by Martin Brown
Unlike Bradley, Randolph had a very well-documented past. From his childhood in Providence, Rhode Island, to his attending Brown University, to his developing one of SoHo’s most successful art galleries, it was all there.
On the other hand, Bradley had a past that disappeared like San Francisco behind a thick veil of summer fog. If he, indeed, was over seventy at the time of his death, then Warren was probably in his mid- to late-forties when he arrived in Sausalito. Rob also became convinced that Bradley must have had a hand in obscuring his own past.
Late Saturday, a frustrated Holly called Rob with her own bad news.
“Wow, buddy, you were right! I spent the day coming up with blanks. This has to be a case of name change, and it must have occurred outside of California, because the state’s database on application filings for name changes is a pretty damn good. Unfortunately, it has nothing on the Warren Bradley we’re looking for.”
“Thanks, Holly. Something stinks alright, and I’d love to know what it is.”
“When you find out something nefarious about the guy, please let me know. And whatever you do, don’t tell the Ladies of Liberty until after they erect that statue. I want to be there when they have to tear it down.” Holly laughed, said “Ciao,” and clicked off.
Rob sat at his desk for a moment and stared at the first few paragraphs of the story he was trying to cobble together on his late columnist. He knew he was going nowhere in a hurry. It was time to call Eddie.
On Sunday morning, they met for breakfast at a small café in the town of Larkspur. Being ten miles north of Sausalito, there was a very slim chance that they would run into any of their neighbors, let alone someone curious enough to overhear them.
“From everything I can put together, Bradley didn’t exist before he landed in Sausalito,” Rob said with a frown.
Eddie smiled. “I’m starting to think our victim might have been a bad little boy. Maybe something—or more accurately someone—finally caught up to the great chef.”
“What do you guys do when you hit a wall like this? I mean, it’s got to be a name change or something like that, right?”
“Pretty damn likely. Every year, more about all of us is ending up online. Bradley likely wanted to hide from prying eyes. Unless you’re paying attention, there’s an awful lot about us that just leaks out into the world.”
“Yeah,” Rob said with a short laugh. “You mean with the people of prying eyes—like his.”
“It takes a snoop to know a snoop.”
Rob took a sip of his coffee. “You must have a plan B.”
“Yep, and Plans C, D, and E, as well. Whatever he did, we know it happened before he landed in Sausalito. But one thing we know for certain: we can’t trace him through the FBI’s fingerprint data bank. The killer might have Bradley’s fingerprints, but we don’t. And, therefore, we don’t know if he ever worked one of a dozen different jobs that they now fingerprint people for as part of their standard personnel procedure.”
“So, what’s the next step?”
“I think it’s time for us to do a little morning jog together, say five-thirty tomorrow.”
Rob groaned. “Why the hell so early?”
“Because we’re going on a little hunting expedition up to Warren Bradley’s place. When we were called onto the scene and my two colleagues from the Sausalito PD scattered to different parts of the house. I ‘accidentally’ took a spare key to Warren’s cottage. I could go through channels, but, A, I don’t know what it is we’re looking for, never what you want to tell your supervisor, and B, an authorized search means taking the Keystone Cops along. Instead, I’m up for a little snooping while I’m off the clock.”
“Can’t we just drive up there this evening? I can wait in the car while you snoop around.”
“More convenient, for sure. But there’s a good chance that a neighbor will see the lights on, or see a flashlight and call SPD—which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.”
“And why do we want to keep the SPD out of this?”
“Because, if you remember, the officers and staff of the SPD are the original town gossips! How do you think Bradley caught the name of everyone’s favorite suspect, Mr. Randolph, in the first place? I don’t know which one of those chuckleheads babbled about Randolph’s arrest for assaulting his wife, but I’ll bet you a week’s salary that was Warren’s original source for that story. If we got caught up there, we’d be the talk of the town forty-eight hours later. Clearly, we need to get in and out of there, while hopefully flying under the radar.”
At five-thirty Monday morning, Rob watched the brightening sky over the East Bay from the driveway outside his home, as Eddie came running up. Together, they looked like any other early morning power joggers.
They took a circuitous route, winding through the Sausalito hills. Part of the route took them on Glen Drive. They followed it as it snaked down to Santa Rosa, then onto San Carlos, Spencer, and finally onto Prospect.
By the time they had reached the end of Prospect, it was nearly six o’clock. By then, they’d come to the mutual conclusion that they should consider jogging the hills more often.
“Helluva workout,” Eddie panted. Rob nodded breathlessly in agreement.
The sun was peeking up over the city of Berkeley across the bay, and the air was sparkling fresh.
Eddie reached into his pocket. “Oh, shit! I forgot the key.”
As the color drained out of Rob’s face, Eddie punched him lightly on the chest. “I’m just screwing with ya, man.” He pulled the key out of his pocket and smiled, then shifted his gaze towards the neighboring homes. After seeing that not a single soul was stirring, he murmured, “Let’s do this now.”
The place was still wrapped with the bright yellow CRIME SCENE tape that was put on the house the night Warren had been wheeled away. It covered the door about six inches above the simple doorknob lock that provided the home’s only security.
