Hungry Ghosts (21 page)

I was balancing supposition on supposition, about to be buried under them. I didn't dare sit down; I'd be asleep in an instant. Real sleep was the only answer. I walked back up the hall to the bedroom and slid under the heap of covers, without straightening them, without even taking my shoes off. Untying each set of laces, pulling at the shoe, the effort, the effort was
too great. I'd wash the sheets later. I pulled the covers over my head. The last thought I had was to promise myself I'd come back to the question of why Gary had taken Tia's case to begin with.

I woke feeling that I had been kicked out of the Room of All Answers. I lay still, struggling to find the door back in, but the room swayed and thinned, leaving whiffs of itself just out of reach. Nothing was left but noise: crunching now, like tires on gravel, like footsteps.

Footsteps! My eyes shot full open. Footsteps? Gary walking in? I hadn't expected him so soon. Whatever time it was, it was too soon. I needed to pull myself together. My head was under the heap of covers. He hadn't even noticed me. I took a deep breath.

Hey! Wait a minute! Someone had tried to kill me just today! And now I was no longer alone in the house! Now I was awake. Holding the sheets up to prevent noise, I slid slowly out of the bed. There was no sound of flushing or water running. I peered around the doorway into the hall.

Still no sound of water. Gary, the burglar, my attacker, whoever it was, must have gone straight through to his office.

I moved down the hall. A board creaked; I froze. The office door was closed but not shut. I peered around the edge and stifled a gasp.

The man in the office, rooting through Gary's drawers, was not Gary. He wasn't here to attack me, either. He was hunched over a drawer, fingers moving quickly, too quickly for a colleague Gary might have sent to find a document. This was no colleague; it really was a burglar!

I was so relieved, it took me a minute to process: a burglar rooting through Gary's papers!

How did he get in here? Did I leave the door unlocked? What was he after? Something to do with Dare? Something about Tia? Breathing through my mouth, I moved closer to the door.

His broad back blocked my view. From the size of him, he would find
his prize and swat me out of the way as he strode down the hall and out with it.

The police! Where was my phone? Where was Gary's phone? I had no idea.

Carefully, I backed away from the door. Could I hide in the kitchen? Not if I wanted to see what he had. In order to see . . .

The hallway had open beams. I suddenly realized open beams could be very useful. I grabbed the second from the end, lifting myself up. The rough plank scraped my hands. The wood squeaked. My ribs thumped down on it. In the office the shuffling sounds stopped. Keeping my ribs in place, I pulled my legs up behind me. My glutes screamed; my hamstrings started to cramp. I stretched through my heels and willed the hamstrings to release until I could brace my feet against the beam behind me.

The edge of the beam cut into my ribs. I lay like roofing up there, breathing through my mouth, straining to hear him. Ready to spot whatever he had when he came out. The shuffling of paper had stopped. Now it crunched. He was folding it. Cloth swished. He was stuffing the paper under his jacket. No time now. He'd be gone. I tightened my fingers on the beam.

The door opened. He put a hand on the side, as if he was about to swing the door back and forth. He was thinking. He wasn't looking up, but he was worried. His shoulders were hunched as if he sensed someone else close by. Or maybe he was worried he'd left a full handprint in something. The beam was cutting into my hand, sawing my ribs. My legs weren't shaking yet but they would be any second.

He tapped his foot.

The beams were thick with dust. I squeezed my eyes against it. It was in my nose. I jammed my teeth together to keep from sneezing.

He fingered the door.

I couldn't wait. I swung my feet down hard, sideways into his throat. He gasped and fell.

He didn't move. Omigod, was he dead? Had I killed him? I didn't mean to— He writhed. I dropped to the floor and stared down at him, horrified, then perplexed, and then outraged. “Webb Morratt! You drive me here and then you come back to burgle? What's the matter with you?” As hard as I had kicked, with the full swing of both legs, as near as I'd come to his jugular, I'd come way too close to killing him. I was almost as shaken as he was. While he was still gasping, I reached into his jacket and pulled out the envelope. Thirty-seven dollars. “Thirty-seven dollars! You broke and entered for thirty-seven dollars! Are you crazy?”

He grunted something close to yes.

“Burglars burgle empty houses. You dropped me here!”

“Up . . . street.”

“You dropped me at the top of the street.”

“I hit the dead end. Turned around. You were walking down the street. It was clear you didn't know where you were going. I figured you were house-sitting, that someone had given you a key and you were looking for the place. I saw you come in here. That was hours ago. Fares were terrible. I got one to Twenty-fourth Street, not enough for a beer. So I came back by here on the chance I might spot you needing a ride back. There were no lights on. I figured you'd left.”

“And so you'd rob me.”

“Not
you
. I'd rob the owner, the person with enough dough for a vacation. What are you doing here, anyway, with all the lights off! This is the city. People use lights!”

I almost laughed at his outrage. “Thirty-seven dollars!”

He was pushing himself up, painfully, to a sitting position.

“Webb, this house belongs to my brother, a lawyer. My other brother is a cop. You do understand that now I own you. Right?”

“I just need—”

“I don't care. What you need to do now is to give me enough to make it worth my while to keep you out on the street. It's going to be easy. I know you drive down Pacific more than you let on. So what did you see that you were holding back?”

He shifted, bracing his right arm against the desk, trying to get purchase with his left hand and push himself up straighter. He would be okay, I assured myself, no lingering nerve damage. But it scared me nevertheless. I watched him sitting there trying to think.

