Dead Midnight

by Marcia Muller

  Jody Houston considered that, her expression thoughtful. She moved farther into the flat, and her gaze rested on the open journal on the table. “That’s Roger’s diary,” she said. “He always kept it hidden. And it’s supposed to be private.”

  “I was hoping it would help me profile him.”

  She moved swiftly toward the table, picked up the journal, and cradled it protectively. “He wouldn’t want a stranger reading it. If his parents are so interested in his reason for killing himself, why don’t they try to find out themselves, rather than hiring you?”

  “Maybe it would be too painful for them.”

  “Then they should leave well enough alone.”

  “That’s not up to either you or me.” I went over to her and pried the journal out of her hands. “Rightfully, this belongs to Roger’s estate.”

  “His estate.” She looked around the flat, sighed.

  “Please,” I said,“won’t you help me? Tell me about Roger?”

  Her eyes moved back to the journal, and for a moment I thought she might try to snatch it from me. Then she sighed again and leaned against the bar.

  “Well, if you think I can help … Rog was a quiet guy. Sensitive. Not easy to get to know. We’d see each other coming and going, smile and nod, but that was it. Then one night I dropped my keys down the elevator shaft, through the gap between the cage and the floor. It’d been a really horrible day, and I went a little ballistic. Came up here and pounded on the door. He helped me fish the keys out of the shaft, I invited him in for a drink, and from then on we were friends.”

  “Romantically involved?”

  “No. He would’ve liked it that way. After a few days he came on to me. I told him no. I was getting over a bad relationship and … Well, that’s not important. So we agreed that we’d just hang together. But I knew that he thought he was in love with me, and he let the people at work think we were an item.”

  So Jody was the hip, beautiful woman with whom things were bound to turn out badly. “So you hung out …”

  “Yeah. We had keys to each other’s flats, came and went. I’m a graphic designer, work at home, so I was always here to turn off the coffeepot if he forgot to, stuff like that. And we’d go to the movies, have dinner. We even drove down to Big Sur for the weekend once.”

  “You say you’re a graphic designer. You ever do any jobs for InSite?”

  “Well, sure. At least for a while. But never again.”

  “Why not?”

  Her lips twisted and her eyes grew jumpy. “Because they’re a bunch of assholes, that’s why. They stiffed me on my last fee. I was lucky to be only a freelancer, though; that place is the office from hell.”

  “How so?”

  She seemed to be listening to her words, and when I repeated the question she shook her head. “I’ve said all I’m ever gonna say on that subject.” Quickly she pushed away from the bar and started toward the door. “There’s someplace I’ve got to be.”

  “Can we talk another time?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m sorry for Rog’s folks, but there’s really nothing I can say that will make them feel any better.”

  I followed, hoping to persuade her, but she slammed the door behind her. It stuck, and by the time I got it open the elevator cage had begun its descent.

  I was climbing the stairway to the second-story catwalk at Pier 24½ when I heard the voice of my office manager, Ted Smalley, yell “Fuuuuck!”

  Now that was cause for concern; Ted is not a man given to obscenities. I took the steps two at a time and hurried to the door of his office. No one was in the outer room, but from the back, where we kept the supplies, fax and copy machines, a black cloud drifted.

  At first I thought something was on fire, but as the cloud wafted toward me I saw it was a gritty powder. I stepped out of its path and called, “Ted? What happened?”

  He emerged from the back room, his face and clothing resembling an old-fashioned chimney sweep’s. His black hair and goatee, normally frosted with gray, looked like the recipients of a bad dye job.

  He said, “I’m gonna kill him!”

  “Who, for God’s sake?”

  “Neal, that’s who!”

  I’d been afraid of this.

  The previous fall, Altman & Zahn, the legal firm with whom I’d shared the suite of offices, had moved to more spacious quarters across the Embarcadero, and I’d taken over their portion of the lease in order to expand my own operation. The first order of business was to hire an assistant for Ted, and as his partner, Neal Osborn, had recently been forced by rising rents to close his secondhand bookshop, Ted suggested they work together. I had reservations: Neal possessed no office skills, and I knew from experience with my nephew Mick and Charlotte Keim how lovers’ quarrels can disrupt a professional environment. But Ted had been at his most persuasive, and late in February I’d finally given in.

