by Janet Dawson
“It meant something to Felice. She still cares about you.” He didn’t answer.” Do you hit on every woman you meet?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Anger flared; then his brown eyes turned stony. “I like you, Jeri. Can’t we just enjoy each other’s company? I guess not. What you do for a living gets in the way.” He took his garrison cap from his belt and put it on. “I’ll leave you to your work, Jeri. That’s obviously the most important thing to you.”
Don’t blame me and my job, I thought with irritation, staring at the closed door Alex left in his wake. You’re not exactly the knight in shining armor, either. I did like the guy, but I was also wary of him, with good reason. He was touchy, moody, and mercurial. Just like me.
I rose from my chair abruptly and left my office, walking to a deli on Broadway, where I muffled my conflicting feelings with pastrami on rye. When I returned, I called the naval air station at Moffett Field, near San Jose. I was passed from office to office before finally locating the one where Neal Patterson, Felice Navarro’s ex-husband, worked. He was out flying, but the woman who answered the phone told me I might find him in the office early tomorrow morning.
This Manibusan case had me tied in knots, and I needed to concentrate on something else for a while. I stuck the professor’s calendar in my filing cabinet and spent the next few hours doing legwork all over Oakland and Berkeley. It was after five when I returned. I checked the messages on the answering machine and wrote up my notes. As they were printing, my office door opened and Cassie entered, looking fresh and crisp in a red linen dress. Whenever I wear linen, it wrinkles the minute I put it on, but Cassie managed to look as though she’d just ironed the outfit. For a lawyer who habitually worked late, she also looked unfettered.
“What, no briefcase?” I asked.
She laughed. “I am off the clock after I return a few phone calls. And tomorrow you won’t find me here. Eric and I are going up the coast to Mendocino for a few days.”
“Oh, yes. When am I going to meet this guy?” Eric was the new fellow in Cassie’s life. They’d been dating regularly for the past two months, which meant I hadn’t seen as much of my friend as was usual in the past. I hadn’t even been introduced, although I knew he was tall, lived in San Francisco, and worked as an accountant for some big corporation in the city.
“Soon,” Cassie promised. “We’ll get together some evening. Me and Eric, you and...?”
“Nobody at the moment,” I said, thinking of Alex. “Why is it I’m always attracted to men who are bad for me?”
Cassie sat down and crossed her legs, dangling one high-heeled pump from her toe. “I think we’ve had this conversation before. When you decided to leave Sid and get a divorce.”
“Many times before. About men I’d just as soon forget.”
“Who is he?”
“Somebody I met in connection with a case.”
“Jeri, Jeri,” Cassie said, shaking her head. “The men you meet in connection with your cases are criminals, cops, or people with something to hide. Not exactly prime material for social interaction.”
“Stop talking like a lawyer. So who else am I going to meet? And where? Don’t tell me to go to church or the Laundromat or the frozen-food section of my local grocery store. The only men I see there look very married. I’ve made that mistake before and I don’t intend to do it again. Where did you meet Eric?”
Suddenly Cassie looked sheepish. “I deposed him for a lawsuit I was handling.” I ragged her about it as she hastened to explain that the lawsuit had settled out of court before Eric called to ask her out.
“The hell with it. I’ve got more important things to worry about than my love life.” I told her what had happened to Dad the night before. After she expressed her dismay and promised to call him, I leaned back in my chair and asked her a question that had been in the back of my mind. “You said you met Felice Navarro through this East Bay women’s network. What do you know about her?”
Cassie shrugged. “Not much, really. I think she’s divorced, but I don’t know if she’s seeing anyone. She has a studio in her house over in Rockridge and supports herself with the usual weddings and portraits. She also does some work with street scenes, capturing people going about their business. Felice and a couple of other photographers had a show at a gallery in Berkeley earlier this year. It was called ‘Avenues’ — shots of Telegraph, Shattuck, University, and San Pablo avenues. I thought it was terrific. I’ll be interested to see this series she’s doing on women and their jobs. Why all this interest in Felice?”
