Night work (8 page)

WHEN EMILY LARSEN OPENED the door to Kate and Al Hawkin two hours
later, Kate almost did not recognize her. Her hair, though still a dull
black, had been professionally styled and the gray roots were gone. She
also wore a defiant if amateurish splash of makeup on eyes and mouth,
and her caricature housekeeper dress had been exchanged for slimming
khakis and a flowered blouse. More than exterior changes, however, were
the set of her shoulders and spine and the way her eyes met theirs
without flinching. She stepped back to invite them inside, and was
speaking before she had shut the door behind them.

"I'm really glad you came by this morning. Here, come on
back to the kitchen, I've got some coffee on." The house
was tidier than it had been when they had shone their flashlights
through its windows on Tuesday night, although Emily had not been able
to do anything about the wear on the shag carpeting and flowered
upholstery. The design sense of the residents leaned more to framed
photos of children than to paintings, the living room had no fewer than
three large arrangements of fake flowers, and one corner was haunted by
a four-foot-long black ceramic panther with a chipped ear. The dust of
print powder still lay over everything, and the house smelled
unoccupied. "Can I take your jackets?" Emily was saying.
"No? Well, sit down, I've got a confession to make."

To a police officer, the word
confession
has a fairly
specific meaning, but the lighthearted way Emily Larsen said it did not
encourage Kate to reach for her notebook to take down her words, and Al
showed no sign of wanting to stop the woman and read her her Miranda
rights. Instead they sat with their coffee cups on the Formica table in
front of them and waited.

"I wasn't very up-front with you yesterday, Inspector
Martinelli. You knew that, didn't you? Carla told me what you
said, but I had to, well, mislead you, like, until I was sure what was
goin' on.

"You see, I've got this brother, he's three years
older than me, and he has this really bad temper, you know? And I was
scared that he'd gotten piss--that he'd gotten
PO'd with Jimmy and... done it to him. I couldn't
reach Cash until last night--that's my brother's name,
Cash--I couldn't get ahold of him to ask him if
he'd... had anything to do with Jimmy's death. I
didn't really think he did, you know, but he has a record, and he
and Jimmy had a... an argument a while back, so I knew you'd
think... well, not you personally, but the police, you know? But
anyway, I talked with him and he told me it wasn't him. And he
has a good alibi, too. He was in an AA meeting until eleven. So
that's okay, then. I mean, Cash has done some really stupid
things in his life, but at least this isn't one of them."

"We'll have to speak with him, though, Ms. Larsen," Al told her.

"Of course, he said you would. He works for a company, they
clean offices at night. He said he'd be home in another hour, if
you want to see him. Do you want his address? He lives down in San
Jose."

"Thank you. However," Al continued, "the fact
remains that someone killed your husband, and did so not in his usual
surroundings. Someone either kidnapped your husband and took him to San
Francisco, or else arranged for him to be there. The phone
company's tracking down the last incoming call he had, but we
also need to have a word with your postman about any mail he might have
delivered."

"Oh. Sure. I mean, would you like me to ask him about
it?" "That's okay, Ms. Larsen," Al told her
gently. "We'll take care of it."

FOR SOME REASON, KATE had been anticipating a hulking bruiser of an
ex-con, a younger, fitter version of James Larsen, but the man who
opened Cash Strickland's door and invited them inside was not
even as tall as his sister, and equally round-shouldered. The
man's explosions of temper must be rooted in his resentment at
the world's treatment of him rather than in any habitual
aggressiveness; from his hangdog look, he might as well have been
wearing a hit me sign pinned to his back.

Still, alcohol combined with chronic resentment made for a volatile
mix, and both detectives kept one eye firmly on the ex-con as they
introduced themselves and entered his apartment. Their free eyes
flicked over the sparsely furnished room, and Al stuck his head into
the adjoining rooms to be sure there were no unfriendlies waiting
behind the shower curtains. Strickland knew what Al was doing, and
waited politely until Al had made his reconnaissance before offering
them seats on the thrift-store sofa and plastic chairs. A well-thumbed
Bible lay on the coffee table beside a couple of folded newspapers. On
one wall hung what Kate had seen advertised as a "sofa-sized
oil" depicting a tree-shrouded lake; on another Strickland had
thumbtacked up the poster of a mewing kitten on a tree branch, with the
inspirational caption "All God's Creatures Need a
Hand."

