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

by Janet Dawson

  The waiter cleared away the empty plates and brought a small dish of fortune cookies. I broke one open and read the sentence on the strip of paper. “Society prepares the crime — the criminal commits it.” I set the fortune aside and turned to Javier. “I’m curious about Dr. Manibusan’s trip to the Philippines last August. He was planning to do research here, in the central valley, then suddenly he changed his mind and went to Manila instead. Did you see him while he was there?”

  “Lito contacted me through an acquaintance at the University of the Philippines. We had dinner one evening shortly after he arrived.”

  “Did he say anything about his plans?”

  “He’d been to see our sister Concepcion and her husband, Oscar.” Javier rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “He visited the Pascals, his late wife’s family. He planned to see friends at the university. And he said something about looking through the archives. He also said he had to go to San Fernando and San Ygnacio.”

  “As I look through the professor’s files,” I said, “World War Two keeps coming up.”

  “One of my brother’s particular obsessions.”

  “Why an obsession?”

  “Our father’s death. The way he died. Lito was very young when it happened. I think it scarred him. He has few memories, so he collected mementos and studied the war.”

  “What do you remember about the occupation?”

  “We were hungry all the time.” Javier swallowed a mouthful of tea. “And I was terrified of the Japanese soldiers. We children tried to stay away from them. San Ygnacio was off the main road, just another little village in the cane fields. But it was close enough to the route of the Bataan Death March. We had an old uncle who lived along that road. He tried to give some rice to the American POWs. The Japanese soldiers beheaded him and burned his corpse.” Javier’s matter-of-fact tone underscored the horror of the long-ago atrocity. “Perhaps the fact that San Ygnacio was such a backwater explains how my father was able to survive as long as he did.”

  “Why do you say that? What was your father doing that would have brought him to the attention of the Japanese?”

  “He was a teacher, educated by the Americans, an important man in the village. He had spoken out for land reform in the thirties, and that brought him under the scrutiny of the big landowners in that part of the province. During the occupation he had to walk a narrow line between appeasement and staying alive. That’s a hard choice when soldiers stand with guns pointed at your head. Something my mother once said makes me believe he may have been collecting evidence against those who collaborated with the Japanese. The day he and those other men were killed, they had gone to San Fernando to meet with a priest.”

  “And on the way home the Japanese stragglers attacked them,” I finished, repeating the story that Alex and Pete Pascal had told me.

  “I’m not certain of that,” Javier said, “and neither was Lito. Nor, I think, was my mother. Before she died, she told Lito and me that my father had been writing things down, but she didn’t know what happened to these notes. She thinks that he gave them to the priest. And in the course of his research on the war, Lito had uncovered conflicting reports about partisans and stragglers in that part of Pampanga. It’s easy enough to blame the Japanese. They were guilty of so many other atrocities. But who can say what really happened? Who can say who killed my father?”

  So Dr. Manibusan’s interest in World War II was personal as well as professional. That put a different point on the tack. I understood why the professor wanted to know every detail of his father’s wartime death. What if that sudden trip to the Philippines had been precipitated by some new information about the San Ygnacio incident? That might explain why he canceled one research trip here in the States and scheduled another back in the Philippines. It might also explain why he’d made such an effort to find a World War II-era army nurse.

  “What if...” I said aloud, then stopped as Javier and Alex looked at me curiously. “Those landowners your father antagonized in the thirties, was Rufino Navarro one of them?”

  “Quite possibly,” Javier said. “The Navarro plantation is to the north of San Ygnacio. Rufino kept increasing his acreage before the war, and Max has added to it since. Now its border stretches past San Ygnacio. Back then it would have been close to the village.”

  People kill other people for many reasons. A child to protect a parent? I had only to look at my own response to the attack on my father to magnify the fury I had felt, and I knew the answer. Was it the answer I needed?

  I looked across the table at Javier. “You mentioned compadrazgo and utang na loob. Alex explained compadrazgo to me. What does utang na loob mean?”

