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

by Janet Dawson

  “Could you verify that with Mr. Fry?”

  “He would not like to be disturbed on such a matter,” Ms. Gupta said. I made no move to leave. I could, of course, look him up in the tax assessor’s records over at the courthouse. But it would be so much easier if his apartment manager would just pick up the phone. I gazed at her. Finally she relented. “I will call him. Come in.”

  I stepped into the hall, noting a bedroom to my right, and followed her to the left, into a small living room crowded with furniture. There was a big window on the far wall that would have provided a lot of afternoon sun had it not been a cold gray day in December. A phone and an address book stood on a small table near the television set. I looked around while she flipped through the pages of the book, selected one, and picked up the phone. The call was of short duration.

  “I’m sorry,” Ms. Gupta said, hanging up the phone. “Mr. Fry does not answer. As I told you before, I have no knowledge of any carpet being replaced in 308.”

  “Could I please have Mr. Fry’s number? I’d really like to talk with him myself.”

  She stared at me for a moment. “Is Emory in some kind of trouble?”

  “I don’t know.” It was as honest an answer as I could give her. She turned and reached for the address book, holding it out so I could read Fry’s phone number. When I’d scribbled it in my notebook, I thanked her and made my escape. Ms. Gupta’s dark eyes bored a hole in my back as I left the building.

  Forty-two

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY OFFICE, THE MESSAGE light on my answering machine was blinking. Sid had phoned, half an hour before, and he wanted me to call him right back.

  “You were on the money about the bank account,” he told me when I reached him at the Oakland Homicide Division. “Maureen Smith had a savings account at the Bank of America branch in downtown Berkeley.”

  He read off a dollars-and-cents balance that wasn’t great but indicated that Maureen had made some progress on her goal of getting enough money together to make a life for herself and her daughter. The balance was more than I’d guessed when I was adding the sums people had given her to the returned deposit on the apartment she’d given up.

  “Has there been any account activity since her death?” I didn’t think there had been. Whoever killed Maureen Smith wasn’t after her meager savings.

  “No. The killer’s not that stupid. She just had basic savings. No ATM card, so any withdrawal would have to be made in person. She was using an address on LeConte Avenue in Berkeley. Does that jingle any bells with you?”

  “A high school friend who’s now a student at U.C. Name of Kara Jenner.”

  “Well, well.” Sid’s tone was unaccountably cheerful. “I’m impressed, Jeri. You’re two for two.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Your second question. Crimes reported in Piedmont, about the time Maureen Smith disappeared.”

  I leaned back in my chair, rotating my knee and ankle as I elevated my left leg. The pain pills had kicked in and I felt much better. “I take it there’s a Jenner in there somewhere.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. William Jenner, address on Bonita Avenue. While they were out of town one weekend, their daughter Kara decided to invite a few friends over. Mostly high school kids, with some college-age crashers. The party got out of hand.”

  “When did this happen?” Sid gave me the date, a Saturday night about eight days before anyone noticed Maureen Smith was gone. “Just how far out did the party get?”

  “The usual,” Sid said with a world-weary tone. “A neighbor called the police at 10:14 P.M. to complain about the noise. And the fact that there were cars parked on his lawn. My contact at the Piedmont police faxed me a copy of the report. The stereo was so loud the street was vibrating. The house was trashed. Some wise guy decided to start a food fight and it deteriorated from there. Plenty of breakage, curtains ripped down, a small fire in the dining room. The Jenners filed a whopping big insurance claim. A lot of underaged kids drinking, smoking dope, screwing in the upstairs bedrooms. Two college students were arrested for possession of marijuana.”

  “Who was arrested?” I asked, wondering if Stuart Marland was one of them. Sid read off a couple of names that didn’t mean anything to me. “Was Maureen at the party?”

  “Let’s see. They hauled the whole lot of them down to the police station and called parents.” He was silent for a moment as he checked the police report. “No, Maureen Smith’s name doesn’t show up on the police report.”

