Treasure Hunt (29 page)

“What did she say? Alicia. When Juhle talked to her.”

“What do you think? She denied it.”

“And you think that was a lie?”

“I think that Al Carter and Ellen Como both didn’t independently make up the same story, let’s put it that way. They’re not exactly bosom pals, you know? There’s no indication that they’ve ever even talked to each other.”

Tamara merely shrugged. “What else?”

“Well, since you ask, Devin’s latest, from underneath the limo’s backseat, there’s the whole semen-on-her-scarf thing. And it is her scarf.” Hunt straightened his back, eased himself off the desk and over to the window, letting the gravity of this last revelation work its way into Tamara’s worldview. At the window, he turned around. “I’m not making that last part up, Tam. It’s her scarf. She admitted it. It was stuffed into the limo’s backseat.”

Tamara uncrossed her arms. Her hands went to her belly, which she squeezed a couple of times.

“I don’t mean for this to give you a stomachache, Tam. But I don’t want you and Mick thinking you’ve got to stick up for her because you’ve all become friendly since this investigation started. And also, let’s remember last Monday night. She’s sleeping in her car a quarter mile from Nancy Neshek’s.” He came back over to the desk. “I’m not saying she did it. Not yet. Although Dev and Sarah are getting pretty close to thinking so. But I am saying we’d be foolish—any of us—to just ignore these facts.”

Now Tamara’s hands had settled onto her lap. Her eyes stared before her without focus. “Does Mickey know all this?”

Hunt shook his head. “Not what I’ve found in the past hour or so. Carter and Devin’s information. I tried to call him but his phone’s off. He’s probably still down at Sanctuary House. I left him a message, but just to call. I thought I’d tell him like I’ve told you, in person. See how he takes it.”

Tamara blew out heavily. “So what about all the money stuff? Didn’t you talk to all those people at the memorial too? Do they all have alibis for Monday?”

The clenched muscles in Hunt’s face started to relax. He just barely allowed the corners of his mouth to turn up. “Well, that’s the other reason I’m not a hundred percent with Devin and Sarah about Ms. Thorpe yet. I haven’t eliminated too many other people either. But I’ll tell you one thing—this Len Turner’s a piece of work.”

“Did you talk to him again?”

“Oh, yes. Definitely.”

“Did you ask him about Monday night?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Well?”

“Well, I asked and he didn’t answer. Not him and not nobody else neither.”

“Why not?”

“Because he clean cut me off.”

“And how about Ellen?”

“How about her?”

“Wyatt? Monday night?”

Hunt met her eyes, shook his head in disappointment. “No.”

“No what?”

“No. Never talked to her. Never even thought of it.”

Tamara pulled herself back up close to her desk. “Do you want me to call her and make an appointment? Maybe if that’s the only thing you’re supposed to do, you’ll remember.”

“Maybe,” Hunt said. “But I don’t know if I’d bet on it.”

 

 

Len Turner sat in a leather chair in his other spacious office, the one that housed his law practice on California Street. He was smoking a Cuban cigar and drinking Hennessey VSOP cognac from a cut crystal glass.

Turner didn’t like the storm of bad publicity about the COO money, but he’d weathered worse. The plain fact of the matter, as he would explain to Jeff Elliot as soon as he could arrange an interview with the columnist, was that sometimes you didn’t see tangible results for specific projects because there was just never enough money, period. And as in every other business, you had to advertise, market, put on shows to educate and generate enthusiasm for the cause, hire consultants and public relations experts, pay decent salaries to your executives so that you’d get quality people. This wasn’t just the nonprofit world; it was the big wide world.

The biggest problem with the CityTalk column was that it conveyed the impression that because the COO program’s specific objectives hadn’t been met, Turner had mismanaged these funds. And this, in his honest opinion, was not the case. The simple fact was that the $4.7 million in private foundation money—really a pittance—that supported the COO over the past couple of years needed to be about double that, or maybe triple, if it was going to address the real needs of real people who lived in the impoverished areas of the city.

