Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels) (3 page)

“Spike,” she said. “Spike, dear, come and meet the nice man Helen brought to help us.”

The cat that came sauntering around the sofa was a rotund and middle-aged orange tabby, with wicked amber eyes and a great swaying underbelly that brushed the carpet as he moved. He plunked himself down five feet from where I was sitting, paying no attention to any of us, and began to lick his shoulder. For a cat that had been sick as a dog two days ago, he looked pretty fit.

“Mrs. Abbott,” I said, “who has a key to this house?”

She blinked at me behind her granny glasses. “Key?”

“Besides you and Mrs. Alvarez, I mean.”

“Why, Charley has one, of course.”

“Any other member of your family?”

“Charley is my only living relative.”

“Is there anyone else who—
uff!
”

An orange blur had come flying through the air and a pair of meaty forepaws nearly destroyed what was left of my manly pride. The pain made me writhe a little, but the movement
didn’t dislodge Spike; he had all four claws anchored to various portions of my lap. I thought an evil thought involving retribution, but it died when he commenced a noisy purring. Like a fool I put forth a tentative hand and petted him. He tolerated that for all of five seconds. Then he bit me on the soft webbing between my thumb and forefinger, jumped down, and streaked wildly out of the room.

“He likes you,” Mrs. Abbott said, smiling.

I looked at her.

“Oh, he does,” she said. “It’s just his way with strangers. When Spike nips you, it’s a sign of affection.”

I looked down at my hand.

The sign of affection was bleeding.

O
ne of those cases, all right. A bigger cutie, in fact, than I’d anticipated after Helen Alvarez started laying it out for me in my office. I’d tried to avoid taking it on, but Jake Runyon and Alex Chavez had been out on other business and Tamara was sympathetic to Mrs. Alvarez, so I had no backup. No backbone, either, when it comes to this kind of case. How do you turn down a determined seventy-year-old widow with a problem neither the police nor most other private agencies will touch?

Mrs. Alvarez was not someone who listened to “no” when she wanted to hear “yes.” She pleaded; she cajoled; she gave me the kind of sad, anxious, worried, reproving looks elderly women cultivate to an art form—the kind calculated to make you feel heartless and ashamed of yourself and to melt your resistance faster than fire melts wax.

I hung in there for a while, waffling, but Tamara put an end to my resistance. She’d established, with my blessings, an
agency policy of taking on pro bono cases for individuals and small businesses who couldn’t afford our fees—a worthwhile public service designed mainly for the benefit of ethnic minorities. Helen Alvarez was not really a minority, being an Angla married to a deceased Latino, and not exactly indigent, but that didn’t make any difference to Tamara. She said we’d take the case, in a no-nonsense voice, and that took care of that. She’d been in a grumpy, distant mood for the past couple of weeks, snapping and growling when something went wrong or she didn’t get her way, and arguing with her when she was like that was useless. The Good Tamara was on vacation. The Bad Tamara who sometimes replaced her was a pain in the ass.

So I’d listened to Helen Alvarez’s tale and written down all the salient facts and agreed to interview Margaret Abbott. Mrs. Abbott’s woes had begun three months ago, when Allan and Doris Patterson and the City of San Francisco had contrived to steal her house and property. The word “steal” was Mrs. Alvarez’s, not mine.

It seemed the Pattersons, who owned a real estate firm in the Outer Richmond, had bought the Abbott property at a city-held auction where it was being sold for nonpayment of property taxes dating back to the death of Mrs. Abbott’s husband in 2000. She refused to vacate the premises, so they’d sought to have her legally evicted. Sheriff’s deputies declined to carry out the eviction notice, however, after a Sheriff’s Department administrator went out to talk to her and concluded that she was the innocent victim of circumstances and cold-hearted bureaucracy.

Margaret Abbott’s husband had always handled the couple’s finances; she was an old-fashioned sheltered housewife who
knew nothing at all about such matters as property taxes. She hadn’t heeded notices of delinquency mailed to her by the city tax collector because she didn’t understand what they were and hadn’t sought to find out from her nephew or Mrs. Alvarez or anyone else. When the tax collector received no response from Mrs. Abbott, he ordered her property put up for auction without first making an effort to contact her personally. House and property were subsequently sold to the Pattersons for $286,000, about a third of what they were worth on the current real estate market. Mrs. Abbott hadn’t even been told that an auction was being held.

