by Janet Dawson
“Don’t pay her any mind.”
I turned and saw a man walking a dog. The man had white hair and a stiff, arthritic gait. The dog, a sturdy brindle mongrel, was white around the muzzle, as elderly as the man who held her leash. Cataracts clouded the dog’s eyes, but the old man’s eyes were sharp behind his glasses.
“Who is she?” I gestured at the house on the corner.
“Peggy Blaine,” he said. “She owns this house. I’m Fred Sutton. I live next door, with my daughter and her family. Peggy’s nice enough, most of the time. But she’s got a mouth on her when she gets going.”
I hauled out another business card and introduced myself to Fred Sutton and his dog Aggie, who very much liked being scratched between her floppy ears. I told Mr. Sutton I was looking into the hit-and-run that killed Emily Gebhardt.
“Dreadful, awful thing.” He shook his head, a frown pulling down the corners of his mouth. “I saw it. Wish I hadn’t. Me and Aggie was out for our afternoon constitutional. We walk down by the beach every afternoon, rain or shine. Keeps us both from getting too stove up. Me and Aggie was just over there.” He pointed to the other side of the cross street. “That car zoomed past like it was in a race. Didn’t even brake. At least I didn’t hear any screeches like brakes. Just screams. The car slammed right into that poor little girl. She went flying through the air and landed here by the corner. Died before the paramedics got here.” He shuddered. “Horrible, just horrible. I’ll never forget it, try as I might.”
Fred Sutton’s description of the vehicle was predictably vague. “I don’t recall the color. Happened so fast it was just a blur. These days I can’t tell one car from another. And those boxy SUVs all look alike to me.”
I glanced at Peggy Blaine’s driveway and saw a maroon SUV. From this distance I couldn’t tell the make or model. I pointed at the For Sale sign on the front lawn. “When did Ms. Blaine put her house on the market?”
He rubbed his chin. “I think it was right after that little girl got killed. Can’t say I’m surprised she’s selling. Peggy and her husband split up a few years back. Her son lives with her, but he’s in college now, commutes over to San Francisco State. I figure it won’t be long before he moves out. Then Peggy will be rattling around like a pea in a jar, all by herself in that big house.”
Emily Gebhardt had died the second week in April. It was now mid-May. Peggy Blaine told me she’d just put her house on the market, making it sound as though the For Sale sign had gone up in the past week or so. Why the discrepancy? Maybe Peggy Blaine had another reason for feeling uncomfortable about the candles on the corner, sprung up near her house like toadstools after rain.
I shook Fred Sutton’s hand and scratched Aggie between her floppy ears. As he walked away, I took additional pictures of the area, maneuvering close enough to snap a shot of the plate number on Peggy Blaine’s SUV. The curtain on the living room window twitched, as though someone stood there watching.
I retrieved my car and drove down Grand Street, turning left on Otis Drive, as the hit-and-run driver had. Then I parked and walked toward the group of girls in shorts and T-shirts who were kicking a ball around the grassy expanse of Rittler Park. I’d arranged to meet Emily’s friends, Lauren Fisher and Dana Robledo, at their after-school soccer practice, under the watchful eyes of their mothers. I introduced myself to the adults who were gathered on the sidelines. When the girls took a break, the mothers called over their daughters and we moved away from the group.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
A month hadn’t lessened the horror of seeing their friend struck down. Tears flowed from two pairs of eyes. “We were walking home from school,” Lauren said, her voice breaking.
“Do we really have to do this?” Mrs. Robledo said with a frown as Dana sniffed and wiped her eyes.
Mrs. Fisher was having second thoughts, too. “Lauren had nightmares for weeks. I really don’t want her to start up again with those bad dreams. I only agreed to this because Mrs. Gebhardt asked.” She sighed. “That poor woman.”
“I’ll be brief.” As gently as possible, I led the girls through the events of that afternoon. Both Lauren and Dana had been interviewed at the scene and again a few days after the fact. They’d been unable to give the police a description of the vehicle. I hoped in the intervening weeks some details may have percolated to the surface.
