“Anything else? Facial hair? Distinguishing marks? So far, the description could’ve fit a lot of people.
Mr. Trujillo thought, staring up at the ceiling. “There was…Yes! He had a mole on his right earlobe. Quite a large one. I couldn’t help but stare at it, and that seemed to make him uncomfortable.”
As Lottie and I exchanged looks, the phone rang. Mr. Trujillo went to dig it out from behind a mound of clippings on the desk. He spoke with his back to us, then held out the receiver to me. “It’s your employer, Ms. McCone.”
How the hell had Shar known to call here? “So you’re one step ahead of me,” she said when I picked up.
“You found out about the house in Ingleside, and Mr. Trujillo?”
“Uh-huh. After you left I decided to run another background check on Homestead, in case the police missed something.”
“Were you messing around with my computer?” Shar’s only now becoming computer literate, and she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Besides, nobody but me touches my office computer or laptop.
“It’s the agency’s machine, Mick.”
And that was that. She wasn’t going to tell me how she came up with the information. Sometimes I think the only reason she resists technology is to bother me.
I decided to one-up her. “Well, Lottie and I have found out that at the time his wife disappeared, Homestead was renting the Ingleside house under an assumed name. Here’s what I think happened: Old Harry had arranged to meet Susan someplace other than the Saint Francis that day. After all, we’ve only got his word about their lunch date. She thought he was gonna take her to meet his mother, who was living in what she called horrible circumstances.”
“In a house held siege by drug dealers.”
“Right. He took Susan there, whacked her, hid the body—maybe in a freezer. Then he activated the alarm system he’d had installed and went to the Saint Francis, where he made sure the staff saw him. And then he put on his act for the people he called and the cops.”
“So the body’s been in the house for all seven years?”
“Protected by the alarm system. For added insurance, Harry bought the place after enough time had gone by that the cops had back-burnered Susan’s disappearance. If he’s visited since, he’s been real careful.”
Shar didn’t say anything. Sometimes those silences of hers unnerve me. “So do we go to the cops with this?” I asked.
“I think you’re right about what happened,” she said, “but it’ll appear an iffy scenario at best to the police. And there’d be nothing they could do. No judge would issue a search warrant without probable cause. We’ll have to see if we can get Homestead to visit the house again—in front of the right witness.”
Shar spent the next morning in conference with Susan Cross’s attorney, an inspector from the SFPD homicide detail, and a representative of Bay Alarm; I spent the afternoon at the florist’s.
Not just any florist, mind you, but Sylvester Piazza, arranger to the glitterati. His fancy shop on Post Street was chock-full of flowers and plants that I’d never seen before, and every customer who came in dropped more bucks than I spend on rent each month. Sylvester himself was a hoot, as Lottie would say: a tubby little guy with thinning blow-dried hair. He scurried around his workroom in his black velvet jumpsuit, plucking a blossom from here, a piece of greenery from there, and mumbling about what an honor it was to be asked to replicate Susan Cross’s masterpiece. La cross—he actually called her that—had been a divine floral “artiste.”
I sat on a stool and watched as he consulted the color photo of Susan’s prize-winning arrangement that her lawyer had given us, and wondered why I’m always the one who gets the weird assignments at McCone Investigations. Sylvester arranged happily, humming opera and occasionally bursting into song. Finally he stepped back and eyeballed his work, nodded, and announced, “Now for the piece de resistance!” He went to one of his glass cases and rustled through the flowers stored there. Suddenly he stopped, clutched his heart, and let out a strangled howl.
I was off the stool right away, thinking he was having some sort of attack. As he doubled over, I rushed to steady him. “What’s wrong?”
“The Strelitzia!” he sobbed.
A fatal disease? Some body part gone out of whack? “Say what?”
“Bird of paradise! It’s the focal point of the arrangement, what gives it it’s meaning! And I have none! One of my dunderheaded assistants must have used it!”
