by Susan Dunlap
“So, Skip,” Kiernan said impatiently, “what is it you know about Dwyer Cummings?”
“Dwyer Cummings is probably in his late forties. Big, blond, football-hero type,” he said with undisguised scorn. “Career oilman, went from engineering to administration. Been on the pipeline. Now he’s spokesman for the Energy Producers’ Group.”
“What’s that?”
“PR wing of the oil companies, all the ones that deal in the state. They’ve got professional PR people; what Cummings does is speak on technical issues with the authority of someone who’s been an engineer in the drilling areas. He’s the point man battling this initiative business.” Olsen laughed decisively.
Kiernan raised an eyebrow.
“Well, Dwyer Cummings does have a kind of folksy charm, intelligent folksiness. He’s a damned good speaker, well-informed. But don’t let his charm snow you. The word in the industry is that Cummings was involved in something no one is willing to talk about.”
“Specifically?” Kiernan said, surprised at the edge to her voice.
Olsen caught it too. He picked up his cup, but continued to stare belligerently as he drank. Then he said, “Best I can tell you is that something happened in Alaska and then Cummings was sent down here.”
“Sent down here to be spokesman for an initiative that could be devastating to the oil industry, and not only in California? Environmentalists in every coastal state are watching Prop. Thirty-Seven. So whatever Cummings was involved in up there, it couldn’t be important enough to endanger the ‘No’ on the Thirty-Seven campaign.”
“I said I didn’t know what it was yet.”
“Okay. Maybe it’s nothing. Cummings seems pretty peripheral to Delaney’s death, and even more so to Garrett Brant’s accident. But we’ve got so little we’re going to need everything.”
“I’m working on it. Stuff like this, it’s not info you get off the wires. For this you need to cozy up to one of his rivals.”
“Cozy away,” Kiernan said with a smile, realizing as she said it that this was exactly the kind of work that would appeal to Olsen. “Okay, what have you heard about Ben Pedersen and Robin Matucci?”
Olsen leaned forward, eyes widening. “As a twosome?”
Clearly, Kiernan thought, this is a man who loves the whispered word. “Sense I got from Pedersen is he would have liked that.”
Olsen nodded knowingly. “Could be. I didn’t hear anything when I was down there. Saw the two of them together once, but nothing lovey-dovey going on. You want my opinion, it’s all in Pedersen’s head. Understandable, set of knockers like that. If he was banging her, there wasn’t any reason to keep it a secret.”
“None we know of,” Kiernan said irritably. Working with Olsen was a big mistake. The man was driving her crazy. “I need someone undercover on the dock,” she said, shaking off her irritation. “Maybe nothing more to be got there, but then again … You know anyone?”
“Let me think. My contacts aren’t too good yet. It’s not the best way”—Olsen fingered his cup thoughtfully—“but I guess I’ll have to do it myself.”
Kiernan stood up. “Skip, you’ve already been spotted.”
“I’ll go after the boats leave. Or I’ll catch the deckhands off the dock.”
“They’ve already broken your windshield.”
“Guess I’ll just have to be more careful.”
“No.” Kiernan put a hand on his shoulder. “This is my case. I decide who does what. And I’m telling you, this isn’t a wise plan.”
Olsen shook off her hand.
“I’m serious. Skip. Either you work on my case my way, or we don’t work together. Got it?”
It was a moment before he grunted out what she took to be a yes.
Kiernan smiled. “Good. ‘Harpoon’ is something or someone Robin called on the ship-to-shore radio. Delaney asked Zack, the deckhand, about it. Zack figured Delaney thought it was a place. Pedersen’s deckhand said something like ‘time to find Harpoon’ as they got ready to leave, and Pedersen nearly took his head off. See what you can find.”
Olsen grinned, showing square yellowish teeth. “If it’s there, I’ll find it. Come this way.” He limped into the bedroom.
All Kiernan had seen of this room the previous day was the end of the bed. What she had missed were three walls covered with bookshelves, one of them entirely filled with phone books and directories. A computer, two phones, Xerox, and fax were lined up on a counter, while a clothesline strung above them held three streamers of drying negatives.