  “But she and Kara Jenner were such good friends,” I said. “Maureen was at that party. I’ve got a hunch.”

  “Sometimes your hunches are pretty good,” he admitted. That surprised me. Had Sid Vernon been possessed by the Christmas spirit? He was certainly being magnanimous. “What gives, Jeri? You found that kid yet?”

  “Not so far. But I still think she’s alive.” I sighed and shifted in my chair. “Somebody pushed me in front of a BART train in the city this morning, Sid.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then he growled, “You okay? Any idea who?”

  “I’m fine,” I told him, looking at the Ace bandage wrapped around my ankle. He grumbled a bit and I could picture him bristling as he sat at his desk a few blocks away. For some reason his concern made me feel better. “Believe me, Sid, when I figure out who, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’m going to rattle a few cages.”

  “Rattle ’em good. I’d like to clear this case. Before the holidays.”

  So would I. Maureen Smith had been dead, and her daughter missing, since the middle of October. The end of the year was a time for winding up unfinished business and settling accounts. Maureen’s account was still open. And I didn’t mean the one at Bank of America.

  Sid faxed me a copy of the report sent to him by the Piedmont police, a thick sheaf of papers which I pulled from my machine as it spat them out. Interesting reading, all the more so for the names that didn’t appear on it.

  Either I was going to have to drive all the way to Kirkwood and catch up with Kara Jenner on the ski slopes or stake out the house on Bonita Avenue. As it turned out, I didn’t have to do either. When I located the large two-story brown shingle house where Kara’s parents still lived, light emanated from several front windows, making it obvious that someone was home. The house stood on a sloping lot, with a driveway and double garage tucked on the lower left The garage door was open, and a big overhead light pierced the December dusk, illuminating two vehicles, one a sedan pulled into the garage and the other a Jeep Cherokee parked in the driveway. A man with thinning silver hair, casually dressed in jeans, flannel shirt, and jacket, unloaded skis from the rack on top of the Cherokee and stacked them against the inner garage wall. I stopped just inside the garage. Before I could speak, he glanced at me, smiled, and said, “Pizza?”

  I grinned. “No. But it sounds good.”

  “Oh, sorry. We ordered a pizza. I thought you were delivering it.”

  “I’m here to see Kara.”

  He pointed toward the door that led from the garage into the house. “She’s in the kitchen. Just go on in.”

  I crossed the concrete floor and went up a couple of steps, opening the door into a big kitchen with a tiled work island in the center. A teakettle hissed on the burner. Beyond me I saw a woman with shoulder-length gray-blond hair caught back with a red barrette, an older version of Kara. She removed three mugs from an open cabinet and set them on the counter. Then she turned, surprised to see a stranger.

  “Your husband told me to come in,” I said. “Is Kara here?”

  “She just took the bags upstairs,” Mrs. Jenner said. I heard the thump of feet coming down the steps. “Here she is now.”

  Shock tightened the features on Kara’s face when she saw me. Her body tensed inside the blue sweatsuit she wore and her arms hugged her chest as if to ward me off.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We need to talk, Kara. About a lot of things. Shall we go into the living room?�
�

  Kara didn’t say anything, but her mother was the perfect host. “Have some tea,” she said, pouring steaming water into a couple of mugs. She opened the door to what turned out to be a pantry and pulled out several boxes. “We’ve got all kinds, herbal, regular, caffeine, decaf. Take your pick.”

  “Thank you,” I said, smiling as I selected a mug and a Lemon Zinger tea bag. I looked at Kara, who seemed rooted to the kitchen floor. Then she moved like a rusty machine, reaching for a mug and the first box of tea her fingers encountered. I headed out of the kitchen, through a large dining room with an oval table, and found my way to the living room, where the Christmas tree twinkled in one corner, a pile of presents spilling from beneath. I didn’t see any coasters so I set my mug on top of a copy of Architectural Digest and took a seat in a wing-back chair to one side of the sofa.

  “Why are you here?” Kara said. From the look on her face, she wished I’d suddenly disappear into the darkness that had brought me.

