Treasure Hunt (21 page)

She sighed. “Well, here’s the thing. I get two days off a week, Monday and Tuesday. Otherwise, I’ve got to be in a dress and nylons and high heels and makeup. And sometimes, a lot of the time, I guess I feel like I’m trapped. So I drive off and sleep where I stop, and I don’t feel so . . . I don’t know, so regimented. Like I can still make some of my own decisions, and I’m not stuck in a life I don’t want to live. I mean,” she added, “look at all of us—maybe not you, Jim—but the rest of us. We’re just all marking time, trying to get into something that’s going to feel like our real lives, you know. You guys going to chef classes, and, Tamara, you starting your day job again.

“Maybe I sleep out to remind myself that my real self is still there, I’ve still got time, I’ve got game, I’m going to be doing something that’s really me someday, that
matters,
and as long as I’m still that person who can just jump up and go sleep out somewhere, then that’s someone I recognize. I’m still here.” As though surprised by how much she’d revealed about herself, she ducked her head a bit into her shoulders and looked around at her audience. “Sorry,” she said. “TMI.” Too much information. “It’s my inner nerd. I can’t shut her up.”

“That’s all right.” Tamara grabbed a bite of arugula from the bowl in front of her. “We’re a tolerant household. The nerd’s welcome too.”

Mickey was looking in at the goat and now pulled it out of the oven, setting it on the top of the stove. He covered it with aluminum foil, then turned back to the table. “Ten minutes to let the meat rest while the polenta cooks, then we eat. And you said it better than I could, Alicia. That was pretty much exactly it.” In spite of her no-nonsense style of dress tonight—she wore old jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and hiking boots—Mickey had been fighting the temptation to stare at her since she’d come in. But now he braved a quick surreptitious look and noticed a faraway glaze and glassiness in her eyes. “Alicia? Are you okay?”

Biting her lip, she nodded. “Just, you know, dealing with the Dominic thing again. That whole doing-something-that-matters is looking a little more distant right now, that’s all. But I’m okay. Really.”

Parr tipped up his glass, then poured himself some more. “What about Dominic? Did you know him too?”

“Did she know him?” Ian asked.

And for the next twenty minutes, until the dinner was halfway gone—everyone loving the goat—they covered the common ground between Jim and Alicia as Como’s drivers, some of the life and politics up at Sunset, how things were the same, and how they had changed. “Yeah, but even with all the changes,” Parr was saying, “everything I hear is that what Dominic did was essentially the same. He drives around, talks to people, helps wherever he can. Serves food. Drives nails. He was just a hands-on guy. I’m never going to believe Dominic was stealing money. And irregularities? A business this big, there’s always going to be paperwork problems. But if somebody was taking money, it wasn’t Dominic.”

“But do you think that’s what this is about?” Mickey asked. “Somebody taking money and Dominic found out?”

“This is what’s been getting to me,” Alicia said. “I can’t
imagine
what it’s about. Given who Dominic was, the man he was, it just defies belief.”

“Well.”

All eyes went to Parr.

“But I promised my good-cooking grandson I wouldn’t go out there and ask around.”

Ian was sitting in the visitor’s chair at the end of the table. “And what would you ask about?”

Parr put his fork down. “Just what we’ve all been talking about here. Somebody taking money. Maybe somebody who just wanted to take over. I mean, look at it. Dominic’s been doing it his way forever. So long as he’s there it’s going to keep getting done the same way. But now there’s more money and more organization all around, am I right? More decisions that he’s got to take part in, but he’s not really interested. He wants to be on the street ’cause that’s who he is.”

Mickey, though, was shaking his head. “It’s a good theory, Jim, but let’s not forget that Dominic wasn’t exactly Saint Francis of Assisi living with a vow of poverty. Just his legit salary was six hundred and fifty grand a year in this job.” He held up a hand at the expected opposition around the table. “Not that he didn’t earn it, but he was also the rainmaker who brought in most of that money.”

