Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  At that moment he had his feet up on the desk, and the chair was cradled under him at precisely the angle to put maximum stress on the back legs. It was a posture that suggested the darkest pessimism.

  “This guy is beginning to spook you.”

  Sam didn’t take offense. At first he didn’t even seem to hear.

  “Could be,” he said finally. “I keep thinking about Sally Wilkes’ guts, spread out like that in the bathtub. He didn’t kill her there—as you pointed out, you can’t disembowel someone without making a hell of a mess, and the place was spotless. For another, we’re going to find out that she was alive and conscious when he did it, probably without even a gag to keep her from screaming. The screaming is likely the part he enjoys most, and she would have awakened the whole neighborhood. No, he killed her in some secret place of his own and then carted her insides back in a garbage bag and left them for us to find.

  “Which, incidentally, leaves Mr. Tregear out. He’s got an apartment on Fisherman’s Wharf, remember? Crowds, neighbors—not the sort of place where you can really enjoy yourself the way Our Boy does.”

  “If he’s rich enough to live on North Point, he can afford a dungeon someplace.”

  “Possible, but not likely.” Sam made a small gesture with his hand to suggest how little he thought of the idea. “Face it, Ellie. This humorist isn’t some pathetic weirdo who cuts up girls because his mommy used to threaten to snip off his dick with the pruning shears. This isn’t about sex with him, or even anger. It’s about winning. He’s a game player. So far he’s making all the right moves.”

  “And he’s laughing at us.”

  “Looks like it.”

  Sam took his feet down, and the front legs of his chair hit the floor with a snap that should have shattered them like glass. He stood up and then settled again on the corner of Ellie’s desk.

  “Play the disk again,” he said. They watched it through twice more, each time freezing on the man in the tan Windbreaker.

  “Maybe he’s made his first mistake.”

  Ellen felt a disappointment that was like grief when Sam shook his head.

  “Maybe, but this isn’t it. That isn’t him, Ellie. Haven’t you figured it out yet? He knows our methods. He knows all about how we go after sick fucks who butcher cocktail waitresses and leave them out in the rain. If we ever do catch him, it won’t be because he fell into our laps.”

  * * *

  When her shift ended Ellen went home and played with Gwendolyn until the poor baby curled up in her lap and went to sleep. By then it was five, time to start thinking about dinner, and Ellen didn’t feel like cooking.

  Mindy Epstein was probably going to be sleeping on the sofa tonight, since that was what she had done after leaving her first husband. She had phoned and said her suitcases were in the trunk of her car. Perhaps Mindy would feel like dinner out.

  She dialed Mindy at her office and they decided on a restaurant by Fisherman’s Wharf where you could get scallops and pasta and a bottle of halfway decent wine and still pay the rent.

  “It was too domestic,” Mindy announced, describing the collapse of her second marriage. “He had this house over in Tiburon.…”

  “I know. I’ve been there.”

  “Really? You’re sure?” She seemed momentarily taken by surprise. “Remind me. When was that?”

  “Seven months ago. Right after the honeymoon.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  They were about three-quarters down on a bottle of Chardonnay, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that Mindy was a little vague on the details. But she was clear enough on the main point—the house in Tiburon was the casus belli.

  “I think Stewie saw our relationship from the point of view of property management. He wanted someone on the premises to deal with the lawn service guys and make sure the cleaning lady didn’t get into the liquor cabinet. Tiburon, for God’s sake. Do you have any idea how long the commute time is from Tiburon to Bryant Street on a Monday morning? I might have gotten used to that, but I’m an assistant district attorney and he wants to play Ozzie and Harriet.”

  “So you dumped him.”

  “Damn right.”

  Mindy nodded emphatically. She was a small, dark-haired woman given to quick, rather startled movements, and she did most things emphatically. She was just the same in a courtroom, which was one reason she was such an effective prosecutor and most of the defense lawyers in San Francisco were scared to death of her.

  “I just packed my bag and walked out. He can keep his house and his alimony checks. The manager of my old apartment building on Fell Street has promised they’ll have a vacancy at the end of this month. Once my mother gets over the shock, it’ll be like the whole thing never happened.”

  “Is she taking it hard?”

  “You can imagine.”

  Yes, actually, Ellen could imagine. On the one occasion she had met Mindy’s parents, when they had come all the way out to California to visit their daughter, they had been invited down to Atherton for dinner with the roommate’s family. Mrs. Epstein and Mrs. Ridley had discovered they were kindred souls.

  “I told Mom I’d probably be ready to settle down by the time I got to my fifth husband, but that didn’t seem to console her.”

  Mindy refilled her wineglass, which killed the bottle. She took a sip and smiled in a way that suggested she had at last come to the interesting part of her narrative.

  “And now let me tell you about my new squeeze.”

  * * *

  They walked out of the restaurant about five to seven, and Ellen gave Mindy the key to her apartment.

  “I just have a quick errand to run,” she said.

  Five minutes later she was parked on North Point, across the street from Number 621. The idea had been forming in her mind all during dinner. She just wanted a quick look at Stephen Tregear’s premises.

  It was almost the end of spring, when the evenings lingered forever and the light seemed less to diminish than simply to clarify.

