled open the apartment door in response to a sharp tap, I leveled the Glock at the belly button of the person in the hallway with a strawberry Pop-Tart clamped in my teeth.
“Don’t shoot,” said Lieutenant Stockwell. “I get killed in San Francisco by a guy in his underwear eating a toaster pastry, Saint Peter’s gonna send me straight to hell. There’s no such thing as mitigating circumstances on a deal like that.”
I lowered the gun and bit off the chunk of Pop-Tart I had between my teeth. I chewed it carefully and swallowed. “Sorry. I thought you were the Girl Scouts. They’ve really stepped up the pressure on the cookie racket lately.”