“And is that a bad thing?” Alicia asked.

“Not at all. But let’s remember that whoever took him out killed the goose who kept laying the golden egg, year after year. Alicia, Jim here is talking about serving food and driving nails, but how often did Dominic do fund-raisers too? Almost every day, right? At least four days a week?”

“At least,” she had to admit.

Mickey shrugged. “I’m just saying I haven’t seen any sign he was slowing down in the job. In fact, the more we talk about this, the more I’m inclined to start with what Al Carter said—Dominic was meeting somebody he knew over how he could help him. That sounds like Dominic, doesn’t it? Hands-on, one-on-one. Even if the appointment was just an excuse to get Dominic alone, at least he believed it.”

“Maybe you should talk to Al Carter again, Mickey,” Alicia said.

And Mickey nodded. “The thought has crossed my mind.”

 

 

Hunt had sat in his car and pondered for most of fifteen minutes, then had placed a call to Gina Roake. She advised him to leave the scene and to make an anonymous call to the Police Department reporting what he’d seen. Maybe even disguising his voice. He wanted, she had told him, nothing to do with discovering the body of Nancy Neshek, if indeed it was she, which he did not doubt.

But they both knew he could not do that without running the risk of losing his license. More than that, he just didn’t see himself operating like that. So about twenty minutes ago, he had called Juhle and then gone back to sit in his car at the curb.

The first police vehicle to appear was a black-and-white SFPD squad car. This might turn out to be a dicey moment, Hunt realized, since his precise role here was nebulous at best. Especially when the crime was murder and the scene was a locked-up, darkened mansion in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, there was nothing to do but brazen it out, so he flashed his lights briefly at the squad car as it pulled up, and emerged from his Cooper into the lights of the squad car with his identification held out in front of him. “I’m a private investigator named Wyatt Hunt,” he announced. “I’m the one who called Inspector Juhle.”

One of the officers—the name badge over his pocket read “Sorenson”—jerked a thumb in the direction of the house. “There’s a body in there?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it from the window.” He didn’t want to go into too much detail about which window and what he’d been doing out here in the first place. Maybe they wouldn’t ask.

“You’re sure?”

“Reasonably, yeah.”

“Okay.” The cop opened the back door of his squad car. “Please have a seat and we’ll be right back.”

This sounded like a request, but Hunt knew that squad car doors didn’t open from the inside when you were in the backseat and that a cage separated him from access to the cop’s stuff in the front. He was being detained in the nicest possible manner.

Sorenson said, “Let’s go, Lou,” and they walked together up to the now-dark front porch where Sorenson tried the door, rang the bell, and called out “Police” a couple of times, to no response. Meanwhile, his partner was shining a flashlight beam through the windows on either side of the front door. After a short discussion, they walked back to the squad car and opened the door.

“It’s all locked up.”

“I know.”

“The back too?”

“Right.”

“We didn’t see anything,” Sorenson said.

Hunt got out. “It’s farther to your left,” he said. “Way over by the corner.”

“You saw something over there? We didn’t see a thing.”

“It was lighter out.”

Hunt was starting to wish he’d taken Gina’s advice and placed an anonymous call when another figure approached on the street to his right. “Excuse me,” the man said. “I live just across there. What’s going on here?”

But Sorenson was within hearing and moved a few steps down the pathway to the door. “Would you please stay back, sir? This is a potential crime scene.”

“A crime scene. What happened?”

Sorenson had the neighbor and Hunt both in his flashlight now. “We’re not sure,” he said, as another car pulled up behind Sorenson’s squad car.

“Here’s the sergeant,” his partner said.

“Let’s hope so.”

 

 

Eventually Juhle arrived in his personal Camry, but not before another squad car, a van from Channel 3 that must have picked up the dispatch call, an ambulance (in case the person wasn’t in fact dead and needed medical attention), and six other locals—neighbors who had materialized out of the once-deserted street. By the time Juhle got there, none of the other five policemen on the scene with their flashlights, and looking through the door and front windows, had been able to spy the body.

