The Dangerous Hour

by Marcia Muller

  Doesn’t follow, McCone. You’re just overreacting to a similar set of bad circumstances.

  My phone buzzed. Mick.

  “Turns out Jeffers isn’t all that common a name, at least in Cloverdale,” he said. “I found only two. You want the addresses and phone numbers?”

  “Please.” I’d come this far. Why not?

  Cloverdale is the northernmost town of any size along the Highway 101 corridor in Sonoma County, nestled in a valley on the banks of the Russian River, where the wine country blends into the redwoods. Years ago, the highway narrowed and became the town’s main street, bringing a fair amount of business to local merchants, but then a bypass was constructed, and Cloverdale was largely forgotten by motorists pressing on to points north and south. Next the lumber industry that formed the economic base for the community became severely depressed. The town was well on its way to ruin when it was discovered by people looking to escape the high housing costs of the greater Bay Area, and as I exited the freeway, I saw a number of new shopping centers and housing developments that had been constructed in response to the migration.

  It was well after two, and I hadn’t eaten anything since my breakfast of coffee and V8 juice. At the south end of town I spotted the Owl Cafe, an establishment I’d noted many times while driving through and always planned to visit. No time like the present, and the number of big rigs in its parking lot hinted at good food. I pulled in but remained in the MG as I called the local numbers Mick had given me. A machine at the first told me I’d reached the residence of Susan and John Jeffers. I didn’t leave a message. The woman who answered my second call sounded wary when I asked if she knew Dan Jeffers. Yes, she told me, she was his sister-in-law, Patty. Could I stop by later to talk about Dan? I asked. She hesitated, then agreed to see me.

  Inside the café I ordered a cheeseburger and, while waiting for it, considered various strategies. Overcoming resistance on the part of a relative who is probably inclined to be protective toward the person you’re investigating can be tricky. On the other hand, if the person is in trouble or missing, the relative may be likely to open up in the hope of learning something or gaining reassurance. Initially I’d have to feel my way with Dan Jeffers’s sister-in-law.

  The Owl Cafe was busy, even this far past the noon hour. Waitresses delivered steaming plates of food to the booths and tables. I watched people come and go, many stopping to chat, as if it were a social club. And as I watched, the owls watched me.

  It seemed there were hundreds of them: stuffed owls, wicker owls, glass owls, ceramic owls, salt-and-pepper-shaker owls. Owls on the place mats, owls on the napkins. Yellow eyes staring from every nook and cranny. No one else in the café seemed to find them unusual or be paying them any mind.

  It made me reflect upon the human capability for normalizing situations. These people probably ate meals here several times a week under the scrutiny of the big-eyed birds and had long ago ceased to notice them. Just as I’d long ago ceased to notice the noise from the traffic on the Bay Bridge above our offices at the pier. Just as, until recently, I’d considered a certain other aspect of my life well within the bounds of normalcy . . .

  It isn’t normal to live this way, McCone.

  What’s wrong with the way we live?

  It’s scattered. Not rooted. We need stability. Commitment.

  Oh, Jesus, Ripinsky, not the “C” word!

  What’s wrong with the “C” word?

  It’s . . . unnecessary. I mean, it’s implied in everything we do and say.

  Sometimes implied isn’t enough. Sometimes things need to be spelled out, written down. . . .

  My food arrived. I banished the troublesome memory, dove into the burger.

  Food, the great tranquilizer.

  Dan Jeffers’s sister-in-law, Patty, lived in a mobile home park near the south end of town. Rosebushes bloomed in profusion next to a walkway that led to a covered deck at the side of her doublewide, and a trio of evil-looking garden gnomes leered out at me from beneath their branches. At my approach a small, wiry woman with blond hair and a dark, leathery tan came to the top of the stairway.

  “Ms. McCone? I’m Patty Jeffers. Come on up, have a seat. I’m just waiting for my husband to get here.”

  The deck was crowded with wrought-iron furniture and flowering plants. In one corner a fan rotated on a table, stirring the plants’ branches but doing little to alleviate the heat, which must now be in the mid-nineties. My T-shirt was stuck to my back, and I pulled it free before sitting down.

  Patty Jeffers stood in front of me, clasping and unclasping her hands. “Lemonade,” she said. “I’ve got some made up fresh. Would you . . . ?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She hurried inside, returning less than a minute later with a pitcher and three glasses. “My husband,” she said as she poured. “I called him at work because, frankly, after I spoke with you I wasn’t sure I should. Meet with you, I mean. And after all, Dan’s his blood relative, not mine. Lou—my husband—said it was all right, but he wants to be here, and—” She paused, cocking her head. “His car. That’s him now.”

  Lou Jeffers was a tall, balding man in mechanic’s coveralls with the name of a Ford dealership embroidered on them. He greeted me, squeezed his wife’s shoulder reassuringly, and took the glass of lemonade she offered. When he sat down and stretched out his long legs, they bisected the floor space.

  “So,” he said, studying the business card I handed him, “you’re interested in Danny. Why?”

  “I believe he witnessed an accident I’m investigating.”

  Jeffers exchanged a knowing look with his wife. “What accident?”

