Locked In - [McCone 29]

by Marcia Muller

  But now, she realized, all that had changed. Sure, she had a crappy car, but she also had parked it in the garage under the square, on her expense account. She was wearing a good leather jacket—almost paid for—and a pair of stylish jeans and boots. Best of all, she was a woman with a business to go about, and a State of California private investigator’s license to prove it. And last night—much as she’d hated the silence—she’d spent the night as a guest of a Sonoma Valley vintner.

  Don’t let it go to your head, chica, you’re only the hired help.

  But it was a lot better than what she used to do when men hired her.

  The light changed, and she crossed the intersection. The big Home Showcase store on Stockton Street was crowded with shoppers inspecting the specialty food items, glassware, china, and linens. Julia angled toward the sales desk, briefly slowing her pace to admire a set of candlesticks that she knew Sophia would love. Maybe she’d buy them for her birthday; that way they could use them on the Thanksgiving table...

  Ben Gold was behind the desk, wrapping up a cut-glass vase and a bunch of multicolored dried flowers. He handed the shopping bag to the customer and turned expectantly to Julia. His smile faded when he saw her, and his handsome features sharpened; alarm showed in his bright blue eyes.

  “Is it news?” he asked. “About Larry?”

  “Can you take a break?”

  He glanced around, motioned to one of the other employees on the floor. “Fifteen minutes. No more.”

  They went out onto the sidewalk and stood beside a window displaying slow cookers and books on using them. Ben crossed his arms on his chest, an intricately braided silver bracelet on his left wrist gleaming in the sun. He tilted his blond head and waited as if for some crushing blow.

  Julia said, “I haven’t found Larry, no. But something’s come up and I need to ask you some additional questions.”

  “What happened to your nose? And your eyes—they’re kinda black.”

  “Car accident.” She waved dismissively.

  “You oughta drive more carefully. Bad karma around your agency. Your boss—I read in the paper that she was shot. How is she?”

  “She’s... not good.”

  “Is she going to live?”

  “They don’t know. Right now she’s stabilized.”

  He shook his head. “This city, the violence. Does she remember what happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. She can’t communicate at present. About my questions ... ?”

  “Yes?”

  “Was Larry happy in his work here?”

  “Not really. I mean, stocking shelves—how many of us are content with that kind of work? At least I get to interact with customers and I’ve got outside interests and future prospects. I think I told you I’m moving to LA next week. It’s only a couple of commercials, but I’ve got an agent and he promises me more work. But Larry, he’d been kicked out of three colleges and had no future except going back to the Sonoma Valley and learning the wine-making business under his father’s thumb.”

  “Are those your words or his—’under his father’s thumb’?”

  “His.”

  “I thought he was close to his parents.”

  “He was, but the life up there can be confining, and his dad can be extremely demanding.”

  “But still he’d given his notice here and was moving home.”

  “It was the money, that’s what finally got to him.”

  “The money?”

  “Well, sure. That’s a successful vineyard his old man has, and very valuable land. Besides, his parents offered him a bribe to come home—a hundred thousand dollars, cash. Larry claimed he was going to collect and then the two of us would head for Tahiti or South America, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “You didn’t tell me this before.”

  Gold averted his eyes, fiddling with his bracelet, a flush spreading up his neck. “It’s tough to admit you’ve been dumped. But dump me was what Larry did. Took his hundred thou and split without me. He’s probably having a great life someplace—with somebody else.”

  Except that the hundred thousand had been hidden in his parents’ tack room since he disappeared.

  And Julia seriously doubted it had come from the Peeples.

  * * * *

  RAE KELLEHER

  T

  he lead she’d been seeking was in Angie Atkins’s file, buried deep, where Rae’s eyes—tired since the night Shar was shot—hadn’t noticed it before. A notation in the police report of the personal property on Atkins’s body: “1 high-school class ring.”

  Jesus, why hadn’t the cops followed up on that? And what high school was it from?

  Sunday She had only two contacts on the SFPD, and she doubted either would be on duty or eager to access the information. But Adah could: she was no longer on the job, but she could navigate the system.

  “Hell yes,” Adah said when Rae called her. “Anything to narrow down who attacked Shar. But it’s totally illegal. Will you visit me in prison?”

  “Every week, with a file baked into hash brownies.”

  “Good woman.”