Trying to think of a lie! “Webb, you've got to come clean! This is your freedom we're talking about.” Chances were it wouldn't be his first offense either. “Who are you protecting? Jeffrey, isn't it? That fantasy about him and the balloons! Jeffrey, your source of tourist amusement and of tourists, right? What did you really see him do?”

His eyes shot to the left; his face tensed. Then he shrugged. “Jeff has an old car. His father left it to him. He doesn't drive it much. It's old, finicky, and dies on hills. He takes cabs. But the day after I let you off, he was pulling up by his store in it.”

“When?”

“Early afternoon.”

“And?”

“Tia Dru got out and she slammed the door so hard it bounced back open.”

The day after he dropped me. The day I went to Tia's for lunch. Early afternoon, right after she vanished.

“Did he follow her?”

“He was in the car when I passed.”

“Did you go back?”

“Why would I? I had fares to hunt. I didn't know she was going to get killed.”

“Did you see either of them later?”

“No. The next time I came by, the street was blocked off for the movie.” He now shifted onto all fours and clambered up. He was a big guy, but the effects of driving eight hours a day showed. Even standing, he was bent forward a bit from hip flexors that had tightened from years behind the wheel. If he came after me, he'd never catch me. If he did catch me, though, I'd be in big trouble.

“So, Webb, what did Jeffrey say after the murder?”

“Huh?”

“When you went by his house?”

“I didn't—”

“Of course you did. You were sitting on this prime piece of evidence. A scoop that could have turned into a sale to the media. You would have been a fool not to try to fill out the story before the cops got on to it.”

For the first time a grin played at his lips.

“So?”

“He wasn't there.”

“And?” Was this guy holding out, or could he possibly have just given up?

“And I got hailed for an airport fare.”

“Please!”

“No, really. Jeffrey lives near the Presidio. He's right off Lombard Street, near all those motels.”

“Motels where the desk clerks never call for cabs themselves, just leave their customers to hail you on the street?”

He was wise enough not to attempt an answer to that.

“Okay, let's go.”

“To his house?”

“That house you couldn't be bothered checking out. Let's just see what Jeffrey has to say about the afternoon Tia Dru died.”

C
HAPTER
21

W
EBB MUTTERED
about lost fares, but it was from habit and even he couldn't whip up a quality whine. And one chorus of our theme song:
You Broke into the House of a Brother of a Cop
, cut his protest dead.

We shot down Market Street past the Castro District and Dolores Street, where the first mission church in the city, Mission Dolores, had been built in the year of the American Revolution. Subsequently, a huge basilica had been erected next to it. In the great earthquake and fire, the basilica was gutted, but the little wooden mission survived. There's probably a lesson somewhere in that.

I wouldn't have been surprised if Jeffrey lived above his shop in the neighborhood he'd so clearly made his own. However, had he been alive in the era that so fascinated him, he would have steered clear of our lewd and lawless street and that would have been a life-lengthening decision. At the zendo reception when he had assigned himself the role of bar and bordello owner, he'd credited himself with a toughness seen only in his imagination. For Jeffrey Hagstrom a house near the Presidio made sense. All the adjoining neighborhoods were upscale and safe.

Webb hit each red light on Divisidero just as it turned. At the spot where he'd told me Jeffrey stopped to play with his balloons, he crested the hill and began the steep shot down, screeching to halts at stop signs, in the manner
of the most novice stunt driver. But I didn't point that out. He pulled up in front of a house on Baker Street, one block from the Presidio. Like so many houses in San Francisco, Jeffrey's was attached to its neighbor. Each had a three-pane bay window in a living room that sat atop a two-car garage. The main entry stood between it and what might be a study.

Drop cloths covered the shrubbery. Splotches of various tans marked the pale green stucco.

“Did Jeffrey just buy this place?” I asked as we got out of the cab.

“Inherited it from his father. He worked at the Presidio, got a deal on the place from someone transferred out in a hurry. Jeffrey's dad hooked him into some kind of scut job in the lab there when he was in college. Jeffrey hated it. Hated the military, hated the lab—you can just imagine, right?”

“Still, his father did him a big favor, leaving him this house.”

“Damn straight,” Webb grumbled.

The last time I saw Jeffrey, the night of the reception, he'd given me a story about just being Tia's good friend. Now my question was, had he intended to fool me, or was he deluding himself? “Just friends” rarely have women slamming out of their cars. And then disappear.

I pushed the bell. There were a lot of questions I was dying to ask, not the least of which was why Tia had abandoned me at lunch to go off with him. Did he drive up and lure her, somehow, into his car? Did he call and entrap her? Or—this possibility startled me—had she called him? Was she going
with
him or getting
away from
me? What had I said before she left? I tried to remember, but all I could come up with was some prattle about a case of John's I'd used to cover her awkwardness getting out of her chair. Maybe she assumed she was driving around the block to settle something and that she'd be back before I even poured the wine. Or maybe she just forgot about me. So many questions that he could clear up in a sentence. I rang again.

“He's not here,” Webb grumbled a full thirty seconds before I would have given up. “Let's check the neighbors.”

“Huh?”

“Trust me. I get calls; I show up; no one answers. They've changed their mind. Or, once in a while, if they've had long enough since they called, they've overdosed. Either way, I go to the neighbor's and ask them to call for me.”

“Couldn't your dispatcher—”

“Yeah, but not nearly so effective. Lemme tell you, when a guy gets a call from a worried or pissed neighbor, he hauls himself to the door.”

“Okay. There's a rental unit, right?”

“Yeah, downstairs.”

“Let's try there first.”