Death in North Beach

by Ronald Tierney

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘We’ve got the records.’

  ‘Be quiet, Lili,’ Sumaoang said. ‘Let’s stop playing this game.’

  ‘He called. I told him there was no way I could lay my hands on that kind of money.’

  ‘Ten thousand dollars?’

  ‘Didn’t matter, ten, five, one. I don’t have it.’

  ‘Weren’t you afraid that your secret would be made public?’ Carly asked.

  ‘What could I do? Can’t get blood out of a turnip.’

  ‘Richard,’ Carly said in not quite a shout. ‘The money. We’ve got you on the money trail.’ Carly turned to Marlene Berensen. ‘Ms Berensen, you got a call too.’

  ‘I talked with Richard about Mickey needing some money. That’s all. Richard was trying to help him and I agreed to chip in. It was a loan. Richard was being kind.’

  ‘I think it may be too late to paint Richard as a saint,’ Carly said. ‘Blood out of a turnip and all that.’

  Carly walked by Elena and Marshall Hawkes to get to Bart Brozynski.

  ‘You paid?’ she said, surprise in her voice.

  Brozynski shrugged.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t have any secrets,’ Carly asked. ‘What would you want to hide? You revel in being controversial.’

  Brozynski smiled. He was smart enough to know he wasn’t required to answer.

  ‘Corruption of a newspaper devoted to exposing corruption?’ Carly continued.

  ‘No. I have reasons. That’s all I’ll say.’

  McFarland stood up. ‘If we all just get up and leave, all at once, all of us, what could they do?’

  ‘This isn’t going away,’ Gratelli said. ‘We’re just trying to sort out the thieves from the murderers.’

  The room went so silent, you could hear the soft music and low grumbling playing out in the bar area.

  ‘I have a feeling there will be a fire sale on the truth very soon,’ Thanh said.

  Serving drinks was now a distraction. Thanh, with nothing to do, watched in awe as Carly conducted a mass interrogation.

  ‘She’s good,’ Thanh said to Lang.

  ‘She is.’

  Lang had to give her immense credit. Carly Paladino may not have had much experience with the nitty-gritty of the streets, but she knew how to run a meeting. It wasn’t all improvisation either. She had already separated the murderers from the thieves, but she knew she couldn’t prove it. She needed witnesses and while they were all in this room, could she get enough of them to incriminate each other? It was pretty amazing. This wasn’t a couple of cops interrogating a suspect in a small room with a one-way mirror. This was a group interrogation by one person designed to get a few of them to turn on the others.

  ‘Murderer or thief, which are you?’ Carly said, looking around the room.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ McFarland said. ‘Even if you had something here, none of this would hold up in court.’

  ‘Wanna go to court?’ Carly asked the room, then targeted her gaze. ‘Marlene, you want to go to court? Agnes?’

  Agnes DeWitt laughed. ‘Perhaps they can put me away for life.’

  ‘I thought you told me you wished you had something to hide?’ Lang asked.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t about me,’ she said. ‘It was about the whole idea of that nasty book. It not only focused on perhaps brief lapses of judgment in an otherwise creative career of many of these fine folks, but he seemed to want to destroy this wonderful place called North Beach and its rich, culture-changing history. I don’t know why Whitney had to do that. It was as if he was destroying himself. He was going to die and he was going to take all the memories and dreams with him.’

  ‘You read the manuscript?’ Carly asked.

  ‘No, we talked though. He would come by and we would talk. He said I was too timid.’ She laughed. ‘Ten thousand to me is a significant amount of money, but it’s quite unlikely I’ll outlive my modest resources.’

  The room seemed to grow calm. A strange perspective had been given, Lang thought. Is it possible to buy off ugliness?

  ‘Ms DeWitt,’ Carly said, ‘by stealing the manuscript and all its copies, you are only delaying things. The only way to make sure it never sees the light is to destroy its creator as well. Did you see the inevitability?’

  ‘I would if the embattled Mr Warfield was twenty-five. He was not. It took him years to write this. He hadn’t time left. He had been given his death sentence.’

  ‘How is that?’ Carly asked.

