The Dangerous Hour

by Marcia Muller

  All heads turned in her direction.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “This morning I reread the Private Investigator Act, especially the part about the owner of the agency being responsible for the employees’ actions. If the D.A. proves his case against me, I’ll only go to jail. I’m not saying it’s no big deal, especially because I’d be separated from my kid, but my family would take care of him, and when I got out I could always get some kind of job. But you, Shar—you stand to lose a profession and an agency you’ve worked hard for. If I wanted to get revenge on somebody, that’s what I’d go after.”

  Of course.

  “Good reasoning, Jules. It’s a possibility we need to explore.”

  She shrugged again and looked down at her hands, but her lips curved in a small smile.

  I turned to the presentation board, where an arrow connected Alex Aguilar’s name to Julia’s. Now I wrote my own name and drew another arrow.

  “Okay,” I said, “who’s willing to work late tonight, and maybe over the weekend?”

  To a person, they volunteered.

  They worked for food. Ted brought in burgers and salads and fries from Miranda’s, our favorite waterfront diner. He supplied soft drinks and mineral water, and brewed pot after pot of coffee. Each operative took a given time frame and went over the agency case files, searching for a disgruntled client with a possible connection to Alex Aguilar, Johnny Duarte, or the shadowy R. D. I shut myself in my office and tried to think back on the cases I’d handled for All Souls Legal Cooperative. Under the buyout agreement for the poverty law firm, all files were supposed to have become the property of the remaining partners, but as I recalled, I’d kept mine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember what I’d done with them.

  Hank Zahn, my best male friend and founder of All Souls, might know, but he and his family were on a two-week vacation in British Columbia.

  What about Rae Kelleher? I picked up the phone and called my one-time assistant at the Sea Cliff home she shared with her husband, my former brother-in-law, Ricky Savage.

  “Hey,” she said, “you’ll be at my signing on Sunday, right?”

  Oh, God, I’d clean forgotten it. After Rae had married Ricky, a country music superstar, she’d quit the agency to write what she called “shop-and-fuck novels.” But instead of sleazy best-selling prose, she’d written what the New York Times had recently described as “a gem of a first effort,” and would be signing copies at a local bookshop on Sunday afternoon. Rae was terrified at the prospect of the signing and convinced it would be poorly attended. There was no way I, or any of her other friends, could miss it.

  “I’ll be there,” I said with more enthusiasm than I felt. “Now I’ve got a question: d’you remember the day we moved from All Souls to the pier?”

  “Yeah. You— Jesus!”

  In the background, young voices had begun to screech, and now Ricky yelled, “Cut it out! Red’s on the phone!” Lisa and Molly, the youngest of his six children with my sister Charlene, were visiting for the weekend. There was good reason we called them the Little Savages.

  Rae said, “Your nieces are driving us crazy. Why do you ask? About the move, I mean.”

  “My old files—I kept them, but I don’t remember what I did with them.”

  “No surprise. You and Hank were both pretty ripped that night, celebrating you closing out your last open file.”

  The morning of the agency’s move, I’d been going over the old files in a fit of nostalgia when I’d come upon the only unsolved one—the first investigation I’d undertaken for the co-op. As I read the inconclusive report, I realized the case’s obvious solution, and by evening I’d closed it. Then Hank and I had indulged in too many celebratory glasses of cheap wine.

  Rae added, “I’ll never forget that night. I was still living at the Victorian, and came home around ten. You and Hank were drunk as skunks and trying to load that awful armchair you still have in your office onto the rental truck. Between the three of us, we got it aboard, and then you rushed back inside for your file boxes. Hank told you they weren’t yours to take, but you said, ‘Fuck it! As of today, I’ve closed every single one of them. That makes them mine.’ And he laughed and stuck them on the truck.”

  “I remember that much, but where are they now?”

  “In the crawl space above your home office. Hank and I put them up there while you were in the bathroom, throwing up.”

  “Not one of my finer hours.”

  In the background, Ricky’s voice was now competing with my nieces’.

  Rae sighed. “Got to go play wicked stepmother, before my husband goes into serious meltdown. You want help getting those file boxes down, give us a call. We’ll bring Lisa and Molly over, lock them in the crawl space for the weekend.”

  Ted was hanging up the phone when I stopped at his office to ask him to tell the others that we’d meet at nine tomorrow morning, to go over our individual findings.

  “Damn! That call was for you,” he said. “I buzzed your office, but you didn’t pick up.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Marguerite Hayley. She said to tell you that the meeting with BSIS was productive, and that Todd Baylis will contact you on Monday about obtaining additional documents and setting up a meeting with you and Julia. You’re to cooperate in any way you can.”

  “Something to look forward to.” I told him to take money from petty cash to buy pastries for the morning, then headed home to review the All Souls files.

  On my front steps I ran into Michelle Curley, who had just finished giving Ralph his shot. She’d been browsing the Internet for information on feline diabetes, and while she helped me drag down the dust-covered boxes, she chattered knowledgeably about such things as blood glucose levels, creatinine values, and Somogyi rebound. As I was descending with the last carton, she got so wrapped up in trying to persuade me to buy a measuring device called a Glucometer Elite that she let go of the ladder and I almost fell on top of her. I thanked her for her efforts on Ralph’s behalf, said she should price the meter, and got her out of there as quickly as possible.

