Treasure Hunt

by John Lescroart

  And what if there was a plea bargain? Did that count? They should definitely give some portion of the reward for the arrest itself. And then a bonus for the conviction.

  “What about if they arrest the wrong person?” Tamara had to ask.

  “That never happens,” Virginia replied. “They arrest somebody, you can pretty well bet that they did it.”

  “But you see the problem,” Tamara persisted. “They arrest somebody and give you half the money or whatever, and then they find somebody else actually did it and they’ve already lost the payment. Then what? That’s why they’ve got to have the conviction along with the arrest.”

  “Okay, that’s a good point. But even so, I want to make sure there’s a record I called and what I told you, and when. Like if I’m first, that ought to make a difference. A big difference.”

  “I’m sure it will,” Tamara said. By now she had concluded she was talking to, if not a certified lunatic, then certainly someone light on a few critical synapses. “Can you tell me briefly the nature of your information?”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t think so,” Virginia replied. “Not on the telephone. They’re all tapped, you know. The cops. I give you the information. They solve the crime, take all the credit, I don’t get no reward. I ain’t talkin’ to no cops.”

  “I don’t think all the phones are tapped,” Tamara countered. “Not anymore.”

  A brief harrumph. “Well, if you believe that . . . if I were you, I’d just be a lot more careful. Somebody’s listening in, I can tell you that for a fact. You’re not on a cell phone there at your office, are you?”

  “No. We’ve got a landline.”

  “Well, maybe that’s a little better. At least they can’t pluck it out of the air, but they can tap a landline just as easy. Especially an investigator’s office like yours.”

  “I’ll try to be careful what I say, then. Maybe you can give me a few more details on your contact information, at least, and we can have someone call you back, or set up an interview.”

  “I wouldn’t have them call.”

  “No. Right. Of course. You said you were down on a boat at the Marina?”

  Mickey had actually been out on real work, serving a subpoena on a dental hygienist named Paula Chow who had worked in the offices of Bernard Offit for six years, ending her employment with him a couple of years before. It seems that while treating female patients for TMJ or, in layman’s terms, clicking of and pain in the jaw, Dr. Offit had developed a technique that included massaging the breasts of these women. Eventually, fourteen victims of this questionable treatment came forward and pressed charges. Dr. Offit’s defense attorney, contending that this technique was indeed not just defensible but therapeutic, needed to call witnesses, such as Ms. Chow, who would testify that Dr. Offit was a fine man and a good boss, and would never have done anything so tawdry for his own sexual gratification. And, more particularly, that she had seen him administer this treatment, and that none of the patients had complained at the time, nor had there been any sexual component to it.

  Mickey found Ms. Chow at her new place of employment at a dentist’s office on Clement Street, and served her for a court date the following week. He then called his sister at work to check in. She told him that right at this moment, Mickey was needed to go talk to a possibly crazy woman who lived on a boat in the Marina.

  “What makes you think she’s possibly crazy?”

  “You’ll see.”

  So he drove out Park Presidio and around to the same Marina parking lot he’d used last Friday morning, parked, and came to the gate leading down to the boats. The sun was out by now, although the wind was brisk, and the bay was a kaleidoscope of sails skidding along over the whitecaps.

  A woman stood just inside the gate with her arms crossed and an impatient look on her face. Wearing a yellow slicker over painter’s pants and boat shoes, she seemed to be in her late fifties or early sixties, with windblown hair the color and consistency of straw. “I’m Virginia. Are you the Hunt Club?” she asked him with some asperity.

  Mickey flashed his disarming smile. “Not the whole thing, just pretty much its top operative.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “I need someone with brains. Got some ID?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Mickey flashed her his driver’s license and gave her a Hunt Club business card. This was a long way from identifying him as a private investigator, but it seemed to satisfy her. Only after she’d perused the card for a long ten seconds did she reach into her pocket for the key to the lock. While unfastening it, she shot him a squinty look. “Can’t be too careful, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I couldn’t agree more.”