Dana screwed up her face and told me she thought it was a car, not an SUV. “It wasn’t boxy, it was lower. I didn’t see the driver or the pass . . .”
“Passenger? There was someone else in the car?” I asked. Maybe a break.
“Yeah.” Dana looked surprised, and so did her mother. “There were two people.”
“Brown,” Lauren said suddenly.
“Brown?” Mrs. Fisher repeated. “You told the policeman you didn’t know what color it was.”
Lauren looked perplexed. “I know. But when I see it in my head, I see brown.”
“You see brown in the bad dreams?” I asked. “Or when you’re awake and thinking about it.”
“No, not the dreams,” Lauren said slowly. “When I’m awake. I think about it a lot. I see it like a movie in my mind. I see a brown car.”
Maybe two breaks. “Brown like a penny? Or like hot fudge?”
Lauren shook her head. “Neither. It’s . . . like a drink.”
“Iced tea?” I suggested. “Cola? Cocoa?”
She shook her head again, considering the images. Then she looked at her mother. “That coffee Mom drinks. With chocolate and whipped cream on top.”
“Caffe mocha,” Mrs. Fisher said.
I pictured the concoction of espresso, chocolate syrup and steamed milk. “When you see the brown car in your mind, is there anything else you notice?”
Lauren closed her eyes and pursed her mouth. “Something green, hanging from the rear view mirror.”
“Tassels from a graduation cap?” I asked. “Plush dice? A little teddy bear?”
“More like a piece of cloth.”
Three breaks, I thought. Details had indeed come to the surface. Lauren recalled a brown vehicle, possibly a car, with something green, possibly cloth, dangling from the rear view mirror. Dana thought there were two people in the vehicle. Memory is notoriously unreliable, but I’d take whatever leads came my way.
I handed out business cards and asked the girls and their mothers to call if any other bits of information surfaced. Then I headed back to my office in Oakland and downloaded the images on my digital camera to my computer. I looked at the shot of Peggy Blaine’s red SUV and wondered if she had access to a brown car. But had the vehicle that struck Emily actually been brown?
The Alameda detective I’d spoken with shared the information that Emily’s clothes and skin bore physical evidence, from the vehicle that struck her and from the pavement where she landed. Minute paint chips—blue, green, silver, and black. But no brown, not even gold or bronze. There had been rust and primer, and bits of glass, probably from a smashed headlight. And dirt—street grit from the pavement, mixed with bits of asphalt, a few clots of dried mud, and dust, the kind that collects on a car that hasn’t been washed in awhile. Had the hit-and-run vehicle been so covered in dirt that it looked brown? I pictured a blue car with an overlay of road dust, wondering if it would look the same brown as a caffe mocha. No, I didn’t think so. Nor green, nor silver. Black? Maybe.
Peggy Blaine’s reaction to Emily Gebhardt’s memorial waved a red flag. I started a background check. By the next day I had a clearer picture of the woman who lived in the house on the corner.
Margaret Blaine, age 44, had been divorced from Ralph Blaine for nearly four years. Her ex lived in San Diego. In the settlement, she got the Grand Street house and custody of the couple’s only child, a son named Charles, now nineteen. She had a good credit rating and a job in the human resources department of a large bank in San Francisco. She’d bought the maroon SUV two years earlier. There was no hint of a brown car in her present, or her immediat
e past.
During our confrontation the day before, Blaine implied the For Sale sign in front of her house was new. When I called a friend who worked in real estate, I discovered that the house went on the market the week after Emily Gebhardt’s death.
“Lookers but no takers,” my friend told me. “The housing market’s slow right now. The house needs work. The agent told Blaine it would make more sense to wait, replace the carpet, spiff up the kitchen and bathrooms, then put the house on the market later this spring. But Blaine insists she has to sell right now. For someone who’s in a hurry to move, she’s asking too much. If she’s selling ‘as is’ she needs to drop her price.”
Why did Peggy Blaine need to sell her house right now? My background check didn’t reveal any financial difficulties. Was there something she wanted to get away from?
