The Dangerous Hour

by Marcia Muller

  I glanced at Mick.

  He smiled smugly: See? I’ve always told you I was a genius. Now you’re hearing it from a total stranger.

  “What kind of concepts?” I asked my nephew.

  “If I could explain them to you, they wouldn’t be advanced.”

  Mick had come a long way since the sorry day when his parents shipped him north to me, as penance for such sins as hacking into the Pacific Palisades Board of Education’s mainframe and selling the confidential information he gleaned to his fellow students. Now he had concepts. Concepts that could only benefit my agency . . .

  Now he also had a talented assistant.

  “Okay, Derek,” I said, “here’s the deal I can offer you: you come to work for the genius and me; I don’t pay you a salary until the agency’s current problem is resolved; I do, however, enroll you in our health care plan, which is a pretty good one; your 401(k) plan will kick in if and when you begin receiving a salary. Should we be unable to offer you a permanent position because our situation worsens, you’ll retain your health care benefits for a period of three months after we terminate you. If you do achieve permanent status, your pay will be retroactive from the date you started.”

  He blinked, and the corners of his mouth quirked up. “That’s very generous, Ms. McCone.”

  “Everybody here calls me Sharon or Shar. So is it a yes?”

  “It’s a yes.”

  “Welcome aboard. When would you like to start?”

  “Now?”

  “Fine. Go help this man”—I motioned at Mick—“work on those concepts I can’t possibly understand.”

  After Mick and his new assistant left my office, I made a note on my scratch pad to purchase for my nephew a baseball cap I’d recently seen in a catalog. One of the things you could have embroidered on it was “Genius.”

  “The D.A.’s going forward,” Glenn’s voice said on the phone. “Arraignment’s at ten tomorrow morning.”

  “But that’s when I’m meeting with Marguerite Hayley over in Marin.”

  “No reason for you to be present.”

  “But I want to be there for Julia’s sake. . . . And what about her bail?”

  “She says she can’t afford it, insists she’ll just stay in jail.”

  “No way. She’s been there long enough. The agency will pay—”

  “I’ll handle it. I’m convinced she’s not a flight risk, and I’d like to invest in her future.”

  “That’s very good of you, to go out on the limb for someone you barely know.”

  “I know Julia well enough. And, as I told you before, she interests me. Things I’ve been hearing via the grapevine interest me, too.”

  “Oh? What?”

  “We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ll take Julia directly from the Hall to my office. You meet us there as soon as you’re done with Maggie.”

  “That guy, I see him in the paper, always smiling. Smiling when he’s sucking up to the voters here in the neighborhood, too. But at home, he’s like an ugly dog with sharp teeth.”

  Angela Batista was the only tenant of Alex Aguilar’s building who had been home when I began ringing doorbells that evening. We were seated on the sofa in the small living room of her cluttered top-floor apartment across the hall from the supervisor’s; the curtains were drawn, and only a dim floor lamp illuminated her broad features and high-piled black hair.

  “You listen to me,” she went on. “I am part owner of the Mission’s newest, hottest tapas restaurant. Café Gastrónomo. Everybody who is anybody eats there. I am connected to the establishment in this city, and let me tell you this: that guy has got them fooled.”

  I picked up the coffee cup Angela Batista had placed on the table beside me, sipped, and tried not to gag. The concoction, she had informed me, was her personal variation on one of the popular International Coffees line. To me, it tasted like instant to which she’d added an inappropriate herb, such as oregano. I hoped to God she wasn’t offering it at her hot new restaurant.

  “That guy,” she went on, “I see him on television, at one of the Giants games, with the mayor. Smiling. I see him at the opening of our new low-income housing development, with one of the governor’s people. Smiling. I see him in the newspaper, at the hospital with that little boy who was hit by a Muni bus on Mission Street. Smiling. But here I see him like he really is.”

  “Not smiling.”