  Rae hung up the receiver and drummed her fingertips on the desktop while looking around the office. Water stains at the top of the far wall, carpet showing wear. Today when she’d come up the stairs to the catwalk they’d creaked ominously. Shar, with the help of her powerful attorney friend Glenn Solomon—who seemed to have something on everybody in city government—had negotiated a good deal with the port commission for an extended lease, but maybe it was time to think of moving on. She’d have to talk to Shar about it—

  Shit! She couldn’t.

  Phone. Adah.

  “The ring was from Acalanes High School, class of oh-six.”

  “Acalanes?”

  “East Bay. Near Walnut Creek, I think.”

  “How’d they miss that?”

  “Dead hooker, overload of cases, and they probably didn’t care all that much.”

  “You wouldn’t’ve missed it.”

  “I don’t know, maybe toward the end I would’ve. I was getting to the point where I didn’t give a shit, either.”

  “Well, thanks for running the check.”

  “No problem. Craig’s been off on some lead since Friday night. I got so bored this afternoon that I went to the animal shelter and came back with two kittens.”

  “I was wondering if you’d ever get another after Charley died. And now two!”

  “Tortoiseshells—sisters, around six months old. Lots of energy. They’re tearing the place apart.”

  “What’re you calling them?”

  “That One and the Other One, till Craig gets back to consult.”

  “Well, good luck. And thanks again.”

  Damn! Why had she stumbled on this lead on a Sunday? In summer, no less, when school was out and staff members only came in to work on a sporadic basis?

  Rae broke the connection and turned to her keyboard. Googled Acalanes High School, and got its address on Pleasant Hill Road in the East Bay suburb of Lafayette. The school’s site had a list of people to contact for various types of information: Rae copied the page. Then she began to search the East Bay phone books.

  * * * *

  “Information on students and former students is confidential,” Jane Koziol, counseling secretary of the high school, said when Rae reached her at her home number in Walnut Creek. “But if this girl has been murdered ... You say you want me to identify a photograph?”

  “Yes. Apparently she wasn’t using her real name. Her family hasn’t been notified of her death, and the closure would be very important to them.”

  “... And you’re a licensed private investigator?”

  “Working with the Bay Area Victims’ Advocates.”

  “All right. I have a fax machine. Send me your credentials and the photograph. If the girl graduated in oh-six, it’s likely I’ll recognize her.”

  “I can fax a copy of my license and the photo in a few minute
s.”

  “Fine. Where can I reach you?”

  Rae gave the agency’s phone number.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  * * * *

  When Koziol called back an hour later, she sounded shaken. “I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you, but I decided to talk with my attorney first.”

  “No problem. It’s what I would’ve done.”

  “The girl in the photograph is Alicia Summers. I... God, I can’t believe it!”

  “What can you tell me about her?”

  “She disappeared a couple of months after she graduated. The family is well-to-do, they live in the Lafayette hills, and her father’s a lawyer, involved in the Pro Terra Party. You’ve heard of them?”

  “Environmentalists? Aren’t they the ones who run candidates on a third-party basis?”

  “Yes. Alicia was a good student until her senior year, then her grades fell off radically. I tried to work with her, but she wasn’t responsive. All she would tell me was that school didn’t matter anymore, nothing did.”

  “Did you ask her why?”

  “Of course I did. But she refused to talk about it.”

  “What about her parents—did you consult with them?”

  “Her mother. She complained of Alicia’s unexplained absences on weekends and sometimes on weeknights.”

  “Had she asked her daughter about those?”

  “Yes—and she’d gotten the same response I did. After a while she didn’t press the issue. If anything, she seemed ... intimidated by Alicia.”

  “Intimidated? In what way?”

  Koziol hesitated. “Alicia had the upper hand in the relationship. I think her mother felt that if she confronted her, she’d lose her.”

  “And the father? Did you speak with him?”

  “No. Lee Summers is too important a man to speak with a mere high-school counselor.”

  “Did you consider sexual abuse as a factor in Alicia’s problems?”

  “Oddly enough, I didn’t. I know it’s the first thing a counselor would suspect, but from her body language and the way she talked, it didn’t fit into the equation.”

  “What did?”

  “... Disillusionment. Something in her experience had opened her eyes to the world in a way a person of her age and development couldn’t deal with except by giving up.”

  “I didn’t tell you before, but she was working as a prostitute in the city when she died.”

  “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. That’s giving up as much as any woman can, isn’t it?”

  * * * *

  SHARON McCONE

  T

  his evening I’m working on moving my toes. Toes, because dexterity on the rudders with one’s feet is essential to flying.

