A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  He turned to look at her and surprised himself when he said, “My son’s in the hospital. He got hit by a car. He came out of a coma this morning, but he’s got another operation tomorrow. I’m sorry I’ve been out. What can I do for you two?”

  Both of the inspectors broke into condolences and questions, and he responded and answered dutifully without really hearing many of the individual words. They were just noise against the constant thrum of the guilt in his head.

  And then finally he became vaguely aware that they were talking about something else, something to do with their case, and after a couple of minutes of that—mostly more white noise—he held up a hand. “Whoa up,” he said to Schiff, who appeared to be acting as spokesperson. “Can you repeat that last part? Are you talking about Jerry Glass? Federal Jerry Glass?”

  “Yes, sir, but that’s what makes this so good, at least potentially. He says the dope is enough, especially in the quantity we found at Vogler’s place, to trigger a forfeiture.”

  “Forfeiture?”

  Schiff nodded with enthusiasm. “Confiscating their property.”

  Glitsky said, “I know what forfeiture is, Debra. But whose property?”

  “Maybe Vogler’s, if for example we can prove that he used any part of the profits from the drug sales to pay off his house. But also Maya Townshend’s, and even better, maybe her husband Joel’s.”

  “Townshend Real Estate?” Glitsky asked.

  Bracco finally spoke. “It could be huge, Abe. Millions and millions.”

  “They were in the drug business? I thought she didn’t know anything about that.”

  “Well, that’s her story,” Schiff said. “But Darrel and I don’t really believe it. And Jerry Glass doesn’t believe it. And he thinks he can get a federal grand jury motivated to prove it.”

  “Well, all that’s well and good, but how’s it relate to the homicide you’re trying to bring to trial? We’re still doing homicide here, right? That hasn’t changed during my short absence?”

  “Jerry thinks there’s much more going on, and that Vogler’s murder’s in the middle of it. He gets these people into a forfeiture situation on the civil side, then he gets to ask them anything on the criminal side in secret with the grand jury, they look into their assets, get connections we wouldn’t have a chance at.”

  “Plus,” Bracco added, “the threat alone. It’s pretty powerful leverage. They tell us the truth or—”

  Glitsky cut him off. “I get the concept,” he said, “but I can’t say I really like it.”

  “What’s not to like?” Schiff asked.

  “Well, for starters, if you don’t have any evidence, how do you decide that these people are your suspects? Or that one of them is. You leaning toward any one of them?”

  “Maya doesn’t look bad for it, Lieutenant,” Schiff said. “She was down there, it was her gun. We know her relationship with Vogler was squirrelly at best.”

  “So bring her downtown and sweat her.”

  “Not so easy,” Schiff said. “She’s already lawyered up. Your friend Diz Hardy.”

  “Wonderful.” Glitsky studied the ceiling for a moment. Then, “What about this list of Vogler’s customers? You don’t think it’s reasonable he was killed by one of them?”

  “Why?” Bracco asked.

  A shrug. “The usual stupid reasons, Darrel. He cut the dope with parsley and somebody didn’t like it. Or one of ’em graduated to crack and just went psycho. Or he stiffed a guy for five bucks. Or any one of a hundred other reasons. Have you talked to any of these people?”

  “Some,” Schiff said. “There’s seventy-two of them, Abe.”

  He nodded soberly. “I’m sorry about that, I really am. But it seems to me that at least you’ve got to talk to them, if only to eliminate. Find out who was where on that Saturday morning. I know it’s tedious, but that’s the job. Sometimes we’ve just got to grind it out.”

  “What about Jerry Glass?” Schiff asked.

  “I don’t know,” Glitsky said. “If I’d have been here, I might have suggested you two hold off on going that route for a while, at least until somebody pops up as a bona fide suspect that the forfeiture or the grand jury might squeeze. Now I think we just gotta hope he doesn’t get too much in the way.”