There were no databases to tell me whether Peggy Blaine had been at work the day Emily Gebhardt died, but I could gather information with phone calls directed to the right places. That’s when my theory about her involvement went awry. She’d been in a workshop with a group of other bank employees.
Scratch that theory. Still . . . Why was the woman so testy about Emily’s shrine? It had to be more than the candles on the corner.
According to Fred Sutton, Charles Blaine lived at home and commuted to San Francisco State University. My databases had no evidence that he owned a car. Either he used his mother’s SUV or took public transit, probably both. I logged onto the university’s website and checked the academic calendar. Spring break at SFSU coincided with the week Emily died.
Had Charles been somehow involved? That was a stretch. I had nothing to go on, except speculation—and his mother’s behavior.
Carol Gebhardt admitted me to the bungalow where the Gebhardts lived, half a block from the corner where their daughter died. Both husband and wife worked in Alameda. Carol was an administrative assistant at a real-estate office. Steve owned a dry-cleaning shop. It was late afternoon and they’d just gotten home from work.
The living room was full of photographs, Emily captured in frames. On the mantel I saw her wearing a pink party dress and a wrist corsage of yellow flowers, in her soccer uniform with her arms around Dana and Lauren, all three Gebhardts in front of a Christmas tree wearing Santa hats and silly grins. More photos crowded the table next to me—the Gebhardts hiking in Yosemite, fishing in a tumbling mountain river, putting up a tent at a campsite. One snapshot caught my eye, Emily and her father on a hunting trip. Steve Gebhardt carried a rifle and his daughter proudly displayed the pheasant he’d shot.
My clients showed two different faces of grief. Carol sat motionless, hands folded on her lap, dark circles around her eyes, as though her daughter’s death had sucked all the life from her. Steve couldn’t sit still. His hand slapped his knee in an agitated rhythm, his eyes flashed with anger.
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
Carol’s voice was dull. “Managing, just barely. It’s so hard. I took a couple of weeks off work. Everyone is understanding and supportive. But I have trouble getting through the day. Trouble sleeping. I think of Emily all the time. The grief counseling helps, but . . . I need closure, I guess. Maybe if you can help us find out who . . .”
Steve’s rage erupted. “I want to get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch that did this.” He slammed his hand down on the arm of his chair. Carol winced. “Hit a little girl on the street and run away. What kind of scum-sucking toad does that? I can’t get my mind around it. Grief counseling, hell, I’m going for Carol’s sake. But damn it, I want to find out who killed my little girl. I want justice for Emily. That’s the only kind of closure that will work for me. Whoever did this to my baby has got to pay.” Tears streamed from his eyes. “Why? Why did this happen? My baby girl. She was all we had.”
Carol wept, with deep, wrenching sobs that finally subsided. Steve put his hands over his face and his shoulders shuddered. I felt awkward, unable to help, as though my presence made the pain worse. When they’d hired me, they’d insisted on regular progress reports. That’s why I was here. I waited until they were more composed, then I told them I’d talked with Emily’s friends and had some leads, without providing details. I suspected Steve might take it upon himself to help me investigate. I didn’t want him looking over my shoulder while I was doing my job.
Carol looked wrung out, as though she had no more tears. She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, then thanked me for coming over. We rose from our chairs. Carol went to the kitchen and returned with two bouquets of colorful spring flowers. On the floor near the fireplace was a flat-bottomed canvas tote bag. I picked it up, surprised at how heavy it was. I looked inside and saw big round pillar candles, pink and yellow, six of each color.
“I’ll take that.” Steve reached for the bag. Carol cradled the bouquets in her arms as we left the house. I watched them trudge slowly toward the corner where Emily died.
Saturday afternoon I was working on another case, parked outside an apartment building on Alameda’s west end. My cell phone rang. I flipped it open. “Jeri Howard.”
“Hi, this is Lauren Fisher. I hope it’s okay that I called. You gave me your card, remember?”
“I remember. It’s okay. Why did you call?”
