Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels) (11 page)

“I don’t know nothing about it,” he said. He was a big guy with a beer belly, loose, wet lips, and dim little eyes.
Two brain cells and one of them is usually passed out drunk,
Helen Alvarez had said. Good description. “What you want to bother me for?”

“I thought you might have some idea of who’s behind the vandalism.”

“Not me. Old lady Alvarez thinks it’s them real estate people that tried to steal my aunt’s house. Why don’t you go talk to them?”

“I already did. They deny any involvement.”

“Lying bastards,” he said.

“Maybe. You been out to see your aunt lately?”

“Not since I fixed her busted window. Why?”

“Well, you’re her only relative. She could use some moral support.”

“Some what?”

“Comfort. A friendly face.”

“Yeah, well, she’s got Alvarez and her brother to take care of her. She don’t need me hanging around.” He helped himself to a long pull from his schooner, smacked his lips. The blonde nuzzled his shoulder and gave him a vacuously adoring look. “Besides, she gives me the creeps.”

“Your aunt does? Why?”

“She’s about half-nuts. What’s that disease old people get?
Al
something?”

“Alzheimer’s. But she’s not afflicted with that.”

“Afflicted,” Doyle said, as if it were a dirty word he didn’t quite understand.

“She’s not senile, either. Pretty much in possession of all her faculties, I’d say.”

“All her what?”

I sighed. “Brains.”

“That’s what you think. How many times you talked to her?”

“Once.”

“Once. Hah. Spend time over there, you’ll see what I mean. Babbles on about crazy stuff. Ghosts, for Chrissake. Her dead husband’s friggin’ ghost.”

“Tell me, Mr. Doyle, do you stand to inherit her estate?”

“Huh?”

“Do you get her house and property when she dies?”

His dim little eyes showed faint glimmers of light. “Yeah, that’s right. So what? You think it’s me doing all that crap to her?”

“I’m just asking questions.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like your questions. You can’t pin it on me.”

“I’m not trying to pin anything on you. Trying to get at the truth, that’s all.”

“Told you, man, I got no truth for you. I got nothing for you.” He sucked at the schooner again, dribbling a little beer down his chin this time. “Last Saturday night, when them rosebushes of hers was dug up, I was in Reno with a couple of buddies. And when that damn cat got poisoned, me and Melanie here was together the whole night at her place.” He nudged the blonde with a dirty elbow. “Wasn’t we, kid?”

Melanie giggled, belched delicately, said, “Whoops, excuse me,” and giggled again. Then she frowned and said, “What’d you ask me, honey?”

“Wednesday night,” Doyle said.

“What about Wednesday night?”

“We was together the whole night, wasn’t we? At your place?”

“Oh, sure,” Melanie said, “all night,” and the giggle popped out again. “You’re a real man, Charley, that’s what you are.”

Doyle nodded once, emphatically, and said to me, “There, you see? You satisfied now?”

“For the time being. But I might need corroborating evidence later on.”

“Huh?”

I slid out of the booth and left the two of them sucking beer and rubbing on each other again. Once of those perfect matches, Doyle and Melanie, that you know exist but fortunately seldom encounter. Four tiny brain cells, drunk or sober, united against the world.

.   .   .

K
erry wasn’t home yet—she had a late meeting at Bates and Carpenter, one of many that had become necessary since her promotion to agency vice president—but Emily was there, working on her computer. We’d instructed her to come straight home after school and I didn’t have to ask her if she’d obeyed. When she was told to do something, she did it without failure or question. Always had until this drug business, anyway.

She had a thin little smile for me, but the sadness and hurt still showed in her eyes. I asked her what she was working on; she said research for an American history project. Two minutes on that subject and then we got down to what was on both our minds.

On the way home I’d worked up a different approach than the ones we’d used before—an appeal to her good judgment and common sense. “Emily, I know you hate to break promises, but this cocaine business is different—it’s a serious adult issue. A promise to your parents is more important than one to a friend or schoolmate.”

Her gaze held steady on mine. “I didn’t break my promise to you.”

