NIGHT WATCH

by Carla Neggers

  NIGHT WATCH

  Carla Neggers

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  A Note from Carla Neggers

  About the Author

  Copyright © 1993, 2019 by Carla Neggers

  2nd Edition

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Design & Interior Format by The Killion Group, Inc.

  Prologue

  Joe Scarlatti had a book and a beer and figured to ride out the fourth straight day of San Francisco fog in his booth at Mario’s Bar & Grill.

  His cousin ran the waterfront place. Joe had a couple of rooms upstairs. It hadn’t always been that way, but it was that way now. And it wasn’t a bad life. After close to six months, Joe had almost gotten to the point where he enjoyed it.

  Almost.

  He spotted Hank Ryan making his way through the swirling, milky fog outside the window and put down his book. Hank was a fellow cop. A working cop. He believed Joe should be working, too. He stopped by about once a week to tell him so.

  Joe felt the dampness of the fog when Hank opened the door. It was midafternoon and the place was quiet, just Joe with his book, a few stragglers, Mario clanking around in the kitchen.

  The tourists and cheap-eats types had yet to discover Mario’s Bar & Grill. It was not a fancy place. Booths, a long bar of dark, aged oak, a worn hardwood floor, a jukebox and a couple of video games in back—that was it. Mario’s had been known for good food and fair prices since Joe and his cousin’s grandfather—Mario, Sr. —had started the place the week after Prohibition ended.

  Hank plopped into the booth across from Joe, uninvited. Hank was a big man. Bigger than Joe, African-American, smart. Cops didn’t come any smarter than Hank Ryan. He knew the law, but more than that he knew people. He was a sergeant with the potential of being a captain.

  Joe was a sergeant, too. Technically.

  “Moby Dick?” Hank shook his head. “You are in bad shape, Scarlatti.”

  “It’s ‘a damp, drizzly November in my soul,’” Joe quoted dryly. “Now I know what Ishmael meant when he said that. Something wrong with reading?”

  “No, but Moby Dick? Why the hell don’t you read something fun?”

  “Moby Dick is fun.”

  Hank shook his head again, regarding Joe with the mix of despair and disgust he usually reserved for repeat offenders.

  “You want something to drink?” Joe asked, knowing Hank stayed away from alcohol.

  “No. You look like hell, Joe. I’m surprised Mario hasn’t thrown you out.”

  “He does periodically, but he always lets me back in. I’m family and I pay my rent on time. And I don’t look that bad, Hank. You’re just jerking my chain.”

  Hank sighed. “That’s why your family and friends are always on your case—so you won’t burn out totally. There’s no escaping us, Scarlatti. But I know there’s no talking to you when you’re in this mood.”

  “Look, I’ve got some news I thought might interest you—Eliot Tyhurst is out of prison.”

  Immediately Joe felt a twist of pain and anger deep within him. “He wasn’t in long enough.”

  “I know it. Woman who put him there is still in San Francisco. Rowena Willow.” Hank pulled a crumpled scrap of paper from a pocket and shoved it across the scarred wooden table. “That’s her address.”

  Joe looked at the scrawled name of the Telegraph Hill street, and right away he knew what Hank wanted. But he said, “What the hell kind of name is Rowena Willow, anyway? You ever wonder that?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “Bet she made it up. Probably born a Debbie and figured it was too ordinary and changed it.”

  “It’s for real.”

  “Who’d do that to a kid?”

  Hank shrugged. “Her parents were kind of eccentric.”

  “Kind of?”

  “They’re dead now. Died when Rowena was eight. She moved in with an aunt even weirder than the parents. The aunt died right before Rowena nabbed Tyhurst. Now she lives alone in the aunt’s house. I hear it’s quite a place. I’ve been by it but not inside. It’s right out of Ivanhoe. A regular castle. I’m surprised it doesn’t have a moat. You’ve probably seen it.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said. “I don’t make a point of checking out architectural wonders. How do you know all this stuff about this Rowena character?”

