Murder on the House: A Haunted Home Renovation Mystery (Haunted Home Repair Mystery) (27 page)

“But—,” I began.

“Thanks for your help,” said Graham, and I felt a subtle but insistent hand on my shoulder.

I noticed the man picked up the phone as soon as we closed the door behind us.

“You suppose he’s calling someone about us?” I asked.

“Could be that, or a whole lot of other things,” said Graham. “But yes, could be he’s letting someone know we’re asking questions.”

“Or he’s just going about his business,” said my dad as we joined him and Stan. “And he’s right, no reason he should tell us anything about old Tom, whether he knows it or not. We’re strangers to him.”

“How about a beer at Heinold’s while we think this through?” Stan suggested.

“Great idea,” said Graham. “I do love being self-employed.”

I returned a couple of work-related calls as we walked toward the bar. Then I checked in with my foreman on each job, just to be sure. The foreman at Matt’s house asked me to stop by this afternoon and check supplies with him, but otherwise everything was running smoothly, so I felt justified—though still guilty—about sitting around having a beer in the middle of the day.

Only two buildings had been exempted from the Jack London Square makeover: the eponymous author’s purported Alaskan shack, and Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon.

Jack London’s shack was a one-room log cabin with a sod roof. Apparently a group of devoted fans found the shack he once lived in up in Alaska, dismantled it, brought it back to the Port of Oakland by ship, then reconstructed it here to honor the author who was born and raised in Oakland.

Sometimes it felt to me as though we Oaklanders were reaching. Still, it was an incongruous little sight at the side of the parking lot, and its oddity always brought a smile to my face. Visitors threw pennies in through the barred windows as though it were a fountain to be wished upon.

The shack sat right next to Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, which opened in 1883 and was said to be the oldest bar in Oakland.

“This place would never pass inspection,” Graham said, quite unnecessarily. “Not exactly up to ADA standards.”

The saloon was rumored to have been constructed from the timbers off a whaling ship. According to legend, the clock on the wall stopped during the 1906 earthquake, and the floor tilted to its current steep angle at the same time. Supposedly Jack London studied as a boy at the same tables that sit in the bar today, and he wrote part of
Call of the Wild
while imbibing at First and Last Chance.

In his wheelchair Stan would have careened to the low side of the tilty bar, so we decided to take our seats at an outdoor table. It was January, but the sun blazed and there was only a slight breeze off the placid estuary
.

I gave everyone my version of the mystery as it stood.

“I suppose it would be jumping to conclusions to suggest that Josh Avery—or whoever he really is—knocked off his alleged uncle at sea in order to cover up some deep dark secret?”

“Hold on just a second, there, Mel,” said Dad. “Some disgruntled worker you caught breaking into a house—a house you yourself had broken into, but I’ll let that slide for now—tells you Josh was skimpy about overtime, and from this you decide he killed Tom Avery?”

I shrugged. “If the man was capable of throwing a woman down a well, there’s no telling what else he might be capable of. Maybe Tom found out about what happened to Mrs. Bernini and Josh had to . . . keep him quiet.”

All three men sipped their beers and remained silent.

“Okay, okay. It’s a wild accusation. I’m just brainstorming—work with me. Maybe it was as simple as Josh wanting the job. He seems pretty in cahoots with Kim Propak, but I think Mrs. Bernini liked me better.”

“If you’re right,” said Stan, “and this Josh guy killed a little old lady to get a job, then took his favorite uncle out for an ocean cruise with no return, what makes you think he’s going to skip you?”

That was an excellent question.

“Sounds to me like it’s time to call the cops,” said Dad.

“I talked to Inspector Crawford just yesterday. But I don’t have anything real to go on, do I? Graham and I are going to go talk to one more man who works for Avery, see what he has to say. If we come up with anything, I’ll call the inspector and tell her what I’ve found out, see if it fits in with her investigation at all.”

“What about the spirits in the house?” Stan asked. “Can they tell you anything?”

My father harrumphed and excused himself to use the men’s room.

