Nobody's Child (The Jeri Howard Series Book 5)

by Janet Dawson

  “Certainly.” I wasn’t planning on leaving, not until I got some answers. Ramona Clark spooned loose tea into a ceramic pot and filled it with water from the teakettle.

  “Who’s the professor?”

  Neither woman made any attempt to answer. Instead they exchanged looks that I tried to read. This was an odd relationship. Something more than rich matron and housekeeper. I wondered how long it had been woven in this texture.

  “All right. Let’s try a different tack. Why did Maureen run away?”

  “I have no idea.” Naomi Smith spat the words at me as though they had a bad taste. “I don’t know where she went. I don’t know why she came back.”

  Neither did I, if this was the reception that awaited her. “You only want to know if she’s dead. Why bother?”

  She dropped her eyes. “I have to know.”

  “You will, as soon as the police get those dental records.” Something in my gut told me that corpse in the muddy grave was Maureen Smith. Still unmourned, if I read correctly the vibrations emanating from this expensive mausoleum.

  “What about your granddaughter?” She grimaced at my use of the word to describe her family relationship with the little girl in the photos and glanced quickly away, hoping I wouldn’t notice her revulsion. “Do you want me to find her?”

  “Of course she does,” Ramona Clark said. Her mouth quirked. Clearly she knew how her employer felt about her daughter’s child being fathered by a black man, and it amused her.

  “Who is the professor?” I asked again.

  “That’s none of your damn business.” Naomi Smith turned as stony as the exterior of her house and the wall that encircled it. She folded her arms around her like a barrier and pushed through the door, fleeing the kitchen and my questions.

  “The professor is a man Naomi was involved with.” Ramona Clark handed me a cup of hot dark tea that burned my tongue when I tried to take a sip. “He left about the same time Maureen did. That ski trip to Tahoe marked the end of the relationship. I think Naomi wonders if the professor had something to do with Maureen leaving.”

  “Now why would Naomi think that?” I asked, remembering Detective Portillo’s comment earlier today, about teenage girls running away to be with older men. Ramona Clark seemed to be implying that something had been going on between Maureen and the professor, but she wasn’t saying it directly.

  “I don’t know why,” Ramona Clark said. “His name’s Douglas Widener. Maybe you should ask him.”

  “I will. Any idea where I can find him?”

  “Three years ago he was teaching math at San Francisco State. If he’s not there now, I don’t know where he is. She really does want to find the baby.” I raised one eyebrow, signaling my disbelief, and she favored me with a smile tinged with weariness. “You’ll have to forgive her. It’s just her way. She feels guilty about Maureen, you see.”

  “Guilty about what?” I sipped the tea and scalded my tongue.

  “That the girl ran away in the first place. That she didn’t try hard enough to find Maureen. That she wasn’t able to make Maureen stay when she came here last March, when I took those pictures.”

  “Did she? Try, I mean.”

  Ramona Clark stirred a spoonful of sugar into her tea. “Naomi’s not a very loving woman. And she has a little trouble getting past the black-and-white thing.”

  “I noticed. Do you know why Maureen left? Or where she went after she left home?”

  “No.” The older woman shook her head. A sad smile curved her lips as she raised the cup. “I wish I did. Maybe I could have helped. But it’s too late for that. Too late for a lot of things.”

  I reached for one of the snapshots that showed Maureen holding Dyese. Maureen was past help, but there was still a chance for her child.

  If I could find her.

  Four

  I LIKE TO SPEND SATURDAY MORNINGS SLEEPING IN, but things often conspire against me. My cat Abigail doesn’t understand weekend. Her internal chronometer goes off not long after the sun comes up, no matter what day it is. When it does, she pads from the foot of the bed where she’s spent the night curled up next to my feet and deposits her brown-and-silver tabby bulk on my chest. Then she pats my face with her paw until I get up to feed her. Only then can we both go back to bed for a prolonged snooze.