  There were seven cartons on the floor of my home office. They contained only the reports I’d delivered to whichever All Souls attorney had assigned me to investigate a given case—not depositions or briefs or actual court documents—but that should be enough to refresh my memory. All in all, it was pretty ordinary stuff: employee background checks, interviews with witnesses in civil cases, skiptraces. Most of the time I hadn’t even met the client.

  Of course, there was the Albritton case, which had resulted in a murder conviction, but the killer had long ago been paroled and eventually moved out of state. The perpetrator of the 1956 “Two Penny Murder,” whom I’d helped bring to justice decades later, had died of a heart attack in prison. I’d sent con artists and embezzlers to jail, returned children to the custodial parent, unmasked insurance fraud, recovered stolen property, and, in a few cases, allowed people whose misdeeds had really harmed no one to retreat into obscurity. In the end, I had to conclude that none of the cases I’d worked during my tenure at All Souls could have provoked serious retaliation. The majority of them were simply not important enough and had happened too long ago.

  Their very ordinariness depressed me. At the time, the co-op’s attorneys and I had thought we were on the cutting edge, out to change the world. But what had we really accomplished? We’d settled petty matters for semi-indigent clients, most of whom had then turned around and complained about having to pay for our services, even though our fees were based on a sliding scale, according to their income levels. And what was I accomplishing now? The clients were better off and tended not to complain as much, but . . .

  Okay, McCone, so you’re not performing brain surgery or forging world peace, but don’t forget that what you do makes it easier for the clients to get through in this world. It’s a legitimate service, and a damned important one.

  Somewhat reassured of my position in the grand scheme of
things, I left the files strewn on the floor, went to the kitchen, and poured myself a glass of wine. Fog misted the window over the sink, and the temperature in the house was edging downward. Instead of turning up the furnace, I went to the sitting room and lit a fire, then curled on the sofa, contemplating my major cases since I’d established the agency.

  The most personal had involved the attempted theft of my identity. But the woman responsible was still in a mental institution, and in the unlikely event she was released, the state would be required to notify me; thus far I’d heard nothing. Ted and his partner, Neal, had been the targets of a series of antigay harassments that the entire agency had worked to bring to a halt, but the homophobe who had perpetrated them was firmly ensconced in prison. A man who had killed his wife in order to inherit her fortune was on death row, and it struck me as unlikely that he had the outside connections to set in motion such a scheme. Maybe someone at the agency would come up with something less obvious, but I had my doubts—

  The phone rang. I started, looked at my watch. Close to midnight. One of my operatives? Hy, tired of my silence and demanding a response to his proposal? I snatched up the receiver.

  Silence, but the kind that tells you someone’s on the line.

  “Hello?”

  More silence.

  “Hello!”

  A click.

  All right, first you invaded my car; now you’ve invaded my home. Next it’s my turn.

  Watch out, you bastard.

  Saturday

  JULY 19

  “And now in local news . . .”

  I’d gotten into the habit of watching the morning TV news during the war in Iraq, and hadn’t yet been able to break myself of it. Today, I decided as I advanced on the little set in the kitchen, would be a good time to change my ways. The news was too depressing—who needs the forecast of a record federal deficit, a movement to recall the state governor, slaughter abroad, and duplicity at all levels of government first thing in the morning? Such reportage would set a bad tone for what already promised to be a difficult day. Better to find out what was going on from tomorrow’s Chronicle, when the events’ sharp edges would be blunted by the passage of time and lack of live film footage.

  I had my finger on the Off button when I caught the words “. . . body of a man found Friday evening on the rocks below Devil’s Slide has been identified as that of John H. Duarte, thirty-seven, of San Francisco.”

  A grainy photograph of Johnny Duarte appeared on the screen. I turned up the volume.

  “. . . Mr. Duarte, who is thought to have fallen while walking on the treacherous cliffs along Highway One, was spotted by a hiker shortly after six last night. Emergency service workers recovered his body an hour later.” An aerial film showed the cliffs and the recovery operation. “According to a friend, Harriet Leonard, Mr. Duarte, a marketing executive, had been absent from his Upper Market home since Thursday evening, although his car was parked in the garage. Anyone with information concerning his fall is asked to contact the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. In other news—”

  I punched the TV off.

  Fell, while walking along the cliffs?

  I don’t think so.

  I went to the sitting room, located the receiver of the cordless phone in the wood basket—what was it doing there?—and called the Marina district apartment that Craig shared with Adah Joslyn. He answered, told me she was working today; I could catch her at SFPD.

  “What’s happened, Shar?” Craig asked. “You sound upset.”

  “I’ll brief everyone on it at our meeting. I’m running a little late, though. Will you tell them I’ll be there as soon as possible?”

  “Will do.”

  “Thanks.” I broke the connection and dialed Adah’s number at the Hall of Justice.

  “Why do I think you want something?” she asked.

  “Because I never call you at work otherwise.”