  “Not smiling. He scowls. He snarls. He tells everybody what to do. The garbage, it can’t go out till he says so. He polices the laundry room. Leave your clothes in the dryer overnight, and he puts them in the trash. This apartment doesn’t come with garage space, but if I park my car one inch over the curb by his garage, he calls the cops and I get a ticket. Those apartments in this building that’re empty? The people left because of him. The others? They probably won’t talk to you because they’re afraid of him. Now, me, I am not afraid of him. He is scum. And the people who come to see him?” She threw up her hands in disgust.

  “What kind of people?”

  “Cheap women, the kind I chase off the sidewalk in front of my restaurant. Men that would sooner cut you than look at you. This one—R. D.—he lived there for weeks last month. He was an ex-con—I could tell; my brother-in-law’s one. But my brother-in-law’s just a stupid pachuco doesn’t know enough to stay outta trouble. This R. D., he was plain evil. I tell you, he must’ve had something on that Aguilar, for him to let him stay. They’d fight, in there. Loud voices, and one time I heard things breaking.”

  “What’s R. D.’s full name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “I don’t know. What do any of those scum look like? Scars, tattoos. Evil.”

  “And you say he left last month?”

  “Yeah, right around the time you were asking about, when Aguilar says that woman ripped off his credit card.”

  “You sure you don’t remember the woman?”

  “I never saw her. But you listen to me: if she did rip off Aguilar, the more power to her. That guy deserves every bad thing happens to him.”

  I was silent, my hand hovering over the coffee cup. Angela Batista’s hostility toward Alex Aguilar was understandable, but why did the well-connected owner of a hot new restaurant continue to live in such an unpleasant situation?

  “Ms. Batista,” I said, “why don’t you simply move, or consult your attorney?”

  Her gaze slid away from mine.

  “Ms. Batista?”

  After a moment she said, “Moving is expensive; attorneys’ fees even more. My restaurant has only been open seven months. It’s hot, yes, but it’s yet to make a profit. My life savings are sunk into it, and I have no extra money.”

  “Perhaps if you talked to one of the influential people who frequent the restaurant . . . ?”

  Her mouth pulled down ironically. “Oh, yes, that would bring me much goodwill from my customers. Aguilar is one of them; he eats there often, both with friends and in the company of his influential colleagues.”

  “You must have some recourse—”

  “No, no, I don’t.” Batista stood. “You must excuse me now, Ms. McCone,” she said. “I have to be at the restaurant by nine o’clock.”

  As I was leaving the apartment, I shook Angela Batista’s hand, looked into her eyes. And what I saw there surprised me: for all her angry rhetoric, Batista was afraid.

  Light shone from under the door of one of the lower-floor apartments. According to Patrick Neilan, this one belonged to Vanessa Lu, a teacher at the nearby Happy Days Preschool. When I knocked and explained who I was and what I was after, Lu—trim and athletic in pale blue sweats—looked wary. When I mentioned Neilan, her reserve melted and she invited me inside. The apartment, because it faced the street, was a mirror image of Angela Batista’s, but uncluttered and simply furnished with items like those I’d seen in Cost Plus ads. Lu asked me to be seated at a teak dining table and, mercifully, offered mineral water with lemon slices rather th
an a noxious coffee concoction.

  “Alex Aguilar,” she said in answer to my question, “is a classic case of someone who’s out of his depth in public and compensating with petty tyrannies at home. I suppose Patrick’s told you about all the rules and regulations?”

  “Angela Batista’s gone into them as well.”

  “I don’t know her, except to say hello to, but I’m sure she’s had her run-ins with Alex. We all have.”

  “What exactly do you mean, ‘out of his depth’?”

  “I don’t think Alex was ready to be thrust into the limelight as a supervisor. The rumor is that he was pushed into campaigning by the district’s Hispanic community, and didn’t really expect to win. So far, he’s holding his head above water, but he’s beginning to show the strain of treading too hard. And strain always shows first at home.”

  “What kinds of run-ins have you had with him?”

