Treasure Hunt Part 18

The address of the administrative headquarters for the Sanctuary House for Battered Women was on Potrero Avenue near San Francisco General Hospital. Unlike the other service-oriented nonprofits he'd visited in the last few days, for obvious reasons Sanctuary did not shelter, educate, or test any of its clientele on-site-instead, they were a.s.signed, often with their children, to one of the organization's seventeen secure locations within the city limits. Because of this, Sanctuary's footprint here on Potrero was so small as to be nearly invisible. Mickey drove by what should have been the address twice before he realized that the office must be somewhere among the buildings that made up the much larger hospital complex.

Fifteen minutes after he'd finally managed to park in a handicapped zone in the hospital's main but still woefully inadequate lot, he found the place-one of many apparently identical offices on the ground floor of the hospital's Admitting and Triage Building. It was a typical overused bureaucratic medical landscape-already at nine A.M., long lines had formed at each of the gla.s.s windows, with the chairs in the main lobby filled with mostly older and poorly dressed patients. Although there was still the usual complement of mothers with their coughing or sleeping children, s.p.a.ced- out young adults, and obvious derelicts, all waiting in numb patience while the clammy fluorescent lighting lit the area and reflected up at them from the greenish tile flooring.

The only indication of Sanctuary House's presence was the name of the organization stenciled onto the gla.s.s doorway, now open at the farthest extent of the lobby. Mickey stood in the doorway for a long moment. In front of him, a counter bisected most of the room across the front, and behind it were mazes of green and gray filing cabinets and a few desks. Venetian blinds over the high back windows. To his left, the counter made a right angle, and behind it more of the ubiquitous green-tinged gla.s.s separated out the two or three other offices.

He heard low voices, apparently coming from one or more of those offices, but saw no one, so he stepped forward and, following instructions, "Please Ring for a.s.sistance," pushed the little hotel bell that someone had duct-taped down to the peeling wooden counter.

In five seconds, a tiny and tentative bespectacled young woman appeared from between one of the banks of filing cabinets, wearing what looked to Mickey like a thrift-store cotton dress and a devastated and yet somehow impatient expression. Beneath her wire- rimmed gla.s.ses, her eyes were red and swollen. Mickey at once realized two things: that the employees had heard the news about their executive director, and that maybe this should have been an a.s.signment for Tamara-the vast majority of the time, Mickey supposed that men here were going to be the enemy; it came with the turf. Still, he dredged up a look of respectful solicitude.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

Having done his homework, Mickey knew the name of the a.s.sociate director. "I'd like to speak to Adele Watrous," he said, "if she's in."

"Is there something I can help you with?"

"Are you Ms. Watrous?"

"No."

"I was hoping to talk to Ms. Watrous."

"It's Mrs., and she is having a difficult morning. I'm afraid we all are. Can I tell her what this is about?"

Mickey's heart went out to this young woman, but he was here to get information-specifically if Nancy Neshek had mentioned to anyone here the question she'd wanted to ask Hunt-and the further down the food chain he went with the staff, he thought, the less likely the result. "I'm afraid it's about Ms. Neshek, which I can see you already know about. I'm very sorry."

She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out, and then she closed it, nodded twice, then again, and finally disappeared back into the maze. After another moment, a grandmotherly woman appeared. Her snow-white hair was disheveled and she, too, had clearly been crying, but she spoke in a crisp, no- nonsense manner. "I'm Adele Watrous," she said. "Is this about Nancy? How can I help you?"

"I'm working on the investigation into Mr. Como's death," he began, "and now Ms. Neshek's. Nancy's. She made a call to our office on the night she died, and I was hoping to talk to you about whatever she might have told you, if anything, that might shed some light on her death."

Nodding wearily, Mrs. Watrous lifted the flip-up portion of the counter and motioned him inside into the office proper, then led him beyond the first door they pa.s.sed and into the second one. Once they were seated, the door closed behind them, she templed her hands at her mouth and blew into them a time or two, regaining her composure.

"When did you hear about it?" Mickey began.

