by Mary Feliz
“We had no idea how they were bringing the drugs into the shop. I called Mountain View PD just now to follow up on your story about the destruction of all the flowerpots and figurines. Claiming theft or destruction of more inventory than you actually have is a common form of fraud, but the insurance company would require a police report. That tells us something else was going on. MVPD had a report of a disturbance in the alley that night, but found it quiet when their patrol car showed up. None of the shop owners seemed to know anything about it.”
He took a sip of water and paused. The rest of us waited impatiently for him to continue. “We’ll go back to interview the businesses that surround both of Ed Bloom’s stores. I’m guessing we’ll be able to prove that at least some of his deliveries and all those gnomes and spaceships and other kitschy pots aren’t exactly what they seem.” He leaned forward. “My gut tells me that it may have been Mr. Xiang who destroyed Bloom’s inventory in an effort to put a stop to his drug trade. The attack could have been retribution or an attempt to recoup their losses if Mr. Xiang confiscated any of the drugs he found.”
I was skeptical. “That’s an awful lot of dangling threads you’ve knitted up there, Jason. It sounds more like a television plot than anything you’ll be able to prove.”
Forrest laughed. “You’d be surprised, Maggie. Crooks watch television too. Many of the cases that the DA prosecutes and that I defend end up looking like badly written screenplays performed by actors who’ve forgotten their lines. The crimes are clichés and the words the bad guys use to describe them are trite. If we wrote them down word for word, no one would believe they were real.”
Jason nodded enthusiastically. “The trick is pulling together enough of the story to make the suspects believe you’ve connected all the dots. Once you bring them in and do that, they get nervous. They become eager to tell their stories to end the suspense or to brag about their crimes. It doesn’t make sense, but I guess they don’t watch the parts of the programs where crooks are warned to get lawyers. I don’t think we’ll have any problem wrapping this up.”
He looked at his watch. “Thanks to you, Maggie, Mountain View and Orchard View Police are now requesting warrants to conduct a coordinated search of both flower shops, along with the financial records, computers, and phones.” He smiled at me as what he was saying slowly sunk in. “And the gold? It’s street slang for high-quality drugs. I’ve heard it used for cocaine, crack, marijuana, and heroin, so there’s no telling what Ed Bloom was up to. But I’ll give you odds it was something nasty that we don’t want in Orchard View. Because of you, we’ll shut that down.”
I smiled. I’d helped with that. And helped the Mountain View Police solve the murder of poor Mr. Xiang.
No wonder I was so exhausted.
Chapter 19
Finishing a project doesn’t mean we’re done. I schedule a follow-up visit with clients to review how their new system is working for them. Some customers find that while the systems make life much easier, maintaining them requires more time, energy, or skill than they are able to commit. Often they’re frustrated. If finances and temperament allow, I suggest they hire a housekeeper or cleaners. In other cases, we’ll schedule monthly or quarterly “tune-ups,” during which I’ll work with them to help maintain long-term order in their home.
From the Notebook of Maggie McDonald, Simplicity Itself Organizing Services
Saturday, February 24, Morning
With Max and the boys still skiing in Tahoe, and my other guests, including Munchkin, back in their own homes, I slept in on Saturday morning, sandwiched between Holmes and Watson. Lulled to sleep by their purring, I was awakened as soon as they decided it was time for breakfast. They told me so by batting at my eyelids until I opened them.
We had a delightfully slow day, but by afternoon I was at loose ends. I thought about going to the gym and got as far as putting my bag in the car. Instead, I decided to pay Annie/Marjorie a visit, update her on all that had happened, and try to learn more about her history.
I saw her long before she saw me. I watched as she fed peanuts to the squirrels with the same kindness she’d demonstrated when she offered to distribute the food and other items I’d brought earlier in the week.
I’d stopped to buy two large coffees on my way to the park, and I offered her one. She took it from me with a little bow of thanks, but with a presence and dignity that suggested it was her due.
I asked Marjorie her last name, but providing it was too intimate a gesture for our short friendship. “Maybe I’ll tell you next year,” she said. “It’s Czech and unpronounceable, although my family has lived in California for five generations.”
We fed the squirrels in silence and drank our coffee, watching the shadows change as the sun sunk lower in the sky. As daylight moved on toward dusk, Marjorie told me her story.
First she smoothed her skirts, fluffing and straightening each layer, one by one. She flicked both braids behind her back, where the sun made them glint silver.
“I was a nurse in the navy,” she said. “During Vietnam. So many of the homeless are here because of damage they sustained during that war and others, but that’s not why I’m here.” She tossed a peanut to a tiny squirrel that had approached slowly but stopped beyond the circle of braver animals.
“I had a master’s degree and a doctorate. I worked in the VA hospital in orthopedics. I liked watching physicians squirm when I insisted they refer to me as Doctor Nurse Marjorie.” She giggled then, like a little girl, and hid her smile behind the coffee cup.
“I lost my job because my hips couldn’t take all the standing and I couldn’t afford hip replacement surgery. My insurance would pay some, but not enough to cover the bills and the time off work. My time in Vietnam made it hard for me to develop close friendships, so I didn’t have anyone I trusted to look after me while I recuperated.”