“If that’s the problem, my dad has one of those plants that he brought back from Hawaii—”
“No, you imbecile, I’m talking about the giant bird of paradise! Strelitzia nicolai. The bananalike leaves, the purple floral envelope! Without it, this arrangement is nothing! Even if I could locate a proper plant, getting the cuttings here on time would be impossible.”
“Can’t you substitute—”
Sylvester’s face scrunched up and got red, and he shrieked, “Substitute?”
Right then Lottie breezed in. “Shar sent me to—what’s his problem?”
“No Strelitzia. I’ll let him explain.” I went outside and took a walk over to Union Square. The most zoned-out homeless guy there looked normal after old Sylvester.
When I got back to the florist’s shop, Lottie was on the phone, and Sylvester lay on the floor doing deep-breathing exercises. “Bird of paradise,” Lottie was saying. “No, the giant variety…You don’t? Well, thanks anyways.” She hung up and gave me the evil eye. “While you’ve been out I’ve called thirty-three florists. Seems the giant bird of paradise is in short supply.”
“So use something else.”
Sylvester moaned dramatically. Lottie rolled her eyes. “He says the arrangement won’t look right, and that’ll ruin the effect.” She consulted a list, picked up the receiver again and punched in a number.
Till then I’d never realized how much like Shar she is. Single-minded and stubborn in the extreme. I watched as she went through the whole list without turning up any giant Strelitzia. Then she grabbed one of Sylvester’s reference books and stuck her nose into it. “There’s got to be something,” she muttered.
You’d think she’d give up. Wouldn’t you?
At around ten that night I was once again hunkered down in shrubbery—this time in the yew trees at the Ingleside house, with Shar on one side of me and Lottie on the other. The guy from Bay Alarm had already called Harry Homestead to tell him about a malfunction in the security system and the huge floral arrangement sitting on the front porch. Now he was waiting on the walk for Harry to arrive. And not far away, in deepest shadow, lurked a couple of San Francisco’s finest.
“You really think this’ll work?” I whispered.
“Yes,” Shar and Lottie said in unison.
I looked from one to the other. Their expressions were so fierce that I was reminded of a horror movie where these harpies ripped a poor helpless male to shreds.
A few minutes more and a car turned into the driveway. Its headlights moved over the yew trees, and even though we were well hidden, I ducked my head. The car door slammed, footsteps tapped on the concrete, and a figure in a trench coat hurried up the walk to the security guy. From my past surveillance, I recognized old Harry.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded.
The security man said something I couldn’t hear, turned on his flashlight, and shone it up the steps at the porch where the flowers were.
Homestead went stiff. He took a step toward the house, stopped and said, “How long has that been here?”
“It was here when I checked the place around nine. The malfunction came up on our command center screens at eight-fifteen.”
Homestead was still staring at the floral arrangement. “You sure it wasn’t a break-in?”
“Well, we can’t be a hundred percent certain, but there’s no evidence of tampering. All the same, if you’ll give me your keys, I’ll check around inside—”
“No! I mean, don’t got to the trouble. I�
��ll take it from here.”
“It’s no trouble—”
“Just go. Please.” The security guy shrugged and went down the driveway to his car.
Harry stayed where he was, staring at the dark porch. Finally he squared his shoulders and started up there. At the top of the steps he took out what I guessed was a Bic and flicked it. The flame flared, wavered and went out as he dropped the lighter. And Harry let out a sound that made the hair on the back of my neck standup. “Got him!” Lottie whispered.
Next I heard Harry fumbling with the lock. The door opened and banged back against the inside wall. Light came on overhead, and Harry pushed the flower arrangement aside and stumbled down the hallway. Other lights flashed on. Progressing from the front to the back of the house. Lottie murmured, “I’d say he’s as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers.”
A few seconds later the cops who had been watching nearby stepped out of the shadows and flashed us thumbs-up sign. Hands on their holstered guns, they climbed the steps to investigate whoever it was who’d entered a long-unoccupied house in one of the city’s most crime-ridden areas.
Shar stood up and brushed a piece of yew tree out of her hair. “The flowers really spooked him! Sylvester Piazza must’ve done one hell of a job.”
