Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  “I did nothing. We’ve got an unsolved murder on our hands.”

  “Relax, Annie. It’s a rare case that gets closed the first day. If you’re not ready to go home, fire off a few clips on the pistol range. Get the feel of your weapon.”

  She followed his advice and went down to the range. Her aim was as good as ever, and after three clips she became aware that Sergeant Reynolds was standing off to one side watching her. “How’d I do?” she asked him.

  “I guess you didn’t need the practice,” he told her with a smile. “Here, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  They sat at a picnic table in what served as a lounge adjoining the pistol range. “Do you know a reporter named Paul Goodhue?” she asked, taking a sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup.

  “Yeah. He been bothering you?”

  “Not really. I think he asked me for a date.”

  Reynolds snorted. “Your first day. He doesn’t waste any time.”

  “What’s his story? Is he a good reporter?”

  “He’s helped us out a couple of times. He knows his way around the city.”

  “He offered to show me the zoo.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  “What’s next?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “I’m bringing Matthew Kirk in for an interview in a half hour. I’ll have the other two in the morning. And then probably Miss Cooper and that Miguel Fernandez after I read your reports on them. Your shift is over, but do you want to sit in on my interview with Kirk?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it.”

  He arrived promptly at five o’clock, accompanied by his lawyer, a stodgy man who might have been Kirk’s brother but turned out to be his nephew. “There’s no need for you to be present,” Reynolds told him. “We just want a statement from Mr. Kirk about what happened this morning.”

  “Wait out here,” Kirk told him. “I’ll call you in if we need you.”

  Annie sat to one side, letting Reynolds do the questioning. “As you told us earlier, you were in your office at the time Perry Valencia was shot.”

  “That’s correct. We don’t have a great deal of walk-in business. Generally, someone phones for an appointment. Chris Fox handles our finances and writes the checks when necessary. Perry, Jenny, and Ashley did the actual appraising and purchased the items from our clients. Anything above ten thousand dollars has to be cleared with me.”

  “Were there any problems with Perry?” Matthew Kirk hesitated. “Not—not really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Last week Chris noticed something odd with a purchase he made. We receive regular fliers from your department regarding jewelry thefts, in case someone tries to sell us stolen goods. There was a diamond ring in one lot that seemed familiar to him. It had been purchased by Perry the day before, and Chris asked him about it. He told me later that Perry seemed flustered by his question and said he’d look into it. He claimed to know the person who sold him the jewelry, though the name wasn’t familiar to me.”

  “Do you suspect Valencia was acting as a fence for stolen goods?”

  He shook his head. “It hadn’t gotten that far yet, but I was a bit concerned.”

  “Was he a Mexican-American?”

  “Well, yes. But I don’t see what that has to do with it. He’d lived here over twenty years, since he was a child.”

  “I’m wondering if he might have been friendly with Miguel Fernandez, one of the crew that cleans your office. The security video indicates that Miguel or someone dressed like him entered your office shortly before the murder.”

  “You think Perry was involved with Miguel just because they’re both Mexican-Americans? We’ve got a million and a quarter people in this city, and more than a quarter of them are Hispanic”

  “I’m trying to touch all the bases, Mr. Kirk. It just seems odd that Miguel came up to the office at that time.”

  Annie felt she had to interrupt. “When I questioned him he denied he was there. It’s possible someone impersonated him.”

  “He had a key card to unlock the inner door, Detective,” Reynolds answered, and she knew he was displeased at her interruption. “If it wasn’t Miguel, he had to obtain the key from Miguel.”

  She knew she should keep quiet then, but she had to speak. “There’s one other possibility. Ashley Cooper must have a key card too.”

  “Ashley?” Kirk repeated with a frown. “She’s home ill.”

  “I interviewed her this afternoon,” Annie said. “She had an asthma attack, that’s all. She wasn’t in bed or anything.”

