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

by Janet Dawson

  I was fairly certain I knew the reason for the delay, I thought, replacing the phone receiver in its cradle. The pathologist still hadn’t determined what caused Maureen Smith’s death. I recalled my conversation with Sid last Friday. He’d been deliberately vague about the autopsy results, other than to tell me about the carpet fibers and the body being damaged by the backhoe.

  I picked up the phone again and called Homicide, asking for Sergeant Vernon. The detective who picked up the phone was Sergeant Griffin, whom I had encountered on an earlier case. “He’s not here, Jeri.”

  “Any idea where I can find him?”

  Griffin put his hand over the phone, but not enough to muffle his voice as he called out, “Hey, any of you guys know where Sid went?” A few seconds later he spoke into the receiver again. “He and Wayne went up the street to get some breakfast.”

  Up the street meant a little hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on Washington between Seventh and Eighth. I walked over there and caught up with Sid and his partner just as they were mopping up the last of their bacon and eggs. Wayne smiled and waved a piece of toast in greeting. Sid looked at me as though I were trouble in shoe leather.

  “Got time for another cup of coffee?” I asked them as I ordered a latte at the counter.

  “Depends on what you want in return,” my ex said, eyes narrowed.

  “Why hasn’t Maureen Smith’s body been released to her mother?”

  Neither of them said anything. “I’ve got to meet someone at nine,” Wayne said, wiping his mouth and crumpling the paper napkin as he got to his feet. “See you back at the ranch.”

  When he’d gone, Sid stacked his plate and Wayne’s and shoved them to one side. “I’ll take you up on that coffee.”

  I carried my latte and a mug of fresh black coffee to the table and sat down in the chair Wayne had vacated. “Only reason I can think of is that you don’t know how she died. Or when.”

  “Good guess.” Sid picked up the mug. “She’d been buried up there about three weeks. There was a lot of decomposition. The skull was crushed and the neck broken, but I don’t know if the killer did that or if it was the damned backhoe the construction workers were using. I’m going to have to let the forensics specialist tell me that, and he’s not finished with his examination. So far he hasn’t found anything obvious, like an entry wound caused by a bullet or a blade. Which would make it a hell of a lot easier.”

  “Is there something else you aren’t telling me?”

  “I’m the homicide detective, Jeri. Let me worry about who killed Maureen Smith.”

  “I’m looking for the baby, Sid. As long as you didn’t find the corpse of a two-year-old up there, I’m guessing the little girl is still alive. Maybe something about Maureen’s death will give me a lead on where to find the child.”

  He frowned. “The forensics guy is going to analyze some blood and tissue samples, what little there was left. To see if there was any indication of poison, or disease. But my guess is that she was strangled or hit over the head.”

  “How long will this take? My client would like to bury her daughter.”

  Sid took another swallow of coffee before he answered. “Another couple of days, a week, I don’t know. They’re backed up. They’re always backed up. I’ll let you know if I hear anything, Jeri. I promise. If that kid’s still alive, I want her found as much as you do.”

  Thirteen

  “THERE ARE NO SHELTERS FOR TEENAGERS IN Alameda County,” Sister Anne told me when I asked her about runaways. “Except a couple of six-bed homes that take them in for a night or two, just until they can return home.”

  “What if they can’t go home?” I asked.

  “Then they’re on the streets.”

  She gestured around us. The pale morning sunshine revealed the seedy side of downtown Oakland. Looming in the distance I could see the shiny twin towers of the new federal building, but here on San Pablo Avenue buildings red-tagged after the earthquake had been left to crumble in neglect. Trucks rumbled above us on the freeway, heading somewhere else. Boarded-up storefronts and down-at-the-heels SRO hotels lined the block. A handful of those who didn’t want to stay confined in those dingy little rooms congregated in a little triangular park formed by the intersection of several streets.

