“Not just yet.”
Rittenhouse led the way to the side window. Meeker said then, “I put in a new pane of glass yesterday. Didn’t ask your permission, but I figured it’d be okay to go ahead.”
The deputy said nothing. He leaned up close to the window, made a frame of his hands, peered inside. As Runyon had done earlier, he moved first one way, then the other, then stretched up on his toes.
When he turned he said to Meeker, “I can’t see the front of the fireplace, Joe.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. I can’t see it from the low angle here and I’m four inches taller than you. The high back of the couch is in the way.”
Meeker was getting it now; his expression remained impassive, but the cords in his neck tightened visibly. “What’re you saying? That I didn’t see the dead guy like I told you?”
“You couldn’t have unless you stood on a ladder,” Rittenhouse said, “and probably not even then. You lied to Fred and me.”
“No, you’re wrong. I didn’t see all of him lying there, just his head and one of his arms stretched out past the side of the couch—”
“That’s impossible. His arms weren’t stretched out; they were pulled back against his sides.”
“… I tell you, I saw him. How’d I know he was in there, dead, otherwise?”
Runyon spoke for the first time. “You knew because you were inside with him when he died.”
Meeker turned on him. “Like hell! I was never in that cabin!” But the angry denial didn’t come off. Forced, phony, edged with desperation. “Who’re you to accuse me of killing somebody?”
“He didn’t accuse you of murder,” Rittenhouse said. “He just said you were inside when Dennison died.”
“How could I of been? For Chrissake, the place was locked up tighter’n a drum; you know that, you and Fred checked all the doors and windows—”
Runyon said, “I know how you did it.”
“Did it? Did what?”
“Rigged the front door.”
Meeker’s face underwent a slow color change, chameleon-like, from angry red to ashy gray. “Rigged it? You’re crazy. I couldn’t have, nobody could.”
“A handyman your size could.”
“Barred, it was barred on the inside.” Sputtering now, losing his cool. “Charlie, you know it was with that two-by-four—”
“All right, Runyon,” Rittenhouse said. “Suppose we go in and you show us how he did it.”
They went around to the front porch, Meeker protesting and casting eye darts at Runyon, and inside. All the living room window shutters were folded back now, two windows opened to rid the interior of the musty odor. Hansen had done some cleanup work as well; there were three filled garbage bags on the plank floor, cleaning solvent and rags on the hearth.
With the door closed again, Runyon took the bent nail from the pocket of his shirt, held it up in front of Meeker. “Recognize this?”
“… A nail, so what?”
“I found it this morning partway under the couch, where it bounced when it pulled loose and fell.”
Rittenhouse said, “Pulled loose and fell from where?”
Runyon showed him the nail hole on the door near its edge, above the knob and lock and a couple of inches higher than where the iron bracket on that side was mounted. “That’s where Meeker hammered it in, not too deep, quarter of an inch or so. Then he set one end of the crossbar into the bracket on the hinged side, rested the other end on the nail. Eyeball it and you’ll see the door can still be opened inward a few inches with the bar set in that diagonal position. Just far enough for a man as thin as Meeker to squeeze through.”
“Bullshit!” the handyman cried.
Runyon lifted the redwood two-by-four, pointed out the vertical gouge. “This was made by the bracket digging into it during the squeeze. Once he was outside, all he had to do was yank the door closed with enough force to dislodge the nail—once or twice would have done it. That’s how the nail got bent. When it came loose and fell, the upper end of the bar dropped into the bracket and completed the seal. Simple as that.”
Rittenhouse said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Meeker pawed desperately at the deputy’s sleeve. “Why would I do something like that, for Chrissake? Why?”
“To hide the fact you killed Philip Dennison.”
“No, I never did, I had no reason—”
“You had a reason, or thought you did. He was sleeping with Verna while you were off on your hunting trip.”
“Oh, Jesus.…”
“You came back early and found out. Was she here when you had it out with Dennison? Does she know you killed him?”
