Evidently my pursuer had followed the same collision course.
The lights of Cliff House were before me now. I raced toward them, avoiding strollers, and burst through the door of the restaurant, breathing hard. I wasn’t sure if Frankie would come in after me or not.
Ahead I saw the stairs to the dining room and the upper bar. I wanted to find shelter in the ladies’ room, but its downstairs location would be a trap. I climbed slowly, my knees weak. The bar was crowded and brightly lit, a cheerful haven from the dismal, foggy sea beyond huge windows. It would also be a haven from my attacker. I stood in the doorway, looking for a place to sit.
A group of people in Levi’s and windbreakers occupied a table in the far window bay. As I stood there, one of them, a woman with a round, freckled face and dark hair, spied me. She waved, her face crinkling into a wide grin.
“Hey, Sharon! Hello! Come on over!”
It was my friend Paula Mercer, a fine arts graduate from Berkeley who worked for the de Young Museum.
Almost collapsing with relief, I started across the bar. The group rearranged themselves as Paula greeted me, introducing everyone by first names and adding asides that led me to believe they were part of the local arts and crafts crowd. As I sat down and one of the guys called for another glass of wine, I glanced at the entry way.
Frankie stood there, his shiny suit rumpled and sweat-stained, his tie askew. His eyes scanned the room and came to rest on me. Our glances locked, and an icy dread frosted my limbs.
“Sharon?” Paula’s voice was concerned. “What’s the matter?”
I dragged my eyes away from Frankie. “What?”
“I said, what’s wrong? You just turned a ghastly shade of pale!”
The waitress placed a glass of Chablis in front of me, and I grabbed it, gulping deeply. “I’ll be all right,” I said. “I’m just in a little trouble.”
Comprehension flooded Paula’s features. “I thought you looked strange when you came in. Is it a case?”
I nodded. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been here. Will you help me?”
“Of course.”
“Don’t leave me, that’s all. Not for a second. And when you go, give me a ride to my car. It’s parked up on Point Lobos.”
Paula frowned. “Don’t worry about a thing. But shouldn’t you tell the police if someone’s out to get you?”
I glanced at the entry way. Frankie had disappeared.
“No, it’s not that sort of thing,” I said. “Don’t you worry either.” I felt slightly more normal, thanks to the wine.
“Look, Paula,” I went on, realizing my friend could help with one of my more mundane problems, “I don’t want to go into it now, but the case I’m on involves taking an inventory of some art objects.”
“You?” Paula clapped a hand to her forehead. “God help whomever the inventory’s for!”
I smiled. Paula’s joking and the chatter of the group around us was doing a lot to restore my sense of reality. “Anyway, there are some paintings, probably done by local artists, that I can’t fix a value on. If I dragged them over to the de Young tomorrow, do you think you could take a look at them?”
She nodded. “I’ve got a big exhibit to put together, but I should be done around two. Why don’t you stop by then?”
I said I would, and we turned our attention to the rest of the group. It was after one in the morning when we left, a large, somewhat drunken crowd that provided perfect cover for me. Paula drove me to my car in her van, waiting while I checked the MG over to make sure Frankie hadn’t disabled it. It surprised me, but the car was okay. Still, I was expecting some kind of trouble and circled the block several times when I got home, watching for suspicious figures. I parked as close as I could and rushed in, clutching the carton containing the paintings and Joan’s records. The apartment seemed okay, too; for whatever reasons, Frankie had, I hoped, given up for the night.
Tired and shaken as I was, I sat down cross-legged on my bed to check with my answering service.
“It’s been a busy night,” Claudia, the operator, told me. “Hank Zahn called at ten and again at eleven. No message either time. Your mother called from San Diego and complained about you not being home, like she always does. That was at ten fifteen. A Mrs. Cara Ingalls called twice, asked that you call her tomorrow at her office. And then a Gregory Marcus called at ten twenty-three, left a number. Said it was important. Revised the number at eleven and called again at twelve fifteen, talking as if he suspected me of not giving you your messages.” Claudia’s professional pride was wounded.
