A Plague of Secrets (8 page)

“Knowledge being power and all.”

“Truer words,” Hardy said.

“And why do you want to know all this, exactly?”

The question seemed to stump Hardy for a minute. “If I’m going to defend her, it would help to know who she is.”

“But you’re going to bill her to find out something she doesn’t want you to know?”

“If it’s going to help her in the long run. If it turns out I need her history, which now I’m thinking I might. Otherwise, I step in it without ever seeing it coming. And she winds up screwed.” He tipped up his glass, brought it down slowly. “So what do you say?”

Hunt nodded. “I could give it a couple of days. See what pops.”

“That’s all I’m asking. She gave me three thousand as a retainer. You can spend a good chunk of it. How’s that sound?”

“Doable,” Hunt said. “I’ll give it a run.”

Hardy wasn’t wrong
when he said that Schiff and Bracco wouldn’t be far behind him in coming to the conclusion that Dylan Vogler was blackmailing Maya Townshend.

They’d gotten to it almost by osmosis the next morning. At a few minutes after nine A.M. they knocked at the front door of Jansey’s house, figuring that she would most probably have known what dirt her man had had on his boss that he had used not only to keep himself gainfully employed, but that also allowed him to treat her as an underling when she came into her own store.

Last night, in spite of their great frustration at having Dismas Hardy show up at the Townshends’ to limit the free flow of information, the inspectors had learned a great deal. Most importantly, Maya had lied to them about her alibi on Saturday morning. Beyond that, she’d admitted that she’d actually been called down to the murder scene by the victim and had discovered his body and then opted not to call the police and report it. In the eyes of the inspectors these two revelations elevated Maya in a hurry to a person of interest in the homicide.

She had had both the means and the opportunity to have killed Dylan Vogler. If Bracco and Schiff could establish a compelling motive, they would be well on their way to establishing her as their prime suspect. And the fact that Maya had apparently been at Vogler’s beck and call-coming down to the store before dawn on a Saturday morning?-argued strongly, in spite of Hardy’s disclaimers, that theirs was not a simple business relationship.

Vogler must have had something on Maya that she didn’t want revealed. And maybe he’d been threatening her with just that-upping the ante on what she was paying him, making new demands. Maybe she’d just had enough and decided to put an end to it.

It wasn’t much of a leap for either of them to imagine her killing him. And the why of it led them to Jansey’s door again this morning.

She was barefoot in cutoff jeans and wearing her usual T-shirt. “You guys put in some serious hours, you know that? You got another warrant?”

“Not this time,” Schiff said. “We were hoping you’d talk to us about Maya.”

Her forehead crinkled. “Why? I don’t even know her.”

“You know who she is,” Bracco said.

“Well, yeah, of course I know who she is. She owns the shop. Do you guys hang out with the chief of police?”

“I take your point.” Schiff didn’t want to antagonize Jansey, who was at this point about their best hope. “Do you think we could come in and talk for a minute?”

“About Maya? Look, I really don’t know anything about Maya.” But the cops simply nodded until Jansey hesitated, looked behind her, then shrugged, indicating they should follow her. “Robert’s over having some coffee with me,” she explained in advance.

As Maya turned to lead the way back into the house, Bracco flashed his partner a knowing look, and Schiff acknowledged it with a nod as they fell in behind their witness.

In the kitchen Robert Tripp sat at the table, again in his green medical scrubs. He’d heard the doorbell and then the discussion at the door and appeared, if not actively enthusiastic about the police presence, then at least engaged. “Hey.” He stood up, coming around the table and shaking both of their hands. “Jansey and I are just having a cup,” he said. “It’s hot and fresh. Bay Beans’s finest.”

“Sounds good to me. Black.” Schiff would take anything that would give her and Bracco more time to chat with Jansey and Robert. “Where’s Ben this morning?” she asked.

“Preschool. Eight to twelve.” Jansey looked at Bracco. “Inspector? Coffee?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not? Two sugars, please.”

Jansey was grabbing mugs and putting them on the counter when Tripp declared, “White sugar’ll kill you.”

Bracco let out a halfhearted chuckle. “That,” he said, “or something else. I promise you, sugar’s the least of my worries.” He pulled a chair around and straddled it backward. “So, Robert, let me ask you this. When do you go to school?”

The question, perhaps intended to get a rise, drew only a muted reply. “I got off at midnight. I’m back in at noon. Twelve on, twelve off, this week. Oh, and I’m on call during the off hours every third day, lest we start to catch up on sleep. That would be wrong.”

“They don’t want you to sleep?” Schiff asked. “Isn’t that dangerous for patients?”