Kiernan laughed. “I hope you didn’t have all this here to shake free during the earthquake. You’d have been so far under that they’d have sealed the house and left it, like in Pompeii.
“It was here, or most of it. Took me the better part of a day to get everything back in place. And San Jose and Eureka”—he pointed to two phone books—“took it hard.”
“When can you find me Harpoon?”
He glanced at his watch. “It’s almost nine now. Noon, no problem. Depending on what else you need and how fast.”
“My office is getting background on the principals. But that’ll only be current to last month. I’ll probably need you to search records downtown.”
“I could have done the background for you.”
“You didn’t tell me. Last night you were only an ex-cop. This morning you’re Sherlock Holmes on line.”
He shrugged. “What’s an out-to-pasture cop to do?”
She nodded, pleased not to have to explain that she didn’t farm out work if she could help it, particularly not to a man who hadn’t been completely honest. On the other hand, some things had to be farmed. “Can you get me a list of Robin Matucci’s and Delaney’s addresses, and their heirs? Also their lawyers. Robin’s not married, right?”
“Not unless it was to Early Bird.”
“Then maybe that one will be easy.” She glanced out the window over his bed. A slice of sun glistened on the feathery leaves of a jacaranda tree, cut a swath across the steep ivy-covered hillside and disappeared. Olsen was still at the windowless inside wall, straightening his out-of-town directories, which, Kiernan noted, were in neither alphabetical nor geographical order.
She leaned against the doorjamb. “What do you know about Jessica Leporek?”
“Married a pile of money,” Olsen said, turning around and resting his hips against the edge of the desk. “Been a volunteer with Bay Watch and the Marine Mammal center, a docent at the Asian Art Museum, and probably worked with a couple other environmental groups. She’s fanatic about the antidrilling initiative. No one questions her sincerity. She’d cut off her right leg to get this thing passed. But …” There was a different quality to Olsen’s speech now, none of the condescension he’d shown when discussing Cummings.
To just what kind of person would Olsen feel kinship? Kiernan wondered. “But what? What’s her flaw, Skip?”
“Not lack of knowledge, that’s for sure. It’s more subtle than that.” He hiked up one shoulder and caught his hip higher against the edge of the desk. “Thing is, she’s not a girl the boys like. Know what I mean?”
She nodded.
“She’s one of those women in public life people make fun of. You know? Like Margaret Thatcher.” He tapped his foot nervously on the carpet.
“Go on.”
“Like the clumsy kid the other kids don’t want on the team. No matter how hard he tries, he’s never going to be one of them. They’re going to snicker at everything he does, and make it so everyone in school understands he’s the goat.” He turned around to face his computer. The movement was too fast. He gasped and grabbed his hip.
Kiernan could see only part of his face, but it was enough to reveal the telltale flush. Another person might have reached out, but, instinctively, she left him his privacy. Her childhood neighbors had shunned her, too, but that was because she rejected the church. At thirteen, it merely fired her adolescent rebellion, and she’d stomped past them, gone to public school, and tak
en out her anger perfecting gymnastic routines till she made the state championships. But that was hardly the same as Olsen and presumably Jessica Leporek’s experience of being scorned for themselves, she thought. There would have been no righteous anger for them. She waited till the color faded from Olsen’s face, and said, “So Jessica Leporek is fighting an uphill battle?”
“Yeah. The initiative might win, but it’ll be in spite of her.”
Kiernan stood up. “Get me an appointment with her, for tomorrow morning if you can. Eleven would be best. And Cummings, see if I can catch him after work, at home. Maybe about six.”
“Where you off to now?”
“Delaney’s. You have a current address for him?”
“Coast guard had zip. If they hadn’t known the deckhand was missing and had a name to begin with, he’d still be a John Doe. Manager at the Neptune wouldn’t tell the coroner’s investigator zip.” He smiled.
“But you got his forwarding address, right?”
“Olsen Investigations at your service. Twenty-sixth and Noe. Green six-plex, sixth from the corner. You planning to take a look in there?”
“I might have to. What about Matucci?”
