by Otto Penzler
He closed his eyes again, riffling through his brain, until he finally opened them again and shook his head. "I can't say I remember anything. If he had one, he'd cleaned it up pretty good."
"So that's it?" I asked.
Terry tapped his head. "That's all I could pull out of here. You get the file, I'd be glad to come down and go through it with you."
I stood up, shook his hand. "Thanks, Terry, appreciate it."
I was around the side of the house, almost to my car parked at curbside, when I heard his voice behind me calling my name. I turned and waited for him. "This is probably nothing. I mean, really probably nothing," he said, "but it just came back to me. One of the burners on the stove was on."
"The stove?"
He nodded. "Big old electric stove in the kitchen. Your dad probably just forgot to turn it off after cooking something. But one of the burners was on low. As I say, it's probably nothing, but you never know."
I didn't trust myself to say much more than thanks again to Terry. Driving away, I looked at my hand, the one that's hot in my dream. No scar, no trace of a burn. But I had felt a definite something in that hand when Terry had mentioned the stove, a sense memory barely more than a twitch. Opening and closing my fist a few times, I turned the nearest corner and pulled up at the curb again. I had the sweats and it wasn't from the heat.
Suddenly I had remembered how I got the burn. I'd been with my best friend Danny O'Keefe, who was spending that night at my house—the next night, when Pop got killed, I was sleeping over at his place. It was summertime and Danny and I had been trading sleepovers on summer nights since we'd been about six or seven. This night, we watched our usual TV until it was time for bed, and then went upstairs.
But with the poker game—the poker game!—going on downstairs and Pop paying no attention to the kids, Danny saw an opportunity to sneak out. His high-school-age sister and her crowd were hanging out at another neighbor's house and skinny-dipping in their pool—the mother there let them, and sometimes, so the rumor had it, even went in herself. Future cop that I was, I didn't want to disobey my father's standing orders, and the thought of seeing naked teenagers and even adults scared me to death, but Danny shamed me into going along with him.
The problem was that the poker game was going on in the living room, so the front door wouldn't work. To get out of the house, we had to sneak down the stairs, then around through the kitchen and out the side door. And, of course, not make a sound.
While Danny was trying to open the door, I don't know why or how, I inadvertently put my hand out and laid it down on the burning stove element. The pain had been immediate and severe, and blisters in concentric circles formed on my palm as I stared down at it. I know I didn't turn it off then, and Pop must not have, either.
But I couldn't yell out. After all, I wasn't the kind of kid who snuck out at night. Both of my parents trusted me, and how was I going to explain my being here in the kitchen, dressed to go out? I was in agony, but couldn't do anything about it. And I certainly had no more interest in checking out the skinny-dipping. I was staying home, and that was that.
But Danny was going. He didn't care. The men would be playing for at least a couple more hours, and he wasn't going to waste an opportunity like this one.
So for the next two hours, while I silently prayed for Danny to get back before the game ended so my father wouldn't ever know what we'd planned, I sat hidden behind the stair's banister, my hand throbbing, hoping I wouldn't be discovered there and have to explain Danny's absence and my own burn, listening to the men swearing and laughing as they placed their bets.
It had been a long and terrible night. How had I forgotten about it for all of this time? If not that, the next night's violent trauma had washed my memory clean.
But at least I now had all the elements of my dream.
Except for one.
Pop being dead.
We had a family dinner that night and then Jen and I read stories to the boys and had them in bed by their usual bedtime of 7:30. After that, I made some calls to my mom's old neighborhood social network and got a bite on my third and last try with Vic Cortipasso. He himself hadn't ever played poker with my father, but thought that his wife's brother, Ben Steiger, might have been a regular at several of the local games. Unfortunately, Ben had died six months ago of a heart attack, but Vic had a suggestion. "Maybe you could talk to his widow, Ruth. I've got her number. She might remember something."
