by Janet Dawson
“This is utter nonsense,” he said, appealing to his listeners. From the looks on their faces, he wasn’t making a sale.
“You were seen,” I told him.
I didn’t elaborate on the identity of my witness or what exactly that witness had seen. My words were enough to send Rittlestone careening toward me, fists raised. I grabbed one of the oak letter trays on his desk, heaved the contents away, and blocked the blow with the tray. Rittlestone came at me again.
The corporate security chief, who’d been standing in the doorway taking all of this in, moved forward. But I wasn’t sure who he was planning to help. Neither was anyone else. I heard Jeff Bates shout, “Buck, no.”
David blocked Tarcher with his own body. I sidestepped Rittlestone, then used his momentum to spin him around. I dropped the letter tray, delivered a right to his solar plexus, and finished him off with a left hook.
We’d been attracting a crowd. Now I saw Sid, Wayne Hobart, and some uniformed officers cutting through the employees who milled in their path.
I reached down and grabbed Rittlestone’s arm, hauling him to his feet. He shook away my grip, panting slightly as he looked at the new arrivals.
“Sergeant Vernon, Oakland Police Department,” Sid said, hauling out his shield.
“Officer, arrest this woman,” Yale demanded. “She burst in here, making a bunch of wild accusations. Then she assaulted me.”
Sid gazed at Rittlestone, then at me. “I got a call from Nancy Fong, who said Jeri Howard wanted us at this location, ASAP. Ms. Howard I know. You I don’t. Suppose you explain it to me.”
“Sergeant Vernon and Sergeant Hobart are from Homicide,” I told Yale. “They’re the officers investigating the murder of Rob Lawter. This is Yale Rittlestone. He killed Rob Lawter, and Charlie Kellerman.”
“I assume you can prove these allegations,” Wayne said, moving past me to take up a position on Rittlestone’s left.
“I’ve got a couple of witnesses ready to roll all over him. I’d be happy to lay it out for you in great detail. We can do it here, or downtown.”
“Suits me either way.” Sid stepped in front of Yale. “Mr. Rittlestone, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Yale threw off Wayne Hobart’s hand, which was hovering near his arm. “You can’t do this to me,” he snarled at Sid.
Sid’s eyes took on an expression I knew well, one that said, oh, yes, I can.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” Yale continued. He turned and snapped his fingers at Hank. “You’re the general counsel. Do something.”
Hank kept his mouth shut. He was looking at the floor, the furniture, anything and anyone but Yale Rittlestone.
“Perhaps we’d better do this downtown,” Sid said in a deceptively pleasant voice. “Will you come with us, please?”
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” Yale said as he attempted to shove his way past Sid. A couple of uniformed officers grabbed him before he got to the door.
“I guess we’ll do it the hard way,” Sid told Rittlestone as he and Wayne flanked their suspect. “Let’s go.”
Forty-three
“FUNNY,” I TOLD MY FATHER, PUTTING AN ARM AROUND his waist. “This day seemed to take forever getting here. But it’s only been six weeks since I looked at the house.”
He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. We stood on the sidewalk in front of my new house on Chabot Road, on a warm Saturday in October.
“Time is fluid,” he said. “When we’re anticipating something, it slows down, like that molasses in January we’re always hearing about. And when we look back, as we do at Christmas or New Year’s Eve, we wonder where the year went.”
Sid stepped out the front door, clad in blue jeans and a paint-stained gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off. He scowled at me. “We’re gonna have a hell of a time getting your bedroom furniture down those stairs.”
I put my hands on my hips and scowled right back at him. “Grouse, grouse, grouse.”
Kaz, my doctor friend, appeared behind Sid. His curly black hair was caught back, as usual, in a ponytail. He wore black pants and a black T-shirt, and he was nodding as he agreed with Sid. “The stairs are kind of narrow, Jeri.”
“Well, what if we carry it through the side gate and into the house from the lower level?” I waved my hand toward the gravel drive that led to the garage.
“That might work,” Sid said. “If the slope’s not too steep. Anyway, the gate’s wider than those stairs.” He turned to Kaz. “Let’s go take a look.”
They headed around the house. I turned to Dad, then jumped out of the way as my kid brother Brian zoomed toward me with three large cardboard cartons strapped onto a dolly.
“Hey!” Brian said. “Don’t just stand there. We gotta get this stuff unloaded. I’d like to get back to Sonoma sometime before midnight.”
Dad and I walked toward the big truck I’d rented. I’d invited about fifteen people to help me move. As my Grandma Jerusha used to say, “Many hands make light work.” My helpers and I had spent most of the morning carting my possessions out of my old apartment and into the truck. Now it was time to reverse the process at the other end. Cassie was in the back, handing boxes down to Vicki Vernon, Sid’s daughter from his first marriage, and several of her roommates, all of them University of California students who shared a house in Berkeley.
