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

by Janet Dawson

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she stammered. Her hands fluttered, and she folded her arms across her chest.

  “Sure you do.” I rounded on her, with nothing to back up my suppositions except Carmen’s eyes, which held the look of a wild thing caught in a trap, afraid of me — and afraid of others. “Dolores Cruz came in here about a month ago and asked you to duplicate a marriage certificate.” Carmen clamped her mouth shut and shook her head rapidly from side to side. I leaned over her. She backed away until she could go no farther, hemmed in by computer equipment. “Talk to me, Carmen. This is serious. Dolores Cruz was killed Friday night. You could be an accessory to murder.”

  That word had the desired effect. Carmen’s mouth flew open in protest as she grabbed a laser printer for support. “Murder? I don’t know anything about a murder. She axed me to do the certificate, so I did. That’s all.”

  “But you told Eddie Villegas about it. Eddie’s a suspect.”

  Her hands went to her temples and she shook her head, fingers catching in the dangling earrings. “Oh, no. He couldn’t have killed anyone Friday night. He was with me, at a party.”

  “Why did you tell him about Dolores Cruz?”

  She looked at me for a moment, brows arched over her dark eyes, full of fear as she sought a way out of the snare. Confession is good for the soul — Carmen’s, anyway. “I just mentioned it in passing. Because the name on the original certificate was Jimmy Rios. He was a big pop star back in the Philippines before he got killed in that car accident. I’ve still got a few of his records.” She took a deep breath and plunged on. “When I said something about it to Eddie, he started axing me questions about her, like what she looked like, did she have a scar on her chin. I never noticed the scar till he axed me about it.”

  “What else did he want to know?”

  “The stuff she wanted me to put on the marriage certificate. The name. It was Manibusan, I think. He said to let him know when she picked it up. Then a week later he axed me to make that phone call. I don’t know why. I just did it as a favor to Eddie.”

  “And when I leave, you’re going to call Eddie, aren’t you?”

  Carmen’s earrings flew as she shook her head. “I won’t, I swear. I’m not gonna tell anybody. I don’t want to be involved in this.”

  I didn’t believe her. She would be on the phone to Villegas as soon as I walked out that door.

  It was past two when I got back to my office. I ignored my growling stomach and dug out the list I’d compiled a week ago, of businesses in San Francisco and San Mateo counties owned by Rick Navarro, Hector Guzman, and Sal Agoncillo, doing business as Kaibigan Inc. I found The Last Word, as I was sure I would. Dolly should have gone somewhere else for her forged marriage certificate, though I guessed she’d heard about The Last Word on some sort of illegal alien grapevine. Instead, she’d become further entangled in the Navarro net that led to her death. First Max Navarro provided Dolly with a green card, right out of thin air, and now I could link his son to a business where at least one document had been forged. At times it’s quite true that where there is smoke, there’s also fire. I’d let the feds sniff out this blaze. I picked up the phone and called Special Agent Campbell at the San Francisco office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, giving her a terse rundown of what I’d learned.

  That done, I left my office and walked to Espinosa Photography. The address Mrs. Beaumont had given me was on Seventeenth Street near Webster, a few blocks from my Franklin Street office. It was a small studio with wedding pictures and family portraits on the walls. The guard at the Parkside Towers had described Carla Espinosa fairly well. She was attractive, about my height, and she wore her dark brown hair in a braid that fell midway down the back of her plaid cotton dress.

  She had been examining contact prints at a chest-level worktable when I interrupted her. Now she pulled up a chair and sat down, crossing one leg over the other and resting her hands on one knee, with her long fingers laced together. “It’s about that murder over by the lake Friday night, isn’t it? The police questioned me Saturday. What can I tell you?”

  I leaned one elbow on the worktable. “I need to know what you were wearing and what time you arrived at the Parkside Towers.”

