Water To Burn Part 8

"We don't know." Sanchez took off his rain hat and ran a weary hand through his hair before continuing. "Several witnesses swore they saw Evers reach into his pockets and throw a number of things onto the ground before he climbed the rail. No one saw them clearly, but one man thought he saw a plastic bag with white powder in it. If it was, I'm a.s.suming it's smack. The powder, I mean, not what the witness said. We kept this area sealed off all night, so if it exists, it's still here."

"Have you found anything?" I said.

"A lot of trash. Used tissue, candy wrappers, that kind of c.r.a.p. Who knows who threw it down? Oh, and one peac.o.c.k feather. There must have been someone from Marin County here."

He laughed, I didn't. A devotee of the Peac.o.c.k Angel had left a calling card. Murder, I thought, for sure.

"Anyway," Sanchez continued, "let me tell you what we know so far."

Because of those important connections, the powers that be had called in Sanchez immediately rather than leaving the investigation to lesser officers in Homicide. Normally, the police would have looked into a case of suicide only to dot all the i's and cross the t's on the report. Sanchez and his team had spent long hours the evening before, interviewing some eighteen witnesses who'd come forward to say they'd seen Evers on his last walk.

"Everyone," Sanchez said, "told us that he looked drunk or drugged. The autopsy report's not in yet, but I'm betting the blood tests show heroin in his system."

"Could be." I was betting against it. Ensorcellment leaves no traces that show up in laboratory tests, but I played along with Sanchez's theory because I wanted something out of him. "I wonder if the person who sold it to him was still close by."

"It's possible. Several witnesses saw the victim come out of the Ferry Building. He seemed to be accompanied by several other men. I say 'seemed' because there's so much foot traffic around here. We can't be sure that they were actual a.s.sociates. They might have just been exiting at the same time."

"Yeah, for sure."

Sanchez took a small notebook from his inner jacket pocket and flipped it open. "One witness did see Evers stop to speak to a loiterer who'd been standing outside the building. Evers fumbled in his pocket and gave the man something. The witness thought it was money, because the man he spoke to looked like one of the homeless. The witness didn't see this person hand Evers anything in return, but I wonder."

"So do I," I said. "Dealers get very good at pa.s.sing bags back and forth without anyone noticing."

Sanchez nodded and frowned at his notes. During this conversation, Ari had been standing nearby, listening, I'm sure, but also keeping a watch on the police officers searching the ground. Sanchez flipped a page in the notebook and smiled.

"Here it is," he said. "I've got an alert out for this homeless man as a person of interest. Even if he's not a dealer, he'll still have information we can use, a.s.suming he's not too crazy to remember what happened." He cleared his throat and read aloud. "A white male about five foot eight, thin, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, slightly stoopshouldered. Long gray hair and beard, with long sideburns like an Orthodox rabbi-"

Ari spun around and walked over to stand just behind Sanchez.

"Probably brown eyes," Sanchez went on. "The witness wasn't close enough to tell eye color. The person of interest's face was wrinkled and tan, like he'd spent time in the desert, the witness said. He was wearing a pair of torn and faded black pants and a black suit jacket, also torn and stained in places."

"Any hat?" Ari said.

Sanchez flinched. Ari could move quietly when he wanted to, and the lieutenant hadn't noticed him come up.

"Yeah," Sanchez said, "a black Giants cap that looked brand-new."

"Huh," Ari said.

Sanchez looked at Ari and raised an eyebrow. Ari smiled and said nothing more. Sanchez turned to me.

"Do you want to interview Evers' secretary?" Sanchez said. "I'm going to his office."

"Will she be there on Sat.u.r.day?" I said.

"Yeah, she offered to come in to meet me there."

"I do want," I said. "Thanks."

With Embarcadero Center so close, Ari and I headed off on foot, but Sanchez lingered to give instructions to the officers manning the barrier. Ten SWAT team members in riot gear had joined the line. We made our way through the mobs and crossed the street, which by then was totally blocked with farm trucks, Muni buses, pedestrians, and cars. Horns blared, drivers shouted. A distant streetcar clanged in rage.

As soon as we'd gotten far enough away to hear each other, I said, "Reb Ezekiel?"

"The description fits," Ari said. "Except for the choice of hat, but some kind soul might have given that to him. On the other hand, we could be dealing with coincidence. It's not an uncommon description."

"Not in Israel, maybe. What Sanchez called long sideburns aren't hot fashion items around here."

"That's a very good point. Let's hope the police can round this fellow up, and then we'll know."

In the Embarcadero Center, we rejoined Sanchez at the base of the elevator tower leading to Evers' office. During the ride up, I asked the lieutenant a few more questions and got some details about the men seen leaving the Ferry Building at the same time as Evers-all of them business types, all of them, it seemed, wearing gray or blue suits. One among them was indeed short and pudgy, and another was tall and rail-thin, but so were hundreds of thousands of men in the Bay Area.

