Night work (12 page)

"He never found who scratched his car?" Gilbert shook
her head. "What about the argument over the parking place? Did it
ever escalate? Did the two of them ever have words about it?"
Scratched paint, territorial disputes--murders were committed
every day for even stupider reasons.

"I don't think so," Gilbert repeated. Still,
Hawkin dutifully got from her what little she knew about the intrusive
neighbor, which was little more than he, she, or it drove a red Porsche
(she pronounced it
Porsh,
and said that Banderas had pointed
it out to her) and lived somewhere upstairs (which she had gathered by
a rude gesture Banderas once made in the vague direction of the
offender's apartment).

"So he knew whose car it was?"

"Oh yeah. I mean, he never told me her name, but he knew who
she was." Then Gilbert added thoughtfully, "But you know,
they might of had a fight after all, "cause the last couple weeks
the Porsche hasn't been in his spot, and when I said something
about it to Matty, he just kind of nodded his head but he seemed, like,
satisfied. You know?"

The coffee, pre-ground or not, smelled intoxicating, so Kate shoved
down the handle, poured three cups, and carried the tray back into the
living room. Melanie declined, saying virtuously that she had given up
coffee, which was bad for the skin.

Kate nodded, took a large and satisfying swallow from her cup, and asked where Banderas bought his coke.

The actress blushed and tugged her cropped shirt down, covering a
fraction more of her admirably flat stomach and revealing a little more
of her round breasts. (Implants, or one of those push-up bras? Kate
speculated. Or could those possibly be natural?) "What do you
mean?" Gilbert said, trying for innocence.

"We found the cocaine in the bathroom cabinet. I wondered if
you knew where he got it, if he was in the habit of buying it in San
Francisco. We're not interested in prosecuting him for it, and
I'm sure you had nothing to do with it. I just wondered if you
happened to know if he bought it locally, or in the City?"

"Urn. Should I, you know, talk with a lawyer or something?" asked this child of the television age.

"We're not interested in your drug use, Ms. Gilbert, or
even Matthew's. Only in knowing if there might have been some
drug-related reason for his being out near the Legion of Honor last
night."

"Where's that?"

"You know that art museum on the cliff out near the
ocean?" Kate offered. "Lots of high school classes go
there."

The pretty face cleared. "Oh yeah, I remember that place. Sculptures and things, I think."

"That's the place."

"And that's where Matty was? At the museum?" From
the sound of her voice, it was not a place she connected with her
boyfriend's lifestyle.

"Nearby. The museum itself was shut."

She shook her head. "I don't know. Unless he was meeting
someone there. But I wouldn't have thought he went there to
score. He usually-- that is, I think there's someone, um,
local."

In the apartment complex, Kate interpreted; what a surprise.

Melanie Gilbert had nothing much more to add to their scant pool of
knowledge. She had never seen another face to Banderas, never glimpsed
a brutal or violent side to him: he had always been polite to her, even
when drinking or doing coke. She confirmed that he was a diabetic, with
"all kinds of things" he couldn't eat, and that she
had never known him to consume anything as sweet as a bar of chocolate,
even when he had been smoking dope. She did not know the names of any
of Banderas's previous girlfriends, and thought his family was in
Southern California somewhere, though she had never met any of them.

Hawkin then circled back to the topic of the Banderas rape charge,
asking as delicately as possible about the man's sex habits. The
young woman protested that there had been nothing at all kinky about
Matty, but the vehemence of her denials indicated that some questioning
note had sounded in the back of that pretty head, and she was beginning
to doubt herself. It was something that needed going into more closely,
but not, thankfully, by two visiting SFPD homicide investigators.
Hawkin had reached the same conclusion, and let the topic go, to
Melanie's obvious relief.

"And you're sure, Ms. Gilbert, that Matthew wasn't
receiving any threatening phone calls or letters, anything like
that?"

"No. Well, he did have a few wrong numbers, rude people in the
middle of the night, things like that. Who doesn't?"

"Recently?"

"Last week. Do you think that could have been... whoever?"

