“Renshaw and Kessell International,” the accented voice said.
“Hy Ripinsky, please.”
“I am sorry. Mr. Ripinsky is out in the field.”
“Do you know where he's staying?”
“I do not have access to that information.”
“May I speak with the office manager?”
“Mr. Rivera is in the field with Mr. Ripinsky.”
“And you've no way of reaching him?”
“He will be calling in.”
“Is there anyone else in the office who can help me?”
“I am sorry, no.”
A small office, most likely, like many of RKI's overseas branches. Small, and not terribly well run. I left a message for the man to pass on to Hy, asking that he call me at any time and saying it was important I talk with him. Too many days had gone by; I needed to hear his voice. Needed to tell him about the woman who was rapidly stealing my identity. Needed …
“Well, you're right; there's definitely something wrong with the client.” Keim had just returned from a breakfast meeting with Jeffrey Stoddard.
“You able to get a handle on what?”
“Maybe. And I've got a pretty good idea of how to confirm it.”
“Then work that angle for a while.”
She frowned. “Don't you want to know what it is?”
“No, I trust your judgment. Go with it.”
“Are you okay, Shar?”
If I didn't plan to confide in Mick, I certainly couldn't tell Charlotte anything; the two were too close to keep secrets. “Sure,” I said. “Why shouldn't I be?”
“You don't seem yourself today. Any more than Ted does.”
“What about Ted?”
“He damn near tossed me out of the supply room this morning. All I was trying to do was save him the trouble of making a couple of copies for me, and he blew higher'n a caprock gusher.”
I waited till Ted had gone on his lunch break, then went to the supply room behind his office. It was quiet in there, save for the erratic hum of the old Xerox machine that would soon be replaced by the new Sharp we'd ordered; the room seemed almost pathologically tidy.
Now, what could be here that Ted hadn't wanted Charlotte to see?
I stood in the center of the room, taking in the contents of the neat shelves. Every box of pens and paper clips, every roll of fax paper and Scotch tape, every stack of letterhead and envelopes was perfectly aligned and in its assigned place. Had Ted compulsively tidied it while attempting to repel whatever demons were gnawing at him?
After a moment I left and went along the catwalk to the office Charlotte shared with Rae. The two of them were at their desks, eating takeout and chatting. “Charlotte,” I said, “when Ted tossed you out of the supply room, did he come in and find you there, or was he already inside?”
“Already.”
“Doing what?”
She pursed her lips, thinking. “He was messing around with a carton of Jiffy bags—number fives.”
“Thanks.” I went back to the supply room and located the carton. The bags were slightly atilt. I slipped my hand between them and the box's side till I came to the place where the Jiffys lay flat, removed the tilted layer, and looked inside the bottom bag.
Cash. A fair amount of it. Tens and twenties. I counted them. Over four hundred dollars.
As the one who paid half of Ted's salary, I knew this was a good deal of money for him to be carrying around, much less secreting in this less-than-secure hiding place. It was also an amount he would not easily part with.
So why was it here—and what did he plan to do with it?
“Shari?”
The voice on the phone was my father's, but I wouldn't have recognized it had he not abbreviated my name in the way nobody else did. He sounded older than his sixty-eight years, and tentative. A chill skittered across my shoulder blades:
Something terrible's happened to one of us, and the family's never going to be the same again.
“Pa? What's wrong?”
“Nothing's wrong here. But in God's name, what's happened to
you?”
“… I don't understand.”
“I had a phone call. Twenty minutes ago. A woman who said she was a nurse at San Francisco General. She told me you'd been shot.”
Oh, Christ!
“Pa, where are you?” My father and his woman friend, Nancy Sullivan, spent a good portion of each year traveling in his Airstream trailer.
“The San Diego house, between trips.”
The unlisted number of the house where I'd grown up was in my home-office Rolodex.
Pa went on, “The nurse hung up before I could ask any questions, so I called the hospital back; they said you hadn't been admitted. I thought maybe I'd gotten the name of the hospital wrong, so I called a few others. Then Nancy, bless her, suggested I check with your office. The shooting wasn't serious?”
