Damage

by John Lescroart

  “Abe. It’s Vi. Sorry to call you at home, but you weren’t at the office yet and I thought I’d take a chance.”

  The implied rebuke did nothing to elevate Glitsky’s mood. “No problem,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I wondered if you happened to see the ‘Our Town’ column today.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  “Well, then it’s lucky I reached you so I could give you a heads-up. She’s pretty much all over you about your handling, or mishandling, I should say, of this Janice Durbin thing. I got a call from Hizzoner first thing this morning—and yes, if you’re wondering, at home—and he read me the riot act about what’s going on and I must say this wasn’t the way I envisioned spending my first month or so on this job, defending myself and my chief of homicide every time I turn around.”

  “She’s an irresponsible lunatic,” Glitsky said.

  “That may be true, but she’s got Leland’s attention in a big way, and he’s all but screaming for your head.”

  Glitsky let out a deep sigh. “You know, Vi, at this point, I’m almost tempted to say give it to him. Who needs the aggravation? If you ask me to, I’ll resign right now.”

  “Don’t tempt me, will you? I don’t want you to resign, especially over this, which strikes me as you just trying to do your job. Not to mention, imagine my future if I cave to this kind of idiocy the first time it rears its ugly head. But I’ve got to have some answers for Leland and for the public before this gets any further out of hand.”

  Again, Glitsky blew out heavily. “What’s she say? Marrenas.”

  “Basically it’s the same old. In your zeal to get Ro Curtlee back behind bars, you’re ignoring a far better suspect who’s right under your nose.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “The Durbin husband, who doesn’t have an alibi and is also evidently having an affair with one of his employees.”

  “She printed that?”

  “To that effect. And of course then the question is, why aren’t you concentrating on him instead of picking on Ro?”

  “Maybe because Ro did it. Although, for the record, you should know that I’ve interviewed the husband at least twice already and plan to do it again because it’s such a good time. Meanwhile, you’ll notice I haven’t arrested anybody yet—Ro or Michael Durbin or anybody else—and that’s usually a clue that I don’t have a viable suspect.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, it might be in your best interest to prepare some kind of statement to that effect, and I’ll do the same.”

  “It should go without saying.”

  “Yes, well, that’s not how it seems to be playing this time.”

  “How about just saying we can’t comment because the investigation is continuing?”

  “How’d that fly last time you tried it? I think we’ve got to be a little more forthcoming. I’m serious here, Abe. I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to keep my own job if this keeps up. I’m on thin enough ice as it is. Let’s try a little proactive appeasement, how’s that sound? Put on a little show for the home team.”

  27

  Fifty-eight people were in attendance at the crematorium service. Glitsky sat in the back row listening and taking notes as the relatives and acquaintances of Janice Durbin stood up to give their eulogies. A borderline tearful but controlled Michael Durbin got up and extolled his wife as a partner, provider, helpmate, and mother. Kathy Novio, breaking down several times, invited everyone over to her house for the reception afterward, then talked about her sister’s childhood, her passion for her family and patients and career, and her belief that the world was a good place, a safe place, and how in spite of what had happened to her, Kathy was sure that Janice would not want anyone to come away from this ceremony with negative feelings or despair. Two other girlfriends, one from college and one from medical school, talked about how much fun she’d been, how dedicated a friend. Her pastor, who appeared to have known her fairly well, talked in a resounding baritone about her volunteer activities with the mentally handicapped, her generosity, and her faith.

  It was, Glitsky thought, pretty much the usual stuff. But amid the tributes to Janice Durbin’s life, he found himself unable to stop wondering which of the guests here, and he thought it must have been one of them, had given her chlamydia. Or if Janice had spread the disease to someone in this room.

  While the last of the talks was winding down, he went out and stood by the back door and let the crowd flow out past him. He didn’t know if anyone recognized him, and he certainly didn’t pick up any sense of hostility from any of the guests for the way he was screwing up the investigation into Janice’s murder.

