Deadfall

Chapter Eight

Outside the gallery I took another look at the guest list. George Collins lived in Atherton, an affluent community down near Palo Alto, so seeing him would have to wait for another day. Margaret Prine, however, lived on top of Nob Hill-not far away at all. I walked back to Powell and down to the St. Francis Hotel, and went in there to consult one of their public telephone directories. No listing for Margaret Prine. I decided to go ahead and make the short trip anyway, take a chance on her being home. Maybe she could tell me some enlightening things about Eldon and Elisabeth Summerhayes, if nothing else.

I caught a cable car out front, the first time I’d been on one in a couple of years. It was overflowing with tourists, as usual-the main reason why San Franciscans don’t ride the cable cars much any more-and I had to hang on outside with what Kerry calls my “ample duff” exposed to pedestrians and passing traffic. I got off at California Street and panted my way uphill past the Stanford Court and the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont, three of the city’s posher hotels, and then over past the Pacific Union Club and Huntington Park to a fancy old apartment building on Sacramento.

There were a couple of doormen in full livery, a species you seldom see anywhere in San Francisco these days except on Nob Hill; one of them took my card and the message that I was here about Kenneth and Leonard Purcell, and said he would see if Mrs. Prine was in. He used a house phone ten feet away, keeping an eye on me all the while. She was home, all right, because he was on there a good minute and a half, but when he hung up and came back to where I was he said, “Mrs. Prine isn’t available, sir.”

“I saw you talking to her.”

“I’m sorry, sir. She doesn’t wish to see you.”

“Did she say why?”

“No, sir. I’ll have to ask you to leave, please.”

I was getting tired of people asking me to leave places. But it wasn’t his fault-he was only doing his job-so I didn’t pick on him about it. I left with something else to wonder about now: Why had Margaret Prine refused to see me?

I hoofed it all the way back to Union Square, not bothering with a cable car because there wasn’t one in sight when I got to California and Powell and because it was an easy walk downhill from there. I ransomed the car, drove over to the Civic Center, and stopped in at the main library, where I checked out a couple of books on the history of snuff and snuff containers. I knew next to nothing about the subject and I figured it would be a good idea if I boned up a little. The more you know about something, the better off you are-in my business especially.

When I got back to the office it was locked up tight. But there was a note on my desk from Eberhardt, typed because his handwriting is so bad you needed a cryptographer to decipher it. The note said:

3:15 P.M.

Ed Berg called. He got the dope on the Church of the Holy Mission and the Moral Crusade. Too involved to put down here, I’ll tell you when I see you. Back around five.

Thanks a lot, Eb, I thought. I crumpled the note, threw it into the wastebasket, and checked the answering machine. Two calls, one for Eberhardt, one for me that didn’t require immediate attention. So I dragged the reverse city directory out of my file cabinet and found an A. Ozimas in the index. He was a resident of one of those big, new high-rise apartment buildings in Pacific Heights. I knew the building-Pacific Heights is my neighborhood; my flat, in fact, was only a few blocks away, on the other side of the hill — and if Ozimas lived there, he was even wealthier than Melanie Purcell had led me to believe. All of the units were condos, and the cheapest would go for something around $250,000.

I considered driving over there, but it was after four and Eberhardt was due back pretty soon. I stayed put and rang up the Hall of Justice. Ben Klein and his partner, Walt Tucker, were still out; the cop I talked to didn’t know when they would be back. I would have to wait until tomorrow to find out what, if anything, the police knew about Alex Ozimas.

My second call was to Tom Washburn at his friend’s place. When I got him on the line I asked if he’d ever heard Leonard speak of Ozimas. He said, “No, I don’t think so. Who’s he?”

“Business acquaintance of Kenneth’s. The man you talked to on the phone-could his accent have been Filipino instead of Latin?”

He thought about that. “I’m not sure,” he said at length. “I don’t know any Filipinos, I don’t know what their accent sounds like.”

“Could sound Spanish, depending on the person speaking.”

“Do you think this man Ozimas might be the caller?”

