A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  Hunt called the number, got the young man’s answering machine, left a message, and decided that it was time he got Tamara working with him on this tedious business. There were several d’Amicos in San Francisco, and Hunt and Tamara called all of them, hoping to find a Jimi, but since it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, between them they managed to talk to only one human being, who didn’t know a Jimi.

  They left more messages.

  As he thought it would be, finding even one of the women turned out to be a chore. He and Tamara were hoping that one of the last names would reveal at least a set of parents who might be inclined to pass Hunt’s name along to one of their daughters, but this was going to involve quite a few phone calls and, again, messages, messages, messages.

  By four-fifteen they’d been at the whole business for better than three hours when Hunt punched up the twenty-third telephone number under Peterson and a woman’s voice answered.

  “Hello,” he said, “I’m trying to reach a Nikki Peterson.”

  “This is Nikki.”

  Hunt punched a fist into the air, threw a paper clip at Tamara to get her attention and let her know he’d finally gotten a hit, then went into his spiel, identifying himself and stating his business. When he’d finished, she said, “Sure. I knew Maya. We were cheerleaders together. I don’t know where she is now, though. I haven’t seen her since college. Is she in trouble?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Well, you’re a private investigator asking about her. I wasn’t great at math, but I can put two and two together. So she is?”

  “What?”

  “In trouble.”

  “Not yet,” Hunt said, “but she might be getting there pretty quick.”

  He told her he was free if she was, and within an hour she was sitting across from his desk. No longer a cheerleader, but from looks alone she would still have a good shot to make the team.

  “So,” Hunt asked her, “I’m talking to people who knew her back then. Did you know a guy named Vogler? Dylan Vogler?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t think so. Was he a jock? Mostly I hung out with the jocks.”

  “Did Maya? Hang out with the jocks, I mean?”

  “Not really. She started out with us, then dropped off the team.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea, really. Maybe it was too much practice. I don’t know. Maybe she just lost interest. That happens.”

  “You don’t remember any rumors or gossip about her sometime around the time she quit? Pregnancy, abortion, anything like that? Drugs? Arrests?”

  “Not really, no. But we weren’t really that close, you know. I mean, I knew her when she was on the team. But after she left, like I said, I haven’t heard from her since.”

  “Were there any other cheerleaders who might have known her better? I’ve got a picture of her with you and two other girls in the Foghorn, Amy Binder and Cheryl Zolotny.”

  “Amy, no, I’m sure. Cheryl? Maybe a little. But she’s not Zolotny anymore now. Just a second, let me think.”

  “Take all the time you need.”

  In the reception room, at Tamara’s desk, the telephone rang. Tamara put her own call on hold and answered, then said, “Just a minute, please. Can you hold a sec?”

  And then Nikki answered Hunt’s earlier question. “Cheryl Biehl. That’s it. Biehl. B-I-E-H-L. I think she’s still in the city. She was at the reunion last year. You can try her.”

  “Okay. Well, thanks, Nikki. You’ve been a help.”

  She’d no sooner left the office when Hunt gave Tamara the high sign and immediately was on the telephone again. “Hello.”

  “Mr. Hunt?”

  “That’s me.”

  “My name is Jimi d’Amico. You left a message for me?”

  And it started all over again.

  “Nothing?” Gina Roake asked.

  “Nothing.”

  It was six forty-five and Gina, Dismas Hardy and Wes Farrell’s law partner and Hunt’s somewhat clandestine girlfriend, had her shapely legs curled under her on the couch in her well-appointed one-bedroom condominium on Pleasant Street just down from the peak of Nob Hill. Hunt sat across from her, in one of her matched brace of reading chairs. They’d pulled closed the drapes in the picture window behind him and she’d turned on some of the room’s lights and the gas fire-logs as the now-fierce wind rattled the panes. Gina, barefoot but otherwise still dressed for work in a tan skirt and a beige turtleneck, sipped her Oban scotch and sighed. “That sounds like a long day, Wyatt.”

