To the Bone (10 page)

M
onks drove to North Beach, following Stover Larrabee's directions to a meeting place. Today, that place was a beat-up blue van with
ON THE SPOT PLUMBING
lettered on the side, parked on Stockton, a couple of blocks north of Columbus. Several lengths of copper and PVC pipes were strapped to the rack on the van's top. The back was filled with scarred toolboxes and bins of fittings. A couple of pairs of greasy Carhartt overalls hung from hooks.

That was all cover. The van was also outfitted with camcorders, telephoto equipment, a parabolic microphone, bugs and sweepers, and a full set of lock picks.

Larrabee was hunched forward with his forearms over the steering wheel when Monks got in. He had a pair of Leica binoculars in his lap. A small TV set with the sound off was playing the
Today
show. A couple of crossword puzzle books and paperbacks lay on the floor, along with a thermos of coffee and a trucker's jug to urinate into. The van was positioned to give a good view downhill.

“Fucking surveillance,” Larrabee said. “Every time I take one on, I swear, never again.”

It was only midmorning, but the streets were already happening, with crowds cruising the cafés and souvenir stores. With the warm weather, there was much flesh on display. Obvious tourists tended toward shorts and tank tops or T-shirts of the
I'm with Stupid
variety. Local skin was likely to be pierced or tattooed, and topped by hair of colors not found in nature. It occurred to Monks that this was an alternative plastic surgery, for those on tight budgets or who wanted to make a more radical statement.

“What's the venue?” Monks said.

“This guy comes to me. Ernesto, he's Panamanian, a little hotheaded. He's got some bucks, and a good-looking wife. But he goes to a business convention, and meets another babe he decides is the love of his life. Comes back home and tells his wife he's leaving her. This all happens within a week, now.

“So needless to say, his wife, she's Latina, too, she goes ballistic, and
she
goes out and picks up a musician, a guy who lives down there”—Larrabee pointed at a row of apartment buildings downhill—“and fucks
him.
He's ten years younger than her, but it seems to actually take—it's been going on a couple months now.

“Meantime, the husband starts to realize that maybe the new babe isn't it after all. He decides he wants his wife back, but she tells him to piss up a rope. On top of that, he figures he's going to lose his ass in the divorce. So he hires me to follow her and photograph her with her guy. That way, he can claim
she's
the one who broke up the marriage.”

“He can?”

“If he can get divorced in Panama, which is what he's planning, maybe,” Larrabee said. “I don't particularly care. He's paying me a thousand bucks a day plus expenses. But sometimes, I get involved in this kind of idiot shit, I think of a lot of other ways I could have made a living.” Larrabee shook his head, face wry. “So? What's going on with you?”

Monks brought him up to date. When he finished, Larrabee turned off the TV. He put the binoculars to his eyes and focused on the building where Ernesto hoped to catch his wife and her paramour in flagrante delicto.

“Has it crossed your mind that this might not have been an accident?” Larrabee asked.

Monks blinked. “You mean murder? No. Not really.”

“I'm just putting together what you've told me,” Larrabee said, still scanning through the glasses. “She was a healthy young woman; she shouldn't have died. The DIC thing is very mysterious. Dr. Kasmarek thinks it could have been caused by a toxic substance, but it would have to be an unusual one—like, somebody deliberately chose it so it wouldn't be identified. She was alone the last several hours, and dopey, so it would have been easy to slip it to her.”

He lowered the binoculars again and slouched back in his seat.

“And it sounds like those women at the clinic know more than they're telling,” he said.

“It's still a long way from there to murder.”

“This girl was not exactly Suzy Creamcheese,” Larrabee said. “Not criminal, but money trouble. I ran quickie background checks on her and Dreyer. Bad credit reports, and they ran out on their rent in a couple of places down in LA. I keep wondering where she was getting all that money. Paying cash for the city's most expensive plastic surgeon.”

“You think she could have been blackmailing somebody?”

“All I think so far is that there's several things that are
off,
” Larrabee said. “What do you say we go take a look around her apartment?”

“A look for what?”

“Just a look. I doubt we'll find anything. It's a place to start, is all.”

“Her fiancé said there were no chemicals—nothing like that.”

“You can't take that guy's word for anything. Remember, he was the last one with her.”

“It doesn't make sense that he'd have wanted to hurt her,” Monks said. “He talked about her like she was his bank account. He was outraged that he'd been ripped off.”

“You never know. Could be he's smarter than you're giving him credit for, and that's what he wants everybody to think. Maybe she was cheating on him, or costing him money some way he couldn't get out from under.”

