A Plague of Secrets

14

Not two hundred yards away from where Maya suffered and tried to pray, Wyatt Hunt turned another page in the yearbook, thinking that private investigators in the future would have an easy time of it. All they’d have to do with kids who were going to school now would be call up their MySpace or Facebook accounts, and they’d have a blow-by-blow account of everything their subjects had done from about sixth grade on.

Maya Townshend, though, at thirty-two, was just a bit too old for that approach. So Hunt was reduced to searching for clues in the hard copy of her college years. Of course, first he’d Googled her and her husband, and though there had been three thousand or so hits, the majority of them by far concerned Joel’s business and their philanthropy. For such a politically connected couple there was very little about either local or national politics, nor were they particularly active in San Francisco’s high society. Hits for Bay Beans West appeared a whopping four times-all of the stories variants on the Little Local Coffee Shop That Could standing up to the Starbucks giant and making it work.

Not a whiff of marijuana or, indeed, troubles of any kind.

On a whim Hunt had done a search for Dylan Vogler, and the coffee shop manager had come up completely empty except for references to his death recently-one of the country’s very few invisible men, Hunt thought.

Maybe Craig Chiurco, he thought, checking the criminal data-banks, would have more luck.

His next stop was the library at USF, where he started on the 1994 yearbook and found the standard posed picture of Maya Fisk looking about fifteen-fresh-faced, perfect hair, big smile. She was one of her class’s representatives in student government her freshman year, on the debate and IM soccer teams, active in music and theater, appearing in two student productions. She was also a cheerleader. Sophomore year was basically freshman year redux.

The change must have occurred late in her sophomore year or in the succeeding summer, because her picture as a junior was so different from the others as to be nearly unrecognizable. Though the hair color had turned light and the style more untamed, the main change from Hunt’s perspective was the facial expression. In place of the adolescent with the sunny smile of the previous two years, now a young woman stared defiantly at the camera with a bored smirk. Seeking another view of this chameleon, Hunt turned to the club and team pages, but here again something drastic had changed-Maya had stopped taking part in extracurricular activities.

In her senior year her photo placed her more closely with the girl from her first two years-she wore a passive toothless smile and she’d combed her still-light hair-but it was a more formal portrait than the others had been. And again, she’d joined nothing.

Pretty much striking out with the yearbooks, Hunt turned to the microfiches of the student newspaper, the Foghorn, for the first couple of years, when Maya was still active, and might have appeared in some captioned photographs with other students. In this he was luckier right away. Here was Maya, in her freshman year, mugging for the camera with three other cheerleader friends at a pep rally. Hunt took down all the names. And three others that he found captioned throughout the rest of her freshman year. Obviously, at the beginning, Maya had been a popular and involved student.

She’d costarred in Othello her sophomore year, and there was a picture of her with her leading man, a handsome African-American kid named Levon Preslee. In an accompanying story entitled “It’s in the Genes,” Hunt read about Maya’s introduction to acting and to the theater through her aunt, the truly famous actress Tess Granat, who’d by that time been the star of sixteen movies and had appeared in four leads on Broadway.

Hunt sat back, intrigued by the connection about which he’d previously been unaware. He’d seen some of Granat’s films before, he was sure, but he couldn’t remember any titles. Or whatever happened to her. Probably the same thing that had happened to so many former talented beauties who lost enough of their looks to become undesirable and uncastable in Hollywood.

Or had she died? Some tragedy?

The name tickled a vague memory of that, but he just couldn’t remember for sure. In any event there was no mention in the article that Granat had played any kind of a day-to-day role in Maya’s life back then, but she was another someone who may have known what the young woman was like or what she had done in those days, and he wrote her name in his notepad.

Sure, he thought, if she was even alive, he’d just call up the once-famous movie star in Hollywood or wherever she was and chat about old times. That was going to happen. Not.

But the afternoon, after all, had not been a total loss. When he was finished, he had nine names of people Maya’s age who had known her in college.

It was someplace to start.

Back in his office downtown Hunt realized that having nine names to work with was all well and good, but seven of them were women, and this made it likely that some of them, like Maya, had changed their last names since college. Meanwhile, he had Levon Preslee and one other male, Jimi d’Amico, and Levon was listed in the San Francisco phone book.

Hunt called the number, got the young man’s answering machine, left a message, and decided that it was time he got Tamara working with him on this tedious business. There were several d’Amicos in San Francisco, and Hunt and Tamara called all of them, hoping to find a Jimi, but since it was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, between them they managed to talk to only one human being, who didn’t know a Jimi.

They left more messages.

As he thought it would be, finding even one of the women turned out to be a chore. He and Tamara were hoping that one of the last names would reveal at least a set of parents who might be inclined to pass Hunt’s name along to one of their daughters, but this was going to involve quite a few phone calls and, again, messages, messages, messages.