She sighed. "This morning. The phone started ringing around six-thirty. One of our women out at the Jackson Street facility heard it on the news. After that . . ." She opened her hands. "Everybody." Then, suddenly, in a kind of a double take, she seemed to focus on him more clearly. "You said you were investigating Dominic Como's death?"

"Yes."

"And you think Nancy's is related to that?"

"We don't know. What we do know is that Nancy called the hotline at our office after the reward was announced on Monday and said that she had a question, an important question. And would we please call her the next day, here at your offices, or at her home? She said she'd be at one of the two places, definitely, but never answered at either."

"No. She never made it in here on Tuesday." She paused. "But that wasn't by any means unusual. I mean, she'd often get called out to one of the sites and have to stay until whenever. . . ." Trailing off, she shook her head in obvious dismay and confusion.

Mickey gave her a minute. "Were you both here when the reward on Mr. Como's death was announced?"

"And when was that, exactly?"

"Around four in the afternoon."

"Well, then"-she considered carefully-"I'm sure we were here, yes, both of us. But I don't remember hearing about it here. I know we didn't talk about it."

This was more or less what Hunt and Mickey had expected, but that didn't make the bare fact-that Watrous had no information about why Neshek had called the Hunt Club-any easier to accept. He pursed his lips in frustration. "Might Nancy have spoken to anybody else here about it? Did she stay late, for example?"

Again, Mrs. Watrous gave the question its time. And again she shook her head no. "She left right at five on Monday, or a little after. I stayed on till a little past six."

Grasping at straws, Mickey asked, "Was that also usual, that she left work right around five?"

"No. Usually she stayed much later. Unless she had a fund- raiser or some event or something like that. The work here is never finished, so we tend to put in some long hours."

"So"-Mickey barely daring to hope, but here at last was a possible opening-"was there something Monday night, then?"

She started to shake her head again, and then abruptly stopped. "Well, yes . . . I mean. Oh, G.o.d, I hadn't even thought of that."

"What's that, Mrs. Watrous?"

"They were having a COO meeting at City Hall."

"COO?".

"You know? The Communities of Opportunity. Oh, and speaking of which, did you see that thing in the paper this morning, the CityTalk column? That's what they must have been going to talk about, that report coming out."

"Who was that? Besides Nancy, I mean."

"Well, I suppose all or most of the beneficiaries. Us, Mission Street, Sunset, Delancey, all the others." Now, her color suddenly high, Adele Watrous tapped impatiently on her desk. "People don't realize. It's harder than it looks. You've got to put on a song and dance to get people to come out and give you money for these projects. You see what's in the paper today, you think it's all about throwing this foundation money away on music or public relations consultants or other nonessentials, but you've got to spend money to make money, especially in these times, in this field. Mr. Turner understands that. There's no other way to do it."

"I believe you," Mickey said, keeping his calm. The mention of Len Turner's name in this other context suddenly put his brain on high alert. "So you're fairly certain that Nancy was planning to attend this meeting?"

"I'm sure she was. But you can find out if she did easily enough."

"You're right, Mrs. Watrous, we can. Well"-Mickey started to get to his feet-"I want to thank you for all your help and cooperation here today. I know this news must have been brutal."

"It was. I still can't make myself believe it. And you know what's really so terrible, almost the worst part?"

"What's that?"

Suddenly her weariness seemed to overcome her. She sighed again and closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, she shook her head in what Mickey took to be resignation. "The worst part is that we're so used to terrible news here. We get terrible news here every single day."

18.

Due to the late night they'd both spent at the Neshek home, neither Juhle nor Russo got into work until just before Hunt arrived to make his statement to them. In Nancy Neshek, they had a fresh homicide to begin investigating, and the crime scene a.n.a.lysis and report to review, but Russo wanted to go down and finish up whatever work remained with the limousine first. After all, they'd gone to all the trouble of getting a warrant and having the Lincoln towed to the impound lot, and that lot was only just across Seventh Street, adjacent to the Hall of Justice, where they currently found themselves anyway.

