12
I had no intention of returning to Claire’s house. I’d cleaned it as well as I could, and I’d left with everything I’d brought in with me. I had her last five notebooks and the keys from the unmarked envelope I’d found in her desk.
I was sitting at an airport bar now, looking at an untouched beer. I had an idea about the keys. Olivia Gravesend said her family had a long-running respect for the value of a pied-à-terre. Claire must have grown up hearing that. So perhaps when she’d left Harvard and set out for California, she’d seen the need for her own foot on the ground. She had the money. And maybe she would have wanted a place of her own. You’re never truly alone in a hotel room, after all. Your things are never entirely secure. She’d have traveled enough to know that.
I heard a call for my flight. I finished my beer and then went to the gate.
I landed in San Francisco before dark and took a taxi to Union Square. I didn’t want to go home. And if White had bugged my apartment, he’d probably bugged my office. I hadn’t put an alarm system in there yet, so I had no way of knowing.
I called Jim from a hotel payphone and reached him at his desk.
“Counselor,” I said. “Have you had coffee?”
“I usually don’t drink it after three o’clock, or I can’t sleep.”
“Then maybe you should go get a decaf. It’s important.”
“All right.”
Jim was already in the body shop when I got there. He had two paper cups of coffee on the desk in front of him.
“How was Mrs. Gravesend?” Jim asked.
“Just fine. The Iron Bitch sends her regards.”
“She heard about that?”
“Watch your back,” I said, and he shrugged. Making an enemy of Olivia Gravesend didn’t concern him, except for his bottom line. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Lorca?”
“There might be a problem.”
“There’s no problem. They dismissed it yesterday. What else could they do, when DeCanza had just confessed? They’ll bring my client back next week and take a plea on the tax returns, and that’s it.”
“Agent White was in my apartment last night, planting bugs.”
“White?”
“I’m pretty sure.”
I showed him the photo from my alarm system.
“There’s no face. You can’t see anything. How do you know it’s White?”
“I’ve got a feeling,” I said. I held out my hand. “Give me that back—I want to show you something else.”
He handed me the phone and I went to my camera roll. I pulled up the headshot of the man I’d killed. I hadn’t looked at it since taking it. His face was paper white, and the reason for that was evident. His neck was covered in blood, the knife gash visible because of the tilt his head had taken. I palmed the phone so Jim couldn’t see it.
“Representing Lorca and his friends, you’ve seen a lot of mug shots. Right?”
“Sure.”
“And you’ve probably seen photo books of federal informants. People in the Witness Protection Program. Stuff you’ve compiled using sources like me. Stuff you got from your clients.”
Jim conceded that with a slight dip of his chin.
“So just tell me this,” I said, and handed him the phone. “Have you seen this guy?”
He looked at the photo. I saw his eyes moving back and forth as he worked something out in his mind. Then he tapped twice at the screen, turned the phone off, and handed it back.
“Did you just delete that?” I asked.
“You don’t want it,” he said. “Trust me. But where did you get it?”
“It doesn’t matter—and I had a question you just dodged. Do you know him, or not?”
“Did you take that yourself?”
“You know him, don’t you?”
“I couldn’t tell you without breaking a privilege.”
“That means yes,” I said. “You know him.”
“Is he dead?” Jim asked. He took the lid off his cup and sipped from the surface of the coffee. “Dead would be better.”
“Who is he?”
When he didn’t answer, I repeated the question. He put the lid back and stood up. His chair scooted backwards on rusty wheels. He brushed his rain-damp coat with one hand to flatten it.
“My advice to you, Lee, is really simple,” he said. “If you were thinking about leaving town, that’s a good idea. Go catch some fish in La Paz.”
“What about Mrs. Gravesend?”
“Forget about her,” he said. “Head south. Tonight.”
“Fuck your privilege,” I said. I stood up too. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned my shirt so he could see the handprints around my throat. “I know what they want to do to me, and I can handle them. I just need to know who they are.”
