As a Favor (3 page)

“I doubt it. The morning paper’s still on the stoop. I pounded on the door. There was no sound inside.”

“Are you sure she heard you? What’s the layout of the apartment?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been inside. But, Jill, Anne was at work yesterday. She wouldn’t just wander off on a Tuesday morning and forget all about her job. If it were Monday, maybe, just maybe, it might have been a long weekend, although that’s not like Anne. But no one is too preoccupied to come to work on a Tuesday.”

I could hear the concern in Nat’s voice; it was an undertone I hadn’t heard in a long time—in two, three years, maybe. I almost asked him how come he hadn’t been in Anne’s apartment, after all her interest in him. But I stopped myself. Why should I care? He was obviously upset; I didn’t need to poke the wound. It was bad enough he was working at the welfare department instead of in classes he loved; I should be pleased he had some companionship there.

And Nat’s conclusion
was
logical. Normal people did not disappear on Tuesdays. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Did you see the neighbors?”

“No. They probably hadn’t gotten home from work yet.”

“Any signs of forced entry?”

“What do you mean? Broken windows?”

“Well, more subtle things, like jimmied locks or trampled branches under the windows or—”

“Jill, there could have been things I didn’t notice. I’m not an expert.” He paused. “Will you go and have a look?”

“Okay, I’ll do that.”

“Anne lives—” A truck passed, muffling Nat’s words.

“What?”

“She lives on College Avenue. That’s your district, isn’t it?”

“You mean my beat? Yes.” District was a welfare term. Already I was sorry I’d agreed to help him. That incorrect term, replacing mine with his, was typical of Nat. It summed everything up.

But regardless of my unsettled feelings toward Nat, or my history of resentment of Anne Spaulding—or maybe because of them—I would investigate. Anne Spaulding’s disappearance did sound suspicious. This could be a legitimate Missing Person’s report.

“She lives just this side of Claremont,” Nat said. I’ll check the house number.”

Another truck passed. The operator demanded another payment. The coins clanged.

Nat came back on the line, reading off the street number. I got out a form and said, I’m taking this down as a report.”

“Don’t do that. Anne might not like it.”

“Look, Nat, either she’s missing or not. If it’s not serious enough for a report, maybe you should wait till tomorrow.”

It was a moment before he said, “No. That’s too long.”

“Okay, have you called her relatives?”

“She doesn’t have any. I asked Alec—Alec Effield, our supervisor. Anne came from back East, two or three years ago, and if she had any family they’d be back there. But she certainly never mentioned anyone.”

“What about friends, lovers?” It was a legitimate question, one I would have asked in any investigation. Over the phone, though, there was no way to tell whether Nat’s silence was due to chagrin at the possibility of lovers or at my bringing it up, or whether he was merely attempting to remember who Anne knew.

“She never mentioned friends. In fact she talked very little about her personal life.”

“So what you’re saying is that you don’t know any more than her address?”

There was another silence that I took for acquiescence.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll check, but it’s probably no big thing. Most likely she’ll be home, exhausted from a rushed day in San Francisco, and annoyed to have to talk to the cops.”

Again Nat was silent, and I wondered if he were reconsidering the whole thing.

“Jill?”

“Yes?”

“Will you call me when you get back?”

This
was
important to him. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call.”

“Thanks. I’ll be home by nine.” He hung up.

I sat staring at the phone, feeling my resentment mount. Nat was concerned, all right, but not worried enough to interrupt his evening’s plans.

I had given Nat special treatment. I hadn’t made him come to the station, or wait for an officer to come out. In truth, had he been a stranger, I wouldn’t have taken a Missing Person’s report from him at all, but told him to find someone closer to Anne to make it.

Be that as it might, I was committed. I still had half an hour before I was to meet Howard. I got the keys for one of the patrol cars and headed for the parking lot. There I climbed in, moved the seat forward, called the dispatcher, and pulled into traffic.

