Fine. “Was Hanson watching Ms. Concepcion on the night she died?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who does know?”
“John.”
Chapter 13
“This is a Crime Scene”
“Frequently, the most important single element in solving a murder involves the careful preservation of the crime scene.”
— Inspector Roosevelt Johnson. San Francisco Chronicle.
I immediately place a call to Shanahan, who politely, but firmly, refuses to discuss any substantive issues by phone, then reluctantly agrees to meet me later tonight. Rosie goes back to the office while I make a beeline to the Mission, where Roosevelt Johnson is waiting for me in the dark hallway on the third floor of a nondescript, six-unit stucco building on Capp Street, between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth. The carpet in Maria Concepcion’s apartment building is worn and the walls are in need of paint. The post-earthquake structure is in a corner of the Mission that’s treacherous at night, and one of her neighbors gained some notoriety a few years ago when he started tossing bricks at the cars of the pimps who plied their trade on the street. It didn’t stop their activities entirely, but it caused some of the hookers to move to another block.
“Technically,” Roosevelt reminds me, “I’m under no legal obligation to do this. I invited you here because we’re friends and out of respect for your father.”
He’s doing me a favor and I express my gratitude, but we both know that the California discovery rules will require him to show me the crime scene sooner or later. The fact that he didn’t foist this exercise off on a uniform suggests he wants to ply me for information.
His partner is conspicuously absent. “Where’s Marcus?” I ask.
“He’s preparing for the prelim that you got pushed up on short notice.”
And he doesn’t want to talk to me. “I want to resolve this case by Christmas,” I say.
“You can resolve it today by having your client plead guilty.”
I tell him that I had a slightly different resolution in mind.
He lifts the obligatory yellow tape and opens the door, then he turns around and says, “This is a crime scene. If you touch anything, I will kill you instantly.”
He isn’t kidding.
I can feel the blood rushing to my feet as he escorts me inside Concepcion’s apartment, which is even smaller than mine. You never get used to the feeling when you enter a murder scene and my stomach starts churning. The tiny living room has been converted into a make-shift law office and the kitchen is big enough for one. The dull beige carpet is tattered and the paint is chipped. A narrow hallway leads to a cramped bedroom and a bath. The windows are closed and the heavy air smells of industrial-strength cleaning solvent.
I ask him why a successful lawyer lived in such a modest place.
“She wasn’t that successful,” he says. “In fact, she was almost broke. She had about a thousand dollars in her bank account when she died and she was behind on her rent.”
I point out that she must have made some good money from her cases against the archdiocese.
“She considered it blood money and donated most of it to the battered women’s shelter.”
I admire her principles, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. “She had other clients,” I say.
“It was small time stuff and she did a lot of work pro bono. Her ex-husband took everything in their divorce. She still had student loans and other debts.”
I look around and observe that she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Her second-hand desk is covered with file folders, and DataSafe boxes are piled haphazardly on the tired olive sofa. A laptop computer, fax machine and photocopier are sitting on a table that came from IKEA. The only family mementos are photos of her parents and a younger brother who died in an auto accident about ten years ago.
I ask Roosevelt if anything was missing.
“Not as far as we can tell. There was no sign of forced entry and there was some money and jewelry in her dresser. We’re reasonably sure Ms. Concepcion knew her assailant and let him in. The back door was unlocked and your client’s fingerprints were on the handle.”
“When did Ms. Concepcion’s mother last speak to her daughter?”
“Seven-thirty that night.” He gives me a stern look and says, “She told us there was nothing unusual about the conversation.”
Duly noted. “Do you think she might be willing to talk to us?”
“I can’t prevent you from approaching her, but I would ask you to be sensitive.”
“Understood.”
He leads me down the hallway to the bathroom where the sink, toilet and tub are original issue. The white floor tile has been scrubbed clean, but I can still make out traces of blood in the grout. “There was a lot of blood,” he says. He promises to send over the photos, but I’m not looking forward to seeing them. He tells me that Concepcion’s clothes were found in a pile on her bedroom floor.
“So,” I say, “you think somebody knocked her unconscious, stripped off her clothes, put her into the tub, slashed her wrists and tried to make it look like a suicide?”
“No, I think your client knocked her unconscious, stripped off her clothes, put her into the tub, slashed her wrists and tried to make it look like a suicide.”
“And the motive?”
“They had a fight. A woman who lives across the hall heard shouting at a quarter to ten.”
Hmm, another witness. “What were they fighting about?”
“You’ll have to ask your client.”
