Diagnosis Murder 6 - The Dead Letter (11 page)

"Weldon Fike is the pivotal figure in the prosecution of a prison gang that's responsible for arranging the killings of two dozen people," Penmore said, his voice quivering with rage. "All of the victims were witnesses scheduled to appear in trials in which their eyewitness testimony would have led to convictions. You would jeopardize that case for the sake of a blackmailer?"

"My job is to investigate homicides, not judge the victims," Steve said.

"Your job is to investigate the evidence in Stryker's files and arrest anyone engaged in criminal activity," Burnside said. "There is no murder investigation. Am I clear, Detective?"

"Transparent," Steve said.

"Good, because if you pull anything like this again, your new profession will require a drive-thru window and a paper hat." Burnside picked up several folded blue documents from his desk and held them out to Steve. "Judge Lancaster issued these warrants this morning. They're good for Detective Harley Brule's home, office, car, and the warehouse full of stolen goods he's got in Chatsworth. Shut him down and arrest every member of the Major Crime Unit."

Steve took the warrants. "Will do. Should I alert the media so we have some footage for your next campaign ad?"

"Don't push your luck, Detective," Burnside said. "You don't have many friends left."

"I wasn't aware I had any," Steve said.

"You're getting my point," Burnside said. "You need the power and the publicity that comes from a string of successful, high-profile convictions much more than I do."

"I don't play politics," Steve said.

"Of course you do," Penmore snickered. "You just do it badly."

Steve turned to go, but before he was out the door, Burnside called to him.

"Are you still thinking about that hot cinnamon roll?" Burnside said.

"Yeah," Steve said.

"Get one for me, too, will you?"

CHAPTER NINE

Mark was awakened by two sharp knocks at his door, but the fog in his head didn't clear right away. His mind was still running through an onion field, searching for something he couldn't name. A crow swooped down and cawed, "Maid service."

It was the jarring sound of the door catching against the chain that finally cleared his head. He'd forgotten to hang the DO NOT DISTURB sign on his doorknob last night.

"I'm here," he called groggily from his bed in the dark room. "Come back later."

Mark heard a muffled apology and rested his head again on the sleep-warmed pillow. The heavy shades blocked out the sun completely. The room was black, illuminated only by the light from the corridor that seeped under the door and the red glow of the numbers on the clock radio on the nightstand.

It was ten thirty in the morning.

So much for an early start, he thought.

It was noon by the time he'd showered and shaved, gone down to the business center, and printed out all the notes he'd made on his laptop the night before. He also e-mailed the notes to himself for good measure.

By twelve thirty, he was on the Pacific Coast Highway heading south to Capitola. It was the perfect day to be skimming along the jagged edge of California, all blue skies, tall pines, cotton-ball clouds, and frothy surf.

Mark stopped for a quick lunch in Half Moon Bay at a ramshackle hamburger stand in a pumpkin patch across the highway from the craggy shore. The cheeseburger was soggy and oversalted, but the pumpkin pie was so good it took all of his willpower not to order a second slice. He was becoming a pie addict.

It was nearly two p.m. by the time he drove down the hill and under a towering wooden railroad trestle into Capitola, a seaside village nestled between two cliffs where the Soquel River met the sea.

Capitola had a unique mix of architecture, setting, and lifestyle that managed to simultaneously evoke a Mediterranean resort, gold rush San Francisco, and sixties California at the height of the hippie movement. Somehow, those sharp contrasts melded together seamlessly to create a place of unusual charm and beauty.

Betsy Cale lived in Venetian Court, a tightly packed hamlet of twenties-era villas embraced by the beach in front, the cliffs behind, a fishing pier on one side, and the mouth of the river on the other.

The beachfront villas looked like brightly colored birthday cakes, frosted with swirls of stucco painted pink, orange, blue, yellow, and turquoise under red terra-cotta tile roofs.

Betsy and her daughter lived in the first row of villas on a concrete promenade that doubled as a breakwater in the winter months, when the beach was often consumed by the churning sea.

On this particular day, the sand was as smooth as sugar, dotted by a few sunbathers, two old men flying kites on either side of the gentle river that cut through the center of the beach, and several giggling children running back and forth through the ankle-deep water.