“Don’t let him bother you,” I told her. Claudia, like the companionship and wine at Cliff House, was helping me pull myself together.
“What’s with him anyway? He sounds mean and sexy.” Claudia, a friend who gave me cut rates on the expensive twenty-four-hour service, loved to speculate about the callers, and we’d had many interesting conversations in the dead of night.
“Mean he is, but forget the sexy,” I said, yawning.
“Do me a favor, will you?” Ben Harmon’s mention of Marcus had made me wary.
“Sure.”
“If Marcus calls again, tell him you haven’t talked to me.” I didn’t like to ask people to lie for me, but Claudia had long ago explained her operator’s code of ethics. It was very complicated, involving concepts of client confidentiality that would astonish even the legal-minded Hank.
“Right. What about your mother?”
“I’ll try to get her tomorrow. Probably one of my brothers has gotten busted again, or one of my sisters is having another baby. No big deal.” I got the number Cara Ingalls had left with Claudia, then said good-night and hung up.
Cara Ingalls: I had temporarily forgotten her, but the message on my card had interested her enough to make her try to reach me twice. Talking with her could well add many missing pieces to my puzzle—or change the shape of it altogether.
And Charlie Cornish: tomorrow I’d have to wring his story out of him. He might throw some light on the van Osten-Harmon connection.
I undressed sitting on the bed, then snuggled down under the heavy quilt. A residue of the terror I’d felt while running through the fog still clung to me, warring with my exhaustion. In minutes, exhaustion won out.
16
At eight the next morning, I could tell it was going to be a beautiful day. A pre-dawn rainstorm had washed the air clean, and early sunshine brought the kids out into my alley, rioting up and down on their skateboards before school.
I watched them, thankful I was in any condition to enjoy the morning. Then, banishing my morbid reflections, I sat down on my bed with a cup of coffee and Joan’s records. I wanted to wrap up the inventory before I called Cara Ingalls.
Hank was right about Albritton: for a successful businesswoman, she had kept remarkably slapdash records. Within an hour, though, I had found a value for the set of bone-handled knives. Edwin I evaluated at a flat hundred dollars, most of it sentiment. The five paintings—two still lifes, the Madonna, a seascape, and a city scene—remained questions that Paula Mercer would hopefully answer when we met that afternoon.
Assuming she would, I had only two loose ends, both shipments Joan had apparently ordered, prepaid, from van Osten. The final two ledger entries indicated one that hadn’t arrived as far as I could tell, due last Monday; the other was slated to appear tomorrow, Friday. I wrote the order numbers in my notebook. If Hank thought it important, he could query van Osten. Of course, by that time van Osten might be in custody for vandalism … or worse. It all depended on the outcome of my activities today.
At nine o’clock, I dialed Cara Ingalls’s number. The switchboard put me through to a secretary, who took my name and left me on hold. Five minutes later, the husky voice from the cocktail party came on the line. I suggested we meet sometime today.
“Today? Sorry, no. I’m booked up, right through nine this evening.”
“You must have fifteen minutes. I can be
there in half an hour.”
“Can’t we discuss it on the phone?”
“I’m not sure you’d want to.”
She paused. Then, “I planned to have lunch at my desk today, but I guess I can get away. Can you meet me at one o’clock?”
I said I could, and she named a restaurant on Battery Street.
“I’ll be outside,” she said. “How will I know you?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll recognize you.” I hung up quickly.
I had plenty of time to spare, so I dressed, tidied the apartment, and took out the garbage. At the big bin downstairs, I ran into Tim O’Riley, the building manager. Tim was a paunchy Irishman who drank beer from the time he got up until he passed out in mid-afternoon.
“You’re here,” Tim commented in surprise as I dumped my garbage.
“Yeah. Why didn’t you think I was?”
“You weren’t answering your door.” A crafty look came over Tim’s puffy face. “Oh, I get it. You’re avoiding him.”