  “I got there about a quarter after eight,” she said, tugging thoughtfully at the strand of wooden beads around her neck. “I remember, because I checked the clock in my car when I parked. I was late. Mrs. Beaumont was upset with me, but it couldn’t be helped. I was delayed finishing another job up in Richmond. I came straight to Oakland from there. I was wearing a denim skirt, blue shirt, and flats. I had been planning to wear something spiffier, but I didn’t have time to go home and change. Everyone at the party was so decked out, I felt a bit grubby.”

  “What kind of camera bag do you carry?”

  “That one,” she said, pointing to a scruffed brown leather square that had seen many years of service.

  “You had it with you Friday night?”

  “Yes. I always carry it.”

  I walked back to my office, stopping at a deli on Franklin, where I picked up a pastrami on rye and a couple of kosher dills. I turned things over in my head, feeling that I must have missed something. As I spread my lunch out on my desk, I played the messages on my answering machine. There was one from Oliver Barnwell, the guard at the Parkside Towers, asking me to call him. I picked up the phone and punched in the number.

  “I was talking to one of my men,” he said when I identified myself. “He was on the desk Saturday. He says a Filipino man showed up about noon, asking to see Ms. Cruz. Beat a hasty retreat when my man told him she was dead. I told the cops, and now I’m telling you.”

  “Description?” I asked.

  “Young, stocky, had an accent. Sharp dresser.” Rick Navarro, I thought. “Something else I wanted to tell you,” Barnwell continued in his crisp voice. “I’ve been mulling it over, and I think the photographer was carrying just a camera, not a camera bag. You thought that was important, so I wanted to let you know.”

  Now I was perplexed. Carla Espinosa had just verified that she’d carried her camera bag up to the Beaumont party. Now the guard wasn’t sure. Of course, he hadn’t been certain when I spoke with him yesterday. Had he seen more than one person with cameras? Some of the guests? That was a possibility. I thanked Barnwell for his information and broke the connection. Then I picked up the phone again.

  “You again,” Mrs. Beaumont said when I called her. She sounded more resigned than exasperated. “Well, of course people brought cameras to the party. It was a celebration. Flashes were going off everywhere. Now, is there anything else, Ms. Howard?”

  Something prodded at me as I opened the window to get some air circulating in my office. I stood for a moment, looking out at the girders of the half-constructed high-rise to the west. I turned from the window and grabbed a bottle of mineral water from the refrigerator. Setting it on my desk, I went to the filing cabinet and pulled out Dr. Manibusan’s calendar, turning to that week last November where he’d made the notes about his appointment with Efren Villegas, where he had written “Sacramento” and “Potter — Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo.” I had a collection of California phone directories on my bookshelf, not all of them current. I found a number of Potters in the two central California cities and began making calls.

  It was a time-consuming process, netting me busy signals and phones that rang without being answered. In between calls I ate my pastrami and crunched bites of pickle, my fingers reeking of brine. I wished I had Dr. Manibusan’s telephone bills for the last year, I thought as what remained of the afternoon moved toward evening. Those bills would have shown calls to the cities the professor had noted on his calendar. But I couldn’t dig through the rest of the cartons, looking for them. I didn’t have the luxury of time.

  Just after six I found Mrs. Sally Potter at home in San Luis Obispo. “I do remember him,” she said after I introduced myself and mentioned Dr. Manibusan. “He
was trying to find some old neighbors of ours, Harold and Olivia Beddoes. We lived next door to them in San Francisco, way back in the fifties.”

  “Did they move to Sacramento?”

  “Yes, in 1959. We exchanged letters and Christmas cards for a while. Then I lost track of them, I’m afraid.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “Yes, I dug it out for Dr. Manibusan.” She set the phone down and went to find the old address book. “Vintage 1964, I think,” Mrs. Potter told me. “But Harold Beddoes was self-employed. A painting contractor.”

  Probably long since retired, I thought. But maybe not. My Sacramento phone directory was just a year old. I looked under Painting Contractors in the Yellow Pages and found “Beddoes and Son.” But it was now past working hours and I got the firm’s answering machine. In the residential listings I found several prospects that could be Harold or Walter, or so their initials led me to believe. I picked up the phone again. The next hour was a replay of the search that had netted me Mrs. Potter. Wrong numbers, no answers, disconnect recordings — I got them all and I still hadn’t found the right Beddoes.

