Damage

by John Lescroart

  When she heard the voice on the intercom say that it was Michael Durbin at her door, Liza didn’t know what to make of it at first.

  He had never before been to her place, a nice one-bedroom apartment at Chestnut and Laguna, not far from the store. Liza had been more than a little bit in love with him now for well over a year. The feeling had developed from an original natural simpatico—she’d had another boyfriend at the beginning—that had turned to friendship in the years that they’d worked together.

  And then finally at the Christmas party two Decembers ago, they had been shooting pool together at one of the North Beach bars they’d all repaired to after the dinner, and as she leaned over to take her shot—she was wearing a low but not particularly plunging neckline—she noticed him noticing her. Janice had already gone home and Liza had definitely had too much to drink. Michael had smiled and shrugged as if to say, “You caught me.” Her eyes had locked into his and she straightened up, walked around the table right up to him, and told him flat out that she loved him.

  He told her he loved her, too, and then leaned down and kissed her with a deep, passionate, open-mouthed hungry kiss that had weakened her knees.

  But then, almost immediately afterward, while they were still holding each other, he realized what he’d done, and he pulled away, saying he was sorry, he shouldn’t have done that, it had been a mistake.

  The next Monday, back at work, he’d taken her out to lunch and apologized again. It wasn’t that he didn’t find her attractive, he told her, and didn’t love the person she was, but he was married to Janice and committed to her and to their family. He’d had a moment of infatuation with Liza that in his weakness he’d given in to, but that was all there could ever be between them.

  If she was uncomfortable continuing to work with him, he’d understand and help her find another job with at least equal pay and benefits if he could. Or, of course, if she’d like to stay on, he would be happy to keep her, but there could be no repetition of what had happened the other night.

  And there had not been.

  Without hesitation, she pushed the button that opened the downstairs door and let him in. And now she opened the door to her apartment, and he came out of the elevator and turned to see her standing there. When he got to her, she stepped into his arms and they stood embracing, holding on to each other as though for their lives.

  31

  Ro’s idea from earlier in the day was more or less in the line of a game.

  He had been talking to Tiffany about some of the things that had changed in the years that he’d been in prison, not just iPods and phones and all the technology, but the other changes that made the world feel so different in the day-to-day.

  The giant malls and the enormous discount stores, with everything you could ever want to buy all in one place. Or, on the opposite scale, all the closed-up independent bookstores. Now, you wanted to buy a book, Tiffany said, you had your basic one or two choices, Borders and Barnes & Noble, and they were pretty much the same. Or coffee shops, Starbucks on every corner. Who could have predicted that? And for coffee?

  But that example had led Tiffany to tell him about another one of the latest things going around in the city, which she had at first found hard to believe, but which, according to some friends of hers who’d actually seen it, wasn’t even uncommon—people were carrying guns openly around in public. This was mostly facilitated, evidently—according to Tiffany—by Twitter and Facebook and other stuff on the Web about which Ro was ignorant, but these people would somehow all get in touch with one another and meet at some predetermined Starbucks location, where they were making some Second Amendment point by showing up wearing their guns out in holsters like in the Wild West.

  This was happening every day, she said, and why at Starbucks stores she didn’t know. But it wasn’t only the coffee shops. Over just the past weekend, a posse of more than seventy people had showed up at Baker Beach, all of them carrying. Wild, huh?

  Ro thought so.

  The catch was that the guns could not be loaded. That would be illegal, as there were city, county, and state laws forbidding carrying loaded weapons around. But astoundingly to Ro, carrying the unloaded guns themselves, as long as they were not concealed, was not only not illegal, it was specifically protected by the Second Amendment.

  Which made no sense, because you could carry your piece unloaded with a clip or four in your pockets and basically load up the gun in about the time it took to rack a round into the chamber. But the point, to him, wasn’t whether it made any sense but that it happened at all. People walking around with perfectly usable guns on their hips? He told Eztli that the two of them really ought to go around the city and see if they could find one of the hot spots, and that’s what they’d done.