  First one, then another. Concentrating hard, because I’m going to beat this paralysis. What Elwood said about my great-grandmother, how she became a warrior woman—I’ll never forget that.

  I’m at war, too.

  I closed my eyes, pictured my right toe. Willed it to move.

  Nothing.

  Okay, I thought, left toe.

  Still nothing.

  Frustration welled up again. Why was I putting myself through this? It was hopeless. I was trapped inside myself, a well-wrapped mummy, with no sensation except my raging emotions. And those...

  Once, in a rented beachfront place on the island of Hawaii, Hy and I had been awakened by an earthquake. The house had shaken violently, gone still, then shaken again almost as hard. We looked outside, saw the sea was placid, but could feel its roiling potential. Fled to higher ground, along with all the neighbors.

  The tsunami we’d feared never happened, although we later found out that we were within three miles of the quake’s epicenter at sea. But its innate rage and desire to destroy everything in its path charged the air, and a day later we cut our stay short and returned home.

  Now a rage like that had invaded my body and threatened to consume what remained of my rationality.

  What had happened to me? Where was the woman who had soared above the Sierras and Crater Lake, thrilled to controlled spins, loved and married a man whom some people, myself included, considered “still dangerous”? The woman who had braved a paramilitary encampment, a clandestine border crossing, a child rescue on an isolated Caribbean island?

  Where was I?

  No. Don’t you go there.

  Right toe. Concentrate.

  ... Can’t.

  Wait a while and try again. For now, concentrate on the verbal reports given to you today.

  Julia had said that Larry Peeples told his lover his parents were giving him a hundred thousand dollars to return home and learn the winery business; instead he was planning to run off with Ben Gold and the money. But that hadn’t happened.

  Rae had identified the hooker who’d been stabbed in the alley off Sixth Street. She was the daughter of a well-to-do and politically connected East Bay family. Rae had notified the SFPD who, after verifying her information, would contact the parents. Rae hoped to meet with them tomorrow, but till then was pursuing leads about the father’s involvement in the Pro Terra Party.

  The Pro Terra Party. Hy didn’t like them. They ran candidates for local office around the state on an environmental stance, but he was dubious as to their motives and actual commitment to the movement. A stealthy money and power grab cloaked in altruism, he suspected. They lost more often than they won, but they were making gains: their most notable success had been with the election of State Representative Paul Janssen of San Francisco.

  It would be interesting to see what Rae reported tomorrow.

  Nothing from Mick or Craig. Curious.

  I was tired. Too many visitors in too little time. Too many things to absorb. Soon Hy would arrive for his evening visit. I’d rest till then.

  No, I wouldn’t. Not until I tried again ... and again ... and again to make my toes move.

  * * * *

  HY RIPINSKY

  H

  e was going to be late seeing Shar, but she would understand.

  The one thing that had remained constant through all of this was their mutual psychic connection. It had been strong from almost the first day they’d met, and while it may have faltered at times during their relationship, it now tugged at him, taut as wire. He knew it tugged at her, too.

  All afternoon he’d been at home, on the phone and Internet, talking and e-mailing with friends and informants around the world. He’d run searches trying to connect any of the cases the agency folks were working with his wife’s shooting. No definite links, but a whisper here and there.

  Yes, I’ve heard the theory that she was attacked by someone looking for information ... No, it probably wasn’t personal, but who knows?... Sometimes people are in the wrong place at the wrong time... She did have enemies. Couldn’t’ve helped but have, in her position ... She’s received a lot of high-profile publicity over the years... That pier was featured in a nationally syndicated piece about unusual working environments ... Maybe somebody was following her. That classic MG she insists on driving is distinctive... Let me call around to some of my contacts and get back to you ...

  Hy got into his vintage blue Mustang, which was parked in the driveway, backed out, and flicked on the radio as he turned down the street.

  News broadcast. Special report.

  San Francisco Board of Supes President Amanda Teller and State Representative Paul Janssen had been found dead in an apparent murder-suicide at a lodge near Big Sur. Mystery surrounded the crimes: as yet there was no explanation as to what they were doing there. Although they had checked into separate units, they were found together on Teller’s bed. Stay tuned for further details...

  Amanda Teller.

  Hadn’t Shar done some work for her about a year ago?

  Worth checking out. And right away.

  Shar would have to wait for him a little longer.

  He called Ted Smalley at home and then set his course for Pier 24½, where
Ted could access the records from the office computer system.