Till The Old Men Die (The Jeri Howard Mystery Series Book 2)

by Janet Dawson

  Just then the light went on, hurting my eyes as it illuminated the living room with sudden harshness. I wasn’t alone after all. Dolly Cruz was there. But she was lying on the floor, on her side, facing me, her brown eyes open and unseeing. One of her white pumps was still on a foot, the other some distance away. Crimson smeared the bodice of her summery dress, marring the pink and turquoise pattern. The same red stain pooled on the carpet under her head. Blood splattered the sofa cushions and the white wall beyond and speckled the surface of the table I’d used to pull myself upright.

  I tore my eyes from Dolly’s body and looked up at the boozy man from the party. He stood in the dining room, his right hand still on the light switch and two glasses balanced precariously in his left. The pink flush had drained from his face and he looked as sick as I felt.

  “Oh, jeez,” he said in a quavery voice.

  Eighteen

  AT LEAST I WASN’T IN THE SMALLEST INTERVIEW room. That windowless cubicle, graffiti scratched into the blue and white walls, was reserved for suspects, its claustrophobic confines designed to make a person think about the reason for being there. The fact that I wasn’t in the smallest room was a good sign.

  I was in the larger interview room, reserved for witnesses and family members. It had the same utilitarian metal table and chairs found throughout the Oakland police administration building. They didn’t spend a lot on decor here. This interview room had two pictures on the wall, neither of them particularly cheery, or restful to my bleary eyes. The circles under my eyes were so heavy, I could feel them. I reached up and touched the spot on my head where the doctor at Kaiser Hospital had taken three stitches to close the wound. It itched, and my head still hurt despite the pain pills.

  The room had once been an office with a window that looked out onto OPD’s Homicide Section, with its metal desks standing sturdily on institutional beige linoleum and case files crowding the bookcases along the walls. Now the Venetian blinds were closed and I was alone with my pounding head and the unbidden memory of Dolly Cruz’s corpse.

  The door opened. I glimpsed the lieutenant’s office across the narrow hallway as the homicide team came back into the interview room where they’d been questioning me. Sergeant Harris was the lead investigator, firing questions at me in his gruff voice while both he and Sergeant Griffin took notes. I knew both of them by reputation, if not personally. Sid thought they were savvy, professional, and thorough. They were certainly giving me and my story a thorough going-over, trying to cull out every detail, every nuance. They kept questioning me, then going outside to discuss my answers. I knew they were looking for discrepancies in my statement. After all, I’d had a very public confrontation with the victim several hours before her demise. I had sneaked into her building, eluding the pursuit of the security guard, and the unnerved partygoer had seen me breaking into Dolly’s condo sometime before he returned with the drinks to find me standing over the victim’s recently bludgeoned body, the murder weapon in my hand.

  As Griffin and Harris started another round of questions, Dolly’s corpse rose to haunt me again. If I’d beaten her with the force to do that to her head, I’d have been splattered with blood, just like the sofa, the table, and the wall. The only blood on me was that on my head and my hand, where I’d touched the candlestick. I knew it, and so did the two detectives. I wondered if the police had found any signs of cleanup in the bathroom or the kitchen, like wet and bloody towels. But they wouldn’t tell me. I’d have to find out another way.

  “You didn’t hear anybody behind you before you got hit?” Harris asked again, for what seemed like the fourth time. Fatigue etched his dark brown face. His broad shoulders strained his suit coat and he’d loosened his tie.

  I shook my head, which was a mistake, and winced as the throbbing increased in intensity. “I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything. I just have an impression of something flying through the air, coming at me. After it hit me, I fell on the floor and tried to roll over. Then I felt the hand touch me.”

  “You said it didn’t feel like a hand.” Griffin spoke in a level voice, looking at me with a gray, unblinking gaze.

  “It didn’t feel like flesh.” I rubbed my forehead, trying to recall the texture of the thing that touched me briefly. “Rubber gloves, maybe. The kind you keep under the sink for cleaning.”