  They got lucky just about the time they were going to quit, getting on toward five o’clock, at a Starbucks pretty close to where they’d begun at MoMo’s, out at Fisherman’s Wharf. As they drove by, from the street they saw not only that the place seemed to be unusually crowded, but three black-and-white patrol cars were pulled up out front. Neither Eztli nor Ro had any fear of the police in general, and beyond that they knew that the policemen here at Starbucks were beat cops. If anything, their presence added to the spice. So Eztli pulled into a parking garage a block away, removed the bullets from his own weapon, and tucked the gun into his belt. He also removed the jacket from his suit, leaving it on the car seat, so there would be no misunderstanding about whether the gun was concealed or not.

  And the two of them had strolled down to check it out.

  Sure enough, there must have been thirty-five or forty people waiting for or drinking their super-tall macchiato or whatever it was, and packing heat. The uniformed cops—now eight of them—were politely but carefully checking to see that none of the guns were loaded. All of the demonstrators were reasonably well dressed and well behaved. Many seemed to be professionals. Most were men, although there were more women than Ro would have guessed, six or eight of them.

  By the time Ro entered the store, he was probably the only person left inside besides the employees who were not armed.

  They stayed long enough to have their own coffees, still flying on their reefer, and until the crowd had started to disperse. Of course, as they’d expected, the cops did not recognize them. Back at the garage, they waited out on the sidewalk until they saw one of the demonstrators—a paunchy, middle-aged, balding man in casual business attire with what looked like a big semiautomatic with custom-made grips in a holster on his hip—pass them and turn into the entrance.

  Eztli had come up quickly and silently behind him and put him down and out with one rabbit punch, and less than five minutes later, Ro was wearing the gun and had the guy’s bullets in his pocket and the two of them roared out of the garage, howling with the good, clean, sheer fun of it all.

  Now, at eleven thirty or so, Ro turned off the TV in his room. He wasn’t so much tired as he was bored, and when he was bored, invariably he got horny. And he sure didn’t want to wait around until two o’clock or whenever Tiffany got off. Besides, he didn’t want to start up anything regular with any one chick. Not when there was so much opportunity a lot closer at hand.

  Ro’s room was on the third floor, at the other end of the house and one floor up from his parents’ bedroom. Eztli, the cook, and the two cleaning girls had their rooms two floors below his parents, on the basement level. To facilitate communication in the seven-thousand-square-foot home, the Curtlees had installed a sophisticated intercom system between the various floors and rooms.

  Starting to get excited by the idea he was developing, Ro got up off his bed and crossed over to his dresser, opening one of the drawers and taking out the gun that he’d scored that afternoon. He hefted it in one hand and then the other, appreciating its weight and appearance. It was a beauty, he thought. Brand-new, or as good as. A big mother with an oversize magazine with a seventeen-round capacity, about a foot long, with a bright satin stainless fin
ish and custom wooden grips. The kind of gun that could get your attention from across the room.

  Twenty-year-old Linda Salcedo heard the faint buzz of the intercom through her blankets and for an instant couldn’t place where the sound was coming from. Then, coming fully awake, she waited in the dark of her room to see if she’d imagined it, or if one of the Curtlees in fact needed her for something, even at this time of night. That would be unusual, since her duties keeping the rooms spotless kept her busy throughout the day. By the time she’d helped clean up after dinner, she normally had her nights to herself. But of course, if anyone needed her at any time—to restock toilet paper, get some hair out of a sink, change a lightbulb, anything—she would have to go and take care of it.

  And yes, here it was again, the intercom buzzing.

  Sighing, throwing the covers off, she padded barefoot over to her door and pushed the reply button. “Sí?”

  “Linda. Hi. This is Ro upstairs. Sorry to bother you so late.”

