Till The Old Men Die

by Janet Dawson

  I’m a sole practitioner of the private investigator’s craft, and every bit of income is welcome. I’ve done fairly well on my own, but it hasn’t been as steady as the years when I worked as a legal secretary and paralegal for an Oakland law firm, or during my five years as an investigator for the Errol Seville Agency before Errol had his heart attack and retired to Carmel. But I like being my own boss, and my clientele keeps growing, mostly insurance and prelitigation work referred by satisfied clients and by friends like Cassie.

  I returned the calls, setting up appointments with two prospective clients, both for the next day. The insurance adjuster had an errand that meant spending a good chunk of the afternoon digging through records in the Contra Costa County Courthouse in Martinez. I ate lunch, the remains of yesterday’s turkey sandwich, and finished my mineral water, tossing the empty bottle into the recycling box I kept under the table.

  It used to be a lot easier to obtain someone’s address from the Department of Motor Vehicles. But in the interest of protecting the privacy of Jeri Howard, citizen, the state of California has made life more difficult for Jeri Howard, investigator. Now I had to be judicious and selective about prevailing on my contact at the DMV, since I didn’t want to get him fired, thereby losing him altogether. But all I had on Dolores Cruz was the license plate of the white Thunderbird she’d been driving. So I called the clerk at the DMV and he groused about it, but finally agreed to run a check on the number.

  “It’ll take a couple of days,” he said grumpily. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

  I already had a file of sorts on the Manibusan murder. It contained a copy of the police report and several newspaper clippings. The media, print and broadcast, had played up the irony of Dad finding his colleague’s body. I read through the police report.

  Dr. Manibusan’s death looked like a robbery, a particularly vicious one, since the professor had been struck several times in the face, hard enough to bloody his nose. His wallet was missing and had never turned up. I looked over the list of items the police had found in the vicinity. Dr. Manibusan’s key ring, a ballpoint pen, a white linen handkerchief, a crumpled scrap of blue paper containing a penciled grocery list, and a couple of AA batteries, one under a car, the other next to the key ring. The battery closest to Dr. Manibusan’s body had a smeared partial fingerprint that wasn’t the professor’s, nor did it match any on file in the fingerprint computer used by the San Francisco Police Department.

  I set the report aside, recalling a conversation with Inspector Cobb, the investigating officer. He theorized two assailants, one holding Dr. Manibusan’s arms, while the other stabbed the professor, because there was no indication the dead man had tried to shield himself or deflect the assault with his arms or hands. On the other hand, the professor could have been attacked suddenly, swiftly, with no chance to fight back. Either way, he’d bled to death from three deep stab wounds near the heart.

  I picked up the phone and called SFPD, finding Cobb at his desk. Had there been any progress in the four-month-old investigation? There hadn’t, which didn’t surprise me. Despite a much-publicized plea for witnesses and information, the police had neither. Most cops will tell you if they don’t have a suspect in their sights within forty-eight hours of a murder, the perpetrator’s trail rapidly grows cold and stale.

  I made a few notes about today’s visit to Cal State Hayward and stuck them into the folder, returning it to the filing cabinet. Finding out what Dolores Cruz was up to would have to wait until I had a lead on her address.

  Then, two nights later, someone broke into Dad’s town house.

  Three

  THAT EVENING I WAS SPRAWLED ON THE SOFA IN A pair of baggy green sweats with a hole in one knee. After dinner I’d popped a tape of The Maltese Falcon into the VCR and settled in, my head propped on pillows at one end of the sofa and my bare feet resting on the arm at the other end. My fat cat, Abigail, joined me, kneading my stomach with her paws before giving herself a thorough wash. Finally she finished her ablutions, curled up, and went to sleep while I watched Hammett’s tale unfold. I had just gotten to the part where Bogie tells Mary Astor, “I hope they don’t hang you, precious...” when the phone rang. Grumbling, I hit the pause button on the VCR remote, dislodged the cat, and shuffled off to the kitchen to pick up the receiver in midpeal. Abigail muttered cat imprecations as she followed me, hoping for food in place of a lap. When I heard my father’s terse report, I put on a pair of shoes and grabbed my car keys.

