As a Favor

by Susan Dunlap

  It was nearly quarter-after when I finally stood up. I was relieved not to see Howard, relieved that Connie Pereira had already left. I had discussed the case enough.

  I opened the door and stepped out into the fog. The parking lot was silent now. I made my way through the rows of cars, patrol cars waiting to be taken on beat, personal cars merely waiting. Apparently Morning Watch hadn’t seen the memo prohibiting personal cars in the lot yet. My Volkswagen was across the street, under an elm tree. I was nearly abreast of it when I saw the old Asian man. He was sitting cross-legged atop the hood! He looked like one of the pictures on Sri Fallon’s wall.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. “You’re denting my hood.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding. Straggly gray hair fell from a balding pate onto robed shoulders. His arms were crossed over an appallingly protruding abdomen. I was glad I hadn’t left anything in the trunk beneath him.

  “Get off there.”

  “Ah, yes.” He nodded again.

  Didn’t he speak English? Was he a refugee? Despite his girth, he looked unwell. The lines in his yellowish face were deep. Even under the shadow of the elm it was apparent he was old and sick. Regardless, he couldn’t spend the night on the hood of my car!

  “I’ll help you down,” I said slowly.

  The man laughed. His head rose; his face rejuvenated. He pulled off the gray wig and laughed louder. “I told you I’d see you. How about that drink?” It was Skip Weston from Theater on Wheels.

  “Weston,” I said, “you’re quite an actor. I’m just relieved that stomach isn’t real.”

  “I’ll accept your accolades—that’s what I’m in theater for—but they should be aimed not at my acting but my make-up.”

  “You had me going.”

  Weston tossed a pillow—the “stomach”—down onto the wheelchair on the far side of the car. “And this makeup job is almost entirely without putty or wax. Doing an Oriental is a challenge. I wasn’t sure I could convince you. You need the orangey-yellow pancake base, but there’s a gray touch to the skin any amateur will miss. And, of course, the epicanthic fold to the eyes—no easy thing. It would have been much easier for me to be black or Indian, but I wanted to give you the pièce de résistance.”

  “Very convincing.” What was behind Weston’s performance? He’d gone to a lot of trouble; was there more behind this than just the challenge of making me have a drink with him?

  “I’ve spent a lot of time on make-up. It’s especially important in a wheelchair theater where you don’t have all the other possible differentiations between actors. See, appearance is what an audience deals with first. And even that doesn’t have to be perfect. Once you give them the major clues, they fill in around them.”

  “Weston—”

  “You saw an old yellow man here sitting cross-legged, and you assumed the rest. I didn’t have to—”

  “Weston, you’re on my car.”

  “Look, it’s like lying—”

  “Weston—” But he talked through me. Make-up was obviously his passion and I decided it would be easier to wait him out and see if his monologue would reveal the motivation behind his presence here.

  “See, if you sit next to a guy on a bus and he starts telling you the story of his life, you don’t question it. Not so long as there’s internal consistency. Well, that’s how make-up is. It’s a lie with internal consistency.”

  When he paused for breath, I said, “It is interesting, but I’m going to have to ask you to get down off my car.”

  “And then we’ll go for a drink? All this has given me a great thirst.”

  When I hesitated, he added, “The bar I’m suggesting is Dalloway’s in Oakland. It has, among its other attractions, a number of artists who know Donn Day. You were asking about him yesterday. Look on this as work, if that makes it acceptable, though I’d rather you considered it pleasure.”

  With Fern Day lying, I was going to have to deal with Donn and his Monday night whereabouts. “Okay. I’ll meet you there in forty-five minutes. Obviously we both have to change.”

  As I watched him grab the aerial, plant his other hand on the hood, and swing himself down onto the chair, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his gymnastic strength and agility.

  The permanent impression of Skip Weston was, of course, on the hood of the car.