  I looked across the four lanes of traffic at a couple of men sitting on a park bench. One stared aimlessly out at the world, or what he could see of it Another drank from a can or bottle hidden in a brown paper bag. Standing near the corner of San Pablo and Grand I saw a young woman in a short tight skirt and a low-cut blouse made of some glittery material, waving at passing cars. One vehicle stopped and she sauntered over to the passenger-side window, a bit unsteady on her high heels. She didn’t look much older than Maureen Smith had been when she ran away from home. If that.

  “Haven’t seen her in a while,” Sister Anne said, following the direction of my gaze. “Her pimp doesn’t like for her to come to our place.”

  Sister Anne and her order run a drop-in shelter for homeless women, a place that provides a temporary haven for women who fall through the cracks. It’s a storefront on Grand Avenue where its clients can grab a cup of coffee, take a nap or a shower, or wash their clothing, taking refuge from the harsh realities of the pavement. No men or children are allowed over the threshold. Some of the men don’t like that.

  After my talk with Sid, I’d headed across downtown to the shelter, a good long walk which gave me the opportunity to mull over the unsolved death of Maureen Smith and wonder how an upper-middle-class kid from Piedmont wound up panhandling on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. In miles the distance was short. In worlds, it’s a long, long way.

  When I arrived, one of the other nuns told me Sister Anne had walked around the corner to San Pablo, where the St. Vincent de Paul dining room fed hundreds every day. I’d located her talking to one of the volunteers outside the door where Oakland’s citizens, the ones on the margins and the ones who had altogether dropped off the page, were already queued up for the noon meal.

  When Sister Anne was finished, we headed back along San Pablo toward Grand Avenue and her shelter. That’s when I asked my question about homeless kids and got the answer that didn’t make me feel any better about the fates of Maureen and Dyese Smith. Sister Anne had some phone numbers for me, local people who worked with homeless youths. While she wrote them down I looked around the big front room of the shelter, where women filled the chairs, glad to be out of the chilly December weather, drinking coffee from the big urn in the corner. I noticed a Christmas tree in the opposite corner, surrounded by presents for the clients. It reminded me that I still wasn’t in the mood for the holidays. Even so, I could bring something over to the shelter to contribute to their Christmas.

  “By the way, your friend has been a big help.” Sister Anne handed me a sheet of paper with several names and phone numbers written on it.

  “My friend? Oh, you mean the Admiral.”

  I smiled. I wouldn’t exactly call Joe Franklin a friend. He is a crusty retired Navy officer with a brusque, take-charge manner, the legacy of over thirty years in the military. Our acquaintance had improved since our first antagonistic encounter early last spring, while I was working on a missing persons case that got complicated by murder. At that time the Admiral didn’t have much use for me. But our paths crossed again in August when his daughter Ruth hired me to find some assets hidden by her estranged husband. When the soon-to-be ex wound up dead in Ruth’s apartment and she was facing a murder charge, Joe Franklin became my unexpected ally. I put him to work locating a homeless woman who turned out to be an important witness.

  What the Admiral learned about Oakland’s homeless population propelled him to action. He now headed a group of retired military people who collected food for East Bay shelters. It agreed with him, filling his days in a way retirement and playing golf had not. He liked bossing the job, which was why everyone still called him Admiral. His organization operated out of an Alameda storefront, with his
daughter as office manager. Ruth was still emotionally bruised from the disastrous aftermath of her equally disastrous marriage and from her encounter with the grim realities of the criminal justice system. Putting his daughter to work at his food bank was more than convenience for the Admiral.

  I thanked Sister Anne, then trekked back to my office, stopping to run a few errands and pick up paper to feed my printer and fax machine. Then I bought a take-out sandwich from a nearby deli before climbing the stairs to my third-floor office. I stowed the paper with the rest of my supplies and played the messages on my answering machine. One was from Duffy LeBard over at the Naval Station on Treasure Island. I decided my first priority was the pastrami on rye. The phone rang before I could get the sandwich unwrapped. When I picked up the receiver, I heard Bill Stanley’s smooth baritone, which managed to sound intimate whether he was cajoling a judge or arranging a date.

  “About dinner tomorrow night,” he began.

  “Dinner?” I repeated. Jeri the Idiot Child.

