Where Echoes Live

by Marcia Muller

  Connie Grobe apparently didn’t pay attention to their opinions, and as I followed her down the corridor to her office, I reflected that her thinking might be justified. What with the recent court reversals on abortion rights and comparable pay for comparable work, I was beginning to suspect that soon we’d have to start proving a few things all over again….

  Grobe’s office was a small cubicle on an inside wall: a bank of file cabinets, a desk, and two chairs. No window; maybe the powers that be at Cross-Cultural thought secretaries really were robots with no need for light or fresh air. As I sat in her visitor’s chair I experienced a residue of the anger I’d felt when I worked part-time as a guard for one of the city’s large security firms while putting myself through college. Every Friday I’d go in to pick up my meager paycheck and see the clerical staff stuffed into tiny, airless cubicles, while the spacious windowed offices of the bosses—who were usually out in the field or wining and dining prospective clients—stood empty. It was back then that I’d vowed I’d never become the victim of a system that abused its clerical workers and then tossed them out the same way it did pencil stubs and bent paper clips.

  When she’d settled herself on the other side of the desk, Grobe folded her hands and asked, “May I see some identification, Ms. McCone?”

  I slid my leather I.D. folder across to her. She studied its contents for a moment before handing it back. “And is there someone on the police force whom I may contact to verify that you are working with them on the investigation of Mr. Erickson’s death?”

  Swallowing my annoyance—after all, the woman had a right to be cautious—I said, “You can contact Inspector Bart Wallace on the Homicide Squad of the SFPD. Or Detective Kristen Lark at the Mono County Sheriff’s Department.”

  She made notations on a scratch pad but didn’t ask for phone numbers. After staring at the sheet for a moment, she sighed and ripped it off, balling it up before tossing it into the wastebasket. At my surprised looked she said, “Excessive caution was something required by Mick Erickson, Ms. McCone. But Mick is dead, so it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

  “I guess not. Why was he excessively cautious?”

  “Many of our clients are major Pacific Rim corporations. The political ramifications of their business dealings in the United States can be extremely widespread and serious. Others are in sensitive positions, such as a number of our Hong Kong firms who wish to move their assets here before the territory reverts to the People’s Republic in nineteen ninety-seven.”

  “Transpacific Corporation is one of those?”

  “Not precisely. Transpacific is an American corporation. Their CEO, Mr. Lionel Ong, is a naturalized citizen and a graduate of Harvard Business School.”

  “But they are funded by Hong Kong interests?”

  She hesitated. “When I said that excessive caution doesn’t matter anymore, I meant as it applies to Mick Erickson, not our clients. As long as Cross-Cultural is a legal entity, I’m bound to protect them.”

  “That’s fair. Can we talk about Mr. Erickson’s supposed trip to Japan, then? His wife tells me he was presumed to be conducting a series of seminars for an important client.”

  Connie Grobe’s mouth tightened, for exactly what reason I wasn’t sure. “The client was Sumeri International, in Osaka.”

  “And Mr. Erickson’s travel arrangements were made through this office?”

  “Travel arrangements, shipment of materials for the seminars, all the attendant details.”

  “Did Mr. Erickson contact you after his departure?”

  “Yes, by telephone upon his arrival in Japan. At least that’s where he claimed he was.”

  “And after that?”

  “He told me when he called that his plans had changed, that he would be out in the field at their various locations. If I needed to get in touch with him I was to contact the Sumeri office here in the city.”

  “Not their offices in Osaka?”

  “No.”

  “Did that strike you as odd?”

  “A little, but Mick often conducted his business in unorthodox ways.”

  “Did you have need to contact him through Sumeri’s local office?”

  “No. Mick travels frequently; the office is set up to run well without him. I would have needed to get in touch only in case of an emergency.”

  And he’d counted on that, I thought. “May I have the name of the person you were to contact here?”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “I suppose it would do no harm. His name is Mr. Hiroshi Kamada.”

  I made a note of it. “When Mr. Erickson called in while traveling, did he typically use a credit card?”

  “If he was in an airport or some other public place, yes. Otherwise the calls were billed to his hotel room, or he called at the client’s expense.”

  “So unless he was in transit and used his credit card, you would have no immediate way of knowing the origin of the call?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “This trip to Japan—had it been planned for a long time?”

  “Actually it came up rather suddenly.” She bit her lower lip, pain evident in her eyes. “Our staff worked very hard in overtime to prepare the materials for the seminars. Mr. Erickson canceled two lectures for important clients here in order to make the trip. Finding out he was merely covering up some deception makes me angry. Angry and terribly sad.”

  His wife wasn’t the only one Erickson had betrayed, I thought. Somehow Connie Grobe’s self-proclaimed anger and sorrow were more poignant than the leashed grief and latent fear I’d sensed in Margot Erickson.

  “Ms. Grobe,” I said, “in a homicide investigation it’s often necessary to focus on very personal aspects of the victim’s life. Do you have any problem with discussing what you know of Mr. Erickson’s private affairs?”