“Actually, the arrangement doesn’t exactly match Susan Cross’s original.” Lottie said.
“Oh?” Shar’s eyes were on the house.
“Yeah. Sylvester couldn’t come get any giant bird of paradise, so I came up with the idea of substituting something even more effective. Sansevierta.”
“What’s that?”
Lottie grinned wickedly. “Something that’s highly appropriate, given that Harry lured his wife here on the pretext that she was to meet his mother. The common name for Sansevierta is mother-in-law’s tongue.”
Shar started to laugh, and she was still laughing when the cops dragged a handcuffed Harry from the garage. They’d found him checking the freezer to make use Susan Cross hadn’t risen from the dead to create one last flower arrangement.
UP AT THE RIVERSIDE
(Ted Smalley)
“Duck if you see a cop, Ted.”
And so we were off on our mission: my boss, Sharon McCone; my partner, Neal Osborn; and me, Ted Smalley. She, the issuer of my orders, drove her venerable MG convertible. He sat slouched and rumpled beside her. I was perched on the backseat, if you could call it that, which you really can’t because it’s nothing more than a shelf for carrying one’s groceries and such. And illegal for passengers, which is why I had to keep a keen eye out for the law.
I think our minor vehicular transgression made Shar feel free—far away from her everyday concerns about clients and caseloads at the investigative agency she owns. I knew our excursion was taking Neal’s mind off the rising rent and declining profits of his used bookstore. And even though I entertained an image of myself as a sack from Safeway, my thinning hair ruffling like the leaves of a protruding bunch of celery, I still felt like a kid cutting school. A kid who had freed himself from billing and correspondence, to say nothing of keeping five private investigators and the next-door law firm in number-two pencils and scratch pads.
Soon we were across the Golden Gate Bridge and speeding north on Highway 101. It was a summer Friday and traffic was heavy, but Shar made the MG zip from lane to lane and we outdistanced them all. Our mission was a pleasurable one: a stop along the Russian River to look at and perhaps purchase the jukebox of Neal’s and my dreams, than a picnic on the beach at Jenner.
Our plans had been formulated that morning when Shar called us at the ungodly hour of six, all excited. “One of those jukeboxes you guys want is advertised in today’s classified,” she said. “Seeburg Trashcan, and you won’t believe this: It’s almost within your price range.”
While I primed my brain into running order, Neal went to fetch our copy of the paper. “Phone number’s in the 707 area code,” he said into the downstairs extension. “Sonoma County.”
“Nice up there,” Shar said wistfully.
“Maybe Ted and I can take a drive on Sunday, check it out.”
I issued a Neanderthal grunt of agreement. Till I have at least two cups of coffee, I’m not verbal. “I’ve a feeling somebody’ll snap it up before then,” she said.
“Well, if you’ll give Ted part of the day off, I can ask my assistant to mind the store.”
“I…oh, hell, why don’t the three of us take the whole day off? I’ll pack a picnic. You know the sourdough loaf I make, with all the melted cheese and stuff?”
“Say no more.”
Shar exited the freeway at River Road and we sped through vineyards toward the redwood forest. When we rolled into the town of Guerneville, its main street mirrored our holiday spirits. People roamed the sidewalks in shorts and t-shirts, many eating ice cream cones or by-the-slice pizza; a flea market in the parking lot of a supermarket was doing a brisk business; rainbow flags flapped in the breeze outside gay-owned business.
The town has been the hub of the resort area for generations; rustic cabins and summer homes line the riverbank and back up onto the hillsides. In the seventies it became a vacation-time mecca for gays, and the same wide-open atmosphere as in San Francisco’s Castro district prevailed, but by the late eighties the AIDS epidemic, a staffing economy, and a succession of disastrous floods had taken away the magic. Now it appeared that Guerneville was bouncing back as an eclectic and bohemian community of hardy folk who are willing to yearly risk cresting flood waters and mud slides. I, the grocery sack, smiled benevolently as we cruised along.
