"You keep all your back receipts, bar tabs, credit card receipts?"
"Yes. We're required by the IRS to keep them for seven years."
"I need to see all the bar tabs from Thursday night, March 13, two years ago."
"They'd be downstairs. Have a seat and I'll get them for you. Would you like a drink, a glass of wine?"
"It's been a long day; I'd love a cup of coffee."
Sean opened the door and signaled for a waitress, a sinewy light-skinned black woman with close-cropped hair, and asked her to bring me coffee and anything else I wanted. I thanked them both.
The coffee arrived quickly. I stirred cream into it and tipped the waitress, thinking of Mayor DiMarco.
Alan DiMarco ranked among the city's greatest mayors. A former star high school and college athlete, he was an architect and historian. He was tall, ramrod straight, fair-skinned, and blessed with a resonant baritone voice. He was warm, unpretentious, and given to understatement, with little of the standard politician's facade.
As a lay minister who led the choir at the Reverend Cecil Williams Glide Memorial Church, a haven for San Francisco's most offbeat characters, DiMarco had periodically delivered sermons on a wide variety of Christian and human issues. He was also the nation's first openly homosexual mayor.
The son of a popular Union Street grocer, he was first elected supervisor from the city's Castro District. His appeal and popularity was great with people in all walks of life. He was a champion of the rights of the working class, women, and the disenfranchised, especially children. He was a staunch preservationist of the city's heritage and yet encouraged what he called "humanistic" redevelopment of the more decrepit areas. His friendship with the trade unions and city professionals had also been major factors in his political success.
It was a single event that galvanized his status in the city, occurring less than a year after his election as supervisor. Two gay men eating at an all-night diner on Market Street were taunted and harassed by a carful of punks from South San Francisco. When the gay men drove off, they were run off the road several blocks away, pulled from their car, beaten with lead pipes and baseball bats and stabbed repeatedly. One of the men died, the other was maimed for life.
DiMarco asked to speak at an impromptu town meeting at a church in South San Francisco, near the homes of the four attackers. He asked people who hated or "didn't understand" gays to attend, a gutsy thing to do. Security was tighter than the President's. I was one of the cops assigned to protect him.
To a standing-room-only crowd he delivered an emotional speech, part plea, part sermon. "There is more to a human being than their sexual orientation," he said, a theme he reiterated often. "There is first and foremost the need to be accepted as a human being."
He read a message from the slain twenty-year-old's father, a construction foreman: "Whatever my son was, he was my son, and I loved him."
Then DiMarco quoted Christ's words: "What thou doest to the least of me, thou doest to me." He told the crowd, "I can only pray that you accept me. But I can demand that you don't beat me, or kill me, or burn down my house."
He ended with one of the most emotional statements in American history, the closing words from Lincoln's first inaugural address, praying that the spirit of hatred and violence be "touched, as they surely will be, by the better angels of our nature."
There weren't many dry eyes in the place. I stood next to him for three hours as he shook hands with everyone in the exit line. I realized then that he'd be the next mayor of San Francisco.
Sean Kaplan's return jarred me from my reverie. He had a stack of large green bar tabs in his hand.
"Here they are," he said handing them to me.
I looked at them. "Your cash register stamps the time of each sale when the bartender rings it up?"
"Yes, it does."
"I want to find all the ones that have the first sale in before eight o'clock; let's say from seven fifteen, seven thirty on."
I separated the receipts that had credit card slips attached to them. Somewhere, somebody had to have made a mistake, I kept telling myself. That's all there is to detective work, the search for the fatal error.
In two minutes, I found a bar receipt for three Rémy Martins, the first at 7:33, a half hour before Lynne arrived, and the last at 8:40, shortly after she left. Attached to it was a Master Charge receipt signed by Bruce Bearden. Bruce Bearden, Calvin Sherenian's smug junior-flip attorney. He'd worked for Helen Smidge that night, and probably on other occasions as well. And he had screwed up: either he had not brought enough cash or he never expected to be traced through his credit card.