Armed with this information, the Sheriff’s Department administrator went to the mayor and to the local newspapers on her behalf. The mayor got the Board of Supervisors to approve city funds to reimburse the Pattersons, so as to allow Mrs. Abbott to keep her home. But the Pattersons refused to accept the reimbursement; they wanted the property and the fat killing they’d make when they sold it.

They hired an attorney, which prompted Helen Alvarez to step in and enlist the help of lawyers from Legal Aid for the Elderly. A stay of the eviction order was obtained and the matter was put before a superior court judge, who ruled in favor of Margaret Abbott. She was entitled not only to her property, he decided, but also to a tax waiver from the city because she lived on a fixed income. The Pattersons might have tried to take the case to a higher court, except for the fact that negative media attention was harming their business. So, Mrs. Alvarez said, they “crawled back into the woodwork. But if you ask me, they’ve come crawling right back out again.”

It was her contention that the Pattersons were responsible for the nocturnal “reign of terror” against Mrs. Abbott out of
“just plain vindictive meanness. And maybe because they think that if they drive Margaret out of her mind or straight into her grave, they can get their greedy claws on her property after all.” How could they hope to do that? I’d asked. Mrs. Alvarez didn’t know, but if there was a way, “those two slime-balls have figured it out.”

That explanation didn’t make much sense to me. But based on what I’d been told so far, I couldn’t think of a better one. Margaret Abbott lived on a quiet street in a quiet residential neighborhood; she seldom left the house anymore, got on well with her neighbors and her nephew, hadn’t an enemy in the world or any money or valuables other than her house and property that anybody could be after. If not the Pattersons, then who would want to bedevil a harmless old woman? And why?

Well, I could probably rule out Spike the psychotic cat and the malevolent spirit of Mrs. Abbott’s late husband. If old Carl’s shade really was lurking around here somewhere, Helen Alvarez would just have to get herself another detective.

I don’t do ghosts. I definitely do not do ghosts.

H
elen Alvarez and I left Mrs. Abbott in her Boston rocker and went to have a look around the premises. Starting with the rear porch.

A close-up examination of the back door revealed no marks on the locking plate or any other indication of forced entry. But the lock itself was of the unsafe push-button variety: anybody with half an ounce of ingenuity and a minimum of strength could pop it open in less than a minute. The cat’s three bowls—water, dry food, wet food—were over next to the washer and dryer, ten feet from the door. Easy enough for someone to slip in here late at night, dose one of the bowls with poison, and slip out again after resetting the lock button.

From there Mrs. Alvarez and I went out into the rear yard. It was a cloudy day, with a biting wind off the Pacific—the kind of March day that made you wonder how much longer winter was going to hang around before spring finally kicked it out. The daffodils and some other flowers in narrow beds that ringed a small patch of lawn didn’t know spring was a slow arrival this year; they gave the yard some color under the gloomy sky. The beds and the lawn were neatly kept—Mrs.
Alvarez’s brother Leonard’s doing, now that age and frail health had forced Margaret Abbott to give up gardening.

The yard itself was enclosed by fences, no gate in any of them; neighboring houses crowded in close on both flanks. But beyond the back fence, which was less than six feet high and easily climbable, was a kids’ playground. I went across the lawn, around on the north side of the house, and found another trespasser’s delight: a brick path that was open all the way to the street.

I walked down the path a ways, looking at the side wall of the house. Helen Alvarez and her brother had done a good job of eradicating the words that had been spray-painted there, except for the shadow of a
bullsh
that was half-hidden behind a privet hedge.

In the adjacent yard on that side, a man in a sweatshirt had been sweeping up blown leaves that had collected around what looked like a fruit tree in the center of a winter brown lawn. He’d stopped when he saw Mrs. Alvarez and me, stood leaning on his rake for a few seconds; now he came over to the fence, carrying the rake vertically in his right hand as if bearing a standard. He was about fifty, thin, balding, long jawed. He nodded to me, said to Mrs. Alvarez, “How’s Margaret holding up?”

