As a Favor (4 page)

“Oh, yes. You want what they got so far?”

“Uh huh.”

“Hendricks took samples of the blood—he’s sure it’s blood—but you know how long it’ll take to get a report from the lab.”

I knew indeed—two to three weeks normally; in an emergency, three days or so.

“There were prints, but they couldn’t say how clear. They didn’t know if any would be whole. And the purse, they checked…”

“The purse!”

“Right. It was under the sofa.”

Now it sat on the table—leather, slightly used purse, an everyday bag.

“There’s the usual stuff—aspirin, make-up, keys, wallet,” Pereira said. “No cash, but nothing else seems to have been removed. Her driver’s license is here and she must have ten credit cards.”

I sighed. “A woman doesn’t leave home on her own and not take her wallet.” Glancing down at it, I looked at the credit cards, social security card, and a health plan card. Nothing unusual.

“These were in the purse.” Pereira indicated three pieces of yellow paper—two scraps and one eight-and-a-half by eleven.

“Did they check them for prints?”

“Yes.”

I picked up one of the smaller pieces. It was a list, but the writing was crabbed and slanted to the left, and the words virtually illegible.

I held it out. Pereira stared and after a moment said triumphantly, “Spinach…eggs…you want me to go on?”

I handed her the second paper. “No. Try this.”

She stared harder, a line creasing her smooth forehead. Finally she said, “Er-men-tine. Ermentine Brown 20? What do you think Ermentine Brown 20 means? Age? Size? Amount?”

“Could be anything.”

The larger paper, a full-size notebook sheet, had been crumpled, then straightened and folded. Judging from the worn edges, it had been in the purse some days.

Pereira and I surveyed it.

“Theater on Wheels,” she said, pointing to the childish printing on the bottom. “It’d be a real challenge to identify the blob above that.”

Take a look at the handbill on the bedside table. It’s the final product. What we have here must have been her first, very preliminary sketch for the
Rhinoceros
.”

“My God, that’s a rhino!” Pereira rushed into the bedroom and a few moments later returned smiling. “It’s certainly a metamorphosis.”

“Still, where does all this,” I gestured to the overturned chair, the blood, the disordered bedroom, “leave us?”

“Fight. Spur of the moment?” Pereira offered.

“Maybe. A kid turned in some clothes, probably bloodstained, torn. They were monogrammed—‘AMS.’ ”

“Anne M-something Spaulding? Hmm. You think it’s a sex crime—I mean from the ripped clothes?”

I leaned forward, tapping on the glass of the coffee table. “I hope this isn’t the first of a series, like that psycho last year, you remember, the guy…” I stopped, staring at the coffee table. My breath caught.

Lying atop one of the chrome supports was a pewter pen, a pen not engraved but with the simple, elegant lines that typified a gift in Nat’s family. This
might
not be the pen Nat’s father had given him three years ago, but if it was not, it was its double. And when in two or three weeks, or three days or so, the lab report returned, Nat’s fingerprints on the pen would be mentioned. It was the only real clue in the apartment.

I took a deep breath. The only clue pointed to Nat, Nat who had told me he’d never been in this place.

Where exactly had Pereira found it? I opened my mouth to ask her just as a great roar came from the apartment above.

“W
HAT WAS THAT?”
P
EREIRA
demanded.

“Sounded like an avalanche,” I said.

The initial roar had abated and a second began. With Pereira, I headed for the stoop and banged on the door to the upstairs flat.

There was no response, just a swelling of noise. I pounded again and got no reply, then tried the door. It had been left unlocked—a practice too common in Berkeley.

As I pushed it open, an explosion of sound forced me back. It smothered all other noises and there was no way to tell whether the room upstairs held one deaf old lady or a score of armed revolutionaries. I motioned Pereira to follow me up a staircase that rose steeply between fuchsia walls. Automatically, my hand poised over my holster.

At the landing, vapors of incense thickened to a gray haze that curtained off the room. Squinting, I made out gaudy posters of Oriental deities along the walls of a room furnished only with floor pillows, a tape recorder, and four speakers. Facing a statue, a lone man sat cross-legged, unmoving.