“So he is dead?” Jim asked.
I nodded.
I didn’t want to say it out loud, even here, where Jim and I talked about anything. But the guy was dead. Right now, if he was wearing anything at all, it was a toe tag.
“Good for you,” Jim said. “But there’s more of them. So go south. And don’t call me for a while.”
He stepped out of the office, and walked across the garage floor. Through the cobwebbed glass, I saw his phone light up as he brought it to his face. He was calling his driver to meet him out front. I gave him five minutes’ lead, and then I walked out. The street was busy, and I didn’t particularly want to be seen. I summoned a car with my phone and asked to go to Chinatown. I didn’t want to go home, but I wanted to at least look through the windows as we drove past.
I ended the night at a backpackers’ hotel in North Beach. From Chinatown, I took a streetcar, and then a cab over to Fisherman’s Wharf, and then walked back to the hotel, where I paid for my room in cash. The bed wasn’t much bigger than a cot, the walls were tissue-thin, and my German neighbors were deeply in love. I didn’t care. I brushed my teeth with the travel kit I’d picked up, showered, and turned off the light. I lay on the bed and looked at the glow of streetlights on my ceiling. I was asleep long before my neighbors.
I also woke before anyone else in the hotel.
First thing I did was pick up my phone and check the Globe, and then the Chronicle. There was nothing new about the man I’d killed, and nothing about Claire. There was a three-inch article about Lorca. The government had voluntarily dismissed its case against Jim’s client, who took a plea on a single tax evasion charge. Nothing about me.
I took the stairs to the front desk, paid for another night, and asked about the Wi-Fi password. Then I walked to a drugstore and bought socks, underwear, and a package of undershirts. I could get another day out of my pants and my Boston shirt, and after that, I was going to need to think about going home.
After I changed clothes, I caught a streetcar out of North Beach and over Nob Hill. I got off near Powell and Market, took the escalator down, and caught the first BART train to the Civic Center station. If Claire had bought a pied-à-terre in San Francisco, then the deed would be a public document, preserved on microfilm and stored in the Office of the Assessor-Recorder, in City Hall. Finding it would be as easy as typing her name into a terminal, getting the deed’s microfilm reel and image number, and then asking a records clerk for the canister. If she bought the house under her own name, that is. If she’d bought it through a holding company, I’d never find it—I wouldn’t know what name to search. And that was all assuming she’d bought a house at all, and that it was in San Francisco.
But Claire wasn’t DeCanza or Lorca. She was a twenty-year-old woman. Though she had become secretive in the last six months of her life, deception wasn’t ingrained in her nature. I walked from the station to City Hall, pushed through a crowd of protesters to climb the marble steps, and stepped into the entrance hall.
The records clerk on duty waved to me when I stepped into Room 190.
“Lee,” she said. “Hao jiu bu jian.”
“Mae—long time no see,” I said. “I’ve been bu
sy. How about you?”
“Busy—but not now. What do you need?”
“I’m looking for a deed. The name is Claire Gravesend.”
Mae was standing behind the counter but had a terminal in front of her. She typed in the name and then looked up at me.
“She’s the grantor, or the grantee?”
“Grantee,” I said. “And this would be recent. Within the last two years, but probably more like the last six months.”
“Okay,” she said. She hit return on her keyboard, and looked at her screen. “One second.”
She took a scrap of paper from a wooden box and jotted down a number, then turned around and walked into the records room. I leaned around to look at the search result on Mae’s screen.
GRAVESEND, CLAIRE
DOC. NO. J5989874-00
REEL: K919 / IMAGE 0956
RECORD DATE: 01/27/2019
DEED
Mae came out of the records room holding a reel of microfilm, presumably canister number K919. She set it on the counter.