  ‘Cancer, young lady. In the blood, in the brain. He told me so. Even if he had lived many months more, he would not have had the strength, or the clarity probably, to recreate it. His impending death was noted in the book.’

  Quiet again.

  Carly continued. ‘But he didn’t die as nature chose. He died because someone else decided that. And the killer has, in fact, confessed.’ She waited. She looked around the room, milking it a bit. ‘Mr Malone, when you told me you killed a man, you led me to believe that it was someone deep in your past. It wasn’t. It was Whitney Warfield. You told him you were going to kill him. That’s why he ran. That’s why he was stabbed in the back of the neck. He was trying to get away.’

  ‘Go on, Ms Paladino,’ Malone said, sipping his Scotch. ‘This is quite amusing. I have to hear it.’

  ‘Mr Sumaoang called you from the bar, saying that Warfield was leaving, going home, and that his son, Mickey, needed more time to make sure he got everything. You knew or Sumaoang knew Whitney’s routine – and I’ll repeat what I said earlier – you arrived and waited for him in Washington Square Park, where he would cut across on his way to his home up Russian Hill. The idea was that you’d engage him in discussion and slow him down until Mickey could complete his task.’

  ‘I was home asleep. I’m not up late. My wife will attest to that.’

  ‘Your wife, Mr Malone, is an alcoholic. She would have been passed out, not at all likely to awaken when you slipped out of the house. You did intercept Whitney. It wasn’t difficult to engage him in conversation. He had already been arguing. He was drunk and the two of you were more rivals than friends.’

  ‘We were probably neither,’ Malone said.

  ‘Oh, you were. You spent hours telling me how the two of you tried to out-macho each other. And that was it, wasn’t it? He somehow impugned your manliness and your ability as a writer to write about the real world. It was Whitney who had killed someone and he lorded it over you as a very special experience yielding a very special understanding. And, quite symbolically, you killed him with his own pen. Very poetic. Much like your work.’

  ‘Very fanciful, Ms Paladino. I like it. It’s almost believable.’ Malone smiled. ‘And how might I have killed Mr Wiley, the Chinese girl and the private eye? I went on a spree, is that it? After all these years I went on a psychotic spree.’ He laughed.

  There was a low-level twittering of laughter in the room.

  Thirty-Five

  ‘You ask the right question at the right time,’ Carly said. ‘You, Mr Malone, killed Whitney Warfield and no one else. You didn’t need to kill anyone else. It was only Whitney who threatened you and no one else’s death benefited you in any way. You and Whitney were rivals and you won.’

  ‘Why on earth would I tell you I killed someone?’ Malone asked.

  ‘You had to tell somebody. What good is having achieved something so important and no one in the world would know it? So, you and Richard Sumaoang conspired to kill Whitney Warfield.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with Whitney’s death,’ Sumaoang said, standing. ‘I just wanted them to talk to give Mickey time to collect the manuscript and any notes. It wasn’t even a crime. Whitney was stealing from us. Our lives. Our private moments. We were merely taking back what was rightfully ours.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Carly said. ‘You can discuss that with the police.’

  ‘You idiot,’ Malone said to Sumaoang.

  Carly turned to Lang. ‘You want to talk about who k
illed Ms LeGard, Mr Lang?’

  ‘I can,’ Lang said, with a mix of surprise and fear. This hadn’t been part of the plan. But he did know this part best. And it did involve him . . . deeply.

  ‘Because Mickey’s whereabouts were questionable the night his father was killed, he knew he was in trouble. One, he would be a serious suspect because they didn’t get along. Two, he had a specific motive because he wasn’t in his father’s will. Three, and the biggest problem of all, he had no alibi on the night his father was killed. The reason he had no alibi is that he was busy committing his own crime, stealing his father’s book. Mickey’s girlfriend, Angel LeGard, initially agreed to lie for him, to say that he was with her the entire evening.’

  Lang looked around the room. He let his gaze stop at Ralph Chiu who was dutifully fulfilling the stereotype as inscrutable.

  ‘Angel worked for you, didn’t she, Mr Chiu.’

  ‘No, I don’t believe so. I have so many enterprises that it might be possible, I suppose, but . . .’

  ‘You knew her, didn’t you?’ Lang asked.

  ‘I have made her acquaintance.’