  Hunt sat back, shaking his head. “I don’t mind long if I get something for it. But we finally got to only five of them before I gave it up. Tamara’s still at it and I must say it’s great to have workaholic employees. But it’s a little weird. It’s like Maya almost didn’t exist after her sophomore year. And there’s no way, or at least it’s unlikely, she was involved in some kind of scandal. Whatever it was, if she was being blackmailed by Vogler, he was one of the very few who knew about whatever it was.”

  “Maybe the only one. Maybe that’s why it worked. And nobody knew him either?”

  “Not so far. The mystery man.”

  “And you’re sure he went there? USF?”

  “Diz says so.”

  “Did you check the yearbook and the student paper for him too?”

  “No.” Hunt made a face. “The reason I like you is that you’re so much smarter than me. But say he didn’t go to USF, so what?”

  “I don’t know. You might be able to find out where he actually went, which might tell you something you don’t know about him.”

  “I don’t know anything about him, except he did hard time for a robbery—which Craig’s checking out—then came back to town and ran this coffee shop and evidently moved a hell of a lot of dope.”

  Pensive, Gina absently turned her scotch glass around and around on the arm of the couch. Finally, she looked up at Hunt. “You’re saying he went to prison from San Francisco?”

  “Yep.”

  “If he was sentenced to prison, he had a presentence report, and the background section of that is going to tell you everything they could find out about him at the time. Surely you have a close personal friend in probation.”

  Hunt considered for a moment. “Have I already told you you’re way smarter than me?”

  15

  At Hardy’s house, less than twenty blocks from the ocean out in the Avenues, the approaching storm decided to get serious. A heavy, wind-driven rain raked the rooftop, turning the skylight over their kitchen into a booming kettle drum that reverberated through the rooms. Hardy, on the wall telephone, trying to hear his client over the din, stood frowning with his finger in one ear and the receiver at the other.

  “The best advice,” he said, “is don’t panic. I got the impression that Mr. Glass sees a political opportunity here. He wants to get his name in the paper, and he thinks tweaking you to get at your brother and the mayor is as good a way as any.”

  This, Hardy knew, was easy for him to say, but not so easy for the Townshends to live with. The truth, verified that afternoon by Art Drysdale, was that Jerry Glass was moving with an almost unheard of dispatch to bring pressure to bear on Joel and Maya. Seen in the kindest possible light, maybe Glass was motivated by a desire to help Schiff and Bracco solve their homicide.

  But Hardy didn’t really buy that, and by the time they both hung up, he didn’t feel like he’d done much of a job consoling or reassuring his client. Still angry about Glass and the way he was operating, Hardy thought a beer wouldn’t hurt him and he opened an Anchor Steam and then placed a call to Harlen Fisk.

  The supervisor picked up on the second ring. “Yo, Diz. What’s up?”

  “Have you talked to your sister recently?”

  Hardy heard a sigh.

  “I talked to Joel earlier today.”

  “Well, if it was before noon, it’s gotten worse since then. Now they’re looking for a court order to freeze Joel’s accounts.”<
br />
  “Jesus. Why?”

  “Because they can. They’re saying they’ve got a money-laundering case. But I’m thinking the real reason is so that Jerry Glass can finally get some national profile for being a good conservative prosecutor with the guts to be tough on dope. He busts the compassionate use spots, the only people who care at all think he’s wrong, and none of them are in the media. But he ties you and your aunt into a bona fide dope operation, I don’t care how obliquely, and you watch, he’s a household name in a week or so.”

  “Joel and Maya aren’t running a dope operation, Diz. Guaranteed.”

  “Right, but the problem is that he doesn’t have to prove it to make noise about it.”

  “Can he do that? I mean just freeze assets?”

  “He’s the U.S. government. He can sure try. I don’t think he’ll actually find a judge who’ll approve it, but he’s got your sister half around the bend with worry.”

  “But what about the forfeiture?”

