Nobody's Child (The Jeri Howard Series Book 5)

by Janet Dawson

  I set down the knife and used both hands to scoop the chunks of bell pepper from the wooden cutting board into the low pottery bowl. I’d saved the onion until last, because chopping onions always made my eyes water. Tonight was no exception. I leaned back to get away from the fumes, diced the onion as quickly as possible, then dumped it into the bowl and covered the whole thing with a plate.

  “Want some more wine?” I asked Dad as I washed the knife and cutting board, then used my sleeve to swipe at the onion tears on my cheek.

  Dad glanced at his glass and shook his head before moving back to the subject of Christmas. He was more enthusiastic about its approach than I was. Ever since I’d greeted him at the door with a glass of wine, he’d been talking about the holidays and the plans for my brother’s impending visit.

  Brian and his family live in Sonoma, about an hour’s drive north of the Bay Area. We have a Christmas tradition which is ritually followed each year. Brian, his wife Sheila, and their two children, Todd and Amy, come to spend one weekend before Christmas with Dad at his town house in Castro Valley. We all do something special to celebrate Christmas in the big city. This always includes a stroll around Union Square in downtown San Francisco, so we can inspect all the windows in the department stores. Now that the kids were a bit older, that also meant a matinee at the ballet, the symphony, or the theater.

  This year we had tickets to the American Conservatory Theater’s annual production of A Christmas Carol. It was a good thing no one had suggested The Nutcracker. There were two versions to choose from, the San Francisco Ballet and the Oakland Ballet. I already had a date to the Oakland Ballet’s production, which was why I’d been somewhat noncommittal when Duffy LeBard suggested we get tickets.

  “Duffy and I went to tour the Paramount yesterday,” I told my father. “It only costs a buck. All you have to do is show up at the box office entrance at ten in the morning. And the tour was really interesting. I’d never seen the theater like that before.”

  “I took that tour several years ago. Fascinating. I’d love to do it again. You know, I’ll bet your brother would too. How long was the tour? Maybe we can fit it in that Saturday before we go to the city.”

  “A couple of hours. But don’t you think that might be too much in one day? For the kids, I mean, with the matinee and dinner afterward.”

  “I’m game if they are,” Dad said. “I’ll propose it to Brian and Sheila and see what they think. How’s Cassie? You haven’t mentioned her.”

  “I haven’t seen much of her lately.”

  I dumped the chicken strips into the layer of hot peanut oil at the bottom of the wok and began stirring, thinking about why I hadn’t seen Cassie and how much it bothered me.

  Cassie’s my closest friend, an attorney whose firm had the suite of offices at the front of the third story of my building on Franklin Street. We’d met years ago when we were both working as legal secretaries for a firm in Oakland. When Cassie went on to law school, I took paralegal courses and finally wound up working as an investigator for a detective named Errol Seville. Errol retired a couple of years ago and I became a solo, renting space in Cassie’s building, where she, Bill Alwin, and Mike Chao had set up a partnership.

  Last spring Cassie met a guy named Eric, an accountant. Through the summer and fall they spent more and more time together. Cassie was increasingly wrapped up in the relationship, no longer available for some of the spur-of-the-moment dinners or day trips that used to be familiar routines of our friendship. It seemed that engagement and marriage were looming on Cassie’s horizon. I felt somewhat abandoned, and I also felt guilty for feeling that way. I wished Cassie the best, but I also missed my friend.

  I explained all this to Dad and he commiserated as well as he could. He too has a relationship, one that is all very discreet and professorial, with his friend and colleague Dr. Isabel Kovaleski. Down in Monterey my mother has a friend too, a man named Karl Beckman, who owns a boatyard. It seemed that everyone was paired up except me. Not that I didn’t have some interest. Duffy LeBard had made his plain. He was a lot of fun, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to go beyond friendship. Navy men always get orders sooner or later.

