Murder Follows Money

by Lora Roberts

  “I’m going to jail no matter what, because if I drive you, I’m an accessory in a homicide.”

  “No, you’re not. There’s no homicide.” Hannah uttered this statement with supreme confidence. “Naomi killed herself, obviously. I’m just trying to get enough breathing space to figure out damage control.”

  I blinked. She was either self-delusional or she had multiple personality disorder. Either way, I didn’t want to be at her mercy. “Hannah, every cop in the city will be looking for you.”

  As if to underscore my words, a ringing noise came from inside her handbag. She opened it, took out the cell phone, and turned it off. With a last beep, it was silent.

  “The police won’t expect to find me in this kind of vehicle.”

  “You’ll be recognized no matter where you go.” I was beginning to feel desperate.

  She reached in her purse, took out a headscarf, and put it on. It transformed her from a fashionably dressed motherly person to a dowdy elderly woman. Nothing could disguise the designer clothes and shoes she wore, but with those hidden by her raincoat, she no longer looked like the famous Hannah Couch who had been on TV the night before.

  “Satisfied?” She glanced at herself in the side-view mirror, craning her neck to get the big picture. “I don’t always go out with an entourage. Naomi and I used to go to flea markets all the time, and no one ever recognized me.”

  There was silence while we both listened to Naomi’s name reverberate through the car. Then Hannah flourished her gun again. “I’m putting this in my raincoat pocket, but it’s trained on you. And let me just say that after my house was burglarized, I spent some time learning to shoot really well. At this distance, I can put a bullet through any part of you that I choose. Stomach wounds are supposed to be very painful to recover from.” She pocketed the gun, and kept her hand in there with it. “So drive.”

  I drove. I pulled back onto Montgomery, crossed Market. Herded by the traffic, I found myself on Howard, veering into the left lane to avoid a lumbering truck, honked at by rushing Infinitis and Lexuses. I turned left onto Hawthorne; there was less traffic.

  “I don’t like this neighborhood.” Hannah looked with disfavor on the grimy storefronts, the homeless winos rolled in their coats like bundles of dirty laundry, not yet awake to face the day. “Go that way.” She pointed down Folsom. “Is that the bay?”

  Would this turn into a kind of bizarre tour? “That’s the bay.” Turning left onto the Embarcadero, I headed northwest. The view out the big front windshield of the bus was a picture-postcard, even in midwinter. Morning fog was piled like whipped cream just beyond the Golden Gate; the early light showed the bridge against it in sharp relief. The water sparkled with whitecaps and the white sails of the occasional sailboat. Grape hyacinths bloomed beneath drifts of tulip trees growing out of large containers around Embarcadero Center. The stop and go traffic brought a welcome slowness to our progress. I hoped some alert policeman was even now phoning in a sighting of the missing Hannah Couch.

  Although that wouldn’t exactly benefit me. Hannah was right: if she claimed I kidnapped her, she’d be far more likely to be believed, especially given my past. No amount of clean living can wipe out an attempted-murder charge. I had finally gotten to a point in my life where I could forget about that part of my history, except when something raked it up again, something like being at risk for once more spending time in jail. I was not at all anxious for that.

  I needed Hannah to turn me loose without involving me in whatever weird scenario had played itself out between her and Naomi. While we waited for the light at Battery, I tried chitchat.

  “So why do you think Naomi killed herself? She doesn’t—didn’t seem like the type to me.”

  “Because no one else would have.” Hannah still didn’t look at me. From the corner of my eye I could see her staring straight ahead. She made no further comment on our route, even when I followed Embarcadero to its end in the heart of tourist territory, Fisherman’s Wharf. Still no one seemed to recognize her; tourists were thin on the ground in January at seven-thirty in the morning. Shopkeepers hosed off their sidewalks, folded back their security gates, and got their stores ready for the day. None of them spared the bus a glance as we meandered past. “Naomi simply wasn’t that important, no matter what she thought.”

