Till The Old Men Die

by Janet Dawson

  Praise for Janet Dawson

  “In recent years women private eyes have become big business, as anyone who’s been following the fortunes of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky can attest. Thanks to their success, the way has been opened for many other women to write mysteries uniquely their own. A fine example is Janet Dawson.”

  The Denver Post

  ‘‘Dawson keeps suspense and interest at high pitch.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Janet Dawson’s new kid on the block, Jeri Howard, another Californian, is a kindred spirit of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op character.”

  USA Weekend

  “A welcome addition to this tough genre.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  Also by Janet Dawson

  KINDRED CRIMES

  TILL THE

  OLD MEN

  DIE

  Janet Dawson

  Copyright © 1993 by Janet Dawson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criticial articles or reviews.

  Cover design by Sue Trowbridge, interbridge.com

  ISBN 978-0-9834031-1-1(ePub)

  ISBN 0-449-221334

  First Edition: April 1993

  For Clarissa

  Acknowledgments

  Salamat po to Leonora Ballar and Benito Aquino for fiesta invitations and translations. I also wish to thank Special Agent Mike Smirnoff, Immigration and Naturalization Service; Lt. Mike Sims, Homicide Section, Oakland Police Department; Lynne Houghton, private investigator, for legwork lessons; Fran Boyle, for her help; and Susan Dunlap, Susan Lowe, Michael Mabes, Fred Isaac, and Bonnie Isaac for readthroughs and suggestions. And many thanks to my agent, Charlotte Sheedy, for her support.

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  About the Author

  Prologue

  RAIN BLEW INTO HIS FACE AS THE MAN WALKED through the double glass doors of the building, leaving the warm light of the corridor for the wet darkness of the sidewalk. The rain had been a fine mist when he entered this building more than an hour ago. Now drops fell steadily as the wind buffeted him. He shivered and paused long enough to button the tan raincoat around his short, wiry body, tying the belt at the waist. As he started walking again, he turned up the coat’s collar, wishing he’d brought a hat or an umbrella.

  Behind him the double doors opened again. Footsteps joined him on the wet pavement as he neared the busy downtown intersection, but he didn’t hear them. Their sound was drowned out by the other sounds that punctuated the night, growl of cars and buzz of people, bells and whistles and shouts, distant sirens, and above all the moan and patter of wind and rain.

  He walked quickly toward the parking garage where he’d left his car, past glittering store windows and neon signs blurred by the rain, sharing the sidewalk with shoppers and derelicts and people out on the town, sampling the many sorrows and pleasures the city had to offer. By the time he reached the garage, his thick black hair, threaded with silver, was also beaded with rain. Under the concrete shelter he shook his head once or twice and the droplets flew.

  One set of doors was just closing as he reached the bank of three elevators, so he waited for another elevator to descend, alone at first, then joined by a young man who kept playing with the zipper of his shiny blue cotton jacket. The two remaining elevators reached street level at the same time. The man in the tan raincoat stepped into the car on the right. The man in the blue jacket joined him, hands moving to the control panel. “What floor you goin’ to?” he asked.

  “Seven.”

  “Lucky seven it is,” the younger man said, punching the button. “Same as me.” As the elevator door closed, he stared out at the third figure, a dark-haired man who had just stepped into view, head bowed, hands stuck deep into the pockets of his black topcoat.

  As the elevator rose, the younger man played again with the front of his jacket, running the zipper up and down. The older man ignored him, staring fixedly at the vertical line where the elevator doors came together. On seven, the older man stepped from the elevator into the wide, dimly lit arena full of vehicles. His was in the far corner. He walked toward it, his footsteps echoing on the concrete floor. He stepped between two parked cars, unfastening his tan raincoat, reaching for the car keys in the pocket of his gray slacks. Behind him he heard a soft bing as another elevator door opened on this floor.

  He paused in the space where the snouts of two cars met, the key ring in his hand now, sorting the keys by touch, familiar with their shapes. Suddenly a hand seized his arm, spinning him around, slamming him back against the hood of a parked car, then yanking him upright. He dropped his car keys and drew in a shocked lungful of air as he saw two faces, one contorted, one cold.

  One mouth sneered above a black topcoat, spat out a few words, and moved toward him. Then the black topcoat slipped behind him and two hands seized him, pinning his arms to his sides. In front of him the shiny metal teeth of a zipper opened and closed and opened again, while above them another mouth grinned like a death’s head. The hands at the end of the two blue sleeves left the zipper tongue and invaded his clothing, picking and plucking at his tan raincoat and the tweed jacket he wore beneath it. The hands drew out his wallet, a pen, a handkerchief, and a forgotten grocery list.

  He struggled and opened his mouth to scream, but the hand that held his wallet flew at his face, smacking him hard across his mouth and nose. He tasted blood as the other mouth moved against his hair and the other set of hands pulled his arms farther back.

