True-Life Adventure

by Julie Smith

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. When I got back from vacation, there was a message that he’d called a few times. That’s how I knew the name.”

  “He was contacting all of Lindsay’s friends.”

  She didn’t speak, but she looked inquisitive as hell.

  “Sardis, I’m afraid Lindsay’s disappearance and Birnbaum’s murder are connected.” I told her about the burglaries.

  “I see,” she said. “But what can I do for you?”

  “I want to know what you can tell me about Lindsay. How do you know her?”

  “We were best friends in college. Still are, I guess. Except…” The tears started again. “Oh, God, I feel awful. She’s had problems and I…”

  I waited.

  “…I guess I wasn’t there for her. I was too busy with my own problems.”

  “What sort of problems? Lindsay’s, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. That’s why I feel so awful. All I know is that she’s been terribly depressed the last— oh, three months or so. Maybe more. I mean, she was depressed the last time I saw her, and that was two months ago.”

  “How often did you see her?”

  “Once a week, usually. Once every two weeks at the least. I just… didn’t call her for a while. I didn’t realize it was such a long while.”

  “She didn’t call you, either.”

  “She probably didn’t feel like it. I wasn’t very good company at the time. She probably couldn’t stand to be around me. All I ever talked about was my own problems.”

  “Did she say what she was depressed about?”

  “No. She wouldn’t talk about it. But I probably didn’t give her a chance.”

  “What sort of person is she, Sardis?”

  “The sort who always knows where she’s going. When we were at Sophie Newcomb, even. She was editing the school paper and doing a campus radio show while everyone else was trying to set new world’s records for gin-and-tonic consumption. I admired her a lot because she never let things get her down. The South, I mean. New Orleans. Sororities and fraternities. I had trouble… relating, I think it’s called now.”

  “Misfit, huh?”

  She looked at me gratefully. “I never could figure out what anybody or anything was all about till I came to San Francisco.”

  “And Lindsay?”

  “She was too smart for the kind of garbage everybody else was handing out down there, but she just didn’t let it bother her. She used it for her own benefit, somehow. Pretended to fit in even when she didn’t. Didn’t get in arguments about race or religion. Just swam with the tide. Wish I could have done it.”

  “Did you ever think it was odd that Jacob had custody of Terry?”

  “Uh-uh. If you ask me, Lindsay just wasn’t cut out for motherhood. She struggled along with that joint custody till Jacob remarried, but he didn’t exactly have to twist her arm to get her to see it his way after that. Terry just kind of cramped her style. It was Jacob who wanted kids in the first place.”

  “Are Terry and Jacob very close?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s a prodigy, you know— supposed to be as smart as he is.”

  “A young scientist at Kogene told me he used to have her work in his lab with him. But I didn’t put much stock in it. I mean, a seven-year-old…”

  Sardis nodded. “It’s true. I don’t know how much she really understood— all I know is that Jacob claimed she was on her way to becoming a scientist. He had her in there a lot.”

  “Oh, lord. I’ll bet she’s a horrible little brat.”

  “Not really, no. A little strong-willed, but pretty well-adjusted for a genius.”

  “If Lindsay didn’t want her in the first place, and then had problems with her, don’t you think it’s pretty strange that she snatched her?”

  She considered. “Come to think of it, yes. I’d have to say it’s an un-Lindsay type of thing to do. It interferes with her career and her social life, and it’s impetuous. Or seems impetuous, anyway. Definitely not like Lindsay. It’s scary.”

  I knew what she meant, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, maybe she didn’t snatch her. Maybe she’s in some kind of trouble.”

  I avoided her eyes.

  “She could be dead, couldn’t she, Paul?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do the police know about this?”

  “Well… no. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell them.”

  “Why?”

  I couldn’t tell her I was having a childish feud with Howard Blick. In fact, I couldn’t think of one good reason why she shouldn’t tell them. “I have my reasons,” I said. I sounded dumb even to myself.

  “What reasons?”

  “Uh, it might endanger Lindsay’s… uh…” There were big hunks of time between the words; any fool could tell my heart wasn’t in it, but I was committed and so I was going through with it.

  Sardis got up and towered over me. “Endanger your precious story, you mean. No wonder you worked for Birnbaum. You’re as low-down as he was.”

  This took me by surprise. But I handled it intelligently. “Huh?” I said.

  “Why don’t you ask me about A&L?”

  I would have, but she got up and left before I could. It wouldn’t even be unreasonable to say she stalked out, if you go in for that kind of colorful phrasing.

  Now what the hell was A&L? And why did she think Birnbaum was low-down if she didn’t know him? And why did she agree to have lunch with me if she knew I didn’t want my C.I. done?

  These were a few of the questions I turned over in my head while I paid the check and waited for my change. I also wondered what else she knew about this case and whether she knew where to find Lindsay. She didn’t, I thought— otherwise, she wouldn’t have been talking police with so much enthusiasm.

  Police. I thought about them all the way home. Once again I tried to think of one good reason not to call them and tell them what I knew. Then I tried to think of a half-baked reason. I didn’t complete either mission.

