An Equal Opportunity Death (19 page)

“That’s supposition.”

“Maybe so. Let the sheriff worry about that. He can dig into your life till he finds hard facts.”

She shrugged. “Let him.” But the words didn’t carry much bravado.

I stood up, prepared to play out her bluff.

She sat.

I reached for the door.

Patsy remained motionless, but her face had lost its cool indifference.

Suddenly I realized this silence was her defense. I wouldn’t break through that by threatening to leave.

I yanked her up off the sofa and thrust her hard against the wall. She gasped.

“The sheriff is on my tail, and I’m good and sick of it,” I said. “Either you tell me exactly, every detail of what you and Frank were up to or …”

Her breath came quick; her eyes looked too wide for her face. Still, she didn’t speak.

“I’m strong, Patsy, and I’m desperate. You tell me—now.”

“Okay.” The word was so small and breathless it was barely audible.

I loosened my grip.

Patsy’s eyes were wide, her breath still taut. “Okay,” she repeated. “But I don’t know anything about any burglaries.”

I tightened my hands on her jacket.

“That’s the truth, Vejay. Frank may have been heisting stuff, but he didn’t do that with me. All I did was change the sewer pipe orders.”

My hands dropped from her jacket. “What?”

“Can I sit down?”

“Yes, sure. But what were you and Frank doing with the sewer pipes?”

She sat, pulled the blanket in place, and took a long sip of brandy. “I work in the office of Solano Construction Company. We send in the pipe requisitions. Sewers take a lot of piping. One pipe has to fit into the next. If the size of an order is off, the pipes don’t go together. If the pipes don’t fit, the whole project stops.”

I nodded.

“Frank wanted to delay the sewer construction. He paid me to alter the requisitions.”

I stared at her in disbelief, yet knowing this was not a tale Patsy would invent. But the idea of Frank Goulet bribing Patsy to hold up the sewer system was almost too ludicrous to consider. I could imagine Frank spending money on a lot of things—ivory, netsukes, drugs—but not on obstructing sewers. “How did you do it?” I asked her.

“It was easy enough. I’d change a number 87 pipe to 78. Or I’d order casing that was too small, or too large. There’s a lot that goes into building a sewer. It’s not like the pipes under your kitchen sink, you know.”

“How often did you do this?”

“Maybe once a month or so.”

“Tell me how it worked, exactly. What did Frank do, and what did you do?”

She took another drink of brandy and leaned back, looking cool and in control again, as if the flush of panic just moments ago had never existed. “Frank called and arranged a meeting, like you said, in town or in the park. He didn’t want to discuss anything on the phone. He’d ask what I could do at that time. I mean, we didn’t order every item every week. I had to work with what I had. So I’d tell him. Then we’d discuss money.”

“You bargained?”

“Well, sort of. I told Frank what it would be worth to me, and then he’d go away and think about it. He always agreed, but it took two or three days each time.”

“Why the delay?”

Patsy half shrugged. “I guess he was cheap.”

“But why did Frank want the sewer delayed?”

Patsy favored me with her normal expression of disinterest. “He never said.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“No.”

I believed her. Anyone else would have demanded an explanation, but Patsy wouldn’t even have been curious. “Surely,” I said, “you couldn’t have gone on altering requisitions indefinitely.”

“Frank knew that. He said eventually the taxpayers would get tired of paying more and more for a system that never neared completion. And if that didn’t happen before the requisitions ran out, he’d think of something else. So far it hadn’t been a problem.”

“And Frank paid you each time?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”

“How many orders did you change?”

“I don’t know—seven, eight, something like that. It started a couple months after I got here, if that’s what you want to know.” She glanced toward the brandy bottle.

I refilled both our glasses, finishing off the bottle. “This is a big fraud. It must be costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Aren’t you worried?”

“It’s only ripping off the government. Cost overruns. It happens all the time.” She said it with the sureness of the sixties, but the caution of the intervening years was evident on her face.

“Who else knew about this?”

“No one, unless Frank told them.”

“Not Paul?”

She shook her head.

“You didn’t tell your own husband?”

“No. He was better off not knowing.”

