Find Her a Grave (30 page)

“Will you please tell me your situation?”

“My situation?”

“You and Mrs. Rabb and your black friend, are you all together there?”

“Yes. We’re in my office, in the front of the house.”

“And the jewels? Are they also there?”

“Yes.”

“Are they what you expected?”

“It’s not what I expect. It’s what Mrs. Rabb expects. They’re her property, not mine.”

“You’ve discussed our conversation with Mrs. Rabb.”

“Of course.”

“And what have you decided?”

“We’ve decided to do what you want.”

“Are you recording this?”

“No,” Bernhardt lied. “I don’t have a recorder that tapes off the telephone.”

“I suspect that you do.”

“Suspect what you like.”

“In my business one assumes the worst, and plans accordingly. Therefore I must assume that you’re recording this. I must also assume that you have plans to win this contest.”

“My plan is to get Paula Brett back. Mrs. Rabb’s plan is to get her daughter back.”

“In exchange for the jewels.”

“In exchange for the jewels.”

“All the jewels?” The question was subtly tainted with ironic good humor.

Bernhardt decided to make no reply.

“I think of myself as a realist,” Chin said. “I expect others to also act realistically. Therefore, I’m assuming that, before you turn the jewels over to me, you will have deducted, say, ten percent of the total. That is acceptable. In fact, to act otherwise would be stupid. And dealing with stupid people, I’ve found, is a losing proposition. I’m sure you agree.”

Bernhardt made no reply. Across the desk, an earphone in one ear, Tate was monitoring the tape machine. As he listened, Tate’s mouth up-curved in a small, knowing smile.

“So much for the, ah, commission arrangements,” Chin said. “Let’s go back to you and your black assistant and the plans you’re most certainly making. You’re obviously an astute man. Just as obviously, you’re familiar with San Francisco, which is actually a very small town. Here, everyone knows everyone else. Therefore, after we transact our business, it might be possible for you to guess at my identity. You might decide to go to the police with your suspicions. With a recording of this conversation as evidence, plus Miss Brett and Miss Rabb, who could identify me, the DA might decide to indict. It’s certainly a possibility. But before I went to trial, Mr. Bernhardt, assuming that you chose to stay in San Francisco—or for that matter, in this country—I can absolutely guarantee that you would be dead long before the judge dropped the gavel.” There was a short silence as the tape continued to spin. Across the desk, Tate’s broad, muscle-ridged face was a study in concentration. The small, intrigued smile was still in place.

“Do you believe me?” Chin asked quietly.

This time, Bernhardt realized, a reply was required; the time for silence had passed.

“Yes,” he answered, “I believe you.”

As, across the desk, Tate was nodding reluctant agreement. Seated in a chair with the brown paper bag containing the jewels on the floor beside her, Louise stared wide-eyed at Bernhardt’s face. Her posture was so rigid that her muscles might have been in spasm. Her expression was numbed.

“Well, then.” There was a new note of crispness in Chin’s voice. The actual negotiations were about to begin. “Shall we make our plans?”

“Yes.”

“Your car, I assume, is the brown Civic station wagon that you used last night.”

“Yes.”

“It’s now parked at the curb near your building.”

“Yes.”

“What I want,” Chin said, “is for you to take the jewels to your car. There’s a homing device on your car. It has a magnet, of course, and it’s stuck to the front part of your gas tank, on the driver’s side. Do you understand?”

As Bernhardt answered in the affirmative, he saw Tate’s face come alive with aggrieved vexation. A homing device—accounting, of course, for the night’s sequence of events, including the murder of Fabrese.

“I want you to put that homing device, with the jewels, in whatever container you choose. Do you have a car phone?”

“Yes.” Bernhardt gave him the number.

“Good. The time is now ten-fifteen. I’ll give you a half hour to take your ten percent. Are the stones unmounted?”

“Yes.”

“But they’re cut.”

“Yes.”

“Good. What I would suggest is that you dump them out on a flat surface and count them. Then, simply deduct ten percent of the total, numerically. I know a little about gems, and I can tell you that a random division is best. Size alone is not always the most important criterion. It’s quality that really counts.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Bernhardt said acidly. Tate smiled appreciatively.