  “Forfeiture is a civil case, so in essence he’s just filing a lawsuit. I haven’t turned on the TV yet, but the smart money says this gets covered tonight and tomorrow it’s in the paper.”

  “Shit.”

  “I agree. Which is why I called you. Maybe there’s something we can do to keep this from exploding any bigger than it has to.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, the first thing is call him on it, get him back on defense a little. You and Kathy get together and make a strong public statement that this is just a political ploy, another partisan attack on liberals. Then you get the medical marijuana or compassionate use people to go nuts. It’s about politics, pure and simple. The second thing is something I’ve already got my investigator working on, but maybe you can help me with it better than anybody else.”

  “If I can, I’m in. What?”

  Hardy tipped up his bottle. “Well, it looks like both me and homicide have come up with the same theory, and that’s that Vogler was connected to Maya in something that happened a long time ago. The bad news would be if that connection gives her a motive to have killed him.”

  “Jesus Christ, Diz. Maya didn’t kill anybody. That’s crazy.”

  “I hope you’re right, but—”

  “You hope? You’re her lawyer, Diz. You’ve got to do more than hope. She’s not some kind of a murderer. She’s my little sister, for Christ’s sake.”

  Hardy kept his voice modulated. “This hasn’t come out yet, but you’ve got to know that she was down there that morning, Harlen. Vogler might have been squeezing or threatening her. The homicide inspectors went to Glass to try to get Maya to start talking.”

  “Darrel did that?”

  “Glitsky said it was Schiff, but Darrel’s on board with her.”

  “That’s bullshit. I’m going to call him.”

  “Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. They haven’t arrested her yet. They don’t have enough. But if you try to pressure them not to, I guarantee it won’t help. They’ll think she ran to you for protection because she’s guilty and you could pull strings.”

  “This is insane.”

  “It’s the way it is, Harlen.”

  “So what did you want me to do? About this connection?”

  “See if you can get her to tell me what it was.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “What was her history with this loser, who treated her so badly? Why was she paying him ninety grand when the going rate is about half that?”

  “I’ve already heard her answer to that. It was a point of contention between her and Joel. At first, she felt sorry for him and wanted to help him get back on his feet after he got out of prison, and then he did such a good job.”

  “I’ve heard that one too.”

  “You don’t think it’s true?”

  “Maybe I would if he hadn’t treated her like the help. But he did.”

  At this, Fisk went silent for a long beat. “So if and when we find out, assuming she’ll tell me, then what?”

  “I don’t want her to tell you, Harlen. She can’t tell you. You’re not her lawyer. There’s no privilege. You’d have to repeat anything she told you in court if you got a subpeona. You have to get her to tell me or one of my investigators. Then at least we’ve got answers. We’re dealing with the reality of what was going on down there. Glass is going on the theory that the ninety grand was money laundering through the drug business. We need to explain away the high salary without any reference to the dope.”

  “But, as you say, it also gives her a motive to have killed him.”

  This, of course, remained a true source of concern, but Hardy spun it the best he could. “I’m hoping if we can somehow defuse Glass, Darrel and Schiff won’t get enough.”

  “You’re saying you think she might actually have done it.”

  “I’m her lawyer, Harlen. I’m trying to keep her out of jail. Jerry Glass is trying to make her a drug dealer. If she’s a drug dealer, she’s a much more likely killer to Darrel and Schiff. At this point it’s mostly a matter of perception, and admittedly it isn’t much, but it’s about all we got.”

  The Hardys rented a double garage only a couple of blocks from their home, and most of the time this was an advantage over having to drive around the neighborhood for long minutes in search of a parking place. Tonight, however, the short walk through the ongoing monsoon had delivered Frannie, soaked and freezing, to her home about five minutes after her husband’s talk with Harlen Fisk.

  He poured her a glass of wine to go with his second beer and suggested she go upstairs and run a hot bath while he made them one of his extemporaneous “black-frying-pan meals.” Since these were usually great-tasting and an absolute snap to clean, Frannie agreed, gave him a shivering kiss and a quick hug, and disappeared up the stairs.