  “Well, he dumped my trash all over the sidewalk once, because I put it out too early. And he yelled at me for spilling detergent in the laundry room. Since then I’ve kept my distance. I’ve learned to avoid emotional storms that are about to break. Now I put out my garbage when he says to, do my laundry at Tidee Clean, and generally keep a low profile.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you, to have to go out of your way to avoid upsetting a fellow tenant?”

  She smiled, running her hand through her short, rumpled hair. “Sure, it bothers me, but the apartment is relatively inexpensive for this city. My place of work is within walking distance, so I don’t need a car, and I can put money aside to buy a house someday. I’m not about to throw all that over for the sake of going up against an inadequate personality who will probably be history in a few years.”

  “History? I thought Aguilar was setting his sights on the mayor’s office.”

  “He—or his people—may be setting their sights, but I suspect that one way or another Alex will self-destruct.”

  “Interesting. Did you ever encounter a recent houseguest of his, a man called R. D.?”

  “Hispanic man? Tall, with a scarred face?”

  “Yes. Angela Batista mentioned him. She said he might be an ex-con.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me. Those scars, and the tattoos . . . He was here for two weeks, maybe three, then left. We passed each other in the entryway, but never exchanged a word, or even a nod. You know, I’ve taken self-defense classes, and I’m not a timid person, but that man frightened me. If he’d been the one making the rules here, rather than Alex, I might’ve given serious thought to finding another apartment.”

  It was full dark when I left Alex Aguilar’s building. While the street itself was quiet, in the distance I could hear sirens overriding a cacophony of other sounds: music blaring, cars honking, dogs barking, a man shouting, another voice wailing. As I walked the two blocks to where I’d left my MG, a bottle shattered on the sidewalk behind me. I whirled, saw a figure dart between two buildings.

  It’s not personal, McCone, and this is not a bad neighborhood. Hell, you used to live only a couple of blocks away, near an intersection whose four corners are now occupied by trendy establishments.

  Footsteps rushed up behind me. A hand tugged on the strap of my slingbag. I tightened my grasp, yanked it away. Before I could turn, the person gave a high-pitched giggle and ran off.

  A kid playing a stupid prank, that’s all. The real predators come out much later than this, in the dangerous hours.

  My MG was parked at a barely acceptable angle at the next corner. I took the keys from my pocket, hurried toward it. Stopped.

  “Damn it!”

  The convertible top had been slashed, a big gash extending its entire width. I looked through the window, saw that my briefcase was gone. It contained files, my tape recorder and Palm Pilot, an expensive pen the staff had presented me on my last birthday, a sterling silver business card case . . . No sense in even reporting the theft; such items were never recovered. My mistake, anyway. Stupid to leave it in plain sight.

  I inspected the damage to the top, saw it was not repairable. They probably didn’t make tops for this model anymore; I would need a costly custom job—and at a time when I could least afford it. Jesus, how could everything in my life turn to shit in such a short time?

  Once I got home, after a warm shower and a cool glass of wine I abandoned my resolve and, with some nervousness, dialed Hy’s ranch.

  A month ago he’d asked me to marry him. I’d told him I’d think about it, but had gotten no further than trying to figure out why the concept of marriage filled me with an emotion bordering on dread. Two weeks ago he’d told me he was flying up to his ranch and would remain there, waiting to hear my decision. So far I had made none, and hadn’t felt right about calling him. But after the events of the past four days, I needed to hear his voice, to ask for his input.

  He didn’t answer, and for some reason the machine wouldn’t pick up.

  Monday. Fucking Monday.

  Tuesday

  JULY 15

  “First of all, I recommend that you cooperate fully with the DCA’s investigator”—Marguerite Hayley consulted the notes she’d taken while I explained the situation—“Mr. Baylis. He may have an unsympathetic or even antagonistic attitude, but, as you yourself admit, he’s simply doing his job. You should provide him with whatever records he requests, assuming they contain nothing confidential, and agree to attend all meetings with him. For my part, I will immediately let BSIS know that I’ve been retained to represent you, and that you are committed to cooperating.”