“If it turns out it is,” Tripp said, “you’re out of the program. If sleep’s more important to you than medicine, you don’t want to be a doctor bad enough anyway. If lack of sleep affects your performance, you don’t have what it takes. I don’t think there’s an American-trained doctor in the world who hasn’t gone through five years of serious sleep deprivation. It’s part of the culture. If you can’t hack it, get another gig.”

Jansey set the mugs in front of the inspectors. She put a quick hand on Tripp’s shoulder. “Robert’s record is four days without a minute of sleep.”

“That’s a long four days,” Bracco said.

Tripp broke a tired smile. “That was a long month, Inspector, let me tell you. I finally fell asleep outside an OR, standing up in the hall, which I didn’t think was possible until then. Luckily, one of the nurses noticed and got me onto a gurney, pushed me into an empty room.”

Schiff blew over her coffee. Bracco took his first slurping sip and pulled his tiny portable tape recorder out and put it on the table.

Jansey got herself settled into the chair next to Tripp, reached over and touched his hand on the table, then brought her hands back, clenched in front of her. “So, back to what you came for, I don’t really know what I can tell you about Maya. I’ve only met her a couple of times.”

Bracco and Schiff exchanged a glance and Bracco took the lead. “We’re looking at the possibility that Dylan might have been blackmailing her.”

The news didn’t seem to startle Jansey. Still, she asked, “Why do you say that?”

“Couple of reasons,” Bracco went on. “First, his salary. She paid him ninety grand a year. For comparison the same job at Starbucks pays around forty.”

“Yeah, but he’d been there nine years.”

“Okay, so say he got raises every year. That brings him up to fifty, or even sixty. Ninety’s still a good ways out of the box. Second, some employees at the shop have told us that when Maya came in, which wasn’t very often, Dylan treated her like she was the help, like he had something on her. And if he did, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have mentioned at least something about it to you at some time.”

The young woman stared down at the table.

“Jansey,” Schiff put in, “if he was blackmailing her, it may have been part of the reason he was killed.”

This brought her head up. “You mean she might have killed him?”

“We don’t know,” Bracco said. “If we’ve got a blackmail situation, that’d be something we’d be forced to consider.”

Schiff expanded on the theme. “It might have just been an ongoing thing covered in his salary. So it wasn’t like she was paying him every month out of her own cash.”

“Even the ninety wasn’t enough,” Jansey said. “It was only sixty after taxes, you know. Why do you think he needed to sell weed? If he was blackmailing her, he could have just asked for a raise, and she would have had to give it to him, right?”

“Maybe,” Bracco said. “But also maybe she told him she was at the limit, she couldn’t or wouldn’t go any higher. Her husband wouldn’t let her, I don’t know, something. Did he tell you he wanted to ask her for more money recently? Something that would have made him a danger to her again?”

“He always wanted more money.” She looked across from one of them to the other. “You’re right, though, about him not being afraid of her, or of losing the job.”

“But he never talked about why?” Schiff asked.

“The most he ever said was that she owed him.”

“There you go.” Bracco leaned forward. “Did he say what she owed him for?”

For a second she appeared to think about it. “It wasn’t like we really ever talked about it,” she said. “Once or twice he might have said something like, ‘She won’t fire me. She owes me her life.’ But that was just Dylan being dramatic. She owed him her life. I’m sure.”

“If that’s a grieving woman,” Bracco said as soon as they were rolling in their car again, “I’m the shah of Iran.”

“I don’t think there’s been a shah in Iran for a few years, Darrel.”

“Lucky for me,” Bracco replied. “And I don’t really want a leadership role in Iran anyway. Just think about it, no booze, no women. Talk about dull parties. I can’t even imagine what the inaugural ball must be like. But I wasn’t so much talking about Iran as the grieving part. If those two don’t have something going on, they will soon, don’t you think?”

“If body language talks, it’s already happening. And the little kid’s gone every morning for four hours when Tripp’s home. I’m tempted to give them fifteen minutes and go back and catch them in the act. Then we’ll at least have caught the future Dr. Tripp in a lie, and it might lead to something else, like their meshing alibis.”

“You think it might have been them together?”

“I think that if they’re an item, and let’s pretend they are, they both wouldn’t mind seeing Dylan dead.”

“Why wouldn’t she just have left him?”

Schiff, driving, thought for a while. “This isn’t a complete list, but offhand here are the first reasons that occur to me. Because of the beatings he had power over her. Two, Ben was Jansey and Dylan’s kid together. Or maybe Tripp wasn’t that serious, just some recreational sex while the old man was at work. Then, finally, Dylan brought in the money and lots of it, where Tripp’s a destitute student. That enough?”

