by Janet Dawson
Frances was different. She had an arresting face, long and narrow, with a strong nose and eyes so light the newspaper reproduction barely caught them. Dark hair curled and tumbled, falling to her shoulders, and her lips curved in a half-smile. Not beautiful, but... I searched for a word and found it. Sultry.
Another face stared out at me, a familiar one. Mark Willis. The suit-and-tie photo was from the yearbook. He resembled his mother, with short dark hair, pale eyes, and a narrow intelligent face. The caption said he’d had a scholarship to the University of California at Davis. He would have started college that fall. Instead he’d matriculated at San Quentin.
I had always wondered about Mark Willis and what really happened that night, though I never joined the crowds of curiosity seekers driving past the house on Gibbons Drive. I couldn’t believe it was true, or I didn’t want to believe that anyone I knew was capable of such a crime. But I had known Mark Willis only briefly.
We were in a play together. In the fall of our senior year the Drama Club produced You Can’t Take It With You. With his dark hair grayed and his face aged by greasepaint, Mark played Mr. De Pinna, the old man who helps Pa Sycamore make fireworks in the cellar. I twirled around the stage as Essie, the daffy sister who wants to be a ballerina.
What did I remember about Mark? I thought he was good-looking, with his wiry body and slow, gentle smile. But he never seemed to notice me. He was quiet, reserved, polite, agreeable, a good student. As far as I knew he never got into trouble until the night he was arrested for the murder of his parents.
I looked at the photos on the screen of the microfilm reader, recalling Bill Rolf’s words. Things like that don’t happen in Alameda. But it did happen. And my fellow students had talked about it, not openly, but surreptitiously, as though words said behind hands would make it less real. Shocked whispers buzzed in the hallways and between the stacks in the library, ricocheted off metal lockers in the shower room after gym class.
The curiosity that had us reading newspapers about our classmate didn’t last long. Tragedy is superseded by the motion of life and time, moving forward like an unstoppable train. The turning of the earth brought other things — graduation, the summer of freedom after high school, and the first semester of college.
As a Navy brat, Mark Willis was part of Alameda’s transient population of military kids who came and went as their fathers transferred from billet to billet, kids who’d lived in exotic places like Japan or the Philippines, kids who moved every couple of years. They provided more spice in the East Bay stew. But sometimes they didn’t fit well in a place like Alameda, where some of us had been going to school together since first grade. Maybe that’s why Mark kept to himself.
Looking at the photographs of George and Frances Willis, I realized that I had seen the Willis family together once. After our opening-night performance at the Alameda High School auditorium, there was a reception in the school’s lobby. The cast, still in costume and makeup, mingled with the audience, drinking coffee, eating cookies, and accepting congratulations.
As I stood with my parents I felt something strike me between the shoulder blades. I looked down and saw a cashew land at my feet. I turned to locate the source. The youngest Willis girl, Karen, stood at one of the tables, blond hair in pigtails, her hand in a bowl of mixed nuts.
She saw me watching her and grinned. Then she lobbed a Brazil nut into the air. It found its mark, the bald head of the principal. Karen’s giggle pierced the drone of conversation. It caught the attention of the older girl next to her, who flushed and turned, long brown hair swinging. She whispered something to her parents.
Commander Willis looked as though he were dozing, his heavy-lidded eyes drooping as he stood with his legs apart. His wife had been talking with another couple. Now she turned toward her daughters and glared. Frances Willis raised her hand and words hissed from her wide red mouth. Mark, still in costume and makeup, crossed to the table and deftly moved Karen away from her ammunition.
Now I advanced the film, taking notes as I read. The newspaper’s coverage fleshed out the story, from the initial investigation of the murders in those first days to the Willis funeral the following week in Stockton, a private service attended only by the family. The day after the funeral there was a memorial service at the Naval Air Station where George Willis had been assigned, the same day Mark Willis was arraigned for the murder of his parents.