“She may figure into this case I’m working on. Remember when Dad found his friend’s body? Things have gotten weird all of a sudden. I’m having trouble fitting it all together.”
“I’m sure you will. I have faith in you.” She reached down and stuck her foot back into the shoe. “You hungry? Got plans for dinner?”
“I’m always hungry. And equally reluctant to cook.”
Cassie stood and reached for the doorknob. “Let me make those calls, then I’ll come and get you.” She headed back to her own office. I turned off the computer equipment and put the case notes in the appropriate file. I switched on the answering machine and had my keys out, ready to call it a night. The door opened, but it wasn’t Cassie.
He looked far more menacing than he had the day he met Alex Tongco for lunch to discuss the late Dr. Manibusan’s files. When he walked into my office, the first thing he looked at was the boxes stacked against the wall. Then he looked at me. His eyes flashed and glittered, like obsidian, or the blade of a knife.
“Eduardo Villegas,” I said. “What do you want?”
“You know what I want.”
“No, I don’t. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
He clenched his hands and took a step toward me. I might be able to take him if he wasn’t armed, I thought, one hand threading through my keys so metal stuck out between my fingers, the other ready to toss my handbag at his face. But I didn’t think anyone called Eddie the Knife would go anywhere without that particular weapon, so easy to conceal. I gauged the distance between us, assessing the situation, keeping an eye on his hands. I was a couple of inches taller and I didn’t think he outweighed me by much. But a blade made a difference.
“I want that envelope.” He spat the words at me. “I know you’ve got it.”
“How do you know about the envelope?”
“Never mind how I know. Just give it to me and nobody gets hurt.”
I shook my head. “I don’t have it, Eddie. I never did. It was stolen before I could get my hands on it.”
Eddie had an unpleasant laugh. “You expect me to buy that? It was your old man he mailed it to. Now you got all the stuff from the professor’s office. It’s got to be there.”
I gestured toward the stacked boxes. “Be my guest. Look through all of them. You won’t find it.” I watched his face as he considered my words. So Eddie knew that Dr. Manibusan had mailed that envelope to Dr. Timothy Howard. Villegas, or the person he was working for, assumed that the envelope was with the contents of the professor’s office. I tried the truth, but people like Eddie very often have trouble recognizing veracity. “My father found the envelope in his office yesterday. He was mugged last night when he left the university. His briefcase was stolen. The envelope’s gone.”
Eddie the Knife thought about this for a moment, clenching and unclenching his hands. “Son of a bitch,” he said. I guessed he’d decided to believe me, or he didn’t want to dig through all those file boxes.
“How do you know about the envelope, Eddie?”
“Never mind how I know about it. If you’re lying to me, bitch, I’ll cut you so bad —” Eddie said, taking another step toward me.
My office door opened and Cassie stood there in her bright red dress and a smile. “Hi. Ready to go? Or am I interrupting something?”
“Mr. Villegas was just leaving.” I gestured toward the door.
He looked from me to Cassie and
back again. “For now,” he said. It sounded like a promise I’d rather he didn’t keep.
Sixteen
EDDIE’S WORDS ALSO ERASED ANY DOUBTS ABOUT the identity of Dad’s attacker. It had to be Dolores Cruz. And if Eddie found that out, she was in danger. I called her that evening at Charles Randall’s condo to warn her about Eddie the Knife, but when I identified myself, she hung up. I punched in the number again, but this time she let it ring and ring without picking up the receiver. Okay, I thought, if you want to play games, it’s your funeral. All the same, I was at Mabuhay Travel Friday morning when Belinda unlocked the front door. Dolly wasn’t there yet, but Belinda promised to give her my message.
I drove across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. The nursing registry I had called the day before was located in a down-at-the-heels Victorian on Oak Street, to the west of the Civic Center. I found a parking place, went inside, and introduced myself to the woman who sat behind the counter, asking for Carrie or Bess.
