by Susan Dunlap
“Maybe you’re better off just asking him.”
“Oh, no, you tossed this accusation out; finish what you’ve been gearing up to say all along. Like what?”
“Like picking up suspects in the cab, suspects’ families, witnesses, and reporting their conversations.”
“That’s hardly illegal.”
“I didn’t say illegal, I said off-the-books.”
“What exactly do you mean?” Breaking and entering? My heart was hammering against my ribs. If Leo’s freedom hung on John, Leo’d better like jail a lot.
“I can’t tell you anything definite. I can only say that Morratt’s been accused before of battery, trespass, and assault, but he’s never been charged.”
“You’re the king of circumstantial evidence! Sometimes guys aren’t charged because they aren’t guilty. Or there isn’t hard evidence. Sometimes cops have legitimate dealings with civilians and those civilians do things unconnected to those dealings during the rest of their lives. Sometimes a murderer picks up the knife lying in the zendo and follows Tia to an empty room and kills her and it has nothing to do with Leo.”
He turned toward me and shook his head. “You know why circumstantial evidence is called that? Because it’s evidence. When it pulls the question beyond reasonable doubt, it’s as good as an eyewitness.”
“You’re so sure you know who’s paying Morratt? Let’s go ask him.”
Korematsu just stared.
“Hey, he’s a cabbie. He’s working tonight. Call the cab company.”
Nothing moved but his eyes, which were shifting back and forth as if visualizing a tennis match between the competing choices. For a guy so controlled, it was a huge breakdown. Hadn’t anyone ever said, “Dude, you are showing yourself bare!” Maybe it wasn’t the kind of unsolicited advice one police detective offered another. But in a minute he had his cell phone at his ear and was talking to someone named Ed. In another minute we were shooting north. In two more, the surprised, then appalled face of Webb Morratt looked toward the source of squealing brakes and watched first me and then Korematsu hoist ourselves out of the Mini.
The cab was in a white zone near Pier 39, one of the city’s most crowded tourist spots. A decade ago I had been here when the last private pleasure boat had relinquished the last slip to a herd of sea lions. San Francisco Bay has a short but plentiful run of smelt, an attractive entrée for the sea lions. Their bellies filled with this delicacy, the adolescent males shoved their way up onto the slips to sun between meals. Soon they topped the tourist attraction chart. I had once seen an outraged boater, separated from his craft, charge down the slip at the nearest male. It was as close as I’ll ever come to seeing a sea lion laugh. Morratt’s expression was akin to the boater’s as he scurried back onto the pier. But Webb had nowhere to retreat and no metal mesh door to lock behind him.
Korematsu moved toward Morratt, but I slipped in front of him and began to list for Morratt the times he’d so conveniently happened by where I was. “Who paid you to keep tabs on me? Save yourself time; don’t bother lying.”
He looked behind me, as if checking escape routes.
“We’re not talking anything illegal, Morratt,” Korematsu prompted. “Anyone can pay a cabbie to make himself available.”
Webb’s brow wrinkled.
“We’re just asking for information. Information we will appreciate,” Korematsu spoke softly, as if truly requesting a favor.
Webb looked from the detective to me and back. His shoulders relaxed. “Okay. But I didn’t tell you, right?”
“Sure,” Korematsu said automatically.
“Who paid me?” He looked down at me. “Your brother, woman. John Lott.”
Korematsu nodded. No glance passed between the two of them, but fingering John was a win-win for them. Maybe Morratt was speaking the truth, maybe not.
“What did he want to know?” I asked.
“The usual. Where you went; who you saw.”
“And?”
He hesitated. “And he wanted to be sure you were safe.”
I laughed. This from the guy who broke into Gary’s house.
Korematsu was smiling like he understood the ludicrousness of this, too. But, of course, he didn’t know about the break-in. That meant his pleased expression was the result of something else. The triangle I’d created to squeeze Morratt was squeezing no one but John, and Korematsu couldn’t hide his satisfaction. Morratt got to shovel dirt on John, and Korematsu got to sift through the pile. Meanwhile, Leo sat in jail.