  She considered. “No, I don’t,” she replied after a moment. “Mick’s dead, and the important thing is to find out who killed him. What do you want to know?”

  “Margot Erickson told me she and her husband viewed the trip to Japan as a trial separation. Were you aware of that?”

  Again her mouth tightened; this time I realized that it was a reflexive reaction to the mention of Margot. “I could hardly help but be aware of it. Mick had been sleeping on the couch in his office for a month. I’d say that was the trial separation.”

  “He slept here for an entire month? Why didn’t he go to a hotel or rent an apartment?”

  “I suppose he was hoping they would work things out. And, of course, there was the problem of finances. That town house in Barbary Park is outrageously expensive; when Mick and Margot bought it, mortgage interest rates were very high. They planned to refinance when the rates dropped, but in the meantime it was costing more than he could afford.”

  “Are you saying that Mick Erickson was in financial trouble?”

  “Not really. If anything, his finances were about to improve. You see, this firm was originally a joint partnership between Mick and his former wife. When they divorced, she moved back east to establish a similar company, and he had to buy out her interest in this one. He made his final payment to her a few months ago, and without that expense, his financial position was bound to get better.”

  “I see. Let’s get back to the Erickson marriage for a moment. All Mrs. Erickson would say about the separation is that it was strictly a family matter.”

  Grobe nodded. “That’s all Mick would say, too.”

  “In your opinion, what did they mean?”

  “Perhaps something to do with having or not having children.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Mick and Margot were a couple, not a family in the sense the word is normally used. They’d both been married before, but neither had children.”

  “Did either want them?”

  Grobe’s gaze grew introspective. “I think Mick did,” she said. “I’m a single mother; my son Jon is ten. Mick had season tickets for the Giants games, and he took
Jon along a few times. Both of them really seemed to enjoy the time they spent together.”

  “Did Margot go with them?”

  “No. Jon used her ticket; she seldom went, because she hates baseball.”

  “How do you think she feels about having children?”

  “I don’t know, but I can’t imagine Margot as a mother.” Grobe allowed herself a small but malicious smile. “After all, she might lose her size-four figure.”

  I was silent for a bit, thinking over her theory about the breakup of the Erickson marriage. They were in their mid-thirties—a now-or-never age for starting a family. If one partner was intent on doing so and the other not (here I felt a twinge about my own lover’s intentions), it could cause serious difficulties. But I wondered about Grobe’s evaluation of Mick’s feelings on that issue; a few pleasant outings to baseball games with an employee’s son did not constitute an overwhelming desire for children of his own.

  When I probed for more details about the couple, the only thing I really learned was how much Connie Grobe disliked Margot. She didn’t know the woman well, had never seen her socially, and had been to the town house only a few times to drop off some papers. Her feelings, I decided, were merely the not uncommon reaction of the employee who works side by side with her boss while his wife stays home and, to the secretary’s way of thinking, idly reaps the fruits of their labors.

  Grobe expressed considerable surprise that Mick’s body had been found at Tufa Lake; she knew of no personal or business connection he might have had in the area, could think of no reason for him to have gone there. She had never heard the Tarbeaux name, and she claimed she knew nothing of Transpacific Corporation’s plans to began working the old Promiseville mine. Finally I thanked her and departed with only twenty minutes to spare before my two o’clock appointment at the Sino-American Alliance.

  I used a few of them to call Hiroshi Kamada at Sumeri International’s local office. He was a good deal less cautious than Connie Grobe about giving out information—a fact I took to mean that borderline paranoia did not permeate the entire Pacific Rim business sector. Kamada said that he’d been asked by Mick Erickson to act as a message taker for him for a few days. Kamada was merely to hold any messages until Erickson called in for them.

  Had he called in? I asked.

  No, Mr. Kamada said, he hadn’t. But there had been no messages to pass on, anyway.

  What about the materials for the seminars that Erickson’s office had shipped to Sumeri’s headquarters in Osaka? I asked. Hadn’t their arrival seemed strange to the staff there, seeing as there was no program scheduled?

  Oh, no, Mr. Kamada told me. I did not understand. The materials were for next month’s seminars.

  So that was how Mick Erickson had engineered his excuse to drop out of sight: the contract for the Sumeri seminars was legitimate; he’d merely misrepresented the date. I wondered how he’d planned to explain that when the actual date for the presentation arrived.

  As I hung up the receiver of the pay phone, I thought about Erickson’s motivation. The reason for his trip to Mono County must have been very sensitive and secret in order for him to concoct such an intricate scheme to permit only a few days’ unexplained absence. A few days—to do what?

  The one thing of which I was certain was that it had to do with Transpacific’s plans to reopen that mine. Perhaps Marcy Cheung at the Sino-American Alliance could shed some light on both the company and its CEO, Lionel Ong.