“How did the witness know it was Father Aguirre?”
“She heard the voices of a man and a woman and we know Father Aguirre was still here.”
Unfortunately, we do. We’ll need to talk to the neighbor. I point to the medicine chest and ask, “What did you find in there?”
“Nothing unusual.” He rattles off a typical list of toothpaste, cosmetics and deodorant.
“Anything else?”
“Birth control pills.”
It shouldn’t surprise me–even for a good Catholic.
His mustache twitches when he adds, “We also found an unused home pregnancy test.”
Seems odd. “Why we should have a pregnancy test if she was taking birth control pills?”
“Maybe she’d stopped taking them. We also found a number of prescription and over-the-counter medications.” His mouth turns down slightly before he says, “Including Prozac.”
Bingo. She was being treated for depression.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, “but just because she was taking an anti-depressant doesn’t mean she was suicidal.”
“Says who?”
“Her mother and her shrink.”
And Ramon. “It doesn’t prove that she wasn’t.”
“Save it for your closing argument,” he says.
I will.
His tone turns defensive when I ask him if he found any blood on Ramon’s hands or clothing. “We didn’t question him until several days later. He would have washed his hands and laundered his clothing.”
“You can’t prove it.”
He doesn’t respond.
I scan the bathroom again and ask, “Did you find his fingerprints in here?”
He studies the evidence markers and says they found his prints on the flusher, the sink, the toilet paper dispenser and the medicine chest.
“That suggests he used the bathroom for conventional purposes,” I say.
“Maybe. But–” He lowers his voice and gestures toward the empty tub. “It was full of water when the body was found,” he says.
“So what?”
“If it was a suicide, Ms. Concepcion would have drawn her own bath.”
I don’t like where this is going. “Are you saying that someone other than Ms. Concepcion started the bath?”
“Yes.”
I know what he’s going to tell me, but heart sinking, I ask, “How could you possibly have made that determination?”
He points to a yellow marker on the lip of the tub, just below the hot water handle. “Because we found Father Aguirre’s fingerprints on the handles to the bathtub faucet, too.”
Chapter 14
“Everybody Knows Eduardo”
“With the downturn in the economy and the competition from the big chains, it’s become increasingly difficult for independent markets to survive.”
— Tony Fernandez. Mission District Weekly.
Tony’s Produce has been a fixture around the corner from St. Peter’s for twenty years. It’s an unusual meeting place for a couple of lawyers, but it’s convenient and Rosie’s older brother is an excellent source of gossip.
Rosie and I are sitting on crates in the back of the market and the sweet aroma of fresh fruit surrounds us as she takes in the details of my meeting with Johnson without reaction. She tosses the core of her Fuji apple into the trash and asks, “Have you talked to Ramon about it?”
“I didn’t want to do it by phone. I’m going to see him later tonight.”
“My gut is telling me he that he may not have been entirely forthcoming with us.”
Her gut is usually very reliable.
Tony is about my age and height, but he spends his free time at the gym and carries two hundred and twenty pounds of pure muscle on his six-foot frame. Widowed almost twenty years ago, he recently began dating an attractive divorcee who works at the LaVictoria Pastry Shop across the street. An upbeat guy with more street smarts than formal education, he never loses his cool and he’s managed to run a clean operation in a business that’s rife with payoffs and graft. His smile is wide when he asks me, “How did you like that smoothie?”
“Not bad,” I say.
He put in a juice bar a couple of years ago in an attempt to siphon off business from a Jamba Juice that opened on Mission Street. He discovered that most of the locals can’t afford four-dollar fruit shakes, and he freely admits it hasn’t been a financial bonanza. Then again, success is often measured in relative terms. He’s still in business, but Jamba Juice isn’t.
I finish the blended orange/strawberry/kiwi concoction and say, “Do you have a Diet Dr Pepper in the cooler?” He stocks them just for me. “Old habits.”
“Let me see what I can do.” He returns a moment later with a can of my favorite soda and his tone turns serious. “Do the cops really think Ramon killed Maria Concepcion?”
I assure him that they do.
He takes in the details with a pronounced scowl, then offers a concise analysis. “I don’t believe it,” he says.
I ask him what he knows about Concepcion.
“Off the record?”
“Anyway you’d like it.”
“She used to come in from time to time and was a Type Triple-A. I don’t think she had a lot of friends. She helped us with the fund-raising auction at St. Peter’s last year and was very good at it, but she wanted to run it like a Fortune 500 company. She treated anybody who disagreed with her as if they were stupid or nuts.”
