Crime Scene

Chapter 11

Two weeks later, I hadn’t heard from Afton or the mortuary, which I took as a good sign. I also hadn’t heard from Tatiana, which I chose to regard as not a sign of anything. I still had the Post-it stuck to my screen, but it had drifted to the margins of my awareness.

On a slow Saturday morning, I opened my queue to begin closing out cases.

Click a name, confirm everything’s square, send it sailing into history.

I came to RENNERT, WALTER J.

The autopsy protocol had come in the previous day.

I didn’t need to read it. I knew what it said. Everything was square.

I moved my cursor to SUBMIT.

The Post-it seemed to light up.

I pulled it loose. Stared at it. Called Ming.

Got voicemail.

I hung up without leaving a message and put the Post-it in the trash.

The cursor sat, ready and willing to flush Rennert Walter J. and Rennert-Delavigne Tatiana Middle-initial-something from my system.

I couldn’t tell her the story she wanted to hear, but I might yet convince her I’d kept an open mind.

I clicked the supplementary tab and opened Rennert’s cellphone data dump.

In the week leading up to Walter Rennert’s aortic dissection, he’d used his browser sparingly. He read CNN and BBC. He searched Southwest flights from Oakland to Reno. He shopped for a new showerhead, probably to replace the leaky one in his attic quarters. He visited the homepage for the California Psychological Association, following many of the links. He’d abandoned his position but not his passion.

His email was mostly spam. One came from a Charles Rennert — Tatiana’s brother Charlie. The REPLY-TO field indicated that he worked for an NGO. He wrote testily that he was still waiting to hear back about using the Tahoe house. He needed an answer from his father by the end of the week, so he could tell Jenna whether to enroll the kids in winter camp or not. So far as I could tell, Rennert had never gotten the chance to write back.

The calendar had him playing tennis on Monday, Wednesday, and — significantly — Friday at noon. The pathologist had placed Rennert’s time of death between eight o’clock that night and two o’clock Saturday morning. I could call the tennis club, find out who he played with. Maybe that final game had been extra hardcore. Although if Gerald Clark was to be believed, Rennert played only one way.

For most of that week, he’d made or received fewer than a dozen phone calls. A dry cleaner; Citibank customer service; the pharmacy where he got his Risperdal. A handful of calls to his daughter. True to her word, she had phoned him on Friday at ten twenty-one a.m., a call lasting about four minutes.

Anything special for brunch, Dad?

Then the pattern changed.

Around three thirty p.m., Rennert began dialing an East Bay number. The calls were short, and there were a lot of them — eighteen, in fact, lasting thirty or forty seconds apiece, as though he couldn’t get through but refused to give up. They started out at fifteen-minute intervals, but by five o’clock he was retrying every few minutes.

Whoever he’d been calling was quite likely the last person to speak to him. Assuming they had spoken.

I reverse-searched the number. It belonged to the Claremont Hotel, adjacent to the club where Rennert played tennis and a five-minute walk from his house.

If he needed to reach someone that badly, why hadn’t he just gone over in person?

Maybe he had.

I called the front desk, identified myself, asked about the extension, and learned it belonged to room four fifteen. I asked who’d occupied it last September 8 and was told that information was private.

“Who’m I speaking to?”

“My name is Emilio.”

“Listen, Emilio, do me a favor and put your manager on?”

Dead air, then he came back. “I asked her, sir. She’s very clear that we can’t disclose that. Was there anything else I could help you with?”

I quashed the urge to point out that he had not helped me overly much. I said, “All right, Emilio. I’ll be seeing you later.”

“Yes sir.” Then: “Sorry, what?”

I hung up.

I went to the Claremont that evening after work. Parking on the street to avoid a sixteen-dollar valet charge, I hiked up Tunnel Road on foot, passing Rennert’s tennis club to reach the minty glow of a marquee welcoming guests of the Lamorinda Women’s Book Society Autumn Cotillion.

The creamy tiers of the hotel rose tilting from the hillside, out of scale and lost in time, like some elderly politician who will not die. I’d been inside, years ago, for a Cal donor event, where I was trotted out and made to pose for photos with the boosters. Hometown hero, full-court general, savior. Folks had faith in me, back then. Maybe they thought they’d be getting a collector’s item, something with eBay value or at least worthy of a place on the den wall, next to their old-timey yellow-and-blue pennants.