  He bestowed on me his enigmatic smile. “Utang na loob is a debt of gratitude owed to someone who has done you a favor. It is a solemn obligation, one that supersedes all other debts you owe. A debt of honor, if you will. Or dishonor.”

  Twenty

  MRS. BEAUMONT DIDN’T SEEM PARTICULARLY EAGER to talk with me. Understandable, since the events of Friday night had put such a damper on her anniversary party. I could sense her hesitation over the phone line, her reluctance to involve herself further with anything as sordid as murder. Besides, she didn’t know what else she could possibly tell me that she hadn’t already told the police. I used my best persuasion skills, and she finally relented.

  “I have to pick up a few things on Piedmont Avenue,” she said. “I’ll meet you at Just Desserts.”

  I arrived several minutes before our agreed-on time of three o’clock, eyeing a wicked-looking chocolate cheesecake while I waited. I’m definitely a stress eater, and there’s nothing like being on the scene of a murder to require lots of calories with strong black coffee to wash them down.

  I had already consumed plenty of coffee that Sunday morning at Dad’s place in Castro Valley, where I cooked breakfast for my father and tried to reassure him that the Oakland police were not going to arrest me for murder. In between all of this fatherly-daughterly dialogue, I questioned him closely about Lito Manibusan, but he didn’t remember his friend talking about the death of his father and the other villagers at San Ygnacio.

  Mrs. Beaumont came through the front door of Just Desserts, wearing a pair of jade green slacks and a crisp flowered shirt, sandals on her feet, and her gray-blond hair in artful waves around her narrow face. She carried a slim shoulder bag and several parcels. I stepped up to greet her.

  “Mrs. Beaumont, I’m Jeri Howard.”

  “I know. I got a good look at you Friday night when the police escorted you out.” She sighed and looked past me at the bakery cases. “I’m going to have something fattening.”

  “I’ll join you,” I said, succumbing to the cheesecake. We stepped up to the counter halfway down the narrow white-walled shop and ordered, then carried our coffee and plates to one of the tiny black-and-turquoise tables at the back. She set her parcels on an empty chair and looked at me with a mixture of exasperation and curiosity.

  “I wanted my twenty-fifth anniversary to be memorable,” she declared. “Being interviewed by homicide detectives is not what I had in mind. Especially with so many of Ned’s business associates there. We’ll be the talk of the office tomorrow.”

  “It’s not my idea of a fun Friday night, either, Mrs. Beaumont. Just for the record, I didn’t kill Dolores Cruz.”

  “I don’t suppose you did, or the police would have you in jail. And I wouldn’t be talking to you, either. I saw you in the lobby earlier, didn’t I, when I came downstairs to give Oliver Barnwell my guest list?” As I confirmed this, she plunged a fork into her carrot cake.

  “What can you tell me about Dolores Cruz?”

  “What I told the police. Not much. I didn’t know the woman. I just knew she was living in Mr. Randall’s unit. She kept to herself, though I saw her in the building from time to time.”

  “How long was she there?”

  Mrs. Beaumont thought about this for a moment. “Since February, I think. I knew Mr. Randall
slightly, as a neighbor, and last year he mentioned that he had orders to go overseas. He said his brother and sister-in-law were going to take care of renting the condo while he was gone. The first tenant was there less than a year, moved out right before Christmas. The place was empty for a month or so. Then one day in February I saw Ms. Cruz unlocking the front door.”

  “Did she have visitors, anyone you may have seen more than once?”

  She shook her head and took another bite of her carrot cake. “I’m afraid not,” she said after washing it down with some coffee. “I’m in and out all the time, and I don’t make a habit of keeping tabs on my neighbors. Besides, Ned and I went to Cancún for two weeks in March. When we returned, I was busy with my volunteer work. Then I went to visit my mother in April. I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary.”

  “It would help if you’d tell me what happened as you got ready for your party Friday night, after I saw you in the lobby. You may have inadvertently seen something that could be important.”

