by Janet Dawson
“Who wants to know?” He tilted his head with a cagy look. “You a process server or something?”
“Me? No. She’s got a car for sale. She said to meet her here at work, but I don’t know what she looks like.”
“Yeah, I know who she is. I seen her name on her badge. A real looker. If she comes this way, maybe I can point her out to you. Hey, Emma!” he called to the woman in the truck. “Look sharp. Here they come.”
People began to trickle out of the buildings, some toward their cars and some toward the lunch wagon. I could smell grease as hamburgers hit the grill. The voluble driver chatted with the customers, greeting some of them by name. I moved away from the truck, surreptitiously checking I.D. badges as people passed.
Three women went past me. As they queued at the lunch wagon, I heard the driver say loudly, “Hey, Tasha, you still playing racquetball?” I didn’t hear the woman’s reply, but I turned to see the driver look at me then jerk his chin toward one of the women, a tall blonde in a lemon yellow shirt and green slacks. I mixed into the crowd around the truck and watched as she bought a chicken salad on whole wheat and a bottle of mineral water.
“Tasha Loring?” I asked as she turned to walk back toward the building. A quick glance at her badge confirmed her identity. The driver had called her a looker, but I thought she was rather horse-faced, with a long jaw and an equally long nose set above her wide red lips. Her yellow hair was piled in careful disarray atop her head. Over her shoulder I saw the driver examining her rear end in the tight green pants, leaving no doubt as to which part of her anatomy he found attractive.
“Can I ask you some questions?”
“About what?” Her hazel eyes looked at me curiously. She twisted the cap off her mineral water and raised the bottle to her lips.
“Renee Foster.”
“I haven’t seen Renee in a while.”
“How long ago?”
“What business is it of yours?” she asked. “Who are you anyway?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Do you have some I.D.? So I’ll know you’re who you say you are?” I pulled out my wallet and showed her my license. She peered at it for a moment, then lifted her eyes to my face. “OK. I guess you’re for real. But why do you want to talk about Renee?”
“She’s missing.”
“Missing?” The hazel eyes widened in shock. “You mean gone? Disappeared?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Oh, my God.” She clutched her lunch to her chest. A parade of emotions marched across her face. “She wouldn’t...”
“She wouldn’t what?” I shifted position so that I was between Tasha Loring and the building. She knew something and she was going to tell me what it was.
“What about the baby?” she asked me, brows shooting up over her anxious eyes.
“Renee left the baby with her mother-in-law a week ago Wednesday. She hasn’t been seen since.”
“Oh, my God. I gotta sit down.” Tasha looked around us, then turned and headed for a bench sheltered by an inadequate tree.
“When’s the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“Four or five weeks ago.” Tasha’s right hand went to her earlobe and she tugged on her yellow enamel earring. “We had a drink after work.”
“What did you talk about? Did she say anything about leaving?”
She shook her head, but her face took on a guilty cast, and she looked down at the sandwich on her lap. She unwrapped it and took a bite of chicken salad, chewing slowly.
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know if I should,” she said, swallowing. “I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“She’s already in trouble. And I don’t mean with her husband. I have to find her.”
Tasha chased her mouthful with a swallow of mineral water. “Renee was seeing someone,” she said finally. “ Someone from here at work.”
“You mean recently?” I sat down next to her. “She hadn’t worked here since before her baby was born.”
“They started dating when Renee came to work here. It’s been one of those on-again, off-again relationships. They’d fight and see other people, then get back together. I think she married Philip on the rebound.”
Which is a terrible thing to do to anyone as earnest as Philip Foster, I thought, seeing the soft brown eyes of my former client. It’s hell to love someone who doesn’t love you back.
“When did she start up the relationship again?”
“When the baby was about a year old. I told her, you’re crazy. You’ve got a nice husband, a beautiful kid. What do you want to blow it for? She said it just wasn’t working.”
“Did she say why?” I asked.
