by Susan Dunlap
Howard, who had been a motivating force in a sizeable drug bust in July and a fencing operation in September, was a likely candidate for upward movement himself. As ambitious as he was, his eagerness to consider my chances was a rare quality. “However,” I said, “if I don’t do anything with this case, if I have to explain that I took the initial report from my ex-husband and then didn’t realize he was lying to me, it’s not going to look good at all. And there’s no way it should.”
Howard forked his french fries. “I know. Listen, I don’t have to write up my report on Nat till end of shift. Maybe you’ll find the answer by then.”
“No. There’s no need to drag you into the messy end of this.”
He swallowed the fries. “A couple hours, anything could cause that delay.”
“No. The lieutenant knows we’re friends. If this case is still in a shambles when it goes to Homicide, there’ll be plenty of questions. You’ve got your career to think of.”
“Jill, it doesn’t matter what you say, unless you’re planning to write my report for me. It’ll be done when I get to it. It’s not a priority.”
“Howard—”
“Hi. Remember me? Daisy Arbutus?” The question was directed at Howard. He looked up and it took even him a moment to place this version of Daisy. She looked entirely different, like a little girl playing a vamp in a school play. She wore a clingy low-cut dress that exposed the ribs in her little-girl chest. Her eyes were outlined in stripes of black, white, and blue, and her curly hair was piled on her head.
“I went down to the police station, but they said you weren’t on duty yet. I waited, then they told me you wouldn’t come till three.”
Howard glanced at me, a tacit reminder that we both had things we didn’t want on our records. All he’d need would be Daisy taking up adoring residence in the waiting room.
I asked, “Did you have something to tell Officer Howard?”
Daisy turned, surprised. Already she’d forgotten I was there. “I’ll tell him.” She slid into the seat next to him.
“Well, Daisy,” Howard said, trying to avoid the adoring gaze, “what is it, then?”
“You said for me to watch the hotel and the people. I’m doing that.”
Howard waited.
Daisy smiled proudly.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“I’m doing what you wanted.” Her smile faded. “It is what you wanted?”
Howard nodded, playing for time. But there was no reason he should know what to ask her. It wasn’t his case.
Daisy had been hanging around the hotel; she had to know something.
“What about the letters, Daisy,” I asked. “Who picks the letters up there?”
Again she looked at me with surprise. “People. They come in. They get them off the table.”
“What about special mail? Isn’t it held somewhere?”
“I don’t think so. No one said so.” She looked at Howard, worried, as if she should have the answer.
“Okay, Daisy,” he said. “What about the mail on the first of the month, when checks arrive? Who comes then, did you ask?”
“I didn’t ask, but Ronnie—he’s a doper who lives right by the lobby—he told me all about it.”
I took out my pad.
Turning full face to Howard, she said, “Ronnie says the lobby’s really busy on the first. That’s the day the welfare checks come. The people don’t want to miss the mailman. They don’t want to leave their money lying around. And—” She started to giggle.
“What?” he prompted.
“Well, Ronnie said it’s real funny. No one wants to have anyone else see him, so all these people just hang around, and don’t look at each other. No one talks. They just walk around in that little lobby, or in the hall. Ronnie said—” She giggled again. “He said one day he went into the lobby and said, ‘Hi, folks, why don’t we all sit down and talk.’ But they didn’t think it was funny. I think it’s funny, don’t you?”
“Sure, Daisy,” Howard said. “Now, these people, what did Ronnie say about them?”
“He’s spent a lot of time watching them. There are four who come all the time. There’s one Japanese guy. Ronnie says he has a moustache and looks very unscrewed, or something.”
“Inscrutable?”
“Yeah. That’s it. How do you say that?”
“In-scru-ta-ble,” he said. “And who else?”
“Then there was an old guy who looks, well Ronnie says he looks like, wait, he looks like a poor man’s Quentin Delehanty.”
That, I thought, should be quite a sight.
“And there’s a guy who’s really hooked on something. Ronnie says he shakes bad, Officer Howard.”
“And?”
“And then there’s this woman.”
“What kind of woman?”
“She’s black. Ronnie says she’s got a big Afro.”
The black woman at Anne’s apartment? Ermentine Brown? Yvonne McIvor? They both wore Afros. Did it all fit together? Controlling my excitement, I asked, “What did Ronnie say about her?”
Daisy turned abruptly toward me, her face pulled into a pout. “He said she seemed okay. He didn’t say much about her.”
“Anything else? Anything?”
Daisy seemed to be reaching down into unused pockets of memory. But she remained empty-handed. Distressed, she looked at Howard. When he smiled, she said, “Can I have some of your pie?”
“Sure, Daisy.” He stood up. “You can finish the coffee too. I have to get ready for work. But you stay and eat.”
I followed him as he hastened to the register, handed over a ten and headed for the door.
Outside, he said, “Maybe it was better to be losing aerials.”
“No. Amazingly enough, Daisy’s given me a lead.”
“What?”
We were next to my car. “I have to think it through. I’ll see you later.”
“At dinner, then. My house.”
