“Then why don’t you tell us too,” Rosie said. “We could ask Clement. We’d rather hear it from you.”
“Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? I thought you were here to find out about that business over at the bank. Why all this shit about Gracie?” I was startled to see a couple of big tears spill over his lower lids. He wiped them away.
“Wolf,” Henry said, “maybe they think there’s a connection. Because you used to go with Nora.”
Wolf stared at us, dumbfounded. “That was years ago for Christ’s sake.” I shrugged. He turned to Henry. “You think these people have any right to be going around asking questions about me?”
Henry shook his head. “No, I don’t. But it might be a good idea to do what you can to get them off your tail, you dumb shit.”
Wolf’s shoulders slumped. He pushed his plate into the center of the table, nearly tipping over my coffee. “Ask Clement,” he said. “He’s probably already checked it out. I was over visiting Hackman. Having a sandwich and a beer with Howard. Gracie was eating with her cousin, so Howard said come on over for a bite. His wife was working the dinner shift, and his kids were getting dinner at the restaurant.”
We finished our breakfasts fast. Mine, I thought, was going to sit like lead in the pit of my stomach. We went to see Clement.
“We hear Wolf’s got an alibi for Friday night,” I said.
He nodded. “News does get around, doesn’t it? I was just talking to Hackman. Wolf was with him, he says. No reason to think he’s lying.”
I told him we’d been at the Hackman place the night before. That Mrs. Hackman had accused Wolf and Hackman, although he’d disagreed, hadn’t said anything about being with Wolf that evening.
Clement laughed. “Hackman didn’t know when any of it happened. Didn’t know the hour. Didn’t make a connection until I questioned him.”
“Doesn’t that seem strange?” Rosie asked.
“Not really. The man drinks. He doesn’t keep track of things too good anymore.”
I sat down on the hard bench under the window. I was unconvinced. “Then maybe he got his nights mixed up too?”
“I don’t think so. Vonnie— that’s his wife— she only works the dinner hour on Fridays. He can probably keep that straight enough. If he doesn’t go over to the restaurant with the kids, he fends for himself. So unless he’s lying, Wolf’s probably clear.”
There was also crime number three to consider— the truck sabotage. “What about Saturday?” I persisted. “Do we know Wolf was at the bar all afternoon? Maybe he was on the coast road and decided to give us a free brake job.”
“Those are his hours. We can check on it.”
“And what about Frank Wooster?” Rosie wanted to know. “Was the garage open all afternoon? Was he there?”
“He was there when I called for the wrecker. In fact, he was working on Henry’s car, and I had to drag him away.”
That didn’t tell us much. The mechanic could have done the work on the truck and cut back to town in plenty of time to answer the garage phone.
As much as I wanted the truck-wrecker, though, it seemed pretty clear that for the moment the way to that crime was through the first two— the burglary and the murder.
– 22 –
We made a return visit to the bank.
The personnel director told us she’d spent hours the night before looking through the files, and she was sorry, but she hadn’t been able to come up with any former or current employees who were obviously unhappy. No one had left, she said, “under a black cloud.” No one had ever complained that the raise and promotion system was unfair.
“But I do have a theory,” she said brightly. We were desperate enough to listen. “What if it was Gracie? She seemed kind of upset around here the last few days before she fell. And she looked through the profiles that time and never said anything about it again. Maybe she had some problem? And went off the deep end? And broke in here and took everything and then killed herself?”
“An interesting idea,” Rosie commented generously. “Incidentally, when was it exactly that she looked at the donor profiles?”
“Oh, just a couple of weeks ago.”
Against the woman’s will, we kept her for nearly another hour, questioning and questioning again her assertion that no one in the history of the bank had ever been unhappy, trying to learn more about Gracie. The time was wasted.
According to her, everything was for the best in this best of all possible cryobanks.
We went to find Nora. She kept us waiting for half an hour before she agreed to let us take her away for lunch. We convinced her to take enough time to drive up to Rosewood with us, because I, for one, was getting tired of having my meals spoiled by indignant citizens.
She recommended an Italian place that she said was pretty good, which was not much of a recommendation. I was even less impressed when I saw that Fredda’s all-natural cookies were listed with the desserts. We settled down with our plates of pasta. They turned out to be, after all, pretty good.
Nora agreed with her personnel director. No unhappy employees or ex-employees.
“Not in the whole history of the bank?” Rosie asked.
“And no really unhappy clients either?” I added.
Not that she knew of.
“How long has the bank been in existence?”
“Six years.” So much for Joanne. She was twelve. If she was Lou Overman’s child, it was by the usual method, which pretty much took care of the possibility that Fredda had a birth-defects grudge against the bank.
“There’s something I’ve been wondering about,” I said, changing the subject. “The sperm that was stolen was worth a lot of money, right?” She nodded. “And you can’t be sure that all of it was dumped, right?” She nodded again. “What about this then— say someone dumped only some of it and stole the rest to sell? Would there be a market?”