  It was like playing the slots at Reno and getting two cherries instead of the required three. I took a breather at seven-thirty, ready to call it a night and go home. But I decided to give it another half hour and reached for the phone.

  Six calls later the cherries lined up.

  Twenty-four

  IF I THOUGHT THE BAY AREA HAD BEEN HOT THESE past few weeks, it was nothing compared to the central valley. The temperature inside my Toyota rose steadily as I drove northeast on Interstate 80, and opening the vents only admitted a rush of asphalt-heated air from the freeway. I stopped in Fairfield for the biggest container of iced tea I could buy, with plenty of ice. I reached for it constantly as I continued on through Vacaville and Davis, my clothes damp with sweat by the time I reached the outskirts of California’s capital. The next time I bought a car, I vowed, it would have air-conditioning. I certainly spent enough time on the road to justify it.

  The boy who had answered the phone the night before told me Olivia Cardiff Beddoes was his grandmother and that she lived with the family. But she was out to dinner with her son and daughter-in-law. I told him I was a private investigator who needed to speak to his grandmother most urgently. This impressed him enough to give me the family’s address.

  They lived south of central Sacramento, off Florin Road, in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood with big lawns shaded by oak trees. I had left the Bay Area before seven, getting a jump on the morning rush-hour traffic, so it was about nine when I rang the bell at the front of the ranch-style home. I guessed that the children in the household had gone to school, but a Honda sedan was parked in the double driveway, next to a Chevy van with BEDDOES AND SON painted on the door.

  Walter Beddoes answered the door, a tall man in tan coveralls, entering middle age, his blond hair receding and a worried expression in his blue eyes. He was considerably upset that his son had given out the family address over the phone, and both he and his wife had stayed home from work to greet me. Mrs. Beddoes, a head shorter than her husband, with a round pleasant face and dark hair above her blue linen suit, joined him as he peered at my investigator’s license.

  Beddoes had a frown on his squarish face as I told him why I was there. “I remember the professor,” he said. “Seemed like a nice guy. He drove up here to see Mom last November. She’s been interviewed a lot about her war experiences. I don’t know that she likes to talk about it over and over again.”

  “This is really important, or I wouldn’t have driven all the way up here from Oakland. I think your mother may have some information that would help solve the professor’s murder.”

  The word “murder” got their attention. Beddoes and his wife exchanged glances. “He was very excited after he talked to her,” Mrs. Beddoes said. “Something she told him triggered that. I guess if it’s important...”

  They opened the screen door and admitted me to their living room, leading the way through the kitchen and a sliding screen door that led to a covered patio with an oval table and matching chairs in white metal. A large rectangular barbecue grill stood on the far side of the patio, protected by a clear plastic cover. Walter Beddoes pointed me in the direction of his mother.

  Olivia Mary Cardiff Beddoes, formerly of the United States Army Nurse Corps, sat at the far end of the patio on a cushioned chaise longue, a hardbound book open on her lap. Her morning coffee sat on a table at her elbow, next to a stack of books. She wore pale green cotton slacks with a matching shirt. A wide-brimmed straw hat covered her white hair. She looked up as I approached, her blue eyes bright and sharp behind a pair of thick-lensed glasses.

  “You must be the private eye,” she said cheerfully, pushing back the brim of her hat. Her voice had a pleasant crackle, still strong, like her personality. Her blue eyes surveyed me from a face like fine old parchment, shot through with tiny wrinkles.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to clear the security checkpoint at the front door. My son’s being protective. Though what he thinks he’s protecting me from that I haven’t already seen —” She shook her head. “Grab a chair, Miss Howard.”

  “Please call me Jeri.” I pulled the chair close enough to examine the titles of the books on the table. They were all library edition mysteries, ranging from Marcia Muller to Susan Dunlap. She stuck a tasseled bookmark between the pages of the novel she was reading, closed it, and rested her hands on the book’s plastic-encased dust jacket. I saw that it was Dick Francis’s latest. I gestured at the book. “He’s one of my favorites.”