  In front of him one hand shoved the wallet into one pocket of the blue jacket and invaded his clothing again, this time pulling out a long brown plastic rectangle. The younger man held it up with a sharp hiss. The man in the black topcoat released the pinioned arms, seized the unexpected object, and fumbled with it. As he forced it open, two cylinders fell into his hands and he tossed them away. One tumbled under a parked car, while the other rolled just beyond the fallen key ring.

  “Where is it?” one mouth snarled above the black topcoat. He struck the other man again and again. A streak of blood from his victim’s streaming nose stained one white cuff at the end of one black sleeve. “Where is it?” His demand gained no response. He seized the older man’s arms again and barked an order. His blue-jacketed companion stopped playing with his zipper and drew something from his pocket, something that seemed alive, glittering as it moved, like a snake about to strike.

  Pain knifed into the older man once, twice, three times, pain burning-hot and liquid, like the blood that spurted, then seeped, slowly soaking his tweed jacket and tan raincoat. The second pair of hands released him, and he slumped to his knees in front of the parked car. He reached for the grille and tried to rise to his feet, but he couldn’t get his body to obey. He fell forward, embracing the cold concrete floor, his nose filled with the stink of gas and oil and some new odor that mu
st be his own blood.

  Above him the two mouths conferred in urgent whispers, while four hands turned him onto his back and searched his clothes again. The blue jacket seemed to float high above him, while the black topcoat loomed at his side. Everything around him seemed fuzzy, but with a brief flash of clarity he saw the crimson smear on the white cuff.

  Their voices sounded far away, as did their footsteps when they finally left him. He smiled up at the burned-out light fixture and managed to roll over onto his side, eyes blurring as he looked at tires and the undersides of cars. He saw his keys lying nearby, and one of the silver and black cylinders, but he couldn’t quite reach them. He was so cold he felt numb. And tired. So tired that all he wanted was sleep.

  “I keep seeing it,” my father said after the first nightmare. “Imagining how it must have happened.”

  “Try not to think about it,” I told him. A totally inadequate response, but what else can one say?

  My father sat up in bed, illuminated by a pool of light from the lamp on his nightstand, and ran a hand through his thinning hair. He had a haunted, troubled look in his eyes, an expression I’d never seen before. I would have done anything to take it away. Unfortunately I couldn’t remove the source of the look, that incident that my father referred to as “it.”

  Later I could guess how it must have happened, because I’d read the police report and talked to the investigating officer. And my father kept seeing it in the dreams that interrupted his sleep and seeped into his waking hours, drawing lines on his face and smudging shadows under his eyes. After the funeral he tried not to think about it, with the assistance of warm milk or sleeping pills. Soon he didn’t have nightmares anymore.

  Or if he did, he didn’t tell me.

  One

  THE WOMAN WITH THE SCAR ON HER CHIN HAD costumed herself for the role of a widow. Her wardrobe included a black silk dress, stylish and expensive, accented by a circular gold brooch and a chic little hat with a veil, anchored to her smooth black chignon by a wicked-looking hatpin. A wide gold band adorned the third finger of her left hand. The manicured fingers of her right hand clutched a single sheet of paper.

  Unfortunately for her, she had failed the audition. That’s why her brown eyes glared beneath the plucked brows and jade eye shadow, and her full lips, sleek with coral lipstick, twisted with anger. That’s why, on this warm Monday morning in May, she stood in the middle of the History Department office of California State University at Hayward, swearing at my father and Dr. Isabel Kovaleski in a mixture of Tagalog and English. I don’t understand Tagalog, but the venom behind the words was unmistakable. As for the English, I hadn’t heard language that colorful since the last time I visited the Alameda County Jail.

  The woman’s tirade cut through class-break chatter and caused heads to turn in the corridor, where I stood next to the bulletin board. Professors in nearby offices appeared in their doorways, looking for the source of the racket. I fingered a notice about spring-quarter finals and watched the drama in the office, mentally taking notes.

  She was Filipina, her English good but accented, her voice throaty, almost guttural. Height five three, I guessed, weight about one ten, and I put her age as mid- to late thirties. I had noticed the scar right away, a thread of white along her left jawline, perhaps three or four inches long. It could have been caused by any number of things, but my first thought was that someone had struck her. Otherwise she looked prosperous and well kept, with a certain hard-eyed, calculating edge, and a high-handed attitude that told me she was used to getting her own way. Maybe that’s why she was now angry enough to swear at the people she was trying to convince. She’d gone to a lot of trouble, but no one was buying her act.

  She had been waving that sheet of paper under Dr. Kovaleski’s nose. Now she shoved it into her black leather clutch purse, whirled, and marched out of the office, pushing past me without a glance. Her high heels staccatoed the linoleum as she headed for the stairwell. I followed her.

  Outside Meiklejohn Hall, she plowed a path through crowds of students like a battleship at full steam, moving up the hillside steps toward the campus bookstore. Before reaching the store, she turned right and crossed the street to a parking lot, where a white Thunderbird with California plates straddled the line between two spaces. She unlocked the door, hurled the purse onto the passenger seat, and slid in behind the wheel. The engine roared and she backed the car out with a jerk, narrowly missing a couple of students. One of them yelled something at her. She responded with the raised middle digit of her left hand and gunned the engine. The Thunderbird squealed down a row of cars and exited the parking lot at an entrance.