“You're not figuring on breaking in, are you?” Monks said warily. He had helped Larrabee do so in the past, and it had scared the shit out of him.

Larrabee grinned. “Relax. Her boyfriend said the building had a super, right? For a doctor and a private investigator—I'm betting he'd open it up.”

“What about the lady you're supposed to be surveilling?”

“I've already got several photos of her and this guy together on the street. I was hoping maybe they'd get frisky this morning and leave the shade up, but there's nothing happening in there.” Larrabee shrugged. “Ernesto wants more, that's another thousand bucks.”

They drove to Eden Hale's apartment, on Twenty-fifth Avenue, near Irving Street.

 

The building was not luxurious, but it was nice—several stories of whitish concrete, post-war, with a glass-doored lobby and small but-well kept grounds. Most of the apartments had a view, with the north-facing ones overlooking Golden Gate Park.

“What do you figure these go for?” Larrabee said. “Couple grand a month, minimum?”

Monks nodded. Minimum.

They rang the outside bell for the superintendent. He appeared after a minute, an earnest-looking Hispanic man who could have been forty or sixty. Monks and Larrabee showed him their respective licenses, while Larrabee explained that they would like to look around Ms. Hale's apartment for just a few minutes. A twenty-dollar bill was artfully presented, and accepted, in the process.

The super took them up to the third floor and down a quiet hallway. “Her mother and father came here yesterday,” he said, taking out keys. “They took some things, her personal stuff, you know. They gonna send a mover for the furniture.” His serious brown eyes looked from one to the other of them. “There some kind of trouble here?”

“No,” Larrabee said. “Just some questions we're trying to clear up. Wait, if you want. We won't take long.”

The apartment was a one-bedroom, beige-carpeted, with a couch, coffee table, dining set, and a few other pieces of furniture. There was a home entertainment center, with TV, VCR, and stereo, and two cordless phones, one in the front room and one by the bed. It was all good quality, and new. But it was oddly impersonal, giving the feel of a waiting room rather than a place where someone actually lived.

If there had been any photographs or other personal touches, they had been removed. The queen-sized bed had been stripped and the bathroom and medicine cabinet cleared. Monks kept an eye out for bloodstains, in case the paramedics had underreported her blood loss, and the salmonella had been more advanced than it had seemed. But there was nothing he could see on the carpet, and the couple of faint small stains on the mattress had the look of dried menstrual bleeding.

There was nothing under the sink but dish soap, a couple of sponges, and a spray bottle of 409. The refrigerator was empty, and the plastic trash can contained only a few crumpled, makeup-smeared tissues. Monks suspected that these had come from Eden's distraught mother. Whatever Eden might have eaten to give her the salmonella was gone.

Only two things remained that gave a sense of Eden herself. One was her reading material—dozens of issues of
Cosmopolitan,
other women's magazines, and fashion catalogs, stacked on tables or just lying around. The other was her clothes. One closet was stuffed, bristling with outfits that looked wild, sexy—on the cutting edge of fashion, he supposed, for the circle she had moved in. At least twenty pairs of shoes spilled out of a basket and littered the floor, with spike heels and boots predominant. Her lingerie drawer was another echo, packed with bras and panties that tended toward the colorfully skimpy.

But the other closet was a surprise. It had only a dozen outfits, dresses and blouse-skirt combinations, neatly hung. These were much more conservative, the sort of things professional women picked out carefully at exclusive shops. They looked mostly unworn, with the tags still on.

Larrabee looked at this closet longer than he had the other one. Then he turned back to the super, who was waiting politely in the doorway.

“Has anybody else been here?” Larrabee asked. “Besides her parents?”

The super shook his head. “Just the ambulance guys.”

“How about her boyfriend? He said he talked to you that morning.”

“Yeah, but I just told him what happened and he went straight to the hospital.”

“You're sure he hasn't been back since?” Larrabee said.

“He don't have keys.”

Larrabee stared. “No kidding? The guy she was going to marry?”

“She didn't want him coming around all the time. She told me. I think they fought about it, you know?”

“I guess they would,” Larrabee said. “How long did she live here?”

The super thought about it. “Maybe four months.”

“Any other regular visitors?”

“It didn't seem like it. I'm not here all the time, you know. But I don't think she had, like, girlfriends or anything.”

“Do you know where she worked?”

“She told me she's a model. But it seemed like mostly when she went out, she went shopping. Or at night.”