“Oh, the private investigator,” she said cheerfully, and stood up. She was a short woman with black hair, very pregnant, moving toward me with ungainly serenity. “I’m Carrie. I talked to you on the phone. Bess is in the other room. She wants to talk to you.”
Carrie knocked on a closed door, then opened it. Bess was an older woman, obviously in charge of the whole shebang, tall with a short helmet of iron gray hair. She wanted to know what I was looking for, eyebrows drawn together in concern about privacy of those long-ago nurses whose files the registry held. I assured her that I was merely trying to locate someone whose name had come up in a case. Besides, the forties were a long time ago and she admitted that the files were considered dead.
Finally Bess took a set of keys from her desk and led me down the hallway and a set of steps to a subterranean storeroom full of old metal filing cabinets. They were in a rough chronological order, starting in 1935. I knew from the letters in Manibusan’s files that Lieutenant O. M. Cardiff had left the army in November 1945, with a last known address California Street in the Richmond district, and there was some connection with M. Harold Beddoes in June of 1946. It was, as Carrie said yesterday, needle-in-a-haystack time. There was no reason to think that Cardiff had ever signed on with this particular nurses’ registry. I was taking the long shot only because this was the sole place that had records back to the forties.
But she had. It was one of those exhilarating moments when the long shot pays off, when the information falls into my lap. It makes up for all the times I have to slog through files and records without finding a damn thing. I dug through dusty file folders from 1946 on, one hour, then another slipping past before I found her in 1949. Olivia Mary Cardiff Beddoes, a surgical nurse living on Wawona Street in the West Portal area of San Francisco. I sifted through the file. The professor’s note about M. Harold Beddoes, June 1946 suddenly made sense. That was when Olivia married Harold. Not long after signing on with the registry, Olivia had found a position at Pacific Presbyterian Hospital in San Francisco.
I wrote down as much information as I could find in the slim file, then went upstairs and thanked Bess and Carrie. I headed for the Civic Center and looked up Olivia and Harold in the 1946 marriage records, feeling a glow as I found them. I hit the birth records next. It took a while, but I discovered that Olivia had a baby in 1952, a boy named Walter. My next stop was Pacific Presbyterian Hospital, where I persuaded someone in the personnel office to look up Olivia Beddoes’s file. She’d left the hospital in 1952, several months before her baby was born. At that time the Beddoes family was still living on Wawona Street, but a check of the assessor’s record showed that Harold and Olivia Beddoes sold their house in 1959. I copied the name of the real estate company without much hope that the Realtor would have any information on a forwarding address more than thirty years after the sale.
Dead end again, I thought. I drove out to West Portal, but no one answered the door of the stucco house and I didn’t want to be late for my appointment with Neal Patterson, Felice Navarro’s ex-husband. I’d made an early-morning phone call to his office at Moffett Naval Air Station, and he’d suggested a late lunch. I drove back through the city and onto U.S. 101, heading south along the marshy shore of the bay until I saw the air station’s huge hangers off to my left. I located the coffee shop Patterson had suggested and parked my Toyota in its crowded lot. Inside, I looked for a navy uniform, but because of its proximity to the base, the restaurant was full of them. I stood near the cash register and scanned the room, spotting a sandy-haired man sitting alone at a booth in the back. Our eyes met and he stood up, a six-footer, broad at the shoulders in his khaki uniform.
“Neal Patterson?” I asked as I approached.
“Jeri Howard?”
Identities thus confirmed, we sat down. “I already ordered,” he said in a down-home southern drawl. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
When the waitress appeared at our table, I ordered a chef’s salad, then studied him as I drank from my water glass. He had a pleasant, tanned face, with crinkly laugh lines at the eyes and a snub nose between a pair of blue eyes, and he wore a lieutenant’s bars on the collar of his uniform. On the phone I’d told him that I was investigating a case that peripherally involved the Navarro family. I was surprised that he had agreed to talk with me on the basis of that brief explanation, but there had been a tinge of something in his voice — regret, perhaps — when he spoke of his ex-wife. Maybe he wanted to talk. That desire for communication, even with a stranger, very often makes a private investigator’s task easier.
