“In his case, it’s the truth. Do you recall how long he planned to keep the car, or if he returned it?”
“No.”
“Can you find out?”
He hesitated, frowning. “I’m not sure I can get that kind of information, or if I should be giving it out.”
I flipped from Hy’s picture to my identification. “It’s a missing-person case. His plane’s tied down at North Field, and they need to free the space.”
“Well, if it’s airport business … The cars’re tracked individually by vehicle number, so I should be able to pull it up.” He turned to his computer and typed, peered at the screen, typed some more. After a couple of minutes he said, “He kept the car for four days. Was returned on Saturday to SFO.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“Ninety-two Toyota Cressida. Blue.” The clerk smiled. “He asked me what the hell Cressida meant. I didn’t know. Then he goes, ‘How can I risk my life on the freeways in something called that—especially when I don’t even know what it means?’ ”
I smiled, too. Hy’s interest in—and knowledge of—cars stopped around the year his ancient Morgan had been manufactured. “And that’s all the information you can access?”
“Yeah. Anything else you’ll have to check with our people at SFO.”
“You know the name of the supervisor down there?”
“Dave Fry. He’s at the car-return area, not the counter in the terminal.”
“Thanks for your trouble.”
“Don’t mention it. Good luck finding the guy.”
* * *
Before I left the terminal I went to the snack bar and asked for the waitress who was seeing a North Field lineman named Jerry. The woman behind the counter pointed out a petite blonde named Katie who was juggling four plates with skill worthy of a magician, and said she’d send her to me when she was free. While I waited I nursed a cup of coffee.
The sight of my I.D. turned Katie’s blue eyes a shade wary. Yes, she said, Jerry had come in for breakfast last Wednesday morning. “What’s he done?” she asked.
“Nothing that I’m interested in. Did he mention giving somebody a ride over here from General Aviation?”
She frowned. “I don’t … Wait—the guy with the Citabria?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yeah, he did mention it. The guy’s not really a friend of his, but they talk when he flies in here. Jerry wants one of those Citabrias real bad, and the guy … What’s his name?”
“Hy Ripinsky.”
“Right, how could I forget that one? Well, Hy told Jerry he’d let him know if he heard about a used one for sale cheap.” She shivered. “I sort of hope he doesn’t. Those planes scare me to death.”
“Did Jerry say why Hy needed the ride or where he was going?”
“Just that he’d only landed to drop off his girlfriend and refuel, but then he’d made a phone call and found out that the plans had gotten switched around on him. He was pissed because if he’d made the call a few minutes earlier, he could’ve caught a ride into the city with his girlfriend instead of having to rent a car. What’s going on, anyway? Is this Hy in some kind of trouble?”
“Some kind.” I gave her a conspiratorial smile. “I’m the girlfriend.”
For a moment Katie looked dismayed; then she laughed. “I know how that goes,” she said. “If I was a detective, I’d’ve gotten the goods on Jerry months ago.”
I thanked her and left the terminal, trying to sort out what had happened last Wednesday morning. Hy was sorry he hadn’t been able to ride into the city with me; that meant he’d felt no need to conceal whatever he planned to do there. Maybe that would make tracing his movements easier.
* * *
Dave Fry, manager of the Econocar lot on the frontage road near SFO, looked like a very depressed individual. I could see why. His desk in the office shack was heaped with unprocessed paperwork; the windswept lot was full of unrented cars; the terminal shuttle bus stood idle. I saw only one other employee, a young Asian man who sat on the step of the bus, looking as down in the dumps as his boss. When I showed Fry my identification, he sighed and shrugged—obviously expecting some kind of trouble and resigned to it.
“That car was returned after office hours on Saturday,” he told me. “What they do, they drop the keys and paperwork in the lockbox outside, and we bill their credit cards.”
“May I see the paperwork?”