At Evers' office, Miss Kowalski, dressed in a blue skirt suit and heels, was waiting outside the locked door, which the police had secured with tape the night before. While Sanchez showed her his police ID and made a few commiserating noises, I ran an SPP on her. Although she read as dazed, absolutely stunned at what had happened, and sorry for her former boss, most of her worry seemed to be directed toward finding a new job and an income. I couldn't blame her. Sanchez ripped the tape free of the door.

"You can open up now," Sanchez told her.

Kowalski nodded and took her keys out of her pocket. Once we were all inside, she sat down behind her desk in the front room.

"Mr. Evers' accountant will be in at two o'clock," she told Sanchez, "to look at financial matters, so if you need to speak with him-"

"I do," Sanchez said. "Was your boss in debt?"

"I don't know." She spoke carefully, choosing words. "He always paid me on time, and as far as I know, the rent here wasn't in arrears. But I got the impression that he was worried about his cash flow."

Heroin's not cheap, I thought to myself, especially the snortable Persian white.

"I'll come back to see the accountant, then." Sanchez glanced my way with a little nod to give me the okay to speak.

"When Evers left here," I asked, "was he meeting someone?"

"Yes," Kowalski said, "over at the Ferry Building. For a drink, he told me, but I don't know which bar exactly."

"Do you know whom he was meeting?"

"I don't, which is strange. Usually he told me who and whether or not I could interrupt him by phone if I needed to. I do know that the person was a man. Mr. Evers said something like 'I'm meeting him at four.'" She paused to hit a few keys, then swiveled the monitor around so we could all see it. "Here's his appointment list for yesterday. I can show you the entire year so far."

"Can you give me a printout of that?" Sanchez said. "A couple of copies would be good."

"Certainly, sir. He also received two calls on the landline here after he left for the day. I had the unit set to record. Do you want to hear those?"

"I sure do," Sanchez said. "If there's anything else you can tell me-"

"I will, and as soon as I think of it." She paused, her mouth slack. "He was a good boss. He always treated me like a person, you know? Some bosses don't."

The phone calls told us nothing of interest. While Miss Kowalski was printing out Evers' appointments, the Homicide forensics team arrived. Sanchez handed me one copy of the printout, then made it clear that we could leave. Since the Forensic team was milling around, he followed us out into the quieter corridor.

"One last thing," I said to him. "Have you interviewed the two women that Evers named as members of his group?"

"I haven't had time." Sanchez hesitated briefly. "I suppose you still want to talk with them."

"Well, if it's possible. I don't want to poach on your territory, but it looks like you have your hands full here."

Ari started to b.u.t.t in, but I silenced him with a scowl. I'd cultivated Sanchez for just this opportunity. I didn't want Ari's lack of manners to spoil it.

"Yeah, 'fraid so." Sanchez said. "Report back to me, will you?"

"Of course, and thanks! You know, I'm wondering if they should be kept under surveillance-for their own sakes, I mean. Do you think it's possible that the person Evers met for that drink threatened him somehow? Or frightened him so badly that he thought suicide was his only way out? If so, they might go after his a.s.sociates next. Just a thought on my part, of course."

"A good thought, though. I'll detail a couple of men to keep an eye on those two ladies, yeah. Especially the one he called Sweetie." Sanchez suddenly grinned at Ari. "Not that I know how you got that information."

"Of course not," Ari said and grinned in return.

Sanchez went back into the office. We turned down the corridor. Standing by the elevator was a dark-haired young man in a pair of khakis, a white shirt, and a blue tie, an ordinary enough person to be in so large a complex, even on Sat.u.r.day. He glanced at us, then away, in a perfectly casual manner. Unfortunately for the deception, though, a thin line of bluish light outlined his head and shoulders. I sketched a ward and threw. He grunted once like a wrestler slamming onto the mat, then disappeared in a fireball flash of azure.

"What?" Ari shook his head and blinked. "That light-"

"Was a Chaos illusion exploding," I said. "Did you see the guy standing there?"

"No. All I saw was a flash of light."

"Oh, yeah? There must have been a lot of power behind the critter for you to see anything at all. Tell you what. Let's take that other elevator back at the far end of the hall. I'm getting a strong SAWM."

"A semi-automatic . . ." Ari let his voice trail away "Warning Mechanism, yeah. I'd just as soon not be in the same small enclosed s.p.a.ce with whatever's causing it."

The location indicator over the elevator's bronze doors showed a car coming up to our floor. I never saw Ari draw the gun, but he was holding his Beretta, braced in both hands. He swirled around to aim at the elevator doors with the gun pointing to a spot at the height of a man's chest.

"Get back," he said. "Step back along the corridor."