  “There was a lot of gossip about her during Tyhurst’s trial, and I’ve kept track of her since, on and off. No big deal.”

  Hank was silent a moment. Then he said, “Tyhurst will come after her, Joe. You know he will.”

  “It’s not my problem.” The words were automatic, born less of conviction than of necessity. Nearly six months on voluntary leave hadn’t convinced Joe that he belonged back on active duty. He still didn’t trust himself. He pushed his empty beer bottle—only his first of the day—to one side and opened Moby Dick. “Count me out.”

  Hank didn’t react. He looked around the dark, atmospheric bar. Joe Scarlatti’s home. Hell of a life.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Hank asked.

  “What do you mean? Tyhurst has served his time. Nothing you can do.”

  “I’ve got a feeling about this one.”

  “Hank, the bastard’s never made any threats against her that we know about. We’ve got no cause, can’t order a watch on her.”

  Hank leaned forward, his gaze hard and knowing. “I was in the courtroom when the jury brought in the verdict. Rowena Willow was sitting in the same row as me. Tyhurst’s eyes never left her, even when the foreman read the verdict. I’ve never seen such cold eyes.”

  Joe flipped a page in Moby Dick, but he wasn’t reading.

  “He’s not going to forgive and forget, Joe. He’s not the type. He’s going to make Rowena Willow pay.”

  “No guilt trips,” Joe reminded him. When he’d gone on leave, Hank had promised he wouldn’t stoop to guilt trips to get Joe back on the job.

  “This isn’t a guilt trip, Joe. You’re Rowena Willow’s last chance. Maybe her only chance.”

  “According to your gut.”

  “Yeah.”

  Joe blew out a breath and drummed the bar with his forefinger, and Hank let him think. Mario had emerged from the kitchen and was polishing the mirror their grandfather had installed behind the bar. People, old grandpa said, should have a good look at themselves when drinking. Maybe that was why Joe had taken a booth. He didn’t want to look at himself. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, combed his hair, bothered with anything dressier than jeans and polo shirts. He knew there were dark circles under his red-streaked eyes. But for his endless walks, filling up the hours when his cousin ran him out, he would have gone to flab by now. Six months. It seemed like an eternity. He had taken a leave of absence only because he had promised his grandmother he wouldn’t just up and quit. Sofia Scarlatti had suffered enough.

  She and her late husband—the founder of Mario’s Bar & Grill—had been among Eliot Tyhurst’s victims.

  Something Hank Ryan knew all too well.

  “If this Rowena Willow lives on Telegraph Hill,” Joe said, “she can afford to hire her own bodyguard.”

  “Yeah, but she won’t. Doesn’t think li
ke that. Even if I encouraged her to hire someone, she’d just tell me I was overreacting. She lives alone, works alone, seldom if ever goes out. Hates distractions of any kind. Rowena Willow likes to keep to herself, Joe. She assumes people won’t bother her if she doesn’t bother them.”

  “Even a man she put in prison?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hank would know. He had answered Rowena Willow’s call when she’d announced to the police she had captured a bank robber. She hadn’t mentioned that “captured” to her had meant that, with the help of her computer, she’d nailed him to the wall. Hank had called in the feds and the white-collar criminal guys, but he’d kept track of the case.

  An ordinary bank robber—the kind he and Joe dealt with—would have done a couple of decades’ time for stealing not one percent of what Eliot Tyhurst had stolen. But Tyhurst was a unique case. Once a prominent San Francisco banker, he hadn’t used a gun to get what he wanted. Instead, he had used the trust people had put in him.

  “He’ll come after her,” Hank repeated, without drama. “I saw it in his eyes three years ago. One way or another, Tyhurst is going to make Rowena Willow pay for finding him out. You know it, Joe, and I know it.”

  “But she doesn’t.”

  “She doesn’t think that way.”

