The Man in the Microwave Oven

by Susan Cox

  “Not that it’s any of—”

  She frowned

  “Right. In a murder investigation, everything is your business.” I bit the inside of my cheek, irritated at the need to lay myself bare for her, and finally said, “I couldn’t sleep. I walked down to the Embarcadero, then up to Russian Hill, back down California, and turned onto Polk.”

  “That’s a lot of walking. You were out for how long?”

  “I’m not sure. I wasn’t in a hurry. Two hours, a little more.”

  “And you did or didn’t see Ms. Dermody’s car when you started out?”

  “I went the other way, down Polk to the Embarcadero, so no, I didn’t notice it then.”

  “Go on.”

  I swallowed. “I got close to Katrina’s car and saw the blood on the window.”

  “You recognized the car?”

  “It’s a new Tesla. We all heard about it when she finally got off the waiting list.” Oops. A little too caustic. I smiled to make it a joke and then mentally slapped my forehead; a joke was probably worse than sarcasm. She didn’t smile back.

  “What did you do then?”

  “I got into the car and tried to see if she was still alive, but … well, she wasn’t. I called 911 and waited here for your minions to arrive.” I’d been sitting on the curb with my head on my knees when Nat arrived, ready to open up The Coffee. He found me, and he sat with me until the first police patrol car and emergency vehicles arrived.

  Her lips twitched. “Minions. Yes. Did you see anyone on the street; hear any footsteps, anything like that?”

  I remembered faintly hearing the buses up on Van Ness, which in daylight would be drowned out by Polk Street’s own traffic noises. The near silence had been peaceful, I’d thought.

  “I did hear something,” I said after a minute, during which she merely looked at me. “I thought it might be Matthew. He sleeps here in the doorway on some nights,” I added in response to her raised eyebrow. “There’s a dumpster in the alley and he picks through it sometimes. I think that’s where he got the duvet.” I pointed at the shopping trolley, abandoned in the doorway.

  “Did you see him?”

  I shook my head.

  “But he left his comforter and his shopping cart here?”

  Right, the duvet was a “comforter,” and the trolley was a “shopping cart.” “He often does.”

  “And you stayed after you found Ms. Dermody and called a friend.” She gave Nat, across the street behind the yellow tape perimeter, a flickering glance.

  She didn’t sound concerned on my behalf, just analytical. I abandoned the duvet and flapped a hand at Nat. He gave me a sympathetic pout.

  “I was supposed to meet Nat. He arrived just before your first-responders and he stayed because we didn’t like to leave her here alone,” I said. Nat had agreed it felt wrong to leave her with strangers.

  They’d separated us, questioned him, and then made him keep his distance, which was just as well since I’d seen him faint more than once at the sight of blood. He’d spent the few minutes he was with me rubbing my back and carefully not looking toward Katrina’s car.

  At street level the lights from all the official vehicles were bouncing off the patchy fog, which revealed and then closed around the storefronts farther down the block. It was strange and disorienting. I was also getting flashes of Katrina’s ravaged face superimposed over the scene of uniformed men and women exhibiting detached competence all around us. I had a new image to add to my nightmares. Lucky me.

  Lichlyter cleared her throat. I tried to remember what we’d been talking about.

  “So not just out walking, then, but meeting your friend.”

  “He’s started a new business, reopening the coffee shop, and I’ve been helping him get things ready for an hour or two every morning.”

  “Starting when?”

  “For the past couple of weeks.”

  She frowned.

  “What time, do you mean? I’ve been coming at around five thirty.”

  She consulted the battered notebook. “So you were early today. You told the uniformed officer you tried to open the driver’s side door.”

  You’d think it would be impossible to forget, but I found details were already hazy.

  “Right. It was locked, so I went around the car and opened the passenger door.”

  “Which wasn’t locked.”

  I shrugged and didn’t say anything.

  “The car was running when you arrived?”

  “I didn’t know how to turn it off.”

  She consulted her notebook. “The Tesla—does she usually park it on the street?”

