Authors: Laurie R. King
Other actions had been attributed to the Ladies of Perpetual
Disgruntlement, both in the Bay Area and across the state, but none
were certain, since they lacked the hallmark humor. The police had no
more idea who the Ladies were (or even if they were actually women)
than they had in January. The obvious suggestion, that some of the
"nuns" of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had decided
to grow teeth, was investigated, but no links were found beyond the
middle words in the two names and their clear common regard for
irreverence. No fingerprints had been found on the duct tape, no
identifiable evidence recovered from the crime scenes, the three notes
were on paper sold by the ream in chain stores and generated by
software and a computer and printer that half of the state could own.
Even the billboard, as public an act as could be imagined, had been a
fast strike involving prepainted sheets and wallpaper glue. All the
police knew was that the Ladies struck at night, and that two of their
actions had involved tasers.
And now a man with a possible taser burn on his chest lay dead.
Crime Scene agreed that, particularly as the rain seemed to have
stopped for the night, it would be far better to leave the site until
morning. Al arranged for the road to remain closed off and for the
scene to be guarded from the depredations of the cameras, before the
two detectives went to interview their only witness.
The jogger who had come across the body seemed to be just that, not
the murderer returned to the scene to "discover" his
victim. He even produced the stub from an airline boarding pass to
prove that he had only returned that morning from a business trip. They
thanked him and left, and then set off to the Larsen home, to make the
announcement and see what they could see.
THE LARSEN ADDRESS WAS in South San Francisco, half an hour down the
peninsula from the city and a different world. The big white letters on
the hillside declared South San Francisco to be THE INdustrial CITY, a
place dominated by San Francisco International and all the freight,
crated and human, that the airport moved.
The Larsen house proved to be one of a thousand cramped stucco boxes
thrown up after the war. Even in the inadequate illumination from their
flashlights and one dim street lamp, the house showed every year of its
half century. Weeds grew in the cracks of the walkway, the cover of the
porch light had broken and been removed, and the paint was dull and
beginning to peel. Al put his thumb on the bell, and after a minute of
no response pounded on the door, but the house remained dark. A trip
around the building with flashlights at the windows showed them merely
the untidy interior of a tract house, so they split up, heading in
opposite directions along the street to stop in at every house where
lights still showed. When they met up again to compare notes, the
information each had gleaned from the neighbors amounted to the same
thing.
The Larsen family had lived here for at least ten years. James
worked as a baggage handler at the airport, his wife, Emily, kept
house. Their two kids were grown and moved away. His wife had recently
left him, and the across-the-street neighbor he went bowling with, the
only one who might possibly know where Larsen's wife or kids
were, was away on vacation, due back in three or four days. The one
piece of information Kate could add concerned the Larsen car, a
six-year-old Chevrolet sedan. DMV gave her the license number, and as
they sat in the front seat of Kate's car to write up their field
notes, she put out a bulletin for the car. Then, since there was not a
great deal more they could do at that time of night, and since there
seemed to be no immediate reason to roust a judge out of bed to sign a
search warrant, they went their separate ways through the dark and
drowsing peninsula, and were both in their beds not so much after
midnight.
A deceptively ordinary beginning to a far from ordinary case.
Chapter 2
ONE OF THE MEDICAL techs had talked. Either that, or the
Chronicle
reporter had a contact within SFPD who had heard the rumor, because the
front page of the paper that Kate fetched from the flower bed the
following morning had the story of the body found in the Presidio, an
indistinct picture of Al Hawkin walking away from it, and the clear
speculation that the death was linked with the Ladies of Perpetual
Disgruntlement. Kate cursed, told Lee that she wouldn't be having
breakfast, and while Hawkin was out checking on the progress of the
crime scene search, Kate set off to hunt down the history of a victim.
James Larsen had a lengthy arrest record, though only two
convictions: one for drunk-and-disorderly at the age of nineteen, and
one five years before his death, for assaulting his wife. In the
twenty-five years between those two convictions, Emily Larsen had been
a regular visitor to the hospital emergency room, but had consistently
refused to press charges. Only in recent years, when the law was
changed to make spousal cooperation unnecessary for domestic violence
prosecution, had Larsen been vulnerable.