  Glitsky had met all the kids and the Novios the previous Saturday, and now when the families came out, straggling behind the rest of the crowd, he saw that the trauma of the past few days had taken a heavy toll.

  Kathy, in stark contrast to her talk inside, was nearly ashen with anger and grief. She held hands with both of her daughters, glistening eyes straight ahead. A couple of steps behind her, her husband walked in a kind of stiff-legged attention. The elder Durbin boy, Jon, his face a cloud of fury, cleared the door and immediately walked away from the general direction of the crowd. Michael Durbin, following, walking next to the middle son, Peter, on one side of him, and his daughter, Allie, holding his hand on the other, called out to him, but Jon half turned and waved a dismissive hand and kept walking away.

  Glitsky had come to the service as part of his chief’s appeasement strategy, thinking that some reporter from the Courier or the Chronicle or one of the TV stations might be among the audience, and would interpret his presence there as having something to do with his investigation, and not to do with Ro Curtlee. In fact, he had arrived at the ceremony with every intention of pulling Michael Durbin aside and trying to get some clearer information either on his alibi for the time of the murder or on the situation, if any, between him and Liza Sato. He even considered that he might reveal the chlamydia angle and see where that led them.

  But seeing the family now so rawly exposed, and with the children around, he simply met Durbin’s eye and nodded in apparent sympathy as he walked past and let them all go to their waiting cars.

  “I think you should call Jeff Elliot back.” Chuck was drinking a beer, sitting on the counter in his kitchen, talking to Michael Durbin while the reception continued in full swing in the living room. “Give the guy an interview in the Chronicle, go on the offensive.”

  “What’s the offensive going to get me?” Michael asked. He held a glassful of bourbon and took a drink of it. “It’s what Peter said this morning, the more I deny it, the more it sounds like I’m hiding something.”

  “Mike.” Chuck put a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Listen to me. We know who did this, right? So, you notice anything missing from the Marrenas column? Like all the reasons we know it was Ro. Did she mention that you were the foreman of Ro’s jury? No. Or the murder of that other woman, the witness? No. Or any other very good reason Glitsky might have been concentrating on Ro instead of you? That’s a lot you could tell Elliot right there that somehow isn’t making its way into the conversation, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anything anymore. I mean, even Jon’s starting to have the idea that ...”

  But Chuck cut him off. “No, he’s not. He’s just devastated by his mom dying, and who can blame him? He doesn’t really believe you had anything to do with it, I promise. Hell, he’s eighteen. He’s trying to find someplace to put all this emotion he’d rather deny he’s feeling, so Marrenas gives him the idea and he takes it out on you.”

  “He’s smarter than that.”

  “Maybe, but he’s all fucked up right now. Just let him work it out.”

  “What other choice do I have, anyway? I don’t know where he’s got to.”

  “He’ll be back, don’t worry about that. Meanwhile, you call the Chronicle. You know they’ll talk to you. Get Ro out there in front of the sto
ry where he belongs.”

  “That son of a bitch. But then what if he comes after me, or the kids?”

  And at this, Chuck drew a breath, drank off a slug of beer. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

  “I haven’t thought of too much else.” He lifted his glass to his mouth and half emptied it. “I know what I should do, I’m not kidding.” Lowering his voice, he said, “I ought to go kill the guy myself.”

  Chuck shook his head. “No. That’s a bad idea.”

  “I’ve got a fucking shotgun out in my garage. I’ve had it forever, from back when I used to hunt. They can’t trace a shotgun. I go over there to Ro’s house some night, knock on the door, start shooting. Then I throw the gun in the bay. And tell Glitsky I was, say, with you the whole time, drinking away my sorrow.”

  “I’ve already said that’s a bad idea. Now I’ll say it again. That’s a really bad idea.”

  “I don’t have any other ideas.”

