Counterfeit Road (3 page)

‘And what are you doing now?’

‘For work, you mean?’

‘Yeah, for work or school or whatever.’

‘I’m DJ’ing four nights a week but that’s mostly spinning an iPod. It’s bullshit, I know, and not really work but I get paid a little and I’m trying to get something going in the music. I know a lot of musicians, and I’m trying to get into producing.’

‘How badly was the doctor hurt?’

‘Broken wrist, concussion, and some bruises.’

Raveneau would have to check out Candel’s record, but it didn’t change the photos his mom had saved.

‘Let’s talk about your dad. Was he a boat captain?’

Candel stared then smiled.

‘You really don’t know shit about him, do you?’

‘No, I really don’t.’

‘His first name was Jim. He was an airline captain not some fucking crab boat captain. He flew for the Navy in the Vietnam War and then for some airline that went out of business. Pan something.’

‘Pan Am?’

‘Yeah, Pan Am and then United Airlines between Hawaii and San Francisco. That was his gig, a bus driver in the sky. He did the Honolulu run for a long time. My mom was like the stewardess he got pregnant then ditched. But even when he dumped her she was still in love with him. She never would have made this call. She would never give you this box. She’d be crying right now if she could see me giving up the great Captain Jim Frank, asshole of the skies.’

‘Did she call him Captain Frank?’

‘She called him Captain. Is that weird or what?’

‘How close were you and your mom?’

‘Yeah, I know how I sound, but we were tight. My mom and I were close.’

‘Do you miss her?’

‘I definitely miss her.’

That quieted him for a moment, and then he signaled the bartender, ready for another. After he got the bartender’s attention he started sliding the rubber band holding the shoebox top on. It snapped before he could do that. He lifted the lid. He moved his drink to make room and said, ‘She was in a van with this friend of hers and this guy ran a red and hit them on Folsom.’

‘It must have been very hard.’

‘It was really horrible. I dream about it a lot, but the thing was it looked like she was going to pull through. She was talking again. Then she had a bad night and I was there the next morning when Dr Leonard came through. He’s the doctor I knocked down. There was another doctor or wannabe, an intern who was worried about her, but Leonard shut her down. I overheard it. Probably none of it would have happened if I hadn’t heard Leonard say he had an appointment and he’d be back in at three that afternoon.

‘But he didn’t come in until like seven o’clock, and basically by the time they figured out she had an infection it was too late. Her internal injuries were so bad she went fast. But, OK, I know you’re just here for the photos. Thing is, she’s in some of these.’

‘I’ll get copies made and get this back to you.’

‘I just want the ones of her back. I don’t care about him or any of the slides or any of the rest.’

‘I’m going to make copies and get everything else back to you. Keep going with your story about Dr Leonard.’

‘After she died, I blamed him and started following him, like stalking him, weird stuff I would never picture myself doing. At first I was going to kill him. In the end I just kind of tackled him hard and he hit his head on a car bumper and trashed his wrist on the street. I totally lost it.’

He took a sip of the new drink then turned to Raveneau.

‘I was like waiting my whole childhood for my dad to show up because my mom made it sound like it was always just about to happen. But he never showed, you know, never once.’

‘What was your mom’s name?’

‘Allyson. Allyson Candel.’ He took a significant swallow, halved his drink. ‘I hated him from the time I was twelve. I’m hoping you take him down.’

‘Is that why you called? I’m wondering because I’m picking up some resentment toward your father.’

Candel smiled at that. He smiled and his face completely changed.

‘You’ve got a sense of humor, dude. Here he is. This is him in the war, the one in Vietnam.’

He handed Raveneau a photo of a young man standing near the nose of a fighter jet on the deck of what was probably an aircraft carrier.

‘You look like him.’

‘Except I’m a failure and he was flying jets when he was my age. Here’s another with his friends from the war. They all stayed friends. That one on the right was his best friend. I don’t remember his name. Here’s one when he flew for United.’

