Rogue Wave (13 page)

Kiernan could see only part of his face, but it was enough to reveal the telltale flush. Another person might have reached out, but, instinctively, she left him his privacy. Her childhood neighbors had shunned her, too, but that was because she rejected the church. At thirteen, it merely fired her adolescent rebellion, and she’d stomped past them, gone to public school, and taken out her anger perfecting gymnastic routines till she made the state championships. But that was hardly the same as Olsen and presumably Jessica Leporek’s experience of being scorned for themselves, she thought. There would have been no righteous anger for them. She waited till the color faded from Olsen’s face, and said, “So Jessica Leporek is fighting an uphill battle?”

“Yeah. The initiative might win, but it’ll be in spite of her.”

Kiernan stood up. “Get me an appointment with her, for tomorrow morning if you can. Eleven would be best. And Cummings, see if I can catch him after work, at home. Maybe about six.”

“Where you off to now?”

“Delaney’s. You have a current address for him?”

“Coast guard had zip. If they hadn’t known the deckhand was missing and had a name to begin with, he’d still be a John Doe. Manager at the Neptune wouldn’t tell the coroner’s investigator zip.” He smiled.

“But you got his forwarding address, right?”

“Olsen Investigations at your service. Twenty-sixth and Noe. Green six-plex, sixth from the corner. You planning to take a look in there?”

“I might have to. What about Matucci?”

He stepped carefully to the desk, extricated a file, flipped to a Xeroxed page and read off an address on Northpoint Street.

“I’ll call you at noon.”

Skip Olsen watched her walk down the stairs. So lightly. Her feet almost didn’t touch the steps. Life isn’t fair, the doctors had kept telling him, as if that would make everything fair on a grander scale. He walked slowly across the living room. Half his ass was skin-numb, and he could feel the bone grinding up into the hip joint like a pestle in a mortar.

He dropped onto the sofa. Too quickly. The icepick pain—cold, sharp, fast—running into the joint and then lightninglike down both sides of the leg. Going back to the wharf would be a bitch. Dumb. But he didn’t have any choice.

Kiernan climbed into the Jeep, and dialed the number Maureen Brant had given her at the grocery store.

“She had to leave,” the proprietor said when Kiernan asked for Maureen.

“She just called me ten minutes ago.”

“She waited as long as she could, you know.” The unspoken accusation was clear. “She was real worried about that husband of hers.”

“How so?”

“Like someone might get to him.”

“Did she say that?”

“Not in so many words.”

Rumors and suspicions she might accept from Olsen, but she was damned if she’d discuss them with a stranger. Still, it made her uneasy. “When is she coming back?”

“She’ll call you at three.”

“Fine.” She hung up and dialed the coroner’s office. When she’d identified herself, Marc Rosten’s secretary said, “Dr. Rosten is in a meeting. Can I take a message?”

“He was to have a copy of his autopsy notes ready for me. Would you check to see if he left it?”

“He didn’t leave anything for you.”

Kiernan took a deep breath. Rosten had always been mercurial and impulsive, but he had not been unreliable. It was a rotten time to start. She said, “When will he be available?”

“Not till after lunch.”

“Fine. Tell him I will call him then.”

Noe and 26th, downhill from Dixie Alley, and just south of the 24th Street bookstores, galleries and coffee houses, attracted singles, gay couples, and newly marrieds. It was a neighborhood that Zack could only dream of. And Delaney? He’d gone out of his way to keep a menial job for which he was overqualified. And here he lived in an area most deckhands wouldn’t choose and couldn’t afford.

Delaney’s building was a typical San Francisco six-plex, with outside central staircases front and rear. Kiernan checked the mailboxes. She wasn’t surprised to find his name absent.

She knocked on the nearest door: Wilson. No answer. That was the problem with a working-adult neighborhood—people were at work.

She tried the second door: Yamana. It wasn’t till the second floor that she got the gift of winter, a man in his thirties (Creswell) with the reddest nose she’d seen since the previous Christmas. Thank you, cold season, she thought.

“You frun da drug sto’?”

“No. ’Fraid not. I’m looking for Carlos Delaney.”

“Who?” He yanked a tissue out of his pocket and honked into it.

“He lived here up until two weeks ago.”

“No Delaney here.” Keeping the tissue at the ready, he put his hand on the door, about to swing it shut.