Mark found Betsy sitting at an easel outside the open door of her villa, facing the bay and delicately dabbing paint on a canvas. She wore a large straw hat, a paint-spattered denim work shirt and loose-fitting shorts. Her skin was evenly sun-bronzed, right down to the toes of her bare feet. She was in her forties, but could easily have passed for a much younger woman. It was only as Mark got closer that he could see the crow's-feet at the corners of her sea green eyes.

He'd assumed she was painting the beach scene playing out in front of her, but as he looked over her shoulder, he could see that her gaze was directed farther south, to a distant pier leading to a shipwreck in the bay.

"I don't see how anyone with a paintbrush could resist capturing a dramatic seascape like that," Mark said.

"They haven't, Betsy said with a friendly smile. "Around here, painting the Cement Ship is a cliché."

Mark squinted into the distance, trying to bring the wreckage into focus through the sea mist. "That ship is made of cement?"

"The
Palo Alto
is our version of the
Spruce Goose
," she said. "She was one of two concrete tankers constructed in San Francisco during World War One. The war was over by the time they were finished. The
Palo Alto
made only one short voyage before she was towed down here seventy-five years ago and beached to become a dance hall. A fierce storm broke the hull apart a few years later, and that's where she's been resting ever since, becoming home to seagulls, pelicans, crabs, mussels, and fish."

"And the inspiration to generations of talented artists like yourself," Mark said.

"I wouldn't call myself talented yet. Fumbling is more like it. There's something about that wreck that captivates me. I could look at it for hours." She sighed wearily and frowned at her painting. "But whatever it is about her that enthralls me, I haven't been able to capture it yet"

"It looks just like it," Mark said.

She shook her head. "It doesn't look like the ship I see."

He studied her painting more closely. There were no birds, no people, no living things in her portrait of the Cement Ship. Only the ocean seemed alive, but even it seemed to ebb into stillness around the wreck. The Cement Ship on her canvas was a broken hulk, fading into the mist like a lost memory.

"It's sad," Mark said.

"What is?"

"Your Cement Ship," he said. "The history you told me is right there in your brushstrokes. I see the wasting away of a dream, the ruins of hopes that went unfulfilled."

She studied her own painting, as if seeing it for the first time.

"What happened to the sister ship?" Mark asked.

"The
Peralta
. Amazingly, it's still afloat, up in British Columbia," she said. "It's one of ten rotting old warships anchored together to form a breakwater for a paper mill on the Powell River. I'd like to go up there someday and paint it, too."

"What's stopping you?"

Betsy motioned towards a slim teenage girl in a bikini, lying on her stomach on a beach blanket. The girl was leaning on her elbows, running a yellow highlighter over passages in a textbook, her face a grimace of boredom.

"I know the feeling." Mark nodded. "It's not easy being a single parent."

Betsy set down her paintbrush and turned to give Mark her full attention. "How did you know I'm a single parent?"

Mark offered his hand. "I'm Dr. Mark Sloan, chief of internal medicine at Community General Hospital in Los Angeles."

She shook his hand but looked at him guardedly. "It's a long way to go for a house call, Doctor."

"You met my son a few years ago," he said. "Lieutenant Steve Sloan."

"The homicide detective who investigated my ex-husband's murder," she said. "Jimmy seems to be a popular topic lately."

"I suppose Nick Stryker came down to see you, too," Mark said.

"So that's what this is about," she said. "You're worried that Stryker might prove that your son put an innocent man on death row."

"Do you think Bert Yankton is innocent?"

"The Bert Yankton I knew was a sweet man who was manipulated and betrayed by those closest to him," she said. "I have a hard time imagining him killing anyone, even with the horrible things that Jimmy did to him. That's probably not what you wanted to hear."

"The evidence against him was pretty compelling," Mark said. "Especially when you look at his motive and his state of mind the night of the murder. His wife was lucky he didn't take a swing at her with that sledgehammer."

"If you're convinced he's guilty, then why are you so worried that Stryker will come up with. something that will set him free?"

"I'm not," Mark said.