Sounds like her instincts for church politics were on a par with mine.
“A lot of people resented it when she filed those lawsuits against the archdiocese,” he says. “I know that she was just doing her job, but you have to understand this community. A hundred people are holding a vigil for Ramon over at St. Peter’s tonight. The church is the center of this neighborhood and he’s still a hero. Some people think she did it just to get back at her ex-husband after he took her to the cleaners in their divorce.”
You can always count on Tony for the skinny. “We understand she was recently seeing a man named Eduardo Lopez.”
“She was.”
“Do you know him?”
“Everybody knows Eduardo. I supply his produce.”
“Is he a nice guy?”
“He’s successful.”
“Is he trustworthy?”
“He’s always paid my bills and he’s donated a lot of money to St. Peter’s.”
I’m still looking for a straight answer. “Is he honest?”
“He’s never been arrested.”
Enough. “Is he the kind of guy you’d want as your business partner?”
The sage of Twenty-fourth Street pulls at his skin-tight sleeveless shirt and says, “Eduardo always has an agenda for which he’s the primary beneficiary.”
Progress. “What about his personal life?”
“What about it?”
I look at Rosie and say, “Is he the kind of guy you’d want your sister to date?”
“His idea of fidelity is a little different than mine. I know his wife. Everybody in the neighborhood knew he was cheating on her. She finally hired a PI who caught him red-handed with Maria. Vicky filed for divorce and blamed Maria for breaking up their marriage.”
“Who ended the relationship between Maria and Eduardo?”
“Vicky told me Maria pulled the plug. Evidently, Eduardo was pretty upset.”
This contradicts the story Maria told Ramon. She said Lopez broke up with her because he wasn’t willing to leave his wife and start a family with her.
“I’ve never asked Eduardo about it,” he says. “It isn’t the sort of thing you talk about with one of your customers.”
It’s also a prototypical lose-lose-lose situation. Eduardo cheated on Vicky to sleep with Maria. Vicky got wind of it and it destroyed any chance of reconciliation with her husband. Then Eduardo and Maria split up. At the end of the day, everybody lived sadly ever after, except Maria, who didn’t live at all. It will be interesting to get their respective sides of the story if they’re willing to talk.
I ask, “Do you know the name of the PI that Vicky Lopez hired to watch her husband?”
“Nick Hanson.”
That name keeps popping up.
“There’s something else,” he says. “Maria and Ramon had some history.”
“He told us they grew up in the neighborhood, they were friends.”
“There’s more.” He shrugs and says, “I assumed you already knew.”
“Knew what?”
“They almost got married before he decided to go to the seminary.”
Chapter 15
Pete
“You just keep digging until you find something.”
— Pete Daley. PI Monthly.
San Francisco’s longest-running party has been in full swing for the last quarter of a century at Eduardo’s Latin Palace at Twenty-third and Mission, a block and a half from Concepcion’s apartment. Lopez’s raucous eatery was serving fresh Mexican food long before various chains sanitized the concept and took it to malls across the country. The evening’s festivities are already underway at six o’clock inside the cavernous space that smells of mesquite-grilled pork. The bar is packed with blue collar workers, attractive singles and button-down yuppies. The margaritas are cheap and the crowd is electric.
My brother is sitting across from me in a corner booth, just beneath a neon Corona logo. We look almost identical, except he’s five years younger than I am and has darker hair and a graying mustache. Pete was up all night and he’s unshaven and his hair is disheveled. It comes with the territory when you pay the bills chasing unfaithful husbands. He nibbles at a tortilla chip, takes a long draw on his Pacifico and says, “I heard you got bail.”
He’s never been much for small talk. “We did.”
“Neat trick.” He takes off his brown bomber jacket and says, “How’d you pull it off?”
“We got the archbishop to testify.”
He winks and says, “I heard. Your little coup is making the rounds. By the end of the day, it will be part of local legend.”
It’s vintage Pete. He likes to ask questions for which he already knows the answers. It comes from his training as a cop and it’s bugged me for years. He would have made a great lawyer if he had the patience to sit behind a desk. He scratches the stubble that covers his pockmarked face. Pete spent a decade with the SFPD before he and a couple of buddies were unceremoniously sh
own the door after they broke up a gang fight with a little too much enthusiasm. He’s still pissed off about it. He’s worked as a PI for ten years. He doesn’t have the bubbliest personality, but he’s perceptive and an excellent judge of character.
He takes another sip of his beer and rasps, “Which judge?”
“Vanden Heuvel.”
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