  “The renovations to her garage weren’t finished in time.” She’d blistered the workmen’s ears with her displeasure. At volume. “She had a charging station installed in her garage, but there was some sort of problem, with a hole or a broken pipe, I’m not sure. They had to lay a new surface on the floor, and it needs a few days to cure before it can take the heat of the tires or something.” Lichlyter frowned at her notebook, and I realized I was babbling. “Anyway, the point is, she couldn’t drive on it. She was charging the car at her office building.” San Francisco being San Francisco, parking garages were required to have charging stations for electric cars.

  “Is there anything else you feel I should know?” The mild sarcasm, with which I was all too familiar, seemed to be bringing our conversation to an end. I couldn’t think of anything to add and probably looked as clueless as I felt. She glanced over at someone approaching with a cell phone in his extended hand. She took the phone with a nod of thanks and turned back to me.

  “You can leave, Ms.… Bogart. I may need to speak with you again later, and if you think of anything … well, you know the drill.” She didn’t wait for me to respond, just flipped her notebook closed and walked away with the phone to her ear. I felt oddly snubbed. I’d remembered her being—not warm exactly, but less brisk. We’d even had a friendly moment or two in the past. Perhaps she didn’t remember.

  I went over to stand with Nat. He put an arm around my shoulders, which was sweet, but I almost ached to have Ben’s arm around me instead. But Ben wasn’t with me, and wasn’t likely to be anytime soon. He’d been recalled to duty for the first time when we’d been together just a month. He wasn’t allowed to tell me anything and he was gone for six weeks. He’d come home with a broken wrist and offered no explanation beyond a dry, “Bumpy flight.” He was still spending two weeks a month at his civilian job in Washington, DC, and two weeks with me so, what with one thing and another, we’d only been in the same town at the same time for a handful of weeks.

  Nat and I couldn’t make ourselves leave. We stood together outside the crime-scene tape and watched procedures roll on like an industrial grinding machine. Men and women in uniform, as alert as border collies in spite of the early morning hour, made note of license plates up and down the block, placing small cards under windshield wipers. Two officers crisscrossed Polk Street, checking doorways, trying handles, shielding their eyes to peer into street-level shop windows, and ringing the doorbells of the apartments above. This brought out an assortment of sleepy or pissed-off locals with bed head who wandered over to the barrier or climbed back to their upstairs windows to stare down at the unfolding drama, hugging their coffee mugs.

  Photographs. Video. Laser measurements. Medical examiner. Ambulance. Flickering red and blue lights. Yellow crime-scene tape. Pale, intent faces. And Inspector Lichlyter’s familiar suspicion that everything I told her was, at least, filtered through my own lack of candor.

  I didn’t really blame her. Most people would feel that a proven liar will always lie. The reasons wouldn’t matter, and I might have felt that way myself not too long ago.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was only because no one suspected anything that I was able to live here unrecognized. If anyone had connected my grandfather to his brother, the Earl, or me to my famous father, my identity wouldn’t remain secret for another hou
r. But generally, people had no reason to think you might not be who you said you were. How often have you met someone new, heard their story from their own lips, and been suspicious that they were lying? I can tell you how often it’s happened to me: Never, that’s how often. Even with my own reasons, and given my own secrets, if my friend Nat was suddenly revealed as the son of a famous actor, or my ex-lover Kurt Talbot turned out to be a novelist instead of a surgeon, I’d be as startled as anyone. Added to that was the generosity of San Franciscans generally—people have come here to reinvent themselves since Oscar Wilde famously said: “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.” People were taken at their own valuation. If anything about my life seemed slightly odd, it would be shrugged off as mild eccentricity or simply none of their business. At least I assume that’s what was happening. Grandfather wasn’t well known, but a simple Google search would probably place him in his family tree, which would make my own relationship to him easier to uncover. And once that happened, his relationship to my father, and our family disaster, wouldn’t be hard to find.

