Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels) (17 page)

Belasco lifted his head, aimed a moist, beseeching look at my client. “I never meant for Margaret to die, Helen. You got to believe that. Just force her out of there so Charley could take over the house, that’s all. I like her, she’s been a good neighbor. I never meant to hurt her.”

Mrs. Alvarez wasn’t buying any of that. She called him a couple more names, one of which surprised me and made him cringe. He hid his face in his hands again.

Another small mind at work. Half-wits and knaves, fools and assholes—more of each than ever before, proliferating like weeds in what had started out as a pristine garden. It’s a hell of a world we live in, I thought. A hell of a mess we’re making of the garden.

H
elen Alvarez and I left Belasco sitting there on his stoop—he wasn’t going anywhere; he had no place to go and he knew it—and went in to gently break the news to Margaret Abbott. I thought it might be a difficult job, that she’d be shocked and upset hearing that her nephew and a longtime neighbor had both betrayed her trust, but she took it better than I’d expected. I guess maybe you get philosophical about most things, even the evils in the world, when you’re eighty-five. Mrs. Alvarez had been and still was considerably more outraged than Mrs. Abbott.

While we were talking, Spike came into the room and hopped up on Mrs. Abbott’s lap. She said, stroking him, “You’re a hero, dear. Yes, you are.” Then she sighed and asked me, “Will both Charley and Everett go to prison?”

“If you press charges against them, they’ll probably get some jail time.”

“For how long?”

“Breaking and entering, trespassing, malicious destruction of property, intent to defraud, intent to inflict bodily harm . . . with a strict judge, they could each get three years or more.”

“Oh. That seems like a long time.”

“Not long enough, if you ask me,” Helen Alvarez said. “Not
nearly
long enough.”

“Do I have to press charges against them?”

The question surprised Mrs. Alvarez. She said, “Of course
you do, Margaret. After what they put you through? How could you
not
press charges?”

“I don’t know. Three years behind bars . . .”

“Margaret, listen to me; you can’t just let them walk away from this. What if they try something like it again? They could, you know. They’re just stupid and venal enough, both of them.”

“I suppose you’re right. But still . . .”

My cell phone, with its burbling ringtone, interrupted the discussion. Inconvenient as usual, but at least this time I wasn’t in the car driving.

Tamara. “I’ve got that name you asked for this morning. Z.U. at Whitney Middle School.”

“Hold on a minute.” I excused myself, went out onto the front porch. “Okay, go ahead.”

“Zachary Ullman. He’s the only Z.U. at the school.”

“What’s his record like?”

“Clean,” she said. “Never been in trouble. Not even so much as a parking ticket.”

“Parking ticket? A middle school student can’t be old enough to drive.”

“He’s not a student. Is that what you thought?”

“What is he, then?”

“He’s a teacher,” Tamara said. “History and social studies. Been at Whitney eleven years.”

My God. The tin box, the cocaine . . . one of Emily’s
teachers!

Third time roaming around the Western Addition was the charm.

One light brown five-year-old Buick LeSabre parked on Steiner Street a block and a half from Psychic Readings by Alisha.

She’d left work early, headed over to the neighborhood again—compulsive about it now—and her figuring had finally paid off. Fresh excitement made her thump the steering wheel with her fist. She hunted up a parking space for the Toyota, hurried back to the Buick. The right front fender hadn’t been visible when she drove by, but she knew it would be scraped and dinged, and it was. No question this was Lucas’s car.

She looked both ways along the street. A few pedestrians, but no familiar black face. First thing, she noted the license plate number and quickly wrote it down. Then, casually, as if she owned the damn thing, she tried the passenger side door. Locked. She bent to peer through the window. Front seat: empty. Backseat: empty except for a light jacket that she didn’t recognize. Another check of the passersby, and around to the
driver’s door. Also locked. So no chance at whatever ID items, such as an insurance card, he might keep in the dash compartment.

Not that it mattered, necessarily. The plate number would be enough to ID the registered owner—either Lucas or Mama. Unless they’d switched license plates for some reason . . .

