City of Whispers

by Marcia Muller

  I drove down there as soon as Inspector Fast told me I could leave. Yanez’s home was in the Sharp Park area, which extends from the beach inland; looming on a hill above it is a dour-looking gray stone edifice called Sam’s Castle. I knew a woman who had written a book about the Bay Area’s oddities, and she’d told me that the castle had been constructed in the early 1900s by a railroad baron and sold in the fifties to a man named Sam Mazza, who had more or less partied his life away there. Since his death in mid-2000 it has been in historic trust and under renovation.

  To me it looked more like a place to hurl oneself off the cliff in despair than a party house.

  The maid’s home was on a side street directly below the castle. Modest, brown-shingled, overhung by old oaks and eucalypti, a small deck wrapping around on both sides. I went up the front steps and rang the bell. No one came to the door, but a curtain in a window to the left moved.

  “Ms. Yanez,” I called. “My name is Sharon McCone. I was at Clarence Drew’s house when you found him today.”

  No answer.

  “I need to talk with you before the police do. It’s very important.”

  Silence, but I sensed she’d come over to the other side of the door.

  “Please, Ms. Yanez. I’m a private investigator. I can help you deal with this.”

  The door opened a crack. Big, thickly lashed dark eyes stared out at me over a safety chain.

  “I promised my husband I would speak to no one until he returns from his work tonight.”

  “As I said, it’s very important that you talk to me.”

  “The police…”

  “Will be here shortly. I’m affiliated with them,” I lied.

  Hesitation. Then she undid the security chain, slipped outside, and shut the door behind her. “Not inside. Out here on the deck.”

  She led me to a white plastic table with an umbrella and four chairs. We sat down facing each other. Her lips were trembling and she compulsively wrung her hands. Her long, polished fingernails were chipped and jagged as if she’d been biting them.

  “Mr. Drew,” she said, and shuddered, “it was terrible.”

  “Do you know of any reason he might have taken his own life?”

  “I have been thinking about that. He was not the same these past weeks.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “He was very nervous. He didn’t notice if I left something undone. He didn’t eat the meals I prepared for him.”

  “You say ‘these past weeks.’ How many?”

  “Two, maybe three.”

  “Did anything unusual happen before or during that time?”

  She considered, her sad eyes narrowing. “No. But yesterday he stayed home from his office and something happened then. When I came back from an errand, he was at the top of the outside steps, shouting at a woman halfway down. It looked as if she had fallen, or maybe he’d pushed her. She was shouting too, but when she saw me she went away fast. Mr. Drew was very red in the face afterward and wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Did you recognize the woman?”

  “No.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “Small, like me. But much lighter hair… what is called dirty blond, I think. But I was much more worried about Mr. Drew than her, so I didn’t look closely.” She sighed. “And today, he has done this terrible thing to himself.” She crossed herself. “A cardinal sin.”

  A red pickup truck pulled to the curb in front, and a handsome, stocky man got out. “My husband, Tony,” she said, standing.

  Tony Yanez came up onto the deck, his eyes wary. His wife introduced us, told him who I was. I showed him my license to confirm my ID.

  “You all right, babe?” he asked her.

  “All right—now.”

  He was still suspicious. He sat down next to her, put a hand on her arm, and said to me, “What’s the deal? Why are you here?”

  “I was at the Drew house when your wife found his body.”

  “So?”

  “I’m assisting the police with their investigation.” That explanation satisfied almost everyone; Tony was no exception. He nodded.

  I said to Carlita Yanez, “Just a few more questions. How did Mr. Drew seem when you went to work today?”

  “He was upstairs when I got there, and he was very short with me. He said he didn’t want to be disturbed, that I should clean only downstairs.”

  “Was he often short with you?”

  “Never, except when I asked if I should clean that room with the door that’s always closed. I was not to go in there, no matter what. I think it belonged to a daughter who died.”

  “Did you go in?”

  She colored. “Twice. It was such a pretty room, and so sad. I wanted to dust and polish the furniture, but I was afraid Mr. Drew would discover and fire me.”

  I pictured the scene in Drew’s bedroom. “When you found him, did you notice anything else out of place or strange?”

  “I didn’t look. As soon as I saw him, I ran out.” A pause. “But… yes, there was something. Some boxes that are usually kept in the storage room—old VHS tapes, but there’s no TV in the bedroom.” She paused. Then, “Earlier, in the den where the entertainment center is, I found DVDs taken from their cabinet and stacked on the floor. And in the foyer I found this. I was going to put it in the garbage, but I forgot.”

  From her jeans pocket she showed me a red-white-and-blue drinking straw, flattened and twisted like a tiny noose.

  My skin prickled.

  Darcy.

  As I drove back from Pacifica, I tried to imagine what Darcy had been doing in Clarence Drew’s house. Of course, Drew might have picked the straw up somewhere else.

  And how many times does a coincidence like that happen?

  Unlike many people, I believe in coincidence. I’ve encountered evidence of it any number of times in my investigations. But, believer that I am, this was too much of a leap. Darcy had been in that house.

  Before or after Drew died? And why?