She kept speaking, but took frequent sips of coffee between her sentences, cleared her throat, and looked away. “I was living in my RV to save money, but someone reported it as abandoned, so the police had it towed to an impound lot. With the parking fine, the towing fee, storage costs, and taxes, the towing company wanted one thousand dollars in cash to get it back. I didn’t have the money. And every day I waited, trying to scrape up the fees, it cost more, because the storage charges went up. Everything I owned was inside it. Eventually, the towing company held an unclaimed vehicles auction and someone bought my RV for less than it would have cost me to get my own belongings back.” She shook her head, but she recounted the story matter-of-factly, as if it had happened to someone else. She cast no blame and didn’t ask for or want pity.
“And I’ve been here, ever since,” she told me, without specifying how long that time had been. “I saw what happened the night Mr. Xiang was killed, when those thugs beat poor Rafi, Stephen, and Munchkin. It was horrible. They kept asking Mr. Xiang where he kept the gold.”
She shuddered. I shifted on the hard bench, about to ask a question, but then I froze because I’d startled the squirrels and was afraid I’d spooked Marjorie. I wasn’t sure why she’d decided to be so forthcoming, and I didn’t want to do anything that would alter the circumstances.
“I had been working on getting signed up for new medical insurance and veterans benefits and retirement—things I worked hard for all my life. But I lost my paperwork, my records, my phone, and my computer when my RV was towed. I didn’t have the money to request duplicate identification. Truth be told, I was in pain because of my hip and that made everything more difficult. I got depressed, and it all seemed like such an uphill battle.”
“What about the library?” I asked.
She sighed. “The library computers time out after thirty minutes and the government web sites are painfully slow to load. Thirty minutes wasn’t long enough to sort out anything. I gave up.”
I cleared my throat, scaring off the squirrels for good. “May I give your name to the detective investigating Mr. Xiang’s death? They have Rafi’s
testimony as well as Stephen Laird’s, but your statement would make the case against them that much stronger.”
Marjorie thought for a moment, and I was sure she would decline my request. But she surprised me. “Give me the detective’s number. If I have a good day, I’ll phone. There’s a lady in the Y who lets some of us use her phone while she works out.”
I scribbled the number on a scrap of paper and handed it to Marjorie. It disappeared into the folds of her skirts. I could see she was tired, so I took her empty cup from her and helped her get settled. “You bring that Munchkin back to see me,” she said. “I miss him.”
I agreed and was about to walk away when I turned back. “Marjorie, did you know Freddie?”
She sighed. “I told him that intersection wasn’t safe.”
“He tried to tell me something last week when I was stopped at his corner. It was something about Munchkin. I wondered if he saw anything the night Mr. Xiang was killed.”
“Did you have Munchkin with you in the car?”
I nodded.
“Then he probably just wanted to say hello. Poor Freddie never said much to anyone, but he loved that dog and would whisper secrets to him whenever he could. He called him Munch. Just Munch.”
“So he wasn’t in the alley that night?”
“No. At least I didn’t see him there. He never traveled far from that blasted intersection—the one that finally killed him. Even if he had been at the Golden Dragon that night, he wouldn’t have been a helpful witness.”
“How so?”
“ ‘Munch’ was about all anyone ever heard him say.”
I wished her good night. As soon as I was out of earshot, I phoned Detective Smith at the Mountain View Police Department. I told her that a homeless woman named Annie or Marjorie would likely be calling her with an eyewitness account of what happened the night Mr. Xiang was killed, but that she had no reliable way to phone back. When she called, the detective would have to talk to her immediately, because she probably wouldn’t have the courage or the ability to phone twice.
* * *
A few weeks later, the DA called to thank me for locking down the information that would put the thugs away. With the evidence that Rafi, Stephen, and Marjorie provided, he was confident their case would succeed in convicting a number of very bad people, including the Bloom brothers and the thugs who’d killed Mr. Xiang and hurt Rafi, Stephen, and Munchkin. Undercover cops were working to shut down the illegal gambling operation and bring those behind it to justice.
Ed Bloom, who turned out to own the entire block, had confessed to making life miserable for the other shop owners by causing problems with their heat, air conditioning, electricity, and plumbing and then dragging his feet when it came to repairs. A friend of his had posed as the landlord whenever Ed needed a real person to make an appearance. He’d also been behind the vandalism, hiring local kids to do his dirty work for him.
Local laws stipulated that leases couldn’t be terminated for any reason other than lack of payment or destroying property. But Bloom was already working with a developer on a plan to level the block and build shops with high-density housing above them. An architectural model was displayed in his apartment over the store, which also contained expensive antiques, artwork, and high-end electronic devices that Ed Bloom could never have afforded based on the sales from his shop.
“We did get one thing wrong,” the DA said, laughing. “We’d been keeping an eye on the owner of the comic book store, thinking he wasn’t open enough hours to be earning any kind of a living selling only comic books. And the age of his customers was in the range we’d expect for people distributing illegal drugs. It turned out his only crime was falling in love with a woman who lived out of town. He’s moved to Santa Cruz to be with her and opened a store there. He’d planned to run both stores, but he couldn’t find anyone to manage the Mountain View shop, so he’s closing it.”