  “We have tickets to The Nutcracker,” he said patiently. “The Oakland Ballet, the Paramount Theatre, ‘Waltz of the Flowers,’ remember?”

  “Is that tomorrow?” I shoved the sandwich to one side and stared at my desk calendar. Sure enough, right there on Friday, I’d written NUTCRACKER, BILL in big black letters. “Okay, you just had to refresh my memory. We’re having dinner before.”

  “Yea. It’s a seven o’clock curtain so I figure we should have dinner early and close to the theater. How about five-thirty, at that Italian place over on Nineteenth?”

  “That’s fine. I’ll meet you there.”

  We disconnected and I tackled my pastrami, thinking about Bill. We’d had a few dates. He was fun to be with but he wasn’t the kind of man I’d want to be involved with on the long term. He’d been married and divorced twice, which didn’t surprise me. I knew I couldn’t live with the guy. The man had ego aplenty to go along with his flashy silver Porsche and his stylish clothes.

  But he was also a hell of a dancer, I thought, recalling our last visit to a club in San Francisco. After I’d finished the last scrap of pastrami and wiped mustard from my hands, I returned Duffy’s call, working my way through several Navy petty officers at the base police station until I got the chief himself.

  “Hey, I got us tickets to the Oakland Ballet’s Nutcracker,” he said, managing to drawl and sound cheerful all at the same time.

  I stared at my calendar in alarm until I found my voice. “When?”

  “Well, I knew you had that family thing with your dad and your brother next Saturday. So I got tickets for Friday, a week from tomorrow.”

  I flipped the page. That particular date was free and clear in the evening. “I can do next Friday,” I said, writing NUTCRACKER, DUFFY on the calendar. I just didn’t know whether I could do The Nutcracker twice in eight days. I guess I’d find out. Duffy and I sorted out the details about dinner before the performance then rang off.

  I had several things that needed doing down at the Alameda County Courthouse, a few blocks away. But first I opened my file cabinet and pulled out the folder I’d started on the Smith case. It was fairly thin yet. I fingered the photograph of Maureen Smith, pale-faced above her navy-blue sweater, her hand reaching out to the soft baby flesh of her daughter.

  My office door opened and I looked up to see my friend Cassie Taylor. As usual, she was dressed like a fashion plate in her lawyer clothes, as I called them. Today it was a relatively restrained charcoal-gray pinstripe enlivened by a bright red silk sweater. On the lapel of her suit I saw a little gold Christmas tree sparkling with jewels. I wondered if the sparkler was real, a gift from Eric.

  Cassie kicked off her high heels and sat down in my client chair. “Got your Christmas shopping done yet?” she teased.

  “Give me a break.” I rolled my eyes. “We’re barely a week into December. Besides, I can’t get into the mood.”

  “Cost Plus has had its Christmas stuff out since mid-September. How could you not get into the mood?”

  “I try not to think about Christmas until Thanksgiving looms on the horizon. Besides...” I shrugged, unable to put my finger on the blues that had dogged me since my birthday. “I don’t know. I’m just not into it this year.”

  “Well, I know what will get that Christmas spirit crackling through your veins.” Cassie leaned forward, her face animated. “If you’re not doing anything Saturday night, I have an extra ticket to—”

  “Not The Nutcracker,” I interrupted. “Please don’t tell me it’s The Nutcracker.”

  Cassie’s eyebrows hiked a few inches in her smooth brown face, surprised at the sudden vehemence in my voice. “You really are in a funk. You have something against Sugar Plum Fairies?”

  “It’s not that. But I’m about to be overdosed.” I spread my arms wide and explained. “I have a date this Friday with Bill, to see The Nutcracker. And a date with Duffy to do the same, a week later.”

  Cassie leaned her head back and laughed. “That’s what you get for dating two guys at the same time. Serves you right. No, my extra ticket does not involve Tchaikovsky. It’s gospel music. Black Nativity.”

  “Now that I would like to see,” I said, my interest perking up. Every year Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church performed Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity, a lively gospel version of the Christmas story. I’d seen it once, several years ago, and I was long overdue for a repeat performance.

