Puzzled now, Kate looked at Al, and the two of them made their way cautiously into the living room, checking out every nook and broom closet in the intervening space. Bedroom, bath, and kitchen were cleared, and they stood in the living room between the black leather sofa and the huge gilt-framed mirror, waiting. When a voice came for the third time—this one a smarmy-sounding male with a heavy French accent declaring, “Eh, beeg boy, you have a fren‘ at ze door”—Kate whirled and nearly shot out the speaker next to the front door before she finally registered the mechanical quality of the sound. A fourth voice sounded immediately on the heels of the stage Frenchman (this one a Southern belle drawling “Hey there, honeybun, there’s somebody here to see y’all”), and then a fifth, which was the same English butler’s voice they had first heard. The pounding started as the person with a finger on the voice-doorbell got tired of waiting.
“Matty,” a woman’s voice called. “Matty, come on! I know you’re home, your lights are on. And don’t tell me you’ve got them on some kind of timing device, I’m just going to stand here with my thumb on the bell until you get sick of these goddamn voices and—”
It wouldn’t take long to get sick of the cycle of announcements, Kate thought. Under the repetition of the four voices, coming from a box next to the door where clever-boy Banderas had adapted the normal chimes to a high-tech version of a doorbell, Kate slid her gun away and pulled open the door, to find herself face-to-face with a gorgeous, polished young woman who could have been a fashion model, dressed in skintight jeans, a low-cut and extremely well-filled top that did not quite reach a very shapely navel with a gold ring in it, a black leather bomber jacket, and shiny high-heeled boots that she might well have bought from one of the shops that Kate had gone into inquiring about recreational handcuffs. All she needed was a whip in her hand, but in truth, she seemed quite unconscious of the dominatrix overtones in her attire. She might have been a six-year-old dressing up in net stockings, makeup, and a miniskirt for Halloween, having not the faintest idea why it was incongruous.
As this was going through Kate’s mind, the woman was in turn staring at her, looking surprised at first, then suspicious and resentful until finally, taking a closer look at Kate’s undistinguished form and uninspired trousers and shirt, surprise again took precedence.
“Where’s Matty?” she demanded.
“Matthew Banderas?”
“Yeah. Of course Matthew Banderas, this is his house. Who the hell are you?”
Kate pulled her ID out of her pocket and showed it to the young dominatrix. “You’re a friend of Mr. Banderas?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. Where is he?”
“Come in please, Ms., um—?”
“Melanie Gilbert. Where’s Matty? What’s happened to him?”
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Gilbert, but Mr. Banderas was killed last night in San Francisco.”
“What? Oh, no.” The woman gaped at Kate, looking astonished but not teary. She scarcely noticed Kate’s hand on her elbow, gently but firmly drawing her inside to the leather sofa. “Oh, poor, poor Matty. I can’t believe it. What happened?”
As soon as she was safely inside and the door shut behind her, Kate let go of the slim, leather-jacketed arm. Gilbert was not exactly devastated to hear of her friend’s death, Kate was relieved to see. Telling loved ones was hard; telling friends and acquaintances, once they were past the initial shock of it, often led to interesting pieces of information being shaken out of the tree of knowledge.
“Can I get you a glass of water, Ms. Gilbert?” Kate asked. She had never known why this was the traditional means of offering support; the times she had received shocks the only drink she’d wanted was alcoholic and preferably bottomless. Still, it did give the woman a chance to gather herself together, while allowing Kate to look as if she cared, and in this case let Al Hawkin sit down beside Matthew Banderas’s girlfriend with the heaving breasts and the demure navel ring. This was one female who would respond more readily to the masculine touch. At which Al Hawkin was an expert.
Al gave the young woman a minute to sip her glass of room-temperature, chlorinated water before asking her in a gentle voice, “Ms. Gilbert, can you tell me how you know Matthew?” Formality combined with the intimacy of the victim’s first name, Kate noted, and the emphasis on the relationship, not (yet) the more pertinent facts such as time and place.