  Sergeant Reynolds sighed. ‘We have the tapes from your security cameras here. Suppose we look at Miguel again.” He chose a tape from the pile on his desk and popped it into the tape player. After a moment’s fast-forward they again came to the spot where the figure of a man in work clothes entered the waiting room and used his key card on the inner door.

  “That’s Miguel,” Kirk insisted. “It’s no one else.”

  “It looks like him,” Annie had to agree. “But why did he lie to me about being there?”

  “Perhaps because he killed Perry,” Kirk said. “And that’s how the Batman mask left the office.”

  They advanced the tape further and saw Miguel leaving at 11:01. He’d been in the office for exactly five minutes. “Let’s see the tape of the killing again,” Annie suggested.

  They watched it once more and froze it at the instant of the shooting. “Look at the time!” Annie said, rising from her chair. “It’s 11:09, eight minutes after Miguel left the office. Why didn’t we notice that before?”

  Reynolds nodded. “Whether or not that was Miguel, he was gone before the killing. We’re back to just three suspects.”

  Annie had another thought. “Look, you have tapes there showing each of the offices. Let’s see who wasn’t in their office at the time of the killing.” They played the tapes one at a time, with Matthew Kirk’s first. In each case the camera was positioned to look over their shoulder, focusing on the visitor. Kirk seemed to be alone, but all they could see was his left elbow. It did move from time to time, and at 11:16 they saw Chris Fox burst into the office and both of them went out. The tape of Jenny showed her more clearly, opening her mail and taking a thick reference book from the shelf. She left the office at 11:17. Chris Fox was also moving around, though the angle of the camera in his office didn’t show the bank of TV monitors. He muttered a soft curse and left the office quickly at 11:15.

  “Nobody could have done it,” Annie concluded.

  Reynolds shut off the monitor and thanked Kirk for coming in. “What happens now?” the jeweler asked.

  “We sleep on it. And in the morning we find out what Miguel was doing in your office and why he lied about being there.”

  Annie went along with Reynolds in the morning. Somehow, she felt responsible for Miguel since she’d interviewed him, and if he’d lied she wanted to know why. Arriving at the building, they were directed to eighteen, where they found him using an electric polisher on the floor by the elevators.

  He smiled at Annie. “The lady with the questions.”

  “That’s right. This is Sergeant Reynolds. He has questions too.”

  “Is there someplace we can talk?” Reynolds asked.

  “I’ve got to finish polishing the floor.”

  “All right, just stop for a minute. I have only one question. Why did you go to the Essex office just before eleven yesterday morning?”

  “I told the lady it wasn’t me!”

  “You’ve been positively identified on the security tape. You entered the office at 10:56 and left five minutes later.”

  Miguel shifted his gaze from Reynolds to Annie and back again. “I didn’t kill him,” he insisted. “Someone left a message for me to check with Valencia about some problem in his office, but when I got up there everything was fine.”

  “You spoke to Valencia?”

  “Sure. I poked my head in his office, and he said everything was fine there.r />
  Said he hadn’t called, that it must be a mistake.”

  “Did you talk to the person that called?” Annie asked.

  He shook his head. “It was a text message on my pager.” He showed it to them. “It just said, ‘See Perry V. at Essex.’ But when I went up there, he said he hadn’t paged me.”

  “Were those his exact words?”

  Miguel thought a bit. “He said there was nothing for me. I figured he’d taken care of whatever there was, so I left.”

  “Did anyone else see you?”

  “No. They all had their doors closed.”

  Josh Reynolds took over the questioning. “Did you at any time remove a Batman mask from that office?”

  “No sir! And I didn’t remove a thing when I went back yesterday.”

  When they were in the elevator, Reynolds asked, “Can we believe him?”

  “We can about the mask. The security camera shows him leaving the office

  at 11:01, and the murder didn’t happen till 11:09.”

  “There’s something not quite right here,” Reynolds decided. “I can almost sense it.”