He stepped carefully to the desk, extricated a file, flipped to a Xeroxed page and read off an address on Northpoint Street.
“I’ll call you at noon.”
Skip Olsen watched her walk down the stairs. So lightly. Her feet almost didn’t touch the steps. Life isn’t fair, the doctors had kept telling him, as if that would make everything fair on a grander scale. He walked slowly across the living room. Half his ass was skin-numb, and he could feel the bone grinding up into the hip joint like a pestle in a mortar.
He dropped onto the sofa. Too quickly. The icepick pain—cold, sharp, fast—running into the joint and then lightninglike down both sides of the leg. Going back to the wharf would be a bitch. Dumb. But he didn’t have any choice.
Kiernan climbed into the Jeep, and dialed the number Maureen Brant had given her at the grocery store.
“She had to leave,” the proprietor said when Kiernan asked for Maureen.
“She just called me ten minutes ago.”
“She waited as long as she could, you know.” The unspoken accusation was clear. “She was real worried about that husband of hers.”
“How so?”
“Like someone might get to him.”
“Did she say that?”
“Not in so many words.”
Rumors and suspicions she might accept from Olsen, but she was damned if she’d discuss them with a stranger. Still, it made her uneasy. “When is she coming back?”
“She’ll call you at three.”
“Fine.” She hung up and dialed the coroner’s office. When she’d identified herself, Marc Rosten’s secretary said, “Dr. Rosten is in a meeting. Can I take a message?”
“He was to have a copy of his autopsy notes ready for me. Would you check to see if he left it?”
“He didn’t leave anything for you.”
Kiernan took a deep breath. Rosten had always been mercurial and impulsive, but he had not been unreliable. It was a rotten time to start. She said, “When will he be available?”
“Not till after lunch.”
“Fine. Tell him I will call him then.”
Noe and 26th, downhill from Dixie Alley, and just south of the 24th Street bookstores, galleries and coffee houses, attracted singles, gay couples, and newly marrieds. It was a neighborhood that Zack could only dream of. And Delaney? He’d gone out of his way to keep a menial job for which he was overqualified. And here he lived in an area most deckhands wouldn’t choose and couldn’t afford.
Delaney’s building was a typical San Francisco six-plex, with outside central staircases front and rear. Kiernan checked the mailboxes. She wasn’t surprised to find his name absent.
She knocked on the nearest door: Wilson. No answer. That was the problem with a working-adult neighborhood—people were at work.
She tried the second door: Yamana. It wasn’t till the second floor that she got the gift of winter, a man in his thirties (Creswell) with the reddest nose she’d seen since the previous Christmas. Thank you, cold season, she thought.
“You frun da drug sto’?”
“No. ’Fraid not. I’m looking for Carlos Delaney.”
“Who?” He yanked a tissue out of his pocket and honked into it.
“He lived here up until two weeks ago.”
“No Delaney here.” Keeping the tissue at the ready, he put his hand on the door, about to swing it shut.
“Maybe you’d remember him if I described him.” She pushed away the picture of Delaney lying on the slab, his scalp eaten, his eyes ringed with bruises from the goggles. “About five ten, dark hair, blue eyes.”
He shook his head.
Recalling Delaney’s day blindness, she said, “Always wore dark glasses.”
“Oh, him! Chet Debbewo. Hey, dat an alias? Dey both sou’d like aliases.”
Debbewo? “Devereaux?”
Creswell affirmed with a nod and a titanic blow into the tissue.
“He lives upstairs. Right above me,” he said, quite clearly this time.
“Where can I find the landlord?”
“Yuma! Left right after da eartquake last year. You want his number down dere?”
“Thanks.”
He was halfway through writing it when the boy from the drugstore plodded up the stairs. Kiernan took the paper, waved thanks, and hurried downstairs.
The good news was that she now knew where Delaney/Devereaux lived. The bad news was that it was above the one person home all day with nothing to do.
Breaking and entering was rarely a good idea, as Tchernak was so eager to point out. It was a practice that created ex-licensed, injured PI’s, incarcerated PI’s, dead PI’s. Sensible PI’s shunned housebreaking at all costs. She knew that. Housebreaking was like seducing a man you work with. You know you’ll be sorry in the morning, and probably for a long time after, but that makes it all the more tempting. She should have learned that from Marc Rosten.