“It’ll get us started, Debra. In fact, assuming Tripp and her are serious, killing Dylan’s a solution to three of their problems, maybe even all four if Tripp’s good for taking over the father role. But I’ll tell you something else.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m getting sick of all this theorizing. You ever get tired of people lying to you?”

“No. It’s my favorite. But who this time?”

“Jansey.”

“You think she knows what the blackmail’s about?”

“You don’t? She’s lived with the guy for like five or six years and doesn’t know something that basic to Dylan’s work? To their whole situation? If Dylan was blackmailing Maya, she might have known about it, might have even been part of it.”

“Might might might.”

“I know. I agree. And if she-Jansey-and Dylan were in cahoots on that, where does that take us?”

“It gives her less of a motive to shoot him, if that’s their business together. And that puts Maya back square in the middle of the picture.”

“Except if Jansey’s really in love with Tripp and wants out with Dylan.”

“So we’ve got Maya alone? Or Jansey alone? Or Jansey and Tripp together? Or a random shooter out for a stroll?”

“I’m not leaning toward random shooter.”

“No, me neither.”

The two inspectors rode along in silence for a couple of blocks, until at last Schiff said, “We’ve got to figure out a way to turn up the heat.”

Hardy showed up
by surprise with deli sandwiches and Diet Cokes in Farrell’s office, but they’d barely unpacked the lunch when Hardy took the call from Frannie. The partners were both sitting on the dilapidated couch, their food and napkins and bags of chips and cans of soda untouched on the low table in front of them.

Frannie told him that she’d just gotten off the phone with Treya and they had brought Zachary out of the induced coma and done something called a “pinch test” and that he’d reacted, which apparently was very good news. The swelling had gone down considerably and they were now talking about reinserting the dura mater and closing up the brain again within the next couple of days.

The doctors were starting to think, and had told Treya and Abe, that their son appeared to be out of immediate danger, on the mend, and that he might recover completely. Although with these types of injuries there would be a long watch-and-wait period to determine if there were going to be any ongoing problems with development, cognition, or motor skills. This still sounded quite serious to Hardy, and Frannie agreed with him that it was, but compared with what they’d been looking at for the past four days, it was the best possible news.

Hanging up, Hardy, with a great sense of relief, reached for his drink and sat back on the couch. “See?” He recounted the gist of the conversation, concluding with, “Things sometimes do turn around for the better.”

Farrell still wasn’t much in the mood to agree with him. In fact, his confidence and spirits had retreated so far that he’d worn a regular business suit to work today, and without a funny T-shirt under it. He’d gone out earlier in the morning and trimmed his thick gray-brown hair to a length that qualified as relatively normal. Now Wes hunched on the couch, holding his sandwich over the table in front of him, shredded lettuce spilling, condiments dripping. “Sometimes they do, and I’m glad as hell for Abe’s kid, and for him. But I haven’t even told you yet about Jeff Elliot’s call this morning.”

“What did our paper’s most esteemed columnist have to say?”

“He just wanted to give me a heads-up ’cause we’re friends. The
Chronicle
’s talking about running the weed story and including the whole list of us alleged dope-smoking fiends.”

Hardy was shaking his head. “Can’t happen. Won’t happen. Never in a million years.”

“Why not?”

“Because your name on a list on somebody’s computer doesn’t mean anything. You didn’t admit anything to Schiff when she called and asked you about it, did you?”

“I’m sure.” Farrell rolled his eyes. “What, I’m retarded?”

“That’s my point. You’re not. So you didn’t cop to it. So she’s got nothing she can prove. Besides, no way does this make ‘CityTalk.’ That doesn’t sound like Jeff.”

Farrell chewed and swallowed, chasing with Coke. “No. He was talking regular news. And you might be right about the libel problem, but the
Chron
’s got to be tempted. It’s a great story.”

“It’s a nonstory. They can’t run it.”

“Okay, good. But evidently there’s more than a few semipublic figures on the list, not including yours truly and Wyatt’s guy. And the public would like to know.”

“Like who?” Hardy asked.

“Jeff, God bless him, didn’t want to name names to me. But at least one judge, more than a couple of city department heads, several prominent educators, two supervisors, a few actors and like that, public personalities, and, oh yeah, some DAs…”

“You want to talk screwed,” Hardy said. “Just on the innuendo, those DAs are screwed. At least the ones that didn’t have the sense to get medical marijuana cards.”

“Yeah, heads are gonna roll for sure. If I still worked here, I’d swoop and scoop ’em up cheap and get ’em on our payroll.”