Nora cut a ravioli in half, stuck in her fork, moved it back and forth in the sauce for a while. “That seems pretty unlikely, all in all. First, why wouldn’t a thief steal all of it?” She ate the ravioli. “Second, I think it would be pretty hard to sell black market sperm without the facilities to back it up. People would be afraid of it. And it’s not like the established banks are that difficult to use. And none of the files were stolen. How could anyone sell it without being able to give the client donor profiles to select from?”
“You could make up your own files,” Rosie said.
“And who says the thief doesn’t have a bank to sell out of?” I added.
“I’m afraid that’s all pretty unlikely,” Nora said. “The sperm was worth a great deal to us, but there would be no reason for another bank to steal it. It’s not expensive or particularly hard to get. An interesting line of reasoning, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
So that answered a couple of questions from our lists of the night before.
“About those donor files, Nora,” I said, “we’re going to have to go through them. This afternoon would be good.” She started to object. “We have to. We can’t help you otherwise.” She shook her head, but it was in resignation. “Could you run down the system for us?”
She sipped her wine. “I’m beginning to be sorry I hired you. The vandalism was a big blow. Violation of confidentiality on top of that could ruin us.”
I commiserated. “I know how important that is, ethically, but at least two crimes and possibly a murder are involved here. On balance—”
“On balance,” she snapped, “the point is not ethics. The point is loss of a business. My business. Ethics are a luxury. So is the social value of the bank. You buy them with money. Without money you can’t have them or anything else.”
Very eighties, I thought, but who was I to quibble? I was getting paid too.
“Okay,” I shot back. “Since we’re still working for you, how about cutting the crap and filling us in?”
She studied me for a moment, sipped more wine, looked at Ros
ie, who was not looking at her, nodded, and began. “You know the files are organized by number. Each container is numbered. A complete file includes all our information on the donor. Name, address, medical information, the agreement he signs giving up paternal rights. That kind of thing. It also includes a copy of the anonymous profile, which is the only part the prospective recipient sees. And of course there are different sets of numbers, depending on the category the donor falls into. Whether the sperm is being held for private use or is available.”
“Say you were looking in the file,” Rosie said. “How would you be able to tell which set of numbers was which?”
“They’re organized by availability. The available ones are in their own drawers, labeled that way. The others are labeled by designated purpose. Under each of those headings is a set of numbered files. In each file is the information about the donor. You understand that only the available ones include the anonymous profile. Numbered. That’s very important.”
“The number is important?” Rosie asked.
“Well, yes. It identifies the donor in the future.”
“You mean in case a recipient wants to use him again?”
“That, certainly, but also for the children.”
“The children?” I didn’t understand.
“Yes. The children. They get their father’s numbers.”
“I still don’t get it. Why?”
“I would think that would be obvious.” Nora was annoyed. “To avoid marriage to a sibling.”
Ah-hah, I thought. That also explained, at least in part, why each donor was limited to ten live births. Twenty years or so down the road, it could be a real pain to keep falling in love with kin. A scenario rolled through my head: “I love you. What is your father’s number? Oh, no, not again …”
“Were all the files broken into?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell me this. Your personnel director says Gracie seemed upset the last few days before her death. Do you remember anything like that?”
A hard question for Nora. A several-ravioli question. “She did seem distracted.”
“Do you have any idea whether the distraction might have started around the time of the break-in?”
“I think perhaps it did. She was upset by the crime. But then, we all were.”
“Did she seem unusually upset?”
She sighed. “Possibly. It’s hard for me to say. I’m afraid I’m not as observant as I should be. It does seem that she was more upset. I remember someone mentioned to me that she’d been talking to Gracie about some work or something and Gracie never heard a word the woman said.”
“Nora.” I finished off a meatball. “Would anyone just off the street, so to speak, have known where to go to find those files and the tanks?”
“No, of course not. We didn’t take clients in there. We had a separate file of profiles and we brought the profiles to them in another room. I suppose someone who had visited to see the profiles could, conceivably, have some idea. Somehow.”
“But mostly it would be employees who would know exactly where to go?”
“Anyone familiar with the bank would know, but yes, that would be pretty much limited to employees.”
“And possibly to nosy prospective clients?”
“Possibly.”
“Then how would a couple of kids or a religious fanatic know where to go? Whoever broke in broke into the right room.”
“They would know,” she said, “if they could get an employee to tell them where to look.”
“A good, order-following employee like Gracie?”
“I said she was a good employee. I never said she had a mind of her own.”
Rosie eyed Nora coolly. “Even so,” she said, her voice matching her look, “any employee could have told anyone.”
Nora shrugged. I switched to something else that had been on my mind and asked her about Lou and Joanne.
“There has been some speculation, apparently,” she said. “I wasn’t in town when Joanne was born, but I have heard that Lou is probably the father.”