"We'll try to find out, Ms. Gilbert. Well, I don't
know that we need to keep you any longer today. Could we have a phone
number, in case we need to ask you anything else?"

She gave them a list of numbers: her home number and her cell phone,
her agent's number and his cell phone, and was trying to think of
anyone else besides her sister and her ex-husband when Al plucked the
paper from her fingers and shooed her out the door. When it had closed
behind her, the two detectives looked at each other.

"Whew," said Al.

"That woman's in the wrong business," Kate agreed.
"She'd make a fortune with a whip in her hand. Those boots
alone would have a masochist squirming."

"You think she...does?"

"I strongly doubt it. Her face looks like a
schoolgirl's. Mixed signals, you know? I think it's just
her idea of fashion."

"Don't sound so disappointed, Martinelli."

"Not my kind of thing, Al," she said evenly. Still, as
she turned back to the Banderas files, she couldn't help
wondering how Lee would look with a ring in her navel...

ONE DAY PROVED TO be all they had before media hell broke loose.
Sundays were generally a slack day for news, but the morning paper had
the Banderas murder screaming across the front page:

The article beneath the headline reviewed the full details of the
Larsen and Banderas murders, only this time the reporters had both
men's history of crimes against women. The use of tasers to
overcome the two men underscored the possible link with the
"feminist vigilante group," the LOPD, with which tasers
were now firmly linked in the popular imagination. An adjacent article
bore the eye-catching heading HATE crimes classification asked, and
Kate read with growing amazement that a delegation of "prominent
businessmen" had been to see the mayor the previous afternoon,
asserting that since the Ladies' attacks and the two murders had
all been aimed exclusively at heterosexual males with light skin, the
attacks should be classified as hate crimes and pursued with all the
commitment that the City had come to demonstrate in its prosecution of
gay bashing.

Kate put the paper on the kitchen table for Lee's bemusement
and left for the Hall of Justice, where she finished filling out as
best she could the highly detailed VICAP forms for the FBI, asking if
they had any crimes on the books that fit the profile of abusers,
tasers, handcuffs, and including the possible link of candy. As Kate
was reading it over, wondering if there were any more blank spaces she
could fill, the telephone rang.

"Seen the paper?" Hawkin asked without preliminary.

"It tells everything except who done it," she noted.
"Why didn't they call and ask for a comment?" It was
the usual way reporters notified the cops that a story was coming, in
the recognition that cooperation worked better in the long run, but
there had been no such message waiting for them when they stopped in at
the Hall of Justice the night before.

"New girl," Hawkin answered. "Gung ho. We'd
better get up to the condos early before the place is under siege. Meet
you at the Hall, or at your place?"

"Why don't you swing by here? Give me a chance to answer some of the messages."

"Fine. See you in a bit."

The messages were mostly from the media, and a few clearing up
details in the Larsen case. Kate placed another call to the desk
sergeant in Marin, suggesting that someone from the department might
want to join them for an exchange of notes before the news reporters
added "lack of interdepartmental communication" to their
string of gibes. She left various numbers for the Marin detective to
call her back, then trotted for the elevator.

The Marin detective rang them back when they were halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge.

"Inspector Martinelli?" the voice said. "Sergeant Martina Wiley here."

"Hello Sergeant, thanks for calling me back."

"I can guess what you want to talk about. I'm over here
talking to a woman who lives upstairs from the Banderas apartment. I
think you might want to join me."

"Er. Do you have any idea what kind of car she drives?"
Kate asked. There was silence for a minute as Wiley gave this odd
question her consideration, then Kate heard the receiver being half
muffled and through the barrier Wiley's voice asking, "What
kind of car do you have?" Kate could not hear the answer, but
Wiley supplied it. "A red Porsche."

"Okay," said Kate with satisfaction. "What apartment are you in, Sergeant?"

"Number three-fourteen."

"We'll be there in twenty minutes."

The woman in apartment 314 did not look the type to drive a flashy
car. Nor did the modern furnishings fit with the small woman dressed in
jeans, a vastly oversized sweatshirt, fuzzy slippers, and plaster. The
last item covered her left arm from knuckle to elbow, and half a dozen
stitches had recently been removed from the still-swollen cut on her
left eyebrow. That whole side of her face was yellow-green with fading
bruises and she held herself stiffly, either from fear of causing pain,
or from fear itself.

