Treasure Hunt (14 page)

Hunt let out a breath. This was a compelling and believable enough scenario. Unfortunately for Ellen, there was an equally compelling argument to be made that everything had been exactly as she had described it except for Dominic actually firing Alicia. Instead, perhaps Ellen had followed him to the Palace of Fine Arts, and heard him tell Alicia he was leaving his wife to be with her. If it was going to be either Alicia or Ellen, Como might have said, it would be Alicia. And so by the time Alicia left, Ellen had worked up enough of her own jealous rage to kill him herself.

But Hunt only said, “Do you mind if I go back to the police and give them the parts of this story you left out?”

“Not at all,” she said. “I wish you would. I should have told them the first time. I just wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“They may want to come back and talk to you again.”

“That would be fine,” she said. Then she added, “I know if they look, they’ll find something on her.” Then, suddenly, as though someone had thrown a switch, she broke a really beaming smile, wiped her palms on her dress, and stood up. “I’ve already sent Len my check,” she said. Crossing back to one of the sideboards, she turned. “This is going to sound a little funny,” she said.

Hunt got up on his feet as well. “What’s that?”

“If it turns out that that girl did kill Dominic, and I’m certain that it will, and it’s on my information that they get her, I’m going to claim that reward. All of it.”

 

 

 

 

The press release went out at 3:45
and Tamara got the first call at 4:08.

“You-all ain’t cops, right, ’cause I ain’t talkin’ to no cops.”

The caller identified herself as Virginia Collins and she lived alone on a thirty-foot sailboat named
Delightly
, berthed in the Marina. She’d heard the announcement about the reward on KNBC’s four o’clock news on her radio, and she wanted to know who she could talk to to give her information. She wanted to make sure that there was a record of exactly who she was and when she had called so that if her information checked out, she would get the reward.

She’d heard all kinds of stories, she told Tamara, about where they’d announce a reward and then deny payment to the person who really helped get the arrest and conviction because they weren’t connected and didn’t know anybody who had to do with releasing the reward funds. And also, she wanted to know about the conviction part. What if they just arrested the person you’d helped to identify, and then they couldn’t convict? Did you still get the money? Or any part of it?

And while she was at it, did Tamara know how hard it was to get convictions on anybody in San Francisco? It was common knowledge that juries in this town never convicted. Virginia’s brother John had been an attorney for a while, working for the DA, this was back in the eighties, and even then it was nearly impossible to get a jury to convict somebody.

And what if there was a plea bargain? Did that count? They should definitely give some portion of the reward for the arrest itself. And then a bonus for the conviction.

“What about if they arrest the wrong person?” Tamara had to ask.

“That never happens,” Virginia replied. “They arrest somebody, you can pretty well bet that they did it.”

“But you see the problem,” Tamara persisted. “They arrest somebody and give you half the money or whatever, and then they find somebody else actually did it and they’ve already lost the payment. Then what? That’s why they’ve got to have the conviction along with the arrest.”

“Okay, that’s a good point. But even so, I want to make sure there’s a record I called and what I told you, and when. Like if I’m first, that ought to make a difference. A big difference.”

“I’m sure it will,” Tamara said. By now she had concluded she was talking to, if not a certified lunatic, then certainly someone light on a few critical synapses. “Can you tell me briefly the nature of your information?”

“Are you kidding? I don’t think so,” Virginia replied. “Not on the telephone. They’re all tapped, you know. The cops. I give you the information. They solve the crime, take all the credit, I don’t get no reward. I ain’t talkin’ to no cops.”

“I don’t think all the phones are tapped,” Tamara countered. “Not anymore.”

A brief harrumph. “Well, if you believe that . . . if I were you, I’d just be a lot more careful. Somebody’s listening in, I can tell you that for a fact. You’re not on a cell phone there at your office, are you?”

“No. We’ve got a landline.”

“Well, maybe that’s a little better. At least they can’t pluck it out of the air, but they can tap a landline just as easy. Especially an investigator’s office like yours.”