“With her boyfriend?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes alone.”

“No other men friends?”

“Nobody I saw.”

Larrabee nodded, apparently satisfied with what he had gotten. “Okay. We may be back.” Another twenty-dollar bill appeared and disappeared. “Thanks again.”

“
Nada,
” the super said.

 

Outside in the van, Larrabee started the engine. “Looks to me like she was trying to change her life,” he said. “Going from a bad girl to a good one. A new, upscale wardrobe. And no key for the old boyfriend.”

Dreyer had used the term
fiancé,
but that could mean a lot of things, and it was looking like it had meant something different to him than to her. Or he might just have been lying. It seemed clear that she had been distancing herself from him.

“I got that, too,” Monks said. “But not much else.”

“Yeah, but there's something that
wasn't
there. An answering machine.”

“Her parents could have taken it,” Monks said. But he remembered that the phones themselves were still there. It seemed odd that they would take just the machine.

“Maybe,” Larrabee said. “Or she had one of those voice-mail services. But if she
did
have a machine, especially if it was digital, which just about all of them are these days, the messages are likely to be recoverable, even if they've been erased.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just my evil mind at work. Wondering if somebody else snagged it—afraid their voice might get identified.”

“Dreyer?”

“Maybe there was something on there he got worried about. Like they'd argued, and he threatened her. He could have taken it that night, while she was knocked out. Or made copies of her keys, and come back when the super wasn't around. You got his address?”

Monks checked in his shirt pocket and pulled out the slip of paper he had copied from the Emergency Room.

“Haver Street. Looks like a few blocks west of Van Ness.”

Larrabee leaned out the window to check the side mirror, then pulled into traffic.

“I can't wait to meet him,” Larrabee said.

R
ay Dreyer's building was a very different order of business from Eden Hale's—an old Victorian that had been chopped up into apartments, like a lot of others in the area, and like many of them, down-at-heels. The street was lined with distinctly unglamorous cars, the sidewalk cracked and gummy. The apartment windows were not open to the light and filled with plants, like in some of the city's other areas. Most were heavily curtained. In the entry, there was an old intercom system that looked defunct. Dreyer's name was not listed next to any of the buzzers, anyway. Only a couple names were.

They got back in Larrabee's van and punched Dreyer's number on the speakerphone. The same machine answered as last time.

“It's Dr. Monks, Ray. Pick up if you're there. This is important.”

The phone clicked. Dreyer said, “Yeah?” in a tone that managed to sound both indolent and impatient.

“I'm outside your place,” Monks said. “I want to come in and talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Eden.”

“We talked about Eden. I got nothing more to say.”

“Some new questions have come up,” Monks said.

“You can tell them to my lawyer. You're going to be talking to him anyway.”

“I'm
going to be talking to
your
lawyer? What about?”

“I'm filing a wrongful-death suit against you, dude.”

Monks stared at the phone in his hand, then dropped it on the seat and yanked open the van's door. Larrabee grabbed his arm.

“Hang on,” Larrabee hissed into his ear. “You can beat the shit out of him as soon as we get inside.”

Larrabee picked up the phone. “You're going to need a lawyer all right, Ray, but not for the reason you think.”

“Who's this?” Dreyer said suspiciously.

“I'm a private investigator who used to be a cop, and I can have you in jail within an hour.”

“That's bullshit.” His voice was scornful, but working at it.

“She was murdered, Ray, we're sure of that now,” Larrabee lied.

“Mur
dered?”

“And you were the last one with her.”

“You're fucking crazy,” Dreyer said.

Larrabee did not speak. The silence lasted perhaps ten seconds.

“What good's it going to do me, talking to you?” Dreyer said.

“I'm sick of sitting out here. Open the door, or not.”

Monks watched the building door steadily, his brain on hold.

“I'll buzz you in,” Dreyer finally said. “It's number seven, third floor.”

The stairway was scarred old oak, spacious, and once even grand, but now musty with the smell of invisible lives. The door to apartment number seven was open. It was a studio, with worn, stained carpet of a bilious green, an unmade Murphy bed, and a few pieces of cheap old furniture. There was a lot of stuff strewn around.

Ray Dreyer was standing in the middle of it, arms folded, head cocked to one side—challenging. He was wearing the kind of nylon jogging suit favored by those who never jogged and had a cigarette toward the corner of his mouth, in a sort of James Dean imitation.