“Fair, Ev, just fair. She’s got it into her head that a ghost, of all things, might be responsible.”

“Ghost?”

“Her late husband come back to haunt her.”

“Uh-oh. Sounds like she’s ready to be put away for safekeeping.”

“Not yet she isn’t. Not if this man”—Mrs. Alvarez patted my arm—“and I have anything to say about it. He’s a detective and he is going to put a stop to what’s been going on.”

The neighbor gave me a speculative look. “Police?”

“Private investigator.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, and I hired him,” Mrs. Alvarez said.

“To do what, exactly?”

“I told you—put a stop to what’s been going on.”

She introduced us. The thin guy’s name was Everett Belasco.

He asked me, “So how’re you gonna do it? You got ways that the police haven’t?”

People always want to know how a private detective works. They think there is some special methodology that sets us apart from the police and even further apart from those in other public-service professions. Another by-product of half a century of fiction, films, and TV shows.

I told Belasco the truth. “No, I don’t have any special methods. Just hard work and perseverance, with maybe a little luck thrown in.” And of course it disappointed him, as it usually does.

“Well, you ask me,” he said, “it’s either bums or street punks.”

“Bums?”

“City calls ’em homeless; I call ’em bums. Drug addicts, most of ’em, live like pigs over in Golden Gate Park. Panhandle, steal, leave dirty needles lying around, destroy property all over the damn place.”

My opinion of Everett Belasco dropped a couple of notches. “Most of the encampments have been cleaned out,” I said.

“Yeah, but not all of ’em. Every day I see some bum wandering around, relieving himself right out in plain sight. Punk kids, too, Mexicans, blacks. Gangs of ’em on weekends at Ocean Beach.”

“What reason would kids or homeless people have to vandalize private property in this neighborhood?”

“They need a reason nowadays?”

“Any particular individuals you have in mind?”

“Nah. But I’ll tell you this—the neighborhood’s not safe like it used to be.” He waggled the rake to emphasize his judgment. “Whole damn city’s going to hell, you ask me.”

I quit paying attention to him, asked Mrs. Alvarez if there had been any other cases of malicious mischief in the neighborhood recently.

“Not that I know about.”

“So Margaret’s the first,” Belasco said. “They start with one person, an old lady can’t defend herself; then they move on to somebody else. Me, for instance. Or you, Helen.” He shook his head. “I’m telling you, it’s either bums from the park or street punks.”

As Mrs. Alvarez and I went on out front, I wondered if it would be worth running two or three late-night stakeouts on the Abbott home. Not me—Alex Chavez. I hate stakeouts of any kind; he doesn’t mind them. If the harassment pattern held, there was liable to be another incident fairly soon. Worthwhile, then?

No. Not with two easy ways to get onto the property, front and back. One man couldn’t watch them both, and on a pro bono case like this one, the expense of hiring a second part-time operative was prohibitive. Of course Chavez could run the stakeout alone from inside Mrs. Abbott’s house, but that wouldn’t do much good if the perp did his dirty work outside. If the situation posed a potential threat to Margaret Abbott’s safety, a single or double stakeout would be warranted and hang the cost, but I didn’t see it happening that way. All the mischief had been petty and none of it directed against
Mrs. Abbott personally. If there was another incident, it would follow the same pattern as the previous ones.

Belasco’s insistence that homeless people or kids were responsible was misdirected venom and bigotry. It was true enough that the city was infested with aggressive panhandlers, chronic drunks and drug users who used the streets and parks as public toilets and sometimes destroyed both public and private property. And gang activity was rampant in the Mission and Visitacion Valley and Bayview–Hunters Point districts. But both genuine and bogus homeless pretty much confined themselves to certain sections—Market Street downtown, the Haight, the inner Mission—and the black and Latino gangs committed their acts of violence on their own turf and mostly against one another. Even those Belasco called street punks tended to be territorial, and their acts of vandalism were generally limited to spreading graffiti and breaking into parked cars.

The kind of malicious mischief Mrs. Abbott had been subjected to didn’t have the feel or methodology of homeless, gang, or teenage troublemaking. No, it figured to be calculated to a specific purpose. Find that purpose and I’d find the person or persons responsible.