“I’ll try to be careful what I say, then. Maybe you can give me a few more details on your contact information, at least, and we can have someone call you back, or set up an interview.”

“I wouldn’t have them call.”

“No. Right. Of course. You said you were down on a boat at the Marina?”

 

 

Mickey had actually been out on real work, serving a subpoena on a dental hygienist named Paula Chow who had worked in the offices of Bernard Offit for six years, ending her employment with him a couple of years before. It seems that while treating female patients for TMJ or, in layman’s terms, clicking of and pain in the jaw, Dr. Offit had developed a technique that included massaging the breasts of these women. Eventually, fourteen victims of this questionable treatment came forward and pressed charges. Dr. Offit’s defense attorney, contending that this technique was indeed not just defensible but therapeutic, needed to call witnesses, such as Ms. Chow, who would testify that Dr. Offit was a fine man and a good boss, and would never have done anything so tawdry for his own sexual gratification. And, more particularly, that she had seen him administer this treatment, and that none of the patients had complained at the time, nor had there been any sexual component to it.

Mickey found Ms. Chow at her new place of employment at a dentist’s office on Clement Street, and served her for a court date the following week. He then called his sister at work to check in. She told him that right at this moment, Mickey was needed to go talk to a possibly crazy woman who lived on a boat in the Marina.

“What makes you think she’s possibly crazy?”

“You’ll see.”

So he drove out Park Presidio and around to the same Marina parking lot he’d used last Friday morning, parked, and came to the gate leading down to the boats. The sun was out by now, although the wind was brisk, and the bay was a kaleidoscope of sails skidding along over the whitecaps.

A woman stood just inside the gate with her arms crossed and an impatient look on her face. Wearing a yellow slicker over painter’s pants and boat shoes, she seemed to be in her late fifties or early sixties, with windblown hair the color and consistency of straw. “I’m Virginia. Are you the Hunt Club?” she asked him with some asperity.

Mickey flashed his disarming smile. “Not the whole thing, just pretty much its top operative.”

“Well, good,” she said. “I need someone with brains. Got some ID?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Mickey flashed her his driver’s license and gave her a Hunt Club business card. This was a long way from identifying him as a private investigator, but it seemed to satisfy her. Only after she’d perused the card for a long ten seconds did she reach into her pocket for the key to the lock. While unfastening it, she shot him a squinty look. “Can’t be too careful, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am. I couldn’t agree more.”

“There’s a lot more rape going on than people report.”

“Right.”

“People look at me, fifty-seven going on thirty I always say, and tell me I shouldn’t worry about rape, I’m too old. But you know, rape’s not a sexual crime. It’s not about sex, it’s about hate and anger. There was a woman last month, sixty-two, over in Berkeley, in a wheelchair, can you believe? Mugged and, as they say, sexually assaulted, which means raped. Anyway, that’s why I like it down here, behind this fence. Nobody gets in here doesn’t know one of the boat owners.”

“Good policy,” Mickey said.

She looked him a good hard squint in the eye for a second or two, possibly to see if he was fooling with her, but again he must have passed her scrutiny because with a “Follow me, then,” she turned and led him down to a badly misused sailboat near the end of the pier, which she stepped onto.

Then she and Mickey were seated on cracked and slightly damp cushions around the wheel. Virginia had some laundry drying, hung with clothespins from the guylines on the seaward side. From inside the galley came the sound of talk radio.

Mickey had already decided that Tamara’s call on this woman was correct, but crazy people could have good information. Still, he didn’t want to take more time than was necessary chatting here, so he crossed a leg, casual and relaxed, leaned back against the seat, gave her a smile. “So, Virginia, I understand you have some information you think might be helpful about the Dominic Como murder?”

“I think I do, yes. Do you need anything to verify the time we’re talking? Is there some official form or something we sign that I can keep a copy of?”