“Okay.” I got into the car, took out my pad, and began writing, trying to fit what Daisy had told me with what I already knew. Anne had been sending the checks to the hotel. The recipients of those checks didn’t live there. Could the clients have moved and not notified Anne? No, not with the memos listing their new addresses stashed away ready to be put into the case folders. Had Anne continued sending checks to the hotels even when she knew the new addresses? But what did she get out of it—more kickbacks? Twenty dollars a month was hardly reason for murder.
Maybe when Pereira finished checking out these clients and their new addresses we’d find that those addresses were false. Maybe the clients were living in San Francisco or Contra Costa County and collecting welfare checks there too? And the black woman, was it her job to pick up and deliver the checks and give Anne her cut?
I sat, tapping my pen. I felt sure the new address memos had been placed in the case folders after Anne was gone. Someone else—not Anne—had done that. Someone else knew about them. That someone had to be in on it. Who? Alec? Mona? Fern? Or Nat, Nat whom Anne had trained?
Or was I, I wondered as I put the pad back, getting caught up in those cases again and missing the obvious? Fern Day couldn’t be sure the black woman had come from Anne’s apartment. The last person she had actually seen in there was Quentin Delehanty.
Chapter 21
I RAN UP THE hotel steps, through the lobby, to Delehanty’s door and knocked.
There was no answer. He could be out still, crashing at some friend’s place for a few drunken days. I banged on the door.
On the third round, I could hear footsteps and a hoarse, sleepy voice growling for a minute more.
“Come on, Delehanty!” I yelled. “I don’t have all day.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m coming.”
When the door opened I brushed past him before he had time to reconsider.
“I’ve got to talk to you, Delehanty,” I said, leaning against the chipped dresser. It and the bed were the only items of furniture in the room. T
he walls had once been beige, but the paint was chipped now and swatches of blue, aqua, and rose showed through.
Delehanty slumped onto the bed, reaching under it for a nearly empty bottle. The movement to his mouth was surprisingly quick.
“It’s about Anne Spaulding.”
He drank again.
“Put that down. You’re drunk enough as it is.”
“Yeah,” he said, taking another swallow.
I grabbed the bottle, spilling the deep red wine across the floor.
“Hey, lady, what…” He looked as if he wanted to say more but couldn’t form the words.
“Tell me about Anne Spaulding.”
He aimed his watery eyes up at me, his scowl melting into a glazed expression of amazement. His long gray hair was matted; his undershirt was grimy and days of sweat emanated from it
“Anne Spaulding?”
He nodded, and kept nodding, rocking himself back close to sleep.
“Okay, Delehanty, get dressed.”
His eyes opened. He said, “Huh,” but it didn’t come out like a question.
Taking out the card, I read him his rights, then I handed him his suit jacket, shoved one arm into it and pulled it around behind him, aiming the other arm toward the sleeve. Delehanty made no attempt either to help or hinder. He looked vaguely at the arm as if watching a movie on dexterity.
“Ouch,” he exclaimed as I pushed it in.
“You may be gone overnight. Anything you want to take? Toothbrush?”
“Nah.”
“Okay.”
I headed for the door, still holding his arm.
As he stepped into the hall, he yelled, “Hey, take your hands off me! Lemme go!”
I tightened my grasp on his arm and looked nervously behind me. But no one came running. In this kind of hotel drunken cries were no special event. Still, handcuffs wouldn’t hurt.
As I fastened them on his wrists, he yelled, “Lemme go! You’re harassing me!”
“Calm down, Delehanty.”
But if he heard me at all, it didn’t faze him. He pushed through the outside door, dragging me along. “Lemme go! Help! Help!”
I hurried him down the stairs. A crowd was gathering at the street. I wished I’d called for back-up. It was too late now.
“Hey, cop, you’re hurting him.”
“He’s just an old man,” a bystander shouted.
“You didn’t have to chain him.”
The crowd grew. Delehanty, in an exhibit of unexpected strength, had dug in his heels, so that I was pulling him like I would a footlocker. His head hung, and he no longer bothered to protest.
Three burly men stood between the patrol car and me.
“Get out of my way,” I demanded.
“Let him go,” one said.
I stepped forward.
The trio moved in around me. “He’s got rights, lady. Like you can’t just drag him away, see.”
“He can get a lawyer.”
“Sure,” the largest man said sarcastically.
The crowd moved closer.
I caught the man’s eye. “Get out of the way.”
His eyes wavered.
“Get out of the way,” I repeated. “You’re interfering with a police officer.”
His heavy hands tensed at his sides. The crowd was hushed now, listening.
I said, “Do you want me to run your name through records? Do you want me to send to Sacramento and see what you’ve got outstanding?”
He stepped toward me.
Yanking Delehanty’s arm, I jerked him forward as the man moved in, and when the man continued his step, it was into Delehanty.
Delehanty came alive, feet planted, body twisting and weaving. He bent forward and lurched, shoulder first, into the man’s stomach. The man groaned.
The crowd burst into laughter.
Pulling open the back door of the patrol car, I shoved Delehanty in before another change of mood should arise. But as I glanced back at the crowd, there was no sign of hostile memory.