  ‘For some reason – and I know this because she told me – she changed her mind about testifying for Mickey should he be arrested.’

  ‘So Mickey killed her?’ Mr Chiu said. He shrugged.

  ‘Well, I thought so. But she also told me that she was tired of keeping secrets, that she had something more important to tell me.’

  ‘And she told you what?’ Mr Chiu asked.

  ‘She died between the knowing and the telling,’ Lang said.

  ‘How unfortunate.’

  ‘The point is, what did she know and how did she know it?’ Lang asked.

  Chiu looked at Lang, but gave no clue about what he was thinking.

  ‘She knew what she knew because of what Mickey told her during the many intimate moments they had together. About your business. Where and how you get your girls and how you keep them.’

  ‘What is it that you have then besides conjecture? Have you told us who killed the lovely Ms LeGard?’

  ‘In a way, it doesn’t matter. If it was Mickey, he’s dead. If it was Markham, he’s dead. I doubt if it was Mr Malone. But he’s going down for Warfield’s death. Of course, it could be you, couldn’t it? If that were the case you would have had it done. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  The truth was, Carly wasn’t hired in the first place to find out who killed Angel or Mickey – or Markham for that matter.

  Mr Chiu shut his eyes slowly and opened them just as slowly. He looked away.

  The businessman’s arrogance got to Lang.

  ‘A down-and-out private investigator named Scotty Markham came to you after Mickey went missing,’ Lang said.

  ‘That’s what you say,’ Mr Chiu said.

  ‘I have a witness,’ Lang said. ‘He stormed out of your office. I thought it was Mickey who hired Scotty Markham to run me off. But Scotty was working for you, wasn’t he? I don’t know if even the police know that Markham was a great deal more deadly than anyone who knew him casually might imagine. He was a Navy Seal, trained in the art of . . .’

  ‘This is all a mishmash,’ McFarland said. ‘You’re throwing crap against the wall just to see what sticks.’

  ‘What sticks is that Angel LeGard, who may have been on your unofficial payroll, Mr Chiu, was killed expertly and coldly. A hand over the mouth and an ice pick directly into a vital organ. After LeGard’s death, which you all hoped could be pinned on me, there was a problem with Mickey. He had a naturally loose mouth and it probably really pissed him off that you had his girl killed. Mickey was found with his neck broken in an abandoned building in Dog Patch. Not many people know how to break another man’s neck. It would have to be a pro.’

  There was quiet in the room, but Lang knew he had, in fact, only thrown suspicion at the wall, as the man said. Chiu was practiced in the art of keeping a significant distance between deed doer and himself. The connection between Markham and Chiu was tenuous at best. Even the notion that a traditional Tong member engaged in questionable activities would use a white guy as an enforcer stretched credulity.

  Gratelli cut across the back of the room to talk with Rose and Stern. Lang could see them nodding their understanding.

  ‘Mr McFarland,’ Carly said, stepping in. ‘You have anything to say about your business partner, Mr Chiu?’

  McFarland simmered.

  Carly picked up on his anger. ‘So, the publisher of the Fog City Voice is here, ready to do an investigative piece on Mr Chiu and the murders and the girls and the hotel and your involvement in the hotel, not to mention that you joined a conspiracy to steal a manuscript that was, in fact, involved in another murder – Whitney Warfield’s. You’re all right with all this?’

  ‘Chiu is going to walk,’ Lang whispered to Carly.

  ‘What can we do? We signed on to prove William Blake didn’t kill Whitney Warfield.’ As she said it, Stern was asking Malone to stand up.

  ‘The rest of you,’ Rose said, ‘will need to stop down to your friendly Thomas J. Cahill Justice Center on Bryant Street. Your taxpayer money paid for it, it’s time you paid it a visit. All of you.’

  Carly went to Gratelli.

  ‘We need for Marshall Hawkes to stay behind,’ Carly said.

  Gratelli gave her a puzzled look.

  ‘We have a photograph to unveil.’