  This morning we got an even earlier start. Just after dawn a sound outside the bedroom window propelled Abigail off the bed with an agility unexpected in a cat that likes her food so much. I lay on my back, down comforter pulled up to my chin, and listened. It was raining, of course. We weren’t up to forty days and nights yet, but it was getting close. I filtered out early morning city sounds and the drip-drip-drip of rain from the gutters on the roof of my Adams Point apartment building. There it was again. It sounded like a cat mewing, faintly, somewhere at the back of my ground floor apartment. Abigail growled deep in her throat, every whisker at the ready as she went into Intruder Alert. I pushed back the comforter and stepped out, shivering in the oversize T-shirt that served as a nightgown. As a concession to the December chill I also wore a pair of woolly knee-high socks.

  Abigail was on the chair next to the dresser. She’d pushed aside the vertical blinds in the back window and was peering out onto my patio. I peered with her, eyes searching the shadows banked against the fence that separated the patio from the apartment building behind, my head cocked as I listened. Again I heard that faint mew. It sounded like a kitten. I could have been wrong, though. Raccoons were not uncommon in Oakland’s residential neighborhoods, even this close to downtown high rises. I’d even seen possums, endearingly ugly nocturnal creatures. Did raccoons make noises? I listened again. No, it really did sound like a kitten. I couldn’t tell which direction the sound came from, nor did I see any movement, human or animal, in the dim light of early morning.

  Abigail growled again and twitched her tail back and forth. When I moved away from the window, she jumped down from the chair and headed for the kitchen. With impeccable cat logic, she figured as long as I was up I might as well dish up some of that fragrant canned stuff. I obliged, and put on a pot of coffee as well. Then we went back to bed, but not for long. I had an appointment.

  I never figured Duffy LeBard for an architecture buff. I met the Navy chief petty officer four months ago while working on the Raynor case. He’s a big good-looking Cajun from some little bayou southwest of Baton Rouge. We flirted with each other from the minute we met, despite the fact that I was dating someone else, a Navy lieutenant commander named Alex Tongco. My relationship with Alex had run its course. Just as well. Alex had orders to the Pentagon and was even now on his way to Washington, D.C.

  I liked Duffy. He was great fun to be with. There was definitely a physical attraction between the two of us, but at the moment we were just friends, sharing some mutual interests. He and I both love good food, which is to be had in abundance all over the Bay Area, so we’d explored restaurants both fancy and funky. I like jazz too, and Duffy had expanded my musical horizon to include zydeco and blues at the many clubs that dot the East Bay scene.

  But architecture was totally unexpected. Which was why, on this first Saturday morning in December, I waited just inside the box office entrance of the Paramount Theatre in downtown Oakland, wearing blue jeans, a sweater, and a jacket, bundled up against the rain and cold. The Paramount offers tours on the first and third Saturdays of the month, at ten in the morning, for the minimal sum of a buck. Duffy and I had come to the theater a few weeks ago, on Halloween weekend, when the feature on the Paramount’s Friday night classic movie series was Lon Chaney’s silent classic, Phantom of the Opera, complete with musical accompaniment on the mighty Wurlitzer organ. Duffy had been blown away by this example of Art Deco Moderne architecture and insisted that we take the tour at the first opportunity.

  I saw him loping across Twenty-first Street toward this side entrance, hands stuck into the pockets of a blue jacket, dressed as I was in jeans and sweater. His head was bare and his wa
vy black hair beaded with rain, the drops sparkling in among the silver threads at his temples. His six-foot-three broad-shouldered frame filled the doorway as he stepped inside and grinned down at me, a twinkle in his heavy-lidded brown eyes.

  “You look like you haven’t had enough coffee,” he drawled.

  “I haven’t. You’re buying me breakfast after this tour, so I can get some more.”

  Duffy and I went inside, where four pairs of clouded glass doors etched with musical instruments led into the theater’s side lobby. All of these were closed, except one where a security guard sat at a table. Above the door hung a banner which read, YOUR PARAMOUNT THEATRE—IT’S ABSOLUTELY PARAMOUNT!