And Patsy was safer. Again, I was struck by her constant control. Patsy had no soft edges, no sides of her personality untended.

“Didn’t Paul wonder where the extra money came from?”

“Maybe. I doubt it. Extra money is never the problem. And before you ask, Vejay, I didn’t kill Frank. His death was a bummer for me. Paul and I will never make it just renting canoes.”

Taking a final sip of brandy, I stood up, pulled on my slicker, and left.

I ran through the water to my pickup, then sat there until the engine warmed. I wanted to get out of the Fernandez’ parking lot before Paul got back. At best he’d be furious that I’d sent him to the Sheriff’s Department for no reason. At worst …

Hurriedly I steered through the water and out of the lot and headed back along South Bank Road. So Frank had paid Patsy to delay the completion of the sewer. Patsy’s story would be easy enough to check. The altered requisitions would all be there. And this arrangement did indeed explain why Patsy was distraught over Frank’s death.

But surely no one would kill Frank to stop him from impeding sewer construction. Everyone I knew would applaud that scheme. Frank had been effectively preserving Henderson, forestalling new business openings, keeping the area free from condominiums and an even greater influx of outsiders. Because of Frank, Skip Bollo’s two-year lease-option turned out to be a boon for the sellers. They enjoyed considerable income from the lease payments and when the buyers couldn’t exercise the options, they could sell or lease the same property again. And Skip Bollo could earn commissions again. Madge might get her shop back. And Ned Jacobs and the Fortimiglios would continue to see Henderson as the town they knew and loved. Had Frank’s activities been known, he would have been a hero.

Only Frank wouldn’t have benefited.

The bridge lights blinked yellow. I turned right on North Bank Road, anxious to get home and dry off. The road was empty. I pulled into the driveway and got out to open the garage.

A sheriff’s deputy came up behind me. “Sheriff Wescott wants to talk to you. You can ride in with me.”

“I
’M ARRESTING YOU FOR
grand theft.” Sheriff Wescott stood behind his blue desk in his blue office. It was only seven-thirty but this part of the building was night-quiet. Lights in other offices were out and shadows pushed at the plexiglass office walls.

From the visitor’s chair, I stared at him. I had ridden to Guerneville in the back of the patrol car, behind the wire mesh, in silence. The driver had been the same deputy I’d eluded earlier in the day. “Grand theft?” I asked.

“The Chinese ceremonial plates.” Now Wescott sat down.

I waited.

“Martin Walucyk called me this afternoon. He reported a ransom contact from a youngish woman with long, irregularly cut, brown hair, wearing jeans and a yellow crewneck sweater.” He eyed my clothes; I hadn’t been home to change. “Driving a brown pickup truck.”

I sat, too stunned to speak. I really didn’t expect Walucyk to call the sheriff. I didn’t think he’d leave his dining room.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. My voice sounded weak.

“Walucyk will identify you.”

“Of course, he’ll do that. I’m not denying I was there.” That came out better.

“Then you’re admitting to perpetrating the theft along with Goulet.”

“Certainly not.”

“Come on now, Miss Haskell. We’ve got evidence.”

Looking at Wescott, I realized that his threats and wheedling in the past had been of an altogether different class of maneuver. When he sat in my living room drinking my coffee and eating my toast, he assumed I was concealing some interesting but basically trivial fact. He had made a show of telling me, but he hadn’t seriously considered me a suspect. Now he stared with disgust. It was no longer “Vejay” but “Miss Haskell.” Now I was a suspect, and worse yet, one who had made a fool of him.

“You don’t have evidence because there is none,” I said.

“Tell that to Walucyk.”

“I told Walucyk I was a writer. He chose to think I was connected with the thief. That misconception encouraged him to answer my questions. I wasn’t about to disabuse him.”

“You didn’t ‘disabuse’ him because you were there to arrange the ransom. You can help yourself by telling me where those plates are before I have to go to the trouble of getting a search warrant.”

Jesus! A search warrant! The Chinese plate was still on my mantel.

