Rogue Wave (17 page)

“Okay. Anything else?”

Kiernan laughed. “It’s a good thing I don’t waste time.”

“I didn’t mean to press you. It’s just that I’m so anxious. I didn’t realize how much I was counting on this investigation. I guess I couldn’t let myself think about it, not when it still wasn’t clear if you’d take the case. Look, I’ll call you later tonight.”

“No, not tonight.”

“You don’t have to worry about going out. I’ve got the number for your cellular phone.”

Tonight of all nights she did not want the car phone buzzing. “Call me in the morning, at ten. If we don’t connect then try me again at noon.”

“The store opens at eight.”

“I don’t.” She could hear Maureen’s quick gasp. “Look, Maureen, most investigator’s reports are made once a week. I know you’re anxious—”

“That’s okay. I won’t be a pest. I’ll wait till ten. Kiernan, I’m just so relieved you’re with me on this.”

Kiernan put down the phone, thinking not of Maureen and Garrett but of Carlos Delaney. Had Robin hired him and all his predecessors because she was so insecure that she needed to surround herself with deckhands as bland as the furniture in her apartment? Why had she chosen to take him out in the Pacific with storm warnings posted? What had she been using him for?

Rain streaked the motel window. Kiernan smiled; it was rain that would grow stronger as the night progressed. The kind of rain that provides a shield for housebreakers. Thinking of Delaney’s waiting apartment, she felt her body grow tense. She’d planned to wait till after midnight, but in this weather she could go earlier.

She called Skip Olsen and got his answering machine. “Skip, something’s come up tonight. I have to cancel dinner. Don’t call me. I’m going to take a nap. I’ll get back to you either later tonight or probably tomorrow morning.”

The world was swaying. Olsen couldn’t see. His eyes refused to open. Or maybe they were open, and it was night-black.

Where were his arms and legs? Couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t hear anything but a kind of swishing and thumping.

Slowly sensation returned. Cold. Damp. His head wedged between rope and metal. Barking outside.

His arm pricked numb. He still couldn’t feel his hands. His mouth was Sahara dry. Wedged open. Gagged. Pain swept down his leg. He shrieked; nothing came out but a shallow groan. And the sloshing of water against the sides of the boat, the crunch of footsteps above. Pain again, burning his leg. Move! Get off the leg!

He couldn’t move his feet, his legs, his arms. He rolled side to side with the boat. The boat! He was in a boat, just like Delaney. Oh shit, Delaney! God, he didn’t want to think about Delaney.

Pain. White-hot!

Blackness.

8:17. The hell with it. Kiernan got up, put on jeans and a green turtleneck, grabbed her slicker and headed for the Jeep.

Rain hit her face, blown at an angle by the strong wind off the Pacific.

As she waited for the engine to warm, she ran through the list of reasons not to break into Delaney’s apartment. None dissuaded her. A second list called “Why to wait till midnight” fared no better. Tchernak, she thought smiling, would have had plenty of good reasons for her. Harry Scott, the investigator she had worked for in San Diego, had insisted that a licensed private investigator had no business breaking the law. “It’s too dangerous. Takes too much time. And it makes us look sleazy.” All that warning without her even having mentioned the sexual rush she got from it! Lock-picking for the erotic woman! She laughed, shifted the Jeep into first, and pulled sharply into traffic, cutting off a Mercedes.

She drove slowly down 26th Street. Rain streaked down, blurring lights in windows. In Delaney’s six-plex lights shone in only the first-floor windows. On the third floor, Delaney’s windows were dark, as were those of the flat next to his. Perfect!

Now, she thought, for the hard part—finding a parking spot. Can’t make a fast getaway if your car’s been towed.

The spot she finally squeezed into was a full three blocks away. She thrust her arms into her slicker, hefted her fanny pack, and walked quickly down the gentle slope of 26th Street. The tarry smell of wet roofs filled the air.

She paused for a moment near Delaney’s building and shook her hair sharply, spraying water in all directions. She allowed herself a brief smile as she surveyed the building. The foreplay had begun.