  At home I dawdled in front of the closet, rejecting the idea of wearing my one skirt; regardless of what Weston might think about this meeting, for me it was business. Seeing anyone involved in the case had to be business; socializing could come only after the case was solved.

  I looked wistfully toward my sleeping bag. It had been a long day already.

  Putting on what could only be described as serviceable jeans and a sweater, I headed for the car. The streetlight bounced off the Weston dent. I got in, started the engine, and turned on the radio. There was only static—the Weston-bent aerial.

  I turned the radio off and dedicated the time of my drive to contemplation of Fern Day. Why had she lied about the party at Effield’s? It was a much better alibi than the one she’d given me—at home with her husband. As alibis, spouses were slightly better than pets. If Fern were not protecting herself, was she protecting Donn? Did she suspect Donn had been at Anne’s apartment Monday night?

  I pulled up in front of a plastic-fronted bar—Dalloway’s.

  Inside, the patrons were clumped into groups, one loudly discussing the merits of California sculptors, another complaining about the lack of standards in local art fairs. In the far corner sat Skip Weston.

  In the time I’d changed from uniform to jeans and a sweater, Skip Weston had transformed himself from the ailing octogenarian back to a robust young man. His dark hair glistened and those ebon eyes shone, moving nervously from side to side, finally lighting on me. He smiled and his face relaxed. Had he suspected I wouldn’t come?

  He pulled out a chair and I sat down.

  “Now is the moment of truth,” he said. “What is the nature of this drink you’ve deigned to accept?”

  “A beer,” I said, matching the underlying defensiveness of his tone. “We cops drink beer.”

  “Two Henry’s, Tom,” he said and added to me, “I hope drinking from a glass instead of a bottle won’t destroy your image?”

  “I’ll try to adjust.”

  When the drinks came the waiter settled down with them. In another moment two more men wandered over, greeting Skip Weston with enthusiasm.

  For a while I sat back, listening to their discussion of various gallery shows. There was a quilt show on College Avenue that got high marks, and a pottery exhibit that was dismissed—fit only to eat off.

  “And the Day show opens Friday,” Skip said, with a wink at me.

  “Donn Day?” I put in.

  “Yeah, do you know him?” a blond man asked.

  “Not really. I know of him. I saw one of his paintings this afternoon.” I described the one over Fern’s desk. “I understand it’s not one of his better things.”

  “Few are,” the waiter said.

  “But he’s having a show.”

  “Listen, honey, obviously you aren’t familiar with the art world. Anyone can have a show if they know people. Isn’t that right, Ted?”

  The man called Ted nodded. “But ol’ Donn’s not so bad. I mean, his stuff isn’t. If he were a normal guy instead of such an ass…”

  “And if he didn’t have that behemoth of a wife galumphing around him…”

  They all laughed.

  “But he does have a good sense of color.” Skip said it, and I couldn’t help but feel it was more an attempt to rescue a friend than a true statement of opinion.

  “Do you know Donn well?” I asked Ted.

  “I’ve known him since art school when he was Donald Dahlgren.”

  More laughter.

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  Ted put a hand on my arm. “Do I look like someone who would hang out with Donn Day?”

/>   “Besides,” the waiter said, saving the problem of how to reply, “if the striving Mr. Day is opening Friday, knowing him, he hasn’t been out of the gallery for days. Jesse,” he said to the third man, “do you remember when Day had three canvasses up at the University Museum and he spent two entire days bitching about the lighting?”

  “Do I?” Jesse said. “By the time he finished, he’d raised such a commotion that the staff shifted the lights and left my work in the dark.”

  “Yeah, and yours sold!”

  “A new marketing technique!” Skip added.

  “You may have been missing a good doing with all those lights, Jesse,” the waiter said. “Darkness may be your forte.”

  I laughed with the others. If I could have relaxed, it would have been pleasant here. But I wondered, as I leaned back, half listening to a conversation to which I couldn’t have contributed if I’d wanted—why had Skip Weston insisted I come here? Why had he had his friends all but provide an alibi for Donn Day? And if Donn were occupied Monday, why had Fern lied?