  The other interest was radiating from Bill Stanley. He’d surprised me earlier in the week when he called, reminded me that he had season tickets to the Oakland Ballet and asked me to go with him to see The Nutcracker. Bill is a criminal defense attorney here in Oakland, a tall rangy man in his forties, not as flamboyant as some of his better-known colleagues, but quirky nonetheless. He defended one of my clients earlier in the year, when she was charged with killing her estranged husband, a crime she had not committed.

  Bill Stanley also had a reputation as one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the Bay Area, with the single-minded, cocky, take-no-prisoners style that seemed to go with that profession. He once told me he assumed all his clients were guilty because they usually were. In some respects the whole criminal justice system was like a pinball game to him, one in which he racked up the most points, any way he could. In the abstract, that offended my sense of justice, and we’d had some stimulating arguments on the subject. When it came to reality, however, and I had a client charged with murder, Bill Stanley would be the first lawyer I’d call.

  I dumped the vegetables into the wok and gave the whole concoction a stir as everything sizzled together in the peanut oil. When it was ready, I dished up dinner right there at the stove. No fancy presentation for me. I set the plates on the table and Dad and I reached for our forks. No chopsticks either.

  “I’d like to find out if someone is still teaching in the state university system,” I said as we ate.

  “I could probably find out for you.” Dad looked at me as he forked up another mouthful of rice. “Is this a case you’re working on?”

  I nodded. “I was hoping you could help. It would save me some time.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “Douglas Widener. Three years ago he was teaching math at San Francisco State. When I called over there I was told he’s moved on. Of course, I couldn’t get anyone to tell me where.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  We talked of other things as we finished our dinner. I was standing at the sink up to my elbows in soapy water when I heard the sound I’d heard Saturday morning. There it was again, a mew from outside, plaintive and abandoned. Abigail had been drowsing on a vacant chair. Now she came to attention and stuck her nose up against the glass of the back window.

  “What’s that noise?” Dad asked.

  “It’s a stray kitten. Probably a feral. Or maybe some creep dumped it.”

  I rinsed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. My kitchen window was obscured by a coating of steam, so I walked to the dining room, where Dad and Abigail were peering out onto my darkened patio. In the light from the apartment building at the rear I could just make out the little black shape huddling at the edge of my patio.

  “I heard it yesterday morning and finally spotted it late last night,” I said. “It seems to be all alone and half starved. I put some food out for it this morning.”

  I went back to the kitchen, to the cupboard where I kept Abigail’s crunchies. Sack in hand, I opened the back door and stepped onto my little square of concrete. At the edge of the patio I’d left two bowls for the kitten, one of fresh water and the other now quite empty. I crossed the patio and poured some kibble into the bowl. Then I sat on the chilly concrete step, watching the kitten, who had retreated into the shadows when I opened the door.

  Now hunger won out over fear and it crept toward the bowl, intent on food. The kitten was mostly black, with one white forepaw and an uneven white mask across wide wary eyes. I didn’t want to frighten the kitten away, so I sat very still in the cold night air until it had inhaled the contents of the bowl and retreated again to the relative safety of the bushes. Then I went back inside.

  “With that white blaze across the face, it looks like Black Bart,” Dad commented. While I was
outside, he’d taken over dishwashing duties and was now rinsing and stacking plates.

  I laughed. “Yeah, he does.”

  Dad’s specialty is what historians call the Trans-Mississippi West. I call it cowboys, Indians, and outlaws. Some kids got bedtime stories about Hansel and Gretel. I got stories about Dad’s favorite outlaw, the gentlemanly bandit who caught the fancy of dime novelists and newspaper hacks. He called himself Black Bart, the PO8, and left poems in the strongboxes that he emptied.

  Between 1875 and 1883 Black Bart prowled the Gold Country up in the Sierra foothills. He held up twenty-eight stagecoaches belonging to the Wells, Fargo Express Company, which took an exceedingly dim view of this enterprise. Black Bart would appear out of the darkness, flour sack with eyeholes over his head and a shotgun in his hand, ordering the driver to “throw down the box.”