“Not really. He seems to have quite a bit of money; he wouldn’t need to shake anybody down for a couple of thousand. But I don’t want to overlook any possibilities.”

Washburn wanted to know what I’d found out so far; he sounded pretty low, so I told him in detail how the day had gone. It didn’t do much to cheer him up, but then I wasn’t trying to cheer him up. I’m a detective, not a professional candy-striper. I asked him some questions about the Summerhayeses, but he had never met either of them and couldn’t remember Leonard ever saying much about them. He didn’t know anything about George Collins or Margaret Prine, either.

Directory Assistance gave me a telephone number for George Collins at the address I had in Atherton. I called the number, and a male voice informed me that Mr. Collins was out of town. I asked when he’d be back. The voice said it was not permitted to divulge that information. Thanks a lot, voice, I thought. I left my name and number and asked that Mr. Collins get in touch with me as soon as he returned.

So much for the telephone. I leaned back, put my feet up, and opened one of the books I’d got from the library. After half an hour and some fairly thorough spot-reading, I knew more about snuff and snuff containers than I would ever need to know. Not that the subject matter was dull; it was pretty absorbing stuff, in fact, once you got into it. I knew, for instance, that it had been neither Caucasians nor Orientals who had discovered snuff, but New World Indians; and that tobacco in general had been unknown in Europe until Columbus made his second voyage to the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century. I knew that by the last quarter of the sixteenth century tobacco was used in one form or another in all the countries of the world, and “snuffing” was so popular throughout Europe that two Popes found it necessary to ban the practice during church services. I also knew that, according to legend, the first time Sir Walter Raleigh’s manservant saw tobacco smoke pouring out of his master’s mouth and nostrils, he chucked a jug of beer into his face because he feared Raleigh’s brains were on fire.

As for snuff bottles and boxes, I knew that they had been painstakingly handmade from any number of substances, the most popular of which were gold, silver, ivory, horn, wood, glass, and tortoise shell; that they were sometimes decorated with precious and semi-precious stones; that they came in myriad sizes and shapes (miniature caskets, for one shape; Napoleon’s hat, for another); that the most valuable ones from an artistic point of view, and therefore the most sought after by collectors, were those created by notable artists that had repousse or raised patterns engraved or incised on their surfaces, or which were festooned with intricate hand-enameled scenes, or which had been made of plane-tree wood in the Laurancekirk region of Scotland. I knew that the prize creations were bottles done in China by Yip Chung San, who had plied his craft during the Manchu dynasty and whose specialty involved painting scenes on the inside of the bottles, somewhat like mirror writing; and gold, silver, and ivory boxes by such European (and in particular, French) artists as Hainelin, Petitot, Watteau, Fragonard, and the von Blaren-berghes, father and son. And most interestingly of all, from my point of view, I knew that in 1904 a British collector, Sir Joseph Duveen, had paid the equivalent of thirty thousand dollars for what was said to be the rarest of all gold boxes by Hainelin, reputedly made as a special gift from Bonaparte to one of his lieutenants.

I was just starting on the second library book, to see if it contained any information not covered in the first, when Eberhardt shouldered in. He saw me sitting there with my feet up, reading, and pulled a face. “Look at this,” he said. “I’m out all day busting my hump and here you are, sitting on yours reading a book.”

“I’m working, Eb.”

“Yeah. Sure you are.” He sailed his hat on top of one of the hideous mustard-yellow file cabinets and sat down at his desk.

“How goes the insurance thing?” I asked him.

“No sweat. Have it wrapped up tomorrow. You got my message, I guess.”

“Non-message, you mean.”

“Yeah, well, the whole thing’s kind of involved. You know I’m no good putting words down on paper.”

“So put ’em out in the air. What did Ed Berg say?”

He settled back and put his own feet up. “Man, I’m bushed. What say we close up early and go get a beer?”

“Not tonight, I’ve got things to do. Come on, Eb, talk to me.”

“Okay, okay.” He got out his little pocket notebook and flipped a few pages. “The Church of the Holy Mission is one of those fundamentalist Christian cults, but not your standard kind; this one’s got some organization and power. Couple of hundred people in the congregation and more joining all the time. They’re starting to make a few waves.”

