Dead Midnight

by Marcia Muller

  As I passed the workstations I saw many had their drawers pulled out, and had been emptied of their contents. The laid-off staffers had made a hasty departure. I gave the desks only cursory attention before going upstairs. Vardon’s office was at the end of the narrow corridor, two doors away from Engstrom’s.

  Desk and workstation against the side wall. Blue carpeting underfoot, still spongy. State-of-the-art computer with a huge screen—nothing but the best for the WebPotentate. Brushed chrome desk accessories, bookshelves loaded with technical manuals, Tensor desk lamp. I tried the lamp, found it hadn’t shorted out in the deluge, and began going through the drawers. The desk was metal, and very little water had seeped inside.

  The usual office items: pens, pencils, notepads, Post-Its. File drawer of assorted items: extra mouse pads, spare keyboard, two coffee cups, several tote bags, a pair of black high heels, a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. Drawer above stuffed with papers; apparently Vardon’s filing system was known only to her or nonexistent. Although I doubted she’d keep anything meaningful in such a jumble, I began going through it.

  Interoffice memos, about as boring as the ones I circulated at the agency. Expense form for last month, half filled out. Flyer for a pizza restaurant, dollar-off coupon expired. Takeout menus, owner’s manual for the Palm Pilot IIIxe. Fax from—

  I knew that name. Barry Carver. Could it be one and the same? Yes, the address was correct. Years before, in the process of trying to add a new bathroom to my house, Carver had practically trashed it. Now his letterhead bore a contractor’s license number. My God, how had the state allowed that to happen?

  The fax appeared to be an informal contract between Vardon and Carver, saying they mutually agreed that work on the property at 211 Water Street, scheduled to begin on March 1, be postponed until further notice. Too bad I couldn’t warn her to get another contractor, but that would involve admitting that I’d broken in here and searched her office… .

  Water Street. It sounded vaguely familiar. I had a Thomas Guide in the MG; I could pinpoint the address, drive over. Maybe Vardon had moved. But I’d have to hurry; it was now after ten, a marginally acceptable hour to drop in on someone.

  No, I could see Vardon tomorrow, but I couldn’t count on having the run of these offices again.

  I went through all the desks on the second story and learned a few interesting facts: Jorge Amaya kept prophylactics in his upper right-hand drawer; Max Engstrom stocked enough Mylanta, Alka-Seltzer, and Beano to mix a potent cocktail; Lia Chen’s publisher had turned down her proposal for a book on intimate urban gardens, and she had a drawer full of past due bills; the art director—title Leonardo da Picasso—doodled obscene caricatures of women on a scratch pad; one looked remarkably like the Money Mongrel. Interesting, but not particularly useful.

  On my way out, I stopped by Kat Donovan’s desk on the ground floor. All her personal effects were there. Sherlock had left town without returning to the office.

  Eleven-ten. I was too keyed up to go back to the apartment, but it was late to pay Vardon a visit. Of course, my line of work gives me an excuse for appearing to have few social graces, and just showing up at odd hours puts the element of surprise on my side. Small wonder that I barely hesitated before consulting my guide and locating Water Street. It was a short block paralleling the Bay’s shoreline, not far from the Islais Creek Channel on the southern waterfront. An industrial area in a very iffy part of the city. Odd place for Vardon to have bought property.

  As I drove along Third Street, deep into the industrial core of the city, the pavement became crisscrossed by railroad tracks and deeply potholed. The night people were also out here, lurking in doorways of closed businesses and congregating under streetlights. They melted into the darkness as an SFPD car cruised slowly past.

  I turned onto Twenty-fourth Street into an area nestled between Pier 72 and the Army Street Terminal, where shabby frame cottages stood side by side with warehouses and other business concerns. Most of the cottages appeared to be condemned, and the only lights that shone in the businesses were security spots behind the chain-link fences. A Doberman paced up and down in the yard of an auto body shop, spoiling for a reason to attack. Twenty-fourth dead-ended at Water Street, and as I turned, I recognized number 211.