  “Is no bother.” No, I was just sitting up here at midnight waiting for something to do, hoping one of you would call.

  “Good. Listen, I was getting out of the shower and I knocked over the shampoo bottle and got it all over the floor. I wondered if you could come up and get it cleaned up. I wouldn’t want to get up and slip on it in the middle of the night.”

  “Okay,” she said, letting out a frustrated and weary breath. You spilled some shampoo? You wouldn’t want to try cleaning it up yourself, would you? Heaven forbid. “In two minutes, sí?”

  “Sí,” he said. “Two minutes is fine. Even three. Take your time.”

  “Gracias.”

  “De nada.”

  She had been sleeping in her nightgown, and now she considered taking it off and getting dressed again in her regular uniform, but that seemed a lot of effort to simply go upstairs and clean up a little spill, which would probably take her all of one minute. So she decided she would just put on her bathrobe and her Crocs. She’d be done and be back down here in five minutes and then she could just go back to sleep.

  No one else seemed to be awake in the house, but the halls were lit with tiny night lights in the wall sockets, and in the light of these she walked up the three flights to the top floor, then turned left at the top of the stairs and went to Ro’s door, closed, at the far end of the hall. Gently she rapped on it.

  “Come on in.”

  When she opened the door, she was briefly surprised to see that Ro had turned the lights out in here already. Probably just going to sleep, he had no reason to talk to her again—he’d already told her what she needed to do.

  “Would you mind closing the door behind you?” she heard him say from where she knew the bed was.

  She did as she was told, and now there was nothing but darkness. She stood stock-still inside the room, waiting for her eyes to adjust so she could go to the bathroom where he’d spilled the shampoo.

  “You can turn on the light,” he said.

  Again, she did as he requested, half turning away to the switch by the door. When she came back around and looked at him, she did a little half jump backward, accompanied by a frightened little yelp, her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with terror.

  Ro was naked on top of the covers, with a full erection. He was holding a gun on her, centered at her heart. With his other hand, the arm in a cast above it, he patted the bed next to him and broke a big smile. “Nobody has to get hurt here if you act smart,” he said. “Just come on over and take that robe off you. And you and me, we’ll lay down and get ourselves comfortable.”

  Driving back from Liza’s to Chuck and Kathy’s place, all Michael Durbin knew for sure was that he was a mess.

  There was guilt but also, no question, elation over the time he’d just spent with Liza. He told himself that he hadn’t gone over there to go to bed with her, but simply because he felt like he needed someone to talk to whom he could trust and who believed him. But did he know even as he was driving over to Liza’s that they would probably wind up having sex? And even if he did, so what? So soon after Janice’s death, that’s so what, he told himself. And yet, Janice was truly dead, now cremated. He had been faithful, as he’d sworn he would, until death did they part. And he didn’t owe her anything after that.

  He didn’t understand so much of what he was going through and he thought that Liza was sensitive and smart enough to help talk him through it all. Janice gone. His paintings now gone. His eldest son thinking he was capable of murder. The beginnings of full-scale mutiny at work. And while he was at it, why not add the facts that he’d slept with a new woman for the first time in twenty years? That, also, he was driving around with his shotgun in the trunk of his car.

  He hadn’t seen any need to tell Glitsky the real reason why he’d gone out to his garage earlier in the evening after the memorial had worn down. He had only inadvertently stumbled onto his slashed paintings; he had not come to the garage to do anything with his paintings. He had come to get his shotgun. He wasn’t quite clear on whether he wanted it more for protection or for aggression, but once the idea of having the thing near to hand had taken hold, he found himself powerless to resist it.

  Parking in the Novios’ driveway, he checked the time on the dash before he turned off the engine: 1:21. He got out of the car and went back and opened the trunk. There was the shotgun, still, and the box of twelve-gauge ammunition that went with it, so he picked them both up and carried them around to the kitchen door. No point having a weapon, he thought, if you couldn’t get to it in an emergency.