That was one advantage of being a woman officer—the macho hostility was diffused more easily.
Chapter 22
BY THE TIME I finished booking Delehanty it was past three-thirty.
He had passed out in the cell. I opened the door to the conference room slowly, expecting to make a stealthy entrance into staff meeting. But the room was empty. One less thing to explain.
I hurried to my desk. Pereira was sitting in my chair, finger tapping on the desk.
“You could almost be Lieutenant Davis, with that finger and that expression,” I told her.
“I’ve been waiting since three. There was no staff meeting—the lieutenant had another session with the higher-ups. So I came here to tell you the news. I hate to wait when I have news.”
I sat on the desk. “So?”
“Well,” Pereira leaned back in the chair, taking her time. “I checked through all of Anne Spaulding’s clients, checked every supposed new address. And do you know, Jill, not one of those women ever lived at those addresses? They don’t get their mail there. No one’s ever heard of them.”
“Hmm. Interesting. Funny that Yvonne McIvor checked out okay, then. Run them through Files, will you?”
“Already done. Files comes up blank too. So do Files in the surrounding counties.” Now she leaned forward. “So, Jill, they don’t live at the hotels where they were getting money. They don’t live at their new addresses where their money will be going. We have no record of them. They’re not living in San Francisco or some other county around here. What does that make you think?”
“It sounds like these ladies don’t exist.”
Pereira gave a nod of agreement.
“Seems like the only real thing about them is their welfare checks. Twelve checks of two hundred dollars a month makes—”
“Twenty-four hundred dollars for the adults. Those five families could well add another twenty-five hundred. So, say five thousand a month. In a year that’s sixty thousand, tax free.”
“Enough to kill over,” I said. “Even half that would be enough.”
I hurried past the weary woman who sat uneasily on the metal chair of the waiting room and made my way by her children on the floor. In the former dining room, Fern was writing in a manila folder. Mona, at four-thirty, was getting ready to leave. Nat was across the room, but I didn’t look his way and he didn’t speak.
With a passing nod to Mona, I moved in on the kitchen-turned-office of Alec Effield.
Effield wore a red shirt with his beige pants; it made him look sallow.
“Mr. Effield, I want to talk to you about those cases of Anne’s.”
“No. I mean, I don’t feel I should discuss them any further. I’ve been slipshod about confidentiality as it is.”
“Mr. Effield, those women, the ones who supposedly lived in the hotel, then moved to the new addresses in the case folders—no one’s ever heard of them. There’s no record of their existing at all.”
“What?” He looked away.
I followed his eyes to the Suzanne Valadon sketch on the wall. Beneath it the copy lay, still only half-completed. I doubted Effield had contributed a line today.
“How do you explain those non-existent people, Mr. Effield?”
“Officer, you saw one of those clients, Yvonne McIvor.”
“She exists, all right, but none of the others do.”
Effield glanced nervously back at the Valadon sketch. “There must be some mistake. You chose Yvonne McIvor as the client you wanted to see, Officer. Maybe your department made some mistake with the other clients. Welfare clients and their neighbors don’t always like to talk to the police.” But his wavering voice belied the excuse. Effield looked so shaken I couldn’t even be angry at his attempt to shift the blame to us.
“Those clients don’t exist. How can you explain that?”
He sank down in his chair. “I don’t know. Let me think. It just doesn’t seem possible.”
“Anne
Spaulding was sending out money to people who aren’t there. There’s only one place that money could have been going, right?”
His head shook in a slow metronomic movement. “It does look like it. But surely that couldn’t be.”
My glance landed on my watch: 4:22. I didn’t have time for Effield’s bewilderment, not if I planned to find Anne’s murderer by eleven. “What’s the procedure when someone applies for welfare?”
Sluggishly, he focused on me. I could feel my fingers tightening on the pen. “Well,” he said, “the client comes into the office, makes an appointment, and sees an eligibility worker.”
“Does anyone keep a record of who applies?”
“The clerk.”
“What happens to the record?”
“At the end of the month, the statistics are taken from it and sent to Oakland and the original is either filed or thrown out.”
“And yours were?”
Effield shook his head harder. “Thrown out.”
I made a note. “So there’s no way of knowing who came in to apply?”
“No.”
“After they filled out the applications, then what?”
“There’s a certain amount of verification necessary.” Effield paused, then in a sudden motion opened the Yvonne McIvor file. “Since you’ve seen this already, I won’t be breaking confidentiality.” He pointed to a white, legal-size sheet on the left side of the folder. “Here you see that Anne has noted the birth-certificate number. If the client hadn’t had a birth certificate, Anne would have requested a baptismal certificate and then sent to”—he glanced across the folder to another form listing the client’s birthplace—“Springfield, for a copy.”
“Here”—he pointed back to the first sheet—“is where we list any real property, personal property—”
“I think I understand. Mr. Effield, I’d like to see one of Anne’s other cases—Janis Ulrick, or Linda Faye Miller.”
“Why?”
“Because those clients don’t exist. I want to see the differences between their folders and the McIvor folder.”
“I really can’t do that. I’ve stretched the rules as it is.”