A Plague of Secrets (3 page)

Two minutes later, his eggs ordered, Bracco stirred his own coffee and looked across at his partner. “So, how about our victim?”

“I think he hit Jansey.”

“How do you get that?”

“Her cheek didn’t look right. Even under the tears. She didn’t love him, I don’t think. You see how she talked about him? ‘He didn’t have any power. He just ran this coffee shop. There wasn’t any drama in his life.’ That’s not a woman who loves her man.”

“So she knew about the weed?”

“Of course. How could she not?”

“You notice she didn’t say anything about the backpack.”

“She might not have known he had it with him. She didn’t see him leave home, you remember. But as you said, the killing wasn’t about the weed or whoever shot him would have taken it.”

“If he’d known. If it was a ‘him.’ ”

“Well, yes, that.”

Their waiter arrived with their plates and both inspectors dug in for a moment before Bracco took it up again. “You believe her about the gun?”

“Not for a second. I ask if he owns a gun and she says he couldn’t. Not he didn’t.”

“I heard that. So he was shot with his own gun?”

“We’ll find out soon enough, but that’s my bet.”

“He know the shooter?”

“Maybe.” She chewed for a minute. “No sign of struggle, anyway. He gave him his own gun and then the guy shot him with it? How does that play?”

“I don’t know.” Bracco put his fork down. “Actually, maybe Jansey.”

“Pretty early for that, but maybe.” She pushed food around on her plate before she looked up. “We have to search the house.”

“I know.” And Bracco added, “Like yesterday.”

Joanne Ticknor sat
next to her husband, holding her grandson Ben on her lap on the couch in her daughter’s living room.

Jansey came back into the room behind a man and a woman, both of whom were dressed casually but who looked serious and professional. “Mom, Dad,” she said, “these are inspectors Bracco and Schiff with the police department.” At the introductions Wayne Ticknor stood and shook hands, and Ben wriggled out of his grandmother’s arms and came forward to do the same.

Bracco went down on a knee to shake Ben’s hand. “How you doing, big guy?”

“Okay. Are you going to find who shot my daddy?”

“We’re going to try, Ben. We’re really going to try.” Then he looked up at Jansey’s mother. “But we’re going to have to have a little adult time to talk before we really get going.”

Getting the message, she stood up. “Come on, Ben, let’s you and Grandma go and find ourselves a snack in the kitchen. How’s that sound?”

As soon as they’d gone, Wayne asked, “Do you have any leads yet?”

Bracco gave him a nod. “Well, as a matter of fact, we might, or at least a place to start.” Including Jansey now, he continued, “Dylan was wearing a backpack that was full of marijuana. Did you know anything about that?”

She opened, then closed her mouth. Finally came out with it. “I didn’t know he had some with him this morning, but it doesn’t surprise me, no. He was selling it sometimes. I wanted him to stop. I asked him to stop. But he said it didn’t hurt anybody and we needed the money.”

“That asshole,” Wayne said.

“Dad.”

“Putting Ben and you at risk like that? What a fool.”

Schiff turned to the father. “You had other problems with him, Mr. Ticknor?”

“You could say that.”

“Dad!” Jansey repeated. “That’s enough, okay? He’s dead. Whatever he did, it’s over now. Let’s just leave it alone, can we?”

But Bracco wasn’t of a mind to do that. “What else did he do, Mr. Ticknor?”

Wayne looked to his daughter and shook his head. “Why can’t they know what he really was, Jansey? That he wasn’t much of a father to Ben? Or that he beat you?”

“He didn’t beat me!” She turned to Schiff, met her eyes. “He didn’t beat me,” she repeated more softly. “He hit me a couple of times, that’s all.”

“Recently?” Bracco asked.

“A couple of weeks ago, we talked about this marijuana thing and he got mad at me. But it wasn’t really a fight. He just got physical for a minute. It wasn’t really a big deal.”

“No, no big deal at all,” Wayne put in, with heavy sarcasm, “except for six months ago when she and Ben moved in with us for a couple of weeks.”

“He was under a lot of stress then,” Jansey said. “He wasn’t perfect, okay, but nobody is, you know?”

“True,” Debra said, “we all have imperfections, but maybe one of his made somebody want to kill him. You knew him better than anyone else. Maybe you could help us.”

Bracco jumped in. “Was anybody mad at him? Jealous about his job? Anything like that?”

Nothing.

Schiff asked, “Jansey, do you know where he got the marijuana? If it’s any help,” she continued, “we brought a search warrant along with us.”

This brought a bit of reaction. “What for?”

Bracco stepped up. “Dylan was on his way to work from here at home. Which means the weed was probably in this house last night. There might be more of it. He might also have left some records of where he got it or who he was going to sell it to.”

