by Susan Cox
While two judges and the director of the city bar association each said a few words, the priest was gently flipping the pages of the photo album. I think I was the only person who saw him take a photo from the album and slip it into his jacket pocket. Before I could do or say anything—not that I wanted to shout “J’accuse!” at a priest—he made an unobtrusive exit and the room quieted for Nat’s introduction of Katrina’s cousin, Gavin Melnik, and I forgot about the photo in the surprise that followed.
Melnik fussed with a laptop the way everyone does, clicking on keys and getting flustered by failure messages until suddenly, and obviously to his surprise, a photo appeared of a dozen or so happy-looking blonde children wearing red T-shirts and eating ice cream cones. I’d seen the same photo in Katrina’s office. With a rather charming, self-deprecating smile, he handed the laptop over to a woman sitting in the front row. She efficiently took over.
He cleared his throat nervously. The murmurs in the room quieted, and he flushed, as if he hadn’t expected it. He was neat and attractive, with a striking combination of brown eyes and thick blonde hair in shades from almost platinum to light caramel.
“I just want to add to all the wonderful tributes to my cousin, Katrina,” he said. That was a stretch. So far, the kindest thing anyone had said about her was that she was a “respected and well-known” attorney. No one mentioned, for example, that due to her efforts, several ex-CEOs were believed to be employed as Walmart greeters in Nevada.
“Before I begin, I want to thank Janine—” He dipped his head toward the woman operating the laptop who had introduced herself as Katrina’s assistant. Janine smiled damply at him, bowed her head, and sniffed into her tissue. Melnik smiled at her. “As you can tell, I’m not very tech-savvy, but Janine kindly put this small presentation together for me. It warms my heart to know that Katrina was a respected colleague,” he said, “and I’ve been pleased to meet so many of her personal friends tonight, too, but I want to share something I think will surprise everyone.” His voice cracked, and he was obviously uncomfortable, but he seemed determined. Several people leaned forward in their chairs, obviously expecting something juicy, and it was, but not in the way anyone anticipated.
“Katrina and I connected through a family tracing website ten years ago. She was an orphan and I had recently lost my parents, and we found we were both alone in the world except for each other. She felt the lack of family very keenly, and seven years ago, she founded a home for orphans in her hometown of Kiev.”
That caused wide eyes and some mutters, quickly hushed when a new photograph of children with a pair of shyly smiling Catholic nuns in old-fashioned black habits appeared on the screen behind him. Janine held her tissue over her mouth, nearly overcome with weeping; clearly the woman hadn’t worked for Katrina long enough to learn to loathe her. The man sitting next to Janine absently patted her shoulder.
Melnik stepped forward to bend down and click a couple of keys on the laptop, and the photo disappeared. He looked momentarily nonplussed and clicked some more keys, and when nothing happened, did that exasperated shrug thing everyone does and abandoned the laptop to pick up the thread of his remarks.
“Katrina didn’t want her philanthropy to be widely known, but I feel she wouldn’t mind me telling you about it now,” he said quietly. “She took a great deal of pleasure in the progress of the children, and I truly think it was the joy of her life. Katrina wasn’t able to leave her busy law practice to see the results of her generosity, but I’ve seen the wonderful work being done at St. Olga’s first hand. Katrina provided for the home in her estate plan, and so the good work of the sisters will continue into the future. I know that she’ll continue to watch over the children.” He smiled. “And, if you feel inclined to make a gift in her honor to the orphanage, perhaps she’ll watch over you, too.” The audience gave him his laugh and a smattering of applause. He handed the laptop back to Janine and stepped away, leaving his frankly astonished audience abuzz.
It brought the evening to a close on a positive note, made Katrina seem more human, and eased some of the negative attitude toward her. I even felt a little sorry that I hadn’t liked her more.
Nat stepped out onto the veranda and opened a basket resting on a table. Several white doves took to the skies and flew over Fabian Gardens. He hadn’t told me he’d planned it, but it was very effective. I resolved to ask him to do that for me, too.
