Strawberry Sunday Page 4

  “I’ll watch my step,” I said. “Don’t worry.” I looked toward the girl with the toys. “Would Eleanor like to play horsey?”

  “Horsey! Horsey!”

  “Do you really think you should—”

  “I’m fine,” I interrupted.

  It was a lie, and the next ten minutes almost killed me, but I did it nevertheless. Horsey on the living room floor, Eleanor screaming with joy and kicking uncomfortably close to my incisions, me gritting my teeth and enduring the pain, a dumb idea but an essential one, at least so it seemed at the time.

  Thankfully, Millicent called a halt before something gave way. She helped me put the toys back in the box and made me promise to come to her house at mid-week. They left after kisses all around and I was feeling so good and so gregarious that I fished in my wallet for the paper that had Rita Lombardi’s phone number written on it.

  The phone rang for a long time. The person who picked up was male and under stress, his voice leaden and lugubrious and lightly accented. “Lombardi residence. What is it?”

  “May I speak to Rita, please?”

  He paused. “Who is this?”

  “A friend from San Francisco.”

  “Rita doesn’t have any friends in San Francisco.”

  “I met her in the hospital up here. We were both patients. We used to take walks together for therapy.”

  “Yeah, well, that was a waste of time.”

  “Why?”

  His voice broke like a stick. “Rita’s dead. What therapy is going to fix that? Huh? You tell me. What therapy is there that’s going to bring Rita back to life?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I was so dumbfounded I almost dropped the phone as I replaced it on the cradle. After I regained the courage to dial again, it took three calls before I found someone who would talk to me. The someone was her mother.

  Her voice was thick, almost masculine, with the lingering warble of a Neapolitan accent. “This is Louise Lombardi. Whom am I speaking to, please?”

  “My name is Marsh Tanner, Mrs. Lombardi. I met Rita at San Francisco General Hospital a few weeks ago. I was a patient there, too. We took lots of walks down the halls together. I liked her very much,” I added, just in case it wasn’t clear.

  “She mentioned you,” Mrs. Lombardi said. “She said you were a nice person.” Her voice wavered only a second, then regained its steady timbre.

  “She wanted me to come to Haciendas to see her,” I said, struggling for control myself. “I was calling to set a date. Now they tell me she’s dead.”

  The sigh was operatic, descending over two octaves. “She died four days after she came home to Haciendas.”

  “What happened? I thought her surgeries had gone well. She seemed so vibrant the last time I saw her.” I thought of the staphylococcus that had threatened to engulf me after surgery, the deadly virus that lurks somewhere in the cracks and crevices of every hospital. “Did she come down with an infection or something?”

  “It was not an infection, it was a knife. Some person stabbed her thirty times, stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. It is beyond thought how someone could do such a thing. It is beyond my faith that God would have allowed this to happen.”

  After a lengthy silence, I managed a bloodless platitude. “That’s terrible, Mrs. Lombardi. I’m very sorry.”

  She continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “To me, I could understand; I have made many mistakes in my life. But not to Rita. Not to someone who has borne so many burdens already.”

  The sigh became a sob, anguished and wrenching and universal; I was an inch from tears myself. “Why did it happen, Mrs. Lombardi? Was it a robbery or something?”

  “No one knows why it happened. Rita had nothing. I have nothing. Everyone in Haciendas knows that no one in this family has anything worth stealing.”

  I asked a question I didn’t want to ask, but the conditioning of twenty years wouldn’t let me suppress it. “Could it have been a sex crime, Mrs. Lombardi?”

  “She was not violated, thank the Lord for that small blessing; she was merely murdered. Now I must go. Friends have come to the house to console me. Now it is I who must care for them.”

  “One second, please.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m a private detective, Mrs. Lombardi. I’ve helped solve several criminal cases over the years. If I came to Haciendas I might be able to help.”

  “Help who?”

  “Help find out what happened to Rita.”

  “We know what happened, Mr. Tanner. My daughter was slaughtered like a sheep in a pen.”

  “Then maybe I can find out why.”

  “How will that help?”

  The answer didn’t come as easily as it should have. “So you will know who did it and why,” I managed finally. “So you will know no one else will suffer the way Rita suffered. So you can know the stranger you see on the street is not the one who murdered your child.”

  She hesitated, breathing in unnatural gasps for air. “I cannot stop you from coming to Haciendas, Mr. Tanner. But I have no money and my daughter was not an important person. There is no one here who can pay you to—”

  “Rita was important to me,” I interrupted. “I’ll be in Haciendas by the end of next week.”

  “Come or not come, Mr. Tanner. It is all the same to me. Nothing you will do can change the fact that my child lies buried in the ground and that the Holy Spirit has chosen to forsake me once again.”

  “I can change the fact that the man who did it is walking around free,” I said, but Mrs. Lombardi had already hung up.

  It took two days to get through the backup at the office, which wasn’t all that deep even though I’d been out of commission for almost two months, which told me more than I wanted to know about the state of my business. I made some calls and wrote some letters and arranged for Ruthie Spring to handle the pending matters that might fester in my absence.

