Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes (29 page)

I could not reconcile the violent act with the ritualistic one.

And the finger. Good God, the finger . . .

I knelt there on the cold ground for a long time, my hand resting on the overgrown foundation. Kept thinking of them all, each a victim in his or her own way. Each a predator, too.

Even though I'd found no real reason here, somehow I felt as if I'd gotten what I'd come for. Finally I stood, wiped the dirt of the dovecote's foundation form my hands. Turned and walked away.

Lights shone in the windows of the Chavez cottage. I parked directly in front, mounted the rickety porch steps, and knocked. A plump woman in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt opened the door. No, she said, Enrique wasn't home.

“When do you expect him?”

She smiled as if I'd made a joke. “Friday night—who knows? My boys, they come and they go like they want. Mostly go.”

I thanked her and started to turn away. A motorcycle rounded the corner. Mrs. Chavez said, “There he is now.”

The motorcycle pulled up to the curb in front of my car. Its rider got off and gave the MG a curious look, as if he'd seen it before and was trying to place it, then glanced up at where I stood on the steps. He was tall and slender, with an acne-scarred face and a thick name that fell nearly to his shoulders.

It was the young man who had come to the door of Louise Wingfield's cubicle at Project Helping Hands the first time I'd talked with her.

What had she called him? Rick. She'd anglicized his name.

Chavez looked back at the MG, putting it together, too. Then he got back on his bike.

“Rick, stay right where you are!”

I raced down the steps. Rick gunned the cycle. I lunged for it, but it moved away from the curb, its exhaust hot through the legs of my jeans. I watched as it careened west up the Clipper Street hill.

Mrs. Chavez stood on the porch, her mouth open. I called to her, “Where would he go?”

She shook her head.

“A friend's? A girlfriend's?”

“You the police or something, lady?”

“I'm not the police.”

“Huh.” She went into the house and slammed the door.

That was all right, I thought. I didn't need to talk with Rick Chavez now. The person I needed to talk with was Louise Wingfield.

On the night of our pilgrimage to North Beach and Seacliff, Wingfield's car had been in the shop and I'd dropped her off at her condominium on Chestnut Street on Russian Hill. I found the sprawling brown-shingled building easily; it was on the north side of the street, and great expanses of glass and cantilevered decks took advantage of the bay view. No view tonight, however; even here the fog held the city in its grip.

I went to the entrance of the building and checked the mailboxes. Wingfield's condo appeared to take up the entire third floor. I rang the bell. Got no reply. Stepped back onto the sidewalk and looked up. All the windows were dark. No Wingfield. No answers.

Now what?

The mist hung as thick in James Alley as anywhere else in the city tonight. I walked along, sounds from the surrounding congested area oddly muted by the buildings on either side of me. The alley was very dark, and few lights showed in windows. I had difficulty located Melissa Cardinal's door.

There it was—the one with the iron mesh over its window. I fumbled with the bells, range the one I thought was Cardinal's. No answer. I rang the rest, but no one came. The two times I'd come here, I'd seen no evidence of other tenants; possibly the other three apartments were unoccupied.

I started to walk back the way I'd come, then stopped. Melissa had been cautious about answering the door the other day; possibly she was climbing down the stairs. I went back to the door, listened, but heard nothing. Finally I grasped the doorknob and pushed experimentally. The door opened a crack.

I looked down, but couldn't see what had prevented it from latching. I pushed harder, encountered resistance. After located my small flashlight at the bottom of my bag, I stood on tiptoe and shone it through the window mesh.

What I saw made me put my shoulder to the door and force it opened about eighteen inches, enough so I could squeeze partway through. I shone the light downward.

Melissa was the barrier I'd been pushing against. She lay on the floor at the foot of the stairs, head propped against the baseboard, dress hiked up to mid-thigh, veined legs splayed. And the blood . . .

It had spurted, sprayed on the walls. The spatter patterns seemed to jump out at me as I moved the flashlight beam over them. Tacky here, still wet there, and the sickly sweet smell combined with the more pungent odors—

My heart did a little skip, then started racing; my stomach revolted. I squeezed back through the door, used a nearby garbage can for the dregs of the Turkish coffee. Then I breathed deeply, leaning against the building's wall. It was several minutes before I could make myself go back inside.