  It took me about twenty minutes to drive south on Interstate 580, through Oakland and San Leandro to Castro Valley, exiting at Crow Canyon Road. I climbed into the hills, then took a left at the intersection anchored by a convenience store, heading up the street where Dad lived. It’s a hilly residential area with single-family homes mixed in with condos and apartments, east of Castro Valley proper, with some woods and open space nearby. Dad lives in the third of three buildings, each with four units arrayed in a line up the hill’s slope, backing up to a ravine. Between each building a drive leads to the carports behind. Dad’s two-story town house is the last unit in the uppermost building, with twenty yards of trees and shrubs between the end of the property and a splitlevel house farther up the hill.

  A patrol car was pulling away from the curb as I parked. My father met me at the door, accompanied by his next-door neighbor Harold, a retired navy chief petty officer.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I have a class from six to nine,” Dad said. “I got home about nine-thirty and the police were here. Harold called them. He saw somebody in the house and he knew it wasn’t me.”

  “I know his schedule.” Harold was a burly man with a light tenor voice that sounded out of place coming from a man with his bulldog face. “Besides, his car wasn’t in the carport. I was out on my patio, looked up, and the light was on in the back bedroom —”

  “My office,” Dad said.

  “That’s right,” Harold continued. “The blinds were open and I saw somebody moving around. I knew it wasn’t Tim, because he’s tall. This guy was short, with dark hair.”

  “What time was this?” I asked Harold.

  “About nine.”

  I looked from Harold to Dad. “Did the cops have an idea how the intruder got in?”

  “Picked the lock on the patio door,” Dad said. “The patrolman who just left said it looked pretty slick, like whoever it was knew what he was doing. He was gone when the police got here.”

  “Was anything taken?”

  “Nothing down here, as far as I can tell.” Dad swept his hand toward the living room, and I saw that his stereo system was still intact, though cabinet doors had been opened to reveal LPs and CDs. Drawers in the built-in storage cabinet between the kitchen and dining room had been pulled open and the contents of several dumped on the floor. The television and VCR hadn’t been touched, though, nor had Dad’s collection of Indian pottery, resting in the cabinet where he stored his treasures. Some of those pots were far more valuable than the electronic gadgets.

  “Some stuff was rearranged in my bedroom,” Dad said, “and the office is a mess.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  We went upstairs, with Harold tagging along, to the smaller of the two bedrooms. Along one wall was the daybed, with a trundle bed underneath, for company. Opposite that was a desk and a four-drawer filing cabinet. Bookshelves filled the other two walls. Most of Dad’s files and books were at the university, but he had quite a few at home, too.

  The office was indeed a mess. All four drawers of the filing cabinet had been opened. Manila file folders were strewn on the desk, the floor, and the daybed. Books were shoved around on the shelves as though the intruder had been looking for something hidden behind the volumes.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t take the computer,” Harold said, pointing to Dad’s new portable system resting on one end of the desk. I wasn’t. My best guess was that whoever broke into Dad’s town house was after the envelope Dr. Manib
usan had mailed to Dad before he died.

  Back downstairs I examined the lock on the sliding glass door. The town house had a patio enclosed by a tall redwood fence running the width of the unit, with about twelve feet between the glass door and the gate leading to the carport. The gate locked and Dad usually secured it, but it was open when he and the police arrived, indicating the intruder had taken that route.

  Harold decided it was time he went home. While he and Dad were at the front door, I went to the kitchen and picked up the receiver of the wall phone. I unscrewed the mouthpiece. Nothing there that shouldn’t be there. There was a second phone upstairs in Dad’s bedroom. No bug there either, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t an electronic device somewhere in the town house.

  “Jeri, where are you?”

  “Up here.” I came down the stairs. “Walk me to my car.”

  I had parked the Toyota directly in front of Dad’s town house. Once we were outside, I turned to my father. “Get another lock for that sliding glass door. The one you’ve got is too easy to open.”

  “I will.”

  “What’s your schedule tomorrow?” I asked him.

