Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  She liked everything about where she lived except, sometimes, every now and then, the fact that she lived there alone.

  It was hard to have a normal love life if you were a cop. Stockbrokers and corporate lawyers, regular guys of any description, resented the hours and the commitment. They just didn’t understand what it was like, and they didn’t want to understand. Ellen had learned that lesson the hard way.

  She had had three serious relationships since graduating from college, and each had floundered over the intractable problems of reconciling police work with the demands of what most men seemed to regard as the necessary conditions of private life. The last disaster, and the worst, had been Brad the hedge fund manager.

  Everyone’s first impression of Brad was that he was like the hero of a paperback romance novel, and, well, with a name like “Brad” how could he be anything else? He was handsome, intelligent and rich. His conversation could be immensely entertaining. He knew everything there was to know about wine and food and where to buy his clothes. He was one of the Beautiful People. Ellen’s mother was crazy about him.

  They met on a neighbor’s tennis court in Atherton, where they had both grown up in perfect ignorance of one another. For once Ellen had Sunday off and, feeling guilty about her parents, she had gone home to play the suburban princess.

  Ellen’s efforts at physical fitness were restricted to three visits a week to the police gym. She didn’t play tennis—tennis was too obviously patrician, so she had spent her adolescence resolutely refusing to learn—but Daddy did. Brad was some sort of cousin of the neighbor’s, down for the weekend.

  It was an unequal struggle. In three sets Daddy never scored a point, but Brad was enough of a sportsman not to gloat. Ellen sat on the sidelines, wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses and admiring Brad’s perfect tan.

  Then Daddy and the neighbor played, and Brad sat down with Ellen to drink iced tea. He was no end of charming and seemed less impressed with himself than perhaps he had a right to be. Somewhere in the conversation he asked her for a date. They would meet for dinner in the city the following Wednesday.

  It got off to a rocky start. She and Sam had been working a very messy domestic murder since about one in the afternoon, and she didn’t have Brad’s cell phone number. She showed up at the bar at Ernie’s almost three quarters of an hour late. There hadn’t even been time to change.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Things got a little hectic at work.”

  He glanced at her tan corduroy jacket, which was not too bad but probably not up to corporate standards, and asked her what she did.

  “I’m a homicide detective.”

  By then Ellen had been on the squad for two months, and she still felt as if she had received an Academy Award. Probably she had expected Brad to be impressed. He wasn’t.

  “Well, I hope then you remembered to wash your hands,” was all he said.

  But Brad was the type who could make a quick recovery and the rest of the meal went much better. They talked about growing up in Atherton and discovered they had friends in common. Ellen felt very much at ease with him.

  Probably she should have known better. She should have finished her dinner, given up on Brad, and gone home to feed Gwendolyn. Instead they made another date, and then another, and after the third she decided he was a really nice guy who made her feel like she might genuinely matter to him, so she went back with him to his three-bedroom apartment on Russian Hill and climbed into his bed.

  Brad was very good at sex, if a bit of a technician. Most of the time she was too busy enjoying herself to notice, but sometimes he left her wondering if he hadn’t taken a course in the subject at Harvard Business School.

  Their relationship lasted for a little over a year and a half, although they never actually moved in together. And that was probably just as well. He seemed such a catch, but the distance between the places where they each lived their lives was emotional as much as geographical.

  Brad cared nothing about justice or unraveling the little mysteries of hatred, jealousy and fear that controlled so many people’s lives. If something didn’t net you an income in the high six figures or wasn’t “amusing”—one of his favorite words—he didn’t want anything to do with it.

  Sam met him once, briefly and quite by chance when she and Brad were on a date and she took the summons to an apparent drug murder in the Mission District. He wasn’t happy about it, but Brad drove her all the way across town to where the uniforms were already putting up their barriers to keep the foot traffic away.

  It was an interesting moment.

  The crime scene was an alley off Dolores Street, and they pulled up in Brad’s BMW. Ellen took her badge case out of her purse and hung it over the neckline of her black cocktail dress. The uniforms seemed to find this hysterical and Brad was embarrassed.

  Sam stepped out of the alley, took one look at Ellen and said, in a perfectly expressionless voice, “Sorry to spoil your evening. Our guest of honor is Freddy Hines—you remember him?”

  Under the circumstances, with Brad at her elbow, Ellen didn’t want to talk about Freddy Hines, whom they had dragged in for questioning the week before in connection with another murder. So she retreated into introductions, and Sam shook hands with her beau.

  “Do you want me to wait?” Brad volunteered.

  Sam answered for her. “This could take a while,” he said. “I’ll see that she gets home.”

  Two minutes later, Brad was gone.

  As they walked back to where Mr. Hines was lying tangled up with the garbage cans, Sam explained to her one or two curious details of the case, such as the fact that their Freddy had been shot in both knees before getting the back of his head blown out.

  “Somebody didn’t like him,” was Ellen’s comment. “I suppose our perp must have used a silencer.”

  “It seems likely.”

  Sam never mentioned Brad, then or later, which could have meant anything or nothing. Ellen had been partnered with him for only about four months, so perhaps he felt some delicacy about commenting on her boyfriends.

