Damage

by John Lescroart

  “If things work out from here,” Ro said, “I’ll just get a cab home from her place. Or stay there and catch up with you tomorrow.”

  “Cool. Whatever.” The cell phone chirped at his belt and Eztli picked it up, read the screen, and said, “Your dad.”

  “He’s living with a woman named Sam Duncan,” Cliff said. “She runs the Rape Crisis Counseling Center out on Haight Street.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Eztli said. “Given everything, that is just too perfect.”

  “I know it is. You couldn’t have made it up any better. But it doesn’t really matter what she does. The point is that Sheila has talked to some of her sources at the Hall of Justice and she tells me that Farrell’s going ahead with some more legal shenanigans, now with the grand jury, that he thinks will wind up getting Ro back in jail and without any possibility of bail.”

  “How many times can they keep putting us through this?”

  “Evidently as often as they want.”

  “So how would you like me to handle it?”

  “Well, the idea is that we want to get the message to Farrell, but we don’t want anything that he can point to as even a remote personal threat, the way Glitsky did. The way they’re all charged up down there at the Hall, Sheila says, one of them stubs their toe, they’re going to try to connect it to Ro and get him back downtown. I think what we’ve got to do is make Farrell see that it’s in his best interest to just back the fuck off, give up on the grand jury nonsense, use his brain.”

  “And you think this woman is how we get to him?”

  “I don’t think we want to have her be hurt, Ez. I don’t think that would accomplish anything, other than get ’em all more rabid down there. But I’m thinking, maybe some damage at the place she works, nothing serious, but so that Farrell can’t help but get the message. I’ll leave it to your discretion.”

  “And what’s the time frame?”

  “Whatever’s comfortable for you. Do what you do, get your plan together. Next couple or three days, maybe, but it’s flexible.”

  Glitsky was talking to Bob Grassilli in Missing Persons. Outside Bob’s window, the day had grown blustery again, and inside the small office the whistle of the wind reverberated with an insistent regularity. Grassilli was a career desk cop in his midforties, balding, and a good forty pounds over his ideal fighting trim. He smiled easily under his reddish brush of a mustache.

  “I don’t even know if this is where I’d look, Abe. Eight or nine years is a pretty cold trail. You’ve tried all the usual databases, I’m assuming.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Driver’s license, Social, immigration, you name it. I’ve been on it for a couple of hours already. So now I’m thinking what if she got married and changed her name?”

  “She’d still have her same driver’s license number. And passport, I’m assuming. You say she’s legal?”

  “She came up from Guatemala on a work visa. That was still in effect when she went into witness protection. Afterward, I don’t know.”

  “Did she become a citizen?”

  “Again. Don’t know.”

  “Well, if she did, there’ll be a record of that someplace. Which of course is worthless if she later changed her name. But did you ever think maybe she just went back home? She’s a crime victim here, right? Maybe she just doesn’t want to be here anymore.”

  “I think that’s likely, tell you the truth, Bob. But how do I find one particular Gonzalvez in Guatemala? It’s like locating a Smith here.”

  “Well, welcome to Missing Persons,” Grassilli said with his trademark smile. “If anybody really wants to disappear and stay disappeared, it’s not rocket science. Unless, hey, you might consider hiring a private eye. They’ve got databases they can buy or download that we’re not allowed to use. ’Course, they’re not allowed to use them, either, but out in the private sector, no one’s checking.”

  “That’s really swell news, Bob. Heartening, in fact.”

  Grassilli shrugged, showing some teeth under the mustache. “I’m just the messenger, Abe. That’s the way it is.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have enough budget for my own men. How am I going to even try to justify hiring a PI?”

  “I’d say you’re probably not.”

  “I’d say you’re probably right.”

  26

  OUR TOWN

  By Sheila Marrenas

  The tendency of the San Francisco Police Department to overreact, harass, and brutalize the citizens of our town has been well-documented over the years in this column. Mayor Leland Crawford’s appointment of Vi Lapeer, an African American woman, as chief of police raised hopes that these practices would not be tolerated any longer under his administration. These hopes were for the most part dashed over the past couple of weeks, most notably in the police treatment of Ro Curtlee, the son of this newspaper’s publishers.