  “I have a nine o’clock class and I’m at the university until about six. Why?”

  “Give me your extra key. I’m coming back to sweep for electronic devices.”

  He looked stunned. “You think he planted a bug?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m being paranoid. But there’s no harm in being careful. These days he might even have planted a virus in your computer. That’s out of my league, but I can certainly have a friend of mine sweep for bugs. In the meantime, stay off the phone, or watch what you say when you’re talking. When you put your office back together, see if you can determine whether anything is missing.”

  Dad took his key ring from his pocket, removed his second house key, and handed it to me. “We’ve been saying he, but it might just have well been a woman. It’s that envelope Lito sent me, right?”

  I fingered the key. “Offhand, I can’t think of any other reason for tonight’s break-in. Especially since someone was prowling around your office at the university last week. Does anyone besides you, me, and Dr. Kovaleski know about the envelope?”

  Dad shook his head. “No. I haven’t mentioned it to a soul. I wish I could remember what I did with it.”

  “Look again, here and at the university. I’ll find Dr. Manibusan’s nephew and see if the envelope is somewhere in the files he took out of the professor’s office.”

  Dad voiced the question that had been on both our minds. “Do you think it was this Cruz woman?”

  “I don’t know. She’s short with dark hair. She’s looking for something that belonged to the professor. And a woman with dark hair was seen in your office last week. Question is, how did she — or whoever — know that Dr. Manibusan sent you the envelope?”

  I went home to a night of interrupted sleep. It wasn’t just that I was concerned about Dad. Abigail spent most of the night hunting and killing her yellow mouse, a cat toy made of crocheted lemon-colored yarn, its ears and tail frayed and fuzzed, its black felt eyes long gone. And I had only myself to blame.

  My motive in purchasing the mouse was Abigail’s welfare. She’s a ten-year-old indoor cat who spends her days sleeping and eating. As a result, she’s too fat and I get lectured about it every time I take her to the vet. I tried some of that low-cal cat food. She looked at me like I was on drugs. So I mixed the low-cal stuff with the regular kibble. With unerring accuracy she ate the regular stuff and left the rest, giving me a haughty stare that asked who was trying to fool whom. Exercise, I thought, but how to move Abigail’s silver and brown bulk off the dining room table, a favorite snooze spot, especially when she has a whole basket of cat toys she ignores.

  But the yellow mouse evidently caught my cat’s fancy as much as it caught mine, with unexpected results. She played with it constantly, tossing it up in the air, pouncing on it, kicking it with her hind legs while she chewed on it. She discovered some long-buried cat memory of being a jungle hunter. Each night she carried the yarn mouse in her mouth, yowling deep in her throat like a mountain lion as she stalked through the apartment, usually at three A.M. That morning I awakened to find the chewed and dilapidated mouse sharing my pillow.

  “I ought to take this thing away from you,” I threatened. But she was enjoying it so much. I hadn’t seen her so frisky since she was a kitten. I brushed the mouse to the floor as I got up. Abigail followed it, landing with a thump. She preceded me through the living room to the kitchen, where I fed her before making coffee.

  After a bowl of cereal and a quick glance through the morning paper, I picked up the phone and called Levi Zotowska. I met Levi several years before while I was an investigator with the Seville Agency. He was a big, solid man in his forties whose blond hair was fading to silver. It was long and silky and he wore it in a ponytail. Levi was from the coal country of eastern Pennsylvania, but he left it long ago, in spirit as well as body. He came to UC Berkeley as a freshman and embraced the sixties like a lover. He still lived in Berkeley, in a brown-shingled house north of the campus, with his wife, Nell, and four stair-step kids with the same cornsilk hair. His passion is electronics and he owns a shop on Telegraph Avenue, around the corner from People’s Park, where in another lifetime he’d been teargassed and arrested.

  “Jeri, you just get better-looking,” he said as he climbed out of his van parked in front of Dad’s town house. He gathered me into a bruising bear hug.

  “Don’t let Nell hear you say that.”

  “She wouldn’t mind. We haven’t seen you in a while. Come over for dinner. Nell will make her famous carrot cake.”

