by Susan Cox
The receptionist, wearing a multicolored wrap-around dress held in place, a little too low, by a sparkly brooch about to pop loose under the strain, finished her call. One of the things I’d found surprising about the city was its almost complete lack of a dress code. Even in downtown law firms the staff often looked as if they were dressed to go clubbing—or hiking.
She was briskly efficient and gave me a prospectus to read while I waited. It was mostly more color renderings of contemporary, multi-use buildings, all much larger than the one he had planned for the Gardens. I looked more closely at the drawings; they all had the same rather dreamlike quality, with pastel colors, cloudless skies, and lots of street trees. One was supposed to be in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood more nightmarish than dreamy. Maybe they were future projects and not completed ones. It could explain why he’d been interested in a relatively small project at Fabian Gardens—something quick and inexpensive to keep the business ticking over while he got permits for his larger projects. Or maybe his intention was always to force nearby property owners to sell so the project could be enlarged. I was escorted through the suite to Noble’s office. Everything was quieter than I’d expect for a busy and successful firm. Where were all the admin staff buzzing around, and why was there no one in the glass conference rooms or in the offices we passed?
Noble’s chair was turned toward the huge window behind his desk, and as I came into the room a cloud of blue smoke rose up from behind it. There was a faint haze in the room, and until I saw the overflowing ashtray on his desk I thought we should be heading for the nearest fire escape. I don’t smoke but I know cigars, and the one he puffed throughout our conversation was definitely of the corner bodega variety. He was middle-aged and paunchy, and in a city where every second person was a devotee of raw food or tai chi, or some other brand of healthy living, he clearly didn’t give a damn. His color was high with either high blood pressure or suppressed anger.
“If you’re here to harass me, you’re behind on the news, Ms. Bogart,” he growled. “We’ve decided to move on to other projects.”
I raised an eyebrow to express my astonishment. “Did Katrina’s unfortunate death have anything to do with that?”
“I know everyone thought Katrina was a huge pain in the ass, but she was our pain in the ass, and she was brilliant.” He waved the cigar. “She found something wrong with the title to one of those properties, and she told us it would be been an expensive battle on top of what we were already paying to fight the city and you Fabian Gardens Nazis. Frankly, I’d already lost interest; I have other fish to fry. So we pulled out of the deal. It was disappointing in one way, I guess, but I was grateful to her. Katrina saved us millions.”
“I heard something about her proposing to buy the buildings herself; it didn’t sound very above board.”
His face darkened further. “I heard something about that, but it made no difference to me if she was willing to get into it. Like I said, I’d already moved on.” He looked at me shrewdly. “If you’re looking for someone who hated her, try Angie Lacerda. She persuaded those property owners to sell for a pretty penny, and bought the properties, intending to sell them on to us for development. Us nixing the sale cost her several million.”
“I—er—understood that she was buying them on your behalf.”
He held up his cigar and examined the ash before he brushed it gently on the rim of an overflowing ashtray, and it fell silently onto the ghosts of his earlier cigars.
“Ms. Lacerda misunderstood the level of our interest. It was just business.”
“Did you happen to know a priest, Father Sergei Wolf? He was the man they found dead in one of those properties.”
“Interesting, but fortunately not my problem.” I showed him the photo Grandfather had shared with me of Sergei with the Coit Tower murals. He shook his head. “No, I didn’t know him. A priest you say? A local?”
“He was visiting from South America. But he seems to have had an interest in the Kiev orphanage Katrina was supporting.”
Noble snorted. “Katrina was proud of that place. She was pretty discreet about it, but she lobbied her clients for donations. She was hard to resist; believe me, I know.”
“So you donated, too?”
“I gave her twenty-five grand last year.” He narrowed his eyes. “It was tax deductible against the business.”
“Did Katrina ever mention someone called Pavel? Maybe someone involved with the orphanage,” I improvised, “or someone she knew here in San Francisco?”
“I’ve never heard the name. Sounds—what? Russian?”
“I think it means ‘little’ in Russian,” I agreed, having looked it up. He shrugged.
He didn’t get up to see me out, just waved his cigar at me as I said my goodbyes. As I was passing the receptionist’s desk, she rose and smiled. “Let me show you how to work the elevator.”
Maybe she was tasked with making sure Noble’s visitors actually left. She walked me to the elevator and as we waited, watching the lights above it indicating its progress, the way you do, she said quietly, “He was seriously pissed about the Fabian Gardens deal falling through. I hear a lot, you know? He’s way overextended; he’s had to let people go in admin, sales, and even construction. The offices are practically empty. He was counting on that deal to keep the company afloat. He and Ms. Dermody had a screaming fight about her putting in a bid to buy the buildings after he”—she tossed her head in the direction of her boss’s office—“pulled out. He fired her.”
“When did this happen?”
“A day or two before she was killed. She was a piece of work, that lady.” She hesitated. “My aunt and uncle live in Fabian Gardens.”
“Who?” I whispered, and she giggled.
“The D’Allessios. Uncle Guillermo was super relieved when everything fell apart.” She winked and glided back through the frosted glass doors.