Raveneau studied a photo of Jim Frank in a United Airlines uniform and then glanced at Candel. Candel didn’t need any DNA test. This was father and son, right to the cowlick on Candel’s left side. Good looking guy, Captain Frank. Raveneau didn’t doubt he attracted women. Candel handed him another six or seven photos and Frank had his arm around the waist of a woman in a bikini. Frank wore bright red swim trunks. Surf broke behind them.

The next photo and the one after it were landscape shots. ‘Where were these taken?’

Candel shook his head. ‘Don’t know, probably Hawaii. He lived there. He definitely lived there when she was there.’

‘Which island?’

‘Check out the back of the photo.’

Raveneau flipped it over and read ‘The house, Big Island.’

Candel slid the box toward him.

‘Got to go, dude, my friends are here.’

‘Give me your cell number.’

Candel scratched his number on a bar napkin and waved at two young women and a man working their way through the bar crowd. Before moving on, he said, ‘I want one thing in return. You bust him, I want to be there.’

‘He’s not a suspect.’

‘When he becomes one, when you go after him, you call me. Give me your word on that, man.’

‘I’m not going to do that, but I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll talk more.’

FIVE

C
eleste sat under a street light on the curb next to a dumpster, a black plastic garbage can on wheels next to her like a best friend. He tasted dust and sweat as he kissed her, and when he emptied the garbage can Sheetrock dust billowed out and enveloped him. He had a pretty good idea what her answer would be, but asked anyway.

‘How did it go?’

‘We failed all the inspections. Want to see?’

She showed him where the fire marshal who had reviewed and stamped the plans months ago now wanted her to add two more fire sprinkler heads. That meant draining the system, cutting into the walls, adding the sprinkler heads, patching, painting, and calling for another re-inspection. The Sheetrock dust that had spread through the almost finished space was from cutting into the finished walls.

‘It’s like fallout,’ she said. ‘It’s everywhere.’

There was also a code problem with the main flue and she unfolded a Health Department correction notice on the bar top for him to read. This was the day she had hoped to have everything to do with the City of San Francisco signed off and done. She pointed at two employees of the mechanical sub and said softly, ‘Double overtime,’ then brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek and acknowledged, ‘They’ve got me. I can’t do anything about it. Sprinkler sub is back at six in the morning. I have to get it done. I have to pay the overtime. The tables are delivering tomorrow. I don’t know where I’m going to put them.’

‘What does this do to opening day?’

‘I’m opening no matter what.’

Raveneau thought about Captain Frank and Ryan Candel’s story as he helped her clean. It was another hour and a half before the mechanical subcontractor finished. After he left they ate sandwiches and split a salad and a bottle of red wine at a place that served until midnight.

Then they went back to his place, an apartment on top of an industrial building at the edge of China Basin. Wind blew off the bay tonight and there was rain coming, but it was just the wind right now and he sat out on the deck as Celeste showered. The night was cold though not too cold and it felt good to sit out here and think. When he turned Celeste was in a T-shirt and otherwise naked.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

‘Holding on to the day.’

‘How would you like to come in and hold me instead?’

SIX

B
efore dawn Raveneau was back in the Homicide office. Yesterday he’d borrowed a portable ultraviolet light from the crime scene guys. He plugged it in now and spun la Rosa’s lamp around to use as a second light. Two one-hundred dollar bills lay on the desk in front of him. One was a new 2011 bill in the current style and the other taken from the sixty-one counterfeit notes before turning the rest over to the Secret Service.

The Krueger bill was tattered where the bullet had passed through it. La Rosa called them the shot-dead notes, and that wasn’t a bad name. He turned on her desk light and adjusted it to the highest brightness, then held up the new one hundred dollar bill first. With light shining through, it was easy to see the tiny print that read
USA one hundred dollars
. Using a magnifying glass he read
United States of America
and saw the embedded American flag. When he turned on the ultraviolet light and held the bill under it the threads turned red in the light.

He turned off the ultraviolet light and moved the new one hundred dollar bill back under the desk lamp, studying the watermark, a shadow of Ben Franklin alongside his face on the bill. The Treasury started making these changes in 1990 and steadily improved on them. The shot-dead bill had none of them. He picked up a counterfeit-detector felt pen and marked the tattered bill. This was stuff store clerks did daily, either holding the bill up to light or using the pen. The pen reacted with starch binders and acid. Genuine US notes were starchless and acid free, and he waited for the counterfeit bill to turn brown, but it stayed yellow.