Except poker for Ruth Steiger didn't appear to be one of the happier memories of her late husband. "I wish he'd never heard of the game, to tell you the truth. He was a mostly good and a sweet man, God rest his soul, but poker almost broke us up at least half a dozen times. I finally made him stop for good after he lost our entire vacation money seven or eight years ago. Can you believe?"
"I don't play myself," I said, "so no. It's a little hard to imagine."
"Smart man. So what do you want to know?"
"Just if you remember your husband mentioning any games he might have played with my father, Aaron Lowens. This would have been something like twenty years ago."
"Twenty years ago?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well, twenty years is a long time ago. I don't believe I ever knew your father, and I don't think Ben did, either. Have you tried Larry Menchino?"
"The barber?"
"That's him. He still plays, I believe. But he and Ben used to go to games together. Maybe he'd have some memory."
After Vic Cortipasso sent me to Ben Steiger and Ben's wife passed me on to Larry Menchino, I started to talk to other men and eventually even got lists of names of Mends and acquaintances. Over the next few weeks, I ran through a veritable rogue's gallery of local gamblers, some of them quite serious about their games, others more recreational. San Mateo is a town of about 95,000 people in the heart of the San Francisco peninsula, bound by other densely populated bedroom communities. Pop's last poker game probably had no more than six players, and finding any one of them—if, indeed, any of them were still alive—was going to take perseverance and luck. Still, I kept at it, putting the word out, dropping Pop's name, leaving my phone number, hoping for a chain-letter effect.
Until finally, on a Monday night in early June, at least a dozen circles of poker players beyond Larry Menchino the barber, I knocked at the door of a mansion in Hillsborough, the town just north of San Mateo. To say that Hillsborough is a high-end community is to say that Catherine Zeta-Jones is mildly attractive. I couldn't help but think that the resident here was an unlikely past Mend of my blue-collar carpenter of a father. But I'd left my message on the machine here without knowing anything about the house or the man who lived in it, Charles Baden. In the endless round robin I'd been playing, I'd gotten his name from one of the pari-mutuel clerks at Bay Meadows, the local racetrack. Mr. Baden called me back, saying he used to play sometimes with a man named Aaron, but he wasn't sure of the last name. In any case, he'd be happy to talk to me.
Once I'd gone through the first ring of connected Mends who might have known me as a cop anyway, I'd found that my uniform didn't serve me particularly well in these meetings, so I was in my nonthreatening yuppie civvies: khaki chinos, Lacoste shirt, Docksiders without socks. When Baden opened the door, he was wearing the same uniform, except that his pants were blue. After we shook hands, he invited me in, introduced me to his wife, Carla, and their two well-behaved teenaged children—all as healthy-looking, robust, and attractive as the man of the house himself—and then led me to a small backyard deck that overlooked the black-bottomed pool.
"So," he began after we'd gotten settled, "how can I help you?"
"As I said on the phone, I'm trying to locate anybody who might have played poker with my father about twenty years ago."
"Right. And why do you want to do that?"
"Well, the short answer is that my dad was murdered."
The word seemed to verify something for him. He sat back in the patio chair and looked off into the dis
tance for a second before coming back to me. "Not murdered at a poker game, though?"
"No. The connection of his killing to the poker game, if any, isn't really established. The theory is he was killed during a burglary attempt at our house. That's the official story, anyway."
"But you don't believe it? After all this time?"
"It's not a matter of believing it. It's true on the face of it Somebody did break in to our house and took a bunch of stuff and killed my father."
"And you think this has something to do with a poker game?"
"I don't know." This was as close as I'd come to what might be a witness, and I decided to be honest with him. "Look, Mr. Baden—"
"Charles, please."
"All right. Charles. I'm a cop myself. In San Mateo. A month ago, I started having a dream about poker and cigars that ended with my father dead. That's about as far as the connection goes, but I feel like I need to follow it until the trail ends."
"A dream," he said.
"If it was someone telling it to me, I might laugh it off, too."
