The Emerald Cat Killer (13 page)

He turned the corner onto Walnut, his legs on autopilot, his mind on other matters, when something warm and fleshy bounced off his chest. He let out a startled gasp.

“Watch out, Mister! Don't you—”

Coffman shook his head. There wasn't much light just here but he could see that he'd collided with a young girl. She was skinny, wore a Berkeley High T-shirt, had short-cropped red hair.

He started to apologize but before he could get past a stammered word or two she was patting him on the shoulder, peering up into his face, actually smiling at him.

“I know you didn't mean it, sir.” She touched his cheek softly, ran her hand through his beard. “I like men with beards,” she said. He wasn't sure whether her smile was attractive or not. Her features were certainly pretty. In the faint light of Walnut Street it was hard to tell, but he thought she had the emerald-colored eyes that went so well with red hair. And the pale complexion that often completed the picture.

But there was an unhealthy look to her. He suppressed a shudder.

She said, “Are you busy right now? You look like you might enjoy…” She left it there.

He said, “Are you all right, miss? Do you … there are some restaurants nearby, have you had your dinner?”

He reached for his wallet, started to extract a couple of bills. He extended them toward the girl. He looked at her more closely. “Listen, how old are you?”

She said, “Never mind that, grandpa!” She grabbed the bills and looked at them. She said, angrily, “You can do better than that, you filthy old fucker. Picking on children. You belong in jail. There's a place for you, you'll be some buck nigger's bitch, you hear me? Stop it! Let me go!”

She was screaming now. Around him, Coffman could see movement inside lighted windows, figures rushing to see what was going on. He felt a thump on the back of his head, then a sharp pain in his back, then saw redness, then blackness.

Bobby pulled his prized Marine Hunter out of the old guy's back. The old guy was lying on his face, bleeding through his suit jacket. Bobby held up the blade, then bent over and wiped it carefully on the old guy's back, once, twice, again, held it up, smiled and nodded approval, returned it to its sheath.

Red was dancing around, waving her hands, pulling her hair with them, chattering like a monkey.

Bobby jumped to his feet and hit her once in the face with his fist, and she stopped dancing around and chattering and stood there with her hands in front of her mouth. She looked like she was getting ready to cry but he didn't have time to waste on her. People were coming from the buildings and he had to get out of there.

Where the hell was the old guy's wallet? Right, there it was, a couple of feet away, lying on the sidewalk. Bobby picked it up, then turned back to the old guy. He was wearing a nice-looking wristwatch on a metal expansion band. That was good. The watch came off easily. He probably had a cell phone and maybe some other valuables but there was no time to look for those.

Bobby ran up Walnut Street, away from the coffee-guzzlers and the yuppies. The farther you got from Vine, the darker it got. That was good. Bobby was young and in good shape, well, pretty good shape, and he had a head start.

He could hear Red's voice, Red was behind him, running as fast as she could, but she wasn't in as good shape as he was and for a moment he thought he might just let her get caught. That way he would be rid of her without having to do anything nasty to her himself. But then the cops would have her and she'd babble, he knew she'd babble, and cops would wind up at Acton Street. He'd never be able to go back there. And the Beretta Stampede Thunder revolver was there, he didn't want to risk losing the Beretta.

So he turned around, actually ran a few steps back toward the pursuers, grabbed Red by the wrist and tugged her after him, running toward Rose Street. There were yards and shrubs around the houses up there and, a little farther, a big park full of rolling hills. If they could get that far, he was pretty sure they'd be all right.

He'd still be stuck with Red but they would have the old guy's wallet with cash in it and credit cards they could maybe use or maybe sell, and there was that fancy wristwatch.

NINE

Strombeck was there and barely blinked when Lindsey came pounding into the waiting room at Alta Bates. Strombeck was there, Marvia Plum, and one of Eric Coffman's daughters. This had to be Rebecca, the one who taught school in Jingletown. She was sitting with her mother, her arms around her, nodding her head and murmuring things that Lindsey couldn't make out. Never mind, they were none of his business anyway.

Lindsey braced Strombeck. “What the hell happened? I was just up there, I ate lunch with Coffman today, we had a meeting at his office this afternoon. What happened to him?”