  Griffin scribbled a few more notes, poker-faced below his pale hair. He hadn’t said much since arriving at the Kaiser emergency room, where the uniformed officer had taken me for treatment. After that Griffin had escorted me downtown and left me in the interview room while he waited for Harris to return from the scene of Dolly’s murder. Since that time they’d been in and out as we traversed the same ground over and over again. A glance at my watch confirmed that it was well past midnight. I wondered how long I’d been there. I couldn’t be exactly sure when I’d found Dolly’s body. I sensed that although I hadn’t lost consciousness after being hit in the head, some undetermined amount of time had passed before I’d dragged myself to my feet.

  I heard a familiar voice out in the corridor, then someone knocked. Harris opened the door. He loosened his tie as he spoke to someone I couldn’t see. Then he turned to me, a question mark in his voice. “Sid wants to talk with you.”

  I nodded. “It’s okay.”

  Griffin and Harris left the room and Sid appeared in the doorway, his suit rumpled and his face tired, as though both of them had had a long day. He pulled the door shut behind him and put his hands on his hips. He didn’t say anything for a moment, just stood there and looked at me with his yellow cat’s eyes.

  “Did they Mirandize you?”

  “No. Which means they don’t think I’m a suspect.”

  “You’re not out of here yet,” he warned.

  “If I killed her, where’s the blood? I have a feeling they found some towels and maybe even some rubber gloves in the bathroom. Am I right?”

  Sid’s face remained maddeningly blank. He wasn’t going to tell me anything, and I wouldn’t have any access to the police report while the case was under investigation. “What the hell were you doing there, Jeri?” he growled. I folded my arms across my chest and propped my feet up on a chair. He sighed and rolled his eyes upward. “I know, you’re working on a case. I just hope you don’t get yourself killed one of these days.”

  So did I.

  * * *

  It was past two when I stripped off my clothes, leaving them in a heap on my bathroom floor. I turned on the water as hot as I could bear it and stood under the shower with a cake of lemon-scented soap in my hand, heedless of the drought, heedless of the time, wanting only to scrub myself clean of the sight of Dolly Cruz’s body and the smell of her blood.

  I breathed the tart perfume of the soap and relished the steam and lather that enveloped me and made me feel clean again. With gentle, careful hands I washed the blood out of my own hair, avoiding the stitches as best I could. It was impossible to wash away what had happened that night, though. I had told the two homicide investigators about Dolores Cruz’s claim to be Dr. Manibusan’s widow and that I had been hired to locate Alex Tongco, the professor’s next of kin. Beyond that I didn’t say anything about the missing envelope and its contents. I did, however, mention that Eddie the Knife Villegas had contacted Dr. Manibusan’s nephew, wanting access to the professor’s papers, telling Griffin and Harris that their colleague in Theft, the ever-charming Sergeant Gonsalves, knew about Eddie. As far as I was concerned, Eddie was right up there when it came to qualifying as a murder suspect. I wanted Homicide to give him all the due consideration they were giving me. But Eddie’s M.O. was a blade, not a blunt instrument.

  By the time Griffin and Harris had finished their probing, my eyes felt like two bags of cement weighing me down and the painkillers were making me woozy. I barely sounded lucid, let alone credible. But they didn’t Mirandize me, at least not then. Sid took me back to where I’d left my car, and I drove home, glad to see my apartment and my querulous cat.
I fed her and knocked back some more pain pills before making a beeline for the bathroom.

  Now I turned off the water and wrapped myself in an oversize towel, carefully patting my head dry. Then I fell into bed, oblivious. The stitches still itched when I woke up, but the pain had lessened. It was almost noon. The phone on my bedside table was ringing, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Abigail was curled into a tight fur ball on my left side, her nose tucked under her forepaws. The phone stopped ringing. I stared at the bedroom ceiling and stroked her silky fur. She commenced a rumbling purr that seemed to vibrate the bed.

  If she wasn’t hungry, I certainly was. I got up, sticking my arms into my robe as I shuffled to the kitchen. Abigail ran ahead of me and chirruped while I dished up cat food. Two mugs of coffee and some raisin toast took away the sharp edge of hunger. The phone rang again while I was getting dressed. I put on slacks and a T-shirt, then picked up the clothes I’d discarded on the bathroom floor. They had blood on them, whether mine or Dolly’s I couldn’t be sure. I stared at them, then walked through the apartment to the back door. Outside, I stuffed the clothes into the trash can.

