Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (2 page)

“Same here.”

“My old man was one,” he said.

“Oh? Sorry to hear it.”

“Not a problem anymore. I found him, years ago, over in Tucson. Made him pay up most of what he owed my mother. He didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t have any choice when I got through talking to him.”

“Good for you.”

“So guys like this Anderson are a piece of cake,” Chavez said, and went out smiling.

In my office, I found three messages waiting for me. Out of the agency loop for nearly a full week, and all I had were three messages. And two of those were from professional acquaintances concerned about Kerry. The lack of business communications was a reminder—as if I needed another one—that I was no longer an essential part of the agency I’d founded and built up and nurtured for nearly thirty years. Hadn’t been for some time. It was Tamara’s now; she ran it with far more efficiency than I ever had, was making it grow and prosper. Runyon and now Chavez carried out most of the fieldwork I’d once handled almost entirely on my own. There wasn’t much for me to do even at the best of times. Retirement is a concept I don’t much like—I don’t play golf, the only hobby I have, collecting old pulp magazines, doesn’t take up much time, and I chafe under enforced inactivity—so I kept on working whenever I could, as much as I could. But except on infrequent occasions, it wasn’t the same anymore. Everything changes, sure, and this was exactly why I disliked and resisted change.

The third message was clipped to a case-file folder. Tamara’s scrawl read:
Call Celeste Ogden
. Followed by a phone number and the comment
Déjà vu all over again
.

The name Celeste Ogden meant nothing to me until I opened the folder. Then I remembered her, and not with any pleasure. One of my cases, some four years old. Routine stuff, or should have been. I was scanning through the report, refamiliarizing myself with the details, when
Tamara finished her call and came in through the connecting door.

I was struck again, as sometimes happened when I hadn’t seen her for a week or more, by what a handsome, poised young woman she was—a far cry from the grunge-dressed, wiseass militant she’d been when she first came to work for me. A lot had happened in her life in those five years, personal and professional both, the combination of which had matured her, added character and patience and determination. She was still very much her own woman, but she had goals and direction now, where before she’d been something of a loose cannon. What she wanted now was for this agency to be successful enough to rival McCone Investigations and the other big outfits in the city, and by God she intended to have her way. I envied her. For her drive and her youth and her health and all the possibilities that lay in her future.

She said, leaning against the doorjamb, “Good news on Kerry’s checkup or you wouldn’t be here.” Making it a statement rather than a question. She’d been a hundred percent supportive during the crisis; you couldn’t have asked more of a friend and business partner.

“So far so good,” I said.

“How you doing? Getting enough sleep?”

“Now I am. You don’t need as much when you get to be my age.”

“Right,” she said. “Old Father Time.”

“Sixty-two must seem ancient to you.”

“Nope. Pop just turned sixty and he can still outrun me in the hundred-yard dash.” She came closer, the better to give me a critical once-over. “Worry lines, not age lines,” she said. “They get any deeper, you’re gonna look like a map of the Mojave Desert.”

“Yeah, well,” I said.

“Not gonna change anything by worrying. But it’ll change
you
in the long run.”

“Tamara Corbin, philosopher. How’s Tamara Corbin, young woman about town?”

“You asking about my love life?”

“Peripherally.” She’d broken up with Horace, her longtime boyfriend, three months ago—or rather, he’d quit her, long-distance from Philadelphia, for another woman—and it had been rough on her for a while. “Just wondering how you’re doing.”

“I’m cool. My love life’s ice-cold.”

“Still haven’t met anyone new?”

“Not looking. Just me and Mr. V, for now.”

“Who’s Mr. V?”

“My vibrator. We’re going steady. Practically engaged.”

I should know better by now than to ask an outspoken young person like Tamara personal questions; they produce more candid information than an old fart can comfortably process. I said, “Moving right along,” and tapped the Celeste Ogden message slip attached to the file folder. “What’s this all about?”

“Same as before—her sister and brother-in-law. That’s all she’d say. She wants you, nobody else.”

“When did she call?”

“Yesterday afternoon. Told her you might not be available until next week.”

“Didn’t put her off?”