“I saw this car,” she said. “It’s not brown. Not even close. But there’s something about it . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Where are you, Lauren?” I heard people talking in the background.
“Mom and I are in the Starbucks on Park Street.”
“I’m on my way.” I started my car and headed for downtown Alameda. The parking gods were good to me. As I neared my destination, a car vacated a space. I slipped mine into the spot, got out, and fed coins into the meter.
Caffeine Corner is what I call the intersection of Park Street and Central Avenue, with three coffee houses cheek-by-jowl—Peet’s on one corner, Starbucks on the opposite corner, and nearby, a local establishment called Java-Rama. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. Tables and chairs outside all three places were full of people getting their caffeine fix. The Fishers were inside Starbucks, seated near the front window. Mrs. Fisher nursed a caffe mocha with whipped cream on top. Lauren drank lemonade through a straw as she peered anxiously through the window.
“It’s probably nothing,” Mrs. Fisher said when I joined them inside. “But she insisted on calling you.”
“I like to play the hunches. Where did you see the car?”
“Down the street.” Lauren pointed. “It’s still there, in front of the bookstore.”
“It’s purple,” Mrs. Fisher said.
“It certainly is.” The car stood out like the proverbial sore thumb, with a paint job in a color that resembled grape soda. If this was the car Lauren had seen hit Emily, it hadn’t been purple at the time. Surely she and the other witnesses would have remembered such a distinctive color.
“Lauren, you said there was something about the car. What do you mean?”
Lauren sucked on the straw. “Maybe it’s the shape. Maybe it’s because there’s two people in it. We were at the bookstore. When that car backed into the parking space, I said, Mom, look at that weird color. Then I looked again and the car seemed familiar. That green thing is hanging from the rear view mirror, just like what I saw.”
“It looks like an Oakland A’s pennant,” Mrs. Fisher said. “Pretty vague hunch.”
“Who knows? I’ll take a look at the car.”
I left the coffee house and walked toward the purple car. It was a mix of designs, its hood sleek and streamlined in front like a car, the hatchback at the rear square and boxy like an SUV. The green cloth hanging from the rearview mirror was indeed a small pennant bearing the logo of the Oakland A’s baseball team.
According to the police, the hit-and-run vehicle probably had front end damage—the left front fender, bumper, and grille—and a broken headlight as well. If this was the car, any dents and breakage left by the impact had long since been repaired. B
ut sometimes repairs left evidence. I stepped off the sidewalk, between vehicles, peering at oncoming traffic as though I were going to jaywalk across Park Street. I shaded my eyes with my hand and glanced down at the purple car. I didn’t see anything that looked like a dent that had been hammered out. But the left headlight and rim looked newer than the right.
As I expected, the steady stream of cars prevented me from having to actually jaywalk. I walked slowly along the left side of the car, gazing at traffic and surreptitiously examining the car. I saw an area on the left front fender that could have been crumpled. It wasn’t as smooth as the rest of the car’s body. There was a small rectangular sticker affixed to the lower left windshield, but the angle of the sun created a glare and I couldn’t read it.
When I reached the back end of the car, I saw another sticker, this one on the rear bumper, with the familiar name of a big insurance company. I stood there long enough to memorize the California license-plate number, then shrugged as though I’d given up the idea of jaywalking. I stepped back onto the sidewalk and into the bookstore’s doorway, where I pulled pen and notebook from my purse, and wrote down the plate number, make and model of the purple car.
When no one approached, I left the doorway and strolled toward the car again. When I reached the front, I unzipped my purse and dropped it between the purple car and the one in front of it, intentionally spilling several items from the purse to the gutter. I stepped off the curb and used my foot to nudge my sunglasses case under the purple car, near the left front wheel.
“Oh, damn,” I said, feigning exasperation as I knelt to retrieve the items I’d dumped. Then I got down on my hands and knees for a look at the purple car’s undercarriage.
Two sets of sandal-shod feet appeared, on either side of me. I looked up at a young man and a young woman who evidently went with the car. They looked at me with alarm.