“Not about using drugs, but bringing cocaine home amounts to the same thing. Unless you had an innocent reason for doing it. Did you?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me what it was.”

“I can’t. I don’t want anyone to be hurt.”

“It’s too late for that. You’re hurt; Kerry and I are hurt.”

“Not as bad as they’ll be hurt.”

“They? More than one person?”

“No. Just . . . no.”

They. Meaning “he or she.” Grammar was one of Emily’s best subjects; she’d used the plural on purpose, to disguise the person’s sex.

What I said next went against my principles, but if it was the only way to pry the truth out of her, then I was willing to make the sacrifice. Kerry would be, too. You can’t police the entire world, especially the complex and volatile segment inhabited by teenagers. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Emily. I’ll make
you
a promise. If all you did was bring that box home to protect a friend, and that friend isn’t pressuring you in any way, then all you have to do is tell us who and why and we’ll let the matter drop. No one will ever know you told us.”

She shook her head. “That’s a promise you wouldn’t keep, Dad.”

“Why do you say that? I’m not a promise breaker any more than you are.”

“I know, but . . .”

“But what?”

Silence. Her gaze shifted to the computer screen. You could almost see her withdrawing again, the muscles in her face tightening, the remoteness coming back into her eyes.

“Tell me about the box,” I said.

“What about it?”

“Did you talk to the person it belongs to today?”

No immediate response. Thinking about it, and squirming a little in her chair as if the memory was causing her some discomfort. It was almost a minute before she said, “The person I thought it belonged to, yes.”

“Thought it belonged to?”

“It doesn’t. It’s not theirs, the box or what was in it. I was wrong.”

“You sure about that?”

“I believe them,” she said, but there was something in her voice that made me think she might not be completely convinced.

“Did the person ask you what happened to the cocaine?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“I told them. How Mom found the box . . . everything.”

“Were they upset?”

“Sort of.”

“Did they want you to get it back? Turn it over to them?”

“No, they’re not like that. They don’t have any idea who it belongs to.”

“Ask you not to tell us their name?”

“. . . Yes. But it’s not what you think. They don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression.”

“That they’re the one doing coke, you mean.”

“Yes. Because they’re not.”

“Emily, where did you find the box?

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Emily . . .”

“You’ll know if I tell you and I can’t . . . I
can’t.
”

“All right. You didn’t see it being lost, did you?”

“No. I found it afterward, later.”

“Then why did you think it belonged to this person you talked to today?”

Headshake.

“Did somebody else tell you who owned it?”

“No. I . . . saw it once before.”

“In this person’s possession?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you go to the person right away after you found it?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

Headshake. Like trying to pry out splinters with a fork.

I said, “Did you open the box before you brought it home?”

“No. Not until after I got home. I wish I hadn’t; I wish I’d never seen what was inside.”

“Would you have returned the box with the cocaine still in it?”

“I don’t think so. I might’ve just thrown it away. Or come to you and Mom, asked you what to do.”

“But once you were sure whose box it was, you felt you couldn’t do that.”

“No, I . . . No.”

“Why? Why is this person so special to you?”

“Please, Dad. Please. They didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong, I don’t want them to be hurt.” The raspy breath she drew seemed to make her small body tremble. “I just want everything to be the way it was before.”

“That can’t happen, Emily.”

“I know it can’t,” she said, and she started to cry. Suddenly, without sound—tears leaking out of her eyes, glistening silver on her smooth cheeks. My immediate impulse was to go around the desk and take her in my arms, hold her, tell her everything would be all right. But it was the wrong thing to do; the time for comfort and reassurance was after confession, not before.

I left her alone, went and sat in my chair in the living room,
and tried to make some sense of the few little snippets of information I’d gotten out of her. She’d found the box somewhere, had seen it before and knew who it belonged to, but hadn’t known what was in it until she got it home. All right. But why had she later gone to him or her and promised to keep the person’s identity secret? Why so protective?