She was still warm, but had no pulse. If it hadn't been for the blood, I would have assumed she'd fallen downstairs and broken her neck. There was no wound that I could see—

Wait, there it was. In the neck. A single puncture to the artery. No wonder the blood had sprayed. The killer—he or she—must have been covered with Melissa's lifeblood.

It was silent in the building—the kind of silence that told me no one else was there. Carefully I edged around Melissa's body and went up to her apartment. Its door stood open; she'd gone done to let someone in, then.

There was a phone on the table next to the recliner. Under the lamp's base my card was still anchored, finger-smudged as if she'd been toying with the idea of calling me. I picked up the receiver and called Homicide. Wallace was in the squad room; he said he and Joslyn would be right behind the uniforms. I replaced the receiver, turned up the lamp and looked around.

The first thing I spotted was Melissa's big white cat cowering under the tall cabinet. I hauled the creature out, stroked it. It wriggled from my grasp and ran back under there. I decided to leave it where it felt safe.

As I straightened, the objects on the shelves caught my eye. I looked closer. The animal figures were not cheap kitsch, as I'd previously assumed, but tasteful and expensive-looking, like the reproductions you see in the museum gift shops. And, also contrary to what I'd thought, they had not recently been dusted. A film overlay the carved stone sea lion. Mexican folk-art cat, gold snail with cut-crystal, ivory tortoises, fine china dogs, and wood-carved jungle beasts. A large lop-eared jade rabbit, nose pointed into the air, had been moved enough to make miniature footprints.

A costly collection for a woman living on Social Security and disability payments, I thought. Of course, Melissa had probably spent very little on anything else. But even so, she must have had an additional source of income to collect in such a manner. Perhaps her recent extortion attempts were not her only ones...

I heard the first wave of law enforcement personnel in the alley and went down to meet them. Melissa's body seemed strangely diminished now, as if the official presence had caused any lingering vestiges of her persona to flee. I felt a tug of sorrow as I edged around her. Already it was as if she were long dead; soon all traces of her existence would be eradicated. All that would remain as a collection of stillborn animals that would find their way into the city's antique shops, a cat that would end up in the pound.

Outside I identified myself to the patrolmen and filled in the basic details. They asked me to wait in the black-and-white until Wallace and Joslyn arrived; I complied, sitting with the door open, my feet on the pavement. A backup unit pulled behind it; neighborhood residents began to wander into the alley. When Wallace's unmarked car pulled in from the far end, I got out and waved.

Joslyn hurried toward the building and spoke with one of the men in uniform. Wallace came over to me. “This the angle you were following up?” he asked, motioning the way Adah had gone.

“Yes. Melissa Cardinal, one of the women who shared the North Beach flat with McKittridge.”

He glanced around for his partner, who was now entering the buildings. “You have any ideas about this?”

“One.” I explained about Wingfield possibly having hired Enrique Chavez to harass Benedict and me—maybe Melissa, too.

“I'll put out a pickup order on Chavez and Wingfield.”

“While you're at it, put one out on Tony Nueva. He's wanted on a drug charge down south, and he may know more about the Chavez situation than he told me.”

Bart took down the details about Neuva and went to join Joslyn in the building.

I leaned against the patrol car, watching the all-too-familiar proceedings. Joslyn emerged from the building, conferred with one of the uniforms, disappeared again. The lab van arrived, and then the medical examiner's people. After a while they left with the body bag.

So that's what it comes down to, I thought. A lifetime, and then they zip you into a sack like yesterday's garbage.

Wallace returned. “Adah wants to see you in the apartment.”

I pushed away from the patrol car. “You coming?”

“Uh-uh. I want to canvass the neighbors personally.”

I went up to Melissa's apartment.

