A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  Neither Schiff nor Bracco was married, so maybe they didn’t. But Bracco kept the early patter alive. “But the place breaks even?”

  “Oh, much better than that. Last year we grossed around forty thousand a month. It’s actually quite a little gold mine, all things considered. People really like the place.” Suddenly a pout appeared. “I’m sorry. What kind of hostess am I? Here we are all standing around. Would you like to sit down? Can I get you some coffee or something?”

  “Sitting’s good.” Bracco lowered himself onto an ottoman. “Nothing for me, though.”

  Schiff took one end of the overstuffed floral-print couch. “I’m fine too.”

  For another second or two Maya stood expectantly, then she shrugged and took her place at the other end of the couch. “So all this business talk is interesting to me, of course, but that’s not why you’re here. How can I help you?”

  Schiff threw a look over to Bracco, and he came forward slightly. “Well, let’s get the hard stuff out of the way first. How long had Dylan Vogler managed BBW?”

  Maya’s lips turned up. “That’s not a hard one. He pretty much started when I opened, which was ten years ago, and took over full-time about two years later.”

  “Were you aware,” Bracco continued, “that he was selling marijuana out of BBW?”

  All traces of animation left her face. “To be honest, I had heard a couple of rumors.” She looked at Schiff.

  The female inspector nodded. “They were evidently true. He was growing high-grade marijuana in his attic. He had a backpack full of it on him when he was shot. He’s got records at his house for about seventy regular clients, a couple dozen of which we’ve already talked to. He sold it out of the store.”

  Maya’s hand went to her mouth. “I didn’t realize it was—”

  “So”—Bracco kept up the press—“you didn’t know that he had a criminal record?”

  Her brow clouded as she whiplashed back to Bracco. “Well, yes. I knew about that. But that was a long time ago.”

  Schiff again. “Before he worked for you.”

  “Right.”

  Bracco, double-teaming. “You knew about his record when you hired him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course?” Schiff asked.

  Maya nodded. “We were friends. We’d been friends in college, USF. I knew he’d made a mistake, but he’d paid for it, and I had an opportunity to help him get back on his feet. It didn’t seem like any kind of risk. He was a good guy and everybody liked him. He’s been an ideal manager for all this time.” She paused. “I can’t believe he was selling dope over the counter at the store.”

  “That’s pretty much established, ma’am,” Bracco said. “Do you mind telling us how much he made working for you?”

  For the first time Maya showed a reluctance to answer. Her back straightened for a second. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “Nevertheless,” Schiff said, “it could save us some time.”

  Still rigid on her corner of the couch, now no longer smiling, Maya looked at her hands in her lap. “He made ninety thousand dollars a year. Seventy-five hundred a month.”

  “A lot of money,” Schiff said.

  “As I said,” Maya responded, “the store made money. And largely because of Dylan’s management. He did a good job, and I thought it was fair to pay him well.”

  “What’s a manager of a Starbucks make?” Schiff asked.

  Maya shook her head. “Less than that, I’m sure. But that doesn’t matter. I’m not a big multinational corporation. I don’t have stock-holders. I can pay him whatever I want. He worked hard and I wanted to keep him happy, so I paid him well. As I said, we were friends in college. Once I got him set up, and especially once he started having a family, I felt a responsibility for him. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Schiff shook her head. “Nobody’s saying there is, Mrs. Townshend.”

  But Bracco wasn’t ready to stop mining this vein. He jumped in quickly. “So did you and your husband socialize with Dylan and his wife?”

  “No,” Maya said. “No. Not very much. He’s my employee, after all. We have very different lives now.” Suddenly seeming to realize that she’d exposed herself somehow, Maya relaxed back into the couch, trailed an arm along the armrest. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what all these questions are about. Do you think I had something to do with Dylan’s death? Or knew more about his marijuana business? I don’t even know what’s going to happen to BBW now. I may put it up for sale. Joel and I don’t need it, and now that Dylan’s gone, there’s no real reason . . .” She shook her head and shrugged.