"You're here about Jimmy, aren't you?" he asked them.

"That's right, Cash," said Hawkin.

"Em told me you'd been askin' her questions. I
hope to God you don't think she had anything to do with it. She
wouldn't hurt a fly."

"No, she has an alibi for Monday night. She seems to think you do, too."

"I was at my AA meeting. Had dinner with my sponsor, helped
set up the chairs at about seven-thirty, maybe seven-forty-five, stayed
at the meeting until it finished about ten. I helped clean up
afterward. Came back here, changed my clothes, got to work at
eleven."

"Anybody see you come home?" Hawkin asked. Not that
Strickland could have driven to San Francisco and back in an hour, but
leave no stone criminal unturned was Hawkin's motto.

"Couple of my neighbors were sitting outside havin' a
smoke and a brew. Guy in two-thirty-four--his wife won't let
him smoke inside 'cause of the kid," he explained.

"Tell me about your brother-in-law," Al requested.

"Jimmy?" Strickland said, surprised that the questions
about his alibi were over already. "What do you want to
know?"

"What kind of a person was he?"

"He was a--" The reformed convict caught himself.
"He was an awful man. Real horrible to my sister. More times than
I can count I told her to leave him, take the kids and get away, but
she wouldn't do it. I mean, any man that'd do that to a
woman. You know he used to hit her?"

"We are aware of that. And that your sister finally left him just before he got out of jail this last time."

"None too soon."

"Do you know who would want to kill him?"

"I will admit to you that it passed through my mind, a couple
of times when I was a drinking man. Not now, though. But I don't
know enough about him to know who else there might be. Somebody he
punched in a bar, maybe?"

"Did he get into fights, then?"

"No, not really. Saved it for his wife. Only time I saw him
get into a fight with someone his own size was when he was giving Emily
a hard time in a restaurant and this other drunk started callin'
him names. Coward and stuff. So Jimmy punched him, they both fell over
each other, and that was the end of it. Kinda funny, at the time. Now I
have to say it was just pathetic."

Strickland's self-consciously pious remarks should have struck
a note somewhere between comical and suspicious, but for some reason
they sounded more dignified than anything else, perhaps even a touch
brave. Kate was surprised to find herself hoping that Strickland was
one reformed drunk who stayed that way, and even Hawkin's final
questions were more gentle than a cop normally put to a recent ex-con.

Strickland gave them his sponsor's name and phone number,
telling them that the man was expecting their call. When they were
through, he showed them to the door.

"I hope you catch whoever did it," Strickland admitted
reluctantly. "Jimmy was a no good--well. But Emily loved
him, and if he'd got sober, who knows?"

Kate wished Cash Strickland luck when they left, and Hawkin shook his hand.

Strickland's AA sponsor and alibi provider was an undeniably
upright citizen. He even owned his own insurance business, and although
he freely admitted that he had a record for drunk driving, he had been
sober now for twelve years and four months, and had acted as sponsor
for Cash since the man had asked him at a meeting back in early
February.

Cash Strickland's alibi stood, as did that of his sister,
Emily, leaving Kate and Al with empty hands and facing the fact that
they would have to begin from scratch, as if the days between the
murder and walking out of the San Jose insurance office counted for
nothing.

Until, that is, the phone company came across with the address for the final call to have reached the Larsen telephone.

It had been placed from a phone located on the wall of a laundromat six blocks from Carla Lomax's law offices.

And two blocks from the women's shelter that had given refuge to Emily Larsen.

Chapter 5

"I COULD JUST ARRIVE on their doorstep," Kate said to
Carla Lomax over the phone. "I do know where the shelter is.
I'm trying to be cooperative about this and talk to the director
first, but if the only choice you give me is between waiting until I
can dig up the name and phone number on my own or just driving over
there and asking, then I'm sorry, I'd rather not waste my
time."