  As readers of this column already know, Mr. Curtlee was recently released from prison by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal. Then, here in the city, Judge Sam Baretto ordered Mr. Curtlee freed on bail while awaiting his retrial, a decision that did not sit well either with District Attorney Wes Farrell, or with the head of homicide, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky. Within days of Mr. Curtlee’s release, Glitsky presented a new set of spurious charges against him and, in a widely publicized incident, arrested him after first beating him seriously enough that he required hospitalization.

  And again, a superior court judge—Erin Donahoe—ruled that Mr. Curtlee posed no danger to the community. She again released him on bail.

  But in our town, it doesn’t seem as though the regular workings and procedures of the criminal justice system apply once prosecutors and police, even contrary to judges’ rulings, have preconceived notions about a person’s guilt. And this is why, yesterday morning, Mr. Curtlee again found himself facing yet another bit of gratuitous harassment from the police, an interrogation—fortunately this one did not turn violent—for the murder last Friday of a woman named Janice Durbin. This interrogation, in which Mr. Curtlee voluntarily and cooperatively participated, unearthed a solid alibi for Mr. Curtlee for the time of the murder. Beyond that, the inspector who conducted the interview, Darrel Bracco, told this reporter that there was no evidence implicating Mr. Curtlee in the crime. Hearing this, one might be tempted to ask, as this reporter was: “Well, then, if there is no evidence, upon what criteria did you decide to interrogate Mr. Curtlee? How could this be viewed as anything but harassment?”

  In reply, Inspector Bracco had no comment.

  However, police have determined that Mrs. Durbin was in fact a murder victim. Since someone did kill her, and Mr. Curtlee has demonstrated that it could not have been him, why are the police still fixated on his possible involvement? Might not the solution to this mystery, as it most always does, lie closer to home, among Mrs. Durbin’s intimates? A cursory investigation by this reporter has already determined that Mrs. Durbin’s husband, Michael Durbin, for example, cannot account for his whereabouts at the time of his wife’s death. Moreover, sources at his place of business told this reporter that Mr. Durbin may be romantically involved with another of his employees.

  This is specifically not to accuse Mr. Durbin of any wrongdoing, but merely to indicate possibilities in the murder investigation that, to date, the police seem to be willfully ignoring as Glitsky and Farrell continue their personal and extralegal vendetta against Ro Curtlee.

  “You’ve got to sue her,” Chuck Novio said. “Her and her newspaper and the Curtlees personally. This is the most appalling libel I’ve ever read.”

  It was a few minutes after seven A.M. and they were all sitting around the dining room table, Michael and Chuck and the three Durbin children. Kathy and the twins were in the adjoining kitchen making eggs and bacon and toast. They would be cremating Janice today at eleven o’clock and so the kids and Chuck were all taking the day off from school. Durbin’s second son, Peter, had been the first one up and hence the first to read the article, and he�
��d barely gotten through it before he went running up the stairs to wake his father and show it to him.

  “But she says she’s specifically not accusing me of anything,” Durbin said.

  “That’s BS, pure BS,” Peter said. “She’s saying you did it, Dad. That you killed Mom.”

  “You’re not going to let her get away with that, are you, Dad?” Jon asked. “You don’t go after her hard, you’re basically admitting that she’s right.” The elder son slumped back in his chair with his arms crossed, staring out into nothing with a sullen eighteen-year-old malevolence.

  “I agree with Jon, Mike,” Chuck said. “You’ve got to go after her.”

  Allie, the thirteen-year-old down the table, barely holding back her tears until now, had been silent all morning, and she finally spoke in a tremulous voice. “You didn’t though, did you?”

  Durbin reached out a hand across the table and covered his daughter’s with his own. “No, sweetie. Of course not. I loved your mother and I miss her so much.”

  “Me, too. I already miss her so much.” And Allie’s tears broke.

