by Janet Dawson
Sid chuckled. “Bingo. And it was reported stolen last night. The Hartzell kids discovered it was gone when they got home from school yesterday afternoon. They thought Leon Gomes or their mother had it. They didn’t realize it had been stolen until Carol Hartzell got home from work. The San Leandro police took the report about an hour before Kellerman got hit.”
I turned this information over in my mind. Once again it was looking as though Leon Gomes had something to do with Rob’s death, and quite possibly that of Charlie Kellerman. I voiced my suspicions to Sid.
“Gomes and Hartzell were playing cards with friends the night Lawter died,” he reminded me. “They got home before he went out the window.”
“They say. Robin said they got home after midnight.”
“I told you before I wasn’t convinced the girl was right about the time. So yes, I’m discounting it for now. As for last night, they went to a movie after they reported the car stolen.”
“Is there any way to check that out?”
“I doubt it, unless someone at the movie theater remembers them. And that’s unlikely. Now, I gotta go, Jeri. You get any more information, you call me.”
I disconnected the call. Motive and opportunity, I thought. Leon had opportunity, but I wasn’t sure about his motive.
It seemed likely that whoever killed Charlie Kellerman was the person he’d been blackmailing. And I didn’t think Charlie had called Patricia Thursday afternoon just to pass the time of day. She was somehow involved in this messy business. But how, and why?
Where did Leon fit in? I remembered the thundercloud look on his face as he left the Bates production department office Thursday afternoon. What was the connection between Leon and Patricia? And was Carol part of the puzzle? Would she want to kill her brother? I couldn’t come up with an answer to that one.
I called my office. When I got my answering machine there, I punched in the code that would let me access the messages that had been received. There were four messages. Sally Morgan, who lived on the other side of Rob’s apartment, had called sounding agitated and telling me it was urgent. I figured she was calling to tell me about Charlie’s death.
The second call was from Bette Bates Palmer. She didn’t say why she was calling, but she wanted to talk with me as soon as possible. The third message was from Darcy, saying she really had to talk with me and suggesting lunch on Monday. The fourth caller was Ruby, who recited the home phone number of Al Dominici, the former Bates food-safety manager.
I debated about calling any of them, due to the lateness of the hour. But Sally had sounded upset enough that I decided to go ahead. When she answered the phone, I said, “It’s Jeri Howard, returning your call. Sorry for the delay, but I’ve been out of town. I heard about Charlie Kellerman, though.”
“Oh, my God,” she said, her voice ragged. “It was awful.”
“You saw it happen?” Neither the article nor Sid had given the names of any witnesses.
“Yes. I’ll never forget it.” She took a deep breath. “I’d had dinner with a friend who lives over on Lakeside Drive. I was walking home. People cross the street there at Seventeenth and Lakeside all the time. There’s a crosswalk, but no stoplight. Lakeside’s pretty heavily traveled and people drive so damn fast.”
I knew the intersection she was talking about well. Oak Street became Lakeside after it crossed Fourteenth, and it was four lanes of one-way traffic as it went around Lake Merritt, with the park and the lake on the right side and buildings on the left. Lakeside curved to the left just after Seventeenth, and people had a tendency to speed up as they headed into that curve.
“So what happened, Sally? Did you see Charlie crossing the street?”
“I saw someone crossing the street. I didn’t know it was Charlie until he landed in the gutter, practically at my feet.” Her voice choked. “He was covered in blood...”
“I know you’re going to see that picture for a long time.” I thought about some of the images that had been engraved on my consciousness over the years, images that were difficult to overcome. “But try to push it aside for a moment and tell me what else you saw or heard.”
“The car that hit him sped up,” Sally declared. “I heard it. I remember thinking, that idiot better slow down.”
“Did you see the car?”
“Not well enough to describe it, or to see who was driving. It was dusk, not quite dark, but dark enough. Someone else who saw it told me he thought the car was one of those American sedans, blue or green.” Her voice took on a tentative note. “The thing is, I saw a car... I told the police officer this, so I’ll tell you. I’m not sure if it was the same car, though.”