“You’re still working here, Wes. Don’t worry about that.”

“I’m not worried about getting fired, Diz.” He looked sideways down the couch. “Tell you the truth, I’m just embarrassed as all shit to have exposed the firm like this. You and Gina don’t deserve it, and it doesn’t exactly put on the best face for the associates, either, does it?”

Hardy waved that off. “Wes, it’s marijuana in San Francisco in the twenty-first century. It’s going to blow over in a week, maybe two. I appreciate your feelings but truly, nobody really cares.”

“They will if this murder turns out to be about a little benign weed.”

“It won’t come down like that. Whoever shot Dylan, he didn’t steal any of it.”

“How do you know that?”

“He was still wearing his backpack, which was full of it. How about that?”

“How about if he also happened to be pushing a shopping cart loaded with the stuff and the shooter ran off with that?”

That proposal stopped Hardy short for a second, but then he shook his head, banishing the unwelcome thought. “That didn’t happen, Wes. Look, worst case, if the
Chronicle
does the story, it’ll sell a few papers, but it’s a nonissue to everybody else.”

In fact, it wasn’t a nonissue to at least one San Francisco official-the newly minted special assistant United States attorney, Jerry Glass.

The previous U.S. attorney in San Francisco, construed by the attorney general’s office to be too liberal, had been one of the notorious Alberto Gonzalez fires. Upon taking office his replacement wanted to waste no time establishing his credentials as a hard-line prosecutor, aligned four-square against the permissive culture of the city that Herb Caen, the legendary columnist for the
Chronicle
, had christened Baghdad by the Bay. For some years after his graduation from law school, Jerry Glass had been an assistant district attorney in Orange County, following his boss the district attorney to Sacramento as a speechwriter during the first appointments of the Schwarzenegger era, eventually catching on as an assistant director of one of California’s dozens of bureaucracies, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

Glass, thirty-five by now, was a well-built though slightly overweight, plain-looking specimen with an office worker’s pasty complexion. He shaved close and wore his light brown hair short, parted low on the right. He trimmed his sideburns up around the top of his ears. He was also aggressive and ambitious and had seen his ABC assignment-accurately-as a dead end. He’d had résumés out and was in a holding pattern when his ex-boss, now an assistant attorney general in Washington, D.C., tapped him for the San Francisco job, and he jumped at it. With this plum in his lap Jerry had no intention of following in the footsteps of his predecessor and, among other priorities, set to work immediately making efforts to shut down the city’s medical marijuana parlors, of which there were dozens. This was always a somewhat delicate endeavor, since the state of California, as well as the city and county of San Francisco, either sanctioned or at the very least turned a blind eye to these so-called compassionate use facilities.

But Jerry was there to enforce U.S., not local, law, and the use of marijuana was a federal crime. He got his name in the paper several times during his first year in office for busting some of the medical marijuana folks, but except for burnishing his conservative credentials-not exactly a plus in the San Francisco cultural environment-these actions did little, if anything, to raise his profile.

And suddenly, here in his office this cool Wednesday afternoon, all by herself, was Debra Schiff. He’d run into the very attractive homicide inspector a couple of times at the bar at Lou the Greek’s and he’d planned to meet her there some more if he could, but here she was now, telling him about this murder of a coffee-shop manager out in the godforsaken Haight-Ashbury.

To date, Glass had only been aware of rumors and what he’d read about this particular murder in the papers. Astoundingly, he thought, Schiff was telling him with a straight face that she and her partner, Bracco, hadn’t brought up the dope connection to the news media before because it simply
didn’t occur to them
that it might be of some special importance-since apparently no marijuana had been stolen, it couldn’t have been part of a motive in the case.

She waved off his objection. “No, listen, Jerry, there’s
always
dope somewhere in a homicide picture. A roach in the drive-by car, some paraphernalia around a DD”-domestic disturbance-“gangbangers loaded up with coke or heroin. So it’s always there someplace. You don’t comment on it any more than you’d talk about the weather. ‘In other news tonight,’ she said in her best anchor voice, ‘Shawahn Johnson was shot seventeen times in an apparent drive-by shooting in Hunters Point when the fog was in.’ Generally, we don’t mention the fog.”

“But this fellow, Vogler, he had an entire marijuana garden in his attic, didn’t he? Thousands of dollars’ worth, right?”

“Right. But again we didn’t have any reason to believe that was part of our case at the outset. We handed the dope part over to the narcs and that might have been the end of it.”

“But for what?” Glass adjusted his spectacles.