Strombeck was holding a cup of coffee. They always held cups of coffee at times like this. It was like the old scene in Westerns when a woman was giving birth and the midwife would send the father out with orders to boil water. Boil water. So Randolph Scott or Bob Steele or Rod Cameron would dutifully go off and boil water while the womenfolk took care of business.

Drink coffee.

Strombeck put his cup down on a table. “Looks like a mugging gone wrong, Mr. Lindsey. We'll know better when we can talk to Mr. Coffman.”

“He's going to be all right, then?”

“Have to ask the docs. It looks as if the perp hadn't planned this. He got panicky and ran away. That's the good news, eh? Didn't stay around to finish the job.”

“Why would anyone want to kill Eric Coffman?”

“We'll have to find out. As I said, I think it was a mugging. Probably a two-man job that went wrong.”

“Why two-man?”

“So far, there appears to be a single wound. Well, two if you count a thump on the back of the head. But that doesn't look serious. There was a sharp-instrument wound in the victim's lower back. That
is
serious. His wallet and wristwatch are missing. Now, why would a mugger attack his victim from behind? Not good technique. They usually work face-to-face. So in all likelihood there were two perpetrators, working as a team.”

For a moment the unflappable Olaf Strombeck turned human. His face scrunched up as if he was exhausted but determined to keep going. He rubbed his eyes with a hand that Lindsey noticed, for the first time, was huge. Strombeck would have handled a football or a basketball well. Maybe he'd played for Cal at one time.

Then he was Sergeant Strombeck, Berkeley Police Department, again. “We've had a rash of these lately. Perpetrator Number One approaches the victim from the front. Perp looks harmless enough, maybe going to ask directions. At the last moment he sucker punches the victim. Hard fist in the belly.”

Lindsey was following Strombeck's narrative with his mind's eye while a tank full of tropical fish in the middle of the room occupied his vision. Strombeck was standing with his back to the fish tank. Lindsey could look at the sergeant and the brightly colored fish at the same time. A blue-eyed cowfish made eye contact with Lindsey over Strombeck's shoulder.

“Victim doubles over,” Strombeck said. “Probably wearing jeans, that's what everybody wears today, wallet in his back pocket. Most of them don't have buttons on those pockets, either. Perp Number Two steps up behind the vic, lifts his wallet, and disappears in the crowd. Vic stands there gasping, trying to figure out what happened to him. His mind is occupied with the sucker punch. The puncher has disappeared into the crowd. The victim isn't seriously hurt, mainly shocked and confused. Only later does he discover that his wallet is gone. He doesn't know it but his pocket has been picked.”

The flirtatious cowfish smiled at Lindsey and batted her eyes, then turned with a swish of her tail and swam away.

“Only odd thing,” Strombeck was saying, “they never carry a weapon. If they get caught, you see, unless we catch them with the wallet still in their possession, they just deny everything. Only witness is the victim. The whole thing turns into he-said-she-said. Not this time.” He shook his head. “This is serious business.”

A doctor came into the room. “Is Mrs. Coffman here?”

Miriam Coffman turned and raised one hand like a schoolchild answering a roll call. Her daughter Rebecca kept her arm around her.

“I am Dr. Pollyam Mukerji. I have just been with Mr. Coffman. I am the surgeon on duty tonight.”

The doctor huddled with the two other women.

The scene was classic, but the gown was green instead of white, and the surgeon should have been Lew Ayres or Lionel Barrymore or Richard Chamberlain or even Rock Hudson. Instead, this surgeon was an Indian woman, dark-skinned and petite, with a red dot on her forehead and a glossy braid hanging behind her. She wore wire-rimmed granny glasses.

The doctor nodded and the two Coffman women disappeared through the doorway.

Dr. Mukerji repeated her self-introduction to the others. Now she was talking to Lieutenant Plum and Sergeant Strombeck and Hobart Lindsey. “You are…?”

They gave their names.

“Very well. Mr. Coffman received a very serious knife wound. The knife entered his body from behind, passing beneath his rib cage. There was considerable damage to his liver, pancreas, and stomach. Several blood vessels were severed. There was a small insult to the bottom of the right lung. There was no damage to the heart. There is no apparent nerve damage. The patient will remain in guarded condition for at least a day but I anticipate a good recovery.”