  “There’s a lot more rape going on than people report.”

  “Right.”

  “People look at me, fifty-seven going on thirty I always say, and tell me I shouldn’t worry about rape, I’m too old. But you know, rape’s not a sexual crime. It’s not about sex, it’s about hate and anger. There was a woman last month, sixty-two, over in Berkeley, in a wheelchair, can you believe? Mugged and, as they say, sexually assaulted, which means raped. Anyway, that’s why I like it down here, behind this fence. Nobody gets in here doesn’t know one of the boat owners.”

  “Good policy,” Mickey said.

  She looked him a good hard squint in the eye for a second or two, possibly to see if he was fooling with her, but again he must have passed her scrutiny because with a “Follow me, then,” she turned and led him down to a badly misused sailboat near the end of the pier, which she stepped onto.

  Then she and Mickey were seated on cracked and slightly damp cushions around the wheel. Virginia had some laundry drying, hung with clothespins from the guylines on the seaward side. From inside the galley came the sound of talk radio.

  Mickey had already decided that Tamara’s call on this woman was correct, but crazy people could have good information. Still, he didn’t want to take more time than was necessary chatting here, so he crossed a leg, casual and relaxed, leaned back against the seat, gave her a smile. “So, Virginia, I understand you have some information you think might be helpful about the Dominic Como murder?”

  “I think I do, yes. Do you need anything to verify the time we’re talking? Is there some official form or something we sign that I can keep a copy of?”

  Mickey, feeling that maybe Tamara hadn’t sufficiently prepped him here, figuratively put on his tap dancing shoes. “Well,” he said, “I’m sure we could have you come down to the office and we could write up a statement for you to sign, and have it notarized, if it comes to that. But why would you want that exactly?”

  “The reward,” she said simply. “So someone don’t steal the reward from me.”

  “Ah.”

  “An’ nobody tells the cops who I am. I come up with something first, and then next thing you know everybody knows it, because I told it, and suddenly nobody remembers where it first came to light. Pretty convenient, if you ask me.”

  Mickey nodded, taking all of this very seriously. “All right, Virginia,” he said at length, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, if it meets with your approval. You tell me what your information is and if we both decide it’s significant or important enough, I can take you down to the office right away and we can draft and notarize your statement. Then copy it and send you back here with your copy. How does that sound?”

  She gave him the thousand-yard stare again, considering. Then, making up her mind, she nodded. “I’m glad they sent somebody with brains.”

  The three of them—Mickey, Tamara, and Wyatt Hunt—sat with their knees all but touching at a small table in a blessedly quiet corner of the Quiver Bar at the Epic Roasthouse, Pat Kuleto’s gorgeous new place on the Embarcadero, right at the water’s edge. It was a cocktail hour of celebration about the new work they’d picked up, Hunt springing for drinks at the end of the day.

  “She was absolutely lucid,” Mickey was saying. “No question about what she saw and what it meant. And I mu
st say, I don’t think any of us would have even thought of it.”

  “So what was it?” Hunt asked.

  Mickey sipped at his beer. “You really ought to guess. If only to get a feeling for how far off we all were.”

  “She saw the limo out there,” Hunt said, “after it was supposedly back at Sunset.”

  “Not close. Tam?”

  “She heard something.”

  “Nope. Way more obvious.”

  “She saw something,” Tamara said.

  “Good.”

  “From her boat?”

  “Getting warm,” Mickey said.

  “Wait a minute,” Hunt put in. “So it happened out by the boats?”

  Mickey was enjoying the moment, leading them on. “I told you, think outside the box. We would never, ever, have thought of this. We’re not even in the right area code. And we know it happened because she saw it with her own eyes.”

  For a long moment, all was silence. “Okay,” Hunt said, “he actually met somebody on one of the boats. They had a fight out there . . . but, no, that’s too far from the lagoon. Nobody’s carrying a dead guy three blocks. Or even from the boats out to the parking lot.”