“Maybe you’d remember him if I described him.” She pushed away the picture of Delaney lying on the slab, his scalp eaten, his eyes ringed with bruises from the goggles. “About five ten, dark hair, blue eyes.”

He shook his head.

Recalling Delaney’s day blindness, she said, “Always wore dark glasses.”

“Oh, him! Chet Debbewo. Hey, dat an alias? Dey both sou’d like aliases.”

Debbewo? “Devereaux?”

Creswell affirmed with a nod and a titanic blow into the tissue.

“He lives upstairs. Right above me,” he said, quite clearly this time.

“Where can I find the landlord?”

“Yuma! Left right after da eartquake last year. You want his number down dere?”

“Thanks.”

He was halfway through writing it when the boy from the drugstore plodded up the stairs. Kiernan took the paper, waved thanks, and hurried downstairs.

The good news was that she now knew where Delaney/Devereaux lived. The bad news was that it was above the one person home all day with nothing to do.

Breaking and entering was rarely a good idea, as Tchernak was so eager to point out. It was a practice that created ex-licensed, injured PI’s, incarcerated PI’s, dead PI’s. Sensible PI’s shunned housebreaking at all costs. She knew that. Housebreaking was like seducing a man you work with. You know you’ll be sorry in the morning, and probably for a long time after, but that makes it all the more tempting. She should have learned that from Marc Rosten.

But patience was the last thing Rosten was qualified to teach, and at the bottom of the list of skills Kiernan seemed likely to master. She could call the landlord in Yuma. Would he tell her to go right in and search Delaney’s flat? Not likely. When he found out what was going on, he’d tell her to get lost. Then he’d call in a cleaning crew, sweep away any evidence, and rent out the flat before she could hunt up a relative of Delaney’s and get legitimate access.

Kiernan glanced up toward the third-floor flat. She was sorry she’d ever admitted it, and to Tchernak yet, but she did love housebreaking. She got a rush, an almost sexual rush from loiding a lock, or climbing through a carelessly left-open window. Penetrating it. Standing alone in the space someone had created to suit himself, sifting through closed closets, secret papers, revealing medicine cabinets, excited her. The pressure that forced total concentration, pitted her against alarms, police, neighbors, chance; it made her tingle all over. That was the real turn-on, not unlike the feeling she remembered from walking up the steps to Marc Rosten’s flat at shift’s end, wondering if he’d be there by his rumpled bed, waiting. She’d only had one close call, in a house in Rancho Santa Fe. She could still feel that as clearly as she could remember the feel of Rosten’s flesh pressed into hers. And then she’d managed to escape through the very door her nemesis had entered. That was the orgasm.

But at ten on a clear morning, housebreaking would not be a prelude to orgasm. It would be a ticket to jail.

Still, even from the outside, Delaney’s building had raised questions. Why had the man from this very middle-class neighborhood posed as a deckhand, and gone to a lot of trouble to do it? He was too smart for Robin’s tastes, but, obviously, not smart enough to survive.

Maybe Robin’s home, in the pricey Marina district, would give some answers.

K
IERNAN CRESTED THE STEEP
hill of Pacific Heights, with its pre-1906–earthquake mansions lined up like matrons at a reception. The fog had burned off entirely here, and sunlight glistened on maples and magnolia trees. At the foot of the hill, the Marina district stretched flat and sparkling white to the edge of the Bay, and a tanker glided under the bright red arches of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It had been here, on a morning just like this, that Kiernan had had her first thoughts of wealth. She and Rosten had speculated that two doctors could afford to live anywhere they chose, but “be wasted on us,” she’d muttered. “We’re both too exhausted to be able to enjoy it.” Later, alone, she pondered the prospect: Pacific Heights, the antithesis of her childhood row house in Baltimore. She’d admired the colorful Victorian houses on Divisadero Street, but she hadn’t acted on her impulse to buy one, even when she was with the coroner’s office north of the city. Instead, she’d bought a modest house and furnished it in rattan, as if at some level she had known part of her life was temporary, that someday she would be gone from the coroner’s office and another day, months later, that she would give up her life there and buy a ticket to Bangkok.

She had returned from Asia after two years to discover her house was worth triple what she’d paid for it. Which was a good thing, because by then she had contemplated the prospect of wealth long enough in the abstract: she was ready for a beach house in La Jolla. And a houseman.

