Dead Midnight

by Marcia Muller

  “In what way?”

  The anger was out now, sparking in his eyes, making him clench his thighs with his hands. A couple at the next table glanced over at the sound of his raised voice, quickly looked away.

  “You wanta know how? Dad’s obsessed with this lawsuit. He says he’s gonna get the people who forced Rog to kill himself. Well, bullshit! Nobody forces you to do that. And Mom—she finally couldn’t take it anymore. She moved out of the house and is living in her office, for Christ’s sake. Me, I don’t go home anymore. And Harry—Jesus!”

  “What about Harry?”

  “I guess you haven’t talked with him yet.”

  “No.”

  “Well, when you do, you’ll see what Rog did to him.”

  I’d planned to ask Eddie about Roger’s final e-mail to him, as well as about the insurance policy his brother had wanted him to help Jody Houston locate, but that would have to wait till another time. After his angry outburst he’d abruptly ended our interview, saying he had to get to class. After walking back to the parking garage where I’d left my car, I took out my phone and began to make calls; its battery was low, and the unit emitted little chirps while I spoke. Not that the conversations were long. The friends of Roger I had yet to contact were either out of the office or on another line, and would have to get back to me about scheduling an appointment. When I checked with my own office for messages, Ted sounded out of sorts. Hy had called from Bangkok, he said. Otherwise there was nothing of importance.

  Bangkok. Hy had flown there on Monday to train operatives of Renshaw and Kessell International, the corporate security firm in which he held a one-third interest, in hostage-negotiation techniques. I wrestled with time zones, the International Date Line, and quickly gave up.

  “What time is it there?” I asked Ted.

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Well, when did he call?”

  “About two hours ago. Hold on.”

  I heard his swivel chair squeak, and then there was a thump and a curse. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I am if you discount the fact that the stack of phone books just fell on my foot because someone piled them too high.”

  “Not me.”

  “For a change.” In the pause that followed, pages riffled. “Yeah, here it is. International calling section. Bangkok’s plus fifteen hours.”

  “That can’t be right. It’s to the west. Plus is to the east.”

  “Bangkok’s halfway around the world, more or less. It’s also east of here.”

  “But if I were flying, I’d go west.”

  “But you could fly east.”

  “Oh. I guess it works that way with everyplace.”

  “Unless it’s north and south. Or northeast and southwest, or—”

  The conversation was making my head ache. “Enough! Fifteen plus, huh?” It was twelve-twenty; that made it three-twenty in the morning in Thailand. Too late to return the call, unless it was urgent. “What did he say?”

  “Who?”

  “Hy!”

  “Oh, him. He wanted to know if you got the rose.”

  “Of course I did.” A single rose—dark red, almost black, was delivered to my office every Tuesday morning; Hy had been sending them since a few days after we met, although the color had changed as the relationship deepened. “Why would he ask?”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of secret code.” Ted liked Hy, but he tended to become sarcastic about his line of work. He disapproved of it and of him having enticed me into becoming a pilot—both too dangerous, in his opinion.

  “Well, if you crack it, let me know,” I said, and ended the call.

  I looked longingly at my phone. Very late or not, I would have liked to talk with Hy. But my next appointment, with Margaret Nagasawa, was scheduled for one-thirty, allowing me little time to drive back to the city, park at the Sutter-Stockton garage, and walk over to the offices of Carefree Days Publishing on Tillman Place.

  Tillman Place is one of the old-fashioned little lanes that abound in the city, a few blocks from the northeast corner of Union Square. Walking along on its cobblestones, I felt as if I had been transported back to the days of the Barbary Coast, when San Francisco was a wide-open town filled with miners down from the Mother Lode, seamen off ships out of faraway ports, and gamblers and con men and ladies of the night eager to fleece them of their hard-earned cash.