  Walking along the easternmost blocks of Jackson Street near the Embarcadero and the U.S. Custom House is like stepping back into old San Francisco. Although they are virtually in the shadow of the Transamerica Pyramid—our prime example of the architectural excesses of the late twentieth century—and only a brief stroll from the noisy steel-and-glass canyons of the central financial district, these few blocks are quiet, narrow, and tree-lined. Their renovated brick buildings, many of which date from before the 1906 earthquake, house small businesses, antique shops, and furniture-and-fabric showrooms. The Sino-American Alliance had the whole ground floor of one, on the corner of an alley with a Parisian-style sidewalk café tucked away at its end.

  The tranquil feel of the street permeated the reception area. Its decor was typical Chinese—black lacquered furnishings, melon-jar lamps, scroll paintings—and even the sleek-haired woman who presided over the desk wore jade green watered silk with a mandarin collar. As she buzzed Marcy Cheung’s office and announced me, her movements were unhurried, her voice as soft as my footfalls on the apricot-and-blue floral rug.

  After I passed the tri-paneled silk screen behind the desk, however, I realized that the calm had broken; on its other side a storm of ringing phones, clacking typewriters, and raised voices raged. And when I entered the room labeled Publicity Department, I was abruptly thrust into the whirling eye of chaos.

  Two desks overflowed with heaps of photographs and papers; file drawers gaped open, their contents protruding at odd angles; color slides were scattered on a light table; a sketch hung three-quarters off a drawing board. The walls were a layered mass of posters, fliers, and schedules. One of the latter, headed “December Issue,” had a big red X drawn through it, with a dart stuck in its center. And on the floor, surrounded by more stacks of papers and photographs plus the remains of a lunch, sat a young woman with waist-length hair that was fastened at the nape of her neck with a rubber band. Her blue-jeaned legs were folded Indian-style, her feet were bare, and she hunched forward, reaching for half of a deli sandwich as she spoke into the phone. She didn’t bite into the sandwich, merely waved it to punctuate her words.

  “You got problems? Well, so do I. My idiot assistant quit. And I need those proofs today, dammit!”

  I stepped around a blown-up plastic dragon that breathed a fiery banner: “The Sino-American Alliance Wishes You a Happy Chinese New Year!”

  “I don’t care how much it’ll cost you to messenger them over here—just do it!” She slammed the receiver down just as a slice of tomato fell out of her sandwich and bounced off her knee, leaving a streak of mayo. “Shit,” she said miserably and looked up at me.

  Marcy Cheung had a round, slightly pockmarked face and a chipped front tooth. As soon as she smiled at me, she clapped an ink-stained hand over her mouth and mumbled around it, “I busted it white-water rafting two months ago and still can’t afford to get it fixed. You’d think I’d have gotten over being self-conscious by now. Are you Sharon?”

  “Yes. You’re Marcy?”

  “Uh-huh. I’d offer you a chair, but …” She motioned around; all of them were stacked with boxes, papers, and magazines.

  Fortunately, I was wearing dark-colored slacks. I sat down on the floor near her, avoiding the slice of tomato, which she seemed to have forgotten. “No problem.”

  She dumped what was left of the sandwich into a waste-basket. “So,” she said, “Lar tells me you hate health food.”

  “Yes. I can’t believe you actually tried his recipe for buckwheat groats.”

  “I didn’t—I lied to him.”

  “I never tried his instant protein drink, either.”

  She smiled, unconcerned about the chipped tooth this time, and held out her hand. We shook, our rapport firmly established.

  The phone beside Cheung buzzed stridently. She glared at it, snatched up the receiver, and said, “I can’t talk—I’m busy.” The she depressed the disconnect button and left the receiver off the hook. “It’s the only way I can get any peace around here.”

  “Your office is …”

  As I was searching for a word that wouldn’t offend, she finished for me. “A hellhole.”

  “And on top of that your assistant quit.”

  “Yeah.” She looked around glumly. “He was an absolute idiot; it may have been the only smart move of his life.”

  “I feel bad about taking up your time.”

  “Don’t. If you hadn’t come in I’d still be arguing with the printer—another idiot. Lar said you want to know abo
ut Transpacific Corporation.”

  “And Lionel Ong, if you know anything about him.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m investigating a homicide in cooperation with the SFPD and the Mono County Sheriff’s Department. One of Ong’s associates was shot.”

  “Do they suspect Lionel?”

  It was not the question so much as the matter-of-fact way she asked it that surprised me. “So far, no. I’m after background information.”

  “My boss probably wouldn’t want me talking about one of the members. But if it’s police business, I guess I should. And you asked at the right time.” She stretched out a bare foot and pulled a cardboard file box toward her with her toes. Felt-tip markings on its side said, “Feb. Interviews.”

  “These,” she said as she rummaged in the box, “are materials for our February magazine. We send it out to the business community at large, plus politicians, trade associations, anybody else who might be interested. This one’s to showcase our Hong Kong members—or it will if I ever get it out. My assistant was supposed to tape the interviews, but he only did two. Somehow I’ve got to do three more, including Ong.

  “Anyway,” she went on, extracting a file and extending it to me, “this is the research I did on him in preparation. You’re welcome to look at it, make copies if you like.”