The Little Death (13 page)

“More
coffee?” she asked, pouring herself a cup.

“Sure,”
I said, noticing for the first time that the backs of her hands were covered
with faint freckles.

“How
long have you been a cop?” I asked, continuing our earlier conversation.

“Seven
years, going on twenty.”

“Tough
life?”

“It’s
what I always wanted. My dad was a cop. He got as high up as captain before he
retired.”

“Did
he want you to join the force?”

“He
never came out and said it, but he was happy that I did.”

“And
your mother?”

“She’d
have been happier if I’d gone into something more feminine. Schoolteaching, for
instance, like my brother.” She sipped her coffee. “What about you? Was your
dad a lawyer?”

“No,
he was foreman of the night crew at a cannery in Marysville. I’m the only
lawyer in my family.”

“The
scuttlebutt around the station is that you’re good.”

“I
am,” I said.

“But
you’re not a great cop,” she said, “judging from what happened to you last
night. The first thing we learn is not to take unnecessary risks.”

“And
how do you know when a risk is unnecessary? I was playing a hunch going to see
Abrams. I didn’t think much would come from it. I was wrong.”

“I’ll
say. Why don’t you run your next scheme by me and let me decide if it’s an
unnecessary risk?”

I
laughed. “Are you my partner or my mother?”

“I
guess that depends on what you need most,” Terry said. “Let’s get to work.”

She
opened the manila folder and handed me a thin sheaf of papers.

“What’s
this?”

“Hugh
Paris,” she said. “Everything I could get on him.”

“Doesn’t
seem like much.”

“It
isn’t. He didn’t have a California driver’s license so I ran his name with DMV
and came back with nothing. The only criminal record he has was his arrest in
July. No credit cards, no known bank accounts. He leased his house from
something called the Pegasus Corporation, one of those companies that owns
companies.”

I’d
been going through the papers as I listened to her. “These are his phone bills?”

“For
the last six months. Service was in his name. An unlisted number.”

A
fair number of the calls were to Portola Valley — the judge

—
    
and even a couple to my apartment. It was
odd to see my phone number there and I wondered if anyone else had obtained
these records. And then I noticed a number of calls made to Napa. I asked Terry
about them.

“They
were made to a private mental institution called Silverwood. You know anything
about that?”

“His
father is a patient there,” I replied, writing the number down. I came to the
last page. “I thought there’d be more.”

“So
did I. I get the feeling he was deliberately lying low.” I nodded agreement.
She took out a bundle of papers from the folder and pushed them across to me. “I
had better luck with the grandmother and uncle,” she said. I had asked her to
find out what she could about the car crash which had killed Hugh’s
grandmother, Christina, and his uncle, Jeremy, twenty years earlier. Hugh had
maintained that his grandfather was responsible for those deaths.

Terry
had obtained copies of the accident report prepared by the CHP, written within
a couple of hours of the collision. She had also gotten the coroner’s findings
based on an inquest held

in
San Francisco three days after the accident.

The
CHP concluded that the car, driven by Jeremy Paris, had been headed east into
Nevada on highway 80 at the time of the crash. It was dusk, a few days before
Thanksgiving, the road was icy, traffic was light and there had been a
snowstorm earlier in the week. The Paris car had been in the far left lane,
nearest the center divider, a metal railing about four feet high. There was
reason to believe that Jeremy Paris had been speeding.

About
twenty miles outside of Truckee, disaster overcame the Parises. Their car suddenly
went through the center divider, skidded off the side of the road across four
lanes of westbound traffic, nearly hit a westbound car, and plunged off the
road where its fall was broken by a stand of trees. Within a matter of moments,
the car burst into flames. Christina Paris was dead when the police got to her,
having been summoned by the driver of the car who had narrowly avoided being
struck by the Paris car. Jeremy Paris died in the ambulance.

The
driver of the other car, Warren Hansen, was the only witness and had provided
details of the accident to the police. Hansen had been returning home to
Sacramento from a week’s skiing. He, the report noted in cop talk, was HBD —
had been drinking, shorthand for drunk. Hansen claimed that the Paris car was
going too fast for the road and that it appeared to be followed by another car,
tailing it from the next lane over. He remembered that the second car was dark
and its lights were off. He said that just before the accident the dark car had
been striking against the back bumper of the Paris car.

All
these statements were duly noted by the cop who took the report. They were then
dismissed by the sergeant who signed off on the report and who remarked that
Hansen was drunk and further disoriented by the shock of nearly having been in
a serious collision. The sergeant concluded that Jeremy Paris had simply lost
control of his car as he sped down the icy roads at dusk, the most treacherous
hour for motorists. It was plausible. I could almost hear the sergeant sighing
with relief as he filed the report; another mess averted.

I
turned to the coroner’s report. Sitting without a jury, he accepted the
findings of the CHP as to the circumstances of the accident, based upon the
brief testimony of a single witness, the sergeant. He added some information
from the autopsies; charred meat is essentially all that had been left of
Christina and Jeremy Paris. Finally, he fixed the times of their deaths. According
to the coroner, given the circumstances of the accident and the conditions of
the bodies, the deaths could be characterized as essentially simultaneous. When
I came upon that phrase, simultaneous death, something clicked in the back of
my mind.