“At ten forty-five,” Chin went on, “I expect the three of you to be in your car. You can begin driving toward Golden Gate Park. Use any route you like. Of course, we’ll be tracking you with our scanner. We’ll give you directions as we go. Be very careful, obviously, not to break any traffic laws.”

Bernhardt gritted his teeth. “Thank you.”

“I’m told you have a sawed-off shotgun. I don’t think you should bring that, since it’s an illegal weapon. If you should be involved in an accident, and the police saw that gun, we’d all be in trouble.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Once you’re inside Golden Gate Park,” Chin said, “you’ll be given instructions by phone. At some point, we’ll tell you to put the jewels in a trash container. Then you’ll be told to drive to a point about a mile from the trash container. You’ll wait there until we have the jewels. If everything is satisfactory, you’ll be told where you can find the two women. They’re now in a small row house in the Outer Sunset district, not too far from the Rabbs’, in fact. There’ll be three keys under a small planter box to the right of the front door. One key opens the door. The other keys unlock two pairs of handcuffs. The women, you see, are in the basement. They’re handcuffed to a large water pipe.”

“They’d better not be hurt.”

“They won’t be. Incidentally, how’s your dog?”

Bernhardt looked down at Crusher, lying in front of the room’s small gas fireplace. “He’ll be all right.”

“Good. Well, there’s lots to be done. Incidentally, if there’s any communications problems, you’re to go back to your office and wait for me to call you there. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent.” The line clicked, went dead.

W
ITH THE CURTAINS DRAWN
in the office and the jewels strewn across the desktop in a multicolored swath, Bernhardt looked at Louise. “I make it two hundred sixty-three altogether,” he said. “And twenty gold coins.”

“So that’s twenty-six jewels for us,” she said, “and two gold coins.”

Bernhardt nodded agreement, saying, “You make the division.” He handed her the ruler they’d just used to separate the jewels for counting. “Then we’ll—”

“Jesus,” Tate blurted, “you want my opinion, you’re both crazy. My God, take a goddam
handful,
why don’t you? Who the fuck’s to
know?”
As he spoke, his eyes were fixed on the treasure. In that moment Bernhardt saw an indefinable nakedness in Tate’s face, something elemental, therefore arresting. Just as, in his own face, he could feel the tug of a companion expression. Here—now—life had suddenly come down to its elemental parts, no longer a civilized whole.

“No,” Louise answered, for the first time speaking calmly, firmly, finally in control of herself. “No, we’re not going to do that.” As, methodically, she began to count. Her lips, Bernhardt noticed, were moving.

“I
HAVE TO TELL
you,” Tate said, “I find this amazing. I mean, shit, we’ve just dropped a fortune in jewels in a goddam trash can. And here we are—” Sitting in the front passenger seat of the Honda, Tate swept the surrounding greenery of Golden Gate Park with a muscular arm. The gesture exposed the big nine-millimeter automatic in its shoulder holster slung beneath his right arm. An identical gun, Bernhardt knew, was slung under his left arm. “Here we are, hoping that this goddam Chinaman is going to give us a—”

The telephone mounted between the seats beeped.

“Yes?”

“We have the goods,” Chin said. “No problem. Are you ready to copy the information I have for you?”

Bernhardt took his ballpoint pen and notebook from his pocket. “Go ahead.”

“The address is twenty-four-twenty Noriega. Do you remember my instructions concerning the keys?”

“Of course.”

“Well, then, our business is concluded. Perhaps, Mr. Bernhardt, we can do business again. In my line of work, it’s not practical to advertise. But I think you’d be impressed. Meanwhile, though, I’ll sign off.”

Bernhardt slammed down the telephone, twisted the key in the ignition, started the engine. In minutes he would see Paula, touch her, hold her close.

W
ITH TATE BESIDE HIM
, Bernhardt turned onto the 2300 block of Noriega and saw a cluster of girls on the sidewalk. The girls wore matching red sweaters, white blouses, and plaid skirts, uniforms of a Catholic girls’ school. Across the street, a Chinese woman wheeled two babies in a double stroller. Farther down the block, in a driveway, two men wearing grease-stained T-shirts were working on a vintage car. Beneath the raised hood, both men leaned far into the engine compartment. It was a typical April afternoon in the Sunset District, where endless blocks of small segmented row houses rose and fell with the terrain that had once been a vast expanse of sand dunes.

