Jeff looked away from the orange-tinted screen. He was having a problem reconciling the Owen Nash in these articles to the body he’d witnessed at the morgue.
He’d gotten there as a limo had been pulling up. Ken Farris and his wife had recognized him immediately from the previous night, and while they didn’t seem all that happy to see Jeff, they were also too distracted to make any real objection when the hawk-faced black inspector with the scar through his lips admitted them.
The other woman in the limo was Celine Nash, Owen’s daughter. She was much older than Jeff, probably near forty, but something about her, even in grief, made him react. He didn’t know if it was posture, attitude or the shape of her, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Stupid, really. A cripple like him stood no chance with most women, much less a beauty of her class and caliber—if that powerful a sexual draw could be called beauty—but he thought there couldn’t be any harm in letting it wash over him.
Until, of course, they saw Owen Nash. At the sight of him, everything else vanished. The assistant coroner had pulled back enough of the sheet to show the face, and there was no question of identification. Celine sobbed once. Farris hung his head and pulled his wife closer to him.
The inspector—Glitsky—had asked the formal question and the assistant was pushing the body back, when Celine told him to stop. She wanted to see her father one last time.
Nobody moved. The assistant coroner looked at Glitsky, who nodded, and the sheet came off, revealing Owen Nash, naked and blue, on the gurney.
First, of course, was the hand, or the lack of hand. The ragged stump without any cauterizing or sutures— one pink tendon extending two inches beyond the rest.
Jeff had seen pictures of the damage a shark bite could do to, for example, a surfboard, but he found that it did not prepare him for the sight of Nash’s ribs opened by the slashing teeth, the wedge taken out of his lower leg.
Celine walked up to the body. Her eyes, he noticed, were dry in spite of the sob. Perhaps they glistened with shock. The coroner’s assistant made a motion to come and steady her, but something in her bearing stopped him. The room became for an instant as silent and colorless as an old black-and-white snapshot—all the life, not just Owen’s—leached out by the tension.
Celine put a hand on the body’s chest, another on the thigh. It might have only been five seconds, but it seemed she stood there forever, unmoving, taking it in. Now a tear did fall. She leaned over and placed her lips against the center of his stomach.
Suddenly it was over. She nodded at the inspector, then turned around and walked past them all to the door and on out without looking back.
In the lobby, Ken and Betty thanked Glitsky. Celine was already in the limo. The evening light was startling— Jeff remembered walking out of matinees as a child, how the Saturday-afternoon light after the dark theater was so jarring, so unexpected. He’d felt that way, squinting against the setting sun.
He knew he should have asked someone more questions—the assistant, Glitsky, Ken or Betty—but he’d been too shaken. By the time he recovered, the limo had driven off. Glitsky had gone into the Hall of Justice. He couldn’t bring himself to go back into the morgue.
He shook himself, pulling out of the memory. The orange screen still hummed in front of him. He looked at his watch and saw that he’d wasted twenty minutes. He had to get down to work.
There was, first, the business side. In 1953, Owen had borrowed $1,500 from a G.I. loan program and put a down payment on a near-bankrupt television repair shop in South San Francisco. He began tinkering with used parts, and within two years had perfected and patented an improved insulation technique for the hot tubes of early TV. General Electric picked it up, and Owen was on his way. He diddled with vacuum tubes, invested in copper wiring, got into simple components before the microchip came along. By the time Silicon Valley exploded, he was ready for it.
Shares of Owen Industries, Inc., were trading on the New York Exchange for $17 a share, and Nash himself had controlled eight hundred thousand shares when he took the corporation public in 1974. Figuring three or four stock splits minimum, Nash’s personal worth on stocks alone, at the time of the BusinessWeek cover story, was close to $70 million.
His other assets were also substantial. Besides the $250,000 Eloise and his Seacliff mansion, he owned a house and more than a thousand acres of land in New Mexico, pied-à-terres in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a condominium in New York. According to BusinessWeek he also held part or controlling interest in three hotels, ski resorts in Lake Tahoe and Utah, a restaurant on St. Bart’s in the Caribbean. His one failure, as of five years ago, had been an airline, the Waikiki Express, which had made two round trips daily between Oahu and Los Angeles for sixteen months before it went bankrupt.
But the man hadn’t spent all his time in boardrooms. The first mention of Owen Nash in any publication had nothing to do with business. In 1955 he was the first non-Oriental to break more than six one-inch pine boards on top of one another in a sanctioned karate exhibition. Jeff was tempted to get up from his chair and see if Archives had the picture referenced in the display, but decided against it. Time was getting short.
In 1958 Nash’s house in Burlingame had burned to the ground. He managed to rescue his six-year-old daughter, Celine, but had nearly died himself trying to get back inside to pull his wife, Eloise, to safety.
After his wife’s death, he bought his first sailboat and took it around the world, accompanied only by Celine. The papers picked up on the rugged outdoorsman life now—for a year in the 1960s he held the all-tackle world record for a black marlin he’d taken off the Australian Barrier Reef. As recently as last year he and Celine and a crew of three college kids had sailed a rented ketch to runner-up in the Newport-Cabo San Lucas race.