  “Reason for what?” Schiff asked.

  “I mean, to keep the place. I certainly don’t have the time to go back in there and work it every day. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” By this time her eyes had taken on a brightness and shine—she seemed to be near tears.

  “Mrs. Townshend”—Schiff laid a hand on the couch between them—“we’re trying to get some idea of who might have had a reason to kill Dylan. It’s possible he said something to you, something he was worried about, a staff problem. Did he fire anybody recently, for example?”

  “No. The staff’s very loyal. He didn’t mention anything like that. I really just don’t have any idea. Maybe it was just a random shooting.”

  “Maybe,” Bracco said, “but he wasn’t robbed, so that leaves us scratching for a motive.”

  “If it’s not something to do with the marijuana,” Maya offered, “I just can’t imagine what it would be.”

  “All right, ma’am.” Bracco got to his feet. “One last quick thing. Just for the record, would you mind telling us where you were Saturday morning?”

  Clearly, the question offended Maya, but she recovered. “I went to six-thirty Mass.”

  “On Saturday?” Bracco asked.

  “I go to Mass most Saturdays. And Sundays too. It’s not too fashionable anymore, I suppose,” she said, “but it brings me a lot of peace.”

  “Well, here’s to peace,” Schiff said. “Can’t have too much of that.” She rose from her own seat, flashed a perfunctory smile. “We may need to speak with you again at some point.”

  “That’d be fine,” Maya said, “if it will help you find whoever shot Dylan.”

  Bracco and Schiff were driving back downtown. They were stopped at a light at Van Ness Avenue, and Bracco was in the passenger seat. Schiff was talking. “So they’re friends from college, and she feels responsible for him and his family, but they don’t see each other socially and still she pays him nearly a hundred grand a year. This sings for you?”

  “Why not?” Bracco said. “You notice her house? Her husband’s doing okay.”

  “So why didn’t she just sell the shop to him? Dylan?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she hadn’t thought of it. Maybe he didn’t ask. It wasn’t broke, so she didn’t need to fix it.”

  They rode a few blocks in silence. Then Schiff said, “Another thing.”

  “You’re really chewing on this, aren’t you?”

  “Tell me why there’s no reason now to keep the shop. It’s pulling in half a mil a year. She hires another manager, pays him half of what she paid Dylan, it’s still making a half a mil a year. I’m not a business gal, but I don’t see selling something that’s making me half a million dollars a year.”

  “She doesn’t need the money.”

  “Give me a break, Darrel. Half a million dollars to do basically nothing?”

  In the passenger seat Bracco shrugged. “She’ll sell it for five times that and it’s out of her hair forever.”

  “I’ve got to think she owed him something. Dylan.”

  “What?”

  “If she kept it open just to keep him getting paid.”

  “You’re fishing.”

  “I am, but I got a license.” They rode in silence for a half a block.

  Then Bracco looked across at her partner. “I thought you were l
eaning toward Jansey.”

  “I was, maybe I still am. I like to keep an open mind. But something Robert Tripp said stuck with me.”

  After a couple of seconds Bracco said, “He didn’t give us anything except the alibi.”

  “No. In fact, he did. He said Ben went and woke up his mother Saturday morning, remember?”

  He nodded.

  “Well,” Schiff went on, “we can always double-check—and I intend to—by asking the kid about it, but that’s the kind of detail I don’t see Tripp or anybody else making up. That’s the story as he knew it. And if it’s true, it means Jansey hadn’t left the house early to go down and lie in wait for Dylan at the store. She could have shot him way closer to home anyway.”

  “So how about Tripp?”

  “As the shooter?”

  Bracco nodded again. “He admits he was up. Maybe it’s him who went to the store instead of Jansey. He could have thought he was protecting her, who maybe he’s got a thing with, in spite of him saying no. Or wants to have one.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do it at the store?”