This was because nothing got done for free in San Francisco. It was a pay-to-play environment, and had been for all of Turner’s lengthy career.

If you wanted to renovate a dump of a house in the Mission and turn it into a marketable or even usable property, first you had to buy it from the slum landlord who hadn’t put in an improvement, including paint, since 1962. That landlord, of course, got a substantial write-off for the monetary loss entailed in “donating” his property to your charity. Then you needed your plans, and then your redone plans, approved by the Housing Department for a sizable fee each time through. Often, if not always, you’d need a zoning variance by the Board of Supervisors, which tended to be exquisitely sensitive to even the most remote and spurious objection to the project, brought to them by one concerned constituent or another.

A residential unit for drug rehabilitation, for example, because it was used in conjunction with the courts, was considered a public building and as such was subject to the strict enforcement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so you often needed internal elevators, wheelchair access, and restricted handicapped parking spaces. All buildings in San Francisco, of course, now had to be retrofitted for earthquakes. Asbestos had to be removed.

Every step of this process demanded juice—some kind of payoff to someone, whether it was financial or political or, most commonly, both.

And none of this even included when the real fun began with the awarding of the contract to do the actual work. On a publicly bid job, for example, the contractor better have a woman or two and some gay people and a politically correct mix of Caucasian and African-American and Hispanic and Asian workers on the job. Oh, and some veterans, even better if they’d been wounded or maimed.

But the great thing about the fund-raising environment in San Francisco was that the very
idea
that somebody was going through the process of trying to get better housing and a better life for poor people, and even using rehabilitated drug addicts to do such meaningful work, tended to open the coffers of philanthropy. Never mind that the houses often didn’t actually get made, the art classes and day care centers didn’t get staffed, the theaters never put on a show because of all the hassles, the payoffs, the uncertainties. Still, the money kept coming in to support the efforts. And it came in at about the same rate that it was going out to advertise, educate, and promote.

Of course, Turner wasn’t going to go into all of that with Jeff Elliot. It would be enough to explain the costs and benefits to keeping the programs running at all. The major foundation donors all understood the game, and would probably continue to give at pretty much the same levels that they always had. So he wasn’t really too concerned about the COO section of the CityTalk column.

The AmeriCorps side of it, on the other hand, and Elliot’s cavalier parting shot that the nonprofit game was a deadly one, was a cause for immediate and serious concern. First of all, although funding had been cut for only a year, this was federal money that, once withheld, might not ever be reinstated. California politicians had a lot of juice in Washington, Turner knew. California would get its share of the money, and San Francisco would always get a bite of that. But that didn’t mean that Turner’s organizations had to see a dime. There were ten others waiting to take up the slack at the first sign of his blood in the water. Further, though all the specific charges of misuse had been leveled at Como, Turner knew that if the feds were sniffing around Sunset for misappropriated funds, they could not be far from his own complicity and, worse, outright fraud.

Turner had cautioned Como about his largesse to most of the city’s political movers and shakers, but the man had been a force of nature and did exactly what he wanted when the mood struck him. And now all that money was gone with nothing to show for it. The actual charges—having drivers and errand goers and paying his teaching staff out of AmeriCorps money—could all be explained away as accounting errors. In a busy place run by nonprofessionals, these things happened.

More problematic was that Turner hadn’t been cautious enough himself. The legal fees he’d accepted from Como—and from all of the other AmeriCorps recipients that he represented—amounted to nothing less than straight kickbacks for helping these charities obtain their federal funding. Fifty thousand a year here from Mission, a hundred thousand there from Sanctuary House, a half a million over four years with Sunset.

Turner knew that he’d let his greed get away from him—he really didn’t know why because he didn’t need it. But the money was just there for the taking and it seemed ridiculous not to. And after the first few years, he simply came to believe that the government would never even look at where the money went, much less audit for it.