Fry looked at the desk in front of him, mouth turning down. “Someplace here,” he muttered, pushing a couple of piles around, then lifting another and peering under it as if he hoped a pair of helping hands might reach out to him. After a few moments of fumbling, he worked a folder free of the stack; it had a yellow Post-it note stuck to its flap. “Hey, that’s right,” he said. “The car you’re asking about is the one that came in damaged.”
“Damaged how?”
Fry examined the envelope. “Dented right front quarter panel and busted headlight.” He held it out to me.
I took it and examined the Post-it note. The message on it said to bill all charges for repairs to American Express, and the writing wasn’t Hy’s. His was more like printing—bold and sprawling. This was fine script that reminded me of Hank Zahn’s nearly illegible scribbling.
Quickly I looked inside at the contract, where the credit card had been imprinted. It had Hy’s name on it and also that of the Spaulding Foundation. I took my notebook from my bag and scribbled down the credit-card number and expiration date, then handed the folder back to Fry. “There’s no one at all on duty here after hours?” I asked. “Not even a security guard?”
He motioned through the window at the lot. “Lady, does our volume of business suggest that we could afford a guard?”
He had a point. “Is the car still here on the lot?”
“Yeah. It’s not going into the shop till tomorrow.”
“May I have a look at it?”
Fry’s eyes narrowed. “The car wasn’t used … well, like in a crime?”
“Not to my knowledge. This is just a routine skip trace.” Didn’t I wish.
He nodded. “Then I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t take a look. Space thirty-four, back against the fence. Hasn’t been moved since it was returned. You’ll have to find it yourself; I can’t leave the office.”
I went outside and crossed the lot. The Cressida was pulled in, nose against the fence, badly dented and very dirty. I ran my finger over the damaged quarter panel, and it came away with a coating of fine gray-black dust, like ash. I went around and slipped into the driver’s seat. It was drawn up so that a much shorter person than Hy—or than I, for that matter— could drive it.
The shaky feeling I’d experienced when I first saw the Citabria in the tie-down at the airport returned. Questions flooded my mind: How had the car gotten damaged? Why hadn’t Hy returned it himself? Who had? I didn’t speculate on the answers, merely turned my attention to a systematic search.
Nothing in the glove compartment but the owner’s manual. Nothing in the ashtray. A couple of Styrofoam cups that had contained coffee on the passenger’s side floor. Some loose change caught in the crack between the seat back and bottom. And shoved down beside the seat, a map. I pulled it out and unfolded it.
It was a Triple A road map of the area south of San Jose where Highway 101 cuts through Santa Clara and San Benito counties on the way to Salinas. A smaller area was circled in red felt-tip on the portion that had been folded out, and in the margin Hy’s hand had written, “Ravenswood Road.”
Ravenswood Road. Something familiar about that. Where …?
I closed my eyes, pictured the stretch of highway; I’d driven it any number of times over any number of years, en route from San Francisco to my parents’ home in San Diego. You bypassed Morgan Hill and Gilroy on the freeway, and then the road narrowed and was open to cross traffic. There was that stretch—I couldn’t remember whether it was before or after the turnoffs for Hollister and San Juan Bautist
a—where the north-and southbound lanes were divided by a big stand of eucalyptus. If you were driving north, you saw a turnout with boulders covered with graffiti on the left, and on the right a sign for Ravenswood Road. A scenic place, and isolated. Nothing much there that I could remember. Why …?
I folded the map and stuck it in my bag, then pulled the trunk release and went to look inside. Nothing. I went over the front seat and the backseat once more, then hurried to the office. Fry still stood behind his desk, staring dejectedly at his mounds of paperwork. I gave him my card, asked him to call me if he heard from the renter of the damaged car. As I ran to my MG, I tried to estimate the amount of time it would take to reach Ravenswood Road. It was quarter to three now—
Dammit! I’d forgotten about the partners’ meeting at All Souls. Command appearance, and I was reasonably sure I’d be in big trouble if I failed to show. I’d have to return to the city for it, then double back, and brave San Jose in rush-hour traffic. At least it stayed light until eight or eight-thirty this time of year, so I’d be able to see whatever there was to see down there—if anything.