Tasha shook her head. “No. I met Philip a couple of times when she was still working here. He seemed like a nice person, but I didn’t think they had much in common. Renee liked to go out, have a good time. Philip’s a real stay-at-home.”
“Did she say anything about her in-laws?”
“Plenty. They didn’t like her, and the feeling was mutual. She said once they didn’t think she was good enough for Philip.”
“Renee’s boyfriend — who is he?”
“A guy in marketing. He travels a lot.”
“What’s his name?”
“Dean Bellarus,” Tasha said. The same name Sandra Baines had given me.
I stood up and looked toward the building. “Where can I find him? Is he here today?”
“No,” Tasha said, shaking her head. “He’s on vacation. For two weeks.”
That meant Renee’s disappearance coincided with Bellarus’s vacation. Maybe Sandra was right. Maybe Renee had run away with her lover. That would make this easier to explain, no matter how mundane. It would also mean I was wrong about a few things. “When is he due back at work?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. I pressed her further, but Tasha Loring insisted she didn’t know anything more than what she’d just told me, and she wasn’t willing to find out. When her friends called to her she jumped quickly to her feet, eager to get away from me and my questions. Before she left I gave her my card. I was sure she would dispose of it as soon as she got into the building.
Sixteen
I SPOTTED A PHONE BOOTH AT ONE END OF THE business park and walked over to it. Thumbing through the pages, I found two listings under Bellarus, one with the initial D and no address. The phone number was a Mountain View exchange, but there was no answer.
I’d made note of Norman Gerrity’s address from the letterhead on his report to Philip Foster. Gerrity’s office was in a building in downtown San Jose, a couple of blocks from police headquarters. I suspected his was a solo practice, and I was right. When I opened the door I saw a man in his late fifties seated at a desk, writing on a lined yellow pad.
“You said if I was ever down this way you’d buy me a brew.”
“You’re Howard?” He stood up and grasped my hand in a firm grip. “I’ll do better than that. How about lunch?”
Gerrity turned on his answering machine and held open the office door. He was a solidly built man with a broad bulldog face and a nose that looked like it had been broken a couple of times. Gray hair curled on his head and his thick forearms and at the open neck of his short-sleeved knit shirt. After he locked the office we walked down the stairs and across the street to a restaurant with dark red vinyl booths and friendly middle-aged waitresses.
“Best burgers in town,” Gerrity said, ordering a bacon cheeseburger, medium rare. I took his word and ordered the same.
“You look like a retired cop,” I said after the waitress brought us each a cold Budweiser.
“It shows, huh? Yeah. Boston — twenty-five years.”
“How’d you end up here?”
“My daughter married a guy from San Jose. My wife and I used to come out to visit. We liked the weather. When I retired a few y
ears back, we decided we’d had our last Boston winter and we moved out here. Believe me, I don’t miss that snow shovel. Only I got bored with retirement. So I got a license and a gun permit, and now I’m a P.I. My grandkids think it’s great. My wife and daughter think I’m crazy.”
“My mother feels the same way.” I gave him a brief history of how I got into the investigative business. The waitress brought our food, and I doctored my burger with ketchup, mustard, and relish.
“This isn’t a social call, Howard,” Gerrity said, spreading ketchup liberally over his fries. “We’ve traded our bona fides. Now tell me what’s on your mind.”
I took a bite of my burger and wiped my hands and mouth with a napkin.
“The Foster case. I got fired.”
“Ha,” Gerrity said. “I’m not surprised. The old man show up?”
“Oh, yes. He’s one-of-a-kind. He told Philip that Renee’s been abusing the kid. So Philip decided to pack it in and come home.”
“Child abuse. Damn, I hate that. Used to see a lot of it when I was a cop. That could explain Old Man Foster’s attitude. I know how I’d feel if I found out someone was hitting my grandkids. There’d be hell to pay.” He picked up his burger and took a bite, chasing it with beer. “But you’re still on the case. Otherwise you wouldn’t be down here.”