Better not be another dead end, Tamara thought. Not when she was so close . . . better not be.

I
t wasn’t.

The Buick’s owner was Alisha J. Delman, with an address in Oxnard. So that was where Mama and Lucas had come from, Southern California. Where they’d been living when the car was registered five years ago, anyhow.

Tamara text-messaged Felice at the SFPD to ask for a quick callback. When Felice complied a few minutes later, she grumbled—as Marjorie at the DMV had grumbled—about being called on too often lately. Some smooth-talking and the promise of a few extra dollars for services rendered and Felice gave in and agreed to run Alisha J. Delman’s name through the system.

“Do it ASAP, okay? If you find anything, call me right away. And if there’s a mug shot in the file, e-mail it to me.”

“Hey, I can’t do that,” Felice said. “Information is one thing, but I can’t be e-mailing files—”

“Oh, hell, Felice. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder down there.”

“Not right now, maybe. But there’s a review coming up next month.”

“You worried about that?”

“No, not really, but—”
“Just this one time. I won’t ask again.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ve heard that before. Why do you want a mug shot? You’re not planning to download it, show it to anybody?”

“No. Just for my own information. I’ll delete it right away.”

“. . . All right, I’ll do it for another fifty.”

“Damn, girl! You getting greedy now?”

“I need the money, Tam.”

“I’ll give you twenty-five.”

“Uh-uh. Got to be fifty for something like this.”

Everybody had their hand out these days, not that you could blame them with the economy in the tank. The fifty dollars would have to come out of her pocket, too.

“Okay, fifty. But this one time only.”

“Same with e-mailing files,” Felice said.

She called back twenty minutes later. And the info she had was worth five times fifty dollars.

Alisha J. Delman, fifty-three years old, African American, had a record dating back to the mid-1980s. Misdemeanors, mostly, in the L.A. and San Diego areas: operating illegal fortune-telling businesses and offering psychic-reading services without a license. But there were two felony charges, one for a bait-and-switch con game, the other for a charity swindle that sounded like it might be the prototype of Operation Save—bilking investors in a nonexistent company that was supposed to help black home owners avoid foreclosure. She’d served two years in Tehachapi for her part in the swindle.

But that wasn’t the best part.

The best part was that Alisha J. Delman’s partner in the charity con was her son from an early marriage, Antoine Delman, who also had a record—petty theft, impersonating a
police officer for purposes of fraud, bunco schemes like the bait-and-switch con—and who’d also been convicted and also served time in prison for the same swindle.

Antoine. Antoine Delman.

And Mama really was his mama.

Alisha and Antoine, the two A’s—
A
for “Assholes.” Everything Tamara had thought they were, and more.

Felice e-mailed a mug shot of him as well as Alisha and that proved it beyond any doubt. He hadn’t worn a mustache back then, but there was no mistaking that blocky face and hooked nose and receding hairline. Mama surprised Tamara a little. From that scratchy old voice on the phone she’d expected a witchlike crone, but Alisha was just the opposite—slim and attractive, with the big soulful eyes of a black madonna. No wonder she’d been able to run her psychic scams so easily.

D
ecision time again.

If Antoine and Alisha had been wanted for anything, what to do now would’ve been an easy choice: call the law and turn them in. But they’d served their sentences and they weren’t fugitives. And as far as Tamara knew or could prove, they hadn’t actually done anything in the Bay Area yet except five-finger the real Lucas Zeller’s briefcase, a theft that couldn’t be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and set up their marks for a new version of the black charity con. Money had to change hands, a large sum of it, in front of witnesses in order for a felony fraud charge to stick.

She could still go to the police, but it wouldn’t be easy convincing them to act. All she had was conjecture—no evidence or corroborative witnesses. Bringing Deron Stewart in wouldn’t do any good; all he knew was what she’d told him,
what she’d hired him to do. The fraud inspectors would want to know who she was representing, the details of her investigation, where she’d gotten the data on the Delmans’ criminal histories. No way would she compromise Felice, and the truth about why she was after the Delmans would make her actions look like a personal vendetta (which it damn well was) and might even leave her open to charges of misuse of her license for acting as her own unpaid client.