He’d been wrong.

And now the records were there should the auditors come around to him, looking for fraud. Given time, he could probably get that billing cleaned up. Como and Neshek were no longer around to testify against him, so he could pass off their excesses and poor bookkeeping on their own organizations. Fortunately, too, Turner was certain that he could control Jaime with the leverage of offering Sunset to him, and Mission back to his wife. Maybe it could still all work out for the best.

But then with this Hunt fellow nosing around . . .

Clearly Hunt had expanded the original mandate Turner had given him to simply monitor the reward calls for the police and, more importantly, to keep him informed as to the progress of the investigation. It seemed to Turner now that Hunt was actively investigating not just Como’s but Neshek’s murder. And nobody—certainly not the reward consortium—had hired him to do that.

Turner considered simply firing Hunt and getting someone more tractable to do the job. But on reflection, he decided to follow the old adage: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. It looked like, for whatever reason, Hunt was in this for good. So long as Hunt nominally worked for him, at least Turner could keep a close eye, and maybe even some control, on what he was up to.

And at that thought, Turner finally felt the knot in his stomach loosen. He took a long sip of his cognac, and a good pull at his cigar, then blew the fragrant smoke out into his beautifully appointed office.

He was going to have to put in a call to Mr. Hunt, remind him of their original understanding, the parameters of his role.

Get this last monkey off his back.

 

 

 

 

For all the reasons he’d elucidated to Wyatt Hunt
, the only thing Al Carter knew for an absolute certainty was that he had to keep his profile as low as possible around the police. He was black, an ex-convict, the last person to see Como alive. As far as he was concerned, right there he had strikes one, two, and three and it might not be long before he was out. Strikes four and five, as if they needed them, were his easy access to the tire iron and his lack of alibis on the nights of either of the murders. The greater part of him was amazed, in fact, that the two inspectors hadn’t already braced him and brought him downtown for questioning.

Somehow he—or maybe just the circumstances—had held them off for now, and maybe what he’d told Hunt about the Thorpe girl would slow them down for a few more days as well. He hadn’t liked to do that to the girl, or to put himself into the evidence mix on any level, but realistically, what were his other options?

In the meantime, he’d been thinking about it nonstop for the past four days and he’d come to the decision that he needed some hardcore insurance. And finally, he thought he had a workable plan.

Now he sat alone in the very back booth in front of a cracked mug of steaming coffee at Miz Carter’s Mudhouse on California. The Carters who’d run this establishment for years were no relation to Al. When the door opened, he raised his hand and caught the attention of the couple who’d just come in—his younger brother Mo and Mo’s wife, Rae. They walked on back, greeting people they knew in the bustling coffee shop. They were childless, married for seventeen years, and regulars here. They were also solid citizens—a crucial criterion for Al’s purpose today—the owners of Ebony Emery, the tanning salon and manicure place a few doors down in the Laurel Center. Meanwhile, Al slid out of the booth and was standing by the time they got back to him. He greeted Mo with a warm chest- bump and a tapped fist, and Rae with a chaste hug and an air kiss by her ear.

The original Miz Carter’s daughter Penny had a couple more cracked mugs of coffee (the place’s funky trademark), small plates, and a big wedge of cinnamon coffee cake in front of Mo and Rae before they’d gotten their napkins unwrapped. Everybody made small talk, casual and loose, while Penny hovered and took orders. Al, on one side of the red leather booth, put in an order for a hamburger and a milk shake while his brother and sister-in-law on the other said they’d split the mac-and-cheese and the house salad. As he ordered, Mo was slicing the cake, giving some first to his wife, then serving himself.

When Penny went to place the order, Mo popped a bite of cake into his mouth, sipped from his mug, then put it down and raised his eyebrows. A question.

But now that the time had come, Al found his resolve weakening. He smiled to cover the sudden embarrassment—that’s what it was—then put his own mug down, twirled it a couple of times. “You’re great to come down.”