“What kind of waves?”

“This Moral Crusade. Moral Majority stuff, like we figured, only even more hardline-strictly Old Testament, or so they claim. Pro-censorship, anti-freedom of choice, anti-sex, that kind of crap.”

“Who’s behind it?”

“Let’s see… Guy named Dogbreath-”

“Named what?”

“Wait a minute.” He squinted more closely at his notebook, turning it a little from side to side. “Can’t even read my own writing.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Daybreak, that’s it. Clyde T. Daybreak.”

“That’s not much better, Eb. Are you sure?”

“Positive. I remember now.”

“What kind of name is Clyde T. Daybreak?”

“You’re asking me? I’m only relaying information here.”

“Well, who is he? Where’d he come from?”

“Used to be one of those traveling evangelists somewhere down South. Tennessee or somewhere. Came out here about ten years ago, got himself hooked up with the Holy Mission-Ed didn’t know the details-and eventually turned it upside down.”

“How so?”

“Church was founded about thirty years ago,” Eberhardt said, “by a dropout from the Rosicrucians. Doctrine back then was half Old Testament and half mysticism, not too appetizing to most people, so they struggled along on a membership of twenty or thirty until this guy Daybreak came along. He took over when the founder died, revamped the doctrine by getting rid of the mystical angle and going the authoritarian route.”

“Meaning strict obedience to him and his dictates.”

“Right. It cost him most of the old followers, but it didn’t take him long to line up plenty of new ones-enough so he was able to buy a big Victorian on Lanford Street, not far from downtown San Jose. He and his assistants live there now. They used to hold services in the basement; now they hold ’em in a new wing they built last year.”

“What’s this about assistants?”

“Ed didn’t know much about that part of it. Three or four guys that call themselves ‘Reverend’ and no doubt do what Daybreak tells them. He calls himself ‘the Right Reverend.’ Which makes the other guys ‘the Wrong Reverends’?”

“So Dunston is one of the assistants.”

“Seems that way. Name wasn’t familiar to Ed.”

“I wonder how he got involved with Daybreak and the church, coming out of that commune the way he did.”

Eberhardt shrugged. “Who knows how these types find each other? They just do.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Anything else I ought to know?”

“Just that Daybreak has been sucking around a couple of those religious cable-TV channels in the Bay Area, trying to go public with the Moral Crusade. Looks like he’s pushing to turn himself into another Falwell. Big noise with a big following.”

“Not to mention a big bank account.”

“Well,” Eberhardt said wryly, “that’s God’s work, too. Ask any capitalist.”

We sat there for a time, not saying anything. Pretty soon I thought to look at my watch, and it was a couple of minutes after five. I got on my feet.

“Quitting time,” I said to Eberhardt.

“So it is. You sure you don’t want a beer?”

“I do want one, but I’ve got to make a stop on the way home. And Kerry’s coming around six-thirty.”

We put the telephones on the answering machine and closed up. On the way downstairs Eberhardt said, “So what are you going to do? About Dunston, I mean.”

“I don’t know yet. Kerry and I have to talk it over.”

“Maybe you ought to go down to San Jose, have a talk with the big cheese himself.”

“Daybreak? Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

We split up at the garage down the street, where we had a monthly parking deal worked out, and I drove up to California and then over and up into Pacific Heights. The building where Alex Ozimas lived was on Laguna, across from Lafayette Park- one of the nicest parks in the city. It was newish and not half as attractive, to my taste, as some of the older apartment buildings in the area; but then, a lot of people prefer new to old. I parked illegally in a bus zone-legal parking in that area after five o’clock is next to impossible-and went into the building vestibule to look at the mailboxes.

Ozimas, I discovered, had the twenty-first and top floor all to himself-the penthouse, no less. The penthouse in a building like this had to go for at least three-quarters of a million. Some Alex Ozimas. Or Alejandro Ozimas, as he was listed on the brass nameplate above his mailbox.

But I was going to have to wait to get a look at him. I rang his bell three times, the last time for a good fifteen seconds, and nobody answered. Which figured. It had been that kind of day.