Since then he had been careful. The police still came to his house
every six or eight months, but they had not arrested him again until
the end of February, when the beer binge that he had begun the day
before fed into resentments real and imagined and was topped off by his
anger over his favorite team's defeat, leaving Emily bleeding
onto the floor of the emergency room. He had been arrested and charged
with attempted murder, and bail was placed too high for him to reach.
Three weeks later the charges were reduced, to battery and assault, and
a tired judge had sentenced him to time served, a year of probation, a
hundred hours of community service, and marriage counseling. He then
turned Larsen loose. Two weeks after that, a pair of SFPD homicide
detectives were standing over his corpse.
Just before his release from jail, according to the neighbors, Emily
had packed her bags and been driven off by a woman in a Mercedes; she
had not been seen since. Or heard from: Emily's few acquaintances
did not know where she was, her sister in Fresno hadn't spoken
with her since early March, and their father, in a rest home near
Fresno, neither knew nor was he interested.
When Emily Larsen had not shown up at her house the following
morning, Kate had asked the phone company to preserve the records of
the incoming calls for a few days, and then made out a request for a
search warrant on the records for the Larsen phone. It was the previous
month's phone bill that gave the missing woman away. Four days
before her husband was released from jail, Emily had made a telephone
call to a lawyer's office in San Francisco. Kate, working her way
through the calls, heard the greeting "Law offices" and
knew she'd found the wife. She identified herself, asked to speak
with the partner who was representing one Emily Larsen, declined to be
called back, and settled in with her heels on the desk to wait. She
listened to the piano music of call-holding coming through the
receiver, understanding that legal dignity required that a cop be made
to wait. She'd done the same herself to lawyers. With the phone
tucked under her chin, she sat tight and glanced through a stack of
memos and Daily Incident Recaps that had been accumulating on her desk.
The recaps, in addition to the usual list of attempted robberies,
hit-and-runs, and sexual assaults, included the laconic description of
assault by a chronic urinator who was proving a nuisance to
passers-by--particularly those on bicycles. The memos included one
decree (what Kate reckoned was the thirtieth such issued) that
department personnel were not, under any circumstances, to make jokes
about the Ladies of Perpetual Disgruntlement, or duct tape, or the
color purple. Another memo was the announcement that an unknown group
had been plastering up flyers seeming to advocate the extermination of
all male children, which caused Kate to read it more closely and shake
her head. She was looking at a third memo bearing a stern reminder
concerning the cost to local supermarkets of the oversized plastic
shopping carts favored by the homeless, when the music in her ear cut
off abruptly and a woman's voice spoke in her ear.
"Inspector Kate Martinelli?"
"That's right."
"Carla Lomax here. I believe we've met, at a fund-raiser for the teen shelter. I certainly know your name."
And reputation, Kate thought. In fact, she'd counted on it.
"Good, then you'll know I'm not the bad guy here.
I'm trying to reach one of your clients, Emily Larsen."
"What makes you think--"
"She called this number on March sixteenth, a few days before
her abusive husband was freed from jail. A day or two later, some woman
came to the house and drove Emily Larsen away. Her husband has died. I
need to talk with her."
"What happy news."
"I beg your pardon?"
"That the bastard is dead. It makes my job a lot easier, and
Emily's life. Not that she will see it that way, poor thing, but
truth to tell she would have gone back to him eventually, and
eventually he would have killed her. Much better this way."
"Urn." In Kate's experience, lawyers did not speak
so frankly, certainly not to a cop. "Right. You are representing
her, then? May I have her address, please?"
"I am representing her, yes, and I think it would be better if
I continued to do so by asking you to come here to interview her in my
presence. She's living in a shelter, and it's better if the
residents don't feel invaded. I could bring her to you, if
you'd prefer, Inspector."