I don’t know if all funerals and memorial services are so exhausting, but I fell into bed that evening at ten, and didn’t stir until it was time to get up to help Nat at The Coffee. It was the best night’s sleep I’d had in months.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning, with the early rush over at The Coffee, Nat and I relived some of the details of the evening. The bar association’s tribute, a large wreath on a tripod, had come crashing down at a key moment, which Nat said was the floral equivalent of being struck by lightning. One of the doves, relieved at being set free, left a small parting gift on his shoulder. “It’s why I didn’t come back inside until everyone’d left,” he said, straightening the cuffs of his pale blue cashmere sweater.
“It was a beautiful send-off. You did a good thing, Nat,” I said.
“Somebody had to, and I got the feelin’ it was sorta ‘ding-dong the wicked witch is dead’ around here,” he said. “I got plenty of practice settin’ up memorials. Like fallin’ off a log.” The sheen in his eyes surprised me until I remembered his stories of families who refused to acknowledge their gay sons, even when their gay sons were sick and dying. I hugged him and he kissed the top of my head before disengaging.
He cleared his throat. “I swear that woman from the law office was the only one to shed a tear.”
“She’d only worked there for a few weeks—”
“That explains it.”
“She told me again how Katrina’s paralegal had just quit in a huff—”
“Yeah, I noticed he wasn’t there last night.”
“—but Janine took up some of the slack, and she said Katrina was grateful.”
“That might be a first. But she shouldn’t be doin’ paralegal stuff. They get special trainin’ and licenses and all.”
“It just sounded like an overdue report for Katrina to sign off on. Whatever it was, Katrina gave her more projects to work on, and for some reason that earned Janine’s devoted loyalty.”
Nat made a cappuccino for a customer and leaned on the counter to continue our conversation. “You know, someone stole one of those damn dolls,” he said.
“It didn’t just get knocked behind something?”
“I checked; the thing’s gone. I’d say they were welcome to it, but—”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Lousy. Gavin was pretty philosophical about it. Said if somebody wanted it that much, they could keep it. He’d been thinkin’ of maybe givin’ them to people as remembrances. I told him what you said about them maybe bein’ valuable, so he’s gonna wait on that.”
“It wasn’t the big one, was it?”
“Nah. I wondered if maybe it was Noble’s kid. I mean who else ’cept a kid would steal a doll? So,” he added in a different tone, as he busied himself building a pyramid of coffee mugs, still hot from the dishwasher, “Katrina was showin’ good form the other day.” I pretended not to know what he was talking about. It was as close as he’d come to mentioning my scene with Katrina the day before she died, and I was flooded with the same near panic.
He would normally tease out the meaning of Katrina’s spite and laugh over it with me. Instead, he looked at my no doubt pale face and launched into a story of the Coast Guard inspectors who’d made an official visit to the coffee shop the day before.
“The Coast Guard? Aren’t they like the Navy? Why would they be inspecting coffee shops?”
He snickered. “They’re apparently responsible for inland waterways runnin’ into the Bay and someone”—his eyebrows gave the word the ironic twist it deserved—“said I’d be po
llutin’ the underground creek under Polk Street with cleanin’ products or somethin’—I’m not sure, but anyway, they came to take a look.”
I blinked. “There’s an underground creek?” I’d renovated a neglected old building in the neighborhood, up to and including preparing it for earthquakes, but a hidden creek sounded like a new and unwelcome threat.
“No. Well, yeah, but it’s more like a seasonal seep in a conduit, and since California’s as dry as Abilene in August, I doubt it’s seen a drop of water in years.”
“What did the Coast Guard say?”
“Well, first, lemme tell you they were both in uniform. And you know how I love—”
“—a man in uniform, I know,” I interrupted and rolled my eyes.
“Anyway, they took a look-see and said everythin’s fine. They gave me a list of eco-cleanin’ products to use. The cute one gave me his phone number.”
“Of course he did,” I said. “Are you going to call him?”
“I might. Think he’d wear the hat to bed?”
