The Man in the Microwave Oven

by Susan Cox

  When I finally steeled myself to open the dossier late that evening, I found a sketch of each person’s life, based on their education and job history and, sometimes, their real estate holdings. Nat, for example, owned a cabin in Wyoming, which, while interesting (he seemed like such a quintessential city person to me, even though he’d started life in Texas) hardly provided material for blackmail. The papers weren’t in any particular order, and most people had just a single sheet of paper, headed with their name, and date and place of birth. A few had articles or photos attached.

  Ruth D’Allessio (nee Lyons), who lived next to one of the vacant buildings with her husband, had been arrested, twice, for participating in anti-war demonstrations, once in 1968 and again in 2007, which probably says more about America’s bellicose history than Ruth’s temper and penchant for kicking police officers. She had a woodshop in the decommissioned Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where she designed and produced uncomfortable chairs beloved of decorators and collectors. She trained and employed young men and women who’d somehow escaped the local gang culture that put guns in the hands of children and provided the community with untold hours of entertainment in the form of regular drive-by shootings. Her membership in Grandmothers Against Gun Violence made a lot of sense in that context.

  Nothing there seemed blackmail-worthy.

  Her husband, Professor D’Allessio, had been a respected professor at UC Berkeley and had written several books on Italian Renaissance drama. I was surprised there was enough to say about it to fill one book, let alone five. There was a translation of an Italian newspaper article accusing him of plagiarism, but nothing had come of it and, while faintly shadowed by occasional reminders of the accusation in Italy, once he’d moved to the US, he left it behind, and his reputation here was unsullied. He accompanied Ruth on her anti-war marches (there was a photo of them together in handcuffs). Rather than damaging his academic standing, his activism seemed to enhance it. After he was pepper sprayed, and the ACLU won a judgment on his behalf, he was given tenure by the university.

  The plagiarism accusation was too old to do him any harm, even if it came to light. I poured myself another glass of wine and turned the page. Moving on.

  Sabina Talbot (nee D’Allessio) was a UC Berkeley alumna, a philosophy major, and a bonded motorcycle messenger and international courier until her marriage. There was a fairly lengthy list of the countries and cities she’d traveled to, often in parts of the world where postal service was unreliable or nonexistent. She’d been to Kiev and Albania numerous times, for example. She’d had an affair with a rich, married tech billionaire for more than a year. Sabina had always refused to identify him. I read his name and then wished I didn’t know. She had married Kurt Talbot and the tech billionaire’s baby (Sebastian) was born three months later.

  The only thing I saw in Sabina’s history that might cause trouble for her was the identity of her baby’s father. If he didn’t know about the baby, he might fight her for custody; maybe that’s what Katrina was planning to threaten her with.

  Her husband, Kurt, was an eye surgeon with privileges in several San Francisco hospitals. He’d interned at a famous Florida eye institute, but earlier, he’d been caught up in an investigation of medical students selling prescription drugs. He’d been exonerated, but several of his classmates weren’t so lucky, and their medical careers were cut short. Reading between the lines, Kurt’s well-to-do family had put him in the hands of a PR specialist who made sure his name was kept out of the media.

  Okay, I could see that coming back to bite him. A doctor’s reputation was his stock-in-trade; no one wants to put themselves in the hands of a surgeon with a shady past. He and Sabina had been very vocal in their opposition to the condo, which I’d always assumed had something to do with supporting the D’Allessios, who were furiously opposed to it. Then, about a month before Katrina’s murder, they had stopped attending meetings and generally muted their responses to overtures to attend protests or participate in letter campaigns. So—either Katrina or something else had changed their minds.

