Hungry Ghosts (26 page)

“I don't know enough to say.”

But I did.

C
HAPTER
25

T
HE
H
ALL OF
J
USTICE
is not in a safe neighborhood. Jails so rarely are. Dusk had come and gone. The wind had picked up. I was still in a sweater and loose pants, garments two seasons short of adequate for this winter night. My sleeves and pants flapped in the wind, creating an extra-cold backlash. Cars, trucks, and enough SUVs to add a degree to global warming whipped by. Not one cab! I dialed Webb Morratt. The suspiciously omnipresent Morratt didn't answer.

A horn blared.

Had I misjudged Webb?

No. A bright red Mini Cooper screeched across four lanes of traffic to the curb. “Give you a lift?” Korematsu asked.

“Do you think brains gave out in my family after the sixth kid?”

“I'm off duty.”

“Good for you.”

“Get in. This isn't a good neighborhood to be standing around in.”

“It's not a good neighborhood to get in a car with a dangerous man.”

He pushed open the passenger door. “Listen, we're on the same side here. I want to help you.”

“Fine. Release Leo.”

“I'd like to. Give me a reason.”

“You've interviewed him. Surely you don't believe he's a murderer.”

He started to speak but caught himself and his silence inflated all my fears about Leo. Leo had the means. Opportunity walked into his room. All that the cops needed was a motive—a melodrama of renewed romantic anguish and long-suppressed revenge would be plenty.

Still, Korematsu'd been waiting for me, which meant he might be open to other possibilities. I swung into the car. “Take me to Jeffrey Hagstrom's shop.”

“We've had a uniform on the shop since morning, you know.” He pulled out and cut across two lanes.

“Of course, you've searched it.”

He didn't answer. Which meant yes.

“No suspicious vials or little bottles?”

He didn't answer that either, not that I'd have expected it. Mostly I was thinking aloud and he was happy to listen in. The answer was no. If he'd found any hint of the toxin Jeffrey had procured for Tia, he wouldn't be tooling around listening to me.

He veered back into the middle lane of Bryant and I exhaled slowly. Even in light traffic there were a million dangers lurking. I'd done the setup for a car gag on a street like this, choreographed trucks backing into lanes, motorcyclists whipping between cars, cyclits jaywalking their bikes, old ladies collapsing in crosswalks, kids running out between cars, and projectiles of all descriptions shooting off every flat spot. If I had to be in this car with Korematsu, I just wished I could say: let me drive.

“You still want to go to Pacific Ave?”

“Let me think. Jeffrey wasn't in his new place or his old one, so where else would he be?”

He focused on the road. I was the anxious one here, desperate to find some lead that would clear Leo. All Korematsu had to do was wait. The
angrier I got, the better his chances. Seeing that didn't calm me down, not hardly.

“What do you know about Webb Morratt—cabbie—shaved head? He's spent more time with Jeffrey than most, drove him around for hours a few days ago. He was waiting for Leo right before Tia was killed. I've had first dates who are less attentive. Run a make on him. See who's bankrolling him. Find him, he's our best lead to Jeffrey.”

He slowed, hung a left on the Embarcadero.

“Do you have a better lead? Why are you waiting?”

He looked straight ahead, pressed his teeth together between parted lips. Finally, he said, “Morratt's strange all right, but Darcy, he's got nothing to do with Tia Dru. He's just on your case. Not that that's not a problem. You could ask your brother—”

“Why would I do that?” I stiffened and assessed his face for a quickly controlled twitch of glee or some more subtle eye shift. I wasn't going to like his reply.

He clicked his teeth slowly, lowers against uppers. “Morratt's in John's stable.”

“What does that mean? He's a snitch?”

“He doesn't have connections worth ratting on. He's just a guy out for a buck. John uses him, for off-the-book things.”

“Like?” I snapped.

“Hey, I'm sorry. He's
your
brother.”

“He
is
my brother. Just what are you accusing him of?”

“Maybe you're better off just asking him.”

“Oh, no, you tossed this accusation out; finish what you've been gearing up to say all along. Like what?”

“Like picking up suspects in the cab, suspects' families, witnesses, and reporting their conversations.”

“That's hardly illegal.”

“I didn't say illegal, I said off-the-books.”

“What exactly do you mean?”
Breaking and entering?
My heart was hammering against my ribs. If Leo's freedom hung on John, Leo'd better like jail a lot.

“I can't tell you anything definite. I can only say that Morratt's been accused before of battery, trespass, and assault, but he's never been charged.”

“You're the king of circumstantial evidence! Sometimes guys aren't charged because they
aren't
guilty. Or there isn't hard evidence. Sometimes cops have legitimate dealings with civilians and those civilians do things unconnected to those dealings during the rest of their lives. Sometimes a murderer picks up the knife lying in the zendo and follows Tia to an empty room and kills her and it has nothing to do with Leo.”

He turned toward me and shook his head. “You know why circumstantial evidence is called that? Because it's evidence. When it pulls the question beyond reasonable doubt, it's as good as an eyewitness.”

“You're so sure you know who's paying Morratt? Let's go ask him.”

Korematsu just stared.

“Hey, he's a cabbie. He's working tonight. Call the cab company.”

Nothing moved but his eyes, which were shifting back and forth as if visualizing a tennis match between the competing choices. For a guy so controlled, it was a huge breakdown. Hadn't anyone ever said, “Dude, you are showing yourself bare!” Maybe it wasn't the kind of unsolicited advice one police detective offered another. But in a minute he had his cell phone at his ear and was talking to someone named Ed. In another minute we were shooting north. In two more, the surprised, then appalled face of Webb Morratt looked toward the source of squealing brakes and watched first me and then Korematsu hoist ourselves out of the Mini.