  “I don’t know. He says he’s walking to school to study and they go down together. Then, maybe he knows Dylan’s carrying a gun. And they’re kind of friends, so he asks Dylan if he can just see it for a minute. And bang.” He darted a quick glance at Schiff. “That accounts for the lack of any struggle. He caught him off guard, threw the gun away, ran back home in time to unplug the sink.”

  “Maybe,” Schiff said. “Could have happened.”

  “But?”

  “But nothing. As I say, I’m keeping an open mind.”

  7

  The next day, Tuesday, Dismas Hardy sat at a small two-top against the back wall of Lou the Greek’s, nursing a club soda and lime. As it was still well before noon, the lunch crowd hadn’t yet materialized, and looking around him at the grungy, dark, semisubterranean watering hole and restaurant, Hardy marveled anew—as he did nearly every time he came here—that the place did any business at all, much less accommodated the booming daily influx of people who worked in and around the Hall of Justice just across the street.

  After all, this was San Francisco, restaurant town extraordinaire. You could eat like a king at a couple of dozen places within a half-mile radius—elegant ambience, exotic ingredients, world-class chefs, superb professional service.

  Where you wouldn’t find any of the above was at Lou’s. The eponymous Lou had a Chinese wife named Chiu who had all the creativity of any of the city’s celebrated cooks, a fact she proved every day with the Special, which was the only menu item the place served. While showcasing Chiu’s culinary wizardry, the Special also revealed a glaring blind spot in her originality—she believed that her creations should always and only include native dishes and ingredients from her own China and from Lou’s Greece. Together.

  It wasn’t exactly what the rest of California was eating under the name Pacific Rim fusion, but within her rather limited universe, Chiu for years had been inventing meal after adventurous meal featuring often-bizarre combinations of wontons, bao dumplings, grape leaves, tsatsiki, cilantro, duck, squid, olives, yogurt—some of which were tasty, many not. It didn’t seem to matter—the crowds kept coming, packing the place for lunch five days a week.

  Today the Special, sweet and sour spanakopita with five-spice lemon chicken, had Hardy thinking about passing on that selection and walking uptown to Sam’s Grill after his meeting, ordering some sand dabs and a nice glass of Gavi. If she’d only left out the sweet and sour, he was thinking . . .

  “Hey, Diz.”

  Hardy, caught unawares in his daydreaming, pushed his chair back and stood to shake hands with Harlen Fisk, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors and nephew of the mayor, Kathy West. Fisk, at a couple of inches over six feet, weighed in at around two hundred and fifty pounds and cut an impressive figure in his tailored Italian suit.

  Hardy had first met him when Harlen had partnered with Darrel Bracco and worked for a time as a hit-and-run inspector in the homicide detail. The cop phase had been just another step in the man’s political grooming—he was going to be West’s handpicked successor and everybody knew it. At forty-one he was getting to be the right age now, but if he was impatient with the wait to become mayor, he didn’t show it.

  Now, sitting down, he glanced at the Special card and grimaced. “You know,” he said, “spanakopita by itself is a fine dish. Why’s it have to be sweet and sour?”

  Hardy broke his grin. “I just was thinking the exact same thought. And here’s another one—if it’s five-spice lemon chicken, doesn’t the lemon make it six spices? And what are the other five?”

  “I think five-spice is more or less considered one spice. Like curry.”

  “I thought curry was one spice.”

  “No. It’s a mixture. That’s why you have different flavors and heats of curries. Different mixtures of stuff.”

  “Dang. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out,” Hardy said. His eyes brightened. “Maybe they’d hold the sweet and sour if we asked.”

  Fisk nodded. “We could always try, though history argues against it.”

  Ten minutes later, they were served. It turned out that, as expected, the sweet and sour was integral to this particular version of spinach in filo dough and couldn’t be substituted out; less expectedly, when Fisk took his first bite, he discovered that it tasted pretty good. He told a still-skeptical and reluctant Hardy, “My kids like ketchup on spinach. This is kind of similar.”

  Hardy took his own small bite, chewed, shook his head in admiration. “The woman’s a genius.” He forked a larger portion. “So,” he said when he’d swallowed, “what’s up?”