  Katrina’s journalist cousin, Gavin Melnik, had been raised in Poland by adoptive parents and attended a Swiss university called ETH, which left their graduates sounding as if they had a severe lisp. (“Where did you go to school?” “Thankth for athking; I went to ETH.”) I giggled immoderately at my own humor and decided I’d probably had too much wine on an empty stomach. I stopped reading long enough to make myself a cheese sandwich before settling in again. Gavin emigrated to the US when he was in his early twenties, after his parents’ death in an auto accident, and he’d lived in San Francisco for twelve years. He was a little younger than he looked—only thirty-four—and his work history was spotty, but that’s almost expected for a writer. After seeing some of the top-flight magazines he’d written for, I had a new appreciation for the uncertain life of a freelance journalist, since Katrina had given the impression he lived with her as a sort of general dogsbody and gofer because he couldn’t afford a place of his own.

  Nothing there seemed worth threatening him in any way, and he wasn’t a property owner, so his support or opposition to the condo shouldn’t have had much impact.

  Jesus and Luis Aguardo, who lived in a flat on the other side of the empty buildings, were married in the window that had briefly opened in 2004, when San Francisco was an outlier, before marriage equality became the law of the land. They leased their flat in the Gardens and, when they weren’t travelling, spent a lot of time at their Architectural Digest–worthy home in Mendocino. They owned a successful wine and beverage company with outlets throughout California, famous for both their private label wines and for their exclusive offerings from small, specialty wineries. In 2012, they were sued by the bereaved parents of an underaged teen who had purchased half a dozen bottles of wine with a fake ID, managed to drink it all in a matter of hours and died from alcohol poisoning. The court case had been brutal, the teen exposed as a binge drinking alcoholic, his parents vilified as uncaring and interested only in the financial settlement of their lawsuit. The mother had committed suicide within six months. The father’s whereabouts were unknown.

  Jesus and Luis weren’t culpable in the teenager’s death, and the entire saga had played out in the media, so there didn’t seem to be anything they could be blackmailed with. Katrina had headed their victorious legal team, so if she were planning to blackmail them, she’d been double-dipping.

  Angela Lacerda was a different story. She was younger than everyone else in the dossier and lived in the flat underneath the Aguardos. She had undergone an abortion when she was in high school. She was about to marry into a wealthy Catholic family with historic roots in the city and a well publicized, not to say fanatical, opposition to abortion. The file speculated that her current fiancé might be unaware of her history. She owned several small pieces of property in the East Bay, mostly vacant lots, judging from the description. She rented her apartment—she didn’t own property in the Gardens—but her prospective family were influencers; Katrina might have been hoping that with the right persuasion, like a threat to tell her prospective in-laws about her abortion, Angela would bring them into the fight on her client’s behalf.

  Having finished the dossier, and feeling as if I needed another shower, I stuffed it behind my pillow and tried to get to sleep. I was awake for another couple of hours. Reading it had been spectacularly unhelpful. I knew things I wished I didn’t, and I couldn’t see how any of it was useful in the investigation into Katrina’s death unless I went to talk to the people involved. And if I did that, how did I explain knowing any of what I’d learned?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Mixed drinks or just red and white?” Nat said he’d been coerced into planning the memorial for Katrina, although I knew perfectly well he’d volunteered.

  “Just wine, I think,” I said. “People can help themselves and you won’t need a bartender.”

  “That’s what I thought. And no one wants to see all those down
town lawyers liquored up and then drivin’ home smashed.” He admired his reflection in the window and adjusted his yellow cashmere sweater. “D’you like the color?”

  “It suits you,” I said, because it did.

  He smirked. “Yeah, but what doesn’t?”

  Burial or cremation would have to wait until the police released Katrina’s body, but the neighborhood, in lieu of any apparent family besides her cousin, was planning the memorial, and a small get-together. Someone in her office provided a list of professional colleagues to invite, and the rest of us were told about it on the neighborhood Facebook page. A few of our more sentimental residents were calling it a celebration of life, which seemed macabre, and I hoped we weren’t supposed to have a sing-along and champagne toasts, because I couldn’t think of anyone who’d join in.