I pointed the MG toward the entrance to northbound 101.
Two
When I hurried into the foyer of All Souls’s big Victorian in Bernal Heights, I saw that the sliding doors to the parlor, where the partners held their weekly meetings, were closed. Ted Smalley, our office manager, looked up from his computer and said, “Aspice quod felis attraxit.”
I sighed. “And that means …?”
“Look what the cat dragged in.”
During the past weekend Ted had come across a gem of a book by one Henry Beard entitled Latin for Even More Occasions. Ted, who is an odd combination of Renaissance man and efficiency expert, read and memorized the entire volume and was now planning to search the stores for all the other Beard titles, as well as seriously considering signing up for a refresher course in the dead—well, apparently not so dead—language. Recently I’d been worried about him because he’d seemed depressed—not an unusual emotional state for a gay person who had lost at least a dozen friends to AIDS during the past year—and I welcomed this improvement in his spirits. But if he was going to greet me every morning with such expressions as Expergiscere et coffeam olface (Wake up and smell the coffee), I wasn’t altogether certain how long I could endure this bizarre new enthusiasm.
I motioned at the closed doors. “I take it they’re annoyed with me for being late.”
Ted shrugged.
“Should I go in?”
“Hank said they’d send for you. If you ever showed up,” He went back to his computer.
Terrific, I thought. The summons to the meeting had sounded ominous from the first, and now I was out of favor for being late. Bad initial impression, and if I went in there preoccupied with Hy’s situation, I was likely to compound it. What I needed was to put Hy out of my mind for the moment. Perhaps some diverting conversation—and not in Latin— would help.
Instead of going up to my office, I went down the hall to the cubbyhole under the stairs that belonged to my assistant, Rae Kelleher. She sat at her desk, one foot tucked up in the chair, the other scuffing rhythmically against the floor as she spoke on the phone. I squeezed past her and curled in the armchair—my former ratty armchair that she’d slipcovered in blue and white—and waited while she finished a conversation relating to one of the background investigations she was working. The office, a converted closet that the building’s former owner had the gall to call a den, was overly warm and stuffy; I glanced at the ficus plant Rae nurtured under an ultraviolet bulb and saw its leaves were dusty and drooping from lack of water. Rae herself seemed similarly uncared for; her curly auburn hair needed washing, and her jeans and sweater looked as if she’d slept in them. It didn’t surprise me; she’d had a big disappointment the week before. Her current love, jewelry chain owner Willie Whelan, had demanded she sign a prenuptial agreement before he’d present her with a diamond engagement ring, and Rae had flown into a rage at his remarks on her inability to wisely handle her own finances. Since then she’d handled her hurt with alternating fits of fury and dejection. This must be a dejected period, because when she hung up the phone and swiveled toward me, I saw her eyes were red.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Oh …” She waggled an outstretched hand from side to side.
“Another fight with Willie?”
“Look, I can’t talk about him, I’d just start crying again. What’s with you?”
I’d come here for diversion, so I wasn’t about to explain the Hy situation. “I’ve been summoned to the partners’ meeting.”
“Uh-oh. How come?”
“Don’t know, but Hank acted mighty shifty when he asked me to be there.”
“Weird.” She screwed up her freckled face in thought. “I’ve been hearing a word around here lately—‘reorganization.’ ”
“Yes, Hank said that’s what they want to talk about.”
“Well, it sounds to me like a euphemism for demotions or layoffs. This place is getting too corporate, if you know what I mean.”
“I do. And I hate to sound like I’m wallowing in nostalgia, but I miss the good old days.” In the old days All Souls had possessed a certain laid-back ambience as well as an excitement about the challenge we were presenting to the legal establishment. Now we were establishment. We’d incorporated; we’d bought the Victorian and spiffed it up with its first paint job in decades; we’d rented two additional houses across the park out front for our support staff; we had an 800-number hotline for clients; we had marketing people to sell the membership plan to large northern California employers.