“There was no shooting.” I gripped the edge of my desk, felt sweat breaking out on my forehead. “Hold on a second, Pa.”
Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. Clean air in, poisonous air out.
It was a stress-management technique a friend had taught me and, mercifully, it worked.
“Shari?”
“I'm here. Listen, Pa, there's this woman who's trying to stir up trouble for me. She got her hands on the phone numbers for the whole family, and she's probably pulled this with everybody.”
“This woman, why—”
“I can't talk about it now. Will you do me a favor? Call the others, tell them I'm okay and to ignore anything like this in the future?”
“I'll call your brothers and sisters, but I will
not
call your mother. If this woman has told her the same story, she'll be carrying on like one of those … What do they call them, Nan?”
In the background Nancy said, “Berserkers.”
“Right. Like one of those berserkers. We went to a lecture on Scandinavian legends during that cruise we took in December, and I finally learned the right name for your mother when she's on a rampage.”
I rested my forehead on the palm of my hand and said, “Then ask Nancy to call the berserker. Or you call Melvin.” Melvin Hunt was the man my mother lived with.
“I do not converse with the person who stole my wife. And I see no reason that Nancy should be subjected—”
“Put her on the phone, please.”
“That Nancy should be subjected to a conversation with—”
“Pa—please!”
In a matter of minutes Nancy—knitter of hideous sweaters, baker of wonderful pies, and a woman who, by virtue of putting up with my father, had a good shot at sainthood—agreed to resolve this latest McCone family crisis. And a good thing for me, because by the time we ended our call, messages from my brothers John and Joey and sisters Charlene and Patsy were stacked in front of me by Ted.
I swept them aside, put my head down on the desk, and did my clean-air-in, poisonous-air-out thing all over again.
At four-thirty someone from Crate & Barrel customer service returned my call of that morning to tell me that the number from which the order for a place setting of my flatware had been placed was that of my own cellular unit.
Impossible! Or was it? I rushed over to the coatrack, checked my purse. The phone was there. How, then … ?
Mick might know.
I rushed to his office, told him what had happened without mentioning I was the individual it had happened to. “How would somebody go about doing that to my client?”
He smiled expansively and motioned for me to sit down on one of the moving crates that we'd never gotten around to unpacking. I flopped there, feeling limp and disoriented.
“Okay,” he said, “the cell phone's been in the client's possession the whole time?”
“Yes.”
“They've used it how many times recently?”
“I don't know, a fair number.”
“How many times a day, on the average?”
“I … she didn't tell me. Maybe ten?”
“That'd be enough. It's obvious to me that somebody cloned it.”
“Cloned
the phone? I thought that's something they do with sheep!”
Mick sighed dramatically, as he often did when confronted with what he called my dinosaur tendencies. “The way it works, criminals use radio scanners to get your phone number and electronic serial number. Then they program them into a microchip that can make any phone seem like yours to the cellular network. The cloned phones are sold for around seventy-five bucks if there's a guarantee of a month's illegal service before the real subscriber or the cell company catches on. Without a guarantee, they go for as little as ten bucks. Drug dealers and other small-time crooks love them.”
As did a woman who was trying to destroy me.
“What if somebody wanted to clone a specific cell phone—one whose number she knew?”
“Easy.”
“And there're no safeguards against it?”
“Providers have started instituting them. There's a system called RF fingerprinting, and it's cut out fraud up to seventy-five percent in some areas. But it's expensive when you have as many cell sites as the Bay Area does, so it isn't fully in place yet. The good news is that the client's provider won't charge her for any calls she claims she didn't make.”
He was smiling even more broadly now, but I recognized what I'd previously taken to be self-satisfaction and smugness about his superior knowledge for what it actually was: Mick was pleased to be able to help me. His abilities made him feel valuable—and valued by me.
“Thanks, genius.” I gave him a big hug and left him looking both happy and embarrassed.
