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

by Janet Dawson

  She stopped as though the effort of talking about this was more than she could handle. “Would you get me some more tea?” she asked her husband, handing him the cup and saucer. He reluctantly abandoned his protective stance behind the sofa and walked briskly to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a fresh cup, the string and tag of a tea bag dangling over the rim. Perlita dunked the tea bag a couple of times, men fished it out, pressed it into the spoon and wrapped the string around the bag, squeezing out the last drop of moisture.

  “How did Dolly know the relationship was over?” I asked. “Is that why she decided to stay in the States?”

  “She could read the signs, I think,” Perlita said, nodding slowly as she sipped tea from her cup. “She and Navarro had been together for several years, and such things cool after a while. He never brought her to the States with him before, and I know he comes regularly, three or four times a year. We read about his comings and goings in the Philippine News.” She set the cup down on the coffee table.

  “This time Dolly came with him. She was excited about it, her first visit to the United States. They spent Christmas in Manila, then flew over a few days before the new year. He has a big house in Pacific Heights, in San Francisco, and they stayed there. The first week in January Navarro had some business to conduct in Los Angeles, so Dolly came to stay with me for a week. She didn’t come right out and say it, but she hinted that it was over. I think she must have been planning to stay all along, because she brought things with her in a box made of sandalwood,” Perlita said. “She left the box here at the house. I thought at the time it was carelessness, but now I realize she intended to do it.”

  “What was in the box?”

  “Keepsakes, pictures, some jewelry and papers, like her birth and baptismal certificates.”

  “And her marriage certificate to Jimmy Rios,” I added. “She left them here for safekeeping.”

  Perlita nodded. “Yes, that must have been the reason. Dolly telephoned me and said she would pick up these things before she left for Manila. But the next time she came, she had her luggage. She told me it was over between her and Navarro. She said she was staying in the United States. Just like that, on a tourist visa. I said, you can’t do that, you have to have a green card. She said that Navarro took care of it.”

  “Did he indeed?” So Max Navarro had the means to wave his fingers and produce green cards. That was a piece of news that would interest the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Of course, people with lots of money can generally buy almost anything. The fact that Navarro had set Dolly up with her bogus documents probably meant that he — and his son — knew where she was all along.

  “How did she seem to be taking the breakup with Navarro?” I asked. “You did say she was angry when he remarried.”

  “She seemed fine at first,” Perlita said with a shrug. “Resigned that it was over and determined to stay here and make a go of it.”

  My eyes moved from Perlita’s troubled face to that of her husband, who had resumed his post behind her. “You gave her a job at the travel agency and a place to live.”

  “Hell, she was family,” Arthur Randall said gruffly. The kind of family you had to tolerate because you married into it, I suspected. From the way Arthur scowled, I figured he and Dolly hadn’t meshed well. His situation had been made even worse because of Dolly’s status as an illegal, leaving him open to fines from INS.

  “We had a position open over in Oakland, and my brother’s condo was vacant. It seemed like a solution. Except Dolly and Belinda didn’t get along. They were at each other’s throats all the time. And I thought Dolly seemed real tense. Like she was expecting something to happen. I put it down to her being nervous about Immigration. We all were. She’d overstayed her tourist visa and she was carrying a phony green card. I guess she knew I wasn’t too pleased about the whole damn situation. But I went along with it, for Perlita’s sake.” He clamped his mouth shut in a grimace, and I knew he was wishing he hadn’t.

  “She was troubled by memories.” Perlita smoothed a hand over the cover of the brown leather album. “Once, just after she got here, I found her looking through this book. She had such a sad look on her face.”

  “But she was angry when Navarro got married,” I reminded them. Angry enough to plot some sort of revenge that would coincide with Navarro’s expected trip to the Bay Area? “When was that? How did Dolly find out?”

