As a Favor (18 page)

“Ouch,” he exclaimed as I pushed it in.

“You may be gone overnight. Anything you want to take? Toothbrush?”

“Nah.”

“Okay.”

I headed for the door, still holding his arm.

As he stepped into the hall, he yelled, “Hey, take your hands off me! Lemme go!”

I tightened my grasp on his arm and looked nervously behind me. But no one came running. In this kind of hotel drunken cries were no special event. Still, handcuffs wouldn’t hurt.

As I fastened them on his wrists, he yelled, “Lemme go! You’re harassing me!”

“Calm down, Delehanty.”

But if he heard me at all, it didn’t faze him. He pushed through the outside door, dragging me along. “Lemme go! Help! Help!”

I hurried him down the stairs. A crowd was gathering at the street. I wished I’d called for back-up. It was too late now.

“Hey, cop, you’re hurting him.”

“He’s just an old man,” a bystander shouted.

“You didn’t have to chain him.”

The crowd grew. Delehanty, in an exhibit of unexpected strength, had dug in his heels, so that I was pulling him like I would a footlocker. His head hung, and he no longer bothered to protest.

Three burly men stood between the patrol car and me.

“Get out of my way,” I demanded.

“Let him go,” one said.

I stepped forward.

The trio moved in around me. “He’s got rights, lady. Like you can’t just drag him away, see.”

“He can get a lawyer.”

“Sure,” the largest man said sarcastically.

The crowd moved closer.

I caught the man’s eye. “Get out of the way.”

His eyes wavered.

“Get out of the way,” I repeated. “You’re interfering with a police officer.”

His heavy hands tensed at his sides. The crowd was hushed now, listening.

I said, “Do you want me to run your name through records? Do you want me to send to Sacramento and see what you’ve got outstanding?”

He stepped toward me.

Yanking Delehanty’s arm, I jerked him forward as the man moved in, and when the man continued his step, it was into Delehanty.

Delehanty came alive, feet planted, body twisting and weaving. He bent forward and lurched, shoulder first, into the man’s stomach. The man groaned.

The crowd burst into laughter.

Pulling open the back door of the patrol car, I shoved Delehanty in before another change of mood should arise. But as I glanced back at the crowd, there was no sign of hostile memory.

That was one advantage of being a woman officer—the macho hostility was diffused more easily.

B
Y THE TIME
I finished booking Delehanty it was past three-thirty.

He had passed out in the cell. I opened the door to the conference room slowly, expecting to make a stealthy entrance into staff meeting. But the room was empty. One less thing to explain.

I hurried to my desk. Pereira was sitting in my chair, finger tapping on the desk.

“You could almost be Lieutenant Davis, with that finger and that expression,” I told her.

“I’ve been waiting since three. There was no staff meeting—the lieutenant had another session with the higher-ups. So I came here to tell you the news. I hate to wait when I have news.”

I sat on the desk. “So?”

“Well,” Pereira leaned back in the chair, taking her time. “I checked through all of Anne Spaulding’s clients, checked every supposed new address. And do you know, Jill, not one of those women ever lived at those addresses? They don’t get their mail there. No one’s ever heard of them.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Funny that Yvonne McIvor checked out okay, then. Run them through Files, will you?”

“Already done. Files comes up blank too. So do Files in the surrounding counties.” Now she leaned forward. “So, Jill, they don’t live at the hotels where they were getting money. They don’t live at their new addresses where their money will be going. We have no record of them. They’re not living in San Francisco or some other county around here. What does that make you think?”

“It sounds like these ladies don’t exist.”

Pereira gave a nod of agreement.

“Seems like the only real thing about them is their welfare checks. Twelve checks of two hundred dollars a month makes—”

“Twenty-four hundred dollars for the adults. Those five families could well add another twenty-five hundred. So, say five thousand a month. In a year that’s sixty thousand, tax free.”

“Enough to kill over,” I said. “Even half that would be enough.”

I hurried past the weary woman who sat uneasily on the metal chair of the waiting room and made my way by her children on the floor. In the former dining room, Fern was writing in a manila folder. Mona, at four-thirty, was getting ready to leave. Nat was across the room, but I didn’t look his way and he didn’t speak.

With a passing nod to Mona, I moved in on the kitchen-turned-office of Alec Effield.