  “Well,” Mrs. Beaumont said, drawing out the word as she divided Friday night into segments. “The party started at eight. The florist had already been there. After he left I took the guest list down to the guard. That must have been about six or a little before. The catering people came at six-fifteen, on schedule, but the photographer was late.”

  “How late?” I interrupted.

  “Past eight. I know because Ned’s business partner and his wife showed up on the dot of eight, and the photographer wasn’t there yet. I was a bit irked.” She stabbed the cake with her fork. “Between seven and eight I was busy getting dressed and taking care of last-minute details. My son and some of his Stanford classmates arrived about seven-thirty, and I had to shoo them away from the food. The photographer finally got there and took pictures as we broke out the champagne and cut the cake. After that I just lost track of time, but I think almost everyone showed up between eight and nine. I’d like to help you, Ms. Howard, but I was attending to my guests. I didn’t realize anything had happened until the police arrived.”

  “What firms did you use?” Mrs. Beaumont readily provided the names of the catering firm, florist, and photographer, but she balked at identifying any of her guests, pointing out that they’d been questioned by the police. I countered that those guests who had spilled out into the eighth-floor hallway could very well have seen someone entering Dolly’s unit.

  “They saw you,” she retorted. “And if you’re a suspect, you probably shouldn’t be talking to them.”

  “The police haven’t arrested me. If I were an investigator hired by an attorney defending a murder suspect, I’d be doing the same thing I’m doing now.” Since I didn’t have a prayer of getting my hands on that police report, I needed some names. Finally Mrs. Beaumont relented and gave me a few names. They were friends of her son, including the sandy-haired young man who found me at the murder scene. I suspected that Beaumont fils had been one of those in the hallway and she didn’t want him involved further.

  Mrs. Beaumont finished her carrot cake and departed with her shopping bags. I demolished the rest of my chocolate cheesecake and coffee, contemplating this whole case, which resembled the frayed end of a rope, with so many unruly strands to be tied together.

  Oliver Barnwell was on duty at the Parkside Towers. He glowered at me as I came through the front door. It was he who had called the police Friday night. He had arrived a few steps behind the young man who found me standing over Dolly’s body, and I knew he’d given the cops his version of my confrontation with the victim in the lobby of his building, a few hours before her demise.

  “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said.

  “I know you don’t. But I didn’t kill her.” His eyes were skeptical as they raked over me, but my investigator’s license heightened his interest. “You used to be a cop, right? Here in Oakland?” He confirmed this with an abrupt nod. “Do you think I’d be walking around loose if the OPD thought I was a suspect?”

  “It only means they don’t have enough to charge you,” he pointed out.

  “That’s true. They don’t have enough to charge me because I didn’t kill Dolores Cruz. I’d sure as hell like to find out who did. Not only would it get me out of the frying pan, it would help me solve a case.”

  He considered this for a moment, then nodded again. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

  I pulled a couple of photographs from my purse, pictures I’d taken out of Dr. Manibusan’s file on the Navarro family. “Have you seen either of these men here, perhaps visiting Ms. Cruz?”

  He examined the faces of Rick and Max Navarro, then shook his head. “No. She didn’t have many visitors. Just Mr. Randall and his wife. I knew about them because Mr. Randall’s brother owns that unit Ms. Cruz was living in.”

  I put the photos back in my purse. Too bad it couldn’t have been that easy. “Let’s talk about Friday night. I was here when Mrs. Beaumont brought you that list of people who would be attending the party. She told me most of the guests arrived between eight and nine. Did you check everyone on that list?” He looked insulted. “Look, I’m not suggesting that you didn’t do your job. I just wondered if the killer got into the building through the front door.”

  “I checked the name of everyone who was going to that party. Those that weren’t on the list, I called upstairs. But there were a lot of people around that time. Some of them arrived in groups. It’s possible,” he conceded grudgingly, “someone could have walked in while I was talking to somebody else. But everyone I remember seeing was either a tenant I recognized, or they were dressed fancy for that party.”