He looked sharply at me. "I'm not laughing. It's not a laughing matter." That settled, he leaned forward, rubbing his hands together. "Do you have a picture of your father?"
"Sure." I gave him the snapshot I'd been carrying, which was pretty much the only picture of Pop I had from my childhood. And actually, it was more a picture of my stunning and regal-looking mother, her hair up in a swirl, who happened to be standing next to him. They were both beaming and showing off her twenty-fifth birthday present which up until that time was the most expensive and special gift she'd ever received—a pair of diamond earrings of about a half carat each. (Alas, they got stolen in the robbery.) But Pop was in the picture, too, his arm around her, proud and protective.
It didn't take Mr. Baden very long. After five or six seconds, he looked up at me and nodded. "Yep. That's the Aaron I knew."
"Did you play poker with him often?"
A shrug. "Maybe a couple of dozen times." He looked back down at The picture. "Beautiful woman. Your mother?"
"That's her." But I wasn't there to talk about Mom. "Did you ever play at his house?"
"That I don't really remember. Where was it?"
I gave him the address in San Mateo, but he just shook his head. "Maybe. It doesn't really ring a bell, but I could have. We had a kind of floating game for a couple of years there."
"Do you remember names of any of the other players?"
Again, maddeningly, he shook his head. "Last names, I can't say that I do. Lennie"—the Bay Meadows clerk who'd made my connection to Charles Baden—"mentioned that you were looking for an Aaron, and the name's unusual enough, but I remembered the murder. I mean, that kind of thing, it sticks. But the other guys ... I don't know. Just guys. None of them were really friends."
"What were the games like?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, what were the stakes? Were they friendly games?"
Baden chuckled. "The proverbial friendly little game, huh?" He scratched at the side of his face. "I guess the buy-in, trying to remember now, was probably low hundreds. And we played table stakes. You know what that is?"
"No limit, right? Everything in on any given hand."
"Essentially, correct. So no, I wouldn't say it was exactly casual. A good night, the big winner could net a grand or two."
"That's a lot of dough."
He laughed. "It was a ton of dough back then, believe me."
"But my dad didn't have that kind of money back then."
"Yeah, he did. If he was in these games. He must have been good, and kept his winnings separate from his day job. Lot of guys did that. I know I did."
I looked down at the picture that was still on my lap and again noticed the diamond earrings. It suddenly didn't seem possible that he made enough to buy them building cabinets.
Baden asked, "I'm not going to get in trouble telling you all this, ami?"
"Why would you?"
"You know, poker. It was different back then. We all knew we were breaking the law, we could get busted. That's why we moved the games around, broke up the rhythm."
"No. You're safe from me, anyway." A blue jay flew to the edge of the pool below us and took a bath. I realized I didn't have any more questions. The trail, marginal to begin with, had petered out again. Sighing, I uncrossed my legs and started to stand up.
"But you know," Baden said, "maybe I do remember something. Maybe it's nothing. At the time, it was just ... odd, I thought. Weird. It freaked a few of the guys out, I know, enough that they stopped playing with any of us."
I settled into my chair and gave him time to bring it back. "What?"
"Well, there were probably about fifteen or twenty of us, but as I said, the games floated. We'd get six guys one time, four the next, sometimes ten or more, which meant we'd have to go to two tables. Some guy would show up one week and then disappear for two months."
"Okay."
"Okay, so the news kind of leaked out slowly, kind of as a rumor, before it got out to everybody. I think your dad was the first, and he was the only one who was murdered, of course, but two other guys who were in the general group wound up dying within, like, a week or two."
I felt a chill run down my back. "Two guys? Do you know who they were?"
"The names? Jeez." He rubbed the back of his neck. "God. Okay, wait. Maybe Brian or Byron. I'd say Byron. The other? I'm going to say Chet, or Chick, but I could be wrong."
"How did they die?"