I couldn’t remember anybody coming to my door. I turned to face Tim. “Avoiding who?”
“The Mexican guy who was at your door a few minutes ago.”
“What did he look like?” The words came out sharp, and Tim stared at me.
“Like a Mexican. Little. Dark. Skinny. Smoked a cigar. Walked like his back hurt him.”
In spite of his alcoholic haze, Tim was a good observer. Of course, there were a lot of Chicanos in the neighborhood. It could have been someone selling life insurance. But then, I had flipped Frankie on his back last night.
“Did you talk to him?”
“I sure did. At first I thought he was trying to look through the glass in the door. You know how people will. So I asked him what he wanted, and he said he guessed you wasn’t home. Then I came down here a while later and found him sneaking around in the alley, looking up at your windows. I told him to get, and he got.”
I was certain it had been Frankie, and I didn’t like him on my home territory, not one bit. “Thanks for sending him away, Tim. Let me know if you see him again, will you?”
“No trouble,” Tim said. “I guess in your business you gotta expect creeps hanging around.” He picked up his beer can and shuffled inside.
Frankie couldn’t harm me in my own building in broad daylight, I thought. Still, I went upstairs and got my .38 Special from the locked box where I kept it. I loaded it and put it in an inner compartment of my bag, where it was easy to reach. Then I sat down and called my friend Bob at the San Francisco bureau of the Wall Street Journal.
Bob sounded stuffy and proper when he came on the line, befitting a writer for that stately publication, but when I identified myself he dropped the pretense. Unknown to the Journal, Bob wrote lurid true-crime stories on the side, and I’d met him a few years before while he was researching one, a case I’d been peripherally involved in.
“What can you tell me about a Mrs. Cara Ingalls, real-estate person?” I asked him.
“She makes a lot of money and is crazy about weird hats,” he said. “Seriously, do you want me to look up her biography?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Bob returned to the phone a few minutes later. “This is pretty sketchy, and I don’t know the lady myself, but it’s all we have: born, San Jose. Thirty-six years old. Three years San Jose State, majoring in architecture. Put herself through school selling houses—that was in the days of the big boom down there—but quit to join her firm’s commercial division in San Francisco before she got her degree. List of various honors received and memberships—I won’t go into that. Formed her own firm, Ingalls and Associates, three years ago. They hold many of the options on the land in Yerba Buena. Offhand, I’d say she invested her commissions well.”
“Is that it?”
“Just about. There’s not much on her personal life, which is what I assumed you’re after. One marriage to Douglas Ingalls, local socialite. No children. Divorced Ingalls four years ago. From what I know of Ingalls, that was a good move. All he does is drink and sail his boat on the Bay. Anyway, Mrs. Ingalls lives in a condominium on Nob Hill, has a summer home at Tahoe, and is a generous supporter of the arts. That’s all we have.”
I thanked Bob; before hanging up, he reminded me to get in touch if I ran across any good murders.
The sidewalks of the financial district teemed with lunchtime strollers. Shifting packs of what appeared to be young executives roved about, enjoying the sunshine and eying the girls who ate bag lunches in the outdoor plazas. The normally gray canyon of Montgomery Street was bathed in light, and smartly dressed office workers moved lazily across its intersections. I was sure a lot of people would be back at their desks very late today.
As I approached our meeting place, I spied the imposing figure of Cara Ingalls on the sidewalk. I glanced at my watch and smiled. I had definitely interested her: she was five minutes early.
I crossed the street, admiring Ingalls’s cashmere coat-dress that met brown leather boots at mid-calf. Bob had been right about Ingalls’s fondness for millinery: today she wore a little wine-colored felt job tilted rakishly over one eye. She made me, in my simple pants and corduroy jacket, feel like a mere slip of a girl.
I approached Ingalls, identifying myself, and she gave me a glance that said I looked the way I felt. “We’d better hurry; they’re holding a table,” she said, ushering me inside the restaurant.