  “A fall that a hiker took at Olompali Regional Park in June.”

  Patty Jeffers said, “I told you—”

  Her husband silenced her with a frown. “Why?” he asked me.

  “Why . . . ?”

  “Why are you investigating it?”

  “A family member wants details. For closure.”

  He nodded, staring down at his glass of lemonade. After a moment he raised it, took a swallow, and turned to his wife. “What the hell, Pats. We don’t know where Danny is. Don’t even know what really happened. Maybe if we talk with this lady, she might help us find him.”

  “If you think we should, okay.”

  Jeffers said to me, “If we tell you what we know about this . . . accident, and some time down the road you find Danny, will you let us know where he is? We haven’t seen or heard from him since the end of June.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Okay, then. You go first, Pats.”

  She leaned forward, rolling her sweat-beaded glass between her hands. “A Monday. June twenty-second or -third. Around two in the afternoon. Danny showed up here, asking for money. Now, that wasn’t anything new; he does it all the time, and when we can, we’re happy to oblige. Danny, he hasn’t been right for a long time—”

  Lou Jeffers cleared his throat, and Patty glanced nervously at him. “Anyway,” she went on, “this time it was different. Usually when Danny asks for money he acts real charming. But that day he was . . . kind of desperate and demanding. To tell the truth, he scared me. So I told him he’d have to ask Lou. And Danny went off to see him at work.” She looked at her husband.

  Lou said, “Pats is right; he was desperate. I took a break; we went to a bar in one of the shopping centers. He was knocking back Scotches, telling me this crazy story. He said he’d seen this guy he knew killed, beaten unconscious and pushed off a ledge into a ravine at that park down in Marin where he hangs out.”

  I leaned forward. “When did it happen?”

  “The day before, Sunday afternoon. Danny freaked, hid in this room where he stays down there, got stoned, took some pills. That’s what he always does when the going gets rough.” He grimaced. “He got so wasted, he decided the whole thing never happened; but the next day somebody discovered the guy’s body, and then he really freaked. Came here, asking for money so
he could leave the area.”

  “You give it to him?”

  “Only what I had on me. It wasn’t much. I told him he should just go to the cops, tell them what he saw, but he said if he did that he’d be a dead man.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the guy who did the killing. According to Danny, he was one bad dude.”

  “Dan knew the killer?”

  “Yeah, he did. He said it was really a weird coincidence, because he hadn’t seen the guy for over ten, fifteen years. And then there he was, killing somebody right before Danny’s eyes.”

  Armed with what personal history his relatives could provide about Dan Jeffers, I headed back to the city. Traffic between Cloverdale and Santa Rosa was light, but once I reached the Sonoma County seat, it came to a dead stop due to multiple feed-ins. I used the drive to consider Jeffers’s claim that he’d seen Scott Wagner murdered.

  On the one hand, the story could have been nothing more than the hallucination of a substance abuser. Jeffers might have seen Wagner fall and manufactured the rest. On the other hand, his family had described him as genuinely frightened, and the man hadn’t been seen since. It made sense to treat seriously the possibility that Scott Wagner might have been murdered, and by someone Jeffers knew.

  A background check on Wagner was in order. I’d need to know if he had enemies or was substantially different from the clean, altruistic image projected in a profile the Chronicle had run on him last fall. When a person is murdered in a manner that isn’t random, there’s usually some shameful secret or connection just waiting to come out.

  As for locating Dan Jeffers, I wondered if I had enough information to proceed with a search. He’d dropped out of Cloverdale High School in the mid-sixties, which would make him in his fifties now, and had gravitated toward San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Lou, who was two years younger, hitched down to visit him once and found him living in a dilapidated Victorian on the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park with eleven cats, five dogs, and thirteen other people, two of whom, Lou later learned, were loosely affiliated with the Manson Family. After that, Dan only communicated with his family by postcard or an occasional collect phone call; Lou recalled mailings from Taos, Mexico, Belize, Costa Rica, Peru, and finally from various U.S. locations where Dan was apparently following the Grateful Dead from concert to concert.

  “Deadheads, they called themselves,” Lou told me. “Dead in the head, if you ask me.”

  Dan’s Deadhead phase had ended around 1988, when he called from San Diego asking for a loan. A buddy and he were going into business, buying a juice bar. Lou invested two thousand of his savings in the enterprise and didn’t hear from Dan for a year, when he called to hit him up for another loan.

  “He said the juice bar failed. I thought, that’s Southern California; how can you fail with a juice bar? But then, fool that I am, I gave him more money to start a surfboarding business. He blew that, too. About the time he hit me up for the next loan, I’d figured out he was spending my money on drugs, so I cut him off.”

  Dan finally turned up at Lou and Patty’s place on a rainy winter night in 1997. He was emaciated and frail and explained that he’d recently been released from a state-mandated stay in a drug rehab center. Lou and Patty took him in and later arranged for him to have the use of the studio at his mother’s Los Alegres property.