  “Well, you’re welcome to join us,” Cassie said. “Mama got a bunch of tickets and one of my sisters can’t go.”

  “Will Eric be there?”

  “He will indeed.” Cassie smiled.

  My eye fell on the photograph I’d been examining, of Maureen Smith and her daughter Dyese. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Does it bother your parents that Eric is white?”

  Cassie looked at me thoughtfully before answering. “I think it bothers his parents more than it does mine. They’re from Minnesota, Scandinavian and German heritage. They don’t quite know what to make of the fact that their fair-haired son is involved with an African-American woman. My parents are very accepting. Of course, Daddy’s mother was Portuguese and I think there are some Irish genes in Mama’s family. So we’re already a melting pot mixture. Why do you ask?”

  “A case I’m working on.” I passed her the photograph I’d been examining.

  “What a pretty little girl.” Cassie smiled, her eyes on Dyese Smith. Then she frowned. “I hope she’s not missing or dead or something.”

  “Missing. That’s all I know for now. The mother’s dead. The grandmother seems reluctant to find the child. One reason seems to be because she’s mixed race.”

  Cassie shook her head and handed the snapshot back across the desk. “It’s a damned shame when a person’s prejudices overwhelm family feeling. But it happens all the time, on both sides of the color line. The multicultural society is coming, inevitably, but it won’t come easy. Maybe it will be simpler in a hundred years when we’re all a nice uniform shade of brown.”

  It was my turn to shake my head. “We’ll figure out some way to discriminate against each other. People have an enormous capacity to focus on differences rather than similarities. Religion, what people wear, or how they cut or don’t cut their hair. Who they sleep with.” I paused, thinking of my cousin Donna, a lesbian whose own brother won’t accept her. I shoved the photo back into the file folder. “If you ask me, it’ll get worse before it gets better.”

  “I think that’s your funky blue mood talking, Jeri.” Cassie glanced at her watch and leaned forward, reaching for her shoes. When she’d found them and slipped them onto her feet, she stood up and straightened her skirt.

  “You come to Black Nativity with us on Saturday, girlfriend. I defy anyone to walk away from gospel music without a smile.”

  Fourteen

  WINTER IS WHAT I CALL APPLE-AND-ORANGE SEASON. I may crave apricots, peaches, and
berries in the middle of December, but even in California I won’t find them unless they are shipped in from somewhere in the southern hemisphere or I visit the frozen food section of my local grocery store. It’s those trusty apples and oranges that get me through until the strawberries ripen down in Watsonville.

  Although the Oakland farmers’ market operates year-round, it wasn’t busy this Friday morning. The produce available was limited to what was in season. I saw lots of apples, persimmons, potatoes, and winter squash being examined by sharp-eyed housewives from nearby Chinatown. No doubt the pace would quicken during the lunch hour, when people left their downtown offices and strolled over to the market, for recreation as much as anything else.

  Tables lined both sides of Ninth Street between Broadway and Clay, and spilled over onto Washington. It was about eight-thirty and some of the purveyors were still setting up their wares. I started at the corner of Ninth and Clay, sipping the latte I’d bought at Café 817 on Washington, and worked my way slowly along the block, asking questions about a gray-haired woman who sold vegetables out of a blue van at the Santa Rosa market.

  “Sorry, we’re from Escalon, out in the San Joaquin Valley,” one woman told me as she arranged her table, mounding butternut squash next to a basket of brussels sprouts. “We stay on this side of the bay, don’t get up to Sonoma County.”

  I got similar answers, accompanied by shaking heads, as I neared Washington, where I bought two scones and a container of lemon curd. Across the street I found a man selling jars of rich golden honey and bags of dried fruit and nuts.

  “Maybe. Could be,” he said slowly, in heavily accented English. “I see a blue van. Santa Rosa Saturday. Or Marin Sunday.”

  The woman at the next stall was arranging several boxes of apples. Now she paused and looked at me curiously. “I think I know who you’re talking about. Why are you trying to find her?”

  I stepped up to her. “I’m looking for someone who’s missing. This woman may know where she is.”