For the next few minutes Schiff ran the highlights of their investigation. “The bottom line, though,” she concluded, “is that we think… in fact, we’re morally certain that Maya, Jansey, and Robert Tripp have lied to us, in some cases more than once. We have motives for each of them, both alone or possibly together in the case of Jansey and Tripp, but almost no evidence and certainly nothing we can use to bring any leverage to bear on getting anybody to talk. We’re pretty sure, for example, that Vogler was blackmailing Maya, and that Jansey may have known about that, but if they both say, ‘No he wasn’t,’ we’re stuck.”

“You can’t just lean on them harder?”

“We could, but as I say, it’s kind of pointless without some new leverage, some change in the status quo. There’s no physical evidence that’s very compelling.” She shook her head. “Besides, we’ve already gone back and talked to all of them at least twice, but Jansey and Tripp are at the very least well-rehearsed, and Maya’s got herself a lawyer. Plus, you know, we’ve got to walk a little easy around her anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“The whole political thing, which I hate, and Darrel hates, but there you go. The plain fact is, Darrel and Harlen Fisk used to be partners, and she’s Harlen’s sister.”

Jerry’s eyes lit up. “Are you talking Supervisor Fisk?”

“Right.”

“Which also makes her the niece of Mayor West?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

Jerry Glass pulled himself up straight in his chair, his attention now riveted. “Is Mr. Fisk interfering with your investigation? Is he talking to your partner?”

“Not that I know of, no. That would be a little awkward, even if…” She stopped.

“What?”

“Well,” she said, “Harlen, among many other names you might recognize, was one of Vogler’s regular customers.”

This stopped Glass dead. He squinted through his glasses, across at her. “Marijuana customers? You’re sure of that?”

“Absolutely. He’s on the list.”

“The list?”

“I’m sorry. Haven’t I told you yet about the list?” She gave him that news, the incriminating computer records. “Anyway, in short it looks like there’s a ton of connections between all these people, and we’d like an excuse to shake their trees and find out if we can what those connections are. The blackmail, for example. What was that about? Was it serious enough that Maya might have killed to keep it quiet? Or, on the other hand-”

“No”-Glass raised his palm to her-“hold up a minute. Let’s go back to what might really make a difference. You’ve told me that Maya says she didn’t know this weed was sold out of her shop, right? How credible is that to you? Especially if her brother was one of the customers.” He waited, a smile beginning to play at the corners of his mouth. “That’s what I thought. And beyond that, if the mayor-I’m kind of new in town, but Harlen’s her protégé if I’m not mistaken-I mean, she’d know as well, or might know. How much was Maya paying Vogler again?”

“Ninety thousand,” Schiff said.

“Well, that’s enough, or almost enough, to live on, right? Do you think it’s actually possible that he
didn’t
kick back some percentage of this drug money to Maya, who had, after all, set him up in business?”

Schiff kept nodding. “You’re saying Vogler-”

“I’m saying it sounds to me like he was her partner on the dope side as well. Which would explain his cavalier attitude toward her as much as blackmail, wouldn’t it? He can treat her any way he wants and she can’t fire him, can she? Since he’s her supplier. They’re in it together hip deep.”

Glass was making sense, although neither she nor Bracco had yet considered the possibility that this whole thing might, in fact, be about the weed. Schiff’s hope, and the reason she’d come to visit Jerry Glass today, was that he could start some kind of a U.S. prosecution on the marijuana issues that would make the principal witnesses nervous enough about the possible dope charges against them that in exchange for lenient treatment on that score, they would perhaps be inclined to trade information they might have about the murder.

But now Jerry’s take took it to a different level, contemplating that Maya herself might have been the prime mover, and armed with political connections and possibly even police protection, she would have been all but invulnerable to suspicion, much less prosecution.

And then-instead of this imagined blackmail about what she’d maybe or maybe not done in her past-the murder had simply been the usual dope deal gone bad. Maya had killed her employee because of any number of common reasons-he wanted a bigger cut, he was selling to his own customers and leaving her out, he was either getting sloppy or hard to control.

Now Jerry Glass settled back into his chair, his hands clasped on the desk in front of him, a faraway glint in his eyes over a tight-lipped smile. “I know how we can get these people to talk,” he said.

Back in his office once again, Glitsky sat slumped, his elbows on the armrests of his chair, his hands joined in front of his mouth. He was back in at work because what else was he going to do? Zachary was coming out of the coma, although they were going to operate on him again to close up his skull tomorrow. Rationally, he knew that there was reason for hope, and yet all he could feel was a deep self-loathing. Regardless of what Treya or Hardy or anyone else said, he knew that all of this was his fault.