  In the living room, one light burned. Michael came through the kitchen, and Chuck looked up from where he sat in his reading chair, one stack of papers lying on his lap, another on the floor next to him.

  “You’re still up?” Michael said.

  “Couldn’t sleep.” He pointed vaguely. “What are you doing with that thing?”

  “Keeping it handy.”

  “Is it loaded? I don’t think I’m comfortable with a loaded gun in the house.”

  For an answer, Michael broke open the barrel and looked down through it. “Both barrels empty.” Then he held up the small cardboard box. “Ammunition over here.”

  “Where are you going to keep it?”

  “Near me. Did Kathy tell you the latest?”

  “I didn’t see her. She was asleep when I got in. What’s the latest?”

  Michael sat down, the shotgun on the coffee table between them, and told him about the slashed paintings.

  “All of them?” Chuck now sat all the way forward in his chair.

  “Every one.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Chuck said. “Why did he do that?”

  “Why did he kill Janice? Same reason. To get at me.”

  Chuck sat back as though exhausted. He glanced down at the shotgun, up at his brother-in-law. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I can see where you’d be tempted.”

  “I’m a lot more than tempted, Chuck. If it wasn’t for the kids ...” He broke off, his train of thought derailed. “Speaking of which, have you seen Jon tonight?”

  “No, but I didn’t look in on any of them. Why?”

  “He wasn’t home by the time I left tonight. He texted Kathy and told her he’d be late. I’d better go look.” And with that, he was up and out of the room.

  Chuck came forward in his chair again, reached out and picked up the shotgun, broke it open over his knee, and checked the barrels again. Then closed it up.

  Michael appeared back in the doorway. “He’s still not here. Shit.”

  “He’s a big boy, Mike. He’ll be all right.”

  “I hate this. I hate all of it.” He took a step into the room. “What are you doing with the gun?”

  “Making sure it isn’t loaded. You shouldn’t be walking around with a loaded gun, Mike. Jon comes home late, you might shoot him by mistake.”

  “I doubt that. Where is he?”

  “Staying with friends, I’m sure. Text him, tell him you’re worrie
d.”

  Durbin, back at the sofa, sat down heavily. “You’re right. You’re right.”

  “And you might think about getting some sleep.”

  “You, too.” He paused. “I think Kathy’s been missing you.”

  Chuck looked up sharply, a frown etched in place. “Why do you say that?”

  “She mentioned a little something about it.”

  “That’s none of anybody else’s business.”

  “I didn’t say it was. I’m just passing along the information for what it’s worth. From a guy who’s just lost his wife to a guy who’s still got one.”

  Chuck stared at Michael with what seemed like true malevolence for a long few seconds, then finally let out a heavy breath. Looking down at the pile of papers on the floor, the smaller stack on his lap, he managed a weak smile. “Sorry, Mike. I think we’re probably both done in. Maybe we ought to call it a day.”

  32

  CityTalk

  By Jeffrey Elliot

  Sources close to the investigation yesterday sat down with this reporter to explain the events of the past few weeks related to Ro Curtlee and the murder of Janice Durbin. San Francisco’s beleaguered head of homicide, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky, has been under fire from both Mayor Leland Crawford and from printed accusations of harassment and police brutality in a rival newspaper.

  It is public record that Glitsky and Curtlee have a long history as antagonists, beginning with the former’s arrest of the latter for rape and murder back in 1998, charges for which Mr. Curtlee was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison. Early this year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal overturned that conviction and ordered a retrial, and since that time, Mr. Curtlee has been free on bail. Also, since the time of Mr. Curtlee’s release, three people with connections to his earlier trial have been murdered. These are Felicia Nuñez, a prime witness against Mr. Curtlee; Matt Lewis, an investigator for the district attorney’s office; and Janice Durbin, the wife of the foreman of the jury in the Curtlee trial, Michael Durbin.