I spluttered, Nat laughed, and the awkward moment passed.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Aromas had made it onto the tourist trail after the publicity of a few months ago, and Katrina’s murder only made a brief dip in the number of our customers. We were busy again at the end of the week. I asked Haruto to add a couple of extra half days to his work schedule, and Davie was still on for three afternoons a week, but I needed at least two more part-timers. I’d been reluctant to hire anyone in case the increased tourist business was temporary. Then I’d need to lay them off, which I wouldn’t have the heart to do, and I’d be worse off than before. My former partner had left the store in some debt. It wasn’t a huge amount, and I could have paid it off from my personal funds, but it had become a point of pride to get Aromas into the black and prosperous.
While I did some sums on the back on an envelope, I also wondered who—besides me—had a reason to kill Katrina. I scribbled over the numbers to make a list of potential killers. It could have been someone we knew nothing about, like one of the ex-CEOs maybe. But, if it wasn’t random—and Nat’s idea about her briefcase seemed to bear that out—it had to be someone who knew where she lived, who knew she’d be parked on the street, and who knew she’d be leaving for work at five in the morning. Nat was right; it wasn’t business, it was personal. So it could be her cousin, Gavin, although he’d seemed pretty broken up about losing his only relative. He didn’t inherit anything, so it was hard to see a motive, especially since he’d probably lost his home, too. We’d hardly seen Matthew on the street in the days since her death, but if he had a guilty conscience, he wouldn’t run away; he’d be sure to tell the first person who asked. I couldn’t picture either Professor or Ruth D’Allessio killing her, even if they were going to be living next to the condo development. I wondered about the priest who’d stolen her photo; I supposed he could have been trophy hunting like a serial killer, but did priests commit murder? Wouldn’t they be more likely to call down hell and damnation on someone? Then there was Angela, with her secret abortion. I didn’t know her, but Nat said she’d always struck him as a fairly colorless, pleasant enough woman. Still, backed into a corner and faced with the loss of her fiancé, perhaps she’d struck back. I also put a reluctant question mark against Sabina and Kurt, who’d recently given up their opposition to the condo project.
By then I’d tumbled down the rabbit hole as far as I was willing to go, largely because I couldn’t imagine any of these people chasing me down an alley at gunpoint. I abandoned the list when a man who’d been hesitating in the doorway suddenly decided to come inside. Little wisps of fog swirled into the shop as the door closed. Older men often approached the shop cautiously for some reason, as if they weren’t sure of their welcome. This one was dressed head-to-toe in black, even to the scarf looped around his neck. He was probably in his sixties, and a little bit portly. He had a thick patch of scarring down one side of his face and across his eyes and forehead. I gave him a friendly smile, but he looked around at the shelves of personal grooming products with faint distaste, as if he wished they weren’t quite so … feminine. He spent a few minutes wandering around, picking things up and then putting them back, the way people do when they don’t know what they want or they’re trying to waste time for some reason without earning the shopkeeper’s ire.
He came to the counter with a bottle of shampoo and a shower cap. He was essentially bald, so I had to assume they were a gift of some sort, although when I offered him gift wrap he just seemed puzzled. He had an accent I didn’t recognize and an odd, slightly smoky smell. His fingers were nicotine stained, which is something you don’t see very often now that it’s almost impossible to find a place to smoke in comfort. He smiled, exposing a gold canine tooth.
“I think perhaps you are the person I am seeking,” he said. Actually, his accent was so heavy I’m not sure I got that right, but I think that’s what he said. The smile fell away quickly, and his face was suddenly completely without expression, which was slightly unnerving.
He asked me something so out of the blue I assumed I’d misheard. “Excuse me?” I paused in the act of handing him his purchases. The turquoise-and-white-striped bags usually gave me a little lift, even after a year in business and a lot of high-impact water under the bridge.
“I am looking for Mr. Clement Pryce. I think you might know him.”
