I still hadn’t told her about Triplett. I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to say when I met her at the house that evening.
She got out of her car and hurried toward me, casting nervous glances at the dark ranks of trees. Her smile was tremulous; the skin beneath the green eyes was smudged. I doubted she’d slept.
Not that I was at my best. Coming straight from work, I still smelled like death. If she noticed, she didn’t let on as we hugged.
I pulled on gloves. Held out a pair for her.
“What’re these for?”
“To do our own search. How was the drive?”
“Long.”
We started in the kitchen, going room by room, checking the contents against her memory and the catalog prepared by the appraiser. In the service porch, three wrinkled, smelly cardboard boxes sat shoved up against the wall: the same three boxes she’d left behind, the last time we were here. She grimaced.
“Why couldn’t they steal those?” she said.
We swept the first floor, ascended to the bedrooms. Nothing looked out of place to her. All that remained was the attic. Tatiana seemed hesitant, as if afraid to enter a space where the traces of life might be in evidence, the tang of death still sharp.
I offered to go alone and report back.
She shook her head. “I’m a big girl.”
We mounted the narrow stairs.
The smell in the attic was the same, only stronger: paper, bindings, dust, now underlined by months of neglect. Tatiana sneezed three times in quick succession.
“That’s why I never come up here,” she said. “Allergy hell.”
I switched on my flashlight and we began stepping over clutter, turning on lamps as we went, revealing the next few feet in a bright, bleaching spot.
“Anything look wrong?”
“I have no clue,” she said.
Neither did I. The place was such a disaster.
We came to the sleeping area. Tatiana switched on the reading lamp.
Rocker. Lounger. Blanket. Neck pillow.
“Look,” I said.
Several of the desk drawers were cracked, including the door to the liquor cabinet.
I crouched down. The bottles of scotch were intact, the levels about where they had been, so far as I could tell. The rack of tumblers, untouched. Three, not counting the one that I had tried and failed to return to Tatiana, presently sealed in an evidence bag and stashed, along with the leftover pill bottles, in the cabinet above my fridge.
I could understand why the cops had failed to note the open desk drawers. The attic was three hundred sixty degrees of distraction, including other cabinets not perfectly shut. Anyone glancing at the desk would have no reason to believe it had been messed with.
I turned my attention to the drawers on the right.
Pens, pencils, checkbooks, bills, bank statements, invoices, Post-its, confetti, crap.
Middle right, more of the same.
Bottom right.
Walter Rennert’s revolver was missing.
—
WE SAT AT the dining room table, Tatiana’s bloodless fingers woven around a juice glass filled high with Chardonnay.
I said, “Who else has access to the house?”
“Nobody except me.”
“The real estate agent?”
“We haven’t signed a contract yet.”
“A neighbor with a key?”
“No.”
“Cleaning service?”
“I canceled them.”
“Did they have a key when they worked here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” She dropped her face in her hands. “I can’t remember. I think they were supposed to mail it back.”
“Are you sure you locked the side door, the last time you were here?”
“I think so.”
“Let me ask that a different way: Do you ever leave it unlocked? Like if you go to take the trash out.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did your father keep a key hidden outside? Under a rock or something?”
“I don’t know, Clay.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She drank half the glass at one go.
“What about your brothers?” I asked.
She shot me a look: Don’t be ridiculous.
“I’m just eliminating the obvious,” I said.
“They’re hundreds of miles away,” she said. “I gave them the appraiser’s list. ‘Claim whatever you want.’ They don’t need to break in. Anyway they wouldn’t want it. We’re not gun people. I’d forgotten he even had it.”
“Do you know when he bought it?”
She shook her head.
“Why’d he want one in the first place?”
“To protect himself from that maniac, I assume.”
I said, “So, no one else who could get into the house.”
“What,” she said. Her lips were trembling. “You’re scaring me.”
I hadn’t meant to. More than anything, I wanted to come up with a benign explanation. For her sake.
She pushed her glass away. “What aren’t you telling me?”
—
“THAT’S HIS NAME?” she said. “Julian Triplett?”
I nodded.
She bit her lip. “I’m trying to figure out how to express this calmly. Because, right now, I’m really angry at you.”
She brushed hair off her face, took a deep breath, let it out. “Okay. I’m telling myself it’s considerate of you to want to protect me. Sweet, even. But dumb, Clay, stupid dumb. If I don’t know I need to be careful, then I can’t be careful.”
“I wasn’t sure that you needed to be careful.”
“That’s my decision to make.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Julian Triplett,” she said, enunciating slowly. “He’s about our age, isn’t he?”
“A little older.”
“I wonder if my friends who went to Berkeley High knew him.”
“He was arrested freshman year.”
“Probably not, then.” She shivered, took a drink of wine. “What should we do?”