  “I’m not sure I buy that.” I swung up Taylor, turned right on Beach. Souvenir shops lined the street on both sides. “You two went back a long way, didn’t you?”

  She was silent for a moment. Then, to my surprise, she answered.

  “We were housemates at Smith.” Her voice sounded younger, less assured. “I was on scholarship, and desperate for money. My family didn’t want me to go to school; they thought I should have gotten a clerical job and brought home my paycheck like a good girl.”

  Again, she fell silent. We turned up Polk by Ghirardelli Square, along North Point, back down Van Ness. I drove as far as I could out the Municipal Pier. People were lined up for coffee at the kiosk near the bocce green. A mounted park ranger stared impassively over the heads of the crowd. The only way I could think to attract her attention was to ram her horse, and that seemed too drastic.

  At the end of the pier I rolled down my window. The rush of cold, salty wind was like a slap in the face.

  “What are we doing here? Keep driving.” Hannah twisted in her seat, looking at the water on one side, the cliff of Fort Mason on the other side. Her hand moved nervously in her raincoat pocket.

  “I wondered if we could hear the Wave Organ from here. It’s around the point, but I think I can. Hear it?” Waves slapped the sides of the pier and crashed through the Wave Organ somewhere west of us, which emitted a hollow, groaning noise. I had always liked it, but now it seemed too macabre. “Never mind. I’ll do you a big favor and show you one of my favorite spots in the whole world.”

  “This isn’t a tour, you know.” Hannah looked at me with disfavor when I turned the bus around and headed back up Van Ness to Bay. I swung into Fort Mason.

  “Where are you going? Is this some kind of police station?”

  “Relax. It’s part of the Park Service, not the army anymore, though they do have an officer’s club over there somewhere.” I drove down a little street, with old houses on it that dated back to the military’s first presence in San Francisco in the late 1880s. Some of the houses were still occupied by army personnel; children scampered out a front door, intent on catching the school bus. “There’s a youth hostel here. And something else very special.” I parked the bus and opened my door. “Come on.”

  “I don’t like this. What are you doing?”

  “I’m showing you something.” I turned and gestured. It made me very nervous, the way she fingered that gun, but I thought if I could loosen her up a little, get her to follow my lead, she’d eventually stop bossing me and come to her senses. “It’s nothing to do with police or people in any way. Come on.”

  She climbed down from her side of the bus, managing to do so with her hand still in her pocket. “You are asking to be shot,” she threatened, but she didn’t do anything. At that moment, I felt my first tremor of doubt that she had killed Naomi. If she was ruthless enough to poison her longtime associate in front of witnesses, she was surely ruthless enough to shoot me and commandeer the bus.

  Instead, she followed me along the path through the trees. I hadn’t been to the spot in a long time, but it was still just as I remembered it—a small clearing in the thick vegetation, with a bench positioned to look out over the steep cliff that marked the end of Fort Mason. From the bench, a perfect vignette of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin headlands, and the distant buildings of Sausalito was framed by the surrounding greenery.

  “Sit,” I invited Hannah, doing so myself. “Take it in. It’s very peaceful.”

  She sat, still pointing that stupid gun at me. The air was incredibly fresh, as if it had never been breathed before. It was impossible not to breathe deeply. I felt more relaxed almost insta
ntaneously. I hoped its magic would work on Hannah too.

  I could see her chest lifting. For a few minutes she didn’t speak. I let the silence settle around us. If you were striving for clarity of thought, this was a good place to be.

  Of course, it was also a good place to kill someone and leave the body.

  I hoped that idea hadn’t occurred to Hannah. I heard her breathing deepen and slow, and tried to project an aura of calm reflection.

  How long we sat like that, I don’t know, but after a while I heard a surprising sound—sniffles. Hannah was crying.

  “Are you okay?” I groped in my pocket, but she was already patting her damp eyes with a hankie.