“It’s image nine-five-six,” she said. The microfilm machines were behind me, and they were all empty at the moment. “Or if you’ve got a second, I can print it for you.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”
I left five minutes later holding a copy of Claire’s deed. I sat down on the steps outside City Hall and read through it. The purchase price was hidden behind the usual language—she’d paid ten dollars, and other good and mutually agreeable considerations. There were no encumbrances to title, so it had been a cash sale. She owned the place outright, and the title was in her name alone.
The address was on Baker Street. I pulled it up on my phone’s map to get a look. The house was a block from the Presidio, near the foot of the Baker Street Stairs. That had to have taken a good chunk out of her coming-of-age money. It was a neighborhood of hillside mansions. The streets were shaded by cypress, were scented with eucalyptus, and you could see the Golden Gate rising beyond the Presidio. I folded the deed and put it in my pocket. Then I called a car and walked down to meet it on Polk Street.
I asked the driver to take me to the top of the Lyon Street Steps. I didn’t want to give him Claire’s address. After what had happened the last time I’d entered a house of hers, I wanted to minimize witnesses. Right now, Mae was the only person with any idea where I was heading.
When I got out, I walked over to the railing and looked down. The steps went from Broadway to Vallejo in two long pitches of stairs broken up in the middle by a stone pavilion. Half a dozen joggers were working their way up the steps toward me. I was the only person around not wearing bright leggings or headphones. I walked down to Vallejo, turned right, and went a block to Baker Street. Claire’s house was down the hill, on the left. It was four floors high, with a wooden balcony that surrounded the top floor. The upper floors were clad in redwood shakes, but the street level was built from stone. Columns flanked the entrance.
It was the only house on the block without flower boxes, or ornately trimmed boxwood hedges, or carefully pollarded plum trees along the sidewalk. It was in good condition, but no one was doting on it. Claire was too private for housekeepers, and too busy to do yard work.
I walked down the hill and climbed the three steps to the door. I didn’t ring the bell or lift the bronze knocker. I took out the larger key and slid it into the lock. It went in easily, and when I turned it, that went easy too. The dead bolt retracted, and I pushed the door open.
The entry hall smelled like a woman had walked through it five minutes ago. A touch of perfume, a hint of lotion. It was subtle, hard to nail down. And then I lost track of it. I took off my shoes and found the kitchen. The counters were bare. There was a liner in the trash can. I lifted the lid and found an empty cup of ramen noodles, a wadded paper towel, and a used pair of chopsticks. Beneath that, there was junk mail postmarked the day before Claire died.
But I was still thinking about Boston, and the last time I’d searched a house of Claire’s. I’d had twenty seconds to find a weapon, and that had saved me.
I’d been lucky that time, and Jim’s warnings to me were still as fresh as the bruises on my neck. I took out my phone and turned it off. Then I started opening kitchen drawers. They were mostly empty, but I found one with the basics: silverware, spatulas, a cheap-looking chef’s knife. Claire hadn’t come out here to play house. She’d picked up the minimum to get by, probably one trip down Grant Avenue to hit the Chinatown housewares shops.
I picked up the knife, and then I went to explore the rest of the house.
The living room was furnished, everything shrouded with white sheets. Same with the formal dining room, which looked out over Baker Street. The table was covered, along with each of the high-backed chairs.
According to the deed, Claire had purchased the house from an estate. The heirs must have unloaded it furniture and all. Which reminded me: I would need to tell Olivia about this house. If I couldn’t do anything else for her, locating assets would be a service. I was thinking about that—how I could trace the source of the purchase money so that Olivia could reclaim whatever was left of the twenty million—when I went upstairs and opened the first door I came to.
It was a guest bedroom. There was a chair next to the bed, and on it was a pair of slender-legged jeans. A black T-shirt was hung over the back of the chair. A pair of sandals lay on the floor, next to a small suitcase. The bed was covered with a heavy down duvet. I followed the shape under the covers up to the spill of blond hair on the pillow, and when I saw that I must have made some sound—a gasp, or a word or two spoken quickly, without thinking—and that woke her up.