  “My sister,” Harlen said. “My little sister, actually. Maya. Her last name’s Townshend now. She wants to talk to a lawyer and I thought I’d recommend you, if you were interested.”

  “In all probability,” Hardy said, “if it’s not a divorce. I don’t do divorce.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Fisk said. “It’s not that. What it is, is she owns Bay Beans West, a coffee shop out on Haight. You know it?”

  “I’ve driven past, sure.” But then Hardy’s brain caught up, and he pointed a finger. “Somebody got shot there over the weekend. The manager?”

  “Right. Dylan Vogler.”

  “Is she a suspect?”

  Fisk had a rich two-note laugh and he used it. “No, no, no way. You’ve got to know Maya. Little Miss Junior League, mother of two, sweetest thing you ever met. No, what happened is she just got a visit from homicide yesterday—actually, in the small-world department, it was Darrel and his new partner. A woman.”

  “Debra Schiff.”

  “Must be, if you say so. Anyway, they came and talked to her and after they left she called and said maybe she ought to have a lawyer if she was going to be talking to the police.”

  “I love people who think like she does. And she’s not all wrong.”

  “That’s what I told her. You can’t be too careful on that front, although in her case, knowing her, I’d say it’s a bit of a stretch.”

  “What’d they ask her about? She tell you?”

  Fisk shrugged. “It all sounded general to me. Her guy gets shot outside her store, they’re going to want to talk to her, right? It turns out, evidently, that Dylan was selling dope out of the shop, and she thinks because she owned it, that might get her in trouble.”

  “She might be right. What kind of dope?”

  “Just weed, I think.”

  “How much weed?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “It might if it was a major warehouse for distribution.”

  “I don’t think it was that. It was mostly a happening coffee shop. But say it was.”

  “What?”

  “A major warehouse or something.”

  Hardy fixed him with a wary look. “You know something you’re not telling me?”
>
  “No, no. Just to know so I can tell Maya if she asks. What if this guy Dylan was moving large quantities? What would be Maya’s exposure as the owner?”

  “I’m not sure,” Hardy said. “I’d have to look it up. Offhand, I’d say she’s probably okay if she can prove she didn’t know anything about it. But landlords in crack neighborhoods—I mean, where they’re selling out of every second apartment—they’ve been known to get their property forfeited.”

  The word jacked Harlen right up. “Forfeited! You mean the whole building?”

  Hardy held up a palm to calm him. “Sometimes, but usually this is with bad guys, knee-deep in the business. If the feds get involved, they can take the whole property.” Hardy knew that, actually, the city’s own DA could try to take the property too; but they never would in this situation. He took a bite of his Special. “But that’s usually, as I say, when they know they’ve got a live one they’re trying to hassle. And that doesn’t sound much like your sister’s situation.”

  “Not even close, Diz. She didn’t know much, if anything, about this, I’m sure. She’s a Goody Two-shoes and would never have taken that risk. Her husband is Joel Townshend—Townshend Real Estate, struggling by on a couple of mil a year. Believe me, they don’t need more money.”

  “I hate them already,” Hardy said.

  “Me too. But there you go. Anyway, the point is, the cops surprised her and got her nervous. You know how that is. So would you mind talking to her?”

  Hardy told Harlen that that went without saying, then pulled a small grimace. “But it’s just a shame she’s already talked to them. That’s all I was thinking. You know how long they were there, Darrel and Debra?”

  “She didn’t say. Half hour or so, I gathered.”

  “Well, probably not too much damage done. As long as she didn’t lie to them.”

  Fisk nodded comfortably. “I don’t think you have to worry on that score,” he said. “She wouldn’t have done that. That’s just not who she is.”

  After telling Fisk to have his sister give him a call to make an appointment, Hardy crossed the street and walked into the massive gray stucco block that was San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. He’d worked there as an assistant DA for a couple of years after law school, and then for most of another year when he’d started practicing law again after he’d woken up from his own grief-induced decade following Michael’s death.