The lobby had since been spruced up with jewel tones and aluminum tubing. In the main ballroom, the dance was in full swing. Teenage girls in ball gowns and boys in slouchy suits spilled into the lobby, gabbing and taking pictures.

At the reception desk, I badged, asked for Emilio.

In short order I was sitting in a back office across the desk from Emilio’s boss, Cassandra Spitz.

“You understand I can’t just tell you that,” she said.

“I wouldn’t ask unless it was important,” I said.

“I’m sure you wouldn’t. But you don’t stay in business for a hundred years by giving out the names of your guests.”

“Nice job with the remodel, by the way.”

She grinned. She appeared to be enjoying the diversion from her usual workweek drudgery. “Thank you, Deputy. I can tell you that we had a variety of events taking place that weekend. You could try asking me about those in broad terms.”

“I’m asking.”

She typed, read from her screen. “Let’s see... There was the Ellis-MacDonald wedding in the Empire Ballroom, on Saturday. Cocktails for the Berkeley Public Library Foundation, Sunday evening in the Sonoma.”

“What about earlier in the week?”

“Wednesday through Saturday, we hosted the annual meeting of the California Psychological Association.”

I said, “The guest in room four fifteen was here for that.”

“I couldn’t say.”

I showed her a photo of Rennert. “What about him?”

Her smile vanished.

“Was he part of the conference?” I asked.

“No.”

“He was here, though.”

She stared warily at the photo. “This gentleman — I’m sorry, I don’t know his name.”

“Walter Rennert.”

“Mr. Rennert came to the hotel and requested to speak to one of the guests.”

“The individual in room four fifteen. Doctor...”

She smiled. Nice try.

I smiled. “When was this?”

“Friday evening. Around six thirty.”

That fit with the phone log. He’d run out of patience. “Can I see the CCTV?”

“We only keep the last ten days.”

“Okay. Rennert shows up and asks to speak to an individual, who may or may not be the individual from room four fifteen, who may or may not have been here for the conference. Did he say what he wanted to see this person about?”

“Not that I’m aware of. Our staff offered to deliver a message to the guest. Mr. Rennert got extremely agitated and began demanding to know the guest’s room number. I came out to try and resolve the situation. I could tell he was intoxicated.”

That fit, too. “Were you aware that he’d been trying to call the guest?”

“Not right then. Later one of the desk clerks told me she’d patched him through earlier in the day.”

“Eighteen times,” I said.

Her eyes saucered. “Oh.”

I said, “Were you able to resolve it?”

“Not in the least. He walked away from me. I thought he’d gone, so I went back to my office. But apparently he started poking his head into the conference rooms, one by one, until he found who he was looking for.”

“And then?”

“There was an incident,” she said.

“What kind of incident?”

“Yelling, mostly.”

“Did it get physical?”

She shook her head. “Security asked him to leave and he did.”

“What were they yelling about?”

“Not they,” she said. “Him. It was completely one-sided.”

“Sounds like a night to remember.”

She shrugged that off. “A hundred years, Deputy. It wouldn’t make the list.”

She typed something, then got up, adjusting the angle of her screen. “Sorry to do this, but I have to go check on the kitchen. Unless you have more questions.”

“Thanks very much for your time.”

“You’re welcome. Can you find your way out?”

“I think I can manage.”

She left me alone.

You don’t stay in business for a hundred years by having a shitty relationship with local law enforcement. Cassandra Spitz had moved her screen just enough for me to see a page from the hotel’s electronic registry.

The booking ran from Wednesday, September 6, through Saturday, September 9, for a total of three nights. The guest had been given room four fifteen — nonsmoking, junior suite, king bed, single occupancy — at the conference rate.

I wrote down the name. While that probably would have sufficed for me to track him down, conveniently enough, the registry entry listed a cellphone number, so I wrote that down, too. The number had a 310 area code: Los Angeles.

Rennert with a jones for a fellow shrink.

To learn why, I’d have to call up this Alex Delaware dude.