  My English parents had been famous and rich, and now they were dead, and the high-profile way they’d died had left me shocked, grieved, and nearly consumed by a media firestorm. After the events that had eventually driven me out of London the year before, I wanted to disappear, and I was almost too successful.

  Because I was a member of the London paparazzi tribe—if taking photos of drunken friends weaving their way around Sloane Square and falling out of West End dance clubs qualified—they felt I owed them easy access to my story and resented me when I wouldn’t play. I’d felt like chum for the rabid sharks of the British tabloid press. Harried and chivvied for weeks, I’d finally thrown some random clothes and shoes into a suitcase and bought a ticket on the first plane leaving Heathrow. I’d dyed my hair red to disguise my natural blonde, and exchanged Stella McCartney and Christian Louboutin for Levis and long-sleeved T-shirts. I introduced myself as Theo and took the name Bogart from an actor in one of the movies I was still watching to improve my American slang. I was even grateful that my nose had recently been broken, which subtly changed my appearance. I hoped it was enough, because there was a limit to what I could accomplish in the way of a new identity. It wasn’t easy to disappear in an era of terrorist watch lists and twenty-four-hour international news cycles. It was, however, fairly easy to keep in touch with a few people via Skype without exactly explaining where I was, knowing that if anyone asked them about me, they’d be typically vague and self-involved. No one was surprised that I’d needed a break after the horrific events of that year, and I was deliberately noncommittal about when I’d be back.

  Fortunately or not, I was as impulsive as ever, or perhaps simply numb. Within weeks I bought a derelict building, agreed to go into business with someone I met over coffee, adopted a dog I found mooching around my back door, and somehow signed on to serve on the board of our neighborhood association. Grieving, and without friends or family or familiar surroundings, I needed something to hold me in place. Aromas was my anchor.

  My shop is called Aromas because pretty smells are what the merchandise has in common. Added to the essential oils, soaps, lotions, and perfumes, we feature bath-related items like kimonos and natural sponges. We also sell shampoo and lotions in bulk (sourced from a former meth-cooking chemist whose professional name is Smart Alex), refilling bottles our customers bring in. It’s a small space, and I’d just installed a rolling library ladder so we could use the top shelves, just below the ceiling. Bunches of wildflowers and herbs, some of them given to us by customers, are jammed together to create a sort of upside down meadow on the ceiling, hiding an assortment of ugly pipes and conduits.

  So I had my anchor, but I was also a prisoner of my own lies. I’d originally intended to just live quietly and anonymously for a few weeks or months, in a city where I knew no one and no one knew me. But being involved in a murder investigation in those first few months, and getting to know and like the people in my neighborhood, meant that in no time at all I had friends here; I had Ben; and trying to explain why my relationships with them were built on lies wasn’t just difficult—it felt impossible.

  And so the lying went on.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  By the time Nat and I left the scene, it was still only midmorning, but it felt like the end of a very long day. I didn’t open Aromas, and Nat left the coffee chop closed—the street was still barricaded, and only residents were being permitted on the block anyway. I spent what was left of the morning and most of the afternoon trying not to remember how Katrina had looked when I found her, and taking phone calls from friends and neighbors, all of whom were agog, and couldn’t wait to share their Katrina stories with me.

  I heard about arguments over rubbish bins; complaints about loud music, some of which ended in police visits; fights over untrimmed shrubs blocking the sunlight to her downstairs rooms; the bitterness over her new window awning, which blocked the sunlight to someone else’s rooms; I heard about babies being awakened by jackhammers, whatever they were, and, flying high and above everything else, impotent fury over the condo development she was championing. As a resident, she was entitled to attend association meetings, which she often did, and devising a coherent strategy to oppose the condo was impossible with her in the room. So I also heard about her threats of legal action over proposals to exclude her from the meetings for a conflict of interest. Katrina wasn’t gracious in victory, and she didn’t come off well in any of the stories. I was exhausted just hearing them.