  It was the old Islais Creek Resort, more familiarly known as “the Last Resort” to those of us who had patronized it during its brief period of popularity. A weathered frame building that sagged above the water, it had a second-story restaurant deck and bar that had been the haunt of the more upscale clientele, and a downstairs bar and poolroom favored by the friends and associates of its owner, Tony Capello, an enterprising man who had conducted an astounding variety of illicit activities from the resort until his luck ran out and he began serving twenty-to-life at San Quentin. The main structure and several outbuildings—a boathouse where Capello had kept his cabin cruiser and the sheds that had housed ill-gotten gains—had been boarded up after his conviction, and I’d assumed they’d long ago been demolished. Now it seemed that Dinah Vardon had purchased and planned to remodel the resort.

  But for what purpose? I couldn’t imagine her in the role of restaurateur. And I doubted she was living there, given the building’s obvious state of disrepair. All the same, I parked the MG and went exploring.

  The downstairs windows were salt-caked and covered on the inside with the type of plastic that painters use to mask the glass. The door to the lower bar was chained and padlocked. A yellow plastic tape proclaiming DANGER … DANGER … DANGER … blocked the staircase to the upper deck. When I stepped over it, I realized why: many of the boards were loose or missing, and the structure wobbled under my weight. I paused, looking up, and saw that the glass door to the deck was not masked. Carefully I climbed, holding tightly to the railing.

  The brightly painted tables and chairs and striped umbrellas that I remembered from past lunches there were gone from the deck; only a collapsed picnic table and empty flower boxes remained. I went to the door, took out my flashlight, and shone its beam around the interior. The bar and stools were still there, as well as a table that had blueprints spread out on it. Through an archway where bat-wing shutters hung, I saw a commercial cookstove.

  I’d have loved to get a look at those blueprints but this door was padlocked like the one downstairs. I was good with locks, had a handcrafted assortment of picks that an informant had given me shortly before he went to prison for the third time. But idle curiosity was no justification for criminal trespass. Besides, if I wanted to know Vardon’s plans for the resort, I could ask her. Its sale was a matter of public record.

  I went back to the MG and decided to make another pass down the world’s second most crooked street.

  I was rounding the hairpin turn above Vardon’s cottage when I saw a white BMW convertible pull into her driveway. Vardon was at the wheel, her head covered in a pale yellow scarf that the breeze whipped around at the nape of her neck. As the garage door rose, I pulled to the curb, got out, and hurried over there. Vardon glanced at me, registered irritated recognition, and drove inside. In a moment she came out, pulling off the scarf and stuffing it into her pocket.

  “Well, Sharon McCone, supersleuth,” she said, in a tone laced with sarcasm, “to what do I owe this pleasure?”

  Fortunately I’d polished my cover story on my way over here. “I need to talk with you about J.D. Smith.”

  She frowned and tapped her foot impatiently on the pavement. “What about him?”

  “Well, J.D. thought highly of you. In fact, he seemed … almost in awe. His landlady and I are organizing a memorial service, and I thought I might be able to persuade you to say a few words.”

  “You did?”

  “Just a short tribute.”

  “And you say J.D. was ‘in awe’ of me.”

  “That’s right. He was impressed by your talents. Especially impressed that you were taking on a big project like the Islais Creek Resort.”

  “How did he know abo
ut that?”

  “Well, he was a reporter.”

  “Of course.” She jiggled her keys, glanced at her watch. “Do you make it a habit of paying calls at almost midnight to ask people to speak at funerals?”

  I widened my eyes. “Oh, no! Is it that late? To tell the truth, I was upset after the planning session with J.D.’s landlady and drove around for a while. I didn’t notice the time.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve been at a dinner party in Marin, and it’s got me so wired that I won’t sleep for hours. Let’s take this inside. It’s chilly out here.”

  Vardon led me up the steps and into the house. Its decor surprised me: velvet draperies, oriental carpets, flowered wallpaper, delicate antique furnishings. Not at all what I’d have expected of her.