Joe Franklin was issuing orders to Eric, Cassie’s husband, as they maneuvered my sofa down the metal ramp to the pavement. Joe did love to boss the job. But since he was a retired Navy admiral, it went with the territory.
The big oak sideboard that had belonged to my grandmother sat on the front lawn, along with some smaller pieces of furniture. I tucked a dining room chair under each arm and marched across the lawn toward the front door, stopping as Dad and Wayne Hobart, who had stacked boxes on another dolly, hauled it into the house. I followed them inside. All my plants were arrayed on the deck, out of the way, and Lenore Franklin, Joe’s wife, and her daughter Ruth and granddaughter Wendy were in the kitchen, opening boxes.
“You don’t have to unpack,” I told her.
She laughed. “Believe me, Jeri, I’m a veteran of many moves. It feels so much better if you know where the silverware is. This place will be lovely when you get it all put together. Have you thought about what you’re going to plant? Bulbs would look terrific in the front.”
“When I’m ready, I’ll use you as my gardening consultant.”
“For now,” Ruth said, “we’re kitchen consultants. Where do you want us to put the plates?”
I told them, then headed back outside, in time to see a smaller rental truck pull up to the curb. My tenant had arrived, accompanied by her father and younger brother. Dan Stefano slid from behind the wheel, as Darcy and Darren piled out of the truck. Darcy gave me a hug. At that moment, Sid came around the house, followed by Kaz. I made the introductions.
“That’s your ex?” Darcy said, eyes twinkling as both men walked toward the larger truck. “He’s a hunk.”
“He’s too old for you. Old enough to be your father.”
Darcy just smiled. She and her brother unlocked the back of the smaller truck and started unloading her possessions. I’d been teasing her about being a computer nerd like her father, but she had more to put inside the studio apartment than just a mattress and a computer.
Darcy’s father looked at me as though he expected me to back out on this landlord-tenant arrangement. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Dan said. “I mean, she can be a handful. As we both know.”
“I guess I’m committed.” I grinned at him. “She did give me a lead on this last case. And, in a way, you helped finance the down payment on this place. We’ll be fine.”
“Well, in that case, I guess I might as well make myself useful.” Dan wiped bis hands on his khaki pants and went to help Sid, Kaz, and Wayne as they carried my bedroom furniture down toward the gate.
Time, I thought, reaching for the second pair of dining room chairs
. As I looked back at the events of the past few weeks, I saw that they had, as my father said, moved in rapid succession.
The district attorney had charged Yale Rittlestone with the murders of Rob Lawter and Charlie Kellerman. Patricia Mayhew was an accessory to both killings, but in the interests of cutting her own losses, it looked as though she would testify against her lover. Besides, her prints, and those of Rittlestone, were all over Rob’s apartment.
Carol Hartzell’s green Buick was found abandoned in the long-term parking lot at Oakland International Airport. The physical evidence from the car and from the victim’s body proved it was the vehicle that ran down Kellerman. Sid told me Yale’s fingerprints were nowhere to be found on the car. He’d probably worn gloves from the time he took it until he left it in the lot. No doubt he’d discarded the gloves along with the key, then taken a bus from the airport to the Coliseum BART station for his return trip to San Francisco.
The evidence against Yale for the Kellerman killing was circumstantial, without Patricia’s testimony. But a clerk at a downtown San Francisco hardware store recognized Yale as the man who’d had a car key duplicated there. The clerk came forward with his statement after the whole mess hit the news.
The media had parked on the steps of the Bates building for days. As Al Dominici had predicted, the eleven calls Rob had received were the tip of a much larger iceberg. Investigators in ten counties were following up on over fifty reported cases of salmonella resulting from Bates Best ice cream products, and the numbers were expected to rise. With that, and the pension fund losses, the first wave of lawsuits had already been filed.
“We’ll be answering class action complaints till the statute runs,” Gladys predicted when we met at the Jack London Village deli for lunch, two weeks after that last confrontation in the CEO’s office. “If it’s not the damn salmonella in the ice cream, it’s the pension scam. Things are in a hellacious mess. I wonder if we’ll ever get it sorted out.”
She gave me a gossipy gleeful rundown of the unsettled state of affairs at Bates. As I’d suspected, Hank was involved in diverting retirement money from one of the mutual funds in which it had been invested. He’d cooked up the scheme with the fund manager and tried to make it look as though Ed Decker was responsible. Tonya Russell had found the beginnings of a paper trail in the two weeks she’d served as human resources director. As Gladys had pointed out, the two scandals left investigators from several federal, state, and local agencies swarming all over the Bates building as well as the company’s plants.