Claire Gravesend sat up and swept the duvet to the side. She rubbed her fingertips against her temples, her eyes still closed.
She was wearing a bra and a pair of panties. Which meant that when she swung her legs to the floor and bent forward to stretch, I could see the scars running up her spine, two by two. As if someone had held her down and used her skin to grind out lit cigars. Box after box of them.
It was her. It could be no one else but her. Her body, her face, her hair. And now the scars.
Claire Gravesend.
I’d found her on Turk Street, had touched my fingers to her throat, where I found no pulse. I’d never forget her autopsy photographs: her body from every angle, stripped, washed with a hose, and laid bare on a steel table. The photographer had documented everything. Her chest cracked open, and her skin flayed out to the sides. Her skullcap lifted off, her brain tipping a fruit market scale to thirteen hundred and fifty grams.
And now she was looking up. Her eyes were meeting mine.
She yanked the covers up to her neck. When it came, her scream was so jarring that I dropped the knife. I stepped the rest of the way into the room and kicked the door shut. I knelt and put the knife behind me, out of her sight but not quite out of my reach.
“Claire,” I said. “Claire—it’s okay.”
She just kept screaming.
13
“Claire!”
It was the third time I’d said her name, and it finally seemed to get through to her.
For an interminable five seconds, we just stared at each other. She’d stopped screaming, and that was a mercy. This was a big house. The windows were probably double-paned. But we weren’t on a block of Baker Street where women were supposed to scream inside houses. At least not out loud.
“Claire’s dead,” she whispered.
“Then who are you?”
“Madeleine.”
“Gravesend?”
She shook her head.
“Adair,” she said. “Madeleine Adair.”
She had to be telling the truth. No matter what I’d thought in the shock of seeing her, the ME had identified Claire’s body with fingerprints. California kept them on file with every driver’s license application. There was no doubt that the girl I’d seen on Turk Street had been Claire Gravesend. That was beyond dispute. It was also impo
ssible to believe she’d gotten up again.
“What are you?” I asked. “Her twin?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then she shook her head. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I have all day.”
“Not while I’m like this,” she said.
I waited outside the door while she dressed. Before stepping out, I’d given her an exceedingly brief explanation of who I was and why I could open the door to Claire’s house: private detective working for Olivia Gravesend, who had given me keys.
Now, standing in the hallway, I realized I’d left the knife on the other side of the door. I was still off-balance, acting as though the woman in the guest bedroom couldn’t be trouble because she was Claire’s mirror image. But that could be reason enough to fear her. I’d never seen Claire while she was alive—just the one moment on Turk Street, and then the autopsy photographs. Still, I’d have bet Madeleine Adair could fool anyone, Olivia Gravesend included. That would be a two-hundred-million-dollar trick, so long as the real Claire Gravesend didn’t get in the way. Which seemed like a sound theory for a second or two. Madeleine might have had a reason to murder Claire, but leaving the heiress’s dead body on a public street made no sense if the plan was to take her place.
I had less than a minute to think about it, and then Madeleine had slid into her jeans, pulled on her T-shirt, and stepped into her sandals. The door clicked open and she came out. She was holding the knife in her right hand, blade down at her thigh. She had a leather purse slung over her shoulder, and she’d put up her hair with a set of crosswise ebony pins. When she turned to pull the door shut, I could see the scars on the back of her neck.
“You were in Boston,” I said. “The day Claire died, you went to her house and knocked on the door.”
“You saw me?”
“Let’s go downstairs,” I said. “We can talk in the kitchen.”
She nodded but didn’t move. She was waiting for me to lead the way so that I wouldn’t be behind her on the stairs. I went ahead, and she followed. If she’d wanted, she could have grabbed a handful of my hair, jerked my head back, and slit my throat. But by the time we reached the kitchen, I was still alive.
Blood Relations Page 9