Runyon had seen felons crumble any number of times, and it always happened more or less the same way once they’d been caught out. First there was the panicked inclination to run. Then, when they realized they had no chance of getting away, no place to go if they did, the tension and the bluster seeped out of them like water out of a punctured sack; their bodies went limp as if collapsing in on themselves, their eyes darkened and dulled with defeat, resignation, shimmers of fear. He watched it happen to Joe Meeker, watched the handyman grope his way to the couch and sink down on it, sit there with his legs spread and his hands hanging down between his thighs.
“No,” he said to the floor, his voice empty of emotion, “Verna don’t know. I told her the place was locked up and I couldn’t get in. She thinks he slipped on the rug, drunk, after she left … an accident like everybody else thought. I didn’t kill him, not on purpose, but I guess you won’t believe it.”
“What happened that night, Joe?”
“Verna wasn’t home when I got back. Her car was there, but she wasn’t. I started to go out and look for her, and there she was on the road. She tried to tell me she’d been out for a walk, but it was past ten; she never went out walking that late. I knew she’d been with somebody; it was written all over her.”
“So you beat it out of her that it was Dennison.”
“Smacked her once, that’s all it took. It wasn’t the first time she cheated on me, she’s a goddamn tramp, but that night … I don’t know, I was tired from all the driving after a lousy hunting trip and I was so mad I couldn’t see straight. I got in the truck and drove over here. I wasn’t gonna do anything to Dennison, just tell him to keep his paws off my wife. Only they’d been boozing it up and he was smart-ass drunk; he laughed and called me a couple names, called Verna names. I got in his face, told him to shut his dirty mouth. Then … he took a wild swing at me, I shoved him, and next thing I know he’s got a poker in his hand ready to take another swing at me with that. Wasn’t anything I could do but belt him one.”
“The contusion on his cheekbone,” Runyon said.
“Yeah. The rug slipped and he went down and the back of his head slammed into the hearthstones and he was dead. Just like that, dead.” Meeker raised his head to look at Rittenhouse. “Self-defense, Deputy. I swear to God I wouldn’t of punched him if he hadn’t picked up that poker.”
“Then you should have reported what happened right away,” Rittenhouse said, “told it just the way you did now.”
“I was scared to. Only the two of us there, and Verna knew how pissed I was when I left home. You wouldn’t of believed it was self-defense. Nobody would.” His head drooped again, loose on the stem of his neck. “You don’t now. Neither of you.”
“You shouldn’t have tried to cover it up.”
“I couldn’t think of nothing else to do. Crossbar leaning against the wall give me the idea. I didn’t know if the trick’d work or not, but it didn’t take long to get a nail and hammer out of my truck and try it.” Long, shaky breath. “I wish to Christ it hadn’t worked.”
Rittenhouse asked, “Why did you come in next morning with that lie about seeing the body through the window? You could have just kept quiet and let Hansen find what was left of Dennison next time he came up.”
“I figured I had to, to make sure Verna kept her
mouth shut.”
“Figured it before you left here that night,” Runyon said. “All the other window shutters were closed—Dennison left them that way. You opened the ones on the side window.”
“Yeah. But I didn’t know you couldn’t see where the body was laying from outside or I’d of moved the couch or something. Didn’t know it until a few minutes ago.”
Rittenhouse said, “So you didn’t plan to bring Fred and me out here when sun on the glass made it hard to see inside.”
“No. I never thought about that. If you’d been able to see clear that morning I’d of been screwed then, I guess.”
“That’s right, you would have.”
“Don’t matter. I’m screwed now.”
Meeker sat slumped and desolate as the deputy handcuffed him and read him his rights. Runyon thought that the little man’s account of Tuesday night’s events was probably true, felt almost sorry for him. Almost. He saved his compassion for the victims—for Patricia Dennison when he told her how and why her husband had died.