  “Well, lose that one. It totally sucks. You’re not a killer, Michael, you couldn’t do that. It would ruin your life.”

  Durbin tipped up his glass, finishing the drink. “As opposed to what it is now, you mean?”

  Sheila Marrenas was waiting just outside the door of the outer lobby of the chief’s office when Vi Lapeer got back from her lunch meeting. She was talking to one of her chief detectives and didn’t notice the reporter until Marrenas stood up and blocked her way. “Excuse me, Chief. I’ve just got a quick question for you.”

  “And I’ll be glad to answer it,” Lapeer said. She looked at her watch. “In forty-five minutes at my press conference. That’s why we have press conferences. So I can talk to the press. Now if you’ll . . .”

  She started forward, but Marrenas moved to the side, blocking her. “This can’t wait!”

  “Well, I’m afraid it has to, because ...”

  Marrenas stepped directly in front of her. “Isn’t it true that you’ve assigned round-the-clock surveillance to follow Ro Curtlee wherever he goes? And that you’ve authorized budget and even overtime for this surveillance? And in spite of all this time and overkill, no one seems to know where Ro is right now? Isn’t that true? Is that your idea of efficient use of an already overextended police budget? How can you possibly justify such an expensive, useless waste of money and personnel?”

  Lapeer’s mouth hung half open in shock, although she quickly recovered. “I have no comment,” she said. “No comment. Now if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  And with that, the similarly astonished assistant chief next to her took her arm and, without touching Marrenas while moving her gently to the side, got her inside the lobby to her office and closed the door behind them.

  Hector Murillo was not aware of the concept of six degrees of separation. He was a twenty-seven-year-old day laborer who’d come up from Mexico in 2004 and who remained undocumented. For the past eight months, Hector had been a regular in the four-man landscaping crew of Roberto Serrano. He was still pretty much low man both because he’d worked for Roberto for the shortest time and because he was Mexican and not Guatemalan.

  But that was basically okay.

  The difference between low man and high man wasn’t so great anyway, not when his boss Roberto himself did whatever had to be done—grunt work like cleaning out gutters or spreading decomposed granite by the cubic yard—as well as the mowing and blowing and trimming. All in all, Hector was grateful to have a regular job, where he got paid in cash every week.

  Hector lived in a trailer park just east of the 101 Freeway in Mountain View, and many nights he would hang out drinking beer with other men, mostly from Mexico, who found themselves in situations very much like his own. This was what he’d been doing last night when Jorge Cristobal, one of the guys from the park, had mentioned the five-thousand-dollar reward that Lupe García was offering to find a woman whose name used to be Gloria Gonzalvez. Evidently her mother had died in Guatemala and she had come into some money, and her lawyers had contacted the well-connected Lupe in the hope that, for a portion of the inheritance, he could help locate her so they could all get paid.

  That was the story, anyway.

  At first, Hector didn’t think much about this, other than to try to fantasize how much five thousand dollars really was. He made sixty-two dollars a day, six days a week, about fifteen hundred dollars a month, and that covered food and rent and clothes and beer, but not much else. He didn’t own even a share of a car; he had no insurance. And even so, he had amassed a savings of exactly zero after two-thirds of a year of steady work.

  It wasn’t until he’d been lying in bed, trying to sleep with that huge number floating around in his brain, that he realized that Roberto’s wife’s name was Gloria. She was also Guatemalan—or at least he assumed she was, since that was Roberto’s nationality. It would certainly be odd if she wasn’t.

  He woke up with the possibility still fresh in his mind, thought about it through their first six houses in the morning. He did not want to give away what he knew to anyone. He knew Roberto and if he told him about the reward, and if his wife had been Gloria Gonzalvez, Roberto himself would go to Lupe and claim the reward and Hector would be lucky if he even got any small part of it. The same went for his three coworkers. If they had any idea what it was about, in exchange for any information they gave him, they would undoubtedly want to share part of the reward themselves. Jorge Cristobal from the trailer park was going to be bad enough if he was going to be the intermediary between Hector and Lupe. It looked like whoever claimed the reward was going to be stuck with someone like Jorge. But at least if Hector came to Jorge with the truth—if it was the truth—about Roberto’s wife, then he would still have some leverage and might be able to keep Jorge’s cut of the five thousand to a minimum.