  Nat borrowed the key to Katrina’s apartment from her cousin so he could look for a few things that might add what he called “texture” to the memorial. (“Sometimes you’re really gay, you know that?” “I suppose you think it’s easy bein’ this amazin’.”) Her cousin was supposed to meet us there, but he had something come up at the last minute, which was a mild relief to me, since as far as I knew he was still suing me, and I wouldn’t know what to say to him. I looked idly round, as if I hadn’t used my lock picks to borrow, and then return, the entrance card to her office suite. She’d renovated fairly recently, and everything looked new and contemporary, except for a collection of matryoshka nesting dolls, one or two of which were more than a foot tall. Nat was going through some boxes on her desk, where someone had made a start on packing up her things. A couple of huge rolls of bubble wrap and some duct tape seemed to promise more packing in the near future.

  “She had a collection of these,” I said, handing him one of the roly-poly dolls. The paint on this particular one was faded and scratched.

  “You’ve gotta wonder why,” he said. He twisted the doll at the waist. She opened to reveal another doll inside.

  “They can be quite valuable, especially the larger ones,” I said, and took the doll back.

  “I guess we could put a couple out for people to—admire, if that’s what we think they’ll be doin’.”

  “Some of the guests might know about them, so it would mean something to see them,” I said.

  While Nat went through her desk looking for photographs, I amused myself by revealing all the smaller and smaller dolls inside the matryoshka and lining them up on a shelf. There were thirty, all the way down to a doll the size of a peanut.

  “Ah, gotcha!” Nat said, and waved a slim Tiffany photo album in my direction. I went over to see what he’d found. “We can have a couple of these enlarged,” he said, “and leave the album out for people to look through the rest. I don’t know most of these people,” he added, flicking through the pages, “but maybe they’ll be at the memorial. Look here.” The photo was of Katrina, looking about twenty years old, wearing shorts and an open-necked shirt. Her arms were around a good-looking guy, who held some of her blonde hair back with one hand as the wind blew it all over the place. They were both laughing and I had to look twice to make sure it was her. When I knew her, she was always immaculately turned out, with every hair in place, and I’d never seen her laugh. Nat was still examining the photo closely. “This guy—”

  “What?”

  He held the open album upright across his chest for me to see. “Does he look familiar? He reminds me of someone.”

  I took another look. It confirmed my first impression; he was a looker, with a large, sensual mouth. His hair was thick and blonde and wind-blown. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes. He was taller than Katrina, who’d been tall for a woman, but he didn’t look familiar. “Who does he remind you of?”

  “I dunno. It’s probably nothin’.” He turned the page to find a photo of her alone, perching on a large boulder, in shorts again but with a different shirt, holding one of the wooden dolls. I recognized it; the mama doll was holding a cup of tea and it was still in Katrina’s collection.

  “Probably started with one, and then people gave them to her for birthdays and Christmas,” Nat said, as I pointed it out. “A friend of mind bought one teddy bear because it reminded him of somethin’, I forget what, and before he knew it he had a hundred. People bought them when they didn’t know what else to get him. And the more he had, the more people thought he liked them. He never had the heart to tell anyone he only bought the first one as a joke.” He tapped the photo of Katrina. “I’ll have this one enlarged; maybe someone will come who remembers her at that age. And this one with the law books in the background. Whaddya think about this one?” Katrina was glamorous in an evening gown on the steps of the Opera House.

  I nodded. “Good choices—three different ages and stages of her life. By the look if it, there were no other men in her life worth a photo since that one.”

  “I’m surprised there was even one.” He flicked over more pages. “Who’s this kid, do we know?”

  I looked at the photo of a boy, aged about ten. “No idea. Are there other photos of him?”

  He shook his head. “Just the one. Maybe her cousin knows.” He picked up the album and tucked it into his messenger bag. “Gimme a couple of those god-awful dolls.” I reassembled the one I’d been playing with, and added the one in the photo and another at random.

  He tore off some bubble wrap, rolled them in it, and stuffed them in his bag. “Not sure there’s anythin’ else. Her cousin’s her executor. He said he’s arrangin’ for her stuff to be auctioned and added to her estate.”