“Not so far. Strange, isn’t it? You’d think the dead would be able to spy on folks, that sort of thing, but in my limited experience they don’t seem to know much of anything. It’s very frustrating.”

“So in a scant few months, you’ve gone from thinking you’re going crazy, to excitement, to feeling frustrated by your ability to see ghosts. I never thought ghost hunting would seem so banal,” Graham said.

“Right?” I returned his smile. Our gaze held. I started to feel tingly; my heart sped up. I lost track of time. My lips parted, but no words came out.

“So,” Dad said as he came back to the table, breaking the mood. “What’s all this garbage Graham tells me about you house-sitting at the Bernini place? I thought a woman was killed there a few days ago.”

“The crime scene was out in the garden,” I said, glad to have my focus pulled away from Graham, however momentarily. “So the police already did whatever evidence collection they needed to, and they’ve released the house.”

“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why you’re going to be there.”

“The Propaks are going out of town for a few days, and with all the media attention and all . . . well, it’s a busy neighborhood. They’re afraid to leave the place uninhabited.”

Graham and I gazed at each other again. This was ridiculous. I might as well be sixteen again, with a crush.

“And Graham’s going with you?”

“I—” I was about to say no, but our eyes caught again and I couldn’t help it—I smiled.

“In that case,” my dad said. “You two need protection.”

Good Lord. Were we that obvious?
My cheeks flamed.

“Geesh, Dad, we haven’t even gotten around to . . . that, yet. And we’re adults, we’ve got it covered.”

All eyes were now on me. My father grimaced. Stan chuckled. Graham grinned.

“I wasn’t talking about
that
,” Dad grumbled. “As you know, I wouldn’t mind another grandchild, but since no one listens to me anyway, I’ll leave that up to you.”

He got up from the table and strode to his car in the adjoining parking lot. He grabbed a leather bag from the trunk, came back, and deposited it on the table.

“That’s a present for you two.”

I opened it and peered in. A handgun. And two boxes of cartridges. “Gee . . . thanks.”

“You need protection, as in a
gun
.”

“Thanks for the offer, Bill,” said Graham, “but I’m not a big fan of armed combat.”

“I’ll take it,” I said, slipping the gun and ammunition into my oversized bag and handing him back the leather case. “Thanks.”

Graham and Stan exchanged looks, raising their eyebrows.

“What?” I demanded.

“You can’t just walk around with a concealed weapon,” said Graham. “In fact, this is California. I don’t think you can have a gun in your possession at all without a license.”

“I’ll pick up an application next time I’m at city hall.”

My father wasn’t what you’d call in favor of gun control. I was, at least theoretically. But frankly, the idea of staying another night at the Bernini house, though I had finagled it, was enough to make me glad of a little firepower.

Maybe I was my father’s daughter after all—I already felt better with the cold weight of the weapon in my bag.

Chapter Twenty-three

C
hewy Garay
lived in a squalid apartment building that looked like it had once been an old motel. A pack of kids were playing soccer in the parking lot that served as a courtyard.

“Number seventeen,” I said, leading the way toward the second-level catwalk.

The soccer ball flew toward our heads. I ducked, but Graham leaned into it and bumped it off his forehead toward the boys. The children laughed and yelled in response, and Graham said something impressive in Spanish.

“You speak Spanish?”

“Enough to get by. You know how it is, working in the trades.”

Wow. Now I
really
felt like a schlub. I needed to get back to those lessons. Add that to my growing list of late New Year’s resolutions.

“And you play soccer?”

He nodded. “Saturday mornings in Golden Gate Park. Nothing fancy—just a bunch of us getting together. I only started a couple of years ago and a lot of the guys are from Latin America, so I look pretty pathetic in comparison. But we have a good time, and it’s a nice excuse to go out for a beer afterward.”

The man made time to learn languages and play sports and hang out drinking beer with friends. He’d even had a girlfriend before I inadvertently broke them up. Whereas I . . . what? Worked. That was pretty much it.

I have
got
to get myself a life.