  I wrote down the Thunderbird’s license number, then retraced my steps to Meiklejohn Hall. When I got back upstairs, Dr. Kovaleski was seated at her desk, a frown on her face and her fingers beating a tattoo on her desk blotter. My father, Dr. Timothy Howard, occupied one of the two chairs opposite her.

  “What do you think, Jeri?” Dad asked, crossing one long leg over the other.

  “Tell me again how all this started,” I said, taking the other chair. Dad had given me bare bones on the phone the previous night, but I wanted to add some flesh to the skeleton.

  “She says her name is Dolores Cruz Manibusan,” Dr. Kovaleski said in her mittel-European accent. “She appeared quite suddenly Friday morning, demanding to see the head of the department. I’m acting chair, so I asked if I could help her. She announced that she was Dr. Manibusan’s widow and she wanted his papers. That was the word she used — papers. I explained that Dr. Manibusan’s office had been cleared out by his next of kin. She became quite angry and shouted at me. She said she was his next of kin and she’d be back today.”

  “Dr. Manibusan was murdered in January. This is the first week in May. It’s been almost four months. Where,” I wondered, “has the grieving widow been all this time?”

  “Indeed.” Isabel Kovaleski’s voice was as dry as the grass on the hills surrounding the campus.

  I looked at my father, searching for signs of that haunted expression he wore earlier this year. When he called me last night he’d sounded upset. Now his eyes were troubled, a frown etched his face below his thinning red-brown hair, and his lips were drawn into a thin line. I hoped this mystery woman with her off-the-wall claim wouldn’t bring back the nightmares that came with the murder of Dr. Lito Manibusan.

  He and Dad had been good friends as well as colleagues, both history professors at Cal State. Dad’s specialty is American history, particularly the trans-Mississippi West, while Dr. Manibusan’s expertise focused on Asia. In fact, he’d been on his way to a conference on that subject, at the University of Hawaii, when he was killed.

  The last time Dad saw Dr. Manibusan alive was around six-thirty on a Friday evening in January. Rain fell on the city as my father drove over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco to meet some friends for dinner and a play at the Curran Theater. Dad parked his car on the seventh floor of the Sutter-Stockton garage, near Union Square. As he walked toward the elevator, putting on his raincoat, someone called his name.

  “I was surprised to see him,” Dad told me later. “I thought he was on his way to Honolulu.”

  The professor smiled and told Dad he planned to have dinner that evening with his brother-in-law in Daly City, south of San Francisco. He would spend the night there, then on Saturday morning catch a flight from San Francisco International. As they stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button for the street level, my father asked why his friend was in San Francisco. Dr. Manibusan said he had a stop to make first. Unfortunately, he didn’t say where or why. He seemed to be in a hurry, Dad recalled, moving aside the cuff of his tweed sport jacket to check the watch on his left wrist. He carried a tan raincoat over one arm, and as the elevator descended, he put it on.

  Dad was meeting his friends at the China Moon on Post Street near Mason, so he and Dr. Manibusan left the parking garage and walked quickly through the rain to the corner of Post and Powell, two b
locks away. As they parted with a few words about seeing each other at work the following week, Dr. Manibusan raised his hand and waved good-bye, silhouetted against the lights of Union Square, hazy through the misting rain, with a clanging cable car as background music as it headed up Powell Street.

  Dad didn’t give the chance meeting another thought as he had dinner and went to the theater. After the performance he and his friends stopped at David’s Deli on Geary, for coffee and pastry. It must have been about eleven-thirty when he returned to the parking garage, tossed his raincoat into the backseat, and got into his car. He backed the car halfway out of the slot, then stopped abruptly when he saw a crumpled figure in a tan raincoat lying on its right side with its back to my father, in a pool of what looked like oil.

  “It never occurred to me that he was dead,” Dad said several hours into Saturday morning. We were at the San Francisco Hall of Justice, and his green eyes brimming with shock in his white, distraught face, hands shaking as he held a paper cup of bad coffee. “I thought it was some poor street person who came in out of the rain and fell asleep between the cars. Or that somebody slipped in the oil and fell down. I think I said something, hey or hello. Then I leaned over and touched the shoulder. The body shifted and I saw the face. My God, it was Lito. He had blood all over his face. His eyes were open, just staring up at me.”

  My father cried out and backed away from the corpse. He told me later his hands felt as though they were burning. He turned away, saw a young couple walking toward their car, and called to them in a strangled voice. The man found a phone and summoned the police, while his wife stayed with Dad, whose heart was pounding, as he had trouble taking air into his tight chest. When the police arrived and Dad calmed down a bit he asked the woman to call his daughter in Oakland. That’s how I wound up talking my way through a San Francisco police line in the early hours that Saturday morning.