The lab team had already dusted for fingerprints there. Joslyn sat in the recliner, going through an address book. She was dressed in sweats—off duty and at home when I'd called in, unlike her workaholic partner. Holding the address book up, she said, “Mightly slim pickings. She had several doctors, a dentist, and a chiropractor. A vet for the cat”—she motioned at where it still cowered under the cabinet—”and a couple called Mary and Rod in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.”

I sat down on the sofa. “They may be family and, if so, the closest relatives she had. I found out some fairly interesting details about the stepbrother.” I related what I'd been told about the life and death of Roger Woods.

Joslyn looked thoughtful. “I'll query Seattle on his murder.”

“Did you recover any weapon here?”

“No. From the wound, it looked to be a thin, sharp blade. Now tell me what else you know.”

I filled her in on everything. When I finished she said, “You sound like you don't think this Chavez killed Melissa.”

“I see the guy as more of a street punk than a contract killer. I think the murderer was someone Melissa expected, possibly someone she hoped to gain from.”

“The Wingfield woman? Melissa didn't succeed at blackmailing her before.”

“Maybe she tried again. And then there's the man she met at the Haven. What about this: the killer called
her,
gave her the impression of giving in to her demands as an excuse to come over here.”

“Could be.”

“Let's think about that extortion attempt on Wingfield for a minute,” I said. “It didn't work, and one of the reasons is that Melissa had no proof. But with someone else, if she did have proof . . . “

“Unless the proof was something that wouldn't mean anything if Melissa wasn't alive to explain it.” I motioned at the glass-fronted cabinet. “I don't know if you've noticed, but that collection is an expensive one for someone living on a small fixed income. This blackmailing could have been going on for some time.”

“So why kill her now?”

“Maybe her earlier demands were modest, but then she saw an opportunity to do large-scale damage to her victim and upped the ante. Lis Benedict's release, the upcoming mock trial—either of those, or something else that we don't know about, could have triggered it.”

“But you said Cardinal was afraid. Wouldn't talk about the McKittridge murder. What was it she told you? That she wasn't suicidal?”

I thought for a moment. “All right—how about this? She attempted to up the ante, and the person—the man at the Haven, Wingfield, whoever—threatened her. So she backed off. But then. . . take a look at that card of mine that's tucked under the lamp. It's well thumbed: maybe she was planning to call me, tell me what she knew about McKittridge in exchange for protection. The person found out and killed her.”

Joslyn nodded. “It makes as much sense as anything else does. And if she had some sort of proof, it's probably in this apartment. Let's look for it.”

Together we examined the two room and their contents, checking the obvious and the not-so-obvious places people hide things. The absence of personal items saddened me; there were no photographs, mementos, or letters to suggest that Melissa had a life beyond these walls. Nothing, in fact, except a small file of paid bills and canceled checks from which to reconstruct the life of the woman who had immured herself here.

Finally the only thing that remained was the glass-fronted cabinet in the living room. I went over, tried its door, found it locked. Joslyn saw what I was doing and produced a key from the drawer of the table next to the recliner. As I fitted it into the lock, the white cat looked up at me, great blue eyes fearful and pleading.
Oh, no, I won't
, I thought, then picked it up and deposited it in Joslyn's arms.

“Hey!”

I opened the cabinet. The dust lay thick enough around an ivory polar bear to resemble a snowfield. The large jade rabbit's footprints were—

The rabbit, I now saw, was actually a vase, its upturned mouth an opening that would accommodate stems. A roll of paper had been pushed into it. I picked the rabbit up, probed with my fingernail, pulled the paper out. A photograph.

It was signed with the same name as those on the wall of the gallery at the Institute—Loomis—and shoed the terrace behind the mansion in Seacliff. A cocktail party was in progress: in the foreground Lis and Vincent Benedict were talking with another couple whom I didn't recognize; in the background Russell Eyestone held court, a circle of men surrounding him; at the far right were two young couples. I recognized Cordy from the photos I'd seen on microfilm; she was laughing, head tilted back, the setting sun sheening her blond hair. Leonard Eyestone stood at her elbow, entranced. Louise Wingfield looked plainly bored, and her companion—a tall, thin man with dark hair—smiled politely, but his eyes were intent on some point in the distance.