It was nearly seven o’clock. The sun was dropping toward the bank of fog that pushed steadily in from the west. On Shattuck, students wrapped heavy Peruvian sweaters around the halters or T-shirts that had been ample four hours ago. I headed east crossing the still-crowded area around Telegraph Avenue. The street vendors who had filled the sidewalks earlier were gone, but university students still hurried to night classes and the Avenue regulars still propped themselves along walls and begged for spare change.

I drove past People’s Park, empty now, and turned south on College.

The building Anne Spaulding lived in was a quarter of a mile north of the blocks of small shops—butchers, flower shops, bakeries and fashionable used-furniture stores—the area most people thought of as College Avenue.

Making a U-turn, I parked in front of Anne’s. It was an apple-green duplex circa 1930. Above the double windows on both floors the stucco was embossed with stylized fruit designs. On the building’s twin across the fence to the south, the fruit had been painted rust and saffron, the leaves aquamarine, a color scheme echoed by the doors and window frames. But this building was just apple green. Even the effect of the lattice windows was muted by the white lining of the drawn drapes behind them.

The morning newspaper lay on the stoop. I rang the bell and waited. There was no answer. I rang again, scanning the door for signs of forced entry. There were none.

Starting up the driveway, I checked the windows and the bushes under them. The foliage was thin and yellowed by the dry summer, but showed no signs of having been disturbed. Anne Spaulding’s flat was four steps up and the windows were higher than eye level. Curtains still covered them, on this side, too. Either Anne was very cautious or she hadn’t been home during the day.

There was no garage at the end of the driveway. The two lanes of cement merely stopped at the property line; from there a macadam path cut between houses to the next street. Paths bisecting long blocks were not uncommon in Berkeley, but they normally went all the way from one street to the next; ending in a driveway was unusual.

Anne’s backyard, to my right, was enclosed by a five-foot-high wooden fence. I glanced over the top, checking for occupants, pushed open the gate and made my way through ankle-deep weeds and ivy to the steps.

The back door stood open.

I
MOUNTED THE STEPS
, calling Anne’s name. The kitchen was dark. Dirty dishes from a pile in the sink spilled onto the counter. Ahead there was a light on.

“Anne!” I yelled. Still no reply. I hurried into the living room and stopped.

Nat was right to be worried. A chair lay overturned. The bedroom door was half open. A shattered porcelain lamp lay on the floor before it, its pieces brown, bloodstained. Dried blood marked the wall.

Involuntarily I swallowed, preparing myself for what I might find in the bedroom. Using a tissue to avoid smearing any possible fingerprints, I pushed back the door and walked inside, checking in the closet, the bathroom, and under a pile of bedclothes.

The room was a shambles, but there was no body—no stench of death. At least that was a relief. I made my way back to the living room and called the dispatcher for a back-up unit and the lab crew.

There was nothing to do till they arrived. I stood away from the stains, trying to picture what had happened, and the person it happened to. But as I searched my memory for an impression of Anne Spaulding, I realized that Nat had said very little about her (he had not met her till after we’d separated) and what ideas I did have came more from my reactions at the time than from facts. My best move would be to start from scratch.

I looked around the living room. Drawn curtains blocked the windows, but the ceiling light had been left on. A leather loveseat stood opposite the fireplace; matching Barcelona chairs, one overturned, flanked it, and before it was a glass-on-chrome table partially covering a small oriental rug. By the kitchen an étagère held the stereo, albums, and a nine-inch television, but no books and no plants.

Despite the predominance of brown, it was a cold room, more like a display model than a home.

But the bedroom was just the opposite. This had to be where Anne did her living. Heaps of clothes littered the floor and the unmade bed. The walls were white, the bed and dresser had a Salvation Army look, and a third of the room had been made into a sort of gymnasium with dumbbells, exercycle, bust developer, sunlamp, and pulleys attached to a giant hook. The only decoration was a poster for “Theater on Wheels.”

In the closet, stacked with care amidst a pile of lace nightgowns and soiled bikini pants, were two pairs of skis—downhill and cross country—and a Wilson tennis racquet endorsed by Chris Evert.

This was the room of someone who viewed her body as one might a sportscar—a machine that, well maintained, will provide pleasure and excitement.

The doorbell rang.