According to the newspaper, George Willis was from Florida and had no surviving family other than his children. He was forty-three at the time of his death, and he’d been in the Navy nineteen years. Frances Willis was sketched in more detail. She was forty when she died. Her maiden name was Madison. She’d been born and raised in Stockton, in the San Joaquin Valley. She and George had been married eighteen years. In addition to her children, she was survived by her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lester Madison of Stockton, and two sisters, Alice Gray of San Leandro and Vera Burke of Piedmont.
Vera Burke, the owner of Granny’s Attic. That clinched it. The woman I was looking for was Elizabeth Renee Willis.
I put down my pen and took the photograph from my handbag, the one that showed the Foster family in front of the Christmas tree. I searched Renee’s smiling face for a resemblance to George and Frances Willis, and saw it only in her fair coloring and blue eyes.
Earlina Dailey said Alice Gray moved back to Stockton to care for her elderly parents. Vera Burke wasn’t home, and the clerk in the bookstore next to Granny’s Attic told me the store had been closed for several days. What if there had been some family crisis in Stockton? Could that explain why Elizabeth called her aunt before she disappeared? Maybe. But it didn’t explain her vanishing act. Or the fact that she’d altered her name and her social security number, a deliberate move to conceal her identity.
I looked at the photograph again and tried to imagine the fourteen-year-old girl who had been in her room while her brother committed murder. Did it mean she spent the next fifteen years attempting to escape the past? I was sure Foster didn’t know anything about his wife’s former life. I wasn’t looking forward to telling him.
I backed up the microfilm reader and scanned the articles again, looking for information about Elizabeth and Karen Willis. Elizabeth had been treated for shock at a local hospital, then claimed by her aunt Vera. Her nine-year-old sister, Karen, had spent the night of the murders at a friend’s slumber party. She too was taken in by Vera.
A later story about Mark’s sentencing revealed that the girls were living with their grandparents in Stockton. Evidently this arrangement continued until Elizabeth returned to the Bay Area to live with Alice and attend college at Cal State. She’d dropped out after two years, according to the school’s records. She would have been twenty then, I guessed. She was nearly twenty-nine now and there was a gap in what little I knew about her, a four-year gap stretching from her departure from school to her marriage to Philip Foster five years ago, two years before her brother’s release from prison.
Newspaper sidebars discussed how the murders affected the community the Willis family called home, full of quotes from people who’d known them. The printed words reverberated with disbelief and incredulity that George and Frances could have been killed by anyone, much less by their son. Mark Willis, they said, such a nice kid. Bright, well-mannered, and friendly. The all-American boy.
I wrote down names of neighbors, classmates, work associates, and friends, remembering that Mark Willis spent a lot of time with a buddy named Leo. I leafed through the yearbook until I found his photo. Leo Mercer. Was he still in the area?
Joseph Franklin was. The next-door neighbor who had reported the gunshots to the police and given the eulogy at the Naval Air Station memorial service still lived in Alameda. Now a retired admiral, Franklin was running for the state senate in the June election, nearly three months away, running hard and running early as he attempted to unseat the incumbent. He had a large campaign fund and a political agenda with a right-wing cast.
&
nbsp; The stories concerning Mark’s sentencing in November of that year were almost footnotes, compared to the fire storm of coverage about the murders. He pled guilty, cooperating only minimally with the attorney hired by his aunt Vera, an Oakland lawyer named Lawrence Kinney. The last story I read dealt with Mark’s arrival at San Quentin.
I’d been to San Quentin once, when I was working a case with Errol. From the Richmond-San Rafael bridge it almost looked pretty, its cell blocks spread over several acres of prime Marin County real estate, with a view of the bay and San Francisco. But it was a hard, harrowing place, a maximum-security warehouse crowded with human dynamite. Twelve years in that place would change Mark Willis. It would either make him strong or poison his soul.
I wondered where he was now. By the time he was paroled twelve years later, his release would not have rated much newspaper copy. There had been too many murders to report in the interim.
When I returned to my office the light on my answering machine was blinking, but none of the messages was from Philip Foster. The hotel switchboard assured me he was still registered and rang the room. Still no answer. I hung up and got out my Oakland phone directory. I wanted to see if Lawrence Kinney was still practicing law in the area.