  Nat and I were together in my flat, and he’d spent a lot of time on the phone, too. In midafternoon he put together a meal for us. He insisted a salad of greens with a lemon and olive oil dressing would go down—and stay down—since it wasn’t likely to bring up any unpleasant associations. We’d eaten the salad, and drunk a little too much wine, and then more or less collapsed on a couple of chairs in the living room. I still didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but Ben had found the George Nelson armchairs somewhere; Grandfather had given me a large and valuable oriental rug; Nat had chosen the peacock blue velvet couch for me, and the coffee table with its splotches of gold leaf had been made by a friend. I was lucky because if it was up to me, the place would still be empty and I’d be sitting on the floor.

  Light from the window left one side of Nat’s face in shadow. I picked up my new camera and raised an eyebrow, asking him for permission. He shrugged, and I took a couple of quick shots. “Turn slightly this way. That’s it. Beautiful.”

  “I feel so objectified.” He wandered over to take the camera from my hand. “Nice piece of hardware.”

  “Retail therapy,” I said.

  Nat knew why I might need some retail therapy, and he looked sympathetic. “No word from Ben?”

  “He can’t while he’s deployed.” I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat, and grasped for a change of topic before Nat started to rehash Katrina’s murder—again. He wouldn’t leave it alone, and I’d had enough. “Hey, here’s something I haven’t told you. Haruto saw me taking a few photos downstairs, and now I have to take the photos for this year’s calendar.” I grabbed a couple of the old calendars from the firewood bin.

  He chuckled and put down the camera. “Better you than me.”

  “Here’s the one with the doorways leading into the Gardens.”

  He leafed through the pages and showed me a door painted with a six-foot Harley insignia. “That one brought in some real strange visitors to the Open Garden two years ago.”

  “And here’s the Pets of Fabian Gardens year.”

  “I’ve never thought Mrs. Oyarzun’s Chinese Crested looks like ‘a skinned rabbit with a pompadour,’ but that’s just me.” He tossed the calendar back to me. “There was nearly bloodshed that year. Too many pets; not enough pages in the calendar. Made the meetin’s fun though.” Nat loved the neighborhood association meetings; he e-mailed unofficial “minutes” full of snarky sid
ebars to his cronies, including me.

  I flipped through the crumpled pages. It was an odd little anachronism, in a way, but it had its devotees, and no one on the board wanted to be responsible for eliminating it from the budget. Every Fabian Gardens household received a copy, and it hung in utility rooms and kitchens, usually a month or two behind the current date.

  “I’ll probably stick to flowers. Everyone likes flowers, right?”

  “Yeah,” he drawled. “You might want to stay away from Georgia O’Keeffe close-ups of the naughty bits.”

  “Oh, God.”

  He smirked and flopped back into his chair, leaning down to stroke Lucy’s belly, which she had presented for rubbing. I’d adopted Lucy as a stray, only later realizing that Shakespeare had her in mind when he wrote, “though she be but little, she is fierce.” Not that I know much about Shakespeare beyond a few quotes, but he’s hard to avoid at school in England, even when you try. Lucy was a small, bad-tempered terrier of some kind; she tolerated me and adored Nat. The jury was still out on Ben, although he was making inroads when he was here, largely due to his habit of giving her scraps of bacon at breakfast.

  Nat kept up the rhythmic stroking, and Lucy closed her eyes. Nat resumed picking at the details of Katrina’s murder. “Why didn’t they just snatch Katrina’s briefcase instead of riflin’ it? Wasn’t that kinda weird? Took time, and you’d think they’d be in a big hurry to get the hell away.”

  I gave him a sharp look, interested in spite of my genuine desire to forget the details. “You’re right—if it was just some random robbery gone wrong, they’d grab the briefcase and run. Maybe it was someone from the neighborhood who didn’t want to risk having anyone see them with it.” It had a band of Russian-looking geometric designs incised into the leather, definitely one of a kind, and difficult to pass off as something from Target or the local luggage store.

  “So something personal? It had to be big. I know she was a pain in the ass, but if that was enough to get someone killed, half the neighborhood would be killin’ the other half.”