I did. The car came to a stop. The doors slid open. I heard a faint burbling sound quickly stifled. The closest I could come to identifying it was the sound that an aerator makes in a fish tank. The elevator car looked empty, but my alarm was still going off.

"Do you see anything in there?" Ari said. "I don't."

"No," I said. "Let's not take chances anyway."

The doors slid shut, and the car began to descend, just as if an invisible hand had pressed the right b.u.t.tons. Look, O'Grady, I told myself, it's more likely that a person on a lower floor just put in a call for the car. Oh, yeah? myself answered. Fat chance.

"Should we warn Sanchez?" Ari asked.

"It's not after him, whatever it is. Besides, would he believe us?"

"No." Ari holstered the Beretta. "Very good, then. Let's go."

As we walked down the long corridor to the other elevator, Ari kept his right hand hovering above the gun's approximate location. Every now and then, he turned and looked behind us. Maybe because of that, maybe not, we reached the other elevator safely and rode down to the underground garage without incident. I was real glad to drive out into the sunlight.

Since I was carrying my notebook in my shoulder bag, we had the phone numbers of the other two coven members with us. While I drove out California Street, Ari called the first woman on his cell phone and made arrangements to interview Mrs. Celia LaRosa. As always on the steep hills of San Francisco's downtown, the traffic moved so erratically, what with Muni buses and double-parked delivery trucks, that I had to concentrate to avoid being sideswiped. I missed about half of what Ari was saying, though I did hear him mention Inspector Sanchez before he ended the call.

"LaRosa sounds terrified," Ari said. "She told me to come straight over, because she and her husband are about to leave for France."

"A planned vacation?" I said.

"Not sodding likely. I can't say I blame her for wanting to leave town after what happened to Evers."

"Ah. That's why you warned her to notify the police. Think she will?"

"If she's smart. She didn't sound stupid."

The LaRosas lived on Washington Street, several blocks west of Divisadero, in a restored Victorian house, painted in tasteful greens and grays, and set back behind a luxury in the city: a few yards of lawn. The husband opened the door, a man of about sixty, skinny but not abnormally so, with a thick shock of gray-brown hair and a tidy mustache. He made sure to scrutinize both our IDs before he stepped back and let us come into the wood-paneled foyer.

"My wife's real upset," he informed us.

"I don't blame her, sir," I said. "Evers' suicide must have come as a real shock."

"It was, yeah. First Elaine, now this! I'm glad they sent a woman officer."

Mrs. LaRosa received us in the living room directly off the hallway, a long narrow room that, judging from the stillvisible seam about halfway along the pale cream ceiling, had been knocked together from two Victorian parlors. Rose velvet overstuffed furniture sat around an Aubussonstyle flowered rug. At the street end of the room was a bay window and at the other, set back in the pale blue wall, was a niche, tiled in dark green art nouveau tiles, that had originally held a gas heater. On the floor inside it stood a flower arrangement, yellow-and-white blooms around a central spray of red gladiolas.

The fashionably slender Mrs. LaRosa, wearing a pair of beige slacks and a pale blue blouse, perched on the edge of an armchair. Her champagne-colored hair in a perfect short coif and the location of her eyebrows, way too high on her forehead, made her seem older than she probably was. She should have waited a few more years for that first face-lift.

"Come in." Her voice shook on the words. "Do sit down."

Ari and I sat on the rose settee. Mr. LaRosa stood protectively behind his wife's chair. Ari took the notebook out of my bag, a pen out of his shirt pocket, and prepared to act like the a.s.sistant.

"I'm sorry to bother you at such a troubled time," I said.

Mrs. LaRosa forced out a smile and waved a feeble hand.

"I need to know when you first met William Evers," I went on. "And why you joined his occult study group."

"d.a.m.n nonsense," Mr. L muttered. Mrs. L ignored him.

"Evers handled my divorce," Mrs. LaRosa said. "This is my second marriage. As for the group, Elaine Politt was a good friend of mine. We belonged to the same bridge club. I joined because of her, not Evers."

"I see. Can you tell me anything about this Brother Belial?"

Mr. L snorted and coughed like a man hoping for an okay to interrupt.

"Very little," Mrs. L frowned and paused. "He was very tall and very thin, but he was always robed when we all came into the room, so I never caught a glimpse of his actual face. He always wore a stocking over his face, you see, like the bank robbers do, and then of course he had the hood of his robe pulled forward."

"Bank robber's about it," Mr. L put in. "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know what I thought of those people."

She winced and twined her fingers together. I figured that I knew, too, and that he'd been right. Aloud, I said, "Evers mentioned that there was something odd about Brother Belial's voice."

"Yes, it was very deep and very slow. You know, there were times when I wondered if he were a human being, he talked so oddly."

In the depths of my mind a little voice whispered, "Bingo!"

"I suppose that sounds silly," Mrs. L continued. "But you know, about his face, at times I wondered if he had one."

"Can you expand on that?" I said.