But those were only surface changes. Others went much deeper, and the fact that I was currently sweating over attending a meeting of the partners told me just how deep. The partners: my friends.
Hank Zahn, senior partner and sole remaining co-founder of All Souls, was my oldest and closest male friend. He was one of several people I’d shared a house with in Berkeley while getting my degree in sociology. His wife, Anne-Marie Altman, another founder of the co-op, had left to become head counsel for a coalition of environmental organizations—including the foundation Hy ran—but she remained my closest woman friend.
Jack Stuart, our criminal specialist, wouldn’t be at today’s meeting because he’d left town this morning to sort through some painful feelings about the case he and I had just concluded. But Larry Koslowski, our corporate specialist, would be present. Larry, our resident health nut whose good intentions and peculiar culinary concoctions had nearly poisoned me on any number of occasions. And then there was Pam Ogata, the tax attorney who had filled Anne-Marie’s shoes—a Japanese-Hawaiian whose exquisitely decorated quarters on the second floor spoke of her homesickness for the islands. Pam, with whom I’d shared many an expedition to flea markets, thrift stores, and antique shops.
How on earth could I shrink from a meeting with such friends? Of course, there were two relatively unknown quantitie.…
Rae asked, “Shar, what do you think of Mike Tobias?”
It was as if she’d overheard my thoughts. Mike Tobias was one of the unknowns—a newish partner. His background—a childhood spent in the drug- and crime-plagued Sunnydale projects and a stint as a social worker before attending Hastings College of the Law—had made him a tireless crusader and perfectly suited him for working with our needier, less empowered clients.
“I’m not sure,” I told Rae. “I like him, and I certainly admire him, but I don’t really know him.”
“The reason I ask is that this corporate stuff became more pronounced about the time Mike made partner.”
“Well, the incorporation and the new partners all happened at the same time. That was when Gloria came on board, too.” Gloria Escobar devoted her attention to equal-opportunity and civil-rights cases. I knew even less about her than I did about Mike, because she seldom socialized with any of us.
That was another difference from the old days: back
then I could count on knowing all my colleagues well. Many of them had lived in free rooms that the co-op provided to offset the low salaries a poverty law firm offered. All employees were welcome to attend the frequent potlucks, parties, and poker games. Today everyone was adequately compensated, and the few who remained in communal living quarters—Ted, Pam, Larry, Jack, and Rae—paid fair-market rent. A number of the newer associates and employees led personal lives that were strictly segregated from their work lives, and while the potlucks, parties, and poker games continued, they catered to an ever-diminishing core contingent.
Rae said, “Mike and Gloria seem like good people, but I can’t warm up to either of them. I get the feeling that anything not strictly relating to work is off limits, and you’ve got to admit that neither of them has a sense of humor.”
“They’re crusaders, Rae. People with missions often don’t see much to laugh at.”
“Well, if I couldn’t laugh at stuff, I’d go totally insane. Even this thing with Willie has its funny side, if you think about it.”
I agreed—both about the thing with Willie and the need for laughter. If I lost my ability to laugh at life’s snares and pitfalls—to say nothing of my own foibles and pomposities— I’d end up in the bin within weeks.
Ted stuck his head through the doorway. “They’re ready for you, Shar.”
“Thanks.” I got up and followed him, smoothing my long red sweater over my jeans and feeling ridiculously like a little kid being called to the principal’s office.
As I slid open the parlor door, Ted whispered, “Noli nothis permittere te terere.”
I glanced back at him. “What?”
“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
They were all there, seated in various attitudes and degrees of repose. Hank was sprawled on the piano bench, leaning back, elbows propped on the keyboard cover. Pam, always more comfortable on the floor, had her back to the ash-clogged fireplace. Larry slouched in the overstuffed armchair, his feet propped on its hassock. He had a big pottery bowl in his lap and was fishing walnuts from a sack and shelling them into it. Mike anchored one end of the maroon sofa, Gloria the other.
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