He was. In fact, his office was on Harrison Street in downtown Oakland. I picked up the phone again. I talked to a receptionist and a secretary before I heard a man’s voice say, “Lawrence Kinney.”
I told him who I was and what I wanted. My words were met with silence. Finally he spoke. “What prompts your inquiry?”
“It has to do with a case I’m working on. I’d much rather talk with you face-to-face.”
“You say you’re a private investigator. Have you worked for anyone I might know?”
“Possibly. I’ve done a lot of prelitigation work.” I gave him the names of several local attorneys. “Check me out. I’m legitimate.”
“Have you talked to Vera Burke?” Kinney asked.
“Not yet. Her shop’s closed and she appears to be away from home.”
“That presents a problem, Ms. Howard. I can’t discuss the Willis case without Mrs. Burke’s approval. Contact me when you’ve spoken to her.”
I tried persuasion, but Kinney had me on client confidentiality and he knew it. I had to find Vera Burke.
Four
I KNOCKED ON DOORS IN VERA BURKE’S MONTICELLO Avenue neighborhood. In a house across the street I found a maid named Eloise who said she knew the Burkes’ housekeeper, a woman named Nellie Potter.
“Her father died. Mrs. Burke’s father, I mean. He had a stroke earlier in the week.” I had interrupted Eloise in her housecleaning routine, and she took advantage of the break to light up a cigarette.
“Mrs. Burke left for Stockton last Wednesday. She called Nellie Friday morning to tell her the old man died. She said she wasn’t sure when she’d be back, so it was OK for Nellie to take some time off. Nellie’s been wanting to go to San Diego to see her daughter.”
I asked her for Nellie’s address and phone number, and she obliged. “Is there a Mr. Burke?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s a doctor over at Merritt Hospital.”
I thanked Eloise and left her to finish her cigarette and housework. I drove to Pill Hill, site of two hospitals and innumerable medical buildings. Dr. Charles Burke was a radiologist on the Merritt staff. He’d left Friday for a conference in Baltimore and was not expected back until next week.
I returned to my office and called Stockton information for a phone number to go with Alice Gray’s address. The phone rang for a long moment, then someone picked it up and didn’t say anything. I heard a wheezing breath and a cough, then a voice, an old woman’s voice.
“’Lo?”
“Is this Mrs. Madison?” No response, just the rasping breath. “I want to speak to Vera Burke. Or Alice Gray. Your daughters. Are they home?”
The old woman laughed. “Dead and gone,” she said. “Dead and gone.” Then she hung up.
I stared at the receiver in my hand. This is getting weird, I thought, replacing it in its cradle. And getting me nowhere, at least as far as Vera Burke was concerned. I had to find someone who would talk to me.
One of my classmates was now a real-estate agent in Alameda. Except for his time at college, he’d never left town, the sort of guy who organized class reunions and kept in touch with people. After a couple of tries I found him at his office. I asked him about Leo Mercer, Mark Willis’s friend in high school. He told me he’d sold Leo a house on Mozart Street years ago. He also told me Mrs. Mercer taught school in Alameda and Leo worked at Ritchie Produce in Oakland, on Franklin near Second Street.
The Produce District is an area along the Oakland waterfront. Broadway ends just past the Embarcadero at Jack London Square, where restaurants and a footpath border the estuary. The district mixes offices, shops, restaurants, and bars with light industry and the produce warehouses that lend their name. Railroad tracks run down the uneven pavement along the Embarcadero and along Third Street, and it’s not unusual to find a train delaying traffic as it lumbers through on its way to the Oakland station.
It was nearly one when I parked my Toyota on Third Street and walked to Franklin. Crushed fruit and vegetables littered the pavement on both sides of the street. A pungent scent of onions and oranges mingled and lingered in the air. The produce warehouses start work at two or three in the morning; several were already closed for the day, but Ritchie Produce was open. I spotted a man at the back of the building. He was locking a door. He turned at the sound of my footsteps on the concrete floor.