  As the hour drifted toward two A.M., the crowd thinned till only the waiter remained with us. When he got up to answer a call from another table, Skip Weston said to me, “Are you ready to go?”

  I stood up. Weston had managed to talk to me only in the group, and now that that had dissipated, he was leaving. Strange.

  I walked beside him to his van, and as he pulled the wheelchair in after, he said, “You might check Donn Day’s studio.”

  “Why?”

  “It might be interesting.”

  “Look, if you know something—”

  “I don’t know anything. It just could be interesting.”

  He started the engine and I let him go. I had the feeling that the face Skip Weston had shown me tonight was merely another false face, and I didn’t know what was behind it.

  Chapter 13

  AT EIGHT-THIRTY ON the dot Thursday morning I passed five empty desks on my way to Alec Effield’s office in what had once been the kitchen. For one who depended on eight hours of sleep, last night had been a disaster; twice while driving to the office I had realized my eyes were closed. I was only grateful that Nat had not made it to work on time. The last thing I wanted was to deal with him, angry at being interrogated by Howard, and to have our relationship presented to Mona, Alec, and Fern Day in all the bitchiness of post-divorce.

  I moved quickly into Effield’s office. To one side of his desk lay the half-done copy of Suzanne Valadon’s “After the Bath.”

  Glancing at the original sketch pinned on the bulletin board I nodded approvingly. “When it’s done I doubt you could tell your copy from the print.”

  Effield looked away, embarrassed. “Thank you. I like to sketch. I’m afraid I’m not very original, but I do have a facility for reproducing. Unfortunately there’s little call for that in the non-criminal world.”

  I smiled, surprised that Effield would have even that mildly humorous thought. But my silence seemed to unnerve him, as if he were still on the spot from having been complimented.

  “It relaxes me, you see. It’s very orderly, every line has its place. If you’re careful, everything has to come out right, not like in the welfare department.” Looking away, still awkward, he picked up a manila folder marked “Yvonne McIvor.” “I hope this will allay your suspicions.”

  “I hope so.” I sat down on a green chair. “Are you going to call her now?”

  “Clients don’t get up this early, usually.”

  “They do for the police.”

  Effield seemed loathe to press the point. Taking the easier alternative, he dialed the phone and held it out so I could hear it ringing. On the fifth signal a woman’s voice said, “Hello.” She didn’t sound all that groggy to me. Perhaps Effield had been a supervisor too long to recall what time clients arose. He put the receiver back to his ear and I listened as he explained that he was cooperating with the police and Ms. McIvor’s name had been chosen at random to check on quality control. She must have had some hesitation for Effield explained the whole thing again and then answered questions. It was fully five minutes before it was agreed that I would be at her house in half an hour.

  Yvonne McIvor’s apartment was the sole dwelling over a cluster of small shops set apart from rundown stucco houses half a mile west of Telegraph.

  As I climbed the steep, dark stairs between two shops I wondered what kind of woman would brave such an isolated apartment. I must have been expecting an Amazon, for when she opened the door I was surprised to find Yvonne McIvor no taller than myself.

  She was light-skinned for a black woman. As if to refute that lightness she wore a wide Afro and bright dashiki. And her apartment picked up the theme. It was a statement of racial pride, with African batiks on the walls, carved native figures on tables, and record covers featuring black artists displayed from three racks on a floor-to-ceiling pole. An old record player stood next to a battered television set, but it was from a portable radio that the soul music blared forth.

  “You the cop?” the woman asked, turning down the radio.

  I offered her my shield, but the uniform seemed to satisfy her. She motioned me to an old couch covered totally with a fringed rectangle of cloth.

  “So what you want? These welfare dudes, they’re always checkin’ up on each other. They’re so busy watchin’ for rip-offs they got no time for nothin’ else, you see what I mean? But you go ’head, honey, you tell me what you want now. See, ’cause I ain’t gonna fuss. I’m just playin’ the game, you understand?”

