by Joanne Pence
“What cops? No one was there when I arrived.” He looked at her a long moment with the same worried, unhappy expression he’d worn since he first showed up at the hospital.
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What do you mean, no cops? It’s a crime scene.”
“Oh?”
Frowning, she called Bradley Frick, the landlord. He had been talking to the police when she left for the hospital with Kiki. Bradley confirmed what Richie told her—the police had already come and gone. No one was there, and no one was watching the place.
Bradley did not sound happy about any of it.
She put in a quick call to the patrol officers who had first shown up. After talking to them, she was even more disgusted.
“Great, just great,” she said to Richie. “The uniforms at the scene called it in to the robbery detail. But since it appeared that nothing was actually taken, Robbery is questioning if it’s really their case. Maybe it’s a simple assault, they said, which could be handled by Central Station.”
“Do they have the manpower?”
“Not as much as Robbery.” Her shoulders slumped. “I know what’s going on. Our new police captain is monitoring crime statistics and clearance rates down to the performance of individual inspectors. Word is out that each unit needs to improve the clearance rates of their cases, which means everyone only wants cases that are easy to solve.”
“Bureaucrats,” Richie muttered.
“I’ve got to go back home and see what’s going on,” she said, and then remembered that she didn’t have her car. She glanced at Richie. “Um…”
“No car?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I didn’t want to leave Kiki.”
They went back into the waiting room and she gave Esteban her phone number, making him promise to call her as soon as he was given any news about his mother’s condition. He nodded and returned to Twitter.
“Let’s go,” Richie said, draping his arm across her shoulders and giving a light squeeze of support. “I’ll drive you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Richie had finally reached the point in his life where he rarely did things he didn’t want to do. But that freedom didn’t include dealing with his mother. Around noon the next day she phoned him.
“Nothing’s wrong, Richie,” Carmela Amalfi said. “But I need you to come to my house right away. I mean, fast. Now, in fact. It’s about my friend, Benedetta. I want you to talk to her. She needs advice, and I can’t help her.”
“What kind of advice?” he asked. A reasonable request in his opinion.
He heard her suck in her breath. He knew what was coming even before she said, “It’s complicated.”
And that was the kiss of death for any argument he might have. “Complicated” to his mother had a mystical significance. Anything complicated couldn’t be discussed by phone, email, text, or god-forbid, by mail. Anything complicated must be handled face-to-face, and depending on the severity of the issue, either over a cup of coffee (mildly severe) or a glass of wine (big trouble).
He knew if he didn’t do what she said, drop everything and go to her house immediately, he’d be hounded until he complied. The best way, no, the only way to get her and Benedetta—whoever she was—off his back was to do whatever Mamma Amalfi asked. And so he found himself driving in circles near the top of Russian Hill searching for a place to park. Normally, he pulled into the space in front of his mother’s garage, but another car was already parked there. The troublesome Benedetta’s, he guessed. It didn’t make him any more eager to help her.
Still, he guessed doing this was better than sitting home thinking about Rebecca. He was sick of worrying about her. Last night, hearing she had been driven off in an ambulance, nearly killed him. It brought back the horror he felt when he got a call about his fiancée having been in a car accident. He had rushed to the hospital back then, and sat in some depressing, ugly waiting room for nearly two days. They couldn’t save her.
One part of him wanted to run from Rebecca, to stop seeing her or caring about her, so he could stop worrying about her and the dangers of her job. But another part wanted to run to her, to make the most of whatever time they might have together. Having lost his father at a very young age, and then his fiancée whose job was in a bank, he had learned that life threw curve balls that were completely unexpected. It was crazy that someone like bank loan officer could be taken at an early age, while some daredevil Flying Wallenda type could live to a hundred. But such was life.
And life was also too short to spend looking for a parking space in the city. He pulled into an opening in front of a garage just a few doors down from his mother’s flat. He hoped he’d hear the tow truck before it drove off with his Porsche.
Carmela lived on the top floor of a three-story building that Richie had bought for her when he couldn’t convince her to move to a nicer, larger home. She refused to leave “the old neighborhood” and the friends she’d made there. A tenant, a middle-aged single man, lived in the flat below, and a garage took up the ground floor. Richie had only seen the tenant once in all the times he’d gone there to visit his mother. Either the guy worked all the time or purposefully avoided him. Richie suspected it was the latter. But if Carmela liked him, he didn’t care.
Richie let himself into the main door, and hurried up the interior staircase to Carmela’s flat. He knocked, then opened her door. “Ma, it’s me,” he called.
“Vieni qui, Richie,” she answered. “In the kitchen.”
He walked in and his gaze immediately went to the table. The wine was out. Uh oh.
Carmela introduced him to Benedetta Rossi. She was in her sixties and “skinny as a rail” to use one of Carmela’s expressions, with dark brown hair and eyes. To him, she resembled most of Carmela’s friends, except that her nose was long, thin, and shaped like a beak. He took off his jacket, and sat at the table with them.
“Vino?” Carmela asked. The wine bottle was nearly empty, and looking at the flushed cheeks and shiny eyes of both women, he knew why.