  “What did he do this time?” I asked.

  “The toner.” Ted ran his hand over his forehead, smearing the powder that adhered to it.

  “The toner for the copy machine?”

  “Right. It ran out this morning, and I asked him to replace it. He’d never done that before, but I figured anybody could follow the directions. He was back there hovering over the machine for quite a while, till it was time for his lunch break. After he left I saw the toner light was still flashing, so I decided to fix the damn thing myself.” He paused, out of breath.

  “And?”

  “And he’d left the box that holds one of those extra-large containers of toner on the coffee cart next to the machine. But he must’ve set it down where somebody’d spilled something. When I picked it up, its bottom gave, the container fell out, hit the floor, and—boom!”

  “The toner exploded?”

  Ted waved his arms, exasperated now by my lack of office know-how. “No, it didn’t explode! That stuff can’t explode! What happened was the idiot had taken the top off the container and didn’t replace it. The impact … Well, we’ve got powder all over the place and the cleaning service doesn’t come in till Thursday night and guess who’ll get stuck sweeping up the mess? Moi!”

  He was working himself into a frenzy. I motioned to him, said, “Come with me.”

  “I can’t. The phones.”

  “It’s the noon hour. Let the machine pick up.”

  He nodded and followed me along the catwalk to my office at the end of the pier, where I sat him down in the old armchair by the arched window overlooking the bay and Treasure Island. Then I fetched a box of premoistened towelettes that I keep for just such emergencies. While he scrubbed I dragged my desk chair over and sat next to him, feet propped on the low windowsill.

  I said, “It’s not working out, is it?”

  “… I guess not. Neal was a great bookseller, but he’s hopeless in an office. Last Friday I caught him trying to send a fax through the slot where the paper comes out.”

  Even I could send faxes. “You’re cutting him an awful lot of slack.”

  “Well, he’s … Neal.”

  “If he’s having so much trouble, why does he want the job?”

  “He’s got to have something to do. Even if we could afford it, he’s not the kind of man who can stay home and tend to his knitting.”

  The image of Neal—a shaggy bear of a man—knitting made me smile. “Couldn’t he continue to sell books online?”

  “You’ve got to be computer literate to do that. Neal’s even worse than you used to be.” Ted turned concerned eyes on me. “Are you building up to telling me to fire him?”

  I wished I could. But what Ted had said before held true for me as well: Neal was Neal, and I cared about him.

  “No, I’m not. But you’ve got to find a way to use him that won’t throw the entire operation into chaos. And you’ve got to promise me one thing.”

  “Sure. What?”

  “That you won’t kill him. It’d be very bad for business.”

  After Ted went back to his office, I
booted up my Mac and accessed InSite magazine. This week’s Top Hit was Bay Area oxygen bars—an article that didn’t particularly interest me because I preferred to get my daily intake by breathing deeply, rather than snorting oxygen at ten bucks a pop. Personality of the Week was one of our urban activists whose not-so-inadvertent clumsiness at the groundbreaking for yet another development that the city didn’t need had caused the mayor’s fedora to be carried off on the breeze and eventually spiral into a sinkhole. The Poetry in Motion department reported on hip Bay Area limo companies. They Say Volumes interviewed the author of Instant Connection in the Elevator and Other Places, who advocated dressing up in outlandish costumes and cavorting in public places as a means of meeting women. Incredible Edibles was singing the praises of tofu for those who hadn’t heard of it, presumably because they’d been living in underground caverns for the past two decades. Here, There, and Everywhere featured a club that was about to go belly-up and a restaurant I’d been eating at for at least a year.

  Maybe there wasn’t enough cool stuff to go around this week.

  I clicked off the site, shut the machine down, and stared at the blank screen, gradually noting my own features. I was frowning. That frown had confronted me from a lot of reflective surfaces lately. Was it becoming permanent? God, I hoped not! I looked like my mother—

  Which mother? McCone? Biological? Adoptive?