  I finished the coffee and a few more pieces of toast, then headed for my office, stopping at the corner to buy an Oakland Tribune. Dolly’s murder made page three, but the story was small and sketchy. Her death was overshadowed by page-one headlines about another in a series of freeway shootings along Interstate 580. Sid was working on that one, which explained why he’d been at Homicide so late last night. I dropped my eyes to the below-the-fold story on the Cruz murder. I read quickly through the few inches of black type, looking for my name. It was there, noting only that Oakland private investigator Jeri Howard had been at the scene and was being questioned by police.

  It was Saturday, and my Franklin Street building was deserted. In my office the answering machine’s red light blinked rapidly, indicating lots of messages. I rewound the tape and listened, ignoring repeat calls from a couple of reporters. Dad had called several times. Had he heard the news? That might explain the ringing phone I hadn’t answered at home. There were calls from Elaine Martini at Cal State, urgency in her voice as she left both her security office number and her home number. I wagered the Oakland cops had called her to verify that I was working for the university. For how long? I wondered. It was one thing to look into Dolly Cruz’s claim that she was the professor’s widow, but murder changed everything.

  I reached Dad at home. Tension thinned his voice. “Thank God you’re all right. Sid called me this morning. He said the Cruz woman was murdered, and you were there. He told me not to worry. How can I not worry about a thing like that?”

  I guess Sid figured it was better for my father to hear it from him than from some other source, but I had to spend the next few minutes reassuring Dad. I don’t think I succeeded. He had called my brother in Sonoma in between calls to me, so after I disconnected I punched in Brian’s number.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go into teaching?” he asked when he answered the phone. “I think it’s slightly less dangerous than being a private eye. I’m glad you called. Dad was frantic when he couldn’t get you on the phone.”

  “I was home, but dead to the world.” I stopped. “Bad choice of words. I suppose I should call Mother.”

  “I’ll do it. You’ve got enough on your mind without sparring with Mom about a more appropriate line of work.” Which just about summed up my current relationship with my female parent. “Better she hears it from one of us than from some reporter. If she hasn’t already.” Brian paused. “This is fairly serious, right?”

  “An accurate assessment, baby brother. I’ll be in touch.”

  I hung up the phone and sat for a moment, contemplating my options. Last night — or, more accurately, early this morning — Sid promised he would try to get a line on the whereabouts of Eddie the Knife Villegas. At least my ex-husband was fairly certain I wasn’t guilty of murder. God knows he’d lived with me long enough to formulate the opinion that I wasn’t capable of cold-blooded murder. But as a homicide sergeant he also didn’t want to tread on the toes of Detectives Griffin and Harris. After all, it was their case. And Sid had enough to deal with, considering his own case load. He warned me to stay out of their way and let them do their jobs.

  But I couldn’t very well sit there with my teeth in my mouth, waiting for someone else to produce results. I’m an experienced investigator, and it’s not my nature to let others take the lead. Besides, I had a lot of unanswered questions of my own. There was more to this than the death of Dolores Cruz. She had started this chain of events herself, when she showed up at the university, claiming to be the professor’s widow, with expectations that didn’t include her own brutal murder. But surely she knew there was risk involved. I was certain she had more to tell about Dr. Manibusan’s murder. If only she’d lived long enough to talk.

  That phone number on Eddie’s bogus business cards, the restaurant called the Manila Galleon, was a logical place to start looking for Eddie, but I had another reason to drive across the Bay Bridge. Now Dolly couldn’t tell me what she had been up to, but maybe she had confided in Perlita Randall. It wasn’t a particularly good time to interview the sister of the deceased, but there’s never a good time for the kinds of questions I was going to ask.