He asked for coffee. Since Carmela always had a pot going, she immediately poured him a cup, and then added some slices of coffee cake to the cheese and sourdough bread already on the table.
“So what’s going on?” he asked, hoping to get this over with as soon as possible. Earlier that morning he had heard from Rebecca that Kiki didn’t need surgery “at this time,” and was resting, but he wanted to be available to her in case Kiki took a turn for the worse. As much as Rebecca liked to act as if nothing bothered her, inside she could be falling apart.
“Benedetta lives down on Francisco just off of Hyde,” Carmela said. “She wants to sell her house and move to San Jose to be closer to her kids, so she had to put in a new heater and air conditioner. To her surprise, the company called in a building inspector to check that they did it right.”
Richie nodded. “They do that,” he said, spreading some cambozola cheese on a sliver of sourdough and taking a bite. He knew the street where Benedetta lived. It was a couple blocks from the “crookedest street” and often seen in pictures of the city with the cable car and the bay and Alcatraz in the background.
“Well, some big bully of a building inspector went to her house,” Carmela continued, “and the hot-shot came up with so much stuff wrong with it, she doesn’t know what to do.”
“Wait,” Richie said. “He didn’t just check the HVAC, but checked the whole house?”
“That’s right,” Benedetta said. “He told me the remodeling had to be torn down. I don’t have money for that!”
Carmela put her hand on Benedetta’s arm. “Poverina!”
“Tear it all down?” This story didn’t make sense to Richie. Years back, he had dealt with a lot of building inspectors as he bought and sold houses, which explained why his mother thought he might be able to help Benedetta. Real estate was one of the main ways he made money while he slowly built up his main business by developing his reputation as a helper of mankind, so to speak.
Richie Amalfi, nice guy. “What about the contractor who did the work? If he’s licensed, he can work with the inspector.”
“It was her son and his friends,” Carmela said.
Richie didn’t speak for a moment. “How much work did they do?”
Again, Carmela answered. “They extended the kitchen—made it bigger. And put in a laundry room for her.”
“Did they add new plumbing or have a plumber do it?”
“They did it,” Benedetta said. “Just a few pipes.—Ma che schifozz’! How this sucks!—How hard is that? And a bigger water heater, of course.”
“Of course,” Richie said, wondering how he was going to get out of this. It sounded like a first class screw-up. “And the electricity? Did they deal with two-twenty wiring for the dryer?”
“Two-twenty?” Benedetta looked at Carmela. “How am I supposed to know all that stuff? They put in a plug. Several plugs. What’s the big deal?”
“That’s not good,” Richie muttered.
Benedetta stared so hard at him, if her black eyes could have leaped across the room and smacked him in the head, they would have. But then, her lower lip started to tremble, and her eyes grew watery. If she began to cry, Richie knew Carmela would feel obligated to join in.
San Francisco did have a stringent and expensive building permit process because of earthquake and other potential dangers, real or perceived, and frankly, as a way to put more money in the city’s coffers. As a result, building inspections and permits were a hassle that no sane person wanted to get involved with. “Usually, you can work things out with buyers,” he said. “They might be willing to ignore the issues if you give them a credit in the sale price. Then they can fix them themselves.”
“Not this problem.” Benedetta’s voice was low and the tone bitter. Her mouth wrinkled. “The building inspector said he might have to turn it over to the building compliance department, and that they might condemn my house!”
Richie could scarcely believe her. He’d never heard of a building inspector going that far—especially in an area where homes sell for well over a million dollars. “How long ago was all this work done?” he asked.
“Let’s see, it was when my Georgie was still living at home. He was twenty-five when he got married, and now he’s forty-three, so about eighteen, twenty years.”
“And in all this time it hasn’t given you any problems?” Richie asked.
“None.”
That was another surprise, albeit a pleasant one.
“Did you tell him that?”
Benedetta nodded. “I was in tears so he gave me the name of a realtor who deals with distressed property. Distressed! Who knew my house would be called such a thing?”
Carmela patted her friend’s hand and pushed some coffee cake towards her.
“Did you talk to the realtor?” Richie asked.
Benedetta snorted, then took a bite of the cake with perfectly sized, obviously false, teeth. Richie waited until she swallowed. “Yeah.” She took a sip of wine. “She said she might be able to sell it to some foreign investor with a lot of money who won’t care if he has to tear it down and build something else. I was ready to go for it until I talked to Carmela.”
“That’s right.” Carmela faced Richie and tapped the side of her nose. “I can smell a scam a mile off, and this one stinks to high heaven. I’ve been to Benedetta’s house many times. It’s a beautiful place, worth a fortune. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Richie pondered his mother’s words. She might drive him crazy most of the time, but she was crazy like a fox when it came to anything involving money. If she smelled a rat here, she might be right. And, if Benedetta’s house went at a “distressed” sale price, considering its location, he might be interested in it himself.
“I’ll check it out,” he said. “And I’ll look into the realtor you’re dealing with. I want to see how legitimate she seems. What’s her name?”
Benetta dug through her gigantic handbag and then gave him the woman’s business card: Audrey Poole, Bay-to-Breakers Realty.