  “Mine, too. And I love detective novels. Never thought I’d meet a real-life private eye. I’ll bet you’ve got some stories to tell. But you didn’t drive up here from Oakland to talk about yourself, Jeri.”

  “No, I didn’t. I came to talk about Lito Manibusan.” I told her about the professor’s murder, how my own father found the body that night in January, and described how my search through the professor’s files led me to this vital old woman. “I know you were an army nurse in the Philippines during World War Two, Mrs. Beddoes. Why did the professor come all the way to Sacramento to talk with you?”

  She picked up her coffee cup and took a sip before she answered. “I was a prisoner of war.”

  “I thought it was something like that. It must have been terrible.”

  “I survived,” she said, her old blue eyes suddenly steely. “A lot of people didn’t.”

  As she set the coffee cup back on the table, the book slid off her lap, forgotten. I picked it up as she began to talk. She told her story in her own way, simply, as she had no doubt told it many times before, her spare words all the more powerful for the images they evoked.

  “I grew up on a farm outside of Ford, Kansas. That’s in the western part of the state, near Dodge City. I got a scholarship to nursing school in Wichita. When I graduated in 1938, there weren’t any jobs. We were coming out of the Depression. Besides, I wanted to get out of Kansas. I’d been there all my life. So I joined the army. And where did they send me? Fort Bliss, down by El Paso. Desert and dust storms and heat. I might as well have stayed in Kansas.” She chuckled.

  “After that the Philippines sounded like a tropical paradise. And it was, Jeri, it was.” Her smile became dreamy as she reached back into memory. “I arrived in the Philippines in January of 1941. I loved it. Manila was exciting, alive, a whirlwind of fun. When I think of Manila before the war, I remember balmy nights on the veranda at the Army and Navy Club, the scent of frangipani and bougainvillea, and Benny Goodman tunes floating on the breeze.” She laughed at the memory. Then the smile left her face.

  “Well, it was fun while it lasted. I was stationed at the post hospital on Corregidor. A friend and I had gone to Manila that first weekend in December. It was the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I recall. The Japanese hit early the morning of December 8, about the same time they attacked Pearl Harbor and Guam. We were on t
he other side of the International Date Line, of course. Everyone knew it was coming, sooner or later. We should have been better prepared.” She stopped and reached for her coffee. “I won’t go into excruciating detail about things you can read in books. MacArthur declared Manila an open city and the American forces fell back to Bataan and Corregidor. The Japanese kept coming, relentless, attacking, bombing the island, finally wearing down our defenses. Corregidor surrendered on May 6, 1942, a month after Bataan.”

  Olivia Beddoes looked at me grimly over her coffee cup. “They sent the nurses to Santo Tomas, an old university on the north side of Manila. The Japanese turned it into a big POW camp, mostly civilians. We had a structure, an organization. I guess that’s what kept us going for three years. We were on short rations and we damn near starved to death. I remember the Filipinos throwing food to us over the walls, even when they didn’t have much themselves. The Japanese shot those they caught. It was bad. But it wasn’t as bad as Bataan.” She didn’t say anything for a long time. The word Bataan conjured up the Death March and its cost in human lives.

  “We were liberated by the First Cav on February 3, 1945. The battle for Manila went on for another month. You’ve heard the term scorched earth? Well, the Manila I knew before the war was obliterated. God, what those poor civilians went through.” She shook her head. “But you wanted to know what Dr. Manibusan and I talked about. And I’m getting to it.

  “A couple of months after Manila was liberated, the army sent me home. Before I left I went up to Pampanga Province. It was a pilgrimage, I guess. Before the war I was engaged to a young army lieutenant. His name was Bill. I knew his unit had been at Bataan, but I didn’t know what happened to him. After I got out of Santo Tomas I asked around. Finally I talked to someone who knew Bill. He died on the Death March, near the town of Lubao, in Pampanga. I had to go pay my respects, you see, before I left the Philippines for good.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as though reliving that other lifetime had drained her strength. Then the blue eyes opened and she continued.