  Just as Sam had predicted, it was a very nice building. Each unit was a town house, brick with bowed windows and a front door painted Delft blue. The rent payments couldn’t have been less than five thousand a month.

  That was about as much as she was likely to find out.

  “What am I doing here?” she asked herself. “What is this supposed to accomplish?”

  Nothing. That was the only possible answer—nothing. He wasn’t likely to come out and volunteer a confession and, short of that, she couldn’t go calling on him. She had no probable cause, so she could have looked through his apartment door and seen bloody handprints all over the walls, and they wouldn’t have been admissible as evidence. She had no warrant and no grounds to apply for a warrant. She had nothing.

  She had nothing, and she was sitting in her car, across the street from a suspect’s apartment, because she didn’t want to go home to a sleeping ferret. She envied Mindy the chaotic drama of her personal life and she wanted a little excitement. Well, she wasn’t going to find it on North Point Street.

  “I’m out of here.”

  Her hand was actually on the ignition key when the door to Tregear’s apartment opened and a man in a tan Windbreaker stepped out onto the street. It was him, big as life.

  He closed the door behind him and started to walk down North Point in long strides. Suddenly he crossed the street. Then he turned a corner and was gone.

  It was irresistible. He was practically begging her to follow him. She hardly expected that he would lead her to an unmarked grave in the middle of Ghirardelli Square, but the thing was still irresistible.

  Ellen had never tailed anyone before, but she knew it was a team sport—on the sidewalk, you needed at least five people to shag someone for any distance. Thus she knew she had a better chance if she followed him in her car than if she started off on foot. Careful, she thought to herself. He knows you by sight. She felt reasonably confident that Tregear hadn’t noticed her yet.

 
She drove up to the intersection and slowed. The sidewalks weren’t crowded, so she had no trouble spotting him. He had cut across to the other side, so it was a safe bet he was heading toward Fisherman’s Wharf.

  In San Francisco the tourist season never ended so the Wharf was always mobbed, particularly in the evening, when the restaurants were serving dinner. The closer you got, the bigger the crowds and the more the streets belonged to them. She would have to leave the car.

  She crossed the intersection, drove two more blocks and pulled over to the curb.

  On the bay side of Jefferson she took up her station behind a rack of T-shirts under the awning of a tourist shop and waited, scanning the sidewalks, with a good view in all four directions, almost hoping that Tregear had only gone out for a pack of gum and the sports pages and was by now safely back in his apartment.

  Assuming the guy was a serious suspect, she had no business doing this; if he spotted her it would only complicate the investigation. The problem was, she couldn’t help herself.

  She just had to get inside his head a little. She wanted a sense of him, something to go with the way those eyes had focused in on the camera—fearless, almost amused. The joker who takes the trouble to have his victim found wearing a pair of red satin heels.

  Besides, he wasn’t going to spot her. Why should he? He had no reason to believe he wasn’t absolutely in the clear and, until a few hours ago, he had been. He was clever, but he wasn’t a mind reader.

  And, anyway, he wasn’t going to spot her because she had probably missed him. If he was going anywhere on the Wharf he would have to pass this intersection. It had probably been seven or eight minutes since she had seen him coming out of his front door, so where the hell was he?

  Childishly, she was disappointed, as if she had been stood up by a date. She had felt something, an excitement, and now it was gone. She didn’t have a lover to go home to, but she had had Tregear—briefly—her very own quasi suspect. But not now.

  And then, there he was, strolling up the street toward her, with all the careless self-possession of a man with nothing on his mind or conscience. Ellen stood perfectly still, hardly breathing, as he passed by on the sidewalk, close enough that she could almost have reached out and touched him. He never glanced at her.

  Aside from a fleeting glimpse of the man on disk, this was the first chance Ellen had to take a good look at him, and she had no trouble understanding how women might be willing to put themselves in his power. He was not handsome in any conventional way, but he was attractive. He had a small, rather thin mouth, but his face, which was angular and hard and appeared a trifle sunburned, was dominated by his eyes. His eyes, for those few seconds at least, were far from cruel. Deep set and shaded beneath heavy eyebrows, they were somewhere between blue and gray and seemed to suggest that they had seen too much. What they reflected back to the world was something almost like compassion.

  And, God, he was a treat to watch. His every movement was graceful, so that he made crossing the street look like something out of a Fred Astaire movie. The man was elegant—there was no other word for it.

  It wasn’t until he had passed, as she was looking at his back, that she observed he had a newspaper tucked under his right arm.

  She counted to thirty before she came out onto the sidewalk. He was three-quarters of a block away, almost lost to sight in the evening foot traffic. She didn’t begin to follow until he had crossed the street.

  He made it easy for her and went to the Cannery, which was a big, open structure with lots of corners and enormous cement pillars to hide behind. He couldn’t have been nicer about it—he took a table out on the patio, crossed his legs and opened the newspaper. With the sports pages open in front of him like a sail, he seemed to think he had the universe to himself. It was several seconds before the waiter could attract his attention to take his order.

  “Your usual?”