  She saw me looking around and said, “I didn’t choose it. My former mother-in-law did. She died and left it to my ex-husband, who stuck me with it in the divorce settlement, while he kept the house on Maui that he inherited from his father.” She sank onto one of the chairs, propped her booted feet on a spindly inlaid coffee table. “Look, do you want some coffee or juice? I can’t offer you anything stronger; I don’t drink or keep booze in the house.”

  I sat opposite her. “Nothing, thanks.”

  “So when’s J.D.’s service?”

  “Friday afternoon.” There had been a message from Jane Harris when I’d earlier accessed my home machine.

  “Where?”

  “On the Marin Headlands. I’ll let you know the exact spot later on.”

  Vardon considered, eyes coldly calculating. “I guess I could say a few words. J.D. could be a major pain in the ass and a sneaky bastard, but he also had his good points. Don’t worry,” she added, noting my disapproval, “I’ll couch it in more flattering terms when the time comes. The two of you must’ve been good friends.”

  “For a lot of years.”

  “I guessed that. Otherwise you wouldn’t’ve helped him out when he tried to get the skinny on InSite.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, we both know J.D. wasn’t after some puff piece on a P.I. solving a silly little manufactured mystery.”

  “… Maybe.”

  “You can tell me about it.”

  I shook my head. “Confidentiality.”

  “Doesn’t apply.”

  I made a show of reluctance before I said, “Okay, he suspected something was wrong at the magazine—something major that would make a good story. He was on to it when he went up to Oregon, but he didn’t put anything down on paper, so I haven’t a clue.”

  “Hmmm.” Vardon looked skeptical. “Did it have to do with Tessa Remington disappearing?”

  “Possibly. You’re an intelligent woman; what do you think?”

  “I have no opinion.”

  “About Ms. Remington?”

  “About anything.”

  “You must. Even Roger Nagasawa suspected something was wrong at the magazine.”

  “Roger? What do you know about him?”

  “For one thing, that you were involved with him.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I was in high school! That was over years ago. You know, for someone who spent only a few hours on the premises you certainly know a lot about InSite personnel.”

  “It was a very fruitful few hours. When I was talking with Kat Donovan she told me she did some research for you.”

  Vardon frowned. “What of it? I often used Kat’s services. In this case I was considering making some investments and was interested in market trends, so she put a package together for me.”

  “Was one of those investments the resort?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “And you bought it when?”

  She hesitated. “In March.”

  Wrong. Barry Carver had been scheduled to start work on March first. Why would she lie about that?

  “D’you plan to reopen it?”

  “Good God, no! The restaurant business is the last thing I’d involve myself in. I plan to live in the building and operate a consulting firm out of it.” Vardon stood. “I think we’d better wrap this up now. I’ve got a long, difficult day tomorrow, clearing out my office and settling matters with Jorge and Max. To say nothing of polishing up my résumé.”

  And my day promised to be difficult too—beginning with the interview with the detectives from Tillamook County. I told Vardon goodnight and headed across town to my temporary home.

  Tuesday

  APRIL 24

  Sleep wouldn’t claim me. I walked the floor through the early hours of the morning. My emotions, which had been burning at a white-hot pitch for two weeks, had cooled. I felt in control, levelheaded—and in the grips of obsession.

  The object of my obsession was a familiar one: the truth.

  I moved about the apartment slowly, taking in small details of the rooms, concentrating for minutes at a time on the weave of a drapery, the texture of the plaster, the pattern of the bricks of the fireplace.

  Emotion, I thought, is fast and hot—and deadly to you. Obsession is slow and cold—and deadly to others.

  I often felt this way when the facts began to dovetail with my theories. Today, I sensed, I would uncover the truth and recognize it for what it was.

  The Tillamook County sheriff’s investigators were already at Glenn’s offices when I arrived shortly before eleven. Tom Scanlon and Dave Parsons. A matched pair in their forties who looked remarkably alike, their manner was polite and professional; their eyes sized me up shrewdly while Glenn made the introductions. We took seats around the table in his conference room, Scanlon set up a recorder, and we began.