Kate and Al introduced themselves to Martina Wiley, who had answered
the door with the air of a family friend and then took them across to
the breakfast nook to meet the woman.

"This is Rachel Curtis," she said. "Rachel, these
are two detectives from San Francisco, Kate Martinelli and her partner,
Al Hawkin. They're investigating the murder of your neighbor
Matthew Banderas."

Rachel Curtis flicked a glance at Kate and then Al, but kept her
attention on the woman who had taken on the role of savior. Kate was
distracted for a moment by the contrast between the cop and the victim,
who might have been handpicked to illustrate the word
opposites.
Wiley was big, black, strong, and bristling with intelligence and
energy. Curtis was about five feet tall and thin to the point of
anorexia, with dark brown chin-length hair, pasty white skin, glasses,
and no more energy than yesterday's pasta.

Kate shook herself mentally, and sat down in a chair across from the battered woman.

"Rachel was beaten and raped eleven days ago," Wiley
told them bluntly. "She never saw her attacker, didn't
recognize his voice. She was stopped in a parking lot by a man with a
gun and a mask, who put a pillowcase over her head and drove her away.
He raped her, dragged her out of the car, kicked her four or five
times, and walked off."

Kate and Al looked at each other, and Kate cleared her throat.
"Did he say anything at all?" she asked the woman. Slow
tears had begun to dribble down Rachel's battered face, which
Kate imagined had happened more or less continuously for the last week
and a half.

"He said, "Hold it' when I got to my car and then,
"Get in the passenger seat." And then later, when
he'd... Afterward, he told me not to move. Then he smashed
the windows of the car and banged it with something hard, and after
that it went quiet. I was lying on some rocks or sticks that were
hurting me, and it was cold, so when nothing happened for five or ten
minutes I figured he'd gone so I started to sit up and pull the
thing off my head and then he was there shouting and kicking me. I
curled up again and put my arms around my head, and he stopped, and
then after a minute he told me not to move at all, and if I did
he'd kill me. And then he said something about nothing being
mine, and that was all. I must've laid there for at least an
hour, but when I finally pulled off that pillowcase he was gone and my
car was there. The tires were flat and all the glass was gone and the
body smashed up, but he left the key and I could get one of the doors
open, so I drove to the nearest road and found a gas station and a
phone."

"What do you think he meant by nothing being yours, Ms.
Curtis?" Al Hawkin asked. He had taken care to remain, literally
and figuratively, in the background. Some rape victims could not stand
being around men for a while, others found men more comforting than
their possibly judgmental sisters. Rachel Curtis seemed oblivious of
pretty much everything outside of her misery and Martina Wiley, and
looked at him uncomprehendingly. Al tried again. "Can you try and
remember his exact words?"

"They were, "You don't own anything," or,
"You don't own everything." Yes, I think it was that:
'You don't own everything, you bitch." And then I
heard glass break again. I think he was smashing the headlights."

"I see," Hawkin said, and he did. They thanked the
woman, apologized for bothering her, and walked with Martina Wiley out
onto the third-floor covered walkway, where they could talk away from
the victim's ears.

"Sounds like Banderas?" the sergeant asked them.
"I looked up his sheet after I saw the paper this morning."

"Or a close copycat," Kate agreed.

"So what was that question about the car?"

"It would appear that Ms. Curtis had the nerve to park in
Matthew's favorite though officially unreserved spot. His
girlfriend said that he and Rachel may have had an argument over it
about two weeks ago, after which he seemed to be, in her words, like,
satisfied." "

"Some argument," Wiley mused, looking down three floors
at the unimaginative condominium garden. "And now Banderas is
dead. Are you thinking Rachel could've pulled it off? Because I
can't see what she has to do with your other case, assuming there
is a link. And besides, look at her, she's a basket case. I mean,
she might've shot him if you'd put a gun in her hand, or
run him down if she saw him walking down the street, but from what I
heard, it wasn't exactly like that, was it?"