  12

  As was often the case early on a workday, Craig Chiurco was lounging in the small reception area of The Hunt Club, Wyatt’s office in the heart of Chinatown, chewing the fat with his girlfriend, Tamara Dade, who answered the phones and occasionally did fieldwork—taking pictures, tailing female witnesses. Tamara, twenty-six, tended to dress for the office in brightly colored miniskirts with form-hugging tops, and there was ample form to hug over the tight, and often exposed, stomach with its tasteful little gold naval ring. Today only the ring’s shape showed under the orange leotard an inch or two before it disappeared into her black skirt—Halloween was coming up.

  Craig, maybe five years her senior, had been going out with her now for about three years, although they still maintained separate apartments. After four years working with Hunt, doing anything he was asked to do, but mostly subpoena service and stakeout work, Craig had acquired enough hours in the profession to start the application process for his own private investigator’s license. But, of course, being on Vogler’s list, his career plans were in jeopardy. And he was saying so to Tamara.

  Who dismissed the idea with a wave. “Wyatt already told you not to worry about that.”

  “Oh. Okay, I won’t then.”

  “Craig. Really. He’s the one paying you, so if it doesn’t bother him, how is it going to hurt you?”

  “It goes on my record and I have to put that on my application . . .”

  Tamara shook her head. “It’s a misdemeanor at most, Craig.”

  “That would do it, though, Tam, which is kind of the point.”

  “But you don’t even have that. The only way that happens is if they catch you with the actual weed. Being on this list isn’t proof of anything. And you’ve gotten rid of all your stuff, so even if they come and search your place—as if—then so what?” She gave him a tolerant look. “You’re just upset because you got caught. And because now Wyatt knows.”

  “Maybe some of that.”

  “Except he doesn’t care. You don’t think he’s smoked a little weed in his time?”

  “I’d bet not much.”

  “Well, you might be right there. But don’t you think he supposes you and me maybe were together a time or two that your alleged dope-smoking took place?”

  Craig, reclining sideways with his knees up over the edge of the small love seat that was the only place for a guest or a client to sit, broke a small smile. “I didn’t rat you out, Tam. Promise.”

  She favored him with her own smile. “I didn’t say you did, Gala-had, and I know you wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean that Wyatt wouldn’t have put two and two together—or in our case, one and one.” She picked up an emery board from her desk blotter and started working on one of her fingernails. “I think the smart thing for you and me to do, which we’ve already done, is just take it as a wake-up call to be a little smarter, give the stuff up altogether.”

  Chiurco, arms crossed, pursed his lips at that request.

  “What?” Tamara asked. “Would that really be so hard?”

  “Not really hard. More like just unnecessary. I like the stuff. You like the stuff. Everybody agrees it shouldn’t be illegal. So why should I be coerced to give it up entirely?”

  Tamara held up one finger. “Me, me, Monty, call on me. How about because it is illegal? Whether it should be or not. And you want to work around law enforcement. You get caught with it—you said it—it’s on your record. It can affect things—your application, for example. So there’s a reason to give it up right there.” She pushed back her chair and turned to face him. “The thing is, though, in real life nothing’s going to happen around this. Your name is on a list that may or may not have been this guy Vogler’s clients. It
might have just been people who owed him money.”

  A short laugh. “That too.”

  “Well, that’s fine. You may know that. But the police just can’t know anything, or prove anything, about anybody on that list. Even if everybody else owned up and said they were his customers, that still wouldn’t prove that you were. And, by the way, if you’re worried that the paper might print it, forget it. They’d get sued from here to Italy. It won’t happen.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m convinced.”

  “Good. I mean, bottom line is we just don’t do it anymore. Easy enough, right?”

  “It should be,” Chiurco said.

  “Well, there you go. Done deal.”

  Wyatt Hunt looked briefly out onto Grant Street through the one window across from Tamara in the reception area, then turned back to his employees. “I will entertain even the smallest crumb of an idea.”

  “Do we have a hint,” Chiurco asked, “of what we’re looking for? Or some kind of timeline?”

