Slowly Stameroff rose from the chair—an old man with a failing body, but still a formidable adversary. “I will not tolerate any more of this kind of talk! I will not tolerate your meddling. You cannot fly in the faces of the people who count.”
The people who count.
No phrase could have triggered more rage in me. I turned, faced him down. “Who are these people, Stameroff? Your friends? The ones at the top of the political power structure? The ones with enough money to buy whatever and whomever they please? Just who the hell are they, Stameroff?”
He compressed his lips, glanced around. It was obvious he wanted out of my house, but he also wanted to have the last word.
“Who are they?” I insisted. “Are the people who count the ones who know the truth about Cordy McKittridge’s murder? Who know the truth and have good reason to fear it?”
Stameroff’s tongue flicked over his lips. He busied his hands with adjusting the hang of his suit coat. Finally he said, “I will not dignify your questions with a response. Suffice it to say, this is your last warning. You will not be allowed to perpetrate this offense against justice. Justice was served thirty-six years ago when Lisbeth Benedict was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to watch her strangle on cyanide. I will not allow justice to be further subverted—not at this late date! And certainly not by you.”
I looked directly into his eyes—eyes that now made me understand what the old westerners had meant when they spoke of the eyes of a hanging judge—and said, “That’s the first time I’ve heard someone refer to righting a wrong as ‘subversive.’”
His mouth worked, and he clamped his lips together again. Then he turned on his heel and left the room. Moments later the front door slammed violently behind him.
I spent the rest of the afternoon on routine work in my home office, and the early evening digging out the remaining blackberry-vine roots from my backyard, while contemplating exactly how much trouble I’d gotten myself into. A good deal, I decided, but wasn’t at all sorry. I was thoroughly sick of the Joseph Stameroff’s of the world, who thought they could trample all over the rest of us. In attempting to intimidate me, Stameroff would find out some of us weren’t so easily frightened.
Tough talk, McCone, I told myself. Not at all bad for one of those uppity enterprising young women. We’ll see how brave you are when the pressure starts coming down.
With renewed frenzy, I resumed my attack on the blackberry roots.
By nine, when I was laying on the sofa listening to some CDs of big band music—a recent enthusiasm, brought on by a rereading of The Last Convertible—I had to conclude that any desire to drop the Benedict case was gone. Anger made me want to press on with it—and that in itself gave me caution. Very few things I’d ever undertaken in anger had turned out well. What I needed was advice—both legal and personal—as well as official sanction from All Souls. Hank could provide both; I’d call him tomorrow at the condo he and Anne-Marie had rented on Kauai.
And if he did give me the green light? I wondered, jiggling my foot to Glenn Miller’s “American Patrol” and sending Allie flying from the sofa’s arm. Investigate very discreetly and hope that Stameroff wouldn’t catch wind of it? Or go full tilt and place myself and All Souls in ever greater jeopardy? Bad choice to be forced to make.
I didn’t like either option any better by the time the CDs had cycled twice, so I gave up and went to bed.
At first I didn’t know what the ringing was. I’d been dreaming at such a deep level that I couldn’t hold the images long enough to identify them. I pushed myself up on one elbow, tossing my hair out of my face. The digital clock showed two-seventeen. The phone kept ringing. I grabbed the receiver, prepared to snarl at a drunk calling the wrong number.
Jack’s voice—agitated, forming words I couldn’t grasp.
“What? Say that again?”
“Come over here right away.”
“Why? Where?”
“Sharon, wake up! I already told you—Judy’s house. Lis has been killed.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
There always are crowds when police cars and an ambulance arrive in a residential area, even at two-forty in the morning. The small one in front of Judy’s house parted, at first I thought for me; then I realized they were bringing the body out, and I stepped back, looking away as the bag on the stretcher went past.
A uniformed patrolwoman guarded the door. I told her who I was; she spoke with someone else, then motioned me inside. Jack and Judy sat on the sofa in the little formal parlor I’d glimpsed that morning. She was rumpled and red-eyed; he wore running shoes that didn’t match. She must have come home late, found Lis, and called and woken him.
With them was Bart Wallace, an inspector on the Homicide detail. A wiry black man with gray hair and silver-framed glasses. Wallace was one of the department’s best detectives. I’d known and liked him for years, respected his abilities, and trusted his judgment. It was a relief to see he’d caught the call.
Wallace came forward and shook my hand. “Mr. Stuart says you may have some information that could be helpful to us.”
“I hope so.” I glanced at Jack, but his attention was focused on Judy. She sat still as stone, eyes on the floor in front of her. Jack had his arm around her shoulders, but she seemed barely aware of his presence, not at all aware of Wallace’s or mine.
Bart noticed, too. He said softly, “We’ll go back to the kitchen, where Ms. Benedict found her mother.”
I nodded and followed him into the hall. “When did she find her?” I whispered.
“Twelve-fifty, the call came in. She’d just returned on the redeye from New York.”
“And how did it happen?”
“Benedict was shot in the head. Looks like a contact shot: star-shaped wound, flaps outward, no blackening.”
“Someone she knew, then?”
“Maybe not. It was a forced entry. You been here before, know the layout?”