An idea occurred to me, one I should have thought of before. I’d locked the box in the mini-safe in Kerry’s and my bedroom closet; the little plastic vial was still in it, but the cocaine was long gone down the sewer. There was a strong halogen lamp on the desk in Kerry’s home office, a twin to the one in Emily’s room; I took the box in there, shut the door, switched the lamp on, and emptied out the cotton and the plastic vial. Then I rummaged around in the desk drawer until I found her big fold-out magnifying glass.

On the first squint through the glass I couldn’t make out anything on the inside or outside of the box except scratches, wear marks, and a couple of tiny dents. I looked again, examining both sides of the lid, all four outer sides, the bottom. Nothing. One more time—

Something.

I was holding the box at an upward angle, with one lower corner in the center of the lens. What had seemed like random scratches before, one on each lower corner edge, took on a different aspect then. And I was seeing what Emily must have seen when she studied the box as I was doing now. Smart kid—smarter in some ways than her sometimes slow adoptive father.

Initials. Two of them, etched into the soft bronze-colored tin, probably a long time ago, because handling and rubbing had made them virtually invisible to the naked eye.

Z.U.

My first impulse was to go back into Emily’s room and confront her again. Wrong move; I didn’t do it. She wouldn’t tell me who Z.U. was.

There was another way to find out.
Z.U.
was a fairly uncommon set of initials, and whoever owned them figured to be somebody Emily knew at Whitney Middle School. As Tamara said often enough, you can find out anything on the Internet if you have a starting point—anything at all.

Deron Stewart called her cell late Thursday morning. Pretty fast response time, but she’d hoped it would be even faster—last night, before she went to bed. She hadn’t slept much. Pins and needles, waiting. Shouldn’t be this wired; the phony Lucas hadn’t hurt her that badly, not nearly as much as he could have. But she couldn’t help how she felt. Hunger for revenge can do funny things to you.

Bill was in his office, with the connecting door open as usual. She told Stewart to hold on, took her phone out through the anteroom into the hallway. Nobody out there. She moved away from the door, over toward the stairs.

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Hawkins just called,” Stewart said. “Suggested we meet for drinks tonight at six o’clock.”

“With Zeller?”

“I asked him that; he said he wasn’t sure. So I left it there. Didn’t want to push him.”

The right way to handle it. But frustration dug at her again anyway. “Where’re you meeting Doctor Easy?”

“Place called the Twilight Lounge, on Ocean near his office.”

“Twilight Lounge. Okay. Make sure you take the voice-activated recorder along.”

“No worries. I’ve got it covered.”

“Call me afterward, soon as you’re alone.”

“Right. You sure you don’t want me to follow Zeller if he shows up?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

T
he Twilight Lounge was in the three-block business section of Ocean Avenue that ran between 19th Avenue and Junipero Serra Boulevard. Professional offices, shops, restaurants, taverns, and the usual limited street parking.

Tamara got there a couple of minutes after five, heading west off Serra. Neither Doctor Easy’s office nor the Twilight Lounge was in the first block, and that was fine, because she lucked into a parking space close to the intersection. She was wearing her coat buttoned all the way up, a scarf, and a wool cap she’d had for years and kept in the car. Not because of the weather, although it was cold and foggy out here near the ocean. Wasn’t much chance Hawkins or the phony Lucas would be on the street this early, but when you were setting up a stakeout you never trusted to chance. Another lesson Bill had taught her.

She walked down toward Lagunitas, not dawdling, checking out the storefronts lining both sides of the street. The Twilight Lounge was mid-block on the south side near where the M line streetcar tracks crossed. Hawkins’s office would be somewhere in the next block west, down toward 19th. Over where she was on the north side, diagonally opposite the Twilight, there was a Chinese restaurant with a window overlooking the street and tables set next to it inside. Perfect.

As early as it was, there were only two customers in the restaurant, and neither of them was sitting by the window. She claimed the table with the best view of the Twilight’s entrance. A middle-aged Chinese waitress came over and Tamara ordered a pot of tea. Quarter past five now—forty-five minutes to wait. Longer, maybe a lot longer, if the phony Lucas showed up. She could linger over the tea until six, but not much past that without ordering food. Worry about that when the time came. Right now, as tense as she was, the thought of food made her stomach clench up.