  Parsons produced my travel bag from under the table, and I identified it. He asked, “Will you tell us how it came to be out of your possession?”

  I explained about dropping it outside Houston’s cottage on Friday night. Parsons then asked me about its contents, and I described them.

  “You flew to Portland, Ms. McCone?”

  “Yes, on the eight o’clock shuttle.”

  “And rented a car?”

  “From National.” Of course they would already have checked with the airline and rental-car company.

  “When did you return to San Francisco?”

  “Late Saturday afternoon, the four o’clock flight.”

  Glenn said, “Gentlemen, may I ask why you’re questioning my client about her travel arrangements?”

  Scanlon said, “We’re trying to establish a time line.”

  “To prove what?”

  I said, “Glenn, I don’t mind answering their questions.” He shot me an exasperated look, but didn’t say anything else.

  Scanlon took over the questioning now. “There’s a four-hour period between the time our department finished taking your statement and when you caught your flight home. What did you do during that period?”

  “An officer drove me from Tillamook to Eagle Rock, where I’d left my rental car. That took … well, you’d know better than I. Then I drove to Portland, which took over two and a half hours because of heavy traffic. I dropped off the car, arranged for my flight, and went straight to the gate.”

  “No stops? Snack bar? Ladies’ room?”

  Glenn said, “Detective Scanlon, is this necessary?”

  I said, “No stops. I didn’t want to miss my flight.”

  “Now”—Glenn’s voice overrode the beginning of Scan-lon’s next question—“Ms. McCone’s been forthcoming with you. It’s your turn to be forthcoming with us.”

  The two exchanged glances. Parsons nodded. “Fair enough. This bag was recovered from a trash receptacle in one of the ladies’ rooms at the airport. According to the maintenance schedule, it was placed there sometime after noon and before midnight on Saturday.”

  “And its contents?”

  “As Ms. McCone describes them. Except there was a knife wrapped in a bloody pair of jeans and T-shirt. The blood on the clothing and the knife is a match for J.D. Smith’s.”

  I shut my eyes, ag
ain saw the stains on his sweater, the jagged tear. It would have been difficult to pull the knife from his chest without getting covered in blood.

  I asked, “What color were the jeans and tee?”

  “The jeans were pale blue,” Parsons said, “the tee white.”

  “Not mine. Was there also a pair of black jeans and a matching tee?”

  “No.”

  “Ms. McCone,” Scanlon said, “do you own a set of kitchen knives?”

  I did—a very good set of German manufacture. The last time I’d cooked they were all there, but that had been a while ago. If someone wanted to frame me for J.D.’s murder …

  A coldness crept over me. I’d had a client who had been tried and convicted on weaker evidence than that.

  Glenn said, “I’m instructing my client not to respond to that line of questioning, unless you’re prepared to charge her.”

  With a show of reluctance, Scanlon backed down. “I would like to ask Ms. McCone to recap her statement about the investigation that took her to Oregon.”

  “I’m sure you would, but you have her statement on file.”

  “There’s additional information we need—”

  “Sir, that was a confidential inquiry, conducted at my request. Ms. McCone is not only my client but my employee. I’ll have to ask you to limit any further questions to matters contained in her statement.”

  Legal privilege. How many times I’d been frustrated by it. How fully I embraced it now.

  “They don’t really suspect me of killing J.D., do they?” I asked Glenn.

  He shook his head, biting into one of the deli sandwiches the office gofer had brought in after the detectives departed. “I know how these people think. From the remainder of their questions, I gather their theory is that Houston killed Smith, cleaned up before you arrived there. Hid the knife in her bloody clothing and took the bundle with her when she saw an opportunity to slip out of the house. She picked up your travel bag on the way, drove south. Abandoned her car where they located it down the coast in Newport, hitched a ride to the airport in Portland, dumped the bag, and flew to God-knows-where.”