  In college I’d made forays from Berkeley to the city and discovered a restaurant at the lane’s end—the Temple Bar, a small, dark place where regulars rolled dice for drinks and society ladies stopped in for trysts after a hard day’s shopping at I. Magnin. Magnin’s is long gone now, its space absorbed into Macy’s, and so is the Temple Bar. Gone also is the small bookshop that used to draw many a reader down the lane, but Margaret Nagasawa’s publishing firm was housed in the building a couple of doors down from the shop’s former quarters—proving that progress had not yet robbed Tillman Place of things literary.

  Carefree Days’ top-floor suite of offices was spacious and filled with light, even on this gloomy day. Brightly colored posters of book jackets hung on the walls in the reception area, and dozens of orchid plants bloomed in ceramic pots. When the receptionist led me to Mrs. Nagasawa’s office, Roger’s mother rose from behind her desk and came forward to greet me. She was small, almost frail in appearance, with gray hair sleeked back and tied in a ponytail. The tail gave her a girlish air, but the deep circles under her eyes and lines around her mouth said that her concerns were far from those of girlhood. She shook my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and motioned for me to be seated in one of a pair of wingback chairs. Then she took the other, smoothing the skirt of her stylish black suit as she sat.

  I thanked her for taking the time to talk with me and glanced around the office. It was as fully cluttered as her husband’s: manuscripts on the floor; books stacked helterskelter on the shelves; sketches of jackets propped against the walls. Once beyond the desk she would have to tread carefully to avoid stepping on what could be the next Wizard of Oz, Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or Harry Potter. Eddie had said his mother was currently living in her office, but where? There was a sofa, but it too was piled high with books, boxes, and files.

  Mrs. Nagasawa said, “I’m glad you agreed to gather evidence for our suit. It’s a complicated job, calling for considerable expertise. And, of course, there are time pressures.”

  “Glenn said you were eager to serve papers on InSite.”

  “My husband is eager. And I am eager to have the matter over with.”

  “I spoke with Eddie earlier. He told me Dr. Nagasawa is … very committed to the suit.”

  She smiled faintly. “You’re a tactful woman, Ms. McCone. Eddie said his father is obsessed with the lawsuit. I hear that every time I talk with him. I suppose he also told you I’ve moved from the house to an apartment in this building.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  She shook her head. “Eddie is so young. He thinks it’s the end of our marriage. The end of his world as he’s known it. He doesn’t understand that in a good marriage you often have to give the other person space to do what he must, but that you don’t necessarily have to allow him to poison your space.”

  “So the arrangement is temporary.”

  “Yes, and Daniel agrees to it. I wish our boys could understand.”

  “Harry doesn’t understand either?”

  A wary look, similar to Eddie’s when he’d mentioned his older brother, crossed her face. “You haven’t spoken with him yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then I think it’s best to allow you to draw your own conclusions.”

  My meeting with Harry was set for three o’clock at the family home in the exclusive Cow Hollow district. It was bound to be interesting.

  “Let’s talk about Roger,” I said, taking out my recorder.

  Roger, Margaret Nagasawa told me, had always been a sensitive child, easily hurt and full of empathy for others. When he was eight h
e bought three goldfish from the pet shop on Maiden Lane, and as they died one day after the other, he grieved as if they were human. If his brothers were punished for some infraction of the family rules, he suffered as if he were the miscreant. And if he accidentally hurt someone’s feelings, he wallowed in guilt for days.

  “He was aware his reactions were out of proportion,” his mother said, “and not without a sense of humor. He was fond of saying that if he’d been born two decades earlier he would have felt personally responsible for the Vietnam War.”

  During his adolescence Roger became moody and withdrawn. He had only one close friend, a classmate named Gene Edwards. Gene was more sociable than Roger, and from eighth grade on always had a steady girlfriend; he and the various girls would fix Roger up with their friends, but the dates were unsuccessful at best, fiascos at worst. Finally Gene stopped trying. Then, in his senior year of high school, Roger fell in love.