“I have another client. Renee’s aunt. She doesn’t buy the child-abuse story.”
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. In the past few days I’ve found out a few things about Renee that make this look like more than a routine missing-persons case.” I gave Gerrity a rundown of the Willis murders and the evidence of family violence in that household.
“I went to see Helen Foster this morning. She’s taking care of Philip’s little boy, but she wouldn’t let me near enough to see if he had any marks on him. There was another woman there, a friend of the family named Sandra Baines. She told me Renee had a boyfriend, and one of Renee’s co-workers confirmed it.”
“Bellarus,” Gerrity said.
“How’d you know about him?”
He grinned and took a swallow of beer. “Maybe I’m just an old male chauvinist. I gotta tell you my first thought was that young Mrs. Foster took off with another guy. So I nosed around that place she worked. Somebody mentioned his name.”
“Was this before or after you were fired?”
“After.”
“Didn’t you tell me on the phone you were glad to be off this case?” I asked. “Because your gut did a tap dance on this one.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “But I don’t like being canned, especially by the likes of Edward Foster. Guess you could say it wounded my professional pride.”
I nodded. “That’s how I felt.”
“I did a little background check on old Ed, by the way. He’s got a reputation as a cutthroat businessman. He’s also a real nut on privacy. Couple of years ago he got verbal with a photographer from the Mercury-News who tried to take pictures of Foster and his wife at some charity ball. Threatened the guy. Philip’s his only child.”
“Something tells me Philip hasn’t turned out quite the way Dad hoped.” I finished my burger and wiped my hands on a napkin. “Did you come up with an address for Bellarus?”
“Monte Vista Apartments in Mountain View, a couple of miles west of Highway 101.” He gave me the street address and apartment number. “I went by there several times, but I came up against a blank wall. He’s not there.”
“According to Renee’s friend, Bellarus went on vacation about the same time Renee disappeared.”
“Sounds more and more like she left with him,” Gerrity said.
“I’m not so sure. Thanks for the address. I’ll check out Bellarus’s apartment and see if any of his neighbors have seen him.”
Gerrity insisted on paying for lunch. I told him next time we got together I’d buy. Leaving downtown San Jose, I drove north on the freeway to Mountain View. I found Bellarus’s apartment complex, a collection of two-story buildings grouped around a swimming pool and clubhouse, with an office facing the street. I circled through the parking lot that surrounded the complex, looking at the numbers on the curbs. Bellarus’s space was empty. I pulled into an unmarked space near a dumpster and got out of my car.
Shrubbery and palm trees masked the rectangular wood buildings. A concrete sidewalk led to the front of Bellarus’s unit. Each building contained four apartments, two up and two down. The lower apartments had enclosed patios, and those above had balconies. The mailbox for 303 had a strip of white adhesive tape lettered in black ink, reading D. H. BELLARUS, and nothing inside. Either he’d stopped mail delivery while on vacation or he’d picked it up recently — nobody in this life escapes junk mail.
I found 303 on the second level and rang the bell. No answer. I peered over the railing of the balcony in front of 303. I saw a couple of folding lawn chairs and a small barbecue grill. Several houseplants in green plastic containers sat on the balcony’s wooden surface next to a watering can, with water seeping out the bottom, darkening the wood. The curtains covering the sliding glass door that led from the apartment to the balcony were open, and I saw a stack of envelopes and magazines on a coffee table in front of the sofa.
Bellarus must be home from vacation, I thought as I went back down the stairs, or he’d left his key with someone who fetched his mail and watered his plants. There was an oil spot on the concrete in the middle of his parking space. I knelt and touched it. My hand came away smeared with black. The oil was fresh.
Back in my car I wiped the oil from my fingers and waited. Forty-seven minutes later a silver Datsun 280Z with a sputtering engine drove slowly through the parking lot and made a left turn into the space numbered 303. The driver got out and opened the rear hatch. He tucked a six-pack of beer under one arm, then scooped up several bulging plastic sacks of groceries and headed for the front of the building, leaving the hatch open. When he came back for a second load I was standing between him and his car.