Mickey, feeling that maybe Tamara hadn’t sufficiently prepped him here, figuratively put on his tap dancing shoes. “Well,” he said, “I’m sure we could have you come down to the office and we could write up a statement for you to sign, and have it notarized, if it comes to that. But why would you want that exactly?”

“The reward,” she said simply. “So someone don’t steal the reward from me.”

“Ah.”

“An’ nobody tells the cops who I am. I come up with something first, and then next thing you know everybody knows it,
because I told it,
and suddenly nobody remembers where it first came to light. Pretty convenient, if you ask me.”

Mickey nodded, taking all of this very seriously. “All right, Virginia,” he said at length, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do, if it meets with your approval. You tell me what your information is and if we both decide it’s significant or important enough, I can take you down to the office right away and we can draft and notarize your statement. Then copy it and send you back here with your copy. How does that sound?”

She gave him the thousand-yard stare again, considering. Then, making up her mind, she nodded. “I’m glad they sent somebody with brains.”

 

 

The three of them—Mickey, Tamara, and Wyatt Hunt—sat with their knees all but touching at a small table in a blessedly quiet corner of the Quiver Bar at the Epic Roasthouse, Pat Kuleto’s gorgeous new place on the Embarcadero, right at the water’s edge. It was a cocktail hour of celebration about the new work they’d picked up, Hunt springing for drinks at the end of the day.

“She was absolutely lucid,” Mickey was saying. “No question about what she saw and what it meant. And I must say, I don’t think any of us would have even thought of it.”

“So what was it?” Hunt asked.

Mickey sipped at his beer. “You really ought to guess. If only to get a feeling for how far off we all were.”

“She saw the limo out there,” Hunt said, “after it was supposedly back at Sunset.”

“Not close. Tam?”

“She heard something.”

“Nope. Way more obvious.”

“She saw something,” Tamara said.

“Good.”

“From her boat?”

“Getting warm,” Mickey said.

“Wait a minute,” Hunt put in. “So it happened out by the boats?”

Mickey was enjoying the moment, leading them on. “I told you, think outside the box. We would never, ever, have thought of this. We’re not even in the right area code. And we know it happened because she saw it with her own eyes.”

For a long moment, all was silence. “Okay,” Hunt said, “he actually met somebody on one of the boats. They had a fight out there . . . but, no, that’s too far from the lagoon. Nobody’s carrying a dead guy three blocks. Or even from the boats out to the parking lot.”

“No. No carrying involved. No boats involved either.” Mickey tipped up his beer again, put it down, gave a last-chance look to his colleagues. Theatrically, he sighed. “We can call Devin Juhle and close the case as soon as I tell you guys,” he said, “but I thought, obvious as it is, we might want to talk about it a little first, before we bring in the cops.” One last triumphant glance around the table. “Okay, you know the blimp, the tourist blimp?”

Hunt, very slowly, nodded. “Airship Ventures,” he said with caution. “The
Eureka
.”

“Right. That’s the one. Well, Virginia was out on her deck Tuesday night, late dusk, just enjoying the peace and serenity out there, and she notices the
Eureka
coming back from out over the Golden Gate. Beautiful, if you like blimps, and who doesn’t, just floating around up there. But whatever, it was a warm night and she just watched it sail pretty much straight overhead, a couple of blocks south, but really, darn close. And then, suddenly, she’s looking up at it and she sees something—I’m not making this up—she sees something fall out of the thing. At first, she can’t believe what she’s seeing, but then she realizes it looks like a body, and it just falls and falls until it goes out of sight just over the trees, about where the lagoon would be.”

“Lucky they drained it,” Tamara said. “He might have killed a duck.”

“But he hit the lagoon before it was drained,” Mickey said, “and he didn’t hit a duck anyway.”

Tamara smiled brightly. “Well, that was lucky too.”

“You’re right,” Hunt said drily, “we never would have thought of that.”

“He fell into the lagoon?” Tamara asked.

“Absolutely.”

“How’d he wind up at the one end, tied up in all the roots and stuff?”

“Must have been the tide,” Mickey said.

“There’s no tide in the lagoon.”