She drove across Union Street and Lombard and into the Marina, wondering whether Robin Matucci’s route to high-style living had been as circuitous as her own.

The last time she’d been here had been only a month or so after the big earthquake; the road had still been torn up and ropes blocked off the crumbling streets. But now the sidewalks were busy and the curbs jammed with cars, parked within an inch of every driveway, in front of garages, blocking entrance-ways.

Kiernan pulled up by Robin Matucci’s house, parking at the angle of the corner. The curb was gone, replaced by macadam, and next door a jagged crack still bisected the bricks in the facade. But Robin’s house looked unscathed. It sat flush between its neighbors, a stucco marina row house with a bay-windowed living room above a garage, a stairway leading up beside it. The house was built atop the rubble from the 1906 earthquake, manmade land that had turned to mud and sucked buildings down just as Garrett Brant’s Alaskan mud flats had pulled its victims into their depths. And still, Kiernan knew, the house was worth half a million.

A plump, gray-haired woman opened the screen door to shake a mop outside. Robin’s mother? Cleaning out a dead daughter’s house was exactly the way a mother might handle her grief. Kiernan remembered her own mother after her sister’s sudden death: so stunned she couldn’t bring herself even to speak. But this woman was not in such bad shape; surely she would be able to help fill in Kiernan’s sketchy picture of Robin, or at least explain her daughter’s friendship with Jessica Leporek.

Kiernan walked up to the front door just as the woman was shutting it. “Mrs. Matucci?”

“Yes, I’m Maeve. And you are … ?” There was a firmness to her square jaw, and shaky defiance clear in the lines around her eyes.

Again Kiernan thought of her own mother. At least Mary O’Shaughnessy hadn’t been beset by private investigators, slimy, deceitful creatures for whom the truth was merely one option and the end always justified the means. … Kiernan could feel her face flushing. She swallowed hard, pushed away the accusing stereotype, but failed to dislodge the flush of guilt. “Mrs. Matucci, Robin is probably alive. My name is Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. I’m a private investigator. And I’m the only one trying to find her.”

The color drained from Maeve Matucci’s face, and she stood stone-still. “Prove to me who you are.”

With relief, Kiernan showed her license.

In the same show-me tone, she said, “What makes you think my Robin’s alive?”

Kiernan relaxed. Maeve Matucci was no Mary O’Shaughnessy crying silently for protection. “Delaney went overboard by the Farallons, thirty miles out. Just because one person is swept overboard doesn’t mean another is. The boat didn’t sink till it was three miles offshore, so Robin could have been on board for hours after Delaney’s death, and what would she have been thinking about all that time? How to make it to shore, right?”

Maeve Matucci was probably unaware that she was leaning toward the door—toward hope, Kiernan thought. But she obviously realized her lips were trembling, because she sucked them in and pressed them tightly together. If Robin Matucci was still alive, wouldn’t she have let her mother know? “Robin was a good sailor, wasn’t she?” Kiernan asked.

Maeve Matucci looked closer to tears than to words.

Giving her time to get control of herself, Kiernan gazed past her at the lavish anteroom. Unlike the simple exterior of the house, it sported a Bokhara rug, a gilt-framed mirror and an elaborate table displaying a huge arrangement of irises and other flowers too dead to identify. Definitely not the place into which a ship’s captain trudges to pull off her salt-encrusted boots. The door to the garage was open. Kiernan shot a glance into the dark space. From what she could tell, it was empty—there was no car, and, more unusual for a Bay Area garage, none of the kind of junk that would normally have filled the attic, had these houses possessed attics. Nothing that suggested permanence. She couldn’t imagine Robin Matucci in this house.

A cardboard box stood by the door. On top of it lay a framed photograph. “May I?” she asked, reaching for it.

It was a family portrait taken maybe twenty-five years earlier. Kiernan recognized Maeve, younger then, a slender, dark, stylish woman. And Robin, sitting on her father’s lap—obviously her mother’s daughter, with the same deep-blue eyes, the same air of determination in her small face, and a mass of red curls that nearly overwhelmed her. She must have been about five years old. Her father had been dark, too. The bond between father and daughter was so evident that Kiernan found it hard to focus on anything else in the picture.