“Yes.”
“Sliding glass door to the backyard was broken. Signs of a struggle in the eating area—chair tipped over, coffee cup knocked off the table. Gun was beside her—thirty-two, belongs to the daughter. Says she bought it for protection.”
“So Lis Benedict was trying to scare off an intruder. He took the gun away from her and killed her.” It was a prime argument against untrained individuals having access to firearms.
“Looks like,” Wallace said.
Poor Lis, I thought. Alone here, frightened, helpless against someone younger and stronger. I remembered my leave-taking of her; I’d become irritated, told her to stop being a martyr. And I’d told her Jack would probably stop by later, but he hadn’t wanted to.
I put my regret away for now and motioned at the kitchen. “Is it okay to go in?”
“Lab crew’s finished.”
We entered the room where I’d talked with Lis that morning. The signs of a struggle, while not numerous, were readily apparent. The chair where she’d last sat had been knocked on its side. Her coffee cup lay shattered next to the chalk outline of her body. A fern had fallen from a stand near the glass door, was trampled and wilted. I looked at the door: jagged shards protruded from its frame, and smaller ones were scattered on the terra-cotta tile. On the table the coffee cup I’d drunk from was filmed with fingerprint powder.
“The prints on that are probably mine,” I said, pointing it out. “I came by around nine-thirty yesterday morning. Stayed maybe half an hour. Do you have a fix on the time of death?”
“Yeah. Neighbor to the right, Adele Skillman, heard the shot. About six-fifteen, she says. A little while later she heard somebody run down the path between the houses.”
Six-fifteen. I thought again of Lis, alone and helpless. Judy had been out of reach, unaware of the crippling depression into which the increasingly frequent anonymous phone calls had plagued her mother. And Jack? He might not even have bothered to call Lis, taking to heart what I’d said: I find it hard to beli
eve that someone who survived all those years in prison can’t survive until Judy comes home tonight.
Well, she hadn’t survived, had she? And perhaps my words to Jack made me, in some indirect way, partly responsible. Where had I been while Lis was dying? At home, obsessing about Joseph Stameroff and how I might have put myself and All Souls in jeopardy.
Stameroff, I thought now. Could Stameroff be involved in this? He hadn’t made an outright denial when I suggested he might have arranged for the graffiti and phone calls. Could this have been a professional hit?
Wallace was watching me closely. “Something wrong?”
I wasn’t ready to bring Justice Stameroff into the conversation yet, so I said, “Feeling guilty, I guess. She was my client, and I didn’t like her much. When something like this happens to a person you don’t care for, you feel guilty for a lot of irrational reasons.” I looked at the smashed door again. “Bart, this Adele Skillman—she heard the shot, but not the glass breaking?”
“Right.”
That bothered me. It had to do with something I’d learned during the seemingly endless years of renovating my house, but I couldn’t quite grasp it. “So what did she do after she heard the shot and the person running?”
“Nothing. Didn’t want to—”
“Get involved.”
“Yeah.”
We were silent for a moment. The Wallace said, “Tell me about your investigation. Stuart gave me the rough outlines, and of course, I know the victim’s history. Now let’s hear what you’ve got.”
I perched on the edge of the table, and he leaned against the breakfast bar as I went over the details. When I finished, he closed his notepad and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “That’s good stuff. You think of anything else, be sure to let me know.”
I hesitate. The concept of a state supreme court justice ordering a professional hit might be farfetched, but my talk with Stameroff had bearing on Lis Benedict’s final attempt to clear her name—and that attempt could possibly have led to her death. Withholding the details of my conversation with Stameroff would have been withholding evidence. “Bart,” I said, “there is something else,” and told him about the justice’s visit to my house.
Wallace’s expression grew very grave. When I finished he was silent for some time. “You’ve really handed me a can of worms, you know that?”
“Yes.”
He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose where they’d made deep indentations. “Christ, I hate these cases that turn politically sensitive! I’m going to have a talk with my lieutenant about his, and he’ll have to go to the captain . . . Listen, Sharon, I want you to promise not to discuss this with anyone else.”
“Of course.”
“And lay off the investigating for now. You don’t want to go stirring things up, even by looking into this old murder. Those . . . what was it Stameroff called them? Those ‘people who count’ can play rough.”
I nodded and slipped off the table. My gaze rested on the outline of where Lis had fallen, and my eyes stung with tears. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t liked the woman; this was a terrible end to a terrible life.
Not much escaped Wallace; he put his arm around my shoulders and guided me toward the door. “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “it doesn’t get any easier for me, either.”
He and I spoke briefly with Jack. Wallace stressing that I was to put my investigation of the McKittridge case on hold. Jack was distracted, his mind on Judy. “It was a bad idea in the first place,” he said, and went to comfort her.
At home I brooded in what remained of the darkness. Brooded not only about Lis Benedict but about the other, living victims of the McKittridge murder. Brooded about all the victims I’d seen during my time in the business. About all the predators I’d seen do the victimizing. And about all the reasons why . . .