Jansey looked to her father, indecision playing over her features. Finally, she came back to the inspectors. “It’s in the attic,” she said. “He grew it up there.”

Debra Schiff climbed the stepladder and ducked through the small opening in the upper half of the closet wall and straightened up into a warm and humid room baking in a grow-light glow. She found a light switch next to the opening and flicked it, then spoke back over her shoulder to Darrel, on the steps of the ladder right behind her. “You’re not going to believe this.”

Bracco poked his head into the opening. “Lordy Lordy,” he said.

The attic space the size of the house’s footprint was filled with plants in various stages of growth, from just-germinated little shoots in cardboard egg cartons to full-blown, six-foot-high plants in raised planter boxes. The air was rich with the resinous scent of marijuana.

Bracco got through the opening and straightened up next to his partner, taking it all in. They shared a wondering glance and, at last, Bracco let out a breath. “Wow.”

“You said it,” Schiff replied. “How much is this worth?”

“Ten grand a pound, right? Or close.” He turned around and peered across the space and into the recesses in the far corners. “And he’s got a jungle of it up here.”

Walking over to one of the closer tall plants, he reached out and picked one of the heavy and sticky buds, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger, then smelling his hand. “Not that I ever inhaled any of this stuff, Debra, of course, and not to get too technical, but my limited experience tells me that this is some righteously good shit.”

First thing Monday morning
Bracco knocked on Lieutenant Glitsky’s door on the fifth floor of San Francisco ’s Hall of Justice.

“It’s open.”

Bracco turned the knob, gave the door a push. “Actually, it wasn’t.”

Glitsky, a large-boned man with a prominent hatchet of a nose, an ancient scar between his lips, and a graying Afro, sat in semidarkness-room lights off, blinds closed up. Glitsky’s elbows rested on his bare desk, his hands covering his mouth. Even with half of his intimidating facial arsenal covered up, Glitsky’s eyes alone could do the trick-they gleamed like glowing coals, the window to his mind, announcing to anyone paying attention that it was scary in there.

Today those eyes stopped Bracco in his tracks. “You all right, Abe?”

Glitsky didn’t move a muscle, still speaking from behind his hands. “I’m fine. How can I help you, Darrel?”

“Can I come in?”

“You already are in.”

Bracco stood holding the doorknob. “If this isn’t a good time…”

“I said it’s fine. Get the lights if you want.”

“Yes, sir.” He reached over and the room lit up.

Glitsky didn’t stir. Finally, his eyes moved and met Bracco’s. “Anytime,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

The office featured a couple of folding chairs set up in front of Glitsky’s desk, a few more leaning against the wall under the Active Homicide board. Bracco took the nearest open one and sat on it, pulling a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket. “Well, sir,” he began, “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about it yet, but we had a shooting out in the Haight Saturday morning.”

“Vogler.”

“Right. Me and Debra pulled it and here I am out there at seven-thirty or so and there’s no place to park so I double up out on Ashbury-”

“And you got tagged.”

“Yes, sir. Again.” He came forward in his chair and placed the parking ticket on the desk. “The thing is, somebody’s gotta talk to them and make them cut this shit out.”

Glitsky lowered his hands, his mouth expressing distaste.

Bracco, who’d mentored under Glitsky in his first weeks of homicide duty, knew his lieutenant’s disdain for profanity as well as anyone, and he shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

Glitsky’s shoulders rose and fell. “How many does this make?”

“For me? Like six or seven this year. Others guys might have more. I figured I had to talk to you about it.”

Glitsky linked his fingers on the desk in front of him. “You think this is important?”

“Yes, sir. I do. Enough is enough.”

Glitsky nodded. “And what would you have me do?”

“Well, number one, get these tickets erased. I’m out trying to do my job and I have to stop and fill in this totally bogus form. That’s just wrong, Abe. So I thought maybe you could talk to somebody in traffic and just make it a rule that they can’t tag us like this. Tell ’em that pretty soon it’s going to cut into the time we need for our sensitivity training. That ought to do the job.”

“Good idea, Darrel. They’re always asking me how I can improve their operation, and now I’ll have something to tell them.” Glitsky scratched at his jawline. “Or, alternatively, of course, you can fill in the form. Or go to traffic yourself and make friends with whoever’s running the place now, plead your case. That might work.”

Not giving in, Bracco said, “I thought if it came from higher up…”

“Tell you what, Darrel, I’ll mention the issue at the next chief’s meeting, which is in about two hours. I’m sure they’ll give it all the time it deserves. Meanwhile”-Glitsky pointed at the citation-“you hold on to that particular ticket. Call a reporter, maybe Jeff Elliot, have him come down and pitch him a ‘CityTalk’ column.” Suddenly, the lieutenant pushed himself back from his desk and stood up. “I don’t have you yet on the board.”