  “Hardy thinks when she was in college, so ten to fourteen years ago. In the city here. Something she was embarrassed by, or worse. Obviously, he thinks, something she could still get in trouble for if word gets out.”

  “Well,” said Tamara, who had taken her share of criminology classes as well, “the statute of limitations would have run out on almost anything she did back then, except if she killed somebody. What did Vogler do that got him in prison? Could she have been involved in that?”

  Hunt pointed a finger at his secretary. “There you go. There’s someplace to start. If she was any part of that, and Vogler took the fall for it . . . how well did you know him, Craig? Did he ever talk about that?”

  “Not to me. I barely knew him at all, except through the coffee shop. Maybe we could get our hands on that list and ask some of those people what they know?”

  “I wouldn’t bank much on that. Besides, I’m thinking what Tam suggests is probably going to be more productive. See if he had an accomplice or two and go talk to them.”

  “Hardy should just ask her,” Chiurco said. “Whatever she tells him, it’s privileged, right? Nobody else would have to know. I don’t see the problem.”

  “Well, one problem, Craig, not to sound mercenary, is if he asks her and she tells him, there goes our fee. But the other thing is that she’s evidently cut a deal with her husband—his name’s Joel—that she’s not going to be seeing Diz except with him there with them too. So what’s that leave?”

  Tamara raised her hand like a good student and spoke right out. “She doesn’t want Joel to find out.”

  “Ten points.” Hunt nodded. “That’s my guess too. Which of course means it might not be a criminal thing at all. Just some behavior she’d rather he never knew about.”

  “She had an abortion,” Tamara said.

  Again, Hunt nodded. “Not impossible. Especially being a good Catholic and all like she is, like they are.”

  “Wait a minute.” Chiurco swung his body around and sat up. “She pays Vogler ninety thousand dollars a year just so he won’t tell her husband that she had an abortion? And Vogler’s the only one who knows? I don’t think that flies.”

  “I don’t know, Craig. Stranger things have happened. Maybe Vogler was the father.” Hunt pushed himself off the window ledge. “But why don’t we see what we can find out about this prison time he did, who he might have been hanging with, see if it leads us back to Maya in any way?”

  “I’ll take that,” Chiurco said.

  “Fine. Meanwhile, I’ll dig around and see if I can talk to somebody who remembers her from school. I talked to Diz about this yesterday and he’s a little worried, beyond everything else we’ve talked about, that if Vogler was blackmailing her, she might know something dangerous that she doesn’t know she knows. So there’s a bit of urgency.”

  Chiurco was on his feet. “I’m all over it,” he said.

  At a little before noon, with a full blustery fall day building up around them, Bracco and Schiff were back out in the Haight-Ashbury, this time talking to an elderly woman named Lori Bradford. They were all sitting around a small wooden table with a lace tablecloth in a nook off her kitchen. She lived on the second floor of an apartment building looking out over Ashbury, several structures up and across the street from the alley where Dylan Vogler had died.

  She’d of course seen the police and the crowd last Saturday and since then had read about the murder, following the story rather closely in the newspaper. Over the last couple of days she had been trying to decide if it would be worthwhile to call somebody about a possible discrepancy that she’d noticed, and finally thought that, yes, it would be, and here they all were.

  “Are you sure about this?” Schiff asked her.

  “Yes. Absolutely. There were two shots, not just one.” Mrs. Bradford, in her late sixties, had dressed for her appointment with these inspectors in a pair of purple slacks over sensible black shoes, and a black turtleneck. “I thought at the time I heard them that I should have called nine one one, but then there wasn’t any more noise, and no screaming or anything like that, so I just assumed it must have been a backfire or cherry bombs or something. If it was a real emergency, someone else would have called nine one one anyway, I thought. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get involved. People always say that, I know, that they don’t want to get involved, but I don’t have a problem with that. But I think I just convinced myself that it was probably nothing. I looked out the window there—you see how you’ve got a clear view of the first twenty or thirty feet of the alley anyway—and didn’t see anything moving. Or on the street either. And then I didn’t want to send a false alarm, which would have been worse than not calling at all. Wouldn’t it? Anyway . . . ,” she said. And trailed off.

