Sleuths (28 page)

"To maintain the illusion, Bernice had to pretend to be you when she collected the payoff. I don't know what sort of arrangements she and Craig made, but they wouldn't have allowed any of the three men to deliver the money personally. An intermediary, maybe, someone who didn't know you. Or maybe a prearranged drop site. In any event, Bernice always dressed as you at collection time."

Orloff asked, "Why do you think Craig killed her?"

"The old doublecross," said. "They'd collected all the extortion money; that's evident from the way each of the three names is crossed out on that paper. Today was the last pickup and I think they had it worked out that she would resign from Ms. Speers' employ and Craig would resign from Xanadu and they'd go off somewhere together: her closet is all cleaned out and her bags are packed. But Craig had other ideas. He knew when she was due back here and he was waiting for her—outside on the rear balcony. When she let herself in he knocked on the window and gestured for her to open the two halves. After she complied he must have said something like, 'Quick, lock the front door, take off the coat, and give me the wig and the money.' She must have thought there was some reason for the urgency, and she trusted him; so she did what he asked. And when she pulled the money out of the bag she also pulled out the slip of paper. In her haste it fell unnoticed to the floor.

"As soon as Craig had the wig and the money he took out the gun, which he'd swiped from Ms. Speers' night-stand, and shot her. And then he threw the gun inside and pulled the halves of the window closed."

"And locked them somehow from the outside," the security guy said, "in the minute or two before you broke in? How could he do that?"

"Simply, considering the catch on those window halves is a bar type that flops over into a bracket. The gimmick he used was a thin but stiff strip of film. He lost it afterward without realizing it: you'll still find it caught on a splinter on the balcony railing. The way he did it was to insert the film strip between the two halves and flip the catch over until it rested on the strip's edge. Next he pulled the halves all the way closed, using his thumb and forefinger on the inner frames of each, and with his other hand he eased the strip downward until the catch dropped into the bracket. Then he withdrew the strip from the crack. With a little practice, you could do the whole thing in thirty seconds.

"So far he had himself a perfect crime. All he'd have had to do was return to his cottage, get rid of the wig, stash the money, pick himself up a witness or two, and come back here and 'find' Ms. Speers locked up with the body. Under the circumstances he'd arranged, she would be the only one who could have committed the murder.

"What screwed him up was me showing up when I did. He heard me pounding on the door as he was working his trick with the film strip; he had just enough time to slip away into the woods before I broke in. But who was I? What had I seen and heard? The only way he could find out was to come back as soon as he'd dumped the wig and money. The fact that he showed up again in less than ten minutes means he didn't dump them far away; they won't be hard to find. And there might even be a fingerprint on that film strip to nail your case down tight—"

Lauren Speers moved. Before anybody could stop her she charged over to where Craig was and slugged him in the face. Not a slap—a roundhouse shot with her closed fist. He staggered but didn't go down. She went after him, using some of the words she had used on me earlier, and hit him again and tried to kick him here and there. It took Orloff, the security guy, and one of the patrolmen to pull her off.

It was another couple of hours before they let me leave Xanadu. During that time Orloff and his men found all of the extortion money—$100,000 in cash—hidden in one of Craig's bureau drawers; they also found the red wig in the garbage can behind his cottage. That was enough, along with my testimony, for them to arrest him on suspicion of homicide. From the looks of him, they'd have a full confession an hour after he was booked.

Just before I left I served Lauren Speers with the court summons. She took it all right; she said it was the least she could do after I had practically saved her life. She also took one of my business cards and promised she would send me a check "as an appreciation," but I doubted that she would. She was a lady too lost in alcohol and bitter memories, too involved in a quest for notoriety and revenge, to remember that sort of promise—running fast and going nowhere, as the comedian Fred Allen had once said, on a treadmill to oblivion.

