Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (36 page)

“Yeah, it’s hard for a gay man to become a successful hair-stylist in San Francisco.” The comment slipped out of my mouth before I had a chance to check it, but Anne just laughed.

“Well, maybe not in San Francisco. But you’d be surprised, Sophie. There are plenty of people right here in Northern California who seem to think that being gay is like having a contagious disease, and they would never let someone who identified himself as a homosexual get near them, not even to do their hair. Flynn Fitzgerald certainly wouldn’t. But then again his problem isn’t homophobia, it’s pandering. He happily assumes the role of a hate-monger in order to woo the Christian right.”

“Yeah,” I said after swallowing another one of Marcus’s chocolates. “Some people will do just about anything in order to win.”

Anne winced, which was…interesting. “Flynn Fitzgerald is not a good man.” Her voice was so soft I had to lean toward her in order to hear. “He’s a hypocrite and he’s dishonest. If he wins, he will not represent the best interests of his constituents. That’s why I
have
to win.” She put both hands f lat down on the table and stared at her mangled cuticles. “If I am elected, I’ll be able to do some good, not just for the people of Contra Costa County but for America as a whole. Flynn Fitzgerald won’t. If I can stop another opportunistic, unscrupulous conservative from getting to Congress I have to do it. You see that, don’t you?” She lifted her eyes to mine, and it suddenly occurred to me that she wasn’t really trying to convince me of anything. She was trying to convince herself.

“It’s been a hard campaign for you,” I noted as I took a sip of my drink. “I read about that guy who committed suicide by throwing himself out the window of your campaign headquarters. What was his name again? Something with a
P
…”

Anne’s face instantly hardened. “His name was Peter,” she said tersely, “and yes, that was horrible.”

“Do you have any idea why he did it?”

“He did it because of people like Flynn Fitzgerald.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Peter was gay, Sophie. He thought he was hiding it from me, but I knew the minute I laid eyes on him. Sometimes you can just tell. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons I recruited him. He was clearly a little lost and depressed, and I thought that if I offered him the opportunity to work in an environment where he’d be surrounded by kindhearted progressives like myself, he’d learn to be proud of who he was.”

“Wait a minute.” I leaned forward in order to make sure I wasn’t mishearing anything. “You
recruited
Peter?”

Anne hesitated, then brought the cuticles of her index finger to her mouth. “I did recruit him,” she eventually confirmed. “I was taking a trip and had bags to check. Peter was working behind the ticket counter. He was very helpful and sweet and he recognized me from the newspaper. I was looking for someone to help organize my phone campaigns and I invited him to come in for an interview.”

“Wow. So you really reached out to him. You said he was depressed, but did you have any inkling that he was suicidal?”

“No.” Anne looked down at the liquid chocolate in front of her. There was an awkward silence before she mumbled, “I found him.”

“You
found
him?” I repeated.

“It was late and I needed something from the office…my speech, that was it. I had left a speech I needed to memorize at my desk. I went to the building and there he was. Did you notice that my campaign headquarters is on the top floor of a fifteen-floor building? And the area around the building is nothing but concrete. I’ve never seen anything so awful. I prayed that I wouldn’t have to see anything like that again.”

“Hopefully you won’t,” I offered.

Anne didn’t say anything. She just continued to stare at her drink. My handbag was on my lap and I felt it vibrate slightly. Anatoly, no doubt. I pulled out the phone just to make sure.

Not Anatoly. In fact, the only part of the number I recognized was the local area code.

“Sorry about this,” I said quickly. “I think it’s my sister again.” I pressed the talk button. “Hello?”

“It’s a shame what happened to your friend. Enough to make your fur stand on end.”

It was Darth Vader. He was calling me, taunting me with jokes about Melanie’s murder. And Anne was sitting here at my table, staring at her drink,
not talking on the phone.

“Who is this?” I whispered. Anne looked up at me curiously.

“It’s your furry friend. This is your last warning, Katz. Stay out of my life and stay out of my campaign.”

The phone went dead.

“What was that about?” Anne asked.

I stared at my phone. My hand was shaking.

“Sophie?”

“Huh?” I looked up at Anne, who was regarding me curiously.