And Leon had moved out of Carol’s house, Robin Hartzell had told me. Her mother took a dim view of his involvement in her brother’s death.
“I hear Frank Weper is over in San Francisco,” I said, “trying to salvage whatever’s left of Rittlestone and Weper.”
“Yeah, looks like the El Paso thing is totally off. Hallelujah,” she added, raising her bottle of root beer. “I’ve still got a job—if the company comes out of this okay.”
“You and Nancy must be run ragged, with only one attorney.”
“Well, Tonya Russell did move into Hank’s office, and they called in Laverne Carson and several other retirees to help mop up the blood, including Al Dominici and the guy who used to head up production before Ward. Thank God Alex is general counsel again. I don’t know when he’ll get around to interviewing attorneys and paralegals for Bates, but in the meantime we’ve got two lawyers and a paralegal from Berkshire and Gentry camped out in conference room one. I heard Alex even asked Lauren Musso if she wanted her old job back, but she turned him down flat.”
Jeff Bates was also back as chief executive officer, and his sister Bette had told me he’d insisted on her being named to the Bates board. I knew she was looking forward to doing battle for the family company again.
It would be a hard fight, though. In addition to the lawsuits and the penalties imposed by governmental agencies, the buying public was weighing judgment on Bates Inc. Consumer confidence, and sales of Bates Best products, had dropped precipitously with news of the salmonella outbreak and the product recall. The jury was still out as to whether the company could be salvaged.
“What about David Vanitzky?” I asked. Was he still chief financial officer, playing the part of the right-hand man no matter who occupied the CEO’s office?
Gladys laughed. “Oh, yes. That man would land on his feet if they dropped him from the Transamerica Pyramid.”
“He’s a survivor if I ever saw one.” I smiled.
After all, as David had told me, so cocky and self-assured, he was the man with the shovel, the one who knew where the bodies were buried.
Elaine Stefano and her mother, Adele Gregory, showed up a couple of hours later, after we’d carried most of my belongings and Darcy’s into their respective dwellings. Everyone but me was taking a break in the backyard, sprawled out on the grass around the big cooler I’d stocked with beer and soft drinks. I was in the front yard with one last box of odds and ends when I saw a dark blue car pull up to the curb. Adele was at the wheel. She and Elaine got out, and Adele walked over to greet me, carrying a shopping bag from Macy’s.
Elaine stood behind her mother, not saying anything at first. She was a real estate agent, and I saw her appraising my new house. “Not bad,” she said finally. “It looks like you got a bargain.”
“I think so. What brings you here?”
“We’ve brought housewarming gifts,” Adele said. “Where is everyone?”
“Out in the backyard.”
I set the box I’d been holding down in the foyer, shut the front door, and motioned them to follow me, wondering if Elaine had come on her own, or if this visit was prompted by Adele. I led the way past the garage and the studio apartment upstairs that was now occupied by Darcy.
As we went through the back gate, I heard laughter. Darcy was entertaining the assembled helpers with one of her stories. She stopped when she saw her mother and grandmother. “What’re you doing here?”
“I brought you a present.” Elaine reached into the shopping bag Adele carried, and took out a large gift box with a ribbon tied around the middle. She handed it to Darcy, who stared at the box for a moment, then slowly untied the ribbon and pulled off the lid. “Towels. I figured you could use some towels.”
Adele placed a box in my hands. It was small but heavy. I thanked her and opened the gift, a silver trivet that would look great on my sideboard.
There was an awkward silence as Darcy examined the towels, thick and pale blue. Then she looked up and smiled. “Thanks, Mom. I do need them.” She waved in the direction of the garage apartment. “Come on, I’ll show you my new place.”
“Hey, Jeri,” Sid called. He and his daughter were seated side by side, cross-legged, taking sips from the same can of beer. “You promised me pizza to go with this beer. Where is it? I was hungry an hour ago.”
“Pizza! Pizza!” The rest of my movers took up the chant, demanding that I feed them after all their hard labor. I stepped through the French doors into my newly arranged bedroom, located the directory, and started flipping through the yellow pages as I reached for the phone on the bedside table. “How many should I order?”
“Lots!” came the chorus.
About the Author
JANET DAWSON’S first Jeri Howard novel, Kindred Crimes, won the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America Best First Private Eye Novel Contest. It was nominated for Shamus, Anthony, and Macavity awards in the Best First Novel category. In addition to the Jeri Howard series, she has written numerous short stories, including Macavity winner “Voice Mail,” and Shamus nominee “Slayer Statute.” For more information on Janet Dawson and her books, check her website at www.janetdawson.com.
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