Muller, Marcia - [09] There's Something In A Sunday [v 1.0] (htm) (7 page)

Now he ran a hand through his thick gray hair. His lean, bony face blanked as he tried to absorb what I'd just told him. He let his hand rest on top of his head for a few seconds, then placed it on mine.

"Did you find his body?" he asked.

"Sort of. I had an appointment to deliver my report to him and—"

"Are you okay?"

"Depressed, but I'll manage. It was a shock—but then it always is."

Jack took his hand away and reached for his wine. "Are they certain Bob was responsible?"

"No, but his pouch was at the scene. You know—that fringed leather thing he carries." I sampled my wine and took odd comfort from its bitterness. "Did you know Rudy well?"

"Not too well, but I liked him a lot. What I handled for him was his business affairs—contracts with suppliers, the sewing union—so the situation didn't really invite closeness."

"Did he tell you much about the job he wanted me for?"

"Hardly anything. What was that all about, anyway?"

I explained, then added, "You'll get a better picture when you read my report. Tell me—had you drawn up a will for him?"

"No, but there is one. I don't know if Gilbert Thayer handled it, or Hank." Hank is our specialist on family law; most of the attorneys refer their clients to him for such work.

"Speaking of Hank," I said, "have you noticed he hasn't been looking too well lately?"

Jack hesitated. "Yes, I have."

"The two of you were talking pretty seriously when I came in. Do you know what's wrong?"

Again he paused. "Oh hell, there's no reason you shouldn't know—you're a better friend to either of them than I am. Hank's got trouble at home. That's why he was talking it out with me—because I've just been through it."

"Trouble at home? But it's so soon! They're not thinking of getting a divorce—"

"No, God no. They're both just at the stage of acknowledging that things have gone wrong."

"But how?"

"They're both very set in their ways. Hank's used to living casually—too casually, probably—like everybody does here at All Souls."

"Anne-Marie used to live here. She was that way, too."

"Then, yes. But once she bought that two-flat building over in Noe Valley, she developed her own way of doing things, and Hank's having trouble adjusting to it."

"Adjusting to
what
?"

"Well, nightly candlelit dinners. Weekly social evenings with the couple who rent the upstairs flat from them. Chores done on a regular basis. You know. It's nothing against Anne-Marie. Personally, I'd love that kind of life.
Did
love it. But Hank…"

"I see." I'd always envied Anne-Marie her beautiful home, and I'd enjoyed many an elegant dinner there, but I could understand why her life-style might be incompatible with Hank's offhanded—face it, sometimes slovenly—existence.

"She has everything systematized," Jack went on, "even down to who does what. She does the laundry, Hank cleans the bathroom. She cooks, all the time, and he misses making his spaghetti and chili. Each is responsible for buying different things: she pays for the paper goods and cleaning stuff and meat; he's supposed to take care of vegetables and staples and liquor."

"Good Lord, how do they do their grocery shopping?"

"Two carts."

"When I used to shop with my boyfriend, we could hardly control one cart between us! What does Hank want to do about this situation?"

"Nothing, so far. Like I said, he's just at the bitching stage. Frankly, I think part of the trouble is that he misses All Souls."

"Well, everybody here misses him, too, but that marriage is important. Both of them took a risk later in life than most of us would have been brave enough to do, and they've invested a lot of themselves in it. They love each other. Besides"—I smiled, trying to cheer Jack, whose expression told me he was reliving his own failure—"he'd better not miss this place too much. I'm not giving my office back to him."

Jack didn't seem to see the humor in the remark—and frankly, I didn't blame him. He tilted his wineglass to get at the last drops, then went to the sink for a refill. "Maybe they'll work it out. People who are set in their ways have been known to change."

"At our age? I wonder." I hadn't been able to change for Don, any more than he'd been able to change for me. I hoped Anne-Marie and Hank wouldn't end up apart, as we had.

Jack offered me more wine, but I declined and went to retrieve my coat from Rae's office. Tonight I'd be better off sulking at home, where I couldn't inflict my mood on anybody else.