  Adoptive. Definitely. Learned behavior. Ma had frowned a lot before she fell in love, divorced Pa, and had a face-lift.

  Learned behavior could also be unlearned. I leaned close to the screen and rubbed furiously with my fingertips at the creases between my brows.

  “So what’s happening, Shar?” J.D. Smith asked.

  J.D. was a good friend, a former Chronicle reporter who, as he put it, had recently gone over to the other side and was now freelancing for various electronic publications.

  “Well, I’ve got an interesting case—”

  “Don’t tell me about it. Your last interesting case, you blackmailed me into putting you in touch with a confidential source.”

  “Whom I prevented from being framed for a felony.”

  “Well … So what’s this one?”

  “An undercover investigation of InSite magazine.”

  “That is interesting. I’d like to hear more about it.”

  “And I’d like to hear more about InSite.”

  “I know enough to fill a long dinner hour.”

  “Name the time and place.”

  In the hours before my eight o’clock appointment with J.D. I caught up on paperwork; spent some time discussing what constituted legal and illegal investigative tactics with my new hire, Julia Rafael; and made a list of the things I needed to do on the Nagasawa case. The first item was to talk with the members of Roger’s family, so I put in a call to their home number, but received no answer. When I reached Daniel Nagasawa at his Bush Street eye clinic he said it would be best if he and I met there tomorrow morning. Margaret asked me to come to her publishing house’s offices on Till-man Place near Union Square in the afternoon.

  Their setting up separate interviews made me wonder if there might be trouble in the Nagasawa marriage. The aftermath of a child’s death, particularly if by suicide or violence, could often exert pressure on previously undetected fault lines. I made a note to ask Glenn Solomon if that were the case.

  Neither of the surviving Nagasawa sons was available at the numbers I had for them, so I left messages. The same was true of most of Roger’s friends who had been named on a list in Glenn’s files. With any luck they’d return my calls tonight or in the morning, and tomorrow would be my day to work intensively on my profile of Roger’s state of mind—

  “Shar?”

  The voice was that of Rae Kelleher—my onetime right-hand who had resigned from the agency last fall after her marriage to my former brother-in-law, Ricky Savage. I looked up, saw her standing in the doorway, her freckled face glowing. She wore blue, her best color, and she held a champagne bottle in either hand.

  I said, “You sold it!”

  She nodded, a slight motion that told me how hard she was trying to contain her excitement.

  I got up, rushed over, and hugged her. Then we were jumping up and down and making undignified squeaking noises. Rae bumped the bottles against my back, gasped, and we got ourselves under control before the wine became so agitated it would be dangerous to open.

  “Don’t say another word yet,” I told her, and went to call Ted so he could round up the staff for a celebration. While Rae unearthed a third bottle from her tote bag and popped corks, I hunted up glasses. Soon everybody was filing in.

  Ted and Neal, both looking broody at first, but snapping out of it as soon as they saw Rae and realized what her news must be. Mick and Charlotte, a handsome couple: he big and blond, she petite and brunette. When his father’s marriage to my sister Charlene broke up, Mick had blamed Rae and vowed he would never forgive her; now I saw nothing but affection in his eyes as they met hers. Craig Morland, my FBI agent-turned-operative, was stroking his thick mustache and looking puzzled; Craig was part of our social circle, as he lived with a close friend of mine who was an inspector on the SFPD homicide detail, but he paid so little attention to what went on that I sometimes suspected he spent most of his time in an alternate universe.

  And then there was Julia Rafael, two months on the job and looking ill at ease. A tall, strongly built Latina with a haughty profile and spiky hair, Julia had dragged herself up from one of the worst personal histories I’d ever encountered in a job applicant. I’d taken a chance on her because I figured that anyone with so much guts and determination to improve her lot in life couldn’t help but succeed as an investigator.

  I motioned to her and introduced her to Rae, whose smile she met with a brusque nod. Julia had few social graces— hadn’t been given the opportunity to develop any in her twenty-five years—but I was confident that in time she’d possess a full complement of people skills. Beneath her rough exterior I sensed real value, both as an employee and an individual.