I
t was dark and silent in the mist-choked alley between Mission and Howard Streets. Then somewhere ahead of me glass smashed and a man shouted unintelligible words, oiled by booze and scrambled by rage. I crouched beside a foul-smelling Dumpster, my .357 in hand.
Feet dragged toward me. A burly shape moved past, head bowed, shoulders rounded, arms loose. He'd emptied his bottle, destroyed it for offering no more solace, and where was he going to get another at close to midnight on this penniless winter night?
I froze in the shadows, waiting for him to be gone. Heard him sob as he stumbled toward Sixth Street, the heart of skid row and the end of the line for so many like him.
Jesus, what was Ted
doing
here at this hour? Something connected with the cash I'd found in the box of Jiffy bags, no doubt; I'd checked before leaving the pier to follow him through the same routine as the other nights, and the money was gone.
At eleven, long after I'd ended the surveillance and gone home to field further calls from my puzzled family members, Neal phoned. Ted had announced he was going to a special midnight screening of Humphrey Bogart's
Dark Passage,
and, no, he didn't want company. It sounded like a ploy to get away for a couple of hours; Ted was a big Bogart fan and could probably recap the film's plot to back up his story. So back to Plum Alley I went, arriving only minutes before Ted's car pulled out of the garage and headed for SoMa.
He parked at an all-night lot on Mission and walked quickly to Sixth Street. I followed in the MG, concerned because he looked so slight and vulnerable among the city's predators. But Ted moved in an assertive manner that told them not to mess with him, and brushed past the few who homed in without making eye contact.
When he disappeared into the alley I spotted a parking space on Sixth and pulled to the curb. Immediately a tall black man whose flashy attire and abundance of jewelry advertised his occupation came over and ran a suggestive hand over the MG's hood. I got out, showed him a twenty-dollar bill and said, “How about watching it for me?”
“I ain't no doorman.”
I showed him another twenty and let the flap of my purse fall open to expose the .357.
He hesitated, nodded, and took the bills. On any given night this neighborhood teemed with undercover cops. Do a cop a favor, maybe she'll return it someday.
And now I was crouched in the alley, breathing noxious garbage fumes and wondering where Ted had gone.
After the drunk was out of sight, I straightened and moved along, scanning the doors of the small businesses that opened onto the narrow pavement. Sutton Overhead Door, Liberty Plumbing and Heating, Nell Loomis Photography. I knew Loomis; she'd once supplied me with evidence that had helped me solve a case. All sorts of people eking out a living in these low-rent spaces, but which one was Ted visiting?
Finally I took shelter at the alley's midpoint, squeezing between a parked van and the wall of a building.
Ten minutes, fifteen. The mist grew thicker, and at the Seventh Street entrance somebody began rummaging through the trash cans.
Nineteen minutes, twenty.
A door opened about fifteen feet away on the opposite side of the alley. Light spilled over the pavement and men's voices murmured indistinctly. Then the door shut and footsteps came my way.
I wriggled farther back, to where I could look through the van's side windows.
Ted, head down, carrying a package. He passed within a yard of me, going toward Sixth. I didn't follow; it was more important to learn whom he'd visited.
When he was gone I came out from behind the van and moved along the alley to the door he'd exited. No name-plate, no other indication of who lived or worked there. The number painted above the bell push was in shadow; I took out my flash and checked it. Then I went to Nell Loomis's photography studio and rang her bell; she was often there at odd hours, particularly when working on a rush job. Not tonight, though.
Trash bins were lined up against the buildings. I eyed them speculatively, found one with a number spray-painted on it that matched the number of the door Ted had come out of. When I lifted the lid, a dreadful smell arose. Oh, hell, I thought, this is what I get for assigning Mick to pick through that guy's garbage!
Then, with expertise born of too many hidden-assets investigations, I reached in and heisted the bag.
When I got back to my MG, the pimp was still there, leaning against it. He smiled, bowed, and ushered me toward the driver's-side door as if I were Cinderella entering the coach that would take her to the ball—a bedraggled, weary Cinderella, clutching a smelly plastic sack of garbage. The fairy godmother had done a lousy job on me.