  Kathy—her own eyes bloodshot and teary with grief and lack of sleep—swooped in from the kitchen and put her arms around her niece. “Nobody thinks your father did anything wrong at all,” she said. “You just don’t even have to think about that.”

  “Marrenas thinks it,” Jon said. “And now maybe half the city. And now Dad’s got to deny it, plain and simple.”

  “I don’t have to dignify what she wrote by responding to it. That’s lowering myself to her level and I’m not going to do it.”

  “You gotta do it, Dad. You’ve got to say loud and clear you didn’t do it, if you didn’t . . .”

  Michael slapped his palm flat against the table, cutting Jon off. “Of course I didn’t do it, goddamn it! I hope we haven’t gotten to that.”

  “No,” Chuck put in, “don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Then just deny it,” Jon said. “Come right out with it.”

  Michael was shaking his head, his fury building, when one of the twin’s voices came from the kitchen. “Hey! There’s somebody in a TV van pulling into the driveway.”

  “Damn.” Chuck stood up, craning to see out the dining room windows. “How’d anybody know you were staying here?”

  “Somehow I just bet Marrenas knows,” Michael said. He was getting up, too. “And if she knows, the word is out. Maybe I’d better go see what they want.”

  “You know what they want,” Peter said. “You’re right, Dad. I wouldn’t tell them anything.”

  “Wrong, Peter,” Jon said. “What have we been talking about here? He’s got to deny it or it sounds like he did it. That’s why Allie’s crying. It sounds like it to her, too. It would to anybody.”

  His voice notching up in volume, Durbin whirled on his older son. “What are you saying? Don’t talk like that.”

  “I’m just saying ...”

  And the telephone rang.

  “Christ, what a circus,” Chuck said. “You want to get that, Les?”

  Leslie, one of the twins, picked it up in the kitchen. “Just a minute,” she said. “Uncle Mike, it’s for you. He says it’s Jeff Elliot from the Chronicle.”

  “Jesus,” Peter said.

  “I’ll get these clowns out front,” Chuck said.

  “I’m not talking to anybody from the Chronicle.”

  “They might get it right, Dad,” Jon said.

  “There’s nothing to get. I keep telling you.”

  “So tell him that if that’s what it is,” Jon said.

  “I wouldn’t,” Peter said. “Don’t tell ’em nothing.”

  “Jon, wait a minute. Look at me,” Durbin said. “What do you mean, ‘if that’s what it is’? I don’t like your tone or the implication. I didn’t have anything to do with your mother’s death.”

  “That’s what you keep saying. So what’s that thing Marrenas said about you getting it on with somebody at work, too? Why’d she say that if there’s nothing there?”

  “Jon!” Kathy snapped. “Stop talking like that. Right now. That’s ridiculous!”

  “Yeah, sure, right.” The lanky kid suddenly pushed his chair back with an obscenity and stomped out of the room and up the stairs.

  “Jon!” Durbin called after him. “Son!”

  But the sound of steps continued until a door slammed upstairs.

  “What’s his problem?” Peter asked.

  And Durbin just shook his head, his hands outstretched in a supplicating gesture.

  “Uncle Mike!” Leslie’s voice, calling from the kitchen again. “He’s still waiting.”

  “Let him wait. No, tell him I can’t talk to him. No, wait, I’ll tell him.”

  “Don’t get roped in, Dad,” Peter said.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t. Christ.”

  Allie, her face wet and blotched, turned away from her aunt’s embrace. “I don’t want this to be happening anymore,” she sobbed. “I just want my mommy back. I want my mommy.”

  Eztli was up early that Thursday morning, too.

  Ro had kept up the press on Tiffany from MoMo’s, and by the time Eztli had left on his own at around three thirty, Tiffany had finished her shift and Ro had stood her to a couple of Cuervo shots with—it looked like—a whole lot more to come.

  Which was all good as far as Eztli was concerned. The more-than-obvious plainclothes cops parked on the street by the Curtlees, even though they’d lost the trail yesterday, looked like they were going to stick around. So the longer that Ro stayed away from home, the more mobility he’d have, at least until they caught up with him again.

