by Janet Dawson
“How’s the family?” I asked, changing the subject.
Vee and her husband Charles, a doctor over at the medical center on Pill Hill, had no children. They lived on Monticello Avenue in Piedmont not far from Naomi Smith. Vee’s sister Alice lived in Stockton, caring for their mother, Mrs. Madison, who was suffering from senile dementia and getting worse, according to Vee. The family member who interested me the most was her nephew Mark, who had done time for murder. Mark and I went to high school together. More than that, we shared an attraction for one another that was probably a bad idea. Still, it was there. Mark was paroled four years ago and now worked as a picture framer in Cibola, an old gold-mining town up in the Sierra foothills. He called me every now and then when he came to the Bay Area to visit Vee and buy supplies.
I filled Vee in on the state of my own family, telling her about my recent visit with my mother in Monterey. Then I got around to the reason I’d come to see her.
“Do you know a woman named Naomi Smith? Lives in Piedmont on Hillside Avenue.”
Vee nodded slowly and warmed both our cups with fresh water from her fancy teakettle. “I know her. Not well, though. She’s a difficult woman, something of a loner, who doesn’t encourage closeness. I’d be surprised if anyone knows her well. Except maybe that housekeeper of hers. Why do you ask?”
“A case I’m working on,” I said. “What can you tell me about her?”
“She drinks.” Vee sighed. “Charles says she’s a classic alcoholic. It’s one of those not very well-kept secrets that people supposedly don’t talk about, but do.”
“I figured that out already. Is she a longtime Piedmont resident? The house looks old and I get the feeling she’s lived there for years.”
Vee nodded and sipped her tea. “She was a Cartwright. The house belonged to her parents. And her grandparents too. I think the place was built around the turn-of-the-century. Lots of money there. Naomi’s a widow.”
“Tell me about Mr. Smith.”
“Preston Smith, an attorney. He died of cancer, about thirteen, fourteen years ago. It was one of those long, lingering deaths. The kind I devoutly hope to avoid. Naomi took it hard. She was devoted to Preston, almost to the exclusion of anyone else.”
Did that exclusion include her daughter? I wondered. “I understand she was involved with someone, about three years ago. A professor.”
Vee nodded again. “I remember him. Douglas Widener. He taught over at San Francisco State. He was several years younger than Naomi, which was surprising. Well, these days I suppose that’s not unusual. Anyway, they were an item for about a year. There was some speculation they might marry, but I didn’t give it any weight. They shared a mutual interest in opera, but that’s all.”
“Did you ever meet Widener?”
“Once. Good-looking, and a bit too full of himself for my taste. I heard—” Vee stopped and looked at me, her blue eyes narrowing. “Naomi and Preston had one child, a daughter. Her name was Maureen. She ran away from home a few years ago. That’s why you’re asking these questions, isn’t it?”
I smiled and raised my teacup to my lips. Vee knew I wouldn’t discuss my case with her, but she was free to guess.
“Well, if that’s what this is about,” Vee said, shifting in her creaky wooden chair, “there’s something you should know. There were rumors. About Maureen and Douglas Widener.”
Now I altered position, leaning forward. “Tell me about the rumors.”
“Naomi and Widener split up about the same time Maureen disappeared. So the local grapevine assumed the two departures were related. Even before the girl left, I’d heard talk about Widener.”
“What kind of talk?” I asked.
“That he seemed to be far more interested in Maureen than he should be. That he’d been forced to leave a teaching position in Southern California because of a relationship with a student.” Vee’s voice trailed off and she shook her head. “Just rumors. But you know how pervasive they can be.”
Sometimes rumors were true, sometimes not. I thought about Maureen Smith, runaway teenager. Had she been running from the unwanted attentions of this older man her mother had been dating? What if the attention had been welcomed?
Either way, I needed more information.