  “Do you think they’re all in it together?”

  He gave a low snort. “I may feel like a master detective sometimes, but not Agatha Christie. If they were in it together they could have devised any number of methods better than this one. But I do think the key to it is what Kirk told us about Valencia buying a stolen diamond ring. If someone else there arranged for him to act as a fence, that would provide a motive for killing him before he talked and the whole operation went down the drain.”

  “Yeah.” She was still thinking about his words when the elevator reached the lobby. “Look, Josh, I’ve got an idea about that Batman mask. I’m going to check out neighborhood stores that might have sold it.”

  “Good luck. It was probably left over from Halloween. It might mean the killer has children.”

  “I’m working on another angle. I’ll see you back at the squad room.”

  There were no costume shops in the upper-class neighborhood, but she found a large toy store a few blocks away in Horton Plaza Shopping Center. Yes, they had several superhero costumes for sale, the sales clerk said. Wouldn’t she prefer Wonder Woman?

  “No, all I really need is one of these rubber Batman masks that covers the whole head.”

  She bought it and headed back to the squad room, wondering what her new boss would think of the idea.

  The Essex office was still closed for business the following day, but Sergeant Reynolds had asked Kirk to assemble his staff for further questioning. Ashley Cooper was feeling better and agreed to come in too. They gathered in Kirk’s office where there were seats for everyone. Reynolds and Annie had arrived with another detective in overalls carrying a toolbox. He went into the restroom and closed the door.

  It was Reynolds who did most of the talking, and Annie could see he was enjoying it, facing the suspects like Charlie Chan at the end of one of those old movies. “We’ve developed a theory that the shooting of Perry Valencia was connected with an earlier incident in which a stolen ring was discovered in a group of items he’d supposedly purchased from an estate. If someone in this office supplied it to him, that person might have killed him to silence him.”

  “But who would be brazen enough to commit the murder in front of our security cameras?” Kirk asked.

  “The killer used those cameras to advantage, hiding face and shape. And a text message sent to Miguel brought him to the office within minutes of the killing, as a possible suspect. Unfortunately for the killer, he came and went minutes too soon.”

  It was Ashley Cooper who interrupted at this point. “I wasn’t here myself, but Chris says the security tapes show everyone in their offices at the time of the shooting. If that’s true, and if Miguel was already gone, who could have don’t it?”

  “Exactly!” Reynolds said, glancing in Ashley’s directions as he followed the reasoning she’d outlined to him. “The only possible explanation is that the killer arrived in the office early and changed the digital clock that records the time for one of the security cameras.”

  Chris Fox was out of his seat. “Look here, if you think I—”

  That was when Annie pressed the pager in her pocket, summoning the detective in overalls waiting outside. He entered with a triumphant flourish, holding several small pieces of wet rubber. “I found them in the toilet trap,” he announced, “just like you thought, Sergeant.”

  It was Jenny Presburg who jumped up then, trying for the door. But Annie grabbed her by the waist. “All the time you were being sick in the restroom you were in there cutting up your Batman mask with manicure scissors and flushing it down the toilet.”

  Sergeant Reynolds made it official by arresting her and reading her rights.

  She just shook her head, looking dazed. “How could you have known?”

  “If anyone changed the time on their security camera, it almost had to be you. You told us you were the first one in the office that morning. It was Annie here who figured out what happened to the mask.”

  Later, after she’d been taken away and booked, Reynolds turned to Annie Sears. “We could have looked in the toilet trap for some real pieces of rubber, you know, rather than cutting up the mask you bought.”

  She merely smiled. “Why risk it? I knew she’d crack when she saw them.”

  “You did pretty well for your first case. First blood’s not always that easy.”

  “I’ve had practice,” she said. Then, “Do you have the phone number for the Union Tribune? There’s a reporter I promised a scoop.”