  The heavy, well-seasoned cast-iron pan was the one possession that Hardy retained from his childhood, and he treated it with great care. Normally it hung on a marlin hook behind the stove and now he took it down, and after admiring the look of it for a moment, he ran a finger over the cooking surface. As always, it was silken to the touch, shiny with a micron brush of oil from its last use, unmarred by any scratch or even the hint of residue.

  Rummaging, Hardy started in the refrigerator—perennially bare now that the kids had gone—and after pulling out a half head of iceberg lettuce, he fixed his eyes upon a carton of eggs and a decent-sized half wedge of triple-crème d’Affinois cheese, which he knew would turn the blood in his arteries to the consistency of tar, but he cared about as much as he had a few days before when he and Frannie had split the first half of it, which is to say not at all. Something was going to get him someday, and if it happened to be the d’Affinois, he could think of lots of worse ways to go.

  They had other only-in-San Francisco staples on hand—butter, truffle oil, sourdough bread in the freezer, some packaged dried mushrooms in the pantry. Hardy dumped the mushrooms in a bowl of warm water to reconstitute, carried his beer with him over to the family room, where he fed his tropical fish, and sat down on the couch to wait for Frannie to descend.

  He was still wrestling with the idea of why he wasn’t asking Maya himself.

  The reasons he’d given Wyatt Hunt had, at the time, seemed reasonable, but now he wondered. True, he didn’t want to get Maya defensive with him. And one of the main tenets of defense work is that no lawyer wants to put his client in a position where she has to lie to him. But he was dimly, naggingly aware of another motivation that made him feel morally uneasy—and that was that he didn’t want to lose her as a client because she represented perhaps a quarter of a million dollars in fees if she got arrested, which he was starting to consider at least as a possibility.

  Hardy billed a hell of a lot of very expensive hours every year, as did his partners and their associates, but even so, a quarter million dollars or more wasn’t something to risk if you didn’t absolutely have to. To say nothing of the publicity surrounding a case with such a high-prof
ile client. And if he got her off, it was probably worth another half million or more to the firm, plus the gratitude of the city’s mayor and one of its supervisors.

  He was hyperaware of the money. That was it.

  He didn’t like to think that he’d become strictly mercenary, not when for so long the law had been a passion for him—first as a beat cop and then a lawyer on the prosecution side, then for the next two and more decades as a defense attorney. Of course, it was also a business and had turned into a fairly lucrative one, but the business side alone had never been the point. And he didn’t want it to be now.

  He wondered if for all the wrong reasons he had sent Wyatt Hunt and now Harlen Fisk off to do a job that should by all rights have fallen to Hardy himself. Or maybe should not be done at all. He knew that he could argue blackmail to Glass without revealing or even knowing the actual fact of it, and thus refute the money-laundering theory upon which the U.S. attorney was building his forfeiture case. But some instinct told him that there had in fact been blackmail, and that the nature of it might be at the crux of this case.

  He sat sipping his beer and staring at his tropical fish, which didn’t provide him with any kind of answers by the time the telephone on his belt went off—Wyatt Hunt atypically calling him off-hours. He must have come up with something.

  “Tell me you’ve got it already,” Hardy said.

  “We got something, all right,” Hunt replied, “but it won’t make you too happy.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The guy who did the robbery with Dylan Vogler? He was a friend of our client when she was in college, name of Levon Preslee.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, not so okay, as it turns out. Levon’s dead.”

  16

  A gust of wind pulled the door of Darrel Bracco’s car out of his hand and slammed it for him just as a fresh volley of rain peppered the blacktop all around him. Lowering his head, he pulled up the hood of his yellow parka and jogged at a good clip toward the obvious destination—the coroner’s van parked in front with a squad car, lights on at the porch and in the front windows. It was ten forty-three when Bracco flashed his badge at the two patrolmen standing by the door.