  When I’d arrived, there had been two other early risers awaiting the theater tour, an older couple wearing sweatsuits under their raincoats. They had been joined by three others, two women and a man, younger than me and Duffy. Now a family of four, Dad, Mom, a boy and a girl, all looking like stair steps, joined us as we waited for our guide. Duffy and I stood to one side, next to the box office window, where tickets were now available for the Oakland Ballet’s yearly production of The Nutcracker.

  “I want to see that,” Duffy said. “Pick a date and we’ll go.”

  “I didn’t figure you for ballet either.”

  He fluttered a pair of impossibly long lashes and grinned again. “I’m a man of many charms,” he drawled, “some as yet undiscovered.”

  I snorted. An older man with a stoop and a pair of bifocals joined us in the box office foyer. He announced that he was Joseph, our guide, and he would conduct us on our tour. First he collected a dollar from each of us, then he shepherded us past the guard into the side lobby.

  “The Paramount Theatre was designed by architect Timothy Pfleuger,” Joseph began, wading into the center of the group. “It’s one of the few surviving Art Deco movie palaces in this country. There aren’t many of them left.”

  The older man nodded in agreement. “I remember when they tore down the Fox over in San Francisco. That was a gorgeous theater.”

  “The wrecker’s ball got a lot of them in the sixties and seventies,” Joseph said. “To make room for more office buildings and parking lots. Well, the Paramount is an outstanding example of the Art Deco style, like Radio City Music Hall and the Pantages in Hollywood. It was built in 1931, in the middle of the Depression, and it closed just six months later. It reopened a year later and operated during World War II.”

  “I remember,” the older woman interjected. “I used to come here when I was working in a defense plant up in Richmond.”

  “I was in the Navy myself,” Joseph said with a smile as he moved us deeper into the theater. “You recall how hard it was to find a room for the night back then. People would buy tickets to the movies and sleep here at the theater. Anyway, it operated through the fifties and sixties and finally closed in 1970. It was in pretty sad shape then. You know how people smoked back then. The place had forty years of grit and smoke.”

  “Then the symphony bought it, right?” This question came from one of the younger women on the tour.

  “Correct. In 1972 the Paramount was purchased by the Oakland Symphony and restored at a cost of one million dollars. Fortunately, we had most of the original furniture, fixtures, and surfaces to work with, as well as a complete set of photographs taken when the theater opened in 1931.”

  Joseph stopped and gestured with his left arm, the affection he felt for the theater evident in his reverent tone. “This is the Grand Lobby.”

  I’d been in this theater many times before, but those visits had so far been limited to nights when the deep salmon-colored curtain, appliquéd with silver and gold, opened to reveal the movie screen or the performers of the Oakland Ballet. On those nights the lobby was lit up and full of people. Under the buzz of voices one could hear music. If it was a movie night, the huge Wurlitzer organ on stage right would be playing show tunes and movie themes as the audience sang along and clapped in time. During ballet season the orchestra tuned up, with preliminary squeaks and scales, before the conductor’s baton signaled silence, then the overture.

  The theater was different in daylight, dim and silent, as though it hadn’t quite made it out of bed yet. I followed our tour group into the lobby that fronted on Broadway. This part of the theater had glistening black marble walls and a pair of staircases curving over the entrance we’d just walked through, rising to the mezzanine. The carpet throughout the theater was predominately green, with repeating shapes of leaves, vines, and flowers.

  “Notice the cookie-cutter ceiling,” Joseph said. All of us obediently tilted our heads upward, to the metal ceiling lit by hidden green lights. “Pfleuger liked to play with light and air vents. This ceiling is a grill of galvanized metal strips formed into patterns and hung from the plaster domed roof by slender steel rods. The air circulating system is integrated with the lighting.”

  Duffy looked like he’d gone to heaven. “This is fascinating,” he whispered to me as we went down to the lower level lounge area to inspect the terrazzo floors in the men’s room and ornate murals on the walls of what had been the women’s smoking lounge. All the while Joseph entertained us with anecdotes about the theater’s restoration, then he led us up into the auditorium, called the house, where the architect had again used the lights, in this case metal lotuses, as vents for the air-conditioning system.