That evening, I told Nat what I’d learned.
“So let me get this straight. Katrina told Noble the problem with the title would mean another long, costly legal battle, which Angela Lacerda said was a lie because it amounted to nothin’ but a clerical error. Noble said he was happy with Katrina’s efforts on his behalf and didn’t care about her tryin’ to buy the buildings, and didn’t mention that he’d fired her when he found out.”
“Right,” I said. “So Katrina lied and Noble lied. At least Angela was up front about hating Katrina,” I added. “And is it weird that the neighborhood association had a vested interest in preventing Noble from getting hold of the buildings? Because from the outside it looked as if they and Katrina were on opposite sides, but they were actually working toward the same end.”
“It’s a rattler’s den. No tellin’ where one snake ends and another one starts.”
“So Noble could have killed her because he felt she cheated him in the business deal, or Angela might have killed her for the same reason, or for some other reason.”
“Yeah, but I don’t get it. All the decisions had already been made before she died. Noble had pulled out, and Angie was reconciled to holding on to the buildings. If everyone’s telling the truth, why’d they kill her?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Faye-Bella waved me in to Bonbons Chocolat as I walked past.
“Hi, Bella, what’s up?” I was talking to her, but I was looking at the coconut chocolates in the big glass case. She used tongs to pick one up without asking me, dropped it into a little pleated paper cup, and put it on the top of the case. Yep, I was probably here too often. My own customers at Aromas were either less habit-driven, or I wasn’t paying enough attention to them. Although, now that I came to think of it, I guess a lot of them did just come in for refills of the same shampoo or lotions. That made me feel better, for some reason; maybe I wasn’t so inattentive after all. I pulled some change from the front pocket of my jeans and put it on the case, then picked up the sweet and nibbled it.
She said, “Matthew was asking about you this morning
; he seemed anxious to talk to you.”
“Matthew always seems anxious,” I said, and then sighed. It wasn’t Matthew’s fault that every conversation with him was an effort. It was hard to know what was best. Was he better off on the streets or in some sort of permanent living situation with rules about showers and clean clothes, where he would get decent meals and help with his medications? I was still aghast that a city as rich as this one, in a country as rich as this one, was comfortable letting people live on the streets—hungry, filthy, and often in need of help. My grandfather told me once that it was possible to ignore the poverty in the streets of Mumbai or Delhi, that fairly quickly one simply stopped seeing the poverty and the lives it held in thrall. I didn’t ever want to be like that, but the enormity of changing even a small thing about people’s lives was daunting. I admired Ben’s ability to keep soldiering on in the face of indifference and outright hostility to his work with abused and homeless women.
“True,” she said ruefully. “And I wouldn’t have known for sure what he wanted, but he kept saying ‘black; no sugar,’ and I know you’re his favorite barista.” She smiled at me. “I suppose I’m guessing it was you he wanted.”
I looked out onto the street. “Does anyone know where he goes when he’s not here?”
“Apparently he has a place near the Panhandle, up past Weller. In some sort of derelict building. Some days he goes down to the cable car turn-round at Powell to pick up a few dollars from the tourists.”
“It’s not much of a life.”
“He doesn’t have a lot of coping skills. And you hear these terrible stories about homeless people being beaten up. A few years ago someone doused one poor guy with gasoline and set him on fire.” Her eyes were wide with horror. “Anyway, I was worried too, so I asked around.”
I hadn’t done anything to find out Matthew’s story, if he had any sort of comforts in his life, if he was safe, or if he had family. “That was really nice of you, Bella.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “I think it was because I started to look after his comforter for him,” she said.
“He’s lucky to have you,” I said, still feeling guilty.
“It’s all of us, really,” she said. “Father Martin makes sure he gets a shower occasionally; you get him his morning coffee and a pastry; Julie up at the sandwich shop gives him lunch some days, and Jonnie at the pizza place gives him a slice and a soda on other days. Marge from the drugstore gives him a toothbrush and toothpaste and a comb every now and then. It really does take a village sometimes. We have to look out for each other.” Tears lingered on her lashes; she pressed her lips together and nodded. “Anyway, you can ask Matthew tomorrow what he wanted; although maybe he’ll have forgotten by then.”
But Matthew wasn’t in his doorway the next morning, or the next, and I forgot about what Bella had said until three days later, when Nat and I were trying to think of how Sergei had been lured to the empty building, or his body transported there in the small hours. There was no guarantee some local wouldn’t roll out of Coconut Harry’s, or step off a late-night bus up on California, at an inopportune time. Even in our famously laissez faire city, I couldn’t imagine anyone seeing a dead body being carried through the streets without at least taking a selfie. How had that been done?
“San Francisco isn’t like London, with CCTV cameras on every corner,” I said. “They’re intrusive, but one of them would come in handy now.”
“Matthew might’ve seen something that night,” Nat said, and I thought of Matthew’s shopping cart. If there was one thing almost no one would remember or think was important, it was a homeless man pushing a shopping cart. It wouldn’t take the killer much more effort than wrapping a blanket around his shoulders and tossing another blanket over the body.