  “You shouldn’t tempt me like that,” I said. Nell’s famous carrot cake has cream-cheese frosting an inch thick. If I ate at the Zotowskas every day, I’d be as big as a bear myself.

  “So what’s the gig?” Levi asked.

  “Somebody broke into Dad’s town house last night. I want to know if he — or she — left any calling cards.”

  Levi got his equipment out of the van. As we went up the walk, I dug out the extra key Dad had given me the night before and unlocked the front door. It was eight-thirty, and Dad was already on his way to the university. Levi started his electronic sweep upstairs in the office, then moved slowly from room to room. He didn’t find anything on the second floor, and his sweep of the ground level yielded nothing.

  “Clean,” he reported, standing in the middle of the living room.

  I frowned and shook my head. “I’m sorry to drag you all the way down here, Levi. I guess I am being paranoid.”

  “No, you’re being cautious. Somebody breaks into your old man’s place and trashes his office, you got to take precautions. Besides, I don’t mind.” Levi gathered up his electronic gizmos. Locking the door behind us, I walked him to his van. “Come see us,” he called as he drove off.

  I headed south to the university. At Meiklejohn Hall I plinked a quarter into the jar in the History Department lounge and helped myself to a mugful of bitter black coffee, sipping it while I waited for my father to finish his first class. When he was free I joined him in his book-lined office.

  “Did you find anything?” he asked, red-brown eyebrows drawn together.

  “No. Levi swept the whole place. It’s clean.”

  “When I got to work I told Isabel about the break-in. Turns out someone — a woman — called here yesterday, asking for my home address. Unfortunately she got it from a grad student working in the office.”

  “Wonderful,” I said. “Where is said grad student?”

  We crossed the hall to Isabel Kovaleski’s office and she summoned the student. He was a skinny guy with pale brown hair and a wispy mustache that didn’t succeed in making him appear any older than he was, which was probably early twenties. As I quizzed him in Isabel’s office, he looked as though he expected me to rip the buttons off his plaid shirt, burn his thesis, and drum him out of the master’s progra
m.

  “I know I shouldn’t have done it,” he said, stumbling over the words, “but she said she was calling from a furniture store about Dr. Howard’s order and the salesman wrote down the address wrong and the delivery truck was on its way and if she didn’t get the address, she’d have to reschedule the delivery for next week. And Dr. Howard wasn’t in his office so —”

  “Never mind that,” I interrupted. “What did her voice sound like? Was it pitched high or low? Did she have an accent? Any speech quirks or impediments?”

  He screwed up his face and concentrated for a long moment, stroking his almost nonexistent mustache. “It was on the high end, you know. Kind of light and breathy. And she did have an accent. Not really heavy, but not your basic midwestern English either.”

  I traded looks with Dad and Dr. Kovaleski, recalling Dolores Cruz’s voice as low in timbre. The grad student brightened suddenly and held up a finger. “She said ‘ax’ instead of ‘ask.’ She said she hated to ‘ax,’ but she had to have Dr. Howard’s address.”

  “Well, that’s something,” I said. What, I wasn’t sure. After obtaining Dad’s address, anyone with a map of Castro Valley could locate the town house. And if Dolores Cruz had been hanging around the university, she would know my father’s schedule — it was on a card posted outside his office door. But I didn’t think the woman who called yesterday was Dolores Cruz. Which left me with the intriguing prospect that more than one person might be looking for Dr. Manibusan’s envelope.

  Four

  WHEN I GOT TO MY OFFICE IN OAKLAND, I CALLED my contact at the Department of Motor Vehicles. On Monday he’d told me it would take a couple of days to run the plate number on the car Dolores Cruz had been driving. But the break-in at my father’s town house had increased the urgency of the situation. In answering my request, he added a new question.

  The white Thunderbird belonged to one Charles B. Randall, who lived at an address on Lakeside Avenue near Seventeenth Street. Who was he, I wondered, and how did he fit into the picture? Did Dolores Cruz live at that address? Maybe she was renting the place from Randall. If that was the case, it was odd that she also had the use of his car.