  The curtain was open, revealing the sets for The Nutcracker hovering in the shadowy background, waiting for light and music and dancers to animate them. “Now this is interesting,” I told Duffy as I walked across the deep wooden stage and looked up at the fly loft. I used to work with a little theater group, both backstage and in front of an audience. Turned out that acting experience was a valuable asset in an investigator. Our venues were never as complicated or classy as this, however. Now I stood at center stage and looked out into the massed seats, reliving one of my favorite roles, that of Madame Arcati, the dotty medium in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. I raised my hands and took a bow, hearing the echoes of remembered applause.

  “I knew you’d like it.” Duffy grinned and came up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist.

  Joseph ushered us off to stage left, up the stairs to a rabbit warren of dressing rooms, where the walls were decorated with signed photographs of the performers who’d played the Paramount. We wound up back at the box office, where we’d begun our tour. Duffy inspected the performance schedule for The Nutcracker and talked again of getting tickets to the ballet.

  “Was that worth getting up early on a Saturday?” Duffy asked me later at Mama’s Royal Café on Broadway near Forty-first, grinning as we fortified ourselves with hot coffee. It was past noon but we were having breakfast anyway.

  “I don’t know if anything is worth getting up early on a Saturday.” I paused and picked up my fork, wondering where best to attack the enormous omelet that sprawled across my plate, threatening to overlap the home fries decorated with sour cream. Ah, cholesterol. “But it was fun. Dad would enjoy that tour, if he hasn’t already done it.”

  Five

  “YOU USUALLY HAVE YOUR CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS up by now,” my father said.

  “I haven’t been able to get into the mood.” I lifted the lid from the cast-iron pot on the front burner of my stove and gave the rice a stir with a big wooden spoon.

  “You loved Christmas when you were growing up,” he continued. “You’d start working on me the first weekend in December to go after the tree.”

  “And you’d tell me, wait until after finals.”

  I smiled and glanced at my father, from whom I’ve inherited my auburn hair and the faint splash of freckles across my face. Dad’s hair is thinning on top, though, and gray at the temples. He was chuckling at my comment about finals. The phrase still held true. Dr. Timothy Howard is a professor at California State University at Hayward, and when one is a teacher, certain times of the year are governed by the exam schedule and the resulting pile of blue books.

>   Memories shuffled through my mind like a deck of cards in the hands of a dealer, random pictures of long-ago Christmases spent in the Victorian house where I grew up, across the estuary in Alameda. Mother and Dad were still married, my grandmother was still alive, and my brother and I were still young enough to be so enchanted by Christmas that we couldn’t sleep that night for the sheer agony of waiting for Santa Claus to come. Now I knew my brother’s children experienced that excitement, up at dawn, impatient for those poky adults who need a jolt of caffeine to get started.

  Yes, I usually had my decorations up by now, the first weekend in December. I knew there were people who regularly felt depressed by Christmas, but I wasn’t one of them. It was only this year that I had fallen prey to some seasonal malaise whose cause I had yet to determine. I needed something to jolt me out of it the way a cup of strong black coffee jump-started me in the morning.

  I sighed, took a sip from the glass of chardonnay at my elbow, and went back to chopping bell peppers to add to the growing mound of vegetables in the bowl on my kitchen counter. It was Sunday evening and I was fixing dinner for Dad, who was seated at one of my dining room chairs watching me work. I’m one of those people who don’t like anyone else in their kitchen. It’s a territorial thing, I suppose. Besides, the working space is not large. It’s what my grandmother used to call a “one butt kitchen.”

  I’m a fairly decent cook. How could I not be, tutored by my mother, a gourmet chef who owns one of the classiest restaurants in Monterey? On the other hand, I could have rebelled in that regard, as I had in many others, and relied strictly on fast food emporiums and frozen dinners for my nutritional needs. I do love to eat good food, though, so I was quite happy to learn at my mother’s knee the proper way to skin and debone a chicken and how to pick the best produce. However, my criteria for a great meal is not exquisite presentation but how quickly I can throw it together. In tonight’s case it was a stir-fry with veggies and strips of chicken breast which were already skinned and deboned when I bought them. All I had to do was toss the ingredients in the wok that was heating on the gas burner of my stove.