“Not her. She got pushy, I pushed back, and she hung up on me. But then she called again a few minutes later, all stiff and formal, and tried to make nice. She even said
please
have you call her as soon as possible. I said I’d give you the message and hung up on her.”

“The Tamara method of winning friends and influencing people.”

“Most of ’em like it when I go that route. Detective’s supposed to be tough, right? No-nonsense. Makes clients feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.”

“Ex-client, in her case,” I said. “I’m not interested in putting up with her obsession again.”

“For a big fee, we can put up with anybody’s obsession. That’s our new agency motto—I just made it up.”

“Then let Jake deal with her.”

“She wants you. Besides, his plate’s full. Hollowell skip-trace, a subpoena to deliver up near Red Bluff, and witness interviews and legwork for the defense team on a homicide case starting next week.”

“What homicide case is that?”

“Parking garage shooting in North Beach six weeks ago. The defendant has enough bucks to afford Avery Young as his attorney. And Young handed the investigative job to us two days ago.” Tamara’s eyes shone. “We do a good job on this one, and we will, it won’t be the last for his firm.”

“Nice.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Score!”

“What’s Alex got other than the Anderson job?”

“Enough preliminary work on the Young case for two operatives. So Celeste Ogden is up to you.”

“Lucky me.”

Tamara’s phone rang and she retreated into her office to answer it. I opened the file folder again, thinking: So now I’m the mop-up guy. Weirdos and recalcitrants, my speciality. Yeah, lucky me.

All right. Background investigation requested by Mrs. Celeste Ogden on one Brandon Mathias, who at the time, nearly four years ago, was engaged to marry her widowed older sister, Nancy Ring. Mrs. Ogden neither liked nor trusted Mathias; she considered him cold, ruthless, self-involved, pathologically ambitious, and several other unflattering things and was convinced he was marrying her sister for her money and the business Nancy Ring had inherited from her first husband. The business, RingTech, was a small but very profitable manufacturer of computer software for businesses, located in Palo Alto.

I’d done what I considered to be a thorough check on Mathias, all the way back to his youth in northern Ohio, and I hadn’t found anything to support Celeste Ogden’s suspicions. He came from a well-to-do family; he’d graduated with honors from both high school and Ohio University, the latter with a degree in computer science; he’d landed a position with a Silicon Valley firm during the boom years, made all the right contacts and all the right
professional decisions, worked his way up to an executive position at an annual salary in excess of $200,000. No question that he was ambitious, maybe even to the point of ruthlessness, but so are a lot of men and women in this country. As far as his personal life went, there wasn’t so much as a smudge: no previous marriages, no questionable relationships, no brushes with the law, not even a hint of unethical business practices.

I was satisfied, but Celeste Ogden wasn’t. If anyone was pathological, it was her. She was convinced that Mathias was some sort of Hyde in Jekyll guise. She insisted I dig deeper, keep digging until I found something. I don’t much like that kind of excavation; everybody has some unflattering secret buried in his past, and if it’s small enough and irrelevant enough, it should be allowed to remain buried. But in my business you don’t just blow off a client who has plenty of money—her husband was a well-regarded vascular surgeon—and no set time limit for results, even if you don’t particularly like her.

So I dug and kept on digging, and I still didn’t find anything. Brandon Mathias wasn’t a saint, but neither was he much of a sinner. If he had any buried secrets, they were down so deep a team of detectives working round the clock couldn’t locate them. Obsessive-compulsive in his drive for success was about the harshest criticism you could apply to him. Maybe that was why he was marrying Nancy Ring, but even if so, it wasn’t a hanging offense. And he wouldn’t be fooling her, either. She was forty-three years old and had been married to a Silicon Valley mover and shaker for
nearly twenty years; she had to be going into the marriage with her eyes wide open.

I’d said all of this to Ogden, verbally and in my report, and in return I’d got a heaping of abuse. She was one of these moneyed types used to giving orders, having things her own way. She didn’t like it when her opinions went unvalidated, and when that happened she blamed the other party, not herself. She claimed I hadn’t done my job properly, hinted that I was incompetent—like that. I wouldn’t take it from her. I don’t take that kind of crap from anybody. As politely as I could under the circumstances, I defended my work ethic and the results of my investigation, suggested she take her suspicions to another agency, and terminated the relationship. I half-expected to have to take her to small-claims court to collect the balance of our fee, but she surprised me by paying the final invoice by return mail.