But patience was the last thing Rosten was qualified to teach, and at the bottom of the list of skills Kiernan seemed likely to master. She could call the landlord in Yuma. Would he tell her to go right in and search Delaney’s flat? Not likely. When he found out what was going on, he’d tell her to get lost. Then he’d call in a cleaning crew, sweep away any evidence, and rent out the flat before she could hunt up a relative of Delaney’s and get legitimate access.
Kiernan glanced up toward the third-floor flat. She was sorry she’d ever admitted it, and to Tchernak yet, but she did love housebreaking. She got a rush, an almost sexual rush from loiding a lock, or climbing through a carelessly left-open window. Penetrating it. Standing alone in the space someone had created to suit himself, sifting through closed closets, secret papers, revealing medicine cabinets, excited her. The pressure that forced total concentration, pitted her against alarms, police, neighbors, chance; it made her tingle all over. That was the real turn-on, not unlike the feeling she remembered from walking up the steps to Marc Rosten’s flat at shift’s end, wondering if he’d be there by his rumpled bed, waiting. She’d only had one close call, in a house in Rancho Santa Fe. She could still feel that as clearly as she could remember the feel of Rosten’s flesh pressed into hers. And then she’d managed to escape through the very door her nemesis had entered. That was the orgasm.
But at ten on a clear morning, housebreaking would not be a prelude to orgasm. It would be a ticket to jail.
Still, even from the outside, Delaney’s building had raised questions. Why had the man from this very middle-class neighborhood posed as a deckhand, and gone to a lot of trouble to do it? He was too smart for Robin’s tastes, but, obviously, not smart enough to survive.
Maybe Robin’s home, in the pricey Marina district, would give some answers.
17
KIERNAN CRESTED THE STEEP hill of Pacific Heights, with its pre-19
06–earthquake mansions lined up like matrons at a reception. The fog had burned off entirely here, and sunlight glistened on maples and magnolia trees. At the foot of the hill, the Marina district stretched flat and sparkling white to the edge of the Bay, and a tanker glided under the bright red arches of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It had been here, on a morning just like this, that Kiernan had had her first thoughts of wealth. She and Rosten had speculated that two doctors could afford to live anywhere they chose, but “be wasted on us,” she’d muttered. “We’re both too exhausted to be able to enjoy it.” Later, alone, she pondered the prospect: Pacific Heights, the antithesis of her childhood row house in Baltimore. She’d admired the colorful Victorian houses on Divisadero Street, but she hadn’t acted on her impulse to buy one, even when she was with the coroner’s office north of the city. Instead, she’d bought a modest house and furnished it in rattan, as if at some level she had known part of her life was temporary, that someday she would be gone from the coroner’s office and another day, months later, that she would give up her life there and buy a ticket to Bangkok.
She had returned from Asia after two years to discover her house was worth triple what she’d paid for it. Which was a good thing, because by then she had contemplated the prospect of wealth long enough in the abstract: she was ready for a beach house in La Jolla. And a houseman.
She drove across Union Street and Lombard and into the Marina, wondering whether Robin Matucci’s route to high-style living had been as circuitous as her own.
The last time she’d been here had been only a month or so after the big earthquake; the road had still been torn up and ropes blocked off the crumbling streets. But now the sidewalks were busy and the curbs jammed with cars, parked within an inch of every driveway, in front of garages, blocking entrance-ways.
Kiernan pulled up by Robin Matucci’s house, parking at the angle of the corner. The curb was gone, replaced by macadam, and next door a jagged crack still bisected the bricks in the facade. But Robin’s house looked unscathed. It sat flush between its neighbors, a stucco marina row house with a bay-windowed living room above a garage, a stairway leading up beside it. The house was built atop the rubble from the 1906 earthquake, manmade land that had turned to mud and sucked buildings down just as Garrett Brant’s Alaskan mud flats had pulled its victims into their depths. And still, Kiernan knew, the house was worth half a million.