  Brad was more forthcoming.

  “What a specimen,” he said on a subsequent occasion. “He looks like he should be working as a longshoreman.”

  “Sam is the best homicide detective I’ve ever seen or ever heard about.”

  There was no response, but apparently Brad didn’t regard that as much of a distinction.

  Police work was neither highly paid nor “amusing,” you see. It might be a lifetime high point for somebody like Sam, but Ellen was part of the gentry. Therefore he tended to regard her job as some sort of neurotic obsession or, at best, a hobby.

  Also, she couldn’t control her time. Since the West Coast was three hours behind New York, Brad was in his office from five A.M. to two P.M., Monday through Friday, and the weekends were consecrated to the Good Life.

  “Have lunch with me on Tuesday. There are some people I want you to meet.”

  “I’m working Tuesday. If I’m lucky, lunch will come out of a vending machine.”

  “Call in sick—what can it matter?”

  “It does matter. And if I called in sick every time you wanted me to, they’d fire me.”

  Apparently, from his silence, that didn’t strike him as an adequate reason.

  There were lots of good times, so Ellen tended to regard her lover as basically a decent sort of man with a few blind spots. By the beginning of their second year together this description was starting to seem a little shopworn.

  The breakup came over a trip to the Florida Keys—lots of sunshine, lots of beachfront, lots of people with serious money. But at the last moment Ellen found herself working a triple homicide, a prostitute and her two children killed by her boyfriend. She couldn’t tear herself away.

  After that, Brad stopped calling. She had tried calling him a few times, but all he had to do was glance at the digital readout on his cell phone to know it was her. He just didn’t answer or respond to her messa
ges. And she was damned it she was going to camp out on his doorstep.

  That had been four months ago.

  At first it had been simply a numbing shock. She couldn’t believe it. They had seemed to strike such a chord together. And then Ellen had begun to see all the reasons why it hadn’t worked—why, probably, it could never have worked.

  It was the job, and it wasn’t the job. She could have been a high school teacher or the Wolf of Wall Street, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. It was the commitment Brad couldn’t handle. If she had been more committed to him and to the relationship, if she had been prepared to get married and spend the rest of her life sending his suits to the cleaners, then he probably would have been satisfied. Brad was the center of his own life and he couldn’t understand why she wasn’t content to make him the center of hers.

  All right, that made it somewhat easier. She was a martyr to her job and he was a narcissistic prick. But she still missed him, particularly in the small hours of the morning, if something happened to wake her and she found herself alone. And she was still in mourning for him—as was evidenced by the fact that she had turned down dinner and maybe a little fumbling around with Ken the police photographer.

  It was past time for getting on with her life.

  Thus the question became what sort of man would not be a mistake.

  One point Ellen had settled with herself early on was that the last thing she needed was another cop sharing her electric blanket. She didn’t want a man who stared out at the world through such deeply cynical eyes. She didn’t know how Sam’s wife stood it.

  * * *

  By seven-thirty she had eaten her dinner—lamb chops because Gwendolyn liked chewing on the bones—and she had watched the evening news.

  Ellen was beginning to worry about Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn was seven years old, which was close to the average life expectancy of a ferret, and Ellen had the impression that she was beginning to slow down. Even a year ago her evening entertainment would have been forty-five minutes of turning the apartment into chaos, but now, after twenty minutes with her yarn ball, she was ready to call it a night. She was presently asleep on a sofa pillow.

  After the day’s events, the prospect of finding Gwendolyn dead in her cage one morning filled Ellen with dread.

  She decided she needed a distraction. Finally her eyes came to rest on the video disk that was lying on top of her purse on the coffee table.

  “Okay. What the hell. Sherlock Holmes every minute of the day.”

  It was only about ninety seconds long. Just a crowd of men standing behind the police tape, like tramps waiting for a free lunch. She watched it through and saw nothing to interest her, so she clicked it back to the beginning and watched it again. Then she watched it again.

  It wasn’t until the fourth time around that she saw him. He was tall and slender, better looking than the others, with a sharp-featured, intelligent face. Light brown hair, a tan Windbreaker, trousers that might have been dark green or brown.

  But his gaze was fixed on the camera lens. Nobody was fooling anybody. He knew he was being filmed, and he didn’t give a damn. You could read it in his eyes.

  Those eyes seemed to look straight through you.

  4

  The next morning Ellen brought the disk with her to Homicide and, when Sam came in, played it for him.

  “Tell me if I’m crazy.…”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Right. But does anything strike you about any of these guys?”

  Sam watched the disk through again and then shrugged.

  “Did I miss something? Does one of them have a sign around his neck, ‘Stop Me Before I Kill Again’? What are you getting at, Ellie?”

  Ellen clicked the disk back to the beginning and then played it over, hitting the freeze frame button in the middle of the second pass over the crowd.

  “Him,” she said. “The one in the middle, in the tan jacket.” She tapped on the TV screen with her fingernail to show the person she meant. “See the way he looks into the camera?”

  “So what? Maybe he’s got a letch for the cameraman. Girl, this is San Francisco.”