The cab was in a white zone near Pier 39, one of the city's most crowded tourist spots. A decade ago I had been here when the last private pleasure boat had relinquished the last slip to a herd of sea lions. San Francisco Bay has a short but plentiful run of smelt, an attractive entrée for the sea lions. Their bellies filled with this delicacy, the adolescent males shoved their way up onto the slips to sun between meals. Soon they topped the tourist attraction chart. I had once seen an outraged boater, separated from his craft, charge down the slip at the nearest male. It was as close as I'll ever come to seeing a sea lion laugh. Morratt's expression was akin to the boater's as he scurried back onto the pier. But Webb had nowhere to retreat and no metal mesh door to lock behind him.

Korematsu moved toward Morratt, but I slipped in front of him and began to list for Morratt the times he'd so conveniently happened by where I was. “Who paid you to keep tabs on me? Save yourself time; don't bother lying.”

He looked behind me, as if checking escape routes.

“We're not talking anything illegal, Morratt,” Korematsu prompted. “Anyone can pay a cabbie to make himself available.”

Webb's brow wrinkled.

“We're just asking for information. Information we will appreciate,” Korematsu spoke softly, as if truly requesting a favor.

Webb looked from the detective to me and back. His shoulders relaxed. “Okay. But I didn't tell you, right?”

“Sure,” Korematsu said automatically.

“Who paid me?” He looked down at me. “Your brother, woman. John Lott.”

Korematsu nodded. No glance passed between the two of them, but fingering John was a win-win for them. Maybe Morratt was speaking the truth, maybe not.

“What did he want to know?” I asked.

“The usual. Where you went; who you saw.”

“And?”

He hesitated. “And he wanted to be sure you were safe.”

I laughed. This from the guy who broke into Gary's house.

Korematsu was smiling like he understood the ludicrousness of this, too. But, of course, he didn't know about the break-in. That meant his pleased expression was the result of something else. The triangle I'd created to squeeze Morratt was squeezing no one but John, and Korematsu couldn't hide his satisfaction. Morratt got to shovel dirt on John, and Korematsu got to sift through the pile. Meanwhile, Leo sat in jail.

I put a hand on Morratt's arm. “Give us a moment, Detective.”

I motioned Webb back a couple of steps. The crowd filled in the space. “And the break-in? You searching Gary's office? Who was paying for that?”

He turned and started walking out on the pier. I matched his pace. The pier was the length of two city blocks, closer to a mall than a working wharf. The crowd surged around us, pushing to cross the wooden thoroughfare to fast fish shops, T-shirt outlets, pearl jewelers.

Webb looked straight ahead, concocting his answer. “No one paid me.”

“It took you that long to come up with such a lame lie?”

“No, I—”

I grabbed his arm. “You broke and entered the house of the brother of the guy who's paying you! While he was paying you. How do you think John's going to take that?”

“He's not going to sue me!” Webb snorted. “Not going to press charges, is he?”

“So you're saying a cop has no other means of making your life unpleasant? A cop with a very long memory? Listen, Webb, I've known John many
more years than you; he is not a guy to turn the other cheek. I honestly don't know what he would do if he found out that you broke into his brother's house while his baby sister was asleep there . . .”

Shaking loose, he quickened his pace.

“If I told him . . .”

He leaned toward me but kept walking, veering around the little merry-go-round that lit up the dark. Once we were past it, the crowd thinned and the air was suddenly colder. “If?” he bartered.

“What were you after?”

A guy in a blue hoodie, arm around a girl shivering above her bare midriff, cut in front. Webb stepped away as if to let them join up with another couple wearing the same shade of blue. Beyond them a man hawked cable car kitsch from a kiosk. The pier would be an easy place to disappear, even for someone the size of Morratt—even with Korematsu tailing us, as he surely was.

“What, dammit! Okay, let me guess. Not money, right? Certainly not thirty-seven bucks.”

He dismissed that with a glance.

“Something in the office. You went right there, like you knew Gary would have his office back there. Like someone—”

“No one told me the layout. Those houses are all alike. You drive the city long enough, you know there're only five layouts.”

“Tia's case is long over. No point in going through legal papers. No other interesting files.” I eyed him in time to spot a small, inadvertent nod. Korematsu had nodded like that when he'd suggested John had been chasing Tia before she leapt the cable car and that Gary and Grace had bent over backwards to help her because of it. But suppose Korematsu had it wrong. What if it was the other way around? What if John thought it was Gary who'd been involved with Tia all along?

The frog! At lunch, Tia had been fingering a little jade frog. Georgia had the same frog on her card table. And by Gary's front door was the big green frog Mike gave him. Why all the frogs? Coincidence? What were they a symbol of?

Mike's frog meant nothing, surely. Probably. But if Gary had a little one, too . . . “Small green jade frog.”

Webb started.

Bingo!

“What was John going to give you, if you found it?”

“How'd you know I—”

“—didn't?”
Because I searched Gary's office before you
, but I wasn't telling him that. “You wouldn't be sitting out in the cold on your cab hood if you'd made that kind of score. So, what was the deal?”

Ahead of us shouts erupted. Suddenly there were a dozen guys in blue hoodies and another dozen in orange, yelling at each other. Gangs?

I pulled Morratt into an alley between shops. The screams bounced off the walls, pushing us forward toward the unlit slips. At the end of the alley I turned right, moving behind the back walls of the stores, toward the open water. We were alone, except for the sea lions, their barks plenty loud enough to cover any splash or scream. Webb had to be thinking the same thing.