“Just tell me what you saw,” I prompted.
“When I left my friend’s building, I saw this car on the opposite side of Lakeside, double-parked with its lights on, as though it was waiting for someone to pull out of a parking place. I think it was green, but I’m not sure, because it was just out of the light from a streetlamp. I turned left and walked up Lakeside toward Seventeenth, and when I was about twenty or thirty feet from the corner, I saw the man in the middle of the street. Then I heard a car rev up and—” She stopped. “It was so awful. It happened so fast.”
“Thanks, Sally. If you remember anything else, be sure to call the investigating officer. And let me know.”
As I hung up the phone I played the scenario in my mind, as Sally had described it. It appeared that someone had been waiting for Charlie to cross the street. That meant a meeting had been arranged, perhaps to get Charlie out into the open. I was sure Charlie Kellerman’s death was no mere accident. It was stone-cold murder, committed with a vehicle as a highspeed and very effective weapon.
My tea had gone cold. I got up to put the teakettle on the burner again. With an eye on the clock, I punched in Bette’s number. “Sorry to be calling so late,” I told her after I’d identified myself. “I’ve been out of town, and I just got back.”
“Can you meet me at my brother’s house tomorrow morning?” she asked. “We’ll have plenty to talk about. The rattlesnake struck, and heads rolled.”
“What do you mean?” I had a sudden, disconcerting image of a snake coiled around a severed head.
“My brother and Alex Campbell got handed their walking papers Friday afternoon,” Bette said, with an I-told-you-so note in her voice. “Hank Irvin’s the new general counsel. We expected that. But Yale Rittlestone’s taken over the whole damn company. He’s made himself chief executive officer.”
Thirty-four
JEFF BATES LIVED IN A SPANISH-STYLE STUCCO HOUSE on Balfour Avenue in Oakland’s Trestle Glen neighborhood. Sunday morning I parked at the curb and went up the wide concrete steps to the red-tiled front porch that went with the red-tiled roof. To the right of the white-painted double doors was a bell, and I rang this. A moment later the door opened. I found myself looking at a solidly built gray-haired woman wearing blue slacks and a white T-shirt. She had friendly brown eyes with a lot of laugh lines around them.
“I’m Rita Bates,” she said after I’d introduced myself. “Jeff and Bette are back in his study.”
She led the way past the formal living room and dining room and the staircase that led to the second story. The study was a square room at the back of the house. It was furnished with a big rolltop desk, a recliner that had seen better days, and a low, comfortable-looking tweed sofa. There were bookcases on two walls, filled mostly with books, but decorated here and there with mementos and family pictures. One shelf held a small television set, while another contained a portable CD/radio and a collection of compact discs. A large window looked out into a yard with a flagstone patio and lots of yellow and bronze chrysanthemums in round redwood planters.
I’d seen Jeff Bates a couple of times during my stint as a temp in the legal department. He was clad in loose-fitting khaki slacks and a plaid short-sleeved shirt, in contrast to the business suits he’d worn to the office. Tall and rangy, like his sister Bette, he looked equally fit
and tanned as she did. His hair was completely gray, however, and his face held more lines. Bette had told me he was three years older than she was, which made him sixty-two. Today he looked older, as though Friday’s events had taken more from him than his job and his company.
Bette, too, was casually attired, in comfortable, well-worn blue jeans and a shirt. She introduced me to her brother, as Rita went across the hall to the kitchen. She returned a moment later with a tray loaded with coffee mugs and a plate of pastries. I took one of each, and we all sat down for a talk.
“My sister tells me you’re a private investigator.” Jeff looked me over. “And that you’ve been working at my company for the past week and a half.”
I nodded. “I’ve been trying to get some leads on another matter, concerning one of your employees.”
“Rob, the paralegal, the young man who was engaged to my niece Diana.” He frowned, his fingers tightening on the handle of his coffee mug. “I’m not sure what that has to do with the coup Yale Rittlestone pulled off on Friday.”