“I’m an actress,” she told them. “I met Matty when I was doing a job for his company last year, acting in a piece of film that they wanted to use in their software. I’m really not sure how they do it, something about feeding the film into their computers and using it from there. I think they were using it to demonstrate some editing software they were developing, or something. Anyway,” she continued, relieved that these technical details were out of the way without any questions from her audience, “that’s when I met Matty, when he came by the set one day to watch. We went out to dinner afterward, and, well, you know.”
“What was your relationship with Matthew?”
“My relationship? I loved Matty, or at least I more or less did; anyway, I liked him a lot. I slept with him, if that’s what you mean, but we never lived together.”
Hawkin considered his next question carefully before deciding to ask it. “Did you know that Matthew spent three years in prison for raping a woman?”
“Matthew?” Her pretty face twisted in disbelief. “No, you’ve got the wrong man. In fact, you probably have the wrong man entirely—Jesus, Matty’s gonna flip when he gets home and finds you here.”
“Ms. Gilbert, I’m sorry. Unless Matthew had a twin brother who was carrying Matthew’s ID, your friend is dead.”
Melanie Gilbert pulled back from the edge of the hysterical thoughts she had been about to succumb to, and studied Hawkin’s craggy features. She gave a small sigh, and slumped down into the black sofa. One melodramatic tear ran slowly down her cheek, and her chest heaved impressively.
“Matty? A rapist? God. You really are sure?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she said, and then in a different voice, one that suddenly recognized the implications, she said, “Oh. Oh my God. Rape? Did he hurt her? I mean—”
“No. Kidnapping and rape, but not battery.”
“But still. Shit, I was sleeping with a rapist. How could I not—jeez, that’s so creepy. I feel like throwing up.”
Kate suddenly had enough of the sexy young actress’s attempt to find out how she ought to be feeling, and stood up to go to the kitchen and find the coffeemaker. She suddenly realized that they hadn’t stopped for lunch, that she was tired, hungry, edgy, and depressed, and was fed up with this young airhead with the twinkle of gold in her navel who was trying to talk herself into being shocked when she was really more than half titillated. Al Hawkin’s voice went on as Kate found a gleaming gold French press coffeemaker, a bag of Italian roast coffee (pre-ground, for which Lee would have deducted points), and instead of a kettle, an attachment on the sink that dispensed near-boiling water. Kate spooned grounds into the coffeemaker and ran steaming water on top, and while she waited the requisite couple of minutes for the grounds to subside, she leaned against the tiled counter listening to the conversation in the next room.
“Ms. Gilbert, did you ever hear Matthew say anything about being harassed or threatened, either here or at work? Receiving letters or phone calls, anything like that?”
“No, I don’t think so. Matty never talked much about work, though I know that his new boss is a real bitch. And, hey—somebody at work keyed his car back near Christmas, left a really nasty scratch. And there was somebody here in the apartments that kept stealing his parking place, but since they’re not really assigned or anything, he couldn’t do much about it.”
“He never found who scratched his car?” Gilbert shook her head. “What about the argument over the parking place? Did it ever escalate? Did the two of them ever have words about it?” Scratched paint, territorial disputes—murders were committed every
day for even stupider reasons.
“I don’t think so,” Gilbert repeated. Still, Hawkin dutifully got from her what little she knew about the intrusive neighbor, which was little more than he, she, or it drove a red Porsche (she pronounced it Porsh, and said that Banderas had pointed it out to her) and lived somewhere upstairs (which she had gathered by a rude gesture Banderas once made in the vague direction of the offender’s apartment).
“So he knew whose car it was?”
“Oh yeah. I mean, he never told me her name, but he knew who she was.” Then Gilbert added thoughtfully, “But you know, they might of had a fight after all, ”cause the last couple weeks the Porsche hasn’t been in his spot, and when I said something about it to Matty, he just kind of nodded his head but he seemed, like, satisfied. You know?“
The coffee, pre-ground or not, smelled intoxicating, so Kate shoved down the handle, poured three cups, and carried the tray back into the living room. Melanie declined, saying virtuously that she had given up coffee, which was bad for the skin.