"But Hunt's going to be here to make his statement any minute." Juhle was at his desk in the homicide detail, a wide-open room filled with desks on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice. "We're going to want to talk to him about that and find out what else he knows or knew about Neshek. I'd bet you he's also going to know about those CityTalk numbers-"

But Russo cut him off. "I don't even want to talk about Wyatt Hunt."

"Sarah, come on. It was late. What were we going to accomplish by taking him downtown?"

"We were going to accomplish the mandate of our job. We were going to accomplish what we're supposed to do to somebody who discovers a body in any kind of a compromising manner. How about that?"

Juhle shook his head. "He didn't kill Nancy Neshek."

"No? How do you know that? How do you know he didn't contaminate the crime scene? How do you know what he did before you got there?"

"Look, Sarah, Hunt isn't going anywhere. If his statement's squirrelly in any way, we haul his a.s.s back here and grill him till he's well-done. But that's not going to happen. He was up at her place because she'd called with a question about the reward and . . . well, we've been through all this."

"Yes, we have. And for the record, it still fries my a.s.s. I don't care what time it was. We should have hauled Hunt down here. And if Marcel"-this was Marcel Lanier, head of homicide-"if Marcel gets wind of this and goes ballistic, I'm laying the whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing off on you as my senior partner who made the final decision. And meanwhile, just so I'm not tempted to lock up Hunt on general principles if he shows up here when he's supposed to, I'm going to stroll on out of here and take a look at the guts of that limo right now. You and your pal can play patty-cake in the interview room and I'll catch the rerun on the tape later."

Sighing, Juhle got up from his chair. "You were way more fun when you were younger, you know that?"

"Not really," she said. "People just think I must have been." And she turned on her heel.

When Hunt got to homicide to make his statement, Juhle was waiting for him. After wrestling with the decision, Hunt decided that his job was to pa.s.s relevant or potentially relevant evidence along to Devin and Sarah. So he included an account of Alicia Thorpe's completely unverifiable and somewhat provocative alibi for Monday night.

Hunt finished with Juhle, then grabbed both his sport coat and a tan overcoat against the still-gusting and cold north wind that he could hear whipping up the street. When he got back into his office, he waited for Tamara to finish her call and hang up, and asked about her progress with his potential pool of part-timers.

"We're in luck. And more than that, you might be happy to hear that the downturn in business over the last six months might not all have been fallout from Craig."

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, my first call was to Willard White"-another local private investigator firm-"and Gloria said I could have her whole staff for a few days if we could put 'em to work. Beats her having to lay them off, she said."

"Really? How many people she talking about?"

"Up to five."

Clearly, the number surprised and pleased Hunt. After Mickey had gone out again this morning for his interviews, Wyatt had spent some time with Tamara going over the notes he'd taken yesterday on the work he'd acquired. He'd estimated that load at close to two hundred hours. Five stand-ins would bridge the gap nicely. And from what it sounded like, they and perhaps even their bosses might all be available to fill in on standby if he kept hustling future work. "Why don't you see if you can get all five of them down here later today, and maybe even Gloria and Will themselves, say two or two-thirty, and call me on my cell and let me know?"

Tamara snapped him a salute. "Will do, mon capitaine. Oh, and we also did get one more reasonably intelligent-sounding reward call, finally, from Hang-up Lady, real name Linda Colores. She was walking home from work-she's one of the floor people at the Pottery Barn on Chestnut-and she heard a man and a woman having an argument on one of the streets down by the Palace. She thinks this was last Tuesday night, but she's not sure exactly."

"Did she get anything they actually said?"

"I didn't ask her that. I didn't want to step on your toes. But I got her vitals if you want to go out and talk to her, although she works all afternoon starting at one. Or I could ask her to come in here in the next hour or so and I could talk to her."

Hunt, standing in front of her desk, shook his head in admiration. "Has anybody recently told you how fantastic you are?"

Tamara blushed and looked down briefly, then back up. "Thank you. It's good to be back working. I didn't know if I could do it anymore. Or do anything, really."

