City of Whispers

by Marcia Muller

  Hy glanced at me. “You want to take the controls?”

  “Sure, so long as you keep a close eye on me.” It would divert my thoughts from the case for a while and allow the facts to percolate.

  The jet flew like a dream. As we entered Bay Area airspace and Hy reclaimed the controls preparatory to our landing at North Field, he said, “You need to get your commercial certification and jet experience.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re good. And one day this plane may belong to both of us.”

  “It belongs to RI.”

  “And who is RI?”

  “You, but—”

  “And who is McCone Investigations?”

  “Me, but—”

  He smiled, then spoke to the air traffic controller.

  When he was done talking, I said, “Ripinsky, are you proposing a business merger?”

  “Would that be such a bad idea?”

  “But everything’s so good the way it is.”

  “When have I heard that before? We got married anyway.”

  “Yes, but marriage—”

  “—Is one of the most difficult and risky things most people ever do. By comparison, a business merger is a piece of cake.”

  “Says you.”

  “Think about it, McCone. That’s all I’m asking.”

  At UC Med Center on Parnassus Heights I chanced to meet Rae in one of the elevators. “Prepare yourself,” she said. “Mick’s in a foul mood.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “His head, he says, feels like it’s been run over by a tractor in a newly fertilized field. His breakfast was like porridge the Three Bears wouldn’t’ve eaten. The nurse would be a pit bull if she was shorter and had four legs.”

  “I never knew he could come up with such colorful images.”

  “Neither did Alison. She visited earlier and he told her that her father—you remember he came out from Indiana for a few days last month—reminded him of a troll.”

  “Jesus!”

  Rae smiled wryly. “Fortunately, Alison thinks so too.”

  We’d reached Mick’s room. “There’re two other patients in there with him,” Rae added. “One reads The Wall Street Journal, keeps his headphones on, and watches FOX News. The other, I think, is in a coma. They’re all separated by those curtains that pull around the bed, thank God.”

  I remembered hospital rooms only too well. Even being here made my palms sweat.

  Rae held up a grease-stained paper bag. “Señor Loco’s burrito grande.”

  “Do they let them have that stuff here?”

  “They’d better, or the Pit Bull will die in a patient uprising. You want to give it to him?”

  “No. I want to talk with him, and I’d rather not do it when he’s got guacamole dribbling from his lips.”

  “… Right. I’ll ask the nurse to keep it warm.”

  Mick’s was the middle bed. I pulled the curtain aside and at first thought he was asleep. Then he turned fierce blue eyes on me.

  “My head hurts like hell, and the food’s bad enough to make a Dumpster diver puke.”

  “Good morning to you too.” I sat down on the foot of the bed.

  “Alison was here. She wants me to move into her place after I get out so she can treat me like an invalid.”

  “I’m sure she has your best interests in mind.”

  “They all do. That’s how they get you.”

  Mick, I was sure, had never been “gotten” by a woman in his life. In fact, he seemed to have worked on losing them.

  “Rae came,” he added, “and I asked her to get me some Señor Loco. Where the hell is she?”

  I didn’t reply, just looked at him.

  Under the thin hospital sheet and blanket he squirmed, a flush spreading from his neck to his face. He turned his head to the side.

  “Must sound pretty lame to you,” he said. “These complaints, I mean.”

  “I know how helpless you feel.”

  “Not as helpless as you were last year.”

  “It’s all a matter of degree. Do you feel like talking about what happened to you?”

  “Not till I get my burrito.”

  I sighed and went to find Rae.

  The food worked wonders on Mick.

  “Nothing like a burrito to perk a guy up,” he said.

  “If that were true of every guy, we’d have world peace.” I sat on the visitor’s chair. “So what d’you remember about last night?”

  “I was tailing that red Honda I told you about. The driver was the only one in it as far as I could tell. He drove into McLaren Park and stopped on the Shelley Loop. I followed him to a clearing in a deep thicket, where he looked around with a flashlight. Then he got out of there so fast I couldn’t get back to my bike in time to keep tailing him, so I went back to the clearing. Nothing but soft ground, probably from one of those underground springs. I had the feeling he was scoping out a place to bury a body.”

  “Not good. Are you sure it was a man?”

  “Pretty much; he was big. Like the guy who jumped me.”

  “You get a look at him?”

  “Practically none at all.”

  “What did you hear before he attacked you?”

  “Thrashing in the thicket. Heavy footsteps. I think he was wearing pointy-toed boots.”

  “Why?”

  “Felt like it when he kicked me.”

  “Anything else about him? An odor?”

  “Sweat. Leather. Old leather, not that new-car smell. A jacket, maybe.”

  “You make a good witness, Savage, even if you were getting the shit kicked out of you.”

  “I’ll treasure the compliment forever,” he said. “Now how about getting out of here so I can rest.”

  I was waiting at the elevator when my phone rang. An unfamiliar male voice said, “We have your brother Darcy.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “Never mind that. We have him, and if you want him back alive, you better follow instructions.”

  So Hy had been right. Quickly I turned up the volume on the phone as high as it would go, rummaged in my bag for my tape recorder, and began documenting the call.