  “It was in the newspaper,” Perlita said. “In April, just a month ago. She was here for dinner and she picked up a copy of the Philippine News lying right here on the coffee table. There was a story in the newspaper about Navarro getting married to that senator’s widow, and it said she would be coming with him on his next trip to San Francisco. It made Dolly very angry. I thought she was jealous, but after the things she said about him when she decided to stay here, I knew she didn’t care for him anymore. It seemed as though she wanted to get even with him.”

  How would Dolly Cruz, the discarded mistress, get even with Max Navarro, the rich and powerful businessman? After talking with Chloe yesterday at the St. Francis, I was sure she’d seen Dr. Manibusan with that microcassette recorder. Nina Agoncillo told me that Dolly had seen the professor mail the envelope. Maybe Dolly hadn’t known what was in the envelope, but she could guess, particularly since she’d been present during the first part of Dr. Manibusan’s confrontation with Max Navarro. What had the two men talked about? I was betting their conversation had something to do with the wartime deaths of those civilians at San Ygnacio, the incident that Efren Villegas described when I talked with him this morning. So Dolly waited, until news of Navarro’s marriage set her off and triggered her search for Lito Manibusan’s papers. But how did I prove this and tie all these disparate strands together?

  Twenty-three

  OUTSIDE THE RANDALL HOUSE I WAITED IN MY car as five, then ten minutes went by. I wondered if I’d misread the signs. Then a gate at the side of the house opened and the oldest Randall boy came loping out, wearing high-top sneakers and baggy patterned pants, a large skateboard under one arm. He threw it onto the driveway, put one foot on the board and pushed off with the other, his motions fluid as he skated out into the street, heading in the direction of the Westlake Shopping Center. I quickly made a U-turn and followed. When we reached the center he stopped outside a fast-food joint and used one foot to flip the skateboard into his waiting arms. As I pushed through the glass doors, I saw him at the counter. “Yo, Nick,” some friends called from a bank of video games. He waved and ordered a double cheeseburger, large fries, and a chocolate shake.

  “Let me get that, Nick,” I said as he reached for his wallet.

  He looked down at me with long-lashed brown eyes, a fifteen-year-old heartbreaker. “Yeah, okay, sure,” he said, and grinned.

  I ordered a diet soft drink and gave the girl at the counter a twenty. Nick tucked his skateboard under his arm, picked up the tray with one hand, and followed as I led him to a table in the corner. Once seated, he set upon his food as though he hadn’t eaten in days, possibly weeks.

  “You wanted to talk,” I prompted him, swirling the ice in my cup.

  “You’re a private eye, huh?” I nodded. He was fascinated by my profession, and I answered several questions about that before he asked the big one. “You gonna try and find out who killed Aunt Dolly?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “I hope you do. It’s really bothering Mom.” He put down his burger and reached for the fries.

  “What can you tell me?”

  “Aunt Dolly was here last Thursday night, the day before, you know...” He swirled a french fry through a glob of ketchup and popped it into his mouth. “She came over for dinner. Afterward I overheard her on the phone.”

  “Eavesdropping?”

  He blushed. “I picked up the extension in the kitchen ‘cuz I wanted to call this girl, you know. Aunt Dolly was on the phone in the bedroom.”

  “What did she say?” I waited for him to answer,
but he was sucking noisily on the straw in his chocolate shake.

  “She and this guy were talking in Tagalog,” he continued. “I don’t understand a lot of it. We speak English at home.”

  “Did they mention any names?”

  He wrinkled his young forehead for a moment. “Yeah. She called him Enrique.”

  “Thank you, Nick.” I saluted him with my soda.

  “What for?”

  “Never mind. Could you tell what they were talking about?”

  Nick looked appropriately conspiratorial as he leaned toward me. “Aunt Dolly wanted some money, and this guy was jerking her around. I was gonna hang up the extension, but when I heard that, I kept listening.”

  I smiled. It seemed Dolly’s nephew shared her nosiness. “What did Dolly have to exchange for this money?”