Ingalls commanded excellent service. Within minutes, a bevy of waiters had installed us in a corner booth and taken our orders. The restaurant boasted Italian specialities, so I ordered cannelloni and white wine. Ingalls must have been on a diet, since she chose grapefruit juice and shrimp salad without dressing. I had never had to worry about excess weight in my life; as I munched on a piece of sourdough bread, I felt I was getting back at her for making me feel young and inelegant.
We had a pretty boring chat about the weather until our lunches came; then I said, “Let’s talk about the Salem Street properties now. Does your offer still stand?”
Ingalls nodded. “I spoke with Mr. Cornish this morning. He’s assuming responsibility for the decision, although the probate of Mrs. Albritton’s estate will naturally slow the proceedings.”
So Charlie was keeping her on the hook. That indicated he might not honor Harmon’s claim on the land.
I asked, “What have you heard about counter-offers?”
She shrugged. “My sources say my offer is far and away the highest. I want that land, and I’m prepared to go as high as necessary.”
“What’s so desirable about Salem Street?”
“Location,” she answered promptly. “Proximity to the Civic Center. People working there are a ready market for condominiums, to say nothing of shops and restaurants. There’s no end to the potential.”
“I’m sure other people have thought of that.”
“Of course. But I have the resources to do it.”
I was beginning to enjoy talking with Cara Ingalls. She was my kind of woman, one who made her way on her own steam and refused to be held back. That was what I had always done, although without anything near her financial success.
I said, “Your sources, who do they say you’re competing against?”
She smiled. “Only one organization, that Western Addition Credit Union.”
So Harmon’s offer was not common knowledge. “You seem pleased.”
“I am. They can hardly match my offer. It’s a good thing, too: this city doesn’t need another shoddy low-income housing project cluttering up the landscape.”
I had seen the credit union’s plans the previous fall, and they hadn’t looked so shoddy to me. “I hear it’s quite well designed. And the city certainly does need more reasonably priced housing.” I thought of the huge rent I paid for my old-fashioned studio.
Ingalls laughed shortly. “Come on. Look at the trash that moves into those places. Each family with dozens of unruly kids writing on the walls—if they can write at all—and dirtying the pla
ce up. Those people shouldn’t be allowed to live here.”
Her tone was matter-of-fact, and it shocked me. “Where do you suggest they go?”
“Anywhere, just so I don’t have to look at their mess.”
“That’s a rather calloused attitude.”
Her eyes narrowed. They were a strange, pure amber color, reinforcing my impression of her catlike quality. “Miss McCone, let’s have none of your girlish liberal sentiments. The world is a big, harsh place. I’m surprised in your profession …”
“I try to hang on to my ideals. Granted, it’s hard …”
Ingalls laughed bitterly. The laugh struck me as a little off-key.
“Let me tell you a story about ideals,” she said in a low voice, leaning forward toward me. “I was the youngest in my family, the only girl. My father was an architect, and we were all brought up to be professional people. My three brothers were to be an attorney, a doctor, and a dentist, in that order. I was to follow in my father’s footsteps as an architect—so I thought.”
Her yellow eyes held mine. I wondered why she was telling me this, but I didn’t want to interrupt.
“My father died when I was sixteen. Of a heart attack on the golf course. My closest brother had completed dental school two months before. After the funeral, my mother and I found out my father had canceled his life insurance the day of my brother’s graduation. His boys were educated, so there was no need for it any more; my mother and I didn’t count.”
The story chilled me. “So you put yourself through school.”
“Not all the way.” She shook her head, her mouth twisted. “For three years I did. I worked nights, studied while I sat in empty houses on weekends, waiting to show them. Then one day I woke up and said, ‘What in hell am I doing busting my ass to become some sort of living monument to my old man, the son-of-a-bitch who thought me less than human?’ So I quit studying architecture and went full time into real estate. I made it big: I’ve already cleared more money than my old man made in his entire life. I only wish the old bastard could know!”
Edwin of the Iron Shoes Page 9