I asked Sean if he knew Bruce.
"Sure, been coming here for years. He comes four, five nights a week, always trying to charm his way into some woman's drawers. He's usually not very successful."
"Do you have any idea where he lives?"
Sean went to one of two massive Rolodexes on his desk, found a business card.
"Yeah, this has his home number and address on it. He gave it to me months ago, told me if I ever needed any legal help to call him."
Sean copied the address and phone number down for me. I thanked him and asked him to keep my visit to himself. He said he would, and I believed him.
As I started out of the office, I saw Bruce Bearden walking in. He said hello to the bartender and waitress as he settled onto a stool. I ducked back into the office without being seen. Using the phone on Kaplan's desk, I reached Arnie on his cellular and asked him to pick up Henry in my Firenze Plumbing van and meet me outside Bearden's house in Diamond Heights.
Sean led me through a storage room, unbolted a delivery door, and showed me an alley leading back to Market Street. I figured Bearden would be ensconced at the bar for a while, exercising his nerd muscles. Sean agreed with me.
I unchained the Norton without Bearden seeing me, then pushed it half a block from Bajilla's windows before starting it. Five minutes later I found Bearden's darkened house, and parked a block away. I did a careful recon on foot while waiting for Arnie and Henry to arrive.
Chapter 14
Arnie kept a great set of burglar's tools in the Firenze plumbing van. He was a wizard locksmith, and I figured he'd have us into Bearden's apartment easily, once I talked him into it.
You read a lot of crap in detective stories about guys just walking into people's offices, rifling through desks, breaking into people's houses like it's normal business. It's not. I had to fight off an unwanted case of the 'noids: the cops catch me, my P.I. license goes south, I spend six months in county sleeping with one eye open, trying to discourage the drooling proctologists from getting familiar with the Fagen posterior. As an ex-cop I wouldn't be a candidate for Inmate of the Year.
My hands were shaking, my insides churning as Henry hid himself in the bushes in front of Bearden's place to stand lookout.
It was an Edwardian-style house with large round windows. According to the mailbox, Bearden's apartment occupied the entire ground floor, with someone named Lipschultz living upstairs.
I deactivated the alarm system in seven minutes flat, then coerced Arnie into taking a look at the back door. We heard no evidence of a dog inside, or any other form of life. I finally convinced Arnie to try his ring of keys on the dead bolt. Thirty keys and we had the mate, but the door lock was old and worn; it took Arnie five minutes to pick.
The apartment was large, filled with old, overstuffed furniture; neat and boring. I made my way to the front and tapped on the picture window to let Henry know we were in. We found Bearden's office and took a look around, careful to return everything we touched to its original place and position. Burglarizing a neatness freak requires a lot of extra work.
I took Bearden's high school yearbook down from a shelf and handed it to Arnie. One thing that struck me was the year he'd graduated: I knew Bearden was fresh out of USC, as Zane had told me, but the yearbook indicated that he was at least thirty-two years old. That meant there was an eight-year ga
p between his graduating from UC Davis and his entering law school.
There was a box of personal papers with a small lock. Arnie opened it in seconds. Inside was a passport stamped with over two dozen trips to Europe during the eight-year period between college and law school, each one with a stop in Zurich, Switzerland. As in bank account.
A look through his income tax statements revealed he'd worked for two major investment banks, the same firms that contributed heavily to Helen Smidge's campaign coffers and that had lobbied heavily for and financed the building of the Farragut skyscrapers in the Market Street corridor. Firms with millions to lose if everyone had listened to Alan DiMarco or a loose cannon like Flynn Pooley.
There was a record of Bearden's frequent-flyer miles on several airlines, dating back years, all of the payment columns on his personal records marked "cash." From Europe, he rarely returned straight home: he flew to the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, a few times even to Panama. Places with bank secrecy rules rivaling Switzerland's.