Monks went in first and walked toward him, in a steady, even stride. On the last step, he swung his open left hand from his waist, coming hard off that foot, pivoting his hips with the swing, and then snapping them back. His palm landed across the side of Dreyer's face with a jolt Monks felt to his shoulder. It picked Dreyer up in the air, half turned him, and set him down facing the other direction. The cigarette went flying across the room and bounced off a wall. When he landed, he lurched another couple of steps with the momentum, hands flailing for something to grab. He caught hold of a threadbare couch, used it to turn himself clumsily around, and came scrabbling back toward Monks.

“You cocksucker!” he screamed, fists clenched. “I'm having you arrested!”

Monks stood without moving, hands ready, breathing heavily.

Larrabee, unperturbed, walked to the smoking cigarette and ground it into the carpet with his heel. Then he sat on a corner of a table, one foot dangling. He opened his wallet and held it at eye level, showing his license.

“Let me explain to you how this is going to go, Ray,” Larrabee said. “First off, Eden dumped you to move up here. Wouldn't even give you a key to her new place. You came after her anyway. That's called stalking.

“Then you let her die. If you'd been with her, like you were legally obligated to be, she'd have gotten to the hospital on time.

“And now, you're trying to turn a
profit
on it. You got any idea how all that's going to look?”

Dreyer clapped his own hand to the reddening side of his face, then stared at it, as if he expected to see it dripping with blood. The look in his eyes was extremely ugly, but he was not making any more moves to fight.

“We're your
friends,
” Larrabee said. “We might be able to help you,
if
you tell us the truth. Believe me, the cops won't help. They like things to get tied up nice and neat.”

“I'm very afraid, man,” he spat out with bitter sarcasm.

“I would be if I was you,” Larrabee said. “And in prison, Ray, a good-looking guy like you—let's just say your dance card's going to stay full.”

“Hey, I didn't
do
anything. She was my fiancée.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that. Seems like she saw it differently.”

Monks was feeling better. In fact, a lot better. He relaxed, stepped away, took a look around the place. Among the litter of clothes and junk, there was a fair amount of photography equipment. One corner of the room was piled waist-high with stacks of contact sheets and photos. Not surprisingly, most of the ones Monks glimpsed were of women.

“I can't believe this,” Dreyer muttered.

“Believe it,” Larrabee said. “Let's start with something simple. Did you take the phone answering machine from her apartment?”

“Why the fuck would I do that? Are you telling me somebody did?”

“I'm
asking
you if
you
did,” Larrabee said. “Just like the cops will.”

“The last time I was in there was when I took her home from the clinic. Everything was just the same as always.”

“Where'd you go when you left her?”

“Why is that important?” Dreyer said. His belligerent gaze shifted evasively.

“It's called an alibi,” Larrabee said patiently.

Dreyer sat abruptly on the couch, shoulders sagging. His hands clasped together between his knees, fingers pulling at each other.

“There's this woman, an actress. She's fan-fucking-tastic, drop-dead gorgeous. You'd recognize her name.”

“Why don't you tell us?”

Dreyer hesitated, but then said—proudly, Monks thought—“She goes by Coffee.”

Larrabee nodded, but Monks drew a blank. “
I
don't recognize it,” he said.

Dreyer snorted in disgusted disbelief.

“Coffee Trenette. She made a big splash about ten years ago,” Larrabee explained. “A movie called
Take Me.
Haven't heard much about her since.”

“She had a little drug problem,” Dreyer said. “She came up to San Fran to get away from it. I'd worked with her a few times, back when. She called me up, the day Eden had the surgery.”

“How did she know you were in town?”

“Eden ran into her somewhere, a couple months ago.”

“Okay, she called you. And?”

“She'd found out her boyfriend was messing around. She said, ‘I'm in the mood for a revenge fuck. Is it going to be you?' I told her I had to stay with Eden. She said, ‘Then I'll find somebody else.'

“I told her, whoa, wait, I'll be there. Eden was out of it anyway. I figured I'd slip over to Coffee's for a couple of hours. But she wouldn't let me go home. Kept cutting lines of coke. Coming up with more sex things she wanted to do.”

“A really
thorough
revenge fuck, huh?” Larrabee said.

“It was thorough, dude.” Dreyer smirked. “Believe me.”

Monks walked to a window and leaned against the jamb. It overlooked a scrabbly, garbage-strewn dirt yard where even the weeds seemed to be having a tough go of it. A decrepit wooden fence topped with razor wire surrounded it, but enough boards had been kicked out to make the yard a no-man's-land anyway.