She removed her glasses, folded their arms, and placed them on a table. She picked up the nearest coffee cup—it was Olaf Strombeck's—took a sip, and put it back. She retrieved her glasses from the table, unfolded their arms, and carefully donned them.

Marvia Plum asked if Coffman was conscious. Dr. Mukerji said he was not. When would he regain consciousness? Probably in one to two hours. Could they speak with him then? Briefly. His wife and daughter were with him now.

When Dr. Mukerji left, Lindsey sat down with Marvia Plum and Olaf Strombeck.

Marvia said, “Rebecca asked me to call you. She said Miriam insisted. You were supposed to come for dinner and she didn't want to stand you up.”

That evoked a dour expression from Lindsey. “I still don't understand … Sergeant Strombeck was telling me about these two-man attacks, sort of a combination mugging and pickpocket crime. But how did Eric wind up here? How did they even know who he was?”

Strombeck said, “Fair enough question. The muggers got his wallet but they left his BlackBerry. The cover was broken when he hit the sidewalk but the innards still work. It was easy to trace his ID from that. We sent a unit to Watergate to fetch Mrs. Coffman. She asked us to call the daughter.” He paused. “And the dinner guest.”

Marvia asked, “What was your meeting with Coffman about?”

“This Gordian House copyright problem. I don't see why—”

“Looks unconnected,” Strombeck said. “But still … do you think somebody wanted to kill Mr. Coffman? That the whole mugging incident was a cover?”

“I don't know.”

But the whole case had started with an apparently random homicide. Now almost another? Six degrees of separation, Lindsey thought, Will Smith playing the innocent-seeming con man. Somebody killed Gordon Simmons. Somebody almost killed Eric Coffman. Simmons to Chocron to Lindsey to Coffman to one killer or two killers or … or maybe the whole thing was just a case of tragic coincidence.

“First lesson I ever learned from Dorothy Yamura,” Marvia was saying, “‘There really are such things as coincidences, but they make me nervous.' Maybe this really is a coincidence. Maybe it isn't.”

Lindsey promised to drop in at police headquarters the next day to give a formal statement. “Do you think the other people at that meeting in Eric's office should come in, too?” That was his last question of the night.

The answer was, “Probably not. Not right now, anyway.”

Lindsey went back to his room at the Woodfin and ordered a sandwich and a pot of coffee from room service. The sandwich might have been gourmet quality and the coffee Jamaican Blue Mountain brewed to perfection. Or a slice of paper between two chunks of cardboard and the dregs of yesterday's breakfast—he would never have known. He chewed and swallowed and sipped and gulped and didn't taste anything.

Too bad he wasn't Robert Montgomery or maybe Mitchum or some other movie eye. He would have opened a bottle of whiskey and drunk himself to sleep.

Too bad this wasn't a movie.

*   *   *

He'd spent the night dozing and waking, faces of the characters in this weird charade swirling overhead like soap bubbles circling the drain in a bathtub. By morning he was still far from a solution, but at least he felt that the pieces were starting to fall into place. He connected his laptop to the Internet and sent a report to Richelieu in Denver.

He grabbed a Danish and a glass of apple juice, retrieved his Avenger, and drove to Berkeley Police Headquarters. He picked up his visitor's badge again and waited for an escort to a cramped conference room. As he made his way down the grim hallway he glanced through a window into an office where a middle-aged couple were in earnest conversation with a female police officer.

Once in Sergeant Strombeck's perfectly ordered office, Marvia Plum sat in on the meeting but she let Strombeck do the work.

*   *   *

Ironically, a conversation was going on in another office a few doors away that might have had an important impact on the meeting concerning Eric Coffman. Nobody knew. Nobody knew.

Officer Celia Varela had been through this kind of conference a hundred times before but it never failed to wrench her guts and challenge her professionalism. Sometimes she felt more like a social worker than a cop. Maybe she should be out there shooting at crooks, bringing in bad guys, and locking them in cells. But this was cop work, too. Finding missing people. Especially missing children. Missing and Exploited Children, that was the unit's name. And working there would break your heart if you let it.