  Tony Yanez had been right: this was a job for the police. If it hadn’t been for that twisted straw, I’d have been glad to let them have it.

  Something else nagged at me as I approached the pier; I left my car in its slot below the agency’s catwalk and walked down to Red’s Java House, bought fish and chips and a Coke, and sat down outside on the low concrete wall facing the Bay. The fresh, balmy salt air and good food sparked my mental processes, and I soon realized what had been bothering me.

  Both Mr. George, the apartment manager in Palo Alto, and Will Smead, the faculty advisor, had implied that Lucy Bellassis and Gaby DeLucci had been best friends. Lucy herself had said so. But didn’t best friends share intimate details of their lives? Wouldn’t Lucy have known Drew was molesting Gaby? Have known about the crowd Gaby ran with the summer before she started at Stanford? Wouldn’t Lucy have reported those things to the police when Gaby was murdered?

  Well, maybe she hadn’t known. There were things in my own past that I’d never told anybody, even Hy. Nothing major, and nothing I felt guilty about any more, just things the people I cared about didn’t need to know. Rae and I were best friends, but we both harbored secrets.

  Or maybe Lucy had known about Gaby and Drew and decided it was wise to keep the knowledge to herself.

  Either way, another talk with her was the next order of business.

  Darcy Blackhawk

  Tell me everything about that time….

  He closed his eyes, hearing the shushing in his ears. Even though he was seated, he swayed slightly from the vertigo. The little brown girl moved, rippling the mattress, and that made it worse.

  “Darcy? Are you okay?”

  No no no.

  He shook his head.

  “Come on, it’s all right to remember.”

  Now he wagged his head from side to side, hard.

  “Darcy—”

  He put his hands over his ears. Moaned.

  “How long have you been in the city?�
�

  “Don’t know.”

  “How long?”

  “I… can’t… remember.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  A vision of Lady Laura’s cold dead face flashed before him.

  What I did…

  His head was pounding and nausea welled up. He took his hands from his ears and clasped his arms around his knees, drawing them up to his chest. And then he began to cry.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  She glared at him. Where had that sweet, understanding smile gone?

  “I can’t,” he repeated.

  “Look, you asshole, Clarence Drew is dead! I heard it on the news. We can’t get into that house again, not ever. So you better tell me—where are those tapes?”

  Acid fluid was rising into his mouth. He tried to make it to the edge of the bed, but there wasn’t enough time. He puked on the spread.

  The girl kicked him with her high-heeled boot, knocked him off the bed. He lay stunned on the floor. Then she wasn’t there any more. Gone. All gone.

  Tell me everything about that time….

  Sharon McCone

  The Bellassises had a pool—a rarity in the city. It was glassed in, with a retractable canopy, and was surrounded by lounge furniture and citrus trees planted in big pots. This evening, with the onset of dusk and fog lurking on the horizon, floodlights were on and tall gas heaters burning. Lucy led me out there and lay down on one of the chairs, a margarita glass and half-full pitcher on the table next to her.

  She waved lazily to me. “Have a seat,” she said, motioning at the lounge on the other side of the table. “Have a drink, there’s an extra glass over on the wet bar.”

  I took the chair, declined the drink. Lucy wore a black bikini under a white lace cover-up; her face was a smooth, untroubled mask. “So what’s happening?” she asked.

  “I came here to talk with you about Clarence Drew and Gaby. It’s even more urgent now: Drew is dead. He committed suicide this afternoon.”

  Lucy sat up straighter. “He what?”

  I explained the circumstances.

  “God,” Lucy said after a long silence. “I’m not going to pretend to be sorry. If I’d had my way somebody would’ve killed the bastard years ago.”

  “You knew he was molesting Gaby, then.”

  “… I knew. She told me when we were freshmen in high school, swore me to secrecy. There seemed to be some sort of… complicity between her and Drew. Or maybe she was afraid of hurting his wife. Or maybe it had just been going on so long.”

  “Did Park also know?”

  “Not then, but I finally told him.”

  “When?”

  “A few weeks ago, August nineteenth—it would’ve been Gaby’s twentieth birthday. For the first time I got it together and put flowers on her grave. But seeing that crappy cemetery and the weeds on the grave got me all worked up. I came home and had too much to drink and ranted to Park about Drew and what he’d done to Gaby.”

  “What was Park’s reaction?”

  “He was shocked, of course. And upset. He made me tell him everything I knew about it, which isn’t much; Gaby was pretty reticent. Park said we ought to have Drew arrested, but how could we? With Gaby dead, there’s no proof. The next morning he said he’d thought it over and decided it was ancient history. We should just let things be. Ancient history! Only two years ago!”

  “Why do you think Park backed off?”

  Lucy slugged some of her margarita before she answered. “Drew still has a lot of power and influence in the state and federal governments. I guess Park was afraid for his career, and I don’t blame him. The FAA has been looking closely at his company for some reason. Any hint of a scandal, you know…”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “Not in so many words. But what other reason would he have for covering up for Clarence?”

  Yes, what other reason?

  Mick Savage

  Clarence Drew was my last lead to Darcy,” Shar said on the phone, “and now he’s dead.”

  She sounded tired. Well, no wonder: she was working her butt off to find her asshole half brother.