You couldn't actually say that lust had killed Eden Hale, but it was a decisive link in a chain. In fact, it seemed to figure into several links.

Larrabee said, “Where did you think Eden was getting the money for her apartment?”

“She said she inherited a chunk. A rich aunt.”

“And instead of cutting you in, she moved out.”

“She
wanted
me to come up here. I wasn't stalking her, for Christ's sake. We were still
together,
she just needed some space.”

“Were you still managing her?”

“I was trying, but it's been tough. And she was taking time off for the surgery. I've mainly been marketing my images.” Dreyer flapped his hands in frustration. “I've gone all over this town, knocking on doors. Back in LA, I was connected. But I can't make shit here, and the rents suck. Look at this dump. Twelve hundred bucks a month.”

“That's not so bad, if you're going to run out on it anyway.”

“Hey,
fuck
you, man. Where'd you get that bullshit?”

“From back where you were so connected,” Larrabee said. “What was Eden planning to do next?”

“Same thing she'd always done. Acting, modeling.”

“Did it ever occur to you that she wasn't being straight with you? About that money?”

“What do you mean?” Dreyer looked from one to the other of them. If he knew the truth he was doing a good job of hiding it. “Jesus Christ, what are you talking about?”

Larrabee ignored the question. “Anybody else who might have had a serious problem with Eden? Think hard, Ray. Fingering somebody could be important for you.”

“Nobody with
that
serious a problem.”

“How about from the old days, when she was doing the porn?”

“That's history. Besides, we didn't fuck anybody over. The other way around.”

Larrabee stood. “You better give us Ms. Trenette's address. We'll need to confirm that you were with her.”

“Oh,
man,
do you have to? She'll never talk to me again.”

“Yeah, well, you'll have your memories.”

“Do me a favor and make sure her boyfriend's not around, okay?”

“Don't worry, that'll be our top priority.”

Larrabee and Monks walked to the door. Dreyer heaved himself off the couch and followed.

“I'm not done with you, fucker,” he told Monks.

“If I hear another word about you, Ray, I'll see to it that you get brought in for questioning and kept in for a nice long visit,” Larrabee said. “I strongly suggest you fall off the planet.”

Outside on the street, Monks said, “Do you believe him?”

“Unfortunately,” Larrabee said, “I do. But I've got a little problem with Coffee just happening to decide to jump him, out of the blue, that one particular night. Let's go see if she's home. Just in case we can get another spin on it.”

 

Coffee Trenette's place was very upscale, at the far west end of Lake Street, in a posh little enclave set in the hills above China Beach. It had a view of the rust-colored hills of the Marin headlands, sloping down into the Pacific, and of the great red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge. The front yard was enclosed by a high masonry wall, forming a courtyard, like in Europe. The yard was landscaped, with border gardens edged with stone, artfully placed trees, and hedges that once had been barbered into topiary. But it had gone weedy and was littered with dead foliage—the way a place looked when there were no longer people paid to take care of it.

“Is that movie she made any good?” Monks asked.

Larrabee grunted. “So good, it's been made about five hundred times. She plays a hooker with a heart of gold, who falls for a hit man who's trying to get out of the business, but he's forced to take on one last job and he gets double-crossed and they have to go on the run together.”

“She hasn't done anything since?”

“There were a couple of others that didn't amount to much,” Larrabee said. “The way that tends to happen, they get into drugs, they get attitude, they get unreliable and hard to work with. The people in charge find another hot young star. I don't think she'd be living up in San Francisco if she had anything going.”

The black iron gate was unlocked. They walked to the front door and rang the bell. A woman wearing loose white pajamas answered it immediately.

Monks did not have to be told that this was Coffee herself. She was beautiful, all right—sinewy body, coppery skin, and a thick silky mane of ebony hair that fell halfway down her back. She might have been African, Latina, Eurasian, or any combination.

But he sensed something cold, almost dead, back in her eyes—a knowing look that was beyond cynical, an awareness that from where she was, there was no place left to go. He had seen it in the eyes of junkies.

“Ray called me and told me you'd be by,” she said. “I'll do this once.” She did not move out of the doorway or invite them in.

“We'd just like to confirm that Ray Dreyer spent the night before last with you, Ms. Trenette,” Larrabee said.

“Confirmed. Anything else?”

“We'd appreciate a chance to chat a bit. About your acquaintance with Ray and Eden, that sort of thing.”

“Why in the world,” she said scathingly, “would I
chat
with people like you?” She turned away and closed the door. It did not slam, which somehow resounded even more loudly than if it had.