  “Well, it’s good you called at whatever time, ma’am,” Bracco said. “But we haven’t heard anybody else talking about more than one shot.” Bracco’s face reflected his frustration with San Francisco’s laissez faire reality. This wasn’t Hunters Point, exactly, in terms of gunshots per minute, but Bracco thought it wasn’t such a high crime area that a couple of gunshots would be a completely normal event. And yet, apparently, no one among the citizenry had seen fit to rally to report them. If it wasn’t napalm, he figured, nobody paid attention.

  Mrs. Bradford looked from one inspector to the other, as though soliciting their forgiveness. “Nobody else called nine one one, then?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Oh, then I really should have, shouldn’t I?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff said. “The point is that you called now and we’re here. Inspector Bracco and I will check with dispatch and see if anybody called to report these shots or make a noise complaint on Saturday morning. Maybe they didn’t think it was an emergency, and then it wouldn’t have come to us through dispatch.”

  Bracco leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Could you tell us a little more about these shots, ma’am? How far apart were they spaced, for example?”

  Mrs. Bradford sat back and stared off into nothing for a second or two. “I’d say about a minute. A fairly long time, anyway. They weren’t right away, one after the other. I was awake, I remember, but still in bed, when I heard the first one, and I kind of lay there wondering what that was for a while, and if I’d really heard it. You know? The way you are when you’re half awake. And then I decided I’d really heard something and got up to see if I could see what it had been and I was just in the hallway there when the second one went off.”

  “And what did you do then?” Schiff asked.

  “Well.” Mrs. Bradford’s face grew animated at the recollection. “Well, then, I of course got to the window as fast as I could and looked down at the street here, and I could see the alley, too, but I didn’t know that’s where the shots must have come from. I couldn’t tell anything, really. Anyway, but then when I didn’t see anybody moving and hear anything else down below there, that’s when I decided it was probably n
othing and not to call nine one one.”

  “Mrs. Bradford,” Schiff asked, “did you happen to notice the exact time of these shots?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was ten minutes after six. The second one, I mean. The first one, just before that. Six oh eight or nine.” She pointed. “There’s the digital on the stove.”

  “And how sure are you,” Bracco asked, “that it was the same kind of sound?”

  “Oh, the same, definitely. If the second one was a shot, the first one was a shot, and vice versa. Loud, and sharp. Louder than TV.” Back to her recurring theme, she said, “I really should have called nine one one. Someone might have gotten here in time to catch the killer.”

  “Really, Mrs. Bradford”—Schiff patted her hand on the table—“I wouldn’t lose one minute of sleep over that. You’ve done the right thing to call us now, and this is a very important bit of information that we didn’t have before.” She cast an eye on Bracco. “This may change our entire theory of the case, and it’s all because you’re a good citizen. We thank you very much.”

  On the second flight down the stairs, out of earshot, Schiff started talking about it. “You believe her?”

  “I think she heard something.”

  “There was only one bullet missing from the murder weapon.”

  “Maybe the murder weapon. Consistent with the murder weapon. And I kind of vaguely remember, Debra.”

  “Vogler didn’t shoot somebody in that alley.”

  “Nope.”

  “And there was only one casing.”

  “Yep.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It means the woman’s going on a hundred. She’s bored living alone. She heard some noises maybe the same morning Vogler was shot.”

  They came out into the overcast and windy day and turned downhill toward Haight, where, even though they’d parked legally in an open metered space, Darrel had gone through his radio-over-the-rearview-mirror and business-card-on-the-dashboard routine. They were walking on the opposite side of the street from Bay Beans West, and as they came abreast of the place, Schiff hit Bracco on the arm. “Darrel,” she said, “wait up. Look at that.”