  “I miss Naomi,” she gulped. “She’s been with me for nearly forty years. All that time, we had a common goal. I always thought it was the most important thing to her— really, to both of us. Why, she never even married, she was so intent on our work.”

  “How did you start out?”

  At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer my question. Then she put the hankie away and started talking.

  “We were in Talbot at Smith. We ended up in the kitchen, cooking to earn our board.” Hannah’s lips thinned. “That’s when I realized that most Americans don’t have the foggiest idea of how to take good ingredients and make a meal, cookbook or not. I mean, even in the fifties, women were slavish devotees of Betty Crocker and mixes and instant foods. It was no wonder those girls liked my cooking; the previous cook had left a pantry lined with huge cans of soup and soggy vegetables and pie apples. They were so happy to get food that tasted real.”

  “Naomi worked in the kitchen too?”

  “She also needed money. I had been on the verge of dropping out because even with a scholarship, I couldn’t afford books or clothes, and she was in much the same straits. Her voice turned introspective. “My family wouldn’t help me. In my father’s opinion, college was a foolish dream. I could get a job in the local bakery, or for real class, an office job. I’d get married, and any education would be wasted once that happened. That’s how it was done in his world. I was truly at the end of my rope, financially.”

  “So that was what led to the Roxy Ripper thing?”

  She reared back, staring at me, outraged. Then, as quickly as it had come, her anger left; she sighed. “I only did it for a month. I was desperate, and so was Naomi. She didn’t mention that in her nasty memoir. We both went down to try out when we heard they were hiring, but they weren’t interested in her scrawny body.” She stopped short and used the hankie again. “God, I hate sounding so awful. But she really made me mad, implying I did that for fun. Hell, I paid her board bill as well as my own before I quit.”

  “I thought you were in the dorm kitchen.”

  “After my brief and unlamented turn as a stripper, I got the cooking job.” She was lost in her story, but not so lost that she forgot to point the gun at me. It seemed to me I was better off trying to talk her out of it than trying to take it from her. Something told me Hannah didn’t like having things taken from her.

  “And that was when you and Naomi started working together?”

  “I needed a helper, so I offered the job to Naomi.” Hannah shrugged. “We worked well together. She was smart enough to know when she didn’t know something, and to follow instructions.”

  “Was your degree in domestic science?”

  “No, accounting.” She laughed. It was a rusty sound, as if not well used. “I was always good with numbers. But accounting was dull. My first job was in a stuffy firm in Boston. They didn’t really approve of women working, and wouldn’t have hired me if I’d been married.” She snorted. “Girls today have no idea of what it was like to make your way back then. Kim thinks it’s always easy to get a job that you enjoy doing. She hasn’t got a clue.”

  “How long did you do accounting?” It occurred to me that if I got out of this alive, I would have the ingredients for a very special interview with the famous Hannah Couch, an interview that would sell for a very nice price to a prestigious magazine. Or, if Hannah ended up in jail, to a less-prestigious rag that would pay even better. I wished I had my notebook, or even the little tape recorder Drake had given me for interviews.

  “Not long.” She was relaxed, now. Still gripping the gun, but not as if it were surgically embedded in her hand. My mind raced in a different direction. Could I disarm her? If there was shooting at this range someone would get hurt, and it would most probably be me. I decided to wait to try anything drastic, unless things got much dicier.

  “I got tired of crunching numbers for other people in less than a year. And I had catered a couple of parties—one for Naomi’s brother Tony’s wedding, and one for someone in the office. I realized I had a gift for it. And it was far more rewarding. Naomi and I formed a catering company, and I resigned from the accounting firm. They were sorry—realized too late what they were losing.” She laughed. I had been on the verge of liking her, but that unconscious arrogance nipped it in the bud. “They offered me a nice raise. But by then I knew what I wanted to do. And everything grew from that.”