  BAJA

  Annie Sears had been a detective with the San Diego Police Department only a few months when she received an unexpected assignment. She was to accompany one of the veteran detectives to La Paz near the tip of Baja California to bring back a prisoner being extradited to the United States. Frank Munson, the detective sergeant she’d be traveling with, was middle aged and a bit stocky wearing a belt in its last notch that told Annie he’d been putting on weight. “This is one bad guy,” he told Annie in the squad room, handing her the plane ticket for the following day’s flight. “Dunstan Quentis is his name.” He passed over a photograph, apparently a mug shot, showing a scruffy-looking man with a shiny shaved head. “His parents were Mexican Americans, very religious. He and his older brother both started out studying for the priesthood. After that he graduated from passing bad checks to stealing jewelry. He served a stretch in prison, and when he came out he turned to armed robbery. Last month while fleeing from a jewelry store holdup on Broadway, he hit a police officer with his car and killed him.”

  Annie studied the picture. “And they arrested him in La Paz?”

  Munson nodded. “The store owner here ID’d him, but by that time he’d made it across the border and kept going south.”

  “Till there was no more south,” she mused. “It was that way back east too. Sometimes people on the run get as far as Provincetown or Key West and discover there’s no place else to go.”

  “Oh, he had reason enough to head for La Paz. His brother lives down there and for a long time it was said to be the pearl center of the world. That’s changed now, but there is still an active trade in pearls.”

  “Is that what he stole from the jeweler?”

  Munson nodded. “Pearl necklaces are his specialty. He contacted a fence there who would have bought the pearls, reset them, and sold them, but it turned out he was a police informer. The Mexican authorities arrested Quentis and he waived extradition. We get the job of bringing him back. It’s a wonder the cops made the arrest. Mexican police aren’t above a bit of bribery at times.”

  “We’re bringing him by air, I hope.”

  “Certainly. I wouldn’t want to drive the length of Baja with a cop killer.” The following morning was a Tuesday, and Annie met Frank Munson at the San Diego airport at eight o’clock. They were booked with their prisoner on a late afternoon return flight, so it would be a fa
st back-and-forth trip. Munson explained that the only problem was the airport, actually at San Jose del Cabo, nearly sixty miles south of La Paz. “That’s the resort complex where most tourists go, so that’s where the airport is. We’ll rent a car, but it’s probably about an hour’s drive.”

  “How long is the flight?”

  “Over six hundred miles, close to two hours.”

  Their plane was a small regional jet filled with a few businessmen and assorted tourists. They had to check their weapons through, and when Munson objected, the woman at the desk explained that a couple had been arrested recently for trying to get guns on board by impersonating police officers escorting a prisoner.

  Once on board, Annie strapped herself in and said, “My first case with your department involved a jeweler, the Essex killing a few months back.”

  He nodded. “I was on vacation then, but I heard you did a fine job.”

  “The jewelry business seems to be a hazardous trade.” He laughed. “I’m sure banks get robbed more often than jewelry stores.”

  Flying high over Baja California, it was sometimes possible to see both coasts of the narrow peninsula at once. The calm waters of the Gulf of California, once called the more colorful Sea of Cortez, contrasted sharply with the livelier waves of the Pacific Ocean. “From up here the land seems to be all desert,” she remarked.

  “Desert and cactuses, but there are some nice beaches. Many Californians have second homes down here.”

  “Have you been to La Paz before?”

  “A few times. Steinbeck once wrote that you can get anything in the world there.”

  She smiled. “You’re a literary man.” Munson shrugged. “Off and on.”

  “Is it true? Can you get anything in the world in La Paz?”

  “We won’t be there long enough to find out, will we?”

  They rented a four-door sedan for transporting the prisoner. The drive north from the airport was dull and dusty, but as they approached La Paz, Annie became fascinated with the iron-shuttered colonial houses they passed on the way. Once in the city itself, luxury tourist hotels took over. In the main square, vendors did a brisk business selling lottery tickets and tacos to the visitors.