“Who was on the phone?” she pressed.

I swallowed. It was time to gamble with a version of the truth. “It was a prank call,” I said. “I’ve been getting a lot of them lately. They’re all from this Darth Vader soundalike who apparently has a thing for animals.”

Anne’s eyes bulged and she was immediately on her feet. “I need to go.” She grabbed her purse and sprinted down the stairs toward the door.

“Anne?” I called after her. I jumped up to follow, but my purse had still been on my lap and I hadn’t bothered to close it after pulling out my phone. Everything from my wallet to my ultralight panty liners crashed to the floor. “Shit!” I dropped to my knees and started stuffing the items back in my bag. I ran out of the café, clutching my purse in one hand and Marcus’s box of truffles in the other, but Anne was nowhere in sight.

Before I had time to plot my next move Anatoly pulled up in front of me in his beige automobile. “Get in!” he demanded.

I jumped in the passenger seat.

“Sophie, I can’t believe you—”

“You can yell at me later, right now we have to find Anne.”

“What do you mean
find
her? You were just with her!”

“Yeah, I was but she ran out. Go down Sacramento Street. Maybe we can still catch her.”

Anatoly’s face contorted into a glower but he quickly complied.

“He called again, Anatoly.”

“Who?”

“Darth Vader!”

Anatoly’s head snapped in my direction. “You got another threat?”

I pointed at the street. “Keep looking for Anne,” I instructed before telling him more about the call. “He said what happened to my friend was a shame. That it made his fur stand on end. And you should have heard the way he said it. It was like this asshole was admitting to killing Melanie!”

“Where was Anne when this call took place?” Anatoly asked.

“Right by my side.” I pressed the base of my palms into my forehead. “It’s not her. I was so sure it was, but I was wrong. Now I’m totally clueless,
again!
”

“You were always clueless, Sophie. You simply fooled yourself into believing otherwise.”

“I’m going to assume that your comment is only referring to my knowledge of this case!” I snapped, then added in a softer tone, “Thing is, I told Anne about the call.”

“Told her what exactly?”

“That some guy who sounded like Vader and liked animals had been prank-calling me.”

“How’d she react?”

“She literally ran out of the restaurant. That’s why we’re looking for her. She knows something, but I have no idea what.”

“I see.” Anatoly was clenching his jaw. “You realize that if you had waited for me I could have started following Anne the minute she left the café. We wouldn’t have lost her.”

“You realize,” I mimicked, “that if you had gotten a small car instead of a sedan the size of a small state, you might have been able to find parking sooner and I wouldn’t have had to make the choice between waiting for you and risking missing Anne.”

“Marcus would have kept her at the salon until you showed up,” Anatoly countered.

“How? By duct-taping her to the chair? She was done, Anatoly. Curled, highlighted and dried. If I had waited longer I would have lost her. Wait, where are you going?”

“Anne obviously got in her car and left. God knows which way she went. I’m driving down to Ocean Beach to look for that homeless woman one more time and then I’m going to take you home and explain to you the meaning of the word
partnership!
”

“Yes, yes, I know. There’s no ‘I’ in team…Oh my God!”

Anatoly slammed on the breaks, nearly causing the Honda hybrid behind us to slam into our bumper. “What!”

“No, no, keep driving…but I have a number this time! It didn’t come up as Unknown Number!”

Anatoly pressed back down on the gas pedal. “Are you talking about the threatening call?”

“Yes. What else would I be talking about?” I accessed the numbers of my recent received calls. There it was, a 415 number. I dialed and put my phone on loudspeaker.

Anatoly and I listened with bated breath as it rung three times and then…an awful screeching, never-ending beep shot through the speakers. “What is that?” My hands reflexively flew to my ears in an attempt to block out the sound. “A fax machine?”

Anatoly reached over and pressed End Call. “No, but it is a modem. Whoever called did it from a pay phone. Most of them are set up to go to that kind of modem after they’ve rung once or twice. It keeps people from calling them all the time.”

“There aren’t a lot of pay phones left,” I noted.

“There’s one on California Street, right around the corner from the Bittersweet.”

“In front of the Starbucks! Darth Vader was right there! We have to go back and look for him!”