The slush fund. Bribes and payoffs, smuggled place to place, in cash or cashier's check. No wire transfers, no records to trace. With all the business that Farragut did with the investment bankers, it's probable they put Bearden on their payroll at Farragut or Smidge's request, especially since he wasn't an investment banker himself. His degree from UC Davis was in anthropology.
We'd been on the premises almost an hour. We were both sweating, nervous. I was about ready to call it quits.
"Look at this," Arnie said. "And this."
In the yearbook was the inscription To my best friend, the coolest guy in 8th period study hall (Ha! Ha.') signed Adam Smidgelewski. I knew that Adam was the nephew of Helen Smidgelewski.
A scrapbook photo showed Bruce Bearden, circa ten years old, on a Police Athletic League baseball team coached by Officer Warren Dillon and backed by Smidgelewski Printing, owned by Supervisor Smidge's father and uncle.
Bearden had been a friend of Helen Smidge's family since childhood. He'd known DiMarco's killer, Warren Dillon, as long as he'd known Smidge. Smidge and Dillon, I already knew, were lifelong friends. They'd groomed Bearden since he was a kid, almost the way that Smidge had found and groomed Warren Dillon to be her reactionary mouthpiece.
Arnie nervously checked his watch. "We gotta book it Frank." We put everything back, double-checked that it was just the way we found it.
On a last-minute impulse, I decided to check the trash cans. I found a note at the bottom of the one in the bathroom that read 10 g, meet J.N. Harris Street 9:00, reason w/ M.B. first.
Take ten thousand and meet John Naftulin somewhere on Harris street at 9:00, try to reason with Lynne McBain first. And then what?
Where would he get ten grand on Friday night? I began crawling around on the floor, patting the carpet, much to Arnie's consternation. I noticed one of the drawer sections of Bearden's desk was a rollout. I rolled it out, felt a round, hollow spot under the carpet, peeled it back to reveal a floor safe imbedded in cement.
Arnie got a stethoscope and went to work on the safe. I wiped sweat from both our brows as he twirled the tumblers and listened intently.
The phone ran on the desk by our heads, almost giving us both a heart attack. I turned the volume up on the answering machine.
"Bruce? This is Sean Kaplan over at Bajilla. Listen, we found a pair of glasses on the bar, thought they might be yours. Let's see, it's one forty-three, if you're headed home you should be there in about five minutes. You can call if you like, we'll be here."
It was Sean warning me. He knew what I was up to, he'd heard me on his office phone telling Henry and Arnie where to meet me.
We had to give up on opening the safe, but we'd found plenty. I turned the volume on the answering machine back down and we tidied up in about ninety seconds.
Before we left, I took a plastic sandwich bag out of the kitchen drawer and dropped into it the note Bearden had written about taking ten grand and meeting "J.N." on Harris Street at nine.
I passed Bearden on my Norton on upper Market Street. With the visor on my helmet down, he never even noticed me.
Chapter 15
The late and very great writer Nelson Algren offered three pieces of advice I've always remembered: never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards with a man named Doc, and never sleep with anyone who has more troubles than you do.
That first weekend together, I broke rule three vigorously with Colleen, who had more problems than anyone I'd ever broken rule three with before.
In between reading case files and studying new evidence and information, we made love like they were about to repo the equipment—which they just might. It was a loving, sweating, kissing, soul-shaking, heartrending, earth-moving, near record-breaking engagement. I had never known a woman who affected me in as many ways as Colleen did. It was as exciting as first love, as scary as sudden death.
We made love with our eyes open, taking in every moment, every sensation, no distance between us, neither holding back anything.
When I got back to work, I concentrated on Bruce Bearden.
Colleen had never heard of Bearden prior to the trial. Her chief impression of him was that he had an astonishing ability to remember hundreds of details from the case files, complete with cross-references and index numbers.
I got Zane to give up the remainder of his weekend and dig up Bearden's past. He uncovered plenty of surprises.