“Jill,” Howard said as I pulled it open, “I was wondering what happened to you. I circled a block half a mile north of here—three times. I was just about to park when the call came through.”

“Oh, sorry.” Howard’s thief had completely vanished from my mind. “I thought this would take twenty minutes maximum, but it looks bad in here.”

I nodded to Connie Pereira as she rushed up behind Howard, and I was about to speak when the lab van pulled up and the crew eased out.

“Do the lamp and the door jambs for prints,” I said as they walked up the steps. “And get the blood on the wall.”

The lab man nodded.

“Take a look at the yard for footprints, if you can find anything through the ivy.”

“Right, but there’s not much chance. What ivy doesn’t prevent, it covers.”

I shrugged. “Start with the yard; it’s already pretty dark out.”

Turning to Howard and Pereira, I explained Nat’s request. “As far as I know, Anne Spaulding was at work at the Telegraph office of the welfare department yesterday.”

“That would be eight-thirty to five, then?” Pereira asked.

I thought a moment. The eight-hour day in government offices varied a bit throughout the state, some counties working eight to four-thirty, some eight-thirty to five. I nodded; Pereira was right “I assume she was there all day, but I’ll have to ask Nat.”

“Do we know what she was doing afterwards?” Howard looked at the upturned chairs.

“That’s something else I’ll have to ask.”

“Presumably,” Pereira said, “whatever it was ended up here.”

“Right,” I said. “Let’s see what this place can tell us. Howard, you want to take the yard? The lab man should be through in a couple minutes.”

“Okay.”

As he headed through the kitchen I could see the fading light from the back windows. Why couldn’t Nat have called earlier, when there was still enough light to do a decent job?

“I suppose that leaves the kitchen for me,” Pereira said.

“And the living room. If you’d seen the bedroom you’d know I was doing you a favor.”

I followed the lab crew into the bedroom, checking through the piles of clothing—clean, washed but unironed, dirty—and the more homogeneous clutter of sweatshirts, sweatpants, shorts, T-shirts, and leotards that had found a home on the closet floor. Despite the overwhelming picture of disorder the room presented, each pile contained a specific variety of garment and the slips and blouses from the “dirty” pile had not invaded the “clean” or the “unironed.” While the room did make that suggestion about Anne’s character—order within disorder—it told me little more. There were no letters, no notes—only a movie schedule and a Theater on Wheels handbill advertising Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros.

I moved on to the bathroom.

It was a small room, obviously a necessity squeezed uncomfortably into a hallway when the building had been converted into flats. A stall shower occupied nearly half the floor space and a waist-high quilted cabinet stood by the bedroom door. I opened the medicine chest and found it surprisingly neat Bottles of Vaseline, deodorant, Maximum Tan tanning oil, make-up in beige and alabaster pink, eyedrops, and astringent stood in rows with no space unfilled. Nothing could have been removed.

Turning to the quilted cabinet I squatted and pulled open the door.

Pereira came in, looked and whistled. “She must have been either a real beauty or an utter witch to justify this investment in make-up.”

I laughed, and the unnatural sound that came from my own throat made me aware of how tense I was. Pereira continued to survey the bottles and tubes in amazement For Pereira, the Department’s investment maven, this type of extravagance was almost a personal affront Connie Pereira spent her leisure hours taking classes in accounting, tax law, and commodities strategies. All that kept her from making a killing was a set of parents and two brothers who drained off her savings on a regular basis.

She held up a bottle of Corn-Silk Blonde. “Look at this. So her hair wasn’t natural either.”

I nodded as she replaced it in the cabinet. “What did you find in the kitchen and living room?”

She shrugged. “Nothing hidden in the living room. And almost everything in the kitchen is out, waiting to be washed. There are some vegetables in the fridge, two place settings of bone china stacked away, clean, and the usual assortment of liquor.”

Going to the étagère, I fingered through the varied collection of albums.

Pereira followed. “Jill,” she hesitated. “I forgot to tell you that I let the lab crew go. Okay? The print man said they were in a hurry.”

It was my case. Technically only I could release them. I said, “Did they finish everything?”