Kate nodded, took a large and satisfying swallow from her cup, and asked where Banderas bought his coke.
The actress blushed and tugged her cropped shirt down, covering a fraction more of her admirably flat stomach and revealing a little more of her round breasts. (Implants, or one of those push-up bras? Kate speculated. Or could those possibly be natural?) “What do you mean?” Gilbert said, trying for innocence.
“We found the cocaine in the bathroom cabinet. I wondered if you knew where he got it, if he was in the habit of buying it in San Francisco. We’re not interested in prosecuting him for it, and I’m sure you had nothing to do with it. I just wondered if you happened to know if he bought it locally, or in the City?”
“Urn. Should I, you know, talk with a lawyer or something?” asked this child of the television age.
“We’re not interested in your drug use, Ms. Gilbert, or even Matthew’s. Only in knowing if there might have been some drug-related reason for his being out near the Legion of Honor last night.”
“Where’s that?”
“You know that art museum on the cliff out near the ocean?” Kate offered. “Lots of high school classes go there.”
The pretty face cleared. “Oh yeah, I remember that place. Sculptures and things, I think.”
“That’s the place.”
“And that’s where Matty was? At the museum?” From the sound of her voice, it was not a place she connected with her boyfriend’s lifestyle.
“Nearby. The museum itself was shut.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless he was meeting someone there. But I wouldn’t have thought he went there to score. He usually— that is, I think there’s someone, um, local.”
In the apartment complex, Kate interpreted; what a surprise.
Melanie Gilbert had nothing much more to add to their scant pool of knowledge. She had never seen another face to Banderas, never glimpsed a brutal or violent side to him: he had always been polite to her, even when drinking or doing coke. She confirmed that he was a diabetic, with “all kinds of things” he couldn’t eat, and that she had never known him to consume anything as sweet as a bar of chocolate, even when he had been smoking dope. She did not know the names of any of Banderas’s previous girlfriends, and thought his family was in Southern California somewhere, though she had never met any of them.
Hawkin then circled back to the topic of the Banderas rape charge, asking as delicately as possible about the man’s sex habits. The young woman protested that there had been nothing at all kinky about Matty, but the vehemence of her denials indicated that some questioning note had sounded in the back of that pretty head, and she was beginning to doubt herself. It was something that needed going into more closely, but not, thankfully, by two visiting SFPD homicide investigators. Hawkin had reached the same conclusion, and let the topic go, to Melanie’s obvious relief.
“And you’re sure, Ms. Gilbert, that Matthew wasn’t receiving any threatening phone calls or letters, anything like that?”
“No. Well, he did have a few wrong numbers, rude people in the middle of the night, things like that. Who doesn’t?”
“Recently?”
“Last week. Do you think that could have been… whoever?”
“We’ll try to find out, Ms. Gilbert. Well, I don’t know that we need to keep you any longer today. Could we have a phone number, in case we need to ask you anything else?”
She gave them a list of numbers: her home number and her cell phone, her agent’s number and his cell phone, and was trying to think of anyone else besides her sister and her ex-husband when Al plucked the paper from her fingers and shooed her out the door. When it had closed behind her, the two detectives looked at each other.
“Whew,” said Al.
“That woman’s in the wrong business,” Kate agreed. “She’d make a fortune with a whip in her hand. Those boots alone would have a masochist squirming.”
“You think she…does?”
“I strongly doubt it. Her face looks like a schoolgirl’s. Mixed signals, you know? I think it’s just her idea of fashion.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed, Martinelli.”