“Help you?”
“Leo Mercer?” I looked him over. He looked like an older version of his yearbook photo, a tall, well-muscled man with coffee-colored skin and a thin mustache, dressed in blue coveralls. A paperback book poked out of his breast pocket.
“Yes?”
“I’m Jeri Howard. We went to high school together.”
“I don’t remember you.” He shrugged. “It was a big school. You go to that ten-year reunion?” I shook my head. “Me neither. I’m not into that stuff. So why are you looking me up? Just to talk over old times?”
“To talk about Mark Willis.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“I’m a private investigator, working on a case.” His eyes bored into mine. “Want to see my license?”
He waved a hand. “No. I believe you. It’s just that I don’t like to talk about it.”
“It’s important. I need some background information about the family.”
He hesitated. Then curiosity won out. “All right. Let’s get some coffee.”
It was the tail end of the lunch hour, and the Oakland Grill was half empty. We sat down at one of the varnished pine tables and ordered coffee.
“You talk to the Franklins?” Mercer asked.
“Not yet.” The waitress filled our cups and departed.
“You should talk to them.” Mercer stirred some cream into his coffee, then raised the cup to his lips. “Of course, they don’t know the whole story.”
“Do you?”
He shook his head. “Nobody does. All I can tell you is what I know. The truth according to Mercer. It’s liable to be different from the truth according to anyone else.”
“Were you and Mark Willis good friends?”
“Mark was the best friend I had,” Mercer said, a somber look on his handsome face.
I reached for my cup. “Tell me about him.”
“We got to know each other junior year. Our fathers were both Navy. Mine was a chief gunner’s mate. We transferred to Alameda about the same time Mark’s family did. Mark and I had a lot of classes together. We both ran the four-forty, so we went out for the track team.”
“What about his family?” I asked.
“I didn’t know them very well,” he said hesitantly. “We were always over at my house. Mark was at our place so much Mom said she was gonna adopt him. I had twin beds in my room. He’d stay over. We worked on our cars. I had an o
ld Ford, and Mark had this beat-up green Volkswagen he’d rebuilt.” Mercer stopped. With his finger he traced a few circles on the table surface.
“There was more to it than that. Mark never would say anything, but he was always looking for an excuse not to go home.”
“Why?”
“His parents, I guess. I thought they were kind of cold. Distant, you know? In my family we hug each other a lot. Over at the Willis house I never saw those people touch one another. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.” I thought of my own family. We hug each other a lot, too. “What can you tell me about the girls?”
“The kid sisters? I didn’t pay that much attention to them.” He thought about it for a moment. “Karen, she was a pistol. Lively, you know. Always into something. The other one, Beth, she was real quiet. Moody. A watcher.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Watching people. Like, I’d be doing something with Mark and I’d feel her eyes on my back. Put me in mind of a cat watching a mouse hole.”
“Let’s get back to Mark and his parents. From what you said before, I sense that they didn’t get along. There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“Well,” Mercer said, taking a deep breath, “somebody was using Mark as a punching bag.”
I put down my cup and leaned forward. “How do you know that?”
“I don’t know for sure.” His mouth tightened under the mustache. “I’m telling you what I think. One day in the fall of our senior year, after track, we were changing clothes in the locker room. Mark had these bruises, on his back, his side, and his upper arm.” Mercer pointed out the spots on his own torso.
“Places that would be covered by a shirt. He looked like somebody’d been beating on him. I asked him about it. He said he was moving some furniture at home and he fell. I said, ‘Man, you’re lying to me.’ He shook his head, wouldn’t say anything else.”
“Was that the only time you ever saw him with bruises?”
“I never noticed anything until that day in the locker room. He had a little burn scar on his wrist, but he said it was from a spark in the fireplace. I look back on it and I wonder. We were teenage boys, always into something. Hell, I walked into a porch swing once and ended up with a black eye. But those bruises I saw in the locker room... I’ve taken some punches in my day. I know what it looks like when someone’s been hitting you.”