I put a hand on Morratt’s arm. “Give us a moment, Detective.”
I motioned Webb back a couple of steps. The crowd filled in the space. “And the break-in? You searching Gary’s office? Who was paying for that?”
He turned and started walking out on the pier. I matched his pace. The pier was the length of two city blocks, closer to a mall than a working wharf. The crowd surged around us, pushing to cross the wooden thoroughfare to fast fish shops, T-shirt outlets, pearl jewelers.
Webb looked straight ahead, concocting his answer. “No one paid me.”
“It took you that long to come up with such a lame lie?”
“No, I—”
I grabbed his arm. “You broke and entered the house of the brother of the guy who’s paying you! While he was paying you. How do you think John’s going to take that?”
“He’s not going to sue me!” Webb snorted. “Not going to press charges, is he?”
“So you’re saying a cop has no other means of making your life unpleasant? A cop with a very long memory? Listen, Webb, I’ve known John many more years than you; he is not a guy to turn the other cheek. I honestly don’t know what he would do if he found out that you broke into his brother’s house while his baby sister was asleep there . . .”
Shaking loose, he quickened his pace.
“If I told him . . .”
He leaned toward me but kept walking, veering around the little merry-go-round that lit up the dark. Once we were past it, the crowd thinned and the air was suddenly colder. “If?” he bartered.
“What were you after?”
A guy in a blue hoodie, arm around a girl shivering above her bare midriff, cut in front. Webb stepped away as if to let them join up with another couple wearing the same shade of blue. Beyond them a man hawked cable car kitsch from a kiosk. The pier would be an easy place to disappear, even for someone the size of Morratt—even with Korematsu tailing us, as he surely was.
“What, dammit! Okay, let me guess. Not money, right? Certainly not thirty-seven bucks.”
He dismissed that with a glance.
“Something in the office. You went right there, like you knew Gary would have his office back there. Like someone—”
“No one told me the layout. Those houses are all alike. You drive the city long enough, you know there’re only five layouts.”
“Tia’s case is long over. No point in going through legal papers. No other interesting files.” I eyed him in time to spot a small, inadvertent nod. Korematsu had nodded like that when he’d suggested John had been chasing Tia before she leapt the cable car and that Gary and Grace had bent over backwards to help her because of it. But suppose Korematsu had it wrong. What if it was the other way around? What if John thought it was Gary who’d been involved with Tia all along?
The frog! At lunch, Tia had been fingering a little jade frog. Georgia had the same frog on her card table. And by Gary’s front door was the big green frog Mike gave him. Why all the frogs? Coincidence? What were they a symbol of?
Mike’s frog meant nothing, surely. Probably. But if Gary had a little one, too . . . “Small green jade frog.”
Webb started.
Bingo!
“What was John going to give you, if you found it?”
“How’d you know I—”
“—didn’t?” Because I searched Gary’s office before you, but I wasn’t telling him that. “You wouldn’t be sitting out in the cold on your cab hood if you’d
made that kind of score. So, what was the deal?”
Ahead of us shouts erupted. Suddenly there were a dozen guys in blue hoodies and another dozen in orange, yelling at each other. Gangs?
I pulled Morratt into an alley between shops. The screams bounced off the walls, pushing us forward toward the unlit slips. At the end of the alley I turned right, moving behind the back walls of the stores, toward the open water. We were alone, except for the sea lions, their barks plenty loud enough to cover any splash or scream. Webb had to be thinking the same thing.
He’d given me next to nothing. I didn’t have much time. I stepped in front of him and stopped. “Did John make you an offer, or did you just figure John would be very grateful, or very indebted, if you found proof his brother was caught up in the dare group?”
He didn’t bother answering but shifted and blocked any escape.
“You broke into Gary’s house so you could blackmail John, right?”
To my right, dark mounds of sea lions shifted on slips. Ten feet behind me the walkway ended, and the railing was broken. There was nothing to keep me from backing right into the Bay. Webb moved toward me.