  “Is Darcy all right?”

  “He’s alive. He’ll remain alive as long as you do as we say.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “We’ll negotiate this in stages. If at any time you contact the authorities, the negotiations will stop. And your brother will die.” The voice sounded as if he was distorting it with some device. “Your first step is to gather fifty thousand dollars in small bills, no larger than twenties. You have until seven tonight.”

  “Fifty thousand—it’s Sunday!”

  “Like I said, you have until seven tonight. Do it.” He broke the connection.

  Immediately I speed-dialed Hy and explained that there’d been a ransom demand after all.

  He said, “I’m not too surprised. Whatever these people had in mind with Darcy at first must not have worked out, so they’ve shifted to a fallback position. That’s why there’s been no ransom demand until now.”

  “How should we handle it?”

  “My advice is to follow the caller’s instructions to the letter. Tell no one else about this.”

  “But the money—”

  “I have ways of getting it, even on a Sunday. Ransom demands don’t always come during banking hours, you know. RI will manage this as we always do.”

  Mick Savage

  He’d insisted Alison bring his laptop to the hospital, and after Shar left and he’d rested awhile he went to work.

  The license plates on the red Honda he’d tailed to McLaren Park belonged to a black Mercedes that had been junked behind a business on Edgewater Road in Oakland two months ago. The car had been stolen off a dealer’s lot in Santa Rosa. The Honda itself was registered to a Kay Zimmerman of Prairie Village, Kansas; she’d reported it stolen six months ago. Given the fact that she was a respected faculty member at the University of Kan
sas, it followed that she was not moonlighting as a kidnapper in California.

  He then called Real Good Properties, the management company that had leased the apartments in the Clayton Street house; its office was open on Sunday, as most realty offices were. Cyndi Smith—who emphasized the spelling of her first name—was initially reluctant to give out details on the tenants, but Mick charmed her with a description of his credentials, which somehow worked as an aphrodisiac on certain young women.

  The Bartletts on three had lived in their apartment for seven years. Good tenants, paid their rent on time. Ed Moss and his wife, Lucinda, on two, were much the same. And the Morgans on one, although they had been there only a few months, were turning out to be model renters. The basement apartment? Well, that had always been a problem.

  How so? Mick asked.

  It seemed to attract all kinds of lowlifes, Cyndi told him. There had been multiple complaints from the other residents and her firm had prepared eviction notices at least five times since she’d been employed there. All the tenants served with notices had fled leaving debris, damage, and overdue rent. After the last couple had trashed the bathroom, the owners had decided to take the basement apartment off the market.

  Who were the owners? Mick asked.

  Oh, one of those partnerships in Culver City down south that bought up marginal properties and used them as a tax write-off. Janus Corporation. They’d recently filed for bankruptcy.

  No way he’d reach anyone connected with them on a Sunday. Besides, he was getting sleepy.

  When Alison came into the room, carrying a covered basket from which the aromas of their favorite Thai restaurant emanated, his memory was drawn back to the morning last year when she’d shown up at the pier with a similar basket of breakfast goodies for everybody, because she knew they’d had a bad night.

  “Hungry?” she asked.

  “Ravenous.” The burrito was just a distant memory now.

  She removed cartons from the basket, pulled out paper plates and plastic forks. “No chopsticks,” she said. “Too sloppy for hospitals.” A warmth spread throughout his chest. He supposed, from his limited knowledge, that it was love.

  Don’t lose this one, Savage. Marry her.

  Darcy Blackhawk

  Where am I?

  Not in jail. He knew that much.

  It was still dark. Earlier this place had been noisy, but now the droning and whining were spaced out and distant. His hands and feet were still tied, but not as tightly as before. Had they moved him?

  He remembered somebody coming in, roughly moving him aside. For a few minutes they squatted in the far corner, doing something with the help of a flashlight. After they were gone he felt the temperature rising, enough to take the chill off his bones.

  He’d told somebody something at one point. Who? The brown girl? What?

  A lie, to make them stop hurting him. A lie that would be bad for Shar. But what was it?

  He’d said… said that…

  Oh, shit. Why couldn’t he remember? Why wasn’t he like other people?

  His eyes stung. No, he wasn’t going to cry again. He’d think about what he’d told them….

  Now he remembered. He’d said that Shar had the box Lady Laura had given him. Only she didn’t, because Laura hadn’t given him anything except a little snort of coke. He’d been so glad to see her, and she’d promised to meet him at some palace later. Then they’d go away, start a new life in Big Sur. But first there was something she had to do.

  She hadn’t told him what, and now she was dead.

  Why was Lady Laura dead?

  Darcy’s head ached. Drug hangover, the kind that you had when the docs pumped too many meds into you. That shrink, the time he’d freaked out and ended up in the psych ward in Boise. The other time too, someplace in Oregon.

  There’d been needle marks on his arm this time, he’d seen them.

  Why hadn’t they just killed him? It would’ve been better for Shar that way. Better for everybody. If he could ever get out of here, he’d do the job himself.

  Here. Where was here?

  Where am I?

  Sharon McCone

  Hy set a battered brown briefcase on my desk at the pier and sat across from me.