  Now Dad and I looked at one another and quoted in unison Black Bart’s most famous line of doggerel.

  I’ve labored long and hard for bread,

  For honor and for riches,

  But on my corns too long you’ve tred

  You fine-haired sons of bitches.

  They finally caught up with Black Bart, tracing him through a laundry mark on a handkerchief left at the scene of one of his robberies. He turned out to be a San Francisco resident named Charles E. Boles, who did a stretch in San Quentin. When he was released in 1888, he disappeared, his legend firmly in place.

  “Maybe you ought to adopt Black Bart,” Dad said as I prepared a pot of after-dinner coffee.

  I shook my head. “Abigail would have a fit. She’d probably eat the poor little thing.”

  Not that I hadn’t considered it. While I was doing laundry Saturday afternoon, my next door neighbor, who’d also heard the kitten, told me the apartment manager planned to get a trap from the local shelter to see if he could catch the kitten. For that matter, I could probably catch it myself, given a little time. I’d already lured it to my patio with food.

  Catch it for what? It would wind up in a cage at the animal shelter, vying with other animals for adoption. Nice docile kittens from a litter had a better chance of that than this little wild one. Probably it would be euthanized, that sanitized euphemism for killing strays. Not a great choice of fates. But how long would the kitten last on its own, out on the streets, with dogs and raccoons, cars and people?

  As I poured the coffee I thought about a book I’d read once, long ago. The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in which the fox tells the prince, “You are responsible for that which you tame.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to be responsible for another creature. But I already seemed to be walking along that path.

  Six

  IT RAINED ALL NIGHT. IT WAS STILL RAINING MONDAY morning when I walked the few blocks from my Franklin Street office to the Alameda County Courthouse. There I began a search through birth records, looking for some evidence that Maureen Smith had delivered her daughter Dyese in this county. She hadn’t, at least not according to officialdom. Over the next twenty-four hours my Toyota and I made a wide-ranging, clockwise circle around San Francisco Bay, moving from county to county. None of them—Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, Marin, or Contra Costa—had any record of a child named Dyese born to a woman named Maureen Smith any time during the past five years.

  By Tuesday morning the sun finally put in an appearance, a big yellow ball riding high in a bright blue sky. I felt more cheerful as I headed west through the Caldecott Tunnel, three bores beneath the East Bay hills devastated by fire several years ago. Maybe my mood had more to do with the sunshine and the fact that my cold finally seemed to be going away. As far as the current case, I’d hit a dead end with the birth records. Should I check out courthouses in some of the northern counties, such as Solano, Napa, and Sonoma? What if Maureen had headed in other directions of the compass? There was also the possibility that Maureen’s child had not been born in a hospital, instead delivered by a midwife at home. But where was home? I didn’t know much about the rules and regulations governing midwifery in California, other than the state medical association heartily disapproved of it.

  I came out of the tunnel headed down the slope toward the bay, noting the green grass and large houses sprouting on the steep lots that had been swept clean by the firestorm. Buena Vista Avenue was above Lake Temescal, where Highway 24 intersected Highway 13, easy freeway access for whoever had left the body on that burned-out lot. By now, dental records had confirmed that Maureen Smith was dead. What remained of her corpse still lay in a chilled drawer at the coroner’s office. My client seemed resigned to this answer to the question she’d posed in my office last week. Naomi Smith had hired me to find out if the body was that of her daughter. It was. So in a way the case was over.

  But Dyese Smith was still unaccounted for. At the heart of it, I didn’t think Naomi was all that interested in finding her granddaughter. If it hadn’t been for the subtle urging of Ramona Clark, her housekeeper, Naomi might have let the matter drop. She hadn’t actually told me to stop, and I hadn’t yet worked my way through that big retainer check she’d given me. Naomi’s disinterest in the child’s fate had kindled mine. I had to find out what happened to that brown-eyed brown-skinned little girl in the picture.

  Someone had to care about her. It might as well be me.