Eddie kneeled down below the tape, slipped the key in the lock, and nodded as it turned and opened. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out two pairs of surgical footwear covers, and two pairs of blue nitrile gloves.
“Slip these on, Robin,” Eddie said.
“Whatever you say, Batman.”
They slipped carefully under the tape and into the house, quietly closing the single hinged French door behind them.
Warren’s cottage held in the chill of Sausalito’s night air. Enough daylight came in through the windows to provide just the needed amount of light. Eddie’s first suggestion was that they walk through each room of the small home and consider where they might want to begin their search.
“I’d like to be out of here by seven at the latest. But, let me just say, if anyone comes tapping on the door, from nosy neighbor to Sausalito PD, I do the talking. Agreed?”
“You got any idea what you’d say?”
“That’s easy. If you see anyone pull up, or a neighbor come walking toward the house, strip off your gloves and booties. We were jogging together, and noticed that the front door was ajar. I stepped inside to see if anything seemed to have been disturbed before calling it in.”
“Wow! You are smooth, Eddie.”
“In my line of work, you better know how to bullshit at a moment’s notice.”
Rob nodded happily in favor of Eddie’s declaration, and then said, “Okay, tell me again what you think we might find.”
“Bradley might have wanted, or needed, to obscure his past. But most people hold onto certain things because of sentimental attachment, let alone a dozen other reasons. I doubt that everything in his life that was more than twenty-five-plus years old was trashed. There may be an original birth certificate, or a picture of him with his parents or siblings. In other words, look for anything that gives us a key to who he was before he became the Warren Bradley the Ladies of Liberty so adored.”
They split up, and began wandering through the cottage. Clearly, the wood paneling throughout had absorbed the aromas of th
e countless meals that had been made in the small neatly arranged kitchen, which still showed the signs of Warren’s last night of entertaining. Two dinner plates, two dessert plates, and two wine glasses had been washed, placed in the dish rack, and left there to dry a long time ago.
“Interesting, isn’t it, Rob? Clearly, the killer wanted us to know that Bradley had a dinner guest. No prints anywhere in the place, but obvious signs that a guest was here. There were even food scraps pushed into the trash bag under the sink that were removed and taken to the lab.”
“No luck with that, of course.”
“Nope. I’m telling you this place was as clean as any murder scene I’ve ever walked into. Of course, with the Sausalito police being the first at the scene, there might have been a slice of chocolate cake on the sideboard that one of their geniuses ate.”
“If they did, it was after I left and went home, because from the time they arrived after I called them, no one ever thought to go inside the cottage until the deceased’s hands failed to appear at the end of his arms.”
Eddie laughed. “That must have been one helluva moment!”
“Trust me, it’s one I’ll never forget.”
They wandered back and forth through the combined living room, dining room, kitchen area, and then around the bedroom with the small nook Warren used for a desk where he wrote his now-infamous weekly column.
Afterward, Eddie and Rob stood back to back and considered where they would look in the relatively brief time that they had left.
Eddie wanted to start by going through the Chippendale oak wood curio cabinet. It had a variety of plaques and awards from various cooking contests and “volunteer of the year” framed certificates from a variety of Sausalito organizations. He carefully slipped them out, and looked behind each one. Inside of one frame that had a back that easily slipped off, was the picture of a kid Eddie guessed to be about twelve to perhaps fourteen. From the color and the clothing the boy was wearing, the photo was likely taken in the late seventies or early eighties. Maybe it was a son Bradley left behind?
Eddie’s curiosity was heightened when another photo revealed a boy maybe four to five years younger, sitting in the back of a rowboat, tied to a crumbling wooden dock. He slipped both photos into his pocket.
Rob’s search focused on an antique mahogany bedroom dresser, and the battered old Queen Anne desk in the bedroom nook. He took out each of the desk’s two narrow and deep side drawers, and its one shallow and wide center drawer. One by one, he turned them over, and emptied their contents onto the floor. He quickly looked at every scrap of paper, hoping to find something that placed Warren somewhere other than Sausalito.
He found nothing.
He piled the papers back into what he hoped was the drawer they came out of, and then realized that it was highly unlikely anyone alive today would know what papers originally went where. Just knowing that he was a few feet from where Warren may have been suffocated and later mutilated sent a shiver up his spine.
Rob had just pulled out the third drawer—the widest and flattest one, in the center, below the desk top—when his hand felt something strange on the drawer’s backside. It was tape, or perhaps plastic. It was enough to make him catch his breath. Excitedly, he flipped over the drawer.
A blank white plastic card was taped to it.
“Eddie, get in here! I think I found something important.”
Eddie came running. When he saw what Rob was holding, he took the small penknife that was attached to his house keys and carefully cut the tape around the card’s edges. On the flipside of the card was a photo of a man they both vaguely recognized as Warren Bradley, probably in his mid-thirties. Younger Warren had no gray hair, no bushy salt and pepper mustache, and no tired eyes, but after a few moments of careful consideration, they were both quite certain that it was him.