  Mick stared out at the string of lights on the Embarcadero, clearly visible from Alison’s condo on the twenty-fifth floor of the Millennium Tower, a luxury high-rise south of Market. She’d bought it with an inheritance from her grandmother and now realized the lifestyle was not for her, but she was stuck with it until real estate prices rebounded.

  He asked Shar, “Are you at the agency?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should ease up some.”

  “I know I should—and I will. Hy’s coming back from Switzerland late tonight, and I want to spend time with him. Of course, he’ll probably sleep for twenty-four hours.”

  “You could do with twenty-four hours yourself.”

  “Mick.” Her tone was sharp. “I know what I could do with. I don’t need to be told.” Then, mellowing, “Sorry. This has all been very upsetting. I’m only doing it for Saskia’s sake, you know.”

  “Maybe it would be better for everybody if Darcy disappeared for good.”

  “I don’t think so. The not knowing—”

  “Is worse than knowing for sure.”

  “Right.”

  Alison appeared with two glasses of a good Zin they’d found on their last visit to the Alexander Valley, then took her own and retreated to the den. Her one weakness was a soap opera, All My Children, which she DVR’d for viewing when she had the time. Mick liked the soap okay, not that he watched it much, but he wondered why all its seemingly otherwise intelligent characters wanted to live in Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, where all sorts of horrible things kept happening to them.

  He asked Shar, “Are you still determined to trace Tick Tack Jack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Vancouver, BC, is a big city. Not much hope of locating Tullock and his family.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. There’s an agency I know of up there—Phyllis Brent and Associates. We could use them.”

  “How high are you willing to go on the cost?”

  “They’ll trade for favors.”

  “Meaning lost profits for us.”

  “I’ll absorb them. I can afford it, don’t worry.”

  “Who? Me? I’m just your dumbass nephew.”

  “Yeah. And you don’t worry—just like I don’t worry about you.”

  Alison had an early meeting in the morning, so Mick opted to sleep at his condo. Once there, though, he felt at loose ends. Nothing he liked on TV, as usual. He got onto YouTube and checked out a few postings of crime-scene reenactments about stupid criminals. There was the burglar who hid from the police under a bunch of plastic garbage bags—with the money and jewelry he’d taken still in his pockets. The bank robber who thought the FBI would have to give him back the loot after he got out of prison—“Hey, I earned it!” The kidnapper who wrote a ransom note on the back of one of his checking account deposit slips. God, they made the human race look as if it were composed of idiots!

  And that made him think of Darcy.

  Shar’s demented half brother was creeping around the area leaving a trail of twisted red-white-and-blue straws to rival Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. He wasn’t what you’d call a linear thinker, but there had to be some explanation for his behavior. Mick tried to put himself in Darcy’s shoes by remembering the times when he’d been really drunk or stoned. None of them, not even when he’d taken LSD and seen cat hair growing out of the water in the kitchen sink, enlightened him as to what must be going on in Darcy’s mind. Drunk, drugged, or sober, Mick had always had a sense of himself and his whereabouts. That, he suspected, was not so with old Darce.

  On impulse he began a series of searches on Darcy’s background. Arrested for kiting checks, shoplifting, possession of various illegal substances, loitering, and jaywalking. Caught stealing beer steins from a German restaurant. Walked out in a two-hundred-dollar pair of shoe
s he’d been trying on at Macy’s. Driven off to avoid paying at a gas station, with the hose still connected to his pickup, then wrecked said pickup and two other cars, narrowly avoiding DUIs. Yet he’d done minimal jail time.

  Mick sensed the hand of Saskia Blackhawk protecting her baby boy.

  Why, for God’s sake?

  Well, she was his mother. No one knew why mothers did the things that they did. Although Mick suspected what his mother would’ve done in the same situation: she’d’ve let him sit in jail and then yelled at him every chance she had for a whole year after he got out. After he’d been caught hacking into the Pacific Palisades Board of Education’s records, she and his father had banished him to San Francisco to work for Shar. Indentured servitude, he’d thought at the time. Best thing that had ever happened to him, he thought now.

  Back to Darcy: he was indeed stupid. All of this was petty crime. The jerk didn’t have it in him to pull off anything clever.

  Enough, he told himself. Enough. A drink, something mind-numbing on TV, and sleep.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

  Sharon McCone

  September 11.

  Nine-eleven.

  The day the hijacked planes crashed into the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania and brought down New York City’s Twin Towers. The day we knew that, as a nation, we’d never be completely safe again.

  Safety has a lot of meanings. Personal safety: lock your doors; arm your alarm systems; look both ways when crossing the street. Have annual doctor’s checkups; take your vitamins; don’t turn your back on the ocean; cliffs crumble.

  But the safety of a nation? How can you control that? There is no way to guard against hijacked planes, hurricanes, massive oil spills, earthquakes. But far worse is the steady rot from within, as society splinters and fragments and no side gives ground on any important issue. Thinly masked racial hatred, each religion claiming that its dogma is the only way to salvation, apathy, the closing of formerly open minds. Fear is a rotten emotion, and in one way or another it had us all in its grip.