His forays into big-game hunting stirred more and more controversy over the years. Jeff Elliot thought the change of tone of the articles was interesting: when Nash bagged a polar bear in 1963 he was a man’s man featured in Field & Stream; by 1978, taking a zebra in the Congo got him onto the Sierra Club’s public-enemy list.
He didn’t “give a good goddamn” (Forbes, “Ten CEOs Comment on Image,” Sept. ’86) about the public. He was one of the only western industrialists to attend the coronation of Bokassa; the Shah of Iran reportedly stayed aboard the Eloise in the Caribbean while the U.S. government was deciding how to handle him after he was deposed; Nash appalled the Chronicle reporter covering his trip to China in ’83 by feasting, with his hosts, on the brains of monkeys who were brought live to the table.
He made Who’s Who for the first time in 1975. He never remarried.
13
“I wish I made more money,” Pico Morales said. “I wish I had more money. Anybody else, they would have more money.”
His wife, Angela, put her hand over his. “English isn’t even his first language,” she said, “but he sure can conjugate the dickens out of ‘to have money.’ ”
They were in the Hardys’ dining room, sitting around the cherry table. After the spaghetti and a jug of red wine, Frannie had brought out an apple pie, and Pico had put away half of it.
“He is a man of many talents,” Hardy said.
“Is there anything special about today and money?” Frannie asked.
“See? That’s what I mean.” Pico had a knife in his hand and was reaching again for the pie. “We don’t think—I don’t think—like a rich person. I think it’s genetic.”
“He thought sharks dying was genetic, too,” Hardy said.
“No, that was lack of family structure.”
“What would you do if you had money,” Angela asked, “besides maybe eat more?”
Pico had no guilt about his size. He patted his stomachand smiled at his wife. “What I would do, given this news tonight about Owen Nash that the rest of the world doesn’t know yet, is go out and invest everything I owned in stock in his company.”
Hardy shook his head. “That stock is going to di
ve, Peek.”
“I know. So you sell short, make a short-term bundle, buy back in.”
“How do you know when it’s going to turn around so you buy back at the right time?” Frannie asked.
“You don’t for sure,” Pico said, “but that’s the nature of stocks.”
“Either that, hon, or they go the other way tomorrow and take off because Nash was mismanaging his company and now they can fly. Then you lose everything.” Angela patted his hand again. “Like every other time we have had hot tips on the stock market. Have another piece of pie.”
“I’m interested in what you meant when you said anybody else would have had more money. When?” Hardy had pushed his chair onto its back legs and was leaning into them, thumbs hooked in his front pockets.
“Today. The last few days. We should already have an agent, be cooking up a book deal, movie rights, something. We’re the ones who found the hand. We should be famous by now.”
“Fame’s an elusive thing,” Hardy admitted.
“Okay, laugh at me.” Pico consoled himself with a mouthful of pie. “But you wait—somebody’s going to make a fortune off this somehow and then where will we be?”
“We’ll be right here,” Frannie said. “I’m kind of immobilized for a while anyway.”
“Don’t you like where you are, Peek? I mean, curator of the Steinhart Aquarium is not exactly an entry-level position.”
“I just feel like we’re all missing an opportunity here.”
“Probably,” Hardy said. Angela agreed. So did Frannie.
Pico ate some more pie.
May Shinn’s apartment was on Hyde, directly across the street from a boutique French deli. The cable-car tracks passed under the window, but this time of night, the cars weren’t running.
There was hardwood in the foyer, an immediate sense of almost ascetic order—a hint of sandalwood? The streetlights outside threw into gauzy relief the one room where she sat in front of her corner shrine, across the room from a low couch with a modern end table and a coffee table. Hardwood glistened around the sides of the throw rug. Along one wall was a high cabinet—thin and elegant lines, glass fronted. Another wall held Japanese prints above a low chair and a futon.
The entranceway itself was an eight-foot circle. Older San Francisco apartments often had turrets, alcoves, arches and moldings that no modern unit could afford. Another rug, two feet wide, was in the center of the circle. A hand-carved cherry bench, the wood warm, highly polished but not overlacquered, hugged the side. Close to ten feet long, it was built to the curve of the wall, apparently and impossibly seamless. It would cost a fortune, and that’s if you knew the artist, if he could get the matched cherry, if there was the time.
The wall in the foyer had an ivory rice-paper finish. Three John Lennon lithographs, which didn’t look like prints, hung at viewer’s height. The light itself came in five-track beams from a central point overhead. Three of the beams were directed at the Lennons, the other two at ancient Japanese woodcuts on either side of the door leading to the kitchen.
There was another longish block of cherry with a slight ridge down its middle on the floor by the open entrance to the living room.
May had bathed after forcing herself to eat some rice with cold fish left over from Friday night. She had combed back her long black hair and pinned it, then sat on her hard, low platform bed for a long while, still undressed, unaware of time’s passing.
