Before There Were Angels (15 page)

“You sure know your San Francisco,” I said.

“Only the parts where somebody dies in them,” Stevie corrected me.

“All good stories have death in them,” I countered.
“Love and death. The red rose.”

“What red rose?” Stevie asked.

“The red rose in paintings, indicating sex and death. They were very closely related in the old days because of the diseases you got from sex.”

“AIDS?”

“No, syphilis then. AIDS only turned up thirty years ago. But it would work for AIDS too. You always have to be careful when you have sex. Best to remember that, Stevie. Let’s go and see those sea lions. Sharks and death work too, which is why the City of San Francisco gave the sea lions a safe haven in the yachting marina next to Pier 39.”

After visiting the sea lions, Belle decided she wanted another Starbucks so she went into the one at the bottom of Powell Street. She came out laughing.

“Our cops are really wonderful,” she said, “and they love their coffee. There were two of them in there sitting by the door in those red chairs. They were on duty because I could hear a dispatcher talking over their radios
saying how he had been expecting fog when he set out for work but it was now a beautiful day. One cop was doing the crossword, the other was playing with his iPad. A street person walked in, went straight up to the counter and stole the tips out of the jar. The cute little guy behind the counter shouted, ‘Hey! Don't steal our tips!’. The cop doing the crossword cop looked up, then went back to his crossword. The other cop didn't look up at all. The guy behind the counter shouted, ‘Hey! Don't steal our tips!’ again, looking at the cops. Neither of the cops paid any attention. The street person had to brush past their knees as he walked out because the cops were right next to the door. ‘Wow,’ the guy behind the counter said, ‘that was really helpful of you.’ The cop with the crossword said, ‘You handled yourself really well there, I thought.’ The other cop didn’t say anything. Some of the people in the line were obviously tourists and their jaws were almost falling to the floor in shock. The locals just put their hands in their pockets and filled the tip jar up again. Only in San Francisco!”

“Well, I suppose it was a lot cheaper not to arrest him.
No harm was done. The tip jar got filled, the people in the line felt good about themselves for doing a good deed, and the cops got their coffee and cakes in peace. Perfect world.”

“H
ow do you become a cop? It sounds like a really great job,” Stevie asked.

*  *  *

On the way home in the street car, Stevie asked about Robert. “How did you meet Dad, Mom?”

“We met in the street
, where I meet all the right people, including Luke here.”

“Yes, we did,” I confirmed.

“In fact it was an almost identical meeting, except one was in Pine Street and the other was over on Sea Cliff.”

“You met Robert in Sea Cliff?” I asked, surprised. “What was he doing there?” Sea Cliff is wh
ere all the old, huge houses of the San Francisco aristocracy are - the Spreckels, the Gettys and Danielle Steele.

“He was looki
ng around, sight-seeing, just like I was. And he was gorgeous. Still is.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do. Which doesn’t mean he is easy to live with -“

“I like him,” protested Stevie. “I like Luke too,” he added.

“I won’t go into details as to what happened next but we went to the Presidio, found a quiet spot and when I finished my modeling assignment, I went back with him to Arizona, we got married and I found out that I was pregnant with Zack and Stevie. It was a mistake - my mistake. I shouldn’t have married him but I got carried away, and I never modeled again.”

“You married me within a month of us meeting,” I said.

“Yes, but that wasn’t a mistake. With you I was sure. With Robert I was just infatuated.”

“You’ve never told me you were a model,” I continued.

“I only did one assignment. It wasn’t worth mentioning. And I don’t miss it at all. It was fun, that’s all.”

“So you don’t miss it?”

“Hell no. I don’t miss anything now, except Zack. I really miss Zack.”

A thoughtful expression crossed Stevie’s face. He was evidently working on a plan. I was pleased about that. Having Zack around the house as a ghost would be a bit weird but a great comfort to Belle
, and that was all that mattered to me.

He might even help us rid ourselves of
Rafaella.

Chapter 19

Sarah in the call center of my company told me that they hadn’t found Rafaella yet. She no longer lived in our old house and the people who had moved in after us had never been given a forwarding address. She was not registered on the electrical roll and there were no updated addresses on the credit reference databases. She would keep looking, though.

Which is why, when I saw two cops standing outside our front door, my blood froze.
Thip had assured us that I was very unlikely to be arrested and thrown out of the country on the next plane, that I would have to appear before an immigration judge and even then I would be given thirty days to buy my own ticket and leave voluntarily, but you never know what authoritarian government agencies will decide to do on whim.

Much to my relief as I opened the door, a noticeable tremble shaking my body, one of the officers was
Luiz Martinez.

“We’ve come to update you on our investigations
,” he said. “Is now a good time?”

At that point, given that their visit had nothing to do with immigration after all, I would have agreed to anything.

“Surely,” I said, standing aside.

“This is Officer
Ricardo Nielsen.”

“Hi there.”

We walked into the living room.

“Has there been any progress?” I asked.

Martinez shook his head sadly. “Not a lot. We have had a whole squad devoted to the case but we can find no trace of the most likely suspects, who are Martha DeGamo or your ex-wife, Rafaella or Claire Parsons or Claire Allendale, or whatever she is calling herself nowadays. Mrs. DeGamo has disappeared without trace and we are assuming Rafaella is still living in England because we have no record of her having entered the US.”