  When I got to the Daly City branch of Mabuhay Travel, it was closed, the door locked and shades pulled. I had copied the Randalls’ home address from the Dun & Bradstreet report. Back in my car, I checked the address on a Daly City map. It was near the Westlake Shopping Center, off John Daly Boulevard. I found the house, but it looked closed up, too, and no one answered the doorbell. I walked to the house next door, where a neighbor told me there’d been a death in the family. Perlita Randall was at a nearby Catholic church, praying for the soul of her sister.

  I drove to the Manila Galleon on Serramonte Boulevard and went inside, my eyes adjusting from the bright May sunlight to the interior gloom. There was no one at the cashier’s counter. It was early afternoon and the lunchtime crowd had thinned, leaving the dining room half empty. I saw a few occupied tables and a busboy clearing the rest. I peered into the bar and spotted several men on stools, knocking back a few and talking to the bartender in Tagalog. Footsteps made me turn. A young Filipino-American woman in her twenties, wearing a black-and-white uniform, approached me from the dining room.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for a friend. He said he’d meet me here. Eddie Villegas.”

  She frowned and looked at me with wide brown eyes, as though she didn’t quite believe me. “He’s not here.”

  I looked at my watch and scowled. “I don’t understand. He said one o’clock, and I’m late. He should be here.”

  “Well, he was earlier,” she said, “but he left. He didn’t say anything to me about expecting a visitor.” From the way she said it and the downward curve of her wide mouth, I realized she was jealous of any female attention Eddie might attract. “Why do you ask?”

  “Ask,” not “ax,” I thought automatically. It would be a long time before I’d stop listening for that particular mispronunciation. “It’s business,” I told her, making my voice rough with impatience. “This is very important. Do you know where I can find him?”

  She shrugged. “On weekends he visits his grandfather in the city. They play pinochle. Or so he says.”

  “Where does his grandfather live?”

  “I don’t know. Efren Villegas. He’s in the book.”

  My ears pricked like Abigail’s when she spots a bird, and it was all I could do not to purr. Efren Villegas. I had heard the name before, the day I visited Rick Navarro at Pacific Rim Imports, when Maximiliano Navarro ordered his son to call a cab for his cousin Efren. I reached back, recalling the scene. Max had passed an envelope to the bent old man who seemed so obsequious in the presence of his more powerful and important relative. And Max had introduced the old man to Antonia and Nina, saying he and
Efren had fought together as partisans in World War II.

  I thanked the young woman and headed for the public telephones near the rest rooms, checking the phone directory for San Francisco and Daly City. No luck there. I found no listing for Efren Villegas, but lots of initial E’s. I went through a handful of change and got nothing but an empty coin purse. My next option was the cab company. It had been a Yellow Cab, and I remember the driver wore a turban. A Sikh. It took a couple of twenties to pry out the information. Yes, the cab company dispatcher told me, they had a Sikh driving for them. His name was Roshan Singh, and he’d picked up a south-of-Market fare last Monday. Unfortunately, he wasn’t driving today and the dispatcher couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me where he’d delivered his fare. I did get Singh’s phone number, though there was no answer when I called. He was due back at work Monday.

  Before I drove back to the East Bay, I called the Randalls’ Daly City number but got no answer. I’d have to save my visit to Perlita for another day. Back in Oakland, I detoured past the Parkside Towers. I wanted to talk to the security guard who had tried to throw me out of the lobby yesterday, if he’d talk to me. But someone else was on duty at the high-rise. I wasn’t batting a thousand this afternoon, but at least I had another lead, about Efren Villegas.

  I unlocked my office and headed for my filing cabinet, where I’d stashed Dr. Manibusan’s calendar. I turned the pages to the entry where he’d written “E. Villegas, 2 p.m., SF.” When I found the calendar earlier in the week, I had assumed the professor met with Eddie Villegas for his article about immigrants and crime. I’d focused my attention on Eddie, who had contacted Alex, trying to get Dr. Manibusan’s files. But the professor must have talked to Efren Villegas, not his grandson. About his wartime experiences, perhaps. It made sense, given Dr. Manibusan’s interest in that era. I thought about the elusive army nurse named Olivia Mary Cardiff. The circle kept coming back to World War II.