“It may have nothing to do with it,” I said. “But I never know until I get some information. Tell me what happened, in as much detail as possible.”
“Well...” It was obvious that Jeff wasn’t convinced that there was any reason at all for me to be here. It was Bette who had insisted on my meeting him here this morning. Now she motioned at him with one hand, as though nudging him forward.
“All right,” he relented. “I’d gone down to Los Angeles early Thursday morning, to attend a food industry meeting. Ordinarily I would have flown back that night, but I have an old friend down there that I hadn’t seen in awhile. I spent the night with him and his wife in Bel Air and flew out of LAX the next morning. I got to Oakland about one o’clock Friday afternoon. I had no indication that anything was wrong until Yale Rittlestone showed up at two, with that assistant of his, Eric Nybaken.”
He paused and took a sip of coffee, as though fortifying himself for the rest of the story. “I wasn’t expecting Yale. He walked into my office unannounced. Then he proceeded to tell me he was closing all of our operations in Oakland and the East Bay—headquarters, the plants, everything. He plans to lay off every single employee and move what’s left of Bates to El Paso.”
He shook his head. “I was flabbergasted, appalled to the point of being speechless. When I found my voice, I objected, strenuously. I told Yale I simply would not agree to any plan to take Bates out of Oakland, let alone out of state. My father built this company from the ground up, and he had feelings of loyalty to the city. He always resisted any suggestion that we move headquarters from Oakland to the suburbs. A lot of good my objections did me. At that point, Yale informed me that Rittlestone and Weper had decided my services as chief executive officer were no longer needed, and that he himself was replacing me, effective immediately.”
“You had no idea about the El Paso move?” I had trouble believing that Jeff Bates had been kept that far out of the loop. On the other hand, I knew that many executives were content to let their underlings handle the day-to-day business routine. But I’d pictured the CEO of Bates Inc. as being a hands-on boss. Evidently he hadn’t been hands-on enough. Or Rittlestone and his team, both inside Bates and out, had been very good at keeping Jeff in the dark.
His expression was a mixture of exasperation and defensiveness. “None whatsoever. I realize what you must be thinking, but I really didn’t. Looking back, I can see little things that should have tipped me off. Yale and I had been talking about expanding the company, going outside Northern California to the western United States. El Paso was mentioned, because it’s close to the produce-growing areas of the Rio Grande Valley. The plan, at least as it was presented to me, was to purchase some existing food processing plants that belonged to a company called Sheffield Foods. Expansion of the company, that’s what we talked about. Not this wholesale abandonment of Oakland.”
He paused, squaring his jaw. “I assure you, Ms. Howard, until Friday afternoon, I thought that’s what Bates was planning to do.”
“Project Rio,” I said. “I suspected what was going on when I saw an office building on that land Bates is buying. Then I did some research at the El Paso courthouse and public library. And I talked with the woman who owns that land and the building. She’d heard rumors from a friend in El Paso about Bates buying the Sheffield plants and putting them into production again. Did you know Sheffield Foods had been taken over by TZI, the same company that mounted a hostile takeover of Bates?”
Jeff Bates nodded. “Yes. And Sheffield went out of business two years after that. That’s why the old Bates board and I wanted to avoid TZI’s hostile takeover. I thought turning to Rittlestone and Weper would solve the problem.”
His rationale for turning to Rittlestone and Weper as his “white knights” no doubt made sense at the time, from a business standpoint and from what I’d learned about TZI’s track record.
But sometimes the business standpoint wasn’t the only one to be considered. There were plenty of other factors that got ignored when they didn’t come under the heading of “good business.” The irony was that the demise of Bates could very well happen anyway under the Rittlestone and Weper regime.
“Presumably Hank knew the truth about the move,” I said, “since he’s been negotiating the sale. What about Alex?”
“Alex was as surprised as I was,” Jeff said. “Evidently Hank has been in Yale’s pocket all along. That’s why Alex is out and Hank is the new general counsel.”
“So when you objected to moving the company, Rittlestone canned you.”