The card was an ID badge from the department of biomedical research at Northern Arizona University. There was no date of issuance on the card, but there was a name:
William Benedict.
They both stood and stared in silence for a few moments.
Finally, Eddie put his arm around Rob’s shoulder and pulled him in close. “Rob, say hello to William Benedict. He must have had some shirts he liked with “WB” on the cuffs. I guess he didn’t want to give up the old initials.”
“Take a look at these; you’re not the only one to come away with a prize.”
Eddie handed his find to Rob: the photos of the two young boys.
“You think they might be Bradley’s kids?”
“Could be,” Eddie said. “Hopefully, William Benedict will be able to tell us who he was, and who these boys are as well.”
“Eddie, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Just what I was about to say.”
Carefully, they relocked the door, then slipped off their surgical shoe covers and gloves, which Eddie slipped back into his pocket.
“Remember when I told you, Rob, that you have to just keep pulling at all the different threads until you find the one string that causes the whole thing to unravel? I’m guessing that Mr. Benedict is going to be that string.”
When Rob got home, he quickly shaved, showered, and then hurried down to the office.
“First a break of dawn jog, then you hustle down to office before nine? My God, you’re a new man!” Karin was teasing, but from her tone he could tell she was curious about what he might be up to.
He shrugged and waved as he went out the door. In truth, he was bursting to tell her about the breakthrough he and Eddie had made just two hours before, but he knew that no one could know about the discovery—not even her, at least not yet.
As usual, Holly was in the office before Rob arrived. She greeted him with the question: “What did you decide to do on the Bradley retrospective?”
“I have to punt. We’ll pull together file photos and story clips of Warren doing his cooking and serving bit for every volunteer group in town. Other than that, as far as I can tell, the guy was dropped here one night by an alien spacecraft.”
“That’s a plausible theory.”
“All I’ve got now is a seventy-two-year old who was born less than 30 years ago.” Rob felt a little guilty holding back on Holly as well, particularly with news that would have delighted her.
With that university ID badge in hand, Eddie was all the more confident that Warren’s real identity—and his killer’s—was perhaps within reach. Finding William Benedict in Northern Arizona University’s data bank clinched it. Even better was when he found information on Benedict’s arrest on a charge of homicide…all of which he kept from Rob, which was, of course, difficult for him to do.
Eddie regularly had to remind himself that Rob’s livelihood made it that much more difficult to share potentially explosive information. No matter what else he turned up, Eddie knew that the very knowledge that Warren Bradley, the dogged persecutor of Grant Randolph, Carrie Kahn, and so many others, was himself tried for homicide, would set Rob’s head spinning.
Expecting Rob to sit quietly on that information would have been like dropping a boulder on top of a volcano in the hope that it would not erupt.
Rob, meanwhile, couldn’t imagine how big a story he was sitting on. Warren’s buried past had Rob imagining all sorts of amazing scenarios. At the same time, he had complete confidence in Eddie that, whatever the outcome of this strange case, he and his readers would be the first to know the whole story; hopefully in time for the next edition of The Sausalito Standard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Four days after they searched Warren’s home, Eddie got his department’s approval for out of state travel expenses. After landing in Phoenix, he’d pick up a rental car and drive the three hours north on Interstate 17 to Flagstaff—home of NAU, Northern Arizona University.
Rob would have happily paid his own expenses to go along, but he was faced with putting another week’s edition of the Standard on press. With a limited staff of two, the paper endle
ssly demanded his attention. The only break for both he and Holly was a week off every August and another week near the end of December. For that reason, the Standard was published fifty, as opposed to fifty-two, weeks every year.
All day that Friday, Rob had an edge in his voice.
“Maybe you should head over to Smitty’s for an early end of week happy hour,” Holly groused, after Rob snapped at her one too many times over something she’d already told him she’d done.
“You’re probably right, but I’m skipping it this week altogether. Eddie had to go out of town on some work thing. I’m going straight home after work.”
“Why don’t you join me at the No Name for a drink?”
As grumpy as he’d been all day, he owed her at least a drink. But, then he remembered the rest of this weekend’s itinerary. He shook his head. “Thanks, Holly, but Karin and I are going to try to leave by noon tomorrow for an overnight at her folks’ place up in Calistoga. We’ve got a dozen errands to run before that, so we’ll have to get a real early start.”
“Okay, suit yourself. Maybe I’ll get lucky and meet Mr. Right tonight.”
That’s not too likely, Rob thought, considering that the same gang can be found at the No Name Bar just about every night of the year.
“The first round is on me,” he said, as he handed her a ten-dollar bill.
She snatched it up. “I should bitch about your moodiness more often,” she giggled and sashayed out the door.
It was nearly six when Holly made the three-block walk up Bridgeway from the Standard’s Princess Street location. When she walked into the No Name and looked around, her first thought was, same old crowd.
As busy as it already was, Holly was lucky to find a seat at the bar. She caught the bartender’s attention—Alberto, a handsome 30-something guy who worked behind the bar and made a point of knowing all his customers.
“Hangar 1 martini, two olives, one onion—right, Holly?”
Holly gave Alberto a seductive wink. “I guess you know me, huh?”