Seven
I HEADED UP THE HILL TO NAOMI SMITH’S BIG STONE house. Ramona Clark, the hot-and-cold housekeeper, was blowing warm today. She greeted me in an almost-friendly fashion and ushered me into the living room to wait for Naomi. I stood at the front window, looking past the azaleas at downtown Oakland, visible through the trees on the lot across the street.
“What are you doing here?” Naomi demanded behind me.
The housekeeper’s friendliness was not shared by her employer. I turned and wondered once again why I didn’t leave this unpleasant woman to stew in her own bitter juice. Or the booze she so obviously consumed on a regular basis. But she appeared to be sober today.
“I have some questions,” I told her.
“You always have questions.”
Today Naomi wore a blue-flowered tunic sweater over dark blue stretch pants, an ensemble that accentuated her skin-and-bones build. Her too-black hair was pulled back tightly from her head, revealing diamond studs in her ears. She walked into the living room, sat on her overstuffed sofa, and removed the lid from a black and red lacquer cigarette box on the coffee table. Diamonds and gold glittered on her thin fingers as she scrabbled for a cigarette and went into her filter-tapping routine. A matching black and red lighter sat next to the cigarette box and she reached for it Once she’d fired up her smoke she leaned back and crossed her legs, favoring me with a glance that teetered on the fence between irritation and hostility.
“Now what do you want to know?”
“Douglas Widener,” I said, taking a seat in one of the wing chairs that flanked the front window. “And Maureen.”
Her hard brown eyes left irritation and jumped right into hostility. “What about Douglas and Maureen?”
“I hear there were rumors about them.”
I would not have thought it possible that Naomi Smith’s sallow face could bleach even whiter, but it did. “Who have you been talking to?” she snarled.
“It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you ended a relationship with a man you’d been dating for a year, at about the same time your daughter ran away. Or did Widener end it? Why?”
“Douglas and I simply decided the relationship had run its course. We decided not to see one another anymore.” Naomi implied that the breakup was mutual, but her words were etched with acid that didn’t quite mask the hurt. It was the first time in our brief acquaintance that I felt sorry for the woman. She huddled on her sofa. “It was mere coincidence that Maureen ran away at the same time.”
Coincidence? I didn’t really believe that. Alcoholics were usually into denial.
“You’re sure about that? Or was it possible Widener was more interested in your daughter than he should have been?”
“I don’t care for what you’re implying.” Naomi’s face turned stony. “Douglas took a fatherly interest in Maureen, that’s all.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, then ground the butt out in a crystal ashtray at one end of the coffee table. “In fact, when he left, he told me I was a bad mother.” She paused, her mouth tightening as she repeated the words. “I’ll never forgive him for that. I’m not a particularly demonstrative person. But I did love Maureen, despite what you or anyone else may think.”
I looked at the woman who sat across from me and recalled what Vee Burke had told me earlier. She said Naomi had been devoted to her first husband, Preston, who died of cancer. Almost to the exclusion of anyone else, Vee said. Even her daughter, perhaps. Naomi was saying the words but I didn’t feel anything behind them. Maybe that was her way. Maybe she only appeared cold and uncaring. Or maybe she was trying to convince me otherwise.
I thought about my own mother, our years of battles and skirmishes. We’d somehow managed to declare a f
ragile truce during my last visit to Monterey, but only after a nasty verbal scrap. Mother and I didn’t get along but there was passion in the relationship. I knew she loved me. That was always a given.
Was I being too harsh as I sat here and passed judgment on Naomi Smith? What did I know of the nuances and dynamics in the relationship between her and her daughter? All I knew was that the girl left home and her mother never reported her missing. And I also knew that Maureen came home to her mother early this year with her own daughter in tow. That indicated to me that she had some desire to reconnect with her family. Such as it was.
“Where can I find Douglas Widener?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “I don’t want to know.”
I didn’t push it. “I’d like to talk with Maureen’s teachers at Piedmont High,” I said instead. “It would help if you’d call the school and clear the way. I want to talk to some of her former classmates as well. Did Maureen have any close friends? You mentioned someone named Kara.”