  Charlotte and Mick were passing out glasses of champagne. When everybody had been served, I held up mine and said, “Here’s to Rae! She’s sold her novel!”

  “Way to go, Kelleher!”

  “All right!”

  “Who’s the publisher?”

  “When can I buy my copy and get you to autograph it?”

  “Did you get big bucks for it?”

  At the last inquiry Rae laughed so hard she dribbled champagne over her fingers. “Listen,” she said, “I’d’ve paid them big bucks to publish it. They’re a little literary house in New York, and they tell me it should be out in about a year. And if I get to do any signings, you’ve all got to promise to come, so I won’t be lonely.”

  A voice from the doorway said, “Anybody need more champagne?” Hank Zahn and his wife and law partner, Anne-Marie Altman, stood there, bottles in hand.

  “How’d you know we were partying?” Rae asked.

  “Ted called over to us. And Ricky phoned us from L.A. after you called him. Gave us the news and said to tell you he was able to charter a flight and will be home to celebrate this evening.”

  Suddenly my eyes stung and I had to turn aside. When Rae had resigned I’d been afraid our friendship would slip away as she became involved in her writing and life as a celebrity’s wife. When Anne-Marie and Hank had moved their offices to Hills Brothers Plaza, I’d feared it was an end for us, rather than a simple relocation. Not so, apparently. Things had changed, but only for the better.

  J.D. Smith and I sat at a sidewalk table at the South Park Cafe, sipping wine and waiting for our steamed mussels to be served. It was an unusually warm evening for April in San Francisco, and people wandered across the oval park or sat on its benches until tables opened up at the crowded restaurants. The branches of newly leafed sycamores moved in a gentle breeze; near the playground equipment a whippet caught a Frisbee with long-limbed grace.

 
Years ago, before the park became a trendy hangout, I’d worked a case there that ended in disaster for several people—both innocent and not-so-innocent. In its aftermath I took to walking the grassy ellipsoid in the darkness of the winter evenings, trying to make sense of the tragedy and my inability to prevent it. Eventually I recovered and so did South Park, which became home to galleries, cafés, shops, and architectural and multimedia firms. The cream of the dot-com establishment conducted their deals and spent money lavishly at the tables of the chic bistros.

  Now I noted that the park was beginning to look a bit shabby again. FOR RENT signs appeared in many of the windows, and the talk in the café was more likely to be about which firm had closed its doors than which was floating an initial public offering. If the downward spiral of the high-tech market continued as predicted, South Park might very well return to being an urban secret known only to those who were brave enough to venture among its shady and often desperate habitués.

  “So,” J.D. said in his faint southern accent, “InSite magazine, nuts and bolts first. They’ve been in business over five years—which, as you know, isn’t all that usual for online ’zines. Their funding comes from VC, who—”

  “Wait a minute—Vietcong?”

  He laughed, throwing his head back. He was a thin-faced, pale-skinned man with a mane of untamable red hair. Dressed in the expensively casual garb of the foundering new economy, he lounged in his chair, keen blue eyes following and assessing each good-looking woman who walked by. Now he turned them, sparkling with wicked amusement, on me.

  “You’re under the same illusion as I was. When I first started freelancing for InSite I’d hang out at the offices because that’s how they do business, and I’d hear the honchos talking about the VC. And I’d think, ‘Why’re they talking about the Vietcong? They’re not a political rag and, besides, that war’s long over.’ Imagine my chagrin when I realized that these particular VC are venture capitalists.”

  “It must be a generational thing. Go on.”

  He waited till the waiter had set steaming bowls of mussels in garlic broth before us, tore a chunk of fresh sourdough off the loaf in the basket. “Okay, VC are people who make their profit by financing likely business ventures and taking them to IPO—initial public offering. A couple of years ago when InSite really began to take off they hooked up with Tessa Remington, of the Remington Group, and she rounded up investors and began to supply capital. Remington was seldom in the offices—not at all now, but that’s another story—but she was a presence, much as Jesus Christ is a presence in your average parish church.”