  Fortunately, and Eztli didn’t really understand why this should be, they weren’t following him. Maybe it was because yesterday he’d driven off, apparently alone, and then returned all by himself as well. Did they think Ro was still in the house, holed up? Well, whatever, it wasn’t his problem. They weren’t on his tail, and that was the main thing.

  By a little before eight, the day clear and chilly, he’d driven the Z4—he loved that car!—down to Haight Street and found a parking space diagonally across from the glass storefront that announced the location of the Rape Crisis Counseling Center. Getting out of the car, he crossed the street and walked by the front of it. A heavy-looking wood-and-metal park bench was chained and padlocked along the front of the building. The Center didn’t officially open for about another half hour, but there was a light on and some movement inside.

  The glass front, he thought, presented some promising possibilities. He could come back later tonight, when it was dark, and shoot out the window, but he wasn’t convinced that this would be the kind of unambiguous message that he was trying to deliver to Farrell through his girlfriend, Sam. Anyone could have a grudge with the policies or personnel of the Center and it wouldn’t be as clear a signal as Cliff Curtlee would want to send.

  Eztli walked down to the end of the block, then crossed the street and came back the other way, familiarizing himself with the lay of the land. It was typical Haight Street—almost exclusively small business storefronts. When he got back to his car, Eztli checked his watch and saw that the Center would be opening in another twenty minutes. While he was here, he might as well wait. Then he could go in and ask for Sam Duncan, telling her that it was important that Wes Farrell abandon his plan to bring Ro to the grand jury. As it had many times before, he knew that his simple presence could work magic.

  But then suddenly a black Town Car turned into the street, pulled up, and stopped directly in front of the Center. After a second or two, the back door opened and Wes Farrell himself stepped out, followed by the yellow Labrador that he’d been walking with the other night out in front of his home. As Eztli watched, the two of them went up to the front door of the Center. Farrell knocked and a dark, attractive woman opened the door, then took the leash. After only a few seconds of conversation—obviously they’d already discussed leaving the dog, and therefore she must be Sam—Farrell walked back to the li
mo and it drove off.

  Eztli sat thinking in the driver’s seat of the Beemer, ideas dancing around in his mind, until after a couple more minutes, the door to the Center opened again and the woman came out onto the sidewalk with the dog on its leash, which she then attached to one of the legs of the park bench. When she patted the slats of the seat, the dog obediently hopped up and settled itself on the bench.

  Eztli waited and watched for a few more minutes. The street was slowly waking up. The woman in the Center turned the CLOSED sign over to OPEN, then came out and put two large red dishes—food and water—on the sidewalk under the bench. The dog hopped down, ate, and drank some water. Then, as dogs do, it sniffed around and anointed the leg of the park bench before it went back to its place up on the bench and stretched out to sleep in the morning sunshine.

  If Glitsky’s three-bedroom flat had a characteristic feature, it was that the thirteen hundred square feet of it always felt crowded. When he’d first moved in here with Flo thirty-some years before, they’d already had two boys, Isaac and Jacob, and within the next year added Orel. After Flo had died of ovarian cancer, the three boys filled up the two bedrooms off behind the kitchen, and a housekeeper, Rita, had taken up nearly full-time residence behind a screen in the barely serviceable living room. By the time Treya and her daughter, Raney, moved in with Abe and Orel, the household reverberated with the noise of the two teenagers, and now they, too, had gone only to be replaced by Rachel and Zachary, who were themselves not exactly monklike in their habits.

  Now there was no trace of any of the children, nor of Treya for that matter, and Glitsky sat drinking his morning tea at the table in his tiny kitchen, experiencing the unaccustomed silence as a palpable and ominous presence.

  When the telephone rang, he had just picked up his cup and the brrring was loud and jarring and unexpected enough that he twitched and spilled some tea over the cup’s edge and into his lap. Jumping up, furious at himself, brushing his pants to get the liquid off, he finally made it over to where the phone hung on the wall and picked up the receiver, growling his name into it.