Hunt knew he was going to have to admit he’d been over to the side window, snooping, and was starting to get a bad feeling about it.

It was a windblown night and late, now at least two hours since Hunt’s original phone call to his friend. Within five minutes after Juhle had arrived, and after trying to finesse what he’d actually done for a little longer, Hunt had finally directed Juhle to the side window, where he’d seen enough of the body to authorize a break-in. Then, after a brief discussion, deciding they could just crawl in and get inside the house if they could unlock and open a window, Sorenson had punched out a small pane of glass from the bay window on the ground floor opposite the room where the body lay. Within a minute or so, someone had climbed through the window, turned on some lights, and opened the front door.

And, of course, discovered the completely dead body of Nancy Neshek.

Meanwhile, breaking the window had set off the burglar alarm, which brought apparently all of the rest of the neighbors out—they numbered at least thirty—along with four more squad cars to control the crowd. Hunt leaned back up against the hood of his Cooper, arms crossed, freezing in his light jacket.

He knew that one day he would laugh about this entire scenario, since to the tune of the deafening school-bell alarm, there were now six squad cars, two of them with rotating blue and red strobelike lights, thirteen cops not including Juhle, three paramedics and their ambulance, and another news van and its crew capturing the absurdity as it unraveled.

But there wasn’t anything really funny about it now.

Finally, the alarm company managed to turn off the bells—the sudden silence like a vacuum in the night.

 

 

“This sucks. It really does,” Juhle said.

“I’m not so wild about it myself,” Hunt replied.

By now it was midnight.

Nancy Neshek’s body still lay in the living room where someone had hit her more than once with a fireplace poker and where she had subsequently died. The crime scene technicians were working and still photographing the scene. The coroner’s assistant was in with them, waiting until they were finished before she would order the body moved. For the moment, she was having a conversation with Sarah Russo, who’d finally arrived an hour ago in high dudgeon from her night impounding the limo and an interrupted late dinner. She very obviously didn’t even want to see Hunt, and not so much Juhle either.

So Hunt and Juhle sat outside in the van that served as the mobile command center for SFPD, away from the action and the hostility.

“Neshek actually called you on this reward thing?” Juhle asked.

“Last night. But not to give information. To ask a question.”

“And you don’t have any idea was the question was?”

“Not a clue.” Hunt shook his head. “Except I’m pretty sure it wasn’t if I knew how to compute the circumference of a circle.”

“Pi-R-squared,” Juhle said.

But Hunt kept shaking his head. “Nope. That’s the area. I think it’s pi-D, but that wasn’t what she called about anyway.”

Juhle hesitated. “So what got you out here?”

Hunt ran it down for him—the original call with its sense of urgency, her lack of availability at both of her phone numbers during the whole day. “But really, bottom line,” he concluded, “it was just a hunch.”

“Hunches are good.”

“I’ve got another one, then. Whoever did this, did Como.”

“Not impossible, maybe even probable.” He indicated the house.

“Let’s see if whoever it was left something for us in the way of evidence. And by us I mean the police, not you and me.”

“I thought we were all about share and share alike.”

“Wrong. In fact, you’re lucky you’re not sitting in an interview room downtown, and you know it.” As far as it went, this was probably true. Who was to say that Hunt hadn’t in fact come out here to speak to Neshek and had gotten inside the house, where for some reason he struck her down with the poker, then set the house alarm, locked up, walked out, and called Juhle? Certainly, both Juhle and Russo had been overtly aware enough of this possibility that they hadn’t permitted Hunt to enter the house and thus have a ready and benign explanation if they found trace evidence of his presence there—a fingerprint, a hair follicle. Hunt had spent time answering questions in police custody before, and knew that the only thing that stood between him and another interrogation room right now was the forbearance of Juhle and Russo. “And in any event,” Juhle went on, “I’ll want a taped interview from you by tomorrow, let’s say high noon.”