“We should try and find him,” I said. “I haven’t seen him for a few days.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“Bella said he lives in a derelict building near the Panhandle. Maybe we could find it. Or maybe Father Martin knows something.”
“I’m trying to remember what I know,” Father Martin said when I called. “I think someone here said he has a place in an old—police station, maybe? Something like that.”
“Do you think you could find out?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. He just hasn’t been around, and I was wondering if he’s okay.”
“Let me ask around this evening and see what I can find out.”
He called me early the next morning, more helpful than I expected given our oddly abrasive first meeting. One of their volunteers thought Matthew lived in the semi-basement of a decrepit former firehouse near the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“I’ll call you if we find him,” I said instead.
Nat and I drove over to the Panhandle and scoped out several blocks on either side before we found it. It was very obviously a squat, since no sane person would have allowed the place to be occupied legally. Not by human beings, at least. The front of the building was sealed with plywood and two-by-fours over the windows and doors, and it was surrounded by a formidable chain-link fence. The narrow vacant lot next door must have been too small for the city to approve a building permit; it was overgrown with eucalyptus trees, shedding their bark in long, ragged ribbons. For some reason I was reminded of the dancers at the Venus. We made our way back along the fence, the ground under our feet slippery with years, perhaps decades, of fallen eucalyptus leaves, seedpods, and strips of bark. Both the firehouse and the vacant lot backed onto a ten-foot retaining wall topped with wooden palings, so there was no way in there. But near the wall, the fence had been pushed and flattened until it was possible, if not easy, to climb over onto a strategically placed, upturned crate in the firehouse yard. Nat went first and helped me across, grumbling when he caught the sleeve of his sweater on a stray wire. We approached the back of the firehouse, and I went down three uneven stone steps to a door, hanging on one hinge and sheltered by the second-story overhang. When I couldn’t get the door open, Nat came down to lean his weight against it. It screeched and scraped until it was more or less open.
Matthew’s crib was an education in the variety of pungent smells caused by moldy newspapers, cats, old fast-food containers, and a nonfunctioning toilet. The atmosphere was like a physical barricade. We both stopped on the threshold and looked into the room as far as we could, which wasn’t very far. Canyon walls of unstable piles of cartons, papers, pallets, and random pieces of plywood and lumber reaching almost to the ceiling loomed over a narrow walkway leading into the apartment. A cat ran at us, back low, ears flat—and as we stood there exchanging an appalled look, a carton slithered off one of the towers and took one of the smaller stacks down. It landed with a thump more or less at our feet, missing the cat by inches and raising a miasma of dust and another appalling stink. The cat made its escape. Nat coughed and pulled his sweater up at the waist to hold it around his mouth and nose.
“Doesn’t help,” he said, and dropped the sweater again. He looked into the apartment and then back at me. “I’m not steppin’ one foot in there,” he said loudly, as if I’d suggested it. When I turned my head, took a deep breath, and started to go through the door, he grabbed my arm and said hastily, “And you, either. God knows what kinda germs are floatin’ around.” He had a point. Even if I wanted to go in—and I really, really didn’t—I wasn’t sure I could inhale more than once without throwing up. “Matthew!” I shouted from the doorway. The silence was broken only by some loudly buzzing flies making a dash for the open door. We both ducked reflexively. Ugh.
“He’s not here; let’s go,” Nat said.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
He raised a fist and cupped it in his other hand. “Rock, paper, scissors?” he said hopefully. “Two outa three?”
I rolled my eyes and held my hands around my mouth. “Matthew! Are you home?”
This time I did hear somethin
g. It was coming from somewhere in the depths of the room.
“Probably another cat or somethin’,” Nat said cautiously. “Smells as if the place might have one or two. Or three.”
The noise, this time obviously a low groan, came again. That was no cat. I sidled to the center of the labyrinth as quickly as I could without knocking against anything or slipping on something foul, and gagged at the smell. The only light came from a couple of ground-level windows, grimy and barely translucent, but I could still see more than I really wanted to, as I grabbed at a pile on the floor of disintegrating newspapers and trash covered in maggots.
I uncovered an ankle with a foot at an odd angle, wearing a tattered sport shoe. “Nat! Come and help!”
“Dear God, do I hafta?” But he came around the corner quickly enough, saw what I was trying to do, and bent to help. I knew it was Matthew under there, but I found myself hoping it was someone else, some stranger I didn’t need to feel responsible for. Another moan came from the pile of trash. It was wispy, weaker than the first, and contained a small squeak that didn’t seem to bode well for his lungs. And then I uncovered Matthew’s face. His eyes wandered until they settled on mine. “Call 911,” I gasped at Nat as I tried to smile at Matthew. “He’s still alive. You’ll be okay, Matthew. You’re nearly out of there.” He closed his eyes and started to mumble. “Coffee, black. Coffee, black.”
I was crying now and barely managed to choke out, “That’s right, Matthew, coffee, black. Hang on, okay?”
I kept digging, flinging things off him at random, and Nat finished the call and bent down again to help at first, but then stood to lean back against a wavering tower that seemed in danger of falling and flattening us all.