  At this point, I really was impeding a murder investigation. Blick had been right about the motive for the murder and I had confirmed that he was right in an effort to prove him wrong and I was currently just being a bad sport.

  I was going to have to swallow my pride and tell him. I resigned myself to it and vowed to do it instantly, the second I got home. Oh, what a good boy was I.

  As usual, I parked on Chenery Street across from my house. I admired my paint job, locked the Toyota, and started across the street absently, just performing a familiar act I performed two or three times a day.

  I could have admired my own paint all the way across the street, as I sometimes do, but that particular day I decided to compare my house with the Hathwells’, two doors down, which hadn’t been painted in years. I had to look slightly to my left to do that, and that’s how I happened to notice that a car was coming right at me, quite a bit faster than a speeding bullet.

  CHAPTER 7

  Reflex is a wonderful thing, full of surprises and revelations. If you’d told me I was going to be in a situation like that, I have no idea what I’d have told you I’d do, but here’s what I did do: I jumped straight up in the air and leaned backwards.

  I came down very hard and painfully on the pavement, and I rolled back towards my car, but the rolling was superfluous— the other car was long gone. I didn’t get the license number.

  I did get about three thousand bruises. Blick had his counter-revenge for my last revenge, although he didn’t know it; I figured if I’d told him about the missing files yesterday, he’d have solved the case by now and this would never have happened. Can you imagine having that much faith in Blick? It gives you some indication of my mental state. I was feeling not only hurt and defeated but also disoriented, because I was pretty well terrified.

  There was a stop sign at my corner, so that car couldn’t have been driven by some random rocket jockey who didn’t see me.
It had to have pulled out of a parking place someplace behind me, where its driver was waiting. It didn’t stop to see if I was hurt, and it didn’t try to swerve to avoid me. So its driver was trying to kill me. That was the only conclusion you could draw from the incident, and that’s why I was pretty well terrified. I figured if he tried once, he’d probably try again. And next time he might have better luck.

  I dialed Blick, said I had some important information for him and asked if he could come over. He said sure.

  While I waited for him, I tried to put things together. Why would anyone want to kill me? I was kind of an easygoing guy, more sinned against than sinning, even in matters of the heart, I felt. So revenge was out.

  I was currently not involved in any triangle whatsoever, so jealousy was out.

  No one stood to inherit from me, either.

  Of course the thing had to do with the Birnbaum case, and I knew it. I was just fooling around before I got down to serious thinking about it.

  The murderer had stolen my copy of the case reports after reading about me in the Examiner and now he must be trying to kill me because I knew what was in the reports. I took time out to shudder, imagining what might have happened if I’d been home when he came for the reports. Then I got back to business.

  Okay. So I knew too much. But what the hell did I know? Those case reports were completely innocuous, so far as I could see; even a little on the slender side. A lot on the slender side, come to think of it.

  Jack was a funny guy to work for. On some cases, it seemed like he detected his buns off, and I was impressed as hell. On others, it seemed like he hardly did anything to justify his two hundred bucks a day, and I was hard put to make him look like a hero on paper.

  Such a case was the Koehler one. I even asked Jack about it; he said that nobody understood how much background checking a detective had to do, that they took it for granted you just went out and asked a few questions and people answered them just like that. He groused about it so much I figured I’d hit a sensitive spot and shut accordingly up. But there was hardly anything in those reports.

  As I recalled, Jacob had given Jack just five names to check out. I made a list of them: Sardis Kincannon, Joan Hearne, Susanna Flores, and Mr. and Mrs. Timothy A. Hearne.

  The Timothy A. Hearnes were Lindsay’s parents, who lived in Atlanta, and the first report I’d done for Jack described in detail how he’d hired Atlanta operatives to watch the house, how they had indeed watched the house, how they had contrived little tricks like posing as this or that repairman to get in the house, and how they could report with certainty that neither Lindsay nor little Terry was there.

  Joan Hearne was Lindsay’s sister, age thirty-three, and a vice president of the Women’s Bank of the Golden State. Not the biggest bank in the Golden State, but an up-and-coming one. The Hearne sisters seemed to be a motivated crew.

  Joan told Jack that Lindsay called her the Saturday morning she disappeared and said she was about to make the snatch. But according to Joan, she refused to say where she’d be on grounds that it was safer that way. It sounded pretty unlikely to me, but Jack said he believed her. All the same, my report went on, Jack was monitoring her mail in case Lindsay wrote. That may or may not have been illegal, assuming all he did was look at the postmarks, but it was unquestionably ineffective. Lindsay could write to Joan at the bank, or at a post office box, or at a neighbor’s, for one thing. But most likely she’d phone. So what was the point of mail-monitoring?

  To misguide the client into believing he was getting his money’s worth, so far as I could see.

  Anyway, Joan provided one other pertinent bit of information, dutifully recorded in one of our reports: She said Lindsay had a boyfriend, a guy named Peter Tillman.

  That fact inspired Jack to do some of his famous “background checking” on Tillman before gumshoeing off to question him. He found out the guy was forty-two, a wealthy real estate developer, and married.