So I went back to San Francisco and the following day I collected my two hundred plus expenses from Adam Brister. And that night, instead of reading one of the pulp magazines I collect and admire, I read Coleridge's Kublai Khan in a book from the public library. It was a pretty fine piece of work, all right, and so was his Xanadu. A place of idyllic beauty. The stuff of dreams.

The one at Big Sur was the stuff of dreams too—dreams of tinsel and plastic and pastel colors; of beauty measured by wealth, happiness by material possessions. Some people could find fulfillment with those dreams and in that place. Others, like Lauren Speers, were not so fortunate.

For them, the pleasure-domes of Xanadu could be the stuff of nightmares.

F
our o'clock in the morning. And I was sitting huddled and ass-numb in my car in a freezing rainstorm, waiting for a guy I had never seen in person to get out of a nice warm bed and drive off in his Mercedes, thus enabling me to follow him so I could find out where he lived.

Thrilling work if you can get it. The kind that makes any self-respecting detective wonder why he didn't become a plumber instead.

Rain hammered against the car's metal surfaces, sluiced so thickly down the windshield that it transformed the glass into an opaque screen; all I could see were smeary blobs of light that marked the street lamps along this block of 47th Avenue. Wind buffeted the car in forty-mile-an-hour gusts off the ocean nearby. Condensation had formed again on the driver's door window, even though I had rolled it down half an inch; I rubbed some of the mist away and took another bleary-eyed look across the street.

This was one of San Francisco's older middle-class residential neighborhoods, desirable—as long as you didn't mind fog-belt living because Sutro Heights Park was just a block away and you were also within walking distance of Ocean Beach, the Cliff House, and Land's End. Most of the houses had been built in the thirties and stood shoulder to-shoulder with their neighbors, but they seemed to have more individuality than the bland row houses dominating the avenues farther inland; out here, California Spanish was the dominant style. Asians had bought up much of the city's west side housing in recent years, but fewer of those close to the ocean than anywhere else. A lot of homes in pockets such as this were still owned by older-generation, blue-collar San Franciscans.

The house I had under surveillance, number 9279, was one of the Spanish stucco jobs, painted white with a red tile roof. Yucca palms, one large and three small, dominated its tiny front yard. The three-year-old Mercedes with the Washington state license plates was still parked, illegally, across the driveway. Above it, the house's front windows remained dark. If anybody was up yet I couldn't tell it from where I was sitting.

I shifted position for the hundredth time, wincing as my stiffened joints protested with creaks and twinges. I had been here four and a half hours now, with nothing to do except to sit and wait and try not to fall asleep; to listen to the rain and the rattle and stutter of my thoughts. I was weary and irritable and I wanted some hot coffee and my own warm bed. It would be well past dawn, I thought bleakly, before I got either one.

Stakeouts . . . God, how I hated them. The passive waiting, the boredom, the slow, slow passage of dead time. How many did this make over the past thirty-odd years? How many empty, wasted, lost hours? Too damn many, whatever the actual figure. The physical discomfort was also becoming less tolerable, especially on nights like this, when not even a heavy overcoat and gloves kept the chill from penetrating bone-deep. I had lived fifty-eight years; fifty-eight is too old to sit all-night stakeouts on the best of cases, much less on a lousy split-fee skip-trace.

I was starting to hate Randolph Hixley, too, sight unseen. He was the owner of the Mercedes across the street and my reason for being here. To his various and sundry employers, past and no doubt present, he was a highly paid freelance computer consultant. To his ex-wife and two kids, he was a probable deadbeat who currently owed some $24,000 in back alimony and child support. To me and Puget Sound Investigations of Seattle, he was what should have been a small but adequate fee for routine work. Instead, he had developed into a minor pain in the ass. Mine.