Jeff looked pained at my choice of words. “He was perfectly within his rights as a majority shareholder to vote me into early retirement.”
“He was not,” Rita Bates interrupted. “You had an agreement with Rittlestone and Weper, from the start of this whole damn buyout business, that they wouldn’t replace you without cause. As far as I’m concerned, they don’t have cause and they’ve fired you illegally. They’re absolutely contemptible, both of them.”
Bette seconded Rita’s comment with a growl of her own. As for me, I wasn’t sure that what I’d heard was the action of Rittlestone and Weper together. It sounded as though Frank Weper was missing from this latest move. What if replacing Jeff Bates had been Rittlestone’s decision alone?
“We’ve been over this a dozen times, Rita,” Jeff said. “I knew that losing the chief executive officer position was a possibility when I went into that leveraged buyout. As for cause, let’s be realistic. In the real corporate world, disagreeing with the majority shareholders is cause enough. The simple fact is that Rittlestone and Weper have more shares than I do. But I’d hoped that the company’s performance in the year since the buyout had convinced Yale that it was wise to leave the current management structure in place.”
Bette snorted. “He had no intention of leaving you, or any of the others, in place.”
“I never discount the company rumor mill,” I said, “and it’s been working overtime, based on what I’ve heard in the short time I’ve worked at Bates. There have been rumors for months that Alex was out and Hank would replace him. And that you were going to be replaced by David Vanitzky.”
Who must be feeling furious at the moment, I told myself, if he’d been expecting to move into Jeff’s corner office Friday afternoon. Something told me David’s status at Bates was more precarious than he’d thought, whether he knew where the bodies were buried or not.
“Where does Frank Weper fit in to all of this?” I asked.
“I assume he concurs with Yale’s actions,” Jeff said. “They’re partners, even if Frank prefers to remain out of the picture in Chicago.”
“But you’re not sure. He seems to be an unknown factor. Why did Rittlestone wait until Friday afternoon to spring his surprise?”
Now Jeff smiled. “It’s an old trick in corporate public relations. Announce the bad news Friday afternoon. Most newspapers have smaller editions on Saturdays, and much of w
hat goes into the Sunday edition has already gone to press. From what I understand, the same is true of TV. By the time anyone in the media realizes that there might be a story, it’s Monday and that corporate press release has been buried under whatever hot news happened over the weekend.”
“Thanks for enlightening me,” I said.
“As for enlightenment,” Jeff countered, “you still haven’t told us what all of this could have to do with Rob’s death. I thought that was an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t. I’m afraid he was murdered. I don’t know why—yet. But I believe it has something to do with his plans to blow the whistle, as he put it. He intended to expose something that’s going on at Bates.”
“Something illegal?” Jeff was taken aback, as though the thought that Bates Inc. ever did anything bad was beyond his understanding.
“I assume so. Whatever it is, it’s unpleasant enough that someone is willing to go all the way to murder to keep it quiet.”
“But what could it possibly be?” Rita asked.
“There are any number of ways a company like Bates can run afoul of the law. Name an agency—FDA, IRS, SEC, EPA. Whatever it is, I have a feeling I’m getting close to the truth.”
Was I? My eyes moved from face to face, gauging their reaction. Or were my words merely spoken to convince my audience?
“Tell us what we can do to help,” Bette said. She was a woman after my own heart, one who liked to get involved. But at the moment I didn’t want the Bates family put in any kind of danger.
“Thanks for the offer,” I told them, “but Rob was warned off, and now he’s dead. And his next-door neighbor, who may have seen whoever killed Rob, was killed this weekend.” Now Bette, Jeff, and Rita looked alarmed, as though they’d never encountered the kind of death I had, the up-close, ugly, violent kind. “The best thing you can do right now, all three of you, is say nothing about this to anyone.”
Thirty-five
WALKING INTO THE BATES BUILDING MONDAY MORNING felt a lot like walking into an intensive care unit, one where the prognosis for the patient’s recovery was precarious.