“She looks like him,” Rosie said.
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess she might, a little.” Nora finished her ravioli. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But we’re trying to get at this burglary, and I keep thinking it’s odd that he heard and saw nothing that night. The burglars were around for a while. They broke the window. They must have had a flashlight. They messed around in the files and they moved the contents of your tanks through the window. They must have made some noise at some point. It would be handy if he had something to do with it.”
“I still don’t know what his being Joanne’s father would have to do with the burglary.” Nora was clearly impatient with this line of speculation.
“I don’t either. But what I really want to find out is whether the files were rifled for fun or for information. Is Lou a donor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there some way to find out if he was ever rejected as a donor?”
“Yes. There’s a file.”
I was not looking forward to going back to the bank and spending the rest of the day looking through the donor files when I wasn’t sure they would tell us anything. But that seemed to be a logical, if tedious, next step.
We drove back to Wheeler. Nora, with what looked like relief, returned to her office. On our way to the file room, I glanced at Rosie, who had been quiet in the car. “You’re not exactly wild about Nora, are you?” She laughed.
“Oh, I don’t really dislike her.”
“She confuses me,” I admitted. “One minute she’s knifing a dead woman with her version of straight talk, and the next minute she’s being polite about someone who doesn’t admit he’s got a kid.”
“I don’t think manners or morals come into it at all,” Rosie said. “When she knows something— or thinks she does— she says what she knows. When she’s unsure, she’s uncomfortable, she gets bored. I think that’s all there is.”
“Oh, come on. You’re saying this successful businesswoman is about as complicated as Alice.”
“You’re complicated, Jake. That’s why she confuses you.”
The woman in charge of the files confirmed what Nora had said. They were intact, nothing was missing. How did she know for sure? She knew, she said, because she had cross-index lists, whatever those were.
We made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the file room, and began a long afternoon of reading.
It was mildly interesting. A lot of different kinds of men with different backgrounds, talents, and occupations. We went through the availables first. Students made up the biggest group, as we’d been told, but there were laborers, businessmen, and professionals too. The profiles were an odd combination of personal information and cold description. Whoever wrote them could have been a botanist describing an intelligent tree. There was this one, for example:
Donor No. 340
Summary: Good intellectual and verbal ability, better than average looks, some musical talent.
Ancestry: Central European.
Occupation: Law student.
Born: 1960s. Eye color: Blue.
Skin color: Fair.
Hair: Brown, curly, full.
Height: 1.8m(6'0")
Weight at 22 years: 77 kg. (170 lb.)
General appearance: Normal, average build, full face.
Personality: Strong presence, assertive, humorous, friendly.
Interests: Include reading, softball, bicycling, music.
Achievements: Law school scholarship, published in law review, first trumpet in college orchestra.
I.Q.: 150.
Art, creativity: Music mentioned above.
Athletics: High school baseball, no major achievements.
Manual dexterity: Good.
General health: Excellent.
Defects: Two grandparents developed duodenal ulcers, one in his forties, one in her fif
ties.
Blood type: O pos. Pressure: 120/75
Comment: Recurrence risk for ulcers estimated at 22 percent after age fifty.
What a guy. I hoped he wouldn’t give up his trumpet when he was a successful, ulcer-ridden, aggressive lawyer.
I read through number 340’s legal agreement with the bank, where he said he wouldn’t come back whining for his paternal rights later on. I glanced at his medical records and various reports on his sperm. His surname sounded German. He had accepted what appeared to be the usual student payment for his donation— twenty-five dollars.
From the availables we moved on to men whose reasons for being donors were part of their files, the guys in categories: the ones who were impregnating surrogates, the ones who had made arrangements with friends, the ones with medical reasons, and a very few who, for odds and ends of reasons, were saving it for posterity. Among the last was Marty Spiegel, donor number 126. If I’d felt like I was looking through keyholes before with the files of strangers, reading the file of an almost-friend, without his knowledge or consent, made me feel like one of those P.I.’s who takes pictures of unfaithful spouses. Sleazy. In his file, I discovered, was an agreement that should he die before his relationship with the bank had ended, his sperm would be turned over to the management of the executor of his estate, an attorney in L.A., who would then, I guessed, be charged with the responsibility of finding a suitable mother for his child. Or would he be directed to sprinkle it over the sea with Spiegel’s ashes?
When we finished with the donors, we searched the lists of recipients. At the end of our reading we had come up with nothing much. None of the men we were thinking of as suspects, with the exception of Spiegel, was a donor. None of the women who were possibles was listed among the recipients.
Lou Overman was not a donor, past, present, or even rejected.
We stepped back out onto Main Street with our eyes and our tempers somewhat the worse for wear. I noticed a newspaper vending machine outside the drugstore full of hot-off-the-press Wheeler Weeklys, and bought one. I wondered whether the paper would have anything interesting to say about the excitement around town lately.
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 14