Coming around, he went to the Active Homicide whiteboard and wrote the name VOGLER in the victims’ column, then BRACCO/ SCHIFF under inspectors. Finishing, he took a step back over to his desk and rested a haunch on the corner of it. “So where are you on that?”

“Couple of steps beyond nowhere, but only that.” Bracco filled Glitsky in on some of the basics: the lack of signs of struggle, the backpack full of marijuana, the apparent murder weapon in the alley. “Because of the dope we got a warrant and searched his house on Saturday afternoon. And guess what? The guy had a full hydroponic pot garden in his attic.” Bracco waited for a reaction, a nod, something to acknowledge this discovery. But Glitsky was just staring over his head, his bloodshot eyes vacant and glassy.

“Abe?”

“Yeah.” Coming back. “What?”

“An attic full of pot plants.”

“Good,” Glitsky said.

“Yeah, we thought so. To say nothing of the computer records. The guy kept pretty good records on his clients and the wife, common-law, Jansey, didn’t think to delete them before we got there.”

“So she knew.” Glitsky’s gaze drifted back up to the ceiling.

Bracco nodded. “Well, yeah. Meanwhile, she, the girlfriend, Jansey, moved out with the kid, back in with her parents, about six months ago for a while.”

“Why was that?”

“Just working things out with the relationship, if you believe her, which Debra doesn’t.” Again, since he wasn’t getting anything resembling normal feedback from Glitsky, Bracco waited. After several seconds he went on reporting. “He beat her up. Sir?”

“Beat her up. Yeah. Go on.”

“And because of the weed still there in the backpack, we’re leaning toward some other motive besides that, maybe personal. Maybe like she got tired of getting hit. Jansey.”

Glitsky nodded wearily. “Alibi?”

“That’s another thing. They’ve got a boarder living in a room behind their garage. Young guy, med student at UCSF. Robert Tripp. Says he was with her. The kitchen drain was clogged up. He was helping her.”

“Okay.”

“Well, okay, except we’re talking about six-thirty on a Saturday morning.”

“Pretty early,” Glitsky said.

“That’s what we thought. Meanwhile, Vogler, the vic, worked all day six days a week.”

“So Jansey and Tripp are hooked up?”

“Not impossible by a long shot.”

“So what’s next?”

“We talk to him, see if the alibi story holds up. If not, I go back and hit Jansey pretty hard. But on the chance that it’s the weed in some way, Debra’s got the list of clients she’s working through.”

“He kept a list?”

“He was an organized guy. Names, cell numbers, average buy disguised as coffee, dates. Of course, proving that this list was his marijuana customers won’t be easy. Nobody’s going to admit they were buying dope.”

“How many of ’em are there?”

“Seventy or so. It might take a few days.”

“So what’d he do, unload this stuff at the coffee shop?”

“That’s the theory. He managed the place and had it all to himself, seems like.”

“But he didn’t own it?”

“No. The owner’s a Maya Townshend. We’re talking to her today, see what she knows, but the staff down there says they don’t know her, she never came in the shop.”

“If he’s dealing to seventy people, maybe it’s a turf thing.”

“That might turn up. Oh, and last but not least, Vogler had a record. Robbery back in ninety-six. Jansey says he was just the driver and didn’t even know what his friends were doing, but I pulled up the file and he was not an altar boy. They let him plead to one count, but the smart money says he was already in the life and just ran out of luck.”

Glitsky took in that information in silence. After a minute, frowning at the effort to stay involved, he looked down at Bracco. “What about the gun on the street, with Vogler?”

“No idea, Abe, other than it was probably the murder weapon.”

“Probably? They didn’t run ballistics?”

“Sure. But it’s our old pal the Glock hex-barrel. Bullet’s consistent with the gun we found. The casing didn’t have enough markings for positive ID. But we got one Glock.40 with a round fired, one bullet from a Glock.40, and one casing from a Glock.40. And we’re running registration today. It’s got a number.”

“Will wonders never cease?”

“Well, we’ll see.” Bracco sat back in the folding chair. “So as I say, a lot’s going to hang on Jansey’s alibi, but if it holds up, we’re about at square one.”

Glitsky nodded and nodded.

“Sir,” Bracco asked, “is everything all right?”

Glitsky looked through him, then focused on his inspector. “Fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

Twenty-six-year-old Robert Tripp’s one-room studio was a narrow rectangle, about ten by fifteen, tacked onto the back of the garage. It featured a Formica counter with the butcher-block knife holder of a serious cook, every slot filled with high-end cutlery-carving, boning, and filet knives of various sizes, an impressive cleaver, and a sharpening steel. Also a sink and four-burner gas stove. A small shower-, sink-, and toilet-only bathroom in one corner.