“I never had a chance to talk to him about the Golden Dragon issues, but I’m glad he’s happy. I liked him.”
But none of that information answered one annoying lingering question.
“Why on earth would Ed suggest I look for Annie, er . . . Marjorie? She provided the information that tidied up most of the loose ends in this case.”
“It’s hard to say. He may have been completely confident that he’d covered his tracks and got a thrill from appearing to help your investigation. The police in Mountain View tell me Annie seldom ventures more than half a mile from Cuesta Park. Bloom probably thought she knew nothing about what was going on in the business district, and he was creating a distraction by suggesting you speak to her. But Annie knows all the local homeless people. She listens, and she’s smarter than he gave her credit for.”
“Have you seen Annie?” I asked the DA. “I haven’t seen her for days and I’m worried about her.”
“We’re looking after her,” he said. “Helping her with her paperwork and finding veterans housing. Part of that is self-serving. She’ll make a more reliable witness if she has a stable address. She’s scheduled for hip surgery and in the meantime is getting physical therapy and anti-inflammatories so she’s in less pain. Without the pain and worry, she’s a fireball. She’s been talking to a friend of mine on the Orchard View city council who has wanted to address some of the city’s homeless issues. She wants to find a way to register them all to vote to give them a little more clout. They’re working on plans to form a county task force to get homeless people the services they need.”
He cleared his throat. “I’d like to tell you more, but it has to remain in the strictest confidence.”
I’d had enough of keeping other people’s secrets. “No, thanks,” I said. “No more secrets. I only want to know things that I can announce on Facebook or shout to the media.”
“Well, let’s just say that the health inspector who was making it difficult for the shop owners to feed the homeless has taken early retirement. He was acquainted with Mr. Xiang’s killers. We may or may not be looking at trying him for extortion.” He coughed and continued.
“We may not be able to prove any wrongdoing on his part. But we’re patient, and the Mountain View Police Department is working hard. Since the health inspector is a county position, we’re looking at other communities within Santa Clara County to see if we can find a bigger pattern of crimes.
“Mountain View and Orchard View are also launching a joint effort to strengthen connections in the business districts so that shop owners and others like them will be able to act against similar pressures should they reoccur.”
“That will help,” I said. “Mr. Xiang didn’t want to contact the police because he didn’t trust them.”
I was about to thank the DA and end the call when I remembered the rumors about the gold. “Do you have any idea why Mr. Xiang’s attackers kept talking about gold?” I asked. “It was a rumor that wouldn’t die, and it was all over town.”
“Piecing together what we’ve learned from Ed Bloom, evidence in his store, and some things the homeless have reported, we think that it referred to a premium strain of heroin Bloom was smuggling inside his figurines and potting supplies. I think that Mr. Xiang discovered what Bloom was doing, destroyed the figurines and confiscated the heroin. We haven’t found it anywhere, but one of the street people saw Mr. Xiang toss some garbage in a dumpster the same night as the burglary. It could have been garbage from the store, or the heroin, or both.”
“So it was probably picked up and is now deeply buried in a landfill?”
“We hope so.”
“There was an incident outside the yarn shop,” I said. “Someone flooded a dumpster . . .”
“We think that could have been a dual-purpose disaster—an effort to destroy any remaining evidence of the drugs and put pressure on the other store owners to close.”
“Did any of your people get information from the café owner?” I hadn’t had any luck getting her to talk to me, and hadn’t been able to figure out whether she was b
usy, guilty, or both.
“We looked into her and she has no record whatsoever.”
I was relieved to know there were shop owners in Mountain View that were neither part of a crime ring nor threatened by it.
“And the evidence against Bloom and the thugs,” I said, “it’s solid? You’re confident of a conviction.”
“As much as we can be. The thugs confessed, as you know, and thanks to you and Dr. Davidson, the UC Davis animal lab confirmed that Munchkin’s fur was caked with blood belonging to the larger bad guy. We have his fingerprints on the knife that the Davis experts say matches Munchkin’s wounds. He claims they were ordered to threaten Mr. Xiang and get him to return the heroin. If he didn’t, they were told to kill him.”
“By Mr. Bloom?”
“Yes. Bloom denies it, but money in the attacker’s possession bore evidence of heroin and of potting soil from Bloom’s shop. We’re continuing to test some of the evidence from the shop and the murderer’s apartment, but the connection is solid.”
We wrapped up the call, and I leaned back in my chair, fully satisfied that Orchard View was back on an even keel. Annie was thriving and contributing to the community and the people she loved and cared for. Freeing Stephen had worn me out and dragged me down. Every day that I worked to do as he’d asked, I was keeping secrets I didn’t want to keep and uncovering a side of Orchard View I didn’t want to see. But I couldn’t un-see it, and I couldn’t forget.
But while working to free Stephen I’d made new connections in the community with good people who were fighting an uphill battle to do the right thing. For a while, I’d lost sight of the good that was happening and could only focus on the cruelty of the people who’d injured my friends and kept the homeless and the shop owners under such a dreadful shadow.