Effield wore a red shirt with his beige pants; it made him look sallow.

“Mr. Effield, I want to talk to you about those cases of Anne’s.”

“No. I mean, I don’t feel I should discuss them any further. I’ve been slipshod about confidentiality as it is.”

“Mr. Effield, those women, the ones who supposedly lived in the hotel, then moved to the new addresses in the case folders—no one’s ever heard of them. There’s no record of their existing at all.”

“What?” He looked away.

I followed his eyes to the Suzanne Valadon sketch on the wall. Beneath it the copy lay, still only half-completed. I doubted Effield had contributed a line today.

“How do you explain those non-existent people, Mr. Effield?”

“Officer, you saw one of those clients, Yvonne McIvor.”

“She exists, all right, but none of the others do.”

Effield glanced nervously back at the Valadon sketch. “There must be some mistake. You chose Yvonne McIvor as the client you wanted to see, Officer. Maybe your department made some mistake with the other clients. Welfare clients and their neighbors don’t always like to talk to the police.” But his wavering voice belied the excuse. Effield looked so shaken I couldn’t even be angry at his attempt to shift the blame to us.

“Those clients don’t exist. How can you explain that?”

He sank down in his chair. “I don’t know. Let me think. It just doesn’t seem possible.”

“Anne Spaulding was sending out money to people who aren’t there. There’s only one place that money could have been going, right?”

His head shook in a slow metronomic movement. “It does look like it. But surely that couldn’t be.”

My glance landed on my watch: 4:22. I didn’t have time for Effield’s bewilderment, not if I planned to find Anne’s murderer by eleven. “What’s the procedure when someone applies for welfare?”

Sluggishly, he focused on me. I could feel my fingers tightening on the pen. “Well,” he said, “the client comes into the office, makes an appointment, and sees an eligibility worker.”

“Does anyone keep a record of who applies?”

“The clerk.”

“What happens to the record?”

“At the end of the month, the statistics are taken from it and sent to Oakland and the original is either filed or thrown out.”

“And yours were?”

Effield shook his head harder. “Thrown out.”

I made a note. “So there’s no way of knowing who came in to apply?”

“No.”

“After they filled out the applications, then what?”

“There’s a certain amount of verification necessary.” Effield paused, then in a sudden motion opened the Yvonne McIvor file. “Since you’ve seen this already, I won’t be breaking confidentiality.” He pointed to a white, legal-size sheet on the left side of the folder. “Here you see that Anne has noted the birth-certificate number. If the client hadn’t had a birth certificate, Anne would have requested a baptismal certificate and then sent to”—he glanced across the folder to another form listing the client’s birthplace—“Springfield, for a copy.”

“Here”—he pointed back to the first sheet—“is where we list any real property, personal property—”

“I think I understand. Mr. Effield, I’d like to see one of Anne’s other cases—Janis Ulrick, or Linda Faye Miller.”

“Why?”

“Because those clients don’t exist. I want to see the differences between their folders and the McIvor folder.”

“I really can’t do that. I’ve stretched the rules as it is.”

I sighed. I didn’t have time to argue. “All right. Let it go. Now, if the worker says she’s seen all the verification, then what?”

“She sets up the grant and sends it through.”

“So you have only the worker’s word that a client exists, right?”

“I suppose so. Unless someone’s seen the client…” Effield’s face had become paler yet his head slumped into his hands. He sat motionless, sweat darkening the armpits of his red shirt “Oh, God, maybe Anne did make dummy cases. How can I go on defending her? She could have. And I recommended her!”

I waited for him to continue.

“She used me as a reference. I knew her before. What will they think?”

“What about the dummy cases?”

“It could have been. If Anne set up dummies there’s no way I would have known. She could have passed them off as real. They all could. Every worker in my unit could be making dummies.”

“Do you think that’s why she was killed?”

Effield’s eyes widened. “Why? I mean, the dummies didn’t do it. Anyone in administration, like myself, would be upset, but you don’t kill because of fraud.”

“Who could have known?” I asked.

“How can I say? I didn’t know about the cases. How would I know who did?”

“Who was in a position to, from a logistical standpoint?”

Effield’s fingers rubbed together. “I guess anyone in the office could have come across something.”

“Like Mona?”

“Oh, no. Mona would have told me.”