  “She said she had a letter he was looking for. This Enrique wasn’t interested at first, but she said something I’m not sure I heard right, about blood on his cuff. Or maybe it was his sleeve.” Nick looked perplexed and shook his head. “See, could be I didn’t understand that ‘cuz they were talking in Tagalog.”

  “But they did arrange to meet?”

  “Yeah. I heard them talking about the lobby of the Hyatt, and I heard Aunt Dolly say something about Friday night. Then my mom came into the kitchen and I hung up the phone real quick.”

  While Nick polished off the rest of his cheeseburger and fries, I considered this information. Nina Agoncillo told me that Rick and Eddie Villegas had left the St. Francis the night of the fund-raising dinner, evidently on the heels of Dr. Manibusan. Rick had been wearing his topcoat, but he didn’t have it on the next time she saw him. She assumed he had checked it, but what if he’d ditched it? Because it had blood on it? I had a hunch Eddie the Knife actually killed the professor, but I recalled Inspector Cobb’s theory that there were two assailants, one who held Dr. Manibusan’s arms while the other stabbed him. Perhaps both men had searched the professor’s body. Was that how Rick Navarro wound up with blood on his cuff? A splash of evidence that Dolly Cruz saw and filed away for future use?

  If, as Perlita Randall told me, Max Navarro had provided Dolly with a green card so she could stay in the United States, it made sense to assume that the old man and Rick, his agent, knew where to find her. No doubt they knew all about Dolly’s sister and brother-in-law, and the travel agency. Navarro may even have paid Dolly off, settling a sum of money on her as a consolation prize for being the discarded mistress. She wasn’t considered a danger until she made a move against Max. The woman scorned had sharp teeth, and she intended to bite, but someone had killed her first.

  Rick knew Dolly had the envelope, and that she’d guessed he had something to do with Dr. Manibusan’s murder. So he’d agreed to meet her last Friday night. Given the jeopardy that Dolly’s blackmail scheme had put her in, it didn’t make sense that she would arrange to meet Rick Navarro at the place where she lived. Meeting him in the lobby of the Hyatt with witnesses all around was certainly safer. Which Hyatt? There were two in downtown San Francisco and one in Oakland. But Dolly had been killed at the condo before she could meet Rick.

  The Navarros had gone out to dinner that night, to Postrio, one of the City’s trendy and expensive restaurants. Plenty of witnesses would attest to their presence. But yesterday Nina told me Rick had left her at home after dinner, around nine, refusing her invitation to come in for coffee. He would have had time, I thought, to cross the Bay Bridge to Oakland. Dolly was killed about nine-thirty. Had he somehow gained entrance to the Parkside Towers? The guard didn’t remember seeing him. Unless the guard was mistaken.

  Nick had reached the bottom of his chocolate shake, slurping up the last few drops through the straw. I offered to buy him another, but he shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell your folks about listening in on your aunt Dolly’s phone call? Or the police?”

  “I bet I’d catch hell for eavesdropping,” he said. “Besides, I wasn’t sure if it was important. Is it a good clue?” He looked gratified as I confirmed this. “When the cops came to the house, I thought maybe it was one of those street things, like a mugging, or somebody was trying to rob Aunt Dolly or something like that. But Dad kept saying it was you that killed her, ‘cuz you were there. But I don’t believe you killed her.”

  “Thanks. I think I know who did. I hope I can prove it. What else can you tell me about your aunt?”

  “Aunt Dolly, she was okay. Sometimes she was hard to get along with, you know. She could really get Dad going.” He grinned. I’ll just bet she could, I thought. “My folks were real nervous because Aunt Dolly was an illegal alien.” He pronounced each syllable carefully, the term foreign to his own experience.

  “You knew about that?”

