I had two weeks or less.
I paid the check and, for privacy, asked to use Franco's office phone. I had memorized Angela Estrella's number off the phone in her living room. I called and asked if she still had any friends at Social Services. She said her brother worked there as a supervisor. I told her I needed her help to nail Tommy and keep Colleen from going to prison.
"Anything," she said. "Just tell me."
But when I told her she balked. I wanted a copy of every case Tommy Rivera had handled in his three years at Social Services, the name of every female who ever received even a single payment through Tommy's docket.
"That would be difficult," Angela told me "records from that far back, before they went to computers, are kept under lock in a basement storage area."
I told her there was no other way. She consented to do it, said she would go see her brother and the two of them would gather the records after everyone else had gone home. It was critical that I get them as soon as possible, that night or the next morning.
She offered to contact me as soon as she had the case records. I gave her the address and phone number of the City Lights Agency. There was relief and determination in her voice when she thanked me "for myself and a lot of other people." I returned the compliment.
After I thanked Franco for the use of his phone and bid his wife, mother, and two daughters a good day, I unchained the Norton and headed up Broadway to Gough Street, through the Fillmore District to the freeway heading south. The traffic was light and I cranked it, making Hillsborough in record time.
I pulled into Eileen Farragut's driveway, rang the musical chimes, and waited until the little peephole opened and the Oriental Cyclops appeared and examined me. I held up my ID and this time tried out a little of my tiny repertoire of Korean. I got a faster response than last time.
In a few minutes, I was shown into a greenhouse where Eileen was tending some African violets. I could have sworn I had seen this scene before. She was wearing a satiny peach dress and had a lot more color in her face than on our first visit. She either had high blood pressure or had taken up aerobics.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Fagen?"
"Were you serious when you offered to help, Mrs. Farragut?"
"I am not a frivolous woman. I'll do anything I can to assist Colleen. Have you found something?"
"I've found quite a bit. I'm convinced that there was a burglar in her house, and I now know where to look. But I'm running out of time and I need some help." I hesitated.
"Come, Francis, if it's money, that's the one thing I have in abundance right now. Time I'm a little short on."
The fact that she'd called me Francis made it a little easier to ask. "I want to offer a fifty-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who can identify the burglar or help me locate Ghiberti's silver plates. I'm certain the police kept the plates out of the paper to keep from setting up a flea market for crackpots. Now that I have a place to look, the reward might help."
There was more and she knew it. She waited patiently.
"I need a little money for extra surveillance and protection. I think Colleen's life might be in danger if it looks like we're going to win this thing."
Putting down her trowel, she started past me, nodding for me to follow. "Do you know who did it, who killed William?" she asked.
"No, but I think I'm heading in the right direction. It's been a long, difficult road." I felt another twinge of paranoia. How did I know she wasn't working with Calvin and had offered to help just to get close to me? What if they had all been on to me from the beginning and were just biding their time, waiting for the right moment to make a move?
She smiled. "Good," she said. "Keep at it, Francis. It's a terrifying situation she's in."
She showed me to an empty guest suite near the back of the house and had me lift up the carpet in the linen closet. Underneath was a floor safe as big around as a hubcap. Eileen gave me the combination and I opened it; it was full of stock and bond certificates and some personal papers. I removed them at her direction and found a tin box at the bottom. I handed it to Eileen.
"This is very trusting of you, Mrs. Farragut," I said.
"Are you untrustworthy, Francis?" She looked into my eyes and right through me, it seemed. I shook my head.
Smiling, she opened the box, counted out thirty-five thousand dollars into my hand. There must have been a hundred grand in there. Eileen's cookie jar.
"There's ten thousand for extra staff, twenty-five thousand as a down payment for information or return of the plates. I don't imagine you'd give it to them all at once. Not until you've coerced them into testifying for you." She was smart enough to be scary.
"I'll return this to you when I collect my bonus," I said.
"No, you won't. You'll have earned your bonus, whatever it is. This is my contribution. I'll give you the other twenty-five thousand when you find what you are after."
Returning the tin box to the safe, I put the certificates and other papers back, closed the door, and spun the dial.
"Just do me one favor, Francis," she said as I replaced the carpet. "Promise me that if all goes well you'll come back and give me the whole story, every smarmy little detail. All I get these days for entertainment is a bunch of old ladies complaining about their ailments and boring the piss out of me. Will you do that for me?"
"It'll be my pleasure, Mrs. Farragut."
When I'd asked her once more to keep our transaction to herself, I smiled, taking her hand, and caught the full effect of the blue eyes again. I practically bolted out the door. A little unnerved by my suspicion that Eileen might be involved with Sherenian—especially since she'd just handed me thirty-five thousand—I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion, gratitude. Electric pinpricks of fatigue ran down both my arms, my hands shook, even my fingernails ached. My head was spinning, throbbing.
Struggling to concentrate, eyes not focusing properly. Long, boring, dangerous freeway run, keep the bike between the lines, too tired to sing goofy songs, back to North Beach, home.
Colleen was waiting when I arrived.