“And how will we know it’s him, Sophie? Will he be carrying a light saber?”

“I don’t know, Anatoly. Maybe he’ll be dressed up like a goddamned sheep. Stop!”

But Anatoly had already seen what I had seen. He yanked the steering wheel to the right, causing the car to pull up onto the sidewalk twenty or so feet in front of the woman with the tinfoil hat.

Without another word we both jumped out of the car and faced her.

The woman hadn’t changed her appearance, except this time she was wearing dishwashing gloves. She scowled at me as if I was a middle-school kid who had thrown a rock through her window.

“What are you doin’ here?”

“We just wanted to talk to you.” Anatoly extended his hand. “My name is Anatoly.”

She studied him for what must have been a full minute before she put her yellow gloved hand in his. She didn’t shake it, but instead held on to it as if it was one more thing that she wanted to add to her shopping cart.

“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name,” Anatoly said.

“I don’t want to be givin’ up my name to no god-damned stranger.”

“Fair enough.” Anatoly smiled kindly, still holding her hand. “I was hoping we could talk to you about that pink bear you saw.”

That was enough to get her to yank her hand away. “Don’t know you well enough.”

“I see. Perhaps you could get to know us,” Anatoly suggested. “Ask us anything.”

“Are you cops?”

“No,” Anatoly and I said in unison.

“Because you gotta tell me if I ask. That there’s the law.”

“We’re not cops,” Anatoly assured her again.

“Are you in league with the bears? You gotta fess up to that, too, if you’re asked, otherwise you’ll be blackballed like dem Pandas.”

“Pandas were blackballed?” I asked.

“Yep, for a while there the other bears wouldn’t even accept them as one of their own. Said they were raccoons or some shit.”

“You’re thinking of red pandas,” I explained.

“Red pandas? Now, why would I be thinkin’ about some red bear? If I’m thinking about anything it’s those pink gay bears. Those are the dangerous ones.”

Anatoly nodded encouragingly. “Sophie told me about that. Can you tell me a little about the pink bear that killed the woman found here? Did you actually see him kill her?”

“Nope, just saw him carry her out of his rented Ford. Had her wrapped up like a burrito in a big blue tarp. Must of killed her someplace else.”

“Blue tarp?” Anatoly asked. “The papers didn’t mention that part. Did the police take that with them when they found the body?”

“Nah, I took the tarp.”

“You did?” Anatoly grinned. “Do you still have it?”

“Don’t be stupid, dem tarps sell for good money in the park. I got three bucks for that tarp.”

Anatoly’s grin disappeared and I squeezed my eyes closed against the disappointment. That tarp could have been a treasure trove of evidence and it was gone.

“What was this bear like?” Anatoly asked, quickly regrouping. “Was he trying to be discreet?”

“Now, who ever heard of a discreet pink bear? Those suckers want to be
seen.
”

“Ah.” Anatoly put his thumbs through his belt loop. “So he made a spectacle of himself?”

“I’d say, what with his waving at me and that grandma with her gran-kiddie.”

“Wait a minute.” I held up a hand to stop her. “What grandma and what gran-kiddie?”

“He came out of that damn Ford truck and started waving. The only people around was me and some old Chinese lady with some snot-nosed toddler. The toddler was pretty excited about it, too—you know how kids are. But the granny was a sensible woman, like me. She just pulled that little tot along with her and didn’t give that bear a second glance. That’s the best way to handle ’em—ignore ’em and walk away. If you run they’re more likely to eat you.”

Anatoly and I exchanged quick looks. Not only had the bear not waited for the coast to be clear, but he had actually waved at a homeless woman and some random pedestrians seconds before dumping the body? What kind of murderer went out of his way to call attention to himself?

“Did he wave again before he drove off?” I asked.

“To me he did, not that I paid him any mind. The grandma and toddler were long gone by then.”

“What did the grandmother look like?” I asked.

“Chinese.”

“And?” I prompted.

“And that’s it. I didn’t get a real good look at her. Maybe she wasn’t Chinese, maybe she was Japanese, or Korean. I don’t know, I was kind of distracted seeing that there was a bear with a rainbow tattooed on his tummy dumping a body wrapped up in a tarp.”