“Fern?”

“Oh, no. No.”

“Nat Smith.”

“Oh, no. I wasn’t suggesting him.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Can’t you see I’m upset? How would you feel if someone you had trusted had done something like this right under your nose?”

“Who, Effield? You? Someone put those fake new addresses in the case folders.”

He stared directly at me. “What kind of woman are you? Don’t you have any feelings? I told you I’m upset.”

“You’re upset! Think about what happened to Anne Spaulding!”

Effield’s eyes dropped. “I’ve told you what I know; I’ve even made guesses about things I don’t know. What more do you want?”

There might have been something else to squeeze out of him, but I doubted it, and time was what I did not have. Warning Effield not to touch Anne’s cases, I started out of his office. Anyone here could have known. Anyone. Nat included.

F
ERN WAS GONE.
N
AT
was gone. But Mona, who had been packing up twenty minutes ago, was leaning back in her chair, swivelled to face Effield’s office door, waiting. She smiled at me.

I smiled back. We had here a meeting of the minds. My only question was where to go to talk privately, but that was answered by the banging of the back door and the sight of Alec Effield making his way to the street.

I sat in Fern’s chair. “What do you know about dummy cases, Mona?”

“Theoretically, or in fact?”

“In fact, Mona. Here in the office.”

Her eyes opened wide. “Really? Anne? Wow!”

“You suspected it?”

“Not specifically. I mean, I didn’t know if Anne was up to something, but I’m not surprised. How’d she do it?”

“You tell me. How would the money go out and get back to Anne?”

Mona glanced around, scanning the empty chairs. Above her desk, a clock ticked against the silence of the room. “I can’t swear to you how Anne did it, but here’s the way it would logically work,” she said. “Setting up a dummy would be no problem. Once the case is ready the money goes out via computer check to the address. Then it’s just a matter of picking it up and getting false I.D.’s to cash the checks. Anyone with half a mind can get phony cards. It’s been written up in magazines, and most of the news shows on television have shown it step by step. You could cash the checks at the supermarket. After all, the checks are good.” Mona paused. “The only thing is, Anne’s left-handed. And her handwriting is distinctly awful. All the phony signatures must look alike.”

I recalled that crabbed writing I had had to get Pereira to decipher. “She could have varied it.”

“No. I saw her try once. She needed to sign Fern’s name to an emergency action—to get a food order for a client—and even with Fern’s signature there to copy she couldn’t do it.”

And Anne had been unable to draw the simple sketch for the
Rhinoceros
handbill. Still, I said, “Maybe it was for your benefit.”

Mona snorted. “I’d have known.”

“Maybe. Certainly you’re pretty clear on how to create dummies.”

“Jesus! You don’t suspect me!” She looked truly outraged.

“You know how to set up the dummies,” I repeated. “And, Mona, you were at Bank of America, hanging around on the first of two consecutive months.”

“I told you, I was thinking of opening an account.”

“That’s what you
told
me.”

“Well, I don’t have an account. I…”

“Could we skip to the truth?”

When she didn’t answer, I said, “First you’re at Alec’s flat. Then you make a point of riding down the hill with me and asking questions about Anne. Then you invite me over to confer. You’re awfully interested in this case. Could it be that you were part of the dummy case racket? Did you kill Anne when she tried to cheat you?” I took a breath. “What were you doing at the bank, Mona?”

Mona stared, amazed.

“I found a long brown curly hair in one of the dummy case files—a hair like yours. Nat overheard you arguing with Alec and Anne. What—”

“Okay. Okay. I was at the bank.” With a sigh, she leaned back in the chair. “I
had
gone in to get some information on accounts, savings accounts. That was the truth.”

“And?”

“Well, the bank was jammed. It was the first of the month. Every welfare client was in there cashing a check. I’d forgotten it was the first, or I’d never have gone in there. Anyway, I was trying to decide if it was worth it to see a bank officer when I noticed Alec standing to one side of the tellers. That’s where you sign to get into a safe-deposit box. Of course, I didn’t know that then. I started over to ask him if he had any idea how long I’d have to wait, since he was obviously familiar with the bank. His side was to me, and as I came toward him he turned away to face the teller. I heard Alec give a name to the teller, and the teller repeat it. Then Alec followed the teller inside.”