But when I got home, things began to look up. I found that my wandering cat, Watney, had returned and was curled in the center of my bed. When I flicked on the light, he looked up and started purring. I went to the kitchen and rooted around in the freezer; damned if there wasn't a package of my favorite macaroni and cheese. While it heated, I cleared some of the mess from the kitchen and shut the door against the construction zone on the back porch. Then I took my dinner to bed and snuggled down with a good book. When I was done eating, I bribed Watney to come home more often by letting him lick the cheese residue from the aluminum-foil container.

As I went about my business for the next few days, I tried to shove Rudy Goldring's death to the back of my mind. Lord knows I had enough to contend with. Rae didn't show up for work on either Tuesday or Wednesday; she called, claiming she had the flu, but she didn't sound sick, and I attributed her absence to her continuing failure to stand up to her husband. As a result, the caseload piled up on my desk; one interview I'd turned over to her required I travel to Sacramento, losing half a day's time in transit. My statement for the police about Goldring's death took up the whole of one morning. It was late Thursday before I had a breather, and I was just thinking of calling Ben Gallagher at the SFPD to ask if they'd made any progress on the case when the phone buzzed, and it was Ben, calling me.

Without preamble, he said, "Did you write down the license number of that woman's BMW?"

"Yes, I've still got it in my notebook. Hold on a second." I grabbed my purse and rummaged through it. "One GDJ three two six."

"Shit. I was hoping you'd just read it to me wrong. But you must have got it garbled."

"Why?"

"We traced the owner of the car. She's not the woman you're talking about, says she was in a meeting in her own living room at the time and the car was right outside in the driveway."

"Maybe she's lying."

"No, she doesn't match the description you gave me. And there are witnesses from the meeting who say the car was there. Besides, this isn't a woman who avoids publicity—of any kind."

"Who is she?"

"Vicky Cushman."

"Oh."

Vicky Cushman certainly didn't hide from the limelight. She was one of the city's most visible citizen-activists, always championing one cause or another—from saving the buffalo in the park to tearing down the unsightly Embarcadero Freeway. In recent years she'd devoted most of her attention to issues in the Haight-Ashbury district, where she lived.

I'd met Vicky from time to time at All Souls functions. Her husband Gerry was a hotshot member of a downtown architecture firm and a close friend of one of our partners, and liberal activists like Vicky were always high on the co-op's A list. Gallagher was understating it when he said she didn't look like the woman I'd encountered at Goldring's: Vicky was petite, had waist-length blond hair, and the kind of turned-up features we used to enviously term "cute" in high school.

I said, "Maybe she loaned the car out, and the witnesses are lying."

"No, you got the number wrong. Did you write it down as soon as the woman drove away?"

"There was a time lapse, until I could get hold of my notebook, but I repeated it over and over to myself."

"Uh-huh."

"Okay, maybe I got a letter or number out of place. Why don't you—" But then I was struck by the statistical magnitude of checking every combination of those seven letters and numbers, coupled with the legendary inefficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

"Why don't I what?"

"Nothing. I was about to say something stupid. What about Frank Wilkonson? Were you able to trace him?"

"Yeah, he works on a big cattle ranch near Hollister. Sheriff down there checked him out. He says he never heard of Rudy Goldring."

Hollister was near San Jose, not King City. Another of Goldring's lies. "Did the sheriff ask him why he comes to the city on Sundays?"

"He says he works six days a week on the ranch and comes up here to unwind."

"He unwinds by checking out the conservatory and plant sale, and visiting every nursery in town?"

"That's what he says." I could picture Ben shrugging. After a moment he added, "The guy's got six kids, Sharon. If I had six kids, plants might look good to me, too."

"Maybe," I said dubiously. "I gather you haven't located Bob, the derelict, yet."

"His full name's Robert Choteau, and he's disappeared from all his usual haunts. That in itself indicates guilt."

"Or fear."

"Whatever. We'll locate him, but it'll take time. He's our only lead, since you muffed the license plate number."

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him to go to hell. But I didn't say it. Gallagher was overworked and tired; I was overworked and tired; he hadn't meant it.

I said, "Let me know how it goes, all right?"

"I'll let you know." He hung up.