  It took another day to get my car serviced and another to deal with the police. They came in two shifts. First, two guys showed up on my doorstep at 10 A.M. on Thursday. They had cop written all over them—brown suits, brown shoes, and the brown butts of handguns sticking out of their brown belt holsters. They looked enough alike to be twins, except one of them had a scar across the bridge of his nose and the other had a chipped tooth. I hadn’t noticed the tooth the last time I’d seen him, which was when he was lying flat on his belly on Twentieth Street, imploring Charley Sleet to spare his life.

  “Figured you’d stop by sooner or later,” I said. “Probably want to thank me for coming to the rescue out at the power station.”

  “Bullshit,” they said simultaneously.

  They barged inside and I returned to the couch and my coffee. They loomed over me like pistol-packing cougars, cool, confident, and menacing. “This place is a dump,” the scarred one said after taking inventory.

  “I would have redecorated, but I don’t have your sources of income.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I met his look. “It means I don’t steal.”

  “Steal this, asshole.” He flipped me the bird.

  Since the one with the chipped tooth seemed slightly less inflammatory, I addressed my question to him. “What do you want?”

  “We heard you kept your mouth shut when the A.D.A. came to call at the hospital.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah. You did. We came to tell you to keep it up, and that way we’ll get along. Start barfing about what you think you know about Hilton and Mandarich and what went down on Twentieth Street, you could get in big trouble.”

  “Like the trouble Hilton and Mandarich got in?”

  “Yeah,” the scarred one muttered. “Like that.”

  I smiled into his bluster. “So what’s the deal? Have you boys taken over the Triad operation? Or are you still flunkies like before?”

  The scarred one made a fist and showed it to me. “You don’t have Sleet around to hold your hand anymore, Tanner. So
be smart and keep the Triad shit to yourself.”

  “Which reminds me, we haven’t been properly introduced.” I stuck out a hand.

  “Ain’t life a bitch,” the scarred one said, and they sailed out the door like a stench.

  An hour later, the second shift arrived. This round took place in my office—Assistant D.A. Jill Coppelia had made an appointment and this time she brought some brass with her. His name was Mark Belcastro and he was a shift captain out of the Central Division, where Charley had been assigned during the latter years of his career. Jill was crisp and cool in a blue suit with a white blouse; Belcastro looked to have bought his outfit from the same clothier who’d dressed Charley Sleet, which was somewhere down market from Sears.

  They took seats in my mismatched chairs and looked around as though the office would tell them something important about me. After a while, Coppelia pointed to my painting. “Nice art.”

  “I like it.”

  “Good imitation of Klee.”

  “It isn’t an imitation.”

  Her eyes bulged to the size of walnuts. “That’s a genuine Klee? The Klee? Paul Klee?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “You must have made a killing in this business.” She saw my expression and reddened. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”

  I shrugged it off. “The Klee was a gift from a client.”

  “You must have done a hell of a job. And he must have been a hell of a client.”

  “I did and he was.” I leaned back in my chair and clasped my hands behind my head. “How can I help the San Francisco law enforcement authorities this morning?”

  “The Sleet thing,” Belcastro said.

  “What about it?”

  He shifted uneasily. “To get right to it, why did he kill those three cops?”

  “I told Ms. Coppelia that I wasn’t going to be a party to this. If Charley gets dragged through the City Hall mud, it won’t be my doing.”

  Belcastro leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. He was handsome in a weathered way, and had the muffled eyes of a nice guy. It’s hard to stay a nice guy and be a career cop, though. I only knew two people who’d managed it and one of them was dead.

  “Sleet’s being dragged through the mud already,” he said. “Every black eye in the department over the past ten years is being hung around his thick neck. They claim he stole cash from the evidence locker, they claim he sold drugs on the street, they’re even claiming he sexually harassed female victims who came to the station to report a violation, for Christ’s sake. Motherfuckers couldn’t hold his jock on the best day they ever had.”

  To get that angry, Belcastro must have known Charley and liked him. Which was enough to make me like Belcastro.

  “All of which has what to do with me?” I asked affably.

  “We figured you might want to put a stop to the bullshit,” he said.

  “How?”

  “By pointing us toward the bad guys.”

  I looked at Jill Coppelia. “Is it true about the frame they’re hanging on Charley?”

  She nodded. “It’s true. In spades.”

  I thought of the cops who had paid me a visit and of what they and their buddies were doing to Charley’s good name. I decided that telling a part of my story wouldn’t make things worse for anyone but them.

  “Charley killed the first cop—Walters—because Walters got Charley’s partner killed on the job way back when Charley was a rookie.”

  “Rather a slow brand of justice.”

  “After the tumor took hold, Charley wouldn’t or couldn’t wait for the system to work any longer. He knew he was going to die and decided to set things right before he did.”

  “How about the other two?”