  On the second floor, lurking around in the impenetrable early evening shadow, Ellen was too far away to hear the words, but that was what it looked like. Without even pausing for an answer, the waiter set a cup down on the table and produced a silver coffeepot from somewhere behind his apron. No cream, no sugar. No little plate of chocolate-covered cookies. That was that. He seemed to enjoy a comfortable understanding with Tregear, as if what a man liked to drink over his Chronicle was the true index of his character. If only he knew.

  Not that Ellen was feeling particularly smug about it. Looking down from her hiding place at the man with his newspaper and his neat coffee, she was forced to admit to herself that Stephen Tregear was a highly unusual suspect.

  How many murderers had she processed in her two years on Homicide? Maybe thirty or thirty-five. As a rule they were not very complicated types. As a rule they were stupid, astonished to be under arrest. Astonished at the fuss everybody was making just because they had knifed some guy over a twenty-dollar gambling debt. The more intelligent ones, the career bad guys, that distinct minority who could figure out for themselves that homicide was not classified as a misdemeanor, were usually remarkable only for what was missing from their interior furnishings—principally any sense at all that, aside from their own, human life had value.

  Killing was simply a way of tidying things up, an exercise in problem solving. As Stalin put it: no man, no problem. Murderers, in Inspector Ridley’s experience, were guilty first and foremost of a lack of imagination.

  But the man who had eviscerated Sally Wilkes while she was still alive was neither a fool nor an emotionally blunted drug dealer just looking after his customer base. Our Boy was an enthusiastic student of pain and death, a perfectionist, a technician and an artist, laughing at his critics and audience, the SFPD. He was a book written in a language only he understood, a permanent enigma. He was a monster, a beast that should have been born with scales and claws.

  And right now, if hunches meant anything, he was sitting in the patio of the Cannery, drinking a cup of black coffee and reading the basketball scores. A nice fellow, a favorite customer. His human face was his disguise.

  The sunlight was fading. The outside floodlights popped on with a little electronic crinkle of sound, which somehow threw Ellen’s hiding place into deeper shadow.

  This is where I live, she thought. In shadow.

  In her head she kept replaying Mindy’s reaction to her turning down Ken the photographer’s dinner invitation.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she had almost shouted. “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And that had been the truth—she didn’t know. And then she had mumbled some excuse about not being big on casual sex.

  “Well, great. We’re over thirty and you want to play the dewy virgin.” And then she had cocked her head to one side, looking at Ellen through narrowed eyes. “You’re not still pining for Brad, are you?”

  “No—maybe. I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do, be like the Indian widows and throw yourself on the funeral pyre? Brad wasn’t worth it. And casual sex is better than no sex at all. Any day.”

  And now, instead of being tucked up in bed with Ken or anybody else, she was watching a man read the sports pages.

  For twenty minutes Tregear had been hidden behind that newspaper. Then, all at once, he closed his paper, folded it neatly and stood up. He shelled out five bills on the table—no wonder the waiter liked him—and started up the steps that led to Beach Street.

  Ellen left the building by another direction. She took her time, and spotted him again within a block.

  She had more or less decided she would let him go now. The fit had passed off, and she realized she wasn’t going to gain anything by following him back to his doorstep. She was parked on Beach, not a block away, so she would wait until he was out of sight and then she would go home to a little television and a long evening of contemplating her assorted sins.

  When Tregear drew even with her car he seemed to slow a trifle. Right in front of her
bumper he stepped off the sidewalk and, before crossing to the other side of the street, he lifted the driver side windshield wiper and slid the newspaper underneath it. Then he walked away, without ever looking back.

  The son of a bitch had made her. He had been toying with her the whole time. Even while she was still sitting in her car, trying to decide what she should do about him, he had spotted her. It was one of the most humiliating moments of her life.

  The newspaper was folded to show two columns of print from the second page. The article was headlined: BODY DISCOVERED NEAR COAST ROAD.

  5

  Inspector Sergeant Sam Tyler did not look convinced.

  “This is the guy,” Ellen said to him, not for the first time. “Don’t look at me that way, Sam. Stephen Tregear is not some innocent civilian. He’s in this up to his belt buckle.”

  “You followed Mr. Tregear…”

  “Will you stop calling him that?”

  Sam paused for a second, subjected her to his best deadpan stare, and then started over, as if she hadn’t uttered a syllable.

  “You followed Mr. Tregear from his place of residence to the patio of the Cannery, where he feloniously drank a cup of coffee. He spotted you, which somehow I have no trouble believing, and, just because he didn’t want you to imagine you were invisible, he decided to let you know he knew you were there. Very humbling I’m sure, but doubtless good for the soul.”

  “He’s teasing us, Sam. He’s having his little joke. Remember what you said, ‘a villain with a sense of humor’?”

  “Sticking a newspaper under your windshield wiper doesn’t qualify as much of a joke—not really up to Our Boy’s standards. However, if it would make you feel better, I suppose we could arrest Mr. Tregear for littering.”

  They were sitting in Sam’s car. It was eight-fifteen in the morning and he had just picked her up for work. When she didn’t answer immediately, he opened the paper bag that was on the seat beside him and brought out a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid. He handled it gently, with the tips of his fingers, since the coffee was still hot.