I set the receiver in the cradle and pushed back my chair, staring out the window at the flat gray expanse of the Outer Mission. Dammit, I didn't believe I had muffed the license plate number. I have a good head for figures; all I have to do is call a phone number once or twice and I have it memorized. Maybe Vicky Cushman and her witnesses
were
lying; it could even be for some innocuous reason, or out of sheer perversity. Liberal activists are never overly fond of cops…

I felt I knew Vicky well enough to call her and ask about what she'd told the police. Better yet, I'd simply drop in at the somewhat peculiar home she and Gerry owned on the hill above the Haight. If my questions seemed to stem from a casual, spur-of-the-moment impulse, she'd most likely be open with me. I could say I wanted to verify that the car had indeed been hers for my own peace of mind. I could say I was concerned about the woman I'd run into at Goldring's, wanted to make sure she was all right.

Yes, I thought, that would be the best approach. And it
was
for my peace of mind; I hated to think I'd slipped up on something as simple as remembering a series of seven letters and numbers. I'd go over there right away—as soon as I'd called a friend at the DMV and asked her to get me Frank Wilkonson's exact address in Hollister.

The Haight-Ashbury District is best known for the social and psychedelic explosion that took place there in the 1960s, but its history encompasses far more than the brief hippie era. It was originally settled by livestock farmers who staked out five- to ten-acre plots on the quiet eastern reaches of Golden Gate Park; with the expansion of the city's rail service to the area, "suburbanites" followed, building the splendid Victorians that are so prized today. In the 1880s, excitement of a more wholesome sort than LSD trips was embodied by The Chutes, a Haight Street amusement park with a death-defying roller coaster. Long before the hippies discovered the district, bohemians and college students moved there for the cheap rents; after the hippies left, hard-case junkies and drug dealers took over.

Today the Haight is a neighborhood in search of an identity. Spruced-up Victorians sit side-by-side with dilapidated apartment buildings that approach tenement status. Haight Street itself—the commercial center—is a curious melange of mom-and-pop stores that have been there for generations, chic new boutiques, bed-and-breakfast hotels, and the ever-encroaching chain outlets. Fashionable shoppers from the suburbs and more affluent areas of the city brush shoulders with the punks, junkies, and neighborhood mothers pushing baby strollers. Some residents fear the invasion of pizza parlors and twenty-four-hour drugstores will destroy the character of the district; others—many of them older people on fixed incomes—are grateful for the lower chain-store prices. Everyone is edgy about the way the University of California Medical Center keeps reaching down from Parnassus Heights to gobble up prime real estate. The Haight seems to be caught in a tug-of-war between gentrification and social responsibility. It is rich soil for neighborhood activists like Vicky Cushman.

I crossed Buena Vista Heights on Seventeenth Street and drove downhill on Ashbury. It was one of those September days when you can tell summer is edging into fall: the sky was the hard clear blue of San Francisco's autumn, and enough of the leaves were turning to signify a change. When I turned off Ashbury onto the Cushmans' cul-de-sac just above Frederick Street, I was confronted by a row of tall Lombardy poplars whose brilliant yellow foliage was so achingly beautiful that it made my breath catch. Directly behind them was the ivy-shrouded brick wall of what local people have always referred to as The Castles. The Cushman Castles, now.

The Castles were a grouping of six small, turreted buildings on a two-acre wooded lot. With the high wall surrounding the place, all that was visible from the street were the dark brick turrets, with their steeply canting slate roofs and mullioned upper windows. Each building served a different function: living area, master bedroom suite, children's quarters, artist's studio, servants' quarters, and garage. They were connected only by stone paths through the gardens and lawn. Gerry Cushman's friend at All Souls had told me that The Castles had been built in the 1930s by a minor newspaper publisher (who soon after had gone bankrupt) who considered himself a potential William Randolph Hearst. Presumably these buildings had been his dress rehearsal for creating his own San Simeon. Over the years they'd passed from hand to hand until the heirs of the last owner had let them stand empty in the 1970s, and they'd been taken over by squatters. Gerry Cushman had picked up the property for the value of the land alone in the early 1980s. After a lengthy court battle to evict the squatters, Gerry, Vicky, and their two children moved into The Castles and restored them to their former splendor.