15
I usually confine business matters to weekdays, reserving weekends for quality time with Kerry and Emily. But on this Saturday morning, with no family plans scheduled, I bit the bullet, so to speak, and went to meet Alex Chavez at SFPD’s pistol range at Lake Merced for some long-overdue target practice.
Long overdue in my case, that is. Chavez, a diligent as well as a first-rate field operative, went frequently to the range to hone his skills; he had urged me to join him because he knew I’d been putting off the task. Despite forty-some years of familiarity with firearms, and an understanding of the necessity for them by those of us involved in law enforcement, I have an inherent aversion to guns. I’ve had too much firsthand experience with the ravages of gun violence, and the monstrous mass killings that have taken place with increasing regularity over the past several years sicken me even more. Still, I owed it to my family as well as to myself to remain as proficient with a handgun as possible at my age, should the occasion ever arise when I would need to use my .38 Colt Bodyguard again.
Another reason I gave in to Alex’s urging was because I owed my life to him and his prowess with a handgun. At the close of a case we’d worked on together not so long ago, he’d got off a quick shot in poor light just in time to keep a vicious attack dog from tearing my throat out—a harrowing sequence that had disturbed my sleep for some time afterward. I wondered if it disturbed his as well. Neither of us had spoken of the incident since.
Chavez was waiting when I arrived at the range, all smiles as usual. He was that rarity in today’s world, a genuinely happy man who loved his job. He’d joined the sheriff’s department down in El Centro as soon as he was of age, married a woman he adored and who adored him in return, fathered three good kids, moved the family to San Francisco when the opportunity to join a private security firm came up. Some racially challenged individuals had a tendency to underestimate a short, stocky, perpetually smiling, slow-moving Hispanic. Actually, he was quick thinking, fast-moving when the situation called for it, and, like Jake Runyon, unflappable in a crisis.
Technically the range is open only to police personnel and investigators attached to the D.A.’s office. Civilians are allowed when accompanied by an officer, but that restriction doesn’t apply to authorized private investigators and security people. You need to make an appointment to secure a target range, especially on Saturdays, which Chavez and I had done. Even so, we had to wait a while before we could take our turns. The place was crowded as usual, and noisy even with Peltor earmuffs in place.
Alex and I each fired upward of fifty rounds. His score of close-grouping hits at various distances was near perfect. As for mine …
“You’re definitely a little rusty, amigo,” he said when we were done.
“More than a little,” I said ruefully. “My hand’s still pretty steady, but my eye isn’t what it used to be.”
“You need to get out here more often, you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No argument there. You have permission to kick my butt next time you suggest it and I find an excuse to say no.”
He grinned. “Figuratively or literally?”
“I’ll leave that up to you.”
I offered to buy him lunch and he accepted. There’s a restaurant at the Lake Merced Golf Club nearby, but you need to be a member or with a member to eat there. I would not have felt comfortable in its rarified surroundings anyway. I know that millions of people are passionate golfers, but it’s a game that has no appeal whatsoever for me. Baseball and pro football are my sports, the former much more than the latter now that the 49ers have abandoned San Francisco for Santa Clara forty-three miles south, a move made strictly to feed the greed of one of the NFL’s worst owners.
We went out to the Beach Chalet on the Great Highway. Crowded there, too, thanks to the good weather, and we had to wait for a table. Worth it, though; the food there is always good. Companionable shoptalk and a second round of draft beer lengthened the meal, so that it was after one when Chavez and I parted company and I headed home.
I got to the condo just as the mailman was delivering two cartons of books to Kerry—the promised trade paperback editions of Cybil’s collected works. I carried them inside, put them on the table in the dining room. While she went to get a knife, I stood looking at the cartons—and my memory jogged and I remembered the padded mailing bag that James Cahill had briefly lifted from his missing wife’s desk. Copies of her latest novel, he’d said. No reason I should remember that, out of the blue like this … or was there?
I was mentally hunting for one when Kerry came back. Her excitement as we opened the cartons prodded the memory fragment back into the compartment that had disgorged it.