  I nodded. “Ms. McIvor, where did you live before you moved here?” In contrast to McIvor, I sounded like a parody of “The Man.”

  “To here? Well, see, I just come here to Berkeley, so I stayed at this hotel. I don’t have people to stay with, so I just stay there till I could find me a nice place.” She lifted her chin, indicating the apartment.

  “When did you move here?”

  “Right on pay day.”

  “You mean as soon as you got your welfare check? The first?”

  “Right.” She leaned back, shoulders moving to the hard beat of the music.

  “And your eligibility worker was Anne Spaulding?”

  “Yeah. I hear she’s gone,” she said, elongating the last word. “That was one tight woman. Honey, she wouldn’t give her own mother a break. If you didn’t have everything, and I mean every little scrap of paper, in at the hour, you was gone. Off. Out in the cold with just your bare ass.”

  “When did you tell her you moved?”

  “The first. I sent in the rent receipt.”

  The first had been Saturday, two days before Anne Spaulding disappeared. “How soon would she have recorded the change?”

  Yvonne McIvor’s brown eyes widened. She shrugged. “I don’t know what she did. I only know I had to let her know right away. Like I say, Miz Spaulding don’t take nothin’ on trust.”

  “Your case file was separate from the others. Why?”

  She shrugged again. “Dunno. Maybe ’cause I moved.”

  I took out the list of clients and read off the other eleven names. “Tell me about these women.”

  “I don’t know them. A couple names I heard.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Linda Faye, I heard that, and Janis Ul…um…Ul-something.”

  “Ulrick. Where do you know them from?”

  “Honey, I don’t know them. I just heard the names. I don’t recall where from.”

  “At the hotel?”

  “Maybe. See, I keeps to myself. I don’t put my business on the street, and when I see someone else’s there, I cross over.”

  I sat a moment, staring at the African batik behind Yvonne. I put the list away. “Anne Spaulding was taking bribes.”

  Yvonne stared, as if waiting for me to continue, then her eyebrows rose. “Listen, honey, you’re not saving I paid her off? Shit What’d I use to pay off with? You see? The welfare don’t give me but two hundred dollars a month. This place h
ere costs a hundred-eighty. Where you think this payoff is gonna come from?”

  I waited. The beat from the radio sounded louder.

  “Why should I pay her? What for? She wasn’t doin’ nothing for me, you hear?”

  “But you know about the bribes, don’t you?”

  “No!” Her fist hit her thigh. “Like I said, I don’t go stickin’ my nose around. Look, when you come up in the ghetto and you stay in dives like that hotel, you learn to be deaf.”

  “Other people, other welfare clients, know. Does it surprise you?”

  She sat forward. “Miz Spaulding, she could. Why not? She sure don’t care about folks. Only thing is, you see, it’s so small time. Miz Spaulding, she’s a high flyer, and the little bit she could get off us—she wouldn’t stoop down to pick it up.”

  “What about her other clients? What did they think of her?”

  Yvonne sat back. She seemed to be considering her response. “I don’t speak for other folks, you understand, but I guess everyone pretty much thought she was shit. Leastways, I never heard nothin’ else. One old dude was carryin’ on how he was goin’ right up to her house and tell her.”

  “You know where she lived?”

  “I don’t, but this dude acted like he did. Like I say, I’m not lookin’ for trouble, so if he say he knows”—she shrugged—“he knows.”

  “What’s his name?”

  She shrugged again. “Search me. He’s just some old dude at the welfare.”

  “A client, you mean?”

  “Honey, they ain’t hardly got no dudes, young or old, workin’ there.”

  “Let’s get back to the old man, the client. When did you hear him threaten to go to Anne Spaulding’s house?”

  “Last week? Week before? Not long ago. He said she better get her act together ’cause he knew what she was and everyone else on the welfare knew and he wasn’t going to put up with no cheat no more.”