“Dean Bellarus?”
“Yeah?”
I could see why Elizabeth had been attracted to him. He was tall, deeply tanned, and muscular, his body displayed by a sleeveless yellow athletic shirt and green shorts, a pair of leather sandals on his feet. His shaggy blond hair had been bleached pale gold by the sun, and a mat of darker gold hair covered his deep chest and his legs. The beginning of a beard partly obscured the lower half of his face. Above it his eyes were light blue. Right now he looked past me at the groceries in his car as though his ice cream was melting.
“I’d like to talk to you about Elizabeth Willis.”
“Who’s Elizabeth Willis?” Either he didn’t know Renee’s real name or he was a good actor. I decided his lack of knowledge was genuine.
“Renee Mills Foster, then.”
“What about her?” Bellarus’s face tightened and he stepped past me to the car.
“She’s missing.” I moved to one side so I could watch his face. “Since a week ago last Wednesday.”
“Shit,” he said.
He reached for another grocery sack. A head of lettuce escaped the sack’s confines and rolled across the carpet-covered surface of the car’s hatch. He retrieved it and jammed it back into the sack, all the while avoiding my eyes. With plastic sacks hanging from both arms and a gallon jug of milk in his left hand, he turned and headed for the sidewalk.
“Have you seen her?”
“What makes you think I’ve seen her?” He tossed the words over his shoulder. I followed him up the stairs and into the apartment, where he dumped the sacks on the kitchen counter.
“I understand you and Renee have been good friends for a long time.”
“Who the hell are you?” He glared at me, then opened the refrigerator. He jockeyed the six-pack of beer and the jug of milk into place on the top shelf, then reached into sacks and shoved the perishables haphazardly onto the remaining shelves.
“I’m a private investigator.”
“Yeah?”
/> I took my wallet from my purse, flipped it open to my license, and held it out, my elbow resting on the counter separating the kitchen from the living room. Bellarus looked at the license, then turned back to his groceries, not saying anything.
“Satisfied?” I put away my wallet. Then I took a seat on one of the bar stools on the living-room side of the counter.
“I don’t know where she is,” Bellarus said abruptly.
“Someone at work thought she might be with you.” I leaned forward, propping my arms on the pale brown Formica surface of the counter.
“No way, lady.” He shut the refrigerator door, shaking his head, and opened the cabinets, shoving in canned goods and boxes of cereal and crackers. “I’ve been in Ensenada for a week and a half, deep-sea fishing, sailing, and drinking beer. Just me and three other guys.”
“Can you prove it?”
Bellarus shot me an exasperated look. He stalked out of the kitchen through a door that led to the bedroom. A moment later he returned, tossing a handful of papers onto the counter in front of me. While he put away the rest of his groceries I sifted through the papers. The folder on top contained a used airline ticket issued to Dean H. Bellarus, roundtrip. San Jose to San Diego, leaving twelve days ago, returning yesterday. The other items were tourist brochures and credit car receipts from restaurants and ships in Ensenada.
“That doesn’t mean Renee wasn’t with you.”
“We sailed for Baja the day I got to San Diego,” Bellarus said, sounding exasperated. “We stayed on my friend’s boat. His name’s Greg McCardle. He lives in Chula Vista and he’s in the book.”
“I believe you.” I stacked the papers into a pile and pushed them to one side. Bellarus and his friends left for Mexico the same day Elizabeth Renee Willis disappeared. Another dead end, I thought. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“I saw her the night before I left, Tuesday.”
“Did anything happen between you two? Argument, something like that?”
Bellarus shut the cabinet door with a bang. “Look, did her old man hire you to get something on us?”
“He hired me because she left the baby with her mother-in-law and vanished. As far as I know, he doesn’t know you exist, much less that you’ve been having an affair with his wife. Come on, Bellarus. If you know anything that could help me find her, talk.”