  “It’s all there,” he said. “Unmarked bills, although the serial numbers have been recorded and will be circularized. But most kidnappers know that’s standard procedure; they’ll launder it.”

  “In your experience, isn’t fifty thousand kind of small for a ransom demand?”

  “Yes, but remember that the clients RI deals with are high-profit multinational corporations.”

  “So these people could be amateurs.”

  “Could be, or maybe they’ve done their homework—credit reports, that kind of stuff—and know what the traffic will bear.”

  I shifted in my chair, put my feet up on the pullout shelf of my workstation. My body tingled with excess adrenaline. “You planning to make the drop? I mean, it’s your area of expertise.”

  “I’m not planning anything. We’ll do as they say. Cardinal rule of ransom situations. But don’t worry, I’ll be here every step of the way. And once the kidnapper has the briefcase, there’s a microchip in its lining that will transmit a signal to a device I can link to my GPS, so I can track him.”

  Hy knew exactly what to do. For twenty years he had been a skillful hostage negotiator; when he took over RI, he’d kept on top of all the new technology, hired the best people in the necessary areas of expertise. Now RI was the best in the field of international executive protection and security.

  It wasn’t yet seven o’clock, but I had my phone out and was primed for it to ring.

  Hy saw me glance at it and said, “They usually delay the call. Puts you on edge, makes you more compliant. Try not to come off that way when the call comes; it’ll confuse them and we’ll have an advantage.”

  I nodded, but kept looking at the phone.

  “You let Saskia or Robin know what’s going on?” he asked.

  “God, no. The man on the phone said to tell no one, and besides, I don’t want to put them through this.”

  “Good. You hungry?”

  “I’d choke on so much as a sip of water.”

  The phone rang, and I reached for it.

  Hy put his hand over mine. “Deep breath before you answer.”

  I breathed, then picked up. It was Ma: the replacement for the pair of pink slippers was on its way. I gave Hy a what-do-I-do-now? look.

  He leaned forward, took the phone. “Hi, Kay. I’m about to whisk your daughter off for a romantic dinner, and if we don’t go now we’ll lose our reservation. Can you and she talk about the slippers in the morning?… Right, a popular restaurant, and they don’t hold your place more than five minutes…. Okay, I’ll tell her. And you have a nice evening.” He handed the cellular back to me.

  “She sends her love,” he said.

  “Why didn’t I check to see who was calling before I answered?”

  “You’re overanxious. Let’s just relax.”

  We lapsed into silence. Around us the old pier creaked and groaned, and above us traffic on the Bay Bridge rattled and roared.

  Again it was silent. Then Hy asked, “You heard any more from the port commission?”

  “No. Glenn Solomon’s been keeping tabs on the situation and he says the outlook isn’t promising. This city—it’s tearing everything down. Granted, the Transbay Terminal wasn’t viable any more, but still the demolition made me sad.”

  The terminal was built in 1939 as a hub for the Key System trains from the East Bay and, later, for buses. It had been torn down last year. I remembered it well from all the times during college when I’d passed through on my way between Berkeley and my security guard jobs in the city. Even then it had been a characterless dingy gray building—its restaurants, the well-known Cuddles Bar, and the shoeshine stands long closed and sealed off from the public. Then the police station, with its conveniently located drunk tank, went d
ark too. The homeless took over, and the lobby and corridors smelled of urine and strong disinfectant.

  Now it had temporarily been replaced by eleven white vinyl canopies that stretched over a concrete plaza like giant umbrellas; to many people’s surprise, they were not as ugly or inconvenient as many of us had thought they would be. By 2017 they would be permanently replaced by a $910 million transit hub, and the Bay Area would eventually expand to previously undreamed-of limits.

  Progress, yes. But progress is not always good, and sometimes I have dark thoughts of California’s becoming nothing more than one sanitized unending city from border to border. Then, of course, I think of the Sierras and the other mountain chains, as well as the fertile central valleys—millions of acres of farmland that grow produce that feeds the whole country’s population. Too valuable to be turned into housing developments and shopping malls; the land will be there long after the cities self-destruct.

  Hy said, “I could see the demolition of the terminal from my office windows. Made me a little sad too.” RI was located on the nineteenth floor of a new building on Battery Street. “Some columnist in the Chron was carrying on a while back about how San Franciscans resist change for no good reason.”

  “There’s a little bit of truth in that, but I think it’s more that we revere tradition. We have a fabulous history here, and it would be a shame for it to be wiped out. We’ve already got the Transamerica Pyramid, Embarcadero Center, Millennium Tower, and some pretty ugly public art. What more do we need?”

  “I don’t much like public art. A buddy of mine in Los Alegres says there’s a truly hideous ice-cream cone statue in front of the cinemaplex. And, of course, there’s that obelisk made out of bicycle parts in Santa Rosa.” Hy paused. “If the pier really is demolished, have you given any more thought to where you’ll relocate?”

  “I should have, but since Darcy disappeared I haven’t had the time or inclination. Ted’s on the hunt, though. The Grand Poobah says he won’t let us move into an ordinary office building. He’s got his heart set on someplace more unique.”