  “The florist had already delivered the flowers. The catering people came while I was there. Did any of those people leave and return? And Mrs. Beaumont said the photographer was late. What do you remember about that?”

  “I don’t recall seeing any of the catering staff come through the lobby after they hauled all that stuff upstairs, at least not until the party broke up. They’d have been easy to spot, since they were in uniforms.” He knotted his bushy gray eyebrows. “Now, the photographer, she came in about twenty minutes after eight. I know Mrs. Beaumont was antsy about that, because she called down to the desk a little after eight to ask if I’d seen the photographer. So I kept my eye peeled. That’s how I know the time.”

  “The photographer was a woman?” I asked. The name Mrs. Beaumont gave me was Espinosa Photography on Seventeenth Street here in Oakland. “Describe her.”

  “Pretty young thing with dark hair in a braid.”

  “You’re sure about the braid?” I interrupted.

  “Yeah, about halfway down her back.”

  “Was she tall or short? What was she wearing?”

  “She was about your height,” Barnwell said. I’m five eight, so that eliminated Felice Navarro. Besides, Felice’s hair was too short for a braid. “She was wearing one of those long blue-jean skirts, with a blue shirt. She was carrying a camera bag.”

  “What color was the camera bag?”

  “I don’t know. Tan or brown. I didn’t get that good a look at it.” He frowned, and his hands went to his shoulder. “I remember seeing a strap. But now I’m not sure if it was a camera bag, or just a camera.”

  The camera bag seemed to be the only point on which Barnwell wavered. We went over Friday’s events one more time, but he didn’t have much to add to what he’d already told me. When I left, I gave him my card and asked him to call me if he remembered anything else.

  Downtown Oakland seemed deserted this Sunday afternoon, quiet except for the occasional diesel roar of an AC Transit bus over on Broadway. In my office Dr. Manibusan’s boxes summoned me. I wanted to see if I could find anything in his files concerning the fund-raising dinner Javier had mentioned last night, the one Hector Guzman had hosted for Max Navarro.

  As I sorted through the folders, I found the one on World War II collaborators and pulled it out, my interest heightened by the discussion with Javier Manibusan. There
were newspaper clippings, photocopies of articles, and references to the Karnow book that Alex had lent me. Benigno Aquino, Sr., father of the murdered Ninoy, had collaborated with the Japanese, and so had Salvador Laurel’s father, Jose Laurel, the latter acting as head of the puppet Philippine government set up by the Japanese invaders. Both men were nationalists, chafing at nearly forty years of American rule, and it was easy to see how they and others could have been seduced by Japanese promises of Filipino independence. But the Japanese were interested only in exploiting the people and resources of the Philippines for the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and the brutality of the occupation soon turned most Filipinos against them.

  I closed the collaborator file and returned it to the carton, looking instead for the folder on Maximiliano Navarro. When I found that one, I looked through it slowly, searching for information on the fund-raiser, something I must have missed on my earlier reading. Finally I spotted a short clipping from the Philippine News dated late last December. Max Navarro’s name was in the headline and so was Guzman’s.

  I quickly read the article, feeling a surge of excitement. It mentioned Max Navarro’s arrival in San Francisco, on a trip to visit his son Rick and his good friend and financial supporter Hector Guzman, who planned to host a dinner for Navarro on a Friday night in January, the same night Dr. Manibusan was killed. The thousand-dollar-a-plate extravaganza would be held at eight in the evening at the St. Francis Hotel.

  I sat back and stared at the wall of my office. Dad and Dr. Manibusan met in the parking garage about a quarter after six that night, and according to the ticket stub found in the professor’s car, he had entered the garage at 6:04 P.M. If my theory was correct, the professor had been going to see Max Navarro. It was just that, a theory with nothing to back it up. The crucial question — why — remained unanswered.