  Just what way did Rowena Willow think? Joe remembered reading about the brilliant financial analyst who had unraveled Tyhurst’s nefarious schemes on her own time, apparently for her own amusement. He tried to picture her and found he couldn’t. “I haven’t met her, have l?”

  “You’d remember if you had.”

  Joe assumed it was because he had a good memory for faces.

  “I doubt she’s even aware Tyhurst is getting out,” Hank added.

  Joe sighed. It didn’t sound good. “What is she, some kind of dingbat?”

  “An eccentric genius.”

  “Hell. Sounds peachy. You going to talk to her?”

  “Nope. I think it’s best we keep our plans to ourselves.”

  “Hank, there is no ‘we.’ I haven’t agreed to take this case.”

  “It shouldn’t be tough work, you know. All you have to do is keep an eye on her place, make sure Tyhurst doesn’t contact her. She doesn’t even have to know you’re there.”

  It still didn’t sound good.

  “Rowena Willow ruined Tyhurst, Joe. His reputation, his career. Cost him millions in fines and fees, a few years in prison.”

  “It wasn’t enough,” Joe repeated.

  “No,” Hank conceded. He settled back against the tall wooden booth. “Catch Tyhurst coming after Rowena Willow to exact a little revenge and we can put him away for the good, long stretch he deserves.”

  “Why me?”

  Hank looked him straight in the eye. “You need to work, Joe.”

  Without responding, Joe snatched up the crumpled scrap of paper bearing Rowena Willow’s name and address and slid out of the booth. He didn’t look back. He walked straight to the door and into the San Francisco fog, letting it envelop him, his soul.

  Behind him Hank called Mario for a cola, asked him how he was doing. He would know that Joe needed to be alone right now, just as he had known that six months was a hell of a long time for a cop to be off the streets. Just as he’d known that Joe needed to work.

  Maybe this job would save him from the abyss of regret and despair he’d fallen into. Then again, maybe nothing could. Maybe it was too late.

  One

  Bleary-eyed from a marathon session at her computer, Rowena Willow found herself stumbling into walls on the way down from her third-floor office to the kitchen. It was an enormous, drafty room with modern appliances that had been installed during her Great-Aunt Adelaide’s reluctant remodeling twenty years ago, right after Rowena had come to live with her. She remembered her aunt tearfully selling a painting from an upstairs bedroom to pay for the job. Aunt Adelaide had never had any real money of her own. Rowena had vowed never to repeat the sweet but rather eccentric old woman’s fate.

  Or her parents’ fate, she thought. But before she could probe the thought further, she dismissed it, willed it back to the far recesses of her mind. She didn’t like to think too much about her parents’ fate.

  She put on the kettle for tea and fed her two cats, Mega and Byte. For her, romantic names. Then she did some stretches and her hand exercises, trying to work out the increasingly worrisome tingling and numbness in her fingers. She couldn’t come down with carpal tunnel syndrome or any of the other repetitive-motion disorders associated with keyboard use. How would she work? What would she do with herself if she had to stay off her computer?

  The kettle whistled, and she poured a little of the boiling water into her simple white porcelain two-cup pot, swirled it around to warm the pot, then dumped it into the sink. She added two heaping spoonfuls of loose-leaf English breakfast tea and filled the pot to the brim, setting it on a teak serving tray. While the brew steeped, she chose a china cup and saucer from her collection in a glass-fronted cupboard—the forget-me-not pattern, she decided. She filled a tiny white pitcher with a dollop of milk, got out the tea strainer and placed one fat honey-butter cookie on a delicate, pale blue paper napkin. Perhaps Aunt Adelaide hadn’t known how to make a living, but she did teach Rowena how to do a wonderful tea.

  Already feeling better, Rowena carried the tray up to her tower sunroom, not far from her office on the third floor. It jutted out from the main body of the house and had floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides with spectacular views of San Francisco. The sunwashed city glistened below her. Sailboats dotted the bay, so blue under the cloudless sky. Or maybe everything seemed brighter and clearer after the days and days of fog. Rowena opened the windows and let in the breeze, half tempted to take her tea into the courtyard behind the house.