That was the last I’d heard from or about her. Whether or not she’d hired another investigator, she hadn’t succeeded in stopping the wedding: the “brother-in-law” reference to Tamara proved that. Now after four years Ogden was back knocking on my door again, and not so imperiously this time. Why? I didn’t want to work for her again, but I was curious enough to listen to what she had to say.

I dialed the number on the message slip. A woman with a Spanish accent answered, asked for my name, and went away to deliver it. Ten seconds later Celeste Ogden was on the line, thanking me for returning her call. The voice was familiar, low pitched and aggressive, but the inflection
was different. Subdued, tinged with something I couldn’t quite identify.

“I imagine you were surprised to hear from me again,” she said, “after such a long time.”

“Yes, I was.”

“I didn’t know who else to call. The police . . . they won’t listen to me. I need someone to
listen
to me.”

“Police, Mrs. Ogden?”

“They say it was an accident, that it couldn’t be anything else. But they’re wrong. I don’t care what anyone says. He did it. He’s responsible.”

“Did what?”

“Nancy’s dead,” she said in a cold, flat voice. “My sister is dead and that bastard killed her.”

C
eleste Ogden lived on the upper westward slope of Nob Hill, in the penthouse of an ornate apartment house built in the twenties. I’d been there before, four years ago, so I knew what to expect. The liveried doorman gave me the kind of fish-eyed look his breed reserves for the lower variety of salesman until I dropped the Ogden name and said I was expected; then he shifted into mock deferential and allowed me to enter. A room-sized elevator whisked me up six floors about as fast as a race car accelerating from zero to sixty. The penthouse had a double-door entrance and chimes that rang with a cathedral-like resonance. A Latina maid, probably the same one who’d answered the phone, opened the door and silently conducted me into a massive sunroom, where she left me to wait.

The room, which opened onto a broad terrace strewn with stone statuary, reeked of old money and old-fashioned elegance. Heavy teak and mahogany furniture, Oriental
carpets, Tiffany lamps, gilt-framed paintings of what looked to be old Dutch burghers and their families in various stages of a picnic. It should have been bright and cheerful, with golden afternoon sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, but it wasn’t. It had an aloof, museum-like aspect enhanced by a hushed silence.

I wandered over to an unused fireplace. On the mantel was a gilt-framed photograph of Celeste Ogden and a white-maned, white-mustached man some twenty years her senior. I’d never met her husband, but the gent in the photo had the distinguished, self-confident look of a successful vascular surgeon. He also had a possessive hand placed firmly on her shoulder. I moved from there to the windows. Hundred-and-eighty-degree view: cityscape, the Bay, Alcatraz and Angel Islands, the Golden Gate Bridge. Add a few thousand a month, minimum, to whatever exorbitant rent the Ogdens were paying. If they were renting; for all I knew, they owned this penthouse.

I’d been there about a minute and a half when Celeste Ogden came in. In one hand she carried a white, shirt-sized gift box. She apologized for keeping me waiting, thanked me again for agreeing to see her. Subdued, all right, but that didn’t affect the imperious, iron-willed air she projected. Or the simmering anger that was evident in her gray eyes. She was past forty now, but she didn’t look it. Slim, trim, her sharp-chinned face unlined and glowing in a way that indicated a recent face-lift; dark hair perfectly coiffed, beige pantsuit that appeared to be silk and was as unwrinkled as her skin, a gold locket at her throat, and rings galore.
The diamond wedding rock on her left hand threw off daggers of reflected sunlight as sharp as laser beams.

She invited me to sit down, sat herself on a round-backed couch with tufted velvet upholstery, and laid the box down beside her. I perched on the edge of a matching chair with my hands flat on my knees. I could feel sweat under the collar of my shirt. Surroundings like this, women like her, always made me feel poorly dressed, poorly socialized, and vaguely inadequate. Kerry says it’s low self-esteem and there’s no good reason for it. She’s right about the low self-esteem, anyway.