I knocked on the door of apartment seventeen. No response. I cupped my hands and tried to peek through a small opening in the curtains, whose inner lining was torn and sun damaged, lying in long peels along the sill.

Graham peeked in over my shoulder. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s home.”

“He got taken in.
La migra
,” said a young woman walking by with two children, one on her hip and the other holding her hand. She looked like a teenager, wearing skintight low-riding jeans and a bright red sweater over a baby-doll T-shirt.

“Taken in? When was this?”

“Just this morning.”

“Were they doing a sweep of the neighborhood?”

“All I saw was that they took him. His wife went down to look for him, but they don’t have to tell you anything. My sister got picked up once after work, but all we knew was she didn’t show up for her kids at school. We thought something happened to her. . . . She finally called us after she got sent back to Mexico.”

The little girl in her arms reached up and pulled her hair. She shrugged and pulled away. “Now we know if someone disappears, we can go down to immigration and ask about which jail ICE keeps people in, and if you file papers and ask for a name, they’ll tell you if they have ’em.”

Were we supposed to consider that progress?

Graham played soccer with the kids for a few minutes; then we headed back to San Francisco.

Employing illegal aliens was a big issue in the world of construction. Most of the people I knew who flooded to California from Mexico and Central America, and beyond, were hardworking, otherwise law-abiding folks just trying to make a living for their families. Some were fleeing truly desperate economic and political circumstances. But it was true that we didn’t have open borders where anybody who wanted could come in, and the trade in illegal border crossings had bred a dangerous but powerful smuggling business.

But when it came right down to it, I needed skilled, hardworking employees and a lot of Latino immigrants, especially the ones from small towns, had impressive carpentry skills and mechanical savvy. And, as a group, their loyalty and willingness to work couldn’t be beat.

Clearly, I was a little muddled on the subject. From time to time issues of legality had come up for us at Turner Construction, and there were a few cases when I had filed papers and gone to court to try to help friends and employees gain their green cards or resident alien papers. But by and large, I tried to avoid the issue by hiring only verifiably legal workers.

“Let me guess,” said Graham. “You’re thinking maybe someone called in
la migra
before Chewy Garay could tell you whatever he knows about Josh?”

“It’s possible. I’ve known employers who call just because they owe their workers wages, and they have them deported before payday.”

“It would be pretty far-fetched to imagine Josh called ICE on his own guys. Regulations are pretty tight these days. Any employer who doesn’t check documents is in for fines and reprimands, if not more serious consequences. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Unless he had something very serious to hide. Oh, and what about this? Dad says Tom Avery had two sisters. So how does Josh have the Avery last name?”

“I know you’re not wild about this guy,” Graham began in that oh-so-rational tone I was already familiar with, “but just to play devil’s advocate for a moment: Not long ago, you thought a perfectly nice man was a murderer because he married a foreign woman he met online.”

“I just found it odd. I
still
find it odd that a heterosexual man can’t find a woman in this city. I mean there are, what, four or five eligible women for each guy?”

“
I’m
not married. And last I checked, I wasn’t a murderer, either.”

“That’s different. Neither am I. You and I are both battle-scarred and bitter from our failed marriages. There’s a reason we’re afraid of commitment.”

Silence.

I finally turned back to find him watching me, once again.

“What?”

“Speak for yourself.
I’m
not afraid of commitment. Nor am I particularly battle-scarred.”

“Um . . . I should probably get back to work.”

Graham chuckled and shook his head. “Whatever you say. Let’s stop by the taco truck on the way. I believe I owe you lunch.”

* * *

Graham was at his charming best as we sat on a low cement wall in the Goodwill parking lot, eating our
carnitas
and
carne asada
. I began to wonder whether his goal was to make me laugh so much I would forget about my plan to occupy the Bernini house, much less to move to Paris.

The tacos were delicious as always. I doctored mine up with cilantro and serrano peppers and salsa so hot my lips and tongue felt a pleasant burn, even as we pulled up beside my car half an hour later.

“So what time are we moving in?” Graham asked as I reached for the door handle.

“Moving in?”