"I wasn't worried about that. In fact, it never crossed my mind." He came forward and put his palms down on the desk across from her. "You can do anything you put your mind to, Tam. You know that, don't you?"

She couldn't meet his eyes. "I used to. But then I kind of got convinced I was fooling myself."

He was standing looking down at her, but she couldn't seem to commit herself to raising her eyes. "Hey."

When he reached across, touched her chin, and gently lifted it, she looked up and gave him a half-broken smile. "You know," she said.

He shook his head. "You weren't fooling yourself, Tamara. You were amazing. You are still amazing, okay?" Waiting, still touching her chin, he held her gaze on him. "Okay?"

And at last something gave way in her and she nodded. "Okay."

He pulled his hand away from her chin and straightened up. "That's settled, then. Once and for all."

She saluted again. "Yes, sir," she said. "Once and for all."

"You want to talk to this Linda Colores?"

"I could."

"Okay," Hunt said. "Go for it."

Nearly the size of a football field, the Green Room at the San Francisco War Memorial was on the second floor of the stately marble building next to the Opera House on Van Ness Avenue. Floors and pillars in the vast room were of marble. The ceiling was at least twenty feet high and the featured colors were gas chamber green trimmed with gold. The room was earthquake rated for 1,300 people, though it easily could hold many more than that. For Como's memorial, city employees were on hand at both sets of doors to turn mourners away and prevent the room from getting overfilled.

Hunt got there early enough to get in without any problem and he looked around to see an oversized photograph of a smiling Dominic Como hung from the wall behind the podium. Hunt had already walked by one of the long tables piled high with brochures of the Sunset Youth Project, the Battalion Special Corps, and pledge cards for the reward fund. The large portable screen up against the front wall indicated that the service was also going to include a video or a slide show.

Hunt was beginning to wonder what he had hoped to accomplish by coming here today at all. Not only was this going to be a difficult, if not impossible venue in which to hold even the most cursory of interviews, he did not yet know many of the players by sight. The only people he had actually met in connection with Dominic Como were his wife, Ellen, and Len Turner.

Now Ellen was surrounded by a mob of well-wishers and fellow mourners-perhaps some of them family members, but also a large host of mostly African-American men, women, and teenagers who Hunt a.s.sumed were Como's a.s.sociates, fellow workers, and many of the beneficiaries of his charitable work over four decades.

But then in the sea of faces, Hunt spied a familiar one on the outskirts of the group surrounding Ellen, and he gradually made his way up near the podium and touched the arm of the man who'd discovered the tire iron in the lagoon.

"Mr. Rand?" he said, extending his hand. "Wyatt Hunt."

Rand recognized him right away, shook the proffered hand, and said half-jokingly, "You ain't here to tell me I already got that reward, now, are you?"

Hunt grinned. "No, sir. I'm afraid not. But now that you mention it, we've learned that it was in fact the murder weapon. I don't think that's been in the news yet. They found some of what may be Mr. Como's hair on it that didn't get washed away. So if that information leads anywhere, I'd have to say that you're still in the running, at least for part of it. Are you waiting to talk to Mrs. Como?"

"Not really. I never met the lady. I'm just payin' my respects." He raised a hand and mouthed a h.e.l.lo to someone he knew and then came back to Hunt. "Good to see this kind a turnout. 'Specially after all that in the paper today. I don't know where they got all that, make Dominic look like some kind a . . . I don't know what. You see that?"

"I did."

"So what'd you think?"

"I think Jeff Elliot usually gets his facts right."

"So you think Dominic was skimmin' some a that?"

"I don't know what to think, to tell you the truth. I didn't read it so much that he was skimming something for himself as that he was only supposed to use certain money for certain things, and maybe he didn't care so much about that."

"You got that right. He just put it where they needed it. And all that about his car and people runnin' for him, that's just the way he done it, drivin' folks around, taking people where they's needed." Rand waved a finger around at the crowd. "You just look around in this room and now tell me Dominic Como didn't help a whole lot more people than most anybody else ever meets. You hear what I'm saying?"

"I do."