“Report it to the cops. We can’t have a loose weapon floating around. At least now we can give them a reason to keep an eye out for Triplett. For your safety—”
“I know what you’re going to say. I’m not going back to Tahoe.”
“We’re talking short-term.”
“No. Forget it.”
“Tatiana—”
“I will not let him intimidate me.”
“You could come back to my place.”
She looked at me, wide-eyed. “You think he knows where I live?”
“No reason to assume that.”
“Then?”
“Humor me,” I said. “At least for tonight.”
Her smile took effort. “If you’re trying to sleep with me, there are easier ways.”
“I’ll take the couch,” I said.
She didn’t answer. She finished her wine, poured more. “Are you convinced yet?”
“Of what?”
“That Dad was pushed.”
“It’s late,” I said. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
A beat.
She shoved her chair back and dumped her refill in the sink.
“The couch,” she said, “sounds like a good idea.”
CHAPTER 25
The next day, I was a zombie at work, jittery and fatigued and doing a poor job of hiding it. On my lunch break I dashed out to the intake lot to call Nate Schickman. He hadn’t heard about the incident at Rennert’s house. As expected: a false alarm wasn’t sufficiently noteworthy to make the rounds. And while he sounded duly concerned to learn about the gun, his responses were guarded. I’d worn out the welcome mat.
I said, “I’ve been trying to track this Triplett guy down for a couple of weeks now. My best guess is he’s on the street.”
“You have a recent photo?”
“Just the mugshot from his file.”
“From twenty years ago?”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not ideal.”
“No shit.”
“You’ll keep it on your radar, though?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”
—
I CAME HOME that evening to a quiet apartment, a note from Tatiana stuck to the TV. She needed to get out a bit, clear her head, had gone to dinner with a friend.
Don’t wait up.
I ate a bowl of cereal, using my free hand to chicken-peck at my laptop. Got the data I needed, made a quick confirmation call, took a shower, and changed into street clothes.
—
THE URBAN FOUNDRY occupied half a square block on 7th Street, about a mile west of downtown Oakland but light-years removed from any spirit of renewal. I parked up the block and stepped out into a puddle of safety glass; walking along, I passed several more, as if to suggest that the price of a spot was having your window smashed.
Even so, optimistic developers had begun to nose around, erecting a run of townhouses in full view of the freeway. On the other side of a weedy lot, a BART train shuffled toward the city, never looking back.
The Foundry itself was a hump of corrugated sheet metal, part hangar, part bunker. The first sensation that registered as I entered—before I could take in the concrete vastness; before I smelled the slag or heard the grinding of machinery—was heat. Immense, pressing heat; heat with mass and force.
The floor plan was sectioned by craft, with signs rendered in the appropriate medium. SMITHY in black iron. BIKE SHOP in gears and chains. Multicolor NEON. Closest to the door was GLASS, three bellowing furnaces that were the source of the roasting air.
The folks working the various stations wore goggles and steel-toes and old-timey facial hair stylings. I had the feeling most of them had been to Burning Man and found it too corporate. They reminded me of kids I knew in high school who built the sets for plays, sneering and striding around purposefully, fistlike masses of keys clashing on carabiner belt clips.
The woman at the front desk had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist: a unicorn, vomiting up a rainbow. I asked for Ellis Fletcher and she pointed me toward the woodshop.
Class was winding down, nine men and three women doing last-minute sanding or returning tools to wall racks. A dozen incomplete Shaker tables sat out, degrees of wonkiness attesting to the broad range of native ability. Anyone could, and did, enroll.
It was easy to spot Fletcher; he was the one eyeballing the surface of a tabletop, checking it for evenness while its maker looked on anxiously. Age was also a clue: mid-sixties, the only person there over thirty.
He wore a broadcloth button-down shirt tucked into Levi’s. Both belt and suspenders had been enlisted in the battle between pants and gut. I liked the gut’s chances. It had gravity on its side.
I waited till the last student had finished sweeping up to make myself known.
“Reverend Willamette said you might be by,” Fletcher said. His hand felt like one single callus.
“I saw you were scheduled to teach tonight,” I said.
“Wish you’d called first,” he said, settling on a work stool. “I could’ve saved you the trouble of coming down here.”
“You’re going to tell me you don’t know where Julian is.”
“I do not. Haven’t seen him in ages.”
For form’s sake, I asked how long, expecting the same answer I’d gotten from everyone I’d spoken to so far: more than ten years. But Ellis Fletcher said, “Hell,” and removed his cap, blue with VIETNAM VETERAN stitched in gold. He rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Must be two or three years now.”
“No kidding,” I said. “That recently?”
He gave me a strange smile. “You call that recent?”
“No one else’s seen him since two thousand five,” I said.
Fletcher looked puzzled. “I—okay, I guess.”
“The pastor told me you let him come in to use the shop in off hours.”
“That was way back in the beginning,” Fletcher said. “Geoff said he had this boy, special case, would I show him the ropes. All right, why not, send him on over. For a little while Julian was here all the time. Then he sorta dropped out of sight.”