  “I want answers. Sit down.” I pointed at the sofa. She sat. Her hands fumbled with the wrapper on the tea bag and she plopped it into the hot water, splashing some of it on the glass-topped coffee table where she’d set her mug. She wiped it up with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “The party, Kara. About a week before Maureen disappeared. You and your friends trashed this house and kept the Piedmont cops busy all night. I want to know what happened.”

  “I got grounded,” Kara shot back. “Until graduation.”

  “What a shame.” Sarcasm colored my words. “I’m not here to talk about you. Maureen Smith was at that party. Something happened to her. Something bad enough to make her run away from home. What was it?”

  Now Kara put her hands over her eyes. “Oh, God. I didn’t mean for things to get out of hand.”

  “But they did. I’ve read the police report. There are some gaps. I want you to fill them in.” She didn’t say anything. “Come on, Kara. Your parents were gone and you decided to play. You wound up trashing the place. You and a bunch of your guests got your privileged little asses kicked all the way to the police station. Oh, and you got grounded.”

  She moved her hands and her brown eyes glittered at me, whether from tears or anger, I couldn’t be sure. “If you know so much, why do I have to tell you?”

  At that moment her father appeared in the doorway leading to the dining room. “The pizza’s here,” he announced. “Does your friend want to join us?”

  “No, thanks.” I smiled politely. “Kara and I have something to discuss.”

  “I’ll be there in a little while, Dad,” she said quickly, one hand fiddling with her blond braid. He gave her a troubled look, then turned and disappeared. When he’d gone, she didn’t speak for a moment. Instead she reached for the mug. It shook a little as she sipped the tea. Then she set it down.

  “All right I decided to have a party. I’d been accepted to Cal. It was spring break for some of the colleges. A lot of the older kids were home.”

  “Including Stuart Marland?”

  She paused, then nodded slowly. “Yes, he was there. He and his three roommates. They had an apartment over in Berkeley. They brought the booze. I don’t know who brought the drugs. It started out with about twenty of us, from high school, college kids. Then I realized that there were more people, some I didn’t even know. Somebody broke a mirror. Seven years’ bad luck.” She laughed. It had a shrill edge to it.

  “They were throwing food, smearing it on the walls. Broke into Dad’s liquor cabinet. Then someone opened Mom’s china cabinet and started playing catch with the dishes. I couldn’t get them to stop.” She lowered her head, visibly cringing at the memories she conjured up. Then her words came reluctantly. “This guy and girl, I didn’t know either of them, they started getting it on. Having sex, right in the middle of the dining room table. Everyone was cheering them on.”

  I recalled Sid’s words on the phone. Drinking, smoking dope, screwing in the upstairs bedrooms. Evidently the latter activity had not been confined to the second floor.

  “Where was Maureen?”

  “Maureen had a crush on Stuart.” Kara spoke slowly, as though her mouth was stiff. “I’d been dating him since he was a senior and I was a freshman. She was kind of vicariously mooning over him. Emory liked Maureen, but he was too shy to do anything about it.”

  “Emory was here too?”

  “Emory’s like Stuart’s shadow. He’s always hanging around his brother.”

  “Where was Maureen?” I asked again. “I know you don’t want to tell me, but you’re going to. You might as well get it over with.”

  “She’d had a lot to drink. She came on to Stuart.” Kara said the words resentfully, as though she hadn’t liked Maureen poaching on her territory. “He and some of the other guys were playing around, teasing her. One of them kept unbuttoning her blouse, and she’d giggle and button it back up. I don’t know exactly what happened. Or when. I didn’t see her for a while. Right before the cops got there, I went looking for Maureen. I found her upstairs, in my parents’ bedroom, on their bed.”

  Kara grimaced with distaste and didn’t say anything. “Come on,” I said impatiently. “Tell me the rest. You’ve gone this far, you might as well tell me everything.”

  “Maureen was naked,” Kara whispered. “She was crying. She had bruises on her arms and shoulders.”

  “Did Stuart rape her?”