  But in the courtyard, she wouldn’t have a view of the street.

  After Aunt Adelaide’s death, Rowena had removed from the sunroom the clunky Victorian furniture her aunt favored, replacing it with dozens of pillows of every imaginable size and shape. She could plop down wherever she wanted to on the thick Persian carpet and look out at the world, a relief at the end of a long, harrowing day working at her computer and dealing with clients. Sometimes it seemed more fun, more of a fantasy, safer, just to look out at the world rather than to go out into it.

  Today she leaned back against a giant, overstuffed, tapestry pillow and set her tea tray on the floor at her side. She stretched out her legs in front of her, not on pillows, as generally would have been the case, but on the carpet. She wanted nothing—not even her toes—to obstruct her view.

  Her view not of the skyline or San Francisco Bay, but of her street.

  She poured her tea through the strainer set carefully over her cup. As she set the pot down, her eyes scanned the cars crammed into coveted spaces up and down her steep, quiet, expensive street.

  What kind of car would he be driving today? Yesterday it had been a modest two-door black sedan. The day before a red German sports car. The day before that a tan mini van.

  She added a few drops of milk to her tea. Three days in a row he had been out there, on her street, in front of her home.

  He parked in different spaces and drove different cars. Sometimes he read the newspaper and sometimes a book. Most of the time, however, he seemed just to sit there doing nothing. She didn’t know if he stayed there all day; she had to work. But he was always there at teatime. Rowena meant to check the street first thing in the morning but she kept forgetting. With the three-hour time difference between San Francisco and Wall Street, she liked to get an early start. And once on her computer, she concentrated only on the job at hand. Her work demanded her full attention and received it without quarrel. She had no intention of ending up like Aunt Adelaide, selling off paintings to survive.

  And of course she wouldn’t end up like her parents. They had been a disastrous match, feeding each other’s worst instincts. Yes, they’d been happy, but they’d died young and bro
ke.

  Willing them to the back of her mind once more, Rowena set her cup back on its saucer and did a few neck rolls to ease out the stiffness, her eyes still narrowed on the street. Her hair—the color of spun gold, friends had told her—was piled up on her head, expertly pinned, not one strand errant. She wondered if its weight contributed to the stiffness in her neck. She couldn’t recall when she’d last had her hair cut. It was quite long, at least to her waist, thick and naturally wavy—not that she ever wore it down. She always pinned up her hair first thing in the morning, even before brushing her teeth or checking her computer, which she kept on at all times. It was one of the ways she exacted control over her life.

  Maybe he’s finished what he came to do, she thought. Maybe he’s never coming back.

  She was surprised at the rush of disappointment she felt, but she didn’t have a chance to examine its source.

  She spotted him.

  He was settled behind the wheel of a rusting, dented gray pickup truck directly beneath her window. Rolling up onto her knees, Rowena peered down through the center window, suddenly irritated by its dozens of tiny panes. She wished he would step out of the truck so she could get a good look at him. Her powers of observation and her prodigious memory were her greatest weapon. She would remember if she had seen him before. Perhaps she would be able to make an educated guess as to whether he was a thug, an undercover cop on a stakeout or a private investigator. She had already dismissed a whole host of other possibilities, including a drug dealer. A drug dealer, she reasoned, wouldn’t eat powdered doughnuts in such a disreputable-looking truck; he would stick to the German sports car.

  If she could see him, she knew she would be certain.

  Who, she wondered, was he watching? She considered her various neighbors on the street, so many of whom she had never met, although she had lived there since she was eight years old. Any likely suspects? She supposed he could be waiting for something scheduled to happen on her street, but not involving anyone who actually lived there. She couldn’t deny her interest: She seldom got to unravel a mystery that involved human beings rather than numbers.