“When was that?”
He paused. “Come to think, right around when you said.”
“Oh-five.”
“That sounds about right.”
“But you did see him after that,” I said.
He slapped the cap against his knee, knocking loose a cloud of sawdust. “Not frequently. Once a year at most. He didn’t give me any warning, he’d just turn up. Like you.”
I smiled. “What did he come to see you about?”
“Nothing special. Showing his face, I think.”
“You’re the one he chose to show it to.”
The suggestion seemed to unsettle him. “If you say so.”
“His mother. His sister. Reverend Willamette,” I said. “They haven’t seen him. You must’ve meant a lot to him.”
“I really don’t know what to tell you,” he said.
Aware of his growing discomfort, I backed off a hair. “What’d you two discuss?”
“We didn’t ‘discuss’ anything,” he said. “That wasn’t the nature of the relationship. I’d ask him what he’d been building, so forth. You know, chitchat.”
He tugged the cap back on. “The man’s not one for talk.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Good with his hands, though.”
“Heard that, too,” I said. “Did he mention where he was living, or who with?”
“I always assumed he was with her. His mother.” Concern came into his face. “You’re here because he’s done something.”
“Not necessarily.”
“You’re here,” Fletcher repeated.
“I’m trying to be careful, Mr. Fletcher. Stay ahead of things. For Julian’s sake, as much as anyone’s. When he came by did he talk about having a job?”
“No.”
“Do you know how he got by?”
He shook his head.
“All right,” I said. “More generally, could you get a sense of where his head was at?”
Fletcher stared out the shop window, at the main floor. The presses and saws and lathes made a gruff but steady chant, oddly soothing. “I get these students,” he said, shifting on the stool, “kids. They buy everything on the internet. They don’t need to touch it first. You bet they never stopped to think how it got that way. Where it started from. It’s click click click click, until one morning they wake up starving and they don’t know why. They can’t put a name on it. It doesn’t have a name. So away they go on the internet again, click click click, until they end up in my class, asking me questions. They want to lock everything down in rules. ‘How do I know when to change the grit?’ ” He paused. “I do what I can. But I can’t make them feel.”
“And Julian?”
“Nothing was for show. He didn’t crave praise, or attention. He did what he did.”
“You taught him well.”
Fletcher shook his head. “Can’t teach talent. Intuition for the wood—you’re born with it or you’re not. I gave him pointers now and again. Showed him pictures or plans from my books and magazines. Most the time I just kept an eye out so he wouldn’t steal my tools.”
“You thought he might?”
“In the beginning, sure. All I knew about him is, here’s this kid just came out of prison. After a while I got to see him for who he was.”
“You know what he went to prison for.”
“I do,” he said and left it at that.
“Did he ever speak to you about the murder?”
“Never.”
“Did the name Walter Rennert ever come up?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Nicholas Linstad?”
“Him neither.”
“Did he e
ver talk about wanting to hurt anyone? Get revenge?”
“No,” Fletcher said. “You’re worrying me, Deputy.”
“Please don’t.” Yet. “Like I said, this is me being extra-careful.”
“Ounce of prevention,” he said.
I nodded.
He gave me a long look, let his features go slack. “Hell, you’re just doing your job.”
I wasn’t. But I appreciated his attitude.
Fletcher said, “Ask me, it’s hard to see him hurting anyone. Ever. Not by the time I met him.”
He raised his arm. “That was his table, in the back. He’d shove himself in there and put his earmuffs on, working by himself, not talking, not asking questions. Maybe I go over there to see how he is, and he shows me. But otherwise he does his thing in peace.” A crooked smile. “Big as he was, I sometimes forgot he was there.”
A chop saw howled, devoured, was satisfied.
“This way a second,” Fletcher said.
Exiting the shop, he led me past an emergency eyewash station and through a door marked STAFF ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT THANK YOU. He stopped at a stainless-steel trough sink to rinse his hands before heading down a row of school lockers. A pale young woman with black ear gauges and a purple Mohawk sat on the bolted bench, blotting her armpits with a hand towel. She waved to Fletcher, who acknowledged her with a salute.
His was the second-to-last locker on the left. He dialed in the combination. “I keep this around for when folks get in their heads they want me to make them something.”
The locker didn’t hold much: a crusty bottle of Gold Bond, a brown paper lunch sack, a spare shirt on the hook. From the shelf, he took down a photo album—not the twenty-first-century ready-made version, but crack-spined, with pocket pages housing three-by-five snapshots.
It was a portfolio of sorts, although it focused more on process than on results, documenting the creation of several pieces, step by step, from raw material to finished product. Fletcher himself hovered at the margins, like some almighty set of hands. He did beautiful work.
He flipped a page, put his finger down. “That’s him.”
Crime Scene Page 17