I stayed where I was and braced my legs. “Where’s Jeffrey?”
“What?”
“Jeffrey. Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I told you before, I don’t know. Last I saw him Tia was slamming out of his car and he was just sitting there looking empty. Get off my case.” He moved closer.
I inched back. “What about the drug? The stuff Jeffrey got for Tia? Where is it?”
“What drug? I warned you: get off my case.” He was so close I could see his brow wadded in tension, or anger, or fear.
I kept moving back. I was so close to the edge I could see the warning signpost out of the corner of my eye. If he pushed me into the drink, no one would hear me. I shifted forward; I was in his face. “Looking empty? Why was Jeffrey—”
For an instant I thought the roar came from the sea lions. Mouth open, red-faced, Webb leaned back, came at me with the full force of his weight, and shoved me off the pier.
I caught the signpost. He sailed by me into the Bay. I heard his scream, but I didn’t have time to worry about him finding the ladder. I knew why Jeffrey had looked desolate the afternoon Tia was killed. And now I had a good idea where the drug was.
CHAPTER 26
“THE DRUG Jeffrey had. It’s in the tunnel,” I said, as soon as I found Korematsu on the edge of the melee halfway down the pier.
“The thing is, Detective, Tia Dru didn’t take something out of the tunnel. I thought that was why she wanted to go down there—to get something. Wrong! She put something in there, hid it. Hid her purse,” I said, as we double-timed it toward the street. “Tia never leaned on her cane if she could help it. But at the reception, she used it once, when she walked over to Jeffrey, put her arm through his. I thought she was comforting him. A minute later she put her hand in his pocket. She was wearing a shawl. It covered her hand when she moved it. She lifted the drug out of Jeffrey’s pocket. There was only one place to slip it—her own purse.”
“So?”
“She was the one who was so eager to get into the tunnel. She ran so fast into the pitch black that she smacked into the far wall. But when she climbed back out, she didn’t have that purse. She put the purse, the drug, in the one place Jeffrey wouldn’t be able to get it, because he’s afraid to go down there.”
“She hid her purse in the tunnel?”
“It sounds crazy, but listen, the purse was small—easy to push into a corner. It was a mud brown that’d blend in. The tunnel—it was dead dark down there. It’s not like it’s a popular spot.”
Korematsu hesitated only briefly, then unlocked the car, and in a minute we shot into traffic. He drove with one hand, phone in the other, calling for a crime scene team.
“Lights!” I said. “Tell them we’ll need major lighting, like they use for a night shoot!”
“What?”
“On a movie set. Filming after dark.”
“Oh. That kind of shoot. I thought—”
“Of course, you would.”
As the traffic light turned from yellow to red, he hung a left.
“We’re going to need a key to the grate. We should call—”
“No need. City’s got masters.”
“To grates leading to private property?”
“Grates in or near public sidewalks. When there’s an emergency we can’t be running around after every property owner asking him to hunt up his key. We’ve got grates all over town.” He cut right onto Pacific and whipped down the few blocks to the zendo.
Brakes screeched. The red flashers from the light bar turned the macadam bloody. Patrol cars. The crime scene van. Techs and investigators poured out. I raced into the courtyard and pointed to a potted tree and the metal cover underneath it. “Entrance is there.”
The tunnel would be warmer than out here, but I shivered at the prospect of climbing back into it. Tia was one daring woman, to descend and run so confidently into the dark to hide that purse. Then to look like she was about to collapse back at the ladder and force us all to help her up the ladder and out. You had to hand it to her.
Korematsu pulled open the grate. A tech moved in beside him and shot a spotlight down into the hole. The tunnel, with its mud-over-stone walls, sucked the variations out of the light, so that what we saw, as before, was undifferentiated muck.
An African American guy with a miner’s cap moved in closer. The tech called for another light. Someone leaned over the entrance and began clicking pictures. The metal ladder attached to the wall was barely visible, but I remembered its location and was over the top, down the five rungs, and onto the gummy ground before Korematsu started shouting.