“Kara Jenner. She and Maureen were friends since elementary school. But I don’t know what good that will do.” Naomi’s face got that stubborn look I was beginning to recognize. “Maureen’s dead. It won’t bring her back.”
“I’m trying to find Dyese. Maybe Maureen connected with a friend during the past year, someone who could give me information.”
“The child’s probably dead too. Had you thought of that?”
I had. How could a toddler survive without her mother? I had no idea how long Maureen had been dead. Was Dyese Smith alive? Or buried in an unmarked grave, the way her mother had been, not yet found and maybe not likely to be.
“She’s your granddaughter. Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
From the way she looked at me, I guessed Naomi hadn’t really made that decision yet.
“Oh, all right. I’ll make a few phone calls.” She stood and walked to the doorway leading to the foyer. “Ramona,” she called. “Where’s my address book?”
The housekeeper joined us a moment later, with a look that said she didn’t want to be interrupted but she was used to it. “In your room, last time I saw it,” she told Naomi.
“Of course,” Naomi said. She started up the stairs. “I’ll be right back with the Jenners’ address. They’re just a block over, on Bonita. Kara’s gone off to college, of course, but I don’t know where.”
When she’d gone, I turned to Ramona Clark. “How did you end up here?” I asked, curious. She spoke and moved and looked like a woman with more style and education than was required for domestic work, but then maybe I was stereotyping her and domestic workers. Besides, working for Naomi Smith was probably no picnic.
“I’m a licensed practical nurse.” She paused in the hallway next to me. “I came here when Preston was ill. After he died, I stayed. Naomi pays me very well to cook and clean and look after things. More than I could make as an LPN. And the hours are better.”
“So you’ve been here a long time.”
“Since Maureen was six.”
“Do you know where I can find Douglas Widener?”
She shook her head. “As I have told you before, if he isn’t teaching at San Francisco State, I have no idea where he is.”
“Why did Maureen come here last March?”
“I have no idea.” Her voice was as smooth as her manner and face, but I couldn’t help thinking that Ramona Clark knew more than she was telling.
“Did Maureen say anything about where she’d been since she ran away from home? About where Dyese was born?”
Ramona shook her head again. “No she didn’t say where. Both Maureen and the child appeared to be... fine. As though they’d been eating regularly. They weren’t wearing brand new clothes but they weren’t in rags either. That reminds me, though. While they were here, I washed some of their clothes. Maureen had a sweatshirt, fairly new, from Sonoma State University.”
Eight
NAOMI SMITH DID CALL THE ADMINISTRATION OFFICE at Piedmont High School, but, with the exception of one teacher, the time I spent talking with the staff was unproductive. Most of these people could barely remember Maureen Smith, though she had been a student there only three years before. Maureen was the type who disappeared into the woodwork, a shy thin teenager with few friends, more apt to retreat behind books at the library than get involved in student activities.
Before I left the school I watched the kids eddy around me during a class break, realizing with a jolt that I thought their clothes and hair ridiculous, their music loud and devoid of melody. Good lord, I thought, I sound like my mother. These high school students looked so young. It had been eighteen or nineteen years since I was the age of the adolescents who rushed by me on the way to class. No wonder I felt so old.
Maureen’s English teacher told me that many of her students, past and present, liked to go to Berkeley on the weekends. The attraction was Telegraph Avenue, or at least that portion of the street that stretched six blocks southward from Sproul Plaza at the University of California. Telegraph and its various side streets were full of shops, restaurants, and cafes, easily one of the liveliest sections of town. The area catered to thousands of U.C. students, as well as Berkeley’s other residents, the people who lived and worked in town, and those who defied easy categorization. The avenue itself was lined with street merchants selling everything from handmade jewelry and pottery to drug paraphernalia. As a counterpoint to all this commerce, street corner politicians set up tables espousing causes. A large and shifting population of homeless people importuned passersby for spare change.