Chapter 22
Colleen didn't say anything when I entered. She looked demure, drained, but very game, sporting the bravest, most convincing smile. I couldn't keep my arms from going around her. I could feel the shaking ease after a long minute.
"I'm starved, I need some energy." Nothing killed her appetite, a good sign. I called Irene at Cafe Roma and ordered a small feast, uncorked a Montefalco Rosso, poured two glasses.
She got right to it, filling me in on the day's courtroom events. Ian Jeffries had recalled John Naftulin for the second part of his testimony. Naftulin reported that after twenty months of investigation, no sign of the burglars or the allegedly purloined silver plates had been found.
The food arrived, and the mood changed, temporarily.
"You're more than I bargained for," she said out of the clear blue. "Once in a while William would replay the tape of you attacking the verdict in Warren Dillon's trial, and while he was laughing and telling everyone how his biggest enemy had self-destructed, I just stared at the screen, fascinated. That took guts, Frank. Whatever happened to men with guts, with moral courage? I haven't asked much of you, have I? Be my lover, be my friend, save me from the worst fate imaginable. Oh, yeah, and I'll pay you later."
We both grinned.
"We'll make it, won't we, Frank? We're going to be all right, aren't we?"
She came around the table, put her arms around me, and squeezed. I could feel warm tears on my neck. "Thank you, Frank, for being more than I bargained for."
"We'll be all right, Colleen. I promise. We're getting close now. If I have to, I can buy you some time. That's all I can say. We'll make it, I promise you."
She straightened up, sniffled, sat on my lap. "Just do me one favor, please, Frank. Let me help if I can. I can't live in the dark. Not knowing where I stand is turning me into a mental case. Just tell me where we are, who we're looking for. If I have a chanc
e, if I can help myself, keep busy, I can keep my spirits up, and that's getting tougher every day. That's all I ask."
I promised I would let her in. Half promised, actually, knowing that I would keep Calvin's betrayal secret until it was all over.
Colleen and I were clearing the table an hour later, after planning our lives post acquittal, when the bell on the agency door rang. I called Martha to the kitchen, told her to stay with Colleen and take her down through the hidden door and out through the alley if there was any trouble. I took my .45 from the drawer, cocked it, stuck it in my waistband at the small of my back, and went downstairs to the office.
A man who introduced himself as Guillermo Estrella, Angela's brother, stood on the porch with a cardboard box in his arms. He was sweating despite the fact the temperature was in the upper forties.
"Angela asked me to deliver these things," he said, and I reached into the box and pulled out some files as he explained that they were the records of Tommy Rivera's former welfare cases. I took the box from him and he left, relieved.
In the box were over three hundred files of women who had once passed through Tommy Rivera's caseload. There were also confidential interdepartmental memos on Tommy's activities, a number of them charging him with sexual harassment of both coworkers and ADC recipients. A gutsy addition on Angela and Guillermo's part.
I went to my office and set the box down. When Colleen came in, I sat her down and looked for a good place to start. I was careful again to omit any reference to the Calvin hatchet job.
I told her I thought Tommy Rivera was responsible for the break-ins at the Schmidbaum, Castellano, and Rosenzweig houses and that the MO's of the burglars in the three cases made me think there might be a connection to the burglary of her own house.
"You think Tommy burglarized my house? Frank, do you think he shot William? Do you think that's why he's lying on the witness stand?"
"I don't think he shot William," I said, although the thought did not seem so ridiculous for a split second. Could Rivera have killed her husband out of jealousy and hit the daily double when she was charged with his murder? That would be a great incentive to commit perjury.
"I think he might have had something to do with the planning," I said. "I would be very surprised to find out he was actually there."
"But he knows," she said, "Tommy knows who did it."
"That's my theory. Tommy knows who did it because he sent them. Tommy organized the whole thing."
"But that would still make him William's killer. Whether Tommy did it himself or arranged for somebody to do it for him, he's lying to protect himself." She paced anxiously as she spoke.
"Yes. If he planned it and pulled it off; it doesn't matter where he was at the time. It's murder one."
"What are you going to do, Frank? How can you ever prove it?"
"I went to see a woman today . . ." I hesitated, thought it over. This much I had to tell her. "Angela Estrella."
"Angela? I know Angela well, she's a great lady."
"She told me she hired Tommy at the Welfare Department, she was his supervisor. Do you know that he was almost fired because he exploited some of the women he was supposed to be helping? He gave them extra payments for sexual favors, and she says he even recruited some of them to commit burglaries for him?"
"I've never heard that before. What scum, what . . ." She was at a loss for words to describe Tommy.
"Did he ever mention the names of any of the women in his caseload to you? Did he ever receive any phone calls from a woman? Did you ever see his phone book or any notes with women's names and numbers on them?"
She thought for a second. "No, never."
"What else do you know about Tommy?"
"Alice Stein, the journalist who caught William with the call girl? She investigated SOHO when it got pretty big, found out a lot of things but couldn't prove them. She couldn't get access to the files."