“Not my kind of thing, Al,” she said evenly. Still, as she turned back to the Banderas files, she couldn’t help wondering how Lee would look with a ring in her navel…
ONE DAY PROVED TO be all they had before media hell broke loose. Sundays were generally a slack day for news, but the morning paper had the Banderas murder screaming across the front page:
SECONDSEXPREDATORKILLED
The article beneath the headline reviewed the full details of the Larsen and Banderas murders, only this time the reporters had both men’s history of crimes against women. The use of tasers to overcome the two men underscored the possible link with the “feminist vigilante group,” the LOPD, with which tasers were now firmly linked in the popular imagination. An adjacent article bore the eye-catching heading HATE crimes classification asked, and Kate read with growing amazement that a delegation of “prominent businessmen” had been to see the mayor the previous afternoon, asserting that since the Ladies’ attacks and the two murders had all been aimed exclusively at heterosexual males with light skin, the attacks should be classified as hate crimes and pursued with all the commitment that the City had come to demonstrate in its prosecution of gay bashing.
Kate put the paper on the kitchen table for Lee’s bemusement and left for the Hall of Justice, where she finished filling out as best she could the highly detailed VICAP forms for the FBI, asking if they had any crimes on the books that fit the profile of abusers, tasers, handcuffs, and including the possible link of candy. As Kate was reading it over, wondering if there were any more blank spaces she could fill, the telephone rang.
“Seen the paper?” Hawkin asked without preliminary.
“It tells everything except who done it,” she noted. “Why didn’t they call and ask for a comment?” It was the usual way reporters notified the cops that a story was coming, in the recognition that cooperation worked better in the long run, but there had been no such message waiting for them when they stopped in at the Hall of Justice the night before.
“New girl,” Hawkin answered. “Gung ho. We’d better get up to the condos early before the place is under siege. Meet you at the Hall, or at your place?”
“Why don’t you swing by here? Give me a chance to answer some of the messages.”
“Fine. See you in a bit.”
The messages were mostly from the media, and a few clearing up details in the Larsen case. Kate placed another call to the desk sergeant in Marin, suggesting that someone from the department might want to join them for an exchange of notes before the news reporters added “lack of interdepartmental communication” to their string of gibes. She left various numbers for the Marin detective to call her back, then trotted for the elevator.
The Marin detective rang them back when they were halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Inspector Martinelli?” the voice said. “Sergeant Martina Wiley here.”
“Hello Sergeant, thanks for calling me back.”
“I can guess what you want to talk about. I’m over here talking to a woman who lives upstairs from the Banderas apartment. I think you might want to join me.”
“Er. Do you have any idea what kind of car she drives?” Kate asked. There was silence for a minute as Wiley gave this odd question her consideration, then Kate heard the receiver being half muffled and through the barrier Wiley’s voice asking, “What kind of car do you have?” Kate could not hear the answer, but Wiley supplied it. “A red Porsche.”
“Okay,” said Kate with satisfaction. “What apartment are you in, Sergeant?”
“Number three-fourteen.”
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
The woman in apartment 314 did not look the type to drive a flashy car. Nor did the modern furnishings fit with the small woman dressed in jeans, a vastly oversized sweatshirt, fuzzy slippers, and plaster. The last item covered her left arm from knuckle to elbow, and half a dozen stitches had recently been removed from the still-swollen cut on her left eyebrow. That whole side of her face was yellow-green with fading bruises and she held herself stiffly, either from fear of causing pain, or from fear itself.
Kate and Al introduced themselves to Martina Wiley, who had answered the door with the air of a family friend and then took them across to the breakfast nook to meet the woman.
“This is Rachel Curtis,” she said. “Rachel, these are two detectives from San Francisco, Kate Martinelli and her partner, Al Hawkin. They’re investigating the murder of your neighbor Matthew Banderas.”
Rachel Curtis flicked a glance at Kate and then Al, but kept her attention on the woman who had taken on the role of savior. Kate was distracted for a moment by the contrast between the cop and the victim, who might have been handpicked to illustrate the word opposites. Wiley was big, black, strong, and bristling with intelligence and energy. Curtis was about five feet tall and thin to the point of anorexia, with dark brown chin-length hair, pasty white skin, glasses, and no more energy than yesterday’s pasta.
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