  Under the direction of Rose and Stern and with the help of uniformed policemen, the participants were guided to waiting vans. It wasn’t easy. There were protests, threats and demands. Cellphones clicked open and there were shouts of ‘I can’t hear you’, presumably to some too soft-talking attorneys. Lang figured Lili D. Young and Elena Warfield would be questioned and released. Those that paid might be asked to appear before a judge on a date yet to be determined. That would be Bart Brozynski, Agnes DeWitt, Marlene Berensen and the outraged Supervisor McFarland. Ralph Chiu might have a tougher time, but beyond the contribution to the conspiracy to commit theft, evidence was thin. Nathan Malone and possibly Richard Sumaoang could be held and arraigned the next day. Whether Sumaoang was part of the murder was something the police and the DA would have to figure out.

  Carly talked briefly with Anselmo and William Blake before they slipped out the back door. When the crowd was gone and the back room again closed off, it was only the four of them. They were seated at a table.

  Lang and Gratelli sat on one side, their backs against the row of photographs, particularly the one that had yet to be uncovered. Carly and Marshall Hawkes sat on the other side. The place seemed hollow and haunted. A little barroom noise crept in through the cracks in the door.

  ‘Marshall,’ Carly said. ‘We know you replaced the photograph of you that Frank Wiley had intended to show and put in the book.’

  Hawkes looked beyond Lang and Gratelli.

  ‘You found the original?’ he asked. He stood, as stiff-backed as before.

  ‘We know,’ Carly continued, without directly answering his question. ‘Why?’

  He closed his eyes, kept them that way. His hand remained folded on the table. Finally his eyes opened and he spoke slowly.

  ‘How could I, after all these years of being who I am? I am not that person. That person, the woman he photographed all those years ago, is someone else. She didn’t paint these paintings. She didn’t write those articles. She had nothing to do with my work being in the finest private collections or in the best museums. She had nothing to do with any of that.’

  ‘So, you couldn’t allow the world to see that you are a woman, so you killed him.’

  Hawkes emitted a short, sad laugh.

  ‘I was confused then. I had just arrived in San Francisco. I had cross-dressed most of my adolescent years and people just assumed I was a boy – a slightly effeminate boy, yes, but in New York, San Francisco, this wasn’t a problem. Anselmo knew. I used to pose for him in New York, as a young woman, then later as the boy I wanted to become and eventually
had to become. I continued to pose for Anselmo because the way he painted, my identity would not be exposed. And one day Wiley came in unannounced. He saw. It was a crisis for me. The three of us talked. We did some drugs. Wiley wanted to photograph me. There was money and ego and perhaps a little blackmail, along with promises that I would be the one to determine when or if the photograph was ever to be released. He was reneging on his agreement.’

  ‘So you killed him,’ Gratelli said.

  ‘No. Yes. It wasn’t murder. I didn’t intend for him to die. I just wanted my photograph back. We argued. We . . . struggled. He held on to the frame. The only thing close was this big, old camera and I grabbed it and swung it at him. It hit him in the head and I left, thinking I had just knocked him out. Apparently,’ Hawkes said, head held high, eyebrows arching, a deep frown on his thin lips, ‘I killed him and in my haste to exit unencumbered I struck you, Ms Paladino. I am sorry.’

  ‘We’re going to have to go now,’ Gratelli said, standing.

  ‘With all the inequities in the world, all the lies, especially those we know so little of, how much does this little bit of truth matter?’ Hawkes asks. ‘How does it look for me?’ Hawkes’s haughtiness remained, but it was drenched in weariness.

  ‘In the end, that’s up to the DA. The problem is that Frank Wiley’s death occurred during and as a result of another crime. Instead of involuntary murder, this becomes felony murder.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Hawkes said, emitting a strange laugh. ‘I was stealing my own image.’ He shook his head and stood slowly. The ordeal made him weak. ‘The world is such a strange place.’

  As they approached the door, Hawkes seemed to lose what little strength he had. He swooned. Lang caught him.

  ‘Pepe,’ Hawkes said.

  ‘Pepe?’ Carly asked.

  ‘His dog,’ Lang said.

  ‘I have no one to care for him.’

  Thirty-Six

  ‘I really don’t care for God,’ Brinkman said to Lang when the younger man came into the office the morning after the arrests.

  ‘Why is that?’ Lang asked absently.

  ‘He tries to be all things to all people.’