I
went on to the next page. It was a death certificate, made out for Warren
Hansen who died on April 27, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Six months
after the accident. I looked up at Terry.

“Up
to this,” I said, holding the death certificate, “I could almost believe it was
just an accident.”

“Me,
too,” she said. “But as soon as I got it, all the loose ends unraveled again.”
She explained that it made no sense to hold the inquest without calling the
only eye-witness to the accident, or the paramedics who brought the bodies up
from the crash and who could have testified to the times of death. “But then,”
she continued, “it dawned on me that that was the whole reason for the inquest.
To set the times of death. There’s no other reason to hold a coroner’s inquest
for a simple car accident. They don’t usually call the coroner unless there’s
some question about the deaths.”

“But
there wasn’t any question here,” I said. “And certainly no reason to hold the
inquest hundreds of miles from where the accident occurred and three days
afterwards. The only difference between the police report and the coroner’s
inquest were the times of death. Someone wasn’t happy with the fact that Jeremy
Paris was still alive when they pulled him from the car.”

“Naturally,”
she said, “I thought it was the judge who requested the coroner but I was
wrong. It was John Smith, Christina’s brother, who arranged it.”

I
thought for a moment. “Well, maybe he suspected,” I replied, “and wanted a
coroner’s independent examination of the accident.”

Terry
laughed derisively.

“What?”
I asked.

“That’s
not what Smith got,” she said. “The examining coroner was Tom Fierro. Do you
know about him?” I shook my head. “He’s the guy they discovered with the
suitcases of money under his bed. My dad used to talk about him and said that
Tom was everyone’s favorite coroner. When you bought him, he stayed bought.”

“Do
you think he was paid off?”

She
sighed eloquently. “Of course I do, but who am I going to ask about it?” She
gathered up the papers and stacked them neatly. “What’s our next move?”

“All
this means something,” I mused, “and if I just sat still long enough it would
come to me. But I can’t sit still. These calls to Napa,” I said, lifting the
phone bills. “Maybe Hugh said something to his father that could help us. That’s
where I’m going. You work on finding out more about John Smith. He may hold
the key.”

“I
don’t know,” she said, “I think there are too many doors for just one key. Stay
in touch.”

*
* * * *

The
street sign was so discreetly placed that I missed it the first time and drove
on until I found myself at a dead end. I turned around and drove slowly until I
saw that the narrow opening between clumps of dusty bushes was, in fact, a
road; a back road off a back road at the edge of Napa’s suburban sprawl.

It
was one of those luminescent autumn days. The sky was radiantly blue and the
air was warm and sultry. You drank rather than breathed it. At my right, a
white picket fence appeared and beyond it, orchards and pasture. These gave way
to a large, formal lawn, arbors, tennis courts, and a rose garden, looking for
all the world like the grounds of a country club.

Only
there was no one around.

I
looked over to my left and saw a white antebellum mansion shimmering like a
mirage in the heat of the day. Smaller bungalows surrounded it at a respectful
distance, each in the shade of its own great oak. One or two people moved
slowly down a walk between the big house and one of the smaller ones. I turned
into a circular driveway and drove up to a parking lot at the side of the
house. I got out of my car and went up the steps of the great house, crossed
the veranda and touched the doorbell.

Above
the bell was a small brass plate with the word “Silverwood” etched into it.

A
husky young man dressed in orderly’s white appeared at the door. “May I help
you?”

“I’ve
come to see Mr. Nicholas Paris,” I said, extracting a business card from my
breast pocket and handing it to him.

He
studied it.

“Are
you expected?”

“I
was his late son’s lawyer,” I replied. “He’ll know who I am.”

The
attendant looked at me and then opened the door. I stood in a massive foyer.
There was a small table off the side of the staircase where he had been
sitting. He went to the table, picked up the phone and dialed three numbers.

“There’s
a lawyer out here to see one of the patients.” He paused. “Okay, clients, then.
Anyway, he’s out here now.” He hung up and said, “Have a seat,” gesturing me to
a sofa against the wall beneath a portrait of a seventeenth-century gentleman.
I sat down. The attendant went back to his book, something called The Other
David. The house was still, but the air was nervous.

“Where
are the patients?” I asked.

“Everyone
takes a nap after lunch,” he replied, looking up, “just like kindergarten.”

“You
a nurse?”

“Do
I look like a nurse?” His muscles bulged against his white uniform. “I keep
people out there,” he gestured to the door, “from getting in and people in here
from getting out.”

“Nice
work if you can get it,” I observed.

He
grunted and went back to his book.

A
moment later, a short, bald man stepped into the foyer from a room off the
side. He wore a white doctor’s coat over a pale blue shirt and a red knit tie.
He looked like an aging preppie and I was willing to bet that he wore argyle
socks. The attendant handed him my business card.

“Mr.
Rios,” he said, “I’m Dr. Phillips, the director. Why don’t we step into the
visitor’s lounge?”

I
followed him into the room from which he had emerged. It was a long, narrow
rectangle, paneled in dark wood, furnished in stiff-backed Victorian chairs and
couches clustered in little groups around coffee tables. The view from the
windows was of a rose garden. A dozen long-stemmed red roses had been stiffly
arranged in a vase on the mantel of the fireplace. A grandfather clock ticked
away in a corner. Except for us, the room was deserted.