Outside of town the road wound high above the slow-moving river. At the hamlet of Monte Rio, we crossed the bridge and turned down a narrow lane made narrower by encroaching redwoods and vehicles pulled close to the walls of the mainly shabby houses. Neal began squinting at the numbers. “Dammit, why don’t they make them bigger?” he muttered.
I refrained from reminding him that he was overdue for his annual checkup at the optometrist’s.
Shar was the one who spotted the place: a large sagging three-story dirty-white clapboard structure with a parking area out front. The roof was missing a fair number of its shingles, the windows were hopelessly crusted with grime, and one column of the wide front porch leaned alarmingly. On the porch, to each side of the double front door, sat identical green wicker rockers, and in each sat a scowly-looking man. Between them, extending from the door and down the steps, was a series of orange cones such as highway department crews use. A yellow plastic tape strung from cone to cone bore the words DANGER DO NOT CROSS DANGER DO NOT CROSS DANGER DO NOT CROSS…
In as reverent a tone as I’d ever heard him use, Neal said, “Good God, it’s the old Riverside Hotel!”
While staring at it Shar had overshot the parking area. As she drove along looking for a place to turn around she asked, “You know this place?”
“From years ago. Was built as a fancy resort in the twenties. People would come up from the city and spend their entire vacations here. Then in the seventies the original owner’s family sold it to a guy named Tom Atwater, who turned it into a gay hotel. Great restaurant and bar, cottages with individual hot tubs scattered on the grounds leading down to the beach, anything-goes atmosphere.”
“You stayed there?” I asked.
Neal heard the edge in my voice. He turned his head and smiled at me, laugh lines around his eyes crinkling. It amuses and flatters him that I’m jealous of his past. “I had dinner there. Twice.”
Shar turned the MG in a driveway and we coasted back toward the hotel. The men were watching us. Both were probably in their mid fifties, dressed in shorts and t-shirts, but otherwise—except for the scowls—they were total opposites. The one on our left was a scarecrow with a shock of long gray-blond hair; the one our right reminded me of Elmer Fudd, and had just as bald a pate.
When we climbed out of the car—the grocery sack needing a firm tug—Neal called, “I phoned earlier about the jukebox.”<
br />
The scarecrow jerked his thumb at Fudd and kept scowling. Fudd arranged his face into more pleasant lines and got up from the rocker.
“I’m Chris Fowler,” he said. “You Neal and Ted?”
“I’m Neal, this is Ted, and that’s Sharon.”
“Come on in, I’ll show you the box.”
“’Come on in, I’ll show you the box’” the scarecrow mimicked in a high nasal whine.
“Jesus!” Chris Fowler exclaimed. He led us through his side of the double front door.
Inside was a reception area that must’ve been magnificent before the oriental carpets faded and the flocked wallpaper became water stained and peeling. In its center stood a mahogany desk backed by an old fashioned pigeonhole arrangement, and wide stairs on either side led up to the second story. The yellow tape continued, from the door to the pigeonhole arrangement, neatly bisecting the room.
Shar stopped and stared at it, frowning. I tugged her arm and shook my head. Sometimes the woman can be so rude. Chris Fowler didn’t notice though, just turned right in to a dimly lighted barroom. “There’s your jukebox,” he said.
A thing of beauty, it was. Granted, a particular acquired-taste kind of beauty - shaped like an enormous trash can of fake blond wood, with two flaring red plastic side panels and a gaudy gilt grille studded with plastic gems. Tiny mirrored squares surrounded the grille, and the whole thing was decked out with enough chrome as a 1950’s Cadillac. I went up to it and touched the coin slot. Five plays for a quarter, two for a dime, one for a nickel. Those were the days.
Instantly I fell in love.
When I looked at Neal, his eyes were sparkling. “Can we play it?” he asked Chris.
“Sure.” He took a nickel from his pocket and dropped it into the slot. Whirrs, clicks, and then mellow tones crooned, “See the pyramids across the Nile…”
Shar shook her head, rolled her eyes, and wandered off to inspect a pinball machine. She despairs of Neal’s and my campy tendencies.
McCone and Friends Page 6