“Lower me a flashlight!” I grew up with a cop; I should have remembered it’s a waste of time giving them orders. Korematsu yelled something about staying still. The tunnel’s mud walls slurped up as much sound as light. Voices called out, but words were sucked away.
Tia had dropped to the soft floor in here, then run so fast she hit the far wall. People lumped us together, but she and I were opposites. She lived for danger met head-on; I choreographed it so I’d never be taken by surprise. Now I stepped into her world, out of the circle of light into total black. I blinked, but my eyes did not adjust. Normal life fell away. I put my fingers on the damp mud wall and forced myself to step forward. The ground squished under my feet. The smell of rot filled the air. I tried not to think of the young girls entombed in rooms like this a century ago. I failed.
Behind me metal clanked. Someone else climbing down the ladder. “Smells awful!” a man yelled.
I moved faster, guided by the wall and the slope of the ground as Tia had. I needed to be close enough to the wall to get a clear look before Korematsu ordered me back and the crime scene crew blocked everything off. With every step the air became thicker, more putrid. I wished I had a scarf to cover my nose and mouth. How had Tia . . . ?
“. . . lights down!” the man yelled.
I ran. My foot caught. I fell.
On something soft. Gases whooshed. The smell was shocking, overwhelming, sickening. My face was in the mud. My breath wouldn’t come.
“What’s going on there?” the man yelled.
“Get me light!” I forced out. I pushed up with my hands and feet, forming an inverted V. Flies buzzed my face.
“Don’t touch anything! We have to preserve the scene. You’ve got no business being down there. What’s going on?” the voice kept yelling.
Lights burst on. The mud glistened. I looked down on legs. Legs splayed to the sides. Legs in brown pants. I squeezed my eyes shut a couple of times to clear them. Then I screamed.
The body was Jeffrey Hagstrom. He was lying on his back, arms flopped to his sides.
“It’s Jeffrey; he’s dead!”
The ladder clanked.
His eyes were open, brown eyes, but they were sunk deep in the sockets. His mout
h hung open, too, like he was merely surprised, not dead.
“Don’t move!”
“Don’t throw up! We have to protect the scene!”
“Get her out of there.”
His skin was both dry and glistening, and white like the underside of a fish. He looked like Jeffrey and not like him, like a much older version with sinking skin.
Blowflies circled his chest.
Bile shot up my throat. I was going to retch. I couldn’t retch, not here. I swallowed hard, bent my knees, and pushed with my arms. It took all my strength to thrust myself up to standing. That’s when I saw the knife protruding from his chest, from the hole the blowflies had zeroed in on. It was the other zendo knife, the duplicate of the one that had killed Tia.
“Darcy. Get out of the scene!”
I jolted up and half staggered, not toward the voice but to the dark corner of the tunnel where Tia had gone. In my memory this end of the tunnel was like the end of a mud-walled boxcar with sharp corners. In reality it was an uneven mass of rock covered in mud. It looked like a giant fist had smashed into it. The corners were not sharp, the wall was not flat, and the bottom edge was not tight. The light was dim down here. The purse had to be there, pushed into the corner, hidden by the shadows.
But it wasn’t. Nothing was there but rock and mud.
I peered down at the empty corner. That position, here in this spot, was familiar. I felt it with body memory. When had I stood like this? Why?
I glanced from the corner to the dark hole beside it. I remembered when I’d shown the tunnel to Robin Sparto that something down here had jarred loose. I’d taken it for a big clod of mud, or a rat. But it could have been a small purse. It had slid slowly down that chute.
The purse, and whatever was in it, had to be that dark chute.
If Tia hadn’t acted on impulse, if she’d had time to plan, she could have chosen a better spot. But she didn’t. She was Tia.
I took a breath and slid my hand into the hole.
“Darcy!”
I felt something. Leather? Or muddy rock?
“Darcy!”
Rock.
“She’s in shock. Come on, we have to get her out of there before she fucks up the whole scene.”