"Then what are you doing here?" Betsy said. "It wasn't to learn about the Cement Ship."

"Nick Stryker disappeared a few days ago," Mark said. "I'm trying to find out what happened to him."

"Why?"

"Because he asked me to," Mark said. He told her about the letter he received from Stryker and his visit with Yankton at San Quentin, but he didn't mention the box of blackmail files.

"You think whatever happened to Stryker has something to do with my ex-husband's murder?" Betsy asked.

"I don't know." Mark said. "I'm following Stryker's tracks, hoping I'll figure out what happened along the way."

"If you do that." she said, "whatever happened to him could happen to you."

Mark smiled. "I try not to think about that."

She regarded Mark anew and, apparently, liked what she saw. "How would you like an ice-cold glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade?"

"That would be very nice. Thank you."

Betsy stood up and led Mark into her villa. While she got out the pitcher of lemonade, two glasses, and some cookies, Mark took a moment to look around, his hands clasped behind his back.

There were only two bedrooms and one small bathroom in the villa, the narrow kitchen separated from the living room by a high counter. All the furniture was wicker, with hand-sewn seat cushions and throw pillows. The walls were paneled in lacquered pine and decorated with photos of Serena and Betsy's paintings of Capitola's many scenic charms.

It was a small space for two people to live in, but Mark thought the location more than made up for the cramped quarters. When Mark's wife had died, he also had moved to the beach to live with his child.

Betsy invited Mark to join her at the table, which was placed in front of the big picture window that dominated the living room. Wooden storm shutters were latched open out side on either side of the window.

As she poured the lemonade, Mark complimented her on her cozy abode.

"This is why I will always do whatever I can to help Bert," she said, settling into her seat across from Mark. "I owe him for giving us this wonderful life."

"What did he have to do with it?"

"The only decent, unselfish thing Jimmy ever did was put Bert in charge of our finances. Bert made sure that our assets were protected, that Serena and I would always be secure."

Betsy looked protectively at her daughter on the beach. Serena felt her mother's custodial gaze. The teenager put her highlighter down and cocked her head quizzically, as if to say, Is everything okay? Her mother smiled reassuringly and turned back to Mark.

"After Jimmy was killed, investigators discovered that he'd been looting from his clients for years and stashing the cash in secret accounts. Bert had no idea either."

"It's hard to believe that he didn't know," Mark said. "It was his business, too. The police believe it was the one-two punch of finding out that Jimmy was stealing from the company and sleeping with his wife that provoked Bert's murderous rage."

"If Bert had known about the looting, he would have reimbursed the clients himself. That's the kind of man he is," she said. "But he ended up paying for it anyway. The pack of wolves cleaned him out and then they came after me."

"Why you?"

"Because Jimmy willed everything to me." Betsy said. "The army of lawyers and accountants hired by Jimmy's clients found only a small fraction of what he stole. So they pillaged our accounts and made us sell off everything. The house. The furniture. The art. The cars. And the thing he loved most of all—his money."

"His money?" Mark said. "You mean you had to liquidate his investments?"

"No." she said. "I mean I sold his collection of cash. Jimmy loved money the way that James Bond bad guy Goldfinger loved gold. He liked the look of it, the feel of it, the smell of it, and, of course, what he could get from it. He enjoyed looking at the cash in his money clip almost as much his collection of paper currency."

"He was a numismatist?"

"Not many people know that word," she said. "Even fewer can pronounce it, including me. So I called him a money collector. It fit his hobby and his profession. He had one of the finest U.S. currency collections in the world. He was particularly fond of large-denomination National Bank Notes, gold certificates, and silver certificates."

Mark knew a little about numismatics. As a kid he collected coins, but after a couple years of intense devotion to the hobby, his interest waned. Along the way, though, he learned some things about currency.

For instance, he knew that National Bank Notes were paper money issued by individual banks across the country under a charter from the Treasury Department, a practice that began after the Civil War and continued until the early thirties. What made the currency collectible was its scarcity and its regional character. The bills were emblazoned with the names of their issuing banks. Some of the institutions were obscure and produced only a small number of notes.