When it was dark, she began picking out what she would take with her. Not much. Two suitcases perhaps. She had to decide. Would too little cause someone to notice? What did businesspeople take on a trip to Japan? On the other hand, she didn’t want to tip her hand that she was not coming back by taking too much. She walked around the apartment, taking things down, then putting them back up, unable to decide. Everything was expensive, hard to replace, precious to her. She’d designed her living space that way.
She went to her shrine and lit a candle. It was not a shrine to any god particularly, just a raised block of polished cherry with a pillow in front of it. There was a white candle, a soap-stone incense burner, a knife and, tonight, a plain white piece of bond paper, five by seven inches, with a man’s scrawl on one side of it.
She had gotten out the piece of paper after reading the Chronicle article about Owen Nash that mentioned her, already tying her to him. The paper was a further tie—a handwritten addendum to Owen’s will leaving $2 million to May Shintaka.
She didn’t know if it was legal or not. It was dated a month ago, May 23, and was written in ink and signed. Owen had told her that’s all she needed.
“Maybe I’ll die on the way home,” he’d told her, “before I get the Wheel to get it done right. This way, even if it’s disputed, after taxes, you ought to get at least half a million.”
She’d told him she didn’t want it, and he’d laughed his big laugh and said that’s what was so great about it. He knew she didn’t want it. But he’d folded it once and put it in her jewelry box. Every time he came by, he checked to make sure it was still there.
She wondered if he had told Ken Farris—the mysterious Wheel—about it. Sometimes she wondered if the Wheel really existed, but there he was in the Chronicle article today. She wondered why Owen had never had them meet.
No, she didn’t. She knew why. It came with her profession. You didn’t meet friends of your clients. In fact, what you did together couldn’t survive outside of its strict boundaries, although Owen had promised her it could.
But it never had. And now, could she go and present this little scribbling to the Wheel, Owen’s financial protector? He would laugh at her, or worse. Perhaps she would do it later. But later might be too late. All the money might be gone, and none left for her.
But she had never expected the money, had never wanted to believe any of Owen’s promises. He’d even told her, in other contexts, “A promise is just a tool, Shinn. You need to promise something, you promise. Later you need to not remember your promise, you don’t remember.”
He’d said that before he’d changed, of course, before something had really happened between them. And yet . . .
It broke her heart, that heart she’d hardened and decided to keep to herself forever. She was kneeling back on the pillow, and a tear fell and landed on her polished thigh. Should she pick up the knife? Should she burn the piece of paper? What could she take with her to Japan and where would she stay when she got there?
PART TWO
14
Elizabeth Pullios found out about it first in Jeff Elliot’s Chronicle story. Owen Nash was a righteous homicide, and probably, she thought, a murder. Also, its position there on the front page changed her opinion about the case.
While Dismas Hardy was stirring up the kettle she had been all for him—it never hurt for a rookie to get some heavy trial experience, and there were only a few ways a new person ever got to try a homicide. One was getting what they called a skull case—an old murder with some new evidence. Another way was when one of the regulars, like Pullios herself, would hand off a slam-dunk conviction to one of the rising stars, leaving herself time to try a more challenging case. Once in a while one of the regulars would go on vacation and everyone else would be full up, so a case would fall to the next level. But that was about it.
She had thought that Hardy’s interest in the mystery hand fell more or less under the umbrella of skull cases. Interesting stuff maybe, but not grist for her. There were four, and only four, homicide assistant district attorneys in the City and County of San Francisco. None of these people would hand off a publicity case. If Hardy had hit the jackpot, Pullios felt as though he’d done it by playing what was rightfully her dollar.
She dressed in her red power suit and sauntered into the Homicide Detail on the fourth floor at seven-forty-five on Friday morning. No one sat at the outside desk, and she walked through into the open area for the inspectors’ desks, all twelve of them. The lieutenant’s office was closed up, dark inside. Over by the windows, Mart
in Branstetter was doing some paperwork. Carl Griffin and Jerry Block were having coffee and some donuts at Griffin’s desk, talking sports.
“Hi, guys.” All the homicide cops liked Pullios. They liked her because when they went to the trouble to arrest a suspect and provide her with witnesses she generally saw to it the person went away, and often for a long time. “Anybody got a fuck for me?” Her smile lit up the office. Branstetter looked up from his report.
When she was speaking to these guys, she called all suspects “fucks.” She knew, as all of them knew, that anybody who got all the way to arrested was guilty. They had done something bad enough to eliminate them from society forever. Therefore, she would start the process of making them nonpeople. They were fucks, starting here in Homicide. And fuck them.
“Slow night, Bets.” Griffin put his donut down.
“So who’s got the Nash thing?” She held up her folded newspaper. “Front-page stuff.”
The cops looked at each other and shrugged. “Sounds exciting.” Griffin was more interested in his donut. It wasn’t his case. End of story. “I must have missed it.”
“I think Glitsky might have gone down there,” Block said. “You can look on his desk.”
It was on top of the stack of papers on the corner of Abe Glitsky’s desk. There wasn’t much more than the manila folder with the name NASH in caps on the tab. Inside, Glitsky had started writing up the incident report, but hadn’t gotten far. There were no photos yet, either from the discovery scene or the coroner’s office.
Hard Evidence Page 10