  Tillman was understandably reluctant to talk to him. But he did say he’d had a date with Lindsay for Friday, the night before she disappeared, and that she broke it, saying she was sick.

  Susanna Flores, the final person on the list, was Lindsay’s producer. She was the one who provided the information about Lindsay calling in sick, apparently after mailing a letter that said she was actually resigning. She was very close to Lindsay and pretty shocked by her behavior. Shock must have made her lower her guard, because she asked Jack if he’d talked to Michael Brissette, Lindsay’s ex-boyfriend. Jack said no, but he would.

  And he did. I presume he didn’t need to do much “background checking” on Brissette, since he was a household word— a San Francisco supervisor with plans to be the next mayor.

  Brissette, a lawyer by trade, said he hadn’t heard from Lindsay in months, until the Wednesday before she disappeared. That night, he said, she called him on a legal matter. He wouldn’t tell Jack what it was.

  That sounded promising, come to think of it. But it was about the only thing in any of the reports that did.

  I thought about typing all that stuff up and maybe giving it to Blick, but there wasn’t really any point in it— he could just get the originals from Jacob. Anyway, he was already ringing my doorbell.

  “This better be good.”

  “Someone just tried to kill me.”

  “Couldn’t have been a jealous husband, Mcdonald. You’re not the type.”

  Now, was he saying I wasn’t the type because my ethics were exemplary, or was he taking another shot at my bearlike physique? It was a way he had, putting a person off balance.

  “Somebody tried to run me down. I mean it.”

  “Now who’d want to kill you?”

  “The same person who killed Jack Birnbaum, maybe.” I swallowed hard. “You were right, Howard,” I said. It hurt, but not as much as I thought it would. “I think he was killed by someone connected with the case we were working on.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Christ, Howard, how would I know? You’re the detective.”

  “You don’t know who killed Birnbaum, but you now think the motive had something to do with the case that you used to think was too routine even to consider.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what made you change your mind, asshole?”

  He wasn’t making it easy. I decided to give him a little of his own. “Someone stole the goddam file,” I said, “in case you didn’t notice.”

  I could see his face twitch a little— he really hadn’t thought of that. “You got any proof?”

  “Yes, I have proof, goddammit! A San Francisco police inspector with a search warrant tore my entire house apart and didn’t find it!”

  “Maybe you flushed it down the toilet, Mcdonald.”

  “Howard, for Christ’s sake. I’m trying to cooperate.”

  “Why would he steal your file, Mcdonald? He’d have to steal Birnbaum’s as well.”

  “Why don’t you check it out?”

  “I will. What’s the client’s name?”

  “Koehler. Jacob Koehler.” I spelled it for him.

  “So what was the case?”

  “Ask him.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Why don’t you ask me about how somebody tried to kill me?”

  “You know why, Mcdonald? Because I don’t give a shit, that’s why.”

  He left without saying good-bye.

  I figured this round was mine. He got to be nasty about whether my life was at stake, but he was so mad he forgot to ask for Koehler’s address. That meant he was going to go to Jack’s office, look for the file, and fail to find it. Then he was going to have to call me to find out how to find Koehler. And that would be a conversation I could have some fun with.

  I did type up my notes on the case. It gave me something to do while I was waiting for Blick to call. It occurred to me that one of the folks I was setting down facts about was a murderer, maybe. Probably not the Timothy A. Hearnes
, and almost certainly not Sardis, since she’d been away during the whole snatch, investigation, murder, and everything. It might be one of the other four and it might not. All it had to be was someone who knew about the investigation, which let in Jacob and probably his wife, and probably Steve Koehler and who knew how many other people at Kogene. Swell.

  The phone rang.

  “Mcdonald? Who’s this Jacob Koehler, anyway?” It was Blick.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “I thought everybody did, that’s all.”

  “Goddammit, Mcdonald, who is he?”

  “Why don’t you look him up in Birnbaum’s files?”

  “I did, dammit. He’s not there.”

  “Oh.” I let a little time pass, waiting for him to ask me again. He did.

  “Who is he, dammit?”

  “He’s a Nobel laureate, Howard. Just about the hottest scientist in the country.”

  “Oh. Well, how do I get hold of him?”

  “That’s your problem, Howard.”

  I hung up, feeling the score was getting pretty close to even. My conscience was clear, because anybody, even Blick, could track down one of the hottest scientists in the country. But I could have saved him a few phone calls, which I had failed to do, and I had also had the pleasure of making him admit his ignorance.

  So much for revenge. Now I had to work on the case. I mean, the story. I was getting carried away with this detective business.

  Blick would be getting to Jacob pretty soon, and Jacob would turn over the one remaining copy of the reports, and Blick would start hitting the people on the list. I already knew who they were, so I could get to them before he did. Brissette was far and away the most promising.

  I changed into a sports jacket and tie, fed Spot, and drove to City Hall. I went into the supervisors’ collective office, across from the second-floor pressroom, and asked to see Brissette.

  His administrative aide was named Janet, a plain, pleasant girl I knew from my days with the Chronicle. She said he’d just stepped out, probably to the men’s room. “Mind if I wait?”

  “Of course not.” She showed me into his cubicle.