  “The girl,” Mrs. Nagasawa told me, “was lovely, but wild and unpredictable. We didn’t really approve of her, but she brought Roger out of his shell, so we decided to keep him on a loose leash. They were together twenty-four seven, as the kids say today. They made joint plans to attend U.C. Berkeley in the fall, but that summer she ran off to Hawaii with an older boy who was visiting her brother.”

  Roger had been devastated. He disappeared from home and, when he returned shortly after his frantic parents filed a missing-person report, he refused to say where he had been or what he’d been doing. From his appearance, they suspected heavy drug and alcohol use. After that he withdrew to his room, neither eating anything from the trays they placed outside his locked door nor answering them when they tried to talk through it.

  “He proved he had backbone, though,” his mother said, “because in three days he came out of there with a plan.”

  He had decided not to enroll at Berkeley—too painful in light of the plans he and his girlfriend had made. Instead he would work for Margaret’s publishing firm for a year and study journalism at City College. He would also reactivate his application to the University of Michigan, one of several schools where he’d been accepted, and enroll there the following fall. He carried out the plan to the letter, left the next August, and except for brief visits at the holidays didn’t return to San Francisco for close to seven years.

  “Effectively we lost him,” Margaret said. “It was as if he blamed us for what the girl did to him.”

  “I doubt that. He probably didn’t want to be reminded of the relationship. What happened to her, do you know?”

  “She married the boy she ran off with, then returned here, divorced, a few years later. At least that’s what Harry says. He was a friend of her older brother, the one the boy from Hawaii was visiting.”

  “And her name is?”

  “Dinah Vardon.”

  Dinah Vardon, the Webmaster at InSite. “Are you aware that she and Roger worked together at the magazine?”

  Margaret’s eyes flickered with surprise. “Roger never mentioned her. Perhaps she didn’t matter to him anymore. Or perhaps they were able to put the past behind them and become friends.”

  “It’s possible. This friend of Roger’s—Gene Edwards. He’s not on my list of people to interview. Were they still in touch?”

  She looked away from me. “Gene’s dead. He … killed himself two years ago, after his wife left him. On Christmas Day.”

  Another suicide, on another special day. Christmas, for Gene. Valentine’s, for Roger. What day had Joey died? April sixth. He’d been dead for seventy-two hours before anyone found him. Nothing special about April sixth, though—

  Nothing? Jesus! April sixth was Joey’s birthday.

  “Ms. McCone?” Margaret Nagasawa’s voice sounded far away. “What is it?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking.”

  No, I thought, I wasn’t thinking at all. Not when it came to my brother.

  It was very late in Bangkok—or very early, depending on your point of view—but I badly needed to hear Hy’s voice reassure me that I wasn’t the monstrously uncaring person I felt like. Trouble was, I also needed a phone that didn’t chirp at me every fifteen seconds.

  As I merged with the sidewalk crowd on Grant Avenue, I looked around. Chichi shops, restaurants, and not a phone booth in sight. The prevalence of cellular units was forcing the phone company to phase out many booths, and it had been my experience that when you found a working one it was bound to be in an inconvenient and noisy spot. Besides, if I stopped to make a call, I’d be cutting it close for my appointment with Harry Nagasawa. I scuttled the notion for now and headed for the parking garage.

  The family’s home was on Vallejo Street in Cow Hollow, a district named for the dairy farms that once were prevalent there. Nowadays the only bovines associated with the place are cash cows—the buildings from which owners frequently milk huge profits. The Nagasawas’ block was quiet and tree-lined, the house a large tan stucco with a blue tiled roof, a small front garden surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, and a pair of yew trees in gigantic blue urns to either side of the door. Impressive, even in this area of very impressive homes.

  When I pushed the bell it rang softly. I waited, but no one answered. I rang again, and yet again. Had Harry forgotten our appointment?

  Tires squealed a block away. I turned, saw a red Porsche careening around the corner. Rae called Porsches “asshole-creating machines,” and she should know; Ricky owned one, and whenever either of them got behind the wheel they turned into maniacs. Obviously this car had exerted a similar affect on its driver.