With Pereira waiting at the landing, I moved up beside the man, stood, and when there was no response, put a hand on his shoulder.

His eyes opened slowly and seemed to glisten against the pale angularity of his face. Even his light brown curly hair seemed to soften. The hair started far back on his forehead, so that his features appeared to have been set low down on his head, rather like a short letter typed on an eleven-inch sheet. But unlike many such faces where eyes, nose, and mouth are tiny and seem to huddle together against the vastness of the skin around them, this man’s features were full—his eyes were blue, a royal blue that appeared just freshly painted on; his nose was fleshy with soft bumps below the bridge and at the bottom; and his lips were full. Indeed, his features would have been jammed on a smaller face.

He wore a loose white outfit that appeared overlarge on his slight frame.

“I’m Officer Smith,” I yelled, extending my shield through the smoky air.

He glanced at it, and back to me, his face set in an expectant smile.

From either side of the room, the noise crashed over my head, beginning a new triad. “The tape,” I shouted. “Could you turn it off?”

It was a moment before he said, “Yes, of course,” in an uninfected voice that mimicked the three-part beat of the tape. Dipping his head to the poster before him, he rose and pushed in a button on the tape recorder.

The sudden silence was startling. Traffic noises from College Avenue were inordinately clear. The bright colors of the posters seemed more intense, and even the pungent scent of the incense seemed sharper.

“I’ll need your name,” I said in a voice that was much too loud.

“Harvey Fallon.”

I stared at his guru suit and I could feel a smile creeping onto my face.

He smiled, too. “My students call me Sri Fallon. I try to keep things simple, but it’s a bit much to expect a novice to call his spiritual mentor Harvey.”

I laughed cautiously, afraid my relief would bubble up in gales of unprofessional hilarity. Turning, I motioned to Pereira, and she headed back downstairs.

Harvey Fallon’s face dropped into what appeared to be an unnaturally serious expression. “Have you brought a complaint?”

“No. Were you expecting one?”

“There have been some, other places I’ve lived. A chanting ashram is not always accepted as a neighbor.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “But I’m here about Anne Spaulding.”

“Who?”

“Your downstairs neighbor.”

“Is something the matter?”

“She may be missing. This is just a preliminary investigation.” She could be dead, but Harvey Fallon didn’t need to know that. Taking out my pad, I asked, “Do you live alone?”

“No one into expanding his consciousness lives alone. But you mean on the material plane, don’t you?” Without checking for my response, he continued, “I’m in charge of the ashram. Whichever devotees wish to stay here, do.”

“And last night?”

“Only I slept here.”

I made a note of that. “And earlier that evening?”

Fallon sank smoothly to the pillow, motioning me to one opposite. I declined.

“I got here about six o’clock,” he said. And watching for my reaction, he added, “I’m a teller at the Bank of America.”

When I smothered my surprise, he continued. “Some time in the middle of last night’s session, around ten o’clock, I had a follower, a man—I don’t know his name. Ours is a very loose organization, if you can call it even that. People come and go. I keep no records. It’s not like we’re tax exempt, or for that matter, that there’s anything to tax.”

“About the man?”

“He was very upset. He kept moving around, fidgeting. He was nowhere near calm enough even to follow the chant.”

“And?”

“After a few minutes he left. That’s unusual. Most times the chant is so powerful that it overwhelms any problem.”

“Mr. Fallon, what happened after this man left?”

“Nothing. It was only his reaction that was strange. He hadn’t been gone too long when the Kirtan ended.”

“Kirtan?”

“Chanting, like the tape of the Tibetan monks you heard.”

“That was chanting!” I said before I could stop myself. It had sounded more like a herd of sea lions.

Fallon’s mouth slid into a smile that showed no trace of censure, but his tone was serious as he said, “Tantric chants—Cho-ga. The chants, the incense, the decor—it’s all aimed at overwhelming the senses. Our goal is to overload the circuits of our sensual responses and be left with only the interior awareness. The chant is very powerful. You get caught up in it, you become it, it becomes you.” He paused, looked directly at me and said, “Perhaps you would enjoy coming? Any time.”

“Thank you,” I said, sitting down on a pillow. The air was clearer down here.