He made another mark on it then marked the new bill to test the pen. It stayed yellow as it should. Raveneau wasn’t sure what to make of the counterfeit bill not reacting. Either the pen was defective or the counterfeit bill was printed on starch-free paper back in 1989. But that wouldn’t have been easy to do. He held it up again and it was still yellow.

He had learned that all the embedding was in response to counterfeiting, in particular to the supernotes. The supernotes scared Treasury and ever since US bills kept evolving. The latest had a textured surface, but given the way things had gone, the way printing also evolved, that wasn’t going to be enough either. Neither was his trying to learn about counterfeiting. He unplugged the lights and slid the ultraviolet under his desk. He put la Rosa’s light back where she liked it to sit, then adjusted it. He put the shot-dead bill back in an evidence bag and sent la Rosa a text before riding the elevator down.

It was still early when he walked out but he guessed Lim would be there by now. He walked to his car. Someone once likened the end of the peninsula where San Francisco was built to a thumb pushed out into the bay. Raveneau drove to the southeastern side past the desolate poverty of the Bayview and beyond the old power plant out to the crime lab in Hunter’s Point with Allyson Candel’s shoebox in a plastic bag on the passenger seat next to him.

At the crime lab Howard Lim who headed the lab slid it out of the bag and with gloves on opened the top.

‘You’ve handled these already. Why didn’t you bring them here when you first got them?’

‘I just got them last night. I won them in a card game.’

‘You see, you’re getting old. When you were younger you would have driven them straight out.’ He looked over at Raveneau and shook his head. ‘You should see yourself. I hear the medical examiner comes up every afternoon to just make sure you’re alive and not a cold case. If you’ve already handled everything why did you come out here to bother me?’

‘I want to know what you can tell me about the photos.’

Banter aside, Lim got it. He understood. He was an avid photographer, had been for decades. He sifted through. There were seventeen photos and a handful of Kodachrome slides. Six of the photos he set aside, glancing at Raveneau, saying ‘Polaroid. You remember Polaroid. Seems so long, long ago now, like when you were fifty.’

In one of the six Polaroids a dark-haired woman swam beneath a waterfall. Raveneau thumbed through the shots and left the waterfall picture on top. Lim adjusted his glasses, looked at Raveneau, started to say something and didn’t. He picked up a small black and white of Jim Frank in his Navy uniform.

‘In Honolulu there used to be these photo booths for sailors. This is from one of them.’

‘Taken when?’

‘I guess early 1970s.’

‘Is your family still in Hawaii?’

‘Some are. My father is. He’s old but he still drives. In Hawaii it is OK to drive when you are older. Everyone drives slower, not like some old crazy detective in San Francisco trying to catch a killer who is already dead.’ Lim turned. ‘What connects now to this killing?’

‘I don’t know yet but it ties to counterfeiting and a victim who once worked for the Secret Service and later possibly other US agencies.’

‘A spy?’

‘I haven’t learned much yet about what he was doing, but I think he was trying to penetrate counterfeiting rings.’

Raveneau and Lim came in the same year. Then, Lim was black-haired and smooth-faced, and ever-so-serious about crime lab techniques and cross contamination. He was much more easy-going now. He set the photo booth shot of Jim Frank trying to look like Robert Mitchum or James Dean in uniform off to the side. He picked up another black and white. He kept the banter going because it helped him think.

‘You need to sit down, rest your back?’ Lim asked. ‘You want to get your walker out of your car?’

‘No, I rode a bike out here. I exercise every couple of hours. I’ve got two marathons next weekend, both are on Saturday.’

‘That’s probably the only way to get blood to your brain now. Other agencies you say, maybe the CIA?’

‘The original inspectors actually thought it was possible, but I don’t have any reason to believe that.’

‘You don’t have any reason yet.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Very careful slow inspector and . . .’ Lim seemed to forget where he was going with that. He picked up one of the 4 x 6 photos and said, ‘Hapuna Beach.’