  “That’s the fellow who’s suing me.”

  “Yeah, I know. Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, he seems okay.”

  “I wonder if he inherits anything? I never heard Katrina was married or had children. And she seemed to have plenty of money, plus her home, not to mention the Tesla. Hey! Maybe he gets everything, which gives him a motive to murder her!” I was quite excited by this flash of brilliance, but Nat shook his head.

  “Sorry, Miss Marple. He said she left everything to some charity.”

  “No kidding? I would have thought he’d be included.”

  He shrugged. “He seemed okay with it.” He walked away and opened each of the doors in the hallway. He called back, “Where’s her wine?”

  “What? For the memorial?”

  He came back. “No, not thinkin’ of that. It’s just—she was always talkin’ about what an expert she was, and what a great investment wine is; she belonged to that wine club and adopted a vine or whatever the hell. And the small bedroom set up with all the custom redwood wine racks.” He opened his arms like a TV game show host. “So where’s all the wine?”

  We looked at each other. “Maybe she put it in storage while she was renovating?”

  “It’s been done for months.”

  “Or maybe she drank it.”

  “Her liver’d be the size of Montana. Take a look.”

  He led the way down the hall, and we both looked into the little room. She’d had a glass door fitted, and the lights were operated by a switch in the hall so the `setup could be admired without disturbing the wine. The last time I’d seen them, several months before, the floor-to-ceiling racks had been full. Now they were almost empty.

  “How long had she been a collector?”

  “She said she had the wine room built when she bought the building; must be fifteen years at least.”

  “They probably had someone in to value the wine, and they took it to sell.”

  “Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Otherwise we’re left with a cartoon image of a guy with a little black mask hauling sacks of bottles out over his shoulder ’til he drops dead of exhaustion.”

  As it turned out, even with its slightly unconventional setting, the memorial on Monday night was dignified and touching. One of Nat’s friends owned a neighborhood antiques store, and ´the upstairs was already arranged into seating areas. The tattered silk upholstery gave the occasion a sort of world-weary, fin de siècle sop
histication. With the addition of some discreet folding chairs, there were plenty of places for people to sit if they wanted to. Nat had taught me to have at least a few chairs in a gathering of more than five people—there was always someone getting over a hip operation or who had sprained an ankle training for a marathon or who’d just had a tough day at work. In this case, we were expecting several people on target for their sixth or seventh decade, so it was best to be prepared. Fabian Gardens was denuded of white flowers, and Nat set up large, elegant arrangements in antique vases. I thought the addition of the giant white trumpets of the poisonous datura plant might have been an editorial comment, but he maintained he just needed the drama they provided. White pillar candles reflected softly in rococo mirrors. The Tiffany album and the matryoshka dolls sat next to the guest book on a faded gold bombé chest. Easels around the room held the enlarged photos in gilt frames, and, seeing the young Katrina again, I found myself wondering what could have changed that carefree, smiling girl into the woman I knew and disliked.

  Several dozen of our neighbors were joined by a number of well-dressed strangers I presumed were professional colleagues. Inspector Lichlyter showd up fairly early in the evening, passed some moments speaking to Katrina’s cousin, Gavin Melnik, and raised her glass to me in an ironic toast. The condo developer, Amos Noble, arrived with Mrs. Noble and a teenaged daughter. The dignity of the occasion probably prevented anything worse than a few furious glares being aimed in his direction. Nat, acting as compere, invited people to speak about Katrina. Noble said a few respectful things about her, half of his audience stone-faced and the rest clueless. A priest arrived fairly late. He was a good-looking man in his mid-fifties, I guessed. He didn’t speak as if he knew Katrina, and he offered the kind of free-form prayer I’m accustomed to thinking of as Pentecostal or Evangelical rather than traditionally Catholic. Afterward, he wandered around and spoke quietly to a couple of the other guests.