We’d seen cover proofs of the five “Cybil Wade writing as Samuel Leatherman” books, and the finished copies were even more appealing. For the collections, the publisher had used full-color reproductions of forties pulp covers that had prominently featured the Leatherman pseudonym; for the two Max Ruffe novels, new pulp-style artwork had been commissioned that was substantially superior to the bland dust jacket illustrations on the original hardcover editions of Dead Eye and Black Eye. Kerry was ecstatic. She fondled a copy of each book, opened each to page through it and to sniff its newness. After which she carried the five editions into her office and arranged them, covers facing outward, on the shelf containing Cybil’s author’s copies. This made the shelf, already a kind of shrine to the mother Kerry had adored, even more of a riot of color than the ones in my study that contained the six thousand pulp magazines I’d accumulated since I began collecting them as a teenager.
For the time being we stored the rest of the contributors’ copies in her office closet. Some would be sent to Cybil’s friends in Redwood Village and the last surviving pulp writer she’d known in the old days, Waldo Ramsey, a minor contributor who had shared the contents pages of three issues of Midnight Detective with her. They’d kept in touch by letter—he still preferred a typewriter to a computer, as had she. He was in his nineties now and as mentally sharp as ever; he would appreciate having the collected volumes.
* * *
Tamara called on my cell a few minutes past four. From the agency, where she admitted to having already put in nearly eight hours of work.
“How come?” I asked. “Why didn’t you take the day off?”
“Why do you think? Crap keeps piling up on my desk and somebody’s got to deal with it.”
Grouchy Tamara today. Fortunately, that’s one of her least common personas; the more pleasant, if not downright sunny, versions take precedence. Another setback in the ongoing soap opera of her love life, maybe. But I knew better than to bring up the subject. If I did, I was liable to get the most unpleasant persona of all, Pit Bull Tamara.
“You could hire another techie to help out,” I said. “The agency can afford it.”
“Yeah, well, then I’d have to teach her or him what to do and that’d take more time than it�
�s worth. I’ve got my own system; you know that. Somebody new would probably screw it up. Better if I just slog my way through on my own.”
“Okay. You know best.”
“Oh, sure. Sometimes I think I don’t know a damn thing.”
“Wait until you get to be my age. Then you’ll know you don’t know a damn thing.”
She muttered something I didn’t catch. Then, “I did some more digging for you on the people in the Cahill case. Found out something about one of ’em I thought you’d want to know.”
“Which one?”
“Dr. Paul Nesbitt.”
“Important?”
“How do I know if it’s important or not? You’re the detective; I’m just the office drudge.”
Oh, boy. “You’re the glue that holds everything together and you know it. Go ahead; let’s hear what you’ve got.”
“Dude’s a good physician but crappy human being.”
“Oh?”
“Nurse at the clinic where he worked before he went with Prime Medical filed a sexual harassment suit against him.”
That was something of an eyebrow raiser. “How long ago?”
“Three years. No specific evidence to support the claim, so it didn’t damage his medical career. Whole thing was hushed up. But there was enough fire for the nurse, Carolyn Feeney, to get a five K settlement out of him.”
“How do you know that? Settlement terms are usually kept private—”
“I talked to her, that’s how. On the phone a little while ago. Got lucky and caught her at home. She says she wasn’t the doc’s only victim. That he’s a sexual predator, the charm-and-bullshit kind.”
“Can she back that up?”
“No. The one other woman she knows that he hassled was too afraid to come forward.”
“Ms. Feeney’s still bitter, still angry?”
“Yeah, and I don’t blame her. Men like him ought to be de-balled along with rapists and child molesters.”
“They’re not quite in the same class—”
“How would you know? You ever been sexually harassed?”
As a matter of fact, I had been—once. But I was not about to get into that with Tamara. It hadn’t been much of an incident, and while I hated to admit it, in a perverse way I’d found it uncomfortably flattering. Aging-male reaction; for a woman of any age, unwelcome sexual advances are neither flattering nor justifiable.
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