  The Porsche screeched to a stop at the curb in front of the Nagasawa house and stalled. A man leaped out, his black hair tousled and his chinos and Henley shirt looking as if he’d slept in them. A pair of sunglasses with one missing earpiece perched crooked on his nose.

  “Sharon McCone?” he called as he came up the walk, tripping on an untied shoelace. “I’m Harry, Harry Nagasawa. Sorry I’m late, but I got tied up at the hospital—and now I’m untied.” He let loose with a shrill laugh and bent down to fiddle with the lace.

  “Housekeeper’s day off,” he said, speaking to the ground. “Otherwise she’d’ve been here. Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? What I mean is that you wouldn’t’ve had to wait outside.” He straightened, launched himself at me, and shook my hand, pumping it up and down. Then he aimed a key at the lock and missed, nicking the door’s varnish with its tip.

  This man was a resident in cardiac surgery?

  Harry finally got the door unlocked and rushed inside. I followed him into a large tiled hallway. It was filled with plants in more urns—silk, but good imitations—and several of a hand-painted type of chest that I’d heard referred to as tansu. Harry heaved his keys and sunglasses at one of them, and both slid to the floor behind it. He didn’t appear to notice.

  “Come this way,” he said, and led me to a parlor to the right. The room was so crowded with objects that I stopped on the threshold to study them. Scroll paintings and statues and temple lamps vied for space with massive leather furniture. Tables were covered with embroidered silks and ivory and jade netsuke. Harry lurched across to a wet bar on the far wall, narrowly missing a porcelain cat that sat haughtily beside an armchair.

  “Drink?” he asked. “You’ll like this Viognier my father stocks for my mother. She doesn’t live here anymore, but he still keeps it on ice, hoping.”

  It was too early for wine, but I sensed Harry was intent on drinking and would take offense at being forced to do so alone. As he plied the corkscrew without waiting for my assent, he babbled on about the vintage, and I realized I had yet to utter a word during our brief acquaintance.

  He carried the drinks—something dark and strong-looking for himself—over to a coffee table and motioned for me to sit on the sofa. After I asked if I could record our conversation and positioned the machine, he gulped most of the liquor, closing his eyes as if he were taking medicine. And of course he was—the classic signs of a person who had
been self-medicating in various ways were all present, and why wasn’t anyone in his family or at the hospital doing something about it?

  “You’re here to ask me what I thought about Rog, right?” he said. “Well, I thought he was a total asshole.”

  No subtle probing necessary with Harry. “Have you always thought that way, or only since he killed himself ?”

  “Always. Rog was born a jerk. Whiney, sulky, self-righteous, self-involved. Sensitive, Mom said. Easily wounded, Dad said. A pain in the ass, I said. Of course, nobody listened to me.”

  “You expressed your opinion?”

  “We kids were taught to always say what we think.”

  “How did Roger react?”

  “How d’you suppose? He whined and sulked.”

  “Then it would be an understatement to say you weren’t close.”

  “Rog was a loner, not close to anybody. During the time he lived here before he bought his flat, he barely spoke. It was a relief to see him go.”

  “And I don’t suppose he told you anything about what went on at InSite.”

  “He didn’t talk about his job to any of us.” Harry rattled the ice in his glass, went to the bar for a refill.

  “What about his final e-mail to you? Did he say anything in it?”

  “His what?”

  “In his journal entry the day he died, he said he’d e-mailed both you and Eddie.”

  “Oh, that. I don’t know what he said; I deleted it without opening it.” He paused. “I sense you don’t approve of our relationship.”

  “I’m not here to judge you.”

  “That’s good, because you don’t understand the situation. Nobody does. Rog gave my parents a lot of grief his whole life.” He returned to his chair, flopped into it heavily. “He ran away from home because he was disappointed in love—at eighteen, for God’s sake. By eighteen I’d been disappointed in any number of things, but I didn’t turn my back on my family. For the next seven years, every time he paid a visit he put a downer on all of us. And then the son of a bitch knocked himself off. My folks’re never going to recover from that.”