  I nodded, envisioning cash flowing out of the agency’s coffers. Everything about Hayley’s office in her home high in the hills above Tiburon spoke of exorbitant fees: the dark blue Chinese rug, the worktable and clients’ chairs that were either original Chippendales or good imitations, the softly lighted oil paintings that reminded me of the Dutch masters. Hayley herself, a petite white-haired woman in her mid-sixties, was dressed in a tan suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe; gold and diamonds winked at her earlobes and on her ring fingers.

  My expression must have reflected my thoughts, because she smiled gently and said, “Don’t feel that this office reflects my fees, Ms. McCone. They’re well within the normal range. It just so happens my late husband left me well off, and I like to work at home.”

  “With that view, I’d want to spend as much time here as possible.” Behind her a glass wall opened onto a balcony; I could see the Golden Gate and the entire sweep of the bay. Fog was pouring through the Gate, obscuring the bridge’s midspan, but on either side the sun shone—an eerie-looking phenomenon that told me the city would be socked in by early afternoon.

  “It is lovely,” Hayley said absently, consulting her notes. “Now, from what you’ve told me, I know you’re well aware of the seriousness of the charges and what the possible penalty could be. I should add that if this goes to a hearing and you lose, you also will be assessed the cost of the investigation and prosecution. My goal in contacting BSIS is to prevent them from taking it that far. Are you at all interested in trying to settle early, accepting some level of probation?”

  “Absolutely not! I haven’t done anything.”

  She nodded approvingly. “All right, then, we’ll wait it out, see how the investigation progresses. I’ll talk with BSIS, meet with their people, and review the file. I’ll speak with the investigator as well. I’ll work my contacts and put you in the best possible light. You have an excellent reputation and a clean record, so there’s a good chance I can get the case dropped. If there’s already a deputy attorney general involved, I’ll get in touch for a little lawyerly jostling. Should be fun.” Her blue eyes twinkled.

  “What about the case against Julia Rafael? If it’s not proven, won’t BSIS drop the case against me?”

  “Possibly, but they could still go forward. In an administrative proceeding, the burden of proof is different from that of the courts. Just because the district attorney can’t prove the charges against Ms.
Rafael beyond a reasonable doubt doesn’t mean that BSIS can’t prove those against you by the lower clear-and-convincing-evidence standard. But don’t fret about that now. I’ll be in close contact with Glenn Solomon about Ms. Rafael’s case. We’ll share evidence, facts, and tactics. The best all-around solution would be if we could prove the theft and credit-card fraud never happened, but that’s unlikely. Now, this brings us to a subject that I sense you’re not going to like, because you strike me as a person with a great deal of loyalty to your employees.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And commendable. However, you should be prepared for the possibility that you may have to let Ms. Rafael go. In effect, distance yourself from her in order to save your license.”

  As I started to protest, Hayley held up her hand. “The law assumes that you know what your employee has done. Ultimately, it may be a matter of disproving that assumption. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet.”

  “All right. What’s your opinion of the case we have?”

  She folded her hands on top of the pad on which she’d been taking notes. “So far, we don’t have a case, Ms. McCone. We have Ms. Rafael’s claim of innocence, and by now Glenn has received details of the evidence against her. We have some facts and, frankly, a great deal of conjecture. We need more facts and a framework to place them in. Normally at this point, I’d bring in my own investigator, and he’d set about developing that.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “But there’s no need for him, now, is there? Who better to build our case than the party with the most to lose?”

  As I drove back to the city, I tried to shore up my sagging spirits. I was equal to the task, wasn’t I? Look at the cases I’d solved single-handedly. Look at what the agency had collectively taken on. And it didn’t matter that this case was deeply personal; I’d solved that type of case before. I’d once foiled a woman who was trying to steal my identity. I’d tracked down the mother who gave me up at birth, and the father who only suspected my existence.