Bearden had been an orphan, adopted by a truck driver and his wife, raised with three stepbrothers. The father drank, the mother worked to help the family survive. It was unclear why they adopted him, although they did receive county welfare until he was eighteen.
He was a brilliant albeit disturbed adolescent. He had a black belt in tae kwon do, belying his wimp image. He graduated third in his high school class and in the top ten percent at UC Davis, but had been turned down at several law schools because he lacked financial resources. He might have been admitted to a lesser school and received financial aid, but the only places he originally applied were Berkeley, Stanford, Hastings, and USC.
After failing to be admitted to any of his first choices, he went to work as an investment banker for Harrison-Goldblume and Associates, a firm with close ties to William Farragut.
Calvin Sherenian eventually got him admitted to USC and paid his tuition. Bearden directed his anger at having been snubbed for eight years into his law studies, graduating second in his class. He had been with Calvin ever since.
Old neighbors said he'd been arrested twice as a teenager, once for sneaking into the San Francisco Zoo while drunk and throwing stones at some gorillas, and the second time for using his tae kwon do skills to beat up a much bigger kid. A check of public records revealed nothing, typical of juvenile offenses. According to a boyhood friend, now Bearden's bitter enemy, it was Officer Warren Dillon who'd had both arrests quashed.
I wondered if Bearden was actually dumb enough to do the job on Lynne McBain himself, or if the ten-grand had been rejected by McBain and subsequently used to hire a killer.
The fact that Bearden had arranged to meet "J.N.," who I assumed was Inspector John Naftulin, was another very disturbing revelation.
I had always considered Naftulin a good cop in spite of his presence on the crew that had lynched me. Now I figured him for involvement in at least two homicides, Simcic's and McBain's.
In addition to checking out Bearden, I sent Arnie to Big Sur to verify Lynne McBain's alibi for the night of the Farragut murder.
The same bartender who'd been on duty the night of the Farragut murder was there when Arnie stopped in. He claimed that a very drunk McBain had spent the night in his bed. Two of his housemates confirmed it. He never saw her again.
I had to believe that Lynne McBain had neither the guts nor the smarts to have William Farragut murdered. Finding whoever had taken Ghiberti's silver plates was my only real hope.
I had Henry Borowski begin surveillance on Bruce Bearden, staking out Bearden's place from half a b
lock away in the Firenze Plumbing van. When Henry tired, Martha would take over. I thought of having Martha sidle up to Bearden, use her charms to draw whatever information she could from him, but rejected the idea as far too dangerous.
Somehow, Colleen's affection and the intensity of our feelings created a grand buffer that helped to block the fear. As soon as we took our hands off each other, as soon as I opened up another evidence file or received another report from Henry or Zane, my stomach started churning and the anxiety grew.
I had to find the link between all of this and Farragut's murder, the last piece in the puzzle. I had decided to concentrate on two things.
The first emerged when Arnie made a startling find in the evidence files under "Miscellaneous Reports." There had been three similar burglaries in Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights during the eighteen months preceding the Farragut shooting, and all were still unsolved. The burglars had similar MOs: nighttime entry through a rear or side entrance concealed by a large wall or hedge. None was a professional job. Things had been knocked over and spilled, lights left on, tools taken from storage rooms and used to pry open drawers.
Things of no value had been taken: a woman's favorite hat, a telephone answering machine, two bottles of wine with the owner's name stamped on the label. And the burglars had only hit a few rooms in the enormous houses; they seemed to know right where the good jewelry was kept, which drawers to look in, which closets to rifle.
They were amateurs, but they had cased the places prior to the break-ins. They might actually have been inside the houses before the burglaries.
Follow-up police reports stated that no common denominators had been found among the victims: none of them had the same cable installers, laundry service, gardeners, anything.
There was not a single follow-up report filed by Hayden Phillips or any of his private detectives. Reinvestigating the three burglaries should have been their highest priority. A major issue was relegated to the junk pile.
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