Hixley had quit Seattle for parts unknown some four months ago, shortly after his wife divorced him for what she referred to as "sexual misconduct," and had yet to make a single alimony or child support payment. For reasons of her own, the wife had let the first two barren months go by without doing anything about it. On the occasion of the third due date, she had received a brief letter from Hixley informing her in tear-jerk language that he was so despondent over the breakup of their marriage he hadn't worked since leaving Seattle and was on the verge of becoming one of the homeless. He had every intention of fulfilling his obligations, though, the letter said; he would send money as soon as he got back on his feet. So would she bear with him for a while and please not sic the law on him? The letter was postmarked San Francisco, but with no return address.

The ex-wife, who was no dummy, smelled a rat. But because she still harbored some feelings for him, she had gone to Puget Sound Investigations rather than to the authorities, the object being to locate Hixley and determine if he really was broke and despondent. If so, then she would show the poor dear compassion and understanding. If not, then she would obtain a judgment against the son-of-a-bitch and force him to pay up or get thrown in the slammer.

Puget Sound had taken the job, done some preliminary work, and then called a San Francisco detective—me—and farmed out the tough part for half the fee. That kind of cooperative thing is done all the time when the client isn't wealthy enough and the fee isn't large enough for the primary agency to send one of its own operatives to another state. No private detective likes to split fees, particularly when he's the one doing most of the work, but ours is sometimes a back-scratching business. Puget Sound had done a favor for me once; now it was my turn.

Skip-tracing can be easy or it can be difficult, depending on the individual you're trying to find. At first I figured Randolph Hixley, broke or not, might be one of the difficult ones. He had no known relatives or friends in the Bay Area. He had stopped using his credit cards after the divorce, and had not applied for new ones, which meant that if he was working and had money, he was paying his bills in cash. In Seattle, he'd provided consultancy services to a variety of different companies, large and small, doing most of the work at home by computer link. If he'd hired out to one or more outfits in the Bay Area, Puget Sound had not been able to turn up a lead as to which they might be, so I probably wouldn't be able to either. There is no easy way to track down that information, not without some kind of insider pull with the IRS.

And yet despite all of that, I got lucky right away—so lucky I revised my thinking and decided, prematurely and falsely, that Hixley was going to be one of the easy traces after all. The third call I made was to a contact in the San Francisco City Clerk's office, and it netted me the information that the 1987 Mercedes 560 SL registered in Hixley's name had received two parking tickets on successive Thursday mornings, the most recent of which was the previous week. The tickets were for identical violations: illegal parking across a private driveway and illegal parking during posted street-cleaning hours. Both citations had been issued between seven and seven-thirty A.M. And in both instances, the address was the same: 9279 47th Avenue.

I looked up the address in my copy of the reverse city directory. 9279 47th Avenue was a private house occupied by one Anne Carswell, a commercial artist, and two other Carswells, Bonnie and Margo, whose ages were given as eighteen and nineteen, respectively, and who I presumed were her daughters. The Carswells didn't own the house; they had been renting it for a little over two years.

Since there had been no change of registration on the Mercedes—I checked on that with the DMV—I assumed that the car still belonged to Randolph Hixley. And I figured things this way: Hixley, who was no more broke and despondent than I was, had met and established a relationship with Anne Carswell, and taken to spending Wednesday nights at her house. Why only Wednesdays? For all I knew, once a week was as much passion as Randy and Anne could muster up. Or it could be the two daughters slept elsewhere that night. In any case, Wednesday was Hixley's night to howl.

So the next Wednesday evening I drove out there, looking for his Mercedes. No Mercedes. I made my last check at midnight, went home to bed, got up at six A.M., and drove back to 47th Avenue for another look. Still no Mercedes.

Well
, I thought,
they skipped a week
.
Or for some reason they'd altered their routine
. I went back on Thursday night. And Friday night and Saturday night. I made spot checks during the day. On one occasion I saw a tall, willowy redhead in her late thirties—Anne Carswell, no doubt—driving out of the garage. On another occasion I saw the two daughters, one blonde, one brunette, both attractive, having a conversation with a couple of sly college types. But that was all I saw. Still no Mercedes, still no Randolph Hixley.