By four-fifteen they’d been at the whole business for better than three hours when Hunt punched up the twenty-third telephone number under Peterson and a woman’s voice answered.

“Hello,” he said, “I’m trying to reach a Nikki Peterson.”

“This is Nikki.”

Hunt punched a fist into the air, threw a paper clip at Tamara to get her attention and let her know he’d finally gotten a hit, then went into his spiel, identifying himself and stating his business. When he’d finished, she said, “Sure. I knew Maya. We were cheerleaders together. I don’t know where she is now, though. I haven’t seen her since college. Is she in trouble?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Well, you’re a private investigator asking about her. I wasn’t great at math, but I can put two and two together. So she is?”

“What?”

“In trouble.”

“Not yet,” Hunt said, “but she might be getting there pretty quick.”

He told her he was free if she was, and within an hour she was sitting across from his desk. No longer a cheerleader, but from looks alone she would still have a good shot to make the team.

“So,” Hunt asked her, “I’m talking to people who knew her back then. Did you know a guy named Vogler? Dylan Vogler?”

She hesitated. “I don’t think so. Was he a jock? Mostly I hung out with the jocks.”

“Did Maya? Hang out with the jocks, I mean?”

“Not really. She started out with us, then dropped off the team.”

“Why?”

“No idea, really. Maybe it was too much practice. I don’t know. Maybe she just lost interest. That happens.”

“You don’t remember any rumors or gossip about her sometime around the time she quit? Pregnancy, abortion, anything like that? Drugs? Arrests?”

“Not really, no. But we weren’t really that close, you know. I mean, I knew her when she was on the team. But after she left, like I said, I haven’t heard from her since.”

“Were there any other cheerleaders who might have known her better? I’ve got a picture of her with you and two other girls in the Foghorn, Amy Binder and Cheryl Zolotny.”

“Amy, no, I’m sure. Cheryl? Maybe a little. But she’s not Zolotny anymore now. Just a second, let me think.”

“Take all the time you need.”

In the reception room, at Tamara’s desk, the telephone rang. Tamara put her own call on hold and answered, then said, “Just a minute, please. Can you hold a sec?”

And then Nikki answered Hunt’s earlier question. “Cheryl Biehl. That’s it. Biehl. B-I-E-H-L. I think she’s still in the city. She was at the reunion last year. You can try her.”

“Okay. Well, thanks, Nikki. You’ve been a help.”

She’d no sooner left the office when Hunt gave Tamara the high sign and immediately was on the telephone again. “Hello.”

“Mr. Hunt?”

“That’s me.”

“My name is Jimi d’Amico. You left a message for me?”

And it started all over again.

“Nothing?” Gina Roake asked.

“Nothing.”

It was six forty-five and Gina, Dismas Hardy and Wes Farrell’s law partner and Hunt’s somewhat clandestine girlfriend, had her shapely legs curled under her on the couch in her well-appointed one-bedroom condominium on Pleasant Street just down from the peak of Nob Hill. Hunt sat across from her, in one of her matched brace of reading chairs. They’d pulled closed the drapes in the picture window behind him and she’d turned on some of the room’s lights and the gas fire-logs as the now-fierce wind rattled the panes. Gina, barefoot but otherwise still dressed for work in a tan skirt and a beige turtleneck, sipped her Oban scotch and sighed. “That sounds like a long day, Wyatt.”

Hunt sat back, shaking his head. “I don’t mind long if I get something for it. But we finally got to only five of them before I gave it up. Tamara’s still at it and I must say it’s great to have workaholic employees. But it’s a little weird. It’s like Maya almost didn’t exist after her sophomore year. And there’s no way, or at least it’s unlikely, she was involved in some kind of scandal. Whatever it was, if she was being blackmailed by Vogler, he was one of the very few who knew about whatever it was.”

“Maybe the only one. Maybe that’s why it worked. And nobody knew him either?”

“Not so far. The mystery man.”

“And you’re sure he went there? USF?”

“Diz says so.”

“Did you check the yearbook and the student paper for him too?”

“No.” Hunt made a face. “The reason I like you is that you’re so much smarter than me. But say he didn’t go to USF, so what?”

“I don’t know. You might be able to find out where he actually went, which might tell you something you don’t know about him.”

“I don’t know anything about him, except he did hard time for a robbery-which Craig’s checking out-then came back to town and ran this coffee shop and evidently moved a hell of a lot of dope.”

Pensive, Gina absently turned her scotch glass around and around on the arm of the couch. Finally, she looked up at Hunt. “You’re saying he went to prison from San Francisco?”

“Yep.”

“If he was sentenced to prison, he had a presentence report, and the background section of that is going to tell you everything they could find out about him at the time. Surely you have a close personal friend in probation.”

Hunt considered for a moment. “Have I already told you you’re way smarter than me?”