Kate reflected for a moment before deciding that if the much-abused
Emily Larsen had nothing to do with her husband's death, it would
not help matters to drag her downtown, whereas if she did, keeping the
first interview away from police territory would give the woman a false
sense of security that might come in useful later.
"I'll come there," she said. "What time?"
They agreed to two o'clock at Lomax's law offices south
of Market Street. Kate took her heels off her desk, brought the
paperwork for that report and a couple of others up to date, and went
home for lunch, a rare occurrence.
At two o'clock, while Al Hawkin was bracing himself for the
first cut of the pathologist's knife into the body of James
Larsen, Kate rang the bell at the entrance of the anonymous building.
As Kate thoughtfully eyed the dents and bashes in the surface of the
stout metal door, the speaker set over the bell crackled to life, and
the same secretarial voice she had heard before declared, "Law
offices."
"Inspector Kate Martinelli to see Ms. Lomax." She lifted
her face to the camera lens concealed in the reaches of the
entranceway, and was buzzed in.
Half a mile north of this address, law offices meant marble,
polished oak, smoked mirrors, abstract art, and a size-five
receptionist with a daily manicure. Here it meant industrial-quality
carpeting, white walls in need of a touch-up, museum posters in
drugstore frames, and a size-six-teen secretary with short, unpainted
nails on her skilled hands. She also had a waist-length braid keeping
her graying brown hair in order, no makeup to speak of, skin too pale
to have spent time out of doors, and a large basket of toys next to her
desk. The woman fixed Kate with a gaze that had seen it all.
"Have a seat," she offered, though it sounded more like an order. "Carla will be here in a minute."
"That's a good security setup," Kate commented,
remaining on her feet. "Do you have a lot of problems
here?" SoMa was not the most crime-free part of town by any
means, and that door had been the victim of at least one determined
assault.
"It's because we have security that we haven't had problems."
"Angry husbands?"
"And boyfriends and fathers. They pound away until the cops
get here, making fools of themselves for the camera." She glanced
at the monitors with amused but slightly bitter satisfaction, and Kate,
reflecting that the odds were high the woman had once needed the
services of a women's advocate lawyer herself, moved around the
desk as if the glance had been an invitation. Peering over the
secretary's shoulder, she saw the displays of four security
cameras. Two showed a small parking area; as Kate watched, a
light-colored, boxy Mercedes sedan at least ten years old pulled
through an opening gate on one screen and parked on one of a half-dozen
spaces shown on the next. From the car stepped two women, the driver
sorting through her keys as she approached the building until the
all-seeing secretary pressed a button and freed the door.
Kate walked up and down for a few minutes, trying to get an
impression of the law offices. Casual seemed to be the unifying
decorative theme, beginning with the untidy forest of objects on the
receptionist's desk (two spindly plants; a flowered frame with
the picture of a young girl; a delicate terra-cotta Virgin and Child; a
figurine of an Indian goddess with a black face and golden crown; a
three-inch-tall carved box representing a heap of cheerfully
intertwined cats; a sprig of redwood cones; and a chipped coffee mug,
stuffed with a handful of pens and pencils, that proclaimed "When
God created man, She was only joking"). The works of art on the
walls were similarly eclectic, with museum posters (Monet and Van Gogh)
adjoining framed crayon studies (stick figures and box houses) and one
competent and very original tempera study of a woman and two children,
done with a deft hand in pleasing tones of green and blue. In the
corner were the initials P W, and Kate was just thinking that Lee would
like this when Carla Lomax came into the room to shake Kate's
hand and lead her back into the building. As Kate followed, she glanced
into the other rooms. There looked to be a couple of other partners in
the firm, neither of them at their desks. Between two unoccupied
offices was a meeting room with a large round wooden table that took up
so much of the floor space, it must have been assembled in the room. On
the wall a striking black and white poster caught Kate's eye, the
blown-up photograph of a woman with a swollen mouth and two black eyes,
a bandage on her scalp, and a cast on one hand, gazing tiredly at the
camera. Underneath her image were printed the words,
But he loves me.
Kate wasn't sure if it was meant to be a joke; if so, it was a bleak one.