Oh, shit.
He not only knew her, but when he bought and sold real estate, he used to date her. If Audrey was involved, this might not be a good situation for a number of reasons.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rebecca arrived at Homicide early that same morning. Although it was Sunday, she wanted to use the quiet of the day to finish paperwork on a few old cases. The first thing on her agenda, however, was to phone Esteban for an update on Kiki’s condition.
Last night, Esteban had given Rebecca the news that Kiki had regained consciousness. Now he explained that the CT scan had showed some swelling inside her head. They inserted an intracranial pressure monitor in the space between the skull and the brain to monitor any changes in pressure. If it increased, she would need surgery. The important thing was to keep her calm and still.
Her second order of business was to call up Robbery and find out why they weren’t all over Kiki’s apartment trying to find out who attacked her. Okay, she knew why. But that didn’t mean she was above trying to shame someone in the department into investigating what had happened.
Richie phoned Rebecca and asked about Kiki’s condition, and then asked Rebecca to dinner. She told him she was too busy and quickly ended the conversation.
When she left work, she headed to the hospital.
She was glad to find Kiki looking amazingly alert, despite her bandaged head and the brace she wore to stabilize her neck and spine. All kinds of tubes were stuck into her arms and head, as well as taped to her skin to monitor her. Given all that, Rebecca realized if Kiki had been struck another time or two, she most likely would be dead.
Her son and daughter were with her. Rebecca said hello to Esteban and then hugged Sierra, who she hadn’t seen in several months. Sierra was a beautiful young woman, twenty-four years old, now working as a paralegal at a Silicon Valley law firm. Kiki once mentioned that Sierra was finding the job so interesting, she was thinking about going to law school. Kiki was quite proud of her daughter.
“Kiki, how are you doing?” Rebecca said softly.
“I’m going to get better, Becca. And when I’m out of here, I’m buying Spike a filet mignon. My kids told me it was his barking that caused you to check on me.”
Rebecca nodded, proud of her little guy. “He’ll love it.”
The room was filled with a number of small bouquets of flowers, and another that was a dozen roses. “Look at that,” Rebecca said to Kiki. “It appears you have an admirer.”
“I wish,” Kiki murmured. “He’s actually your admirer. Those are from Richie.”
“That was nice of him.” She went over to the flowers. Their soft scent took away some of the medicinal hospital smell of the room, and gave it a gentle perfumed quality. She lightly touched a rose petal as her thoughts momentarily turned to the man who sent them.
“I don’t know when I’ll get an admirer again,” Kiki said. “They shaved off most of my hair!”
Rebecca took a deep breath and turned back to Kiki with a smile. “You’d get admirers if you were bald.”
Rebecca sat by the bed, and after more talk about how Kiki was feeling, Rebecca gently prodded her about the night she was attacked.
“I know you’re a cop, Becca,” Kiki said. “And you’ve got to talk about these things, but I didn’t see who attacked me. And I have no idea why he did it.”
“Do you remember anything about it?”
“Only that, one minute, I saw you and Spike in the yard, and the next some man was standing in my kitchen.”
“Did you recognize him at all?”
“No. He wore something over his face, and gloves, I think.”
She wearily shut her eyes and Rebecca waited a moment before she said. “Do you remember anything else?”
“I fought … and I ran. And I think … I think I heard you calling me.”
Rebecca nodded. The story confirmed what little she had heard from the investigators af
ter she’d kicked up enough of a fuss at work that they sent someone to Kiki’s flat. They had dusted it for fingerprints, but they hadn’t found any that were on file. It went along with Kiki’s statement that her attacker wore gloves.
“Can you think of any reason someone might have a grudge against you or want to hurt you?” Rebecca asked.
“You think someone is after me?” Kiki’s breathing started to quicken.
Her daughter, Sierra, put her hand on Kiki’s arm. “It’s okay, Mom. She’s just looking for a motive. Nothing to worry about.”
“Sierra’s right,” Rebecca chimed. “I’m just thinking of someone who had a big bill to pay, or something like that. Someone who’s angry and things got, momentarily, out of hand.”
Kiki drew in a deep breath. “I don’t know. My head hurts so much.” She shut her eyes again.
“Okay,” Rebecca whispered. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll have plenty of time to talk later, when you feel a little better.”
“One thing …” Kiki’s voice was scarcely a whisper. “The owner of the building, my spa’s building, he wants to sell. I have a good lease, so they can’t force me out. I spent a lot of money converting the space into a spa … they can’t force me to go …”
“Who wants to buy it?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know. Some foreign investors. One of my customers knows all about it. She’s a realtor.”
“Let me look into that.”
“It’s not a reason to attack a person, is it?”
Rebecca had worked any number of cases where a person was brutally attacked for a lot less reason than ruining a real estate deal. And in hers, the victims had ended up in a morgue, not a hospital. “I’m sure we’ll find yours was a random attack—a robbery gone bad.”
“Maybe,” Kiki murmured.
Rebecca didn’t want to trouble her any more than necessary, but she had to ask. “There were no signs of a break-in at your house, and your alarm didn’t go off. Did you, by chance, let someone inside?”