"But she was convinced that Tommy was tipping off my husband to which properties south of Market were going to go into foreclosure or were about to be condemned, so that William and his cronies could buy them before the city took them over. Helen Smidge would get them approved for demolition instead of renovation and give Willy and the boys big tax write-offs. He was getting them for nothing, just a promise to 'upgrade' and getting tax credits to do it."
The last bit was a shocker. It raised the distinct possibility that William had known all along that his wife was having an affair with Tommy and William could have set the whole thing up to discredit his wife in case she tried to take the matter to court and be released from her prenuptial agreement.
"I think I know how Tommy committed the burglaries." I started pulling the files from the box. "These are the files of Tommy's welfare clients," I said, putting a few in her arms. "They're in alphabetical order. My theory is he kept his connections with some of these women, women he'd used in the past." Just saying it made it again seem weak, desperate. It was the best shot I had. Where else would Tommy find these women?
"Look at every name in this file, see if any rings a bell, if by chance you remember any of them from the time you spent with Tommy."
Fatigue was playing with my mind. Doubtful I could make it even a few days more without getting caught, I suffered a wave of paranoia that I'd be discovered by Calvin. Every door I knocked on, every question I asked raised the level of fear.
I was starting to get my first touch of a familiar nightmare, a giant fist pounding on the door, a disembodied voice mumbling "The party's over."
Chapter 23
With Henry standing by the monitors, armed to the nines, Colleen, Martha, Arnie, and I went through all three hundred files, organizing them into different groups. Martha and I took turns at the computer while Arnie and Colleen worked the Xerox machine, as we recorded and cross-referenced everything. This is the fun part of detective work you don't often see on network television.
After days of breakthroughs and revelations, burglaries, homemade bondage tapes, and people flying off bridges, the euphoric feeling of progress was dying out. Fear and a sense of impending doom kept our hearts pounding, our hands busy, our minds churning. You could feel the mood swinging back and forth in the room between desperation and hope that the answer was here at our fingertips, if we could just find it.
We made our lists: women who'd received the highest payments; women whose payments increased during their relationship with Tommy; the youngest women among his charges.
Seventeen women had filed one type of complaint or another against him, six of them charging sexual harassment. I put that list at the bottom of the pile, figuring that anyone who filed a complaint against him was not likely to turn around and commit crimes at his behest.
There were no pictures, or I would have arranged a list of the best-looking; I figured that would have been the most productive approach. It's easier to conspire with someone you're intimate with.
All through our search, I kept hoping that one of the names would jog Colleen's memory, that she had heard of one of the women. Nothing, not a ripple.
We were able to eliminate only fifty names, women who had moved to another state or died prior to the Farragut murder. That left us 250 women to track down and question.
I printed out the names and dates of birth and gave a copy to Arnie to drop off at Lloyd Dinkman's house so he could run a records check on them the next day. If any of them had any arrests or convictions for burglary, fencing, or possession of stolen property, they would go to the top of the list.
Tommy Rivera had probably done the same thing, looking through his caseload for women with priors, who perhaps were in danger of having their support payments cut off.
Near midnight, Arnie's cousin Phil arrived to take over sentry duties from Henry Borowski. He donned his bulletproof vest, loaded his .12-gauge, and took his place near the monitors. Henry retired to the guest bedroom at the top of the steps, where he slept with the intercom on so Phil could wake him if he were needed.
<
br /> I told Martha and Arnie to get a good night's sleep and to be back at seven to start the haystack phase of the investigation. Colleen and I went to bed, too edgy to sleep, emotional gravity killing any urge to make love. We lay there for a while, and then she said, "Do you want to tell me now?"
The question made my heart stop. Did she know about Calvin? How?
"I used the downstairs bathroom," she said, "I saw the photograph."
It was my turn to smile. The photograph was of me and a former porno star named Ginger Snapps standing in front of a poster for a movie called Peekaboo. On the poster, Ginger, in a black corset and stockings, was surrounded by a large black keyhole.
It was the origin of my nickname, a story almost no one knew except Zane Neidlinger and my former cronies in the department. "You really want to know?" I asked.
"I've been dying since day one."
It had been a rough day, a rough night, and I thought the story would at least get us off her worries and make it possible to sleep. With the city's lights streaming through the open window, I propped up a few pillows. She did the same, looking at me expectantly.
"When I was twenty-eight I got an early transfer to plainclothes during the last round of the Chinatown gang wars. I was only one of two officers on the force who spoke Chinese, and I'd gone to school with a lot of the older kids in the gangs.
"I gathered a lot of information and helped an Asian ATF agent—AFT is Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—infiltrate the Jake Howe gang. That resulted in the arrests for the Golden Dragon Massacre, when five Chinese kids went into a restaurant and mowed down about twenty people. As a reward, I got a permanent promotion to inspector.
"There had been a serial rapist working in Northern California for about two and a half years without anyone being able to grab him. They called the guy the C-Mart rapist because he grabbed his first victim in the parking lot of a huge C-Mart store in Daly City. That was his MO, grabbing women in parking lots, forcing them into a van, driving them into the woods, raping them and dumping them out.
Bohemian Heart Page 16