As the sitting room windows were taking on gray definition, the doorbell shrilled. I started, flooded with that uneasiness such untimely summonses cause. Went down the hall and peered through the peephole. My neighbor, Will Curley, a short-haul trucker whose route throughout the Bay Area took him away at all sorts of ungodly hours, stood on the steps. Under the bill of his Giants cap, his face was angry.
“Have you seen this?” he demanded as soon as I opened the door.
I stepped outside and looked where he pointed. The shingles on the front of my house were streaked with red; it had soaked in and bled, but I could still make out the words: DEAD WOMAN. Sprayed two, three . . . no, four times.
Numbly I touched the nearest patch of paint. Still tacky. Had it been done as I sat wrapped in an afghan on the sofa, or earlier, while I was at the murder scene? Or even earlier than that, while I slept? I could have missed it while leaving and coming home in the dark. I’d been upset and in a hurry, and the porch light had burned out the night before last.
Dead woman. Me, if I didn’t leave the Benedict case alone. I thought of Wallace’s words: “Those ‘people who count’ can play rough.”
Will was waiting for me to do something—scream, curse, cry, anything but just stand there. Finally I asked, “Do you know how I can get that off?”
He frowned, clearly puzzled by my mild reaction. “Probably you’ll have to reshingle. Is this a job thing or what? The wife said a limo was hanging around here yesterday and that you were talking to a couple of guys in dark suits.”
I smiled weakly. “You’ve seen too many Godfather movies. The guy with the big car—it wasn’t a limo—is on our side of the law.” Or at least he was supposed to be, I reminded myself.
“Then who did this?”
“I wish I knew.”
“You find out, come to me. I’ll take care of him.”
“I’d rather you asked around for a cheap shingler.”
“I got a cousin in the building trades—he’ll get you a good price.” Then Will peered at my face, checking to see if I was really all right. “Anything else you need, just give a holler.”
“Thanks, Will.” As he jogged down the block toward his truck, I felt a wave of gratitude for having found this oasis of neighborliness. Then I went inside and called Bart Wallace at his office.
“You remember something else?” he asked.
“No, but there’s been a new development.” I explained about the graffiti.
“‘Dead woman,’ “ he said. “I don’t like that one bit. I’ve been in conference with my lieutenant for the last hour, and now he’s with the captain, but my gut feeling is that I’m going to have to move slow on the Stameroff angle.” He paused. “Tell you what—I’ll send a lab crew out there to take pictures and paint samples. Maybe we can get a match with the stuff at the Benedict’s. You okay?”
“I’m not frightened, if that’s what you mean. In fact, I’m starting to get really pissed off.”
Wallace was silent for a moment. “Sharon, why don’t you go away for a few days? Memorial Day weekend’s coming up. Have yourself a little vacation.”
“Why? I doubt I’m in any real danger.”
“You don’t know that. Besides, you keep on getting pissed, it’ll be the ruin of my case.” He tried to make a joke of it, but there was real concern for me behind the words. “Think about it, will you? There’s nothing you can do here.”
“Bart, I do have other work besides the Benedict case.”
“Well, think about it anyway. If you decide to go, just let me know where I can reach you.” Abruptly he hung up.
As I ground coffee beans, I considered Wallace’s suggestion. Leaving town seemed like running away, but on the other hand, I really couldn’t do anything about the Benedict case or the graffiti. My remaining caseload was light, and I’d already requested this coming Friday off, so why not take a couple more days on either end of the long weekend? I could sort through the facts and my impressions of the case in a different environment; something might occur to me that would aid Wallace’s investigation.
But could I leave, given wha
t had just been done to my house? What if the perpetrator returned, wreaked even more costly havoc?
Of course I could leave. Through Wallace I could arrange for extra police patrols on my street; it stood to further his case if they apprehended the vandal. And Ted could be persuaded to periodically check on the house; he had a proprietary interest in Ralph and Alice—they’d originally belonged to his childhood friend, Harry, who had died of AIDS—and always fed them when I went out of town. Plus there were vigilant neighbors like Will Curley. Sure I could leave.
And there was an added factor that made the prospect of getting away attractive; I’d feared I was becoming obsessive about the McKittridge murder, and now I could feel the pull of that long-ago crime even more strongly. I needed to sort through not only the facts and my impressions but also my feelings. With distance, perhaps I could regain control.
After I’d finished my first cup of coffee, I made my arrangements. Then I called Hy. Said I needed to get away for a while. He heard the seriousness in my voice and without question told me he’d meet me at Oakland Airport in four hours. We’d fly over the Sierra Nevada. He’d take me to the Great White Mountains, where bristlecone pines, the oldest living things on the earth, grow. We’d watch the tule elk, the wild mustangs, the golden eagles. We’d make love under the black star-shot sky. We’d listen to the silence.
Uneasiness nudged me. I reminded him that I hated the oppressive silence of the mountains.
That was because I’d never really listened to it, he said. Once I learned to do that, the silence of the Great Whites would soothe me. Strengthen me, so I’d return home prepared to face whatever was driving me from the city.
I wasn’t totally convinced, but I agreed and started packing. And realized I’d made all my arrangements without once doubting that Hy would fly here for me—just as he hadn’t doubted I would fly off to the Great Whites with him.
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