"One got hit by a car, I remember. And the other, I think ... I'm going to say maybe he killed himself. But if it's the same guy I'm thinking of, he was pretty strung out, doing a lot of weed, maybe more than that, probably dealing to get his buy-in, I'd guess. Pretty loose with his game. Anyway, suicide made sense to me when I heard it; I remember that. Anyway, as I said, not too many of us were really friends who saw each other outside of the games, so this all came out in dribs and drabs over a matter of weeks, although the deaths might have actually happened pretty close to the same time. There wasn't any real sense that they were connected in any way. It was just one of those weird coincidences."
"Yeah, except for one thing."
"What's that?"
"In the cop business," I told him, "coincidences don't happen."
I started with the obituary page of the San Mateo Times from the day of Pop's death. Two days after that, a thirty-four-year-old father of three named Brady Wirth was the victim of a hit-and-run accident on the suburban street in front of his home in Belmont. Brady was close enough to Brian or Byron, and I figured I'd possibly located my second murder victim, but none of the Wirths listed in the phone book in any of the local directories—and there were plenty of them—had any knowledge or memory of a Brady. The wife had probably remarried, changed her name, and moved away. Going back to the Belmont police, I learned that there had been a serious investigation at the time but the case, like most hit-and-runs, had never been solved.
Which left Chick, or Chet. Unfortunately, no names that were close surfaced in the Times for the two-week period I was checking. Next I was going to check the San Francisco Chronicle, but because the Redwood City Tribune was both smaller and closer to home, I thought I'd eliminate that first.
Good thing I did.
On the third day after Pop's murder, one day after the hit-and-run that had killed Brady Wirth, I ran across the name Chester Mobley, "Chet," age twenty-five, who'd shot himself in the temple with a nail gun one day at the end of his construction shift. There was a small story on the second page with a few details: He'd been alone at the time at the construction site, he had a minor criminal record for narcotics violations, he had one Baggie with two ounces of marijuana and another with a gram of cocaine in his pockets. His girlfriend had broken up with him a few weeks before. No hint that it was other than a suicide.
His mother, Laraine, still lived in the same house that Chet had grown up in, the most unkempt yard in an otherwise-nice res
idential neighborhood up by Foothill College in Redwood City. Although it was still shy of 8:00 on a warm and still-light summer evening, Laraine Mobley answered the door in a cloud of tobacco smoke, wearing a frayed and faded quilted housecoat and slippers. She was smoking a cigarette and holding a glass of amber-colored liquid in her other hand as she pushed open the screen door. With a weary welcoming smile, she told me in her husky voice to come on in and take any seat.
A rerun of The Flintstones was playing on the television, muted.
Before I'd even sat down, she said, "Chet didn't kill himself, you know. If that's what this is really about." She'd told me the same thing on the telephone when I'd called her an hour earlier. And for this interview, I was in uniform. "That's what I told you guys when it happened."
"It wasn't 'us guys,' ma'am. I'm up in San Mateo."
As if that mattered to her. Her hand brushed the comment away. "I mean, how could they ignore the dope connection? He was selling it—everybody knew that. I think the guy he bought it from paid you guys off to go away. I still think that. Chet wasn't an unhappy boy. He was straightening himself out, too. I mean, the job. Okay, maybe he was buying and selling, too, but he was working at a real job. That's trying, isn't it?"
"Yes, ma'am. It sounds like it to me. Was that his first real job?"
She took a deep drag and let it out, talking through the smoke. "Full-time, yeah. Except for McDonald's in high school. And he and Shelly were done, anyway. That didn't even bother him."
"Shelly?"
She nodded. "His girlfriend. They all made such a big deal about how they just broke up, but he'd been talking about breaking up with her when she went and beat him to the punch. But you know, they find dope on you, you're a known stoner, they don't look as hard or as much as they look with other people. It's a known fact."
"So you think somebody killed Chet?"
"Absolutely. I've always thought that."
"Why?"
"Because of the dope, somehow. He was trying to get out of the business, but they don't let you just quit something like that. Whoever he was buying his stuff from. I told all of you guys back then, but nobody listened."