  “Hilton and Mandarich were top dogs in a group of rogue cops called the Triad. They’ve raped and pillaged their way through the city for years. Charley said some of them were second-generation scum.”

  “The survivors were in this group, too?”

  My memory of the threats of the morning was fresh enough to make me as definite as gravity. “For sure, and there were lots more besides them. The powerhouse where they died served as their hideout. Like Jesse James and the Daltons, except these guys were the posse, not the outlaws. Ironic, don’t you think?”

  Belcastro didn’t bother to wrestle with the rhetoric. “Where did you get this information?”

  “From Charley.”

  “Do you have independent evidence that what he said was true?”

  “Not a scrap.”

  “So you wouldn’t have much to tell a Grand Jury.”

  “Nothing that wasn’t hearsay.”

  “Grand Juries can consider hearsay testimony.”

  “That’s one of the things that’s wrong with them,” I said, then looked at Jill Coppelia. “But prosecutors can’t get convictions if that’s all they’ve got to offer in criminal court.”

  “We’re considering impaneling a Grand Jury to investigate all forms of police corruption in the city,” she said stiffly.

  I smiled at the extravagance of her ambition. “That sounds like lifetime employment.”

  “Would you cooperate in the investigation?”

  “I already have.”

  “How so?”

  “I told you everything I know.”

  They looked at each other and held a silent meeting. “When did you first hear of this Triad outfit?” Belcastro asked.

  “The night Charley died.”

  “Did he give you any other names?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did he tell you about any specific crimes they’d committed?”

  I searched what was left of my memory. “He said the Triad had murdered a guy named Chavez in the Mission, a guy named Jefferson in the Fillmore, and a guy named Pearlstine in Lake Merced.”

  Coppelia and Belcastro looked at each other again. “That would explain some things,” Coppelia said to her mate.

  “What else?” Belcastro asked me.

  “That’s it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The two exchanged looks once again. I started to wonder if they were lovers.

  “We need to get this under oath,” Belcastro said finally.

  “No, you don’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m always under oath.”

  I stood up and walked to the door. “It’s been a pleasure to discuss these matters, but I have business to attend to. It would be swell if I could hand you a case against the Triad on a silver platter, but I’m afraid you’ll have to do some policework to flesh it out.”

  “That’s okay; we’re pretty good at it,” Belcastro said.

  “Not as good as when Charley was alive.”

  As they were going out the door, Coppelia told Belcastro to go down to the car and wait for her. He hesitated, then frowned, then did as he was told.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked after he had disappeared down the stairs and she had looked at me for several seconds.

  “Fine.”

  “For real?”

  “Yep.”

  “Good.” She glanced at the Klee and then back. “We won’t be filing charges against you. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  “Excusable homicide; no question.”

  “That’s the way I saw it. The way Charley saw it, too.”

  Her look softened. “I imagine you’re being punished anyway.”

  “Only after midnight,” I said, but I didn’t want to get into it. “I appreciate your seeing it my way.”

  “We try to do the right thing.” She smiled and touched my forearm. “Most of the time.”

  “I know you do.”

  “Well …”

  “Well …”

  “I’ll probably be talking to you if this corruption thing gets underway.”

  “I’m going out of town for a while. Maybe we could have dinner when I get bac
k.”

  “Maybe so. How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Little place named Haciendas; down by Salinas somewhere.”

  “Vacation?”

  “Business.”

  “What kind?”

  “A friend of mind was murdered.”

  Her brow lifted. “Another one?”

  I nodded.

  “Sounds like it could get dangerous to know you.”

  She didn’t seem daunted by the prospect.

  An hour later, the doctor gave me a clean bill of health, though with a stern caution about cholesterol and triglycerides. An hour after that I was packing my bags. An hour after that I fell asleep in my chair during a rerun of Law and Order.

  My dreams were all of Rita Lombardi. And in all of them she was dead or dying.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The first thing Friday morning I took Highway 101 south out of the city, through San Jose and Gilroy and into the Salinas Valley, which cut a verdant swath between the Santa Lucia mountains to the west and the Gabilan range to the east. The turnoff to Haciendas was south of Prunedale and north of Salinas. When I took it, I was plunged into the world of modern agriculture, into a land of warm sunny days and cool foggy nights where the breezes off the Pacific Ocean to the west met the high heat of the Central Valley to the east to produce a climate particularly suited to delicate crops like strawberries and raspberries and lettuce and artichokes, which could grow to juicy ripeness without being burned on the stem.

  Mrs. Lombardi hadn’t been enthusiastic when I’d called and told her I was coming. In other circumstances, I might have taken the hint and stayed away, particularly since I didn’t have a client and the bank balance was low already because of my enforced inactivity. But in the last few months I’d lost two people I’d cared about, which reduced that particular population by 20 percent, which left a taste in my mouth I wanted to be rid of. It was too late to help Charley Sleet, at least until the D.A. and the police department decided what they were going to do about the gang called the Triad, but Rita Lombardi was someone I could help, if not her flesh, at least her spirit.