He went over ground that Felice and I had already traveled, telling me how he and Felice had met and married and broken up, the regret in his voice more evident now that he sat across from me. When I asked about his former father-in-law, he frowned, and echoed Felice’s comment that Maximiliano Navarro seldom approved of anything his daughter did. His friendly face darkened. “Of course, my own father’s no better,” he said.
“Felice told me.”
He was quiet as the waitress set our lunches on the table, then he took a bite of his club sandwich and chewed, his eyes troubled. I picked up my fork, searching for the lettuce under the layers of ham and cheese atop my salad bowl.
“My dad’s an Alabama redneck,” Patterson said, sipping his water. “I don’t think the past twenty-five years have had any impact on him. When I brought Felice home from the Philippines, I wanted her to meet my family, so we went to Huntsville. Mom was okay, but my old man acted like a horse’s ass. Felice stuck it out for a couple of days, then she hopped the next plane back to San Francisco. That really put a wedge between us. I think it contributed to our breakup.” He sighed. “As long as we were out here, it was fine. There’s a big Filipino-American community in the Bay Area, and a lot of military men are married to Filipino women.”
“Felice seems bitter toward her own father.”
Patterson worked on his sandwich for a while before he answered. “Hell, the old man treats her like a checker he can move around on a board. From what I could see, he treats everybody that way. Jun just goes along with it and Rick’s cut out of the same cloth. He manipulates right back. Felice rebels. It’s the only way she can deal with it. She really is a terrific photographer. You should see her pictures. While we were still in the Philippines, she had a big-deal show at a gallery in Manila. It was shots of marketplaces, street scenes, all of them taken right there in the city. She really catches people’s faces.”
Patterson stopped for another sip of water before continuing. “Anyway, Felice got a lot of attention as a result of this show, but it really bothered her that her own father couldn’t find the time to attend. He treats the photography like some damn hobby, and it’s so important to her. She just can’t seem to make Max understand. I thought she would’ve given up long ago, but I guess what it boils down to is, Felice is fonder of the old man than she lets on.”
I certainly wouldn’t have thought that based on my conversation with her, recalling Felice’s bitterness
as she spoke of her father. “She seems to be close to Rick.”
“Oh, yeah. They bicker back and forth, but that’s mostly brother-sister stuff. Rick acts as a buffer between Felice and her father, and he’s supportive of her work. I think Felice would do anything for Rick.”
“Tell me about her mother, the first Mrs. Navarro.”
“She killed herself, you know,” Patterson said thoughtfully, “right after Felice and I married. An overdose of sleeping pills. She had cancer and went through all sorts of treatment, but she kept getting worse. I was at Cubi Point, the air station up near Subic, and Felice spent a lot of time at her parents’ house in Quezon City, near Manila, just so she could be near her mother. We’d get together on weekends. That’s when Mrs. Navarro took those pills. She was alone in the house. Max was off somewhere, on a trip to Taipei. Felice took it real hard. She can’t talk about it easily. She blames herself for not being there. She blames her father, too, but he wasn’t there much anyway.”
“Felice said something about a mistress,” I said, playing with my salad, remembering the anger in Felice’s voice as she spoke of her father and his querida. What happens to mistresses after they’re discarded? I wondered. Had I seen anything about the mistress in the professor’s extensive file on Max Navarro?
“Max wasn’t known as a faithful husband. Everyone knew he had a woman on the side. But it seemed like that was fairly common in his circle. He was fairly discreet about it until his wife died.”
“Did you ever meet this mistress?”
“Once,” Patterson said, and he flushed to the roots of his sandy hair.
“What happened?”
“She made a pass at me.” Patterson looked indignant and sheepish at the same time. “I thought Felice was going to kill her.”
“What did Felice do? I think you’d better start at the beginning.”
“It’s in the past,” he protested, flushing again. “I’d just as soon forget it.” I fixed him with a steady gaze. He wiped his hands on a napkin and glumly continued his story.