I hesitated. That sounded as if he knew my grandfather, whose name was actually Pryce-Fitton. He could just be a nice guy, ex-friend of my grandfather’s, but his eyes bothered me. I’d learned to read people by watching their eyes—remind me to tell you about the kid who stabbed me in the hand with a ballpoint pen. This man’s eyes were dead. They were the kind of eyes you’d expect to see on a prisoner of war or someone who’d lost his family in a fire. On the other hand, he didn’t seem nervous enough to be planning to rob me, or charming enough to be a reporter. He could be a photographer from one of the London tabloids; all he’d need was a phone with a sharp camera lens. On the other hand, he was older—and better dressed—than any of the robbers or journalists I’d come across, but it wouldn’t do any harm to be cautious.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think so,” I said, and fiddled with the glasses I sometimes wear nowadays because I couldn’t wear a Batgirl mask to protect my identity.
“Ah! Perhaps this will help. I have something—” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a handful of small papers and receipts. He sorted through them, crushing a couple of them in his fist and tossing them on the floor, and then reached into the breast pocket of his overcoat. He pulled out one of those old-fashioned leather wallets almost the size of a paperback book, the kind people used to take on vacations because it fit their passport and oddly sized foreign currency
“It is this.” He carefully withdrew a piece of newsprint, which seemed to be an ad for lingerie, and I took a step back. Robbers, reporters—I guess fetishists needed a category of their own. You might think I was unreasonably skittish, but the last time a perv had come into the shop, the few clothes he’d been wearing had been quickly dispatched for my edification. Grappling with a naked man who’d managed to douse himself in one of our more expensive body lotions was an experience I had no desire to repeat.
But he unfolded the paper and showed me the other side by smoothing it flat on the counter with his palm and then pushing it toward me with a stiff finger. I recognized the image of my grandfather. It had appeared in The Chronicle a few months before, during all the excitement caused by two murders, a near-fatal assault, and the arrest of one of our own. We’re a close-knit neighborhood, and, speaking for myself, we hadn’t yet recovered from the series of shocks.
I took a couple of seconds to regroup.
“This gentleman,” he said impatiently, pointing a finger at Grandfather. The photographer had caught him walking past the front window of Aromas, frowning at the camera. It was actually a very bad likeness, and I was surprised he was recogniz
able to anyone but me. “He and I were colleagues years ago. Imagine my surprise seeing him in the newspaper.” He blinked at me and smiled widely, evidently to encourage my participation in his astonishment. The smile disappeared almost instantly, and his oddly flat expression returned.
I picked up the clipping. “This was from quite a while ago,” I said.
He shrugged, which didn’t help me much.
“I don’t think I know him,” I lied, because lying was practically second nature. “But I can ask around, if that will help.”
He flashed the gold tooth briefly in another smile. “Excellent,” he said. “Thank you very much.” It came out like “Tunk you verree masch,” which took me a second or two to grasp.
“When you find him,” he said with a slight bow, “tell him Sergei was asking for him. Sergei Viktor Wolf.” He shifted his scarf out of the way to reveal a Roman collar, which explained the all-black wardrobe. It was a surprise, and one that you might think would give me reason to be more trusting. On the other hand, it reminded me that I’d seen the priest at Katrina’s memorial filching a photo from her album, which wasn’t exactly priestly behavior. I’d have to remember to mention it to Nat and see if he knew which photo was missing.
I stopped staring at his priest’s collar and pulled my phone from the back pocket of my jeans. The collar made a friendship between them less likely because my grandfather was slightly suspicious of Catholic priests. It was an unusual prejudice in a man who was otherwise very modern in his thinking, and predated the scandals of recent years, when mistrusting priests seemed to have turned into a cottage industry. I also couldn’t imagine how they could have been “colleagues” in the past. As far as I knew, my grandfather spent his career in fairly high levels of the civil service, something to do with agricultural policy. When I was young, he was always going over to the countries of the old Soviet Union to discuss tractors and food production methods with politicians. I couldn’t think of a time when he would have worked with a Catholic priest. Sergei’s heavy accent sounded vaguely Russian; maybe that’s where they had met.