  “He knows he’s being photographed.”

  “All right—he knows. Maybe he’s just smarter than the rest of the innocent bystanders. That doesn’t make him guilty of anything.”

  “I’ve seen him before. The car trunk in North Beach, remember?”

  “Maybe he’s a homicide groupie. Anyway, the car trunk thing wasn’t our case.”

  “So? I heard it on my police band and thought I’d drop by.”

  “It was your day off. Are you nuts?”

  “If he’s a groupie, you must have seen him before—you never forget a face, Sam. Is this guy somebody you know?

  Sam reached over and, with an impatient stab of his finger, hit the power button on the TV set. The image of the young man in the tan Windbreaker imploded into a tiny dot of light, and then flickered out.

  “Our Boy is turning into an obsession, Ellie. Get a life. Go out and find yourself a new boyfriend or something. You’ve got to stop this shit.”

  “Have you ever seen this guy?” Ellen answered, ignoring the advice.

  “No, never.”

  “And how many murders have we worked since then? How long has it been? Six weeks? And you’ve never seen this particular specimen behind the barricades?”

  “You need a vacation, Ellie. Come home to Daly City with me tonight and let Millie feed you some of her lasagna. Afterwards we’ll have a little three-handed canasta and play with the dogs.”

  “Let’s find out who he is, Sam.”

  It was not very difficult. Murderers loved to admire their own handiwork so, as a matter of routine at every homicide that attracted a crowd, one of the uniformed officers would be assigned to walk around and write down the license plate numbers of all the cars in the immediate area. If a suspect turned up, his car plates were checked against the lists, and if the numbers matched, it at least established his presence at the scene. Also it provided the sort of corroborating evidence that made an interrogator’s life so much easier: What were you doing at Van Ness and Stockton at three o’clock in the afternoon on the twenty-sixth? You think we don’t know you had your car parked around the corner from where David Thomas got his head blown off? More than one man had been put on death row that way.

  And so, to cut down on computer time, they compared the plate numbers from the Sally Wilkes scene with those from the North Beach killing. They found three matches. They would start with those. They ran the numbers over the hookup with the DMV, checking the photographs on the driver’s licenses. Two of them Sam recognized at once as well established members of the Fan Club. The third was the man in the tan Windbreaker.

  “Stephen Tregear, six twenty-one North Point Street.”

  “So the guy isn’t broke.” Sam lit his tenth cigarette of the morning and exhaled a cloud of smoke that seemed to stand as a comment on life’s many injustices. “Apartments that close to the Wharf go for a nice nickel. I imagine you want to run a check on him.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  But a search of the department database came up empty. Stephen Tregear, it seemed, had never been arrested or questioned by the police, had never been mentioned in any filed report, had never even received a parking ticket. He seemed to be a model citizen.

  Which should have ended it—it ended it for Sam.

  “So file his name,” he said, “and we’ll see if he turns up again sometime.”

  “Let’s dig around a little.”

  “Why?” Sam held up his hands, as if to prove he had washed them. “You have nothing on this guy except you don’t like the way he looked at the camera. For the rest, he’s Mr. Clean.”

  “He’s too clean.”

  “Just so you know, Ellie, there actually are people out there who go through their whole lives without so much as incurring a library fine. He isn’t any guiltier because we don’t have a folder on him.�
��

  “I think we should run him, give him the full treatment. We’ll find something.”

  “Ellie—sweetheart—give it a rest. What have you got in mind? The Bureau? His service records? A search like that costs money, and what are we going to tell the lieutenant when he asks us why?”

  “He won’t ask if we come up with something.”

  “And if we don’t? Forget it. The answer is no.”

  Sam was right. He was usually right. His was the received wisdom of the department and Ellen went back to her paperwork without even a grumble of rebellion.

  By eleven o’clock a preliminary report on the glass found in Sally Wilkes’ kitchen had made it upstairs to Sam’s desk. He handed it to Ellen almost as if disappointed.

  “I don’t suppose we could have asked for more,” he said. “They came up with good saliva residue, and Our Boy is definitely a secreter, so the next step is to see if the DNA in the saliva is a match with the semen.”

  “And no prints.”

  Sam raised one shoulder and smiled, as if to say, What did you think? “He’s arrogant, but he isn’t stupid.”

  “You think he’s still playing with us.”

  “Oh sure. He’d love for us to spend a couple of hundred hours of very expensive lab time trying to find a cross match. He knows we won’t find it, and he doesn’t expect we’ll catch him.”

  “None of them ever expect that.”

  “And some of them are right.”

  Two or three times a year the department had to requisition a new swivel chair for Sam. He was a big man—he had played football in high school—and he was hard on the furniture. He didn’t so much sit down as throw himself into a chair, and he would lean back in it until, eventually, the bearings would wear out or a leg would come loose or some other catastrophe would befall it and it would have to be taken out with the trash. The lieutenant received regular complaints from Accounting, but he never mentioned them to Sam because he, like everyone else, had come to realize that such casualties were necessary. Chairs were the innocent victims that got caught in the cross fire of Sam’s career-long war against the bad guys.