“What are you going to search?” I demanded. “You’ve already been through virtually every room in my house, and in my garage. From what Walucyk told me those plates are big and they oxidize quickly. They’re not things you plunk under the sink.” I leaned back in my chair, hoping that made me look more assured. “I assume you’ve searched Frank’s Place and his apartment.”

He nodded.

“Do you really think if I were involved in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar theft, I would come barrelling in here demanding you check out Frank for drugs? Do you think I would irritate every one of my friends hassling them about Frank? Do you think I would drive to Walucyk’s house in my own truck, in”—I eyed my sweater and jeans—“this clever disguise?”

“You knew where Walucyk lived.”

“His address was in the paper.”

“You connected the theft to Goulet.”

“For obvious reasons. They are the two big crimes of the year here.”

“There are plenty of crimes that are unrelated. Now how exactly did you figure Goulet for this one?”

I realized Frank took the plates because I found the one in his secret room. I could hardly admit that. But I couldn’t refuse to answer either, not with a search warrant threatened.

I took a breath. “It was something Madge Oombs told me. You remember I mentioned talking to her?”

“Go on.”

“Well, I ran into her again, quite accidentally, in the supermarket, and more to fill the time till she could get rid of me than anything else, she told me a tale she had related to Frank when he first came here, about a Japanese bronze buddha.” I related the story to him.

“So?”

“At the time I didn’t think anything of it, either. But then I realized it was an odd thing to tell Frank. Frank was a bartender. He had some interest in ivory and figurines, but not in bronze. Why did Madge tell him that? Madge isn’t a chatterer. She wouldn’t have been filling time with him like she was with me. There had to have been a reason. Something Frank said had to have occasioned the story. So, I figured Frank must have been asking about bronze, oriental bronze. And that led me to the Chinese bronze plates.”

I waited, hardly breathing. Wescott didn’t say anything. He couldn’t decide.

“According to Chris Fortimiglio,” I added, “Frank had a habit of researching areas of art that interested him. You could ask Madge what Frank said.”

“I doubt she’d remember after two years.”

“You could ask.”

He nodded, a little rocking motion with his head.

I tried to keep the show of relief off my face. I wasn’t in the clear yet. The plate was still on the mantel. Frank’s financial records were in my drawer.

“Where have you been today?” Wescott asked.

I laughed. “At Walucyk’s.”

“You left there at one thirty-seven.”

I laughed again, this time forced. “I came home the long way. I was afraid Walucyk might call the highway patrol and I didn’t want to be stopped on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“Six hours,” he said. “You must have gone through San Jose.”

“And I haven’t had dinner yet. It is eight o’clock.” I waited, unsure whether I could really leave.

Wescott looked unsure too. “I don’t have enough to hold you,” he said finally. He didn’t add that he would be watching me. I didn’t need to be told. “The deputy will drive you home.”

“Thanks, but as long as I’m in Guerneville, I think I’ll eat here. I can always find a ride home.”

Even if I had to walk all six miles in the rain, with the flood water inching toward North Bank Road, I wasn’t going to let another sheriff near my living room and the Chinese plate.

I was too unnerved to be hungry when I left the Sheriff’s Department, but I decided I’d better do as I said and have dinner in Guerneville before going home.

The bakery, the drugstore, the normal places I grabbed something to eat, were closed. The only place still open was The Pines, a restaurant with tablecloths. It was more formal than I had in mind, more so than I was dressed for, and likely to cost more than I wanted to pay. The hostess, apparently sharing my assessment, sat me at a table next to the kitchen door.

It seemed like days since I’d left Walucyk’s with the knowledge that Frank had a partner. And Patsy had insisted that she was not that person.

There was no reason not to believe Patsy’s story. But Frank as a preservationist? Ned had said Frank was very anti-growth. I’d discounted Ned’s view, colored as it was by his own prejudices. But Frank had been paying Patsy to sabotage the sewer. What would he have gained? Frank rarely left his bar. He had never, to my knowledge, gone to the town beach. He got seasick in a canoe. Keeping Henderson unspoiled wouldn’t have mattered to him. More residents would have meant a better trade at the Place. And even if that business were not his main interest, any growth in population would have been primarily summer people, who, in winter, would have left empty homes waiting to be burglarized.

It didn’t make sense.