“We can’t find her in England either,” I said.
“All her official records that we can gain access to give her home address as our home address but she left there nearly six months ago and nobody knows where she went to. I have been checking with mutual friends and they don’t know where she is either, or if they do, they are not saying. It is almost as if she has gone Black Ops or died. Personally I prefer the latter.”

Neither officer laughed.

“It’s pretty much the same story with Martha DeGamo,” Martinez continued earnestly. “Maybe she’s dead too. She could have killed herself after she shot her entire family but no unclaimed body has turned up anywhere.”

“I didn’t know it was so easy to disappear,” I said.

“Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants disappear without trace every year,” Officer Nielsen replied. “It’s a big country. It’s a big world. And a lot of countries over there in Europe don’t even have border controls.”

“That bit I know,” I smiled.

“The best way to find people is not from official records but from financial records. People have to take money along with them eventually unless they empty their bank accounts so as to avoid being traced. Then you know that they are deliberately in hiding. Martha DeGamo hasn’t withdrawn anything from any bank accounts that we can find since the murders and we can’t find a single record of a financial transaction, or even application, relating to her. We really think she may be dead.”

“So the two main suspects are dead, are they?” I quipped. “That doesn’t advance the situation very much, especially as one of them seems to have killed from beyond the grave.”

“One of them will turn up eventually,” Martinez observed. “It is too early yet. Lots of people disappear for a while, then, when they believe no-one is looking for them anymore, they get careless. It is a question of waiting for that to happen. Dead people don’t kill other people, so whoever did this to your son is alive, they’re just invisible for now. We spend a lot of time waiting for that tell-tale little blip to appear on our computer screens. Everything is electronic nowadays. We do a lot of physical things to reassure the public that we are doing something, but the reality in these cases is that we are looking for an electronic transaction of some kind.”

I changed
the subject because there was nowhere further for this line of thought to go. “You don’t have anyone trailing Stevie to school and back again by any chance?”

The two officers looked puzzled. “No,” confirmed Martinez. “Why, is somebody following him around?”

“Yes, a woman. Blonde. Thirties to forties.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“We have tried but she has a spectacular ability to disappear when we get close to her.”

“How do you lose her?” asked Nielsen.

“Don’t ask me,” I said. “She literally disappears into thin air or down an alleyway or something. We can’t explain it.”

“Not so many alleyways in San Francisco,” Nielsen mused.

“No, you are right.”

“See if you can get a photograph of her,” suggested Martinez. “Maybe we can work from there.”

“But she is definitely not one of yours?”

“No, definitely not.”

“OK, I’ll try a photograph instead. I don’t know how she can avoid that.”

“In this case anything is possible,” commented Martinez wryly.

“True that,” agreed Nielsen. “This is the weirdest case I have ever been involved in. Three suspects now and they all seem to be ghosts.”

*  *  *

We tried to take photos of Stevie’s shadow, all of us, but we couldn’t manage to capture a single image of her. We took them from behind, from the side and from the front, but it was as if she wasn’t there. As we got more frustrated, we became more obvious about it. She smiled for several of the shots with a quirky compliant-cum-triumphal look, and she posed for a couple, but all we got was the scenery behind her, not even a shaft of light or a reflection to suggest she had ever been there.

So we concluded that she must have been a ghost or some kind of astral projection, which accentuated
our initial questions of who she was and why she was there.

We finally managed to get
Luiz Martinez to release pictures of Martha DeGamo but it wasn’t her. She was the right profile in terms of age, coloring, race, weight and height but she didn’t look like her.

Officer
Neilsen also became intrigued by the mystery and took to following her around as well, and he was as baffled as we were when she always disappeared having tailed Stevie to his school or back to his home.

She never said anything, she never betrayed any specific emotion beyond that teasin
g smile of hers as we took full-frontal pictures of her, she never tried to avoid us during the procession to and from the school, and she seemed to walk much as any other person walks although very quietly, and maybe silently.

Could Martha
DeGamo disguise herself, could Rafaella disguise herself, and if she was neither of these two women, who the hell was she?

One day, however, she dropped a note into the road, a note that was eagerly picked up by Belle who was following her that day, and then immediately checked by Officer Nielsen who was following Belle. It read:

I am Genevieve Giraud. Now go away!

You are making a spectacle of all of us.

That told us, but not much. Who was Genevieve Giraud and was she even telling us the truth? Nor did her note explain why she was escorting Stevie, why it would matter that we were making a spectacle of ourselves (as we undoubtedly were), and whether she was, bluntly, friend or foe.

Before leaving Belle
that day, and after losing Genevieve Giraud yet again somewhere in the vicinity of the school, Ricardo Nielsen almost shook his head off in puzzlement as he gyrated it vigorously from side to side.

“This case beats it all,” he said. “I know you have suffered the tragic loss of a child but I am beginning to see the funny side. Somebody is messing with us. I don’t know how they are doing it but they must be doing it. This is crazy stuff. You can’t reach out and touch anything, and yet a twelve year old child is dead and that is terrible. I’ll make some investigations into
who Genevieve Giraud might be and get back to you. Almost certainly the name is made up and we’re heading towards another dead end, but then again - who knows? - it might lead to something.”

Belle was outraged when she got home. “Zack is dead and Officer Nielsen is looking on the funny side,” she spluttered.

“He can’t really have said that,” I replied.