Glancing around the room, I could easily see how Fallon created his effect. Every foot of wall and floor clamored for attention: pictures fighting candles fighting statues, incense burners and brass bells. On the floor one pillow was brighter, busier, more intricately designed than the next.

Focusing with relief on Fallon’s simple white cotton shirt, I said, “I need to know about your downstairs neighbor.”

“What about her?”

“Did you see much of her?”

His angular face squirmed into a very different smile. “I should say yes and no.”

“Mr. Fallon?”

“If you mean do we talk much, the answer is no. She is, however, in the habit of sunbathing nude, so if that’s what you mean, I’ve seen all there is.”

“And she doesn’t mind?”

“Apparently not. She lies out there every free moment during an entire week of every month. She’s one of those olive-skinned women, and by the end of the week she has an all-over tan that any surfer would be proud of.” He leaned back, and I didn’t have to ask what picture was in his mind. “Doing that monthly can’t be any good for her skin, but you’d never know it to look at her.”

“You never go out or talk to her, or anything?” I asked in a tone of disbelief.

“Alas, I do have to keep my distance. I may be a Sri but I’m not a eunuch and hers is definitely not a body you’d kick out of bed. But I’ve moved the ashram eight times in the last year and a half, and I can’t jeopardize this living arrangement for the benefit of my physical drives. Not everyone wants to live downstairs from chanters. And landlords rarely side with us when the neighbors complain.”

“Hasn’t Anne complained?”

“No. Before I moved in, I explained what we did, how we lived, how removed we were from other people, and she had no complaint. She’s had none since. The perfect neighbor.”

“Does she go out much?”

“She seems to keep regular work hours. She leaves at the time our morning devotions end.”

“Do you chant then, too?”

“Oh, yes. Chanting interspersed with meditation.”

“What time is that?”

“We start at six o’clock and end about eight.”

I could see why I hadn’t found an alarm clock in Anne’s apartment. “What about at night?”

“I don’t know. If I’m home there’s usually something going on. I don’t hear anything. It’s our policy to keep to ourselves.”

I sighed, regretting that if there had to be some religious person living upstairs from Anne, it couldn’t be an aging fundamentalist who would watch her every movement lest some sin pass by unnoted.

“What about visitors?”

“She may have had them, but I saw very few; in fact, only one I can recall. A young man, with light-brown hair, lean build.”

“How young?” Nat was nearly thirty.

Fallon shrugged.

“How tall was he? What about features—full or bony?”

But Fallon shook his head. “I saw the man only from above, and then only briefly each time.”

“Recently?”

“Maybe once or twice a week for the past month.”

“Did you see him last night?”

“I told you, Officer, I saw nothing outside the apartment after I got home.”

“Okay, but I’ll need the names of the people who were here then.”

“I have no idea. I couldn’t even give you descriptions. Once I get caught up in the Kirtan, that level of reality fades entirely.”

I extracted a card. “Call me if you see or hear anything about Anne Spaulding.”

He nodded, stood up, and turned on the tape.

Pushed by the roar of the Tibetan monks, I made my way down the stairs, feeling a more unstable mix of emotions than when I’d seen Anne’s apartment. I would have to question Nat now. What was it with Nat? Why couldn’t he just have told me the truth? Why did he go out of his way to tell me he’d never been inside Anne’s apartment? His pen was in her living room, and the top of his head (or at least a head that fit his description) was a familiar sight to Sri Fallon. Why hadn’t Nat told me?

Surely if Nat were involved in Anne’s disappearance he wouldn’t have called me. Unmentioned, it probably could have gone unreported for days. If her relations with the other neighbors were like that with Fallon, there would have been no report coming from there. From her office, perhaps. But it sounded like only Nat was very interested.

Whatever Nat’s reason, it wouldn’t be sufficient excuse. Shading the truth, hoping to avoid confrontation, was not a new tack with him. It reminded me why I’d divorced him.

But now I wondered if I could be detached enough to handle this investigation professionally. Regardless of Nat’s peccadillos, his instincts were right. Something had happened to Anne Spaulding, something that needed investigation.

The sensible thing was to turn the case over to Howard. He knew almost as much as I did.