The only way to get quick action was with evidence that kept the cops’ focus off of her and on Antoine and Mama and their con game. That meant finding out more about how they’d set it up, how much money they’d scored so far, and when they were expecting the rest to be paid. It also meant convincing at least one of the victims that they were being conned, then convincing them to take a trip to the Hall of Justice.

Four options there. No, make that three. Wait and do nothing until after the down-low club’s meeting on Saturday night was out. Deron Stewart might be able to get her some of what she needed and he might not; he might even screw up and blow the whole deal. If the two A’s got even a whiff that their scam had been found out, they’d take off like a shot.

Okay, three options—the three people she knew for sure were marks. Doctor Easy, Viveca Inman, Judge Alfred Mantle. Which one had the most knowledge? Which one was the most vulnerable?

Doctor Easy? No. She just wasn’t sure enough of where he stood. A man with a past record like his was as untrustworthy as they made ’em.

Inman? No. She knew Mama, she knew about Operation Save, but she might be hard to convince if Alisha had her hooks in deep enough. People into psychics the way Viveca
Inman was would fight like hell to keep from admitting they’d put their faith in crooks.

That left Judge Mantle. She thought about him a little, and . . . oh yeah, he was the best choice. The perfect choice, matter of fact—just so long as she stayed cool and handled him the right way, no mistakes.

Z
achary David Ullman lived in Daly City, in one of the houses that march in long, close ranks up and down across the spines of the hills overlooking Candlestick Park, the bay, SFO. Ticky-tacky houses, Malvina Reynolds called them in her sixties song “Little Boxes.” Ullman’s was exactly like all the others on his street except for its color, dark brown with pale blue trim, and a couple of stunted yew trees along the front wall next to the garage.

It was after five when I pulled up in front. Fog rolled sinuously along the winding street, up and around the houses, blotting out the bay view. Three hundred days a year it would be either foggy or windy up here; the people who bought these homes on one of the few clear days and expected to enjoy regular sunny vistas would always be disappointed.

I sat in the car for a couple of minutes, looking over at Ullman’s house. A not very new Hyundai sat on the cracked concrete driveway and there was a light on behind a curtained front window above the garage, so he was home. He apparently lived alone; the only blot, if you could call it that, on his exemplary record was a divorce nine years ago. He was thirty-five, had no children of his own.

Anger had ridden with me on the drives to the condo to pick up the tin box and then on up here, but I had it tamped down now. Mostly. I wanted to be sure I was in complete control before I went over there and had my talk with Ullman. Getting in his face, hurling accusations, figured to be counterproductive. The situation called for a more subtle approach. I had no real proof that the tin box belonged to him; the fact that he was the only Z.U. at Whitney Middle School was circumstantial at best. You had to be very careful in a case like this, where a man’s livelihood and reputation were at stake. The last thing I could afford was a lawsuit.

Still, I had a feeling he was the right Z.U. Emily always responded to authority figures; I should have remembered that. She was more likely to believe and let herself be talked into protecting a teacher than one of her classmates. It wasn’t the probable fact that Ullman was a recreational coke user that had me so upset; it was the way he’d used and manipulated Emily. That and bringing cocaine onto school grounds, as he must have done, and then being careless enough to lose the box there. Where else would she have found it?

Okay. I got out and crossed the street, hunching against the bite of the wind-driven fog. The entrance to Ullman’s house was on the side away from the garage, up a short, inclined path and a short flight of concrete steps. A few seconds after I rang the bell, a dead-bolt lock clicked and the door swung inward.

He was slightly built, with regular features and thinning caramel-colored hair, wearing slacks and a tan sweater with suede elbow patches. He did a mild double take when he saw me, his eyes widening and blinking—soft brown eyes, like a melancholy hound’s, eyes that could melt the heart of a naïve
thirteen-year-old girl. Expecting someone else, I thought, and caught off balance to see a stranger standing here instead. None too pleased about it. And suddenly nervous.

“Yes? May I help you?”