  “Not true. You called three weeks ago to cancel our swim date.”

  Adah, like Craig, was big on physical fitness and had nagged me into joining her athletic club. I love to swim, but in a year I’d used the pool fewer than two dozen times, and was considering canceling the membership.

  “Okay,” she added, “what is it now?”

  I could picture her: sitting at her desk, trim and elegantly dressed even on a Saturday, a pencil stuck into her closely cropped curls, frown lines marring what was otherwise a flawless honey-tan countenance. Adah liked to refer to herself as the department’s “poster child for affirmative action,” but that alone didn’t account for her rapid rise through the ranks. She was a damn good investigator, and in the past year she’d also proved herself a good diplomat, having tactfully distanced herself from a rash of scandals that threatened to cripple the already troubled department.

  I said, “A Mission district drug distributor, Johnny Duarte, took a tumble off of Devil’s Slide yesterday. Has San Mateo County contacted you about it?”

  “Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Yeah, here it is. They copied your pal Greg Marcus on it, too. Circumstances don’t point to an accident. Duarte was dressed casually, but not like you would for hiking; Gucci loafers don’t provide much traction. Also, there was no vehicle belonging to him in the vicinity.”

  “How’d they identify him?”

  “His wallet was in his pants pocket.”

  “And no autopsy results yet?”

  “McCone.” She clicked her tongue. “You should know better than to ask. Pathologists are even more backlogged than I am. Does this have to do with the problems at the agency that Craig’s been telling me about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything San Mateo—or I—should know?”

  “Yes to that, too, but I’m running late for a meeting.”

  “Come by the apartment this afternoon for a glass of wine. We’ll talk then.”

  I was on my way out of the house when the phone rang. Ma, I thought. I’d planned to call her the night before and then got sidetracked. If I picked up, she’d want to talk for a long time, and I hated to cut her short. Although she was happy with her new husband, Melvin Hunt, and received frequent visits from my brother John and his two sons, Joey’s death had hit her hard, and she seemed to need constant reassurance that the rest of us were there for her. For a moment I debated letting the call go on the machine, then rushed back inside.

  “Hey, McCone.”

  Hy. Now, of all times.

  “Hey, yourself. How are you?”

  “Good. Feeling like a jaunt in Two-Seven-Tango.” The sexy red Cessna 170B we jointly owned, a magnificent tail-dragger capable of speeds up to 120 miles per hour. It was currently tied down at Tufa Tower Airport near Hy’s ranch.

  He added, “What say I pick you up at North Field, take you on a picnic at that grass strip near the reservoir in Lake County? On the way, we can hit the aerobatics box at Los Alegres, put Tango through her paces; she hasn’t had a good workout in weeks.”

  Take me on a picnic in an isolated place; hold me hostage till I’ll talk about our future.

  Somehow, the idea didn’t alarm me as much as it would have a week ago, and genuine regret crept into my voice as I turned him down. “There’s a crisis at the agency,” I told him. “Something I could use your input on.”

  “Okay—change of plans. I’ll fly down later today; we can talk about it tonight. I’ve got to be in the city on Sunday, anyway, to lend moral support at the book signing.”

  The idea appealed to me. We’d have a nice evening, a productive exchange of ideas about the situation with the agency, and a good time in bed. Now that I could anticipate Hy’s arrival, I realized how much my body had been aching for his. And Sunday we’d have brunch at a favorite restaurant, attend the book signing, spend more time in bed.

  Maybe I’d even get away without a discussion of marriage.

  After I finished briefing my people on Johnny Duarte’s “accident,” we turned our attention to the cases they’d gone over the previous
evening.

  Mick led it off. “Last Christmas you conducted that investigation for the mayor’s office—about the official they suspected of leaking sensitive information from city hall.”

  I’d thought of the case myself. “Right. That architect who worked on the other side of the pier, Tony Kennett, was a friend of the official and tried to steal the disk of my final report so his buddy could find out what we had on him. My investigator friend, Wolf, was at the party and helped me apprehend Kennett. Kennett was fired, and the official’s no longer working for the city.”

  “Not directly, but I found out he’s now on Aguilar’s staff, in a low-profile position. Apparently the folks around city hall have short memories, or else they don’t care.”

  “So maybe the guy persuaded Aguilar to set this thing up. Question is, does he have that much influence over the supervisor?”

  “I’ll have to find out,” Mick said. “Also there’s Kennett. He was unemployed as of June.”

  “Get on it, Savage.”

  He saluted me and left the conference room.

  Charlotte said, “I’ve got something promising. Last year you handed me a skiptrace in a child custody case. The father had fled the area with his ten-year-old daughter; I followed the paper trail to Palm Desert. When I located them, the mother wanted the daughter escorted home by Atwater Security—that outfit that specializes in transporting juveniles to the custodial parent or, if they’re out of control, to special schools.”

  “I remember. I wasn’t comfortable with Atwater’s operatives, so I asked you to go along. Their team—what were their names?”

  “Tracy Escobar and Mike Fairchild. They went to the kid’s school and, in my presence, flashed badges at the principal and teachers. Acted like they were cops, in flagrant violation of the Private Investigator Act.”