Delaney’s staircase was empty. She walked quickly up to the first landing, past the side-by-side doors, climbed the seven stairs to the half-landing, then paused to check the second-floor door—she did not want to run into Delaney’s neighbor again. His front lights were off. With that cold he should be in bed. Probably in back of the apartment. So far, so good. She hurried on to the third floor, breathing faster.

There were no lights in the apartment across from Delaney’s, and no outside light. All the better. She pulled out what looked like a credit card, but wasn’t. A credit card might work in a lock, but the chances of opening a door were not half so great as snapping the card. This piece of celluloid was more flexible. Flexible but firm under pressure, always a good combination. She stood perfectly still, listening to the hiss of cars, the grind of low gears, the groaning of brakes, the slamming of car doors. Not a housebreaker’s paradise. But it heightened the tension. She liked that.

Despite the chill air, Kiernan’s face was still warm. Rain that had previously tapped gently on the windows now seemed to pound. But there were no footsteps on the stairs. As she pushed the card between tongue and striker plate, her fingertips tingled and the skin across her cheeks felt taut. She could feel the touch of her nipples against the fabric of her bra. The edge of the card was against the tongue. She pushed, the tongue gave. Slowly, she turned the handle.

The door didn’t move. The deadbolt was on. Damn! The card felt limp in her hand.

She sighed. Lightless or not, this was no place to try anything fancier. No surprise Delaney had left the deadbolt on, any sensible city person would. But if this building was a standard San Francisco six-plex there would be a similar staircase and door arrangement at the back. Walking softly, she made her way down the stairs.

The walkway was beneath the first story, open to the sky only once in the middle, by way of the narrowest airshaft Kiernan had ever seen. But at least it was dry. She took off her slicker, folded it small and stuck it in her fanny pack, moving the pack around to her stomach. There was no rain in the backyard, either. It took her a moment to realize that wind-slanted rain couldn’t reach the ground here; the whole backyard was a larger version of the airshaft. In the pale trapezoids of light from the first-floor windows and the brighter one from the second story she could make out a yard no more than ten feet deep, ending at a three-story blank wall. The yard would be useless for growing anything more sun-hungry than ivy, but for a woman needing facile entrance to a flat, that arrangement could not have been better—except for the sick man in the bedroom under Delaney’s window.

She could wait. Go back to the motel, sleep, come here in the morning and try the “woman friend locked out on a cold, rainy morning” routine. Common sense … But it was too late. She was too far into the foreplay now.

She made her way up the stairs, walking to the sides to avoid squeaking steps, listening for sounds of TVs or stereos. Her breath came faster. The apartment below Delaney’s was silent: not even the honk of a nose blow. But the light was on. The guy had to be reading. Damn! She moved on, placing a foot, pausing, stepping up.

She recalled that Rosten’s flat had had a three-window bay like these. Occasionally, when she’d lost her key, she’d opted to go through the window on the far side of the bay, the one residents assumed was safe from burglars. In those days, knowing she was legit, she’d given no thought to the police—her only worry had been of falling, and years of gymnastic training had turned that into simple care not to misstep and humiliate herself.

The stairs here protruded beyond the bay. A glance at the catch on the nearest window showed it was locked. She leaned out to examine the second. Rain chafed the side of her face, and the backyard enclosure provided no protection. The second window was locked, too. But the top of the far window was down a couple of inches.

She leaned back under the stair roof, listening. The house to her left was only two stories high, too low to be a problem. It was the one to the right, next to Delaney’s apartment and a duplicate of this one that bore watching. The windows there were dark. All she needed was three minutes.

Her skin tingled, her breathing was shallow. She looked back at the windows, gauging her moves, running the tape through her mind as she’d done with gymnastic routines. The windows were wet, the sills slick. One of the first things she’d learned in gymnastics had been how to mount the uneven bars: grab the bottom one, catch a knee over it and swing up; then, using the momentum she’d gained, get both feet on that bar, balance, and grab for the top one. The only time she’d stopped midbalance had taught her the properties—and the pitfalls—of inertia.

She wiped her sweaty palms on her jeans, climbed onto the railing, leaned out over the three-story drop, and placed her right foot on the middle windowsill. No stopping now. She pressed her hands against the moldings, brought her left foot onto the sill, pushed off and grabbed for the top of the far window. She pulled it down; it creaked, but gave. Hands poised on the top, she paused momentarily, savoring the thrill, then thrust herself through headfirst, hanging onto the top till her thighs were on it and she could bring her hands to the floor. She slid her legs down slowly till she could bend a knee and bring one foot down. Then she pushed the window back up.