  “Of course not.” Kara tightened her lips. “Maureen was no virgin, hadn’t been since we were in junior high. For all I know, she wanted it. For all I know, she went up there with someone else.”

  “Or several someones,” I snapped, my voice harsh. I wanted to shake Kara Jenner until she rattled. “You just said Maureen was crying and she had bruises on her arms and shoulders. That doesn’t imply willing participation. It sounds to me like she was raped. More than once. Where were Stuart and his three roommates when you found Maureen?”

  Kara ducked her head and I had trouble hearing her next words. “Stuart was on the stair landing when I went up for Maureen. I saw two of his friends coming out of the bedroom. One of them was zipping up his pants. I thought he’d been using the bathroom off my parents’ bedroom. They went downstairs. That’s when I heard Maureen crying.”

  I shook my head in anger. “Where was Emory? He was there, wasn’t he?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He was upstairs, somewhere. Maybe he was even in the room. I don’t know for certain. I was busy trying to calm Maureen down and get her cleaned up and dressed.”

  “What did Maureen tell you?”

  “She didn’t tell me anything,” Kara insisted. “She just kept saying she wanted to go home. So Emory took her home, right before the cops showed up. Things were bad enough as it was. All I could think about was I don’t want anyone to find out.”

  That explained why neither Emory’s name nor Maureen’s showed up on the police report. As for Stuart and his three roommates, they must have taken a hike about the same time.

  “You didn’t want anyone to find out,” I repeated. “That anything had happened to Maureen? How convenient for Stuart and his friends.”

  “I don’t know for sure he had anything to do with it.” Kara looked stubborn. “With everything that was going on that night, Maureen could have had sex with every guy there.”

  “But it was Stuart and his friends who were teasing her earlier. It was Stuart you saw on the stairs before you found her. And Stuart’s roommates you saw coming out of the bedroom. I hope Stuart appreciates your loyalty, Kara. Too bad you couldn’t have been a better friend to Maureen.”

  “I was,” Kara insisted, stung by my words. “I got her out of there. She didn’t get busted like the rest of us.”

  “She didn’t get any help either. What the hell did you think was going on when she disappeared a week later?”

  “I don’t know. I was in such deep shit myself I didn’t even realize she was gone. Not until much later.” Guilt etched lines on her young face. “And when I saw her panh
andling on Telegraph, I thought, it’s my fault. I should have done something. I tried to make it up to her. I gave her money and clothes, I bought her food, I let her stay at my place. I didn’t know about the baby, not till you showed me the picture. It must have happened that night. One of Stuart’s roommates was black.”

  I filed this further complication regarding Dyese’s parentage away for future reference. “Kara, was there someone at that party named Van Alt? Someone who lived on San Carlos Avenue here in Piedmont?”

  Kara looked at me in confusion as I mentioned the name and address I’d found out this morning at Cavagnaro Industries. It was the place the Keltons had gone after leaving their burned-out house in the fire zone, and somehow a link to Maureen’s unquiet grave.

  “Wait a minute,” she protested. “You don’t want to drag their mother and stepfather into this.”

  Her words propelled me to my feet “Emory and Stuart have a stepfather named Van Alt,” I said.

  Forty-three

  TO MY CHAGRIN, SOMEONE HAD CLOSED THE OUTER door to Emory Marland’s seedy building on Seventeenth Street. I hit the buzzer for the manager’s apartment, but evidently Ms. Gupta wasn’t home this evening. I worked my way along the row of buttons, not getting any response and wondering if the damn things worked. Maybe everyone was out Christmas shopping or making the rounds of holiday parties. Finally an older man bundled up in an overcoat exited a first floor apartment. I waited until he opened the front door and then I strolled into the building as though I belonged there.

  I’d taken some more pain pills and my knees seemed fine, as long as I kept moving. After my experience this afternoon with the balky elevator, I opted for the stairs. It was past nine o’clock and I figured Emory was at work, behind the scenes over at the Paramount as the dancers twirled their way through another performance of The Nutcracker.