  “I helped him fix up an old van, and Pats tried to teach him about budgeting his money. We made sure he visited the doctor and filled the prescriptions for his meds. But then we realized he was getting hold of other drugs that the doc hadn’t prescribed. And he was spending a lot of time down at that park, smoking grass and pining away for the good old days. Tell the truth, I was sick and tired of trying to deal with him. And I guess that’s why I wasn’t very sympathetic when he came to me with the story about the murder down there. Like I said, I told him to go to the cops, but when he wouldn’t, I gave him what money I could and hoped he’d go away for good. And he did. I feel awful about it, but you know what? I don’t miss him. I don’t miss him at all.”

  Abruptly the Santa Rosa traffic jam eased, and the vehicles in front of me began to move. I ran up the RPMs and shifted into a higher gear.

  Is that how I feel about Joey? That I don’t miss him?

  Yes and no. Certainly he wasn’t a burden like Dan Jeffers. He never asked any of us for a thing. But we worried about him, all the time. And I don’t miss the worry.

  No, I don’t miss the worry at all.

  But I do miss Joey.

  It was after six when I got back to the pier. None of my employees’ cars were parked in their spaces on the floor below our catwalk, but a faint glow came from the office Julia shared with Craig. I looked in and saw her slumped at her workstation. The computer’s screen saver displayed a school of colorful fish.

  When she realized I was there, Julia swiveled to face me. She was a mess, her clothing dirty and wrinkled, her hair greasy. Why had she come to the office in such a state? We stared wordlessly at each other, and then she attempted a smile, but it turned into a defensive smirk.

  For a moment I flashed back to my conversation with Marguerite Hayley: You may have to let her go. In effect, distance yourself from her in order to save your license.

  How easy it would be. Cut her loose, contribute to the costs of her criminal trial, but set the wheels in motion for BSIS to drop the case against me. And get on with business as usual.

  Except that I’d always know that I hadn’t given her a fair chance.

  Or had I? The evidence against her was overwhelming, her explanations flimsy at best. Was I blinded by my fondness for her? Or had I perhaps not been asking the right questions? It was best to find out now, while my options were still open.

  “My office,” I said. “Five minutes.”

  Julia entered the office tentatively and waited till I asked her to be seated. She’d used the five-minute interval to visit the restroom and wash her face. It was only a slight improvement, but I took it as a good sign.

  She said, “I want to thank you for asking Glenn to represent me. And for standing by me.”

  “The agency is behind you one hundred percent. Craig’s in Southern California, investigating Alex Aguilar’s background, and I’ve been pursuing leads of my own.”

  “Wish I felt it would help, but it just seems like more of the same.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, look at my work history since I got out of CYA. First I get fired from my maid’s job at the motel because a guy groped me and I smacked him. My fault—I shouldn’t’ve lost it. But then there was my boyfriend stealing from my uncle’s convenience store where I was working. Did my uncle believe that I didn’t know the guy was lifting stuff? No—he canned me, too. And then when I thought I was set with the neighborhood outreach program, the feds pulled the funding. Story of my life.”

  She sounded as if she was on the verge of a full-blown pity fest, so I said, “Well, history’s not going to repeat itself this time. We’re going to get to the bottom of this. Do you remember what I taught you about looking at the facts of a case?”

  She nodded. “Look at the surface facts first, then look at what lies beneath them. Look for a motive.”

  “Right. Eventually everything goes to motive. I’ve analyzed what surface facts we have, and I think the charges against you—and the agency—are the result of a carefully orchestrated plan on the part of Aguilar. We need to know the reason behind it.”

  “Because I wouldn’t sleep with him?”

  “No, that’s not enough for a plan of this scale. Now, I’m going to ask you some questions, based on things I’ve found out over the past couple of days, and I want you to think carefully before you answer them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Scott Wagner—as I recall, he was your main contact at the job-training center. What was he like?”

  “Nice guy, very helpful, gave me free run of the place. We got along fine.”

  “You heard he die
d?”

  “I saw the story in the paper after I wrapped up the case.”

  “You hear anything else about his death?”

  Julia frowned. “From who?”

  “In the neighborhood, maybe from somebody you met at the job-training center.”

  “No. I thought about going to his memorial service, but there wasn’t much point. I mean, I didn’t know him all that well.”

  “Okay—Aguilar. Had you ever met him before I assigned you to the case?”

  “No. I’d’ve remembered.”

  “What about his administrator at the job-training center, Gene Santamaria?”

  “I never even saw him. I don’t think he’d been hired yet.”

  “Is it possible you might’ve met Santamaria somewhere else at some point, and not remembered the name?”

  “. . . I suppose I could’ve.”

  I made a note of that. “What about the clients at the center? You know any of them from before?”

  “There’s a woman who was in the CYA same time I was, but we weren’t close, and I hadn’t seen her for maybe five years until I ran into her at the center. We just said hello—didn’t talk or anything. That’s usually the way it is when you come across somebody you’ve been inside with, if you’ve got your life together.”

  “Anybody else?”

  She thought. “A guy named Rocco something. I see him around my neighborhood, but we’ve never even said hello.”

  “Okay, here’s another name for you: Dan Jeffers.”

  “Jeffers . . . Nope.”

  “What about someone who goes by the initials R. D.?”

  “Just R. D.?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Ask her if she knows a drug pusher named Johnny Duarte.”