Her heart beat faster, her skin tingled. She was aware of a tightness in all her muscles: arms, legs, chest, groin. She felt alone against the apartment and its hidden contents, against the ghost of Carlos Delaney, against the curiosity of neighbors, the ambush of noise, the police, the universe. She loved it.

She stood still, focusing her whole being on the flat. The windows rattled, rain played on the glass. The water heater rumbled on. The place smelled of crackers, old chocolate, stale sweat.

Her eyes had adjusted; the rooms were not dark so much as dim. She extricated a flashlight from her pack and walked carefully, stepping along the sides of the hallway rather than the middle. Couldn’t the man have bought rugs! At the end of the hallway was a living room, in the middle, a kitchen and bathroom, and in back the bedroom through which she had entered. Exits: living-room door, bedroom window, kitchen and bathroom windows on the narrow airshaft.

If the flat had not come furnished, then Delaney had spent some time at Busvan or the Salvation Army searching for threadbare pieces of a beige sectional. The living-room carpet was equally worn. A long, tall bookcase covered the outside wall. She moved closer to it and shone the light on the titles: legal works, novels, books on plumbing, travel, beginning electrical repair.
Electrical repair!
On the floor beside the coffee table was a pile of magazines—
California Angler
,
Sports Fishing, Cruising World
—magazines suited to the novice deckhand Zack had described Delaney as portraying.

Along the far wall was a piano, with sheet music open to a Scott Joplin rag. Not music for a beginner.

The kitchen revealed nothing but Delaney’s taste for chocolate. The sink held one dirty cup, stained not with coffee but with cocoa. The image of Delaney’s crab-gnawed head flashed through Kiernan’s mind. She shut her eyes to keep that image separate from the cozy picture of a man drinking one last cup of cocoa before going out to drown.

Moving toward the window, she listened for voices coming up the airshaft. No sound but the clatter of rain on the roof and water gurgling down the drainpipe.

She moved on to the bedroom. If there was anything to be found, it would be here. Even in the dim light, the bedroom had the look of a place left in a hurry: sheets and quilt in a tumble, dirty T-shirt, shorts, socks in a heap beside the Murphy bed.

The thickness of the dust made it clear that Delaney had lived here for a while. So why did he rent that sleazy room in the Tenderloin? Why the pose that he was just another deckhand who needed a place to live? Why the alias?

In the closet into which the bed was intended to fold was a fold-top desk. Locked. She pulled out a penknife and forced it.

The cubbyholes were stuffed with bills: P G and E, Sprint, Pacific Bell, Mastercard, Visa: all in the name of Devereaux. The bills went back over two years.

The drawers held nothing but clothes, clothes that suggested a better life than Delaney had on the dock. Another life.

She bent down and shone the light under the Murphy bed. Boxes crowded together to the edge. Twelve, maybe even sixteen of them. She moved to the end of the bed and shone the light across the floor in front of the boxes. More dust. At the far side, she found what she was looking for, the dust-marked trail of the box someone had pulled out. She yanked it out and pawed through. Sweaters. She pulled out the box behind it. Manila files. Files with case names and number on the left, with a log of transactions, and a billing log. Files like she had in her own office. Private investigator’s files!

Investigator’s files, a book on electrical repair, and a job on a boat on which the coast guard had found eavesdropping wires! Odds were then that Devereaux, a.k.a. Delaney, had been spying on Robin. What was he waiting to hear? How she found fish? No. Bright as Delaney might be, well prepared as his books suggested he was, he wouldn’t have spent six weeks listening to Robin and not come up with Hartoonian. Finding Hartoonian had taken Skip Olsen just a couple of hours. So what was a private investigator doing on Robin’s boat? Who was he working for?

The wind rattled against the windows. Kiernan jumped. She searched the box of files for “Matucci.” Not there. “Damn,” she muttered. Whatever Delaney was investigating, it must be listed under the client’s name, as indeed it should be. She started through the files again, more slowly this time.