  “No. No carrying involved. No boats involved either.” Mickey tipped up his beer again, put it down, gave a last-chance look to his colleagues. Theatrically, he sighed. “We can call Devin Juhle and close the case as soon as I tell you guys,” he said, “but I thought, obvious as it is, we might want to talk about it a little first, before we bring in the cops.” One last triumphant glance around the table. “Okay, you know the blimp, the tourist blimp?”

  Hunt, very slowly, nodded. “Airship Ventures,” he said with caution. “The Eureka.”

  “Right. That’s the one. Well, Virginia was out on her deck Tuesday night, late dusk, just enjoying the peace and serenity out there, and she notices the Eureka coming back from out over the Golden Gate. Beautiful, if you like blimps, and who doesn’t, just floating around up there. But whatever, it was a warm night and she just watched it sail pretty much straight overhead, a couple of blocks south, but really, darn close. And then, suddenly, she’s looking up at it and she sees something—I’m not making this up—she sees something fall out of the thing. At first, she can’t believe what she’s seeing, but then she realizes it looks like a body, and it just falls and falls until it goes out of sight just over the trees, about where the lagoon would be.”

  “Lucky they drained it,” Tamara said. “He might have killed a duck.”

  “But he hit the lagoon before it was drained,” Mickey said, “and he didn’t hit a duck anyway.”

  Tamara smiled brightly. “Well, that was lucky too.”

  “You’re right,” Hunt said drily, “we never would have thought of that.”

  “He fell into the lagoon?” Tamara asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “How’d he wind up at the one end, tied up in all the roots and stuff?”

  “Must have been the tide,” Mickey said.

  “There’s no tide in the lagoon.”

  “Hmm,” Mickey said. “There’s a slight snag in the story.”

  “Here’s another one,” Hunt said. “She saw this and didn’t call the police?”

  “Ah.” Mickey held up a finger. “That one’s covered. She thought the police might think she had something to do with it if she reported it. She was going to wait until it was in the paper or on the radio and learned more about it, but then they were obviously covering it up somehow. At least until she heard about the reward, and realized what it must have been. Which was Como.”

  Tamara put down her Cosmopolitan. “Wow.”

  “I know,” Mickey said. “I was impressed. So now I’m wondering how many calls like this we’re going to get. Wyatt, maybe we could figure out a better weeding-out process.”

  “Not if they won’t talk on the phone,” Tamara said. “They’re all tapped, you know, and I don’t think Virginia’s the only one that knows it.”

  “Heck,” Mickey said, “even I know that. But really. Wyatt?”

  Hunt finished his Scotch. “Well, let’s see how many of ’em we get. We told Devin half our work would be weeding out the wackos, maybe more. And if we don’t get some live ones, I’ll be interviewing them too.”

  “Not that it wasn’t a good time,” Mickey said.

  Hunt made a face. “No. I hear you. Sounds like it.”

  12

  At ten after six, Hunt walked into the homicide detail and over to Juhle’s desk. The inspector looked up and Hunt opened a leather folder and extracted several sheets of paper.

  Juhle didn’t exude joy at the interruption. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Eleven reports. One guy didn’t give his name or address, but we included a summary of his statement. Nine people gave statements, eight to Tamara over the phone. They’re in order from least obviously crazy to most crazy. One lady wouldn’t talk on the phone, so I sent Mickey out to talk to her. She saw Como fall out of a blimp. And I had a chat with Mrs. Como, who mentioned a couple of things she forgot to tell you when you interviewed her. Don’t look at me like that—I’m just the messenger. That’s ten in two hours, Dev, plus Mrs. Como.” Hunt paused. “It’s something,” he said.

  Juhle raised his eyes. “Tell me about the blimp lady.”

  At a quarter to seven, Hunt and Juhle had baseball gloves on (Hunt owned several) and were playing hardball catch, soft-tossing, alongside the basketball court in Hunt’s warehouse, both of them dressed in street clothes.

  “What pisses me off,” Juhle was saying, “is people telling you stuff that they didn’t tell me and Russo when we talked to them. What’d they think we were doing, just dicking around?”

  Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and threw it back. “People don’t trust cops. Either that or they’re scared of ’em.”

  “Me and Russo? She looks about fifteen and scares no one, trust me. And I can’t even scare my own kids.”

  “It’s what you represent. You’re involved with the cops, everybody knows that basically you’re in some kind of trouble. You talk to me or Mickey, or even Tam, it’s just a conversation. Besides, you didn’t want to talk to the blimp lady. We saved you from that.”

  “I’m grateful. You guys are my heroes.”

  Juhle threw. Hunt caught.

  Hunt threw. Juhle caught.

  Juhle said, “Ellen Como. We talked to Ellen Como for like an hour, maybe more. She told us basically nothing helpful, and she gives you the store.”

  “She got the feeling you thought she was a suspect.”

  “Well, she wasn’t all wrong there. She is a suspect. Note the clever use of the present tense. What’d she think? She doesn’t call to report her missing husband for a whole day? She lives two blocks from where they find his body? He got left off outside their house? No, no, it can’t be her. What can we be thinking?” He unleashed a fastball.

  “Hey! You’re gonna throw the arm out again. Easy.” Hunt demonstrated, a nice soft sixty- foot toss. “So anyway,” he concluded, “Ellen’s pretty sure it’s her. Alicia.”

  “She said he fired her on that day?”

  “The very one.”

  “Well, the girl said there wasn’t anything physical between them.”

  Hunt caught the next throw and shrugged. “Maybe there wasn’t.”

  “I’ve seen her, if you remember. I’d bet there was. But even if there was, so what? That doesn’t mean she killed him. And you realize that Ellen could have just been trying to deflect the investigation away from herself?”

  “You’re kidding,” Hunt said. “I never would have thought of that.”

  “Yeah, well. The thing is, they both had a reason, and she’s the spouse, so she gets top billing until we find some evidence leading someplace else.”

  “And on that front . . . ?”

  Juhle shook his head no. “Somebody must have dragged him to the lake, or even went in with him and got him tucked under the trees, but there’s no sign o
f struggle on any of the banks. We’ve just got the body with the bump on the head.”

  Hunt threw. “What caused the bump? Any idea?”

  “ME says no pattern injury. No definite shape or weight to the weapon. Other than that, something hard. A rock, a piece of lumber. Hell, a baseball bat, an anchor, a sap, a gun? Who knows? Maybe somebody will call you and give you a hint, and then you can tell us. Did I mention that this pisses me off?”

  “I think so.”

  “You dangle three hundred grand out there—and by the way, that’s obscene in its own right—and suddenly you’ve got witnesses, you got people just dying to be good citizens. You think any one of ’em might just think to pick up the phone and tell what they think they know to the police? You think that maybe could happen just once?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Always.”

  Hunt caught Juhle’s toss and kept the ball in his mitt, signifying the end of the catch. “I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  Hunt met his girlfriend, Gina Roake, for a late dinner at Sam’s Grill. Sam’s was a hopping power room during the lunch hour, but settled into a more intimate groove as the evening wore on. Now, closing in on nine o’clock, Roake and Hunt sat in one of the booths back by the kitchen. Their waiter had pulled the curtain on them after he’d left their dinners, and there might as well have been no one else in the restaurant.

  Roake was older than Hunt, closing in on fifty, but as an inveterate exerciser and outdoors person, she was in excellent shape. After twenty-five years in the practice of law, she’d just recently had her first legal thriller, Brief Deception, accepted for publication, and she was thinking about her next one.

  Most of the dinner, they’d talked about what that one might be about, and of course the marketing for the first one. Would they want her to go on tour? What about her law practice when she was out of town? Should she spend her own money on advertising? Did she want to use the same character in the second book, or break in an entirely new one? Maybe she should go to nonfiction, write up one of the real cases she’d seen or worked on? God knows, there had been some good ones. Did she have a big enough theme? Did it have to be a murder case?