  I needed more information, I told myself as I changed lanes. For instance, who owned that lot where Maureen Smith’s body had been found? I could find that out with a trip to the assessor’s office. Digging through computerized tax records was easier than getting facts from Naomi Smith. Computers didn’t ask why I wanted the answers.

  As for obtaining details from my ex-husband, the homicide detective, that was like prying pearls from a tight oyster. Sid was being closemouthed about the autopsy, especially the cause of death. Was Maureen’s death murder? Oakland Homicide investigated all deaths not readily attributed to natural causes, accidents as well as murders. I supposed there was a remote chance Maureen Smith had died accidentally, or naturally, even if she was only twenty years old. However, I didn’t think burying her in an unmarked muddy grave in the Oakland hills was quite the normal interment for someone who died in her sleep or fell down some stairs.

  Why hadn’t Maureen’s body been released to her next of kin? Was there some doubt about how she died, other than what Sid had said about the backhoe damaging the remains? Sid was holding something back, and it must be an important piece of evidence. He didn’t have to tell me anything. Solving murders was Homicide’s job, not mine. I was just the pesky private investigator who was looking into the whereabouts of Maureen’s daughter Dyese, and coming up empty thus far. But I had a hunch the fates of the dead mother and the missing daughter were inextricably linked.

  I exited the freeway and drove toward Piedmont Avenue, which is in Oakland rather than Piedmont I parked in a lot behind a block of shops between Fortieth and Forty-first, then crossed Piedmont, heading for an antique shop called Granny’s Attic. The place was empty and the proprietor was behind the glass counter midway down the central aisle, seated at a desk that was barely visible under a flurry of paper. She looked up when the bell above the front door tinkled and stood to greet me.

  “Jeri Howard,” she said, her mouth curving into a wide smile. “How nice to see you. Come back here and have a cup of tea.”

  Vee Burke looked the way she usually did, her silver-streaked dark brown hair in untidy curls wreathing her pleasant round face. Several strands of jet and amber beads hung over her generous bosom. Her sturdy figure was clad in a loose-fitting orange sweater and a long blue skirt, her feet in sensible flat-heeled shoes.

  I stepped behind the glass counter, took a seat on the familiar sagging sofa with its tatty flowered cushions and looked around. Vee always had a teakettle going. Last time I’d been here, while working on the Willis case, which involved her nieces and nephew, the kettle had rested on an old hot plate that was a candidate for an electrical fire. Now she had one of those
sleek expensive kettles that had the heating element built in.

  Something else was different. I didn’t see the wicker basket full of blanket fragments and towel scraps, the usual resting place of Vee’s elderly Yorkshire terrier, Ziggy. When I asked about it, Vee didn’t reply at once. Instead she busied herself pouring water over the herbal tea bag she’d placed in a blue-and-white-flowered china cup.

  “I had to have him put down,” she said, eyes glistening with tears as she handed me the cup and saucer. “Last month. I hated to do it. But he was so old and arthritic. First his eyes went, then his kidneys. Finally Charles and I decided it was cruel to keep hanging on. But I miss him so much.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told her. “I know how I’d feel if anything happened to Abigail. Are you planning to get another dog?”

  “I don’t know,” Vee said. She replenished the water in her own teacup and sat down at her desk, turning the oak office chair around to face me as she settled onto the pillow that cushioned the seat. “I can’t face the prospect right now. I’d had Ziggy since he was a puppy, just eight weeks old. In a way, I wish I’d gotten another pup when Ziggy was younger, so there wouldn’t be this empty spot. But Ziggy was always jealous of other dogs.”

  “Abigail’s the same way.” I lifted the tea to my lips and took a tiny sip of the scalding brew, recalling the time I’d rashly agreed to care for a friend’s cat for a few days. He was a neutered tom, younger and larger than my own tabby. Nevertheless, Abigail terrorized the poor beast. She ate from his bowl, used his cat box, and finally drove him to hide in a closet for the duration of his visit. Talk about territorial.