In the next block, in a house like all these others, Paula and Angela were shackled to a water pipe.

“Pretty benign,” Tate said. “So far.”

In the 2400 block now, Bernhardt slowed the Honda, began checking house numbers. Yes, there across the street: 2420. It was a small stucco house painted pink with white trim. The architecture was fake Spanish, suggested by a few terra-cotta roof tiles and hand-hewn beams tacked to the stucco facade. The single large picture window was covered by white Venetian blinds. A few neglected plants were dying in the barren ground of a small front garden. Like most San Francisco houses, it was built on a narrow twenty-five-foot lot over a ground-floor garage. The overhead garage door had three small windows, all frosted. A few circulars littered the narrow concrete steps that led up to the front door. The tightly drawn blinds, scruffy garden, and yellowing circulars all suggested disuse.

Bernhardt parked the Honda so that it blocked the driveway. He switched off the engine, set the brake, turned to look at the house. Tate, too, was silently staring, both of them alert for signs of life from inside.

Bernhardt spoke in a low voice: “I feel like I don’t want to go in.” It was an admission of the ennui that had overtaken him, left him incapable of rousing himself to act. He could only struggle helplessly with the monstrous horror bursting in his imagination: Paula, shackled to the water pipe, eyes wide and empty, lying in her own blood. Dead.

“Yeah …” Tate nodded reflectively, an unexpected expression of rough-cut sympathy. “Yeah, I guess I know what you mean. Still …” He tripped the door handle, then waited for Bernhardt, moving woodenly now, to do the same. “Still, we came here to wind it up. So let’s get about it.”

Obediently, Bernhardt got out of the car, went around to join Tate, who stood on the sidewalk looking at the house. Then, in unison, both men scanned their surroundings: middle-class San Francisco on an amiable, secure Monday afternoon. Except for three small children playing on the sidewalk nearby, there were no Chinese to be seen. Carefully, both men verified that, of the dozen-odd cars parked at the curb of the 2400 block of Noriega, none were occupied. Only one car was in motion: an orange pickup driven by an overweight Caucasian male.

“Okay.” Bernhardt drew a last long, tremulous breath. “Okay, here we go.” He stepped forward, mounted the front stairs. Yes, there was the small rectangular planter on the porch railing that the voice on the phone had described. Like the shrubs and flowers in the front garden, the plant in the green pot was dying. With Tate beside him, a two-man crowd on the small porch, Bernhardt lifted the ceramic container, set it aside—

—and, yes, saw the keys: one door key, two small handcuff keys.

Was he offering up a small prayer of thanksgiving? Addressed to which deity?

Was there, after all, a beneficent God?

Soon—in minutes—he would know.

He handed the two handcuff keys to Tate, who carefully pocketed them, then stepped back. It was a deferential withdrawal, as if he’d just viewed a body lying in state, and was now stepping respectfully back.

Aware that his hand was trembling, Bernhardt managed to fit the key to the lock. He turned the key until the latch clicked. Then, slowly, he pushed the door open. He pocketed the key, opened the door wide, drew the .357. With Tate close behind, he stepped into a small, pastel-painted entryway. Had there been a sound from the garage below? Could there still be guards in the house, a failure of communication after the jewels had been handed over?

Bernhardt moved into a small living room as Tate swung the door closed behind them. The house had a shut-up, musty odor. Except for two chromium-plated kitchen chairs, a small coffee table with towels spread across it, and a threadbare couch, probably left behind by the previous tenant, the living room was unfurnished. The small Spanish-style fireplace was littered with refuse. The floor was bare, badly scratched and spotted. Bernhardt stood motionless in the middle of the room, listening. Standing beside him, Tate also stood motionless, staring into the hallway that led back to the rear of the house.

Bernhardt spoke in a whisper: “Let’s—”

“Shhh.”
Holding a Browning automatic in his right hand, Tate raised his left, a warning. Then, silently, he inclined his head, his gaze fixed on the floor just ahead. The message: he’d heard something. But when Bernhardt listened, he heard nothing. Now Tate frowned, shrugged. Whatever sound he’d heard, the house was silent now.

“Did you bolt the front door?” Bernhardt whispered.

Frowning, Tate nodded abruptly. The message: of course he’d bolted the door.