Berkeley had been a magnet in my day too. AC Transit’s Number 51 bus was the lumbering diesel magic carpet that carried my high school friends and me from the wide, tree-shaded streets of conservative, middle-class Alameda to that other world that swirled around the U.C. Berkeley campus. We hung out on the avenue, in search of excitement and Blondie’s Pizza, thinking ourselves grown-up and sophisticated as we drank coffee at the Med. Back then the air sparkled with excitement and smelled of possibilities, even though the scents of marijuana and patchouli oil didn’t quite mask the odors of unwashed bodies.
We never gave a thought to the dangers that might lurk on those streets, though I gave People’s Park a wide berth even in those days. Maybe it looked different now because I was older, because I’d been a private investigator for years and I’d met the evil that sometimes hid behind the facade of friendliness or good intentions or quirkiness. This afternoon, as I walked along Telegraph Avenue, it seemed that the stench of urine in the doorways overwhelmed the incense on a street vendor’s table. Even though it wasn’t raining, the air had a damp chill. To my cynical eyes, the panhandlers looked rougher, more menacing.
I was headed for The Big Z, an electronics store owned by my friend Levi Zotowska. He’s about six-five, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with silvery-blond hair in a ponytail down his back and a little gold stud in one ear. A family man in his mid-forties, he would now look odd in his eastern Pennsylvania hometown, which he left as a college student on scholarship.
But in Berkeley he was right at home. I walked through the showroom, eluding Christmas-primed sales clerks who were eager to help me buy everything from computers to stereo components, and found Levi in his crowded, untidy office, talking on the phone as he listened to one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on a portable CD player. A framed photograph of Levi with his wife Nell hung on the wall, surrounded by smaller pictures of all four Zotowska offspring, two boys and two girls. Nell was as short and dark as Levi was big and fair, but the kids were all tall blondes.
“Jeri, my homegirl.” Levi hung up the phone, which promptly bleeped at him again. He ignored it, turned Johann Sebastian down a couple of notches, and stood up to envelop me in a bear hug that left my vertebrae tingling. “Got somebody you want me to bug? Or are you here doing your Christmas shopping? I got a great buy on cellular phones.”
“Christmas shopping, yech.” I waved away thoughts of
the shopping season that had been going full blast since Halloween. “I don’t think I’m quite ready to go cellular.”
“Private eye like you? You gotta get plugged into the latest technology. Mobile phones, modems. You don’t want to get left standing on the curb of the information superhighway.”
“Look at how long it took you to convince me to buy a fax machine.” I pulled up a chair and sat down as Levi settled back behind his desk and put his feet up on a nearby carton full of what looked like technical manuals. “Of course, now that I have one, I can’t believe I managed without it. I suppose a modem’s next. But George the computer consultant still has the office next to mine. He’s much more adept at this stuff than I am.”
The intercom on the blinking phone announced, “Levi, line two.”
“Take a message,” he bellowed. “So you’re not shopping and you don’t want to exploit my technical skills. What’s up?”
“I need your observational skills,” I said. I took the photograph of Maureen Smith and her daughter Dyese from my bag and handed it across the desk. “Ever see this girl hanging out on the avenue?”
Levi took the snapshot and examined it. “Runaway?” he asked, eyes involuntarily moving to the photograph of his oldest child, a daughter who was about sixteen, only a couple of years younger than Maureen had been when she left home.
“Yes. Three years ago. She and her high school buddies liked to come to Telegraph on weekends.”
“Don’t they all,” Levi commented with a laugh. “Around here we’re knee-deep in high school kids all weekend. They drive in from the ’burbs by the hundreds.” His face turned sober. “We’ve got lots of runaways too. And a lot of the girls look like this one. Little waif girls with sad faces. The boys look tough, or they try to. I don’t know if I can help you find her, Jeri. There are so many kids out there on the street.”