  “So Naomi was your partner all along?”

  “She never had much vision,” Hannah said judiciously, “but she was great at executing. When I realized that ice sculptures would start a new craze, she was the person who found the one place left to get European-style ice sculptures. I’m going to miss her.”

  “So why did you cheat her over the crepe maker?”

  She turned to me, her eyes wrathful. “Don’t believe everything you hear. Naomi was getting greedy. She wanted to be a creative partner as well as a business one, even though mine has always been the guiding vision in our company. I commissioned that crepe maker with some other kitchen tools for a new line we’re going to offer in our catalog.”

  “So she didn’t invent it?”

  Hannah took a few more deep breaths. “It’s true that Naomi had one good idea about it. But she didn’t design it alone. I did a lot of the work too. And she didn’t build it—our contractor did. I gave her a very nice bonus for her contribution, but she wanted more.” Hannah’s jaw firmed. “If she hadn’t killed herself, we’d have probably come to a parting of the ways. I was getting fed up with her need to be in the limelight.”

  Because that was your place, I thought, but had the brains not to say. Obviously Hannah would brook no competition at center stage.

  Our solitude was disturbed by a man with a very large golden retriever, out for a morning stroll. The dog was interested in my pants legs, which probably smelled like Barker if your nose was very accurate. I scratched the dog’s ears, earning a blissful look from the dog and a chatty “Good morning” from its owner.

  Hannah stood up. “Let’s go,” she muttered, her hand once again in the raincoat pocket. I sighed and got to my feet. If our little interlude had been my opportunity to disarm my captor, I had blown it, so interested had I been in her recounting of tales from her past.

  She marched me back to the bus, and once more had me climb into it from the passenger side, following me in quickly so I couldn’t prepare any surprise for her. I drove back through Fort Mason while she fiddled with the radio, finally finding an all-news station. We listened in silence as a perky traffic reporter told us that traffic was sluggish on all approaches to the City. Several commercials followed. Then the news, full of depressing stories about blizzards, war, and Biblical-quality famine in various parts of the world.

  “In local news,” the radio chirped, “celebrity Hannah Couch is being sought for questioning in the suspicious death of her business partner, Naomi Matthews. The death occurred early this morning at the luxurious hotel where the two were staying while on a promotional tour for Ms. Couch’s new cookbook.”

  “Cookbook!” Hannah was outraged. “Hannah Hosts Brunch is far more than a cookbook!”

  “Shh.” I turned up the radio. “Let’s listen to this.”

  “… believe she might have been abducted in connection with the death.
Police are not saying if a ransom demand has been received, or if they have any leads on Ms. Couch’s whereabouts. Her great visibility as a celebrity will no doubt help them find her.

  “The threatened Muni strike—”

  Hannah turned the radio off. “You see. They think I’ve been abducted.”

  “You didn’t hear who they thought was kidnapped,” I pointed out. “It might have been me.”

  Stopped at the Lombard Street light, we stared at each other for a minute. Ringing commenced again.

  “I thought I turned that thing off.” Hannah took out her phone. It was still off. The ringing continued. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  The ringing was coming from my backpack. Hannah rummaged in it, found Judi Kershay’s phone, and turned it off. The light changed.

  “I need a better disguise,” Hannah said worriedly. “Is there a BigMart around here?”

  “The only one I know about is in Redwood City.” I waited for it to occur to Hannah that the police would be looking for my bus. She didn’t appear to realize that, and I wasn’t going to enlighten her. Even if they thought I’d abducted her, it would get straightened out sooner or later once they’d stopped us and gotten the gun away from her.

  “How far is Redwood City?”

  “It’s about thirty miles.”

  “We can’t really stop at a phone booth to look in the phone book for a closer one,” she fretted.

  “Probably no phone book in most booths anyway.”

  “I guess we’d better go where you know to go,” she decided. “Just get on the highway. Too many cops hanging around the city streets.”