He’d papered the walls with enlarged, full-color details of human body parts from his medical literature. The double bed was made up. A flat-screen television sat on a Goodwill desk below half a wall of Ikea bookshelf packed with CDs, magazines, paperbacks, and some folded clothes. A well-used bicycle hung from the ceiling.

It was a little after two P.M., and with the predictable volatility of San Francisco weather, the weekend’s heat wave had been replaced by an Arctic afternoon, as an early fog had started to drift in just about when Schiff and Bracco had pulled up and parked on the street out front.

Now the two inspectors sat across from Tripp, in his medical scrubs, at his table in front of the solitary window that looked out onto a small grassless backyard bounded by a weathered brown fence, and with molded-plastic swings and a sliding board play-set erected in an island of tanbark.

“The disposal was backed up,” Tripp said. “I already told you guys this.”

“We believe you,” Bracco replied. “We’re trying to get the timing clear, that’s all. You said this was at six-thirty?”

“Give or take. It was still dark out, so it couldn’t have been much later.”

Schiff, sitting back from the table with her legs crossed, canted forward a bit. “And Jansey felt okay coming over to knock at your door at that hour?”

The young man lifted his shoulders and let them fall. A couple of days’ stubble darkened his cheeks and the bloodshot brown eyes said he hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep; that combination lent a few years to an otherwise young face. “I was already up, studying. That’s all I do, every waking hour, is study. Anyway, she probably saw the light was on.”

“She couldn’t fix the disposal herself?” Bracco asked.

He shrugged again. This seemed to be his default mannerism. “Ben. You know Ben? Her kid? He had a stomachache. He woke her up and told her about it right after his dad left for work. He’d been trying to do the dishes they’d left in the sink or something and then it overflowed and he left the water running. The place was a mess. The kid was a mess.” He broke a smile. “It was a messy morning. Jansey was freaking out a little. That’s all it was.”

“And this was before she heard about Dylan?” Schiff asked.

“Of course.”

“What was she wearing?” Bracco asked.

“When?”

“When she knocked on your door.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Jeans, I think, maybe a T-shirt. Why?”

Bracco came back with another question of his own. “So she was dressed? Shoes? Socks? A jacket?”

Tripp frowned. “Of course she was dressed. Why wouldn’t she be dressed?”

Schiff supplied the answer. “If she’d just gotten woken up by her son and there was disaster going on below, she might have just thrown on a robe or something.”

Tripp shook his head, impatient. “I just told you I didn’t remember exactly what she was wearing. I thought it was jeans and a T-shirt. That’s what she usually wears.”

“You wouldn’t have noticed,” Bracco asked, “if she was in a robe? Maybe you were used to seeing her in a robe.”

Tripp sat back and crossed his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means maybe you were used to seeing her in a robe.” Bracco came forward in his chair. “What is your relationship with her?”

“With Jansey? We’re friends.”

“Friends with benefits?”

“You mean am I sleeping with her? No, I’m not. Did I like her getting hit by Dylan? No to that one too. Did she come over here to talk about Ben or her life sometimes? Yep.”

Schiff took over the questioning. “Did you know Dylan well?”

The topic shift slowed Tripp down. “To talk to. He was my land-lord. He didn’t treat Ben or Jansey right, but that really wasn’t my business. I can’t say I’m brokenhearted to see he got killed. He put on a good act, but he wasn’t really that nice a guy. Jansey’s going to be better off without him.”

“So.” Bracco, elbows on the table, asked, “So you were already up when Dylan went to work Saturday morning?”

“I don’t know when Dylan went to work. But if it was after four, I was wide awake, in here studying until Jansey came to the door.”

“And that was about six-thirty, you said?”

“I said I didn’t know the time for sure. Only that it was still dark.”

After the inspectors left, Tripp followed them outside to make sure they were leaving. When the car started up and headed down the street, he walked to the back door, opened it, and walked inside. “Jan!”

In a minute she was in the hallway coming toward him and then she was in his arms. They held each other for a long moment until finally Tripp pulled out of the embrace. “At the very least,” he said, “they suspect. They asked me directly about us, but I said no, we were just friends. And how are they going to prove otherwise?” Looking back behind her, he went on. “So from the resounding silence I’m guessing they finished up there too.”

She nodded. “They got it all, every leaf, every bud, every seed.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s okay, actually,” she said. “I can always start up again when this has all blown over. I’ve been thinking maybe it would be better if I didn’t go back to it at all. The inspectors took all the records, all the buyers, so I’d have to start completely from scratch. And you know they’ll be watching the house…”