  “Shoot, yeah.” Nick tossed his dark head and tried to look worldly and sophisticated. The effect was spoiled by his attempt to balance the red-and-white plastic straw, which he’d pulled from the cup, on the knuckles of his right hand. “Dad was afraid La Migra was gonna come down on him. The green card was s’posed to be a big secret, but Aunt Dolly didn’t treat it like one. She acted like it was a big joke. Laughed about it and said something about having the last word.”

  “Having the last word about what?” I asked, thinking of Dolly’s relationship with Max Navarro.

  Nick shrugged with teenage insouciance. “I dunno.” Then he stopped playing with the straw and tilted his head to one side. “Wait a minute, I got that wrong. It was a place. She tore an ad out of the Philippine News, about a month ago.”

  “A place,” I repeated, turning what Nick just told me over in my mind. The Last Word was a good name for a bar. Something else tugged at my mind. “Thanks, Nick. You’ve been a big help.”

  He blushed and looked at me from under his long dark lashes. “Yeah, well, I hate to see my mom so upset, crying all the time, you know. Like I said, Aunt Dolly was okay. But it was like she was mad at life,” Nick said with a flash of insight. “She wanted to get back at it. Guess it got her instead.”

  That was a damned good guess, I thought as Nick and I parted outside the fast-food joint. He tossed his skateboard onto the pavement and set off, one sneakered foot providing the power. I walked to a nearby pay phone and leafed through the directory. There was a reason the phrase “the last word” sounded familiar. It was located on Mission Boulevard, a scant three blocks from the Daly City branch of Mabuhay Travel, a storefront word-processing service and copy shop with a sign in the window advising that a notary public was also available. I had passed it several times on my way to the travel agency. Dolly Cruz must have seen it, too, as well as the ad Nick mentioned. I suspected it provided other unadvertised services.

  I pushed open the front door. A sign on the counter in front of me advertised business cards and stationery. Behind the counter I saw a bank of photocopying machines along the wall to my left, one of them thumping out copies with a noisy rhythm. The right side of the room held a couple of desks, some computer equipment and printers, and several filing cabinets.

  Directly in front of me a young woman in tight blue jeans and a peach-colored T-shirt was perched on a stool, bent over a drafting table. She had long black hair piled untidily on top of her head, and a pair of long gold earrings dangled from her lobes like a spray of sparklers. Her face was screwed up with concentration as she worked on a poster, doing calligraphy with several different color pens. She looked up long enough to toss a smile at me and say, “Be with you in a minute.”

  “No hurry,” I told her.

  The copy machine stopped thumping. In the sudden silence I heard a radio somewhere, playing a bouncy dance tune. An older woman wearing thick-soled shoes and a shirtwaist dress plodded from the back of the shop to the copy machine. I don’t think she saw me. As she picked up a stack of copies, she called over her shoulder, “So what happened, Carmen? You going to tell me, or do I drag it out of you?”

  The woman at the drafting table set aside her calligraphy pen and hopped off the stool, pushi
ng a strand of hair away from her face. The earrings swayed and glinted in the light. “Well, I thought he was gonna ax me out,” she said in her high, clear voice, “but he got cold feet at the last minute.”

  At the copy machine the older woman laughed. “You’ll just have to warm him up.”

  Carmen grinned as she approached the counter. “I don’t think Eddie would like that.”

  “I’m going to deliver these.” The older woman disappeared through the back door.

  Now Carmen gave me a dazzling smile and her full attention. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. May I help you?”

  “You certainly may.” I stepped behind the counter and walked to the drafting table, examining her handiwork. “Let’s start by talking about that phone call you made a couple of weeks ago, to the History Department at Cal State Hayward. The one where you asked for Dr. Howard’s home address. Did Eddie Villegas put you up to it?”

  Carmen’s mouth had opened, ready to protest my incursion to her side of the counter. Now it rounded into a startled O as I let fly another salvo. “You’re good with the calligraphy. It’s a real talent. Do your skills extend beyond posters? How about forgery? Green cards, visas, birth certificates, maybe even a marriage certificate?”