  Five thousand dollars! It was unfathomable.

  They didn’t take much time for lunch, no more than twenty minutes, but Hector arranged it so that he sat near to Roberto, who tended to sit somewhat apart from the crew normally, and halfway through their food, he struck up a conversation with his boss, under the pretext that he had a girlfriend himself and was thinking about marriage.

  “How long,” he asked in Spanish, “have you been married?”

  Roberto shrugged. “Eight years.”

  “And how is it?”

  “Good. I got lucky. Gloria works hard and she’s a good mother. Don’t marry a girl who doesn’t like children.”

  “That isn’t the problem,” Hector said.

  “If you already have a problem, maybe you should think about this decision some more. You shouldn’t have problems before you get married.”

  “Well, maybe it isn’t one. I don’t know. It’s why I wanted to ask you.”

  “You don’t know if you have a problem?”

  “I know what I have. I don’t know if it’s a problem.”

  Roberto waited.

  “She’s . . .”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Maria.”

  “All right.”

  “Maria has lived here already for seven years.”

  “Is she a citizen? Because then, yes, marry her.”

  “No. Not yet. She is like me. But she has gotten ideas from some of the women she knows. She says it’s not right that I should force her, if we become married, to change her name.”

  This seemed to confuse Roberto for a moment. “What would she change her name to? There is no better name than Maria.”

  “Her last name,” Hector said. “To mine. Murillo.”

  “Murillo is a fine name. Why would she not want to have it?”

  “It’s not about the name. It’s about being a modern American woman.”

  “But she’s not American.”

  “No. But she speaks good English. She wants to fit in here. It’s the new culture, she says.”

  Roberto frowned. “She will never fit in to the culture here. Doesn’t she know that? Her children, maybe, or their children, but maybe not. I don’t want to tell
you what to do with this woman, but I’ll be honest. This doesn’t sound good to me.” He took a bite of his burrito, chewing as though he was considering the issue from all angles.

  Hector took the opportunity to go on. “So your wife, there was no problem, she changed her name?”

  Roberto nodded. “Of course. It was never discussed. I would not have discussed it. She is my wife, she has my name.”

  “That is what I’ve been thinking,” Hector said. “Except then I wonder if it is just that she doesn’t like the sound of it, Maria Murillo.”

  “Nonsense. The sound of a name. What does that matter? What is her name now?”

  “Gonzalvez,” Hector said. “Maria Gonzalvez.”

  Roberto said “Ha!” and threw his hands in the air in a gesture of triumph. “You know this was my wife’s name, Gonzalvez? Once she changed, she has never missed it. You tell your woman that. And if she still won’t do it, I don’t advise that you go ahead with this marriage. A woman who doesn’t want to take your name, she sounds like she could be a lot of trouble.”

  Eztli bought two piroshki—meat-filled pastries—from one of the little Russian shops in the nearby neighborhood. He started eating one of them while walking back toward Haight Street, and when he’d finished that, he unwrapped the other one and pressed four of the little tablets he’d bought at the hardware store into the bottom of it. He threw the wax-paper wrapper and the package that the tablets had come in into a trash receptacle sitting on the sidewalk two streets down from the piroshki stand.

  Coming around the corner a block away from the Rape Crisis Counseling Center, he turned right and strolled casually along, taking in the storefront windows as he aimlessly window-shopped. Stopping two doors down from the Center, checking out the vacation specials in the travel agency’s window, he waited while a couple of elderly women stopped to interact with the cute yellow Lab on the bench, now very much awake and receptive, licking their hands as they petted it.