"These women are in a very fragile state, Insp--"

"Carla, look. I'm not unsympathetic; I'm prepared
to keep my voice down; I'm even willing to leave my male partner
out of it. But it's going to happen, with or without your help. I
have a job to do."

"Okay. Let me have your number. I'll ask her to call you."

"I'll give her five minutes, and then I'm going to
leave this phone and climb in my car. You have my number."

A sigh came over the earpiece as the lawyer admitted defeat. "The director's name is Diana Lomax."

"A relative?"

"Cousin. She'll call you."

They both hung up at the same time.

Kate sat reading departmental memos for three and a half minutes before her phone rang.

"This is Diana Lomax," said a hoarse voice at the other
end. "Carla tells me you want to come to the shelter and
interview the residents."

"Anyone who was there on Monday night, yes."

"Carla said you have the address. Just don't come in a marked police car."

"I won't," Kate assured her, but the phone had already gone dead.

The building that housed the temporary residence for abused women
and their children might have been chosen by the same eye that picked
out the Lomax law offices. It, too, was anonymously like its neighbors,
in a street busy enough that a few more cars would go unremarked but
not so filled with traffic that a stranger would go unnoticed. Its
hedges were trimmed back, the walkway had strong lights, the front door
was solid and fitted with a sturdy dead bolt lock, and the glass on the
ground floor was shatterproof, just in case.

The woman who opened to Kate's knock was enough like Carla
Lomax in stature and the color of her skin and hair that Kate knew it
had to be the lawyer's cousin, but whether or not the two women
had once resembled each other could no longer be determined, for the
face this woman wore was not the one she had been born with. Her nose
had been comprehensively flattened and badly reset, a scar bisected her
left eyebrow, and the two halves of her lower face were asymmetrical.
Long ago something had bashed her face in, breaking her jawbone,
knocking out teeth, and leaving her with the rasping voice Kate had
heard on the telephone. Put together with her chosen employment as
director of a women's shelter, it seemed unlikely that an
industrial accident or car crash had been responsible for so brutally
rearranging her features.

Kate put out her hand instead of her badge, and after a brief
hesitation, the woman took it. Once inside the door Kate flipped out
her identification. Diana Lomax glanced at it, then led Kate toward the
back of the house.

"We had six women in residence on Monday night," she
told Kate without preliminary, speaking over her shoulder. "Four
of them are still here. Of the two who left, one went back to her
husband, down near Salinas, the other--but of course you know
about Emily."

The walls of the narrow hallway they had been passing through were
broken by four doors, all closed, each with its own hand-lettered sign:
chapel and office on the right two, meeting room followed by training
on the left. At the back of the house the hall opened up into a light,
cheerful room the width of the house, a combination kitchen and dining
room that was obviously the center of the shelter. Half a dozen
children sat at a table along one wall with homework or crayons, washed
in the sweet light of the low, late-afternoon sun, while three women
were preparing a meal at the counter space under a window at the back
and two adolescent girls laid plates and silverware at another table.
Kate's stomach growled at the scents of dinner.

Diana went over to where the women were working and spoke quietly to
a woman chopping tomatoes. The woman looked up at Kate, her face going
pinched with a deep-rooted, habitual fear. Diana rested her hand on the
woman's arm and said something else. The woman nodded, dried her
hands, and followed in Diana's comforting shadow.

Going back through the central hallway, Diana opened the door marked
office, standing back to encourage her charge to go in, and let Kate
bring up the rear. Kate was not surprised to find Carla Lomax already
sitting in the room, dressed in a gray-blue suit and looking every inch
the lawyer.

"Crystal," Diana said, "this is Kate Martinelli.
She's with the police department, and she's looking into a
death that took place Monday night. It's nothing to do with you,
and you don't have to talk with her if you're not
comfortable with it, but she would appreciate it if you could help her
with a few questions. Kate, this is Crystal Navarro."